Saturday, October 24, 2015

Reconsidering YS1 The Outpost of the Outer Ones From Jeremy Reaban For Your Old School Campaigns

The big problem that I see a lot of folks having on G+ is the time factor and the fill in game between adventures and levels for PC's. Given the the time of year that it is I started to look for a science fantasy/horror stop gap adventure, something with the Lovecraftian themes and the weird horror aspect of Lovecraft. YS1 The Outpost of the Outer Ones From Jeremy Reaban is a pay what you want adventure that ticks all of the boxes and its only twenty pages! Fast, simple, and very well put together the Mi Go are one of my favorite alien races of the Mythos. I've already reviewed this module in detail. 
Today I'm going to talk about actually using this module as a convention style set up for a Halloween get together. This module doesn't come across as a horror or investigative adventure instead this is a straight up dungeon crawl.  


The Set Up right out of the gate could be based on the rumors that the adventure provides :
"Graveyards have been dug up and the bodies removed. But only recent burials.  Local farmers have been reporting their haystacks  have been getting up and walking away at night. A ranger has mentioned hearing strange buzzing sounds coming from the woods at night.  Old Gwen (a local witch) has gone missing from her  cabin in the woods.A group of creepy looking men have been asking about the strange occurrences in the woods, and muttering something about a yellow sign. Hope they  don't mean the Golden Dryad, my favorite tavern." None of these are going to give a damn thing away about the rest of the crawl at all. This module is a bit light on the traditional treasure but get's into far more dangerous things. This module is meant for levels six through ten depending upon what OSR rules set your using. It's meant for OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord, it could be used with Lamentations of the Flame Princess but there will have to be some adjustments where necessary.
I've used this module a number of times with Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea, the module puts the PC's center stage with the horrors from Yuggoth and brings things to a head quite nicely. The reason why I chose AS&SH with The Outpost of the Outer Ones is quite simple. AS&SH is damn close to OSRIC and the stats are easily adaptable between the two games. AS&SH actually features a version of the Mi Go close enough to this adventure so that transitions and conversion is a snap.
There is a sense with this dungeon crawl that your adventurers are going to be taken for a wild ride into what essentially amounts to a weird, gonzo and very isolated crawl in the claws & lairs of the Mi Go. This modules goes over the author's style of them in spades and the module could be used as a fun little crawl with White Star or even Stars Without Number but level adjustments and some mathematics might be involved. Knowledge of the mythos isn't going to help your PC's at all. This is the author's take on the Mi Go and in places it's quite original. This module could be used with Dungeon Crawl Classics but it would take a good deal of wrap around or a copy of Call of Cthulhu D20. The PC's are going to need a great deal of luck and skill to survive this one. Can this module also work for other games? Easily this module could be adapted to X plorers, or as medium style game for Hulks and Horrors, your fancy sci fi technology isn't going to help you with the Mi Go folks.

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