Review: The Dying Vale
The premise of this setting is compelling to say the least. "Rulakham is doomed. There is no saving it. No matter how many monsters you slay, even if you bring down the sovereign within the machine heart of the capital city, the dark eye sun will descend, the Chasm will open and on the ninth day, this land will be gone. Will you vanish along with it?"
The PCs have 8 days to escape the blighted vale before the whole place sinks into a chasm, contending with desperate survivors, blighted knights and monstrous beasts across the desperate landscape of a ruined world. If Dark Sun has ever appealed to you, this is Dark Sun vibes cranked up to 11.
The driving force behind the hexcrawl is the "glimmer of hope", essentially a rumored avenue of escape that the party is meant to follow. On top of that, at the location of each glimmer is an obstacle the party must overcome, usually requiring journeys to other locations to resolve. The glimmers are crucially important to drive the game forward but there is an important connection missing - we have a list of glimmers and a list of ultimate hexes for each, but no key for which glimmer goes with which hex. You can suss it out but the importance of this question deserves a definitive answer.
Also central to the adventure is the Soulblight - a progressive curse with both flavorful ("Black smoke clouds your eyes. Corpses speak with you, encouraging you to join them in death.") and mechanical ("All Morale checks in near of you are at DISADV") effects. There is no real cure and an afflicted character will eventually become a monster under the GMs control. So it's best to set that expectation at the table. But hoo-boy that time period between when your PC becomes afflicted to when the eventually succumb seem like it will be a blast to roleplay.
The hexcrawl itself gives us 23 keyed areas in 144 hexes. Not a terrible ratio but you will be running out of ways to describe desolate plains by the end. The hexes themselves are full of powerful imagery and interesting situations - cultists in the throes of a terrible ritual, unfinished airships, haunted villages, etc, etc. Great stuff, but what it's really lacking is connective tissue. Few of the locations have any direct ties to other locations, and there is little here that will drive the party to diverge from making a beeline to wherever their glimmer of hope lies. Combined with the strict time limit, I think few of these locations would be visited in actual play. Even something as simple as a rumor table would go a long way towards enticing the players to explore.
The random encounters could also stand a little more fleshing out. We have a nice table with different encounters for different terrain, and the entries are varied. But as with the recently reviewed Shadows of Camelot we don't get anything beyond a name. I want to see not just a list of monsters but also *situations*. Something to interact with. This is a missed opportunity to include things that will hook the PCs into, and teach them about the setting.
Laurin has a real talent for writing descriptions that are evocative and almost poetic at times, but that also rarely overstay their welcome. "Standing alone upon a bed of bones rises the vile shrine of the night-whisperer, its roots strangling the life from the soil, its pale chimes whispering deceit in the wind." It channels the Appendix N authors in the best way.
Although the writing is beautifully flavorful, precious little in the book exists just for flavor. There is sort of a maximalist design philosophy here. For example, there is a d20 list of backgrounds and each one includes a trinket. You've seen trinket tables before - usually something useless, only given meaning by how the player and/or the GM interpret it. Well all of the trinkets in Dying Vale have a description, a benefit and often a curse or drawback. For example, a perfumer's kit - something that, in any other setting, would probably be dropped immediately to make room for a spare torch - here explicitly grants a +2 reaction checks and the ability to disguise the party's scent. It reflects an emphasis you see throughout the book, of creating something that is not only interesting and fantastical but also gameable and impactful. Yes, you might come up with stuff like this on your own but you don't have to because it's already been done. And done well.
The maximalism carries over to the NPCs and factions. They are manifold and rad as hell. We have the masked Skrai bent on stopping the spread of the curse, the unholy priestesses of the Bleak Coven corrupting the ancient guardian spirits, and the elven warrior Ebnir Sa’ Norokha Nek’izolet, servant of the calamity itself. A lot of them will only come into play if the PCs are following a particular glimmer of hope. And frankly they're too cool to ignore. If I was running this I would be very tempted to delay the apocalypse in order to include more.
Wherever the adventure takes the party, I strongly recommend it leads to The Old Hero's Tomb, a beefy 45 room dungeon that serves as a potential climax to the adventure. And it is wild. The setup is that a hero of old slew a dragon and vague prophecies foretell that he will rise again to save the vale. A community of survivors have gathered there, as well as a group of Skrai warriors ready to cleanse them in blood.
The party must assemble the eight pieces of a sundered blade in order to progress to the deepest areas of the dungeon. A simple conceit that goes a long way towards pushing the PCs to explore and search every nook and cranny for secrets. Of which there are many. It's an impressive thing to write a dungeon this large without any empty or irrelevant rooms, but each one here has something to talk with, pray to, dig up, stab, or puzzle out. Despite its length, I don't think it would risk becoming a slog.
The specificity and detail is relentless. Each area has an order of battle. The random encounters are fleshed out and dynamic. The rooms contain multiple interactive elements. All of it is dripping with flavor and meshes well with Shadowdark's core mechanics. Except that it uses non-standard DCs.
The random encounters are also a step up from those in the hexcrawl. It doesn't take much, but with a brief description they are given purpose and connection to the dungeon.
The catch is that, with all this detail, this is not a slick Necrotic Gnome or Arcane Library dungeon. The descriptions are not a list of keywords followed by 2 or 3 terse bullet points. It's not something I would feel comfortable running right off the page. You will need to read this in advance, maybe take some notes or highlight a few things. But in return you get something deeper and juicier than typical Shadowdark fare.
Which is not to say that all of that juice is needed. The maximal design aspect sometimes tips over into the "fussy" territory. There are regions of the dungeon where light only lasts half as long, and fire does double damage, and also there's a chance that one of three sapient appendages appear. On top of the numerous factions, timed events and various other scourges that might be afflicting the PCs. It's a lot to keep track of and could do with some paring down and streamlining.
Collecting eight pieces of the sword is central to the dungeon, but the only way this is communicated to the PCs is via the spirit of the old hero telling them directly. Which is only a hair's breadth away from the GM telling the players out of game. It's a bit meta, and a bit contrived. I would have liked to see a more diegetic way of conveying this information to the players. There is also little to foreshadow the consequences of an important decision the PCs will make at the end. Otherwise the dungeon is full of great environmental storytelling so this seems like an odd misstep.
But, as the kids say, the vibes are immaculate. I have never read another Shadowdark setting with such a strong and singular identity. If you're looking for distilled sword and sorcery you can't beat this. And beyond the vibes there's a technical competence that shines through, so that it's not only evocative, it's also gameable.
On a scale of 2-12, the hexcrawl gets 8 stingbats and the adventure gets 10 stingbats, so The Dying Vale gets an average of 9 stingbats.
I don't know if that makes sense or if any of these scores makes sense but if you want to know how I feel I just wrote 1,500 words about it.
https://laurin-david-weggen.itch.io/soulblight-the-dying-vale
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