Today we’re looking at The Spear of Horrendous Iron by Samuel McClure Taylor – a small but dense regional adventure for level 5 PCs. In its own words, Horrendous Iron is “an oldschool-ass dungeon adventure with all the classics: a town with a problem, a forest, and a dungeon.” Here at 2d6 Stingbats we would prefer an old school ass-dungeon but we’ll take what we can get.

There is a lot going on here. The town of Halgalant is home to a group of Anarchists that want to summon and then kill an avatar of Gede in order to return the goddess to her “true” and wild state. Within the Anarchists is a group of fanatical Cultists that are taking on plant-like characteristics. They’re all working with a giant princess that is reforging an ancient weapon in order to re-establish her ancestral kingdom. They have also hired a group of ogre mercenaries for security. The whole lot of them are hanging arounnd in a dungeon where a dragon has taken up residence.

Meanwhile, the townspeople are behind on their taxes and the fantasy IRS is gonna show up any day to test the strength of the Anarchists’ political convictions. And FURTHERMORE a powerful druid is on her way to put a stop to the Anarchists’ plans through extreme violence.

Phew. It’s been said that a good adventure is a powderkeg and the PCs are the spark. The Spear of Horrendous Iron is like 3 powderkegs daisy-chained together and hidden under a fireworks warehouse. Something cool is and terrible is gonna happen and that’s probably gonna lead to a few other cool and terrible things.

The adventure provides a few hooks to get things going, but I think they might need a few more barbs. We get things like some goblin attacks, a murder investigation, and a failed dragonslayer. These may eventually lead to some interaction with the Anarchists and other factions but some of the connective tissue is missing. For example, one of the hooks investigating a fire. One of the townspeople has been accused, and that person has accused the goblins. Neat. But this isn’t followed up anywhere else in the adventure. There aren’t any clues for the PCs or any hint for the GM as to how it might play out.

Everything kind of hinges on getting the players to care about the town. We have some flavorful descriptions of the townspeople and their beliefs but I would rather have some specific connections to the aforementioned factions and plots rather than the table of ways to create non-specific townspeople that takes up an entire page. The named PCs that we get are a little vague on their ties to the goings on around town. Selbyn wants her brother to come back but we don’t get any information about where he is or what he’s up to. I guess he’s supposed to be an Anarchist? Spell it out for me. Tell me exactly how I can use this NPC to get the PCs into the action. Saide believes animals can talk. Why? Is she connected to the druid somehow? There’s a rumors table but it’s similarly obtuse.

The book itself says “If the fate of the town doesn’t matter to the players, this adventure will lose its heart. The town should matter.” 100% agree. So give me some reasons for it to matter. Give the townsfolk some specific knowledge about the various situations (“my brother’s been going to meetings out near the big tree at night, where they talk about some wild stuff”) and clear problems that can be solved by the PCs that will also get them involved (the ogres are holding a merchant for ransom because the Anarchist’s last check bounced).

There are three clocks that count down as things progress – one each for the town, the surrounding forest and the dungeon. Each day the PCs spend in the area, things deteriorate and the plots of the Anarchists, giant and druid progress. This is sort of a failsafe against uninvolved PCs and will force their hand if they hang around. It’s a great mechanic used very well here. Simple enough for a GM to easily track while putting some pressure on the PCs.

The region is a small hexmap with 6 points of interest around the forest including the town and the dungeon. The forest itself is a highlight. Random encounters are strong, presenting dangerous situations rather than just random numbers of monsters. “HURT UNICORN. Bleeding, in a Stampede of 4d6 FANGED ELK”. There’s a lot of potential energy there in just a few words.

The locations themselves have a lot of personality and do a great job of fleshing out the factions. In the ogre camp we read “Liberal but rational with violence. They’ll try to knock intruders into the ravine. They’ll ransom prisoners if they’re rich. If not, they’ll take turns throwing rocks at them until they’re dead.” For me, this paints a pretty clear picture of what the ogres are like and how they operate. It also provides a few ideas for the kinds of things they might be doing when the PCs show up.  Locations related to the Anarchists and Cultists are similarly rich without being overlong or complex.

The dungeon has 22 rooms and is home for just about every faction heretofore included in the adventure. The giant is there forging the eponymous spear. The anarchists are holding meetings and the cultists are culting it up. The dragon broods on a pile of silver. Despite all that it borders on being minimally keyed. As an example, room 2 reads:

2. FOYER
MURDER-HOLES concealed by geometric carvings. Secret Door to the NW, faint footprints on the floor.

It tells us only the things that are hidden and doesn’t give us much to tell the players directly. The author clearly knows how to turn a phrase so I would’ve liked to see some more of the ol’ terse and evocative room descriptions. Some rooms have them, some (see above) don’t. As it is, you will probably want to write some notes about how you will describe the rooms, and that may include fleshing some of them out a bit.

The room descriptions hamper usability in places. In room 19 we’re told, “A covered brass keyhole conceals the secret door into this room. Around the lock, telltale scratchmarks of frequent picking. Dappled sunlight with no source fills the room. Soft bird sounds.” There are two issues with this – the secret door needs to be described in the room it is found, not the room that it leads to. Otherwise the GM won’t know to include it in that room unless they’ve gone ahead and taken some notes.

The other problem only becomes apparent when you look at the map: there are two entrances to the room, both coming from a hallway. It’s not clear which one (maybe both?) has the secret door. A little while back, I linked to this blog post. It says: “In Shadowdark hallways should have descriptions, and longer hallways should have more description. This is particular to Shadowdark because of the interaction between described elements and the real-time torch; if a corridor is described, it takes longer to traverse in-game.” I don’t see a lot of hallways keyed and described, and I don’t think I’ve done much of that in my own adventures. But besides the usefulness of having descriptive hallways for a game that is tracked turn by turn and hour by hour, if you have special features like secret doors, it’s almost a necessity. Otherwise these features are likely to be overlooked.

Despite the multiple factions inhabiting the dungeon, 5 of 22 rooms, nearly a quarter, are effectively empty. Some of you are angrily shaking your LBBs at me, pointing out how, in OD&D dungeon stocking, about half the rooms would be empty. Ok, sure not every room needs a monster or trap or some other HOTTness, but there’s no reason not to include something interesting in every single room. Room 20 says, “A small channel diverted long ago from the river outside. Hisa has widened the passage all around it.” That’s 101 characters. None of this information is useful or even knowable to the players. But you’ve got a river so put a talking crayfish in there. “A talking crayfish named Dale peaks out from under a rock. He likes poetry and can grant a luck token.” 102 characters. Send it.

Also room 21 says, vultures attack anyone who “stays longer than 5 minutes.” What the hell is a minute.

Otherwise the giant and the dragon are obvious points of great interest but even the dragon is a bit underutilized – simply waiting in a small room for a party of level 5 adventurers to come in and kick its level 11 teeth in (Shadowdark, pg 193). And room 9, for some reason, has a ton going on. Some of those ideas could have probably been spread out a bit.

So the adventure is a bit lopsided. For all the generous and flavorful description we get of the NPCs and factions, for all of the ticking clocks and impending dooms throughout the rest of the adventure, there just isn’t a lot going on in the dungeon itself. It serves a venue for resolving some of the situations found elsewhere, but doesn’t do much in supplying its own interactivity.

But there is still a lot here to like and a lot fun to be had. The strength of The Spear of Horrendous Iron is in the interesting situations it sets up, and the inevitable interactions that will happen between those situations. How the players approach these situations will lead to interesting and impactful choices and that’s really the heart of this game.

And the vibes are great. The writing is downright mythical in places and although it uses stock art, it’s very well-chosen and complements the tone of the adventure well. The layout strikes a delicate balance between usability and aesthetics.

On a scale of 2-12, The Spear of Horrendous Iron gets 8 stingbats.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/3x5arcana/the-spear-of-horrendous-iron