Rashomon - Isle of the Plangent Mage

 

Isle of the Plangent Mage is an adventure written by Donn Stroud. It is illustrated by David Hoskins, with cartography by Glenn Seal, editing by Fiona Maeve Geist and Jarrett Crader, and layout by Anna Urbanek. It is written for Old School Essentials (OSE), a retro-clone of B/X or "Moldvay" D&D. The adventure is published by Gavin Norman's Necrotic Gnome in their novel house-style as part of a Kickstarter for the most recent printing of Advanced OSE. 

Five of us playtested this module over four 2.5 hour sessions with a party of five 3-4 level Old School Essentials (classic edition) characters whom we created for this purpose. Our group was:

*Ben (DM)

Eric (Jonra the magic-user)

Dan (Par the monkey man thief )

Ava (Rabta Swango the dwarf)

Qpop (Rumble the cleric)

Zedeck (Ball Bearing the halfling)

*In keeping with our stated policy, we note at the outset that Ben L has published one free adventure with Gavin Norman, The Submerged Spire of Sarpedon the Shaper, which appeared in From the Vats. This adventure is referenced in Isle of the Plangent Mage once. From time to time, Ben L has discussed the possibility of further collaborations with Norman's Old School Essentials line.

What follows is a "Rashomon" style review. Each member of the group will give their perspective on our game. Although we did discuss the module briefly after the final session, these opinions are our own. Spoilers aplenty follow, so if you might play in this module, you should probably stop reading now. 

Ben

Overview of the Module:

The Isle of the Plangent Mage begins with a two page overview of the locations and events of the module. It also discusses one starting vignette: the beaching of a pod of whales. It also gives some possible adventure hooks for visiting the module's dungeon. 

It next presents a small coastal sandbox, consisting of the village of Imbrich and Darksand Isle. The village is covered in three terse pages that discuss the not-quite-Innsmouth vibes of the villagers, outline a few personalities and local establishments, and presents a table of rumors. Darksand Isle gets a terse writeup of 6-7 pages, with several locations, including a pair of lighthouses (one inhabited by the ghost of Cetus' wife, the source of Cetus' plangency), an eerie idol risen from the sea, feral mutated teenagers, and hidden pirate treasure.  

But the bulk of the module is taken up with a single 47 room dungeon, the Undertower of Cetus the eponymous plangent mage. It is very recently abandoned and only starting to come to pieces. (The villagers do not know Cetus is missing, although they are perhaps beginning to suspect that something may have happened to him.) It is a submerged wizard's tower filled with Cetus' personal effects, force fields, mutated creatures, and sound-themed arcane contraptions. It is deadly, with a rapid random encounter clock.

Play Experience:

The hook I gave the party was that they were very short on funds and came to the coast looking for Cetus to sell him a remarkable musical artifact, a xylophone that played notes that could only be heard in the astral and ethereal planes. In need of cash, they were hoping that he would pay them a huge sum for this highly specialized device. 

In play, we spent one session in the sandbox focused almost entirely on the beaching of a pod of whales on the outskirts of Imbrich and the moral dilemma it presented after Rumble cast speak with animals and conversed with the terrified whale children of the pod. Attempts to deter the villagers from butchering the whale children failed, until Jonra cast charm person on one of their leaders. Although they were not able to save a pink whale who pleaded with them to just let him die--in fact the polymorphed form of Cetus himself, they did rescue the whale children. The party then used the charmed villager to help them recruit a hireling, commissioned a boat again with the sway of their charmed villager, and proceeded directly to Cetus's Undertower. 

We spent the following three sessions in the Undertower, exploring a little less than half of the dungeon in total. The adventure ended in catastrophe when the party, overwhelmed by the horrors of the Undertower, descended to the lowest level with the intention to slay Cetus. Instead, there they confronted the Night Trawler, a spiritual horror. 

Clearly overmatched, the animal cleric Rumble, trying to redeem himself for inadvertently luring a great shark to its own death earlier in the dungeon, ran through the darkness playing a music box to draw off the Night Trawler. This allowed the party to escape, but not before Rumble ran face first into a force field that sheared him in half. Along the way, Ball Bearing lost his voice, only to find it later, and Rabta may or may not have killed her hireling's husband (promises were made).

What Worked

As a DM, the module was a breeze to run owing to its information design. The Necrotic Gnome house style involves incredibly terse and utilitarian presentation of information. Each dungeon area has its own map printed on the page, and all important information is bolded and then nested below the description. Like this:

Furthermore, the important information is bolded at the top of the room entry and explained at greater length in bullet point style below. As a result, the module couldn't have been easier to run straight from the book. I read it through once. I then spent an hour prepping the first session, which mainly consisted of imagining a bit more fully what was going on in the village, and what the beaching of the whales would be like. In subsequent sessions all I did was briefly remind myself what was around the players in the dungeon, and consult the text to answer a few lingering questions about the dungeon. While there is a cost for the Necrotic Gnome house-style in a loss of evocative writing that conveys mood and theme, the gains in usability at the table are big.

We also used the high quality VTT maps that come with the electronic version of the module on Roll20, and this made dungeon crawling easy with fog of war, since the entire Undertower could be put on a single page and revealed as the party progressed through it, including across different levels. 

As a DM and reader of the module, although it didn't see much play with our group, I found the mystery sandbox that surrounded the dungeon an interesting twist on what would otherwise be tired cliches about "sea folk" and a wizard driven to distraction by lost love. 

The Undertower, however, is where the module shines. Stroud richly imagines it as a mysterious location full of arcane oddities and wonders connected to sound, mutation, and the sea. There were many moments of wonder intermingled with horror in our sessions. There are numerous toys to play with, sound-themed puzzles and curses, and the like in the dungeon. The Undertower also contains an artifact, the Resounding Assembly, with the possibility to transform a campaign in really interesting ways that couldn't be explored in our short play through. 

As a DM, my experience of the module was dominated by what I liked about it, but there are some issues that came out in running it that suggest room for improvement.

What Could Have Worked Better

Among the most important information about any location-based adventure like a sandbox or dungeon is what is going on with the factions that inhabit the location. Interacting with factions is probably the most fun part of play. For this purpose you need to know how the factions are disposed to react to the players, how they relate to other factions, and what generally speaking they want. In short, factions provide a lot of what makes anarchic location-based exploration fun. They also shape everything about what's happening in the space the players are exploring. For these reasons, the factions for a location need to be pulled to the front of the description and highlighted. 

The module does this well in some places and not so well in other places. The village is described well, but Darksand Isle and the Undertower much less so. I entirely missed the fact at first that the Undertower is inhabited by caretakers, which you have to infer from details of room entries and the encounter table. Who are they? Are they from the village?  Do the people in the village know about them? How much do the caretakers know about the Undertower? What do they want from the PCs? Also there are pirates on the encounter table! What is going on with them? Similarly, part of the tower is dominated by a mutated shark and its spawn, whom he sends out to collect further subjects for mutation. Is the mutated shark intelligent? Can you converse with it? Is this a faction or a just a big dumb monster? I had to make a ruling at the table and went with the big dumb B-movie monster alternative, because it seemed to fit the awesome illustration of a screaming tentacled shark monster by David Hoskins. 

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most of these factions only appear on the very large encounter table. So there's also a substantial chance that the main groups you can actually talk to in the tower won't be encountered at all, as was true in our play. In an adventure that's primarily about exploring a space, it's better to locate the factions at least partly in space, and include at least some factions you can converse with in numbered locations. 

Now, I suspect part of the problem here was that the module was part of a kickstarter and had a set page number of 58 pages to which all the adventures had to conform. This is a very ambitious module for that page count. Perhaps the faction element was what ended up on the cutting room floor. If so, maybe it would have been better to shorten the dungeon in other ways.

Another thing that could perhaps have been a touch better concerns the "motive" for exploring the lower levels of the dungeon. Strangely, in what's set up as a mystery sandbox, a journal that tells you everything you need to know is in the first room room that the players are likely to walk into on the first floor of the Undertower. The very next room over has Cetus' spell book, another big ticket item. And, in fact, some of the biggest treasure hauls are right down the stairs from there. 

If you're going to have a vertical dungeon with levels that get nastier as you go down, you should probably put the big ticket items at the bottom. As it's written, I think the main reason to explore the lower levels is to turn on all the different parts of the Resounding Assembly. Perhaps the module would work best if they players choose to come to the Undertower to activate the Resounding Assembly for reasons of their own. 

Eric

The module had a good theme and good opening--the party spent the whole first session interacting with the whale butchers. But I think a lot of that came from Ben more than the module. 

A central elevator is a cool secret if you find it AFTER exploring a bunch of the dungeon conventionally: it lets the party skip a bunch of encounter checks re-travesing explored space. But as the main method of getting between levels, there's a kind of excess of choice--you get analysis paralysis and "let's check the next room for easy loot."

Button-pushing puzzles really call for illustrations. The ability to easily imagine things from descriptions is not a talent everyone has. 

Dan

I felt like the dungeon was most characterized by choice paralysis. Near immediate access to all floors via the main elevator, a colored button puzzle that took up most of a session. Combined with the implicit threat found in an oldschool dungeon, I kept feeling that I shouldn't interact with things--too many options, all of them horribly dangerous. 

Ava

I say this with absolutely no shade to Ben's skills as a Referee, and he ran a fantastic game, but I don't think the hook he provided us for this adventure quite worked.

The Undertower dungeon portion of the adventure, which is where we were more or less driven to by our narrative justification of having to meet with Cetus, suffers a problem that a lot of old LotFP modules and their imitators suffered from: its a horrible fucking place with not much reason to be there. Divorced from the traditional structure of a dungeon as Mythic Underworld which exists as a site for repeated expeditions to extract treasure, I was left with the sense of wandering around a pretty terrible haunted house with no real reason for being there. The lack of any conversant inhabitants in the dungeon did not help this fact. There's a lot of great interactivity, tons of puzzles and machines and gizmos and gadgets with levers to pull and knobs to turn, but with such an overall sense of danger permeating the space and no real option to safely retreat and return to engage on our terms, it was hard to want to really play with all these toys we were given.

Much of these problems are remedied by all the areas surrounding the Undertower, which we didn't get to play with. These provide short adventure sites where one can gather information, treasure, and magic items; NPCs you can talk to, who have goals and quests to give you; and clues which help you piece together the mysterey of the Isle and provide guidance for interacting with the many strange machines of the Undertower. Plangent Mage feels like its designed to be utilized as a mini-sandbox over a mid-to-long term campaign, and thats where its strengths would reveal themselves. Alternately, one could run the Undertower by explicitly leaning more into its "Negadungeon" aspects, though thats a term and style thats come into disfavour: doing so would likely require retooling the hook and trapping the players in the Undertower till they can find a means of escape.

 

qpop

Impressions as the player of a cleric that talked to the beached whales and got really sad / determined to help them. We thought that the pink whale might have been the plangent mage but did not find out until Ben told us at the end. If there are clues in the dungeon that we didn’t find, that’s great! If it’s just a hidden surprise, not as good. Related, there were definitely a lot of interesting things to investigate, just felt like we may have missed a lot of clues. It seemed like a lot of the information we could get was supposed to come out of the journal but stopping to read it in the dungeon seemed like a bad idea, although in the end we did. Were there other clue avenues? Definitely felt like we were stumbling around a bit, would have helped to have someone to talk to in the Undertower. 

I usually am more comfortable running much smaller environments and so was pleasantly surprised by the size of the dungeon, which felt like we were wandering around in a massive, but coherent, space. The weird shark mutant, the lever room, and all the trappings were really engaging. Hitting one of the levers and having a giant squid (octopus?) come floating up was an awesome moment. Doing the same thing but then screwing up and having the giant shark come flying into the chamber was another! High marks for environment and atmosphere.

Last point, this adventure needs a really compelling hook. The town seems overall very friendly, but there is no one to talk to inside the Undertower. The party will need a compelling reason to go inside in the first place, let alone keep exploring, beyond "What happened to Cetus?" Our group was trying to find the wizard to sell a fancy sound-based magic item, but the ambiguity about whether he was there or not started us off not wanting to steal / loot / disturb too much. 

Zedeck

Caveat: These notes are based on what we saw of the adventure -- which wasn’t much, admittedly. Impressions:


1. I liked the theme. The sea is always good, in that regard.

2. I didn’t like how complex the Undertower was. A personal preference thing -- but, I generally don’t love big dungeons that are literal dungeons. Felt like the stuff in it could’ve been spread out across the island, in coherent packets: the Mage’s household, a separate place from his laboratory, a separate place from the Resounding Assembly, etc.

Would’ve helped with variety; and also with answering the question that nagged our party throughout: “Okay, this place is scary, why are we going deeper?” Multiple shallow dungeons would feel less risky, and therefore mean players take more risks, even though the entire island is functionally a dungeon (just obscured).

3. I didn’t like all the unlabelled buttons. There were some buttons with different colours, I think? But these didn’t correspond to each other, for the most part? So there was a lot of random button-pressing, which didn’t feel like we were making interesting choices.

More signposting of what things did would’ve been welcome! Things like research papers would’ve made sense in various spots, like the Summoning Ambiance area -- “I tried reasoning with the merfolk, but they rebuffed me. Calibrate green frequency to induce soporific effect?” in a notebook on the lectern, etc.

Ben, Again

Listening to the players, perhaps we could say in a practical vein that you should consider running this module for its great mood and theme, high levels of interactivity, and good supporting sandbox. It's imaginativeness captivated most of us in play and led to some memorable moments. With a little work it could be a strong addition to your ongoing campaign or serve as a memorable standalone. But if you run it as a standalone learn from my mistake and ditch the mystery frame, instead using a hard frame about looting the tower or turning on the resounding assembly. Whether used as a one-shot or for an ongoing campaign, as the DM you may want to do some work on the factions before the party gets to the Undertower, deciding on their motivations, and locating some of them in keyed areas to help it come alive as less of a static negadungeon, and more as a living location with colorful NPCs with whom to interact. Prepare yourself for the fact that your players may experience some problems with choice paralysis and fatigue about choosing to play with Cetus' toys.

On a more theoretical level, we could say that the problems with the Undertower arise from the fact that the classic dungeon crawling is about the open-ended exploration of a space inhabited by factions. This is why what Justin Alexander called "Jaquaying a dungeon" after the work of legendary designer Jennell Jaquays is important. To "Jaquay" a dungeon is to design it in such a way that there are interesting and meaningful choices for players to make about which way to enter and how to navigate the space. It involves designing the dungeon with loops so that the players can make tactical choices or just stumble on things from multiple directions. In a multi-level dungeon it also involves designing several vertical connections, and ideally some secret paths to discover. This design uses space to short-circuits railroading by destroying the possibility of a planned sequence, and treats the dungeon as an open-ended spatial puzzle to be explored and used in anarchic fashion. 

The problems with this module, as excellent as it otherwise is, all arise from the failure to leverage space as a principle of design. Stroud puts an elevator right at the beginning that takes you clear through the dungeon with an otherwise linear stacked form, with obvious stairs as an alternate route. This is not Jaquaying a dungeon. It's simply saying, "there will be no puzzle of space here, go where you please", without any indication what might lie in any given direction. In this way, the up and down elevator buttons mirror the unlabelled buttons in the summoning chamber that troubled Zedeck. The general form of the dungeon is less an open-ended spatial exploration and more, "Do you want to press this button?" The problem of choice paralysis is a symptom of this deeper problem. 

Similarly with the location of information and treasure. Placing a lot of it at the top, when the bottom is so dangerous, removes another orienting feature about space, namely that if the players are experiencing greater peril in some quadrant of space, this is a clue that greater reward might be found there. Finally, leaving all encounters with (unfleshed out) factions to a random encounter table makes the dungeon denizens float free from the spatial design of the dungeon. Since the dungeon crawling is an open-ended spatial puzzle, you should locate at least some of the factions in keyed areas. This is how the social dimension of dungeon is integrated with the spatial dimension of dungeoncrawling.