I was looking for an interesting old-school horror style adventure and I stumbled up on The Road to Hell. I’d gotten some pretty cool stuff from D101 Games like Crypts & Things so I figured what the hell. Let’s grab this one up and give it look.

It’s an adventure designed for characters 3rd to 5th Level and it’s set in the early 17th Century. While the background is loosely tied to a European pseudo-history, the GM can just trash those parts and plop it down in their own campaign world. The adventure itself is a series of five encounters. Once things get going it’s a bit of railroad but then the characters are literally going down the road to keep them on track. They could the subsequent encounters in any order but they’d be going back and forth down the road probably with little reason. The first three encounters are pretty good IMHO. And they’d work well with a little tweaking to separate them from the overarching plot. Now that plot is good. Evil sorceress sister is imprisoned in a pocket hell dimension and her evil lover/brother is going to get her out. I feel like it could have broadened out a little more. Heck, it could serve as inspiration for two or three adventures with the characters trying to keep ahead of the brother as he tries to free his sister. The last two encounters are the player characters going to the pocket hell dimension. While it’s evil, it really doesn’t seem that hellish at least to my mind. Maybe I was expecting something more alien.

What else do you get? Well, there’s three new spells, a few new monsters, and stats for Lucifer. Yeah, I know that maybe a standard in may old school products but I never been that fond of having those really power beings with HP. But that just may be just me.

I’d never really run this adventure as written. But I would break down the initial three encounters into stand alone adventures and then amp up that overarching metaplot into a several session romp. So it’s got some good ideas but you may have to add a little more to suit your own tastes.

You can pick up The Road to Hell on DrivethruRPG. Note: it’s behind the adult filter but compared to some stuff it’s not that adult.

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