There is certainly no shortage of zero level funnel modules for Dungeon Crawl Classics at this point.  From the wildly over the top Hole in the Sky, the epic adventure of Sailors on the Starless Sea, to the basic dungeon crawl of Portal Under the Stars, and many, many others. You’ve got options.  Still, they’re fun.  Plus, it’s nice to have a variety of ways to start a campaign.  The funnel isn’t just about finding your player characters, it’s about setting a tone for what’s to come.  Enter Edgar Johnson’s Bloom of the Blood Garden, for something that straddles the mundane and the gonzo.

The premise is easy.  You’ve got a weird manor where a bunch of peasants have gone to work and not returned.  The PCs are the friends and relatives of those missing peasants, come to the manor to figure out what’s happened.  They then try to get into the manor and figure out what’s going on.  Easy.  Right?  Of course not.

There’s a cool backstory, which is enough to make things interesting, but little enough that it won’t take much effort to modify or scrap it to fit your needs.  There are some great maps.  And I like that the encounters are on-theme throughout.  It doesn’t just feel like someone flipped to random pages of a monster book to choose what was in each room (see: a ton of old D&D modules).  Like many funnels, which are meant to be deadly, it does have a spot to restock your PCs if needed, which is nice.

If I have a complaint it’s that the module sets up a potential god and a potential patron, but doesn’t flesh out either as much as I’d like.  I’ve seen a couple modules that have the little patron section in the back, and that would have been greatly appreciated here.  Could I do the work?  Sure.  Do I want to?  Not really.

This one is going to fit very well into a sandbox setting I’ve been stitching together over the last year or so.  But it should also be good for one-shots or convention play.  

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