Review: Righteous Vow Vol. 2 - The Whispers of Minh

Today we're looking at Righteous Vow Vol. 2: The Whispers of Minh, the second in a series of adventures by Bill Harvat. This one centers around a conflict between a kingdom of ratkin and an evil empire of lizardmen.

As with Vol 1, the production value here is very high. There is a buttload of original art and it is beautiful. Reminds me of the old Palladium RPG books. Layout is clean, maps are abundant and legible. There was clearly a tremendous effort made by several people to bring this book to fruition.

We are told "this adventure is a sandbox" and "whatever your destiny, make it your own." Then we get a 4-page, beat by beat breakdown of how the adventure will go. It has a 3-act structure. The party will travel here where they will discover this but they won't know this until later. Then the party will be sent here to do this and discover that. 

The home base settlement is keyed, but no one there provides any information to the PCs about possible clues to follow up on or places to visit. There are rumors but they are not specific enough to be actionable. "A giant thunder lizard has been attacking villages to the south." Well the map doesn't actually have any of these villages so hopefully your players won't want to follow up on that one.

It’s not a sandbox if players only get information that pushes them down the predetermined path. Sure, I guess technically they could go marching through the featureless wilderness in any direction they want, but why would they? Throughout the adventure it says "depending on the party's choices" without presenting any choices, except obvious ones. And even the choices they can make are rendered moot in order to keep the train on the tracks. 

For example, the PCs will be asked to negotiate with a ratkin general for reinforcements. We are told that "If Prince Auroraos is with the party... With some discussion and convincing. The characters can get General Tiiken to bring his forces to Micodenus’ aid." but "If the party does not have Auroraos with them... some wit and intelligent negotiating can get the general to see their side". Astute readers may notice that these are the same thing, and it doesn't matter at all whether the prince is with the party. 

So in order to respect player agency you would need to do two things. The first is to seed some clues and rumors that provide the players with enough information to make an informed choice between multiple paths. Maybe a local fisherman has spotted lizardmen heading towards Burrow Ae's from the river or maybe some treasure hunters uncovered strange snake-cult artifacts near the swamp.

One of the rumors is "Gerome the Bard was once an adventurer like you until he took an arrow to the knee." This is an obscure reference to the hidden gem of a video game, Skyrim. You probably don't get it. More importantly, it's a waste of a rumor. Tell the PCs something about the world. Something that will make them want to go out and explore.

The second thing is, you gotta have the guts to give those choices consequences. If the party doesn't have the prince with them, General Tiiken denies their request and they have to find another way. In another place, the party can do a job with the thieves' guild and get arrested. But someone from the thieves' guild will come to bust them out. LEAVE THEM IN THERE. Choices have no impact if they have no consequences. 

We are told that the party will go to Burrow Ae's first. Note that we are told that, but the party is not told that in-game anywhere that I can find. There are no clues or rumors that lead to this location. It's just kind of assumed, and since the party doesn't have any other leads and this is the first stop on the only road out of town I guess that's where they go. 

This is our first adventure location. The room descriptions are serviceable but a bit overlong and redundant in places ("Looking at the walls, you see a dull blue glow emanating from crystal formations in the cavern walls") with inappropriate use of 2nd person ("You realize by the targets at the west end of the long room, that this was once an archery range, used for training.") Don't tell me what I realize, tell me there's targets and I'll deduce the rest. 

The contents of the dungeon are a bit routine. A few pit traps, some rats, search corpses for treasure, etc. There isn't really anything to do here but walk through a dozen rooms until you get to the one with the guy the outline says you're supposed to meet. Of the 13 locations in the book, one is for mass combat, six are settlements and six are dungeons/adventure sites. Of those six, five are ratkin burrows. There's little to differentiate them. The party will be fighting a lot of lizardmen.

If you're going to have all of your adventuring take place in very similar locations, you could give them different themes (the ratkin that lived here were really into fungus) or meta mechanics (this burrow is rapidly flooding and you have limited time before it's underwater). Throw some bacon bits and chives on this baked potato.

The dungeon random encounters are a step up from volume one in that they don't all use the same table. But they are also mostly empty. For example:

d6       Details 1          2d6 lizardmen warriors 2         1d4 lizardmen warriors 3         The light source flickers 4         Disturbing noises 5         Silence, only the wind 6         Quiet and calm

Fully 2/3 of these are not encounters at all and undermine the purpose of random encounters - choosing to spend precious rounds searching a room or fiddling with a locked chest should be a risk/reward calculation. But if you remove random encounters, you remove the risk so there's no choice to be made. No risk, all reward. In one burrow there's a locked door where if you fail the lockpick attempt "you can take your time to attempt picking the lock again." But if there's only a 6% chance of a random encounter the PCs have all the time in the world, so you may as well not even lock the door.

There's also a problem with non-specific room descriptions. For example:

 2d4 snake swarms (SD. p.252) will become irate and possibly attack if the characters are not careful. The characters may be able to sneak by without disturbing them.

An average adventure would provide a DC for sneaking through the area. A good adventure would anticipate other possible solutions - a song to calm the snakes or a favorite meal to pacify them. I feel like a broken record saying this, but the fact that a GM can improvise these things does not excuse the author from including them. The presence of these sorts of details is inconsistent throughout.

There is also a mass-combat scenario with accompanying rules. It boils down to using an individual stat block to represent an entire regiment, along with a "force multiplier" die that increases damage and also becomes less effect as the regiment's HP are depleted. It's a nice diversion from crawling through the burrows and the t-rex adjacent thunder lizards will certainly be memorable. But the outcome doesn't change much and the book tells us "Many of the followup quests remain the same, however a different tone is set for each."

It would have been cool to also use the mass combat rules during a final assault on the lizardman city, where the allies you've gathered along the way will increase your forces and chances of success. That would have been a nice payoff.

Instead, the final act of the adventure has the party infiltrating the lizardman palace to assassinate the emperor. We run into a problem right off the bat. "If the party enters the palace through the front entrance, they will immediately be met by two of the lizardman veteran palace guards. They will need to talk their way into the palace or find a way to discreetly incapacitate the guards without sounding an alarm."

OK, what happens if they do sound an alarm? How many reinforcements come? Where do they come from? How long does it take them to get there? There's no support for an infiltration mission. No order of battle or alarm mechanics. Go back and read my review here: https://2d6stingbats.blogspot.com/2025/07/review-letters-from-dark-vol-iv.html for what an infiltration mission needs. As it is, the location is completely static. The party can just go room to room, killing everything inside at their leisure. They don't even have to worry about random encounters since the headquarters of the evil empire is only "risky" and 4 out of 6 of the table entries are non-encounters like "You get a feeling of empty dread."

The final room contains a solid gold throne. We are told that it is "priceless and its wealth would be without measure. However, It cannot be carried by the adventurers because of its immense weight." That's not how TTRPGs work. PC's can get a horde of grateful ratkin to help. They can chop it to pieces or melt it down. But what they can't do, is be told something is impossible. So if you drop a huge gold throne in the world expect that the PCs will find a way to cash it in, and provide the details the GM needs like weight and value. But you can't just say "don't touch."

It occurs to me that author views this adventure as a video game. Certain things can be interacted with, others are just set dressing rendered in the background. Enemies are palette-shifted versions of the same thing. NPC dialog is scripted. "Quests" are well-defined with specific activation and completion conditions. The choices you make might get you a slightly different cutscene, but the next level is the same. You don't need context to decide what to do next, there's a map marker to follow. You can do what has been programmed and nothing more.

Righteous Vow Vol. 2 looks professional and polished, but it promises a sandbox and delivers a bus ride. Choices rarely matter, locations are repetitive, and the world only reacts when the script says so. If you want to run it, be ready to add your own clues, consequences, and variety.

On a scale of 2-12, Righteous Vow Vol. 2: The Whispers of Minh gets 5 stingbats.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/507184/righteous-vow-vol-2-the-whispers-of-minh