Up Chaos River - Play Review
I've started a new Shadowdark campaign. With Abomination Vaults behind us, we're moving on to new pastures. I decided to start things off with Up Chaos River, a level 0 funnel that I tweaked to fit my level 1 crew. Up Chaos River was written by Brad Kerr (the hex crawl portion) and Chris Dudinak (the dungeon) and published by Necrotic Gnome in Carcass Crawler #5.
I've written up my rulings and how I've twiddled the dials of Shadowdark here for anyone interested. Up Chaos River filled 4 sessions of 3 hours. We played online with Foundry VTT.
What is this?
The aptly named town of Backwater is in trouble. Chaos ooze in the river is mutating people and the next town upriver has gone silent. Time for a bunch of yokels to grab their pitchforks and go fix the problem! But not today, buddy. I adapted this to fit level 1 adventurers passing through on canoes to a city further upstream.
Up Chaos River is a short riverine hex crawl and a beaver lodge dungeon. The hex crawl has it's own traversal and encounter rules with 12 keyed locations and a 6 entry random encounter table. Each location is interactive, has good hooks and a few are enticingly open ended.
It's a lot of stuff in a small region lending the journey a wild and chaotic tone. The players would hop from vignette to vignette in an unhinged expedition.
The dungeon is a massive beaver lodge more than 200 feet across with 16 keyed locations. Would you guess there are beavers inside? Beavers the size of bears? Well, there are. Many jokes were made. So many. Other residents include delightful fey weirdos and strange fishy dudes. The key is easy to parse with bolded terms drawing your eye to important information quickly. I appreciated the sensory information at doorways and corridors to make traversal decisions more interesting.
At the table
I ran this Old-School Essentials adventure with Shadowdark and needed to make a few adaptations. The biggest was shifting the funnel's save or die moments, of which there are many. Monsters were easy to convert. Where possible I used the matching stat block from Shadowdark. For the many new critters I converted special abilities and applied them to the stat block of a similar level Shadowdark monster based on HD. Shadowdark encounter rates were used but the hex crawl procedure was not. I opted for the Up Chaos River traversal and encounter rules instead.
This was an absolute blast and my player's had a good time. After receiving the tip about the chaos water they made a beeline up river, skipping past nearly every encounter in their haste to reach the source of the chaos. Seeds were planted from these decisions. The key for a net, thrashing with prey, included the fisherfolk monitoring it. I easily extrapolated out what would happen if they did not investigate immediately.
There was more ambiguity with a weretoad encounter. Is he hostile? Or freshly turned? I could have rolled a reaction roll but I made him a gormless local who was freshly bitten. This story wove its way through the entire adventure.
These locations were uniformly brief little storylets. A submerged angel statue holding a magical sword. A ship, eternally swirling on a single point in the current. A lonely graveyard high up on a hill. While I only rolled a single random encounter, they also look engaging. The panic on the call increased when the giant catfish slammed into one of their canoes. I really wanted to have the River Man appear, dripping and burbling water as he talks.
Beavers having proved dangerous foes during the hex crawl, it was with trepidation that the party approached the lodge. The various animal and monster encounters were balanced by the rebellious teenage antics of "Junior" the river troll and his ersatz mother, the Hag.
Freeing the river spirit is an important part of this adventure accomplished quickly by my players. From there they found their way to Junior, the bored river troll, floating, splashing and blowing bubbles in his pool. After speaking with him they agreed to find his dagger "Ripper" in exchange for Junior's help in defeating his mom. I feel like an alliance with Junior is the key to successfully ousting the Hag. I made Junior dumb and gave him a "dude's rock" vibe that was so fun to play.
There are frogs in one chamber of the lodge, implied to be previous troublemakers that the hag transformed. My players assumed that they were more weretoads and stayed far away from that room. The key makes the croaks "sound vaguely like pleas for help." I was allowing them to hear the sound from several rooms away and choose not to give the players this detail until they got closer. They never did.
The final confrontation with "Ma" the hag was successful thanks to Junior's assistance but could have been quite lethal.
Final Thoughts
Up Chaos River was an absolute blast. The hex crawl is brimming with interesting encounters and I loved the light-hearted tone. The dungeon is more focused but continues the vibe. This gets a strong recommendation from me.