The folks over at Vortex Verlag provided me with a copy of this book. No other compensation was provided for me to review it.

I never know if someone reading one of my reviews has previously read something from me or not, so I always feel like I need to put in a few qualifying statements when I talk about anything related to Dungeons & Dragons.  So, here it is.  I don’t like the game.  It’s not the RPG I started with and when I have tried it (every edition except for 4th), I’ve disliked the experience.  Consequently, I don’t think of myself as someone who would seek out or read a lot of material around that particular game.  Yet, time and again, I do just that.  I’ve written several reviews of D&D modules and the like, because even if I don’t like the rules, the material can still be rich and rewarding, and can be worked into games I actually do like.  In the past, I’ve resisted doing reviews for D&D 5e products when folks have reached out to me, but I’ve realized that I have to get over myself and be more open. Though books that are primarily focused on rules and stats are going to just fly right over my head.  When the folks at Vortex Verlag asked me to look at their sourcebook and adventure, The Straight Way Lost, I decided to go for it.  I’m glad I did, as this is a fascinating book, and one that could make for some really great roleplaying.

Let me get rules stuff out of the way, first, as it’s the part that I don’t have a lot to say about.  I only played 5e for a short time, and as always happens when I play any version D&D, I understood the rules just enough for them to annoy the crap out of me.  So, I’m not going to be able to tell you if these rules modifications will be “good” for your 5e game.  But I can at least tell you what the book contains.  There are a few rules alterations.  For setting-specific reasons, the traditional alignments aren’t used.  Instead, there is a conflict between Permanence and Possibility, which I think is a cool way of looking at Law VS Chaos without some of the baggage that comes with those terms (like how “Chaos” is often incorrectly used as a synonym for “Evil”).  There are a few restrictions on class and species choice, and also a few tweaks on magic.  It all makes sense to me, and though I know there’s a camp that doesn’t like any restrictions on anything, I don’t think those players are going to be into this adventure anyway, so it shouldn’t be a problem. This is not a “one size fits all” book.  There are a few new species and classes, as well as a few bits to plug in that will make your characters more interesting to roleplay and fitting for their time and place.  For example, you’ll choose a dark secret, a good deed, and a happy memory.  These will play into things that happen in the adventure, too, which is nice.  There is also a Dismay tracker.  This functions similarly to the Sanity mechanic in Call of Cthulhu.  The more horrible things your character sees or experiences, the lower their emotional state can fall.  There are also stat blocks for a bunch of NPCs as well as for an array of creatures.  The rules stuff takes up a relatively small part of the book, about seventy pages out of the near four hundred.  And even within those seventy pages, there’s actually a lot of setting information and flavor.

With the rules stuff out of the way, let’s get into the meat of the book.  It is set in a fantastical, alternate version of Florence in 1492.  In this world, Dante wrote his Divine Comedy based on his actual journey, but it was never published, so while the PCs likely know of Dante as a beloved poet, they are unaware of the events depicted in Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.  The setting reminds me a bit of Ars Magica in that it is almost our world, but our world as it was believed to be by the people who lived in it.  Here, the Biblical God is real and he actually cast Lucifer down to the Earth, where the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso of Dante all actually exist as physical locations (though in another “dimension” in this book).  And at the same time, the Fae exist, demi-humans exist, and magic is real, yet history has played out in much the same way and most historical figures are as they were (though a few are secretly not entirely human).  You don’t have to be a religious person to play characters who are, though sometimes that is more palatable for people when the religions and gods aren’t connected to our real world.  This is one of the things that the GM and players are going to have to be on the same page about in order for this adventure to work.  The general setting presented in the book has a lot of potential for further play, or even for running some earlier scenarios before embarking on the epic presented here.  Because the setting is very close to our real history, author Melina Sedó (with Andreas Wichter, Benjamin Strack-Zimmermann, and Michel Strack-Zimmermann) often suggests reading further about certain subjects, or tracking down actual art or photos of locations to flesh out your game.

As far as the adventure itself, it takes up more than half of the book, is quite extensive, and is broken into scenes.  Though there is a bit of material that might allow for some “sandbox” play in places, this adventure is very much not a sandbox.  It is instead linear or “on rails.”  The term “railroading” has very negative connotations in the RPG hobby, but when I say this is on rails, I don’t mean it in a bad way.  However, it’s important that everyone is on board.  Look at the classic Call of Cthulhu campaign Horror on the Orient Express, for example.  The players of that campaign have to be committed to traveling from London to Istanbul via a certain route. What happens along the way might be up to player choices, however, the overall thing will still progress in a certain way.  If you have a player who refuses to go from one location to the next, then the campaign simply isn’t going to happen.  In the same way, this adventure has an inciting incident, a bit of investigation, and then a mission.  If players aren’t willing to go on the mission, and then aren’t willing to take on the journey into literal Hell, beyond, and back, then the adventure won’t happen.  Now, the adventure does not dictate how your characters interact with the various steps of the story or the creatures, obstacles, and characters they meet along the way.  There is a lot of room for roleplaying and character choice.  But for the adventure to work, that roleplaying and character choice should be within the context of the scene progression.  So, make sure your players are on board.  This is definitely a game that should have a ‘session zero,’ even if it’s only a virtual one.  Folks need to be comfortable with the setting, the content, the restrictions and additions, and with the somewhat linear nature of the adventure, or else they’re going to be unhappy.

In very broad strokes, there are five major parts of the adventure.  It begins with a big social event, a murder, and an investigation.  In this part, there are a lot of NPCs to juggle, some world building to get across to the players, and some foreshadowing of things to come.  Large social events are not my strong suit, in reality or in games, so I imagine this would be a challenging part for me.  I would likely make lots of 3X5 cards with the various characters, their obvious traits, and any secrets or clues they might reveal.  When this part is finished, the characters go out into the Tuscan countryside to follow a lead, where they meet some strange people and begin the major arc of the story.  The second major part is the descent into Hell.  Like Dante in his poem, they’ll have a guide who can show them the way, give some advice, and answer some questions, but will usually not help them if they get into fights.  The next part is Purgatory, where things are a bit less glum, and then from there, to an Earthly Paradise, where they’ll find some peace as well as some answers.  Finally, they’ll return to our world, where hopefully they can reveal the conspirators and save Florence.

A question I’m left with is “how long will this all take?”  I mean, in real, face to face hours of gaming.  Obviously, this can vary widely depending on the makeup of your group, but I could imagine it taking a really long time to get through the whole adventure, or it might be only be a handful of sessions.  There are seven acts, and each act is broken into between six and sixteen scenes.  Many scenes might take only a few minutes of gameplay, while others might take a whole session.  If I ran it, I think my goal might be to do an act per three hour session, though I suspect the first act, with all its many moving parts and important character interactions, might take two sessions, and the third act, the journey down into the Inferno might take two or three sessions.  I’d be wary of allowing the Inferno section to go on for too long, however, as it’s so bleak and grim that I could see it starting to feel like a slog if they were stuck in hell for too long.  What does that mean?  Ten sessions, maybe?  I wonder.  I suspect it might end up being double that.  Anyway, there’s plenty of potential, not only within the main story, but for side adventures, and for follow-up adventures.  You could use this book to build several years worth of gaming, especially as you read and get inspired by some of the real-world history around the time and place. On a personal note, I’m not generally a fan of the “magic goes away” branch of alternate, fantastic history. For example, I didn’t like the 3rd Edition of Ars Magica‘s idea that magic in the world was dying because of the rise of reason. If I ran an Ars Magica game that somehow went on for many years of real time, and thus many decades, if not centuries of in-game time, I would want to explore the ideas of how history moves forward while magic and the Order of Hermes is still around. Do mages still lurk in the shadows in 1600? Or do they reveal themselves as the New World is opened? I mention that, because one possible way The Straight Way Lost ends could lead to a very different progress of time, one where demi-humans no longer have to hide their true nature, and that might be a really cool alternate history to continue to explore when this adventure is done.

The above question leads me to another thought.  As I mentioned in my opening, I’m not a D&D fan, but I’m also something of a realist.  It’s safe to say that 5e is not only the most popular edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but for better or worse, probably the most popular single RPG in the history of the hobby.  So, producing a book like this, that is designed to be compatible with 5e makes perfect sense.  That said, I don’t think D&D is the right game for this adventure, because this is largely about investigation, contemplation, and deep roleplaying, while at its core, D&D is about killing monsters and taking their stuff. Yes. You can play it in other ways, but the rules are meant for and reward you for playing violent, thieving sociopaths.  If you go into The Straight Way Lost with the idea that you’re going to battle your way through hell, slay demon princes, and eventually kick Satan in the nuts, you aren’t going to enjoy this adventure.  I know the old saying, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”  Call of Cthulhu specifically and Basic Roleplaying generally may sometimes appear to be my hammer.  Yet, I couldn’t help but think time and again how much more appropriate BRP would be for this adventure.  The fact that the author doesn’t even provide stats for several of the beings, because there would be no point as no player character could hope to do any appreciable damage to it, was much like the situation in Call of Cthulhu, where the combined armies of the world couldn’t hope to stop even a relatively minor creature like ol’ Cthulhu (forget about universe-scale something like Yog-Sothoth).  What is a human, even a powerful wizard, going to do in the face of a prince of Hell or one of God’s own messengers?  Nothing.  That’s what. They’re functioning on a different scale by orders of magnitude.  Throughout the book, the author seems aware of the problem, mentioning things you might do either to stop players from going full murder-hobo, or how to deal with the after-effects of such times.  Again, that makes sense, because D&D is a rules set that is designed to reward players for killing everything and stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.  This is an adventure that rewards paying attention, doing the right thing, negotiating, helping people out, convincing monsters to let you pass, sneaking around, finding stuff out, etc.  You could easily go through this entire adventure without ever drawing a sword.  There is potential for combat, sure, but more as a last resort.  I don’t think there is anywhere in the course of the adventure where combat is the only way to proceed.  This is also why I’m not quite sure how long the whole thing would take, because one of the primary things that takes up a lot of time in game sessions is combat, and if your players are smart, they’ll avoid combat like the plague, which also means they might cut through some sequences in fairly rapid succession.

One of the many nice things about the book is that vast swaths of it are system agnostic.  Yes, there are bits of mechanics for plugging it into D&D 5e, but much of the book is perfectly useful for whatever your pet system might be.  I mentioned Ars Magica before, because there are elements of tone and the whole “almost our world, but not quite” aspect that are similar.  While reading, I also thought about how it might be cool to use this adventure with Ars Magica.  If you had an Italian-set covenant that lasted from the 1200s, up through the late 1400s, perhaps a few of your characters might get involved in these happenings?  It might be an interesting reason for a winter covenant to come back around to spring, if things went well, or for an autumn covenant to fall into winter.  Anyway, it’s an idea.

I would be remiss not to mention the artwork, which is gorgeous and copious.  I don’t have a lot to say about it beyond that it does a great job of setting a tone and giving a GM some visual inspiration, which is exactly what I want in an RPG book.

I feel like I’m leaving a lot of my thoughts unwritten, which I suppose is the nature of reviews like this.  It took me a while to read the book, in part because it’s fairly involved, but also because I broke part way through to go back and actually read Dante’s Inferno, which I’ve somehow never read before.  As I write this, I’m most of the way through Purgatorio.  I’m not going to lie and tell you I “get” Dante.  Poetry isn’t something I’ve ever been very literate in, and a lot of his references are very much related to his local area and the time in which he was writing.  Still, there are compelling and “timeless” elements that I suppose are why people are still coming back to it seven centuries later.

The Straight Way Lost is an impressive work.  I often say that I like roleplaying games that are “opinionated.”  By that I mean games that aren’t just meant to be blandly inoffensive to the largest number of potential buyers, but instead have something particular to say.  Is The Straight Way Lost going to be for every game table?  No.  However, for the right table, this is going to be an adventure folks will remember for the rest of their lives.  For people who prefer delving into their characters, immersing themselves in a setting, and solving problems without flashing blades, this might just be the book for you.  And if you’re like me, and somewhat put off by seeing 5e on a book, don’t be.  I know there are also a lot of folks who buy RPG books to read them as much as to actually bring them to the table. For those folks, this is definitely one to pick up.

Visit Vortex Verlag here: https://vortex-verlag.com/

Look here for my unboxing video if you want to see what the book looks like.

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