Cursed Scroll #2 Review

Cursed Scroll #2: Red Sands takes Shadowdark into the Djurum, a desert hexcrawl of salt flats, red mountains, hidden monasteries, caravan routes, oases, bandits, and ruins. Across its 68 pages, Kelsey Dionne adds three new classes, new weapons, pit fighting, enduring wounds, poisons, mounts, desert travel rules, monsters, and the 4th–6th-level adventure Fortress of the Burning Brothers.

What I like about Red Sands is how much of that material grows directly out of the Djurum. Heat changes resource consumption, wind affects travel, and sandstorms can halt a journey. Mounts, meanwhile, become important for both transportation and survival. Even your torch isn’t necessarily safe. Shadowdark’s core rules specifically allow gusts of wind to extinguish open flames. I ratcheted it up with a homebrew d6 wind table.

Three Classes, One Place

The Desert Rider begins with a camel or horse and is built around mounted combat. Its charge ability rewards movement with increased melee damage, while the mount improves alongside the character. The accompanying mount rules handle carrying capacity, food and water, exhaustion, combat, and pushing an animal beyond its limits. Mounts even get personalities ranging from Horrid to Lovely, a small table that can turn a piece of equipment into a character at the table.

The Pit Fighter is exactly what the name promises: a durable melee combatant who can recover hit points while fighting and has an unusual ability to keep standing when other characters would go down.

The Ras-Godai goes in another direction entirely, combining assassination, stealth, Smoke Step teleportation, and supernatural talents granted by the black lotus. Their hidden monastery and the lotus itself are waiting out in the Djurum rather than existing only as character-class flavor.

Pit Fighting and the Cost of Getting Hurt

During downtime, characters can participate in pit fights for treasure, XP, favors, carousing bonuses, and fame. The GM determines the venue, stakes, danger level, opponent, and possibility of a hidden twist, with separate encounter tables for solo and group fights. Complications include burning oil, antimagic zones, rolling boulders, deep pits, water hazards, and equipment restrictions.

The Thraxis Arena outside the Shar Oasis gives those rules a home. Travelers gather each night to gamble and watch fights under torchlight, and even the mood of the crowd can change what happens. The Enduring Wounds table can leave characters scarred, blinded, maimed, bleeding, or permanently diminished after a particularly severe injury, while a short poison system adds eight toxins ranging from paralysis and unconsciousness to delayed death.

This is something I appreciated in Shadowdark: A Review⁠. Shadowdark can make consequences matter without burying the table beneath procedure, and Red Sands keeps that philosophy intact.

The Djurum

The Djurum map uses six-mile hexes divided among desert, canyon, mountain, and salt-flat terrain. Encounters are separated into Walkers, Fliers, Diggers, and People, with the likelihood of meeting each changing according to where the crawlers are traveling.

The keyed locations are brief but packed with adventure. The Siruul elves protect their prized silver camels, Hawk Bandits use trained birds to watch the caravan routes, and purple worms return monthly to spawning grounds in the western salt flats. At the Pyre, the Siruul pile jewelry, artwork, and food upon a crimson altar every solstice as a rejection of material possessions. At midnight, a phoenix descends from the mountains and burns the offerings to charcoal. The altar itself contains ten rubies worth 250 gold pieces each, and the Siruul hunt anyone foolish enough to tamper with them.

That’s a good Shadowdark problem. The treasure is right there, and you know approximately how stupid taking it would be.

Alkesh, the City of Red Sands, gives the region a civilization of 70,000 people without turning the zine into a city sourcebook. At the other extreme is the Vale of the Moon, where the moon remains visible during daylight, a day inside equals a week in the outside world, and sixty-foot doors seal a lost citadel that nobody in the Djurum has entered for a thousand years. Sometimes a door is enough.

Then there is the Scourge, an ancient dragon whose brass and lapis scales have been corrupted by a sickly green patina. Long ago, the dragon swallowed the Shield of the Witch-King to end an ancient war, and the evil spirit trapped inside has tortured and corrupted it ever since. At level 18, the Scourge is less an encounter than something most crawlers will desperately hope remains a distant shape on the horizon.

Fortress of the Burning Brothers

The final major section is Fortress of the Burning Brothers, a 4th–6th-level adventure set inside an old duergar mining stronghold in the Howling Caves. Two efreeti brothers, Malik the Cunning and Gaspar the Fierce, are competing to inherit their father’s title, and each wants the other dead without getting his own hands dirty. When adventurers arrive, both brothers see an opportunity.

The fortress is divided between the stronghold above and the mines below, with competing factions, patrols, alarms, and plenty of opportunities for the players to decide whom to trust, betray, or rob. That’s about as much as I want to say about it. Fortress of the Burning Brothers is worth discovering rather than spoiling.

Red Sand’s Limit

There is a tradeoff to all this thematic focus. As I discussed in our Cursed Scroll #1: Diablerie! Review⁠, witches, warlocks, cursed knights, demons, and pieces of the Gloaming can be dropped into almost any fantasy campaign. Red Sands is more specialized. Pit fighting, poisons, and enduring wounds travel easily, but the Desert Rider, desert travel rules, mounts, and much of the Djurum become most useful when the campaign actually goes somewhere capable of supporting them.

I don’t consider that a serious flaw. Diablerie! Probably has broader utility if you’re looking for individual pieces to raid for an existing campaign. Red Sands is stronger when you use the place it gives you.

Conclusion

Cursed Scroll #2: Red Sands packs the beginnings of a campaign into 68 pages. The Djurum gives the crawlers somewhere worth exploring, while the classes, rules, monsters, and Fortress of the Burning Brothers give them plenty to do once they arrive.

Bring water.