Review: Virginia Disastrum

My group recently wrapped up around 20 sessions in True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633. I used the PDF, and made ample use of the bookmarks as well as Microsoft Edge allowing you to have multiple copies of the same PDF in memory, each turned to a different page. As usual, I ran Shadowdark, though I did give the wizard the “summon” spell from LotFP. At the start of the campaign, my players were around level 4 and I gave them each a henchman. My overall verdict is that if you like the idea of OSR play style for Annihiliation set in colonial Williamsburg then you won’t be disappointed.

I was a bit nervous about running another hexcrawl after having been so dissatisfied with Hot Springs Island but Virginia Disastrum ran pretty well. The mundane hexes are pretty empty so the module isn’t constantly yelling “squirrel” at the players. The combination of the hooks and the river providing faster transport with few encumberance issues nudges the players towards heading straight towards “the warp.” Although the warp is still a hexcrawl (with more fine-grained hexes than the rest of the James River region), it feels like a dungeon that is a few days hexcrawl travel from town.

Both Shadowdark and LotFP assume SP=XP but I found that this resulted in very lumpy XP. One issue is that the campaign has a lot of dangerous spots and, as is typical for LotFP, often punishes PCs for interacting with the environment. The other is that the distance from town (and having to portage at the fall line) makes it punishingly time consuming to recover treasure. Between the two issues, my players would come across a location with looting opportunities and decide it wasn’t worth it to get a PC or henchman killed to aquire treasure that they wouldn’t realistically be able to transport anyway. On the other hand there’s one location where as long as you’re mildly curious and don’t do anything too obviously stupid, you not only get the opportunity to cure any parasites but also level up and get enough XP for halfway to the next level. DMs, a sure way to tell if your players have read the book is they will go straight to that location and then bail.

The “new people,” who show up fairly often on random encounter tables even outside the warp, are all delightfully weird and creepy. My players were very intrigued by the melanomous exterminators and were convinced they were shape shifters until they realized they could control animals. 

One thing I missed was a “calendar of events if the PCs do nothing.” I got the impression that the warp is supposed to grow over time, Dr Trefusis is supposed to get up to various shenanigans, etc, but I wasn’t sure when. I suspect that the information is in there, but it didn’t seem to be available in compact form. Likewise, I was never sure if the warp is  visible from Jamestown and if so when it becomes visible? I think it’s not visible from Jamestown, only inferred from the various signs and prodigies that come down the James.

It’s really cool to play on an actual map as this makes it easy to expand the map beyond the considerably large map already in the campaign. For instance, after my players got tired of heading up the James River, they portaged across the penninsula to the York River so as to approach the warp from another angle.

I recommend it, though I wouldn’t want to play in the setting for much longer than the 20 sessions or so that we did.