[REVIEW] The Lost Crypt

The Lost Crypt

The Lost Crypt (2020)

by Bill Silvey

Published by Necromancer Games

Levels 7^th to 8^th

[Disclaimer: I have, on multiple previous occasions, done freelance work for Necromancer Games and their successor Frog God Games.]

The Lost Crypt comes from the remains of a lost manuscript: The Teeth of the Barkash-Nour, one of the Castle Greyhawk offshoot scenarios Gary Gygax had drafted, but never completed. In the mid-2000s, when hopes were high that Greyhawk (or “Castle Zagyg”) would see the light of day for the Castles and Crusades RPG, Gary had drafted Bill Silvey (a.k.a. “The Dungeon Delver”) to develop his notes into a full treatment. This work, while completed, never saw the light of day due to publication delays, and later Gary’s death in 2008. The current module, a much shorter affair, is constructed from the material Bill had added to the original, and now released as a standalone adventure. As such, this adventure bears a peculiar distinction: it is not a Gary Gygax module (all of Gary’s material had to be excised, and the remaining text repackaged), but it bears his blessings on an encounter-by-encounter basis, and indeed, hews close to his style and design approach. Despite the different theme and level designation, it felt most like the Moathouse dungeons from The Village of Hommlet (although without the charismatic villain).

The Lost Crypt in its current form is a relatively small scenario, with 23 keyed areas and a bugbear lair featuring nine more. It is an Egyptian-style dungeon set in an extraplanar setting (although this element plays no further role beyond the setup, and can be safely altered). It is best described as a gauntlet of archetypal dungeon challenges. It is structured in a very linear way, with encounter after encounter in a mostly straight line. You arrive, deal with whatever the location throws at you, and move on. Every keyed area has something to deal with – combat, and not puzzles per se, but the kind of dirty GM tricks which require a good combination of courage, caution and thinking on your feet to solve. The bugbear lair, continuing the adventure where the tomb ends, is a tough combat encounter with organised, intelligent humanoids helped by their high HD. There is a nagging sense something is missing – a more grand set-piece encounter, a find that makes you go “Whoa”, a dirty trick that leaves the players shaking their fists in mock anger. This is not there in the adventure, and it gives it an unfinished feeling. As is, it just sort of ends.

The writing is clear, no-nonsense stuff, about what you would find in an early AD&D module – there is some boxed text of the helpful sort, and some environmental detail, but nothing too bad. The phrase that comes to my mind concerning the whole adventure is “well crafted” – nothing jaw-dropping, but everything is in its proper place, and it is a fine test of dungeoneering skills. There could be more of it, or it could use a more interesting layout, or end with more of a bang, but for a side-adventure, it is about the right scope, and offers a versatile side-quest you can send your players on. It is a useful thing in a GM’s library.

No playtesters are credited in this publication. 

Rating: *** / *****

[BEYONDE] Thief: The Metal Anniversary

Rooftop exploration in Feast of Pilgrims

Thief: the Dark Project, a unique and moody stealth game, was released late November 1998. It was instantly recognised as something new – a kind of game that has not been done before. The Dark Project was praised for its inventive darkness- and sound-based stealth mechanic, its commitment to what became recognised as “immersive simulation” (a term invented years later to describe a design movement Thief had spearheaded), its massive and complex levels, and the pervasive mood of mystery and menace that enveloped it. But Thief was also criticised: many had thought it had not yet perfected its own formula, or that it had included several supernatural-themed missions as a sop to action game fans. As these arguments went, Thief’s real strength lay in its human-centred levels, where its advantages could shine fully.

Casing a Victorian interior in Fierce Competition

Thief’s creators, Looking Glass Studios, took this feedback to their heart. The sequel, originally planned as a mission disk, would mostly leave behind the forgotten tombs and weird underworlds of the first game, to focus on social upheaval, human intrigue, and the rise of a fanatical sect of technologically inclined militants calling themselves the Mechanists (as the game’s anti-hero, Garrett would put it, “Every bit as fanatical as [their predecessors], and twice as industrious.”). Thief: The Metal Age would be Thief, but even more so. The game would prove to be Looking Glass’ last hurrah: they could barely get it out of the door in March 2000 before being sunk by old financial difficulties, which had haunted them for several years and finally caught up with them. Ironically, the game proved a massive critical and financial success (although not, as it is often suggested, as successful as the first instalment); had Looking Glass still been active, the sales could have provided it with a substantial cash injection, and an evergreen title that would continue to sell well over the years. Thief 2 was also embraced by the growing fan community as the definitive version – the game that finally delivered on Thief 1’s promises.

Keeping off the streets of an upscale market area in Into the Odd

In hindsight, The Metal Age is a troubled sequel. It was produced under a short development cycle, and rushed out to avoid getting mothballed as the studio was shut down. The poor texture work and the obviously unfinished levels show a lack of polish, but the problems reach deeper. The story is a baroque mess, sacrificing The Dark Project’s elegant noir plot of a talented but vain man’s downfall and his inability to see his fault in it, with a poorly paced and often nonsensical narrative which drags our hero this and that way, but is not meaningfully connected except by fairly flimsy railroading. The Metal Age is more a collection of individual levels than a coherent whole. Some of these levels are all-time classics – taking to the rooftops (“the thieves’ highway”) of a bustling metropolis and infiltrating a mediaeval art deco skyscraper in Life of the Party, looting a sprawling warehouse complex with dark and sometimes funny secrets in the underrated Shipping and Receiving, or breaking the interlocking security systems of First City Bank and Trust – but there is a lot that is filler, or fundamentally botched. More than that, the loss of supernatural elements and “otherworldly” levels had robbed the game of much of its mystery and menace. The critics wanted a “pure” thieving game, a “Victorian burglary simulator”, and they got what they wanted – to the game’s detriment. It is still very good (in a gaming subgenre not known for an abundance of titles), but it does not replicate the success of a much more focused, aesthetically superior predecessor.

Approaching an eccentric mansion in Where Unknown Lurks

Yet Thief 2 undeniably lives, and it does so through its fan community. It was the fans who had convinced Looking Glass Studios to release a level editor for Thief 1, but it was second game where this tight-knit design community really took off. There were 17 Thief 2 fan missions in 2000, 60 in 2001, and until 2008, the number had steadily remained in the 70s (more recently, the number has been around 20 annually). There is a lot of inevitable repetition among the 870-or-so titles, and of course many uninspired missions or beginner efforts. But the overall quality has always been good, and there is a staggering amount of outstanding levels, even some masterpieces of game design and interactive storytelling. In some sense, the basic game’s weaknesses may even be said to encourage creative experiments – wild departures from the look and feel of its default stock assets and sometimes iffy level design. Thief 1 is so distinct and strong in its look and feel that it stamps every mission made with it with its own identity; the second game can be pushed very far (even in very odd directions) and moulded into very individual projects.

Someone has met a gruesome fate in Ten Little Taffers

There has also been another factor in Thief 2’s success as a level design platform: the lack of good alternatives. The game offers one of the few genuinely accessible and powerful editing platforms to produce your own interactive stories. This element is missing from first person shooters, while games from other genres rarely offer accessible editing tools. The Thief scene has thus been populated by many aspiring writers and game designers – some of whom went on to successful professional careers in the field (readers of this blog should recognise the name of Anthony Huso, whose contributions to the Dishonored series, and excellent RPG work are also to be noted; the late Terry Pratchett was an enthusiastic fan mission player). The Thief community’s demographics have consequently been a bit “out of place” in gaming, with more women, and a larger share of older players (some now in their 60s and 70s). It is, for all intents and purposes, a very helpful and supportive bunch, a self-contained, if a bit insular creative movement. After all, there are no games like ours! Techraptor has recently published a piece on what makes the community tick, interviewing Huso, yours truly, and other figures involved in the level design scene.

A Metropolis-worthy vision of industrialisation
run amok in The Builder's Paradise

The occasion for this post, then, is to celebrate not just the game’s 20th anniversary, but also the surrounding community, which took it way beyond its intended scope and lifespan. Last year, a 20th Anniversary Contest was launched to commemorate the occasion. The results are now 11 new missions to download and play (and a few out-of-contest entries to come in the future). These missions are a great showcase of the community’s ability to deliver great gaming, and covers many of the popular styles and approaches to mission design. We have missions from enthusiastic beginners who wanted to make something for the occasion (and may later improve their craft further), and from old hands with several missions under their belt; smaller projects and grand affairs which took a full year of intense work to produce and polish for release; missions which are easy and comforting, and others which offer a formidable challenge even to the best. There is a mission which reproduces the exhilaration of exploring the rooftops and noble palaces of an upscale districts to infiltrate and rob a massive cathedral in the middle of a grand assembly of heavily armed fanatics; a warehouse job with more than meets the eye; a surreal and terrifying trip to weird underworld beneath a cramped and labyrinthine bazaar area (titled Into the Odd – no explicit relation to the OSR RPG, but some interesting thematic parallels); a journey into a grandiose and terrible mechanical hell that’s half high-tech factory and half expressionist movie set – and much more. 

At 20, The Metal Age is a Methuselah of computer gaming, but the longevity of the game, and the creative community around it, shows that it has transcended the constant churn of new titles, and become a classic – perhaps in a different way than The Dark Project, but certainly no less valuable. And then there are the contest missions - after all, what else should you be doing while the Bat Plague is out in full force?

Exploring an elegant office in pursuit of a rare vintage in My Favorite Year

[CAMPAIGN JOURNAL] Into the Jungle, and Back Again

“The Vietcong dug too deep.” This is the premise of Into the Jungle, an interesting Into the ODD hack I reviewed here last summer. Mixing Vietnam-era combat with fantasy monsters emerging from jungle dungeons, and making even more of a mess out of Nam by taking both sides completely off guard, it is a quick, deadly little game that holds together surprisingly well. Over the holidays, we got the chance to play two sessions of the game with Marvin (posting here as Volja, not his real name either) as the GM. What follow are some quick notes on how the game works, and what kind of adventures you can run with it. If you haven’t read the review first, much of this post will leave you baffled; if you have, there will be some duplication. You can’t win either way. Welcome to Vietnam!

...but with beholders and orcs

Character generation is one of Into the Jungle’s strongest sides. It is very simple and mostly random, but in a way which helps a lot to define your characters from the outset.

• You roll randomly for three ability scores (2d6+3 for Strength, Dexterity and Wisdom), hit points (a brutal 1d6 per level, although 0 does not necessarily mean death), a “class skill” and two “weapon skills”. These characters are random losers drafted into the war, and while they would all be classified as “Fighters” (duh), the class skill acts as their basic military profile (e.g. medic, sapper, heavy weapon guy, tank crew, etc.), and their weapon training rounds out their approach to combat (you can use weapons unskilled, but you will have really crappy damage that way – you can lug around that M60, but can’t aim it properly).
• The second layer of customisation comes from equipment, which contains some basics (e.g. jungle fatigues, an M1 helmet, your rucksack, a canteen, etc.), but also a handful of fun random items: 1d4 standard and 1 special.
• Then there is a third, giving you miscellaneous details like a pre-war job, a basic trait, a motivation (and, optionally using the NPC tables, a name and nickname).
• You can also generate a few disposable secondary squad members. These guys have the three stats, 1 Hp, and one weapon skill.

This takes about ten minutes, if you have to have the process explained to you.

So the three of us sat down and rolled up some basic PCs:

• I got Stanley “Junior” Horowitz, a goldsmith from Brooklyn, with STR 6, DEX 11, and WIS 11, 5 Hp (sturdy!), demolitions, skills in pistols and infantry rifles, and a weird old book he got somewhere in Saigon. Junior was lazy, but he had an Ideal (The American Way), as well as a companion, Robert “Touchdown” Francisco, who was much needed because he had to carry low-STR Stanley’s equipment.
• Premier got Henry “Doc” Cavinton, a combat medic and former cook, followed by Corky “The Swede” Henriksson.
• …and Orastes got Arthur “Hollywood” Turner, a sniper who has somehow gotten his hand on his “own” jeep, and also controlled (?) Diego “Afterburner” Hendrix, a flame thrower guy suffering from acute stress and paranoia.

These nobodies were brought together in May 1968 in District 202, a military district nominally pacified after “the battle of Hamburger Hill” (not the real event), but still beset by Vietcong activity. Base 204, a small “keep on the borderland”, was a small microcosm to itself, with an enigmatic and frankly shady commander, and a burgeoning black market. In driving range along the river were three villages (Bao Loc, Dalat and Ban Bai) and three fire support bases, located in a jungle-covered mountain area. Summoned by Commander Ateman, deathly pale and wearing sunglasses, we were allowed to pick between four codenamed assignments, and chose…

District 202

Operation #1: PURPLE BEER

A partially pacified settlement, Ban Bai has been found abandoned. We were tasked to find out what happened during our patrol, and report back to Ateman. Using Hollywod’s jeep (super useful), we drove along the river. Transportation is a godsend in Into the Jungle: “Stress Points” are an important rating, which accumulate by doing stressful stuff, including combat, witnessing horrific things, or hunting/being hunted by hostiles, but also moving through mosquito-infested jungles, heavy rain, or the sweltering heat (so basically everything you actually do in Vietnam). R&R helps, but exposes the company to random encounters. As a neat touch, drugs also knock off stress, but come with a nasty addiction mechanic. Since this is still the “Reefer Madness” age, weed cigarettes are exactly the addictive devil drug portrayed by television!

Along the way, we stopped to gather intel in Bao Loc, a mostly friendly locale. Here we learned that the inhabitants of Ban Bai were “Dead but not dead”, and Mao Duc, the local VC leader was somehow involved. We also learned that Uncle Dung, a local elder, was kidnapped by the “dog-faces”, who were living next to the northern missile base. We continued to Ban Bai, which was indeed deserted, save for a hungry tiger, which we ambushed and killed.

• There are no attack rolls in Into the Jungle unless you are using auto-fire (which, granted, you generally do); the attackers immediately roll damage. This makes setting ambushes and avoiding getting ambushed crucial to survival.
• On the other hand, you need that auto-fire, because otherwise, multiple-HD monsters are impossible to take down reliably. This is a flaw in the otherwise elegant system.

A limestone pit hid no bodies, but seems to have had a trail of perhaps 100-150 footprints leading off to the south. Afterburner started getting really unhinged due to stress, and set the village on fire.

The trail led to a tall, lone tree next to abandoned rice paddies. Junior realised this is a tree he had seen on an illustration in his strange old book, next to drawings of bizarre purple flowers, and a picture of the flowers in a tree hole. To the south of the tree, we also discovered an encampment of a dozen horrid, pig-like creatures grilling human remains, equipped with discarded old firearms! We circled around them, and set up an attack with claymores and ambush positions. However, when commencing the attack, the pigmen called out not to shoot, and one of them came forward as an emissary. Calling himself Nguo Chan (~Pig Leg), he let us know that the purple flowers were in the lair of the dog-faces, and that their females were abducted by the people of Bao Loc. He offered to lead us through the jungle to the dog-face lair, which we accepted (although Stanley only reluctantly once it occurred to him this guy was made of pork).

Halfway through the jungle, we discovered a small village, and doing some reconnaissance, found that it was inhabited by loathsome snake-human hybrids! We retreated a little, and called in a strike from the nearby fire support base, watching the village get turned into flaming wreckage. Continuing, Nguo Chan took us to a hill overlooking an bunker entrance, the lair of the dog-faces. We parted from our companion, and decided to make camp for the night. In the morning, we left the unstable Afterburner to watch camp, while we called base and arranged a napalm strike set exactly 2 hours from now.

Snake-men?! What the...

Down at the entrance, we knocked on a heavy, rusted gate. The dog-faces – tall, shaggy, dog-headed monsters with firearms – emerged, and we somehow negotiated with them to fetch their boss, Alpha Mane. The boss and his second arrived on a roaring Harley Davidson, cutting a few circles in the field to impress us. We held up our offer: a jerry can of gasoline for the vehicles. Alpha Mane started to become more interested, and we asked him to release Uncle Dung. Alpha Mane barked about “Uncle Dung purple death!”, but agreed to the deal. Stanley started getting big ideas. “Yeah, this was just our first gift. There will be more gasoline, soon. Our guys will deliver it by airdrop, you should just bring out the rest of your guys to carry it.” Alpha Mane didn’t quite get this, but seemed positive, and we decided to pack it and get out with Uncle Dung’s unconscious body while the going was good – we were already back through the jungle when we heard the helicopters sweeping in from above the clouds.

On the way back, we made another detour to Bao Loc, where the wise Uncle Dung’s recovery was met with cheers and impromptu celebration. Stanley and Doc started interrogating the villagers about any “new pigs” they may have seen around. While initially resistant, a pack of cigarettes changed hands, and a local informer showed us to a disgusting pen filled with mud, and fat porcine shapes with a faint resemblance to… No, Stanley was not interested to find out. We sternly warned the locals that the “pigs” are to be released without further ado, no ifs and no buts. And so we headed back to base. Operation #2: Roentgen #78 ­– a scenario where we would have to escort a NYC newspaper reporter around the area, and show him just what the Army wanted him to see, and not to mind the Viet Cong massing on the borders, or a massive six-headed river monster emerging from the murky waters – would commence in a week. But until then, we were free to spend time in Saigon, and not worry about the future.

Not depicted: river hydra

[NEWS] Shipping Suspended

Oh no you don't

Worthy Customers & Valued Bots,

Let it be known that, due to the Vagaries of the Bat Plague & its divers Consequences, shipping from this Humble Enterprise has now been suspended until further Notice. Such a Notice shall surely be provided at once when the Plague passes, and fairer Winds return. Fresh Merchandise, yet unseen on our Globe, shall be in Bountiful Stock; Old Mainstays shall likewise be provided in Prodigious Quantities. In the meantime, let us pass our Days with Games, Musick, Wholesome Literature, Good Food & health-bringing Elixirs. May Good Fortune shine upon all of us & all the Saints extend their Protective Hand!

--The Grand Mercantilist, 18th of March A.D. MMXX

[REVIEW] On Downtime and Demesnes

Downtime and Demesnes

On Downtime and Demesnes (2019)

by Courtney C. Campbell

Published by Hack & Slash Publishing

Old-school D&D has been fairly well supported by adventures over the last decade. Rules and character options, we have had more than we needed (we honestly didn’t need that many). This book targets a fairly neglected niche: campaign-level play. This is the stuff that happens between the characters go on adventures – when they spend their well-earned money, advance character and party goals, and gear up for the next expedition. In modern models of play, a lot of this has fallen by the wayside; the role-assumption-vs-adventuring dichotomy has taken hold too firmly in peoples’ minds. You are either supposed to be doing silly voices, or you are supposed to be heaving skulls (silly accents optional).

I suspect many old-school games also forgo this element, or simplify it to “okay you buy equipment, you go to the cleric, you ask the sage, what about you?” This is all right. However, OD&D, Ready Ref Sheets, and the Dungeon Masters Guide hint at a game that expands the scope of D&D into domain management, trade, diplomacy, hireling management, and similar activities… something D&D’s “complex wargaming” precursors like Blackmoor and Tony Bath’s Hyboria were already doing. It is a loss that most “OSR” rulesets – even the better ones – have largely stuck to copying the rules or inventing their own, while failing to cover the true scope of expanded play you can find in the AD&D rulebooks.

On Downtime and Demesnes is a supplement meant to introduce these elements to your game. (The default system is B/X, but the lessons apply just as well to all the other D&D variants out there.) Its approach is to create easy, straightforward procedures to turn downtime activities and strategic-level play into gameable content. This is undoubtedly the right way to do it. The guidelines the book offers are not as hard as ironclad rules (game mechanics), but they are also not vague like general guidance – they are somewhere in-between, a tool to navigate game situations in a fair and interesting way, a bit like dungeon crawls have procedures for random encounters, treasure allocation, or light sources. The end result should provide a challenge, have a meaningful stake, and produce a better game experience. As the book suggests, only significant or interesting forms of interaction are worth the attention (a wise principle regarding spending game time), and the subsequent guidelines tend to stick to this maxim.

Laying the Groundwork

Accordingly, the book covers all the varied situations that may come up during downtime. This is a comprehensive work, in that it offers either a procedure, a random idea generator, or at least basic advice for most things that could reasonably come up in a realistic game situation. Healing from sustained injuries – there are guidelines for that. Earning an income – here is a way to handle it. Amassing a library of exotic books for future benefit – yes. Hiring specialists or launching the career of a secondary character to step in the main PC’s footsteps – it is there. Investment in mercantile ventures? Mining? Clearing terrain? Building stuff? Breeding bizarre monstrosities to terrorise the land? Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.

These guidelines are of varied complexity. None of them would make play burdensome, and most tend to be something you can resolve with a few player decisions and random rolls. Earning extra XP by carousing is a 1d8*100 roll, deducted from gp and added to XP, followed by a saving throw to see if there have been complications. Sacrifices to dark gods can net you gold, XP, a magic item or the services of an evil creature, depending on the implied value of the sacrificed person/animal. Spending a week bragging about the party’s adventures nets 5% more experience (but you have to roll maintenance). Racketeering gains 100 gp per level per month on a successful Move Silently roll (but has a small, unspecified odd of attracting unwanted attention). A few guidelines are on the level of mini-games – designing your own fortress and clearing/developing the land around it is more involved, as it should be.

Making it Come Together

I believe some areas are underserved by this otherwise useful book. I was excited to read the guidelines on political influence, but it only outlines what influence entails, and how you can gain it – not how you might use it in concrete terms, what you may gain through influence (and how much), or what happens when two influence conflict or simply overlap. It seems to be the beginning of something, a thought experiment that was never properly finished. This is the case with a few more interesting guidelines – the author pitches an intriguing what-if, but doesn’t give a satisfying answer. There is an extensive set of tables to ideas and guidelines to build ships with various capabilities and unstandard quirks, but no system for sea battles or just sailing adventures to put these capabilities to the test. The end results are a bit fragmentary and scattershot, even if it is very strong on the idea level.

Where the general procedures are fairly universal, the “random ideas” are oddly specific. A list of 10 bizarre pet stores includes a shop selling attack chickens, an ant farm, and a balloon animal store. Do you really need one of those? If yes, how many times?

Then we come to a curious flaw that seems to permeate the whole work. All of this seems to take place on Horror World. I can’t put it otherwise: there is such a strain of pessimism and negativity about mankind running through the book that it seems deeply misanthropic. The philosophy, in turn, messes with the systematic outcomes. This is an implied setting where bad things happen, people are rapacious and evil, and you are screwed from day one. It first becomes visible in the random tables. An early one, “100 Obnoxious Peasants”, should have been rightfully amended “…who Will Ruin Your Life”. These village bumpkins are not annoying but funny louts – these are peasants who will flirt with your characters only to rile up their whole clan against them (94), offer them friendly handshakes while unwittingly infecting them with the plague (86), or buy them a beer while trying to provoke them to say something treasonous (99). Then there are “100 Noble Patrons”, more appropriately “100 Noble Patrons From HELL”. Here, we have a lady who invites the party for dinner to pick their mind, only to beat them to the score with a self-sponsored party (03), another lady who hires adventurers to awaken her evil god under the guise of making trade deals (96), a baron who invites adventurers to his castle to use them for flesh golem parts (35), another lady pursued by killers who will try to befriend you (27), and a baroness who runs a charity for orphans, sacrifices 10% of them to devils, and “If killed she arises as a vampire due to a wish she got from hell.” (09) You would think I am cherry-picking, but these are just two sequences of random rolls – most (almost all) of these peasants and patrons are literal or social deathtraps if you interact with them. Or not interact with them, because many will become extremely vengeful and dangerous anyway if spurned, and will come after you if you give them a wide berth.

Random Goblins Destroy Your Life's Work

Certainly, nothing like a corrupt, dangerous fantasy world to generate adventure opportunities. Sometimes it is appropriate – sure, goblins are nasty little evildoers, so 12 horrid goblin pranks are sort of useful (although, being so specific, they have much less use than the procedural elements). But in a bunch of these mini-games, the only winning move is not to play, and that pushes the players towards disengagement, non-interaction, and a foul kind of cynicism. Would you play Russian roulette with one chamber? Yeah? How about five chambers? This is like the social equivalent of a “negadungeon”, those stupid things promising to wreck your campaigns and the player campaigns therein if you play them. Fortunately, this particular mean streak does not invalidate the book, and is much less present on the procedural level than the “idea generator” level. But there, you can run into nasty stuff in seemingly inconsequential situations. Perhaps you were happy to inherit something – but you are fucked, because it is a necklace of decapitation, or a peculiar curse. The odds are really bad, and that makes for dull gaming.

So here is an enjoyable book (handsomely illustrated by the multi-talented author) filled with a whole lot of highly useful guidance for running campaign-level sessions, either to expand on the existing action, or to enter new domains of play. The procedures it introduces are clear, elegant, low-maintenance, and appropriate. In this respect, Downtime and Demesnes is an excellent resource and a great idea mine. It also has aspects which are half-baked, or damaged by a very peculiar view of how your average D&D world was supposed to function. These elements, good and bad, are mixed together in a single volume. You will need to exercise judgement to decide what to use from it (or how to use the flawed content in a fruitful way – this is a distinct possibility). It should be fairly easy. But it should have happened in the writing phase.

No playtesters are credited in this publication.

Rating: *** / *****

[REVIEW] The Treasures of the Old Kingdom

Treasures of the Old Kingdom

[REVIEW] The Treasures of the Old Kingdom (2020)

by Jonathan Hicks

Published by Farsight Games

Low levels

Disappointment comes in many forms. The cynical cash grab, the sloppy mess, the paint-by-the numbers borefest, the formulaic knockoff, the fantasy module with no sense of the fantastic, the outrageous disaster. None are more tragic than the misguided labour of love. This is the adventure you would like to succeed, but which end up failing. Treasures of the Old Kingdom is a tragic failure, because it is built on multiple fundamental adventure design mistakes. It is not bad because its author failed at doing something – rather, it did because he kept doing the wrong things. Not out of malice, but because we – the hobby, collectively – have failed to make a proper distinction between good and bad adventure design. This module keeps making mistakes in an entirely typical manner – typical enough among many disappointing modules to make me choose it as an exhibit of “DON’T DO THIS!” So here we are.

To begin with the good, this adventure is entirely self-illustrated in an amateurish but endearing style. Nobody will call it good art, but it has charm – there is a soul to it. It is also a module that has a few pieces of good imagery poking out from the bad baseline. A tiny kingdom whose king is little better than a local bandit; a muddy, half-built settlement that’s between an encampment and a new village; its tavern, a great tent with a tree sticking out through a big hole in the canvas; a great ruined statue standing over a river, Colossus of Rhodes-style; a military camp preparing for a battle with invading orcs. These are well realised, and there is certainly a visual imagination at play.

Best Tavern

But these are set pieces. Not interactive bits, not even things which get a part in play (none of the above do). They are scenery in a predetermined story. It is clearly intended as an epic that starts as skirmishes against monster lairs, and builds up into an epic secret quest into dangerous territory involving a mysterious benefactor and an evil magic item… and you get to sail beneath a great statue from a forgotten age (where could that come from?). What actually happens over the course of the adventure follows the stages of a linear narrative, with a fairly inconsequential side quest. You know it will be bad when you see it is set up as a story – “Part One”, “Part Two”, and so on. It is railroading, with a lack of player agency – things happen because they happen, and because the adventure would be over if the players didn’t go along with the GM. If they don’t take the mission… if they follow a different course of action or a different route… if they do something differently than intended… the adventure as written is over.

Meaningful player agency is missing from the big picture, but also from decisions on the level of individual encounters. There is nothing useful to do outside the adventure plot, and there is not much opportunity to do something more than go along. Initially, the players can pick between clearing out multiple monster lairs, a choice which does not matter (because the lairs are simple 1-4 room affairs with little content going for them). Later, they get a Plot Chaperone, who feeds them plot points in exchange for doing as she tells them. Except for the last segment, they don’t have to make hard decisions, or figure out something on their own, or come up with a clever stratagem that saves the day. They are just along for the ride. Ironically, the railroading even removes the usefulness of the content that might actually serve as a basis for something better. For example, there is some not-entirely-bad background info on the mini-kingdom, along with a nice regional map, but it gets no play because it does not matter – the plot train passes them by.

The Kingdom of Cardigul (not actually featured in a meaningful sense in this module)

As it often goes with tragically bad adventures, the proportion of functional and utterly useless content is seriously skewed. A lot of attention is dedicated to background detail (that does not enter play), read-aloud texts and NPC monologue (that only pulls down the experience), and a lot of framing for utterly inconsequential scenes (that are basically filler). There is the obligatory “next morning” section, one of the sure-fire signs the author wanted to write a story instead of playing a multi-player game. Lengthy exposition on trivial material, usually as a way to link important scenes to form a coherent narrative structure. That is the mistake: trying to enforce a vision instead of letting it happen spontaneously. Railroading is not just a removal of player agency. I have observed in many similar modules that it also tends to result in a lot more effort to accomplish simple things than normal. In a better constructed module, one good paragraphs could convey the GM the ideas which several bad ones do not. This is a 28 page adventure which could have easily been two pages (as it stands), or which could have used so many words to give us a much more rounded, complex adventure, and a mini-gazetteer to boot. However, this adventure does not even trust the GM to do obvious, simple things. Paradoxically, it becomes over-detailed in filler sections which do not matter, and remains underdeveloped in sections which might (adventure content).

The adventure’s dungeons are not dungeons. Not in the sense envisioned by D&D’s makers. They are quite minuscule even by lair standards. The lair of the Mutant Ogre is a 4-room cave system, the two optional side-encounters are single-area affairs, and the burial vault – the final objective – is a corridor with four rooms to the sides, and a fifth room at the end. But even this vault has barely anything in it except overlong boxed text focused on mundane detail, and four basic encounters which are slightly fancy combats.

Ce n'est pas un dungeon.

The story must triumph over all impediments, including pesky players. We encounter the typical design tactic of second-guessing. In an early lair encounter, the GM is advised to fudge an encounter:

“If you feel that the players outmatch the Mutant Ogre too much, or they are defeating it too easily, then have another walk in from cave 4 – it seems the Mutant Ogre wasn’t working alone, after all! However, don’t make it too hard for the players as this is their first encounter and there’s a lot for them to do before this adventure is even remotely over.”

I have seen many similar adventures as a player (and have been guilty of GMing them in the past), where, for the sake of “correct pacing”, the GM sacrificed the game’s ability to offer surprises, setbacks, and grand victories. You can never be too clever, or just absolutely lucky, nor can you fail conclusively. If you rise above the “plot zone”, you are hammered down; if you fail, your defeat is snatched from your grasp to keep you trudging along the Storyline – one that is no longer your own.

Later in the adventure, the characters must venture into a war zone to retrieve the MacGuffin, hidden in a small dungeon. A battle between orcs and men rages around them as they race against time to find a hidden switch, but there are no stakes, because the GM is instructed to control the scene:

“Make sure that the PCs who fight aren’t hurt too badly and run the battle as cinematically as possible; the enemy should be easy to fight, foes the PCs can take down with pretty much one hit, and any attacks on the PCs should be weak and lacking damage – minus 1 from all rolls with a minimum of 1. (…) If the PCs do engage in the fight, make it exciting and incredibly tense as the orcs try their hardest to get over the wall and into the compound. (…) The battle is fierce, and just as it seems the walls are about to be breached have Carthean or one of the PCs find the symbol (…).”

Carthean Outlines
the Plot

The culprit is there in plain sight: “cinematically”. This undoubtedly is a cinematic event, but one that makes for a lousy game: the characters have plot armour, their enemies are impotent, and the search for the switch succeeds or drags on purely at the discretion of an all-important Storyteller manipulating a GMPC. The encounter accomplishes the exact opposite of what it sets out to do: there is no real tension or challenge (because things are continuously being fudged to make things a bit easier or a bit harder), and no real accomplishment or sense of victory. A proper setup for this encounter would give the players a puzzle, and a countdown to hold back the tide until they can solve it (perhaps with the provision that on round 6+1d4, Carthean will do it on her own, should the players be absolutely incompetent puzzle-solvers). It would actually make it easier to describe and set up the encounter, and it would give the characters a real sense of beating the race against the clock. But this is obviously not what happens in this module.

It is fairly clear the author does not quite understand the game system he is writing for. It is no accident. The credits reveal it to be a scenario originally made for Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2^nd Edition. I grew up on the Fighting Fantasy books, and love them to pieces – but they are obviously not D&D in their assumptions, and AFF is no exception. For example, D&D awards the bulk of its experience points for treasure – mountains of it. Like it or not (I have my reservations, on which I will write later), GP = XP is the grand equation of old-school D&D. Treasures of the Old Kingdom offers measly bounties of 60 gp (for the Mutant Ogre, going up to 80 if the characters haggle successfully), anaemic lair treasure at 1d6*100 gp (same place), and a princely tomb with “jewels worth 2d6*100 gp”. Or you can always search the trash for 2d6*2 gp (page 7). One thing is made clear here: the author does not know what “treasure” means in old-school D&D – only the final dungeon helps things. But don’t forget – you will have to divide up the loot among the party members.

For another case, let us take the module’s deathtraps, found in the final dungeon. Consider the following:

“Every three rounds the tiles shift colour and if a player is not standing on a red tile (…) a vial of poison gas will drop from a hole in the ceiling onto the player and, if they do not make a Save roll [sic] they will suffer 1d6 damage.”

Or:

“The floor is false and once more than one person is on it the flagstones will give way and reveal a drop six foot drop [sic] down to spikes that inflict 1D6 damage if they fail a Save!”

Or even:

“Also, each chest has a 1 in 6 chance of being trapped with a mechanism so that when the chest is opened a poison dart shoots out of the lock doing 1 point of damage per round for 1D6 rounds. These traps can be found with a successful roll, and the dart avoided with a successful Save roll.”

Disregard the typos, the lack of punctuation, the varieties of notation and the wrong terminology, and focus on the principal issue: the supposed deathtraps don’t do their job. They are feeble. Now yes, S&W Whitebox (a.k.a. LBB-only OD&D) is a game where first-level PCs have 1d6 Hp on the average, and damage is also 1d6 by default. Your character might die in them... if you trigger that 1:6 chance, followed by a failed save, followed by an unlucky rolls. Maybe. But these traps will never get respect. Here is a good one, from Tomb of the Serpent Kings:

“When the bar is lifted, the iron pegs begin to rise. When the bar is fully removed a trap is activated. A huge stone hammer swings down from the ceiling, aiming straight for the backsof the now-trapped PCs. It nearly fills the corridor, but there is a small gap on either side. The PCs can:1. Save to Dodge OR2. Use another PC as a springboard, giving them +2 to Dodge but giving the shoved PC –2.PCs hit by the hammer automatically die (or take serious damage, like 2d6+4).”

That is a trap that accomplishes what traps should do in a dungeon: make you very, very careful about taking the next step. I could also mention the ferocious animated statues guarding the vault’s treasures: they have what I would call (pardon my English) “shit HD and damage”. Something that is described as something like a hulking golem-like thing has 1+2 HD, and your regular 1d6 Hp damage. They are worth – no joke – 30 XP each.

 

That's terror.

I could no doubt go on about Treasures of the Old Kingdom. It seems to be wrong on many levels. But the central flaw of the adventure is that it is not written and set up as a worthwhile interactive experience. Why would you take a game whose central conceit is that you can “inhabit” fantastic characters and attempt the heroics you see in books and movies, and then take that control back through GM shenanigans? It is perhaps the bad question to ask from a small self-published affair like The Treasures of the Old Kingdom. The author did not do this to us. The module’s sins are not his. Other game designers, much more influential ones, did this to the author and all of us. It took so many of us a lot of effort to break free of our mental shackles after being taught – conditioned, even – to Love The Story or face the rats. This is the fate old-school gaming was supposed to liberate us from, and have us appreciate being free once more. And yet we still see this stuff, again and again and again. It is such a sadness.

No playtesters are credited in this publication.

Rating: * / *****

[REVIEW] The Abandoned Tower

The (An) Abandoned Tower

The Abandoned Tower (2020)

by “Ed S”

Published by FEI Games Inc

Small, dodgy homebrew adventures are the realm of the pleasant surprise, the rough gem, the underappreciated talent, the enthusiastic beginner effort, the artsy amateur project. Then there are these things. They are small, dodgy, and... yeah, they are small and dodgy. I buy them and usually don’t bother to review them because what’s the point. This time, they have gone too far.

The Abandoned Tower (called An Abandoned Tower in its DTRPG listing) is an 8-page adventure written by “Ed S” (more on this later). It is a marvel of engineering. Two of the 8 pages are dedicated to the OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a. Some publishers try to shunt this off into a half-page section – not Ed S. He lets it stretch, comfortably, over ¼ of his adventure. One page is reserved for the Credits & Thanks section, where the author thanks, among others, E. Gary Gygax (spinning mightily), Wizards of the Coast for their OGL/SRD, Open Office Writer, Dungeon Painter Studio, PDF Architect, Microsoft Paint, GOOGLE Search Engine, YAHOO Search Engine, LuLu Printing, DriveThruRPG.com, and more. This page also includes the three maps for the (an?) abandoned tower. This has some fancy-pants objects placed here and there, but in a classic TSR blue map, it would be three circles with a spiral staircase symbol each, an exterior stair, and two doors.

Credits & Thanks

But how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? I am glad you asked, for the next four pages are dedicated to the actual adventure (including a quarter-page illustration of a rose of all things). When I call an adventure’s margins “generous”, I mean it. This adventure has generous margins, and a font size to match. So then we get to the actual adventure, which begins with 1¼ pages of read-aloud text describes how the party is led to “a modest but well kept cottage” in the village of Blue Lake, and how the village elder, Shem Long, makes a long-winded speech to the party about investigating this “old abandoned tower” in the woods, and offers them a 30 gp merchant voucher (“can go up to 35 gp”, he notes, parenthetically). After the introduction, we get ½ page on the Lakeside Inn, where the party will be sleeping. “The bar, tables and chairs are all well worn but stable.” Unquote. There are rumours, and “The rest of the night goes by without any incidents…..” (it is not an ellipse, it is FIVE dots) This is followed by a section titled “Next Morning”. What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck.

Next Morning

… Ahem. This is followed by a section titled “Next Morning”. The adventure informs us that Shem Long is now waiting for the party, sitting on the bench outside, and generously also adds that “If the party refuses the job offer, this adventure is over….” (four DOTS) Otherwise, Shem takes them shopping to the “General Store (25% of stocking anything common), a Simple Butcher & Cheese Shop, a Bakery, and a Blacksmith. The DM can build upon this if needed.” Am I IMAGINING this SHIT?! WHaT?! “As the party uses the merchant voucher the amount spent is written on it with ink.”

Then, no kidding, it has a wilderness section in a ¼ page paragraph called “Area Around The Abandoned Tower”. It is a world of limitless imagination, because the module tells you the area around the tower should be mostly encounter free, except for wildlife. But you can hunt or fish, find tracks, or outright make up things. “If anybody checks for tracks they will find the tracks of typical small wildlife, horses and ponies, and various sizes of human and humanoid footprints going in all directions. The DM should feel free to ass [sic] anything if so desired.”

Some of you vulgarians might be wondering “But where is the adventure? Aren’t we running out of pages?” Why, yes, this is where we get our tower adventure, on one (1) page. There are kobolds and an ogre, described with basic tactics – this is elementary but not entirely terrible, with watches, alarms, and sallies. Some of the text describes the tower, describing pretty much the same thing you could gleam from the map. “The tower appears to be 3 stories tall with 2 doors on the outside.” Appears to be? …appears to be but isn’t? …appears to be but secretly, one of the stories is divided horizontally? …appears to be but there are dungeons? No. Subverting all expectations, it is just a shit boring forest tower. “The structure of the tower is made of large stones mortared together. The roof is made of your typical clay tiles.” What am I reading here. Help. The horror. The HORROR.

The tower has no key. Everything about the description is a jumbled mess, describing the tower by describing the battle the characters will have there. It is a chaotic affair, for we never actually know how many kobolds there are. Are there 25 kobolds? Or is the ambush party of five kobolds counted separately? But wait, there are five more kobolds armed with bows… are they the same as the ambush party? Well, there are no stat blocks in the text. The ogre will escape during this final battle, and make away with the collected treasure, for the TRV and AVTHENTIC “Ye Olde Crapsacke Fantasye” feel. But only if the ogre rolls his rope climbing check – this is specifically mentioned, although how this check should be conducted, or what are the odds of its success, are left to A Wild World of Wondrous Imagination. The ogre can then become a recurring villain, or the party can track him to an old cabin, where he will “try to bargin [sic] his life for the sack of treasure. If this offer is refused then the Ogre will challenge the party to a one on one [sic] to the death duel between himself and one of the party members…..” FIVE dots. And so ends the expedition to the (an) Abandoned Tower.

But wait! There is another page with a monster section! This section, surrounded by more of those generous margins, describe the “kobold” and the “ogre”. Wow! The kobold is ½ HD, does 1-4 or weapon-1 damage, and is of the Chaotic alignment, while the ogre is 4+1 HD, does 1-10 damage, and is of the Chaotic alignment. Both of these monsters are illustrated by the artists credited in the Credits & Thanks section as “Unknown Artists”. You can find the ogre in the 1^st edition WFRPG rulebook, page 224, under “Ogre”. Anyway, the module also comes with helpful DM advice, saying, “All treasure found within this adventure should be chosen by the DM, randomly rolled according to the treasure charts in the rule book, or a combination of both to ensure game balance in each individual game…” As you can see, this greatly aids customisation, as well as adaptation to different rulesets, in A Wild World of Wondrous Imagination.

Unknown Artists

No playtesters are credited in this publication. Actually, the author is not credited either, here or anywhere else. He knows this would be a bad idea. The only reason I know his name is from his response to a DTRPG comment complaining about this goddamn ripoff. To which “Ed S” responds, quote, “Did you expect a $10 module for a $2 8 page pdf?????? I will be happy to refund your money....” Well, yeah, fuck you, too, Ed, fuck you too. You win this round.

Rating: * / *****