Review & Commentary On The Free OSR Adventure - Red Tam's Bones By John Turcotte For Your Old School Campaign

There are adventures that seem to just have a sense of the weird right out of the gate and this is one of those. The premise sounds basic but its really anything but; "Can you find the bones of Red Tam, the notorious Bard? An adventure for 5 to 8 characters of levels 3 - 5." This is one of those adventures that thrives on fairies and fey and in fact they're featured throughout this adventure.
This adventure recreates an idealized English fairy tale adventure and the cover blurb doesn't do it justice. There's everything here to stage your own mini campaign within  the lands of fairy. The PC's are trying to find the bones of a bard whose shuffled off the mortal coil to break the charm he's placed on a young lady. But there is far more going on then meets the eye. The fairy elements are both like a fairy tale gone wrong and bits of a hex crawl gone right.

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 But is it worth the download? Yes in point of fact it's well worth the time for a download; the Fey elements are well done the encounters very interesting and engaging without resorting to pandering BS that we find in other modules. The author/designer keeps the encounters fast paced without rail roading the PC's. This adventure feels like a Disney movie come to life in the right ways. A dark fantasy adventure to be sure but nothing over the top. The material here is solidly designed for OSR play but the adventure takes its materials very well without completely blowing the adventure out of propitiation. This adventure can easily be adapted into a Fairy heavy campaign set against an  Edwardian/Regency England.


Everything here is oriented toward getting the players into the deep end of the adventure's plot lines without hitting over the head and taking full advantage of pit falls of this sort of adventures. Folks are going to have a blast playing this free adventure while trying to out wit the NPC's and gaming situations. This one rates a five out of five for some old school fairy tale action; don't miss the  adventure Red Tam's Bones. There's plenty of fun still to be had with this one.
This adventure could also be adapted to other retroclone systems including Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Dark Albion, there are some areas in this adventure that fit both game systems as well as  some of the conceils of  where this adventure is trying to take players.