Dungeon Magazine #2: Caermor

The third adventure in issue 2 of Dungeon Magazine is titled “Caermor”, and is written for levels 2-4. The brief description in the contents page tells us that “a highland town faces a greater danger than can be imagined – and no one wants your help against it”. This is an interesting pitch that feels like an inversion of the normal trope of the PCs being asked to intervene in something, but I’m immediately cautious that this is going to be a weird stereotype of Scottish people written by an American who identifies as Scottish. Let’s hope that that’s not the case.

The author, Nigel Findley, had a pretty amazing career before passing away tragically early in the mid-90s. His biography is very impressive, including a lot of work for TSR and books for Shadowrun, GURPS, Earthdawn, and a ton of other work. This is a very aspirational career. It also looks like he’d published a few articles in Dragon Magazine prior to selling this adventure to Dungeon. So despite my reservations about the potential setting – which are slightly assuaged by the fact that he was born in Venezuela and lived all over the world before settling in Canada – I have high hopes for this module.

Caermor itself is a tiny village on the edge of civilisation, home to barely 100 people who spend their time growing grain and raising a local breed of small, tough sheep. We’re told that “the terrain is very similar to the highlands of Scotland: rough and rocky, with stunted growths of heather and scrub, cold and whipped by incessant sea winds”. The people who live there are “small, stocky, dour farming folk” who “tend towards strong drink” and become “rather belligerent when drunk”. My fears of Scottish stereotypes are immediately confirmed, but unless it becomes particularly egregious in the rest of the adventure I’m going to put it aside and try not to labour the point.

The people here are taciturn and insular, and trust outsiders so little that even though “hell itself seems to have turned its attention upon them” they have told nobody about their problems. Word has spread, of course, because word always spreads, but even though several adventurers have come to town to try to help – or to make a name for themselves – none have returned to the city from whence they came. And, we’re told, the locals “have looked upon these would-be saviors as unwelcome visitors at best – invaders at worst”.

So, what’s going on in Caermor that keeps drawing adventurers here and making hem disappear? The answer is good old-fashioned devil worship. A local coven has summoned a devil and for the past seven weeks it’s been terrorizing the town. The coven believe they’ve summoned the devil for their own purposes, but in fact they are pawns in a larger plot that will eventually threaten the entire country.

We’re given a run-down of the weird things that have been happening in the village over the past couple of months, starting with the slaughter of sheep at night and ending up with the disappearance of a local woman. Before her disappearance she had been seeing a lot of a local man who the people see as a vagrant (because he’s an unemployed artist), and upon searching his house they found blood on his robes. As a result it’s generally agreed that he has been responsible for the problems facing the village, because that’s easier than accepting there’s a literal devil in town.

Despite being given all of this information, we’re told explicitly that although everyone in Caermor knows all of this, “getting it out of them is easier said that done”. It’s interesting to compare this to the second adventure in this issue, which is similarly an investigative module filled with NPCs who want to keep their secrets and haven’t told any outsiders about the problems they’re facing. Neither really offers any guidance for how the PCs can go about extracting this information, but Caermor does provide a lot of things that I wish In The Dwarven King’s Court had also contained; namely, encounter tables to force the players into contact with NPCs, and a number of “special events” that occur after the party arrives in Caermor.

This is a big difference between the two modules, and the result is that I’m much more able to envision how Caermor might play out at the table. In The Dwarven King’s Court asks the GM to do a lot of work to make the adventure actually playable, whereas Caermor gives us almost everything we need. What it’s missing, though, is a rumour table to give players some direction in their enquiries. Between In The Dwarven King’s Court and Caermor we probably have everything we need to run a good investigative adventure, and it’s a little frustrating that neither of the adventures is entirely complete in that regard. Caermor definitely comes closest, though – the NPCs have things to do, and are actively trying to put the PCs off the track and to sabotage their investigations if they get too close. They feel much more alive and fully-realised than the NPCs in In The Dwarven King’s Court.

The other thing Caermor has going for it is that it feels like a place with history in a way that the castle in the previous adventure didn’t. Locations like the standing stones have encounters that don’t relate to the events of the adventure at all, simply existing to give the village some depth. Much like Into The Fire this feels like the sort of location you could put into a game and return to again and again. Rather than being An Adventure, it’s a real place with a specific problem happening right now that can continue to persist in your world once the players have solved the immediate problem.

There’s nothing in terms of encounters or details that really jumps out to me here as something I want to highlight or steal. This is, simply, just a solid module that I think would be a lot of fun to run. If you’re interested in “village with a problem”-style adventures, or adventures that involve investigating a mystery rather than dungeon crawling, this would be a good one to look at, And especially it would be good to look at it side by side with In The Dwarven King’s Court to see where they diverge in their approaches, and how you can combine the tools both adventures give you in order to create something better than either of them.