The Howling Rock

Approximate time to read: 4 minutes.   

This is a review of The Howling Rock, an adventure written by Cesar Silva and published under the Free League Workshop. The title was added March 2025 and runs to 11-pages. Of those pages, there’s little time wasted and I’d say you were getting good value for money.

Warning: this review contains details of the adventure and if you plan to play, stop reading now.

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General Summary

If you’re still reading, The Howling Rock is a three-act horror-laced adventure for Symbaroum, set in and around the mystic Volgoma lake, the barbarian stronghold of Karvosti, and an ancient island tainted by otherworldly corruption. At its heart is a tragic desecration: Brother Anton, a priest of Prios, unknowingly undoes a centuries-old seal by destroying the skull of Huldra Alena, unleashing abominations and drawing the attention of powerful factions.

Structurally, the adventure progresses in scenes that makes up each of the Acts and, roughly speaking, each Act would probably take a session to complete, possibly more, depending on the Player Character actions and interactions. I’m not totally sold on the format used, which struck me rather like a random table rather than numbered scenes with headings—but that’s just personal taste.

• Act 1: Introduces Ludolf, a broker, who seeks a party as hired escorts traveling from Thistle Hold to Karvosti. As the party makes progress on their journey, they begin to witness the consequences of increasing attacks by abominations, including the devastation of the Jakaar settlement and a deadly ambush while crossing the Volgoma.

• Act 2: Arrival at the plateau settlement of Karvosti finds tensions running high, with competing interests from the High Chieftain, the Church of Prios, and the witches. Player Characters may be called to investigate an expedition’s disappearance by different factions—with differing agendas and a similar reward. However the Characters sway, the adventure leads them back out into Davokar across the mouth of the Volgoma toward Jakaar.

• Act 3: The party returns to the cursed settlement of Jakaar before setting sail to the hidden island of Howling Rock, now revealed. There they confront twisted ruins, navigate otherworldly corruption, and may face the resurrected Anton and the rising Horned King in a bleak wasteland beyond mortal realms.

The adventure ends with a branching moral-political dilemma, which I always think suits Symbaroum well. What do the Characters do with the information and evidence uncovered in their investigation and journey to the Howling Rock? Their choice could ignite factional strife, provoke reprisals from the Church, empower the Iron Pact, or leave the Queen with a tough choice of her own.

Ease of Use

The three-act division is clean and purposeful. Each act has discrete locations, encounters, and objectives, which makes prep and scene pacing straightforward for the GM.

• Act 1: A travelogue with rising tension and horror.
• Act 2: A political and investigative hub.
• Act 3: A bit of a wilderness crawl with cosmic horror overtones.

The text could do with another editing pass to sort of a few confusing sentences. The whole adventure could also sorely use maps for each of the acts. The scenes within each Act often refer directly to locations and to have these picked out on a sketched out map would have made visualisation easier. You may have to improvise with blow-ups of Davokar and Karvosti.

NPCs have distinct motives and are well-written, offering multiple vectors for Character engagement. The relationships between the Church, the Witches, and the High Chieftain at Karvosti are nicely interwoven without requiring deep lore knowledge to be effective. That said, a GM would benefit from owning The Witch Hammer to make the most of the material and improvise around it. Certainly when the adventure concludes, there’s great opportunities to lean into the background of Karvosti for future politicking.

The adventure includes Stat Blocks in full for abominations and non player characters plus information on the rowboats and knarr they might use crossing the waters of the Volgoma. These are all well-formatted and table-ready, although you probably want to review one of the newcomers, the Slithers, which appear to have double-15s and double-5s in their attributes, which reads to me like an oversight in the copy/pasting. But, the adventure does include several new challenges, including Dead Waters, a drifting aquatic horror, and the Horned King itself, a Challenging boss.

The adventure makes heavy use of environmental corruption, especially around the Volgoma crossing and on the island of Howling Rock. You may want to soften the blow here if you’re using this with relatively weak or ill-prepared adventurers—although, to me, Symbaroum has never been about pulling punches.

(I don’t want to make matters worse, but for lack of Burden relating to inability to swim, I’d be tempted to penalise anyone falling in the water by at least -1 on a challenge, and more so if the Character has the Sickly or Slow Burdens.)

Final Thoughts

I haven’t run the scenario, but from a thorough read-through I think The Howling Rock is an excellent ready-to-run Symbaroum adventure, well suited to several sessions of play. It makes a good introduction to the tension between barbarian tradition versus Ambrian imperialism, spiritual corruption versus religious dogma that make up the meat and drink of a long-term Symbaroum campaign. It makes good use of tough moral choices, a haunting tone, and structured progression, requiring minimal prep to bring to the table, but offering the potential for the GM to expand on the details and carry the endgame through with long-term challenges and repercussions.

You can download the PDF of The Howling Rock from the Free League Workshop section of DriveThruRPG, from where I acquired the adventure for this review.