Archive Delving - Barrow Keep

My weekly cycle was broken by illness, but I'm back at it again! This week I'm reading Barrow Keep: Den of Spies, an OSR-ish module from 2020. I read this a while back, but bounced off of it - in the intervening years, I've read, listened to, and played a lot more games and modules, including in the OSR vein, so I want to see if I can make better progress. Plus, it's got a Bathtub Review, which I put off reading because I didn't want it to influence my own, and I want to finally get to read it (Nova's reviews are fun and insightful, and one of the blogs that inspired me to start my own).

So, Barrow Keep! The Kickstarter declares that you'll "play the young residents of the Keep, coming of age while dealing with mysteries, treacheries, and intrigues" and goes on to describe itself as something in the Game of Thrones genresphere. The book introduces itself as a "romantic fantasy" setting, which will involve "politics, misunderstandings, quests, intrigues, ceremonies, alliances," and romance/relationships. It also declares that it's a science fantasy setting, which I did not remember from either the kickstarter or my previous readthrough, so that's something to look forward to. I don't know if it's just my old preconceptions, but something about this description didn't quite grab me this time. I'm way into exploring politics and relationships in my fantasy, much more than I'm into swashbuckling or freebooting against hordes of ontologically evil monsters. My best guess is that this is the shadow of romantasy lingering over the genre space, which is boring to me. Well, so be it. I'll be looking for stuff that will support me making or playing in a castle with a tangled web of characters.

Part 1 covers a lot of ground! We're introduced to a large cast of characters, including the central three, who each get a table to roll on for options. We also get the rundown of a host of locations, mostly within the Keep, but also a handful of locations nearby. There's also a section on economy items, weapons (including "plasmic" weaponry), travel costs, and armor, along with some general ideas on the commonality of these things. Finally there's a section on performing magic rituals.

Most of this stuff doesn't quite grab me, unfortunately! Some of it is just that I and the text are at cross-purposes - I don't want a bunch of potential Archons with some small plot hooks, I'd like one really compelling Archon with some big plot hooks! It helps that the options are all interesting, but it's just not really what I'm looking for. The other big problem I think is that there is a lot of information, and it is very spread out. There are some really interesting characters in the wider cast - unfortunately, the huge list of them means that my eyes start to slide off of them, and they're not ordered in any way that I can discern - if I want to refer back to the text for more details, I have to swim through the whole section.

The stuff that works best for me is the location detail - they're relatively easy to flip through, and the "Sights and Sounds" for each often have short but juicy ideas for something cool to be happening there. It's still just a little bit out of order for my preference! The sights and sounds come before the individual locations; so when I'm reading about the catacombs, one entry might tell me about the Shrine of Archons Lost, which I have to turn the page to find out about, but that's small potatoes. It would be really nice if there were a map for all of this, I think! Especially because it seems like the text has opinions on the difference between the holdings of a Duke and an Archon, and it would be great to see that represented spatially.

The other thing I want to say about the "sights and sounds" (which are nearly identical to random tables) is that I wish the cast of characters were utilized a little more here! Many of the sights and sounds are great, but they're not so jam-packed full of good stuff that I wouldn't mind more, and with a cast this big (and mostly strong), it's too bad they don't get referenced here! Especially because these characters have ties to the "big three" but no explicit ties to each other - putting them in locations would help me build that web that I'm looking for.

The last thing I want to comment on in this section is the magic & technology piece. We get one tantalizing description of the ancient black stones that Barrow Keep is made out of, and at the very end of the section learn that there are two other buildings made from that same stone - the temple in the capital and another (rival?) castle. There are also "plasmic" guns, powered by mysterious crystals, available for sale. For now, this just has not landed for me. Maybe in the second section, about the secrets, there will be something a little more for me to get hooked on, but as it is the "mysterious old stone" is just... well, what is there to do with it? I can think of a couple of things to invent here - maybe the stone is really scavenged from some old spaceship's hull - or maybe it was carted here from another planet! That's fun. But the text hasn't really given me a reason to think any more deeply about it.

The rituals and guns are maybe on the other side of this, where they're already too well defined for me to be excited about the mystery. Rayguns are treated as though they're fairly common - that's fine, but it doesn't seem like it pays off in any other part of the setting. If the casual observer might be armed with a raygun, what has that done to, like, the balance of power between regions? I have similar questions about the airships alluded to here and there. All in all, the inclusion of science fantasy elements into the text feels kind of like an afterthought - they exist as facts, but (unless the later text can convince me otherwise) don't really seem to have exerted any gravity on the world the text is presenting.

Rituals are overwritten to the point where they seem, if not pedestrian, then at least pretty normal. They use a kind of pbta roll+questions model, which is cool. The questions are fun and evocative, but there are a LOT of them, and each of the individual rituals adds more. I can imagine this as being fun in play - "well, I can't schedule it for tonight with the full moon because we've got the banquet, but as long as I get some hair and can have the catacombs to myself, it should go ok". That kind of decision making sounds fun! So what's my hang up? I think my preference would be to require some of these things, like how Dungeon World handles rituals - making the bargaining happen there, instead of just being a bonus or penalty to a roll. There's also the problem that the effects of the rituals are kind of boring, particularly the one to enchant a weapon. Well, that's enough sour grapes. Let's take a look at the secrets.

Part 2 is really more a list of little adventures than secrets! Some of these are really exciting to me, but not all of them. For the most part, I do like their random tables - the first adventure, about the locked tower, has a couple of fun ideas for who is the ghost haunting the place, and it's always great to have a ghost. For the most part, these secrets are still asking you to do a lot of the assembly yourself, but they've at least got a pretty good hit-rate in terms of interesting little hooks. Some of these I just wouldn't use, or would have to edit in order to use them - the table of "who you encounter moving through the great hall" for example just does not fit the need I imagine it would fill. Others are great but too short - I would gladly have taken a d20 sized table for feasts & celebrations. The rumors table is another good one.

The lists of visitors are pretty good, although I did find it a little strange that only one major figure per visiting faction got written about in detail - I think it would be nice to have a little more to help weave that web of social connections. The "dangerous delegations" caught my eye a little more consistently than the "strange visitors" did. 

We wrap up with a handful of adventures - one into the lost crypt, which seems fine, one involving a magical train station, which doesn't really match the kind of thing I was expecting and is a little too whimsical for me, and some stuff to spark a rivalry between Barrow Keep and the Drestfalls. That last one is probably the most interesting thing to me in the whole section! It's definitely the most Game of Thrones-y tool, helping to build longstanding relationship with another noble house.

The very last things are a list of weird magic items (they're ok), and a quick bestiary, with some monsters who were mentioned in the text and some who simply were not - apparently there are goblins in the world of Barrow Keep! But they only make their appearance here, at the end.

At this point, I went and read the bathtub review where I saw a comment about the playkit pdf, so I checked that out too. It's got two fun scenarios in it that do both seem like things I would want to run (and could run without too much additional work!), so I'm glad I did! They're not mind blowing expansions of the genre, but they're simple and interesting. The other thing in here is a whole mess of playbooks, which have a bunch of cool character creation questions for making rivals and other connections to people in the Keep. These are great, although there are some quirks, like making the Hostage be a "Beast Bound," maybe to get them to fit within the boundaries of Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells, a system I am utterly unfamiliar with. I tabbed through the OSE version too, and found it fairly similar in that regard.

Final word: There's not quite enough in here to get me really excited to run Barrow Keep. The scenarios in the playkit do seem pretty fun - I think I would reach for them if I had friends interested in a intrigue-heavy fantasy one shot. I could maybe see myself pulling this out to generate a strange castle, and just roll on all the tables to get a few sparks going - but otherwise, I don't think it's fulfilling my desires for complex social webs or dramatic betrayals or weird science fantasy adventuring.

Another one archived! it's been two saturdays since my last update, so we had to fend off the romans twice (first at strength 4 and then 5). We do so pretty handily, with our level 8 resources. Now about those points - 5 +(14*5) +3 for leaving a rating on itch! We score 78 points, bringing our current total to 314. I'll buy a ninth medal for 45 points, for a final score of 269. We're gonna have to accelerate if we ever want that pizza.