Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Beseeching Parliament

​A dungeon by Pekka Rihko, levels 1-3.
Written for Dungeons and Dragons with “1 gold = 1XP systems”
  Well, this was a pretty thing. Soft and slate grey watercolor cover, skillful pencil sketches, gentle color palette, understated and tasteful formatting…The Beseeching Parliament is forty pages of love and care. It’s also forty pages, very complex and detailed, with an intricate plot involving multiple characters, a 70+ year backstory, worldbuilding involving a decently high-level fae lord and soul-pacts and tons of subsidiary information. This ain’t the usual Monday crapshoot, this is a hefty, weighty tome of sweeping ambition and scope. The last two adventures I’ve reviewed had around the same page count but nowhere near the breadth and depth.
  The story, which I’ll note does require sitting down and reading carefully at first, involves an adventurer family with a long history of selling their souls to the Owl-King, a fairy lord holding court on an island in the middle of a lake, in return for magical powers. Fifty years ago, the old matriarch of the family sold her soul and now time is up. Her son, who runs the house, is torn between giving up mean ol’ ma or handing over the soul of his friend imprisoned in a giant gem, but all that waits while he gets ready to host dwarven pilgrims who pay their respects to another friend, a dwarf lord who fell in battle and is buried on the grounds. There’s more drama than that but the immediate somewhat tenuous hook is that he’s looking to hire a grounds crew/house staff on short notice and the PCs hire on while scoping out his manor as a potential heist target. Yes it’s every bit as complicated as it sounds.
  However, I’ll quickly say what I liked to start with was the economy with which Mr. Rihko drops details pointing to a much deeper story. “There is also a vortex of black energy within one of the picture frames. This is what’s left of Irmine’s husband, Stewart’s father. They have no memory of him as a person, and assume he was nevermade in the tomb-halls of Ur-Saquaan.” That’s great stuff, while also functioning as a trap. The slave rebellion of Horadropolis, a sacrifice of a cat upon the Gorestone, said expedition into the ruins of Ur-Saquaan…I’m not sure how gameable all this is, but it’s great quality writing. The menace and numinous vibe of the Owl-King are on point too.
  I like more, too…I was about to get annoyed by how much of the manor’s loot is just “very valuable” in the text, but then all was forgiven and more when it was all summarized with what looks like B/X values in the end, with a comment that the players shouldn’t know the value of this stuff without appraisal. Then the author makes me even happier by listing the value of the manor looted down to the studs, even taking things like the windows, and he lists it by the cartload. This man games. Likewise, his sensibilities are personally offended by simple +1 magic arms and armor, preferring special magic abilities, but he’s more than happy to offer the bonuses in a sidebar for more bog-standard D&D. This fundamental sensibility runs throughout, and it’s appreciated.
  That’s not to say what can be improved is a null category. There’s a fundamentally unhurried attitude throughout the module that requires not just patience from the game master, but also from the players. There’s more detail in mucking out latrines and dealing with saunas than works best for a fantasy adventure. The final confrontation with the Owl King is encouraged as a very hand-wavy, almost story game type of fight, and there’s some fuzzy bit elsewhere too…the cockatrice that guards the dire-chickens pecks angrily at egg-gatherers, and while there’s an insulation suit that grants +10 on a petrification save, this isn’t going to work if its been a daily task for years. Most emblematic of this tendency is the mimic down in the basement protecting the master’s armor…it’s literally toothless, having had it teeth pulled so it now only does a d4 of damage gumming victims. There are a lot of pulled punches here, as the adventure really, really wants the players to reach the end of its excellent story. That’s at odds with 1gp=1XP D&D by default.
  All that said, the best use case for The Beseeching Parliament is as a real banger of a one-off, not quite a single session but probably 3-4 to let it really breathe. It would set a very strange tone as the start of a long dungeon-crawling campaign, but it’s certainly got hooks for long-term play. The playstyle of this really isn’t to my taste, but it’s so darn solid that I still can imagine really enjoying running this.
  Final Rating? *****/***** even with the occasional meandering it’s a wonderful time with the right kind of players and a thing of beauty. I don’t assign five stars just for perfection, but it does mean in my crapshoot I’ve hit a rare A-rank adventure, it’s ridiculous that this thing is laboring in obscurity with a PWYW price tag. Phenomenal module.
  It's also available on DriveThru.

---