Vengeance at Trollbridge By Pickpocket Press (adapted for Shadowdark)

Adventure Framework 31: Vengeance at Trollbridge 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 and swapping out random treasure rolls for the Shadowdark treasure tables. LFG and Shadowdark share a lot of thematic DNA. Easy-peasy.

Play Time: One session, 3 hours – more to explore

General Thoughts: Again, Pickpocket Press does some great work with Adventure Frameworks. These well-made adventures are super-easy to adapt to Shadowdark and slot into my weekly RPG sessions. I also appreciate that Pickpocket Press doesn’t have a level band on the Frameworks, just a danger level. Of course, bigger risk = bigger rewards, as always.

Spoiler: There’s a lot of trolls living under a bridge, which features a collapsed gatehouse and a deep chasm. The gatehouse and chasm are a side-view map, which works for this adventure decently. I appreciate vertical maps and adventures that incorporate height (or depth) instead of flatland. Unlike the manticore adventure, the vertical chasm map wasn’t confused to my players, probably because there’s less going on that’s obscured. In Trollbridge, you can identify every room on the map, it’s just a side view.

Again, some good role-playing moments here. The party started clearing rubble and fending off (with some difficulty) troll attacks. After they climbed down to a bridge inside the chasm, Thraani (the barbarian that hired them) was dragged off by a bulbous, green-skinned, bulging-eyed trollspider. That was a real moment of tension. The trollspider was later dragging off Mark, the party’s bard, but Darin the thief just cut the spinneret cord and dropped both trollspider and bard to their doom, 100 feet below. There’s a whole GM question of PvP that comes up in situations like this, but the group handled it well.

I just used troll stats for most of the trolls, with a bump here or there for big “name brand” monsters. Pickpocket includes random rolling on Argosa (Low Fantasy Gaming) specific treasure categories, which I substituted in Shadowdark’s Treasure 0-3 and Treasure 4-6 tables. Having the players roll the d100 gives a bit of a dynamic setup; it is less the GM telling you what you find and more actual treasure-finding.

There’s more to unpack here, but I’m unsure if the group will return to the troll den now that Thraani is dead. Time will tell.

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

Available on DriveThruRPG: https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/251176/Adventure-Framework-31-Vengeance-at-Trollbridge?affiliate_id=14013

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