Blood Moon Rising is an adventure designed by Peter C. Spahn, published by Small Niche Games, for 3 to 6 characters of 1st to 3rd level. It uses Labyrinth Lord (the B/X Moldvay/Cook D&D retro-clone) rules and stats, but is compatible with most old school D&D fantasy game systems.

The product is available for download at RPGnow for $4.95 US. For that price, you get an extensive village sandbox, a large number of NPCs, plot ideas to develop in your own campaign, as well as a main adventure, described in a timeline manner, unfolding in the background of a fair taking place in town, two new monsters, two magic items and one new spell (lesser charm monster) for your game table. Not a bad deal, if you ask me.

Disclaimer

In the interest of the potential readership, this review contains spoilers. If you intend on playing at a game table using this module without being yourself the GM, please do not read any further. You have been warned.

Overview

The material itself, minus covers, advertisement and mandatory OGL, is 29 pages long. The layout is clean, clear, and easy on the eyes, without being too impersonal, mainly because of thin bars decorating each page at the top and bottom of each page.

The basic premise of the module: The Feast of St. Garan is taking place in the little town of Garanton. The PCs join the festivities, either to prove their valor competing against other warriors seeking the blessing of the Saint, or as spectators to this important moment for the community. While they are dealing with various events, NPCs and elements of the fair, a local artist disappears, some sheep get killed in the countryside, and winged demons end up attacking people during the night. The PCs must find out what is going on and put an end to the threat by dealing with a group of orcs who set up camp in the area, uncovering a portal to an ancient Demon Gate, and possibly discovering the real story behind the legend of St. Garan in the process.

The book first sets up the situation in its introduction.

   Chapter 1 details the town of Garanton, with a keyed map, various locales and details pertaining to them.

Chapter 2 details the Fair taking place in town, and lays out a day-by-day time line of events that would take place without any player-character intervention. It also details ways in which PCs could make a difference, or deal with different situations if they are so inclined, and includes a list of 20 random encounters with possible ramifications throughout the adventure to spice things up a bit.

Chapter 3, Other Encounters in Garanton, details various locales pertaining to the main plot of the adventure, the opening of the Demon Gate during the festival, mostly. It includes floor plans of these locations.

Chapter 4 details NPCs and groups the PCs are likely to interact with during the festival. Some of these descriptions also include some ideas to spice things up a little further during the adventure.

Finally, the Appendix describes the new spell mentioned above, as well as the new magic items and creatures featured in this module.

Right there, you can already tell this is not a conventional hack and slash adventure. I’ll come back to it later on, but if your players basically assume they’ll go to some dungeon and hack their way through it, it’d be a very, very bad idea. Instead, they should be interested in character interaction and finding out more about the background of the place, its visitors and inhabitants.

It’s also fair to say that it isn’t an adventure for the newbie DM. It assumes you know how to run a “timeline” adventure, where the PCs shakes things up and anything can happen. Your improvisation skills may be put to the test. This is all a good thing, when you’re not expecting a set of predetermined encounters to do the job for you.

Introduction

The introduction is a two-page summary of the present situation and the history of St. Garran, the warrior hero that people are celebrating during the fair of Garanton. Turns out that long ago, Garan was an evil warrior who conquered and pillaged along with two friends of his: Mir the wizard and Rone the cleric. Long story short: Rone turned on his buddies, attempted to build a huge demon gate to summon a terrible balor from the great beyond, but Garan and Mir put an end to his dreams by killing him before he could end his ritual, with unfortunate consequence that both Garan and Mir died in the process.

History became legend, and legend became myth. Rone’s Demon Gate was forgotten and buried up the High Cliff not far from Garanton where once stood the mighty Castle Vyn, the headquarters of the three half-brothers at the time of their conquests.

Soon, instead of a conqueror in league with Mir and Rone, Garan was remembered as a great hero who stood up against the darkness and stopped it before it could destroy the world. He became a Saint, a patron of warrior and heroes. A brotherhood grew out of his teachings, and a fair started to take place in Garanton allowing local warriors and knights to compete against each other in a variety of tests to determine who would be worthy of St. Garan’s favour.

Not long ago, an artist was commissioned by the town to carve an image of St. Garran at the bottom of the cliffs. Interested in history, local legends and the like, he started looking around the area, found the ruins of the Castle, and digging here and there in his spare time, finally uncovered the remains of the Demon Gate.

A Demon Gate which, when exposed to the light of the waxing moon, opens briefly to an antechamber where demons wait for their Lord to be summoned by the long-dead Rone…

This is basically the main adventure in a nutshell: the PCs participate in the Fair and each night at least, some bad things occur, from beasts slaughtered to peasants attacked, up the the point the opening of the Demon Gate becomes are real threat to the town itself, assuming the PCs haven’t done anything about it until then.

All the rest, the PCs participating to the Fair, interacting with NPCs, solving various sub-situations, making friends and enemies of the factions in and around town, all this stuff is the meat on the bones, the stuff that will basically make or break the rhythm of the adventure. Hence the importance of strong improvisational skills for the DM.

Garanton

The town is described over three pages which basically present the main locales in the area, from Garanton’s abbey of servants of St. Garan to the local tavern currently used by the people attending the Fair to relax after a day of ceremonies and trials to gain the favour of the Saint, to the cliffs and meadows around town.

There is a map there depicting the town of Garanton, and unless my eyes are cheating me, some locations, like Hildor’s Quarry, “on the southwest side of Hildor’s Bluff”, is not represented on the map. The path leading up from Hildor’s Quarry to Hildor’s Cliff isn’t visible on the map either. Or monument Canyon, where the tomb of St. Garan is located, for that matter. The problem is that these locations are relatively important to the main adventure going on in the fair’s background here, and I’m left more or less improvising where these locations are on the map. It seems to me that either the map isn’t complete, or its scope isn’t large enough to incorporate all these elements onto it. And that’s a big flaw, in my book. A map is supposed to give you all the elements right there on the page for you to check out during the game, and not leave you wondering if something’s missing, or you have to make it up or whatnot. There’s also no scale, no cardinal directions indicated, no legend. And it’s computer generated, which … I really don’t like.

Not a fan of the map, obviously.

The description of the locations in the adventure is very well done, however. Three pages is indeed largely enough: you’ve got basically a paragraph about each location detailing its main features and how it matters to our adventure. All the important information seems to be there. Better to get to the point than write a novel out of it, I think.

The Feast of St. Garan

This is where you get all the timeline for the adventure, a sort of day by day descriptions of the events going on at the fair, and all the plot elements unfolding in the background, in the morning, midday, afternoon and evening/night, assuming the PCs do nothing to interact with them or stop them.

I think this is the right approach, because it basically pushes on the DM the idea that all this stuff exists in a vacuum and can only come alive through him, and the PCs interactions with these elements. What you’ve got here is a basic tool, not a timeline of events set in stone that the player characters would have to follow blindly.

What you’ve got here in the end is a second sandbox, a timeline sandbox if you will, which could be easily taken away from the first, the physical sandbox that the town of Garanton represents, and transplanted directly into your home setting with few adjustments, either using the adventure elements provided in the module or not. You could switch the opening of the Demon Gate for any other adventure to your liking, from classic serial killings to a treacherous plot to assassinate one of the people attending the Fair to God knows what else.

And that’s really I think the strength of this particular module: its dual sandbox.

At the end of this chapter you also get a table of “Random Festival Encounters”, where you roll a d20 and refer to the proper entry to see who the PCs meet when they’re hanging out around the fair, participating in the competitions, etc. It only adds to the coolness of the festival sandbox, and there are plenty of ways there to get inspired and build your own.

The competition itself is basically described as a specific test each different day, like archery, sword fighting, horsemanship and the like, which include very simple ability rolls with incrementing penalties as the test becomes harder and harder. Then you get a number of points that basically add up to your total gathered by participating to all the tests, which in the end determine whether you get the favour of the Saint or not. It’s simple, to the point. No need to make a big mechanical deal out of it, since it’s the competition itself, with the NPCs taunting you and whatnot, that’s fun to play. It’s done right in this module.

Other Garanton Encounters

This is where you have specific encounters described in the module, those that related specifically to the adventure, the demon gate itself, orcs setting camp around town, that kind of thing. Maps are provided. Two out of the three include a scale; no cardinal directions indicated; same computer black and white maps: I’m definitely not a fan of these maps.

Now, there is one in particular that caught my attention: it’s the tomb of St. Garan which you can explore once you’ve gotten rid of a bunch of orcs who came here and set up camp after being sent to investigate the visions of their tribal shaman. Now, the tomb itself is made up of three rooms string together in a straight line, which basically brings me to a first point: it seems to me that these encounters were built with a very “modern” set piece arrangement in mind. That is, we don’t have any dungeons in there. No exploration per se, but rather one locale after the other which together form the stage of a particular threat or “encounter”. The Demon Gate is described the same way. It really doesn’t feel old school to me, and that’s kind of a bummer.

But I digress. The Tomb of St. Garan basically leads you to Garan himself, which is now a Wight that will awaken 1d3 rounds after the PCs enter the room, and will pursue them well outside the tomb, thus gaining its freedom, and becoming a major threat of the adventure of its own.

Now pause for a moment and think about it. A wight, which does automatically awaken, and does follow the PCs to wipe them out. For character levels 1 to 3. With level drain. Who can’t be affected by non-magical weapons. Can you guess where my criticism is going here? The problem is that it’s almost an anti-D&D encounter, where exploring the area will only land you a major threat and a near TPK, i.e. it’s BAD to explore, here. You should not want to explore stuff, and you don’t really have choices on how to approach the threat at all: just entering the room awakens the wight. There’s no option here. You should just avoid this tomb. Problem is? Apart of a previous room with animated statues and such, which is well, standard fare for dungeon exploration, there’s no way to know you’ll be running into that much of a threat until you actually are in front of it, and then it’s already too late. And if you escape, then you’re basically screwed, you have to run to the NPCs of the abbey and cry your way out of it. That’s not really heroic now, is it? Maybe I’m missing something here. Even bringing back his mantle to the wight and putting him at rest seems like an idea the PCs might not get before they actually awakened the undead. This part could have been much better I think, and it just fails for me at this point. I suspect there’s a lot more to it that wasn’t actually put onto the page and would have needed to be there to make sense of it all.

Also, one thing I can’t understand is why there is so much treasure laying around. I mean yes, it makes sense to have riches buried with a warlord like Garan, but there’s 6,500 GP in gems here to recover from the sarcophagus. That’s a LOT of money for characters level 1-3, not counting the plate mail +1 the wight is wearing. It really feels like a TPK button in the adventure – you really can’t possibly hope to face this opponent, but just in case you make it through somehow with the help of NPCs and somehow maneuver in such a way the tomb is not investigated by the monks at all afterwards, you could possibly end up rich beyond belief. I actually checked the LL rules for that, and indeed, wights seem to have huge piles of treasure buried with them. I wonder if the Hoard class of XXI is a typo in the book. This is just very weird, to me. Now imagine you are using this module with say… AD&D or OSRIC, which operates under the assumption that 1gp equals 1XP, and yeah. Level up button for everyone.

Now, the Demon Gate as a setting for an epic fight really is great. A huge dome with demons sleeping in alcoves all around. A span leading from the room’s teleporter (leading back to the cliff where the Gate was discovered by the disappeared artist) to a huge, closed gate to the abyss. A pit below with thousands of previous victims piled up on top of each other. And the artist surviving here because he picked up a shield +1 that happened to Protect from Evil. It’s pretty cool as a setting. Now, there are a bunch of things that make me cringe, like a Mace +2 the PCs acquire from Rone’s dead hands (for low level PCs, some DMs might cringe at that – this is not 3rd edition D&D, and +2 weapons are not the sort of items you find lying on the ground like this, especially when THOUSANDS of people ended up in the place before you (which is itself a Hoard Class XXI by the way, if you take the time to search among the corpses there).

This seems to be a awful lot of treasure for low-level characters. Thing is, again, I really like the basic setting of the encounter, and would probably use this in the adventure proper, but I’d seriously rework it, cut some of the treasure, replace creatures like the wight with something else, and include some proper exploration to make it feel like an actual dungeon, before I’d consider running it.

NPCs and Factions of Note

This part of the adventure basically presents a whole host of NPCs, from the competitors to the fair to the monks of the abbey of St. Garan and the inhabitants of the town, as well as factions, such as The Wandering Lords and Ladies, a troupe of travelling entertainers that may or may not become employers of the PCs for future adventures, the Wilder Company which is a mercenary band of adventurers or the Orcs of the Blood Moon, the guys who camp near the Tomb of St. Garan I previously talked about. This is the stuffing that makes both the physical and timeline sandboxes of the module come alive.

This is all very well written, to the point, with flavourful NPCs, motivations, contrast between goals and attitudes. There’s a lot to do with these people, whether you use them for the adventure included with the module or not. They can even inspire you to come up with NPCs of your own. Very cool stuff.

Appendix

This part provides you with the stats of a new spell, Lesser Charm Monster (level 2), two magic items, The Mantle and the Sword of St. Garan, and two new monsters, the Night Demons (2HD, 4 attacks winged demons, basically) and the Demon Grubs, which are like night demons larvae, with 1HP and a bite.

I don’t see anything glaringly wrong with those. I find the monsters pretty cool, myself.

Conclusion

I really, really like the organization of the module. You can find most of the stuff when you need it, it just flows nicely, and it’s well written. No complaint on that side of thing. Kudos to Peter Spahn on this.

The adventure part has some pretty good ideas, but the implementation is not going to satisfy DMs who’d want to run this stuff right off the page. I’d need to seriously rework this stuff before I’d consider running it for my group, in any case.

The maps are not good. Bad maps make me cry. Don’t make me cry.

Blood Moon Rising is a module that shines mostly because of its twin sandbox: the town of Garanton, the timeline of the fair that takes place in town, and all the NPCs, factions, nuggets of adventure and ideas that comes from it all. That in itself is worth well over the 5 bucks you’re going to pay for it. It’s very, very cool, and highly recommended.

This module is excellent if you’re searching for a sandbox to use as-is, or elements for a village sandbox or fair you’d like to plug to your own “Hommlet” style adventuring area, so to speak. That’s what really makes it stand out, along with the overall organization of it all, which I found both clear, and to the point. The adventure part is still usable if you’re willing to greatly modify its contents, or you’re the sort of DM that just makes things up on the fly loosely based on what’s on the page to begin with.

It is worth $4.95 US and more, actually. Despite my harsh criticism of its contents, I recommend it to anyone searching for a sandbox/sandbox stuffing, and anyone wanting to know how to organize timeline adventures the right, non-railroady way. This is a good one.

7/10 overall. Well worth getting.

Hey Benoist, thanks for the review! And I'd hardly call your criticisms harsh!

I'll freely concede the maps. I made them myself and they're functional at best. They're all made with North at the top of the page, but I didn't think of adding a compass. I'll make sure I address this in the next adventure.

The trail to the quarry and canyon is described in the section on the bridge. There were no encounters set to take place on the trail so a larger area map seemed like unnecessary filler.

The wight is a potential TPK for some parties, mostly the never retreating kind. My group ran back up the stairs and closed the secret door after the first level drain attack. I guess I should have made it clearer that the wight does not automatically escape if the characters flee which is why I include the writeup about the mantle in the Concluding the Adventure section. Also, don't forget a cleric also has a chance to Turn it before fleeing.

Again, thanks for such a thorough review. I'll be hitting you up for a review of my next horror themed adventure, The Inn of Lost Heroes which should be out in the next few weeks just in time for a Halloween one-shot.

Thanks!

Pete

You're a good sport, Pete. I appreciate that.

You're writing good stuff. You should definitely not give up on adventure writing. I will definitely use the material in Blood Moon Rising for my own games, and that's the best compliment one can give really, in my mind.

Quote from: pspahn;405983The wight is a potential TPK for some parties, mostly the never retreating kind. My group ran back up the stairs and closed the secret door after the first level drain attack. I guess I should have made it clearer that the wight does not automatically escape if the characters flee which is why I include the writeup about the mantle in the Concluding the Adventure section. Also, don't forget a cleric also has a chance to Turn it before fleeing.

That's right. I hadn't thought of that last point. I guess you need a Cleric level 2 or 3 in the party to really get a chance to get away from the wight, then. Pretty tricky stuff. I understood the role of the mantle, but it seems like there are so many ways the PCs can get in contact with the wight without knowing how to deal with him. Unless the wight start screaming for his garment... but the module just says it attacks immediately.

It's really not crippling if the PCs and DM are thinking on their feet, I guess. Still, that encounter surprised me "wow. that's a tough one".

It's worth noting I can really see this working as a Ptolus adventure.

Replacing Garanton with a particular District of the City by the Spire, Castle Vyn with Ghul's labyrinth, rearranging the locales a little bit to be more dungeon-like, using Garan, Mir and Rone as lieutenants of the Half God instead, and the Saint as one of the Saints of the Church of Lothian, it should work pretty well with this setting.