Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow
Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow (NORH) is an Old-School Essentials adventure for Level 1-2 Characters written by Joseph R. Lewis, with art by Li-An, and layout by Olivier Revenu. It’s set in a relatively vanilla fantasy world with a few whimsical/”fairy tale” elements alongside some horror moments. It has enough going on in it to level a party up to around level 3. It also includes my favourite primer on what OSR gaming is, and comes with a bunch of fun pre-generated characters. The adventure begins in a very solid starting town, that has everything you need to get a campaign started (adventure hooks, local colour, chatty NPCs and rival adventurers). The plot of the adventure itself can be summed up as follows: the wanna-be adventurer Tobias got in over his head and was possessed by an evil otherworldly entity—the Dolouros Ichor. He ran back to town and went to the temple for help. But in an their effort to cure Tobias, the local clergymen only made the Ichor more powerful. To contain the evil entity, they invoked powerful magics that erected a force field around the temple. Now, the temple is a contaminated nightmare zone that the heroes need to somehow get into, so they can save the survivors and hopefully banish whatever is causing all of this.
Just to get it out of the way early: NORH is pretty bloody good. This was the first non-old Old School module that hit for me. It’s a good demonstration of how you can do modern feeling adventures with old school bones. This isn’t one of those OSR adventures that gravitated towards an old school system because the designer wanted something “lite” where they could just do aesthetic jazz riffs and not worry about rules. Rather, NOHR thoroughly embraces the adventure game ethos of the original material. It retains what makes old school D&D old school (lethality, dungeon crawling, crunch, exploration) but its presentation and usability is thoroughly modern. Not everyone will agree with me on this, but imo the emphasis on an open sandbox world is actually a modern OSR sensibility, and NORH does that part extremely well too.
Zooming in on the sand-box nature: the entire adventure is structured around an open ended problem that is resolved by adventuring in the larger world in and around Ragged Hollow. The magical dome covering the temple can only be entered from the very top (more on this later), you have to figure out a way of physically getting there, and there’s a bunch of magic items that can help you do that in the surrounding environs. A haunted house in town has boots that let you jump really high, a dwarven cave has a grappling hook that always hits its target, a hag has a magical chain that can slither to the top of the dome and tie itself to it. The surrounding environment also has clues on what caused this whole thing in the first place. So basically exploring the “spokes” around the central adventure “hub” is how you crack open the final dungeon. It’s a bit on the “video game” side of things, but I don’t care. I think that’s actually a good thing. Not to mention that the module is open to the dome issue being solved through creative mundane methods not involving the aforementioned magic items. Not everything on the map ties back to the central adventure. There’s a bunch of unrelated stuff like a twee (sorry—more on the tweeness later) Goblin Market and a far more mundane serial killer. But those locations add flavour, provide other buff items that should help with the final dungeon, and help the adventurers to level up. Plus many locations are thematically tied back to the town of Ragged Hollow via quest givers and hints. This is a really solid way of creating a hexcrawl that doubles as an adventure. Create a central geographically grounded hub problem that is solved by uncovering thematically connected spokes that are scattered across the map. This is the sort of open ended spatiality that makes Old School play great. It’s a big part of what people are on about when they say that Old School adventuring is about exploration. I think that sometimes modern games and gamers misunderstand what is meant by exploration—they think it’s just about describing locations that are full of wonder and whimsy (boring. whack.) No. It’s about the satisfaction of literally mapping a space and cracking puzzles via spatially communicated clues.
The sandbox nature of the whole thing isn’t perfect. I have a few issues with it. The sequencing of the problem and solution are a little off. Let me explain: the module starts with this big forcefield suddenly appearing over the temple, and a whole bunch of creepy stuff happening at night. That’s where the adventure wants you to start your players (as far as I can tell). So imagine you present that to the players and also create a sense of urgency mechanically, by tolling bells and killing off temple hostages over time. I think that most players will be hyperfocused on that adventure site and getting in there. I don’t think their first impulse will be to take on seemingly unrelated side quests in and around the site in the hope of maybe finding some flying boots. It’s not a very intuitive set-up. That’s a macro-level problem with the spatial set-up. A more micro-level problem—and maybe this is just me—is that the solution for entering the impenetrable force field just doesn't really make sense. Spoilers: the force field is impenetrable but for some reason where the bell tower pokes out of the force field, it just sort of wraps around the walls and leaves an opening inside the bell tower that you can climb through. This is going to get a bit in-the-weeds but we’ll blame NORH for presenting us with an in-the-weeds challenge… Why does the church tower wedge open the force field there? If the force field is soooo powerful and impenetrable, wouldn’t it just sort of phase through the church bell tower walls, or physically destroy the walls and snip the tower off? Like, what a shit force field. And you can’t see the entrance from the ground. You just see the tower poking out the top. So me as a player, I’m thinking “that’s weird but I can’t really get up there so who cares”. I don’t think all players will gravitate towards getting up there and having a look to see whether the tower magically wedges open the force field. To me, the more intuitive solution would be one that the module specifically prohibits: digging under the force field. The module specifies that it goes all the way around. Well okay if it can phase through soil, then why can’t it phase through the church tower? See what I’m saying? It can be hand-waved but it's sort of annoying. That's sort of the extent of the problems, they need a bit of tweaking but can be addressed by any somewhat competent DM. E.g. I'd address the larger issue of the party hyperfocusing on the temple location by either feeding them some ideas via a chatty villager “Jee I heard the hag has a rope that would come in handy.” Or “Mr Windler was working on some jumping boots that would be perfect for this. Too bad he died and left behind that abandoned Windler House.” Alternatively I’d actually start the adventure before the force field goes up; let the players explore and find some useful stuff, and then let the dome go up. That second solution brings me to another cool feature about this adventure. It's worth the money just for the sandbox alone.
I actually have never run the temple proper. But I've used basically everything else from this adventure. There's tonnes of useful and interesting locations and dungeons in the hexcrawl. And like I said they do often link back to the central adventure but they are also great for a regular hex crawl. What that means is that even if the players reject the central adventure and decide to just walk off into the wilderness like that penguin in the Werner Herzog doco, the DM can just run a bunch of sessions in the wilderness. It's a true sandbox in that sense. You can run the whole thing as is, or you can steal whatever you like. For example there's a fun, extremely simple little encounter with some bugbears who plan to roll a big rock onto the party. Another nice touch in terms of modularity is that the adventure has organised surrounding locals into very nicely illustrated 6 mile Hexes that have a point crawl inside of each hex. So you can just plonk whole hexes onto your map and it provides a nice pre-made way to navigate the hexes. The whole thing just looks really nice too. It has a cartoony style that may or may not be to your liking but it's incredibly good quality work. The book itself is made out of good paper. The layout is killer. Etc etc.
Alright, let me get off the Mushmens’ Merry dick for a second to talk about what I didn't like, or rather little things that bugged me. I've praised some of the spatial problem solving that NORH sets up, but the dungeons themselves are not really that clever in terms of spatiality. They're not terrible, they're just very straightforward and generally short. Your players won't care or have a bad time, but you just won't find the sort of tightly crafted and carefully thought out “jewelbox dungeons” that Gus L is known for, or even the sprawling, ramshackle dungeons of old—stuff like B1. The dungeons are generally 5-10 rooms and have fairly unremarkable layouts (although some like the haunted house have funky aesthetics and dressing). Even the final dungeon, while bigger than the others, sticks to a pretty linear design. You just kind of go door to door SWAT-style. The aesthetic is also not my favourite. The cartoony visuals are fine. I'm more referring to the set pieces and magic items. There's a magical forest that has a lot of “folk lorey” situations like kind old witches, silly goblins and magical apples. It's fine in small doses and probably works fine alongside more vanilla D&D tropes. But it's just not what I gravitate towards. That said, were I running a Dolmenwood campaign, this stuff would actually be great. I just happen to run a Greyhawk campaign with a bunch of old blokes who want gritty Greyhawk-lore-abiding groganard shit, and I have a bit of a personal aversion to the twee. It's really an aesthetic preference. I reskinned certain things really easily. Just know that NORH is more Dolmenwood than Arden Vul. On a related note there's some stuff Joseph Lewis has come up with that is a bit too rogue for me. It's not that it's too twee, it's just a bit random and in some cases a tad half baked. For example there's a cave where people are harvesting a special plant. Because it's in a cave, the plant is growing from the light of a big crystal. Ok but the huge crystal can't be moved and you're not given any guidance on what to do with the thing if your players decide to hyperfocus on, and tinker with, it. Why can't they move it? Can it be damaged? Is it magical? Wtf is it doing here? There's a haunted house with a random encounters with a ghost kid. But the kid just points at stuff wordlessly. There's no way to free it from its purgatory, there's no way to talk to it and no backstory. Another random encounter in the haunted house is a nutcracker soldier who bursts into flames and melts into a screaming puddle. Ok definitely an entertaining bit… but like there's no context given. Is it a toy the kid played with? Is it a clue? Players get obsessed with this stuff and I have no answers. This is the sort of “wahahahoo” randomness that some people in the OSR seem to love but I really can't get excited about. I am pretty good at coming up with off the wall shit on my own steam. I want crunch and context. I think all of these little gripes have to do with the lineage of the adventure and its writer. Joseph Lewis originally wrote indie stuff for 5E iirc. If you look at his older stuff, what stands out is a strong imagination and crisp writing. The Mushmen I think saw this particular adventure (a version of which he’d already published), and recognised the potential for it to be a proper OSR adventure with really high production values (which is what they brought to the table) and went for it. On the whole the generative, creative nature of Lewis's ideas is a major upside and works for the adventure. But sometimes it just doesn't tie back to the crunchy OSR premise and you have to do a bit of leg work yourself. Now I've gotten it off my chest I can say it's an entry price worth paying. Last thing that bugs me: the module is a bit too focused on how great the lethality aspect of the OSR is. It lists all the adventurers that died during play testing and some of their deaths sound really annoying to me (bitten by a rat, died testing ways to climb up the tower). I'm fine with, even enjoy, the danger of OSR. But I'm not someone who's hyperfixated on lethality for its own sake. Generally I want players to have a good chance of survival as long as they play it clever, and aren't super unlucky. But I realise that's not everyone's view. If you run this thing exactly as written you will probably kill a fair few level 1 characters. Have a read of it before running it and think about where you do/don't want to soften it up a tiny bit. I’d probably start the party at level 2-3 and leave the rest as it is. Unless the mudcore high lethality funnel vibe is what you are after… then just let it rip.
In summary, this is a great open world adventure, jam packed with content and interactivity served up in an elite level aesthetic package. It emphasises exploration and lethal adventure. There's a few random bits and bobs you might want to flavour differently but on the whole you can’t go wrong here. Highly recommended.