Review of Demon Driven to the Maw by Brad Kerr, based on actual play
tldr; Fun scenario. Timing could be a challenge, but otherwise pretty easy to run.
Demon Driven to the Maw by Brad Kerr, for Cairn.
- System used: Brighter Worlds (with characters converted from Into the Odd)
- PCs: 3
- Time to complete: 2.5 hours
This scenario had a wonderfully simple hook:
The thief Jougal stole the famed Sky Marble from the king’s bedside. It’s the talk of the town. A drunkard at the tavern swears he saw Jougal headed towards Firnhirst castle in Edburg, a forlorn neighboring hamlet. Following the drunkard’s tip, you find a full blown party at Firnhirst Castle. Two smiling servants hold the door and beckon you to enter…
This small adventure is packed with fun encounters, most of which are easy to run. In his review of Demon Driven to the Maw, Bryce Lynch wrote: “You can run this. You instinctively know HOW to run this. The adventure supports you in running it.”
Unfortunately, Lynch was a bit too overconfident in my instinctual abilities. Timing is a huge part of the module, and can likely make it or break it. In my case I wouldn’t say it quite broke it, but it led to an earlier than desirable conclusion to the adventure.
Let’s go straight into spoiler territory
What’s really going on here: a bunch of baobhan vampires are throwing a party that old Jougal has just wandered into. Satan himself is in attendance, so the baobhan want the event to be perfect, though Satan “Doesn’t really care about all this blood and sacrifice stuff as much as everyone thinks he does.”
The doors are chained shut shortly after the party enters the castle. 4d4+1 turns (a turn here is roughly 10 minutes, enough time to search a room) later, a bunch of invisible redcaps sets fire to the castle, trapping everyone inside. A few ways to escape are sprinkled into the module: A miniaturization spell in the library that could be used to shrink the chains, a giant demon woman who is strong enough to break the chains if she’s convinced to.
The challenge really is in the timing of when the fire (dubbed “Nightmare Mode” in the text) takes place. Rather than track the time precisely I decided to wait until there was about an hour left in the session.
I think this would have been roughly nine turns into their visit, which happens to be roughly what you could expect from rolling 4d4+1 anyway. The PCs were able to escape the castle pretty quickly using bombs to blow open the kitchen door, leaving nearly an hour left in our session. In retrospect I think I made that too easy on them. I sort of assumed the kitchen doors would be weaker than the front gate, but I don’t really know. Also, their ease of escape could be an artifact of having started these characters out as Into the Odd characters, one of whom started out with bombs in his inventory, instead of Cairn characters. But really I think the problem is that Nightmare Mode started too soon as they’d only explored part of the castle.
The castle has several bedrooms on its east side. On the west side has a parlor, then a kitchen and pantry, which leads to a basement. My group ended up entirely on the west side, never exploring the east side at all. It feels like the scenario is sort of designed around the assumption the PCs will explore the bedrooms first (There’s a baobhan with her skin off in the kitchen: “If the PCs haven’t seen any witchy stuff at the party yet, here’s their chance.”) But the layout makes it just as likely that they will explore the west side of the castle.
Perhaps the intention is to limit the number of rooms the PCs spend time in before the fire starts. They could try more frantic searches of the property once the fire begins. But that seems like it would diminish many of the encounters.
I’m not sure what to recommend here. Maybe just run it as written. Maybe wait to enter nightmare mode until 30 minutes to the end of your session, or until the PCs have explored most of the castle. I dunno.
Other thoughts and stuff
- There’s a portal to hell in the basement. I had the free one-page dungeon Mulciber’s Flute from Trilemma at the ready in case the PCs were foolish enough to enter hell. Fortunately, they got to the big acid pool with a huge skull over it and immediately turned back.
- Instead of rolling for encounters, I printed up the random encounters from the ballroom on slips of paper and had the players draw them and then read aloud what happened. This worked well and I think it’s a nice way of doing random encounters in situations where you don’t want to have the same encounter more than once.
- This was billed as a “Partycrawl.” That put into my head the idea of doing a sort of pointcrawl within a ball room. Maybe something like the “Carrowmore Flowchart” of encounters from Deep Carbon Observatory. I’m not saying Kerr did this wrong, but that it’s an opportunity for someone else to do something a bit different. I’ve always thought the DCO flowchart was an underused mechanic:
