Today we are looking at Legacy of Iskald by Brynjar Már Pálsson. It’s a level 3-6 viking-themed regional adventure covering 12 points of interest around the titular Iskald mountains, a 24-room dungeon and several smaller keyed locations. Hey, if you want a viking-themed adventure “Brynjar Már Pálsson” is probably the sort of name you should look out for.

Things center around a dragon imprisoned in an ancient mountain stronghold that is being hassled by an unscrupulous alchemist and a cult of fish people. On top of that, some kind of illness is wafting over from the nearby bog and mucking things up generally. The impact of these events on the region are determined by a random table, to be rolled on at the end of each day. 

The adventure refers to this as a “ticking clock” but I don’t think that’s the effect it will have. Clocks advance. The table doesn’t build up to anything and plots don’t advance, but rather random events related to the plot happen. It’s like if you checked your watch every hour and it went from 12:15 to 3:30 to 10:54 to 6:02. Some things are happening but the order doesn’t make any sense, nor does it allow you to draw any conclusions about what will happen next. The adventure emphasizes how important it is to track the various factions as they advance their agendas, but only the cult of fishpeople (cultfish) have linear progress. 

The cult ritual has a separate chart that advances whenever a ritual is rolled on the previous table. This includes things like blighted crops, stillborn livestock and even mutations or collective delusions. There’s a 2:5 chance of that happening every day, so it would take around 30 days of adventuring to hit all 13 events. Not terribly likely but the party will definitely start feeling the pressure after the first 5 or 6 take effect. 

The regional map is set up as a pointcrawl, and unlike the last few of those that I’ve read, the author has included travel times. Excellent. Unfortunately they have also decided to completely revamp the Shadowdark travel system to be something more like Cairn 2e. Each day is divided into 6 watches and the distances are given in the number of watches needed to go from place to place. It’s workable, and somewhat understandable because the Shadowdark core rules assume hexes. But I think simply converting travel times to hours to travel instead of watches would dovetail nicely with other systems like random encounters. 

Before we get to the pointcrawl locations in Chapter 2, Chapter 1 describes the centerpiece of the adventure: Hrimskegg’s Tomb is a 24-room dungeon where a long-imprisoned dragon, the alchemist and the cultfish all reside. It’s broken into three sections including the tomb itself, the adjacent caves and the sanctum with the alchemist and dragon.

Dungeon keys use the ultra-terse style that I think I’ve complained about before. “Sounds: Dismal moaning. Cairns: Black slate. Walls & Floor: Blue mural paintings.” Just give me a few complete sentences. For some reason, somewhere along the way, room descriptions that could be relayed directly to the players got lumped in with long passages of boxed text as adventure design taboos. But in my opinion, nothing works better than a few clear and evocative sentences. My brain has enough to keep track of. Don’t add “writing usable room descriptions on the fly” to the list.

On top of this there’s a fundamental communication problem. Things are unclear and confusing. In the factions list we learn about a pair of twins that are looking for the alchemist. Factions are inexplicably split into two sections – Faction Overview and Encountering Factions. In neither place does it mention that the twins are werewolves. This very crucial information is hidden in the random encounters table for the third section of the dungeon, even though they will be encountered in the very first room. There is also a statblock for werewolves in the key for room 7 even though the twins, nor any other werewolves, are present. “Werewolves” should be the first thing we learn about the twins, but instead it’s a mystery that the GM will have to spend precious time solving. 

Consider the order in which this information is presented:

◆ Voice. Coming from inside the chest.
▷Finny is trying to persuade Melmore to let him out, unaware that he’s gone. 
◆ Chest. Finny lies discarded on top of spare clothes and bundles of parchment. 
◆ Finny. A severed cultfish head atop a runecarved canopic jar.

It’s exactly backwards. The voice is coming from the chest. What chest? It’s described in the next bullet, sitting on a pile of clothes. The chest is named Finny? That’s explained in the next bullet – he’s a jar. A more helpful order would be Finny -> Chest -> Voice. But also nowhere does it plainly say, “There’s a jar in a chest on top of some spare clothes. Inside is a talking canopic jar named Finny”. Sometimes bullets are helpful, but not always. If your layout isn’t helping to make information clear, ditch it where you need to. Even if it’s inconsistent. The first job of the layout is to facilitate the conveyance of information.

But there’s a decent little dungeon here. Lots of secrets. Some interesting faction opportunities. A few quest hooks for other locations in the region. A little light on non-combat hazards and obstacles, perhaps. A large part of the interactions in this dungeon, and the enjoyment derived from it, will be reserved for those parties that take time to speak with the NPCs, learn their goals and what they have to offer, and use this to maximize their reward and minimize their risk. The alchemist is friendly but refuses to abandon his dangerous experiments. The aforementioned twins could be powerful allies but are wary of strangers. The cultfish are attempting to subjugate the dragon and must be reckoned with, but their sheer numbers make a direct confrontation dangerous. So there’s a sort of social/diplomatic puzzle here to be solved.

Unfortunately, the level of risk won’t really provide much motivation for the party to engage in that kind of problem solving. If they want to commit cultfish genocide to stop the ritual they will have to deal with 20 or so enemies, but the vast majority are level 1 cannon fodder and the boss is only level 7. Certainly not insurmountable odds for a level 5ish party. There is a moral dilemma here, in the form of 20 tiny and helpless cultfish hatchlings. It’s a tale as old as Keep on the Borderlands: What do you do with monster babies? Are the monstrous races inherently evil? If spared, will they go on to commit more atrocities? Or can you teach them to be productive members of society? If you do adopt them, are you erasing their culture? IS THAT A COLONIALISM?! Or, more likely, will the GM just decide to leave them out because I’m not trying to waste my game night on a debate about biological determinism?

The real big bad of the dungeon is the dragon. It is here that I will point out that putting the dungeon as chapter 1 and the pointcrawl locations as chapter 2 was a mistake. This should be pretty close to the last place the party visits and there is a lot of information in chapter 2 that should be known before reading chapter 1. For example, Hrimskegg’s Crown is a legendary item the party may be able to claim elsewhere in the region that will cause the dragon to obey them absolutely. In its hoard they will also find a statuette that turns into a wyvern for 1 hour a day (unclear if that is meant to be a real-time hour) and a magic orb that functions as an unbreakable wand of fireball, arcane eye, and resilient sphere. Whew. None of these items has any downside. It’s kind of like if you asked a 12 year old player to create their own magic items. Wildly imbalanced and a huge PITA for the GM to deal with. Luckily the command word for the statuette is nowhere to be found in the adventure so the GM will only have to reckon with the fact that their PCs can now hide in an invulnerable sphere while their level 12 buddy strafes their enemies with its fire breath. I’m not trying to be a stick in the mud, and giving out wildly powerful magic items can be a lot of fun, but you need to balance them out with a curse or drawback of some kind. Relics of this magnitude should make the PCs question if the power they offer is really worth it.

Moving on to chapter 2. The party’s base of operations and the main hub of the adventure is  the town of Leifsvík. Leifsvík is full of colorful NPCs with a lot of intrigue and secrets. It also feels a bit like one of those CRPGs where you have to go and talk to every single person in town to make sure you don’t miss anything important. Which is to say there is a list of 16 different “quests” available but not all of them have an associated rumor or anything that will lead the players to them besides randomly knocking on the door of the questgiver and asking to get involved in their personal lives. Look, nobody has a giant exclamation mark hovering over their head so we need a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the good stuff. But there isn’t a lot here to go on, so GMs will have to engineer some contrivances to get the PCs on the path to adventure. 

One of the major plots in the adventure is that Agata the night hag is doing hag stuff and infecting the locals with nightmare juice via an army of giant centipedes. But there are precious few ways the party might pick up this thread. A merchant named Gyrtha’s prized goat was stolen and, unbeknownst to the merchant, given to the hag. But “Gytha trusts no one in Leifsvík and therefore is quietly investigating the theft herself” so that’s not really a lead we can give the PCs. A child in the mead hall has seen the hag transform from her alter-ego Elfa the milk maid. But “ His young mind hasn’t quite processed the trauma yet” so it’s unclear whether or under what circumstances he would reveal that. 

A couple of leads will get us to an inn on the bog near the hag’s hideout, called the Barrowstead. There’s a 12-room crypt under the Barrowstead with a passageway to the hag’s hideout. But we aren’t given any reason the party would know the crypt is there, and no one is asking them to go inside it. So the GM will, again, have to come up with something to get the party where the action is.

The crypt also has an information delivery problem. As you’re reading the keys you will come across: 

“◆Coffin. Mummified remains of Saga.
▷Personality. Cantankerous & grim.
▷Opening. Lid grinds as her desiccated corpse sits up with an outstretched palm in an eerie, spastic motion.”

You may be asking yourself why the mummy has a personality and whether it is alive. You might also wonder what is the significance of the outstretched palm. I sure did. I went back and scanned the dungeon from the beginning to see if I had missed something, but the explanation and context for this and two other rooms came after where it says: 

So now the GM knows what the mummies do. Sort of. We don’t really know if they’re sentient, if they can talk, etc. But we know how they function. The problem is that this information is not conveyed in-world to the PCs. There’s nowhere that I could find for the PCs to learn the names of the mummies or what sort of price they need to pay or what they can expect when they pay it. 

Following that we have six revenants with a neat backstory about being betrayed by the founder of Leifsvík, Valka. They can only rest when they either kill the last living descendent (Valgerthur, the current leader of Leifsvík) or recover Valka’s body from a shipwreck and entomb it in the crypt. Good stuff. Too bad there’s no way for the PCs to find this out. There are a couple of cryptic murals that sort of hint at these events but it would be a miracle if anyone was able to connect the dots without some terribly obvious hints from the GM. What will happen is that the PCs will probably disturb the revenants who wake up in 1d6 hours (probably after the party has left, but also not clear if that’s torch time or in-game time or what), and never interact with them again. They will have no reason to expect that Valgerthur might be in danger and they certainly have no incentive to drag Valka’s frozen corpse back here from the crevasse where it currently resides.

The main thread of the adventure, the cultfish ritual and Hrimskegg’s Tomb, has the same problem. Unless the party decides to break Leifsvík’s pact with the cultfish and go poking around their caves apropos of nothing, they won’t know about the ritual. The only way to learn about it is to ask the seer Kaja who lays it all out for them in a very expository sort of way. But even Kaja is only mentioned once outside of her lair. So that’s also a bit of a long shot.

Besides the hag and the cultfish, there are a lot smaller happenings. Several smaller keyed dungeons litter the region including a shipwreck, the hag’s lair and the cultfish tunnels. There are many subplots and sidequests to engage with. Many of them are nicely open-ended and present some good dilemmas. A merchant might hire the party for a fake cave bear bounty only to try and get them killed so they can rob their corpses and resell the goods. There are missing people, oathbound spirits and lycanthrope mercenaries. There’s a deep history with lots of twists and turns. It’s a very rich little setting with enough to fuel a dozen sessions or more.  

But all of it is hampered by this broader problem – information is sometimes difficult for the GM to parse and often completely inaccessible to the players. There are a lot of interesting things happening in this adventure but hints and clues to these things are pretty thin on the ground. Perhaps I need to amend my review standards. It’s not enough to tell the GM what’s going on, there needs to be a way for the PCs to find out as well. And that’s what’s missing here.

If you’re going to run this, and there are lots of reasons why you would, it’s going to take some work. You’ll need to read through it pretty thoroughly to make sure you understand it. If you don’t put in some prep you’ll miss a lot. And you’ll need to come up with, and place, lots of those missing hints and clues to make sure the players can engage with what is fundamentally some really good material. If I was editing this I would advise the author to pare it down and really focus on fleshing out the main conflicts with the hag and the cultfish. As it is, that job will fall on the GM. 

I had a tought time deciding on whether to give this the “I would run this” tag. It has some aspects that I really love. But I’m not sure if I would put in the effort. You might, especially if the themes resonate with you or the campaign you’re running.

The artwork is amazing. Cover of the year, so far. Lots of beautiful work on the inside, as well.

On a scale of 2-12, Legacy if Iskald gets 7 stingbats.

https://brynjarmp.itch.io/shadowdark-legacy-of-iskald