Hideous Daylight by Brad Kerr. For low-level characters, either Old School Essentials or Cairn.
tldr; Good enough, maybe just not my thing.
- Version reviewed: Cairn version
- Systems used: Brighter Worlds, Into the Dungeon Revived
- Time: Three 3 hour sessions (not counting Fabien’s Atalier, which I’ll review next)
What it is: A hexcrawl of a walled garden owned by a duke. For some reason the sun is stuck at high noon, but only within the garden. The persistent daylight driving the animals mad and some sort of strange monsters now roam the grounds. The king’s missing wizard Fabien* is the prime suspect for this strangeness. The duke offers a reward for anyone who can make the sun go back to normal.
*On page five, Fabien is referred to as the “duke’s magician,” while on page six he’s referred to as the “the king’s magician.” I went with him being in the king’s service.
I have mixed feelings about this. It’s a good adventure, but I guess it was just not really my cup tea. That makes its flaws stand-out in ways that they probably wouldn’t for someone who was more excited about its contents. I also went into it with high expectations given the rave reviews and how much I like the podcast Kerr co-hosts. So this review might come off more negative than my experience actually warrants. Hopefully my criticism is constructive and helpful to others planning to run the module. I suspect in many cases you’ll find the things that I didn’t like perfectly acceptable or even good. Also, I loved the sequel, Fabien’s Atalier, from Wyvern Songs, which I’ll review next.
Let’s start with my three elements of a good adventure module:
Someone to talk to: Yes, plenty of NPCs. This doesn’t go quite as overboard with NPCs as Kerr’s Demon Driven to the Maw, but there are several you’ll need to figure out how to portray.
Something to experiment with: Again, plenty: A shimmering tear in reality, a magic shovel, some mysterious standing stones, the general problem to be solved of making the sun set.
Meaningful choices: Plenty.
So, yeah, it has everything needed to be good, and most other reviewers seem to have really liked it.
I think the adventure could use some better hooks to get the PCs involved in what’s happening. Why would a group of low-level adventurers have any hope of solving such a vexing problem?
There’s a great variety of encounters, it’s just that many of them were disappointing. For example, the sidequest involving retrieving a horse for a woman who maintains the stables in the garden fell completely flat for me. There was a lack of payoff for many of them. Examining/experimenting with the tear in reality is all downside for PCs and gives players little information, apart from a few foot (and hand) prints that suggest this is where some of the weirder monsters (the “Visitors”) in the garden come from.
Indeed, It’s hard to convey information to the players about what was going on behind the scenes. There are various clues, but my crew had trouble putting the dots together, and I don’t think that was there fault. There’s little if anything (I might’ve missed or forgotten something) player facing to explain why the Visitors are there or how the tear in reality formed, even though they were one of the most interesting aspects of the module. All that said, others didn’t seem to have this problem. For example, this reviewer on Reddit wrote that “the story hangs together well and pretty much tells itself as the players proceed through the hexes.” So maybe I missed some opportunities or just did a bad job of telegraphing everything.
I definitely did miss a few details, which is partially my fault but also partially an issue with the formatting. Although the area descriptions aren’t overly long, they’re hard to use at the table because player-facing information is often mixed with GM information. There’s some use of bolding to highlight important information, but it’s used inconsistently.
For example, the text for area G-10, the boathouse, kinda buries the lead that there’s a dead body outside. The description covers the interior of the boathouse before mentioning the body, and doesn’t even bold this item.
The formatting in Wyvern Songs/Fabien’s Atalier is considerably better. There’s some boxed text you can read aloud or paraphrase, then information on some of the points of interest in the room broken out into their own paragraphs. Super easy to run at the table, without the terseness associated with the Old School Essentials house style.
I guess it’s not that big a deal, there are many modules that are worse at presenting information than Hideous Daylight. You could use a highlighter or do what I do, which is make my own bullet-pointed notes list.