Sourcebook Review: Hogwater: Village of Secrets

 

Author: Travis Miller

Publisher: Self-published

System: Swords & Wizardry

Marketplace: Lulu, Square

I'm going to start this review with full disclosure. I consider Travis Miller to be an internet friend. When I was trying to start an OSR actual play podcast a few years ago, he volunteered to play, and played three sessions of Lamentations of The Flame Princess with myself and Stephen Smith. I've also written guest articles on Grumpy Wizard, and featured guest articles from him on Welcome to the Deathtrap. Travis gave me a complimentary copy of Hogwater: VIllage of Secrets hoping that I would review it, and in the process give him the kind of feedback that people like about my articles.

I will also confess that the article I did on factions with examples from Temple of Elemental Evil last week was to set this review up.

Hogwater is a slightly different way of setting up a home base for the first phases of a campaign.

Rather than provide a map of the village off the bat, and then go place by place describing the people who live in it, Travis Miller describes the village in terms of the NPCs and factions within it. Every NPC of note is given clear motivations, preferences, quirks, and goals with the first few steps described.

What he describes is a small, unfinished keep surrounded by a young borderlands town situated on a new highway that serves as a midway point for some relatively new trading routes. It's a place where merchants pass through to resupply on their way to other places.

The hero that established hog water a generation ago has recently been usurped by the current lord of the keep, who enforces his law through a dangerously skilled marshal, and an incredibly corrupt Reeve.

Factions

Aside from the forces at the keep and the Reeve's gang of ne'er-d-wells, much of the villages held together by a trading post controlled by a large mercantile dynasty. The merchant leading it is a decent man and more interested in the growth than preservation of Hogwater than the Lord is, but has a slacker nephew who is anything but.

The townsfolk, thanks to the corrupt land-grubbing of the Reeve, the brutality of the Marshall, and they usurper status of their lord, see themselves as a completely separate faction from either the merchant or the keep. And the regular townsfolk and the craftsmen in town are somewhat at odds with one another over the direction the town's future should take.

Besides the five "in-town" factions, there is also a group of Druids who see the encroachment of civilization as a threat, and are weaponizing the monsters of the forest against the town. There is a distant archmage who is an enemy of The Druids, who's not yet involved in the affairs of Hogwater, but may soon be as The Druids concentrate on the town. There is a group of bandits with a disgraced knight leading them who are trying to fool themselves into believing they are a revolution. And there is a camp of vagabonds and mendicants away from the town proper who can provide cheap hirelings and useful information, but have spies from all of the other factions laced within. Finally there's a powerful and unique dragon with powers of mind control and illusion that is playing its own game, and has agents in the village that may be watching for player character threats.

Laced throughout the module are ways that the different factions could end up befriending or becoming enemies of the PCS and what they might do. As well as events that could cause the various factions too come into conflict with one another. While all out armed warfare is very unlikely in this setting, espionage, treachery, assassinations, and misinformation are quickly weapons of choice that any of the factions might start to employ.

The villains here are interesting enough and settle enough that it will take several sessions for the player characters to detect any of them and deal with them in a meaningful manner.

Adventure Hooks

Aside from the detailed faction and NPC data, hog water village of secrets also has several short adventures. Clearing goblins from a invaded farmhouse provides an ideal starting adventure, and can earn PCS favour with the vagabonds and the villagers. On top of that there is an ogre camp nearby that player characters can deal with, which was carefully cultivated by the druids. And as they increase in level there is a pig farm that has been taken over by a vicious wereboar. Finally there is a large adventure dealing with an evil magician from out of town who has acquired an ancient artifact and identified an alchemical substance he needs in the village that will allow him to make an army of homunculi.

This last adventure is structured with both a mapped hideout, and a mapped quarry dungeon to explore, along with a timeline of events from the start of the adventure so that if the PCS don't pick up the hook things can metastasize into an utter disaster for the town. With multiple opportunities for them to finally clue in once it gets rolling.

The game stats are Swords & Wizardry compatible and follow most of the conventions for OSE and S&W: Complete. And because they notate both ascending and descending armor class, there is virtually no conversion required between different OSR games.

What I Loved

Unique Content

Travis went out of his way to make sure that there was a mix of familiar monsters and his own unique ones throughout the setting. Vampiric homunculi, an evil artifact, a magic ring with a special condition in order for it to be used, clay infused the blood of a demigod that causes the undead to rise, and a dragon that doesn't fit any of the usual colour coding make sure that the players are going to run into some surprises.

Well Designed Factions

The factions in Hogwater are very well thought out. They have potential alliances and amenities, clear goals, and almost all of them have hooks connected to the various adventures presented in the book. They have clear rules for how they will treat the player characters and what benefits and penalties they can expect as they aid or cross the different factions.

Interesting NPCs

Likewise, Hogwater presents NPCs in valuable detail. Any NPC worth a stat block also has a clear listings of their motivations, quirks, desires, goals, and plans for the immediate future. Many of them are interesting and quirky people who are believably flawed. 

• For example the lord of the castle is depressed and uninterested and actually ruling, having found it far less interesting and exciting than he had planned on it being. Meanwhile his castellan runs the show with clockwork precision, or would if it weren't for his incredibly corrupt Reeve. 

• The Reeve in turn is a great villain not because of  an impressive stat block, but because he is a believable man who, given an opportunity has abused his power in slimy, subtle, and petty ways.

• Likewise the leaders of the bandits is self-deluding himself because of incredible cognitive dissonance. Presenting himself as a Robin Hood like figure, while the bandits under his command are nothing but common thieves or disaffected villagers who mostly just tolerate his eccentricities

And this is just a small sampling of a very large ensemble.

Information Design

The pages and Hogwater are usefully cross-referenced. More importantly, stat blocks are repeated wherever they are relevant to prevent it GMs from having to flip around too much while using the module. This can mean that there are entire duplicate sections within the book.

The PDF is also well-indexed, which is a massive bonus to me.

The back of the book contains one-page reference and tracking sheets for keeping the factions straight and finding information quickly, and an appendix with most of the significant NPC stat blocks. It also has a sheet listing all of the dirty little secrets in town for quick reference.

Set up for Multiple Levels of Play

The threats to Hogwater vary a lot in level and complexity. Some, like the goblins, ogre and Wereboar are straightforward. But at every time the player characters will be pointed towards more complex and subtle foes such as the Reeve, Druids, and Dragon.

Just getting enough information and leaves to identify these threats and deal with them can provide material for several adventures per enemy, giving time for the players to build up to meet the challenges of the most powerful foes in the settings. I could easily see players growing to 6th or 7th level before leaving Hogwater for adventure further afield.

And because many of the villains spend multiple villages, eventually being drawn back to Hogwater at 10th or 11th level to start cleaning house. Which, I gather was how it played out in Travis's original campaign, which he discusses places in the book to get GM's pointers on how it may play out.

Specific Encounters

Rather than random "dryad" or "centaur" encounters, the random encounter tables in the vicinity of Hogwater includes specific creatures like "Karya the Dryad". These encounters come with descriptions of specific dispositions, motivations, etc. to help build the setting rather than leaving it purely to the dice.

I am if mixed feelings about this; as it does take the guesswork out of the encounter, and enriched the setting beautifully, but leaves the potential for happy accidents or the world-changing chaos that totally random encounters can create.

Lucky Find

A roll of 12 on the random encounter table leads to a sub-table of interesting and rare discoveries that I thought was a really clever touch.

Growth Points

Sparse Design

I'm a sucker for an artful layout; I don't need a lot of Art, but multiple columns, some variance in color scheme, and a font that sits comfortably at ~75 characters per line across 2 columns really is much easier to read.

A slight re-arragement of sections might have obviated the need for some of the repetition.

This is, of course, a minor gripe.

The Wereboar Misses a Beat

The Wereboar adventure that is one of the first hooks that the PCs get is pretty straightforward; the Wereboar is a savage beast who has massacred a family and settled into the farm to mate with the sows on it. Played as written, it would be a frightening and savage bush encounter.

It could have been much more complex and deadly if we had details on how the Wereboar might try to deceive or bait the PCs posing as a human farmer. This would have given it the same level of sophistication as the Ogre encounter, which is set up to be tactically interesting and reward investigation.

The Reputation Mechanics Could be Integrated

One of the Appendices in Hogwater: Village of Secrets is a mechanism for judging how well the PCs are liked or disliked by a given faction that has an impact on 2d6 reaction rolls.

When describing how the NPC factions will react to certain PC behaviours it could have been useful note how those actions would adjust the reputation score of the PCs .

Consistency in Stat Blocks

Many of the early shorthand stat blocks were edited form a previous format, and remain incompletely edited. The stats themselves are prefectly usable, and complete versions of the same NPCs can be found in multiple places throughout the book.

Conclusions

This is an well-realized setting for running a classic Old-School D&D campaign. It gives you enough of a world to run the first handful of adventures and seen rumours of bigger, wider-ranging threats, so that by the time your PCs are ready to go further afields they will already have clear motivations, and you will have had time to expand your world around the starting village.

Travis' focus on complex NPCs with goals and motives makes it a very dynamic world that is easy to use in response to PC actions.

My complaints are mostly organizational: Hogwater could use a little tinkering with layout and presentation to be the best it could be.