Night's Dark Terror 5: The Wilderness Beckons

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

The siege of Sukiskyn is over. The party has won - else there's no point reading this. Some of the weary all-night defenders sleep, others make plans. The honored dead to be buried in the little cemetery in the woods. The scores of dead goblins are to be burned on a pyre in the meadow, like they do in Rohan. The goblins have been carrying coins (p. 10) which Pyotr will likely divide with the heroes. He would give it all away in gratitude, but lean times loom ahead for his family, now that the hope of great profit contained in that herd of white horses has been rustled away.

So, the next urgent task is to get the horses back. That in turn means overland travel. This kind of play can be handled three ways: as paths between pre-specified encounters, the open-air dungeon approach that we've seen in the adventure so far; or, as free travel between pre-specified encounters, the "hexcrawl" way; or finally, as procedurally generated content, random encounters all the way. For now, the horse quest takes on the first, pathed kind of play. Random encounters don't play a part in the recovery of the herd, if we follow the adventure as written.

Public domain licensed image from pxhere.com

Much is made here in B10 of the party finally acquiring horses from the Sukiskyn stable, and using them to truck around the wilderness. You'll recall that it's an important enough point that the DM is encouraged to deny the party horses before they reach the homestead. But this is where Mentzer-edition B/X D&D and 5th edition diverge. In Mentzer's Expert rules a riding horse is a veritable Harley-Davidson that can carry its rider 48 miles a day, twice the movement rate of an unarmored footman and almost three times that of a character weighed down by metal armor. 

But the 5th edition rules are skeptical of this advantage - the only reason in 5th edition why horses might give a travel benefit, other than acting as visible status symbols and keeping the mud off your boots, is if you gallop them for double-fast speed an hour each day and then rest them = a paltry 18% bonus per day of normal travel.

These rulesets give rise to huge differences in the daily travel rate, with B/X riders making 12 more miles a day then 5e riders over trails and clear terrain, and going over twice as fast through forest and hills. The truth about mounted travel, according to this writer's site, is debatable but probably somewhere in the middle (foot travel +50%, with no bonus in very heavy swamp, mountain, or forest. For the equipment investment in a mount to give benefits, and for B10's horse obsession to make sense, I recommend that 5th edition DMs house-rule a little.

 (An oft-neglected factor in mounted movement seems to be the availability of good grass or fodder in town for the horse to eat. If fodder is poor, the horse needs to spend more time per day grazing and will not be in good condition to trot or canter. Taking horse rations on the journey is not easy; a stabled horse eats 15-20 pounds of grain and hay daily. But if towns and plains allow the best feeding opportunities, that roughly works out to "roads and grassy plains good, other terrain bad" much like the present system.)

In any case, the hoofprints of forty horses are not easily missed, and they lead to the east. I recommend that the eldest son of the family, Taras, come along with the party as the module suggests. There's a part for him to play in the flawed. but fixable, action that follows.

Next: Tragedy and treachery in retrieving the herd.