Prison of the Hated Pretender: The Module That Teaches You to GM
I adore this module. It’s amazing for running - players will have a bunch of fun in it. But what it has which I really like, and isn’t done enough, is GM commentary. It doesn’t just teach you how the module was intended to be run. The advice in there is priceless and will make you better at what you do.
Prison of the Hated Pretender by Gus L is a pedagogical module - a teaching module. It doesn’t just teach your players, it teaches you as a GM. Brilliant if you’re coming from 5e because it gives really great advice, although it’s written for older school games. There are two pages at the back that make it runnable with 5e, no issue at all.
Broken Huts: The Most Depressing Starting Village
Let me read this description to give you an idea of the writing quality:
“20 slumping huts of clay, dried hay and bent sticks centered around a sunbaked brick square and a muddy well. Even the water’s muddy here. Wilting fields of turnips and black squash - and turnips are the most depressing vegetable you can have - worked only by human labor. The huts are homes to a shocking number of scruffy, soiled, sickly people, as broken and beaten down as their homes. Life in Broken Huts revolves around drinking as much mulchy-tasting turnip wine as possible to drown out one’s pains and keep one’s dreams dead.”
Immediately you know this place. It’s not a description you need to read to your players, but you know how to run it. It’s a horrific place to live. The only way for them to survive is to kill their dreams by drinking mulchy turnip wine.
The Prison Itself
About an hour north from the last dusty turnip field sits the Prison of the Hated Pretender - a popular destination for drunken dares and a topic for local gossip. It stands on top of a knoll with a large solitary tree hanging next to it.
The tower is a magical prison for a hated tyrant whose crimes against a long-forgotten religious state would be too grievous if anybody remembered them. He can’t escape it.
But here’s the thing: there are also the Honor Dead there. A seething mass of rage and pain that constantly creates phantasms of vengeance which hunt the Hated Pretender and tear him apart.
The Hated Pretender isn’t just this bad thing you have to deal with. He’s a pitiful undead wretch. Despite retaining brilliance of mind, he’s confused by broken memories, incapable of recalling his life as a monarch except in rare, brief lucid moments. His torturers have seared and scored him to death again and again. He lives pathetically, in constant overwhelming dread of the phantasms who have now killed him innumerable painful times.
You know how to play this now. That vivid description is exactly what a module should do - give you stuff that once you read it, you understand how to portray it.
The Phantasms
These things look completely different each time. You can roll or decide beforehand. Descriptions like “an illuminated floating featherless heron that stabs with a glowing beak.” Nobody’s ever seen that before in their game, which is a beautiful thing.
GM Commentary Throughout
The module has this darkened writing with a slightly darkened background throughout - that’s the GM advice. The white background is the actual module content.
Some gems from the commentary:
On false rumors: “Many older modules include false rumors. I find false rumors a waste of play time. A false rumor that exposes a character to danger when they act on it is like a trap, but often lacks sufficient information for players to detect and avoid it.”
I agree 100%. That’s how I feel about them. Having that explanation took me a while to understand when I came from 5e.
On traps and puzzles: “It should be evident, dangerous, and tempting - offering a prize to a player who figures it out at their risk.”
I don’t like traps where they touch something and then save or die. There’s no choice in that. No player skill. This is saying: here’s a trap, the players know it’s dangerous, there’s something tempting on the other side - off you go, what are you going to do with it?
On describing monsters: “Describe monsters as you think the characters would see them, but not by name.”
Amazing advice. Let the players name the monsters themselves. If you describe it as a “phantasm” and then describe another one as a “phantasm,” you’re taking mystery out of the player’s mind. Let them give things back to you - things you can riff off.
On turns: “Rather than thinking of a turn as 10 minutes, consider it as a significant action - vague, malleable, and undefined. Imagine how hard it would be to guess how long it is doing something in a complex, unfamiliar environment filled with hunting beasts.”
The Orrery on the Roof
Here’s one thing I really enjoy. On the roof there’s a fake mechanism the Hated Pretender used to control his lost empire. If players can figure it out and get it working, any living sentient being adjusting it is stunned by a prophetic vision of their fate.
This takes a simple starting point - nobody’s going to want to hang out in Broken Huts long-term - and sets you up to build a bigger campaign. The module gives you different options for these visions:
For a travel campaign: “Hazy lands that call out to you - deserts, jungles, a glass tomb of strange goods which will bring you great wealth. You see an ancient coffer in the dust, a golden spire above a white sand shore.”
For body horror: “Soon a beastial change will overtake you unless blessed by an ancient animal god. You won’t be immediately rendered into a slavering terror, but the transformation will be slow.”
These give you options to build an entire campaign from.
Why This Module Matters
If I was putting a kit together for people switching to OSR or starting to run games, this would absolutely be in it - for the GM advice alone. Along with stuff like Tomb of the Serpent King and other teaching modules.
It’s super cool. It’s an enjoyable read as well as something great to run.
Get it. Prison of the Hated Pretender on DriveThruRPG - pay what you want. It’s fantastic and worth a read.