Night's Dark Terror 1: Meeting Stephan in Kelven

This is part of a series of posts with a scene-by-scene critique, appreciation, and fan improvement of the 1986 TSR module B10, Night's Dark Terror.

Our adventure begins in the town (or is it city?) of Kelven (or is it Kelvin?) Although scholars of the Known World setting may quibble on its details, B10 as a module is self-contained, with the only necessary point of connection to other modules and world resources being the shadowy organization known as the Iron Ring. So, it's portable to other generic D&D universes with little fuss, as long as you make room on the map for its rivers, moors, and mountains.

The start, likewise, is no-nonsense: you meet A Guy in An Inn with A Job for you. Some reviewers have called out this opening as a cliche, but D&D runs on (to use kinder terms) tropes and conventions. Indeed, how an adventure begins is not as important as how it plays out. But if we're going to separate cliches from convention, what makes stock elements bad is the mindless reliance on them without regard for the reasons they are there. What makes a D&D "standard" acceptable, be it a tavern scene, a secret door, a pit trap, or a sacrificial rite, boils down to whether it makes sense in its own terms. To focus on the element that computer games call the "quest-giver," you need to answer two questions:

1. Why can't this person handle the mission themselves (or with existing associates)?
2. Why does this person trust this group of strangers?

So, meet the quest-giver.

 

Stephan Sukiskyn, a tall red-haired man nearing forty, an experienced warrior. Seems he needs to hire some swords to help him escort a herd of white horses that his family has captured, down one river leading to Kelven up another, ending up in the elven town of Callari. There, the elves who prize white horses as symbols of their tribe will pay top dollar for them -- enough for the guards to be offered a decent-sized flat-rate pay for the job which can be bargained up a bit. There are some advantages, though, which will become clear later on, to phrasing the reward as a percentage of the proceeds - say one in ten, bargainable up to one in seven.

Back to our questions 1 and 2. The module gives no answers, so we must supply them, through things that can emerge in conversation with Stephan.

1. The fighting personnel of the Sukiskyn homestead are about as powerful together as the party - 15 character levels, at least. So they could escort the herd if they wished. However, Stephan's brother Pyotr doesn't feel comfortable leaving the ranch nearly unguarded. The red-clothed goblins who live in the forest to the south, who usually are busy fighting other, unknown goblin tribes, have been spotted more and more in small scouting parties. Disturbingly, a goblin clad in wolfskin and riding a great wolf has also been seen, a kind not familiar to the Sukiskyns. A dose of foreshadowing for what's to come!

2. Stephan is a seasoned fighter and the clan's outside trader and diplomat. He won't give his trust blindly, but some kinds of people he has learned are right for this mission. If they are of a holy order (the family is pious, numbering two clerics among them) or an elf (for the mission ultimately is with elves) he will deal directly with them and ask them to vouch for the others. Otherwise, he "just knows" on the back of experience in dealings that the party - maybe in particular the one who has shown the most true morality in play up to this point - are to be trusted. If you have a bunch of players who enjoy being civilian-murdering shitheels, don't run them through B10. The whole front-end of the adventure assumes they are good people who want to do the right thing.

There is one more mistake in the Kelven setup. Stephan tells the party to wait a week in Kelven until the boatman Kalanos comes to ferry them upriver - and at the same time, that he will meet them in Sukiskyn in a week! Fixing this to "nine days" would be simplest. But in the adventure, hanging around in Kelven for a week accomplishes very little. The module does not detail the town, and any necessary shopping can be done in a day. There is also the question of how Stephan is traveling. If he is going on horseback, why can't the PCs also buy horses and ride with him? If by riverboat, is there really no room for 4-6 other people?

It's eventually important to the plot that Stephan does not go with the party to his homestead. Sure, realism can be tweaked to support the plot points. Kelven can be out of horses at the moment, or the boatman won't allow horses, as the module suggests; or Stephan's river boat ride can be full. But also consider (as I did in play) having Stephan ride on Kalanos' boat with the party, dropping them off at Misha's Ferry on the way. This is especially useful if you feel the first encounter might be too much for the player characters to handle. Also, including Stephan gives another reason for the villains to attack. In any event, I would shorten the waiting time to a day, so Stephan tells the party he will ride on the next morning, and the morning after that (which can still be the early spring date of 7th Thaumont - but more on that next post) Kalanos sets off from the river docks, also at dawn.