Retrospective: The Forest Oracle

According to the scheme I laid down long ago in Ages of D&D, the year 1984 is the start of the game's Silver Age. The hallmarks of this age are a concern for "dramatic coherence" and "believable" worlds, as well as an esthetic of "fantastic realism." Despite this, Carl Smith's AD&D module, The Forest Oracle, released during the first year of this new era, possesses none of these hallmarks, being instead, by turns, mundane, nonsensical, and – worst of all – dull. 

On the face of it, this is precisely the kind of module I should like. I'm a professed admirer of low-level adventures, particularly those featuring rural communities beset by the forces of Evil. It's not for nothing, after all, that I judge Gary Gygax's The Village of Hommlet not merely a great module, but my favorite of the game's Golden Age. To my way of thinking, there's something particularly appealing, indeed almost mythical, about the set-up of so many of these low-level adventures that I can't help but look on them beneficently.

The premise of The Forest Oracle is that the Downs, "a hidden vale farmers claimed from the wilderness long ago" lies under a curse that causes fruit to rot, plants to die, and animals to flee. When the characters arrive in the Downs, they meet a kindly old wizard, Delon, who tells them that he believes a "gypsy witch" pronounced the curse after the people here refused to aid her. He then asks the characters to travel into the Greate Olde Woode – no, I am not making this up – to visit the druids who dwell there. Perhaps their powers will be able to lift the curse. (Delon is unable to do this himself, because he is old and feeble.) 

What follows is a series of linear wilderness encounters and fetch quests, as the PCs are shuttled from place to place to the accompaniment of badly written boxed text. I give the module points for even having wilderness encounters, since that's not common in low-level scenarios. I'm also willing to cut it some slack regarding its blandly atrocious naming practices (Greate Olde Woode, the Downs, the Wild River, the New Wilderness Road, Quiet Lake, etc.), because it's explicitly intended to be easy to integrate "into any existing campaign," since it's "an independent adventure, and not part of any series." Presumably, this is meant to make it easy for the Dungeon Master to insert in his own setting, replacing the insipid names with more appropriate (and flavorful) ones. 

Unfortunately, The Forest Oracle is just so straightforward and unimaginative that, even grading on a curve, it's still an almost complete failure. I say "almost," because there are glimmers of clever ideas here and there, like the flesh golem used as a guard by an ogre or the nymph who needs help in freeing her lover from an enchantment, but they're often handled in the most banal (and occasionally nonsensical) ways. It's almost as if the writer went out of his way to choose the least interesting versions of every idea he came up with. A perfect example of this is the hackneyed "gypsy curse" aspect of the adventure. I assumed that the story Delon tells about this is untrue or at least misinformed in some way, since it'd open up other possibilities for the true cause of the blight affecting the Downs. Nope! Madame Riva is responsible for the curse, though she regrets it now and aids the characters in removing it – but only if they do a favor for her first ...

It's all so tiresome. Back and forth, bouncing around from quest giver to quest giver, funneled from one linear locale to another, battling fairly typical low-level enemies – orcs, goblins, giant rats, and so on. Now, to be clear, I don't dislike such enemies; what I object to is their being used in trite, unimaginative ways, which is exactly what we get here. Again and again and again. The cumulative effect is enough to overcome my natural tendency to want to "fix" even a bad adventure module, to find some way to use it as the "raw material" from which to build something more to my taste. 

Compared to many, I'm generally quite forgiving of this sort of thing. I don't enjoy trashing a game or a module. I derive little pleasure in pointing out the missteps of a designer or writer, perhaps because I know only too well how easy it is for something that sounds great in one's mind to go terribly wrong in the process of committing it to paper. I'm not sure that's what happened to The Forest Oracle, but I simply don't care. Looking around online, I discovered that I'm not the only person who feels this way about the module. Indeed, I discovered, much to my surprise, that The Forest Oracle is widely considered among the worst Dungeons & Dragons adventures TSR ever published. I'm not sure I'd go that far – Castle Greyhawk is right there, after all – but there can be little argument that it's very, very bad.