RPGPundit Reviews: No Dignity in Death - The Three Brides

This is a review of the adventure booklet "No Dignity in Death - The Three Brides", by James Raggi.  It is the print version of this adventure, which is actually a trilogy of short adventures, all themed around the idea of a dead bride, intended for the "Old School" D&D or Clones. It is listed as being playable for 1e, OD&D, or Basic D&D, as well as clone games like Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry or OSRIC.

The booklet itself is softcover, and comes in at only around 30 pages. Each of the three adventures therein takes up about a third of the text. The three adventures all happen in and around a rustic fantasy town with a very silly name, Pembrooktonshire.  However, the adventures are clearly distinct in such a while that, due to their common theme and setting you can run all three together; but you don't really have to. You could run only one or two of the adventures, and the absence of the rest would not leave any loose ends as such.

To summarize in very broad terms: the first adventure deals with the PCs getting caught up in a murder mystery of a bride on her wedding day, where the suspects are a band of gypsies, that would seem to likely be scapegoats chosen by the xenophobic townsfolk. Its a relatively predictable adventure.
The second adventure involves an unusual rite of spring among the townsfolk of Pembrooktonshire, where its revealed that essentially, the people of the town engage in a kind of human sacrifice, to what appears to be a Dragon, in exchange for security. This adventure somewhat depends on the PCs giving a damn, or at least being interested in the idea of taking on a dragon for the loot. There's an interesting twist to the adventure, which I won't reveal here.
The third adventure involves an ancient haunting, of a long-dead elven bride in a haunted house, and a secret in the mountains near Pembrooktonshire.

The second two adventures are considerably better than the first, in my opinion, and none of them are directly "bog-standard" D&D fare, so that's interesting. But really what makes these adventures happen more than anything is not so much the plotline, as it is the setting. The community of Pembrooktonshire is what's truly interesting, as a fucked up place for the PCs to adventure in for a while (though some of the basic setup of the place as per the adventures means that it probably would not be a particularly interesting place to stay in as a long-term base for adventuring).

On the whole, this product is quite a bit better than the first series of Raggi books I've reviewed ("Green Devil Face"); but not as good as the really high-quality adventure that is Death Frost Doom. Still, there's quite a bit of creativity here, and in particular if you enjoy the idea of including some warhammer-esque "PCs as outsiders" and "PCs as investigators" elements to your game, this can be a product worth checking out.

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