As always, October is the perfect time to get into some darker, scarier adventures, and The Deep One certainly fits the bill. In it, you're drawn into the cursed village of Orden, where people have become mysteriously infected by a flesh-rotting disease and, in some cases, madness. Within the village are alchemists, necromancers, infected ones, and madmen, and you must somehow navigate these people to determine what is causing this infection and how you can remove the Deep One, an extra-planar eldritch horror, from their midst.

The Deep One is a genuinely creepy adventure what is great fun to play in a darkened room lit by candles with some atmospheric music going. People become jumpy, and it's hard for players to figure out who to trust. The adventure comes in three parts, allowing players to both investigate and fight, and, since there is a real chance the PCs will become infected, they're extra-motivated to stop the madness. The final battle was appropriately difficult, and players felt a genuine sense of relief when they successfully finished the adventure.

However, there are some issues with the adventure, most notably involving railroading and formatting. Parts of the adventure were quite difficult to read and understand, and as the DM I had to do a lot of pre-game reading and note-taking; if I had to scan during the adventure, we had to stop everything since I had difficulty reading the page. While the formatting does contribute to the creepiness of the adventure, much of it was ultimately more harmful than good. In the future, I would lighten the background, not use red font, and use a standard font instead of stylized. The adventure is genuinely creepy enough that these dressings didn't really add much.

There is also quite a bit of railroading, especially at the end of the first chapter. Overall, neither I nor my players minded that too much since it contributed to the creepiness of the adventure, but it did occasionally frustrate characters that there was no way out of the situation. Perhaps instead of making the encounter with Myn and Wil go a particular way, there can be different pathways? Re-organizing that section and labeling sections and not having so much be read verbatim could also help.

However, like I said, this is a really good, creepy adventure. It definitely draws you in and gets you invested, and it has enough combative and roleplay elements to keep just about anyone invested. If you'd like a horror adventure to play, I would recommend you give this one a try.

I'm not a big horror guy, but when I was talking to Joshua about Jaden's adventure, I became interested and wanted to give it a look. The cover already pulls you in, making you think of a bunyip or other murderous sprite dwelling in the reeds surrounding a lake or swamp. The Deep One is a merge of numerous different psychological and supsense horror classics: Relic, IT, The Dark Tower, The Tomb of Dracula, Pet Semetary, and other titles that feed on primal human fears. The layout is stark, simple, and fuels the mood of the adventure all the way through - but what The Deep One also does is make the players directly invested in the conflict, direclty invested in the small town of Orden and the people and their plight. While there are some minor issues with typos and at times the formatting seems to fall off at points, overall Jaden put a great deal of time into creating an excellent dark and gritty adventure.

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