Thursday, February 9, 2023

The Opened Barrow - Beyond the Wall Scenario pack



By John Cocking & Peter S. Williams

Flatland games

Beyond the Wall, starting characters


Premise: A barrow near your village has been opened, and now there is an unquiet spirit to deal with!


What do we get here?


  Over 8 pages we get tables to create an adventure.


 Usability/formatting

 

 This is not an adventure exactly, rather most things you need to improvise one on the fly. 


More realistically what you'll do is roll up most of this before hand then slot in some details from the player character creation. In Beyond the Wall character creation fills out the NPCs and locations of the starting village which I have always thought is a nice touch to the game, something I regularly want to steal for my own nefarious uses.


 The table entries are really good at giving you plenty of hooks to pull off of in a single sentence and the tables included are comprehensive enough to give you the frame work. You can even get some good faction play and interesting treasures out of the tables, nice!


 What is missing here is a barrow map or a way to generate a barrow map. Otherwise you are good to go. Even the monsters you might need are all included in the 8 page write up, very helpful.



Portability


   You can probably adapt this pretty easily to any barrow haunting village scenario you want to use, not just as a starting adventure.


Recommendation


 A tiny bit more flavour would really tip this over the edge however as is I think it is a really good starter for either new or experienced referees. Beyond the Wall gets rather over looked in the OSR scene these days which I think is a real shame given all the fantastic tools it has like this, there is a huge amount to plunder from the system.


 This scenario pack is part of a larger product which is $5.99 over on drive thru, plenty of value in my opinion for the whole thing.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/313621/Beyond-the-Wall--Dangers-Near-and-Far


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