Dungeon Corner #2
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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.
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.
