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Message: <blockquote data-quote="demiurge1138" data-source="post: 4696595" data-attributes="member: 7451">DCC #20: Shadows in FreeportAn adventure for 6th-8th level characters.The city of Freeport is one of the triumphs of the OGL. It’s Green Ronin’s pet city, but they’ve opened it up for anyone to use. Better, the latest gazetteer of the city, The Pirates Guide to Freeport, is completely system neutral. Freeport is fantasy pirates plus Lovecraftian horror, and that’s the sort of thing I can get behind.Shadows in Freeport emphasizes the horror much more than the pirates. Fifty years ago, there was a terrible old man named Alexander Cresh. He was a cutthroat business man who loved to literally cut throats, especially those of children. He paved a road to Hell with the blood of the young, and was lynched by an angry mob for his crimes. Now, children are disappearing again. Cresh has risen as a revenant, and he’s back up to his old tricks. He plans on opening a permanent gate to the lower planes using sixty-six sacrifices, and has been warming up by sending his fiendish minions to nab kids off the street and torture them to death. The PCs have been hired to find the missing kids, only to find out that they are for the most part too late. Cresh’s son, the grotesque Fatty Blue, has risen as a ghost, and acts as mob boss to the gangs of tortured child ghosts, who are more likely to attack the only people who can help them than grant the PCs aid. Demons and undead stalk the grounds of Cresh Manor, protecting their dark master and looking for victims to practice their trade.What I liked: Shadows in Freeport is grim with a capital G. It’s clearly the sort of adventure that Legends of the Ripper wanted to be when it grew up, with blood and guts and gore aplenty. They’re used with a somewhat defter hand than in Legends of the Ripper, contributing to a unified source of mood. Shadows in Freeport gives the option of using Unearthed Arcana’s sanity rules, a modification of those found in Call of Cthulhu d20. I liked the character of Fatty Blue. The son of a child murderer and monster, Fatty Blue is a consummate bully, only made worse now that he’s dead. He lords over the other undead children with his superior skills and power, and he’s got levels in barbarian—what better way to model the tantrum of a spiteful child? He’s a parasitic hanger-on of a greater evil, and in that respect (and physical build) reminds me somewhat of Pokey from Earthbound. Probably not an intentional reference, but I’ll run with it.What I disliked: Cresh Manor seems somewhat thematically sloppy. Demons, daemons and devils all have a run of the grounds, and they traditionally can’t stand each other. There’s also pwalgs, delightfully grotesque creatures spawned from the effluvia of the Unspeakable One, Freeport’s resident Great Old One (who’s basically Hastur). Why? I’m not exactly sure. Likewise, the undead are all over the place—ghost children are good, and I can buy the bodak, but wraiths? Allips? I’d like an explanation for my variety, please. Combat isn’t very scary in D&D, so having a haunted house full of hacking and slashing somewhat reduces its impact, Sanity rules or no Sanity rules. Cage of Delirium used handouts deftly, and had lots of encounters solely for atmospheric purposes. Pathfinder’s The Skinsaw Murders used a very clever trap-based haunting system to simultaneously deliver exposition, challenge characters, and spook the players. There’s a few choice bits (the handout that just reads “thegatetohellwillopenthegatetohellwillopen” forever is creepy), but it’s mostly just fighting with grislier set dressing.Speaking of thematics, Shadows in Freeport doesn’t feel very, well, Freeport-y to me. It could be set anywhere with absolutely no problem. There’s a gang hiding in the manor (bad idea) that pays lip service to the idea that Freeport is a rough and crime filled town, but the “concerned citizens” hook (and the motivation of doing a good deed and saving some kids) doesn’t really fit. I’d have rather gotten a sense of “well, we all might be a bunch of greedy bastards, but whatever’s taking all of the kids is even worse!”Cresh himself also annoys me. He’s a revenant, which are traditionally undead that seek unerringly their killers to get revenge. There’s no real revenge aspect to Cresh at all. He is opening an eternal portal to hell, which is what he was going to do anyway if he hadn’t been lynched.  And haven’t we gotten enough “opening a permanent link between our world and the Abyss/Hell” plots? It was the main motivation in both Dungeon Interludes and Citadel of the Demon Prince. And there’s weird stuff with him having a vulnerability to slashing weapons, which would make sense if it was Cresh-specific, but apparently is inherent to all of this interpretation of revenants. It would have been better to make him a ghost, or a dread undead from Green Ronin’s Advanced Bestiary. Was it worth the $2? I’m leaning towards “no.” As far as DCC horror adventures go, Shadows in Freeport is miles ahead of Legends of the Ripper, but it has miles to go before reaching the level of Cage of Delirium.</blockquote>

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