Dungeon Corner – Loot The Room

Dungeon Magazine #3: Falcon’s Peak

LtR_Chris1 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 12:06:24 +0000

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Issue three of Dungeon Magazine contains four adventures:

Falcon’s Peak by David Howery
Blood on the Snow by Thomas M Kane
The Deadly Sea by Carol and Robert Pasnak
The Book with No End by Richard Emerich

All of the authors in this issue are new to Dungeon. All of the adventures in this issue are for AD&D and range from levels 1 to 12. I’m particularly interested in “Blood On The Snow” – an arctic adventure – and “The Deadly Sea”, the rare underwater adventure (which happens to be my favourite genre of adventure, in large part because there are so few of them).

As always we’ll start at the beginning, though, with David Howery’s “Falcon’s Peak”. This sounds like a pretty straightforward setup – a Lord is dead, he’s left treasure behind, and you intend to go and steal it. This should be simple, but the fortress holds “a new brood of evil” that may complicate matters. This adventure is designed for 5-8 characters of 1st-3rd level, and should include a thief, at least one experienced cleric, and preferably a ranger.

David Howery appears to have had a good success rate selling things to TSR, with adventures in 10 issues of Dungeon and articles in around 15 issues of Dragon. He doesn’t look to have been active much past the late 90s/early 00s, though.

The backstory here is pretty brief. An old brigand chief – Lord Falcon – had a fortress in a mountain pass that was said to hold a horrible monster to whome said warlord fed his enemies. Eventually the baronies that bordered his territory banded together to mount an assault on the fortress and overwhelmed the brigands, but Lord Falcon himself was never discovered. Rumours say that he and his family drank poison and had themselves sealed into their catacombs by retainers, but nobody knows where said catacombs are – only that they’re likely filled with treasure. The place has been abandoned for close to a century, bothered only by would-be treasure hunters who fail to return from their expeditions as often as not. And so, hearing this, the PCs decide that they should be the next group of would-be thieves to brave the fortress and seek the treasure.

The fortress is currently occupies by brigands, and they’re likely to be encountered on the journey there. They’re “the usual riffraff one sees in small gangs of this kind – dirty, crude, and vicious”. They’re also more than happy to admit that they live in the fortress if the bribe is high enough, though they’ll lie about its defences. All of them live in fear of the bandit chief Millard, a magic user who has allied his brigands with a small clan of hobgoblins. Their forces are still fairly weak and so they haven’t launched any raids on nearby settlements, but they’re hard at work reinforcing Falcon’s Peak to make it as formidable as it once was.

The fortress itself is fairly well defended, both by brigands and by hobgoblins encamped in the caves nearby, and the first challenge here is one of simply getting inside the place. Quite a lot of attention is paid to the way in which the walls of the fortress are defended and to the details of the hobgoblin caves, which actually leads directly to the catacombs. The hobgoblins haven’t yet been able to enter them due to the presence of a pair of ghouls, though I’m unsure why a warband of hobgoblins should find just two ghouls difficult to deal with. Regardless of the reason, Lord Falcon is waiting for an evil cleric to come and help him with the ghoul problem rather than deal with them himself.

Interestingly, if the PCs are only in search of the catacombs themselves, they could potentially find them without ever having to go near the fortress if they come to the hobgoblin caves first. They will have no way of knowing that the catacombs are here, but if they decide to clear the caves they’ll eventually discover them. The ghouls have partially broken into the catacombs through the back wall of the caves by “entering through the caverns and digging through the loose rock until [the catabomcs] were reached” but haven’t managed to breach them any further because they accidentally locked a door. This seems like a really silly way of stopping the ghouls from ransacking the rest of the catacboms – why can they dig through rock but not kick down a door? – but I suppose there needs to be some reason why the place is still intact. I don’t particularly like this one, though, and I wish the module was a little more inventive here.

The catacombs themselves are nicely creepy, with walls decorated with “lurid paintings” of demons carrying scythes and throwing screaming victims into a dark pit. A temple dedicated to the Grim Reaper – yes, that Grim Reaper, who is the neutral evil patron of Lord Falcon – is guarded by a bunch of human zombies and a huge ogre zombie, all carrying scythes. I find zombies a little silly, but zombies with scythes are a cool touch, and them combined with a magical idol that freezes low-HD characters in place through a fear effect could make for a really nasty encounter. This is made particularly mean by the idol also blocking a cleric’s ability to turn the zombies here, which is an additional fuck you. I’m not sure whether I like this or not, since clerics don’t get to use their turning ability all that often. It seems a little cruel to give them something to turn for once and then to say “actually no”, especially after explicitly calling out the fact that a couple of clerics would be useful to have on this adventure.

Things get a little sillier deeper in to the catacombs. One room contains a cursed scroll that turns those who read it into a scum creeper, a sort of slug-like monster about a foot long. Another room contains another such scroll that’s been utilised on a group of tomb robbers, all of whom have been turned into scum creepers. There are some “normal” scum creepers in this room but also the four thieves, all of whom still remember being human. While the normal monsters attack the PCs, the thieves “crawl onto the floor and write “WE ARE HUMAN” into the dust in one corner, using their cilia. They then frantically wave their cilia in an attempt to draw the party’s attention to the words”. This is so daft that I can’t help but laugh. It’s especially funny that, after having been turned into slugs 12 years ago, they’re grateful to be rescued but not so grateful that they don’t “consider robbing the party and escaping if the party appears rich, weak, and foolish”.

Something interesting going on in this adventure is that lots of the rooms explain things that the PCs don’t really have any way of discovering, especially at the low levels suggested for the module. One room contains a pair of skeletons, one of whom has a knife embedded in him. The GM is told that “the man’s skeleton is that of Falcon’s most trusted servant. The servant entombed everyone in the catacombs, including Falcon’s mistress, the other skeleton in the tomb. After bolting the fortress’s trap door which leads in the catacombs, the servant lay down and killed himself”. There’s simply no way for the PCs to discover this information.

I’ve written in the past about modern adventures for games like 5e and Pathfinder often containing a lot of writing like this that seems to function more like fiction for the GM to read while prepping rather than gameable information that could actually be revealed to the players. Thus far in my journey through Dungeon Magazine we haven’t seen much of it, but that’s definitely what’s happening here. The PCs could, I suppose, discover this with a speak with dead spell, but that’s a 3rd level spell in AD&D and clerics don’t get access to them until level 5, so the chances of them actually having access to this are incredibly slim. I understand the urge to include these sorts of explanations in the text of an adventure, but I actually think things are much stronger when the explanations aren’t present. If players have no way to access the information then all it does is get in the way of the GM’s ability to parse the important stuff, and players who are interested in finding an explanation will always come up with something during play that’s more interesting anyway.

The catacombs themselves have an exit at the back, a ladder climbing up through the cliff that emerges at a trapdoor in the storage room of the fortress. Much like the ghouls being unable to open a locked door earlier in the adventure, I’m a little sceptical of this entrance to the fortress. We’re told earlier that nobody has ever been able to find the entrance into the catacombs from the fortress, but it’s literally just a trapdoor in the floor of a storage chamber. Even with it being locked from below as in this case, and well concealed, it feels like somebody who was actively searching for it over hundreds of years would have find it. Either way, though, it’s very funny that the reason the bandits in the fortress haven’t currently found it is because they’ve put two big crates full of food directly on top of it.

The logic falls down a little more as we get deeper into the fortress, too. We were told earlier that the bandits aren’t really known of in the local area because they’ve been keeping a low profile while they build their strength, but that doesn’t appear to be the case when we get to the “Captives’ Room”, which contains a bunch of hostage including a noble elf from a far land, four minor officials from a nearby town (each with a 100gp reward out for them), the daughter of a wealthy spice merchant from another nearby town (500gp reward), and a gnomish assassin who the brigands are planning to ransom as soon as they can figure out who to speak to about that. It seems to me that somebody should be looking for these people, but the module entirely ignores that. Finding any of these people would be a much more interesting reason to come here than searching for the catacombs, especially as finding the catacombs can be done without ever interacting with the brigands, and I think if I were to run this I’d put these captives in a much more central position in the way I presented the adventure to the players.

In the final room of the fortress we meet, at last, the fabled monster said to live here. It’s a wight in a pit, the floor surrounded by the bones of those who have been fed to it, and the pit is accessed via a trap door in the floor of what is now Millard’s room, directly in front of the door. As with the fortress itself, it’s actually quite likely that the players could go through this whole module without ever encountering the wight.

This is the biggest weakness of the module, really. The hook the players are given – the whole reason they’re coming here – is to search for the catacombs and the treasure inside it. Once they’re there they really have no reason to go to the fortress other than that it’s there. I think if this were put in an ongoing campaign, most players would simply take the loot and run – particularly as the brigands have no real way to know who’s looted the place or who killed all the hobgoblins. It could be interesting for the players to later find out about the hostages in the fortress and be forced to come back, or Millard could do some scrying and put a bounty on their heads, but as a standalone adventure this feels a bit lacking. It’s particularly interesting to compare this to Into The Fire from issue 1, which also allows the players to obtain their initial goal without interacting with half (or more) of the adventure but which is compelling enough to make them want to keep exploring afterwards. I don’t really get the impression that that would be the case here, and this doesn’t strike me as an adventure that I’d be in a hurry to try and get to the table.

The Keep At Koralgesh

LtR_Chris1 — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 10:53:07 +0000

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The final adventure in our second issue of Dungeon Magazine is The Keep at Koralgesh, by Robert B. Giacomozzi and Jonathan H. Simmons. I unfortunately can’t find any other RPG work by either of these authors, though there’s a chance they’ll show up in future issues. (There are a couple of authors called John/Jonathan Simmons, but I can’t confidently link either of them to the co-author of this adventure).

The short blurb on the contents page tells us that “Only the Keep survived the destruction of Koralgesh, but few adventurers will survive the terrors that now stalk the lost Keep’s halls” and indicates that this is an adventure for levels 1-3. The adventure text itself tells us that this is “A difficult adventure for a party made up of only 1st-level characters”, and advises that we should bring two or three PCs who are above 1st level in experience (out of the 6-8 characters this is designed for). In addition to wondering when we stopped recommending party make-up in adventures, I’m also now going to keep an eye out for when the standard party size became 4 in published modules, because expected groups in early D&D are generally much bigger than we’re used to today.

The basic pitch here is that a great city once stood on the coast of Gesh, but it fell to an invading force who came over the sea and – according to legend, at least – was swallowed by an erupting volcano on the same day, which seems like an astonishing stroke of bad luck. All of this happened barely 70 years ago but, somehow, the story has faded into legend already. This history and the exact date of the destruction of the Keep are meant to be kept from the PCs, and only revealed if they dig into things enough. To that end this adventure has a rumour table, and this time it’s handled a little better than it was in In The Dwarven King’s Court. As well as the GM being instructed to roll on the table to generate rumours, specific NPCs are given specific rumours that they have knowledge of. This is great because it ensures that the PCs definitely get the important bits of information. For example, the innkeeper in the tavern where the adventure starts explicitly knows rumours 19 and 20 plus one more, meaning that he can tell them that the treasures of the Keep have never been found (true) and that Stump claims his father was the King’s smithy (also true). These are the two really key rumours that get things moving; everything else is extra.

What I also like in this rumour table is that in addition to false rumours we’re also given some true but unrelated things about the local area. We’re told that there used to be a dragon in the keep, which is true, and we’re also told that sheep have been going missing and found partially eaten, and that some shepherds went in search of strays and never returned. This easily gives the impression that there’s a dragon on the loose in the local area, and both of the rumours about missing sheep and shepherds are factual, but the truth of the matter is much more mundane – we’re out in the wilderness, and there are predators here. With the false rumours we’re also given details about where they came from, too; someone made one up for fun, someone got really drunk and hallucinated it, the stories of the dragon in the Keep simply got exaggerated in their telling over time. This is something I’ve never really thought to do but I really like it. It adds a nice level of depth to the world should the players pry, but doesn’t require the GM to keep track of a ton of additional information.

The GM is instructed to create a wilderness map in order to run the journey from the village to the Shrine, and we’re given specific details about where to place things. I don’t see any reason why there couldn’t have simply been a map included in the module here instead. We’re also told that the GM shouldn’t populate this map with encounters, and are instead given a small encounter table to make use of, so this seems a strange decision. I think it’s probably perfectly easy to run this section without the use of the map, though. You know that the PCs have a week to get to where they’re going, and you know that you want them to get there, so why bother introducing the element of them getting lost and missing their deadline? (Unless you’re running this as part of an ongoing campaign, of course, in which case you presumably already have a map of the region to hand).

Stump, as it turns out, is a dwarven blacksmith who has a wooden leg, because he lost his real leg to a dragon. His father was indeed the blacksmith to the King of Koralgesh, and Stump can tell the party how to get into the Keep if they agree to bring him his father’s great hammer in return. He also has an amulet holding a really, really bad rhyme:

In valley east of great Helm’s Peak,

if Koralgesh is what you seek,

Stand close and face the Shrine of Kor

if you would find the only door

In morning light of longest day

if Kor would send you on your way.

Tolkien has a lot to answer for. Please stop putting poems in your adventures, I’m begging you.

Interestingly – and conveniently – enough the summer solstice is only a week away, giving the PCs just enough time to get to the Keep and find the door. This is the sort of thing I both love and hate in an adventure. If you’re running it as a one shot then this feels really contrived. On the other hand, if you’re planning to drop this into a longer campaign then it can just exist on the map and the players can learn of the Keep organically. Maybe the solstice is soon, or maybe they’ll have to remember and come back later. (Meaningful campaigns, strict time records, etc).

Really, though, the one week deadline doesn’t really matter. The entrance to the dungeon is concealed beneath a statue and the entrance mechanism is revealed by light reflecting off a gem embedded in it when the sun is in the right position, but the entrance itself is entirely mechanical and can be located by searching. And, failing that, there’s no reason why resourceful PCs couldn’t just topple the statue to reveal the entrance beneath it.

This is the only proper dungeon crawl adventure in this issue, and it’s one that leans into a lot of classic tropes very heavily in a way I really enjoy. I particularly like the streams of deep, slow-moving lava flowing through fissures in the rock throughout the dungeon. They’re not keyed on the map but are instead on the encounter table, and that feels like a really nice touch. This dungeon will be geographically very different for every group that plays through it. Lava streams as a hazard is not particularly original, but crucially it’s fun and I like the way it’s implemented here. (I’m generally a big fan of using tropes and “cliche” things in dungeons. Not all the time, of course, but I think that so many people eschew them because they’re overdone that it often comes around the other side of things, and players don’t see them very often. This is also why I like using classic monsters like gelatinous cubes a lot – because they aren’t cool anymore, so GMs don’t use them, and players get to be surprised by them when they show up).

There is more fun to be had with wandering monsters here, too. One of the early rooms is a mud pool that players can easily slip into. It doesn’t deal any damage but does coat everyone in mud, and while they’re muddy – and therefore leaving footprints everywhere and making a weird sucking sound when they move – encounters occur on a 1-2 in 6 rather than a 1-in-6. This does mean that being covered in mud also increases the chance of encountering lava flows, which makes absolutely no sense when you try to rationalise it, but that’s just the nature of putting weird stuff on random encounter tables. (The mud here isn’t entirely punitative, either. It has an anti-venom property that could be useful later, though the only way to come by that information outside of experimention is to get the orc chief in the adjoining room to tell you. Still, the fact that that’s an option in the text is an apt demonstration that reaction rolls were a core part of gameplay, and that “this thing is here to be fought” wasn’t a default assumption).

Once we get into the meat of it this is mostly fairly standard dungeon crawl fare. We have traps, we have monsters, we have a generally horrible time for incautious explorers. It’s certainly not going to win any awards, but I think it looks like a fun time. Some rooms are a bit rubbish, but some of them I like a lot: a lake of lava with a hard black crust on the top that looks safe to walk across but absolutely isn’t; an abandoned bestiary filled with cages holding the skeletons of great cats and apes; an encounter table result of a hot wind that heats all metal, causing it to glow slightly for a few rounds; a museum room filled with scrimshaw carvings, including a pair of crab statues carved from coral that come to life and attack. As we get deeper it does become more and more like a funhouse – why are there baboons and mountain lions on the encounter table this deep inside the volcano? – but I’ll forgive that because it’s fun and it’s got a gelatinous cube in it.

This thing is really big, and I think were players to fully explore it you could be wandering through it for weeks. While it’s definitely got some fun encounters in it and some interestng NPCs, I’m not sure it’s a good enough dungeon overall to want to spend that much time with it. But there’s certainly enough here to steal from it that it’s a worthwhile read, It also includes a very early iteration of what we’d now call an “overloaded encounter die”, with one floor dictating that results of 2 and 3 on encounter checks produce gusts of hot and cold wind (respectively) that blow out torches and, as mentioned above, heat metal to glowing. I’m glad this adventure is here, and – as I said in the last post – I think it’s especialyl interesting to compare how this handles rumours with the rumours in In The Dwarven King’s Court and Caermor. Between the three of them you’ve got a really great example of how to utilise rumour tables effectively, and that alone makes this issue worthwhile.

All in all I think this is a better issue than the first one. It certainly feels more thematically cohesive, though the flipside of that is that there are a couple of adventures that do the same sorts of thing. And there’s nothing really small to drop into a game here, unlike in issue 1. Still, it’s nice to see some variety, and I’m looking forward to issue 3.

Dungeon Magazine #2: Caermor

LtR_Chris1 — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 15:44:43 +0000

I’m blogging my way through every adventure published in Dungeon Magazine. These posts are published on Patreon a month in advance of appearing on Loot The Room.

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The third adventure in issue 2 of Dungeon Magazine is titled “Caermor”, and is written for levels 2-4. The brief description in the contents page tells us that “a highland town faces a greater danger than can be imagined – and no one wants your help against it”. This is an interesting pitch that feels like an inversion of the normal trope of the PCs being asked to intervene in something, but I’m immediately cautious that this is going to be a weird stereotype of Scottish people written by an American who identifies as Scottish. Let’s hope that that’s not the case.

The author, Nigel Findley, had a pretty amazing career before passing away tragically early in the mid-90s. His biography is very impressive, including a lot of work for TSR and books for Shadowrun, GURPS, Earthdawn, and a ton of other work. This is a very aspirational career. It also looks like he’d published a few articles in Dragon Magazine prior to selling this adventure to Dungeon. So despite my reservations about the potential setting – which are slightly assuaged by the fact that he was born in Venezuela and lived all over the world before settling in Canada – I have high hopes for this module.

Caermor itself is a tiny village on the edge of civilisation, home to barely 100 people who spend their time growing grain and raising a local breed of small, tough sheep. We’re told that “the terrain is very similar to the highlands of Scotland: rough and rocky, with stunted growths of heather and scrub, cold and whipped by incessant sea winds”. The people who live there are “small, stocky, dour farming folk” who “tend towards strong drink” and become “rather belligerent when drunk”. My fears of Scottish stereotypes are immediately confirmed, but unless it becomes particularly egregious in the rest of the adventure I’m going to put it aside and try not to labour the point.

The people here are taciturn and insular, and trust outsiders so little that even though “hell itself seems to have turned its attention upon them” they have told nobody about their problems. Word has spread, of course, because word always spreads, but even though several adventurers have come to town to try to help – or to make a name for themselves – none have returned to the city from whence they came. And, we’re told, the locals “have looked upon these would-be saviors as unwelcome visitors at best – invaders at worst”.

So, what’s going on in Caermor that keeps drawing adventurers here and making hem disappear? The answer is good old-fashioned devil worship. A local coven has summoned a devil and for the past seven weeks it’s been terrorizing the town. The coven believe they’ve summoned the devil for their own purposes, but in fact they are pawns in a larger plot that will eventually threaten the entire country.

We’re given a run-down of the weird things that have been happening in the village over the past couple of months, starting with the slaughter of sheep at night and ending up with the disappearance of a local woman. Before her disappearance she had been seeing a lot of a local man who the people see as a vagrant (because he’s an unemployed artist), and upon searching his house they found blood on his robes. As a result it’s generally agreed that he has been responsible for the problems facing the village, because that’s easier than accepting there’s a literal devil in town.

Despite being given all of this information, we’re told explicitly that although everyone in Caermor knows all of this, “getting it out of them is easier said that done”. It’s interesting to compare this to the second adventure in this issue, which is similarly an investigative module filled with NPCs who want to keep their secrets and haven’t told any outsiders about the problems they’re facing. Neither really offers any guidance for how the PCs can go about extracting this information, but Caermor does provide a lot of things that I wish In The Dwarven King’s Court had also contained; namely, encounter tables to force the players into contact with NPCs, and a number of “special events” that occur after the party arrives in Caermor.

This is a big difference between the two modules, and the result is that I’m much more able to envision how Caermor might play out at the table. In The Dwarven King’s Court asks the GM to do a lot of work to make the adventure actually playable, whereas Caermor gives us almost everything we need. What it’s missing, though, is a rumour table to give players some direction in their enquiries. Between In The Dwarven King’s Court and Caermor we probably have everything we need to run a good investigative adventure, and it’s a little frustrating that neither of the adventures is entirely complete in that regard. Caermor definitely comes closest, though – the NPCs have things to do, and are actively trying to put the PCs off the track and to sabotage their investigations if they get too close. They feel much more alive and fully-realised than the NPCs in In The Dwarven King’s Court.

The other thing Caermor has going for it is that it feels like a place with history in a way that the castle in the previous adventure didn’t. Locations like the standing stones have encounters that don’t relate to the events of the adventure at all, simply existing to give the village some depth. Much like Into The Fire this feels like the sort of location you could put into a game and return to again and again. Rather than being An Adventure, it’s a real place with a specific problem happening right now that can continue to persist in your world once the players have solved the immediate problem.

There’s nothing in terms of encounters or details that really jumps out to me here as something I want to highlight or steal. This is, simply, just a solid module that I think would be a lot of fun to run. If you’re interested in “village with a problem”-style adventures, or adventures that involve investigating a mystery rather than dungeon crawling, this would be a good one to look at, And especially it would be good to look at it side by side with In The Dwarven King’s Court to see where they diverge in their approaches, and how you can combine the tools both adventures give you in order to create something better than either of them.

Dungeon Magazine #2: In The Dwarven King’s Court

LtR_Chris1 — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I’m blogging my way through every adventure published in Dungeon Magazine. These posts are published on Patreon a month in advance of appearing on Loot The Room.

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On to the second adventure in issue 2 of Dungeon Magazine, Willie Walsh’s “In The Dwarven King’s Court”. The short blurb for this 3rd to 5th level adventure tells us, “A thief prowls the dwarven palace, but even more goes on than meets the eye”.

I’ve very quickly become interested in the people who wrote the adventures in these early days of Dungeon. Willie’s bio says that the module is “his first sale of gaming material”, and a quick search indicates that it wasn’t his last. It appears he was active up until at least 2013, writing a host of adventures for Dungeon as well as a few things for Goodman Games and Kobold Press. One thing the industry in general is really missing in the present day is a venue like Dungeon where people can get their foot in the door. Obviously self-publishing means it’s possible to build a career without needing to be traditionally published – my own career is very much evidence of that – but there’s definitely something to be said for allowing writers to just write and work on their craft without also needing to become fully fledged publishers in their own right.

The introduction to this adventure tells us “Detective work is involved to a greater extent than combat” in what we’re about to read. Investigative modules are a hard thing to do well in D&D, and people have written endless articles and blog posts trying to figure out ways to make them function in a way that’s satisfying, so while I’m looking forward to seeing how this adventure handles it I’m also going into this with the expectation that it might be a bit of a mess.

The set-up for this adventure is not something that immediately appeals to me, if I’m being honest. Two neighbouring dwarven nations have agreed to sign a peace treaty amid growing hostilities. Ahead of the day of the signing the two kings exchanged gifts, which are to be displayed when the treaty is signed. Unfortunately there has been a spate of thieves in the palace of King Baradon, and the sword that he was sent by King Jeraldus has gone missing. If Baradon were to turn up at the signing without the gifted sword it would be a mark of huge disrespect to Jeraldus, and the peace process would fall apart. And nobody can know that the theft has happened, because for some reason “explanations and excuses will not be tolerated”.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this set-up, since it’s just fluff to set the stage for the players to get in and start messing things up. I don’t find it particularly inspiring, and I probably wouldn’t choose to run this. But the search for a thief sounds like it could be fun despite the silly premise.

It’s the next detail that makes this all a little bit more interesting, which is that the identity of the thief is already known to Queen Isobella – and the thief is King Baradon. Baradon is labouring under an ancestral curse placed on his family through the use of a ring of wishes that has caused him to develop “a form of disorder that resembles a multiple personality.” The result of this is that “Baradon believes himself to be his imagined twin brother and rightful heir to the throne, Baradaar. It is […] Baradaar who steals items randomly from the palace, hiding both the items and himself in the dark recesses of the catacombs behind the throne room”.

I honestly can’t decide if I love this or if I hate it. It’s definitely not what I was expecting, though, and it’s not something I would come up with myself, which means the adventure is at least serving the primary purpose of published modules.

After the introduction, which lays out the facts of the theft for the GM, we’re given a list of “others at the court who are involved either directly or indirectly with the thefts”. These include people like the Court Jester, Fingal Furfeet, the only non-dwarf in the palace, who has been sent to the court after the local Thieves’ Guild heard news of the thefts and sent him to investigate. He has also met the King at night, and fully believes that he has actually met Baradaar, the deposed heir. Fingal has been acting as Baradaar’s fence, selling the items the King steals through his contacts in the Thieves’ Guild with the help of the Royal Blacksmith.

Other NPCs include the Court Executioner, who has had a ceremonial goblet stolen and is also on the hunt for the thief; the Royal Blacksmith, who believes Fingal to be the thief and has refused to help fence the stolen sword, though he knows where it is; Snagrat Slimtongue, a spy from the court of King Jeraldus who is so bad at his job that he knows nothing about the thefts and has instead been giving information about his employer to Baradon; and Bern Sureshank, the Royal Armourer, who has been “collecting” wine glasses and bottles from the palace and is now worried that they will be discovered and all the other thefts will be pinned on him.

Alongside these major NPCs we’re also given a host of minor NPCs who work in the palace, as well as a table of rumours that the palace staff can pass on to the PCs. As with any good rumour table, some of these are true (“Sureshank wants to be pickled in spirits and preserved in a jar after his death”) and some are false (“The queen reads books of magic in order to predict the future and give advice to the king”).

I’ve written a lot about rumours in the past, and especially about the use of false rumours. I firmly believe that false rumours have to exist in your game, because part of an investigation – whether it’s an explicit investigatory module like this one or simply your players following up on interesting things they came across in the game – lies in sifting the truth from a mass of often contradictory information. If you always only provide completely true information then the game risks becoming an exercise in being led by the nose around the world, and that’s not the sort of game I like to play in or run. With that in mind, it’s probably not surprising that my favourite rumours here come in the form of the rumours that are partially true, like this one: “The moans of the king’s dead ancestors can be heard in the dead of night sometimes. (False; the noise is caused by wind currents passing through the secret catacombs behind the throne room)”.

This is a good rumour that gives the players something to investigate and provides a solution that opens more questions than it answers, thus leading to more roads of investigation. It’s much more interesting than simply being given the information that the catacombs exist and then going to look at them. This way the players still get to where they need to be, but they feel like they’ve actually discovered it themselves in way that they wouldn’t if an NPC just told them about it.

Similarly, the rumour of “a phantom of some sort” that stalks the corridors at night is how the players might come to discover the King wandering the halls of the palace the guise of his imagined brother. That, again, is much more interesting than finding a clue that tells them explicitly what’s going on with the king.

One thing I was curious about while reading all of this is how the PCs become involved. We’re told early in the adventure that the Queen has deliberately kept a lid on rumours of the thefts, because if word reaches the court of King Jeraldus that the sword has gone missing it could derail the entire peace process. We’re also told, though, that the local Thieves’ Guild has heard about strange goings-on in the castle and has sent Fingal to investigate, so it’s clear that word is getting out. An obvious solution to “how do the PCs find out about it?” is obviously in having them hear a rumour, or having someone in the palace reach out to them, but that’s not what happens.

Instead, as the PCs are travelling, they each fall into a strange sleep where they’re given a vision in the form of one of three dreams. Each of these dreams directs them to “seek out the Lord and Lady of Fairgeld, for with your help, much grief will be avoided”. Each of the three dreams claims that a voice from either the past, present, or future has contacted the dreamer, and provides them with a piece of information they shouldn’t know in order to gain access to the palace (the inscribed words on the inside of the king’s royal ring; the contents of the royal treasury; a cryptic phrase about the comic treaty signing that “more than any other message” will “convince the king to accept the party’s help”).

The voice that speaks to the PCs in the dream is that of the spirit of Flavis, the person who cursed the king’s family line with a ring of wish in the first place and has now been condemned by an unnamed deity to haunt the castle dungeons until the curse is lifted. Being incorporeal he can no longer use the ring of wish, and so he’s reaching out to random travellers on the road to try and get them to do it for him. We’re told that “the deity that cursed Flavis has relented slightly, allowing such telepathic contact to be made”.

Frankly, I hate this. I like the rest of the set-up of the adventure and I think it could be a lot of fun to run, but I really dislike this way of getting the PCs involved and of giving them a clue to the existence of Flavis. Something about this, and particularly the last piece of information about the deity who cursed Flavis relenting enough in his punishment to allow him to contact people in a cry for help, that makes me think the author was struggling for ways to include the PCs into the adventure and introduce Flavis and his curse. I’m entirely sure that if I were to run this adventure I’d do away with this entirely. There are plenty of easy ways to get the party involved here. It’s established that the Thieves’ Guild knows something weird is going on and that their agent has become a bit lax in his work since falling in with the king’s alter-ego, and that seems to me to be the obvious way in. Information about the curse, the ring of wishes, and Flavis extra-mortal imprisonment are easy enough to drip-feed through rumours and the results of investigations in the same way as the rest of the information in the modules is delivered.

One thing that this module is lacking is guidance for how to run it effectively. We’re given a table of rumours but instructed to roll a d20 on it in order to disseminate them, which seems foolish given that progress in solving the mystery largely relies on hearing the rumours and following up on them. Similarly, the module explicitly tells us that “no mention of the appearance of Baradaar during the characters’ stay at Mount Diadem is made. It is for the DM to decide how to create the proper atmosphere of mystery by staging close encounters with the unknown thief” and that “the comings and goings of the various NPCs should be planned out beforehand by the DM, using random encounter tables or timed placement lists”. I’m not averse to prep at all, but writing an encounter table of the comings and goings of key NPCs seems like something that should just be in the module to begin with.

The other guidance we’re not really given is how to ensure that the PCs are able to extract relevant information from NPCs when they don’t want to reveal it. I’m more forgiving of this, since Dungeon Magazine isn’t aimed at new GMs – and it especially wasn’t in 1986 – but tight-lipped NPCs combined with random rolls not giving the “right” rumours can easily mean that an investigation grinds to a halt due to a lack of information. And while that’s very much a feature of investigative fiction, it’s not fun to experience it during play. Pointing novice GMs in the right direction here would go a long way towards increasing the utility of the module.

One of the really good suggestions here is that since the thefts will continue the entire time the party is in the castle, those thefts should also include party possessions. This suggestions is sort of buried in the last paragraph of the adventure, which is a shame because it’s a really key one. Having the king as Baradaar breaking into the party’s chambers at night to steal from them is a great encounter, and I think more should have been made of it in the text.

This was an interesting one to look at, because I initially wasn’t interested at all. It’s only the introduction of the twist that the king has been stealing from himself that hooked me here, and if I’m looking for takeaways from this module that’s a good one to start with. Even the most mundane of scenarios can be made interesting and gripping by introducing a slight twist to what we expect in order to make it a little less mundane. And the other takeaway, I think, is that false rumours are fun but partially-true rumours are what drive gameplay, and that if you’re going to utilise them – which you should – you should make sure you put them in the hands of the players soon and often, rather than holding them back because they didn’t ask exactly the right question or the right person or because you didn’t roll the right number on a d20. The key to solving a mystery is information, after all, and the game is no fun if you’re not given the tools you need to play it.

In The Dwarven King’s Court is by no means perfect but surprisingly I think this is one of my favourites of the Dungeon Magazine adventures I’ve read so far. It is, of course, only the eighth adventure they published, so there’s plenty of time for that to change, but this was a pleasant surprise from a genre/style of adventure that I don’t often get along with.

Dungeon Corner 2: The Titan’s Dream

LtR_Chris1 — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Welcome to month 2 of Dungeon Corner! As always, these posts hit Patreon several weeks before they go live here on Loot The Room.

Unsurprisingly, today I’m looking at issue 2 of Dungeon Magazine, dated November/December 1986. I realised that we’re nearly halfway through this month and I haven’t had a chance to look at this issue yet, so since there are only four adventures I’m just going to tackle them one at a time over the next week or two. Here’s the table of contents:

The Titan’s Dream by William Todorsky
In The Dwarven King’s Court by Willie Walsh
Caermor by Nigel D. Findley
The Keep at Koralgesh by Robert B. Giovanni and Jonathan H. Simmons

We’ve got a good range of levels in this issue, covering everything from first level to ninth, but today I’m just going to look at “The Titan’s Dream”. We also don’t have any repeat authors from issue 1. The editor’s introduction ends with a call for submissions that I think is quite interesting:

I’d particularly like to see Immortals- and Masters-level adventures, but the readership may wish lower-level ones (Basic to Companion).

We are still hunting for short, quickly played modules, such as The Elven Home and Guardians of the Tomb from issue #1. Shorter modules allow for more adventures per issue and greater variety. We have some longer modules on hand, too, good for several nights’ play.

There are two things I find interesting here. It’s my experience of publishing on the DMs Guild that lower level adventures definitely sell better than those for higher levels. I remember reading somewhere – and I can’t remember where, nor am I inclined to try and find it, so this memory could well be inaccurate – that most play happens between levels 1-5, and this seems borne out commercially as well. It’s interesting to see that this higher demand for lower level adventures has been the case for at least 40 years.

I have many theories about why this is. It’s hard to write good higher level modules anyway, so a lot of the extant ones simply aren’t very good, but my main thinking is that by the time players have reached higher levels it’s simply much more likely that the GM is making everything that sees play rather than relying on modules. By the time you’re at levels 10+ you’ve been playing for a long time, you’ve built up a vast web of “story” in your ongoing game, and it’s much harder for a GM to slip a module into that and have it make sense. Very few people are playing one shots at high levels, so you’re always trying to aim a high level module at a very small audience of people with high level characters, whose GM doesn’t already have something planned or written.

The second part of that introduction – the call for short, drop-in encounters – is interesting because it sort of validates the way in which I’ve always used Dungeon. Those short encounters are so much more useful to me than a long adventure, and I think their appeal is there for similar reasons to the dearth of higher level modules. That is, they’re much easier to actually use than a 40 page adventure. (The fact that I’ve staked my career on writing longer adventures surely isn’t a cause for concern after this realisation, right?)

There’s also a letter printed here from Greg Hazzard of Eden, North Carolina, that I think is interested purely from a publishing standpoint:

Dear Mr. Moore,
Regarding your periodical, I have two questions. What do you put into a cover letter? Also, what do you consider a word?

This seems like a silly question, especially “what do you consider a word”, but the primary concern of magazine publishing is how much physical space you have on the page, and while “the” and “transubstantiation” are both single words, they obviously take up much more space on the pace. The answer given is fairly illuminating on this point:

Some periodicals consider a “word” to be a measure of space. A group of six characters thus forms a word for editorial purposes. When I calculate payment for a module, however, I have my computer count the number of actual words in the manuscript.

There’s no insight to be had here, I just thought it was an interesting thing to see. (I also googled Greg Hazzard to see whether he ever sold anything to Dungeon or had a career in RPGs but, alas, it seems he didn’t. He did have another letter published in Dragon #254 in 1998, though, so good for him.)

Anyway. On to the adventures.

The Titan’s Dream

This is an AD&D adventure for levels 5-9, described as “a casual visit to a living, nightmare theater” and “a bizarre journey into the realm of sleep”. We’re given the standard breakdown of which sorts of characters should be used here (“an even mix of the standard character classes (fighter, thief, magic-user, and cleric) would do well here”) and I’m now curious to note when this stopped being a convention. I’ll try to remember to keep an eye out for it as I read.

This is a very weird adventure. The party travels to the home of a titan to consult with him over whether or not the king should have his daughter wed a prince of questionable character in order o forge peace between the two nations. When they reach the titan’s temple they find him sleeping and are sucked into his dreams, which play out as “three, five-act plays […] running continuously and simultaneously. The party enters one of the 15 acts at random, as determined below; the scene will already be in progress. The party has to accomplish a good-aligned task in each act to successfully complete that act. Completing an act resolves a conflict in the titan’s mind, allowing him to go on to other topics (i.e., other acts)”.

There are two things I really hate in module design – railroads, and what I call “diorama encounters” (those being the sort of encounters where the PCs are constantly walking into rooms to find the occupants right in the middle of some activity, as though they’ve been standing frozen in action waiting for the door to open). When I read this pitch I assumed that I was about to read the worst kind of diorama module. And make no mistake – this is very much a railroad. We’re told that “if a character tries to leave a scene without interacting with it, he simply passes into the fog and reenters the same set by walking out of the fog from a different place”. The PCs – and the players – have no escape until they played through all fifteen of these little pre-written scenes and found the right way to progress.

And it gets worse. If the PCs find a way to affect the scene and exit that act, but they don’t find the “right” answer – i.e. their actions are “evil or inadequate”) – then at some point later in the adventure they’ll find themselves back in the same scene they thought they’d already got out of once, which “will be at the same point as it was when the party originally entered it”.

I can’t state this strongly enough: I hate this. Thankfully the players don’t need to “solve” all fifteen scenes, they only need to find the solution to five of them, but frankly that’s five too many. This isn’t the only thing I don’t like about this adventure, either. Take this:

The same five sets are used in all plays. Each act uses a different set, but the sets won’t appear in the same order for each dream-play. The details of each set have been deliberately left sparse to allow each DM to put his personal touches on the layout. The five sets are:

SET A: A forest clearing with five trees and three rocks

SET B: A section of underground passage with doors and chambers (the doors can be ordinary, secret, or concealed as the DM wishes)

SET C: An open section of ground covered in grass or sand

SET D: A long, twisting cave with rough walls and chamber

SET E: A free-standing, single-story building with three rooms

This puts me in mind of one of my biggest problems with Christopher Nolan’s Inception. The trailer for that film showed us characters twisting reality with their minds, folding cities in half and making use of weird dream logic to achieve their goals. The promise was this weird dream-hopping, reality-shifting sci-fi extravaganza. The reality was a series of three Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare maps, one of which turned upside down but otherwise did nothing out of the ordinary. The execution was entirely underwhelming when placed next to the premise.

That’s what’s happening here. I firmly believe that one of the main purposes of a good module is to provide the GM with things they couldn’t come up with themselves. Here you’ve placed us into the dreams of a titan who happens to be a master of illusions, and what we get is “a forest clearing with five trees and three rocks” and “an open section of ground covered in grass or sand”. This is, frankly, insulting. This should never have been published.

I won’t drill into each of the “plays” in detail. I’ll just pick one at random to show you what we’re dealing with here. This is Act 1 of dream #2, “The Squirehood of Sir Staghart”, which takes place in Set D.

Sir Bombast is badly wounded but fighting bravely; lesser devils, all barbeds, are falling before his sword. Suddenly, a hugh barbed devil (the only survivor) appears before him and, with a mighty blow, kills Bombast. When the squire moves to defend his master, the huge barbed devil strikes him in the chest with its tail. The squire falls and is left for dead.
The party arrives just before Bombast is slain and cannot reach Staghart before he is struck by the barbed devil.

Tasks:

A. The party may interrupt and drive off the barbed devil before it can deliver a fatal second blow to Staghart.

B. The party mat save Staghart by defeating the barbed devil or removing the squire’s body from the cave.

C. The party may pray to a good-aligned deity to protect Staghart (if done, this action automatically succeeds).

There are other equally thrilling tasks in this adventure, such as “ignore a small child’s pleas to play a game with him until he teleports away”, and “kneel before a Valkyrie and do nothing”.

This is the kind of module where I read it and think that the author should really write that novel they wish they had time to write instead of forcing their friends to play through their plays under the guise of gaming. I sincerely hope the rest of this issue is better than this first adventure!

Dungeon Corner #3

LtR_Chris1 — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

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If this first month of looking at Dungeon magazine has taught me anything it’s that even though I knew this was going to be a big undertaking, I’d actually underestimated exactly how much work it is if I want to look at these issues in any meaningful depth. And that’s fine – it’s not putting me off doing it, and I’m going to continue with it for as long as I’m able. But I’m definitely going to experiment with the format in these early issues and figure out the best way to make this work. I also haven’t quite figured out what I want to get out of this project beyond finding some cool things in these adventures, but I think that will come with time as I work through the issues. Thanks for bearing with me!

Today we’re wrapping up issue 1 by looking at the final adventure from this inaugural issue, Carl Smith’s Guardians of The Tomb. This is described as “a silent forest, a lonely shrine, and no survivors” which sounds very cool. Carl Smith was part of the Dragonlance design team for TSR and worked on an AD&D Lankhmar adventure (CA1 Swords of the Undercity), so I expect that this adventure will feel the closest to an “official” module out of all the work in this issue.

As with The Elven Home, this is designed to be dropped into an ongoing game while the characters are travelling. Designed for 2-6 characters of 3rd-5th level, this sees the group stumble across an abandoned shrine to a forgotten thief who may or may not be the avatar of an evil thievery god. The area is overgrown and abandoned but, curiously, there is no wildlife in the area at all.

The entrance to the dungeon itself is located on a small island in a shallow marsh. I don’t know what it is about this sort of setting but it really appeals to me and I love seeing it. Maybe it’s because I grew up playing in the woods and stumbled across lots of weird old structures in exactly this sort of setting, so it evokes a very specific sort of nostalgia for me, but whatever the reason this is one of my favourite ways to present a location for players to stumble across.

Something I’m always interested in is how early D&D adventures handled what we now think of as skill checks before skills were codified. We see modules asking players to roll under their attributes very early in the life of the game – I think Judges Guild were doing this as early as 1975, and there’s an article by Katherine Kerr in an issue of Dragon magazine (I can’t remember the issue number, unfortunately) that gives a method for turning ability scores into percentage chances. It’s not uncommon for individual modules to offer unique ways of doing things for that specific module, though, and this one is no different. Here we see a system wherein “any character [can] roll a percentile score equal to his intelligence, expressed as a percentage” in order to sense that the party is possibly being watched. This is basically “roll under, but on percentile dice” and I really like how simple it is.

Characters can find a slippery walkway of submerged stones under the swamp that leads to the entrance, and we’re given various ways for them to slip and fall into the water. One interesting thing comes in the way it deals with flying or levitating characters:

Anyone attempting to fly or levitate across the lake discovers unexpected turbulence. Warm air over the lake contacts the cooler air from the surrounding woods, causing sudden drafts. The chances of turbulence disturbing a flight over the lake is 75% on warm days only.

Characters find that maintaining flight (by animal, spell, or device) is difficult but not impossible (flight speed slowed by 1” per 6” normal speed, so flight at 12” becomes 10”). However, those levitating across may find themselves at the mercy of the winds, even being pushed into trees at the lake’s edge or into the shrine itself (causing 1-4 hp damage per round) — or down into the lake’s razorweed.
Guardians of The Tomb

I think this is interesting to contrast with the way scrying is dealt with in Into The Fire. There the magic is simply negated entirely, and I said in my writeup of that adventure that I really hate when modules completely nerf a character ability. Here we’re still fiddling with the way in which characters are able to use their abilities, but in a way that tells us something about the area we’re exploring rather than simply saying “no, that doesn’t work”. This is the sort of thing I really like to see, because it’s signalling to players that things are weird here without making them feel useless. It’s also much more memorable than “that time we got told we couldn’t scry”.

The razorweed at the bottom of the swamp is also doing some interesting things design-wise, dealing damage that varies based on the height of the creatures who fall into it. Here’s how it works:

Anyone falling or walking into a patch of razorweed suffers immediate slashing damage from the hundreds of bladelike leaves on the plant. This damage varies with the size and surface area of the victim. Human-shaped beings take 1d4 hp damage if they are 3’ or less in height; for every foot of height over 3’, an extra 1d4 hp damage is taken. Four-legged beings take 2d4 hp damage if 3’ high or less at the shoulders, and an extra 2d4 hp damage for every 1’ over that height.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of thing before, and I think I love it. Height is usually only meaningful when it comes to the physical dimensions of the dungeon, and I love a natural hazard that says “you’re bigger, so you’re in contact with more of it, therefore you take more damage”.

The rest of the dungeon itself is a little underwhelming, being one big trap. The shrine is a single room filled with warnings not to steal from it, and if players ignore those warnings it seals itself shut for a full day. At night an army of shadows – two for each PC, plus 1d12 more of them – attacks anybody inside the shrine. This is basically a TPK machine that punishes players for looting it. I love the setup and the location but I can’t say I’m particularly fond of this execution, and I wish there was a little more here – maybe a larger dungeon complex beneath the shrine that the shadow assault forces players into in order to escape, or something of that nature. Still, as a weird location to drop into your world that players might stumble upon this is pretty cool, especially if you run a high consequence “fuck around and find out” style game. It’s certainly true that all the warning signs are there that this isn’t a place to fool around with, so maybe the potential TPK is entirely earned if players are daft enough to ignore all of said warnings.

Overall this issue is largely forgettable, but I don’t think that’s surprising really. Much like how I’m not yet sure what these posts are, exactly, this first issue feels like Dungeon trying to find its feet in a lot of ways. There’s definitely some cool stuff in here – the sentient sword with separation anxiety from Into The Fire is my personal favourite, and I think with a bit of work Guardians of The Tomb could be turned into something really great, too. If it’s done nothing else, this issue has highlighted some things I really love about D&D and has made me want to write dungeons again, which is nice.

Now that I’ve worked through the first issue and you’ve read these posts, I’d love to hear from you about what you’d like to get out of this series as it continues. I’m happy to be very self indulgent and just follow my own interests here, but if there’s a specific angle you’d like me to look at these from please do let me know!

Dungeon Corner #2

LtR_Chris1 — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

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Today we’re looking at the second half of issue 1 of Dungeon magazine, which contains the following adventures:

The Elven Home, by Anne Gray McCready
Into The Fire, by Grant and David Boucher
Guardians of the Tomb, by Carl Smith

If you missed the first half of this issue, you can find that post here. Because this post runs a bit long I’m only looking at the first two adventures here, and I’ll write about the final one in a subsequent post tomorrow.

The Elven Home

In a change of pace for this first issue, The Elven Home is a wilderness scenario for Basic D&D. This is aimed at 1st-3rd level characters, and the introduction tells us that it “can be used as a side trip for most any to relieve the boredom of a journey through the wilderness”. This is the kind of thing that I often think Dungeon is most valuable for – encounters with a little more meat on the bones, rather than “full” adventures. In later years Dungeon would publish “Critical Threats” (specific NPCs or monsters to build an encounter or adventure around) and “Maps of Mystery” (small maps of various locations with a couple of keyed areas) that sort of served this purpose, and I’m interested to see how frequently these much smaller encounters found their way into the magazine before they were formalised in this way (which I think happened somewhere around issue #90).

The idea that this is here to “relieve the boredom of wilderness travel” is one of those sentences that makes me really want to know how the game was being played at this point in time. These days in OSR land we tend to run wilderness games in a fairly standard way, relying on random encounter tables to do a lot of this work for us. And that’s certainly how the rulebooks present wilderness exploration, too. Having a “prepped enecounter” like this for a long journey feels much more akin to the way modern trad is played than the style of play that the OSR is trying to emulate. Whether we’re trying to emulate a style of play that ever actually existed is one of those things I’m very interested in, though it’s obviously outside the scope of this post to try and explore that.

The setup here is a very simple one. While travelling cross-country the party encounters “a strange cluster of unusually large trees” and hear screaming noises. Rather than anything malevolent, however, what they’ve come across is – as revealed in the title – a secluded elven home, with children playing in a nearby pond.

This encounter takes up more space than it probably needs, as the author spends a lot of time trying to account for the different ways the party might approach this thing – the main focus being on “what happens if they break into the house and rob the place while the elves are absent”, which probably tells us quite a lot about the way the game was being played (and which will likely seem very familiar to modern players). It’s all written with an eye to leading into future adventures, though, which I like. The party might make allies or enemies of the elves (and of a fourth elf who isn’t present but is set to return later that evening); there’s a magic item with no known origin or purpose that they might want to steal or buy and investigate; and there’s a suggestion that PC elves might want to build their own home in this area and settle down once they’re ready to retire.

The most interesting part of this encounter is the stream that flows from beneath a treant living beside the house. It’s filled with large bubbles, which are made of “energy gas” that gives the elves a temporary “surge of cool adrenaline”. In game terms all this does is provide a slight temporary hit point boost, but the image of the elves casually getting high on natural gas while they play in the stream is one that I really like and I think this is a really interesting thing to drop into an adventure. With the right party this could send a campaign into an entirely new direction, and that’s the sort of thing I really value in published modules.

Into The Fire

A lost prince, a silver necklace, and a dangerous journey.

This is an AD&D adventure for 6-10 characters of 6th-10th level. Years ago a young prince’s ship was attacked by pirates, and a silver necklace engraved with the royal seal and his own name found its way into a dragon’s hoard after the pirates were themselves destroyed by said dragon. Fifteen years later the dragon’s hoard was robbed by a group of knights. One, called Sir Hujer, managed to return to a fort on the edge of unexplored wilderness with the necklace and a report that the rest of his companions were dead. The necklace was returned to the King, who wants to know how it ended up in the mountains when his son was lost at sea. He also wants to know what killed his knights.

Enter the PCs. The King doesn’t know exactly where the knights were when they were killed, or where Sir Hujen was recovered before being returned to the fort by grey gnomes, so he commands the PCs to begin where the original patrol began and follow their path until they learn what happened.

The first part of the adventure is the 170 mile journey from the capital city to the fort where the patrol began, and GMs are instructed to make use of information given in the DMG and “whatever maps the DM wishes to create for the local terrain” to run this part. I really like it when adventures engage with the core rules like this and acknowledge that some parts of what constitute “the adventure” lie outside the scope of the publication itself. Thematically I’m also enjoying the fact that you could make use of The Elven Home during this first part of the adventure. (As a side note, this setup feels a lot like the modern Pathfinder organised play modules, where PCs work for a Lodge of Pathfinders and are sent on missions across the country each month).

One frustrating thing here, which is something you see in a lot of modules, is the fact that the PCs are expressly forbidden from finding out about the dragon before it’s too late. The adventure tells us that “under no circumstances can the party learn anything about the dragon Flame or its lair, as Flame is protected from all scrying spells and devices by a magical item. […] No rumours of dragons are circulating in the kingdom at present”. This is one of the reasons why I tend not to enjoy higher-level D&D in most editions. Surprising the party becomes harder due to the scope of the magic that’s available to them, and the solution that most published material comes up with is “actually that just doesn’t work”. It’s unimaginative, lazy writing, and it feels like punishing players for trying to make use of the tools provided to them in their spell lists.

Something I go back and forth on a lot is how often to check for random encounters during wilderness exploration. This adventure settles on twice a day (morning and evening) plus one each night right after dusk, which is what I’ve settled on in my own games as being the sweet spot. Annoyingly, though, it also specifies that “no random encounters occur while the party travels from the capital to Fort Silan”, a decision which makes me question why that journey needs to be part of the adventure at all and why it directed GMs to the rules for travel in the DMG. Personally I would simply ignore this and run the journey as I run any other journey.

The encounter tables provided are split into day and night, and the tables for the plains and foothills do a pretty good job of making the location feel populated and alive. You’ve got patrols of frontier guards, pioneer caravans moving south before winter sets in, giant eagles high above that don’t bother the party unless they’re first bothered, and marauding packs of hunting trolls. The encounter tables for the mountains are much less imaginative, and mostly just throw monsters at the PCs.

Interestingly, even though we’re told that there are no rumours of a local dragon in the area, three of the encounters deal directly with the dragon – and they also happen to be the best enounters on the tables. The first is a force of 20 ogres lead by an ogre mage. Realistically this is likely to be a combat encounter, or one that the PCs straight up avoid, but the text tells us that “some of the ogres have seen a huge flying beast in the mountains” but don’t know what it is. Then we have “a haunt”, the spirit of a woman looking for her missing husband. He was killed by the dragon 60 years ago, and while the text doesn’t indicate that she actually knows anything about the dragon – and it’s likely intended that she doesn’t – I like how she works in combination with the detail about the giant flying beast from the ogres.

The final encounter that I really like is a lone gray elf ranger/druid sheltering from the elements. He has heard rumours of a dragon in the mountains – rumours that we were earlier told don’t exist – but he believes it to be a white dragon rather than the red dragon that’s actually present here. Combined with the other two encounters this feels like the point in the adventure where the players would start looking to scrying magic and things of that nature, and I’m again frustrated by the idea that the text just says “no, you can’t do that”. I absolutely love the idea that, having discovered there’s a dragon in the mountains, the players might return to the fort and raise an army to go and deal with it (there are 240 soldiers in the fort that the players are using as a base of operations once they get here). That’s the sort of thing that feels amazing in play, and we’re robbing them of that by insisting that they should instead wander blindly into its lair and fight it on their own. If I were running this I would absolutely scrap the anti-scrying item.

The back end of the adventure details the areas surrounding Flame’s lair, which are a very cool setting – a mountain lake warmed by volcanic vents, with a collapsed wizard’s tower on their banks – marred by very unimaginative encounters. And annoyingly the most unimaginative part of the whole thing is Flame and his lair, which is a single tunnel and cavern inside the mountain. Flame is almost certain to see the PCs coming and so sets a “trap” – meaning sitting inside his lair and waiting to drop a portcullis and open a pit beneath the intruders. Then he allows himself to be trapped inside the cavern with the party. Despite the fact that the text tells us “and encounter with this monster won’t be the usual hack-and-slash battle” that’s exactly what it is once the trap has been sprung. The only thing that makes it atypical is that Flame is given the opportunity to retreat to his sleeping area and block it with a large rock that the party is, apparently, entirely unable to move.

Weirdly, the most interesting part of this adventure – the collapsed wizard’s tower – is detailed right at the end, and is only accessible after defeating the dragon. I’m a sucker for a ruined, partially flooded tower, and this is a pretty cool one. The best thing in here – and if you’re familiar with my work at all you’ll have an idea of how much I love this – is an intelligent sword that’s deeply lonely after spending 120 years alone. Here’s the entry for it:

The long sword’s name is Mironus and it is intelligent (IN 14), with a neutral-good alignment and the ability to speak the languages of dwarves and gnomes as well as its alignment tongue. It has an ego of 8 and possesses the following abilities: detection of traps of large size in a 10′ radius; detection of evil/good in a 10′ radius; and, detection of gems, kind, and number in a 5′ radius. The sword can “see” though a gem set in its hilt, above the handgrip.

When someone approaches Mironus, the sword shrieks piercingly for rescue. If a drawf or gnome holds it, the sword uses the appropriate language (dwarven, by preference). If not, Mironus will us an alignment tongue.
There’s one major problem with Mironus. It has been trapped alone in this room for over 120 years and is a bit screwy. Should it be rescued by a party member, the sword
never, ever allows that character to leave it alone, anywhere, anytime, for any reason (including taking baths, etc.). The sword is very worried about being deserted again and screams as loudly as possible until brought along. It’s also afraid of the dark, and always glows at full strength (equal to a light spell) at night or in darkness – even in a scabbard.
Into The Fire

What’s left of this module details the rest of the tower, plus the deep gnome settlement beneath it. As I said above it’s a very strange decision to put all this after the climactic battle with the dragon that forms the crux of the adventure, but I also sort of admire it from the perspective of presenting a world as it is and inviting the PCs to explore it as they see fit. This is a pretty large module and I think there’s enough here to fuel play for a very long time, which is something I love to see, but the magic sword with separation anxiety is in my opinion one of the best things I’ve ever seen in a published module.

Tomorrow I’ll take a look at the final adventure in this issue, and see if I can find some thoughts about the issue as a whole in order to wrap this thing up.

Dungeon Corner #1

LtR_Chris1 — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:13:13 +0000

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Welcome to the first instalment of what I’m tentatively calling “Dungeon Corner”, a regular series of posts in which I look at the adventures published in TSR/WoTC/Paizo’s Dungeon Magazine. As I said in the first post about this project, I’m still not sure as I write this exactly what form these posts will take. There will be an element of “review” in here, but I’m more concerned with looking at these adventures and seeing if there’s anything modern writers can learn about writing modules from them, or if there’s anything fun that you can steal for your games. The form will hopefully reveal itself to me over time.

This first post is publicly available immediately on being posted, just so that people can see what these things look like. Future posts will be Patreon exclusive for a little over a week before going live on Loot The Room. So if you’re into this and want to follow along, sign up for the Patreon!

Today we’re starting at the beginning with issue 1. It’s a 68 page issue (including covers, letters, and advertising) which contains six adventures:

The Dark Tower of Cabilar, by Michael Ashton and Lee Sperry (15 pages)
Assault on Eddistone Point, by Patricia Nead Elrod (9 pages)
Grakhirt’s Lair, by John Nephew (10 pages)
The Elven Home, by Anne Gray McCready (4 pages)
Into The Fire, by Grant and David Boucher (19 pages)
Guardians of the Tomb, by Carl Smith (7 pages)

Those page counts are taken just from looking at the contents page, so they may not be exactly accurate – there will be advertising and other things breaking up those numbers. But as a rough guide they’re useful. I’m going to split this issue into two posts, looking at the first three adventures today and the final three next time.

The Dark Tower of Cabilar

“A vampire has the royal crown – and you’ve got to get it back.”

The issue opens with an AD&D adventure for 4-8 characters of 4th-7th level. The text specifies that “the party should have several fighters and at least one magic user, thief, and cleric. Magical weapons are required”.

The adventure structure we’ll recognise from modern D&D and Pathfinder adventures is already in full force here. We open with an Adventure Background, a section titled “For The Dungeon Master”, some boxed text under the heading “Starting The Adventure”, and then straight into keyed areas. This adventure started life as a tournament module, which means it’s a very classic dungeon crawl and also doesn’t really do anything hugely interesting.

There’s a strong hook – an evil wizard killed the city council and usurped the throne and now, years later, the surviving prince has come of age. He needs his crown to be able to claim the throne, but the crown has been stolen by a vampire who lives in the very same tower that the wizard lived in before his conquest. Your mission is to storm the tower, kill the vampire, and get the crown back.

Strong hook aside, though, this adventure is basically just a gauntlet filled with set-piece encounters and no wandering monsters. In that respect it actually feels quite modern in its design – wandering monsters don’t really work in tournament play because every group needs to have the same experience, and modern 5e/Pathfinder adventures have done away with them almost entirely. Here the text explicitly calls out that there are no wandering monsters, explaining that “the creatures which dwell within the tower and dungeon are, for the most part, charmed or trained to protect an area, or have no choice in their actions by the way their room is designed or by what is protecting their exit. They are also enchanted to resist hunger and have no desire (thanks to Cabilar’s magic) to leave the dungeons”. Because it’s a tournament module there’s also an assumption that most encounters will tend towards combat.

The location of the tower itself, plus the means of accessing it, are both pretty fun. The tower is inside a huge cavern in the side of a cliff, and initially it looks like a massive stalagmite. It has no entrances or windows around the base – instead there are wooden ledges “high up on its sides”, and some narrow windows that start about 90’ above the ground.

In classic tournament style, accessing the dungeon itself becomes the first challenge. You can only get in via the windows, so you probably have to climb the walls, and the wooden ledges are obviously bait – they risk collapsing once anything weighing more than 200lbs is placed on them. The mechanism by which this works is a little cumbersome:

“Whenever 200 lbs. or more is placed upon a ledge, that ledge must make a saving throw of 10 or greater on a d20, with a -1 on the save for each 10 lbs. over 200. For instance, if a fighter weighing 223 lbs. (gear included) stands on a ledge, the save for the ledge is a 12 on a d20. Note that if a 150-lb. fighter stands on a ledge and attempts to pull up a 70-lb. halfling, the effective weight on the ledge is 220 lbs.! If a ledge fails a save, it collapses, carrying all upon it down, doing 1d6 hp damage per 10’ fallen, cumulative. There should be ample warning for a reaction: “The ledge creaks loudly under you,” etc.). If the ledge makes its save, loud creaking and popping noises are heard.

Even if the ledge survives its initial saving throw, any shift or addition of weight requires a new save. If a character tumbling from the ledge hits the one beneath it (which he will if one exists), the lower ledge makes a save also, requiring an 18 or above on a d20 to keep the character from falling to the next ledge (or the cavern floor).”
The Dark Tower of Cabilar

Saving throws and working out bonuses aside, I can picture this being a really fun, chaotic encounter – especially if you were to run this in DCC as a funnel, where you suddenly have 16 peasants trying to climb the tower. And of course there are also four firedrakes to contend with, which emerge once “several characters are actively climbing the tower”. There’s a whole section talking about how to adjudicate area of effect spells like fireball, and I particularly love this detail:

“Firedrake blood burns, as noted in the Fiend Folio Tome, making the creature into a living (suicidal) fireball for one round.”

This first encounter is honestly the best thing in the adventure for a while. Once the party is inside the dungeon it becomes a bit of a funhouse, with mimics disguised as stairs, an ettin just hanging out in a room, and a “puzzle” room that punishes players for stepping on the wrong floor tiles, with no indication that there’s anything different about them. This is the sort of encounter design I really hate. There is one encounter with thousands of tiny, harmless spiders swarming over characters who disturb them that’s gross, which I quite enjoyed, but frankly there’s very little else in here that I think is noteworthy. It’s a shame that the adventure peaks with the first encounter, but I think that opening section is very stealable.

Not the most auspicious start to Dungeon Magazine, but I think we may need to manage our expectations for a while.

Assault on Eddistone Point

“What happened to the signal tower? What waits for you in the misty mountains?”

Our second adventure is also for AD&D (in fact all of the adventures in this issue are for AD&D, which isn’t true of future issues), this time for 3-5 characters of 1st-3rd level.

This is an interesting one, because it’s essentially a miniature sandbox. If someone published this as an OSR module today I don’t think I’d think twice about it, though I’d perhaps expect there to be a little more weirdness to it. We’re given the situation – two neighbouring city states use signal beacons to communicate, and a magic-user and her companions were hired to cast a continual light spell on the beacon here but haven’t returned – and then we’re given a surprising amount of information about the local area. After the first two pages of introduction setting up the scenario, situating the town, and telling us about the missing party, a further the next three pages of this nine-page adventure are given over to detailing the town and the surrounding area itself.

There’s nothing particularly special about this location but those three pages do as much work to make this a living space as many 40 page gazetteers do, especially when you add in the major NPCs detailed in the last page. None of those NPCs have set locations in the village – there are no dioramas here, just a naturalistic location waiting for the player characters to descend on it.

Inside the tower it’s again quite naturalistic and understated, with nothing that jumps off the page and says “I’m an amazing encounter”, but I actually think that’s a good thing. If every adventure you run is filled with massive set pieces then nothing feels special – you need the small mundane stuff to juxtapose the big stuff against, and this serves up small and mundane well without being boring. There’s a hostage situation, plenty of people to talk to, some cool ways to navigate the scenario and gain access to the tower without going in the front door, and when the adventure is complete you have a solid starter village to serve as a base for future adventures.

This adventure feels like a bit of a hidden gem, despite not doing anything flashy. In terms of first level adventures for new players I think you could do a lot worse than to run this, and then build out the campaign world with this at the center of your map as the players begin to explore more.

Grakhirt’s Lair

“The leader of a norker uprising is free. Go find him!”

The final adventure we’re looking at today is for 4-8 characters of 1st-3rd level, including “at least one strong fighter (above 1st level) […] to increase survival chances in difficult combat encounters).

My immediate question here is “what the hell is a norker”? According to the Forgotten Realms wiki they’re something like a hobgoblin. I don’t know why you wouldn’t just use goblins, frankly, but here we are.

The pitch is that a powerful illusionist called Grakhirt who “dreamed of raising humanoid armies who would rise up at his calling and follow hin in conquest across the lands”. He manipulates the norkers, organised them into a rough army, and laid waste to the local town. Nobody knows anything about Grakhirt other than his name and that he commands the norkers. The adventure takes place in the immediate aftermath of a massive battle that devastated both the norkers and the local militia, with the remaining norker army pushed back into their lair. The players arrive just in time for somebody to send up the bat signal and ask for the remaining norkers and Grakhirt to be killed.

If I’m being perfectly honest here, the extensive background to this adventure – most of which is relatively useless, and written in that classic dry encyclopedic tone that’s plagued RPG writing for half a century – absolutely bored me to tears. It uses far too many words to say “a goblin army is raiding the local area and we’d like it to stop, please”. The lair itself is also deeply uninteresting, and I’m struggling to find anything worthwhile here. The author has tried to seed this adventure with things to set up further campaign play – random encounter tables for the local wilderness, a connection with an assassin’s guild that could lead to future adventures – but it all just falls a bit flat. I very much believe that published modules should offer you something that you couldn’t (or wouldn’t) come up with yourself at the table, and I think that if I said “you’re running a game in half an hour, do something with a goblin army terrorising the local settlements” you’d be able to run something very similar to this by generating a random cavern map and sketching out half a page of notes while your players were arriving.

Wrapping Up

So, not a huge amount to work with in the first half of the first issue of Dungeon, but we can’t expect to find gold every time. I do think that the opening encounter from “The Dark Tower of Cabilar” would be a lot of fun as a funnel, and “Assault on Eddistone Point” is a solid starter village that takes up much less space on the page than something like T1 The Village of Hommlet, so it’s not a terrible start. I’m confident we’ll encounter better issues, but I’m also 100% sure that we will encounter issues that are much, much worse than this one.

Next time we’ll take a look at the final three adventures in issue 1. In the meantime, let me know if you have any thoughts about these three or any ideas for things I could include or focus on in this series going forward!