Review: Grotto of the River Pirates

Today we're looking at Grotto of the River Pirates by Ryall Hancock Hyatt. We've got a pirate hideout with a hidden temple to a frog demon that has corrupted the pirate leader and some of the denizens of the nearby caves. It's kind of like Goonies, Temple of Doom, Alien and The Shadow Over Innsmouth all mashed together. If that doesn't appeal to you, I don't know what the hell you're doing here.

Grotto ostensibly has 18 areas but many of them are subdivided into smaller rooms. I'd say it's more equivalent to a 30-ish room adventure. 

Let's start with the map.

It makes great use of all 3 dimensions, there's a variety of locations and multiple routes to explore. And it's gorgeous. No notes I'm gonna put it up in my living room. 

If you want an example on how random encounters should look, you should also print these out and frame them. You can hang them next to the map. Each region of the dungeon has a different table, and each table is a list of real encounters, situations, actually. No "Eerie humming sounds" or "2d4 giant rats" here. Instead you have "2 crambobold Packmates drag 1 pirate Mate toward Area 3.b." and "The panikoko thieves Po and Fo sneakily steal from the pirates." These are encounters that will result in interesting interactions and decisions, rather than distractions or throwaway combats.

Gameplay will primary have the party negotiating naturalistic challenges and environmental hazards while engaging with the dungeon's various factions. This gives it a wonderfully open design that, for the most part, allows for a variety of approaches and strategies running the gamut from stealth to literally blowing holes in the walls. Plenty of NPCs to talk to, assist or hinder. Plenty of strange loot to grab. Plenty of strange and terrible creatures to stab like the sticky kobold-frog hybrids and the blunderbuss-firing pirates.

Everywhere you turn there is a depth of creativity that draws you in and fills out the world. You don't just find a scroll of magic mirror, you find it etched onto thin sheaf of rolled bark. Searching a pirate's bed turns up thin metal plates with bawdy images stamped in relief. There's a carousing table, tables for NPCs from the various factions, treasure tables, etc. There is a tremendous amount of effort and care that went into this product and it shows. It all comes together to create a very vivid, dynamic location to explore.

What starts out as a pirate lair transforms into the temple of a Lovecraftian cult, complete with body horror and strange gods offering powerful boons. The party can uncover a mysterious power and either strike it down or yield to it, with some substantial rewards if they choose the latter. Great stuff for kicking off a campaign and seeding future adventures.

Of course, as Sir Francis Bacon said, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." And Grotto has a few strange proportions. Some the pages appear cramped and a are a bit difficult to follow, with words wrapping around map excerpts and images. Many of them are subdivided like 3a, 3b, 3c etc when I think they would better either lumped into one key or split out into distinct area numbers. And some of the room keys are a bit overlong or poorly organized. Here's the description for room 12:

I would have trouble synthesizing that into something I can tell my players fast enough that it won't have them stacking dice or checking their phones. Descriptions for things like the obelisk and the bowls should be moved to the bullet points and the whole thing cut down so that the GM can relay the initial room description quickly and in 2-3 sentences. Otherwise it's going to slow the game down while I stare at the page with knitted brows trying to suss out the most important parts. 

There are also a few places where important information, or things that should be obvious to the PCs are relegated to a bullet point rather than being shared up front. If a hallway has a body in it, that would be one of the first things they see. But when it's a few bullets down, you can run into the "oh wait, I forgot to mention..." problem.

And throughout the dungeon there are several places where NPCs and events have an x-in-6 chance of appearing. For the most part, I would just have the interesting thing that might happen, happen. There are always exceptions to the rule (in this case, whether the dragon is in its lair or whether it hunts down thieving PCs, for example) but if it's a choice between something and nothing, I usually go with something.

The author and the editor have the same name, which is either a wild coincidence or perhaps they are the same person. In which case I would strongly advise the author to have someone else edit their work. It's impossible to be objective about your own writing.

I wouldn't call any of these things nitpicks, but I also wouldn't let them stop me from running this adventure by any means.

It's been said that a good adventure is a powder keg and the PCs are the spark. That's exactly what Grotto is. Not to mention the fact that there are literal powderkegs laying around, so you know things are going to blow up and some poor PC is losing a hand. It's packed to the frog tits with creativity and potential energy, and I can't imagine not having a blast playing it.

On a scale of 2-12, Grotto of the River Pirates gets 10 stingbats.

https://groktao-publishing.itch.io/grotto-of-the-river-pirates