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Blog Preview: Pedantic Wasteland: Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals
🕑 Added 2024-12-13 02:17:45 +0000 UTCThis review is written as part of a Secret Santa type thing for my friend Anne, so if you know Anne, consider this review embargoed until I post it!
Pedantic Wasteland: Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals
Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals (hereinafter “Lighthouse”) is an adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) by Anne Hunter, published by Thick Skull Adventures in 2022. It is 18-pages (inclusive of the cover), designed for 4 to 5 characters of 1st level, and aims to function both as a standalone adventure or as part of a series of adventures, slotting between Attack of the Frawgs (2012 funnel adventure by Stephen Newton) and The Haunting of Larvik Island (2013, also Stephen Newton). Lighthouse contains “additional writing” by Stephen Newton, presumably to add connective tissue to tie this adventure more closely with its sibling adventures. Because I have read neither of Lighthouse’s companion adventures, I am evaluating Lighthouse as a standalone adventure.
Reviewer’s Disclaimer: Anne Hunter, fellow blogger at DIY & Dragons, is also a friend of mine, so there is no way that doesn’t color my evaluation of this module, try as I might to read Lightbreaker as a floating set of transparent eyeballs. This review was also written as part of a “Secret Santa” type event (inspired by the non-monetary gift guide from Explorer’s Design) called “Covert Critic” that I hosted this year on my Discord Server, and Anne is the name I drew from the digital hat.
However, as a potential counterweight to my potential bias in favor of Anne is that I am not a big DCC-head. I’ve played its inbred cousin, Mutant Crawl Classics, this year at GenCon, and have read a number of DCC’s adventures and hacks and, while the funnel style of adventure is absolutely inspired, I find DCC’s rules are often too fiddly for my taste and that its adventures tend more toward the beer-and-pretzels lightly plotted waves of monsters style that are popular among more mainstream games (which DCC undoubtedly ranks among) instead of what I prefer in adventures which is simply a complicated situation that player characters might be thrown into rather than a universe that mostly orbits the players themselves. So right off the back, I am potentially biased in favor of the writer and biased against the DCC ecosystem. So please, add salt to taste.
Structure and Strictures
The OSR and its descendants seek to uphold player agency above all. In adventure design, this manifests in ways that make what Lightbreaker seeks to do difficult. The typical P/OSR adventure tends to present an open-ended powderkeg of a situation with no set path for player characters, a large, looping dungeon with plenty of factional intrigue like those pioneered in the adventures of Jennell Jaquays, or some combination of these elements to maximize the choices available to the players. While this is all well and good, it makes one type of adventure difficult: the one-shot. A one-shot needs to be relatively focused to deliver something satisfying in a few hours without the players feeling like “dang, we were just getting started” when the evening of gaming concludes.
Lighthouse is consciously a one-shot and uses tightly packed design techniques to provide an adventure that can be satisfyingly run from beginning to end in 3 to 4 hours, but these techniques would feel out of place if it were instead a more open-ended adventure that wasn’t constrained in such a way. The first way that this difference in structure presents itself is in what I call the Hook-Or-Crook Dichotomy. Some adventures, particularly open-ended adventures, cast out several hooks in front of the players, trying to bait them into going into this direction or that. My colleague, Nova of the Playful Void blog, has some advice on applying juicy bait to adventure hooks for this type of adventures. If Lighthouse were twice or three times the length and wasn’t designed as a one-shot, just the fact that the lighthouse, an important landmark for the region that is being pressed by mysterious and dangerous forces, has gone dark would be enough of a hook to simply put in front of the players. The crook method, by contrast, doesn’t give players the choice between biting or not. It is the difference between saying if you enlist in the military, you’ll get your college tuition paid for, versus getting drafted for war. In Lighthouse, the crook takes the form of the adventure premise: the player characters are loyal citizens of the besieged town of Sagewood and have been voluntold that they are to head to the lighthouse to restart the light before it causes any ships to run aground or any other mischief to occur. This makes more sense when playing Lighthouse as a follow-up to Attack of the Frawgs, where the Alderman at least has the reason of your previous bravery to hand-select you for this mission. If Lighthouse presented itself as a typical open-ended adventure, the crook method would feel overbearing, but in the one-shot context, it is a necessity of getting the players directly into the adventure without having to spend at least a half hour either hemming or hawing.
While Lighthouse employs the crook method, if you just want to instead plant this adventure site as one of many in a seaside campaign, it very subtly embeds a fun hook that you can instead dangle in front of your players: a mysterious wooden leg. The lighthouse keeper, Hek Linenden (whose name actually resembles “Hook, Line, and” missing only the Sinker from the idiom), has a wooden leg that it seems every person in town has a different story about how he got it, from eating his own leg to survive after trying a sea-god ritual to losing it to giant crabs he was trying to trap to having it wither away as a result of fooling with black magic. When the player characters find his [spoilers, obviously] corpse, the adventure says “The wooden leg is ornate, but non-magical; however, the judge is encouraged to let the players to think it might have magical properties.” It still is a valuable piece of treasure in and of itself, but playing up the potentially magical wooden leg in addition to the mystery of the darkened lighthouse is a good enough hook to toss into an open-ended campaign that features Lighthouse as one adventure site among many.
Once the players are thrust into the adventure (by hook or by crook), Lighthouse follows the classic town and dungeon structure. You begin in the town of Sagewood before heading to the eponymous Lighthouse where foul beasts lie in wait.
The Town
The starting settlement of the adventure is Sagewood, a village to which the player characters are presumed to be members in good enough standing to be sent on important adventures for the protection of the commonweal. It seems that Sagewood is likely the home base for Lighthouse’s sibling adventures and, if so, probably receives more detail there. That would explain the absence of a set of locations in town, but so too would the aforementioned limitation of this adventure aiming to be a fairly self-contained adventure. As soon as you start writing about the tavern and the smithy in town, you can almost guarantee that the players will spend half the session picking about civilization instead of heading directly toward danger.
Instead of locations, Sagewood is presented by detailing its various NPC residents. This is similar to my approach in my own adventure Trouble in Paradisa (which was written as part of a game jam that the author of Lighthouse ran over the summer, to further stress to you that this review might not be fully objective) where the resort town is mostly fleshed out by describing the residents and their connections to each other. In the case of Trouble in Paradisa, this approach was both because of form (a pamphlet adventure where the exterior folds were already monopolized by art) and function (the adventure is about figuring out which of the residents is the murderer and gameplay is likely to center around interviewing them as witnesses and potential suspects). Lighthouse’s approach is governed similarly, not only as I said before by its function as a one- or two-shot, but also the NPCs are written with the assumption that they are being interacted with as part of the town meeting that starts out the adventure. I’m not sure how many player characters would mill about and chat and not immediately set out for adventure, but those that do are well served by the clues they can glean.
Each NPC entry has a description of the character and their function in town and a quote the NPC might say when asked about the player characters’ quest. I generally like a short quote from NPCs because it is an efficient way to help the referee know how to roleplay them by showing how they talk and what eccentricities they might have. These quotations are longer than they need to be for that purpose and contain enough important information that referees might be tempted to just use them as read-aloud text. I am not fond of this approach both because I find read-aloud text to be stilting to the conversational approach of an RPG but also because even the best NPC quotation cannot be perfectly tailored to what the player characters actually said to elicit the information. In practice, it makes it feel more like a video game RPG where you are unlocking the NPC’s dialogue tree. I prefer to apply the “tactical infinity” of TTRPGs to not just the usual tactics of exploration or combat but of social interactions as well. Long and important NPC quotes have a tendency to stifle this in play.
That said, the NPCs are themselves interesting and have neat opportunities for interaction. Some are cynical and warn the player characters from returning back to the dying town (Widow Sorcha and Rosano), which is nice tone-setting. Most provide at least a rumor (often incorrect) about what waits at the lighthouse and what befell its keeper (or, as I already mentioned, details about his missing leg). And every single NPC can be persuaded to part with something or other that will aid them in their quest. If player characters hit up every NPC for assistance, they make off with a short sword, boiled leather armor, a blackjack, a set of thieves’ tools, a half-finished potion, 50’ of rope, a children’s prayer book that, if studied, contains lore about the sea god and his daughter-rival, a medicinal beer, two 0th level followers, and a swig of non-medicinal beer. Not a bad haul!
One thing that this section of the adventure could use is some sense of urgency. Perhaps after the second or third NPC who the player characters chat into giving a gift, the Alderman urges them to get moving and that the lighthouse is a pressing matter. If they still loiter about after that warning, there could even be a chance of some monsters (perhaps a giant axolotl) interrupting the town meeting, to show how dire the circumstances are for the town.
The Dungeon
The “dungeon” is a lighthouse and its environs and is illustrated very neatly as an isometric map. In fact, the map is just as much a piece of artwork (my favorite in the adventure) as it is a practical tool. My only quarrel with it is that it is landscape in orientation, which necessitates flipping the portrait-oriented book to its side to use. However, it is a single page and black and white, so would be easy enough to print out and refer to separately when running this adventure. The layout of the dungeon itself is not linear (aside from climbing the lighthouse itself) but it is also too small to be considered properly Jaquaysed. However, it is a good size for a one-shot and the layout makes sense for the fiction of the adventure.
I already complained about the read-aloud text in the town section, so I won’t dwell on the issues with this practice in this section other than that it is also employed, typically one or two paragraphs for each area. This is less of a problem for locations than NPCs, but still goes against my preference for more conversational refereeing. However, I will note that DCC comes from a play culture influenced by 3rd edition D&D (in fact, my understanding is that it began its life as a producer of adventures for such system rather than its own system), and that many of those adventures also rely on boocoos of read-aloud text. So it is likely something a DCC-player expects going in and something a non-DCC player could just treat as ordinary room descriptions. For what it’s worth, the descriptions are evocative.
A real treat of this adventure is how effectively Anne weaves interactable clues into the rooms. So often, you’ll see dungeon rooms with secret features that players have no way of expecting might be present unless they obsessively poke and prod every nook and cranny, bogging down play. In my review of A Rasp of Sand, I called this (which by no means is unique to that module) the “Action Prompt Problem”. Anne gets around this problem by adding clues that hint at secret features of the dungeon. For instance, there isn’t just a secret door in the cooking shack next to the lighthouse; it is a false wall that the lighthouse keeper’s dog scratches at. This would be a “secret” as slotted into Anne’s famous Landmark Hidden Secret categorization. However, the adventure isn’t wholly free from Action Prompt Problems with at least a concealed panel built into the side of a rowboat (which panel includes some treasure but also a link to the next adventure in the published path of adventures) having no reasonable clue to its existence. An easy clue would be the fact that the rowboat is heavier than it appears (containing a spear and spyglass) or that these secret items make sounds as they clank about inside when the characters attempt to haul the boat up the cliff.
Another convention of typical adventure design is a stumbling point for me but at the same time includes one of the most engaging aspects of the module: the boss monster. In this case, it is a dragon. That’s right, you’ve got both dungeons (lighthouse and adjacent structures) and dragons (technically a hagdragon) in this one! My issue with the deployment is one that I have with the way so many boss monsters in dungeons operate: it is static, waiting for adventurers to get near to wake up and fight. There is an in-universe reason (it is awakened by the sea god that sent it), but I still think it would be better if there were multiple avenues by which this encounter could be sprung. There is, in fact, a pretty easy way to do this because the hagdragon is slumbering elsewhere in a sinkhole but the way it is written, it is inaccessible there and the intent is for it to “awaken during the climax of the adventure.” My issue is mostly in having any preordained climax to an adventure. If the players are foolhardy enough to to descend 200 feet into a saltwater-filled sinkhole, they deserve a premature climax!
As far as climaxes go, this is a good one though. The dragon rises from its hole in the ground and wraps itself around the lighthouse, seeking to destroy the building itself. Of course, because this climax occurs when they are at the top of the lighthouse, collapsing it would also likely mean the death of the characters. The hagdragon also has detailed tactics for the first 5 rounds of combat (assuming its tactics aren’t somehow disrupted by player action) which includes how the lighthouse reacts to the assault and when it will collapse. For a group of level 1 characters, this dragon (although not a conventional dragon) is an overwhelming force and is sure to be the most memorable part of the adventure, whether they overcome it through quick thinking or if it ends in a total party kill. The adventure includes a boxed “Judge’s Note” with a few tactics the player characters might employ against the superior foe and the effects of such tactics, with a note that these are just a few creative solutions the players might bring to bear but are listed to help the referee adjudicate them. I definitely appreciate this note because without it fledging referees might believe these are the only tactics that would work. Instead, it tells the referee to be on the lookout for creative problem solving. My favorite of these is feeding the hagdragon to prevent it from using its bite action on the next turn (it suggests both the garlic, onions or horseradish that are available in the gardens but also suggests using the aquatic guinea pigs or turnspit dog in this manner–some player characters are demented and this module doesn’t bat an eye contemplating that).
The art and layout is serviceable and reminiscent of old school adventures put out by TSR but is much, much more readable. I’m just spoiled by all the amazing layout happening in my corner of the post-OSR these days that relatively simple black and white art paired with conventional two column scrolls of text don’t do anything for me. But it looks like it would be easy enough to reference out of the book and the layout never gets in the way.
Ideas Worth Stealing
Here are a few choice ideas that you might pluck from this adventure even if you don’t end up running Lighthouse as an adventure wholecloth:
The town’s druggist gives the party a half-finished potion that will have a different effect based on what rare reagent is added. The adventure suggests three possible additions found in the adventure (hagfish slime, crushed barnacle shell, and horseradish or garlic) and what effects result, but this is an opportunity to allow players to experiment and also makes even mundane seeming “treasure” like slime worth picking up.
If you need a lighthouse-based adventure that provides enough for about one session, the map could easily be repurposed for your lighthouse.
Pets as treasure. Coin and gems as treasure? Boring! In the garden maintained by the lighthouse keeper, there are baby-sized guinea pigs that have grown gills and thus become water-breathing. The adventure calls out that each is worth 10 gold coins as exotic pets in the nearby city. Capturing rare and usual creatures could be a campaign premise of its own, but including small rewards like these are more fun than ordinary treasure because it gives the players a choice: sell the creatures as a profit or keep them for themselves as pets (or feed them to the dragon). (There is also the aforementioned turnspit dog that is pet worthy, but it doesn’t have any value as treasure.)
Body parts as treasure. I already touched on how the lighthouse keeper’s wooden leg is a potential adventure hook, but it is also an example of an interesting type of treasure. If your players get their hands on interesting prosthetics, even if non-magical, they’ll tend to hold onto them just in case. I had one player who found a prosthetic eye made of iron early in the campaign and was later much more excited than he should have been when he later lost his eye in a fight.
Monsters that want to destroy buildings. Plenty of people have pointed out that it is boring for all combat to involve both sides wanting to kill the other. It is a classic dynamic for a reason but gets old when every fight is a fight to the death. It is better when one or both sides have a unique goal they are pursuing and the combat is just a means to achieve that goal. Destroying a building is an interesting goal and is made all the more interesting when the player characters are inside that building and don’t have a means to quickly exit it.
Where to Find Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals
Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals was written by Anne Hunter. A watermarked PDF version is available on DriveThruRPG for $5.99 but it is also available as a softcover print with complimentary PDF copy (sans watermarks) at Goodman Games’ webstore for $14.99. I opted for the latter both because I like reading physical versions to digital and because DriveThruRPG’s janky architecture is seemingly designed to prevent me from buying the PDF. Also, if you would like to read a retrospective of writing the adventure from the designer herself (I always love reading these), Anne wrote about her process on her blog.
If you have run Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals, I would love to hear about your experience doing so. Feel free to regale us all with your field reports in the comments.
