[Review] Tomb of the Serpent Kings (OSR); Those who would presume to teach…

[Adventure]
Tomb of the Serpent Kings v. 4.0 (2017?)
Skerples
Lvl 1

Tomb of the Serpent Kings is an introductory OSR module that has garnered no small amount of acclaim from different corners of the internet. The great Melan has gone so far as to suckle at its teat and gift it the coveted three out of five that module writers throughout the internet would sell their newborns for. I don’t think it succeeds at what it sets out to do, despite laudable elements.

The point of Tomb of the Serpent Kings is stated in the introduction.

Everyone can name “classic” dungeons—Tomb of Horrors, Barrier Peaks, The Temple of Elemental Evil, etc.—but in order for those adventures to make sense, there needs to be some sort of introduction. Tomb of Horrors and Death Frost Doom are both reactions to something, but what they are reacting to doesn’t really exist as a published product.

It’s like all the adventures we have are Bach concertos. People keep writing amazing works of staggering genius, but someone needs to write a book on how to play the piano.

This dungeon is designed to be “classic” without being full of callbacks and nostalgia. It has some, but not all, of the major tropes. It also has full design notes.

The problem with Tomb of the Serpent Kings is that something is missing in what it is trying to convey. There is an artificiality to TotSK that makes it hard to get invested in anything that is going on.  

The adventure opens without even the courtesy of a paragraph of backstory to justify its existence and just goes in dry and I don’t quite understand why. Over the years we’ve discovered that DnD is more exciting if the players can get invested and a few niggling hints of backstory serve to provide the GM with some co-ordinates with which to place the dungeon in the proper context. Some weak hooks are provided and anyone familiar with Appendix N or video games should be able to cope but its still a shame.

What I do like is that Tomb presents several notes on its basic assumptions, how much gold it assumes is needed to level up a character, how many hit points are assumed, how much damage is standard etc. etc. I cannot for the life of me figure out what Innsmouth crossbreed version of 0e Skerples usually runs with but the notes are very welcome. The habitual pussyfoot ‘if you don’t like it you can change things’ that modules feel they need to include is quickly becoming the OSR equivalent of the ‘no 9 to 5 mentality’ requirement companies put in their dead-end vacancies to pad them out and make them seem like real jobs. It follows this up by providing descriptive pointers for each of its three areas, again, a courtesy that will surely find use in the hands of novice GMs.

Tomb takes pains to divide itself into 3 parts, the third of which is probably the most compelling. The map starts off very linear but soon branches out into an attractive maze of branching corridors and interlocking rooms that looks good and provides manifold different means of tackling the dungeon. If I am not enthusiastic about Tomb as a whole, there are hints of genuine craftsmanship I can appreciate.

Like Tower of the Stargazer, Tomb has extensive design documentation explaining the purpose behind many of its decisions, which makes it supremely easy to review and criticize, for which I am thankful.

The first section is linear, a false tomb constructed over the real one in an effort to fool would-be looters. Clay statues of the extinct serpent men contain trinkets and poison gas. Water damage from leaking has eroded the stone underneath the statue to the point where it reveals the secret passage below, but has somehow preserved its structural integrity to the point where it can still hold the statue. These sorts of odd continuity errors contribute to an artificiality that keeps me from getting into Tomb. It seems constructed with less pretense of reality then the usual fare, like a video game level themed around a tomb. 

After the first section the Tomb opens up and starts introducing random encounters and traps of increasing lethality, pulling surprisingly little punches for an introductory module. One Tomb is trapped with a 4d6 lightning pressure plate. That’s fair, there’s something clearly valuable here. Most of the traps are telegraphed subtly, the gentlemanly thing to do to keep all the PCs on their toes, unless they are not, in which case you are just going to take that pit trap. The snake men didn’t want their sacrifices to run away. In the tomb that they were also using as a sacrificial complex cum alchemy lab with a fake tomb atop of it? Why do I have to walk through the slave room on my way to the Sacrificial Pit?

Encounters are generally colorful but seem designed to disrupt the suspension of disbelief. Fungus Goblin Monsters that have a spawning pit in warrens adjacent to the Tomb, a disguised succubus trying to pull a fast one and a lich. There’s a high level serpent man lich chilling about that has not realized his species has gone extinct (how old is this tomb supposed to be?). There’s a fantastic encounter using a basilisk chained to the ceiling equipped with a visor in a room with several pillars. It’s good but…it’s so manufactured. There’s a room where a large Ogre zombie thing (with three different signature moves) attacks and you can lead him off a ledge and everything. It’s good design on an interactive level but its not woven into the background. It stands out like a sore thumb. Is this a converted Dungeon World module, where all pretense of simulation is abandoned? Something in this feels like a converted Dungeon World module…only I don’t feel like killing myself. Hmn.

Magic items are interesting and varied, very weird and cursed. A ring that turns your eye to glass and allows you to pop it out, a ring that turns your finger into a sort of serpent at the price of possibly losing it. This thing should theoretically be landing and I don’t know why it’s not. Is it Scrapprincess Art? Has my second occupation as a reviewer of old games for the internet made me allergic to Scrapprincess Art?

Pictured: Artist Impression of Xixmanter

The Lich Xiximanter has been experimenting for nine bazillion years yes? So long all trace of his entire civilization has been reduced to a few scattered tombs and he is the only one that has not noticed it, and he can be bargained with for live creatures to distill into his EVUL POTIONS. That’s the only thing he cares about. So my question is has he been down there for nine aeons working on his experiments and is only just now running out of ingredients so he feels the need to trade? He has 20 square feet worth of raw materials to sustain him for all of eternity? He uses some fungus goblins that he caught in the meantime? Has he been doing so for millenia?

And it’s not like this module does not take the time to explain its inner workings, if anything, but every time its mentions something ‘The goblin spawning pit is one of the wizard’s failed experiments in immortality’ I must control an urge to raise my hand ask ‘butwhatabout.’

There’s immortal skeletons covered in orange goo walking about the place that must be disabled somehow. Their immortality has no clear origin. Again, good concept, monsters that have to be taken out with something other then fucking daggers and bows, video-gamey execution straight out of Castlevania.

Tomb of the Serpent Kings mostly succeeds in teaching players about traps, presumably by pushing them into them, teaching them that NPCs are lying whores that will drain your xp (damnit Karen!) and concealing its treasure pretty well. It does a good job of telegraphing its dangers and a fucking rotten job of keeping underlying verisimilitude.

Why is that a problem? Because part of the Tomb is MEANT to teach by looking for things that are out of place or missing and the destruction of verisimilitude interferes with that module. There’s nothing wrong with a funhouse module running on bizarro logic but this is clearly not trying to be that.

Good adventures are about crafting an illusion and getting people invested in the game. Players want to believe you. Most dungeons don’t make sense when you dig deep enough. That’s fine so long as you hide this behind ambiguity, misdirection and open-endedness. A bottomless chasm is a great way of hinting at far larger reaches of space that contain the answers to any possible unanswered questions. Tomb of the Serpent Kings keeps pressing my nose in its unreality with its fucking convoluted video game encounters that should not be there or should be in something much less mundane, and its not distracting me enough to compensate for that. Go full on gonzo or go for restraint, don’t try to do one and do the other. 100 bushels of Rye is a style. Liberation of the Demon Slayer is a style. This is a clusterfuck. In his efforts to evade anything that smacked of classicism Skerples really needed to establish a consistent tone to make this work.

I am not going to get into an old man’s tirade about leaving the central treasure room unstatted, or that you can betray your friends for power is a lesson for first level characters or how the true name of the Succubus is mentioned in her description but not in the room where it can be found. The bottom line is that Skerples has a firm grasp on the gaming components of a dungeon, understands how to use traps and has made some good encounters (I am intrigued by the Basilisk and the Succubus encounter) but should work on working those into the dungeon so it feels like an organic whole, not several good but random set pieces bolted onto an empty framework. I feel like playing Castlevania now. **