Review: Soulblight - Hamartia

Today we are looking at Soulblight - Hamartia by Laurin-David Weggen. Hamartia is billed as a “hexcrawl setting” and also includes a 40-room dungeon, all wrapped up in the vibes of Reconquista-era Spain. The region is a collection of islands that serve as a penal colony for the nearby kingdom of Verocia.

I hope you like words because Hamartia has, like, all of them in a huge pile before the adventure starts. Hex descriptions don’t start until page 102. I’m not complaining that the author included too much content, but I think it would be better organized by importance to gameplay, and certain sections like “Cultures in Verocia” and “Gods of Verocia” could probably be relegated to the appendices. On top of that there are 31 NPCs with a half-page description each and 24 factions with leaders, goals, allies, etc. That’s just scratching the surface of all that’s provided from black powder weapons to holidays to diseases.

It’s all very well done but a bit intimidating, and your tolerance of it may come down to whether you are looking for a setting or for an adventure. As a setting it’s incredibly rich. As an adventure, it could do with a healthy dose of brevity. 

For the map we get 198 hexes, of which 15 “major” and 19 are “minor”, for a ratio of about 6:1. Pretty dense, and each of the major hex keys could easily be fleshed out to multi-session adventure in itself. In one stands a tower infiltrated with awakened rat spies, built on top of a half-flooded city ruin. An elder entity from beyond the stars sleeps at the deepest level of an ageless labyrinth. If the party latches on to thread that features any of these locations there’s enough detail for the GM to throw together an interesting adventure site. A description like “Designed by a malevolent architect, the compound is a maze of torture rooms, arcane laboratories and surgery chambers, patrolled by vicious, blade-bearing constructs and monstrosities worthy of the Thanian sorcery pits.” should be enough to get the creative juices flowing.

Even the so-called minor hexes are filled with hooks. We’ve got radicalized talking rats, a sphinx oracle of Memnon, a tower full of demonic torturers and a sea hag hiding in a shipwreck with undead sailors as guardians. The boughs of this tree are heavy-laden with adventure fruits ripe for the plucking. I’m just going to paste one of the minor hexes here in its entirety. If you aren’t excited to have your players find a place like this, this isn’t the hobby for you.

“A walled off yard on Isla de la Redención, located atop the ridge of hills north of San Irene. There exists no gate along the entirety of its tall, bright red walls, only the call and flight of singing birds that rise from the inside of the yard suggest there to be nature of any sort. A most curious place, none in town may accurately say who built it, though the design of its four corner turrets and the peculiar, carbuncle-red stone used in its construction suggests it to be of Lothorian make. Many have attempted to climb across the carbuncle-red walls, but the few that succeeded were never seen again, and none of the wizards of Verocia could hope to scry or allow the eyes of a summoned imp to reveal to them what lied beyond. 

Protected by jackal-headed, red stone golems that roam the garden, a grand mausoleum stands at the centre, overgrown with an ancient, leafless tree of pure white bark. Here, a guardian demon watches over the ancient spells that seal the Sword of Lothra, awaiting the day it is to be raised against the coming Sovereign.”

Then we get, I dunno, a few hundred random encounters across regional tables. None of them is boring. They serve the dual purpose of building the world and teaching to the players, as well providing interesting interactions and adventure hooks. And each one is specific to the area where they’re encountered. They are the sort of random encounters that, as a GM, I want to present to my players because I know they’ll result in some fun gameplay. “Oops, rolled another 1! What are the odds?! No, you can’t see my dice.”

Connections between the hexes are a bit lacking and not as direct as I would prefer. That is to say, exploring one hex doesn’t necessarily result in obvious connections to other hexes that will propel the party forward. If you have really studied the NPC and faction descriptions you can probably tease out or generate those connections but I’m a bit slow and need them spoon fed to me. For example, the seal in hex 1002 can only be opened by the Staff of the Pale Star. If you were paying attention during the NPC section you would know that the staff is in the possession of Grandmother Rosa and that she is a member of the Shrikes. When we flip over to the factions section and read about the Shrikes, we learn that their hideout is in hex 603. So we got there but it had to take a few detours. A little parenthetical in the hex description of 1002, like (staff is in the possession of Grandmother Rosa, hex 603) would go a long way to enhancing the usability here. 

Deep in the bowels of the book, beginning on page 238, we find the 40-room dungeon, Castillo Pájaro. This location is set up wonderfully for infiltration and exfiltration missions. If you need something like that for your campaign, you won’t find anything better than this. There’s a detailed order of battle describing how each faction responds to intruders. We have a list of what it costs to bribe the personnel and what they’re willing to do. There’s a page describing the way certain factions behave at night vs during the day plus an hour-by-hour schedule of meals, different random encounter tables for day vs night and most keys have different sections describing any differences between day and night. All of it is well-organized and handy, and honestly I don’t think I’ve ever seen such thorough support for a heist-type adventure.

On top of all this, we are provided with 10 suggested scenarios for adventures in the dungeon. Each includes goals (“Plant rebel insignias in the belongings of a few guards in the Barracks”), a complication (“A training exercise is being held in the central courtyard, leaving the entire castillo in high activity”), the consequences of success and failure and more. 

The 14-area ground floor of the castillo is somewhat mundane - exactly what you’d expect to find in the castle of a penal colony - but is brought to life by the multiple NPCs and their various endeavors. There are more than 20 named NPCs including rats, cats and fish and even the faceless guards are given something to do besides “standing guard”. Many of them have favors to ask or information to trade. And all throughout there are things to learn or find in one place that will help navigate the hazards of another. The minotaur gaoler can be bribed with wine, a cauldron in the kitchen can be poisoned to disable the guards, and so forth.

It’s the sort of place that fosters (pardon the buzzwords) emergent gameplay. Once the PCs interact with it, it will immediately start reacting and those reactions will demand a response. And it will all snowball until the PCs are leaping from the castle walls with bloodied swords to escape a burning massacre of their own making.

There is also a generous amount of treasure hidden throughout. We sometimes forget that gold = XP and that we need to provide enough loot to keep the PCs advancing at a nice pace. So even if you’re escaping prison or assassinating the captain, careful searching will be richly rewarded.  

Underneath the castillo lies the dungeon, where things get a little weirder and a lot darker. In addition to the rows of cells and their imprisoned inhabitants, PCs can buy seized contraband, tinker with unfinished golems or plunder alchemical bullets for blackpowder weapons. Castillo Pájaro has a tremendous amount of verisimilitude - it feels like it could be a real place ripped from 12th century Spain. But there’s a fair bit of strangeness hiding in the darkness. 

I have only two beefs with the dungeon and they are minor: 1) It’s a bit one-note. This is partially due to the location itself, but there’s not a huge variety of the types of challenges the PCs will encounter. The biggest puzzle is how not to be discovered and the biggest hazard is being discovered and putting the castle on alert, and there’s not much else in the way of tricks or traps. 2) As I mentioned, there are myriad NPCs and factions and almost no information regarding them is given in the room keys themselves. I can see why this might be done to keep the room descriptions uncluttered, but it means there will be a lot of flipping around and more than a few awkward pauses while the GM tries to recall who is who. I would rather see this information in the margins than map excerpts. The NPCs and their various intrigues are the lifeblood of the adventure, so there needs to be better tools for keeping track of them. 

All that being said, even if you have no intention of using the Soulblight setting or the Hamartia region, even if you set fire to the first 237 pages of this book, Castillo Pájaro is worth the price of admission. It could be easily dropped into any setting that includes castles and provides a multi-use dungeon that is more than fit for purpose to support any kind of heist, prison break or infiltration mission you could devise.

But you shouldn’t ignore the setting. Because although it is quite dense, it is superbly written and lavishly detailed. Maybe not the slickest design, but it will be incredibly rewarding to those that put in the effort.  

On a scale of 2-12, Soulblight - Hamartia gets 10 stingbats.

https://laurin-david-weggen.itch.io/soulblight-hamartia