[No-Artpunk] #4 The Lair of the Brain Eaters

The Lair of the Brain Eaters
D.M. Ritzlin
AD&D 1e
Lvl 1 – 3
13 pages

A contribution by none other then the esteemed owner of DMR books himself and based on the short story of the same name [1], The Lair of the Brain Eaters reads like a spiritual successor of Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine, pitting the heroes against all manner of degenerate mutants, ghouls, flabby naked necromancers, rats, perilous pits and fire-breathing rats. It is Sword & Sorcery, of the slightly disgusting and horny Bronze-Age variety, and with a sexy cover on it and some art it would be good enough to publish by itself. I am blessed with the quality thus far on display.

The necromancer Obb Nyreb founded a cult based on acquiring sacred knowledge by the consumption of brains dubbed the Yoinog. His idea does no quite work and the forced consumption of cerebrums turns his unwilling followers into imbecilic cannibal mutants. The party must venture down into the chaos-tained caverns underneath the graveyard of the city of Desazu, once dedicated to the death-goddess Veshakul-a. The PCs have been hired to fuck him up.

With that slightly understrength hook we are propelled head-first into the adventure, given 8 hooks in the flavorful pen of Master Ritzlin himself in the voice of the seedy locals of this grimy metropolis. It communicates flavor fairly well and sets the mood, and behind the flavor there are some subtle hints about both the dangers of the place, as well as a nod that, if followed up thoroughly, will reveal a secret second entrance into the dungeon proper. A nice touch.

“Last month a pair of lovers snuck off for a little tryst in the woods behind the graveyard, or so I’ve been told. No one’s seen them since.” (True)

No time is wasted. Random encounter table, a zesty d8 with 1 in 6 chance every turn, just how we like to see it. Little cosmetic details like having skeletons with the top half of their skulls removed, or a one-off encounter like a Ghoul that has absorbed the memories of its last victim and is now strolling through the caverns in search of his lover are always appreciated, as is the way the tomb is entered; Hidden studs on one of the skulls in the mausoleum, if the right one is pressed a doorway opens, the wrong one triggers poison gas. Excellent. Making a cool entry-piece into your dungeon is often bypassed and for shame! Set the mood immediately!

Lair of the Brain Eaters is going to be another one of those adventures where I must absolutely scrape the bottom of the barrel to find a lot of mean things to say about it because for its weight-class it has very few flaws or omissions and does a little bit of everything. The map is suitably winding without being absolutely desolate, there are some interesting natural features like narrow tunnels, chasms, the odd Bottomless Pit and both a secret door AND a tunnel hidden by an illusion. Someone has been doing their homework! This is supplemented with some liberal sprinklings of encounters that are mostly there for atmosphere, like a weird alien plant that seems to grow artificial brains, or a cave filled with disturbed graffiti.

Alternative means of egress, I hope you like traps!

Encounters come across as very measured and precise. Precisely enough enemy variation without going overboard, an opportunity for stealth and deception added in one place, then a set of skeletal guardians that can be bypassed if the right sign is learned from their fat perverted master, a naked sexy red-head lady that knows most of the layout of the map here! then a hidden ghoul lair 70 feet down the 300 ft. pit, it’s all just enough. We are almost getting comfortable. And then it throws a bastard trick at you.

Fire-breathing Rats. Having already expended his single monster slot on the degenerate mutant Yoinog, Ritzlin cheekily grinds across the limit for acceptable modification by introducing a (mercifully rare) variety of giant rat that looks exactly like the normal variety EXCEPT IT HAS A 2D4 BREATH WEAPON WITH 5′ RANGE, SAVE VS HALF. Perfect. Just mean enough. When was the last time your players inadvertently shit themselves? I notice a lot of neophytes are afraid to throw an artfully concealed wrench but every once in a while it is actually totally fair to throw something nasty at the players, provided you don’t overdo it. For a party of levels 1-3 it’s JUST mean enough.

The sinister agency behind this place is more gross then imposing but it works, and he should prove a formidable challenge without being entirely insurmountable.

Nyreb’s physical appearance is as repulsive and off-putting as his behavior. He usually
dresses himself only in a stained loincloth and his magical girdle, disdaining more
conventional garments that would cover his undulating layers of sweat-drenched flab. His oddly-shaped head lacks most of its hair, and his sickly pale skin sports many a purple blotch. He speaks in a surprisingly shrill voice.

Trap, trick and hazard use is about on par for a module of this scope and size. The aforementioned entrance trap has the right amount of viciousness built in without being a total asspull. There is a cryptic trap too where a Wooden board is seemingly placed in the middle of the room and if the characters walk around it they sink through the floor and are lost in time and space, which is also great, and if you find a rare secret door it is actually possible to find the Doorway to Nothingness and retrieve the characters, although the chances of doing so are admittedly remote. The alternative entrance into the necromancer’s sanctum is very short, and is composed exclusively of weird trick shit like a gauntlet, so I also love it. You are surrounded by weird black flames and you hear a voice “Only the faithful may pass unscathed, whom do you serve?” Did you pay attention during the rumor part? There’s two other traps like it, more akin to riddles, requiring player skill and ingenuity to solve. Or a statue of the goddess with her arms crossed over her chest, an altar before her, and each hand holding a human femur and then the inscription “show proper reverence.” And one femur has an eye carved on it and is actually a wand of magic detection and the other is actually an elaborate scroll case. Rocks!

Treasure placement is good, no freebies, concealment without contrivance, and flavorful where it needs to be. Reskinning potions as enchanted brains is a pretty good gimmick. Finding a golden tooth with an embedded diamond in the mouth of a skull is dope, as is finding a booklet entitled ‘The Six Hymns to Veshkul-A’ interspersed with normal currency in a way that I dig. It’s like the author understands making nice treasure is a feature but doesn’t devote more time to it then he needs to. Total treasure in the caves is something like 10000 gp, some magic items included too, but it is very unlikely all of it will be found, as Gygax indeed intended.

As far as a straightforward adventure for low levels goes, this is good stuff. There is not much in the way of factions or a great deal of complexity, although there is a prisoner to rescue, but it has such a good grip of the fundamentals it doesn’t feel stale or dumb. My only challenge to Mr. Ritzlin would be to increase his ambitions and see what he can do with a higher level range, but this is fine work, and I am grateful that the contest has seen it brought to light.

19 to go and we are already batting a thousand. Will we surpass No Artpunk 1?

[1] You can read it in the collection Necromancy in Niltzira, which I happen to own now that I think of it