A city is having supply problems, and asks the party to find out why deliveries from the village of Darbin have failed to arrive for a couple of months - Darbin hitherto having been the city's main source of produce. The citizens are getting hungry and the price of food is soaring. With the Player Introduction on the back cover of the adventure, a more detailed DM Introduction explains what the problem is... but it will be up to the party to discover a way to deal with it.

The adventure text begins with the characters arriving in the village of Darbin. This makes it easy for you to drop the adventure in to an existing campaign, using a suitable city and either building up to the adventure with the growing dearth of food in the city, or just reading the Player Introduction to them if you are eager to get on with the scenario. There's plenty of potential to turn this into a horror story, as the villagers do not seem to be... quite themselves. There is a map of the village, with associated notes on what is to be found there, and one of Kurishan's Garden itself... Kurishan being a botanically-inclined wizard who retired to the village.

This adventure focusses on rather creepy investigation and combat - most everyone the party meets will engage in combat at first sight, although there may be some opportunities to interact in other ways. A new plant monster and a variant magic item are introduced during the course of the adventure, and are written up in full at the end. The adventure will end when the party kills off the main antagonist (or dies trying), there are no notes for follow-up adventures although to be fair apart from helping the villagers rebuild I cannot think of anything much! It's quite unusual and played right could be quite spooky, an interesting evening's entertainment to drop in to your campaign at an appropriate moment.

Return to Kurishan's Garden page.

Reviewed: 16 April 2017