Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Wand of the Whippoorwill Wood

​A fairytale adventure by Dylan Franks, levelless, because…
Written for Cairn
  The days are short, winter is near. Those of us so blessed to live in the United States are dining light in anticipation of the incoming gluttony of Thanksgiving in a few days. No better time to curl up by the fireplace and leaf through a meaty adventure of fine quality. So of course I’m going to instead be squinting at the PDF of a long Cairn adventure on my smartphone while weed-eating, I live in the South. Technically thirty-five pages, the Wands of the Whippoorwill Wood has generous margins, huge medieval public-domain art spreads, and vast tracts of whitespace to cover the ten-key hex…er, triangle crawl for a quest for the titular wands in the titular wood. It’s lush with art and formatted to within an inch of its life, but how’s the play, Mary Todd?
  It’s pretty much what you expect from that title, honestly. Whippoorwill Wood is an enchanted forest full of fairies, protected by a pair of magic wands (Rockwood and Tanglewood, and zero points for guessing what each does), the meanie humans outside the woods want to find the wands to be free to do Captain-Planet-villain-stuff, while fairy factions want to find the hidden wands to push the humans back. Oberon and Titania are also around. Also, there are fairy-bound knights and a fairy village and random little woodland encounters. Plus “dungeons” where the wands are held of sixish rooms. There are technically nine factions, each with its own relationship with the others and goals, and because of this decision to load up the faction number this high the motives and relationships are all about a thimble deep. Really working hard here to convey everything though:

​  So what I liked about this one, beyond obviously appreciating the hard work that went into it…there’s some thought put into conveying the complex factions, an understanding there’s an issue here that needs effort to convey. The enchanted wood map looks odd at first but it’s neat how it eventually makes sense as a magical confused wood where leaving on one side lands the PCs on the other side exhausted. There’s an occasional moment here and there where the old fairie tale feeling shines through, like how a human-sized creature shrinks if “both a toenail and a fingernail” are wet from the central brook. That’s nice. A few of the magic items make it to near that level as well.
  What could be improved would be embracing more of that. Occasional flashes aside, the majority of the flavor of module is depressingly postmodern, thoroughly 2023 despite the old art. Stuff like the Wand of Rockwood or the Wand of Tanglewood are much more standard. Despite the admirable attempt at making factional relationships clear, it’s unfortunately redundant. “Sir Joliet OTHERED by The Brigade” vs. “The Brigade CRITIQUES Sir Joliet”…is that clear to you? Able to run everything from that? The random encounters are extremely detailed as well, with a morning/afternoon/evening/nighttime division, but enough to cross the line into unwieldy and difficult to run. The traditional formatting exists for a reason, this whole thing creaks under the weight of all these pages and pages of redundant and confusing information. The dungeons are hidden by clues and there’s rival parties and it’s all the right idea but put into a muddle. The system is doing this one no favors, either, you’ll want a lot of diegetic advancements before tackling this properly.
  I’m going to leave the tanglewood and say our best use case is to raid this thing for fairy-flavored bits. There aren’t many and they aren’t as flavorful as you’d like, but you could do worse, might be so critters to borrow too. Running this as a direct adventure would be a lot of squeeze for not all that much juice, a group read-aloud of Lord Dunsany would be much more rewarding.
  Final Rating? */***** with a nod for the genuine hard work that went into this. Sadly, all the formatting departures ultimately make this a more difficult run than an easier one, and when boiled down to its essentials the story is all very bog standard.
  By all means this makes it a top-five Cairn adventure though.

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Looks like you've encountered six fairies. Now give me five minutes while I roll 5 times for EACH ONE...