A Legacy of missed Opportunities

By the end of this review, I well tell you that Legacy of Blood for vsD is worth buying - after picking it apart in bloody pieces. Really, I'm positively angry about many things this scenario does, BUT it features a great premise and enough material to actually make it work. This could be a great, complex, atmospheric scenario about falling from grace (and maybe rising again) - instead, author Jonathan Hicks for some reason decided to write LoB as a railroaded mediocre dungeon romp that doesn't make much sense. It's a mystery, and not one of the good kind, but it leaves enough to be salvaged and turned into something beautiful.

What's it about? [SPOILERS from here]

The premise is that after the long and undeserved fall from grace of the noble Leoric family, its current Lady, in her desperation, has secretly allied herself with the Darkmaster and invited his servents into her home. Most good souls have been driven away from her seat at Windown Castle, and a subtle shadow has fallen over her holdings. Her handmaiden Amberly Ash knows all about this and doesn't approve, so she steals a magical key that opens the door to a cache of magical items hidden in Castle Dulgroth, formerly owned by the Leorics, which lies in ruins these days and has been claimed by as lair by the dragon Delveniul. She gives to key to the heroes, imploring them to get the magical items so that they don't fall into the hands of the Darkmasters servants. She knows of a secret way into Castle Dulgroth, through the old family barrows beneath it. Naturally, the servants of the Darkmaster will find out about the stolen key and set out after the characters ...

As an added complication, the Gelbreth family, old rivals of the Leoric, want to get their hands on some of the documents kept in the cache that could stain their good name, and send out an agent.

What's right with it?

We get good write-ups of the central characters - Lady Leoric, her handmaiden Amberly Ash, the two major servants of the Darkmaster living in Windown Castle and a spy of the Gelbreth family. Lady Leoric is a tragic character - her families name has been wrongfully smeared for generations by corrupt kings, her holdings have dwindled, and she finally had enough of it and taken the outstretched hand of the Darkmaster (she's even supposed to get a Theoden moment at the end of the adventure that turns her around). The servants of the Darkmaster, Varus and Eorin Darkelm, who are father and son, are pretty straightforward bad guys, but still get some delightful pieces of characterization that should make them fun to interact with. Amberly Ash is a classical everyday hero who just does the right thing, and Stry Hemborn, the Gelbreth spy, is characterized as a capable adventurer and smart manipulator with few scruples who will try to remain on the good side of the characters as long as he can. This is rich material for interaction.

We also get some introductory mini-adventures along the lines of "clean the ghouls out of the old watchtower" to establish the characters in the area and make them likely candidates to approach for Amberly Ash. These don't go beyond giving out a mission in one or two sentences and providing some adversary stats, but they still make sense in the broader context of the adventure.

Together with the backstory, that makes for the first third of the scenario, and if that sounds appealing to you, I'd say it's worth the price of admission.

What's wrong with it?

Basically, that the rest of the adventure decides against doing anything with the good stuff - more so, if you play it as written, it actually seems to try to keep you away from interacting in any meaningful way with Lady Leoric, the Darkelms and Amberly Ash (beyond her role as the one who sends the characters on their mission).

As written, the characters are supposed to meet Amberly Ash in an inn. How hard would it be to suggest that the characters - after, for example, cleaning out a watchtower full of ghouls - might actually be Lady Leorics guests at Windown Castle, where they could meet the bad guys in person and maybe sniff out that something's wrong about them? It's possible to spin the scenario that way, but there's no guidance for it, and while we get good NPC descriptions to work with, there's next to nothing about Windown Castle itself.

So the adventure presupposses that the characters go relic hunting without ever having met Lady Leoric or the Darkelms (and without worrying about what will happen to Amberly Ash, as well), which is the first big wasted opportunity of the scenario as written, because it robs later encounters with the Darkelms and the likely epilogue with Leoric of a lot of its possible impact.

After that, we get a heavily scripted wilderness chase sequence, in which the GM is told quite explicitly when the heroes are supposed to hold their ground, when they should flee due to overwhelming numbers and when Stry, the Gelbreth spy, shows up to save their asses and endear himself to them with a cooked up story about him being a friend of Amberly's. The dramatic timing of all these events might look excellent on paper, but really, dramatic timing is best left to the GM, because it's highly dependent on what's actually happening at the table. I'm not buying a scenario because I want it to tell me a dramatic story, I'm buying it because I want tools I can use to create a dramatic story together with my players. At the same time, there's very little help provided for running the actual encounters. One of them is heavily dependend on missile combat, so you'd think there'd be some guidance about how far the opposing sides might be apart ... but no. Instead, it is stated that if, at a certain moment, none of the heroes loose an arrow at Eorin Darkelm, Stry will do so and kill him with one shot. Because you know how much players love it when NPCs steal their thunder ...

Oh yeah, did I mention that Eorin Darkelm is following the heroes with a warband of orcs ...? Until now, it looked like the Darkelms operate with human henchman. Them having orcs at Wondown Castle would have certainly been a huge red flag in the implied setting of vsD that might have been mentioned before. And if the orcs are not from Windown Castle, they must have camped somewhere around - but there's no orc camp to be seen on the map of the surroundings. While reading, this was the point where I started to wish that LoB would have just followed the scenario format of the other two vsD adventures, which would have provided just that kind of information.

So after the scripted chase follows a trip through the barrows. Again, there's some nice scenes here, but in the end, the whole sequence lacks coherence and is full of ill-judged ideas. For example, each time the characters disturb a grave or rob a piece of treasure, an undead guard will awaken - but in a room at the very end of the barrows! So the worse the heroes behave on their way through the barrows, the more opponents they'll have to face in the end ... but there's no way for them to know that or find it out. So either the GM rubs their noses in it in the end ("You were very, very bad, and here's your just deserts! Ha!"), or the whole thing is pretty pointless. Also, in terms of trying to guard your graves from graverobbers, it just makes zero sense.

Even worse is the room where, if you rob a piece of treasure, you'll be cursed to not gain any XP as long as you don't get rid of said treasure - and the adventure text explicitly tells the GM not to mention anything and let the players figure it out for themselves. Yeah, that's going to go down well: "You're not getting XP this session." "What, why?" "Go figure!"

These two things actually made me angry (I'm still angry!), because they seems to be written for GMs who feel the need to punish their players for doing "bad things". I hate this. It's not about the actions of the characters having consequences, because for that to be true, the players would have to have at least a slight chance to figure out the consequences of their actions and think them through on an ethical and/or practical level. This is just "You better behave, or you'll see what happens!"

Apart from that, vsD has truly great rules for cursed items that can provide lots of role-playing fun for players as well by giving them new, problematic passions ... why not use them, instead of coming up with a simplistic and mean-spirited punishment for grave-robbing characters and their players? (Actually, LoB seems to be reluctant to engage with the rules of vsD on several occassions.)

And then there's the grand finale that takes place in a vault right under the room where the dragon Delveniul is sleeping. Delveniul remains a purely abstract threat - if she awakes, she will send down a burst of fire, but she won't be able to fit into the corridors to come down to them. Though I shouldn't write if, but when she awakes, because once again, it is a foregone conclusion that she will not wake up while the characters sneak around in the vault beneath her, but that she will wake up as soon as the bad guys catch up with the characters and make a racket. At least, that will leave the characters with some decisions to make about whether to save treasure, magical items or information.

Once again, it feels like LoB is afraid to let the characters interact with the major players while the actual adventure is underway, because that might lead to things going off the rails laid by the author. So you have a dragon, traditionally a monster with personality, a threat that can not only be avoided or defeated, but also negotiated with, and instead of doing something with it, you reduce it to a burst of flame at the showdown.

There's an epilogue to let us know that Amberly Ash has (against all odds, it would seem) survived as a prisoner on Windown Castle, but it is really the first time that it is implied that the characters might care about her fate. Strangely enough, in the next section, that deals with Lady Leoric shedding the influence of the Darkmaster, it is implied that, on the contrary, her handmaiden has died and that she is heartbroken about that. Both these conflicting outcomes are not described as options, but stated as fact. Finally, we get several good suggestions for follow-up adventures, including dealing with Delveniul, who becomes more destructive once plunderers start to venture into the now re-discovered barrows under her castle, and investigating the shady Gelbreth family. While I could well imagine running the former with the material provided, there's next to nothing on the Gelbreth family in LoB, which is quite a shame.

What can be done?

However much I might have written myself into a rage, this doesn't change the fact that LoB offers a great premise and good scenario material, especially when it comes to NPCs. I do want to run this, but certainly not remotely as written. There's so many options that the scenario fails to explore, support or even hint at. For example, it would make so much sense to have the characters actually visit Windown Castle before starting their quest. How would the atmosphere in this shadowed place of former greatness be? Will the heroes figure out that Lady Leoric and the Darkelms serve the Darkmaster, and if they do, how will they react? Will they confront them? Will they pretend to be agents of the Darkmaster themselves? Even if they pick a fight with the Darkelms there and then ( "You, Sir, are scum, and I will call you such!"), there's ample room to still let the treasure hunt unfold after that. And it would make so much more sense for Amberly Ash to approach them if they turn up as guests at Windown Castle.

And a dragon - always a golden opportunity to let the characters negotiate for what they want! They could ask Delveniul to just let them go with the coveted magic items and offer her to bring her the treasures from the barrows instead. They could even ask her to guard the magic items against the Darkmaster (but could she be trusted not to ally with him of he makes her a better offer ...?). There's so much potential here that the adventure seems to actively try to cut off by stating that the dragon will just kill anyone who ist stupid enough to venture further up into the castle.

Oh yeah, and I would probably just throw out most of that barrows nonsense ...

What I really don't get: Nothing about LoB calls for that kind of railroaded wilderness/dungeon chase that takes up most of the pages of the written scenario. Quite the contrary - after reading the first 8-10 pages, I was really baffled by what came afterward.

In the end, this one gets 3 out of 5 grumpy dragons for all the good stuff in the first pages that, for some reason, it doesn't want you to use.