Review: Soulblight - Swords and Sorceries

Today we are looking at Soulblight - Swords and Sorceries, a collection of 7 adventures and 2 settlements by Laurin-David Weggen. Although it is ostensibly for his Soulblight setting, any of the adventures could easily be dropped into any other setting you desire.

So what is a Sword and Sorcery story? Besides the swords and sorcery parts, it's usually an adventure that moves quickly, with a focus action rather than character development, dealing with an immediate threat or need rather than world-impacting events or long-term story arcs. This is not the story of a party of adventurers methodically exploring an ancient tomb, peeling back its mysteries and puzzling out its secrets. Nor is it the story of an ages-long conflict between the forces of good and evil. This is a story of heroes taking big, violent risks for gold and glory, where one danger propels into the next until it culminates in a grand, bloody finale.

It is, in some ways, antithetical to the sort of procedure-based dungeon crawl that Shadowdark excels at and that I spent the last review extolling. But other parts of Shadowdark - fast and deadly combat, dangerous magic, rulings over rules, etc seem like they would support the genre well. So how does this shake out?

I'm going to deep-dive three of the adventures, starting with The Ardent Convent. The Ardent Convent is a gauntlet with a very healthy 24 rooms where the party will try to escape a corrupted abbey. We get a brief one-page background and instructions for running the adventure and we’re off.

The imagery here is strong. “3 mad camels cluster in the stables, flat teeth digging into the flesh of a half-alive smiling nun.” or “Moonlight seeps in pale coloured rays through the stain-glass windows”. Rarely have I been to see a location in my head as vividly as this one. Properly creepy.

The gameplay is similar to a mini-metroidvania. You’ll be chasing down various keys to progress as you explore and backtrack. Most of these doors cannot be opened by any other means. On the one hand it forces thorough exploration and gives the players clear progression. On the other hand, the single solution limits creativity a bit. Speaking of the keys - there are 5 to keep track of. Would have been nice to include a little chart of where each key is and what it opens, but you’ll have to make your own.

Locked doors are a double-edged sword in adventure design, especially one with a specific win condition (get the key to escape the abbey) like this one. It’s one thing when they guard optional treasure or other rewards. But in this case, they’re a necessity to make sure the PCs don’t just walk out the front door on a lucky STR check and leave everyone to play Ticket to Ride for the remaining 2 hours. Hunting for the keys is the dungeon. So you need to make some of the doors “magic doors” that can only be opened by the key for no clear reason. And that means reigning the “tactical infinity" and limitless creativity that are an important part of TTRPGs. My advice is not to avoid these magic doors entirely, but to use them judiciously. Here, I think they could be dialed back a bit. 

All this is not to say the adventure is linear. There are many secret passages and alternate routes to navigate the abbey and the aforementioned magic doors only appear in a few places. 

The adventure also hints at the possibility of the PCs being able to cast a key to help them escape rather than facing down almost certain death from the blighted abbess and half a dozen vicious nuns, but provides no details on exactly how that may be accomplished. In another place, we’re told a rat can be bribed with some cheese, but no mention of whether there’s any in the kitchen. 

Overall it’s an incredibly evocative location to explore with lots to keep the players busy, but may require the GM to do a little work to fill in a few blanks and keep it running smoothly. But don't let that stop you. 

Let’s take a peep at Juggernaut Road next. We open with "Blighted fumes rise from the chimneystacks of the quartz workshop strapped to the giant chariot, as it roams the hills of the Blue Glades. The dreaded blight has seeped into the very veins of the earth and the giants' operation harvesting the quartz serves only to spread it further. Their chariot must be stopped before they carry the blight toward the roving city of Zarana." 

The amount of evocative world-building that happens in these three sentences is impressive. It hearkens back to pulp fantasy and Appendix N in the best way, and makes other adventure backgrounds seem needlessly wordy and complicated. We're off to a good start. 

The premise is that the party is boarding a slow-moving chariot manned by blighted giants with the implied goal that they must stop it. In practice you could approach this two ways - as a stealth infiltration mission or a sword-swinging lair assault. Although the former could be fun, I feel like it's built for the latter.

Yes, the primary activity for your players in this module will be combat. It's very easy to make a bad combat-focused adventure because it's often difficult to include meaningful choices and dilemmas in combat. If your adventure is 3 hours of "I attack with my sword" or "I cast Magic Missile" everyone will get bored quickly. The solution is to present combat as a puzzle. Let me give an example:

The simple addition of the acid vat turns the situation from a simple combat into a puzzle of "how do I get that giant (and other baddies) to fall into the acid". And it's a pretty good puzzle with many potential solutions and shenanigans.

That room gives a pretty good taste of what this adventure offers - it is primarily about murdering giants but most rooms are presented with extra hazards and challenges that can provide wonderful and gruesome rewards for those players willing to engage with them and take big risks. But a party with the "stand and fight" mindset will be quickly overwhelmed. At any rate, the action will not stop - there are plenty of opportunities for big stupid heroics and no time for moral quandaries or obtuse riddles.

All this being said, I have my nitpicks. There seem to be at lest three factions on board but we get no information about how they interact. A few clues on how the PCs might play them against each other would be helpful. Treasure is almost 100% randomized from the books and quite light - I would juice it up a bit. Understandable for a somewhat minimally keyed and free adventure, but I would love to see some really creative custom magic items. Especially some that would add some additional solutions to the challenges of the module. 

And again, there is some information missing . What happens if the PCs try to use the giant-sized spear throwers? What does it take to sever the reigns to stop the chariot? Stuff that the GM could improvise, but that I would expect to be included in a fully realized and polished adventure.

Tertiarily we have The House of the Crimson Lord - a heist/infiltration to steal a magical seven-fingered hand from crime boss Shula Al-Saif's 43-room abode. We're given some nice tools for running it as a clandestine infiltration - day/night cycles, NPC schedules and overheard conversations. The only thing we're lacking in this area is details on how the dungeon reacts to alarm, such as how many guards will respond and how quickly they will arrive.

The dungeon itself is richly populated. 43 rooms and every single one has some kind of interesting, interactive element. Many of them have different states between day and night. Moving through undetected will be extremely challenging because the players will inevitably want to poke and prod at the strange and tempting things they encounter. 

We do run into the issue of the "magic door" again. The vault may only be unlocked by a key that is on Shula Al-Saif's person at all times. I think it would have been a good use of the large location to plant some additional possibilities for breaking the vault, or at least some other means of acquiring the key besides waiting for Shula to fall asleep and yoinking it. As it is, the PCs are unlikely to learn of this requirement until they've made it all the way to the end. During a heist that may be too late for them to have a fighting chance.

So I would probably at least be generous with that information and with providing a means to get the key. Just making it to the fault without aggro'ing the entire place will be trouble enough. The rewards will be worth it, both from a gameplay standpoint and loot standpoint. 

The layout for this and all the adventures is very clean and very useful. I’m probably going to steal it. We’ve got a text column covering ⅔ of the page, with the final ⅓ including monster stats and the relevant bit of the map. I found it very easy to follow.

Swords and Sorceries provides a nice variety of locations and adventures and they are all not only technically competent but also evocative, creative and capture the spirit of the genre while marrying it nicely to Shadowdark mechanics. It might require the GM to do a little more prep and fill in a few details in order to keep things running smoothly, but it's a small price to pay. Speaking of price, I don't normally comment on the cost of adventures but Swords and Sorceries is PWYW. 120+ pages of really solid adventures for potentially zero dollars. Go get it.

On a scale of 2-12, Soulblight - Swords and Sorceries gets 9 stingbats.

https://laurin-david-weggen.itch.io/soulblight-swords-and-sorceries