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