[Review] The House Under the Moondial (OSE); Bad Habits

[Adventure]
The House Under the Moon Dial (2024)
Hexagnome
Lvl 3-4

Alright, Mr. HexaGnome’s second adventure. I still think of the contemporary OSE authors, especially if you go into the purple OSR side, this guy is probably among the more legitimate. Who do we have that isn’t in a NAP guy? Brad Kerr, Gavin Norman, Stephen J Jones, Filip Gruszczyński, and this guy. This adventure is frustrating because much of it is pretty good, you can tell there is at least the impulse of adding some depth and granularity, a tonne of work went into the presentation, there’s a VTT version available, but you can also tell Hexagnome is picking up some bad designing habits.

Premise seems like something you can slot into Dolmenwood and is a bit convoluted. The former pagan village of Romaj once had a compact with the faery kingdom nearby where they would exchange faery kids with human kids because of a faery war. The tradition fell into disuse with the advent of the church who sealed off the moon door. Now there’s a problem because an inexplicably lawful apostate cleric and his band of werewolf bandits begin burning unbelievers at the stake, which threatens to kill the last worshippers of the faery viscountess, which will sever the connection between Faery and the mortal domain, which will trigger the long lost Prismatic Storm to seek out the otherwise immortal hag because part of her soul is in faery, and if it is re-united the spell will hone in on her, causing a cataclysmic apocalypse. Get it? An investigative adventure with a deadline where you must defeat the evil lawful aligned monotheists and rekindle neutral crystal-witchy-bush child-sacrifice paganism. I guess I don’t have to ask who you will be voting for ey? Inspirations are Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz so its twee with a capital T but at least its not more Artpunk.

Convoluted is probably a byword for a lot of content in the adventure. First: this adventure uses layout like its cocaine. It is on an absolute layout bender, a layout rampage. Its not snorting it, it is injecting two syringes of layout directly into its brain through the eyesocket. This is the pope, the queen, the keanu reeves of layout. The amount of information it attempts to fractally compress into every page comes across as vaguely belligerent, and the amount of work and intelligence spent on creating a PDF like this with all these color palettes, hyperlinks etc. makes one vaguely apprehensive. Don’t get me wrong, its impressive, but I have to wonder at what point all this graphic wizardry is not just burying the lede. Take, for example, the almost invisible grey text in the bottom, which is used to convey various tooltips, snatches of useful info, or trivia. It does not quite meet the OSE standard of $5.000 of layout for an 8 room dungeon but it is begging the question if it isn’t all a bit overdone.

Lets talk about overdesign and bad practice. So you have a village with a surrounding hexmap right? And you have a terrain type, and a hex scale. If you add an encounter frequency, you are essentially set. Why, for the love of Hextor, would you clutter up B/X, a game appealing for its simplicity, with a second vestigial watch system pioneered by Luka Rejec, a person who believes you should play nothing as written and not entirely coincidentally THE WORST CRUNCH DESIGNER IN THE WORLD. Take a moment to bask in its wretchedness, the egregious way the amount of time per watch can double, the sickening incompatibility with the already extant travelling rules (p. 111 of OSE classic if you were curious), the way Carousing is not explained, or the penalty of taking two actions being entirely arbitrary, a precise weather modifier but then you can just search at night and sleep whenever etc. This is NSR design in a nutshell: a system that would sort of work at achieving a goal in a more abstract way with ugly regressions and corner cases that is jammed into a more granular system that already does most of what it tries to achieve.

This is probably the most egregious example. This is a dungeon with 4 inhabitants. To create a system for the movement and interaction of these 4 inhabitants, the adventure not only uses the byzantine 2d6+2 under ROOM NUMBER for the knight (a strange moving target), but this is only by night, by day it uses 1d10+1/turn (forcing you to track elapsed turns, +1 tracking complexity) AND suprise is reworked to be 1d12 BELOW number of areas the PCs have explored (+1 tracking complexity) but makes no mention of the monsters chance of surprise (still the same? never?) AND the knight arrives conditional to either games OR combat UNLESS the dominoes that are stacked throughout the first tunnel are not carefully disabled in which case +3 to event rolls OR roll different dice type. Sir? Surely there is a more elegant way?

Village proper is a bit like Hommlet and has a good impulse, a lot of the houses have some concealed treasure. That’s good, that’s a holdover from the days when players were a bit more feral and tried to do a bit more on-site procurement while in town. In fact, this adventure has about 27.000 gp worth of treasure total, of which 17.800 gp (!) is in the town. But I have to wonder how much of this is going to be found by the PCs, who are recruited as big damn heroes trying to save the village from the depredations of the lawful (?) apostate priest and his band of neutral (?) werewolf bandits for absolutely no reward whatsoever. There’s also a lot of specific information like the age of each villager, how they feel about the church, a random generator to determine what villager the wolves capture, social status, some personal rumors, price lists and services, some torchbearers and so on. No levelled retainers which is a bummer but I’ll rock it. All the detail is probably good and feels like I am reading a fucking ACKs module, and like an ACKs module, you can convincingly argue that a lot of the material here actually CAN come up during play, although the usual ACKs autism of a comprehensive economic system is absent so a bunch of 0th levels rock 500+gp in treasure, I can buy health potions at 35 gp/a pop from a herbal lady, and a bunch of +1 arrows from a shopkeeper at 15 gp per arrow (max 10). An imported bottle of wine is 150 gp. This is ridiculous, but this might be your brain on OSE. But there’s an attempt at depth, far above the standard for this game. I think the sickest detail was the inscriptions on the gravestones being hints at the supernatural boons obtained by people travelling into Faery. That’s good, subtle detail.

Interaction with the wolves is pretty good and probably works…for the most part. The adventure attempts to curtail the PCs automatic aggressive response by clearly telegraphing that the Wolves of God are unnatural and formidable, and by making them threatening but amendable to conversation. It doesn’t inform them about the actual danger of a deadline but hints at the existence of one by establishing that there will be a festival on day 15, which might work in a meta-way, with knowledge of the actual convoluted nature of the threat being scattered around the map and in Faery. The Wolves also function as a rival adventuring party that will make raids on nearby supernatural areas (complicated timeline), losing some of their number along the way as well as gradually weaking their defences, and there is even a fallback position should they be driven from the town. The adventure mentions that getting the village on your side is important, thereby justifying the allegiance statistic, there’s even rules for calling a council meeting, but since the one thing that is lacking is hard statistics and certainly character levels, it is not really clear what you are going to do with the villagers once they decide that enough is enough, but apparently they can just vote out the Wolves and they will submit to the democratic process?. I think this is another example of slightly burying the lede. You cover all these eventualities but you lose track of the likely path, that of the PCs trying to murder the wolves piecemail. You also give them insultingly little treasure for overcoming the central threat, so fuck you for being a hero I guess.

Surrounding wilderness area is where you will have to get your hands dirty if you lack the testicular fortitude required to murder, by cunning and subtle craft, 12 no good lousy rotten dirty good-for-nuthin’ werewolves, but then again this is an adventure where the alternative is to get a village to worship an elf princess so probably Hexagnome knew the temparement of his audience. Notice all these caveats btw, different encounters for night and day, the odd conditional encounter, a major detail of finding wolfsbane totally buried in invisible ink, then some areas altering the random encounters. Mostly animals with some twee cursed animals which is all above board. Encounter frequency is high. Normal forest exploration would give you 2 in 6 per day, so an average of 1 per 3 days. In Moondial its about 50% per watch, so assuming you sleep in town, you would expect 1.5 encounters per day, more without a guide (curiously, no one in town is described as a guide, although some are huntsmen, or walk to specific areas etc). The hex encounters are pocket change and flavorful trivialities for the real meat, which are the lairs proper.

These range from fair to good and each one different. Good techniques occasionally, with inhabitants having a chance to be out, or their placement in the lair being determined randomly. The lair of the Fen witch is presented as both a social encounter and a lucrative but extremely dangerous place for burglary, the Saints tomb is a suprisingly aenemic tomb with paltry rewards containing hints about the history of the region and a single 4 HD skeleton that recombines from two seperate halves and wields dual weapons which will probably go down in 2 rounds, the Ship in the Tree is some sort of deranged Peter Pan inspired boathouse with a werecrocodile manchild and other assorted talking animals that is the most twee of the selection but still ties into the larger adventure and still manages to be pretty good. Same goes for the titular House under the Moon Dial, although the tweeness is increased to almost intolerable proportions, with its annoying 3 fey children and their invincible guardian, what appears to be an undead lawful good death knight trying to teach the misguided pieces of shit (there is a tiny rectory present), various games (and probably the best most thorough children’s story grading system I have seen in a long time) and why are we indulging in this shit with these fucks again? I assume it is to avoid having to put the little shits to the sword but one could have been more clear.

The last section is going to be extremely controversial (although obviously the adventure could theoretically be resolved without people ever going there) because this is where the adventure essentially turns into Cairn. Some people are going to love that, some people are going to absolutely fucking hate it. If (if!) the characters figure out how to do it, they can learn some sort of nursery rhyme and pass through a black pool into The Other Side where they start as level 1 children with a random piece of equipment. They are given 13 hours (clearly indicated by the passage of a huge moon), to find the Visceral Viscountess, but they also have to impress her. This is pure storygaming, the shitty watch mechanic thrown in the trash where it belongs and we can go back to normal people timekeeping, the world is populated by various quirky NPCs with fetch-quests, and the characters must stumble between them while either tricking them or figuring out what the fuck they want Sierra adventure game style, while avoiding hazards that eat up shards of time. Eat size mushrooms, drink tea, storygame heavily. You get paid out in chess pieces for solving many of the quests, which you can trade with the Visceral Vicountess and her retainer for DIEGETIC ADVANCEMENT (blooms that give permanent abilities) provided you impress her with a gay little story about what you have learned about yourself. Fuck the regular game, everything is custom magic items and talking to quirky NPCS now. The difference between something like this and say, EX1, is that in EX1 you shift the normal balance in favor of illusions and interaction but its still normal D&D. Here you more or less change it up entirely. This is a bit like announcing that in this section, every interaction shall be resolved via a game of chess. Some might enjoy it but chess is not dnd. It actually makes the game less complex, because you eliminate a lot of approaches and force interaction.

And still there is good game design even here right, there is intelligence behind the godawful change in mechanics (level 4 was getting to be a drag i guess?), different puzzles, a weird sort of ultra-twee wit that probably works if you are into it, and there’s all these different resolution options and alternate ways you can or cannot end the scenario. And then there’s traps, there’s ways to get more time, there’s a bit of ominous lovecraftian terror. Some weapons and items in the other side are ridiculous like the vorpal swords you casually find but you can’t keep them (this is handled in a pretty good way too, with the items floating away when you enter the black pond and go back, but then you can cling to one item but the Viscountess will haunt your dreams until you throw it back, but this would mean you could keep, say, a Vorpal Sword +2 long enough to deal with the wolves etc). Someone made a horrific choice in an adventure but made that horrific choice in a fully committed responsible way, with multiple means of resolving the scenario if you get trapped, with depth, with various permutations etc.

So this is good but flawed and a bit overcooked. I find myself asking why Hexagnome is still using OSE when his approach to design is comprehensive and granular, with all these permutations and variations and different ways the scenario can unfold. I would consider moving to S&W, ACKs or even OSRIC. The alignment interpretation is questionable but I guess it would survive the barebones explanation in OSE and Im not sure what I feel about sending off the kids to the faery lady but here too there’s so many ways the scenario can unfold, up to and including convincing the witch to send her fake-ass wicker children to the Viscountess (which works?) or even killing the Viscountess. I think some of the more practical concerns would be the amount of loot, the occasional softball difficulty, the compulsive tinkering (tink! tink! tink!), the last section, the sense of juggling too many plates at once. But yes, serious attempt, serious game design, actual scenario.

This is high ***, and at least **** if you are storygaming scum (you know who you are).