Game: Silence Is Golden
Publisher: Pisces All Media
Series: d20
Reviewer: sunken
Review Dated: 7th, October 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 91
Average Score: 8.27
Silence is Golden is a module of 73 pages that provides the town of Innsmouth from H.P. Lovecraft’s novella Shadow Over Innsmouth for play in a d20 game. The game that the module is written specifically for, Eternium d20, has character classes such as Teen, Kid, Wage Slave and so on and this means that the town is a good beginning campaign for more normal type characters. Eternium has a lot of new Feats in it including non-combat ones so the characters fit the setting real well.
The map of Innsmouth is not too flash, but it is described as “hand-drawn” and is quite deliberately meant to be the sort of map a kid might have in their possession. I am copying it as a handout.
On the topic of handouts, there are several provided for this module as in addition to a very detailed and cool description of the town building by building there is also a murder mystery to solve. The handouts and mystery are super. They really add to the value of this module and are a fun way to get the player characters involved straight away. the module is old skool without being stupidly old fashioned.
Another thing I thought was really cool was that it goes out of its way to say that there is no Cthulhu mythos monster or similar as the big threat. Theres a writeup of the Deep One monster but you get the feeling this is just as a addon not a must-use thing. The attitude is that Lovecraft was about suspense and that always having some kind of monster all the time is no good for play. I have to agree. It’s easy to add a monster to a module, it’s very hard to get rid of one if all the module has going for it is a monster encounter.
Silence Is Golden is very entertaining and nicely written.
I have also added the URL of the support pages on the Pisces website. Not much there yet but it is good to see this sort of module and support come back.
I am running the adventure unchanged BTW, it doesn’t need adaptation to run. Excellent.
7.5/10 IMO.
