the single worst piece of RPG adventure text I’ve ever read (a summary of my problem with Wild Beyond the Witchlight)
Note from the future: This article sucks and I don’t endorse the advice section any more. I still agree with the complaints more or less though
Creatures, look at this shit:
Bad RPG Text
(For those of you in my witchlight game, I got permission before I started reading the adventure)
Now, I’m a lil old school, a lil grognardish. I like to track arrows and light sources and I dont like darkvision. I’m hyperbolically critical of 5th edition and all it’s adventures. But this is seriously the worst piece of adventure text I’ve ever read.
This is on page 106 of The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. My boy dylan is running this game for us, and it’s in a bit of turmoil at the moment. Me, being the GM of the prior game (which actually went quite shit in the end, might turn into another gloopy), decided in my infinite grace and wisdom to skim the chapter we’re up to and offer some guidance, however little use it may have.
Sidenote: Yes, I recognize that believing oneself to be an expert player and “just reading the adventure to help out” is pretty back seat gaming, and very childish, but I am not immune to ego, and I’ll take any opportunity to analyse the structure of the adventure I’m playing through.
Quick Structural Recap, for those unfamiliar with the module:
- The party is tasked by the owners of The Witchlight Carnival to enter the fey realm of Prismeer and find three hags, with the overall goal of getting them to stop sending their minions into the carnival to steal things.
- The players are motivated to do this out of the goodness of their hearts (hah!) and the fact that these hags have things that these players have lost. My character, for instance, has lost three inches of their height.
- Each hag owns one domain of Prismeer - the realms Hither, Thither and Yon. (Cool names, very thematic)
- The party starts in Hither, and journeys to various locales until finding and meeting with the ruling hag, retrieving some of their items and learning how to get to Thither.
- The party then progresses to Thither, and this is where our group is up to.
If there’s one major problem I see with witchlight as it stands now, it’s that 5th edition just cannot wrap its fucking head around the exploration pillar.
When we first arrived in Hither, and were given a description of the vast fey wilderness with some landmarks in the distance, my little old school soul starting glowing. I immediately turned to a page in my notebook and drew a very crappy and, it turned out, upside down map of the landmarks. We concocted a plan to journey to a tower we could see, so we could get a lay of the land. This was going to be fucking awesome. Wilderness exploration in the feywild! What a cool fucking idea! Maybe 5th edition did something right!
Then my boy dylan handed us the map that the adventure provides:
Map of Hither
Boom, my wonderlust, instantly destroyed. What is the point of dumping us in the mysterious forest if you give us a map of exactly what is in the bound of the mysterious forest!? Now, I must confess, the map my boy dylan actually gave us was the named version of this map, the DMs map as presented in the actual adventure text. Here’s the thing, the only difference between the two was the names under each location. Of which, it should be mentioned, there are 4.
Now, four detailed locations is enough to run a good exploration game, especially in a small bounded location like Hither. Supplement that with some points of interest, landmarks, and you’ve got yourself a really cool little sandbox. Wild beyond the witchlight actually comes with a neat set of random encounters that are more than just monsters - they creatures have real motivations.
Sidenote: Isn’t it interesting how the adventure touts itself as being completely winnable without combat, but what that really meant was giving NPCs actual motivations and purpose in the world beyond being stat blocks. Who knew, 5e, who knew!?
However, the presence of the map essentially renders these encounters useless. Because now the players know exactly where the interesting things are, and exactly how to get there. Random encounters now become distractions in the way of what the players want to do, rather than content itself taken at face value. We’re not longer exploring the wilderness, we’re travelling through it. The distinction between travelling and exploring I believe is lost on most modern players, but it really is an important one.
Now, okay, we’ll get rid of the map. The adventure is already 80% better. However, 5th edition does not come packaged with a good way of distributing the random encounters it’s got. It’s missing any sort of travel procedure. Now it doesn’t need to be in depth. Hell, we’re not even using hexes. We’ve got at least the distance the party can travel on one day. (Does time work the same in the feywild? The adventure doesnt say, so we’ll assume it’s the same as the real world, Mundane, but workable.) The piece it’s missing is how often should we check for random encounters.
The random encounters play an important role in exploration as things the players can actually find. Too frequent and they become annoying, but too sparse and they’re basically not there. Now, the best approach in my opinion would be to take the random encounters and make them not so random, just dot them around the wilderness and let the players stumble across them, but a wilderness exploration procedure is the missing piece that turns witchlight from a boring 5th edition style mess into a true feywild exploration.
Okay, I got a little distracted, I love to bitch :)
Why is this the worst piece of RPG adventure text I’ve ever read?
Bad RPG Text
Well, mostly because I dont read many adventures. Don’t get me wrong, this is horrible advice, but far from the worst. The problem is that witchlight could so easily be a good exploration game and the adventure goes out of its way to stop it from being one. Even if you dont give the players a map, teleporting locations in front of them misses the point of exploration so hard. The core of exploration is player agency, piecing together information and discovery. It is bafflingly stupid to suggest putting the locations in the players path in the order you want them in. I am baffled by it. I cannot believe it’s included in an official product for the worlds biggest TTRPG. This is kid stuff, come on.
Alright, honesty time. Creatures, I have to come clean. The adventure doesn’t actually tell you put the map in front of the players. This makes my overall point weaker, but in the interest of honesty I should at least disclose what the adventure actually says:
Navigating Hither
This doesn’t excuse the horrible advice from before, and there’s something to be said for the adventure including a “players map” that actively harms the experience of the players, but the adventure doesn’t actually state to give the players the map. grumble grumble
Now for once, I’m not just bitching. I have some ideas on how to fix this mess, and it’s really not that hard:
- DONT give the players a map showing everything in the region
- Place landmarks around the map, and have NPCs refer to these landmarks as directions. Describe them to players when they get close.
- Take the random encounters and put them around the region, rather than being random. Let players encounter them as they get close. Hell, put them right under some of the landmarks you placed!
There’s a lot more that goes into fulfilling exploration play than just this (rations, robust distance tracking, rumors) but hey, it’s 5th edition, your players probably don’t want to do that crap anyway.
It’s worth noting that this whinge-fest of a “review” doesn’t actually cover any of the major locations. Indeed, the whingy reviewer doesn’t actually know how those locations are written. Ideally, you’d get tips and rumors that help further your exploration. Witchlight really likes to give information off the bat. “Oh, you’re new in town? Here’s your objective and the exact directions to it.” To really make the best of the exploration in the module, you’d want to do a pass over of the locations and make sure that at least a little is left for the players to discover naturally on their own. Hints, rumors, imperfect information. Not directions.
Witchlight actually has really good bones. The whimsical fairy tale forest adventure is fucking perfect for 5th edition. It’s so close to being really compelling that maybe I’ll rip off the alexandrian and do a witchlight remix at some point. It would take so little work that a remix that fixes the glaring problems might be copyright infringement.
Done reading this terrible article? Want to see it dismantled? Check out this article from the future