Friday, April 1, 2016

Free OSR Adventure Resource - Adventure Module BL1-2: The Ruined Hamlet/Terror in the Gloaming From Barrataria Games For Your Old School Campaigns

So here is a free fifty nine page OSR module from Barrataria Games  it has a sort of Village of Hommlet feel with a twist or two. Are you looking for an excellent adventure to start a campaign with? Then download this book because its bursting with some great OSR campaign resources and lots & lots of hooks throughout.
GRAB IT RIGHT HERE


The set up is pretty nice and ropes in the PC's straight out of the gate and into the back end of the module where they're walking into a situation that they may soon find themselves up to their necks in;"nto the Unknown! The wilderness around the cave stronghold called Gold Hill Trading Post is dangerous and scattered with ruins of large and small settlements. Will your party find fame and fortune, solve ancient mysteries, or just disappear into the Borderlands like so many that came before? This module contains underground and wilderness maps that form a detailed adventure and mini-campaign for beginning characters, including an abandoned village, haunted graveyard, ruined church, traders’ camp, wilderness encounters, and monster lairs. It also includes a ruined keep and dungeon as well as a mapped and detailed “base camp” stronghold"



There are some really nice maps and hooks in BL1-2: The Ruined Hamlet/Terror in the Gloaming  as well as a large assortment of NPC's, factions, powers, and over arching situations to get your party of adventurers into. The material here feels like a compete touch stone to step into a campaign, with a large amount of sword and sorcery action on the side. You get There are fifty pages of adventuring and 6 pages of maps all designed to dovetail and slide into your existing campaign material which is fine. This module has a bit of everything from a small range of spells, monsters, a distinctive flavor about the setting and more but none of this takes away from or tries to perform hugely distinctive adventure setting on its own. Its almost as if this module was designed to seamlessly expand and fit into your own campaign world. I'm all on board with this style of game writing and design. Everything here is fairly evenly put together making this a perfect DYI D&D module for a retroclone, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord or first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. The settings include a fully detailed hamlet, a wilderness section, a graveyard, a trading post, and much more which makes the price of admission worth a look alone! 
Everything in this module suggests and sets up a campaign from the ground up with the PC's hip deep in the local scene. There are mixes here of the mundane and the fantastic, the module reminded me of the Village of Hommlet more then once making this an adventure module to drop into an existing campaign or as a location to have more experienced PC's deal with some of the adventure hooks that  Module BL1-2: The Ruined Hamlet/Terror in the Gloaming brings to the table.


There are several reasons why this module reminds me of the classic T1 adventure:
  • Organic campaign set up and implementation into an existing campaign as well as use for a jump off point for a brand new campaign. 
  • Old school no tears encounters with a mix of the bizarre and the mundane. 
  • The adventure blends the local scene and politics with the PCs playing into both! This makes the PC's invested in the action. 
  • The factions and NPC's are deeply invest in the adventure's plot and themes. 
  • The 'Big Event' of  BL1-2: The Ruined Hamlet/Terror in the Gloaming  actually has some solid repercussions on the campaign world and setting and not simply an implied campaign or setting impact. 
The bottom line is to grab this adventure for your old school games and use it as both adventure and tool box. The fact that its free is icing on the cake in my opinion.

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