Roots Run Deep is an urban and wilderness adventure for level 1-4 characters, playable in about three to five hours. A corrupted knight has entered a town and killed a lot of the small creatures there, and the players must track him back to the dark forest that corrupted him and end the threat.
This adventure, while not a D&D Adventurers League-legal adventure, is written using their Season 8 format. I wish it hadn’t been. The format is brilliant at obfuscating text and making even simple adventures difficult to parse. There are two bonus objectives here, and they’re described in one of the later appendices as the format demands, and thus are hard to reference. No boxed text doesn’t help, either.
The first section of the adventure involves the characters attempting to find what is responsible for the killings. To do that, they need to talk to three people in the town, Zara, Panna and Zadok. Unfortunately, the briefing they get doesn’t explain this. It’s just assumed the players know. This an example of how boxed text or dot points do wonders for comprehension, and the adventure suffers from their lack. The characters’ patron also gives them an artefact that requires the players to solve a cypher in order to activate it fully. The cypher’s keys are the names of the people they’re meeting. Is this something the players are told or are they expected to figure it out? I couldn’t tell what the intention was. It would make sense for the characters to do the investigation, learn the names, then solve the cypher, but I don’t know how they find the people they need to talk to without knowing their names!
It isn’t the greatest investigation.
The second section of the adventure, which takes place in the dark forest, is better realised. The setting is evocative and contains a few dangerous threats. The party need to determine how to use the artefact correctly to proceed, then deal with some of the forest’s defenders before braving the corrupted knight in its lair.
One of the bonus encounters expands the investigation by providing a subquest you need to undertake before one of the NPCs reveals information. The other bonus encounter adds an additional challenge to the forest, a Dardana. What’s a Dardana? I don’t know. She’s described as a creature that is integrated into a thicket, and that’s it. This is tremendously underwritten, and it also suffers from the trigger for the quest not being in the place you’d expect – only in the adventure summary, rather than in the encounter where you’d be given it!
The formatting shows a lack of care in some places. Consider the bottom right-corner of this page:
Put a new column/page break before the monster header to keep it all on one page!
Overall, this adventure feels underwhelming. The concept is engaging, but the execution displays numerous flaws. It does get better as it goes along, however, so it might be worthwhile just running the second half.