Our story begins in that wretched hive of scum and villainy known as the land of Zamora, in that wretched hive of scum and villainy known as the city of Arenjun. Getting things rolling with a bit of GM fiat, the adventure assumes that the PCs have caroused-'till-they-dropped in a particularly trashy tavern. City guards give them a rude awakening as they're hauled before the city's governor, the Fat Disgusting Decadent Noble™ known as Oleksa the Stout. It seems that just as he was ready to consummate his marriage to his beautiful young bride, Juliana, someone nasty brigand bonked him over the head and made off with her. He wants the PCs to find her, destroy those responsible, and bring her back.
Since he is a Fat Disgusting Decadent Noble™, he's lying through his stinky overused teeth, of course. The truth of the matter is that Juliana wasn’t abducted at all; rather, she’d been forced to marry Oleksa, and her true love, Bogdan – a former captain of the guard too honest for Oleksa’s corruption who fled the city with his loyal men, and who now leads them in Robin Hood-style banditry against Oleksa’s caravans to Arenjun – came to rescue her. The PCs must find the relatively easy clues as to the means of the “abduction” – and, if they’re lucky and/or clever, an inkling of the truth behind reason for it – through a combination of interaction and investigation. If they start to sniff out the real story, of course, Oleksa will be, shall we say, less than helpful.
This, by the way, will be the only real chance for characters adept at urban snooping to shine, and one of two chances for the “talkers” in the group to show their stuff.
| Playtest: With his eye for treasure, for example, the group’s thief noted that the “brigand” who abducted Juliana left an awful lot of valuable loot untouched... This character would have a chance to show off his sneaking and climbing ability later on, but the nature of the fights left him with little chance to use his sneak attack. |
Once they establish that Juliana’s captor took her from the city, things get a little more complicated. If the group has a tracker, he’ll be able to tell that a lone horseman took the road away from the city, then left it shortly thereafter and headed into the hills. If they don’t have a tracker, or if the tracker fails at his tracking, all they’ll know is that the rider left out of one particular gate opening onto one particular road that leads into the mountains.
| Playtest: The problem here was that my players seemed doubtful that the abductor really would have taken that road at all, and for a while seemed likely to follow up fruitless investigations as to whether he’d doubled back onto a different road after leaving the city. Fortunately, the borderer in the group finally picked up the trail. |
From here, I suppose you could argue that the adventure avoids railroading – or, in this case, dirt roading – the characters along a single path, since following either the road or Bogdan’s trail will take them to their goal.
Following the road takes the PCs to a small mountain village, where the villagers can point them in the right direction. First, though, one of them will have to beat the town bully in a wrestling match.
Following in Bogdan’s wake forces the PCs to contend with dangerous terrain, a couple of traps, and a starving mountain lion.
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Playtest: Thanks to their borderer’s tracking skills, my group’s PCs took the latter route. Sharp eyes avoided a log-fall trap, and a bit of luck kept the undetected scything tree-branch trap from leading to any fatalities. The mountain lion’s attack, however, took the group completely off-guard, leaving the group’s scholar all but dead in a single round – a little annoying, considering that the real meat of the adventure had only really just begun.
Granted, the mountain lion wasn’t a match for the whole party once they got over their surprise, but the stealthy beast could have taken out even the toughest of them in its likely successful surprise attack. The scholar managed to cling to life – barely – but as the only options at that point were either leaving him to die on the mountainside or anticlimactically trudging back down to the city, the latter leaving Brogdan with ample time to make good his escape, I ended up retconning the mountain lion attack altogether. |
This, by the way, was the first of several clues that “1st to 3rd level” didn’t necessarily mean that the adventure was going to be particularly newbie-friendly.
Either way, the two possible routes eventually converge. Not long after they do, the PCs find the ancient wreck of a wagon carrying the skeletal remains of caged prisoners intended for sacrifice and the two cultists taking them to their fate.
| Playtest: This was the first chance for the scholar in our group to put his knowledge to good use; unfortunately, the adventure allows even the most accomplished scholars to discern no more from the golden medallions they find on the cultists than the fact that they belong to the Cult of Kovag-Re, and that this name conjures unsettling rumors of massive blood sacrifices. In other words, it just makes the scholar an instrument of foreshadowing. |
Then, at last, the heroes find Bogdan and his men encamped in a bowl sheltered by the surrounding mountains, a cave opening nearby. Now they have to decide whether to spy, talk, or attack.
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Playtest: My players chose spying, followed by talking when the spying didn't turn out so well. It quickly became clear to them that Bogdan wasn't a bad guy and that Juliana wasn't a prisoner.
Things almost got ugly, however, within the party itself. The adventure offers no suggestions regarding the likely event that one or more characters in the group follows the Barbaric Code of Honor, which obligates an individual to abide loyally by a contract of employment, even with a dishonorable employer. The barbarian in our group did, indeed, follow the Code, and was inclined to snatch and return Juliana, true love notwithstanding. |
Fortunately – sort of – Oleksa shows up at that point with a force of men almost double that of Bogdan's bandits, boldly declaring his intention of double-crossing the heroes by killing them along with Bogdan. And also, not paying them. Which, of course, activates the escape clause in the Barbaric Code of Honor.
From this point, the adventure three times makes what is, in my opinion, a very dangerous assumption: that given the circumstances presented, the heroes will retreat. This is the first of those times, and the one that makes the most sense. Oleksa's men have the high ground, better numbers, and bows for each of them, so they proceed to launch flights of arrows down into the bowl. Bogdan grabs Juliana and orders his men to retreat into the caves – which, conveniently enough, they've never bothered to explore before now – and, presumably the PCs follow.
The second time the adventure makes that "retreat" assumption is once everyone is inside the cave, and this is the worst instance. The caves haven't been explored, so there's no reason for Bogdan or the PCs to think that they're going to find a way out, and since the text describes the first part of the cave as a tunnel, they can bottleneck Oleksa's forces and take a stand.
| Playtest: And that's exactly what my players did, with great success. |
I should mention here that the text says that individual soldiers should be no match for the characters.
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Playtest: To which I said, "Huh?" The soldiers are 1st level and well armed. My PCs were 1st level. In what sense is that no contest? It was upon reading that passage that I decided to boost all of the PCs to third level. If they're expected to overwhelm individual 1st-level soldiers, I figured they'd need the extra punch.
And that is why the players were able to hold off Oleksa's forces, and might well have whittled them down to nothing. But the adventure hinges on the PCs retreating deeper into the caves, and so I had to nudge them on with a combination of their bandit allies retreating and Oleksa's men falling back and sniping with arrows. |
That got them into the chamber in which they were supposed to end up, containing five black monoliths, ancient writings on the walls, and a floor ankle-deep in powdered bone. The monoliths are the Black Stones of the title, serving as the “mouth” of Kovag-Re, the Hungry God.
| Playtest: Here was another chance for the group’s scholar to prove useful by translating a bit of the ancient writings. Not that the adventure is going to allow the sliver of knowledge regarding the nature of the Black Stones be put to any good use. The inscription makes it clear that the Stones thirst for blood, but a wounded character – a bandit or a soldier, if not a PC – will bleed on them, bringing them to life. |
Again, the adventure assumes that the PCs aren’t going to take these things on in a stand-up fight. They are, after all, animated stone, and therefore almost impossible to damage.
Several problems crop up here.
First of all, running isn’t much of an option, since the adventure has already established the presence of an insurmountable force of soldiers following the group down the only exit. Why go to all the trouble of convincing the players that their characters can’t possibly fight their way through Oleksa’s soldiers if you’re planning on forcing them to do so later?
Secondly, in the likely event that this is being used as an introductory adventure, the players may still be in the mindset that makes any big, bad monsters the goal of the adventure to eliminate, not terrors from which to flee in Call of Cthulhu fashion.
Now, if you have Oleksa’s forces arrive close on the heels of the characters so that they’re within the “Smash Zone” when the Black Stones animate, the Stones will have that many more targets to choose from, and might then give the characters a chance to escape. Of course, that scenario is just as likely to leave some of the PCs’ newfound allies in danger, if that matters to them. But even if they run, the Stones will come after them.
The text suggests using trickery rather than direct combat to defeat the Stones – having PCs dodge aside at the last moment, causing the Stones to crash into and destroy each other or smash against the cave wall and seal themselves away forever. That would be great, if the Conan mechanics lent themselves to thinking in those terms. Unfortunately, there’s no “active dodge” option, so even if players think to do this, it means having their characters go on full defense and hoping the little defensive bonus will save them. And even then, how do you determine if the Stones hit each other or do enough damage to cause a cave-in? Pushing them off of a cliff is another suggestion, but any cliffs are an awfully long way away.
| Playtest: In my game, the players didn’t see any alternative to fighting the Stones. The group’s Barbarian went into Crimson Mist and was actually able to do decent damage to one of the stones, but it still wasn’t looking good. Then the scholar cast Incantation of Almarlric's Witchman on the Stones, which removes the otherworldly defenses of demons and leaves them vulnerable to normal weapons. Now, since the fact that these were demon-animated stones, I wasn’t sure whether their nigh-imperviousness really counted as being of demonic origin; however, the scholar really hadn’t gotten a chance to do anything interesting magically, and I was clearly looking at a total party kill unless something drastic happened, so I let him have his fun. He basically turned several of the stones to flesh, allowing his comrades to dispatch them. Unfortunately, he ran out of juice before he could de-stone all of the Black Stones, and the ones that were left were well on their way to decimating the party, the barbarian who’d actually managed to damage them in their stone form being the first to fall. This left me with several basically indestructible Stones wandering around smashing the PCs and their allies and with Oleksa’s soldiers filling the only escape route. Seeing the outcome as a foregone conclusion, and growing weary of the time it was taking to get there, we decided to throw in the towel. |
Being an adventure for 1st through 3rd level characters, I’d assumed that it’s meant to be friendly to GMs and players new to the game. But from gauging the power levels of opponents, to applying detailed tactical rules to reasonably large combats and unusual situations, to understanding key differences between Conan and other fantasy games when it comes to supernatural threats, this adventure asks a lot of Conan rookies. And even if the GM and players already know the system and setting like the backs of their hands, the adventure felt like a one-way trip into almost certain death – especially if the PCs are all 1st level.
It's not a terrible adventure. It's just not a great one, nor one to use as an introduction to the game. It could be fun with a bit of tweaking and run by someone who really knows the system, but as it is, I can't rate it much better than "okay".
