Looking at Unholy Land for (He)X-Mas

Over at Worlds Without Master the Epimas bundle sale is still going. Bundles of indie tabletop role playing games and supplements available until the morning of the 24th of December (so hurry!).

In the mix of exiting games Unholy Land - An Ahistorical Hex-Mas Crawl for Mid-Level Characers, which is a bona fide OSR offering, appears.

(I was a bit surprised, the Indie RPG-scene and the OSR (the OSR also being indie, but possibly not "a scene") at times seem to exist in parallel universes, hermetically sealed from one another. Although the number of people with the necessary universe-transcending powers seem to be growing. Hopefully)

Product

"Bethlehem" from Mead Clarkes
Christian Parlor Magazine Vol III (1847).
Similar art is used in Unholy Night

The Unholy Land hexcrawl by Casey Garske is a 26-page PDF of which there are 23 pages of game material. The cover and hexmap are in color while the rest of the PDF is black-and-white.

It is a single column layout with what appears to be mostly public domain artwork from medieval sources.

Illustrations range from a depiction of the mummified head of Ramses the Great to old book-style illustrations of the town of Bethlehem.

Content

Unholy Land quickly (one page) sets the scene for the hexcrawl. In short we are in Roman Judea in 2 BCE and things are going down. King Herod fears the birth of child destined to bring about his downfall, but even weirder things are afoot with the undead rising, monsters of legend reappearing and demonic forces on the move.

On top of it all a star, visible to the naked, eye moves from east to west in the heavens astounding astronomers and sages alike.

After the scene is set we are given tools. A load of encounter tables for different types of foes. There are also tables for random village encounters and a specific Jerusalem encounter table. Most encounters are somewhat fleshed out with a line or even a paragraph to guide the DM. A table of rumors and prophecies guide the player characters into the hexcrawl.

The three magi appears in
Unholy Night

The hex descriptions are short and clear rather than evocative. They range from cultist seeking sacrifice to the PCs possibly allying themselves with an undead army.

Some hex locations describe encounters that will move around the map as time progresses in the game. Not all the encounters are tied together however so there are multiple potential emerging stories depending on the players actions.

At the end there is a bestiary for both NPCs and monsters. Stats are minimal and in a basic OSR format. (The damage levels makes me think the stats are AD&D inspired, but i could be wrong)

Judgement

I liked reading Unholy Land and i think i would enjoy running it immensely for the right group of players.

My one criticism is that there is no guidance, not even a single line, about what kind of PC's might be suited for the game. A band of Judean rebels? Roman soldiers on leave trying to earn some extra gold on the side? Time travelers? Anything would be possible, but it requires some work up front for the DM and players to decide. Of course, this is not necessarily a negative.

Unholy Land - An Ahistorical Hex-Mas Crawl for Mid-Level Characters is also available as a PWYW-product at DriveThruRpg, but i recommend looking closely at the Epimas bundle-sale for even more good (and oh-so indie) games.

Preparing X1 - The Isle of Dread

Cabin view including ski tracks.

This time of year for over fifteen years, I have retreated to mountain cabin in central Norway for four to five days of intense gaming.

Our yearly winter trip has become a fond tradition for me and my friends that now live scattered across Norway. Still we get together, almost all of us, every year.

We have run many different games over the years, but Warhammer FRP (1st and 2nd edition) have featured prominently with the occasional round of D&D, Kult (Swedish horror game) and EarthDawn.

This year we are going to do something that I have been looking forward to for a long time. Running one of my favorite modules: X1 The Isle of Dread by Tom Moldway and David Cook. I do not think I need to tell people why X1 is great, this great person has done so and this great person as well.

With my personal nostalgia out of the way, I will turn to how I have been preparing to run it.

I am using the module with D&D 5e, so there is something new as well as something traditional. I am also leaning on the play test version of the module as well as the original version (and even a Norwegian translation of the module from the Norwegian edition of the Mentzer Basic D&D Expert-rules, aka “Blåboka” in Norwegian).

So how to prepare the sandbox?

Isle of Dread module-cover (1983 cover)

Well, the first thing to realize with a hexcrawl-type sandbox is that it is only a framework and that, as a DM, you have to create the details of, and connections between, the seeds that the sandbox gives you.

I have read somewhere (but I cannot remember the source) that a sandbox is about emergent stories.
Not the stories you, as a DM might want to tell, but the stories that you as players (the DM also being a player) find as you explore.

Sowing adventure seeds

Consequently, I have spent my prep time taking the seeds that are already in the module and trying to fill them with good stuff.

The first thing I did was hack the encounter tables. There are significant variations between the play test encounter tables and the original ones. I wanted to stay close to the original ones but I had to remove a few monsters because I did not have the time to convert them. Weighing the different results of an encounter table is also a fun exercise and it lets me prefer some encounters to others without implementing the quantum ogre.

The second thing I did was create rival NPC adventuring parties. This is not in the play test version, but the rival adventuring parties suggested in the original module are nice and I love making NPC parties. Now I have an evil band of adventurers looking for a temple, a neutral band of treasure hunters and a good pair of adventurers looking for a powerful fey.

The third was creating a web of relationships between the village chieftains, their witch doctors and war chiefs. I made a few choices and clarifications about how the villages and clans of the module interact. Adding some political intrigue to this module is exiting because the structure of clans in the villages opens up another level of complexity.

The last point was writing a paragraph of additional detail about the major encounters on the island. Detailing the current plans and some personality traits of the leaders of the isle have really made the island come alive.

Improvisation

Another reflection after preparing this module is that the loose structure is very useful for providing the DM with a room for improvisation without having to resort to railroading the players. In other words, the undefined parts of the module are actually the most exiting parts because it is where the players have room to unfold their ideas and plans (or schemes…)

I have made sure there is still enough room for those on the Isle of Dread.