Graves Left Wanting (Mörk Borg)
Last night we played Graves Left Wanting by Karl Druid from the Mörk Borg supplement Heretic. Also available here for free. It is a short Graveyard crawl in the bleak region of Graven-Tosk which we used to fill a gap in our current ongoing Daggerheart game. Layout and organization is pretty straightforward and table usable, albeit not as well done as Rotblack Sludge in the rulebook. Particularly because information density per page is much lower, necessitating a lot of page flipping. This is only a minor quibble though.
We used premade characters from the excellent scvmbirther and jumped right in using Owlbear Rodeo, my preferred VTT. A simple trick I like for one-shots of this kind is to simply embed the one page rules summary in the VTT next to the map. This makes for an easy and quick rules reference for everyone.
The writing is dense and inspiring and full of great ideas. I started them off buried alive and things went downhill for them from there: moments like finding your own beating heart in a box, turning your bones into iron or the grotesque endless bile spewing from a sarcophagus in the Vomatorium stood out and had the players laughing out loud. Especially blowing the recovered horn from said bile provided a fun moment, when the key instigator thought he had avoided all dangers within the Vomatorium and ended up puking his guts out. They bested the Übertaker (great name) and “beat” the adventure, though are none the wiser of how to leave Graven-Tosk and requested a follow up session to continue their escapades. I think there is no higher praise from players than this: requesting a follow up to a designated one-shot. Mörk Borg thus delivered once again and solidified my love for simple rulesets that allow for player creativity and improvisation. The only thing I noticed was that there was no explicit guidance on how to handle light/torches, but I just tracked rough dungeon turns and things worked out just fine. Loved the adventure content wise, but it felt a bit limiting in the the amount of choices the players had available at times of where to go next. Overall a great time. 8/10