[REVIEW] Bitterroot Briar

Bitterroot Briar (2013)

by Lang Waters

Published by Expeditious Retreat Press

2^nd to 4^th level

Bitterroot Briar

Enchanted forests may be the number one staple of fantasy literature (probably going back to our caveman ancestors’ fireside tales), yet good forest adventures are hard to come by – which is why I tend to seek them out with particular interest. Bitterroot Briar is one of these modules: it revolves around an elusive enchanted grove surrounded by a ring of impenetrable briars, and hiding a series of lost mysteries.

Unfortunately, this scenario feels bloated at only 10 pages (not counting the cover and the OGL). It spends a paragraph where a good sentence would suffice. An overwrought backstory is followed by the description of an uninteresting village community. There is an area map which has no function whatsoever: the wilderness it depicts is represented by a random encounter chart, while the main adventure location’s position is entirely subjective. No other areas are described, or even located on this map. It is a mystery. Getting to the briar has no rhyme or reason to it. It is not at a specific location, so you can’t look for it; and there is no transparent means of getting there. It is mostly built on a random encounter chart and GM fiat.

Some things probably wouldn’t work so well at the table either. There is a one-column “Lore” section in the appendix with a childrens’s song containing important clues for the inside of the grove, but I know no GM who would break into a song during a game session, and thanks God for that. No, we didn’t sing those Dragonlance love poems either. This is not the best means of giving the characters a hint.

Map to Nowhere

The grove itself is an interesting concept: an anomaly of time and space, where visitors are shrunk to minimal size, and time passes out of synch with the normal world. As a neat touch, some of the grove’s inhabitants are transformed humans who were trapped here a time ago, and are now living as insects and other small animals while still acting according to their original personalities. The former good guys are bees and the former bad guys are ants, while the main antagonist is, of course, a snake. The seeds of an interesting adventure are there. Sadly, the actual location key does not actually do much with this material. Some entries are, again, a complete mystery:

“B. DEAD TREE: This tree has already been looted.”

“5. ORDINARY TREE: There is nothing of interest about this tree.”

“9–11. ORDINARY TREES: These trees have nothing unusual about them.”

Eight of the 26 keyed areas have nothing of interest to them. Eight more are lazily placed treasure drops:

 “F. DEAD TREE: An empty iron flask lies in the tangled roots of this dead tree, about a foot below the surface.” (Note unobtainable treasure.)

“G. DEAD TREE: A sword +1 dangles from some wines in the mid-branchs [sic] of this suicide.” (???)

You get the idea. There is, simply, a lot of padding, and because of the padding, even things which would be otherwise okay feel like more padding. The module has four different random encounter charts (one for the surrounding woodlands, one for the grove, one for the pools and one for a mini-dungeon found in a fallen oak). You would never notice, or even consider it a feature if the module had an abundance of useful content. But this is a module which takes its sweet time on these side issues, and leaves us hanging when it comes to the actual worthwhile content.

There is some potential there: conflict between the miniature denizens of the grove, the return of old history, treachery in the village that is linked to the grove, some interesting faerie animal characters – all of these could be incorporated into a fun, whimsical module, and it wouldn’t have to be longer than the present work. However, it never becomes a cohesive whole. Worse, once you strip out the chaff, not much of a location that could be used on its own. Some encounters are actually rather imaginative or at least moody, but this is a module where the whole is not more than the sum of its parts. Bitterroot Briar is frustrating because you see flashes of unrealised potential, but no easy way to set things right. Unfortunately, something elusive seems to have been lost in the writing here.

No playtesters are credited in this adventure.

Rating: ** / *****

[REVIEW] Magical Murder Mansion

Magical Murder Mansion

Magical Murder Mansion (2019)

by Skerples

Self-published

Mid-level

Before you stands a bizarre creation: a funhouse dungeon that tries to make sense. It is a neatly engineered mishmash, an IKEA nightmare that would pass an EU inspection. You see, the killer cucumbers are all according to directive, and the death ray room will kill you in a fair way. Do not run. You will, in fact, have fun. Welcome to Magical Murder Mansion.

In this module, the characters will explore the haunted house of a crazy wizard who has apparently shuffled off this mortal coil, but not before turning his mansion into a funny deathtrap where adventurers will love to die. Indeed, it will be Hubert Nibsley – and the GM – who will have the last laugh! Where early funhouse dungeons were created through a stream-of-consciousness loose association approach (magical herbs optional), this is a studied recreation of this dungeon subgenre. Tegel Manor, White Plume Mountain and The Tomb of Horrors are cited in the introduction, which lays out the design goals of the module in a clear and transparent fashion. It is deadly, it is full of bizarre stuff, and it is somewhat adversarial, but it is not capricious – a real “thinking man’s dungeon” that plays fair and allows for a lot of open-ended problem solving. Of course, it is also a lesson in the ultimate funhouse design – that poking hornets’ nests is a lot of fun.

Magical Murder Mansion is admirably large and complex by modern standards. It describes a multi-level mansion and its 90 keyed areas – and takes only 15 pages to do so with inset maps and a few illustrations, before dedicating the other half of the module to new monsters and other supplementary materials. The entries represent a good compromise between scope and detail. There is establishing flavour (“Tawdry abstract red and orange wall hangings, badly chewed or motheaten”), and GM information presented in a clear, succinct way tailored for table use (“Small water basin full of light pink oil of slipperiness: makes everything it touches frictionless for 10 minutes”).

Most encounters are things to mess with, traps, or puzzles which are reasonably open-ended and typically depend on observation and a little lateral thinking, which usually represents 40-50% of the mythical “player skill”. The author set out to write a module where even failures make sense in hindsight (“Yup, we did walk into this one”), and has stuck to this vision. The action is mostly non-linear (although there is one gated “collect these four objects” puzzle that’s essential), and after the players go through a few encounters, they’ll invariably start to think up crazy schemes to turn the deathtraps and monsters into an asset to combat other deathtraps and monsters. This kind of emergent complexity is nice to see in a published product.

Vegetables Gone Bad

This is not a module for people who like deep immersion, or care for some kind of pseudo-historical veneer over their games. The mansion is completely anachronistic even in D&D’s obviously ahistorical assumed setting (which, ironically, would not have been out of place at a late 1970s game table). It is also filled with gonzo monsters like laser rats, the cool-as-ice wrestling angel, and the veggie-mites, a tribe of animated vegetables. It is all silly, but the monsters are functional, and two (the module’s take on tooth fairies and the mole dragon) are original and quite creepy. It did lack a certain whimsical sense of wonder that’s present in Tegel Manor and White Plume Mountain, which also pitch seriousness out the window, but somehow do better at building an environment that feels magical (the whole "dungeon as mythic underworld" concept). This is, again, a rationalist’s take on these old hallucinatory visions.

It would be unfair to omit the module’s dedication to usability. Dungeon sections are mostly presented on facing pages, one of which displays a partial map of the specific mansion section. The map itself is easy to read, and there is a blank players’ version that could be printed on a larger sheet of paper (something that comes from Tegel). Handy cross-references point to the material you will need. Creature stats are not included in the main module text, but at least they are simple to find in the appendix – along with more useful stuff, like tables for magical accidents and enchanted pools. There is also abundant explanatory text and GM advice about running the module and getting the most out of it.

As mentioned above, Magical Murder Mansion is a sleek, highly polished take on the funhouse dungeon concept. Everything is in its right place, and it is actually quite sensible as some powerful madman’s final prank on the world. Maybe it is just a bit too orderly – it lacks some of the drive and baroque flourishes of the modules it was inspired by, like the Green Devil Face or the Gazebo with a killer vine which has -8 AC and 50 hit points. So what you get is more Scooby Doo than a bizarre Fleischer Brothers cartoon caught on late night TV – which is a criticism only if you were expecting the latter. As a beer-and-pretzels that doesn’t take itself too seriously, it is very well done.

No playtesters are credited in this publication.

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

[REVIEW] Into the Jungle

Into the Jungle (2019)

by Christian Plogfors

Self-published

“The Vietcong dug too deep.” This is one of the games whose core idea can be summed up in one brief sentence. It will probably be sufficient to establish your reaction to it – it could sound fascinating, stupid, or absolutely tasteless. It is certainly original, even if it combines two well-known genres in the form of old-school D&D and Vietnam War combat. As the background goes, the Vietcong inadvertently broke an ancient seal while digging tunnels, and “pigmen, skeletons and other fantasy monsters are spreading out into the jungle around the area.” CIA-sponsored patrols have been sent in to disappear without a trace. Whatever the source, both the Americans and the Communists want it gone.

To reiterate, this is NOT primarily a Vietnam War game with fantasy elements; it is a fantasy dungeon crawl set in the Vietnam War, featuring modern combatants in what are presumably fairly D&Dish dungeon crawls and wilderness expeditions. “Dragons and helicopters”, so to speak – a setting which thrives on the juxtaposition of fantasy and recognisable modern technology. Would a squad of Vietnam-era conscripts fare well against gnolls, jungle vampires and dungeon bigfoot? Here is the time to find out.

Operation Manual

It would be a lie not to admit this bonkers concept was sold to me through the game’s presentation. It looks and feels like a half-declassified military file (at least a civilian’s idea thereof), with a typewriter font, “classified” sections where the text can benefit from ambiguity, and stark black-and-white stencil illustrations of mostly guns and helicopters. It is even called an “Operation Manual”. The game comes in the form of several modular, landscape-oriented pages which could be arranged in any order after printing, or laminated and split up during play between the players and the GM (since the precise order does not matter that much). It is compact and logically laid out. For a minimal system, it is very well presented.

The game rules are based on Into the Odd, one of the worthwhile old-school systems which take a step beyond “here be my favourite edition of D&D with some house rules or extra streamlining on the top”. ItO is not a variant, but an in-depth rethinking of the D&D concept, with its own play dynamic, strong implied setting, and support material (which establishes the game more firmly than just a set of mechanics). Like pre-supplement OD&D, ItO is a small, mean, fairly deadly game that has more going on than initially meets the eye. It is far superior to its essentially interchangable rules-ultralight rivals. Consequently, ItO has always seemed to serve as a fertile ground for good spinoffs – like D&D itself, it is a good baseline to build on.

It is all very simple. Your characters are defined by three ability scores (Strength, Dexterity and Wisdom) rolled with 2d6+3, and also the basis of an ability test mechanic used for “saves” and more general actions. Characters get 1d6 Hp per level. Characters are also defined by a random class skill (PCs with low ability scores gain a second one as compensation), 2 weapon skills, a few disposable squad members (these flunkies have 1 Hp and 1 weapon skill each), and gear – some standard, some rolled on extensive random tables. Characters are further rounded out through a series of random background/personality tables.

Your average player character might look something like this:

Doug “Taco” Cavezza, Strength 7, Dexterity 7, Wisdom 2 (he sucks!), Hp 5. He has two class skills due to low stats, First aid and Leadership (he can remove stress points from comrades, a valuable skill). He can handle Submachine guns and Infantry rifles.

Doug has two companions, Dwayne “Doc” Ferguson (1 Hp, pistols), and Howell “BooKoo” Hendrix (1 Hp, pistols).

He gets two combat weapons (M16, Ingram MAC-10), one melee weapon he is not good at (utility/combat knife), misc. gear (jungle fatigues, combat boots, M1 helmet, belts and pouches, a rucksack, and a canteen). He can pick 2 standard items (a flashlight and maps), roll 1d4 more (a 4! He gets sunburn preventive cream/foot powder, a camouflage helmet cover with mosquito net, a poncho and 2 frag grenades), and roll for one special item (a fragmentation vest!).

As miscellaneous details, Doug is attached to friends, he is courageous, and he was an electrician before the War. He has a secret he is not telling.

Character Sheet (front)

The character generation process and the power level are a strong suit of Into the Jungle – your guys are fragile enough to make expeditions risky, just simple enough to make to render their inevitable loss okay, yet just detailed enough to get invested in. The high randomness of the system drives home that these are essentially everymen who got drafted and shipped out after basic training, and like old-school D&D’s murderhobos, their survival hinges more on a combination of guile, opportunism and luck than any innate ability. Doug up there is certainly a random loser swept up first by world events, and then by Dungeons Fucking Dragons manifesting in the centre of the Nam jungle. However, like in Dungeons Fucking Dragons, thinking laterally and exploiting your equipment can save your bacon, and characters do gain a good supply of random mundane gear to use in various mcgyveresque ways.

Nevertheless, and even taking into account a fairly generous dying mechanic, this is a swingy, low-powered, high-risk game. Like ItO, there are no attack rolls, only damage, reduced by an armour score that tends to be zero for PCs, and up to 3 for monsters (a rifle does 1d8 points of damage). Consequently, going into battle without an advantage is always a coin toss in Into the Jungle, and fighting dirty reigns supreme. A slot-based encumbrance system is in effect (you can carry as many extra items beyond the basics as your Strength score). You also accumulate “stress point” for basically everything (including mosquitoes, leeches, heavy rain and walking in the thick jungle where you might get ambushed), and characters who get 4 SPs start experiencing Traumatic Stress Disorder, which gives a 5e-style “disadvantage” on your rolls (roll twice, take worse result). Stress can be eliminated via rest, socialising, your friendly drugsssssss, and rolling while under the effects of disadvantage (which also burns away stress points).

Into the Jungle’s character generation is great, and it has one of the better lightweight modern-era systems I have seen. In that respect, it is fairly close to Into the Odd’s simple but robust original rules (as a caveat, the upcoming revised system seems to be taking a slightly different approach). The “GM section”, the background information for running adventures, is less well realised. It still shines where it employs random generation. There are great tables here for generating fast missions, including a hilarious codename table – e.g. “Operation Tunnel Ninja” may be a reconnaissance mission in some tunnels, to eradicate a vampire spawn pit in the Mekong Delta, ending with a party; “Operation Bay of Eagles” would be to infiltrate a crash site as a search-and-destroy operation against two giant spiders in Phuoc Tuy province, ending with 5 days R&R in Hong Kong. It also has guidelines for random encounters and locations (“a small waterfall with a blue lake and submerged ruins”, “someone is having a BBQ”, “rice paddies with mortar craters”, “mountain plateaus”), and a good selection of wildlife, monsters and rival NPCs (from “Lesser false vampire bats” to “Pigmen”, “Dungeon toads” and “Dryads”, and from Spetnatz teams to Viet Cong commandos). This is a superb kaleidoscope of “Vietnam Movie” imagery and fantasy stuff to combine and extrapolate from.

Guns and Guns and More Guns

And this is where it stops and runs out of steam. A well-realised GM section, complete with support material for running Vietnam-style dungeons and perhaps other types of adventures are missing; as are useful exploration procedures. This may be quibbling about a mini-game, but what makes a game more than a ruleset is the surrounding galaxy of information – the stuff which helps the players get their characters’ bearings in the milieu, and the GM’s guidelines for creating and managing the same. This is what makes a game like traditional D&D (in its various incarnations) great, the stripped-down ultralight systems so dissatisfying, Into the Odd pretty cool, and Into the Jungle an “almost there” game. It separates the wheat from the chaff. This is a game that needed a great intro adventure (this is of course hard – even ItO slipped on this particular banana peel), maybe a condensed Keep on Hill 330. It would also have benefited from a more in-depth treatment of GMing, including specific procedures for organising play in the scope of an adventure or a mini-campaign. But that kind of information is not there, and the game feels unfinished. Unfortunately, the two minuscule and frankly underwhelming supplements released so far aren’t helping. I mean, Dinosaurs in the Jungle. Sure. But it doesn’t fill out the gaps which should have been filled out.

In conclusion, this is midway between a well-developed thought experiment and a potentially great full RPG – it has a strong premise, and parts of it are nicely rounded out and admirably well presented. It almost manages to embed its rules in support material which make the game worth playing in a sustained manner. Yet it also has gaps which deserve to be filled in, and in the end, it does not feel like a game that fully grasps its own potential. It would need further elaboration for that. This does not mean additional mechanical detail – those parts, in fact, are just about right – rather, a developed and complex vision of a game that has gone through a rigorous testing phase, and which presents a rich framework to build on. Perhaps one day.

The publication includes a special thanks section to people who may be playtesters. It is, also, completely free!

Rating: *** / *****

[REVIEW] The Forgotten Grottoes of the Sea Lords

Tombs Forgotten Grottoes
of the Sea Kings Lords

The Forgotten Grottoes of the Sea Lords (2019)

by Keith Sloan

Published by Expeditious Retreat Press

6^th to 8^th level

It all began in 2006 with Advanced Adventures and Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shroom, at least if we define our beginning as “the first commercial module to exploit the Open Gaming License to publish an adventure for a classic D&D edition” (these things are fuzzy because Cairn of the Skeleton King was published around the same time, and solved the license problem by simply sidestepping it). Yet Pod-Caverns was not just the first one through the door, but also a solid demonstration of the old-school aesthetic and adventure design principles. The Advanced Adventures line has had its ups and downs in the 13 years since, and it has faded from the public eye a bit – at least I don’t see it mentioned with the same kind of excitement as the newest Kickstarter money sink. This is a mistake. There is still very good stuff there.

The Forgotten Grottoes of the Sea Lords (any relation to Tomb of the Sea Kings?) has a lot of the same timeless qualities which were found in Pod-Caverns. It fills a niche perfectly, and even helps define it. There are many tombs of this and tower of that, but Forgotten Grottoes is the natural choice if you would like to run an adventure in a series of sea caves (U2 and U3 are close, but a lot more specific). Like Pod-Caverns ran with D&D’s bizarre ooze and fungus monsters, this module mashes together all your favourite sea legends from pirates and sea monsters to fishy cults and buried treasures, and puts them in a big, open-ended dungeon. It is not stuck on a single note, but integrates a lot of them into a place that feels both cohesive and varied.

The Forgotten Grottoes are a large place, beyond the scope of a single expedition. 112 keyed areas are described over two dungeon levels, all in some 13 pages (the rest are supplementary material). Yet nowhere does it feel bare-bones or lacking in some aspect: the adventure has both complex set-piece encounters and small, hidden mysteries; bargaining and combat; puzzles and environmental hazards. Even lesser side-areas receive their due, or offer some odd opportunity for discovery and interaction. There are all kinds of small, clever touches that are hella atmospheric and make for neat mini-puzzles. The dungeon denizens have hung up a few dead seals near one of the entrances, which you can toss into the water to distract a hungry monster. Observing a pattern of repeating bas-reliefs lets you spot the odd outlier, and find a long-forgotten hidden room. Strange and powerful dungeon denizens like a weird bird-sage, a vampiress or a lich can become temporary allies, patrons or dupes (if the players play their cards well).

The number of things to mess with – not to mention the number of ways you can mess with these things – is staggering for a lean booklet. With six ways in and many more routes and level connections to get around, not to mention the strong inter-NPC dynamics, there will always remain an element of the unknown. In the finest traditions of old-school dungeon design, this is a place to explore and plunder, or a fine location to locate your favourite MacGuffin, but its scale and complexity prevent it from being fully explored and solved. You can’t go in and “clean it” – it is a place you organise expeditions into, then get out of before things get too hot. And that’s how it should be: there is always a corner of this dungeon that will make the players wonder – what did we miss there? Fabulous treasures or horrible death?

The balance of old and new material is right. There are well-known (or vaguely familiar) AD&D mainstays, but like the better TSR modules, there is sufficient novelty in terms of new monsters (including some truly horrid crustaceans) and non-standard magic items to keep the players off balance and guessing. Creative thinking will go far here, but there are just as many satisfying opportunities for good, honest hack-and-slash. It is a generous module that rewards the shrewd and the adventurous alike.

The Forgotten Grottoes of the Sea Lords feels a lot like a lost TSR module in style and execution. It maintains a strong identity while remaining broadly usable – if you have seacoasts and pirates in your campaign, it will certainly have a place there. It is the precise kind of “generalist” module which fits most games without sacrificing its distinctive identity. Well worth owning.

Both playtesters and their characters are credited in this adventure.

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

[REVIEW] The Hidden Tomb of Nephabti

The Hidden Tomb of Nephabti (2019)

by Jeremy Reaban

Self-published

Levels 5-7

Mummies. Why did it have to be mummies?

Should you want to explain the concept of a dungeon crawl to a layman, looting pyramids and Egyptian royal tombs might be your best bet to get across the idea. D&D is often highly esoteric, but pyramids? Those are on TV. The first game session I ever played took place in a pyramid. If you have played AD&D reasonably long, you have probably been to one, too.

The Hidden Tomb of Nephabti is a short tomb robbing-adventure. Of its 17 pages, 8 are dedicated to a dungeon with 23 keyed areas, the rest describing new monsters, gods, and magic items. It is meat-and-potatoes in a good way. If you need an Egyptian tomb, here is one that can fill that spot. It is written and laid out in a straightforward way, and focuses on what matters around the table. It is not going to win any award, or draw hype, but it is the stuff that makes for a nice home game, packaged for reuse.

The rooms are good. Every one of the dungeon rooms has something worthwhile going on: interesting combat setups, magical tricks, interesting and well-hidden treasure, and even good NPC interaction. It does not concern itself too much with mundane elements like rotting linen or sand with bits of broken pottery – it is all about the fantastic side of dungeoneering. A lot of adventures have two or three good ideas hidden in them. This one has several, and much of it is even tied to the local mythology (may contain traces of Cthulhu; time plays another important role). Most importantly, it is all material which invites and rewards PC engagement and experimentation. Look and touch!

One aspect I am finding weaker is the way the rooms are connected. The tomb is laid out in a fairly boring way which looks like the rooms are mostly linked arbitrarily. Nothing of note takes place in the corridors (not even traps or random encounters), and it lacks the vertical elements of a good tomb-crawl. The real pyramids had stairs and air shafts and interior galleries! One or two rooms are positioned in a way that requires some thought to deal with or bypass, but you could mostly just march unimpeded to the final room, and leave the way you came. Not even a lousy pit trap in your path? This needs work!

But all in all, this is a solid, unpretentious scenario with a fake-TSR style cover I have a soft spot for. As I understand from the text, this is the first module of a trilogy, to be followed by The Fearful Fane of Bubastis, and Black Pyramid of the Faceless Pharaoh.

No playtesters are credited in this publication.

Rating: *** / *****

[REVIEW] Sision Tower

Sision Tower

[REVIEW] Sision Tower (2019)

by Graphite Prime

Published by Graphite Prime Studios

Levels 3-5

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

Good adventures often follow well-trod paths, and add their own creativity to a tried form. The best invariably carry a personal stamp – they try something new even while benefiting from decades of good practice. These are creative risks which do not always pay off, but when they do, the results are fruitful beyond playing it safe. This is one such adventure. That is: many adventures are basically good (my usual 3 ratings); and some adventures excel at one or two aspects (these tend to receive the 4s). Sision Tower excels at all of them. It breaks new ground, and handles all aspects of a play-ready adventure expertly.

Sision Tower is a 40-page dungeon crawl featuring a massive, otherworldly tower that seems to be constructed of rock slabs in the shape of stacked ice floes. The tower, travelling through space and time, had appeared out of nowhere in a desolate region, and drawn multiple groups of adventurers to its location with a mournful song that could be heard hundreds of miles away. The player characters are neither the only, nor the first explorers in this strange place: they will have to contend with rivals operating within the dungeon, as well as coming across the remains of less fortunate predecessors.

Where lots of poor adventures get stuck on background detail, and fine adventures often discard them to begin in medias res, Sision Tower starts with a straight-to-the-point introduction which wastes no words, but provides flavourful and practical background details which come in handy when running the scenario. Rumours are followed by an overland travel segment, and a description of the “grounds” around the tower proper. It handles small stuff like travel times, gathering information, and finding extra supplies for the expedition in a succinct manner. Later, navigating the tower’s vertical rooms, illumination, random encounters and the rest are all given thought – the necessary stuff is there at your fingertips. The adventure is comfortable to use, an impression which continues through the rest of the module.

Polished, skilful presentation is a major strength of the text: there is always enough to communicate mood and play-relevant information, but it never becomes indulgent, or engage in hand-holding. The module calls attention to important ideas at the right places (including GM tips on getting the most out of specific encounters), and is admirably “readable” without straying from a basic two-column layout. It mainly uses small tricks like bolding, boxes (although not boxed text), bullet point lists and random tables to guide the reader, but never as gimmicks. These devices always serve a useful purpose in making the material handy during play. The module is peppered with the author’s diagrams and vignette illustrations; dark and moody graphite pieces which emphasise the tower’s gloomy atmosphere.

Atmosphere is an outstanding feature of Sision Tower. It has an iconic look and feel which should stay in one’s memory over the years: just like every player who has been there will remember the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl or the Vault of the Drow, Sision Tower is a distinct place. Once a sanctuary of Law and a demesne of angels, it is now gloomy and abandoned. It is a vertical dungeon writ on a vast scale: pretty much a small mountain with a 550’ atrium in the middle, constructed of enormous, cyclopean stone blocks and its rooms connected by vertical shafts and sloping passages. The mournful sound of enormous chimes permeate the mostly empty structure.  Sadness and abandonment are moods which are hard to conjure in the context of an adventure game, and themes associated with angels are hard to use without reverting to cheap clichés. Sision Tower succeeds where others have stumbled: its angels are distant and inscrutable seraphic beings, but the tower’s tragedies are readily apparent. This is not a happy place, and it feels properly haunted – not a locale to linger for an extended timespan (indeed, the scenario’s moral conflict lies between trying to resolve the tower’s tragedy while risking death and failure, and looting it in a mercenary fashion before finding a way out).

Encounters along the Z-axis

But it is not just about mood. It works as a proper exploration-oriented adventure, too! The tower is a great dungeon with good flow, well-designed encounters and a sense of wonder in every nook and cranny. Navigating the out of scale verticality is perhaps the most unusual aspect, one that has a substantial effect on random encounters. The tower’s treasures are cleverly but not arbitrarily hidden, requiring thought to find and claim. The main prizes are sixteen special magic items, whose precise location is randomised among multiple treasure rooms. They are original and interesting, such as an amulet which turns you into a shadow, but carries the risk of staying as one; or a velvet mask which allows you to charm birds.

The fixed encounters are excellent set-pieces, allowing the players to take risks, experiment with their own solutions to open-ended problems, and win or lose big depending on their luck and resourcefulness. How to open a trapped chest which has already claimed someone’s life with a poison gas trap? How to explore a submerged passage inhabited by an intelligent giant jellyfish? Is the cursed medusa an asset or a deadly risk? Almost all of the 34 rooms have something to tamper with, with good clues and multiple possible solutions. This tends to bring out the best in players, while offering a different experience for every group. The main challenge, in particular, is deadly, dangerous, and plain damn scary. It requires player bravery to tackle, and the price of failure is not mere death, but eternal suffering. Sision Tower’s rooms are rounded out by random encounters, ranging from nightmare monsters adapted to this environment (sssspiderrrrsssssss) to adventuring parties and magical enigmas. More than simple adversaries, some can provide useful information and equipment; and some represent a non-standard challenge (the Choir Doves whisk away engulfed PCs to a different part of the tower, the Fool’s Ghost is a font of riddles, Lythia’s Purse-Cutters can become enemies or allies, depending on how the encounter with them proceeeds).

Altogether, Sision Tower is one of the finest adventure modules I have read in recent years. It shines bright in every aspect, combining vivid imagination, competent writing and inventive encounter design. It is not simply an interesting module to read (although it has much to learn from even that way), but one to play or run. As a “wandering” extraplanar location, it can be located in a desolate corner of your preferred campaign setting, and it should prove a session (or two) to remember.

No playtesters are credited in this publication.

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

Even the obligatory "Weeping Angel Statue" encounter is great in this one!

[BLOG] Shallow and deep wilderness sandboxes

Difficulties concerning this area of play notwithstanding, most of us manage to create and run rewarding wilderness adventures. The OD&D and AD&D rulebooks offer workable procedures to run an outdoors expedition, and there are multiple approaches to build a wilderness sandbox, from fixed, linear journeys along roads and rivers, to more free-ranging pointcrawls and hexcrawls. Only three ingredients are required:

1. An underlying approach to turn the imaginary world into a game space (hexes or squares, connecting lines, visible landmarks) that can be described by the GM and navigated by the players.
2. Procedures for outdoors expeditions: movement, exploration, encounters, food and other resources, and so forth.
3. Points of interest which give a reason for visiting the wilderness at all, and differentiate going one way from going another way.

All three of these points can be satisfied in very different ways, usually with a mix-and-match approach. With a little preparation – or prodigious bullshitting – it is not hard to assemble and run a miniature setting.

However, there is an often unaddressed issue which makes a strong difference in how actual wilderness-based campaigns pan out. This is the issue of depth. The concept of deep and shallow settings is familiar. As the idea goes, you can generally sketch out a wide campaign setting in broad strokes, or select a more narrow area, and give it an in-depth treatment where every little corner has something. Doing both is theoretically possible (Tolkien, Greg Stafford and M.A.R. Barker did it, and so did the rather less reputable Ed Greenwood), but the resulting setting may become inaccessible for players, and burdensome or at least very hard to manage for the GM. The question of depth also poses questions for campaigns with a strong wilderness component: this is the subject matter of this post, which highlights the differences between shallow and deep wildernesses.

A shallow wilderness: single-layered structure

A shallow wilderness stretches far and wide, and its points of interest tend to be individually small and often unassuming – proverbial “grains of sand”. The Lord of Crows maintains a castle in hex 1212; 1214 is the lair of 26 gnolls living in a hilltop encampment surrounded by a palisade; and 1313 is a mysterious obelisk where wise old crows read glyphs only known to their kind. These are mostly encounter-level descriptions; they may be free-standing (like the gnolls) or interrelated (what about the crow motif?), smaller and larger, but they are about as complex as your usual dungeon room. There is a single "layer" of adventuring: the wilderness itself. That does not mean there are no cities or villages - but they mostly exist on the encounter level, without going into deeper detail. Wilderlands of High Fantasy is of course the main model of this approach, while The Sea of Vipers – which has partly inspired this post – is a more recent one.

The implications for play point towards lots of travel across a large number of hexes. Travel-related procedures such as random wilderness monsters, getting lost, managing food, and so on become an important aspect of play. Some character resources are going to be less of a going concern (spells and hit points can be replenished through rest), while issues like movement rates and daily random encounter frequency can become a bigger deal. All in all, the wilderness is most of the adventure, at least for a number of sessions: our large 3.0 Wilderlands campaign was mostly one long trek from one dungeon (Necromancer’s Rappan Athuk) to another dungeon (JG’s Dark Tower, although sadly, the campaign ended right before we got there). There were diversions and stops along the way, but the game was largely about wandering through the coastal areas of two enormous campaign maps, and wrecking stuff.

A deep wilderness: multi-layered structure

A deep wilderness is perhaps better connected to the common D&D experience: here, the wilderness expedition part is the connecting tissue between other kinds of adventures, which are substantial on their own. The resulting games may perhaps be better thought of as multi-layered: there are layers of declining size and increasing complexity as you drill down from the “overland map” to the individual hex, and below. To borrow an example from an intermittent campaign I am running,

1. You have a general setting map (the fallen Roman-inspired empire of Kassadia and its early Renaissance successor city states)…
2. …but some areas, like “The Forest of Gornate” in the embedded picture, are described in more detail; in my case, as a pointcrawl…
3. …and some points on this maps are themselves detailed locations (the town of Mur) or separate dungeons (the Great Cleft; the Villa of Lucretia Vinalli; the Hanging Gardens of Marabundus, etc.). In our case, the Great Cleft has Keep on the Borderlands-style mini-dungeons of its own!

Obviously, only selected areas of the broad setting are described in this detail, since it would be extremely time-consuming, not to mention wasteful to extend this treatment to the whole.

A deep wilderness setting places somewhat less emphasis on prolonged travel and its associated procedures. In fact, it tends to anchor players in a smaller area; by drawing them to local adventure areas and getting them involved in local conflicts. Once you start getting entangled in the affairs of local nobles, or drawn deeper into the mysteries of the forest, it makes less sense to just cut ties and travel to Frabotia, let alone Thrygia or the borderlands beyond the northern edge of the map. You could play an entire mini-campaign in a limited area – and we had done so in various corners of the Wilderlands (around Tegel village, on the Wormshead peninsula, in the wastelands and island realms around Zothay).

The game can develop a complexity which does not happen as much on a long itinerary (which tends to encourage episodic play), and the same locations can be reused to an extent where they become familiar, while they can still reveal new challenges and threats. Finding out that the hideout of the beast-cultist was in the Hills of Ligonia all along, or arriving back in Mur to uncover an insurrection plot involving former friends, is an experience. However, you lose the magic of long-range travel: there is something liberating about wide, shallow settings where you can truly head for the horizons to see what is there.

At this point, I don’t know if our campaign in Kassadia will evolve in either direction – this is going to be the result of its natural trajectory – but I see potential in both routes. I would like my players to see red-walled Viaskar and its places of pilgrimage, and go toe-to-toe with the savage Harepsi and their rolling fortresses. Yet I would also like to get them involved in complex local schemes and let them discover interconnections and hidden details. And here is the dilemma: time and the natural lifespan of a campaign will limit how much we can grasp; and depth will have a decisive effect on where our adventures will take us.