The Pit of Loch Durnan, by Doug Herring and Andrew Thompson
Published by Mystic Eye Games
Reviewed by Greg Ragland
NOTE: This IS a playtest review. There are extensive spoilers.
OVERVIEW: This module's overall subject has been covered extensively in previous reviews, so I will keep this section short. POLD is an adventure wherein a group of PCs are lured to a sleepy mining town to deal with some goblins in the mines. Unknown to them, the miners unearthed a devil named Warphit trapped in a crystal, which has charmed and enslaved the populace. The PCs must investigate the mines, deal with the devil in the gem, then work their way out, confront the two brother-mayors who run the town, and destroy a crystal that is the devil's last foothold on the community. The adventure is intended to be creepy and eventually horrifying, not unlike a Ravenloft adventure, and to fit in with Mystic Eye's horror-themed campaign world. As to whether it succeeded…well, I'll get to that.
PRESENTATION: I had heard that POLD's art and mapping were not the best, but I was nonetheless seriously disappointed by the low quality of the artwork of the adventure, some of which was so bad as to actually break the mood the game was intended to foster. The maps, too, were terrible-they look like something I would whip out in an hour or two using Campaign Cartographer. They didn't bother putting an actual grid in, relying on a "dot grid" which is all but unreadable from behind the DM's screen, especially if you are trying for atmospheric low lighting conditions. All of this felt amateurish, and while I thought the cover art was good, it didn't come even close to making up the poor material inside.
ORGANIZATION: Another major weakness in the adventure, which others mentioned and I found to be one of the most annoying things about this game supplement. While running this adventure, I spent an inordinate amount of time flipping pages back and forth, hunting down a particular map (which were out of sequence with both the party's order of progression and the sequence they are presented in the book), or looking for statistics for guards, which can be encountered in several locations, but whose stat block is located elsewhere. The order of presentation does not match the order of party progression (e.g., upper floors of the McAllister mansion are presented before the cellars, which is where the PCs will enter the complex), and the way the maps were numbered was also pretty strange at times-for example, a goblin lair area is described before a major ambush spot, which is what the party will encounter first. All of this led to me either having to flip pages back and forth, or else wing it.
Another major problem with the presentation is the incompleteness of the stat blocks, and their locations. Some NPCs are detailed in the back, though you have to flip back and forth to find them amid the excessive numbers of maps and poorly-designed player handouts. Other NPCs are detailed in the main text, however. And critical information is missing from some listings; one that got me was the fact that the cleric Crimble McAllister has no spells listed as being memorized, something I missed on my initial readthrough, and found out the hard way when the party ran into him.
STORY: This is where POLD had the most promise, although I don't feel that it lived up to it. The beginning of the adventure is fairly atmospheric, with heavy, drizzling rain, misty forestlands, and the town of Loch Durnan itself. As I was first reading through the opening part, doing my best to ignore the illustrations, I thought this adventure had great promise indeed. Unfortunately, it subsequently sabotaged this atmosphere in a number of ways:
1. The names given to many of the NPCs are pretty ridiculous; several times I knew the mood was shot as my players started chuckling over names like Bawth Laury, Gart McDonald, Stephon Crumper, and of course Crimble McAllister himself. I thought Warphit was such a bad name I didn't even use it in my running of POLD. In retrospect, I wish I had gone through and renamed many other NPCs as well.
2. The adventure is designed to progress from a generally creepy feeling, through unease, fear, and finally horror and disgust at the perverted experiments of Ian. Unfortunately, it sabotages this by rushing the PCs through the initial stages of the adventure, encouraging the DM to get the PCs into the pit as soon as possible, and not have them explore the strangeness of the town. I suspect this was done to avoid players figuring out something is wrong right away, and thereby skipping the meat of the adventure in the pit. I ended up adding some more atmospheric encounters in the township to beef it up, which I think my players appreciated.
3. Then, once the characters do enter the pit, they almost immediately encounter Barlan the dwarf, who fills them in on everything that is going on, thereby ruining the mystery of the town at an early stage. Once the dwarf encounter is over, there are a few side encounters (the most interesting, with some ghouls, was quickly dealt with by the party priest), and then they run into the goblins.
4. Later on, when the party starts running into trapped monstrosities designed to be released into the pit to terrify victims, I wondered why they WEREN'T down there, instead of being kept in cages which my players easily bypassed. I felt that there needed to be about an additional level of mines filled with such abominations to build up the fear factor, which simply did not exist.
Another place where I felt the adventure suffered was at the climax, when the party finally confronts Ian-and he flees. He left behind a minion creature which was easily dealt with, and more caged critters which the party took out with missile fire without ever endangering themselves. To make the finale more memorable, I decided prior to running it to add a Pain Mistress (from Green Ronin's excellent Legions of Hell, who was there as an "observer". Even with that, though, my players were still surprised that the adventure was over so quickly-they expected a final confrontation with Ian, and a larger underground dungeon complex, both of which were missing.
RECOMMENDATIONS: I cannot recommend this module, though it is not so deeply flawed that it is unrunnable (which would have earned it a 1/5). But in order to get it to work, I think you'll either need to put some effort into organizing coherent stats for the enemies, fleshing out the body of the adventure, renaming many NPCs, and generally putting a lot of work into it-and the point of buying a published adventure, in my opinion, is so I don't HAVE to do this.
If you do plan on running POLD, though, either because you already bought it or it sounds interesting, here's a summary some stuff I did, or wished I had done, to make it more playable:
--Make a list of the NPCs in town, renaming where appropriate, so you'll have a reference handy when they do some town exploration.
--Check the stats of all monsters and NPCs for completeness. Be sure to pick spells for Crimble.
--Before the adventure, draw your own copies of the player's handout maps.
--I ended up making Warphit an unnamed entity, and tying it in with the Unnamed One from the Freeport trilogy; when it generated spell-like effects in the crystal chamber, it would do so by displaying the Yellow Sign. That was MUCH more effective in generating player paranoia.
--Consider adding extensively to the mine levels, and move some of the imprisoned creatures from Ian's tower and the McAllister mansion cellars to the mines-or creating monstrosities of your own.
--Don't rush them through town too quickly. Encounters I added included having them run into a group of children standing around the carcass of an animal they had mangled, and having all the townspeople line up in curiously regular, regimented lines when they finally made their descent, waving and calling cheerfully, but with strangely blank expressions on their faces.
--In the encounter with Timmy, when the priest turned him, I had the little fellow explode in a wash of blood and gore. That got my players' attention! In retrospect, I would also have riddled his carcass with thousands of maggots-nothing like being covered with squirming fly larvae to up the horror factor for squeamish players.
--Consider having Ian stay, and not flee, in the final encounter, especially if the party has not been too challenged by previous encounters (the only parts that threatened my group significantly were the goblin ambush and the fight against Crimble; dealing with the devil was easy, as the paladin with the dwarf's medallion simply walked in and started chopping posts after easily dealing with the undead there-another encounter I would beef up in retrospect). If you do have Ian stay, be sure to alter his stats so he is a suitable challenge for your party.
At the end of the adventure, BTW, when I asked my players what they thought, they told me that they felt it was a pretty average adventure, with some stuff that had been added to make it more interesting (e.g., explodin' Timmy).
In closing, although POLD's story has promise, and it is runnable with work, the poor quality of the art and maps, the serious disorganization of the adventure and stats, and the problems with the pacing of the adventure itself all serve to seriously impair the adventure.
