The Haunting of Hida Dasan

A Review

This adventure takes the characters to a small Crab town reeling from the brutal murder of an entire unit of veteran soldiers. The murderer? Hida Dasan, one of their own. The village headman asks the PCs to examine the body to help determine the cause of Dasan’s rampage. His body is being examined by three priests however, and they won’t finish for three days. The PCs must wait for them to finish, which gives them time to learn about Dasan during the day, and the Lying Darkness time to attack them at their most vulnerable: in their dreams.

I really enjoyed this adventure.

I have something of a talent for gory and weird descriptions, and a field full of eviscerated bodies provides ample opportunity for the first and creepy dreams provide for the second. Though, one thing I was really hoping for didn’t come to pass; I wanted my duelist PC to challenge one of the Crab ambushers in the beginning of the adventure.

When the PC invariably won the roll to strike first, just before he rolled damage someone was going to shout halt. The PC would’ve had the opportunity to check his strike or continue. Regardless, the Crab stands down. So if the PC had elected to continue swinging, they would’ve buried their sword in a guy standing at attention. I would’ve died laughing. Can’t win them all I guess.

The adventure is tight overall and the dream sequences are sufficiently weird. Everyone had fun, and the PCs enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on. The variety of people for PCs to get information made each part of the investigation feel fresh.

The fight against Dasan went okay. One of the PCs severed his leg, which I should’ve hade slow him down for a few turns to help signal that they were on the right track to beat him. My signaling that he needed to be decapitated to defeat him could’ve been better too. Overall though, it achieved its objective of being scary. I suspect it was also added by the writer to inject some combat into the adventure.

As with Ichime Castle, there are a number of problems I had to resolve to run the adventure.

It’s written for a Kitsuki. Kaagi gets invited back to the village to help with the investigation because of his family’s reputation for being able to detect poisons. What do you do if your PCs don’t have a reputation for possessing this morally dubious knowledge? The solution I landed on was to have the headman of the village be aware of the party’s reputation for solving mysteries.

If I run this again, I’m going to have the PCs get stuck in the village during a torrential rain that makes travel impossible for several days. Then the focus will be on the weird stuff that’s happening to them, rather than an unsolvable investigation.

There was no rationale for Kurusu to get involved with the Lying Darkness. PCs always want to understand these things and knowing why he was consumed helps run him. I decided he had been in love with Dasan’s wife, Kohi, and he traded his humanity to get rid of Dasan.

There wasn’t any guidance on how to signal to the PCs that dream Dasan can be defeated by decapitation. I tried signaling by showing that his neck was uninjured and then having his leg dissipate once it was amputated, but I didn’t quite have it right. If I run this again, I’ll penalize Dasan for a few rounds if they cut one of his limbs off, do something else to draw attention to his neck, and maybe describe his face as being like a porcelain mask, to make the PCs think of zombies and decapitation.

The ending is anticlimactic from a PC perspective. They think they are trying to discover why Dasan went mad and murdered all his friends. Instead there is a super creepy monster reveal. That’s dramatic, but then the adventure just sort of stops. The PCs don’t really get the answers they were looking for. There isn’t really any closure of the mystery. That’s fine for Kaagi, because unlike PCs, he won’t flounder around trying to figure out what piece of information he missed.

Stranding the PCs due to weather provides better closure because the Lying Darkness reveal and the fire provides a partial answer to the question of what is happening in this creepy village. Whereas they don’t really get an answer to what happened to Hida Dasan.

The adventure includes a map of the village and Dasan’s house, and I’m not really sure why.

Final Thoughts

I liked this adventure more than Death at Ichime Castle. It shows off The Lying Darkness while demonstrating that it is not from the Shadowlands. Like Ichime, it can’t really be played out of the box, but that doesn’t bother me. They took a risk with the format. It didn’t pay off 100% from an adventure perspective, but the experience for the GM, or someone who just likes to read, overall is much better than if they’d just published a book with four adventures.