Old-School Essentials: Whisper & Venom

Whisper & Venom is a setting and adventure located in the Whisper Vale, an isolated community of insular villagers beset by an outside supernatural force and hardships of their own making. Whisper & Venom is an epic Old-School Essentials adventure designed to be deadly for parties of 4–8 characters of levels 3–5 (henchmen available, but not included) and useful to players, gamemasters, and referees.

There are, by design, sparse details of places, pantheons, and faraway specifics, which allow it to exist in your campaign world. The prominence of magic and healing is also ambiguous, making it an addition to and not an anomaly in your campaign.

The Whisper Vale setting contains three settlements that exist despite their very different residents. They are:

• Whisper is a hard-working, low-nonsense village of farmers and tradespeople. It consists of humble farmsteads, a busy inn, an empty temple, and a smattering of small shops. Talk in the Tavern revolves around weather, harvests, and (most importantly) the quality of ale. Arguments in the town had been rare and usually drunken; brawls rarer still and always drunken.
• Swindle, a once idyllic town across the bridge from Whisper, was abandoned in a catastrophe and settled, in a second catastrophe, by a band of lazy goblin bandits. Now, it is charitably described as a scruffy, ill-mannered, and comically dishonest place filled with "merchants" and "craftsmen.”
• Cleft is a dwarven settlement where the younger generation ceased working thanks to an ingenious machine that simulates the sounds of production.