Black Rose Keep by Simone Matzanke is a role playing game supplement published by Free League Publishing through the Free League Workshop Community Content Programme for use with Forbidden Lands.
The supplement is available as a 12 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover and one the front matter.
This is an adventure site for the Forbidden Lands and is a castle. The opening paragraph on the cover explains this provides the background for a short to medium adventure and involves a woman living in a castle overgrown by roses.
The first page of content has a description and then gives the Background. The castle was commissioned 300 years ago and, thanks to some machinations by a demon, the lord and his wife ended up dead and their daughter was, and still is, cursed.
Getting Here has two hooks for getting characters involved; being given information by a witch or hearing about a missing young man.
Legend has two variations for the site, depending on how the characters hear it. These are duplicated in handouts at the back.
Next is a map of the castle followed by a description of the various locations.
Monsters and NPCs describes the daughter, the missing young man and the demon.
Events has several events to happen.
The final page, Handouts, has the two versions of the Legend as mentioned earlier.
Black Rose Keep in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and has enough different sections that these would have been useful. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are a number of stock art black and white illustrations. Presentation is decent.
This supplement was originally done for a 24-hour RPG supplement contest, and is a nice little adventure site for that, especially as it’s Pay What You Want. It might be possible to flesh the adventure site out further if desired. Black Rose Keep is a good little supplement and it can be found by clicking here.
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