Grave Trespass - Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Adventure Game

 A Scathingly Positive Review

Jim Henson's Labyrinth: the Adventure Game is a self-contained system and adventure adapted from the 1986 film Labyrinth, published in 2019 by River Horse Games. The main creators behind it are the brothers Jack and Chris Caesar, but the adventure is mostly written by Ben Milton (AKA Questing Beast). The book is 294 pages and uses the original concept artwork for the movie by Brian Froud, with additional artwork by Ralph Horsley and Johnny Fraser-Allen.

I own the PDF of the game and am currently running it for the second time, both campaigns using Discord voice+text and Roll20 as a VTT. As probably indicated by the fact that I'm running it again, I am a big fan. Short review: 10/10, quite likely the finest experience I've ever had using published RPG material at my table. But this book already has a lot of positive reviews, and I felt like it might be worth it to spotlight some of the qualities that I haven't seen discussed in those. The things which I didn't really discover until I played it myself.

[By the way, the artwork in this post was done by my friend Norn, a groovy firey whose face was stolen by the Goblin King. You can find their stuff and contact them about commissions at norn-noszka.com]

My critical lens

I'm not super into RPG reviews. I don't read or watch them very often, and I've never set out to write one myself. Mostly I just don't think there's anything uniquely valuable about my perspective for your purchasing decisions (as a potential consumer) or design decisions (as a designer). But Labyrinth helped me recognize at least one thing that's a bit special about my perspective: I play games.

An uncomfortable truth that is rarely acknowledged in RPG discourse is that there are a lot more people who want to play D&D than there are people who actually play D&D. It's really hard! Most adults can't form a successful RPG group. They either don't know enough interested people, or the people they know can't commit to it. Or they, themselves, can't fit it into their life. And even if it does work out for a while, it rarely lasts more than a few months or maybe years. It's extremely difficult to maintain an active participation in this hobby. Some of your favorite game designers, bloggers, and YouTubers secretly haven't played an RPGs in literally years. It's true. Meanwhile, I have a group of 8 that meets every single week to play, for just over six years now. On top of that, I have at least three other groups of people in my life who I can reliably summon for a one-shot or even mini-campaign on an ad-hoc basis.

I am extraordinarily lucky, and I try never to take this for granted.

But the more time I've spent playing games, the more it sticks out to me when I'm reading RPG discussions, reviews, and other discourse that this division is present. That the strongly opinionated and verbose RPG connoisseur who's making all these assertions about how this-or-that should have been done or what sorts of things should be prioritized or what's deserving of an award... clearly does not actually play games very often, if at all. 

Don't get me wrong. Some of those folks often still have a lot of extremely valuable insights. They are your favorite designers, bloggers, and YouTubers, after all. In many ways, they are the ones who drive the medium forward. But it can be easy to become overly concerned with some made up ethos of design purity and a cohesive fidelity to high-minded ideals when you spend more time thinking about games than playing them. 

I say all this as somebody who is extremely prone to making judgments about RPG products based on an ethos like that one. Labyrinth is a perfect example of the kind of game that I needed to actually play in order to make a fair assessment. So in a greater sense, think of this review as really being about "games made for game design nerds vs games made for people playing a game together."

Labyrinth's appeal is obvious

This book is basically engineered to make you say, "oh that's cute" every 5 minutes. Visually, it's made to look just like Sarah's book in the movie, almost as though it's an in-universe artifact. It's got the famous gimmick of the inserted dice that come with the game. The GM is called "the Goblin King" and is encouraged to come up with their own Goblin King character. The end of the adventure has a "Guest Book" page that the players are invited to sign their names on once they've beaten it. And of course, the adventure itself is full of playful, Muppet-y whimsy.

It's also just plainly luxurious. The book quality, I'm told, is very impressive. Plus it's got a ribbon bookmark. Everyone knows all the best RPG books have those. And the Brian Froud artwork is truly sublime. But you likely knew all of this already. What's not to love?

But if Labyrinth didn't have those surface-level charms, I feel like it might be subject to a lot more criticism!

1. The players have no agency.

You are told what your goal is: get to the center of the Labyrinth. You are free to come up with a reason why, but that's largely insubstantial. You can't really adapt the adventure for a different goal, either. Every single aspect of it is constructed around that goal and wouldn't make sense or work otherwise.

The players don't have any input on their path to victory, either. Navigation of the maze has been abstracted away into a mechanic that is GM-facing and involves no choices. There's no way to tackle the goal strategically. The Goblin King marks the party's progress and then rolls a die to determine the next scene, throwing it at the players and saying "here, play with this." And even though there's a neat depthcrawl-like procedure going on behind the scenes to simulate maze exploration... from the players' perspective, this is functionally indistinguishable from if the GM just made one sequence of encounters and railroaded the players through them.

2. The encounters are extremely contrived.

There's a lot of advice out there on "how to make a good encounter." Let's take a look at Prismatic Wasteland's checklist. With few exceptions, the scenes in Labyrinth fail on several or all of these points. They often have nothing to do with the player characters, and are instead just some situation that an NPC is currently going through. They are occasionally toyetic, but are just as often pretty one-dimensional. They are usually open-ended in the strategies you can employ, but many of them have a specific, singular listed solution. The players often have nothing to gain from them, except sometimes the arbitrary "doing this thing will somehow update your progress marker in the depthcrawl." Many of the encounters have no motive at all, occasionally even just being passive bystanders or objects. And there's frequently no consequence to ignoring an encounter, except maybe that the Goblin King will have to roll for a different one that the players find more interesting.

The most justifiable ones boil down to, "you are traveling down a linear hallway, but there's this big thing in the way. You must get passed it to keep going down this hallway." But also, like, that's most people's mental idea of a classic railroad-y feeling encounter. A literal choke point in the adventure. More commonly, the encounters will be something like, "you're meandering through all sorts of crisscrossing paths aimlessly, and you see a guy minding his own business staring down at a chess board." And like, why wouldn't the players just ignore that, right? I mean come on, how is that even an "encounter" in any real sense?

3. There's basically no stakes.

Because it's a Muppet-y sort of thing, the nastiest content you'll see is cartoon violence. Meaning that death is pretty firmly off the table! In place of that, there's a really clever alternative consequence for failure: losing time. Time passes at the speed of failure. The players have 13 hours to complete the adventure, and will lose 1 hour every time they muck up a scene or waste time. In theory, this is an amazing idea. It's such a perfect, clear and usable consequence to inflict so that challenges carry meaningful weight in the overall adventure.

In reality, this just isn't actually going to be used. The first Labyrinth campaign I ran, the players literally did not lose a single hour. Not one. At least, not fair and square. There was one moment where I pulled the bullshit move from the movie where Jareth decided to just steal a few hours to be a dick. I felt comfortable doing such an unfair thing because I knew that even stealing 6 hours from the players would be negligible. Same thing with my second campaign: the players got about 4/5 of the way through and had only lost 1 hour by that point. They just aren't actually going to fail at the challenges, y'know? It's not like I'm pulling my punches. The instructions and the scene descriptions are quite explicit in what triggers the passage of time. And my only explanation is that it just comes down to how easy the challenges are!

Even if the party were to fail somehow, the book isn't really prepared for that possibility. The only thing the text says about losing is this: "If the group loses all 13 hours, they run out of the time and become lost, forgetting why they ever entered." Personally, I wouldn't feel super comfortable with just that alone to handle the party failing at their quest. The players are only ever told "you have 13 hours to do this." If they had any idea what happens if they fail, I think they'd immediately combat it as rather flimsy.

…But none of that matters

Because it's fun. Like, it's really fun.

Labyrinth is the most instant fun right-out-of-the-box game I've ever seen. It's like hitting a button that generates a good time and an evening well spent.

Every scene is contained within a two-page spread. They have very succinct descriptions, always at least one table to randomize some elements, and always an image of the general area in which the scene takes place (if you need a reference for making a battle map). It is incredibly easy to parse. I will confess: during my first campaign, there were two sessions where I didn't read ahead and preview all the scenes in the next layer of the Labyrinth. So I was flying by the seat of my pants trying to read these encounters for the first time as I was running them. And... it still worked. I needed to ask the players to pause for about 20 seconds once or twice, but that's literally all it took to absorb the whole thing and say, "Cool. Got it. Let's jump in." One of my players told me that she had no idea I wasn't prepared.

I'm not recommending you do that... but you could get away with it more easily in this adventure than in basically any other. Every scene is a scenario that you can just quickly set up and then watch the players go. They always take 20-40 minutes, very consistently.

But what about all that lack of player agency? The railroading? Ehhh. Doesn't matter. Nobody's complaining. Nobody's disappointed. The scenes are enough! Sure, we can imagine a hypothetical version of this game where the Labyrinth is like a sandbox and the players get to pick and choose where they want to go and what their ultimate aim is. And that could be cool. But it's not really necessary for having a good time. The scenes are already fun enough that every player is super eager for the next session. Eager for the next time the adventure tells them what they're going to be doing.

But didn't I say the encounters are all contrived? That they don't conform to commonly agreed upon standards of good encounter design? Ehhh. Doesn't matter. They work anyway. The players want to engage. They want to say yes to whatever you offer them. Partly I think it comes down to the material and its tone. Everything is silly and charming and fun. Players like goblins. Players like worms. They like puzzles and games. And it doesn't matter how contrived things are. Without fail, somebody will say, "eh... I'll bite." And they give it a shot and then you've just bought the easiest 20-40 minutes of laughter of your life.

I can understand why, if you just read the book, you'd think, "why the hell would my players interact with this guy playing chess by himself?" It sounds like a bad encounter. But somebody is going to be interested anyway, and they'll interact with the guy and then they solve a chess puzzle and they feel great. There are so many scenes that show no outward indication that they'd help the players progress (and, occasionally, they might really not!), but which they'll want to do anyway. "This cricket is challenging you to a race. Want in?" "These goblins are all playing a game of Lunchball. Want in?" "These dwarves are landscaping. Want in?"

Even a scene like “get from one end of the room to the other” has all the right ingredients to generate fun, from the adventure’s side to the GM’s side to the players’ side. Is it silly and game-y for there to be literal cube-shaped obstacles to climb which correspond with d6s? Yes. Is it fun for players to strategically rotate them to the best sides possible for them to traverse, as each one has an equally-gamey obstacle on it? Also yes. Will the players ever get tired of using their weird tricks and equipment and talents to solve obstacles? Of course not. Singing and dancing your way past goblins or tossing magic fruit at objects and adversaries to shrink them never gets old.

Of course, it's not like they're all amazing. In my first campaign, there were 3 or 4 scenes that my players decided to ignore. I had to roll for a new one instead. And... what's wrong with that? It's not exactly a meaningful expression of agency in-game. But having the real-world agency to choose how you spend your evening together, and agreeing to do what everyone will have the most fun doing, is the single most important part of playing games with your friends. Why don't we acknowledge that more when discussing game theory? We're so keen to discuss the abstract, nebulous, theoretical game space that we construct and how to perfect it, but we forget that games are an activity conducted by humans.

Yeah, it's true. If you don't like the scene in front of you in Labyrinth, you can just reject it and ask for a different one. But who cares how that "weakens" the imagined scenario? I don't really mind if that undermines the challenge, because we're not just seeking a challenge. We're seeking stimulation and creativity and laughter. You can claim that consequences are the root of true challenge, that a task cannot be meaningfully difficult to achieve in a game of make-believe without stakes to contextualize it. But the truth is that players set their own challenge merely by the very act of choosing to try things. The text's offer of the 13-hour time limit as stakes is nice as a backup, but it never ended up being necessary. Because the players are already motivated to tackle each scene by their own desire to have a good time and do cool shit they can tell stories about later.

Moreover, the priorities of the game clearly show an intention that it be played. As soon as possible, as much as possible. The prose is not terribly evocative or engrossing. That's a priority for writers who intend their RPGs to be read. The rules and character creation are not very deep or interesting. That's a priority for designers who intend their RPG to be dissected. The world it shares is neither coherent nor consistent, a flimsy setting that often sits atop the fourth wall and doesn't have answers to your questions about it. But that's a priority for worldbuilders who intend their RPG to be dreamt about. But Labyrinth knows exactly what it's here for.

Everything about the product is beginner friendly. Most RPGs open with a tiresome description of "what exactly is an RPG?" and this one sincerely is among the best I've ever come across. It actually seems as though the author understood what needed to be explained for the layman. Because the single biggest barrier to games being played is accessibility, this product makes it extremely easy to jump right in.

The details necessary to grasp the setting, how things behave in this world, and how to populate it are all established quickly, cleanly, and exactly when you need them. There is no setting gazetteer to guide you. No write-ups on goblin culture and society. If you're expecting to go into the campaign prepared with answers, this book might disappoint you at first. Instead, the book is a toolkit. It teaches you how to key into the setting's tone, and then offers tables and details as necessary to aid in improvisation which consistently aligns with that tone. Because another major barrier to games being played is fact-checking, detail-memorization, lore-researching, and scavenging for answers in an adventure module, this product makes it extremely easy to spontaneously worldbuild without ever contradicting established truths.

And of course, there's endless variety and potential. As mentioned, every single scene has at least one element that can be randomized. Not just some cosmetic detail, either. Sometimes, the entire point of the whole scene is selected from a random table. Moreover, the selection of scenes themselves is randomized by the maze-navigation procedure. There are exactly 100 scenes in the book, but the players won't experience all 100. As they make progress, the GM is always rolling dice to determine the next scene, so the players will probably only experience 20-30 in total. And of course, the Goblin King themself is a villain that you have to design yourself, which you could potentially use to drastically change the adventure. Because finding or creating high-quality, usable content is a very taxing part of GMing and adventures can be rather expensive, this product emphasized replayability as a core selling point. Replayability is a value nearly ubiquitous in the world of video games but is almost never even considered in RPGs, even though it rules.

A few genuine quibbles

Some of this is a warning to anyone out there who's thinking of running the adventure, but some of it might end up being read by the creators and could be addressed (if not in this product, then at least future ones).

1. Many of the hyperlinks in the PDF are broken. For example, the link to the Toolkit chapter in the Table of Contents instead takes you to a scene in the Land of Yore chapter, a full 100 pages off.

2. The website has some downloadables! This is very nice, but form-fillable versions of the character sheets would be appreciated. I made my own and the result is clumsy and sloppy but functional.

3. Another offering found in the downloads seemed to be a VTT asset pack of a sort. I was super stoked for this because I was running the game online. But I was let down. It's a PDF containing an image of every single "battle map" including in every scene of the adventure, with all the numbers and annotations removed. Seems perfect for using on a VTT, right? Just take each one and upload it as the background layer. Except... the resolution is absolutely terribly. Like, unusably bad. They're also all recolored yellow and are shrunk down to the center of a page with a huge margin of dead space, for some reason.

4. The first page of the Castle chapter shows a map of the castle's layout with all the rooms numbered and keyed appropriately, but the castle is oriented the wrong way. In all the subsequent pages showing maps and room layouts, everything is 90 degrees counterclockwise. This confused me for an embarrassingly long time.

Some bonus advice

I am a big believer in one-shots and mini-campaigns. As somebody who frequently actually plays RPGs, it is my belief that one of the other biggest barriers to play is the insistent norm of only ever attempting long-running campaigns. Don't get me wrong, I've played quite a few of them myself. They can be immensely satisfying. But the expectation of them, at the exclusion of nearly all other forms of play, is detrimental to the hobby as a whole. It is a completely unreasonable expectation for the vast majority of people who are just getting into the hobby and it creates problems that shouldn't exist. The world of RPGs would be a lot healthier if long-term campaigns were treated as the exception rather than the rule, because then more people would get to play more often.

Labyrinth works remarkably well as a mid-length campaign, good for about 7-10 sessions. But if you can't manage that kind of commitment, I don't think it's the worst idea to run it as a one-shot. A lot of the book's potential and brilliance would be sacrificed, but you'll still have fun. In order to complete the adventure in a single evening, my advice would be to take 1 juicy scene from each layer of the Labyrinth and just run those. Forget the depthcrawl procedure and forget the 13 hours thing. Just pick out 5 or 6 awesome scenes and you've bought yourself 2.5 hours of fun. My recommendations would be:

1. Stone Walls 5: Brick Keepers

2. Hedge Maze 11: Orchard or 19: The Hunt

3. Land of Yore 2: The Land of Stench or 4: Quicksand

4. Goblin City 12: The Checkpoint

5. The Castle is tricky because it's a dungeoncrawl. If you need to reduce it to 1 room of substance or maybe a sequence of 2-3 rooms, then I recommend 7: The Stairway as most important, and optionally 6: The Throne Room, and if you're playing in person, 8: The Simulacroom.

Give yourself at least 30-40 minutes of buffer space. The adventure's opening, wrap-up, and scene transitions will eat up that time. I have not attempted this myself, but I'd love to hear if anyone does.

Conclusion

Like many GMs, I almost exclusively ran my own content when I was new to the job. I love designing adventures. But something I love a lot more than designing adventures is playing adventures. And I have discovered that these two loves, which seem like they should complement one another, are instead in fierce and unforgiving competition.

Finally giving in and running published adventures was the best decision I've ever made. There are so many amazing offerings out there which people have poured passion and creativity into. I cannot recommend it enough. I still write adventures now and then, but I have to credit games like this one for allowing me to play as much as I do and as richly as I do.

I have a blog. I write about game design and theory. I write about adventure design. I write about homebrewing. I write about themes and narrative. I write about politics and discourse. And I write a lot about semantic bullshit. But trust me, I get tired of it all. That stuff is not why I'm into RPGs. It stimulates my brain and gives me a side hobby. But I wouldn't be interested in any of that if I didn't also get to play. And through play, I discover far more than I do just from reading and writing and discussing and thinking.

Really, the worst thing I have to say about Jim Henson's Labyrinth: the Adventure Game is that it has an unwieldy title.

-Dwiz

Grave Trespass - Where the Wheat Grows Tall

Where the Wheat Grows Tall

A review by Yochai Gal

The Introduction

Where the Wheat Grows Tall is an old-school adventure for low-level characters inspired by Slavic myth. Written by Camilla Greer and Evlyn Moreau, featuring illustrations by Evlyn Moreau. Black & white, 44 pages digest-size zine. My copy was purchased during the zine's successful kickstarter.

The writing in Where the Wheat Grows Tall is dream-like, flavorful, and concisely written. The module is infused with creatures from Slavic fairy tales, heavily bolstered by concise writing and beautiful illustrations. The adventure suggests a (mostly) overland adventure, peppered with talking spirits & beasts, each with their own agenda and affiliations.

The Overview

Presenting itself as an "Agrarian Adventure," Where the Wheat Grows Tall is set exclusively in the area around a struggling farmstead, the last farm in the area. The module's central conflict revolves around two opposed spirits, the Fairy denizens of the field (each with their own murky alliances) and the Polotnikovs, a human family that works the adjacent farm. A wall divides the farm from an adjacent field, which flourishes despite the dead surroundings.

The field is governed by two ancient fey, their spirits bound to earthly totems. Now, something has upset the balance and the wilds of Fairy are spilling over into the mortal realm. The PCs are meant to explore the farm and the field beyond the wall, and find out what really happened to the Polotnikovs.

Crossing the wall and into the field transports the PCs from our world and into Fairy, a place with its own rules, history and personalities. Between the farm and field there are roughly 20 points of interest for the PCs to explore, each tightly distributed across a gorgeously-illustrated map. There are story hooks and rumor tables to help get the PCs started, mostly involving the disappearance of Piotr, a local farmer and father of four.

In practice, Where The Wheat Grows Tall is an above-ground dungeon, trading corridors of stone and squalid rooms for narrow clearings and row upon row of wheat stalks. I'm not convinced that the authors conceived of the adventure this way but it certainly plays as much. The module also refers to "conflicting worlds and roles within the characters" and challenges the reader (as well as the players) to answer broad questions about the NPCs, their motivations, and what's really going on.

Text

The text is sparse throughout and carefully concise, leaving just enough room for the players to fill in some of the descriptive gaps themselves. For the most part I found the writing clear and easy on the eyes, eschewing a denser presentation in favor of spreading information across multiple pages and ignoring grammatical necessities. Overall I liked it a lot.

Art

The book is packed to the brim with Moreau's unique art style, and her illustrations of the people, places & creatures really does a great job at creating a distinct "mood" for the setting. Included with the game is a PDF consisting solely of her illustrations (including some that didn't make the cut); unfortunately I only discovered this after we'd already finished the adventure. The map is well-designed and despite some minor flaws (see Layout Quibbles below) I found it quite useful during play.

Sections

A helpful index divides the book into multiple sections including background information, tools for running the game, a bestiary, and finally the adventure proper which takes up the last third. The adventure itself is divided by two uneven halves: The Farm and The Field Into Fairy.

The module opens with a family history coupled with a recounting of what has transpired "in recent days." The first few pages are dense with setting information about the two Fae sisters (the Midnight Maiden and the Noon Lady). The information herein is absolutely essential for running the adventure, yet somehow lacking at the same time. I recall referring to these sections during the game and wondering why specific answers (or even hints) were not given, particularly around NPC motivations—more on that later.

The following page entitled "Running this Adventure" provides an excellent overview on the module but similarly feels shorter than it should be; like the previous section I found it lacking in specific details and elaborations. The authors pose specific questions for the reader to consider while preparing and running the adventure, followed by hooks and one-shot suggestions. All of this is really great to see upfront in an adventure! Finally there is a useful rumors table and an oddly-placed description for a monster that appears whenever fires are started in The Field.

The book presents three different encounter tables divided into day, night, and "under the roots." I used these a lot while running this adventure, particularly the results that determined what a family member is presently doing or where they can be found. I would personally prefer a clock of some sort for those specific results as the family is pretty important; a run-in with most of them is fairly inevitable.

There is a wonderful page dedicated to "Farm tools as weapons." I found this very helpful and referred to it a bunch during the game, though interestingly the one farm tool the PCs will almost certainly come across (a mattock) is not described or drawn on this page or anywhere else.

In the Bestiary there are 6 pages of illustrations and descriptions of the many strange and unearthly creatures the PCs are certain to encounter. The monster stats are joyfully sparse, leaning heavily on bulleted flavor text to describe their unusual behavior, desires and fears of each creature. Creatures are given their traditional Slavic names as well as a more generic (yet still flavorful) alternative, e.g. Barstukai or "Children of the Crops." In general the creatures were less dangerous than what my players were used to, relying on defensive abilities over offensive.

In the final section before the adventure text there is a two-page "Polotnikov Family History" that recounts some more essential exposition regarding the NPC character motivations. There is a helpful illustration of the family tree, which comes up a few times.

Quibbles

Overall I found some of the layout decisions puzzling; some of which resulted in significant flipping around the book and having to look for something in multiple places.

• Why was Old Svarg (the fire spirit) placed beneath the rumors tables instead of in the bestiary?

• Why wasn't the "Polotnikov Family History" section merged with the introduction? It only served to confuse me when I was searching for a specific NPC detail.

• Why does the map (p.21) interrupt the first "section" of the adventure (The Farm, p.19), rather than precede it, or appear at the back of the book?

• In the PDF, the index sections were linked to specific pages. This was useful, and I wish it was also applied to the numbered POI on the map.

• Encounters 19 and 20 do not appear on the map. Both were underground (which perhaps explains it) but I would have loved for the designers to have made it more clear where the entrances to these places actually exist on the map.

• The path towards the bridge (13) does not connect with anything else on the map. How do the PCs arrive there? Do they head through the wheat itself? How does that work with the mechanics described on page 27?

• The path towards the 7 is described differently when accessed via the crack in the wall than entering via the old tree growing over the wall. I had PCs enter on both and it was hard to keep things consistent.

• The family history bits: I consider these some of the most relevant details in the book and finding ways to disseminate it organically through play was rather difficult.
The Actual Play

Let's get this bit out of the way first: the PCs in my game did not roll a single damage die during this adventure. Although my players tend to avoid danger (lethality is a big deal in my games) the outright lack of combat was highly unusual for them. There were plenty of saves thrown of course, and not all were successes, either. I'm not sure if this speaks more to my specific playgroup or the module itself, but I thought it important to note.

A Note About Time

Fairy is weird. Straying from the paths within the wheat field can be confusing or fraught with peril, and leaving isn't as easy as getting in. The module provides some guidance on how to handle these things, including optional mechanics for time. I elected to use these mechanics, and I regret it. I don't believe this is a fault of the module as proper time management is tricky in RPGs in general at best, and playing by post likely compounded my issues.

At multiple points during the adventure we found the PCs in different areas, governed by different time mechanics. For example, time became especially difficult to track after the Sun had set in Fairy but not on the Farm. Further complicating matters was the fact that "splitting the party" is especially easy to do in play by post games; there were even points during the adventure where players were in three different time periods of play!

Play

I ran Where The Wheat Grows Tall over Play By Post using the Cairn system (see my conversion notes here). My home group is comprised of three seasoned players who each bring a distinct play style and focus to old school play (problem solving, narrative/roleplay and discovery). Cairn is classless, but loosely the party was comprised of a Herbalist, a Miner and a Merchant.

Setup

"Upon which is agreed, An old stone wall separates the family farm from a field they say is cursed. Deep within the wheat, two forgotten idols once balanced the spirits of the crops. One has been destroyed and balance is gone, The Noon Lady rises and the crop spirits grow cruel. The Polotnikovs have disappeared into the field and their farm is soon to follow."

The PCs arrive at a seemingly-abandoned farmstead, though there are a few immediate sites calling their attention: ramshackle buildings, spilled paint, a broken wall, etc. As the party explored, I enjoyed meting out the evidence of what had happened here from the clues they'd gathered. Fortunately this is easy to do, as there are already a few NPCs to engage with: an obviously evil girl trapped in the well, a hungry creature locked in the granary, and a spirit residing within the farmhouse. There is a magical windvane that points in the general direction of any person that the PCs name aloud. It was one of my favorite bits of this adventure because it provided a useful & immediate mystery to my players.

The "meat" of this adventure happens largely on the other side of the wall, and my players knew as much but needed to explore and find out more. There are two major expository NPCs in this portion of the adventure: a young girl, Masha, and the house spirit, Oleg. From these the PCs can learn a bit about what happened before their arrival, and provide a central hook for exploration. Oleg was unhelpful, as the module explicitly states that he knows no family secrets, nor can he leave the house.

One of my players expressed a frustration with the opening points of interest. Specifically he felt that the initial encounters did very little to provide any actionable worldbuilding. For example, the Noon Wraith in the well and Spiteful Wierga in the Granary both tell a fascinating story of what had happened before, but don't actively spur any specific action or encourage specific problem solving. Why would the party care about dragging a plainly deceitful creature out of a well, or collecting fingers and toes for another they can't readily see? It's all very creepy, but there isn't much the party can do about that, or even care to.

Additionally, the PC's duplicitous first encounter with the Noon Wraith in the well led my players to distrust nearly every NPC they encountered afterwards! I'm not sure if this was intentional but it certainly set the stage for future interactions with characters like the Likho.

The Field Into Fairy

There are only two entry-points into the field: The Old Tree Growing Over The Wall and "The Crack In The Wall" (details for both are helpfully found on the same page). My players split up and explored the field both independently from one another and as pairs (or a trio, on occasion). They ventured through the narrow corridors of wheat and chaff, interacting with the strange denizens to gain information about the whereabouts of each Polotnikov family member. As stated before we never entered a combat state, though there was certainly a hint of danger laced throughout the adventure, particularly with respect to the Likho.

The central theme of two semi-warring factions and a loss of balance is well delivered through the various encounters in the field. The PCs formed partial alliances with all manner of folk on both sides in their search. With each new creature, the players debated amongst themselves: who could help them, who could be trusted, what they might want, etc. Although the writing does provide a modicum of interactive story elements for each point of interest, the players did complain that some of the NPCs held their cards a bit too close to the chest. I tend to provide maximal possible information to my players so that they can make educated decisions about what they should do next, and I struggled to deliver important information to the PCs organically and through the NPCs.

For example one of the first NPCs a PC encountered was Trull, hiding under the Bridge at 13. The book makes it quite clear that he is afraid of the Likho and unwilling to divulge secrets. As an expository device this character was difficult to handle; in the end the PC simply set the field aflame (leading to some fun interactions with Old Svarg, the fire spirit). The player remarked, "more exposition would actually have been nice in this one, with so many characters and backstories to track."

As the PCs explored the wheat field (as well as the bits underground) player actions seemed to devolve into a sort of "fetch quest," moving to and fro throughout the area and rescuing the various Polotnikov family members. And goodness, there were a lot of them! Although the module provides plenty of opportunities for the PCs to go off and do other things, rarely did the players see a reason to follow-through on them. There was little hint of treasure beyond the Likho's reward, and not enough expository details from the various factions. As a result, the players felt that any potential "results" of their PC's actions were limited in scope.

Towards the end of the adventure one of the players expressed an interest in learning more about the world in general, particularly regarding the Likho and her former lover (the Midnight Maiden). And while their desires were fulfilled to some degree through a vision at the water wheel earlier on, there weren't a lot of opportunities to actually transmit this history, which was so well told in the book text itself. There is a lot to be gleaned from the underlying text describing each encounter in the field, but at times their terseness leaves open gaps I struggled to fill. Or perhaps it wasn't the terseness, but the words they chose?

At the core of this module is a story, waiting to be plucked and told by the players. A family secret whose consequences echo throughout the generations. Former lovers, desperate to become reacquainted. Ghostly soldiers that sing of long-buried wars, hiding from the crows who only wish to carry their souls to the beyond. The authors weave together these tales of conflict, love, sadness, and hope into something truly special. It is unfortunate that I struggled so much to reveal all this to my players in a way that felt natural, organic and player-driven. I think if I were to run this module again (and I plan to) I would assign an NPC as a guide to the PCs, or assume that at least one of the PCs had foreknowledge of the setting.

Grave Tresspass - Hole in the Oak

THE HOLE IN THE OAK

By Necrotic Gnome
A Review by Warren D.

The end of the year and beginning of the next in RPG-land prompts thinking about how to get our non-RPG friends and family into the hobby. It is also a time when soon-to-be DM’s receive their first rulebooks and seek recommendations on what to run. The options are numerous and rapidly climbing to the top of many recommendation lists is The Hole in the Oak. In this review, I hope to outline why I think The Hole in the Oak deserves such a position by describing its opening, evaluating the content, and touching on how the adventure facilitates world building.

This review arises from 4 three-hour sessions of The Hole in the Oak which started after a TPK playing its sibling module Incandescent Grottoes. I used Old School Essentials/BX D&D as it is my preferred D&D flavor and the players randomly generated 2 clerics, 2 dwarves, 1 elf, 1 fighter, 1 magic-user, and 1 thief. I have no relationship with Necrotic Gnome or its products beyond being a fan.

THE LAY of the LAND

The Hole in the Oak is billed as a low-level dungeon situated in any “magic forest” possibly constructed by wizards, definitely inhabited by creatures of a fay bent, and currently being used as a base of operations for an evil gnome cult. More specifically, it is a 60-room dungeon well “jaquaysed” by 5 large loops from west-to-east and boarded by a large cavern to the south and a fast river to the north. Monetary treasure guarded, buried, forgotten, or secreted away totals about 17,000 GP which will take a party of 8 from 1st level to about 2nd by the end (using the Fighter XP progression as an average). Total magic item count is 11 which includes magic scrolls, a spell book, potions, rings, a couple of pieces of armor, and weapons of note. The opposition to the PCs’ clandestine infiltration includes three cannibalistic and duplicitous fauns, a slumbering ogre, three troglodyte fishers, seven (!) hungry ghouls, twenty (!!) heretic gnomes that worship a demonic tree trunk and finally four giant lizards.

The map for Hole in the Oak

Interestingly, while the module as a whole has a “French vanilla D&D” feel- meaning it’s a well-done dungeon featuring many classics of fantasy adventure- it is a heterogeneous environment that doesn’t feel like patch-work. This is a skillful trick and it’s worth a moment to list the adventure’s thematic clusters. If you imagine the dungeon as a compass:

• East “places of worship” cluster: alters involving a giant statue, defunct lizard-cult, & demon tree stump
• Northeast cluster: “Hot house” gardens, giant lizards, and a lizard cult
• Southeast cluster: Weird gnomes & weird caverns
• West “areas of experimentation” cluster: trap rug, magic mirrors, & mysterious levers
• Southwest cluster: Tricky fauns & a mutant ogre
• Northwest cluster: Drowned ghouls and fishing troglodytes
  

Often in D&D modules of lesser quality the presentation of an equivalent amount of heterogeneity requires far more levels. With each of those levels being a very expected presentation of those environments. Or conversely, the same number of environments are presented in a more patchwork fashion making it feel as if it was assembled merely from die rolling on random tables. The Hole in the Oak employs its environments to unify seemingly disparate D&D classics. For instance, I would expect troglodytes in a cave environment and ghouls in a crypt environment. Here, the presence of the river allows both of them to be tied to the theme of water-ghouls posing as drowned corpses and trogs that have fishing spots (and even a “feed the fish” sign). This “classic but clever” presentation is exactly what I wanted for my two players who grew up with B/X D&D and is also exactly what I want as a DM at the table when giving new players their first taste of old-school play and D&D in general.

Let’s delve into the specifics of why I think Hole in the Oak is a present day classic…

Grave Trespass - Pokemon Dungeon Crawler

Grave Trespass is our series of guest reviews. This guest review is by Marcia. --Ben L.

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe

and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

- James Joyce, “The Dead”, Dubliners

Often the Old School Renaissance is characterized as a return to a particular playstyle, which was not necessarily the norm in the early years of the hobby, but has since been upheld as an original style of play. With respect to playstyle, then, Pokemon Dungeon Crawler by John Battle [1] postures itself as an OSR-inspired rulebook. The player takes on the role of a Pokemon creature in a post-human world, “delving into the dungeons [human beings] left behind” (Battle 3). On the same page, Battle notes that his game plays “similarly to other dungeon crawlers” and that the rulebook uses the same language as other OSR-style texts, including hit dice and levels. This statement allows the text to locate itself not only in an existing literary tradition (as it were), but, being a rulebook, imports understandings of play common to the declared style without having to explicate them.

Reinventing the Wheel

Pokemon Dungeon Crawler is split between an implicit intended playstyle and an explicit set of rules which do not facilitate that playstyle. Having established that it uses OSR terminology as boilerplate, the rulebook instead focuses on distinguishing Pokemon characters by their abilities in combat. There are twenty playable Pokemon characters, and each one is defined by a number of special abilities that deal damage or inflict conditions in battle. The book maps each special ability to an element, and it explains that certain actions will have stronger or weaker effects against a particular target based on the target’s own element. Although this emphasis on combat makes most sense to adapt the Pokemon characters to paper and pencil, it does not lend itself to a playstyle where exploration guided by desire (often of gold) is the primary loop of play.

One useful point of comparison might be to the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons published in 1974. It referred to itself not yet as [rules for] a role-playing game, but as “rules for fantastic medieval wargame campaigns”. The first volume which defines player characters does so mostly according to their combat abilities, although it also includes rules for levying taxes, recruiting monsters, and carrying equipment in that order. The third volume however gives procedures for underworld and wilderness exploration, by defining a ‘turn’ as the interval between random encounter checks (albeit at different scales of distance and time). Although the usage of the word ‘turn’ becomes confusing when reading the spell lists and trying to decide if a spell should last 1 minute, 10 minutes, or a whole day, the book is consistent in defining the ‘turn’ as the base loop of a play. The effect is that the original Dungeons & Dragons has a clear notion of what constitutes the game it prescribes by defining it in terms of its repetitive procedures.

On the other hand, Pokemon Dungeon Crawler offers rules for dungeon exploration, but they are scant and unintuitive in their presentation. They are given in a section entitled “Dungeon Rules”, but the first page of this section is concerned with handling encounters. First it defines initiative as the procedure to determine if it is your character’s turn to act or your enemy’s turn. Then it defines a turn as simply that: your character’s turn to perform an action. This definition does not mesh well with the explanation of dungeon exploration on the next page, where it says “You can take a turn to explore a room/area. This lasts about 10 minutes” (Battle 42-3). Here, dungeon crawling appears as an action a character can take rather than the core loop of the game itself.

The book offers more of a procedure for long-term travel, prescribing that every six hours of travel requires a ration and an encounter check. Still, that is the most detail it offers and so it gives more questions than it does answers (Does every traveler consume a ration? How much distance does a ‘6 hour chunk’ cover? How many time-chunks can one travel in a day?). Depending on how much travel is expected of the players, which is unclear, this rule might be too costly; however, if places of interest are only a trail away from each other as in the Pokemon video games, then perhaps the high cost of travel makes sense. In any case, for both overworld and dungeon exploration, the reference to literal timekeeping seems to be more of a vestige of stereotypical OSR rules than something with procedural function. This is not to say that the rulebook fails to meet my own tastes, but that it does not offer a full framework for the playstyle it prescribes. This must be supplied by the players.

To me, the text is indicative of a preference in the hobby culture for rulebooks (or ‘games’) over other materials produced for tables. The same material offered in Pokemon Dungeon Crawler would have been better suited for an adventure or a setting module, where hard rules could be supplied by a base rulebook and specific minutia handled by the Pokemon adaptation. I understand the motivation to make a rulebook to adapt specific Pokemon mechanics, but I don’t see this as necessary when the book prescribes that the Pokemon serve as player characters, and that these characters even adhere to the traditional D&D class schema of fighter, magic-user, and cleric. An adventure text would have suited Battle’s intent better, I think, to allow players to explore a world of Pokemon without human beings. Instead, as a rulebook, the text cannot fully commit to its vision of a fictional world nor does it explain fully the sort of play it prescribes.

Nostalgia in the OSR

Pokemon Dungeon Crawler also embodies the sort of nostalgic attitude that originally propelled the OSR as a cultural trend. Only a few hobbyists now grasp at an ideal of Gygaxian play that Gary himself did not strive for; most who have stuck around after the end of the OSR understand that old school play is not actually original, but a matter of personal preference [2]. Since then, there have been whispers of new school revolutions and sword dreams that would redeem the kernel of creativity from the corpse of the OSR. Yet these post-OSR works have not quite parted from the desire to return to a lost state, whether that state is the dubious origin of the role-playing game hobby or a memory of childhood trapped at the turn of the millennium (if not earlier).

John Battle’s works are preoccupied with the recapture of a time long past .dungeon is a tabletop adaptation of the experience of playing a massive multiplayer online role-playing game [2], taking cues from the 2000s anime franchise .hack and contemporary video games of the time like Runescape and World of Warcraft. The book yearns for the days of LAN parties and late night Skype calls, or whatever they used back then. Likewise, My Body is a Cage adapts the premise of the Persona series of video games (most recently Persona 5 in 2016), where characters explore psychological dungeons in their sleep to escape the confines of their living experience [3]. However, unlike Persona which envisions an escape from the dullness of teenage life, My Body is a Cage mourns the loss of the player characters’ dreams which have been unfulfilled in mature life. It’s a Persona-esque fantasy for people who wish they still had something to look forward to in adulthood.

Unlike Battle’s other works, Pokemon Dungeon Crawler does not contend with the failures of adult life to live up to childhood expectations. Instead, it asks readers to play the roles of Pokemon in a world without humans. The sample dungeon takes place in an abandoned power plant, implying that this is not merely a world without humans, but one where humankind is done with. Of course, the book also explicates this: “There were humans at one point and now there aren’t. Pokemon have inherited all that was left behind.” It is a Pokemon world robbed of the childlike innocence with which the video game and anime series, both intended for children, is infused. The effect of this near-apocalyptic background is a sort of melancholic eulogy for childhood, which injects the player with a desire to reconstruct their world and return to what has been lost. This situates the game’s premise in the ideological presuppositions of the OSR as a return-to-tradition, even as that rhetoric has been discarded in superficial form by the left-leaning factions of the post-OSR community.

The setting’s apocalypticism also echoes what Joseph Manola refers to as the OSR’s aesthetic of ruin [5], which is a sort of setting where the player characters explore a fallen world populated with “ruined bodies, ruined minds, [and] ruined societies.” This trend is not original to any edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which has historically adhered to what Gus L. calls Gygaxian vernacular fantasy [6]. Whereas Gygaxian vernacular fantasy has the veneer of medieval fantasy on top of a nostalgia for Wild West tales, the aesthetic of ruin expresses open nostalgia for a society and time rotting before the player characters’ eyes. Manola argues that the aesthetic facilitates the libertarian sandbox play encouraged by the OSR: “Well-maintained social order is the enemy of free-wheeling adventure, and so the more ruined everything is, the more freedom PCs will have to run around inside it.” This is absolutely true and necessary for understanding.

However, I cannot help but notice the timing. The late twentieth century was an increasingly optimistic time period in the United States, and this might be reflected in Gygaxian aesthetic which appeals to a nostalgia for a fictionalized past (the expansion of law and order) but serves as the conduit through which to fantasize about that past. The aesthetic of ruin, on the other hand, reflects the political volatility of the twenty-first century, having emerged in the post-9/11 era for example. Now the fantasy of tabletop campaigns is not to celebrate a constant state of symbolic victory, but to mourn for an impotent symbolic realm that has fallen to its self-inflicted trauma. For Battle to imagine a Pokemon world without humans reflects the larger attitude of melancholy in the tabletop hobby community, the modern culture industry, and finally the capitalist state of things gazing into its own navel and finding ruin.

This is not to say that the nostalgic attitudes that permeate Pokemon Dungeon Crawler and other works by John Battle are morally problematic, even besides moralism being a flimsy basis for analysis. In fact, they are utterly normal from the Lacanian standpoint that lack grounds desire, and so we desire what we think we lack. Nostalgia, a perceived loss of a past (blissful) state of being, consistently emerges in cultures across history. Marx says in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.” Of course, the Romans always looked to the Greeks as a role model of political power, and the Greeks were obsessed with a mythological golden age they could not attain. Hence when we discuss nostalgia as a motive for contemporary art, it cannot be reduced to fascistic tendencies. As cultural analysts, we ought to better distinguish between structures of desire that fascism plugs into (e.g. nostalgia), versus content that is plainly fascistic (e.g. what does it have to say about nations or about class antagonisms?).

Nevertheless, as a younger person, Pokemon Dungeon Crawler strikes me as a relic past its own time that appeals to a different demographic than my own (perhaps people who think that Pokemon creatures are cool rather than cute). This speaks to the nostalgic tendencies of the OSR that run deeper than advocating for an anachronistic playstyle that was never really “old school”, but which are nevertheless situated in an identity shaped by the simultaneous guilt and pleasure of nostalgic consumerism. This is on one hand an admission that I am not the intended audience of this work, but it is also a call for authors in the post-OSR to not so readily rely upon nostalgia as a premise for play. As long as our fantasies indulge in the pleasures of memories past, we will not yet have exited the OSR as a yearning for things that never were to begin with.

[1] Battle, J. 2020. Unofficial Pokemon Dungeon Crawler. https://johnbattle.itch.io/pokemon-dungeon-crawler

[2] B., J. “Six Cultures of Play,” The Retired Adventurer. 2021. https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html

[3] Battle, J. 2021. .dungeon.

[4] Battle, J. 2021. My Body is a Cage.

[5] Manola, J. 2016. “OSR aesthetics of ruin,” Against The Wicket City. http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/09/osr-aesthetics-of-ruin.html

[6] L., G. 2021. “Classic Vs. The Aesthetic,” All Dead Generations. https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2021/07/classic-play-v-aesthetic.html