Thursday, April 14, 2022

Retrospective: The Assassin's Knot

My appreciation for The Secret of Bone Hill is well known. Alongside The Village of Hommlet, I consider it one of the best low-level adventure modules ever written for Dungeons & Dragons, in large part because of the care author Len Lakofka took to establish its "home base," the village of Restenford. However, in both of the aforementioned modules, there's another important ingredient: the menace that lurks on the borders of the that home base. Without the Moathouse and the titular Bone Hill, I suspect my affection for these modules would diminish considerably, if not evaporate completely. I like both adventures because of the effective contrast between the sleepy outposts of civilization and the evil that threatens to overwhelm it.

In The Assassin's Knot, Lakofka attempts to mine the same vein – to much more mixed results, in my opinion. First published in 1983, the module is a follow-up to The Secret of Bone Hill, starting with the fact that, like its predecessor, it takes place on Lendore Isle in the World of Greyhawk. More importantly, the ultimate antagonist of the adventure is a character first introduced in Bone Hill (where his eventual villainy was explicitly mentioned, the consequences of which would appear in a future adventure, namely this one). Nevertheless, The Assassin's Knot can stand more or less on its own.

The bulk of the scenario takes place in another little town, the implausibly named Garroten. Like Restenford, Lakofka lavishes much detail on this settlement and its inhabitants. We meet Gelmark and Lydia, a pair of retired adventurers who married and settled down to run the general store. We also meet Krak, the half-orc armorer who's sometimes possessed by an evil sword he acquired some time ago, as well as many more characters, each with their own personalities, quirks, and backstories. Most are genuinely well done and it would be very easy for a referee to spin this information into many more adventures. This is where The Assassin's Knot excels and why I still have a soft spot for it.

However, the main action of the module is not as well done. As its title might suggest, The Assassin's Knot concerns the assassination (by strangulation) of Baron Grellus of Restenford. Clues left at the scene of his murder point toward the town of Garroten – you see what I mean about the town's infelicitous name? – and the characters are tasked with discovering the identity of the murderer and bringing him to justice. On the surface, this all sounds compelling. As most experienced referees no doubt know, murder mysteries are a lot more difficult to execute successfully than they might seem and it's rare that published adventure modules do this well. There are simply too many ways that things can go of the rails, which is a recipe for frustration and disappointment for the players.

That said, Lakofka makes a good effort at trying to obviate the most apparent stumbling blocks, starting with information presentation. He provides the referee with a clear summary of who did what when, in addition to their motivations. Thus, the referee is in a good position to handle the characters' investigation of the baron's murder. Unfortunately, the murder itself was motivated by insanity, which makes it much harder for anyone attempting to make sense of it. The matter isn't helped by the fact that the assassin who perpetrated the crime is, in turn, planning to double-cross his patron, thereby creating more contradictory information for the characters to sift. The end result is something of a chaotic muddle, despite Lakofka's best efforts to make things clear.

In the end, I view The Assassin's Knot as a failed experiment – or perhaps, if one is more charitable, a partially successful one. Garroten, its name to the contrary, is nicely imagined place filled with interesting NPCs. Likewise, the module as a whole is notable for not including a single dungeon. Instead, its text is entirely given over to providing clues, information, and NPCs with which to interact. It's an important departure from earlier D&D modules and it's for that reason that I look on it with more fondness than it might otherwise engender. It's not perfect by any means, but it gets a lot of points for effort.

12 comments:

  1. I remember this one primarily for the too-on-the-nose naming you point out. I always faintly hoped it would launch a series: "A Knifing in Stabbyville," "A Quarrel in Crossbow Land," "The Beatdown in Bludgeonton" and so on.

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  2. Great summation. Restenford is really one of the all-new time great home bases in tabletop history. I'd even rank it above Hommlet but that's certainly personal preference.

    Question for you Mr. Grognard: the new Judges Guild collection of Jennell Jaquays' work is out and features a number of issues of The Dungeoneer and Judges Guild Journals which are absolutely fascinating historical documents with some genuinely great (if rough) table-ready content. Would they be worthy of a series here? Pretty sure there are ways to get them without the commentary if you don't want to shell out for these huge tomes.

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    1. That would almost certainly make good entries in the series. The main problem is that, while I am familiar with most of Judges Guild's stand-alone adventures and supplements, I don't know The Dungeoneer and the Journals all that well, which limits my capacity to comment intelligently.

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    2. I think very few people are intimately familiar with them - which is why it would be interesting to hear your impressions!

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    3. I have copies of many of them, so I may need to take a closer look at them. Thanks for the suggestion.

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    4. I'd like to read your impressions too, for what it's worth. Reading your blog has gotten me digging through my collection of Dragon magazines from the early 80s, and seeing them in something of a new light.

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  3. I've never run this one, but have read it several times.

    There's a nifty blog (at least a dozen posts?) called "The Restenford Project" that has some deep dives into elements of Bone Hill, Restenford, and Garotten. I found that writer's insights into this module interesting, particularly his opinion that the assassin's guild was probably originally set inside Restenford.

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  4. I've run Bone Hill more times than I can count, and repurposed parts of it into other adventures numerous times. I've never run The Assassin's Knot, however.

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  5. I agree that murder mysteries are hard to pull off well in RPGs, and I never liked The Assassin's Knot anyway. Death of an Archmage (in Dragon issue #111) was actually not too bad, though I had to tweak a few things. An excellent murder mystery is the Traveller module Murder on Arcturus Station, because it's designed so that any one of eight NPCs could be the murderer, though of course it means a lot of careful prep for the GM. The Keith brothers did a similar thing in Duneraiders (any one of six crew members of the Orecrawler could be the spy). I wish one of the Keith brothers had designed a murder mystery for AD&D; they certainly had the mojo for it.

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    1. "An excellent murder mystery is the Traveller module Murder on Arcturus Station"

      A solid mystery. Youtuber Seth Skorkowsky did a vid covering the various tweaks he made when he ran the adventure to make it flow more smoothly. Mongoose tapped him to write the newest version, which is still very much the same open-ended approach to an investigation but much expanded from the original with higher production values.

      You can see the original, highly complimentary vid here:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ6M8pGa138&t=15s

      and the follow up talking about the updated version and a new prequel mystery scenario to boot:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4zoiDztAPQ

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  6. Reading this belatedly, I have to say that L2 had room for improvement. Renaming the town to "Lake Farmin" seemed to be one of the simplest means of making the town less ominous.

    The other thing that I'd do -- and that I'd also do with L1 -- is reduce the amount of magical items and the number of NPCs with class levels, but that is entirely because of personal taste.

    I've long intended to run something using those as a beginning point, but I've never yet gotten 'round to it.

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