Friday Fantasy: EM1 – Eastern Spark

EM1 – Eastern Spark is a classic fantasy roleplaying scenario, set on the edge of an empire where the frontier promises work, adventure, and danger. The region is ‘The March’, a province of Mertannic Empire far from the capital. It is beset by brigands, pirates, dangerous creatures of all types, a bear beset by lightning, and more. It is specifically written for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition and its retroclones, such as OSRIC, but there is also a version available for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. It is published by Tarichan Games and designed to be played by five Player Characters of First Level. To get the best out of the scenario, at least one Player Character should be a Druid or have the capacity to speak to animals. The scenario offers some eight mini-adventures or extended encounters, across sixteen different locations, which all together should offer roughly ten to twelve sessions’ worth of play.

EM1 – Eastern Spark begins with the Player Characters on the road to the village of Hadd, the main settlement in the region. As they make way past a horse ranch, they see a trio of men dismantling the fence, enter the ranch, and approach the horses, who shy away. Clearly an act of horse theft is about to be carried out. It is not an unreasonable start to the scenario, as it drops the Player Characters straight into the action. However, there is no payoff to the encounter. There is no discussion of what happens next or how the sisters who run the farm react. It would be the perfect situation to get the Player Characters invested in the region, if only a little at this stage, and then an opportunity for the Dungeon Master to impart some information via the sisters. This lack of information compounds the lack of reasons why the Player Characters might want to travel to ‘The March’. There are no hooks to pull them towards the village of Hadd, no rumours to entice them to visit. Nor does it help that instead of going on to Hadd, the Player Characters could wander off to the nearby fishing hamlet of Fry, where the brawny inhabitants might hire the Player Characters to help them fish because they no longer have the manpower to do as much as they did, or they might attempt to drown the Player Characters because it turns out that the fisherfolk of Fry are evil cultists. What cult they belong to and what its aims are, is not explained, and certainly, there is no suggestion that the sisters at the horse ranch might hint that the people of Fry are a strange lot…

Things do pick up once the Player Characters reach Hadd. There are more NPCs to interact with and there are rumours that the Player Characters can pick up. There is a visiting herald who will spread the news and there are potential employers to be found. Jobs available include finding work as fishermen in the nearby hamlet of Fry, that an agent of the Guilds’ Bank wants someone to visit a nearby hidden village of Gnomes and collect a message from them, and even someone wanting some ‘night work’ done. In terms of presentation, these individual employment opportunities are the highlight of EM1 – Eastern Spark as they are neatly organised and easy to use with sections for each job’s ‘Origin’, ‘Destination’, ‘Description’, ‘Trigger’, ‘Engagement Opportunities’, ‘Successful Consequence’, and ‘Consequence if incomplete’, all handily encapsulated in half a page. What is interesting with many of these jobs is that some of them do not have any positive outcomes. For example, in the ‘Light Work’ plot, the Player Characters are hired for some ‘night work’, which actually involves their signalling with a lantern to a boat out to sea at the mouth of a nearby river. If the Player Characters get involved and successfully signal to the boat over successive nights, they will have alerted some pirates who on subsequent days will come ashore and either sell slaves and/or raid farms. However, even if the Dungeon Master and her players do accept slavery as an aspect of the scenario, the scenario does not say might want to buy them, if at all. If the Player Characters decline this task, the scenario suggests that others will be recruited in their stead, but the scenario does not say who they are. Potentially, they could be a trio of amoral, selfish adventurers that appear in the scenario’s climax, but again, the scenario does not say whether this is the case. Potentially, this is an interesting situation that can play out in several ways and have different consequences for the Player Characters. Is their involvement discovered and if so, are they blamed, and who by? If not involved, will they discover the involvement of the other NPCs? However, again, the ramifications are not fully explored.

The scenario’s two major plot strands include a druid under a curse and the Gnomes at their hidden village of Opus. Hadd’s druid Nehira has been struck with a curse that renders her unable to communicate because her links to a radical sect of primitive druids. Initially, the Player Characters’ involvement with this is peripheral, encountering an NPC who sets up Nehira’s assassination. In the meantime, the Player Characters are expected to visit the Gnome village and collect a letter. However, the Gnomes do not trust them and ask the Player Characters to deal with a problem that they have—an attack by a ‘Lightning-infused Black Bear’! This encounter with the strange bear takes place in a grove, the nearest that EM1 – Eastern Spark has to a dungeon.

When the Player Characters return to Hadd after revisiting the Gnomes of Opus, the scenario kicks into a higher gear with the penultimate encounter, ‘Savage Hadd’. All of the animals in the village are enraged and have gone berserk and not only are the villagers terrified, but they also blame the druid, Nehira! Here the scenario does bring the villagers to life, detailing the different ways in which the various households are under attack and what their inhabitants will do if the Player Characters saves them. There is a nice mix here. The likelihood is that the scenario will end with the Player Characters confronting Nehira. They may kill her, they may save her from whatever is affecting her—though that is likely to be through more luck than skill, since there is little in the way of clues as to the cause of her condition and how it might be relieved. Certainly, there are no clues as to who might have done it and why. Perhaps these and the other questions raised in EM1 – Eastern Spark might be answered in EM2 –Prelude to The March?

There are three primary issues with EM1 – Eastern Spark. One is that it raises more questions than it answers, such as the nature of the cult in Fry and who might purchase slaves from the pirates? The second is that the scenario is too often threadbare when it comes to making connections between people and places and plots and fleshing it with smaller details that might arouse the interest of the players and their characters and so motivate them to act. The scenario looks like a hexcrawl, but it really is not given the main plot around Nehira’s madness. Arguably, it would have been better if that been brought to the fore as the scenario’s spine and the other plots presented as side encounters.

Physically, EM1 – Eastern Spark is perfunctorily presented at best. The artwork is variable in quality and the cartography is serviceably done using a software mapping program.

EM1 – Eastern Spark is underwritten and underdeveloped and rarely clearly explained. There is the basis of a decent adventure within its pages, but the Dungeon Master will need to do some deconstruction and redevelopment, adding some much needed details of her own before it really fully works.