By John Large
Red Dice Diaries
OSE, 1st-3rd level
Premise: A noble has been murdered in the big city, figure out what is going on!
What do we get here?
Over 36 pages we get a murder mystery.
Usability/formatting
Investigation adventures are not easy to pull off at the best of times and I am not sure that OSR games are really the natural place for them. That being said this adventure does a pretty good job of pulling it off.
There may be a bit too much text but you get a fairly good idea of what is going on here. The layout is decent and the paragraphs mercifully short. What the writing needs is a bit more personality in the NPCs and evocative descriptions of locations, it is not the end of the world that these are missing as you can add them in as a GM it is just that would really make this a top tier adventure.
The hooks are a bit limp, they often are in adventures, in any case I would suggest if you want to use this adventure you run it once your players have some contacts in the city. Thankfully there are a few ways to tackle the adventure depending on which factions your players already have a working relationship with.
How the players approach the investigation is pretty open to them and there should be enough clues they can figure things out.
I do like how the story mixes together common tropes for the killer, the story fits into a believable world (with a little bit of magic) fairly well.
Portability
You need a city to run this in really or at the very least a large town.
Recommendation
In my opinion this is a decent frame work you can build off of. No it is not something I would be itching to run as, I can see how I would fit it into my own world and drop it as a seed in a campaign there. A useful resource to have in your back pocket even if you do need to embellish a little. Hard to say no to when it is pay what you want on drive thru.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/333285/The-Little-Barbershop-of-Terror
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