The Headless Horseman

The Headless Horseman is a 2nd level adventure by Oliver Korpilla. Art is by Bernd Jans, Earl Geier, Michael Scotta, Elizabeth Porter, The Forge, Bradley K. McDevitt, and Gary Dupuis. The publisher is Mount Parnassus Games.

This adventure uses the Effect Engine System (author Sarah Newton). The link to the EES SRD in the product is broken, but it seems to be a method for organizing information within an adventure so that it can be accessed and used by the Game Master in a quick and easy fashion.

If so, it is an unmitigated success in this adventure.

(Yes, in Dungeon Crawl Classics the Game Master is the Judge, but the Effect Engine System is not game-specific.)

The storyline here is excellent, without being in any sense a railroad. The section on The Living Map (with evocative locations) is cool, so long as the judge remembers to map these locations as play occurs for the sake of consistency. I rather like the Horrors of the Enchanted Forest, and in particular the Delusion Newts. There is a lot of information on staging these encounters, including how to evade them.

There is a note that the adventure might work well in conjunction with the setting of Transylvanian Adventures, and I concur wholeheartedly. It would also work well in the Weird West of Dark Trails Weird Frontiers or Black Powder, Black Magic. I would also recommend this adventure as an add-on for anyone running the Faerie Tales From Unlit Shores series.

Beyond the shadow of a doubt, what the author and publisher are doing here is different from what other Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures provide. That is actually a great reason to grab this one up...It is a solid offering, well-organized, and which can be played in one or two four-hour sessions.

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