[TenfootpOSR 03] Dungeon #41; Mushroom Band

Inspired by a recommendation of the Great Melan. As per usual I did the entire magazine. Some decent fluff pieces, two garbage adventures, a nice Spelljammer one and a very good comedy adventure. Not a bad haul.

This issue starts with Adam C. Chun from Texas asking if they can please fuck off with all this story stuff and make adventures that are just locales that can be dropped in one’s home campaign, proving that even as the edifice of DnD was levelled and paved over by the grinding steamwaltz of history, there were some who still kept the old ways. Also a passionate plea from Tom from Athens, Georgia to please keep your filthy psionics in Athas and nowhere else. All in all, there’s hope for DnD.

Deadly Treasure
AD&D 1e
Coby W. Hedberg
Lvl 10+

This is it. The module that broke Bryce’s brain and the Great Melan slyly recommended, perhaps to test my mettle. For those halcyon junior highschool days? Perfect. For the rest? Enough to slay any mortal man.

A 23rd level Wizard decides lichdom isn’t for him and instead elects to spend his remaining wealth to fuck with any adventurers that try to loot his tomb before killing himself in it. 4chan the magic-user. If this was some sort of meta Aguirre, Blood Meridian-esque meditation on the nihilistic futility of living in a D&D world then it would be brilliant, instead we are merely forced to conclude that only the greatest assholes can become high level wizards. The wizard is kind enough to give a notice to any adventurers that want to break in in the nearby village, setting us up for a perfect farce that never pays off.

The tomb is basically a straight line filled with bullshit encounters. The trick here is that all the guardians use magic items from Tome of Magic, Unearthed Arcana and the DMG with limited charges in their defence of the tomb, meaning that your reward will be directly proportional to how quickly you switch to the tactic of preventively cloudkilling any room you unlock, before throwing in a silence, throw some clairaudience/clairvoyance, send in the summoned creatures, and then cast invisibility on your thief, who has already had detect invisible cast on him. Add extra steps to taste. If you like that style of play then by golly this might be the module for you.

So this thing is a peace of shit, with bullshit combat encounters, but rather then point that out I want to take a look at the difference between this module and Tomb of Horrors, since one clearly takes inspiration from the other. So like in Tomb of Horrors the Tomb of Zardaz has been protected with wish spells so you can’t use Passwall, Teleport, and Detect Magic. Fucking Detect Magic is banned? Okay. Where the prohibition in ToH was light and specific to some obstacles, DT just throws in blanket prohibitions because go to hell. Ham-handed.

The premise in ToH is intriguing and ominous, almost meta, and Acererak’s taunting and cruel trickery draws you further in. DT is stark and bland like a wallmart parking lot, the premise is banal and the dungeon exists only as a series of bullshit challenges, bound demons, a Simulacrum and undead armed with magic items, coupled with traps.

Tomb hits you hard and then carefully racks up the tension, introducing multiple paths, dead-ends, secret doors, cryptic hints, fake hints and misdirection. DT is a straight line, no mystery, door after door, tunnel after tunnel, combat/trap based on book items, next. No riddles to break up the monotony, no wonder or unique encounters, some Yugoloth’s, which you don’t see everyday, but who cares? Wights with Dust of Disappearance. Invisible Imps that drop a Daern’s Instant Fortress on you as you walk under them. The difficulty doesn’t really vary that much, though the encounter with the wizard’s simulacrum might try the patience of some.

The room at the end might win some sort of award for the longest boxed text ever made. At least you are well rewarded in the end, but there’s so many lines of ‘Zardazz used temporal stasis on the paladin and then flesh to stone and then he used a wish.’ There’s a way to do Deathtrap dungeons and that way is finesse, a saucy wink, some pizzazz, a nice variation on the type of encounters, some…mystery? This thing telegraphs what it is immediately and you are just going to roll up your eyes and go FUCK IT. Unless you thoroughly enjoy deathtrap DnD, a * and even if you do there are MANY adventures better then this one. One Fucking Star.

The Well of Lord Barcus
Side-Trek (AD&D)
Roger Baker
Lvl 2 – 5

Fluff. Are your standards for encounters that they be challenging as games, or is merely being interesting scenery enough? A 2-page side-trek, most of it backstory. An enchanted wishing well on the site of a fallen hero. A curse on all who steal from it. The spirit of an unlucky thief seeking to be laid to rest. Window-dressing but not without merit, the table of random effects is good and the thief trying to end his curse is charming. As written its not challenging but exploring it should be mildly diverting. Plunk it down somewhere. **

A Way With Words
D&D Basic
Teeuwyn Woodruff & Tim Beach
Lvl 1 – 3

A comedy adventure, 10 pages, 3 encounters, 1 good joke gaaaaah. They should have called it Travesty in Thunder Rift. Humor in D&D is best interjected against a backdrop of normality. A farce is hard to pull off, and requires writing. A POS gnome had his book of shitty poetry stolen by a bard. The entire summary could have been a paragraph. The wretched PCs, unwitting stooges in this debacle, are forced to assist this odious presence and tolerate its autistic preening for mere pocket change while the GM chuckles to his own amusement. Turns out the bard had it stolen by Kobolds! I did insulting rewards once in Carcosa but its important that you do it after the fact and you have the NPC deliver it as though it were a gift of immense benevolence while it is actually a ridiculous amount; i.e. 1 gp for a kidnapped princess or something.

There’s two encounters here that sort of work. There’s an encounter with Vampire Moss that drains hp if you go near in a swampy area, its weird and strange and the PCs have to think quick! Then there’s an encounter involving logs in the water that are actually Crocodiles, but the GM has to get all anal about what logs they want to examine and has them roll secret intelligence checks and if they fail they still think they are logs. Dude.

The encounter with the kobolds is pretty funny. The Kobolds think the book of terrible poetry is a spellbook and throw bundles of flour and sand at the PCs while chanting Poetry at them. I think I’d break and crack a smile before breaking out the weapons and executing the little bastards. Treasure is low but its 3 encounters. Much too long for what it is. **

Mammoth Problems
Spelljammer(AD&D)
Lawrence M. Kapture
Lvls 8 – 10

The first Spelljammer adventure I’ve ever read and it’s…pretty interesting. I’m not super familiar with spelljammer so take with a grain of salt. The PCs encounter a floating dreadnought (a Mammoth) from the Unhuman Wars centuries ago. Its haunted by the ghosts of the Ogre Mages that were spelljamming it (you need wizards to propel the magic ships through space in spelljammer) when an elven mage teleported in and destroyed all of them.

The ruined vessel is a decent 19 room affair, mostly nonlinear, with the ghosts functioning as intelligent adversaries and setting traps, using hit and run or animated undead to fight the PCs. There’s other hazards like a room full of giant rats, or the odd magic piece of equipment or trap to keep everyone invested. There’s some decent foreshadowing and complexity, an extra faction is introduced to bother the PCs later on. Description is irritating (this was once…) etc. but not excruciating. There’s a good magic item, a door that prevents a room from being entered via knock, plane shift, gaseous form etc. etc. that represents a much needed innovation on the higher level GM font. Treasure is decent enough.

Monsters in Spelljammer are still fresh so we get weird Jammerghosts, animated rats, a plasman, undead ogres, an amulet with a bound soul etc. As a bonus, options are discussed for salvaging the Mammoth, which should be the real haul. I think this might be your average night of Spelljamming. ***

Hopeful Dawn
AD&D 2e (Greyhawk)
Gary Lai
Levels 3 – 6

An honest to god S&S adventure, brimming with Greyhawk lore. It is the day of Hopeful Judgement in Veluna, when demons are said to prowl the streets and carry off wretched sinners. A band of evil thieves called the Hazenbane disguises itself as Demons and prepares for a night of thievery and some of the ole’ ultraviolence. As a bonus, this entire adventure has no magic in it excepting a sword of the planes at the end, all the thieves and fighters have optional stats from complete fighter and thieves handbook. Reminds me of WHFRPG, in a pretty good way. The adventure mentions that all the baddies have sworn off magic for ideological reasons, a silly contrivance that is necessary because by then the assumed amount of magic in D&D was so high a mid-tier thieves guild needs an excuse not to have several magic items.

The execution has the usual Dungeon pet peeve, verbosity, coupled with lengthy description. The description itself is good, all the NPCs are distinct (the leader has a brand on his cheek!) and have a backstory and motivation but since you are going to end up kicking the shit out of most of them this is largely wasted. The adventure proper starts in an inn after a priest has explained that they should repent and most of Veluna locks its doors, scared shitless. The PCs hear screaming, there’s a spy in the inn, and from thereon its a chase through the city as the PCs uncover what is actually going on.

There’s some bullshit with some of the thieves ‘not responding to interrogation’ and I’m not quite sure how the upper floor of the Thieves’s hide-out works but its several encounters that are interesting (ambushes, people setting loose horses, war dogs etc.) followed by an attack on the thieves’s lair which is one big gauntlet of nasty mundane traps followed by an ambush. I want to like the shit out of this but so much of the (actually decent) NPCs are wasted in fights. I’m not quite sure how the entire chase goes given you have a city of 10.000 with just 6 locations. I mean there’s good stuff here like clues on the encounters, there’s no magic lamp posts and the men dressing up like demons is such an S&S thing to do. Its heart is in the right place. **

Old Man Katan and the Mushroom Band
AD&D
Ted James Thomas Zuvich
Lvls 1-6

Another comedy adventure in a swamp. A good comedy adventure in a swamp. Why does this one rock and A Way With Words suck? Let me count yon ways.

The adventure begins as a complete farce and it knows it. An old half-deaf hermit is taking a bath while being plagued by singing mushrooms and he needs YOU to retrieve his clothes. There’s volumes of boxed text, but genuinely funny instead of annoying. Call it a character piece. As the characters contemplate what is going on the plot thickens and it turns out there is something not quite right in the swamp.

The interaction is really what sells what would otherwise be a sort of pointcrawl in a large swampy area. There’s all these things to discover that do not necessarily have anything to do with the direct adventure but make the world of Old Man Katan’s Swamp feel alive. A sentient Mimic Boat. The ridiculous antagonist behind the plague of Giant Mosquitos. Interaction is rewarded by wonder and whimsey. Its also not a cakewalk, occasionally throwing pretty deadly antagonists at you, especially if you run it for a level 1-3 party as the game might admit is possible. There’s something about throwing a fucking Will O’ the Wisp on the random encounter table for a low level comedy adventure that could probably be completed in a single 8 hour session that doesn’t sit right with me.

Another point in this adventure’s favor; You can’t bash your way through it, you have to find a creative solution. Does anyone remember that? Do you find yourself reciting memorized equipment tables in dreams? Do you remember the Hit Dice of an Owlbear but not your cousin’s birthday? When was the last time you were given bonus XP for helping a group of mushrooms sing in tune? Give this one a spin and remember the wild, wacky side of D&D. ***

Post-Sleep Rumination Correction: Busted Down Ole’ Man Katan to a ***.