One of remarkable bits of exposition this adventure starts with is that a few guards were chasing some thieves over half the continent, from Notmark to H’Rabaal, just to get discouraged by a few lizardmen and turn back.
According to the map that’s easily 2500km/1500 real world miles.
Some determined guards.
Well, according to lore the Baron of Notmark is a piece of work, so I get it.
As far as I know the familiar map of Aventuria only came out after those few first adventures were written, so I can’t blame the author for that.
On the other hand I do blame the author… Hans Joachim Alpers by the way. writing here as Claus Lenthe… for rhyming Kelche (goblets) with Elche (elks) which feels like someone should be punished for.
It’s at least memorable.
Unlike his fellow DSA authors Fuchs and Kiesow Alpers was not that fond of the game or the hobby as such. And while his contributions have echoed through DSA-lore he never really seems to have warmed up to the setting. His adventures introduced science fiction elements that later had to be retconned, and even his later novels somehow always managed to take place in locations only peripherally connected with the established world. He also… was not actually that good an author to begin with. I alway found it a chore to get through his fiction.
Anyway… Schiff der Verlorenen Seelen (Ship of Losts Souls) is the first part of the very first campaign for DSA, one that concluded with the very next adventure Die Sieben Magischen Kelche (The seven magic goblets).
I somehow always had disregarded the opening narration as just fluff text on previous readthroughs. It’s not: After nearly 4 A4 sized pages that introduce characters we never hear about anymore (well ok, they are the pregenerated characters in the back of the book), an NPC that actually is important (the wizard Rakorium). the plot for the next module (there used to be a magic blade, that blade was made into 7 goblets, the bad guys just stole the second to last, now we are transporting the last one there for… reasons) and various characters, we are introduced to the actual plot of this module: big bad sorcerer King Mordor (sic!) tries to bring a crystal containing doomed souls somewhere ashore in Aventuria to corrupt the land. And this ship of lost souls is the means to that.
Except right now it’s floating somewhere in the middle of the ocean and nobody even seems to notice a few stray adventurers boarding and looting it.
Oh, by the way, speaking about adventurers: the focus character of the fluff has been shanghaied into the whole situation. He just wakes up after too much drink and talking to a pressgang and now is part of this venture to the lizard infested ruins of H’Rabaal.
Talk about railroading characters. Curiously enough the text makes it clear nobody is going to force any participation if he’s really against it. After all the leaders of the expedition are supposed to be good guys, you can’t just force a guy to participate. Even if you carried him off to the other side of the continent.
So… after that overly long introduction we start directly on board of the black ship. The first encounter is a sea serpent that just strolled on board to relax. Hmm.
The next is two undead pirates who just stand around until the sun goes down.
Which brings me to another interesting thing about this scenario: the crew of the ship is for a large part made out of undead pirates. Not zombies or skeletons, but actual self-interested pirates like out of Pirates of the Carribbean, except they can only move about during night, but when they do they… seem to be doing anything but performing their mission. A later encounter with a group of them has them partaking in heavy drinking. Drinking what? That’s not specified. But they also have normal foodstuff on board, so it seems they are undead and yet still need butter.
Considering this is a ship, the whole location sometimes seems annoyingly static. Wald ohne Wiederkehr had some implication that stuff was happening despite being set in a ruin, this one is set on a ship and yet everyone seems to stay in place until the characters come by. There’s an encounter with a Klabautermann (a water kobold, in the way of magical fairy tale kobolds not little lizardmen). And it’s specifically pointed out that after stealing the party’s treasure he can be re-encountered in the same area after a set number of rounds.
There also is a captured human who gives out magic potions but otherwise just likes to lay about drinking in only a loincloth. This is something that didn’t need an illustration, and yet here we are.
He also is mentioned specifically as an “Aventurian” in contrast to the crew of undead which, conversely, are implied to come from a different place.
Speaking about the illustrations: they range from kinda ugly, to quite nice old school art. They again have been done by Bryan Talbot, and I wonder how they came about because they clearly show stuff from the scenario, and yet they show up in weird places in the text. Both the encounters for the fishlike Zilits and the frog-like Krakonians have their illustrations switched.
Come to think of it, this already was an issue in the previous scenarios. Wirtshaus zum schwarzen Keiler also had some of the illustrations in weird places. I guess someone really didn’t care on the last leg to publication.
I… do not like this adventure. It’s not very good. I think it is clear that Hand Joachim Alpers did not really care about how roleplaying games are supposed to work, and just tried to tell his own story. A story he only told with disdain in the first place, considering he called the evil sorcerer Mordor, as if to say: who cares, in fantasy they are all called Mordor aren’t they?
I would not want to play this. I guess it could be saved with extensive rewrites, but then what’s the point?
Notes:
- One weird thing I notice a lot with both this and the other part of the campaign is that Alpers seems to have had ideas about how this world was supposed to work that do not fit with later descriptions of Aventuria and Dere. There is a Shadow Realm mentioned that seems to be implied to be some dark Mordor-like location full of dark and evil creatures. This is where the pirates are supposed to come from. The closest we got to that in DSA only came about in the 90s with the establishment of the Dark Lands. Something that harkened back to this campaign a lot and reframed a lot of things to work with the then-current view of the world. But the “Schattenreich” itself is mentioned a lot, but disappears after the next module.
- The plans of the ship dungeon do not look very ship-like. This is brought up in text: the ship is implied to not have been built, but grown instead, with all the rooms hewn into the living wood afterwards. This also was one of the things which were intended to come back during the Borbarad metaplot campaign in the 90s. Unfortunately some editorial miscommunication caused the Demon Arks in that campaign to have legs for land assaults, which leaves the original Ship of Lost Souls as the only example of it’s kind. (although if I was mad enough to play it I would just make it into a demon ark as well, or just establish it as a younger version, or something)
- The demons we are introduced to on the ship are clearly the inspiration of the later Heshtoth demons from DSA lore (dark robes with nothing but glowing eyes visible under it). They do not behave like them though: one of them just prepared himself a nice cup of camel dung tea that serves as a very low-key trap to curious adventurers. Later depictions of demons in DSA would present them as much more inimical beings with no worldly desires except their inherent demonic traits.
- Unlike the previous modules this particular one does not seem to have been published in Italian.
