EZG reviews CE3 – The Folk of Osmon
The third installment of Purple Duck Games Campaign Elements-series fort eh Dungeon Crawl Classics-series is 14 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 12 pages of content, so let’s take a look, shall we?
This being a review of an adventure-locale, the following review contains SPOILERS. Potential players should jump to the conclusion.
Still here? The Folk of Osmon are weird – they have no hair. Their skin glistens and gleams and they live in a mire where once a vast city was destroyed by a dread cataclysm, now the home of argodiles, parasitic vines that implant their seeds in their victims and dread psilamanders. (All with full stats, mind you!) Swamp Faerie swarms seek to lead their victims astray and getting stuck in the mire poses a more mundane threat as well.
Apart from the map, four scenarios are provided: One depicting a good-natured bandit lord and his men, with whom the PCs will have to ally – for both groups have been surrounded by the strange folk of Osmon – which actually are asexual, amoeboid humans that reproduce by budding and worship their strange deity – which brings us to scenario 2: An atavism of the folk thinks of himself as gendered and falls in love, refusing to bud – resulting in the very real possibility of exploding into proto-osmonfolk and potentially exposing the nature of these men to the PCs. Scenario 3 has the PCs hunt for gold, but if you really want to scare your PCs, go for scenario 4 – the avatar of the Folk of Osmon’s chaotic deity, a vast ooze demanding sacrifice, wants his due – the PCs will have to interrupt the ritual (which btw. comes with information on the phrases used, including the translation – I wish more supplements did that!) and potentially take Osmon as a deity…
Advice for further adventures (squeezing it dry) are included as well.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to the printer-friendly two-column standard of PDG’s DCC-supplements and the pdf comes with an original one-page piece of awesome artwork and the other b/w-artworks and the cartography are awesome for the low price-point.
Author Daniel J. Bishop is one master of the weird, of the uncommon, of the disturbing – he simply GETS what made old-school modules and the sword & sorcery genre tick. This campaign element is in the stellar tradition of superb offerings that should not only incite those playing the DCC-rules to check them out – for the ideas alone, this is very well worth the asking-price: Breathing imaginative ideas, cool and disturbing, full of potential, this supplement can be used in so many ways it is almost painful – this campaign element once again should be considered an absolute must-buy and thus will get full 5 stars + endzeitgeist seal of approval – I really hope I’ll get to read a mega-adventure from Mr. Bishop one of these days.
You can get this superb location and all its awesome potential here on OBS and here on d20pfsrd.com’s shop!
Endzeitgeist out.
