[Review] The Hole in the Oak (OSE); Adult Swim

[Adventure]
The Hole in the Oak (2019)
Gavin Norman (Necrotic Gnome)
Lvl 1-2

I need a palette cleanser after braving such soaring heights as Caverns of Thracia. The Hole in the Oak by Gavin Norman is a widely popular flagship adventure for Old School essentials and was included in the april kickstarter. I have seen it recommended as a good starting adventure and while I agree that it is quite good, it is not without its flaws.

Underneath a great tree stump is ‘a section of the Mythical Underworld’, a dungeon complex once held by an order of rangers and their lizardman foes, now inhabited by evil gnomes, troglodytes and all manner of mysterious undead. Backstory or premise is sparse, more implied then mentioned outright. You are here because that’s the adventure we are running tonight, also treasure? Enter the PCs.

Hole in the Oak is high in charm, low in versimilitude, something closer to the wild days of OD&D then the more restrained, coherent era of AD&D. The adventure is more concerned with properly adhering to dungeon crawling procedures then any sort of fantastical emulation, and the result is something that is highly playable and might offer occasional delight but has the feel of an episode of Rick & Morty. It feels almost impressionistic at times, it out and out tells you to make up some details about certain elements of the dungeon if it catches the PCs attention. Various factions inhabit the dungeon and have complicated relationships but the place is really a bit too cramped to accommodate 5 disparate groups living 20 feet away from eachother. There is a sort of hyper-realism that might delight some and turn off others. Polite tea-drinking cannibal goat-men, chaotic gnomes worshipping a blood-drinking tree-stump demi-god, fire beetles locked in a mating dance, a mutated ogre, a weird technological control room and a vast bronze idol in an inexplicable jungle area guarded by anthropophagic babies.

The map is good and highly legible. Branching passageways, secret rooms that may be discerned by diligent mapping, an investigative 6th sense or homing in on odd details and there are even occasional quasi-natural hazards like slippery floors, grasping roots, bats and an underground river to top it off. 60 encounters total, with an encounter density that is closer to 1 in 2 rooms then the usual 1 in 3. The underground river provides a possible route to further dungeon levels, which is appreciated.

Rumors are decent but not spectacular, serving more as hooks then actionable information for the party to act upon. Random encounters are half monsters and half weird stuff, but I appreciate that nearly all the monsters encountered are from distinct areas in the map and can be depleted, a rare bit of versimilitude that is probably necessary.

Encounters cover a broad spectrum of interaction and avoid the mistake of including only combat. Most intelligent opponents at least pretend to be friendly, ghouls might pretend to be dead and then leap up and ambush the party, you stumble upon a sleeping, mutated ogre and his cages full of mutants, a wizard skulks about in the dark and the shrine to a reptile god is lazily guarded by 4 6 HD tuatara’s. The aforementioned faction play means you might get some actual use out of the reaction table for once. The one thing that is notably missing is an order of battle or intelligent tactics for something like the Evil Gnomes, which would have helped considering they occupy 10 of the 60 rooms and are quite numerous and well organized. I would have liked to see maybe a prisoner you can free? Henchmen are always in short supply in oldschool games.

Despite its cartoonish trappings Hole in the Oak does not fuck around. Well-telegraphed haymakers alternate with occasionally brutal encounters. A secret tomb with a wight, a trapped chest with flesh-melting gas, a 4th level wizard with a sleep spell, a mind-controlling evil tree-stump; encounters that are deadly if engaged without caution. A lot of beginner adventures check their blows too often and end up becoming boring. Hole in the Oak seems like it would be dangerous but exciting, the right balance. Good set ups too; You see a jungle room, with a great bronze statue of a smiling fat man, with a platinum chalice standing on a pedestal in a circle of sunlight. Yeah you are going to get fucked up if you try to grab that. Or one where you stare into a mirror and you see the eyes of a huntsman, and this activates an entry on the random encounter table where you encounter a spectral huntsman.

Treasure is customized, pretty good and too generous. I know most low level adventures make the mistake of being too stingy but 3 Troglodytes with a hoard of almost 1000 gp is too high. Even 7 ghouls with something on the order of a thousand gp + a magic dagger seems too high. I think in other adventures the treasure was generally more dispersed, so you would get a dripfeed of treasure every once in a while and then a major hoard once you had cut and carved your way through multiple encounters. Hole in the Oak is a bit more free with its gifts. Magical items are occasionally interesting and charming. My favorite is a ring that raises your Con by 1 and gives you the ability to increase the fermentation of yeast by a factor of 20? What about a horn that summons a loyal hound for 1 hour. I appreciate the occasional subversion so finding a hidden closet with nothing but jars of teeth and insect husks is a nice nod.

Another nice nod to traditional dungeon crawling design is the introduction of the weird. Strange black fruits, do you eat them? Weird holes in the walls, do you stick your hand in. Faces in the gnarled roots that can be bribed in order to gain information about the rest of the dungeon. This is the sort of stuff that is bread and butter for oldschool games, almost like a gamble, and its good to see it implemented properly. Mörk Borg always fucks it up by making all the weird negative, here it’s unpredictable, it might be good, it might be bad. Perfect. And then you have random events or little hints in the dungeon that lead PCs to certain areas. Also good.

The dreaded OSE subliterate format rears its head once more but somehow the keywords, arrows and sentences work infinitely better in the hands of Gavin Norman working with clearly delineated spaces then they do with Luka Rejec desperately figuring out what things to highlight in an abstract space. Norman manages to extract critical details, meaning we don’t have to burn precious processing cycles unzipping the room in our head during the game, we can parse the information quite cleanly. I am still not, and might never be, convinced this format beats out natural language wielded effectively but the result is quite useable.

Hole in the Oak is no work of profound genius, but as far as a solid introduction to Oldschool D&D is concerned it is quite fit for purpose. While it does not win out to B1, possibly the finest introductory module of all time, unlike something like Tomb of the Serpent King, it manages to give a pretty good cross-section of what Dungeons & Dragons is about, it does communicate the type of wonder oldschool DnD is about, and it doesn’t coddle the players or treat them like morons. Though not quite to my taste, this would be a fairly suitable introduction to D&D for a younger audience. You get the idea Gavin Norman understands D&D, and is not just aping Bryce’s review standards. I would rate it a high ***.