[REVIEW] Shrine of the Demon Goddess

There Goes the Neighbourhood

Shrine of the Demon Goddess (2023)

by Jonathan Becker

Self-Published

Levels 7–9

Bored with weird ingredients and stamp-sized portions? Jaded with molecular gastronomy? The nightingale tongue pâté and the jellyfish confit no longer do anything? Is it all fated to be filled with ennui? If so, you might try wholesome home cooking. It may not be fancy, but it is based on the tried and true, and the wisdom of generations. Shrine of Demon Goddess is that sort of module. The final stage in the three-part Storming the Forbidden City series run on Cauldron Con (which would probably give it the C3 module code), it is now freely available on the author’s blog as a free download. Let’s be clear: this is the PDF conversion of a very simple Word file, the first two parts of which (the first two tournament rounds) do not even have a map. The text is a simple series of bullet point entries without art or any further layout. The text is not even justified. We did not come for the production values.

Without a map for the first two scenarios, To Rescue a Prince and The House of Horan (which are also more bare-bones), we will only focus on the third. Shrine of Demon Goddess is an add-on to TSR’s Dwellers of the Forbidden City. Much of the ruined city was never detailed in the module, so Jonathan Becker took one of the random city blocks, and turned it into a scenario. The scope of the adventure is about one or two sessions of play (if the players decide to explore the whole of it), featuring a three-level dungeon with a total of 27 keyed areas. Each level follows Dwellers’ Meso-American theme, but each is subtly different: the surface area has a weirdly shaped five-sided pyramid temple; the first underground level is catacomb exploration and tomb-robbing; and the third is a cave system with setpiece encounters in the titular shrine. The levels are interconnected, making for about an expedition each – we mostly focused on the second, while a different playtest group hit the third.

We now come back to the home cooking analogy. There is nothing here that causes a complete surprise, or tries to dazzle you with wild ideas (Ship of Fate has you covered there), it is just solid, competent material, the sort of thing a skilled DM creates in a few evenings for a weekend game session. It all hangs together, and there is a pleasing smoothness to it all. The encounters are built on D&D standards, employed and combined skilfully, and adapted to the module theme. You infiltrate a compound that seems deserted, but suspiciously so. You explore a gridlike catacomb system, trying to find the “special” rooms. A subterranean chamber has four statues depicting three-headed eagles, three in a sad state, one pristine (if you immediately go “I chuck a stone at the mimic”, you are a better player than us). A hard-to-access room is “dominated by an ancient well, intricately carved with eagles and serpents” (observe the emerging theme, as well as the Mexican flag homage), inhabited by a pack of water weirds, and blocking a passage with treasures. It is all familiar concepts, but constructed well. The Forbidden City theme is heavily exploited; elements of decaying and dangerous architecture, Meso-American weirdness, and the feel of National Geographic-approved funerary complexes are gamified.

On Grid

The skill of the design also crops up in the structure and smaller details. The treasure distribution is built on the “large, well-defended treasure caches” idea instead of a more even trickle with the occasional spike (which tends to be closer to my approach). You are moving through the environment to hit one of the scores, and there is not much small-scale stuff. When you win, it is a big one, like 10,000 platinum with extra gems/jewelry and a few high-quality magic items. Likewise, the monster encounters are not just random assignments plopped down in rooms, they are placed in situations where they represent a challenge. A yuan-ti jailer is weak on his own in single combat, but has the ability to sneak up on the party and cause mayhem. The water weirds are blocking treasure, and are vulnerable to the Cleric’s spell… unless he is the first to get dragged underwater (as it happened with us). A cavern filled with 92 snakes in all sizes and varieties and blocking your path presents a conundrum – do we go around silently and risk an attack? Nuke them and waste a fireball, or even alert the rest of the complex? Do something else? This is a module filled with interesting choices and strong opponents, even for a level 7–9 party.

Shrine of Demon Goddess looks unassuming on a first look, but then establishes a strong, functional baseline, which it sticks to. It is well made. One reason you aren’t paying good money for modules like this is that they are not for sale, and what you get instead is fare that invariably tends to be higher concept but lower quality (often considerably so). A bunch of releases you see in the wild have the production values and wahoo ideas, and all they lack is skill. This module is just skill. You will find it useful if you ever need something Meso-American – if only standard stuff was exactly as good. The rating is a high ***; the award-winning GMing added the extra * in play.

This module does not credit its playtesters, but I hereby witness having played and survived it. We took losses and carried away fabulous treasures, as is proper.

Rating: *** / *****

[REVIEW] Alchymystyk Hoosegow

Alchymystyk Hoosegow

Alchymystyk Hoosegow (2023)

by Alex Zisch

Self-published

Level 7 “with some fatalities”

Hello, and welcome to part SEVEN of **THE RECONQUISTA**, wherein entries of the scandalous No Artpunk Contest II (banned on Reddit but the top seller in the artpunk category on itch.io) are subjected to RIGHTEOUS JUDGEMENT. As previously, the contest focuses on excellence in old-school gaming: creativity, craft, and table utility. It also returns to the original old school movement in that it assumes good practices can be learned, practiced and mastered; and there are, in fact, good and bad ways of playing. Like last year, these reviews will assume the participants have achieved a basic level competence, and are striving to go forward from that point. One adventure, No Art Punks by Peter Mullen, shall be excluded since Peter is contributing cover and interior art for my various publications. With that said and solemnly declared, Deus Vult! Let Destiny prevail!

* * *

High funhouse (as in “this guy must be high”) is kind of a lost art in adventure design. Puzzle-oriented, gameplay-heavy adventures with a strong emphasis on player skill and anachronistic comedic settings were the bread and butter of early D&D, but are rarely encountered in modern old-school, although they still exist in the forbidden pamphlets of the Scribes of Sparn, Unbalanced Dice Games, and sometimes Buddyscott Entertainment, Incorporated. Alchymystyk Hoosegow throws down the gauntlet and delivers high funhouse like no other.

What we get is a complex adventure site: an abandoned penitentiary converted into the workshop of an imprisoned alchemist, and left to the elements and various monsters. The first thing that strikes the reader is the dense, oddball writing: “The plateau backs up to the mountains where the talus contains an inky orifice. The mine opening has wagon-sized piles of clay soil spread nearby. A belching beehive-shaped smoke stack emerges from the ridge. (…) A species of Brobdignag proportions swarm the countryside. Mega-insects dart around chasing easy prey. They especially strike single file hikers, rock climbers and sleeping campers.” Or: “Clad in jade cloaks, two elves and two jackalweres (in human form) keep watch behind a parapet with a box of 500 arrows and 30 spears. A brass bell and cymbal can be gonged to raise the alarm. The jackalweres and foxwoman communicate in their alignment tongue with percussive signals. A trap door connects to the stair down”  The verbiage is strange and laden with four-dollar words (adjusted for inflation), but it is essential: you get a strong idea of places, personalities and situations. This allows the author to cram an enormous amount of content into the contest page count, even allowing for homemade art and permanent marker cartography that will win no beauty contest, but… well, it will win no beauty contest, and let’s leave it at that.

While the focus is on the alchemist’s two-level “science bunker”, the surface area and three entry levels connected to the main deal are also described in broad strokes. The oddball energy is quickly unleashed. Giant cranes trudge through contaminated water, hunting for fish. A foxwoman rules a gaggle of charmed elven simps from her tower. Orc miners, generally peaceful, make deliveries for their mining operation. Margoyles collect rocks. There is just enough to kick the GM’s mind in a good direction, and let things develop. The entry levels are simplistic, sketched, but conceptually strong, each with a different dynamic. The foxwoman and her elves control the surface, and may offer a bargain to plunder the alchemist’s bunker. The orcs are working class guys just out to make a buck. A prison level is haunted by its jailers and inmates, and a furnace level is operated by salamanders creating expensive and bizarre ceramics in a fiery workshop inimical to human life. Each of these levels have their own logic and “game rules”, which the players must discover and exploit.

Periodic table-shaped rooms

The main deal, though, is the alchemist lair, a 36+12-room puzzle dungeon that serves as a storehouse for crazy alchemy-themed puzzle rooms. Lab equipment, transformation and potion miscibility experiments are offered in dazzling variety, from the relatively simple to the supremely complex. They are not really interconnected for the most part except by theme; they are isolated setpiece rooms to be messed with and exploited for profit. There is a lot of raw, playful creativity exploiting magic items and monsters, involving a strong theme of trickery. Tiny gnomic creatures stored in the vats of a bio-lab grow into giant spriggans to ambush their rescuers, while a bonsai is a disguised hangman tree patiently waiting for its prey. The puzzles are multi-layered. For example, a giant “pool table” has mastodon ivory balls worth 25 gp each, and the holes contain various liquids from port wine to cyanide and a living mustard jelly… the real treasure being the pool stick (a quarterstaff +1 with a chalky tip).

High art

Treasure is hidden carefully – potions disguised as paint pots, opening a secret door to even better treasures if sorted into the colours of the rainbow; a “floating” dunce cap that’s just sitting on top of an invisible iron flask, and so on. There is generous mundane and magical loot scattered around, if you can recognise and obtain it, but the best stuff tends to be behind the really fiendish puzzles. The traps are also hilariously deadly: consider an invisible inkwell on a writing desk, whose contents develops into a cloudkill spell if carelessly knocked over (with enough clues to give a hint to clever players and goad the foolhardy into making a deadly mistake). Of course, it is all very silly, veering into doggerel verses, groanworthy puns (“Meat the Beetles”, a book by Beer Brewbeck), and bizarre monster-NPCs. The greatest treasures are locked away on the lowest level, the alchemist’s treasury and vault – from pillars of pure gold to purple “Crown Royal” bags doubling as bags of holding, filled with 15,000 gp worth of golden dice. The difficulty curve also increases here, and both monsters and puzzles become formidable for the level range.

Alchymystyk Hoosegow is a very peculiar module occupying a very specific niche. Players will love it if you enjoy puzzle-solving and foiling the GM’s clever tricks in a place governed by cartoon/adventure game logic, and probably have a bad time if they prefer their games serious and more-or-less plausible. It is pure gamergaming, and does that very well. Hoosegow, by the way, means a jailhouse. No, I have never heard this one either. Were drugs involved in the creation of this adventure? Well…

This module credits its playtesters properly.

Rating: **** / *****

[REVIEW] The Crypt of Terror

The Crypt of Terror

The Crypt of Terror (2022)

by Jeff Simpson with Kim Kuffner

Published by Buddyscott Entertainment Group

Levels 8-9

Since Swords & Sewercery, Buddyscott Entertainment has established itself as a publisher of short PDF adventures. These releases are simple, matter-of-fact booklets around 12 pages each, featuring stickman art, homemade maps, and a surprising amount of good content. This post is a review of the most recent one, but the others are mostly similar in scope, style and quality.

[NOTE TO MY PLAYERS: STAY AWAY FROM THIS REVIEW!]

[REVIEW] The Bone Place of Dreib

Muh Production Values

The Bone Place of Dreib (2022)

by Rob Alexander

Published by Medium Quality Products

Levels 3-4

Just the facts, ma’am! This here module does not do those superfluous things. You go in, you poke the things, you die horribly. Simple as.

The Bone Place of Dreib seems to offer more proof that most of the cheap, simple-looking modules on DriveThruRPG are doing it wrong. Most of these 12-20 page affairs offer a long and convoluted backstory, followed by a long and convoluted way to convey the characters to where the adventure is happening, followed by some disappointing 4-page dungeon, if that. Well, this adventure does the exact opposite, and wonder of wonders, it works admirably. Here is the Cheap Mini-Adventure That Does Not Suck.

What Bone Place gets right is that it does not intrude on the GM’s domain by trying to answer stupid questions like “Why are the characters there” and “What is the detailed history of the place”; it helps the GM by offering a lean, mean adventure location where characters may go for any number of reasons. All the intro text outlining the background is on the back cover, and no further lengthy backstory is offered: the rest is show, not tell. On the other hand, the introduction sets forth the adventure’s assumptions (such as the low amount of monetary treasure, easily addressed with a *10 multiplier) clearly enough that they can either be taken into account, or modified to suit the GM’s own game. Another page follows with three basic hooks, a rumour chart, and from here on, it is all solid adventure all the way.

The Bone Place of Dreib is the name of a rocky mesa, serving as an ancient burial site dating back to primordial times, but also used more recently. It is a cursed locale where things are off, and bad things happen to those who venture there. This is often the unrealised intent with various dungeons, but Bone Place delivers a horror scenario in the good sense with a deft combination of psychological tricks and the real eat-your-face stuff you run into when you let your guard down. Through dozens of small touches, it gives off a sense of wrongness and intruding on something best undisturbed. Deep Carbon Observatory and Sision Tower had similar vibes; Bone Place is smaller with 27 keyed locations, but effective in messing you up. It starts delivering hints that something is amiss, and this place is inimical to humans: horses will panic at night if trying to sleep, and characters will have oppressive nightmares offering no recovery. It never rains in the area, even if it rains all around. From subtle hints, we move towards an encounter chart, which at first only delivers creepy flavour like “small rocks falling in the middle distance”, or “a random PC feeling unusually weary, right down in their bones”, but starts to become more lively as the party starts unleashing the place’s denizens, and they occupy their respective places on the chart as things go to hell in a handbasket. Escalation mechanics are always fun when done right. This is done right.

The rest is two levels of stuff to explore, try to loot, and mess with. There is an admirable strangeness and sense of the weird to these encounters, which deal with symbols and ideas we all understand, but don’t over-explain things. There are hints of old rituals that had taken place below the earth. Human remains – not really standard undead, but horrid nightmares of skin and bone – animate to destroy the intruders. Lurking things spring forth to drag off a single careless PC to be murdered and devoured. Signs of religious piety conceal malformed abominations, and enacting blasphemous-feeling rituals leads on to further chambers. You can descend into really bad places and crawl into suspicious passageways which leave the character exposed and vulnerable. When bad things happen, they often come quick and with terrible consequences – better think on your feet! Hell yes, that is the good stuff! There is treasure, too, with a macabre flair – “a compressed pancake of 250 sp” retrieved from underneath a skeleton trapped under a heavy rock; two solid golden balls used to replace the eyes of an entombed nobleman; vestments offering the appearance of purity and health, but only until the clothes are removed; or a crown that brings pleasant relaxation, but slowly turns the wearer into an imbecile. (Obviously, a lot of things in here are horribly cursed in very imaginative ways) The tension is ratcheted up on the lower level, a set of prehistoric tunnels and crawlspaces that hint at immense antiquity. This place is mostly prowled by a single monster, but it will be bad enough – a thing of nightmares if there ever was one. You cannot kill it, although it may be driven back – for a while. The price is a peculiar thing that is perhaps best left undisturbed. But you want to try, don’t you.

All things considered, this adventure delivers in more ways than one. First, it is a simple, no-nonsense piece of writing that does not dwell on superfluous things, while avoiding the pitfalls of minimalism, or faddish formal exercises in trying to reinvent adventure design. It is just competence all the way through. Second, it is a creative, creepy, occasionally really nasty adventure site that demonstrates an abundance of imagination and skill with instilling terror in players’ hearts. You want a cursed and haunted place? This is a cursed and haunted place.

This publication credits its playtesters, and a proofreader/editor. This is to the module’s benefit.

Rating: **** / *****

[REVIEW] City of Bats

So... This is the Lost City!
It's not lost no more...

City of Bats (2021)

by Dashwood

Self-published

Levels 4–6

Hello, and welcome to part EIGHT of **THE RECKONING**, wherein entries of the infamous No Artpunk Contest are taken to task. This promises to be both a treat and a challenge, as the competing entries were written with an intent that is close to my heart: to prove, once and for all, that the power of old-school gaming is found in a fine balance between finely honed and practical design principles, and a strong imagination. That is to say, it is craft before it is art, and this craft can be learned, practiced, and mastered. The following reviews will therefore look not for basic competence – it is assumed that the contest participants would not trip over their own shoelaces or faint at the sight of their own blood – but excellence. The reviews will follow a random order, and they will be shorter than Prince’s original pieces. One adventure, the contest winning Caught in the Web of Past and Present, shall be excluded for two reasons: one, the author plays at my table (and I have previously played in his one-offs); and two, I am going to republish it in an updated edition. With that aside, Deus Vult! Let Destiny prevail!

* * *

Can you do proper homage to the greatest of all TSR modules: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan? Tamoachan’s dark shadow looms high over even the greats, and presents the perfect weird pulp adventure: Meso-American mythology synthesised into complex AD&D setpiece encounters, a diabolical timer in the form of slow-acting poison gas forcing players to think on their feet, a dilapidated environment where the passage of time has created puzzles and dangers equal to the magical enigmas resting in Tamoachan’s undisturbed tombs... and even whimsical stuff like a talking slug. The Hidden Shrine has it all, and its boots are hard to fill!

City of Bats draws ideas from the module as well as a mixture of Meso-American myths at their strangest. The result is a two-level dungeon presented on lovely homemade pencil maps: a slightly linearish set of caverns called “Cave of the Mists” (16 keyed areas), followed by the “City of Bats” proper, a more open lost city/caverns mixture with numerous side-branches (34 keyed areas). This is good size. It feels like a proper expedition to a distant place, where “getting there” is already an adventure. You do not even start in the Cave of the Mists, oh no! It first takes a treacherous ascent on an ancient, crumbling road that “zigzags its way up a barren white cliff face to the top of the escarpment”. Pack animals and mounts each have 1:20 of plunging to certain death. Then, chopping your way through “dense jungle infested with poisonous tropical reptiles”. Then, descending down into a “yawning rock fissure some 40’ long by 20’ wide, opening down into a vertical cavern” – a shaft that comes alive with a myriad bats each dusk. And then, you find yourself down there in a cavern, its floor marked with an enormous petroglyph of a bat, the sign of Camazotz! Hell yes! This is just an opening section, but it sets the scene: here you are, far from civilisation, the way back to recovery as costly as getting here, and the true dangers lurking ahead – as effective and iconic as anything. And then you still have to traverse a cavern level before you get to the subterranean city – by the time you get there, you will feel like you have earned it. Masterclass.

’Archeologist’ sounds so much
more dignified than ‘Thief'

And indeed, City of Bats continues to deliver. While the encounters are nowhere near Tamoachan’s baroque (and a bit weighty) complexity, it is still a superb “mini-Tamoachan” where everything is a bit simpler and smaller in scale, but the same guiding concepts are put to good use. Mythological concepts are translated to game encounters, as in the case of a dreaded “buzzing demon”, the city’s guardian, or the various servants and followers of Camazotz in the city below. These are named beings, some of whom may be interacted with, and some which are just weird and freaky in their appearance – the Guardian Mummy Vucubkai, stalking the ruins of the subterranean city with two spitting cobras who have burrowed into his decayed body; or the High Priest Zapatazap, who is merely a dreaming consciousness in the bottom of his tomb. Both encounters and treasures are organic; they feel like a part of the place. Treasure comes in the form of custom items like “Bronze sculpture of a bat. The head twists off to reveal that it is actually a bottle. The bottle is filled with an ochre liquid, a potion of speed.”, or “6 Jade Eggs worth 500 gp each”. Some of the valuables are also deftly concealed in the grave goods and other bric-a-brac strewn around the city. Almost all that you encounter is “stock”, but they are made memorable by the clever customisation.

Time to... raid some tombs!

This is an archaeologist’s adventure, with its puzzles and rewards alike focused on historical and mythical objects. For example, a storehouse of several bronze goblets resting on shelves, along with a large bronze punch bowl stained with ancient blood tells you of the former denizens’ evil customs (the rewards are two 250 gp gold goblets hidden among their bronze companions). It can be a stone step pyramid standing in the middle of the city’s necropolis, containing an upside-down chamber you can descend into by smashing or extracting a marble slab wedged into the pyramid top. Or it can be an island in a blood-red lake swarming with tiny amphibious scorpions, containing a pedestal holding a valuable statuette of Camazotz. How do you get through the lake or grab the loot without dying like a dog? There are several good, open-ended environmental puzzles like this for the explorers. And there are intelligent NPCs, from the primitive lizardmen tribe in the upper caverns to magical beings who have been trapped or slumbering down here all these years. Great modules encourage exploration, interaction, and conflict, without putting the straightjacket on the party. And this is what City of Bats delivers on – a great place to Do Stuff, from your best Indiana Jones impression to making the local NPCs do your fighting for you.

There are some flaws which, while not serious, detract a bit from the module’s greatness. The first dungeon level’s linearity verges on the railroading, and the same problem crops up in the city, where the side shows can feel a bit like fairground rides. The final location is behind a "three keycards" style puzzle, a bit of a shame. This problem, I feel, comes from the contest limits; otherwise, the dungeon could have been maybe 25% larger, with more ways to do thing, and some empty connecting space in the iddle. This touch is missing from the scenario. There are also presentation issues: anyone who reads this blog knows that I generally view the issue with tolerance, but, well, City of Bats is a rough text which could have used something like a two-column format, or at least bullet points since it kinda blends together.

But as it stands, it is quite inspiring! It is not Tamoachan, it is a deserving homage to it, with plenty of imagination and adventure. When it comes to Tamoachan, this much praise should be enough. Recommended!

This publication credits its playtesters. Neat!

Rating: **** / *****

[REVIEW] Fractious Mayhem at Melonath Falls

The Chair

Fractious Mayhem at Melonath Falls (2021)

by Trent Smith

Self-published

Levels 5–8

Hello, and welcome to part SEVEN of **THE RECKONING**, wherein entries of the infamous No Artpunk Contest are taken to task. This promises to be both a treat and a challenge, as the competing entries were written with an intent that is close to my heart: to prove, once and for all, that the power of old-school gaming is found in a fine balance between finely honed and practical design principles, and a strong imagination. That is to say, it is craft before it is art, and this craft can be learned, practiced, and mastered. The following reviews will therefore look not for basic competence – it is assumed that the contest participants would not trip over their own shoelaces or faint at the sight of their own blood – but excellence. The reviews will follow a random order, and they will be shorter than Prince’s original pieces. One adventure, the contest winning Caught in the Web of Past and Present, shall be excluded for two reasons: one, the author plays at my table (and I have previously played in his one-offs); and two, I am going to republish it in an updated edition. With that aside, Deus Vult! Let Destiny prevail!

* * *

Consider, my brethren, the Parable of the Chair. How simple it looks! On four legs it rests, and a seat and a back it does possess. Naught more does a chair need – and it can sometimes do with even less. How come, then, that so few good chairs are being made, and that those dabblers who can not assemble a simple chair have set their eyes on fancier upholstery, obscuring the fact that the fruit of their work is scarcely fit for sitting on? Falsehood and clumsy workmanship lurk there. But these pretenders are easily unmasked, for their vile tricks melt away at once before the simple command: “Makest thou a good chair!”

Supreme skill is revealed in simplicity. High concept and fancy presentation can conceal faulty game writing just as much as too much spice can mask spoiled cooking ingredients. In a simple, straightforward design, everything is transparent. Can you work under the limitations of the general toolkit? Can you create “good vanilla”? This is a true test (note, not a “one true way”!) of design ability. Consider the deceptive simplicity of Keep on the Borderlands, the tutorial dungeon crawling of In Search of the Unknown, or the plain “orcs in a hole plus some tombs” premise of Borshak’s Lair. They are often dismissed as uninteresting and basic, their popularity only ascribed to nostalgic memories and a large print run (Borshak’s is an obvious exception – it has been virtually forgotten, even though the fanzine where it is found is relatively easy to obtain). Yet that cannot be the cause, as people who are introduced to them in our time, with no previous experience, love them just the same. Truthfully, they are not particularly deep or sophisticated experiences: they are elementary, even primal. Keep was allegedly written and playtested relatively hastily; there is nothing to suggest Borshak’s is anything but a zine article. On the contrary, many have tried to crack the “basic humanoid adventure” code, and failed. Very few remember TSR’s later efforts in this area, and few of the new old-school humanoid lairs have a reputation comparable to B1 or B2 (meanwhile, megadungeons have a modern canon). And this leaves the aforementioned as examples of pure, effortless craft.

The previous considerations serve to make the case for Melonath Falls, a humanoid lair adventure for mid-level characters. A multi-level complex of four, loosely connected caverns behind a mighty two-tiered waterfall, it is a low-key homage to Gygaxian adventure design which does nothing “special”, except do every “simple” thing expertly. A band of xvarts (why xvarts? and why do they crop up so often in great modules?) are operating from the caverns behind the falls, harassing the river and the rough lumber town downstream. The setting is quintessential North American frontier myth: grandiose natural wonders, outposts of civilisation populated by hard men not afraid of getting their hands dirty and ruled by charming individuals named along the lines of “Boss Bowlton” (indeed, the lumber town is scummy enough to present trouble for characters looking for a place to rest and store valuables without getting gutted), and a dangerous wilderness teeming with hostile tribal civilisations beyond the realm of men. Setting is not the main concern of the adventure, although the background it sketches up with a few broad strokes and later backwards references add a layer of intrigue to the baseline scenario.

Mighty!

The meat is the network of four caverns opening from the waterfall face. These entrances are connected by various treacherous routes, some obvious and extremely hazardous, and some only made available to players who can think about the environment and don’t fall prey to routines which will just channel them into danger. (While there are diagrams illustrating this all-important front sections, if there is one thing this module would need is a player handout giving the players exactly what they see – the written descriptions are exact, but long enough to miss details.) And here, we get the real core of the adventure: what on first sight looks like a vertical B2 homage in fact works like a WG4-style murder machine, where a gang of relatively weak monsters are operating from entrenched defensive positions to repel and harass much more powerful intruders. The xvarts of Melonath Falls are ready with rocks, harpoons and nets, deceptive and treacherous terrain segments, a freight elevator exposed to observation and missile fire, axes ready to cut ropes in a desperate situation, and a xvart Magic-User with a push spell, one of AD&D’s “never memorise” spells, used here for that “fractious mayhem”. Not quite Normandy, but it will take tactics and party discipline to clear the bottleneck – almost hopeless for a normal force, but then a mid-level party should have just enough extra juice to clear the obstacles with some trouble. Break out that Swiss army knife and get to work on the problem.

Just like the B2/WG4 reversal from fun smurf-killing excursion to deadly meatgrinder, the caverns do not connect quite the way you would expect them to based on knowing previous adventure classics. The two lowermost cave systems are inhabited by incidental monster groups unconnected to the xvart levels, and only connect to the main adventure core through obscure and hazardous connections – or, in the case of cave B, not at all. Adventurers who get it into their heads to just go in through an undefended rear entrance may either not find that back entrance at all, or waste a lot of resources doing so. There are climbing hazards, other environmental dangers, bizarre vignette encounters (a mushroom garden with a very strange gardener), and cleverly hidden treasure. The final cavern, on the top, is a strange enigma and easily missed.

Fractious Mayhem

The main caves are a more conventional environment (your usual combination of barracks rooms, a shrine, a prison, chief’s quarters, stolen good, the mostly unused caverns, etc. – all the common notes are being hit), where the remaining, lurking foes are supplemented with a landscape of finer-grain complexity which are an excellent test of player resourcefulness. Here, you can go deeper and mess around with stuff for fun and profit. Valuables will seem sparse on a surface scan, but some of the non-obvious stuff is rather neat, and it adds up. There are interesting choices to be made – how to get rich on stolen trade goods that are, technically, still owned by somebody, or what to do with loot pieces which are valuable but heavier than their gp weight, or connected to organised crime. The xvarts are allied to a company of shady wererats – mutual benefits, mutual distrust. The rat god may appear in person and give you the smackdown of your life if you mess with his temple (no stats, alas!) These minor touches contribute a lot to the “campaign-level” impact of the module, the stuff that happens afterwards. There are hostages, and a few NPCs to interact with. Unexpected possibilities like triggering a marble elephant figurine in enclosed spaces (ouch!) There is always a layer of very Gygaxian misleading and deception, which draws the players’ attention in one direction to hit them from another (or steer them away from the really good stuff). There are a few spots where it seems a bit “too clever” (a mild case of the “hidden depth” problem you find in RJK modules) – certainly, this is a module for highly skilled players. You have to see behind the façade and notice the odd detail or error in the pattern to get ahead. Some players who are not into this style of play would probably see the module as frustrating, while others would get a kick out of it.

The presentation is utilitarian – mostly clear two-column text, could use the occasional visual anchor because the information density can get very high in tight spots. Italics and boldface were invented for a reason, and were used in the TSR modules to good effect, so why not use them here? Likewise, another editing pass (or even map notations) to add cross-references to show how reinforcements and other forward/backward links work in the caverns would be useful, and even important to the flow – although all this can be added with a little effort. The content, however, is gold, without rushing forward to convince you of its originality – it is just there. It is also highly Gygaxian, but not in a tryhard way. The homage is obvious, but the personal take is clearly there too. Here we return to the chair analogy: if Melonath Falls was a chair, it would be the unassuming hand-me-down your eyes might skip over when appreciating the décor, but after a few hours of sitting, you would get up without any discomfort or back pain. How odd… A chair for sitting? Who has heard of such a thing?

This publication was not playtested (the author ran out of time due to the contest deadline), and it would no doubt be a little tighter if it was. Still, a mighty good effort.

Rating: ***** / *****

[REVIEW] The Temple of Hypnos

Better opium than copium

The Temple of Hypnos (2021)

by Olle Skogren

Self-published

Level 5

Hello, and welcome to part FIVE of **THE RECKONING**, wherein entries of the infamous No Artpunk Contest are taken to task. This promises to be both a treat and a challenge, as the competing entries were written with an intent that is close to my heart: to prove, once and for all, that the power of old-school gaming is found in a fine balance between finely honed and practical design principles, and a strong imagination. That is to say, it is craft before it is art, and this craft can be learned, practiced, and mastered. The following reviews will therefore look not for basic competence – it is assumed that the contest participants would not trip over their own shoelaces or faint at the sight of their own blood – but excellence. The reviews will follow a random order, and they will be shorter than Prince’s original pieces. One adventure, the contest winning Caught in the Web of Past and Present, shall be excluded for two reasons: one, the author plays at my table (and I have previously played in his one-offs); and two, I am going to republish it in an updated edition. With that aside, Deus Vult! Let Destiny prevail!

* * *

Just how much stuff is there in your usual old-school game? How far can you go with the basic building blocks? Give a bunch of  creative and driven people the same general kit, and you will find out soon enough. One of them will make The Keep on the Borderland, but with completely new and completely fun content. Another will build a vampire castle. A third will do the island on the back of a giant turtle, with djinns. And some weird guy will just mess with the Lego pieces until they run DooM, thus proving once and for all that DooM can run on anything. The Temple of Hypnos is a module that makes dirt simple D&D look and feel like some bizarre sword and sorcery hallucination, without actually changing anything in the rules. The module takes your D&D adventure to the temple of a Greek-style mystery cult dedicated to dreams, and now a site of mysterious disappearances. Something evil has set foot inside the bucolic sanctum, and turned it to its own malign purposes. There are multiple strong hooks to reel in the company – stealing an idol’s enormous silk tunic for a giant who is too large to enter the temple, helping an insomniac magic-user recover her ability to sleep (can relate… can relate), or beating a force of 100 men intent on sacking the place by… well, plundering the best stuff first.

Not everything about the module is about clever reskinning, but clever reskinning is definitely a central part of it. It is an old and very useful GM trick to “invent” bizarre new monsters by just describing the equivalent of a 2^nd or 3^rd level Fighter as “a slim humanoid figure, with lush green leaves sprouting from its torso, and roots in place of its limbs”, or “a cadaver in a terrible monster mask, grey from volcanic ashes clinging to the desiccated flesh”. The Temple of Hypnos runs with its theme by describing everything in a way any specific D&D element might look like in the context of the dreaming temple. What were “zombies” are now “sleepwalkers”, semi-catatonic worshippers lost in opiate dreams. “Bugbears” become “brutes of Hypnos”, described as “large men, their shaggy hides and goblinoid faces hidden in robes of midnight blue and beaten copper masks in the image of Hypnos. Their voices are droning and monotone due to the way the mouths of the masks are shaped”. Damn, that’s good! Satyrs, of course, fit right in. The priests are really Magic-Users. It is not a radical idea, just a smart, thorough implementation. Everything in the module radiates outwards from the central premise, and balances variety with internal cohesion flawlessly.

But there is strong craft there, too! As the adventure hooks suggest, this is an open-ended module that can be played in multiple ways. There is a central situation/problem in the form of a night hag who has taken possession of the temple, and who is now a formidable master of this environment in more than one way (recalling Strahd’s role in the original Ravenloft – she has a battle plan, and a fallback option). However, there are many ways towards this problems, and not a few around it – dealing with the night hag is only one option. What the adventure does is introduce a roster of enemies and NPCs who inhabit the temple area, the night hag’s behaviour, an adventure-specific mechanic (“drowziness points”, to simulate the characters slowly drifting towards sleep and dreaming), and then use these elements in different combinations through the room key. The main challenge then becomes to adapt to this environment, learn the patterns, and either disable/evade them or turn them to your advantage. This sort of “environmental hacking” is always satisfying to see in a module, and The Temple of Hypnos provides ample opportunities to engage in it. There are alternate degrees of risk-taking for an enterprising party – do you dip your toes or go in deep? Mess with the barricaded section which is probably barricaded for a very good reason? (Editor’s note: it is barricaded for a very good reason.) You decide. Help the temple’s priesthood, put an end to them, or just sneak out with some nice prize? Your call.

The room key first describes the temple grounds with 6 loosely keyed areas. This is stage-setting, although you can see the craft already from the interesting nature of the situations you encounter – “field of opium poppies and edible herbs worked by 2d6 zombies overseen by acolyte of Hypnos (2^nd level)” and “30’ doric column overgrown with vines. A satyr at the top piping a languid tune that carries far” are the kind of images that stick. It is, however, the temple where the author’s creativity is on full display. I was fully on board when I hit on this gem in the Anointing Room (4):

“Ceiling only 10' high. Bronze squid with leather sack body hangs from the ceiling. Black stains on the floor. Pulling its two longer tentacles it squirts fragrant black oil (olive, soot and herbs – adds 1 drowziness). If emptied completely the oil will cover the entire floor of the room.”

Hell yes! This is why I signed up. This little detail is perfect – the strangeness of an artificial suspended squid, the ritual use, the fragrant black oil, and the consequences of using this temple device – it encapsulates the essence of weird fantasy in a single side encounter. “It is going to be a 5, right?”, I asked myself with some concern. “Of course”, I responded, reassuringly.

The locations make sense as the mysteries of a weird dream religion, like an enchanted garden of sleepers crossed by a milky stream laced with diluted poppy milk, or an orgy around the triumphant idol of Hypnos. They are also highly interactable – there is a lot to do in a multi-layered environment, from looting the precious décor (which is where the treasures are mostly hidden) to messing with the temple denizens to interacting with weird dream experiences. Audible and visual cues are used to lead deeper into the complex (or, in a memorable case, to “a domineering satyr (…) teaching an increasingly frustrated bugbear the harp”), or into devious traps (such as a pool inhabited by a multitude of shadows). The treasures are fun, and it takes some attention to find the really good stuff, like an antelope horn hanging from a wrist strap on the limp left arm of a priest (wand of magic missiles), or a library of rare works on scrolls. This is a high-density dungeon. The encounters are close to each other, and they often involve a lot of “stuff”, sometimes all kinds of moving parts on stage at once. While the writing is excellent, it takes GM processing power, especially if a multi-room situation develops – so read carefully, underline, and prepare to be tested!

Much about The Temple of Hypnos recalls the better Judges Guild products: a willingness to think beyond the basics without actually breaking the game with runaway rule inflation (it is almost all core), creative encounters, the care taken to make the scenario useful for very different gaming groups. Most of all, though, it is the willingness to go fantastic, and let the alien beauty of the imagery guide you. It is all very well done. Highly recommended. And damn good showing from a module with zero production values.

This publication credits a playtester (was it a solo game?) and a proofreader.

Rating: ***** / *****

 

[REVIEW] Swords & Sewercery

Swords & Sewercery

Swords & Sewercery (2021)

by Jeff Simpson

Published by Buddyscott Entertainment Group

Levels 2-5

Hello, and welcome to part THREE of **THE RECKONING**, wherein entries of the infamous No Artpunk Contest are taken to task. This promises to be both a treat and a challenge, as the competing entries were written with an intent that is close to my heart: to prove, once and for all, that the power of old-school gaming is found in a fine balance between finely honed and practical design principles, and a strong imagination. That is to say, it is craft before it is art, and this craft can be learned, practiced, and mastered. The following reviews will therefore look not for basic competence – it is assumed that the contest participants would not trip over their own shoelaces or faint at the sight of their own blood – but excellence. The reviews will follow a random order, and they will be shorter than Prince’s original pieces. One adventure, the contest winning Caught in the Web of Past and Present, shall be excluded for two reasons: one, the author plays at my table (and I have previously played in his one-offs); and two, I am going to republish it in an updated edition. With that aside, Deus Vult! Let Destiny prevail!

* * *

Sewer levels are the ugly runts of computer games; the retarded, poor, red-headed orphans everyone enjoys kicking while they are down. Accordingly, designing a sewer level people will not reflexively write off as crappy is a bit of a challenge. It is easy to see why sewers get a bad rap. Not only are they unpleasant environments, they tend to self-limit the kind of things you may meet in them: yeah, there are the rats… and wererats… and I guess cultists and thieves… yeah, maybe an ooze or an otyugh. Surprisingly few people do more with their sewer dungeons, and this will not do. It is time to make sewers great again!

Swords & Sewercery is a short and sweet module describing a city block and the sewer passages underneath. Short, in this case, means really short: each of the two environments gets a little more than one page, and individual keyed areas tend to be two or three lines in length. There is a further page with a comparatively lengthy background on the city of Salo and its factions, as well as an appendix with wandering monster charts, rumours, and new monsters/treasure (they bend the contest rules… slightly). This, is, clearly, a minimalist affair, usually the domain of disappointing sludge. And yet… it isn’t, and the reasons for that are the scope of the material and the imagination on display.

First things first, this is a comparatively large affair crammed with stuff. A lot of mini-modules tend to be 16-20 pages with a playable area of 8-12 locations (if that); Swords & Sewercery has 18+6 above ground, and some 31 in the sewers. That’s a handful! There is precious little empty space left on two excellent maps; furthermore, the encounters tend to have good conceptual density, high interaction potential, and a strong style. They embody Bryce Lynch’s favourite hobby horse, “expressive terseness”. The above-ground section is a teeming slum of questionable establishments and dirty backyards to get stabbed (or, as it happens, get dragged off by ettercaps or torn apart by a gargoyle – ouch!). The clients of illicit drug dens rub shoulders with bandits, members of Salo’s busy secret police, and Resistance operatives, all of whom operate deposits, safe-houses and shops in the area. There is a lot to this single city block, from a cockfighting ring to street food vendors and a holy brothel. It is the condensed essence of Lankhmar, Haven, City State of the Invincible Overlord, and similar sinful cities rolled into one.

I am Once Again Asking For Your Financial Support

It gets even better underground: this is, in fact, an exceptionally interesting sewer, populated by a criminal underworld of bizarre NPCs and strange encounters. There is an undermarket selling junk and scraps, a sewage conduit where lepers pan the effluvium of an upscale restaurant for gold crumbs, a crazy goop-bottling machine operated by an insane Magic-User (with magical drinks to sample), and the residence of an ogre mage who keeps a group of mongrelwoman concubines. Most of these encounters transcend standard investigate/fight/flight responses – things can get fairly complex and non-linear, as the inhabitants know of things they want and can offer knowledge or items in exchange. You can run errands, rat your allies out, meet monsters completely out of whack for the designated level range, and have a whale of a time. Even some of the comparatively minor encounters have good stuff like “There is an otyugh eating garbage here”, or a ceremonial fountain used by cultists, and inhabited by a water elemental. Things that don’t force you on a single course of action, but let you develop your own schemes. All of this is complicated by an encounter chart which has an honest-to-goodness grell on it. Way too good.

Far from perfect, something that should be obvious to anyone, the author included. The utter minimalism of the encounters is limiting, even if they are overflowing with cool basic ideas. There is a sort of depth, coming from play, layering and refinement, that is just missing. For example, the streets level and the sewer level are connected, but not interconnected; they do not form a single whole where you can decend a sewer hatch and emerge in the back room of that brothel-temple. The same is true of the various plot threads, which do not reference each other across the two parts. Ironically, the conceptual density is just too much at times. The material feels too busy, without sufficient empty connecting material to let it breathe and develop a sort of pacing. It is a non-stop sugar high. And of course, a lot of the monsters don’t have stats. (Is this trend going to be the defining feature of “No Artpunk”? I remain unconvinced!)

Swords & Sewercery is not a refined module. It feels like the result of a hell of a brainstorming session; more properly, the beginning of something rather than the ultimate product. A draft-version before the playtesting session where the pieces fall into their correct place? Something like that. However… there is something here that’s really good, the crazy leaps of imagination and enthusiasm from the OD&D era which is rare to see these days. High energy. It is easy to imagine the author fitting together a bunch of similar city blocks (perhaps leaving some space empty) into a massive CSIO-style map, and doing something similar with the sewer/undercity section. Not over-polished, not over-produced, just fixed up a little and expanded just slightly. THAT would easily be a formidable city supplement, with a clear path to a 5/5. Make it happen!

No playtesters are credited in this publication. Woe!

Rating: *** / *****

[REVIEW] Tetutuphor: Norkers and Xvarts

Tetutuphor: The Elemental
Castle Environs:
Chapter Two B:
Norkers and Xvarts
Subtitle Goes Here

Tetutuphor: Norkers and Xvarts (2021)

by Gene Weigel

Self-published

Levels 1–3 

Keep on the Borderlands and The Village of Hommlet: two of the most recognisable, and most played introductory D&D/AD&D modules. Both have served as the blueprint for a myriad successors, clones, and “inspired by” adventures. This freely available, 14-page module (of which half is taken up by the actual dungeons, and half by the new monsters featured therein) is a fanmade side-show to Hommlet, but following the design of Keep’s Caves of Chaos. While deceptively simple, the Caves have rarely been successfully imitated, let alone equalled in adventure design. Anyone can plonk down a succession of monster caverns, but replicating the gotchas and dirty tricks of Gary’s original requires design chops. Norkers and Xvarts – “Chapter Two B” in “The Elemental Castle Environs” series – is one adventure that does it right.

The module is set in a narrow, meandering valley allowing access to twelve small dungeon-complexes through eleven entrance points. Like the Caves of Chaos, the higher up the sides of the valley you go, the more dangerous the caves become; from a brigand lair to elemental-themed shrines and of course lairs with a multitude of low-level monsters. That’s no small feat in seven pages: a lot of “OSR” adventures use as much space to describe a single 12-area lair. Gene crams in a complex 92-area dungeon environment (B2 was 64 areas in 10 pages), and while the key is terse, it does not feel lacklustre; you do not feel like you do with most one-page dungeons. It is effective, play-friendly writing like:

“D27) ENTRANCE TO EARTH CULT – A man in full scale armor with helmet is actually a spider zombie (See NEW MONSTERS). He says to intruders, “Welcome to the chapel of Earth!” then immediately attacks.”

or:

“D34) THE GIFTED ONE – This is the lair of a giant spider that is the guardian of the shrine to Lolth in the other cave. Livth the spider can look like a beautiful human woman as a gift from Lolth. She can also in spider form spray out a web like the web spell.”

or:

“E46) OLD SHRINE OF AIR – Another altar similar to the other Iuz altars lined with air-vesicled basalt. The walls of this columned cave shrine has various wicked and winged creatures (Gargoyles and harpies) dropping children from tremendous heights as a pair of sinister orange and purple swirled inhuman eyes look on. It reads underneath “Pneumo, King of Elemental Evil Air”. A giant bin of crudely nailed together boards seems to be for offerings as it has a sign reading “PAY UP YOU RUBES OR GET SQUISHED”” (etc.)

Descriptions are relatively simple and action-focused. There is a very good variety to the encounters. Many Caves of Chaos clones focus solely on the combat – Norkers and Xvarts has that in spades (all of Sir Mulfric the Smurfinator’s smurf-killing wishes will be fulfilled in the xvart caves alone), but it livens up the action with simple dirty tricks worthy of Gygax. There are monster tactics and alarms, character-killing traps for the unwary, mysterious elemental shrines to experiment with, and some light potential for interaction. The gotchas are funny, deadly, and ultimately fair (“I69) FRIENDLY SKELETON – A skeleton waves from the far end of this room as if very friendly. It is a false skeleton illusion and is a pit trap.”) There are great moments of adversarial GMing: in the previous trap, there is a 5% probability anyone falling into the pit will also fall on the antlers of a rotting deer carcass for an extra 1d4 Hp.

Snake Wolf

Above all, the caves offer good variety. Far from endless monster hotels, the individual mini-dungeons have interesting sub-themes. The A-C areas have abandoned areas with a strong horror component playing on fears of helplessness (a pool of stagnant water with zombies lurking underneath the surface; an illusionary floor plunging you into a bone pit with 5 ravenous larvae; a horrific mummy mermaid). D is a mysterious evil earth shrine with  weird, creepy aesthetic, where the action slows down and you have to watch your every move. G and J are a norker/xvart meat-grinders. K houses a mysterious frog-mage and his servants. There are constant hints throughout the complex of a wider world of evil intrigue; not in a didactic way, but as places where you may come across the machinations of evil elemental lords, Lolth, and old Iuz. It is all tied to what will presumably be Gene’s take on The Temple of Elemental Evil, although neither this future adventure nor Hommlet are necessary for the use of this module as a standalone. Variety is also seen in the monster roster, which uses the Fiend Folio, adding several new low-level creatures like the creepy spider zombies (corpses animated by arachnid parasites), the luphid (snake-wolf), or the shadrow (shadowy drider forms) – just to mention a few.

Some design choices are peculiar, at odds with accepted wisdom. Monetary treasure is absolutely minimal. In The Village of Hommlet, even random cobblers and leatherworkers may have a thousand gp or a priceless gemstone hidden in the rafters, and the Moathouse ruins have over 10,000 gp in key locations. Monster lairs in Norkers and Xvarts have pitiful copper pieces and handfuls of silver; the brigand leader (to cite an example) has about 54 gp in loose change; the norker treasury has 370 gp and 420 gp of gems, and their leader has a 50 gp gold chain plus a pewter tub filled with gold-washed lead coins (actual value 675 cp – mean!). These are some of the larger caches, too; magic items are not particularly generous either, although monster XP is relatively decent due to the abundance of combat. By AD&D’s levelling/training requirements, this is very little. The choice, according to Gene, is deliberate – I would nevertheless recommend adding some more loot at various locations, or even multiplying existing figures by 4-5, which should take care of this issue.

The module has a simple but generally effective presentation. Gone are Broken Castle’s generic-system stats (it is all nice, readable AD&D), and the layout is simple but functional. There is an excellent blue-tone map that might have come right out of B2. If you end up running this scenario, it may be useful to chart out the valley on a piece of paper with only the entrances and surface vegetation visible – the map, while great, overlays the two, and I had a slight difficulty reading the surface topography. One extra complaint is that locked doors are not marked – you will have to study the text beforehand and do the job yourself. A simple but useful trick in room numbering: it is all sequential, but in the text, entries are preceded by the caves’ letter codes (e.g. A6, E41, H68A), which makes things extra readable. The monster section is illustrated; this is not pro art, but it does have a lot of soul.

Norkers and Xvarts is a great example of a short-form module that nevertheless packs a mean punch. It is nothing fancy, but it knows what it is doing, and written with a lot of understated skill in building memorable encounters. It can serve as an add-on to The Village of Hommlet, or used as a dungeon in a different campaign, and in any case, it offers a lot of useful insight into building a good Gygaxian dungeon environment. It is, also, free. Highly recommended.

No playtesters are credited in this publication.

Rating: **** / *****

[REVIEW] She Who is a Fortress in Dark Water

She Who is a Fortress
in Dark Water

She Who is a Fortress in Dark Water (2021)

by Phillip Loe

Self-published on https://captainahabsleg.blogspot.com/

Levels 5–10

Free modules with homemade charm rarely get the respect anymore in old-school gaming. The scene has commercialised, attention has become fixated on production values, glitz, and Kickstarter extras. More’s the pity, because there are still things out there which are not just free, but as good as anything released for money. She Who is a Fortress in Dark Water, a free wilderness and dungeon scenario, has action, whimsy, and a unique imaginative touch that puts commercial projects to shame.

The tone of the module is grotesque fantasy set in a swampland. Mother Cordelia, a now exiled member of a local monastic order, created a human child through alchemy, to eventually use his deformed spine as a key to the lock of a massive magical codex. Although her schemes were thwarted, now a different evil cult has kidnapped young Ignacio for their own nefarious plan, and are keeping him in an abandoned temple inhabited by lizardmen. Well, at least until the spine can be extracted and their evil plan meets with success (the mission is timed, precise movement rates apply, and STRICT TIME RECORDS MUST BE KEPT). The setup, while bizarre, does not lead to a grimdark module. The tone is more eccentric, with grotesque beings and events, and strongly original while staying comfortably within the boundaries of D&D gameplay. The locale, Theero Marsh has its own little ecology of denizens, from the unctuous oiltoads (human-faced toads whose gaze compels their victims to scarf down the poisonous critter there and then) to a local band of lizardmen, and a handful of weirdo NPCs. It plays effectively on disgust and decay, with a sense of humour to lighten the mood.

The first segment of the adventure is a swamp described as a pointcrawl (9 keyed areas), with rules for getting off track and getting lost (this chart is perhaps too punitive for the time limit) and a random encounter chart with entries that go well beyond “meet X monsters of Y type”. NPCs with their agendas or personal misfortunes, navigation hazards, and even a local petty god can appear before the party. A woman who asks the adventurers for all their food in exchange for a gift of gold thread and answers to three (but no more than three!) questions. A questing paladin with his retainers. Sunbathing crocodiles blocking the path. These chance meetings can greatly affect the rest of the module, adding or altering the way things proceed; or offer obstacles that require a bit of creative thinking to get through.

Free Hugs

The keyed areas, likewise, are a good mixture of challenges, and each one has something that needs more than a standard fight/flight/loot reaction. There are hand-fruit trees, a giant crocodile called Cynthia, and the ghost of a saint. It is very visual stuff, with things that poke your brain and stay there. The final location, the temple, is a lizardman dungeon with 20 keyed areas. Once again, the random encounters offer good interaction/conflict potential – the giant rats are not just there, they are “rooting in the garbage”, and the four different lizardman encounters each have something specific going on (some guiding captives, some fomenting rebellion, and some just absorbed in an impromptu game of dice). The location key here is shorter, less setpiece-like, but the temple as a whole has superb flow, and there are many different ways things can go once the players get inside. Even throwaway places have details like the obligatory barracks room using once priceless tapestries as blankets, an organ room with “a curiously intelligent magpie”, or a barricaded room with a sign reading “BATS DO NOT ENTER” (with an invitation like that, who can resist?). It goes quite far with small, “inexpensive” details, and stays original throughout.

She Who is a Fortress in Dark Water is free, pedestrian in layout, and unapologetically homemade in its art and cartography. It is, I believe, just about right for a small one- or two-session adventure. In 16 pages total, you get a good background, adventure hooks, imaginative random encounter tables, new monsters, a wilderness and a dungeon. The writing is tight yet not underdeveloped; it is the sort of text that’s helpful and rich with flavour. Where appropriate, underlining calls attention to important room features. It is clean and effective. (As an anecdotal detail, you can also see the original sparse sketch/key it has developed from on the author’s blog, and make a comparison between raw notes and finished product.)

Overall, there is simply a good vibe and a sort of balance to this adventure. It is whimsical, fairy-taleish D&D with a strong element of grotesque. This is what module writing should be about. It could be an odd detour in a regular campaign, or a more permanent fixture in something like Dolmenwood. I can wholeheartedly recommend it, and hope there will be more in due time.

This publication does not credit its playtesters (it was apparently playtested at GaryCon).

Rating: **** / *****