Wyvern Songs: A Fantasy RPG Adventure Anthology opens with ‘The Sinister Secret Of Peacock Point’. This is for First Level Player Characters and is designed as an introductory adventure for both new players and Old-School veterans alike. They explore the guildhall belonging to the Apple Bottom Gang, a band of thieves operating out of a repurposed dungeon below a lighthouse. Whether the local mayor is concerned that the lighthouse lamp has gone out or the Player Characters are hired by a wizard to recover a music box—which he specifically warns them not to open— stolen by the Apple Bottom Gang, they discover the complex in darkness, seemly abandoned and suffering from an insect infestation. This mystery turns darker when the Player Characters discover the first bodies, stripped off their flesh… There is an element of nicely judged lurking horror to this scenario, enough to ratchet up the tension, but not overwhelm Player Characters, as they move from room to room, revealing more of what is obviously a home and a working environment that has suffered a disaster of some kind. This is reinforced by some of the encounters, such as with a teenage guild initiate, returned from his first assignment and traumatised that all of his erstwhile colleagues have disappeared.
There is also a whimsey and weirdness to the adventure, obviously in the random encounters, such as finding a peacock has got into the complex somehow from atop the cliffs or ‘Fish Guts’, the mascot for the Apple Bottom Gang, an undead, but toothless skeleton that shambles about wearing a horned helmet with his name on it in large letters. In addition, there is a link to the wider underworld—in both senses—with complex’s access to the Night Road, a subterranean highway controlled by Skunk Goblins! If the Player Characters are successful, they walk away with a lot of treasure as well, though they will need a way to transport some of it and find buyers. Overall, ‘The Sinister Secret Of Peacock Point’ is a cracking good start to the anthology.
If ‘The Sinister Secret Of Peacock Point’ had a drop of the weird and the whimsey to it, ‘Fabien’s Atelier’ has a whole vial’s worth. Designed for Player Characters of Second to Fourth Level, this is a puzzle dungeon set on a puck-shaped floating disc that is invisible to the naked eye, but which still casts a shadow on the ground. It can be run on its own, but it is actually a sequel to the author’s Hideous Daylight where it is the home to a wizard that has prevented the Sun from setting over a duke’s favourite garden—though for a good reason. In Hideous Daylight, the Player Characters were able to get up onto the disc, but not explore it. With ‘Fabien’s Atelier’ they can. As a puzzle dungeon, the puzzles themselves are more odd than overly challenging. Upfront, there is good advice on how to run a puzzle dungeon and the adventure itself has its clues repeated over and over, and ultimately, does state that the Game Master should allow for there being no right answers and that violence is always the answer! Again, there is a ticking clock at the heart of the heart of the adventure, but slightly more obvious as the floating disc rocks and rumbles. The adventure is not very big, but it is nicely detailed and there is lovely sense of otherworldliness to the whole of the wizard’s complex.
The third adventure, ‘The Singing Stones’ is even stranger than the previous two in the anthology. Designed for Player Characters of Third to Fifth Level, it is a pointcrawl set in a weird valley whose towering hoodoos and stone pillars have had their wisdom freed so that they constantly sing and drone, the sound reverberating up and down the valley. The setting also recalls both the frontier of the Old West and Death Valley of the USA, so the adventure could actually be run in a roleplaying game like Weird Frontiers. What drives the adventure is the search for a missing prince who is actually suffering from a poisoned wound that would kill him were it not for the fact that he has been turned to stone. This though, is only the start of the Player Characters’ problems as they search for a solution to both problems. Thankfully, the adventure does not give only the one solution, so there are multiple ways in which to solve both problems. In the process of looking for answers, the Player Characters will encounter various NPCs and get involved in their stories and plots and make further discoveries about the strangeness of the valley. Again, there are great random encounters, like the bottom half of a shattered stone golem futilely stomping about in search of its upper body, a rock formation being chomped on by creature that is slowly eating its way through the valley with the surrounding rocks all suddenly going silent as if in mourning or hiding, and a hungry stone giant hunting for food whose stone body has been affected by the area’s magic that it broadcasts his thoughts! ‘The Singing Stones’ really takes its central concept and develops into some wondrous ideas and encounters, combining them in a very well designed pointcrawl for the best adventure in the anthology.
The last adventure in the anthology is ‘The Dreaming Caldera’, a tough dungeon designed for Player Characters of Fifth and Sixth Levels. It is set atop and inside the dormant volcano Mount Embersnake below which a Chaos godling sings and it tries to give birth to itself. Its singing has been heard all across the region, summoning many to climb the steep sides of the volcano and descend inside to assist. During the adventure, this will include the Player Characters if their Alignment is Chaos, so they had better make their Saving Throws! What they find is a compact dungeon that is actually a cross between a factory and birthing pool with the godling’s worshippers working to put together a body suitable for young Chaos god. So, there is a chicken farm where the chickens are being slaughtered for their body parts—though nobody knows what to do with the feathers, so there is a room full of mounds of feathers—and some of the chickens have been evolved by their conditions into unsurprisingly angry Dire Chickens, whilst Ogres working as incompetent stone masons attempting carve bones for the godling, but blaming their incompetence on the neanderthals they force to mine the stone. Meanwhile, the previous god to whom the shrine atop the volcano was dedicated wants it back and will reward those who stop the godling from being born. The rewards would be great, except that this god is an evil deity of gluttony! ‘The Dreaming Caldera’ is the most grim and perilous adventure in the anthology, and the most challenging. It is a solidly designed dungeon, but in terms of tone, it feels different to the previous three adventure, darker, with less whimsy, and so a bit out of place.
Wyvern Songs: A Fantasy RPG Adventure Anthology also includes four appendices of bonus content. The first presents a new Class, the Mektaur. This is effectively, a one-off, an option for a recently deceased Player Character to live on in a new form, that of a rare magical relic and warrior. It is a centaur-shaped magical automaton into which the blood of the recently deceased is poured. Whatever the Class of the Player Character now dead, he now becomes a warrior proficient in the use of polearms, good at charging, and if that Class involved spellcasting, the Player Character is longer able to cast spells. He can though, speak with the undead, but requires weekly winding like a clockwork device and cannot climb ropes or vertical surfaces.
The second appendix, ‘Adventurer’s Guilds’ suggests the benefits of joining an Adventurer’s Guild. This includes information about adventuring sites, getting properly outfitted (enabling a player to declare that his character has an item even if it is not on his character sheet), and free lodging. It is accompanied by sample guilds, one whose membership is primarily mercenaries and landsknechts and one that specialises in mushroom hunting. Both have their extra benefits, but the latter is more interesting, suggesting that its members team up with wizards and thieves for the more dangerous dungeon expeditions. Mushroom identification training is mandatory, though.
‘The village of NANLET’ is described in the third appendix. It is a frontier settlement with its own oddities, like the fact that the local witches protect the inhabitants in return for their keeping a sealed coffin in their homes and never, ever opening it. What is in the coffins? That is for the Game Master to decide. Both of the Adventurer’s Guilds mentioned in the previous appendix have chapter houses in the village and the village centre is dominated by the head of a cyclops and an adjacent cathedral where the chanting continues unabated for twenty-four hours a day. There is also a table of town gossip, which the Referee can use to create adventure hooks, including one to Hideous Daylight.
Lastly, the fourth appendix, ‘The Grand Duchy of Bhosel’ is a setting where the author has not only placed the four scenarios in Wyvern Songs, but also recommends where other scenarios for Old School Essentials might be placed, including those from its publisher, Necrotic Gnome. However, as a setting it is not developed much beyond this, so that the Game Master will need to do a lot of work to tie these individual adventures and locations into a coherent whole, rather than the scrappy patchwork which is presented here. There are some connections between the four scenarios in Wyvern Songs, but they are very light and so not strong enough to reinforce what the ‘The Grand Duchy of Bhosel’ is trying to do. In a very good anthology, this is the least interesting and least useful entry.
Physically, Wyvern Songs is very well presented. The adventures are concisely written and easy to grasp and accompanied by decent artwork and excellent cartography. The adventures are also colour-coded for easy identification. However, the book is not perfect. The secret doors on the maps could have been more easily identifiable and sometimes the text is accompanied by maps of their individual rooms or locations taken from the main maps for the adventures, sometimes not. So, the scenarios are inconsistent in how easy they are to run.
Wyvern Songs: A Fantasy RPG Adventure Anthology is a superb collection of adventures. Each entry in the anthology gets to the point, and consequently, is easy to prepare and run, yet packed with lots of intriguing little details alongside their engaging plots that really make you want to run them. No matter which retroclone a Game Master uses, Wyvern Songs: A Fantasy RPG Adventure Anthology will have something that she will want to adapt and run—more likely, all four of them.
