Cryptic Signals - The Plantiary, Bizarre Monsters, Lusus Naturae

Check out part 1 of our bestiary reviews here.

The Plantiary review by emmy

The Plantiary is a 47 page zine containing descriptions of 19 plants , published by Games Omnivorous. Written by Andre Novoa and brilliantly illustrated by Pipo Kimkiduk. Each plant contains details on its habitat, size, frequency and special ability. It is written in a playful style geared more towards silly interactions between plants and PCs, more than biological accuracy. I imagine them better suited for a gonzo or a science fantasy setting.

The zine itself is of an unusual format 29.5x14cm (11.5x5.5in), making it stand out (literally) from the other zines. Most of the page space is overtaken by flora. Each of the plants has a page of a unique colour, and all the illustrations use bright tones that pop out of the page. Joyful to flip through all in all.

The special abilities have plenty of interactivity to them. Ranging from being a helpful tool to absolutely game-changing to being a setting’s core feature. The descriptions seem to me as only a starting point, since they will need some detailing to fit into your world. Only a few sentences are given per plant, which is not enough to pick up and play for me. More information about the plant's habitat and relationship to its environment would be a great addition. My other gripe is that the zine doesn’t give any aid with rumours or player information about the plants. You will have to come up with how to inform players about the plant’s abilities.

Several of the plants feel really unfair. Their abilities activate when someone “passes nearby” and the danger is not telegraphed. For example there is a plant that gives a player a vision of death, and allows the GM to make that vision true by any means in any situation where it “might be plausible”. I really wish abilities like these were only activated on interaction and didn’t give the GM absolute power.

Overall it is a fun little zine to draw inspiration from and make your setting a little weirder.

Bizarre Monsters Review by Nick LS Whelan

Disclosure: My own most recent publication is a monster book of similar size and style to this one. As this book is 8 years old, no longer in print, and not being actively promoted, I don't believe it meaningfully competes with my own work in a way that would prejudice my review.

Bestiary of Fantastic Creatures Volume 1: Bizarre Monsters (A Rusty Dagger Supplement) is 36 pages and features 15 creatures. Very nearly all the creatures are interesting in at least one respect. They've got some bit of background, or ability that I'd be interested in playing with at my table. Unfortunately, few or none of them represent more than a single interesting idea. The entries are padded out with naturalistic justifications for the creature's one interesting feature, and the rest of the details are filled in by the sort of rote creature design that anyone can do in their sleep. The giants are dumb, the savages are noble, the the eyeless creatures have sensitive hearing.

It was a frustrating book to read because I kept getting excited about finding something good, then losing that enthusiasm as the promise led nowhere. It reads like a book that could have been a strong 4-6 pages, but had to be padded out to hit the assigned word count. Take the cover art creature, the Pohke, for example. "Exploding cattle" is a good prompt for a monster, but a whole paragraph explaining the effects of their explosion (which are exactly what you'd expect) doesn't help me run the monster better. Neither does the entire paragraph that details their domestication and mating habits (challenging), or the paragraph about the general attitude of a herd (not hostile unless there's a bull present). The paragraph explaining the exact process of internal gasses and rubbing anal sacs that cause the explosions to occur definitely wasn't helpful, though it was at least pretty funny.

Even as I go through the Pohke's entry for these examples, I am again frustrated by its highs and lows. All these paragraphs do contain bits of evocative information buried between passages like:"[…] if there is a bull present (average 1 bull per 4 Pohke), there is a 75% chance that the bull will charge if characters come within 60 feet. A charging attack needs a distance of 30 feet, and a bull charging will do 3d8+6 damage. A cow may charge, but…" That sort of hyper-specific instruction buried in the middle of a paragraph, that is itself buried in the middle of a page is self defeating. It's only possible for specific measurements like that (1 per 4, 75% chance, within 60 feet, needs 30 feet, deals 3d8+6 damage) to be useful if they can be referenced quickly during play. But since they're hidden in these blocks of text, they cannot reasonably be referenced at the table, and thus they fill space while contributing nothing.

And the Pohke are only middle-of-the-pack for good ideas. I quite like the eyeless people who wield weapons with large feathers on them that enable them to be exceptionally aware of their environment in the heat of battle. There's also the giants who can create fire with their mind, but aren't smart enough to understand their own agency in creating it; and the bugs that spit out fast-hardening, highly flammable cement. All great starting points for a creature, but none of these live up to their potential. I believe the author is capable of much better writing, but that their style is burdened by expectations that were established by the worst tendencies of older manuals of monsters.

Ideally each of these creatures could have been condensed down to one page, or even half of one page, preventing the good stuff from being diluted by boring stuff and allowing more of them to fit in the booklet. Alternatively, I'd like to have seen the table-reference info put into an abbreviated stat block form. The paragraphs of text could then be used to communicate the sort of information that helps round out a creature in the referee's mind. Snippets of history, culture, and motivation answering why a creature would intrude on the player's adventures, or why the players might be tempted to intrude on the creature's lives. The "Campaign Integration" section at the end of each entry makes some attempt at this, but they read like brief afterthoughts.

I will praise the book for how often local knowledge is referenced throughout. People who live near these creatures don't just have rumor tables. They have tried-and-true survival strategies, and #LifeHacks to share with any traveler smart enough to listen. Most of these creatures are species that live and reproduce the same as people and animals do. There's no way for creatures like that to remain completely mysterious. It's nice to see that second level of thinking about how they interact with the world, and represents one way in which this Rusty Dagger Supplement has a step up other monster manuals.

Overall, this is a book that falls too far short of its potential. Care and creativity clearly went into its production, but its ideas are undeveloped. Like a highly polished first draft.

Bizarre Monsters was written & illustrated by Casey Sorrow, and edited by Whitney Sorrow. As best I can tell it is currently only available in a digital edition from DriveThruRPG for $4.99, Though a print edition was produced at one time.

Lusus Naturae

Review by Ava

Lusus Naturae was a popular book during the mid-OSR G+ era when I first found this corner of our hobby, and I remember it being an influential book for me. It seems distinctly of that era when reading it, an LotFP-adjacent game text that is definitively horror focused, with prose more indulgent than the terse minimalism often found in OSR products currently.

The best of such prose opens the book, with Chandler declaring:

The truth then: monsters love us. They love humans. They need us.

They acknowledge the debt, in the same way that some people kneel beside an animal they have killed while hunting, and murmur words of gratitude; or clasp their hands over a holiday meal and express their thanks to some deity before cutting meat from the bone crushing between their teeth, washing the warm bolus down with wines and gravies.

When we see this perspective properly executed within the book, the work excels. Far from the somewhat gratuitous and entirely misogynistic scenes of body horror and gore that illustrated the core LotFP books, Chandler here understands that what is horrific is not the monster itself but what the monster reflects in is; how the monster recontextualizes humanity. Many monsters here, such as the Auspice, which produces prophecies when it feeds on human flesh, the Kakistocrat, which kills those who are ethical and capable, or Throatworms, which continue to be bred as articles of assassination, are less interesting in and of themselves than they are for the kind of social situation they are likely to engender and what they imply about the world.

Beyond these, there are occasional moments of sublimity, where Chandler so perfectly encapsulates a chilling human foible or eccentricity within a moment of monster description; the Abstruct, for example, who comes from a dimension where killing children and constructing citadels of their flesh is perfectly normal, and refuses to debate the morality of such an action, but is otherwise exceedingly polite, will “display happiness by wrapping its shawl around its body” if it “believes that it has made a friend.” Or the way in which the Rapturous Weaver keeps its gold it uses for sculpting fake prosthetic noses “arranged in neat stacks” and “the other treasures…dumped in a pit near the back.” Such behaviour is so lucid, so telling, so utterly human and banal that it serves as the best function of fantasy, to hold a mirror to the parts of us in something that seems so utterly unlike us. In the Abstruct I see terrifying humanity of the kind person who holds monstrous beliefs; in the Rapturous Weaver the single-minded obsession of the well-intentioned who has lost perspective.

With a collection as large as this there are often more misses than hits, however. Many monsters’ description comprises several pages of backstory that are unlikely to ever be relevant in play, or the interesting avenues of interacting with them can only be learned by incredibly esoteric means. Or, much ink is spilled on sentences which strain themselves to achieve a literary “weirdness” (as in the New Weird) and sufficient horrific effect, but don’t contribute otherwise to the theming of the monster or will be likely to be useful as descriptive fodder for the Referee. This to me seems emblematic of the mid-OSR period, which to me seemed to want to seek to differentiate itself traditional D&D through aesthetic means, emphasizing horror and surrealist fantasy themes, and that developed techniques like “don’t say the monster’s names” in service of such aesthetic goals. One also begins to see similar conventions re-appearing over and over, such as Chandler’s fondness for creatures displaced from their dimension whose mere presence chaotically alters reality, or behemoths who are insensible to the destruction they inadvertently leave in their wake, and the repetition tends to dull the initial novel effect of such creatures.

Another problem that presents itself is that, like Fire on the Velvet Horizon, these monsters all carry with them a heavy bit of worldbuilding. Most of them are unique entities, not something that you’d typically place on a random encounter table, and used as a collection from which the Referee would cherry pick one or two within a campaign, this would be a much stronger text; however, more than half of these monsters have some form of interconnection with a different monster in the text, with several “boss monster” types such as Davinia Marrow, Void’s Memory, and the Ideologue having large groups of subservient monsters with whom they form quasi-“storylines”. The book suggests a world in which every single one of these monsters is extant, but such a world immediately strains credulity by how absurdly horrific it would be; every third monster on this list is a reality warping terror, or at the very least causing widespread destruction to a region. Such unremitting horror quickly becomes bathetic in its monotony, and there are few entries which deviate from this emotional palette to offer something of a reprieve (Dr. Volt, a cartoon supervillain blasted out of their time period into a medieval fantasy world, is a notable exception).

On brass tack levels, almost every monster in this book at least presents a much more interesting potential fight than a simple hacking and slashing of hit points down to 0 (though Chandler relies a bit too much on Save vs Terrible Hallucinations Which Do Damage Also). Many of them fundamentally alter the rules of engagement, and have a strong context which makes it easy for a Referee to situate them within a world and adventure. I also appreciate the omens which tend to foretell each beast (useful for those using Hazard Dice!) and the strong, tactile descriptive language which describes them (along with some absolutely stunning artwork by Gennifer Bone). The Killing Blow mechanic, whereby a character that lands the killing blow gains some boon or effect is, I think, rather ingenious though often wasted on somewhat lacklustre or uninspiring effects. The monster generator contained within is also quite interesting, and given that it contains such concrete elements as what a monster says rather than the vagueries found in other monster entries is likely to provide a more serviceable “standard” monster most of the time than the weaker 50% of monster entries in the book.

Overall, Lusus Naturae remains one of the stronger monster manuals I have read, and a work that is worthy of revisiting. In its rougher edges I see a movement still in its aesthetic growing pains, perhaps too singularly devoted to a particular aesthetic without nuance or consideration for actual play at the table, but there are true moments of aesthetic delight within. Chandler understands horror1, and if you wish your game to bend farther that way, there is much inspiration to be found here, even if some of it may require a little bit of polishing.

[1] I actually think several of these monsters would find themselves a much happier home in a Mothership game than standard D&D.

Brain Infestations - Wheel of Evil

Wheel of Evil is a module for use with Labyrinth Lord by Jeff "Bighara" Sparks and Joel Sparks, recommended for 4-6 characters of Levels 3-5. I ran this module as part of my ongoing home campaign, ran in Errant over the course of about 3 sessions, with 3-6 players ranging from levels 1 to 3.

The basic set-up of the adventure is that the party is hired to protect some generic town's prized cheeses from marauding kobolds. This familiar premise is soon up-ended as the party quickly discovers that there is something more sinister afoot. Soon they will stumble into a subterranean fungal hell ruled by a sentient mold with plans for world domination, and those lowly kobold the party was prepared to genocide are likely to become valuable comrades, their bottles of distilled urine a weapon to combat the mycelial menace.

A Blast From the Past

Remember when Labyrinth Lord was the system du jour for the burgeoning OSR? Go back through the archives of DTRPG far enough, and you'll see our current crop of made for OSE adventures give way to LotFP, and before that to Labyrinth Lord (or at least, that's what the historical trajectory of my DTRPG library looks like). And something you'll notice on those modules which you don't see as much nowadays in modules, or at least not featured as prominently, is the expected range of player characters and their levels that are suitable for playing the adventure. This little snippet of paratext is, I think, key for interpreting the contents of the module within.

Because within this module, dear reader, you will not find any Kempian lateral thinking challenges, McDowellian traps, Gustovian factions or orienteering, combat-as-war, or any of the other well-worn bon mots found in the Principia Apocrypha. The structure of the module is, essentially, an introductory prelude of exposition and light investigation followed by a linear progression of set-piece encounters with a succession of Morale 12 Hostile creatures (aka guaranteed fights to the death). The one section within the adventure in which there is some non-linearity hazarded, as the players find themselves lost in a sprawing complex of cave tunnels that they will need adequate light to navigate, is handled by a succession of ability checks, resembling nothing so much as a 4e skill challenge. Indeed, there is no chance of the players failing, even if they run out of light sources, so long as they manage to survive the two pre-determined encounters that occur within this section (and any wandering monsters). After 8 ability checks they are guaranteed to move onto the next part of the dungeon.

To me, this is indicative of a time when the R in OSR might be better understood as "revival" rather than "renaissance". While the OSR and its proponents often purport to be a return to the good old days of how the game used to be played, this is nothing more than a romantic creation myth; as John B. notes, the play culture of the OSR and its precepts is a latter day invention, a re-reading of the fundamental texts that revealed new avenues of play largely unexplored. The predominant culture of play "back in the day", which John B. dubs Classic, is the style of play we can see evinced textually in the TSR tournament modules of old, with a focus on the 

linked progressive development of challenges and PC power, with the rules existing to help keep those in rough proportion to one another and adjudicate the interactions of the two "fairly".

And it is this play ethos that I see reflected in Wheel of Evil primarily. This makes sense to me historically; that early in the OSR's history when values, norms, goals, and expectations around design were still inchoate and yet to cohere into a more stable play culture, early efforts by revivalists would align more closely with early D&D design as they actually remembered playing it, rather than how the "OSR" design orthodoxy which later emerged would dictate they remember it.

Taken within this context, the design decisions of Wheel of Evil seem much clearer. Structurally its very similar to a tournament module; even the reward structure of the adventure, with characters paid in shares of sales from the cheese festival, the value of those shares determined by a number of key factors related to the party's performance within the adventure, functions explicitly as a sort of grading system akin to those employed by Referees at conventions. Within this framework, the linear adventure and the set-piece encounters function to provide a uniform rubric against which the player's performance can be evaluated.

Yet more textual evidence for Wheel of Evil falling more squarely within a classic mode of play rather than a normatively OSR lies in the adventure's adherence to the aesthetics of Gygaxian vernacular fantasy. Yet another norm of the OSR is the reskinning of monsters, describing them in odd ways, and refusing to name them; this is to undermine player's attempts at system mastery and force them to engage with novel and unexpected challenges beyond those for which they have an expected frame of reference. By contrast, many of the encounters in Wheel of Evil seem to rely on an assumption of system mastery, that your players will know what a shrieker is, or a yellow mold or gelatinous cube or black pudding. It deploys these familiar creatures in novel situations, using their presence to signal to savvy players to be on the look-out for danger and treachery. Successful players will parlay their knowledge of these monsters to navigate the new and novel situations they've been reconfigured into, while those who do not recognise the black masses being spat out by a minion in the boss battle as a black pudding or the immobile skeleton floating down a tunnel to be evidence of a gelatinous cube and not some malign undead are likely to have a very bad time.

Hamburger America

Almost all the regional hamburgers George Motz presents in his YouTube show are pretty much the exact same burger with one or two slight variations. And yet, within the constraints of this formula of bread and beef, these slight novel introductions manage to produce what feel like wildly different culinary experiences. Looking at Wheel of Evil, this is similar to what I find to be the joy of the vision of Classic design with which it presents us.

The scenario design in Wheel of Evil feels like a tone poem or a limited palette painting that asks, "how many ways can we combine all the classic oozes, slimes, and molds in D&D to create weird new encounters?" By working within a known and stable set of conventions, the slight novelties and variations it introduces strike me as being all the more surprising and delightful. The excitement and tension within the module derives not from the vast possibilities arising from a sandbox or a more open-ended adventure, but from the juxtaposition of discrete mechanical parts (e.g. monster statblocks or traps with very particular abilities represented mechanically) whose interactions present very narrow paths of success. The very first hostile encounter within the module sets the stage for this, with a large mushroom grove within which lurks an incredibly stealthy high HD monster with a paralyzing attack (and as the ability to swallow a paralyzed target) as well as a number of shriekers which will immediately alert said high HD monster. This is also illustrative of a trend within the encounter design where a familiar monster will be combined in an encounter with a new, bespoke creature, or else be presented in a novel environment (the chamber leading to the boss battle is a shallow pool studded with slippery stepping stones, within which lurks a gray ooze) or form (miniature starter cultures of yellow mold, or mini black puddings, for example). 

This mechanistic adventure design produces an almost point-n-click adventure game logic to the puzzles and challenges within the module. Preceding the dark, twisting caverns is a grove of bioluminescent fungus, which will glow for 1d6 hours; before the players descend into the fungal depths they have the opportunity to discover a large still of distilled alcohol, which the fungus monsters in the module are weak to (and later on they will encounter a cadre of potentially friendly kobolds who have similarly helpful flasks of distilled urine). In the spirit of presenting a tournament-esque level playing field, everything a group of clever players would need to bring to bear to be successful exists within the closed system field of the adventure itself.

The corollary to this is that there a number of very clever, rather devious "gotcha" moments in the adventure waiting to catch unwary players off guard. The first and most obvious of these is the mold valve in the starting section of the adventure: investigating too closely will lead to that character getting stuck in the valve and, if not rescued, being deposited to the lower levels of the dungeon in an unconscious state, where they will be carried by a bunch of goons to be devoured by the boss monster of the dungeon. Their party members have time to rescue their unfortunate comrade, but the most readily available way to damage the mold valve, fire, will also end up causing damage to the cheese that provides the bulk of the party's reward. Another trick that I particularly enjoy is that, right after the party emerges from the dark, winding tunnels that require light sources (e.g. torches) to navigate, their next encounter will be with a creature that is attracted to fire; a clever party who managed to navigate these tunnels by mushroom light quickly enough won't face this danger. 

My favourite, however, has to be the twin pit traps. When I ran this module, the party sprung the first pit trap, and then, being on the look-out, easily spotted the second pit trap further down the hallway. But, beyond that second pit trap, is an ochre jelly whose proportions just so happen to perfectly align with the size of the pit trap they avoided springing. Thinking themselves very clever, they goaded the slow jelly back down the hallway, avoiding a fight by making it fall into the pit trap. To their dismay, however, they then saw the translucent mass of the jelly that the bottom of that second pit trap contained some very attractive plate mail and a magical greatsword, which was rapidly being dissolved within the acidic mass of the jelly.

There is a great joy in seeing this kind of tight design, similar to the feeling one gets seeing a well-engineered Rube Goldberg contraption go off. While such design may not be en vogue in the old school scene anymore, I think there are many valuable lessons to be drawn from the examples set by Wheel of Evil.

Other Passing Remarks

The kobolds in this adventure all speak in peevish Bavarian accents. This is great. It seems the natural extension of WH40K's football hooligan Orks. I want to see every problematic fantasy humanoid recast as a farcical European caricature.

There are lots of nice little handouts in this adventure. My favourite is the one for the cheese shares the party gets. 

Cryptic Signals - Dissident Whispers

Last year, a white police officer murdered George Floyd on camera, which set in motion uprisings by the Black Lives Matter movement across the United States and around the world. Despite the remarkably nonviolent nature of these demonstrations, over 10,000 protestors were arrested by the very police whose egregious abuse of power they were protesting. Many organizations and communities organized in support of the protests. One such effort, led by the Whisper Collective, produced Dissident Whispers. All proceeds from the project go towards bail funds, supporting all those arrested for standing up for Black Lives Matter.

Dissident Whispers is an anthology of 58 TTRPG adventures, produced by Tuesday Knight Games in collaboration with the Whisper Collective, made possible through the collaboration of over 90 artists, writers, editors and designers. This issue of Cryptic Signals will not review every adventure in Dissident Whispers, but focuses on a few that catch our individual sets of eyes.

...

Canal of Horrors (Review by WFS)

Canal of Horrors is an adventure for Electric Bastionland by Chris McDowall. Like most adventures in the Dissident Whispers anthology, Canal of Horrors is short and sweet, fitting on a two-page spread. It consists of a map of several boroughs of Bastion (“The only city that matters”), annotated with details about each borough and a simple adventure hook and things that get in the way. In short, it has everything needed to inspire an adventure. 

McDowall is often praised for his terse style, both in his advice and his rules. He has a much-lauded ability to cut rules to the core. As Anne of DIY & Dragons said, 

“I consider Into the Odd to be something like the Platonic ideal of simple Dungeons & Dragons. Both the rules and the writing have been distilled down to their very essence and presented in the tersest, most compact possible way, without sacrificing the elements that are most essential to play. I'm not saying that no one else can write something better than I2TO, but I am saying that you'd be hard pressed to write something shorter. Chris McDowell has seemingly cut out everything but the most necessary elements of D&D, and edited his own writing to be as terse as possible.” 

What goes less-often commented on is that McDowall is one of the funniest writers in TTRPGs. While his description of the “Rich Future Bastard Versions of You” pursuing the player-characters cracked me up the most, almost every entry in Canal of Horrors matches the understated comedic tone. It isn’t trying to be funny; it just is. The worldbuilding hits the right mix of absurd and mundane, and the tone remains firmly tongue-in-cheek. Like the rest of the Electric Basionland canon, the droll writing makes Canal of Horrors a pleasant reading experience.

But how does it play? You are in luck. I ran this adventure as an intermezzo between a starting adventure in a Bastionland hospital and You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge (a play report, of sorts, is here). However, my problems with the adventure are best illustrated by the changes I made. In Canal of Horrors, the player characters begin at the docks. There is an abandoned luxury yacht. To get paid, the characters need to take the boat through the canals to the Buyer at the intersection of Mocktown and the Central Bog boroughs. The canal itself is forked like a trident, but it is a straight path to the Buyer. I always pay attention when designers break their own rules, and in Electric Bastionland, McDowall provides the following advice about mapping Bastion: “draw two or more circuits denoting different transport routes, ensuring they cross over each other.” There is no circuitry here, and players don’t really need to make any interesting navigational choices to get from the starting point to the end. Essentially, it is a railroad with five locks between start to end, with each lock having a 50% chance of triggering an encounter. So I flipped the adventure geographically (partially as a necessary way of shoehorning in the Garbage Barge), but also provided multiple routes through this section of the city. My players ended up crossing bridges on foot, taking cable cars, and swimming in the canals as they made their way from a privatized hospital north Mocktown to the Dock to the south. The worldbuilding and writing of the adventure drew me in, but the adventure structure itself is lacking (perhaps to be expected, based on the real estate the adventure covers [several city districts] versus its real estate in the book [two aesthetically pleasing pages]). Like many adventures, it takes some tailoring to make Canal of Horrors as flattering as it can be when you bring it to your gaming table.

…

Muto Station (Review by Dan D.)

The Incident at Muto Station is a Mothership adventure by Brian Hauffer, which I ran for three players who had no experience at all with the system to great success. It’s a rather simple setup - here is a creepy, if linear, abandoned space station, there is a horrible monster onboard it - but that's fine for a one-shot. It doesn’t have much in the way of reason to get involved, other than a brief mention of it being a place for poachers to drop off ill-gotten xenos for sale, so when I ran it, I framed it as a cleanup job, grabbing some data and scrubbing the rest under the auspices of a shady patron. Worked like a charm. The monster is big and gribbly and has a table of behaviors and tricks, plus a much-appreciated note that it will start cutting off escape attempts when the players try to leave (as there’s not much stopping them otherwise). 

The players had fun, it was easy to run, and that’s fine enough for me.

…

 Ghost Ship (Review by mv)

*

Ghost Ship is a module for Mothership by Matt and Charlie Umland. This 2 page spread promises a paranormal exploration of a long forgotten derelict. “Those who investigate it often never return”  - we are warned right off the bat. OoOOooo. Rotate 90 degrees, we got the classic badly kept poster (terrifying), maybe a blueprint - clear yet grungy design by Jonah Nohr (known for Mörk Borg). 

**

Ghost(s) / are the main / supernatural / part of this / Ship. Encounters with them are randomly generated, so it took some improvisation to make them fit into the various rooms of the ship. However it was super fun to be surprised by the creepy specters I’ve rolled up. One thing to watch out for are possessions. There are two random table entries that have the ghosts possess PCs and deal harm, and one ghost who possesses to speak. They are not in any way baked in the overall plot of the module, so you can decide with other players if you want to use these entries or not.

***

I ran the module using Ian Yusem’s funnel rules from The Drain. The players used their numbers to split off and explore various rooms simultaneously, which made the session feel like a true haunted house horror flick. Encounters with the ghosts were spooky and memorable, but the turret traps felt a bit out of place when there is such a cool paranormal premise. After the ship was cleared, the players were left with a lot of hooks to follow up on. What’s up with the weird sphere? What to do with the expensive equipment? Where to transport the survivors?

****

10/10 would get haunted by space ghosts again.

...

Dust Remains (review by Anne)

A few years ago, I was running a weird west Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign where I went searching for mine-themed adventures to reskin and convert to DCC. I used Melancholies & Mirth’s Abandoned Mines Above the Caverns procedural generator, reskinned Into the Odd’s Iron Coral as “The Irontown Corral,” and even started in on Goodberry Monthly’s Goldsoul Mines before my play group moved on to other things. If I had known about “Dust Remains” at that time, it definitely would have made my list to try, and might have beaten out one of the others.

Christian Kessler pushes the two-page format to probably its absolute limit, giving us a mini-setting on one page and SIX mini dungeons on the other. In the extra space, Christian finds room to give us a table of encounters, four new monsters, a list of ghosts, a random table of minor treasures, and 11 unique magic items and spells, all written up for Troika and other descendants of Fighting Fantasy.

“Dust Remains” presents us with a series of ancient tombs, left over from an empire of cruel wizard kings, carved into the cliff faces of a winding canyon. The area is still haunted by elemental spirits who escaped from their long-ago enslavement, and by the zebra riding nomads who claim to be the empire’s only survivors. Some of these details, along with the names of the tombs - “Vault of Enuliki” or “Vault of Mazzolamus” for example - make me think the setting is meant to be fantasy Africa. There’s a tent city of wannabe tomb robbers and the various merchants and traders that accompany any gold rush, and a second camp of “rich fucks desiring ancient artifacts as status symbols” who provide an immediate market.

The flavor of the various treasures and the activities of the ghosts (which show typical actions of the long-dead imperials) help to communicate the distant culture of the ancient empire. The dungeon keys consist mostly of traps and puzzles, plus a list of treasures behind the final door at the back of each vault. The variety Christian presents is impressive, although the referee will likely want to add a bit more to each dungeon to bring them to life and give them a true sense of exploration. The referee will also need to create NPCs to populate the groups described in the setting introduction. Given all that Christian manages to fit into the available space though, I think these limitations are understandable.

The greatest flaw in “Dust Remains” is the maps, which are almost unreadable. The region contains two different encampments plus all six dungeons. I’m not sure which camp is shown or where the second one is located. The dungeon maps are reproduced in slightly smaller form on the second page, where a handful of the rooms are keyed. At that size, and with the very thin font used on the key, it’s very difficult to make out where anything is supposed to be. Christian’s instructions for randomly stocking any unkeyed rooms also ask the referee to differentiate between “accessible” and “inaccessible” rooms, a distinction I’m not sure I can make quickly at a glance. 

If I had a second quibble, it would be that the anticipated time frame of the “Events & Encounters” table isn’t specified and seems unclear. I would guess you’re meant to check daily, because that’s the only way certain results make sense, but others seem a better fit for checking on expedition time.

...

 

Lair of the Glassmakers (Review by Ava)

I ran Lair of the Glassmakers for a group of 4, mostly new players, using Into the Odd. I selected this particular adventure as I felt the rooms full of inventive, creative puzzles and the adventure themed around cute, mischievous glass kobolds (visually depicted in a pixel art style that reminds one of Pokemon by way of Moomin) would be a good intro for a group of queers who had never played D&D before and were used to the softer fantasy of the new She-Ra cartoon.

I was mistaken. Lair of the Glassmakers is, if run as written, an absolute meat grinder.

The rooms are, as previously mentioned, full of interactive elements and fun puzzles. There’s an alchemy mini-game, and reflections that are alive, and an Annoying Fucking Cat who is literally designed to create hijinks and chaos. This is all really great. If the dungeon was actually just what was keyed within the rooms and nothing else, no denizens, it would actually make for a really fun, if low-stakes, little puzzle-solving session.

The failure of this to all cohere comes in the way random encounters are implemented, and the denizens of this particular dungeon.

The dungeon is the workshop of a glassmaker and alchemist. It is full of treasure, which adventurers will want to ransack. Every room contains, as a random encounter, d6-1 glass kobolds (the entryway to the dungeon, not a keyed location on the map, also has 4 glass kobolds in it). These kobolds surprise on a 2 in 6 (3 in 6 first time they’re encountered) and if they surprise, they each nick an item from the players after which it ends up in the bedroom.

This setup strains credulity for me a little bit already. In the first case, it isn’t quite clear how the stolen items end up in the bedroom. The most logical reading of it is that the kobolds run off with the stolen items to the bedroom but: why? And how does one handle this running off? Do they do it at the beginning of the encounter, absconding in a Road Runner-esque fashion before the PCs have time to react? What if the PCs plan for this and try to catch the kobolds before they run off? And what becomes of these fleeing kobolds? Do they linger in the room next to the bedroom? Do they disappear into the ether? Am I supposed to roll for how many kobolds are in each room each time the players enter any room, or just the once? These might seem like petty questions that any GM worth their salt could make a ruling on, but this sort of nebulous quantum amount of kobolds that always end up teleporting stolen goods into a bedroom strained my credulity, and undermined my sense of this location as a coherent space. 

But of course, that only occurs when the kobolds surprise the PCs. The other 67% of the time, what do they do? Well, they guard the place from intruders who want to mess up the workshop or steal from it, and guard its owner Elsa with their lives. No morale rating is given (which feels odd; the module is labelled system agnostic but gives AC values as Plate or Leather and Levels as Thieves or Magic User, so its clearly working with OSR systems in mind), so this seems to imply fanatical glass kobolds that will fight any adventurers to the death. With several of them in every room, confrontations are bloody and frequent. For the low level characters this module is recommended for, this would be a meatgrinder.

The space is small enough (8 rooms all jammed close to each other) that random encounters aren’t really necessary in order to provide a sense of risk to orienteering: it would have been better served with a definite amount of glass kobolds keyed to each room, preferably engaging in distinct but cute hijinks which provide PCs a method of interacting with the kobolds that isn’t wholesale slaughter.

The only other inhabitant of the dungeon, Elsa the glassblower/alchemist, isn’t much better. She hides as an imperceptible glass statue (undetectable without detect magic), and she will only act if she feels the players are messing with her space, in which case she attacks them (dealing 3x damage on a surprise, which she has a 4 in 6 chance of). So this character, potentially the most interesting person to interact with, certainly the only person to parlay with if you want to be friendly with the kobolds, has two states: 1) unable to be interacted with whatsoever or 2) murdering the party. Oh and also she’s in the very first room of the dungeon, so the players will almost certainly be immediately attacked, being drawn into an ambush against a 5HD creature and d6-1 kobolds at the very beginning of the adventure.

Really, with there basically being two types of inhabitants in this dungeon (mook and boss) that are all singularly aligned to common purpose, this can’t really be classified as a dungeon at all. It’s a faction lair, and should be treated as such. The only way to get through it for a party of players is directed assault which requires foreplanning, or placed in relation to other faction lairs so as to allow emergent social play from competing agendas and goals. 

...

Dissident Whispers was produced by the Whisper Collective, in coordination with 90 individual collaborators. It is available in Print & PDF for $30 at Tuesday Knight Games (North America), in PDF for $20 at itch.io or DriveThruRPG. Physical copies outside of North America were previously being distributed by Melsonian Arts Council, but as of time of writing that option is no longer available. 

Brain Infestations - The Waking of Willowby Hall

 

The Waking of Willowby Hall is an adventure by Ben Milton (aka Questing Beast) produced as part of Zinequest 2, with illustration from Sam Mameli (aka Skullboy) and edited and published by Jacob Hurst of Swordfish Islands. It’s designed to be used with any old-school system, but assumes a B/Xish base with 3^rd level characters.

I ran this game as a one-shot live on stream with a group of 4 players, most of whom were relatively new to old-school style play. We ran it using my system, Errant, with 1^st level characters (they were all first-time players of the system also). You can watch the session here.

The short version of this review is that this adventure is, as is likely well known by this point, absolutely excellent. It is a masterclass in usable design, and the flaws I find within are only minor nitpicks at best. The scenario provided within is dynamic and inventive, and the aesthetics of the product are absolutely dynamite and point towards, I think, a new sort of poetics for the old-school space moving forward.

USABILITY

This is probably my foremost concern when looking at any adventure, above and beyond the content. I am pretty confident in my ability to take even the blandest dungeons and ensure that it results in a pretty fun time at the table (though this is largely due to my common habit of integrating them into ongoing campaigns, which by their very nature add depth, complexity and interest; for one-shots, the content of the adventure needs to pack a little more punch). However, I’m not really great at coming up with completely off-the-cuff original scenarios (probably an atrophied skill due to how much I rely on published adventures), so really what I look for is just something I can pick up and parse with little effort to throw my players into. “Parse with little effort” is an incredibly load-bearing phrase here, because I am notoriously bad at reading maps and imagining architectural spaces, so I really need straightforward cartography and clear room-keying so as to not overtax my last two remaining brain cells.

I am happy then to report that Willowby Hall rates exceptionally well in this regard.

Maps

The map is rendered with clear, bold lines; the layout of the dungeon is a fairly straightforward manor, where each room enters into another one, without any hallways in between; each room is not numerically keyed in the normal fashion, but rather labelled with the page number where the room description can be found. There are also basically no symbols that require a legend: there’s doors, secret doors, stairs, and windows, all immediately intuitively legible at first glance.

The maps are presented in full size on the first 3 spreads of the book, utilizing the inner front cover for space, along with quick reference notes for the contents of each room. These maps are then replicated in a smaller size in the interior of the book with the room descriptions, with each spread having a map of the floor of the manor being detailed with the specific rooms highlighted. This is probably my favourite thing I can see in an adventure; it reduces page flipping immensely and helps keep the DM oriented to the player’s position relative to the layout of the space at all time. Funnily enough though, I find that this basically obviates the need for those first 3 full spread maps, except as an initial overview to familiarize oneself with the space in its entirety. The brief room notes on this map, clearly intended as quick reference during play, basically are obsoleted since I found no need to ever have anything but the spread of the rooms the player’s were in open at any given time.

The module also comes with maps ready for VTT play, which made the game incredibly easy to run. Honestly at this point I feel this should basically come standard with all adventures.

VTT Maps

Two minor quibbles with the maps. First, the VTT maps, which are playing facing, still have the secret doors on them marked. An easy fix, but also kind of a silly oversight. Second, the doors on all the maps are shown as open. I assume this was to indicate the direction doors open in, which can be relevant especially if considering how to hide behind them (a concern likely to come up in this adventure), and also I took it to mean that all the doors in the manor were unlocked, but there isn’t much indication of this anywhere in the descriptive text. A little note on that, and the inclusion of some stuck or locked door, I think would have been a welcome addition to the adventure: trying to pick the lock before the giant peers into the room, or having to bash a door down to progress, creating sound that draws the attention of Bonebreaker Tom, have the potential to be exciting and memorable moments. Pay attention to doors in your dungeon crawls!

Room Keying

The room descriptions utilize a minimal keying structure with bolded key words and tiered descriptions based on information level, similar to that found in OSE products. In each room are several sentences describing the salient features of the room which are immediately apparent; beneath each of these structures are indented bullet points with further information about each feature that are notable with further inspection. For example, the first room, the Great Hall, has at the sentence level “a wrought iron chandelier”. Below that are two indented bullet points describing what the players would see if they took a closer look at the chandelier: one socket has a black candle in it, and there are cracks in the ceiling where the chandelier is attached. Indented below that last point is a note that swinging on the chandelier has a 50% chance of causing it to crash to the ground. Information is tiered by salience, essentially following an “immediately apparent -> close look -> closer look” structure. This makes describing rooms a breeze, an almost programmatic “if-then” sequence for the DM to follow: when the player’s enter a room, describe all the stuff at the sentence level, and as they investigate features, just move down the levels of indentation. Writing is minimal without coming across as terse, with plenty of evocative description.

Layout & Other Matters of Note

The layout of the adventure is pretty consistently excellent, of the kind that’s executed so well as to seem unremarkable. As expected, pages are organized into neat, two-page spreads with everything relevant to that section of the adventure contained within.

The two spreads devoted to most of the NPCs in the adventure were ones I particularly enjoyed; 2 characters per page, with a column of text describing their stats and motivations below, cumulatively resulting in a Usual Suspects-esque identity parade. This is something I’ve seen in other adventures as well, probably first in The Cursed Chateau, but since then it’s cropped up elsewhere like in Dead Planet, Willow, and Darkness Moves. The fairly uniform nature of the NPC portraits was also really helpful for running this game online as I could screenshot them into pretty easy player handouts to show what the characters look like, without any awkward cropping to hide game relevant info.

The only quibble I have here is that the last spread of the book is a little awkward, with one room spilling onto the inner back cover, resulting in about half of that page space being empty. With the inner front cover put to such great use with a map and simplified key of the first floor, it makes this wasted space more pronounced. I think it could have been better served by adding an extra sheet to the zine, and using the last spread with the inner back cover to replicate the adventure’s encounter tables, which are buried a little awkwardly in the 11^th page, to reduce page flipping.

Besides layout, there a few minor quibbles I had when running the game that I think could have been elaborated or clarified better within the adventure. First is the question of how exactly Bonebreaker Tom should be ran. The adventure provides a mechanic whereby on a roll of 2 on the encounter die, the GM rolls a d12 and has Tom move in that direction around the manor and swings his bell at the wall. But to me it was unclear whether or not I was supposed to have Tom roaming around the manor in between rolls of 2 (e.g. rolls of 2 simply trigger a “move and swing” action from Tom rather than his usual “roam” protocol), or if once Tom had moved to a location he remained there until the next roll of 2. The adventure states that Tom peers into windows “as he moves”, but doesn’t really fully answer the question of his movement. The adventure places a pretty big emphasis on having to hide from Tom to keep the tension of the adventure up, which is reinforced both by aesthetics (the cover illustration of the NPC party hiding from Tom) and design (the numerous hiding places detailed in each room). When I ran the game, I opted for the latter approach (Tom is stationary in between rolls of 2), but this resulted in that aspect of the adventure not being really relevant past the initial segment; however, I could see a case where a constantly roaming Tom might make it too onerous to achieve much within the dungeon. Still, I think the first approach of having Tom periodically roam around the manor in between rolls of 2 would provide a more engaging gameplay experience.

Second, there are two little “miniquests” within the manor that involve the moving of fairly large and heavy objects from one area to another, but doesn’t provide much guidance for making rulings regarding weight and encumbrance of these objects (one a heavy free-standing mirror, the other a harpsichord). One could argue it would be easy to make a ruling in the moment based on intuition, but I’ll note that after researching to find the likely weights of these objects (50-75 lbs for the mirror, 100-125 lbs for the harpsichord) I would have vastly overestimated the weight of the harpsichord in play (in my head it was more the weight of a grand piano) and underestimated the weight of the mirror (I assumed one person could have carried it kind of awkwardly). Something like the mechanic for moving the granite slab covering the tomb entrance in Winter’s Daughter (“Moving the slab: Requires a cumulative STR bonus of at least 4”) would have sufficed (my personal ruling would be that the mirror/harpsichord require cumulative STR 20/40 to lift).

The miniquest involving the harpsichord also struck me as being a little odd. For one thing, it’s given by the ghost of Lavinia, trapped within the harpsichord itself. Whereas every other NPC is given a “want” that defines basic motivations that while inform their actions, Lavinia’s takes the form of this one-time task, which seems like it undersketches her character. Second, for how difficult the task is (moving a heavy harpsichord from one floor of the house to the upper floor while avoiding dungeon hazards and an angry giant), there’s no reward at all for doing so, unlike the miniquest involving the mirror which rewards one with important information. The only thing relevant to the harpsichord in the guest bedroom, the place Lavinia asks it to be moved to, is sheet music which when played on the harpsichord…summons the ghost of Lavinia, the one who gave you this quest in the first place. Yeah.

Finally, and this is almost entirely a personal preference of mine, I find the “triggered” nature of the adventure’s events would make it hard for me to incorporate this module into campaign play. My method for using modules is to just place them somewhere on my campaign map for my players to run into; if I attempted that approach here, that would mean that as soon as the players stumbled onto where this adventure was keyed, no matter when they did it, then that would be the exact day that the sequence of events regarding Tom and the NPC adventurers had played out. This might not bother most of you but something about that approach strikes me as off-puttingly videogame-ish. The alternative I suppose would be to not only assign the adventure a place on the map but also a date on the calendar, but unless there’s heavy forecasting to let the players know something goes down on that date, that also feels a little unsatisfying. Though you could always play it a bit forward and have the party hear rumours that a giant’s golden-egg laying goose was stolen and have them deal with that aftermath, but that is significant adaptational work on the part of the GM. Though, it must be said that these qualities which make the adventure difficult to integrate into a campaign make it an excellent one-shot adventure, all but guaranteeing that your game will hit the ground running, which is especially important if you’re playing at a convention or somewhere else with a limited time slot.

AESTHETICS

I’ll conclude this review with a brief discussion of the aesthetics of the adventure, which can really only be described as pretty as fuck. Seriously, this adventure is so gorgeously illustrated that when I got this in the mail my partner wanted to flip through the book simply just to look at them. The cover piece in particular is gorgeous, with an incredibly striking and vibrant blue and yellow palette (my partner also decided to base my make-up for the stream in which I ran this on the cover). Having the whole book be illustrated by one artist also presents a unified aesthetic which really gives the adventure a characteristic feel and tone. Sam Mameli really knocked it out of the park with this one.

An odd thing about the cover illustration being so striking that I’ve noticed happen a few times though is that people approaching this module think that the NPC adventurers which are depicted on the cover are actually the PCs, as they’re the point of identification within that drawing. This is a point of confusion that seems somewhat common when even the hook of the module is being discussed, where people assume that the PCs are the one who stole Mildred the goose. In play also, especially for a one-shot where the players don’t know each other and the PCs are new and a little half-formed, I think there is a bit of a risk of the NPC adventurers, who are so well drawn (in both the literal and figurative sense), overshadowing the players.

The reason I choose to discuss the aesthetic of the adventure though is not solely because of the quality of the art, which as excellent, but the way the aesthetic serves to heighten the usability of the adventure. It does this through conveyance; when I first saw the image of Bonebreaker Tom, his eyes scrunched shut, his huge mouth open screaming within the tangled mess of his beard, I could immediately hear his voice and mannerisms (which for me was pretty much just Brian Blessed).

Mildred is much the same way; her dead eyed stare immediately painted the picture of how I would run her, as a combination of the horrible goose from Untitled Goose Game but with the warm mischief swapped out for the soulless cruelty of Damien from The Omen.

This usability extends not just to the GM but to the players to. Everything in Willowby Hall has a sort of cartoon fairytale logic to it that will be immediately recognizable to players, like something out of Fantasia. This clues players onto the expectations of the adventure (once they see a giant with a goose, they’ll almost immediately grok what’s going on), and provides a framework for assumptions which is important when trying to navigate potentially deadly puzzles and traps, ultimately resulting in an incredibly toyetic experience. It manages to achieve the strengths of vanilla fantasy, the quick communication of fundamental assumptions about the setting and its logic, while still being a little off-centre enough from that aesthetic to be surprising (animated taxidermied owlbear probably sums this up the best).

I feel like this fairytale/folklore/cartoon aesthetic is one we’re seeing more and more in old school play, with settings like Dolmenwood (being more on the folklore side of things) as well as the illustrations of folks like Evlyn Moreau and Nate Treme. I think that, counterintuitive as it may seem, this is actually an aesthetic I think works really well with the old school play, particularly the high lethality aspect of it. Whereas previously creators have opted for grimdark and miserycrawls to set the expectations for high lethality play, I think this cartoon-ish style works just as well for that purpose with the added benefit of being far more appealing and accessible to a wide variety of folks. There’s something about the vibe of this adventure that to me feels halfway in between something like Adventure Time and Happy Tree Friends; lighthearted, but still with the possibility for violence and disturbing features. I can pretty vividly imagine, when I read Bonebreaker Tom’s bell flail attack (dealing 6d6 damage), of some hapless adventurer being crushed against the floor with a “SPLAT!” sound effect. I think this achieves the effect of creating a bit of an ironic detachment from one’s player character, so that one can relish in the humour of your cute little dude meeting some tragic demise. While I still love my gross-out, shit and blood dark fantasy settings too (which, to be clear, I also find funny though in a pretty different way) I am glad to see a diversity of different aesthetics proliferating in this space after a period of one particular aesthetic reigning rather hegemonically.

CONCLUSION

This was a lot of words about an adventure that is honestly pretty much near-flawless. In summary, go play this one. Not only is it eminently runnable, it also is really unique in terms of play experience from most other modules out there; usually I’ve found that an adventure either pulls off the former or the latter. This is the rare one that pulls off both.

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.