Green Ronin's Bleeding Edge #1: Mansion of Shadows

It's hardly new; I believe Green Ronin's Mansion of Shadows was published in 2006.  However, I'm often very slow to get around to reading stuff that I acquire somewhat impulsively.  I have physical books that I've owned longer than that that simply went immediately on my bookshelf with the "I'll be excited to read that—sometime, when I get around to it."  Because reading PDFs is more difficult—usually—than simply picking up a book, I'm even more behind on reading them.  I don't even remember where I got the Bleeding Edge series, although I have the entire run of it.  I often buy PDFs impulsively, especially if there was some sale at DriveThruRPG or something like that; although there may not have been.  I might simply have bought them in a rush of loyalty to Green Ronin during the height of my Freeport fandom, or something like that, for all I know.

Either way, I finally read the durn thing, and thought I'd discuss briefly what works and what doesn't with it.  I've recently just talked about my preferred adventure style; I've been going through a lot of Paizo stuff, and honestly finding it very traditional in format, and not very much to my liking.  I don't care to have a bazillion details on rooms with nonsensical traps and magic and monsters all through them like some kind of sadistic carnival attraction.  I've enjoyed modules like Princes of the Apocalypse or Out of the Abyss that give you plenty of structure to work with, but also plenty of flexibility, and which kind of float over the concept at a relatively high level, leaving you to flesh out the specific interactions of NPCs, and their dialogue, and their set-pieces even, a little bit more on your own.

Into this context, comes the Bleeding Edge series.  Well, not really obviously—they've been around for years, but I find them at an opportune time when a lot of my own reading and thinking and whatnot has converged into a coherent theory of what works well for a gamer like me and adventure design. You can still pick this module up from DriveThruRPG, it looks like, but I can't find any sign that Green Ronin still supports it or sells it from their own store.

So first, the good.  The module is designed specifically to be open format and flexible, with lots of "here's how you could handle this or that if the PCs do this or that," kind of stuff, which allows for the PCs to make all kinds of perhaps unexpected choices and yet still not "throw off" the game.  NPCs that are meant to be saved could die, and that's OK.  NPCs that are meant to be allies could be killed in a fit of pique, and the module still works.  Villains, up to and including the BBEG himself could be killed in advance if the PCs don't like them, and the module still works with you.  If I were to compare it to, say, Out of the Abyss and The Shackled City, both of which I'm in the middle of reading currently, I'd say that it straddles a line between them.  It offers a bit more detail than the former, but doesn't have the mind-numbing tedium of the latter.  Of course, it's a single module, meant for 1st level characters, who are maybe at 3rd level by the end, not an entire campaign, so the comparison isn't entirely fair.

But that brings up another point of what's good about it; although only loosely linked and meant to be stand-alone, the entire Bleeding Edge series can be linked.  The 2nd in the series is meant for a group of PCs level 2-4, while the 3rd is for characters level 3-5; etc.  There are six numbered entries in the series, and then a Freeport Special at the end for characters 8-10.  In total, the page-count (and therefore content) is comparable to a campaign—kinda.  The Mansion of Shadows pdf is 48 pages, but that includes a page for a cover, a page for inside cover/credits, and pages at the back for a back cover and ads, and a page at the back for the OGL.  All of the page counts should be reduced by about 4 each to give you a "true" page count of actual gaming content, and if you take the pdf pagecounts, add them together, and reduce each by four to account for front and back covers, credits and OGL, then you get a total pagecount of 227.  In the same ballpark as Out of the Abyss, which is, if I remember correctly, real close to 250 pages.

Oh, that reminds me of another good point; technically, these are set in the same setting as Freeport, although, with the exception of the last Freeport Special issue, not actually in Freeport itself.  That's probably what prompted me to dig them up; I'm wrapping up soon a re-read of The Pirate's Guide to Freeport which has consistently been one of my favorite RPG products—in spite of my wishes that it were a little more true to concept and less invested in being D&D; but with pirates.  See this old post, as well as this one.  This doesn't actually matter a lot since, they take place in the environments around the Ivory Ports, which are about as close to a generic D&D area as you get in the setting, but it's interesting.  In fact, it probably tells us more about that setting than anything else we've got, with the possible exception of that one chapter in the Freeport book

We're starting to wander into territory that's very subjective, if not neutral, so I guess I should point out a few things that are potentially the bad.  First, the module is very dark and even horror-tinted, involving devil worship, cannibalism, incest, corruption and temptation, fratricide, filicide, patricide, mobs of anarchic villagers, etc.  This isn't necessarily a problem in its own right, and given the flexibility of the module, it doesn't have to turn out this way, but the default resolution is also kind of nihilistic.  This last part bothers me more than the details of the content, and I suspect that even someone like me who openly admits to trying to turn D&D into Call of Cthulhu in terms of its tone, finished reading the module and thinking... huh.

I also wasn't a fan of the art.  It looked—mostly, although with some exceptions—almost cartoonishly bad, and often clashed with the descriptions; dark haired characters shown with very light hair, for example.  Now, I don't mind a garage band publisher vibe, but Green Ronin had been around for quite some time by this point.  To be fair, I've always thought their art direction was hit or miss, and I really liked some of it and wondered what compromising blackmail certain other artists had to have on the company that they continued to get so much work.  With the exception of the cover, I wasn't impressed by much of the art, and would have actively preferred to have seen less of it, to the point of "I don't even need any, if that's what I'm going to get."

However, the art studio who did the art did the maps, and they're good quality, at least in terms of how they look.  That doesn't mean that they make any sense; the Cold Wood, for example, is supposed to be infested with kobolds and haunts, while the Grey Wood has tons of wolves, including some as big as horses.  Given that both of them aren't much bigger than my backyard (I don't live on some gigantic countryside estate either) those are both rather ridiculous; either it's a stupid rumor spread by really stupid villagers, or it's a stupid rumor written in a moment of brain-fartery by the writer, or there was poor coordination between the writer and the map-makers.

The biggest con against it, however, is the unremitting product placement.  Hardly a page goes by that the writer doesn't make some reference to some other Green Ronin product, from including monsters from The Book of Fiends, or templates and character classes from a variety of Green Ronin sources (The Avatar's Handbook, The Cavalier's Handbook, Book of the Righteous, The Advanced Player's Manual, The Advanced Gamemaster's Manual, etc.)  They also make reference to alternate rules systems—that they produce, of course—that you might be using instead of D&D, and the provide almost two whole pages worth of stats for a mass combat minigame that's only present in one of their other books.

Now, they're very careful to have designed the whole thing so that you don't actually need to have any of those books, but only just.  It does manage, especially in the Appendices where most of the stats are, to start to become kind of obnoxious, though, and there is a few pages worth of stuff that you can't actually use—NPCs that you'll have to restat as some other class, pregens that you can use but can't advance, stats that you'll have to do something else with (the mass combat minigame, for instance, which you'll mostly have to handwave away the results of if you don't have access to it.)  It's certainly not enough of a problem to ruin the adventure, but it's—like I said, the best adjective for it is that it's enough to become obnoxious.  It's not a big deal to me personally, because I was almost certainly going to do that if I ever actually use the module anyway; I'd adapt it to FANTASY HACK and have to do all kinds of conversions on my own.

In that sense, then, I can say that it's not a bad way to start a fairly traditional campaign, albeit leaning towards the darker near-horror side of fantasy.  Heck, it'd even have been a decent module for WFRPG for that matter.  They didn't provide any web enhancement for that specific conversion, sadly.

The flaws are fairly minor, and for me personally, kind of not applicable anyway.  I recommend it.  I do have to point out that I got a little bit of a chuckle at a little bit of a superior tone in the description of the series overall, though—if you're a "modern, savvy" gamer, who's tired of nostalgia, giants and drow, etc.  Ouch!

Then again, I was a fan (for quite a while) of The Window, and you don't get more pretentious than the language he used to describe his game.  It was so bad that even in his own revision he had to laugh at himself for his posturing.  I hope the Green Ronin guys are doing the same.  And if not; well, I'm not really an OSRian anyway, so I literally have no reason to take it personal, even if I were inclined to do so, which I'm not.