By Daniel M. Perez
Published by Highmoon Media Productions
Pages: 19 + OGL + advertisements
Fully bookmarked
Bardic Lore: The Villa of Mysteries is a short little PDF detailing a fully fleshed out location that you can drop into your campaign world. What you get is a fair amount of backstory for the location, three maps, brief descriptions of rooms keyed to the maps, four NPCs, a handful of plot hooks, a new creature, and a new spell. Four pieces of art grace the pages, done in a classical style, one of which is in full colour. The art and the maps are all fairly spread out amongst the document, breaking up the text and making it relatively easy to read. Instead of borders along the sides of each page, Villa of Mysteries sports a green banner at the top and bottom, which may cause an issue for those wanting to print it off on older machines like my own where toner is difficult or expensive to replace. The pages are all laid out in the standard portrait style, except for the very last page, an advertisement, which is inexplicably in landscape.
The Villa of Mysteries starts off with a journal entry describing the villa as written by a previous visitor, and setting the tone for what is to come. This is followed by several pages of history describing the villa’s part in the author’s campaign setting, that of a modern fantasy Roman Empire. Mostly it details previous owners, when certain features were added and under what circumstances, who painted the frescoes, and the like. This in turn is followed by a pair of maps, and several subsequent pages are given towards a brief description of the various rooms’ contents. One of the maps is in full colour, and takes up the entire page. Four NPCs incumbent to the location are next, including full stats, motives, and fairly detailed backgrounds. Finally, the document wraps up with three adventure seeds, a new creature called a “marble guardian”, and a new spell.
I found The Villa of Mysteries to be very hit-and-miss, which is regrettable, because it is clearly an ambitious work that shows much promise. The introductary journal entry does a rather nice job of setting the tone. It starts to draw you in with its prose until you come to some rather awkward writing. The villa itself has a long and glorious history, but one in which it is difficult for one’s players to interact with. Unfortunately, the history is tied to a rather specific setting and deity. If you don’t have a Roman-style setting with an empire-spanning civilization, and barbarians at the gate, or a Bacchus-like god in your game’s pantheon, then you will likely need to rewrite a good chunk of the backstory anyway, largely defeating the purpose of a product like this.
The black-and-white maps are well done, and artistically, I quite like them for their simplicity. I find them reminiscent of blueprints of the kind you might find in an archaeology textbook, fitting the subject matter rather nicely. But they have no scale and no key. The full-colour map has squares at least, but the colour and the artwork make it terribly busy, and difficult to actually understand or use. It also lacks a scale and a key. The new creature, the marble guardian, looks to me essentially like a golem with a few extra special abilities. OK so far, but why does it use a hardness mechanic instead of damage reduction? I thought hardness was only used for objects, and creatures get damage reduction instead? There is a new spell, but it is essentially just a cleric version of limited wish, and its primary use is to allow the villa’s owner to create her marble guardians. The spell is even called limited miracle. (Wouldn’t something like ‘minor miracle’ be better? I’m just saying.) Four NPCs are detailed, but there is no real reason to speak with any of them other than the villa’s mistress. They could just as well be furniture with names, for all the interaction you’re likely to do with them. To boot, they all seem to get along with one another just fine. Oh there are a few character conflicts, but they are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things; the kind of impotent, gossipy infighting you might find between servants vying for position. Although one does wear a mask in a rather feeble attempt at intrigue. Is that the villa’s mystery?
Of the three adventure hooks, two are throw-away ideas. One has the party arrive as a “reward” for having accomplished some previous feat. The second recommends the party escort a caravan with the villa as its destination. The third is more interesting, and briefly describes a murder that takes place while the PCs are there. Unfortunately, while many suggestions are raised, none of them are actually fleshed out. If a murder mystery is to take place in the Villa of Mysteries, DMs will have to import their own.
Bardic Lore: The Villa of Mysteries provides a DMs with a detailed location to throw into their game. For what it is, it’s reasonably well done. Unfortunately, as a DM for a group primarily composed of hack-and-slash players, I just don’t see it as being terribly useful to me. There is simply no real conflict there to resolve, and nothing really to do except chat with a few NPCs. Which may be fine for the role-players among us, but is likely to produce only ennui amongst the roll-players.
Reviewed by Scott Benoit
