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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8775181" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 59: May/Jun 1996part 3/5The Mother's Curse: Another issue, another little village with issues that need solving that you can still keep around as worldbuilding afterwards. That continues to be one of their more popular formulas. This time the naming conventions are vaguely italian and the problem is cursed pregnancies with the mothers dying at the end. This has been going on for decades and the place has become insular and fatalistic as a result, so even getting them to talk directly about their problems may be a challenge. Fortunately, they avoid the problem of missing out on the adventure entirely by having some of the villagers be spies for the big bad, so even if you fail on your gather information rolls, you'll still set the wheels of plot in motion and the trouble will come to you. After a few ogre attacks from the nearby swamp, even the dumbest players will get the hint and head in. If you can penetrate the general wet mazy unpleasantness, it'll eventually lead you to a ruined abbey filled with both undead and plant monsters, led by a pregnant greenhag. She's been swapping babies while still in the womb and selling them to a night hag on the lower planes to be turned into larvae, while her own kids burst out of the surrogate mother, killing her in the process and are left to their own devices. Charming. If you act fast you might be able to save the mother and return her real baby to her, but it's more likely this adventure will have a certain degree of tragedy & body horror and the players will have to clean up the problem afterwards with large amounts of violence. So this is unusually creepy for a horror adventure in here, (although still not at White Wolf levels of explicit nastiness) with the whole evil pregnancy thing potentially triggering for some players. If you can handle that it's a pretty good one, with the various creatures acting in a self-interested way that makes sense in setting and using their powers intelligently. It's also easily set up for a sequel somewhere along the line, when the Night Hag investigates what's disrupted her deliveries and seeks revenge on the PC's. Despite a few silly names, this is well within the level of quality I'd consider usable in a campaign.</blockquote>

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