Review: Thoughts on The Lightless Beacon

[Roger Bell_West's autoposter]

[The Lightless Beacon](https://www.chaosium.com/we-are-all-us-free-adventures/)
is an adventure by Leigh Carr with Lynne Hardy, released to
commemorate the death of Greg Stafford. I recently ran it for
[Whartson Hall](https://tekeli.li/whartson-hall/).

Generally it holds together, but – particularly since it's
written for novice GMs and players – there are some things I think
could be better expressed. For example, the first clue:

> A successful **Spot Hidden** roll reveals small, muddy, animal-like
> footprints in front of the main cottage door but, beneath these, are
> distinct boot prints, only partially obscured by the overlaying
> track marks. A successful **Natural World** or **Science (Biology**
> or **Zoology)** roll concludes that the small footprints appear
> duck-like in nature; a Hard success suggests that there is something
> unusual about these footprints, as if they may be from an as yet
> unidentified species.

The party fixated on the duck-like nature of the prints. It might have
helped if somewhere the adventure had said that these (being the
prints of the you-know-what) are closer in size to the footprints of a
human child.

There's a body to be found on the island, but it's described only as
"in the thicket", which occupies the entire rear area of the place.
Some clue as to just where in the thicket it should be found would be
helpful.

Why on Earth is anyone bothering to maintain _two_ jetties on a tiny
island, where boats only call every few weeks with supplies and
replacement crew? (My players never even found the second one, and it
doesn't have much plot significance except to give them an escape boat
without making it available at the start. Though chances are they have
their lifeboat anyway.)

Most importantly, the introduction has the PCs being put into a rowing
boat from a sinking coastal steamer, and arriving at the lighthouse as
it's the nearest bit of land. But what about other passengers?
Shouldn't some of them be aiming for this island too, rather than
going an uncertain distance towards the mainland? _Are_ there any
other passengers? What about the crew?

The adventure doesn't, to me, feel particularly Lovecraftian. There
are clues to be found and pieced together, and that's great, but the
climax is a fight against monsters that will happen whether or not
they've worked out what was going on (and if the players don't already
know the significance of Innsmouth – to be fair, that's probably not
many players these days – it'll make no sense at all). It doesn't help
that the party is desperately under-armed for a physical
confrontation, and has no other means of solving the problem. There
also aren't many opportunities for sanity loss.

It's OK, I guess, and it made a decent evening filler, but there's a
lot more that could have been done with a little more effort.

https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2019/11/Thoughts_on_The_Lightless_Beacon.html