Sacrebleu! is a role playing game supplement written and published by Tito B.A. This is an adventure for 4-8 characters of level 1-3 that is intended for use with the OSR-derived Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells, but there are options for using it with other systems too. It is published under a Creative Commons under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (rather than the Open Game License, which is a bit odd and possibly inaccurate).
This is a 13 page supplement that is available as a Pay What You Want PDF from RPGNow. One page is the front cover and one page is legal and a list of inspirations.
The first page of content has a colour hex map of the island of Erewhon; the style is that seen in some earlier D&D supplements.
The Introduction is another page and explains that this is a system-agnostic adventure (well, for D&D-based systems anyway by the looks of it) with conversion advice for various monsters. There are details on travelling on the island and weekly weather (one result being a rain of frogs which doubles the number of man-eating black lion tamarins encountered). Finally, there are game stats for a number of guns, for the goblins of the island have guns. And speak French.
The next page has Wilderness Encounters. There are two main tables, a d20 and a d10, with some unique encounters.
Fairmead is the island’s village, which was recently attacked by goblins. This page gives its population and some important NPCs and locations.
Adventuring Around Fairmead gives some GM’s information on the recent goblin attack, two random encounter tables for the area, a short list of rumours and details on three shops and two ships.
Ambush by the Old Road has an encounter with goblins equipped with World War I weapons outside the village.
Goblin Burrow is the lair of the goblins. There is a map and the introductory text explains why the goblins have guns and speak French.
Rich Man’s Swamp is another area, with various encounters. The swamp is also where the valuable, and addictive, fungus that the island’s wealth comes from, with a recipe for a salve.
Hill Temple is a final small location that used to be occupied by monks but is now occupied by the ruler of Fairmead, who is in hiding after being injured by the goblins. There is also a set of three d4 tables for rolling up random scroll names.
Sacrebleu! in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and a table of contents. Even though it is not that long, such would have been useful. Navigation is quite poor. The text does not maintain any particular format, having different layouts on most pages. It appeared to be largely error-free. There are various black and white stock illustrations and photos, black and white maps of some locations and the colour map of the island. Presentation is pretty good.
This is essentially a short sandbox wilderness hex crawl. Characters can move around the island as they wish, although there are only a few main encounters. Once they have had all of those, the adventure could be considered to be over. The addition of guns – and there is a reason for this, one which players can find out – should come as a nasty surprise. Hopefully all of them will be destroyed or the ammunition used up by the time the characters get them; ammunition is definitely limited.
This may be a small adventure, but it’s really quite an interesting one, with a fair amount of content. Perhaps it could be developed further and the island expanded, or at least more encounters adding in some way. Sacrebleu! is a nice little adventure and it can be checked out for free by clicking here.
Leave a Reply