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| Snapshot of my notes that I printed out based on the Retired Adventurer’s Better Notes series of blog posts. These were very helpful all the way through the adventure. |
General Thoughts
Overall, The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen was incredibly fun and very educational. My skills as an RPG referee have undoubtedly improved over the course of this adventure, and the longer narrative arc allowed for a lot of immersion and memorable character moments. The dark humour and Lovecraft flavour both come through strongly in this one. The way we played it, it wasn’t very horror focused, it felt more like a Lovecraft themed adventure than a spook fest or an eerie mood piece. I think the dark aspects could be played up though, with the right group.
The module will require a lot of quick thinking from the GM and a little extra seasoning to fill in the blanks throughout. There’s 41 locations and a lot of them are just a single paragraph. There are events and NPCs hinted at, but not fully fleshed out. This will be a challenge for newer GM but I do think it’s a challenge worth taking on as it will be good practice.
Layout
The layout is pretty to look at, but hard to reference at the table. Looking at the city map and then flicking forward to the locations to match them felt like spinning plates, especially with no distinct city landmarks or districts to orient around.
The text is also very densely packed in there. It’s the Merry Mushmen editing flavour, which I appreciated in a dense zine of articles to be read like Knock, but for adventure layout I found myself frustrated with it. It also has a fair few typos to watch out for.
Length
I did not expect this adventure to last 15 sessions. That’s something I wish I’d known going in. I’ll know better from now on what kind of things make an adventure long and “sticky” – lots of things for PCs to trip over and get involved in. This one could really double up as a city setting, as Brad and Yochai mentioned on their podcast review recently.
Expectations
In addition to understanding the proper length of a given game, I learned too that tone is an important thing to consider before diving into a game. I didn’t quite anticipate the tone that this adventure would take, and I think I was expecting a bit more Elric due to the tone of the core rulebook. That was really my own mistake, since the adventure text is very clearly Lovecraftian in tone, and I should have just adjusted based on that.
Rules preference
I’ve also refined my personal palette for what I enjoy in RPGs over this game, as well. I’ve decided that Black Sword Hack is a little on the light side for me when it comes to longer games. Some of the aspects, like player-facing rolls and roll-under ability checks as a core mechanic, are not things I gelled with, and I often found myself wanting to rule things differently.
I don’t like roll under ability checks as a core component because they tie roll outcomes too strongly to ability scores. In contrast, other games such as Delving Deeper only give players a small bonus to certain actions if their Strength score is 15+. This de-emphasises ability scores, and emphasises player strategy, character traits and usage of things like items, environment, etc.
Balancing
I also think that if you were to run this game system yourself, you may need to house rule a few of those background special powers. At-will invisibility and assassination were the most potent combination, and the two players were able to trivialise quite a few encounters throughout this adventure. It’s okay to have these things tempered a little either in-fiction or simply as an agreed upon house rule.
Variety
Something I really enjoyed was introducing variety throughout the adventure. In session #8, the players took the role of two different characters for a session (I used A Man on the Road and it was awesome). In session #14, I used By This Poleaxe to run a large-scale city skirmish, “zooming out” the action from the two main characters. These diversions were fun dashes of heterogeneity to the adventure that I think worked very well and served to flesh out elements of the world that wouldn’t be accessible through the eyes of the two usual player characters.
Thanks,
Feirsteax
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