Adventure Review: Death Love Doom [UPDATED]

Back in the '80s there was a scenario in an issue of The Beholder D&D fanzine that was simply a merchant's house that the player-characters decided to burgle.

Behind the innocuous cover (shown above) of James Raggi's Death Love Doom lies an adventure along very similar lines. Only here the property the opportunistic thieves (that is, the player-characters) have decided to raid has already fallen victim to a foul blight and the characters will find themselves walking onto the set of a piece of splatterpunk grotesquery that makes The Human Centipede look like an episode of  Blue Peter.

Death Love Doom is an immensely evocative - and stomach-wrenching - tableaux that the thieves stumble across and then have to decide what they can do. They certainly can't undo the hideousness that has been perpetrated on the inhabitants of the house and the default course of action appears to be "grab as much loot as you can and head for the hills".

I would love to run this shock-horror tale for a group one day, or - if I hadn't read, I would have loved to have been a player encountering it, but this certainly isn't an adventure for the Tuesday Knights. You'd need a very select group of people to put through this adventure (probably die hard fans of Cronenberg body-horror movies).

A solid social contract would also probably be required between players and gamesmaster as there is no avoiding the fact that the scenario addresses some very intimate and controversial subjects that some people would be very uncomfortable with confronting in the context of a game.

There's also the danger that the adventure could topple over the edge into Grand Guignol farce when mixed with a typical gaming group's penchant for wise-cracks and goofing about.

A small matter that might also make it difficult to run as a "drop-in" to an on-going campaign is its setting in 17th Century England (complete with flintlock pistols and muskets). Now I know this element could easily be removed - or doctored to some more fantastical setting - but then that would undermine the backstory that James has woven into the adventure.

Done right this could be a truly life-changing and visceral experience for the player-characters, but would your game still be D&D (or a retro-clone) if the characters started to question their diety-given right to kick in doors, kill monsters and take their treasure?

Death Love Doom is almost calling out for conversion to a system like Call Of Cthulhu or Clockwork & Chivalry, where its period setting and nihilistic atmosphere might be more appropriate.

A minor niggle with the 20-page adventure, though. Although the setting is established as historical all the treasure throughout the house is still in very traditional Dungeons & Dragons copper, silver and gold pieces, which seems rather incongruous.

Clearly labelled with an 18+ certificate and "graphic content" warning on the back cover, Death Love Doom is illustrated by the talented Kelvin Green (I suspect operating outside his comfort zone).

He provides stark images of every key person in the adventure and, as Erik from Tenkar's Tavern pointed out in his review, it's almost a shame they are so well integrated into the text as they would serve as gruesome hand-outs to the players (hey, kids, you could even colour them in) because a "picture is worth a thousand words".

[UPDATED August 19, 4.30pm - removed erroneous criticism]