Whitestone Tower By Pickpocket Press (Shadowdark)

Adventure Framework 42: Whitestone Tower by Pickpocket Press was written for Low Fantasy Gaming (LFG; now the Tales of Argosa RPG). I ran it in Shadowdark, just swapping out LFG stats for Shadowdark stats. LFG and Shadowdark share a lot of thematic DNA, so it was an easy, on-the-fly conversion.

Play Time: One session, 3 hours.

General Thoughts: Pickpocket Press is a favorite of mine. The Adventure Framework series gives me a collection of well-designed adventures that I can plug-and-play for my weekly RPG sessions. Not a lot of mental overhead to adapt and make them work – and the whole Low Fantasy RPG is the same as my general sword and sorcery RPG style.

This adventure features a manticore in a tower. The tower doesn’t have an interior map (it does have a terrain map and a side-view image of the tower itself), which lead to some confusion with my players. Having to explain there’s double-doors at the landing of the stairway, which continues upwards, is a lot easier with visual perspective.

There’s some really great things about this: for example, Malmogg the berserker is camped outside, and his cult-tribe worships the manticore, bringing it meat in exchange for protection. Malmogg has a whole plot that didn’t get brought into play this session, but it was wonderful when the adventurers went in thinking they’re on a monster hunt and suddenly had to negotiate with zealots.

Good setups kept happening the entire time I was running this: when trying to seek shelter from the manticore’s tail spikes, the bard ran into the tower and opened a door randomly, hoping to duck inside. Instead, he nearly walked right into a collapsed cesspool full of rot grubs, and had to quickly evaluate his options. The party decided to fight the manticore, and were suddenly surprised when it took off airborne and then blasted them with tail spikes from a far distance. Things like this, that feel of an ecology or environment that isn’t just “kill, loot, repeat,” are what make me a Pickpocket fan.

Pickpocket just released Tales of Argosa, the next edition of LFG. I’m excited to see where that goes. I’ll include a link to it as well as this adventure.

Available on DriveThruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/260668/adventure-framework-42-whitestone-tower?affiliate_id=14013

Tales of Argosa RPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/479871/tales-of-argosa?affiliate_id=14013