Review: Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow

Last year I ran Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow (also known in a different iteration as Ragged Hollow Nightmare). I will refer to it as NORH going forward. I previously discussed part of this adventure in my rats-in-the-basement post. 

This review is intended for DMs who might run the adventure. I would recommend readers skip this post if they think there’s any chance they’ll see this adventure from the player perspective, as the review will definitely spoil some aspects of the book. 

What It Is

NORH is an Old-School Essentials adventure for low-level characters. It exists in the same space as The Black Wyrm of Brandesford or Blackapple Burgh; a small rural region, compliant with D&D tropes, but with some classic fairy tale energy. A brief introduction explains some of the tenets of old-school play for the uninitiated. 

What Works

Fast start. The premise of the adventure is that a golden dome has mysteriously sealed much of the titular town’s populace in the local temple. The people who would typically deal with such problems are among those trapped inside. The adventurers are the most capable people left outside. This is your call to adventure. 

Grounded PCs. The PCs are locals who have returned from a local tradition akin to a rumspringa. They’re from Ragged Hollow, so they’re invested in what is happening, but they also have adventurer skills they presumably picked up on their travels. It strikes a good balance between believable PCs and player discretion in creating characters.

Good NPCs. The NPCs have nice little bits of detail, but are open-ended enough to run. Favorites of mine included the goblin Croaker, Beatrix, and Master Neven the satyr (fun to do with a Matt Berry-style voice). The NPC adventuring party has a lot of personality and was a hit with the players. They also attached themselves to Joanna, Keegan, and several other town NPCs, who are easy to personify based on the concise details provided. The goblins are particularly well-done as a troublemaking faction who can be fought or befriended, as the PCs see fit.

Complications and opportunities among the survivors. NPCs rescued from the temple present a range of opportunities and threats. Some are likely to get in the party’s way, while others could be good hirelings. You could imagine turning this adventure upside down, letting the players play the people trapped inside, and running it as a funnel.

Escalation. Things get worse as more time passes and the adventure’s McGuffin ratchets up the titular nightmare. The temple bell sounds each night at midnight, indicating the number of survivors trapped in the temple. This provides a nice player-facing clock, and provides that Strict Time Records energy without requiring the DM to explicitly signpost it. 

Presentation. The editing and language is clear and concise, with only a few minor formatting issues. I found one or two incorrect room references, but those appear to be the only content (versus formatting) mistakes in an otherwise very clean product.

What Needs Some DM Work

Every TTRPG product needs at least a little work to bring to table. The following is intended less as criticism per se, and more as guidance on where to best spend prep time tailoring the product to your table. It is longer than the above section not because there is more to "complain" about, but simply because explaining criticisms and areas of possible improvement is more word-intensive than praise.  

Too many “Huh, that was weird. Anyway…” moments. The adventure includes nightmarish events that manifest in the area due to the influence of the McGuffin at the heart of the adventure. I appreciate that these are not combat encounters, but most of them don’t “mean” anything, and vanish before the PCs can engage with them. “Thousands of white worms wriggle up through the dark soil. They hum a deep resonant chord, swaying in the starlight, before burrowing back down into the ground.” “A severed hand crawls toward the party and dissolves into red foam.”

This stuff is mostly non-interactive by design. Perhaps at some tables these work just as mobile bits of set dressing. But my players (and I suspect a lot of other players) engaged with the first few instances of these events by obsessively focusing on "what they meant.” By the fourth or fifth event, they (pragmatically and correctly) concluded that these are random, dissociated, spooky events with no inherent meaning, and just ignored them. In my game, I mostly replaced them with echoes and omens tied to interactive elements of the adventure.

The main dungeon is (kinda) linear, and presumes one method of ingress. I don’t dock points for NORH’s small regional dungeons; these are basically lairs, not true dungeons, so it is OK that the kobold caves have only one entrance and lack much exploratory complexity. The temple that is at the heart of the adventure only has one intended entrance: the belltower, the highest point of the temple, exposed after time passes and the golden dome begins to shrink. 

I don’t think this is bad, per se. It is a neat inversion of the standard bottom-to-top tower adventure. And the conceit of the adventure kinda requires it. But the game definitely presumes the PCs will quickly focus on “how to get up to the belltower” as their main goal, and the region around the adventure is geared toward facilitating that. For a number of reasons, my players did not immediately focus on the belltower, because the adventure premise and telegraphed course of action depends on several assumptions that the players may not make.

For example, it was not initially obvious to my players that the outside walls "block" the dome (i.e., that once inside one part of the building, they could move freely throughout, and that the dome would not continue to block access inside as it shrunk). I essentially had to have an NPC tell them this, so they wouldn’t completely base their plans around the presumption that the dome would continue to slow progress once they were inside.

The players also considered digging underground. Through some investigation they learned that the dome was really the upper part of a sphere (I improvised this detail), but they still considered the merits of digging. The adventure does not provide a clear indication of how far the basement levels of the temple are from the edges of the dome, so there is potentially a lot of work for the DM if a group goes in this direction. 

Eventually my group found one of the magical items that is intended to facilitate access to the tower, and did eventually get on the "right" course of action. But some support here would have been a nice addition, as it would in turn support the PCs engaging in some outside-the-box problem solving. 

The monsters attack! The adventure has a few too many encounters that only make sense as fights. There’s an overabundance of ambush attackers, some with an X-in-6 chance, others simply stating they “immediately attack.” Ambushers have their place, but too many of them train the PCs to expect every adversary to be a fight. This is especially relevant for a product that assumes at least some players will be new to old-school play, as this one clearly does, since it includes a brief primer for this purpose. I would recommend DMs running NORH spend some time developing goals and desires for some of the NPCs and monsters to facilitate more varied interaction.

The kobolds, for example, occupy one of the regional lairs, and possess one of the magical items that can be used to enter the temple. They have no named members, no connections with other creatures in the region, and no agenda. They’re just... mining. All the notes about their lair treat it as a trap-laden combat encounter. My players ultimately did decide to ambush the kobolds, and I couldn’t really blame them – the module wasn't really suggesting any other purpose for these creatures besides a fight. 

I liked the idea that the monsters in the region were affected by the titular nightmare, just like the townsfolk. I decided that the kobolds were mining crystals to trade to the bandits for stimulants, so they could avoid sleeping, and escape their nightmares. The bugbears were in turmoil because terrible dreams from the adventure's McGuffin drove their shaman to the brink of madness. I replaced the ogre with an ettin who was quite literally fighting with himself over which head would sleep next.

The temple itself is populated by monsters that are the products of nightmares. These make a bit more sense as combat encounters, since they are inherently hostile and have no instinct for self-preservation. And a few of them have neat hooks. When a nursery rhyme wolf emerged from a magical storybook, the PCs blockaded it behind a door, allowing me the unique DM pleasure of doing the whole “I’ll huff and I'll puff…” act in-game.

But several of the others are weird-for-the-sake-of-weird. Acknowledging it would swell the page count, tying particular nightmares to particular villagers would allow for some fun interactions. Rescue the appropriate villager, or understand their fears, and gain an edge over the monsters. If I were to run this a second time, I would probably embellish this aspect of the product, as the players generally liked interacting with the townsfolk, and would have appreciated some more Nightmare on Elm Street flavoring to the dangers.

All that said, I do want to again give credit to the monsters and NPCs that break the "they attack!" pattern. The goblins are the faction that shines the most in this respect, as many of them will show up in situations where they are helpless or in danger, which does a better job of opening the door to PC discretion in defining the interaction. 

This adventure could be a lot shorter than intended. My group explored two of the three regions outside the town, and we got about a dozen sessions total out of this book, which is a good return for the price and page count. But it could have been much shorter if the players made different choices! One of the three magic items that could facilitate entrance to the temple is located immediately outside of town. A group could grab that item and then wait until the temple is accessible. Sure, they would be underleveled, but that is not inherently an obstacle in OSR play. 

This isn't inherently bad. It is not a scripted adventure path, where the players are punished for not following the designer's intended path. But speedrunning this product would not be much fun, and would involve missing out on some of the best bits (like the goblins, satyr, and witch in the woods). 

Final Thoughts

We had an overall positive experience with this adventure, and I would recommend it. “Regional classic fantasy for low levels” is a very well-served niche, and there are other competing options that you may want to consider. But the inciting incident of the townsfolk trapped in the temple is a genuinely distinguishing selling point, and the organic clock it puts on events really brings the "time matters" energy to the proceedings. 

Ultimately, the adventure provides a lot of good stuff to work with, and the areas of potential improvement are a reasonable ask for the DM's tailoring and prep time. 

I give it four out of five spider-rats. Praise Halcyon!

You can buy NORH here.