My D&D 5E Greyhawk game is running through a series of adventures written for the Castles & Crusades game. Published by Troll Lord Games, C&C is one of the longest standing systems of what we now know as the OSR. It was first released in 2004. Castles & Crusades is a variant of the first edition of D&D, with a few interesting touches that set it apart from pure retroclones. And it has been supported well over the years.
The first adventure of their “M” series, A Stranger Among Us, is designed for a party of 5th-7th level characters. There is also a version converted for D&D 5E, which – amusingly enough – I’m not using. Why am I not using it? Well, when I went to buy it, I wasn’t thinking they’d have converted it: I was looking for an adventure by TLG. I’m also running it for 9th and 10th level characters, adding or modifying monsters when appropriate.
I hadn’t intended to run the adventure. It just that, after I read it, I was so impressed with the storyline – which fit brilliantly into my campaign – that I immediately slotted it in.
Given the adventure was published in 2020, a year before I even started this campaign, that’s some foresight from Davis Chenault!
The plot of the adventure initially appears to the party as a thief-hunt: the local lord has had some valuable statuettes stolen from his home and wants the party to pursue the thief and recover the statuettes. However, there’s more going on, with an invading army on the horizon and the thief being an agent of that army. There are refugees fleeing from the army, and many other complications that will enrich play of the later adventures.
In this first instalment, the adventure is split into three sections:
- The party are hired by the local lord to hunt the thief, and investigate the crime scene and interrogate a captured accomplice,
- The party follow the trail of the thief through the wilderness, and
- Finally, the party confront the thief in a ruined village he’s using as his temporary stronghold.
Of these sections, the second is undoubtedly the weakest. It takes up six pages, but three of those are devoted to describing a single random encounter – a set of troll caverns that any party actually following the thief would likely ignore. Most of the remaining three pages is given over to a description of the terrain the characters are travelling over, with only limited attention to encounters – three random encounter tables, each corresponding to a terrain type.
Here is one of the encounter tables, for a winding broken land known as the Defiles:
As a resource to help challenge the party as they chase the thief… eh, not really. Running wilderness travel is difficult, as I’ve noted recently. For a journey where you’re in a chase, the nature of encounters needs to be different from an exploration. In this case, small dungeons don’t make sense unless the thief went through them. (This seems unlikely). And having a pile of cobbles? It feels very out-of-place as a wilderness encounter – especially as one that might be repeated.
Thankfully, the rest of the adventure is better. It isn’t perfect, but better. I find the material indifferently presented. Sudden bits of background about the villain appear in the middle of a description of an abandoned village.
And that village? Seven pages of description, but the main contents are some human refugees and three enemies. As it played in our session, the party ran into the first of the enemies, and then the other foes came to help in a tricky encounter. And then we got the exploration where the party hit the highlights of what was in the village and had the big revelation of the huge army poised to invade their homeland – which leads into the rest of the series.
But for all this, it’s an adventure I found inspiring. Why? Because the core story and structure were so good.
The party learn about this thief, who with accomplices, stole some statuettes (described as either crystal or wood in different sections of the adventure). But it becomes apparent that he was using magical mind control to force his accomplices to aid him. And, as the party follow him through the wilderness, they get clues that some sort of magical beast is stalking him. Then, when the revelations come at the end of the adventure as to his true nature and that of the greater threat looming, everything falls into place.
And, while I’m unimpressed by how the wilderness travel is handled and think a little too much detail is given to describing the village, these sections do have decent worldbuilding. The chase goes through three different terrains, each of which has its own character. The mismatch is between the nature of the adventure and the material, not in the quality of the invention. If these descriptions had been a scenario focused on exploration, I’d be much happier.
But it’s a mixed bag. If the adventure concept doesn’t work for you, you’re probably not going to find much here. I would have liked more set encounters during the chase sequence, and, even if random encounters were still used, more attention to making them varied and more than “a random monster” which probably attacks you.
I think, most of all, this is an adventure full of inspiration, but needs a GM to collect the pieces together and work out how to employ them.