B9 was the first DSA module published in 1985. This is a year into the publishing history of the game. The Ausbau rules extension was around the corner, and so was the A-series of more advanced adventures. As that it actually is trying some groundbreaking things that are preparing the way for more involved roleplaying scenarios.
For one it tries to be Death on the Nile, but as a roleplaying scenario. With this we have the very first detective adventure for DSA. We also have the very first river journey for the game, if not for TTRPGs in general. Warhammer’s Death on the Reik came out in 1987, so this one might be an actual first. I am not aware of any Dungeons and Dragons scenarios with dedicated plotlines during river travel until Ravenloft comes along.
Death on the Reik might be the better scenario though. I didn’t say Strom des Verderbens was actually that good.
It does actively try to be a detective scenario, and introduces a new formatting tag for the ever more bewildering DSA format jungle: key information. (as bolded text)
This might be the only official scenario that ever used it though. It makes the already overloaded format key of DSA adventures even busier.
Unfortunately, despite big promises it fails in the detecting part of being a detective story. Instead it tries to offer the players the illusion of being in one: There is no real chance to capture the culprit(s) until they frame the party for the murders about two thirds through.
It does try new things with PC-NPC interactions though, and when looking at the previous publications that is quite significant: I think the highest amount of named NPCs to play might have been in B6 with the whole of 2 named NPCs (which also lead to a NPC/NPC battle they could not influence). In this scenario we have 12 named NPCs in a tight space, as well as multiple other unnamed ones, all of which are stuck together on a boat for multiple days. Of course it gets a bit easier as the NPCs start dropping like flies, and nobody wants to talk to the heroes anyway until the shit already hit the fan. Which is good because barely anyone gets worked out past a portrait in the props section.
Plot brief: the characters are in Ferdok (a city you might know from the Drakensang computer game) and get caught gambling.
They have to be gambling because they need to be caught doing that by the authorities who just have enacted a new law that forbids gambling. They need to be caught so they get into a fight with the guards who just entered in least secret undercover action ever. And they need to get into a fight to be saved by a river captain who was not gambling, just happened to be hanging out in the place where his lover leads her soldiers for a gambling raid, and convinces her to let him hire them as guards for his river ship.
Got all that?
May I point out that this is basically a list of potential failure points? Who wrote this?
Ah, Ulrich Kiesow. Yup. We are on a railroad again. Well, technically a river boat. Anyway.
I guess it wouldn’t be much of an issue for most groups. Getting into gambling (on toad fights) sounds just like something most players would have gotten into. Not all though.
So the captain of the guard leaves the heroes to her paramour river captain (and then gets murdered by morning). The river captain has important passengers: the family of a rich and deceased merchant from Havena is trying to get to the harbor city to inherit the sizeable fortune the old man left. And our characters are supposed to be the guards for that.
Oh. Well. Did we expect a meaningful choice from a Kiesow scenario?
So we go down the “Great River”. The name is of course an established part of the setting by now, but it still seems kind of odd. We meet river pirates, race a slave galley (it’s interesting how slavery in the Middenrealm still was part of the background back then, we are gonna get into that with adventure A3), and have to face goblin attacks at night.
The whole thing is of course hampered by us not actually being able to talk to the victims. And, well, being guards instead of detectives. you’re supposed to do guard things.
Luckily the murderers make some really basic mistakes that allow the characters to still make at least some headway. Like losing a family tree with every victim struck out. That is until they ice cold frame them for a murder and have them jailed.
Luckily after a successful jailbreak the authorities notice that we can’t be responsible (another victim) and so we are supposed to track down the culprits.
That is literally, the culprits have kidnapped the last few remainig members of the family and thrown them to the ogres. And you can hope that you read the clues you are presented right, because if you didn’t they end up in the stomachs of three hungry ogres and the culprits are untouchable because very rich.
Well, if you did read the clues right you get, what else, a dungeon.
Seems we couldn’t manage to finish even a detective scenario without one. This one is in a small wilderness area where we meet a dwarven druid for the first time (they would later become a defining part of DSA dwarves), and is quite stocked for what it effectively just a small cave.
Yes, it has a Krakenmolch again. Because every proper DSA adventure needs a Krakenmolch in one way or another.
So. This is one of these problematic adventures. If it works as the author intended you get a really nice and atmospheric story. If it doesn’t, then you don’t.
It’s a railroad though, and one with a lot of failure points: What if they don’t gamble? What if they just leave town at night? What if they don’t manage a jailbreak? What if they don’t turn themselves in after the jailbreak (seriously, what did Kiesow expect here? Why in the gods’ names would they turn themselves in immediately)
What if they don’t pick up on the quite obvious clues in the tracks in the forest and follow the wrong trail?
Now a lot of these failure points are of course very specific. In 90% of cases characters will behave in the right way to follow along the railroad. But once they don’t, what do you do then?
As much as Kiesow is heralded as one of the most important people in German ttrpg history, he also is infamous for his fondness of railroads. And I think this one and the previous one (B6 unter dem Nordlicht) are some of the main culprits for that view. No, I don’t want to say that his other stuff is so much better (although A1 and B13 are much better about player choice), but for some reason B9 and the earlier B6 were both republished under the DSA Klassiker sub-line, so these examples of bad design were some of the most widespread and replayed over the next 20 or so years, and this also was what people came to expect with roleplaying scenarios in general.
Notes
- As mentioned this was republished under the DSA Klassiker line as A53. This was also the version I have. One improvement: the cover
- No seriously, what are those guys on the B9 cover supposed to be? Are they orcs? Lizardmen? Something else? They don’t show up in the scenario, there the bandits are all human.
- For some reason this adventure was one of the most revisited for the next few years, if only in the Aventurischer Bote, the newsletter for DSA. The canon ending is that the last victim survives and inherits the business (showing up as a patron in later scenarios) while the culprits were exiled to the islands of the Cyclopes (didn’t they just murder most of their family? Exile? And to an area under jurisdiction of a different polity?) from whence they fled and then turned pirate. Uhm. Yeah. But as this scenario was one of the few where named NPCs survived we also got to hear what they were doing afterwards. Especially as the last survivor also was used as a patron in multiple later scenarios.
- One thing lots of people notice is the race against a slave galley on the river, as slavery has long been established as outlawed in that particular area (the Middenrealm), so this grates on a lot of peoples’ sensibilities. Only… that was not the case at that point. The Ausbau Set that would have come out around that time also highlights the fight against slavery as something Princess Emer and her father Cuino are deeply engaged in. And we later would see that again in adventure A3. But this whole plot thread was somehow forgotten in later years, and slavery was established as much more limited in scope than in these early publications. I think the Middenrealm was envisioned as much darker and more decadent than what it became later.
- By the way all the scenarios so far, and up to the Orkland trilogy as while later had secondary titles as a sort of pseudo-intellectual affectation in the style of 19th ct. adventure novels. The only one notable so far was B1’s secondary title “The Tavern of Terror”. This one has “Todesfahrt nach Havena” and I really like the ring it has in English: “Death Ride to Havena”.
- This module was also published in French, no Dutch or Italian versions it seems.
Running Tally (by quality, from best to worst):