The Temple of the Blood Moth
By Jacob Butcher
Edited by Skerples
If you want a bit more science in your fantasy The Temple of the Blood Moth by Jacob Butcher is a great place to start at the price point. This 24-page, black and white module is a perfect short adventure for an extended session at a convention or a 2-4 nights delve for your weekly game. The book is designed to work with your standard OSR games, like Old School Essentials, but could easily be converted to 5e with little problem. It is considered a “hard” adventure for levels 1-3 and “moderate” difficulty for levels 4-5. The layout of the book conforms to the 2-page spread motif that is popular right now. This makes for easy use at the table whether in physical form or on a PDF reader. The art and maps of the books matches the tone, which is an eerie and grotesque mutation of a common D&D type temple adventure.
According to the zine you will find, “Inside you’ll find Monsters, original Spells, new Magic Items, and three Random Tables for Mutations, Revelations, and Madness” and it is true. The adventure has plenty of cosmic-style horror with a healthy side of body-horror. The basic premise of the plot, without spoiling the adventure is that zealots are kidnapping people for sacrifice to their abomination of a god, The Blood Moth. If you put this into your existing campaign world just know it could forever change it with the ramifications of the story. Also, the PCs can go through some intense, will say “changes”, over the course of play. This adventure is not for the faint of heart.
The adventure is provided with several hooks to get the PCs started, in general they mostly revolve around the players finding an abandoned town with tracks leading to the temple. This leaves a lot of room for interpretation or hacking. One option given is to have the players wake up in the temple, taken as prisoners and working their way out. This would be a good option for convention play in my assessment.
One of the features that I like a lot was an escalating random encounter chart. The chart goes from one to twelve with the challenges being greater the higher the number rolled. Surface level encounters roll a d6 and the deeper you go the die grows to a d8, d10, and then 2d6. I am sure this has been used before, but this is the first time that I have seen it, so I was impressed. It comes with several handy random charts and a few new spells that fit the theme of the zine overall.
I think this is a great zine for the $5 pdf price point. Is it perfect, no. It has some issues with the many of the combatants having the Sleep spell, some of the damage by the new creatures is a bit intense, and without modification the BBG is going to be rarely seen in any adventure. All these issues are significantly outweighed by the other quality bits you receive inside with a cool setting and theme. You can smooth out the rough edges with just a minor amount of work. It is a strong recommendation from this blogger, check it out.
Click here to buy The Temple of the Blood Moth
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