Tower of the Mothman can be found on Itch for PWYW.
~ 2300 words. 12 minutes to read.

The title bringing up an American cryptid made me sit up and pay attention. The interior styling choices kept my attention throughout. After a few examples of dungeons using the Shadowdark trade dress and similar templates, it’s refreshing to open a book that speaks with its own voice & bludgeons you with personality.

What is it?

Tower of the Mothman is a SD adventure for levels 2-4.

Unique Features?

A more Mork Borg-ian layout. A pressure system that serves as the timeline in some respects. It’s based on rolling encounters to progress each factions’ actions. It’s an interesting solution to the rigidity of timelines, but it sort of needs a tracker for easier use. You can use tick marks in the faction section of the table to track. There is some slightly odd wording on how it works where the pressure counter resets after a crisis occurs, but each pressure has a pre-determined outcome after a crisis occurs as well. This is probably an instance where you either interpret it as the count resets to 0, you roll to increase the pressure again, AND also the Mutiny/Revolt occurs OR, you wait to increase the pressure after the Mutiny/Revolt. So, simultaneously or specificity before generality.

What’s the story?

To solve a pirate problem, the town hired a witch. She solved the problem, but something else formed in the wake of the witch’s actions. Now, everything is getting worse and people are about to revolt.

So… Adventure?

The background is pretty straightforward as a story and the map is more abstract (although a scale would have been useful).

Setup

When reading the factions, I miss 2 things: 1) a point man for each faction; and, 2) how each faction would potentially interact. Other than that, it provides a lot of great directional detail to figure out how you may want to use them as the GM. It’ll be a bit more heavy lifting, but it’s okay. This is an adventure style/format that will require some of that. Think Witchburner but a little less mystery.

Room Keys

The Estates, Pimsburg, and Alcoves are treated more like scene locations more than location keys. There’s a lot on offer from how things are used, what they do, what the characters can learn, how they may employ the party, what they would offer, etc.

As a one shot, this is more or less enough material to run the adventure. It keeps things focused by being very direct. This is a solid choice for the type of session this adventure is designed for. But if you want this to last longer as a few session arc, you will need to expand upon this and given the number of plots, I think that’s where the adventure probably should sit.

As a comparison, Witchburner is a similar adventure with one town, several NPCs, and maybe 3 factions for an adventure that is 76 pages long. This is 30 pages and includes a mapped out Lighthouse and a point-crawl cave network.

The reason I’m bringing up this comparison is because for an adventure like this, you want to give the GM as many tools as possible. So a little more expansion on NPCs and their actions over time would be incredibly helpful. The basic framework is there, but a little more would be nice.

Speaking of the Lighthouse, the description component of the room keys is the briefest of description. It’s mostly 3 objects with descriptors. None of them are more than 10 words long. Not a fan. As a GM, I want the adventure to do slightly more work for me. Jordan of 2d6 Stingbats often talks about wanting the creator to provide more than he can generate on his own in any adventure. Usually, it’s in the scope of conceptual density, but it also applies here in terms of description. Why? Because if you get too brief, you lose clarity.

For instance, how does the search function work in the side column? Does it apply to the nearest room or the entire page? Is it if they take the time to search or make a check to do it? Okay, some of this is just make a choice and stick with it. That’s okay, but what does “The missing crank piece in the safe [L07] is needed to open the compartment” mean? Are we suggesting there is a missing crank piece in the safe (which is located in area 7) is necessary to open this compartment that belongs to … something? There’s a crank in the sack, is that not usable? Or is it useful here and can be used to open the safe in area 7. Regardless of how you interpret the writing, there is a lack of clarity to explain the structure of the room and how things interact because we’re using less than 10 words to describe the space. Where does the compartment exist and how does it function? Is it in the hole? Is it in the room? If it is in the hole, how big is it? I presume it’s smaller than the sack, but it’s unclear.

Also… because it’s my hill, Ch was used for Charisma instead of reducing it to a single letter abbreviation of Z. Booooooo! Use Z. Okay, I got it out of my system.

The Lighthouse seems to be mostly concerned with the Mothman, it’s a little difficult to discern or see the connection to other issues happening within the adventure through this crawl. That said, it has journal entries about things happening in the Alcoves in area 7, but the majority of them are about how the moths & Mothman are effecting matters. I would prefer it be used as a point of view overlooking the Alcoves so the players could potentially learn something happening elsewhere by viewing it themselves.

After that we delve into the Den (which is below the Lighthouse and potentially accessible from area 6), but it’s primary access is through the caves from the Alcoves. I’d probably move this before the Den.

A lot of the aforementioned issues with the Lighthouse room keys applies to the cave network as well. I think the biggest loss is the lack of interaction between everything else and the dungeons regarding the moths. They are hiring adventurers to tackle this problem because it’s such an issue, but there isn’t much evidence that they tried to tackle it before hand. There aren’t really NPCs anywhere to interact with and the factions aren’t really engaged in the dungeon. Which means, we could remove all of the factions and run this as dungeon crawl about the mothman and avoid the extra mechanics or faction play entirely. I would prefer a bit more integration.

Why do I want more integration? In many OSR adventures, you’ll see a passage about allowing the party to decline certain elements of an adventure at a location. Here’s the one from Nightmare over Ragged Hollow (note this is links to the US page for the Merry Mushmen – it is not an affiliate link).

This location is interesting. There’s a lot going on with the revolt and the mutiny. Neither of which really tie-in to the Mothman story/dungeons. So if my players aren’t interested in that portion of the adventure, I don’t really have a whole lot they can do. AND if there is better integration to the dungeons, even if the mothman story isn’t interesting to the players, maybe they’d want to run the dungeons if there was a pirate or Pim story attached to it as well, even as a subplot. But without those connections, I can’t even offer it as an option. Since it is the bulk of the adventure, I should be able to offer it. So a little expansion there would really help this adventure out. I’m sure a lot of experienced GMs could make that work for them relatively easily.

So who is this for?

I think anyone can enjoy this adventure, especially if they like weird American cryptids, but it’s going to require GMs to put in some work to flesh it out. An experienced GM could take what is here and make this adventure sing by adding some meat to the bones for the moths to consume. You could also just carve off most of the interesting elements of the mutiny & revolt and focus on the main adventure here – the Mothman dungeon.

Either way, you’re likely going to have a good time with a little bit of effort. And at PWYW, this is a stark contrast in quality compared to some of the $8 zines out there.

If you made it this far, thank you. Now, I’m going to nitpick & nerd out on design. You have been warned.

Okay. This adventure tries a few things throughout with layout that is more Mork Borg-ian and I love it. So I want to focus on the room keys because I think that’s where things falter some. We’ll focus on 2 areas to keep it simple. I already described my issue with the brevity of the description, but I want to address a few other things as well.

In both of these examples, you have 2 major issues. First, the annotations to the side take up more space than the room descriptions. It creates a lot of useless negative space and creates a sense of claustrophobia or cramping of the information in the margin column. Second, the color-coding is never explained and makes things blur together as well.

In any book, you’ll find the margin columns tend to be less populated with text than the main body. That’s because the majority of text should be in the body. It’s the main thing you want people to read. The margin is for notes and asides that can be skipped without affecting understanding. So if you are writing a book about King Charles the 24th, the margin might have an annotation explaining he was coronated on January 34, 3719 before the Xlerion invasion. It’s extra context for the main discussion, but it doesn’t change what is being discussed in the body. It’s a timeline point essentially.

That purpose doesn’t naturally disappear when we move into ttrpgs. When you are reading the room key, you should anticipate finding all the pertinent information to run the room in the key, but it’s not, because all of the pertinent information is in the annotation. On the Cave Entrance, I need to know the Webs are a trap more than anything else, instead, the body text basically redescribes the silken web as thin strands of silk. As a GM, that’s useless information. The useful information is that it is a Trap with a DC 12 DEX or it triggers a reaction. (Also, why would moth doll drones arrive at the entrance from the Mothman in 1 round when they only fly Near? But that is a nitpick beside the point.)

As a result of that misplacement of information, the GM can easily miss that is a trap until they look into the margin. Sure the red is meant to draw the eye to the red in the column, but it is never explained that’s the purpose for something that is ostensibly a unique layout construction. You don’t always need to explain unique layout constructions, but they need to be intuitive.

The primary construction of bolding in Shadowdark layout design is the bolded words match. You will first have a word bolded in the description and then additional details provided in the GM only text which will start with the bolded word.

Runes = runes. Door = barricaded door.

That is the training Shadowdark has done with its layout design. So to then shift to “dresser drawer = search” or “strand = trap”, it is less intuitive and requires a little explanation. I think it’s more obvious with [L01] Mud Room (above), because you have “storage bench = search = beneath sack”. Realistically, all of that information should be in the body anyway like we see with the Hall of Deeds example.

The other issue is the colors are soft and sort of blend together in the cramped margin column. You get encounter information about Moth Drones, and then the stat block for moth drones and it’s not something you can quick reference anymore, because you have to read to find the starting point of the monster stat block. This is something OSE does a great job of in many of their adventures.

The purpose of these techniques is usability and I understand that is what is attempted with these techniques. But, there are times where we might get too clever for ourselves. In order to read the color-coding clearly, I had to zoom in 200%. This doesn’t even get into the issue of font size (which I think is 8 or 9 at points). This is just how faint the purple and yellow are relative to the surrounding black so the color-coding loses weight and impact that you want it to achieve. It doesn’t truly serve as a reference point anchor like you want, because you have to seek it out to understand it.

I love the creativity and the attempts, but there’s a point where we’re breaking things that work and the purposes is unclear why we’re breaking fixed things. Even Mork Borg has a very rigid system of keying in Rotblack Sludge that keeps the majority of the text in the body, only quick reference in the columns and everything functions in black & white.

I can’t say the same here. A chance was taken, but it didn’t work out. If your color-coding doesn’t work in black & white, it doesn’t really work, especially, when you cannot connect runes to runes.