This week, I am continuing
my March Madness Theme by taking a look at Perilous Places: TheKing's Mercy. This twenty page PDF is another offering from the
Dungeon Master's Guild, written by Paul
Baalham, and featuring another take on emulating the progression
of madness (or in this case despair) in the minds of hapless
adventurers. The supplement is laid out nicely, is done in full
color, and there are good illustrations throughout, including an
image of each new monster and unique item presented, which I truly
appreciate. Let's take a closer look, and I'll let you know what I
think about this supplement and the “Despair Track” that it
introduces.
First, I want to stress
that "Perilous Places: The King's Mercy" is not a
fully-realized adventure; rather, it's a location template for a part
insane asylum part torture chamber with a set of rules to help you
track the effects of such a place on a character's psyche. To make
proper use of this supplement, you will need to provide your own
dungeon map and stock it at as you see fit (or apply the rules
presented here to an existing dungeon). I really like this concept,
as it affords the game master a lot of flexibility in terms of the
adventure's size, scope, and challenge rating. This approach also
makes it easy for game masters to add The King's Mercy to any
campaign world without reworking anything. I'll go ahead and say this
up front: there are a lot of good ideas and inspirations here if
you're thinking about including a dungeon with a torture and/or
insane asylum theme in your game, and you should go ahead and spend
the $2.00 to pick this up. Also, all of the proceeds from this
adventure go to The Alzheimer's Society, so you'll be doing yourself
a favor while supporting a worthy cause.
In addition to the Despair
Track, which we'll discuss in a minute, you also get a brief history
of the location, some plot hooks, new creatures, new items, a table
of "dungeon dressings," a random encounter table, and
random loot table. All of these elements fit together well, and
server to present a cohesive vision of The King's Mercy that is
dripping with theme. Right now though you're probably still saying:
“Sure, all of this is great – but what is the theme, and
what is the King's Mercy, and why is this a Perilous Place?”
Excellent questions!
According to the
background information provided, The King's Mercy used to be a sort
of asylum for the criminally insane who couldn't be put to death on
account of the fact that there was this evil necromancer about who
would animate their corpses and add them to his undead armies. Oh,
and there were more criminally insane folk than usual running around
because a powerful wizard thought it would be a good idea to fight
the necromancer with demons, and lots of people got infected with
some sort of demonic-madness-plague. It was a whole big thing.
Ok, so the backstory
doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that honestly doesn't matter.
Whether you use the supplied backstory or not, the rest of the
information provided in the supplement does a good job of conveying
the ambiance of The King's Mercy, describing it as an insane asylum
where the patients/prisoners were tortured and kept alive as long as
possible. It's an awful place, where awful things happened, and it's
full of lingering psychic energy and anguish. This is where the
Despair Track comes in: it provides a way to track the effects of
this lingering energy as it erodes the sanity of your adventurers.
The Despair Track is
basically a scale that goes from 1 to 5, with zero being normal and
five being bat-shit insane. Upon entering The King's Mercy each
person's Despair Track is set to one, and after each hour each
character is required to make a DC 13 Wisdom check, with failure
increasing the position on the track by one and success decreasing it
by one. The supplement states that you can never fall below one on
the Despair Track while adventuring in the dungeon. Each level of
despair that a character gains adds an additional die (d4, d6, d8,
d10, or d12) to any psychic damage suffered by the character,
charisma checks (other than intimidation) become increasingly harder,
and at later stages of despair intelligence and wisdom checks are
impaired. Conversely, intimidation checks always get easier the more
levels of despair a character has.
I like this a lot
thematically, this idea that a character's ability to reason and
perceive reality goes down while her ability to intimidate goes up as
she moves further along the Despair Track. It reminds me of Stephen
King's “The Shining,” so I think it hits the mark. However, I
worry that a DC 13 Wisdom check every hour may be too much, and I'm
not crazy about the stipulation that characters can never fall below
one on the Despair Track, since even level one is pretty severe, and
the size of the dungeon and length of the adventure are left up to
the game master. For longer adventures or larger dungeons, I might
instead call for despair checks after short rests, long rests, or
after especially traumatic events.
Aside from mechanical
effects, each stage of despair is also accompanied by a d10 table
full of horrible effects that a person might suffer from at that
stage. These range from psychological traumas, like hearing voices,
to experiencing weird itches, odd temperature sensations, and gory
hallucinations. There is a good mix of each type of effect, and I
love that there are so many of them, but the tables don't do a great
job of separating these effects by levels of intensity. For instance,
at stage five you might have a hallucination that your skin is being
peeled off by a rusty blade, or you might just hear a gruff voice
singing a lullaby. At stage one you might hear a parent whispering
their disappointment in your ear or you might feel a hand piercing
your chest and crushing your heart. Because of this wild variation I
doubt I would ever roll randomly for these effects, but rather I'd
just pick and choose what I liked from all fifty results without
regard for what stage of despair it was associated with.
Moving on from the Despair
Track, let's talk a little bit about the new monsters.
My favorite new monster is
the headless zombie. These creatures came about as the king sought to
deplete the undead armies of the necromancer by decapitating
criminals. They had underestimated the necromancer however, and soon
these new, headless zombies joined the ranks of his armies. I love
this monster because it is in turns both horrifying and comical,
depending on how you play it. These zombies have a preternatural
ability to detect the living, represented by a passive perception
score of 7, but they are not very good at hitting their targets once
they locate them. If I used nothing else from this supplement I would
still use these monsters somehow, somewhere.
The next monster is
“Animated Ashes.” After the headless zombie debacle, the king
decreed that the dead would henceforth be cremated. Surely this would
thin the ranks of the necromancer's armies, right? Wrong! Animated
Ashes are formed from the ashes of several cremated creatures,
forming what the book describes as “a weird cross between a powdery
golem and a zombie.” Weird indeed! I like this creature less than
the headless zombie, but it still works thematically and it has some
interesting abilities, like being able to slip through most cracks
and crevices, that could make designing encounters fun.
The final new monster
provided is the Despair Hunter, and it's kind of a mixed bag for me.
It looks like a sort of slug with a mouthful of tentacles, and it is
attracted to suffering, gaining a bonus to hit creatures depending on
how far along they are on the Despair Track. Interestingly, once it
has a victim grappled, it begins to feed off of its victim's despair,
actually lowering his or her level on the despair track with each
successful attack. I think this is a clever bit of design that could
lead to some interesting situations where a character might actually
want this thing to lick his brain for awhile, to wipe out some
despair levels. However, I think an opportunity was missed to give
this creature an attack that deals psychic damage and thus tie it to
the despair track that way, rather than giving the creature “to
hit” bonuses that increase as the target progresses on the Despair
Track.
I don't want to spend much
time on the unique items, the dungeon dressing table, or the dungeon
loot table, but I will say that each of these elements compliments
the Despair Track well and, as I said before, everything fits
together cohesively and thematically.
I've already said as much,
but I'll summarize it again here: if you're willing to put in the
work to make your own adventure site and stock your own dungeon,
Perilous Places: The King's Mercy is a great way to drape a
compelling theme over that location, leaving you with more time to
worry about drawing maps and building encounters. There are a lot of
little details here that help spark the imagination, and it's worth
mining this supplement for ideas even if you decide not use anything
presented here whole-cloth. In fact, I wasn't even considering an
insane asylum adventure location before reading this, but I have to
admit I am now!
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