It’s hard to find anything interesting any more. You know things that dare to color outside the lines even a bit. Enter The Bastard Princess.
I admit that I’ve been on a Grim Dark streak recently. So the title and the cover caught my eye and I was curious. So just what/who is The Bastard Princess?
This is the first adventure for Neckbeardia’s own system, Dice & Demons. (Don’t worry. Links below.) So I grabbed up the Dice & Demons Quickstart to have the module make more sense. At it’s core Dice & Demons is a roll a d20+modifier against a Difficulty. So converting it to another D20 based system wouldn’t be too hard but you really should read through Dice & Demons to pick up a few differences that would affect your choices when converting.
Let me get back to the adventure. The Bastard Princess is a three part mystery. And I’ll try to do this spoiler free. In the first part, the party is tasked with travelling to village and figure out what is going on. No one has heard anything from the village and even travelers who were passing through seem to have vanished. Needless to say, the village is pretty much destroyed and the party ends having to hunt down and question any survivors.
The information that the party uncovers in the village should lead them into the woods and an encounter with a Baba Yaga type hag. While it’s an interesting encounter, I feel you could skip it and go straight to the final stage of the mystery. If I was using this adventure at the beginning of a campaign, I’d keep it as means to introduce the hag as a reoccurring character. But the hag should get the party the final clues to lead them to the third and final stage.
This is a nasty dungeon crawl through a fortress. Here’s where I won’t go into too much detail because this is the real heart of the adventure but let me say that it’s filled with bizarre monsters, NPC’s, encounters, and magic items. I mean there’s some really weird shit in there.
Sure, the adventure is a mystery but it’s not too difficult to to solve. Of course, fixing things will tougher. It’s grim dark and disturbing in places and there’s a grindhouse vibe in a couple of others. Since I’ve been focused on Lamentations of the Flame Princess, my thoughts went to that first. So if any horror elements that would probably be an R rating in the movies disturbs you then this ain’t for you. Me I like it.
But wait there’s more. It is a free PDF but also get separate maps, handouts, and VTT tokens. Pretty sweet.
You can grab up The Bastard Princess here for free!
And here’s the link to the free quickstart for Dice & Demons.
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