Ruination Pilgrimage: The Mistress of Sorrow
Delving into medieval horror
Ruination Pilgrimage is out! And so is the Bestiary and so is the book of Adventures & Pilgrimages! Why do I, one who usually just talks about DCC, bring this up? Well, one part is because Donn Stroud wrote this and he’s created one brilliant DCC material before, my favorite of which is The Lesser Key of the Celestial Legion. If you pair that with his The Forgotten Rites of the Moldering Dead, you can see the DNA forming for what would become Ruination Pilgrimage. The other part is simply because I wrote one of the adventures in the Adventures & Pilgrimages book. That adventure is titled The Mistress of Sorrow. Just like with children, it can be hard to pick the favorite adventure that I’ve written, but I think this may be one of my best. So let’s talk about what exactly Ruination Pilgrimage is and a bit about my little adventure.
Ruination Pilgrimage is a Panic Engine Game (aka, it uses the Mothership system as a basis) of horror, plague, warfare, and demons set in a medieval age. The book contains the rules, setting info, and numerous tables to help game masters run their games. Tonally, the game owes a lot of inspiration to Between Two Fires. It’s an excellent book that had been on my radar before Donn asked me to write an adventure, but that request is what got me to dive into it. I actually listened to the audiobook and can promise that its excellent!
To help you imagine the game setting, my one sentence description would be: quest through a demonic bubonic plague, fight back hell, and don’t let it take you down with it.
The players can choose one of the following classes: Fighter, Priest, Merchant, Scholar, or Laborer. It’s got tables to generate past jobs (which inform skills and stat bonuses), starting inventory kits, and a characteristic vice. The game master leans on these vices similar to how Mothership uses Stress. But instead of Stress, we have Sorrow and characters might eventually find themselves wallowing in Despair.
Donn contacted me a few months before he launched his Kickstarter. He liked the work I’d put out and was curious if I’d be down to write an adventure between 500-1000 words. Donn’s work is great and said “yes” without any hesitation. I mentioned his DCC stuff above, but he’s also behind Isle of the Plangent Mage for OSE, plus Dead Planet and A Pound of Flesh for Mothership. I was stoked to work along with/for someone whose got that as their list of credentials.
Anyway, I got to thinking about what I could write for him. I outlined one adventure that was a new idea and wrote a pitch for it. It was set in a starving city where a lottery was held for a masquerade where you could eat your fill (and then you were fed to demons). But I also readied a pitch for an adventure that I ran in 2019, back when I was still running 5e. Let me just say that it was the “least 5e” adventure I ever ran in 5e. The players technically rolled initiative twice, but there was never any real combat. It’s was 3 hours & 55 minutes of investigation with about 5 minutes of me pretending that I actually had stat blocks for the creature that they were fighting. And of course, that’s the pitch that Donn liked.
I still had an old google doc with notes from that adventure so I had good reference material. That said, a fair bit of it was page references to where monsters were in various 5e books. I never used that stuff when I ran it back then, but the ideas present were still good. The core of the actual adventures is that the PCs arrive in a very cursed town that is on the brink of economic and spiritual collapse. The vineyard owner and the general store owner have an unspoken love, but the vineyard owner killed her husband to escape his abuse and is now haunted by him even in death. He wanders through their vineyard at night (souring the grapes) and calls her name from under her window. There’s a couple more horribly cursed folks but I won’t spoil everything. Essentially, there’s a demonic entity that offers people deals that turn out horrible for them. It’s a real monkey’s paw situation.
So the PCs need to uncover clues, perhaps there’s some fighting or perhaps not. I looked at short Mothership adventures to get a feel for how to best actually write the adventure. What I ended up enjoying the most and trying to emulate in a presentation style was how Mothership adventures were so concisely written in Dissident Whispers. After getting a feel for the scope that I wanted to accomplish, I got to writing out what was already in my mind. At the end, I sent Donn an adventure that was precisely 1000 words. He changed up a few things for the eventual publication, but those were all mechanical. After all, the other adventure writers and myself were writing based off of an unfinished version of the rules set!
I can now say that I have an adventure published alongside folks like Diogo Nogueira (Halls of the Blood King and so much more!), Alan Gerding, Ben Laurence (Through Ultan’s Door), Sean McCoy (Mothership), Benjamin Kanelos, Perplexing Ruins , Alex T, and James Pozenel (Netcrawl)! If I make my own game, I’d be thrilled to have a team like that. So if you dig Mothership or even just percentile systems and like those horrific vibes, go check out Ruination Pilgrimage!
What’s your take on Ruination Pilgrimage? Thoughts on more games using the Mothership engine?
What else is going on?
Big Trouble For A Little Blood
We are in the last 24 hours! It’s your last chance to get it at the special price for Kickstarter backers.
