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.
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 3rd 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 1st
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 11th 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.
