Review: A Night at the Golden Duck

This weekend I ran Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess’ zine-module A Night At The Golden Duck.

We played it as a one-shot with two veteran players and one complete newbie. I had them roll up Into the Odd characters who all got firearms in their starting package and dubbed themselves ‘Gunpals’.

The premise: Your players shelter from a deadly storm in an inn built out of a tree stump. The hostess tells everyone at dinner about a great treasure (the titular duck) hidden somewhere in or around the inn.

The adventure itself is a stylish black comedy which sets the stage for a) a murder mystery b) a treasure hunt c) the strangest evening ever or d) all of the above and more. The NPCs receive the majority of the focus, and the layout of the inn is simple enough that the majority of the comedy/drama/violence is centered on the five weirdos your players meet.

The weirdness of it is a draw -- the hostess is a giant beetle, a doctor on the premises is a deeply paranoid crow, there is a tremendous royalist ape with a heavy French accent, a cursed nihilist, and a self-confessed kleptomaniac that your players will find darling or annoying… at the start, at least.

Scrap’s art is tremendous, my players were able to imagine a clear physicality for every character (Armstrong is eight feet tall, Chaffinch moves like an animated figurine, Miss Tricks scuttles on the walls) through her illustrations alone. Patrick’s writing -- purple prosey and discursive usually -- is clipped to a length more manageable than some of his other works, making for a quick and engaging read that retains a lot of depth.

The character pages are so vivid and clear that the encounter runs itself. The NPCs each have some reason to side against each other, and the players will almost certainly rub at least one of the patrons the wrong way. Everyone’s nighttime plans will eventually stumble over one another in a spectacular display of poisonings, thievery, and finger-pointing.

I love how many tiny little micro-challenges seem naturally built into the module -- Arm-Long Armstrong’s nighttime habits will give stealthy treasure-hunters a challenge, navigating the inn can be made simple through some clever tree-climbing, and the central mystery can be made a non-issue by a halfway-decent French speaker who asks Miss Tricks to repeat her story again.

It’s hilarious, off-the-wall, full of possibility, and would never play the same way twice.

As for negatives? Well, it’s a big thing in a small package, and it’s hard to incorporate every little NPC’s quirks into the game -- possibly helpful that some of them are bound to be killed through the course of the night. And I’ll echo that the execution of the map on the flip-side of the zine is unfortunate; the map is nice so you want to use it, but it’s attached to the booklet you’ll want to reference and contains the answer to the mystery on it. If you have some time to prepare then you’d photocopy it yourself and scribble the DM notes out, but I didn’t have time and I like how big the map is. Oh well.

So what happened to my group? One of the player characters managed to freak the Doctor out with a simple philosophical quandary and Miss Tricks was flustered by the group’s rudeness many times. Pierre Pierre Pierre and the PCs formed an alliance to suss out the treasure, but before long, [REDACTED] ended up killing Doctor Roaaak and throwing him from the roof into the outhouse. The PCs determined the suspect’s guilt by using the mechanics of Armstrong’s curse, and one thing led to another until one of the PCs murdered Pierre Pierre Pierre in a petty duel. They didn’t solve the mystery -- they found a randomly generated treasure in one of the rooms which allowed them to phase through walls and believed that the error in the Golden Duck story was ‘cannot door’, meaning the treasure they found. Instead the two PCs uninvolved in the duel with Pierre took the treasure and disappeared into the night.

It was a wonderful night and your players will adore it. Everything Patrick and Scrap do, with each other and independently, is novel and wonderful.

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