[No-Artpunk] #18 Under Mt. Peikon

Under Mt. Peikon
Wagner
AD&D
Lvl 3 – 8
??? Pages (wordpad does not have page breaks by default)

The anonymous author of the Inverted Pyramid of Hankjawin strikes again! Who is this mysterious module maker? Can anyone stop this madman? Since I am batting zero for 1 already with my attempt to unmask various competitors (for example, Kent is clearly the product of a sort of butthead-like fugue state J.B. reaches after his fifteenth goblet of communion wine) I will not indulge in any more irresponsible conjecture as to the secret identity of the author.

Demented creativity is the operative word, though I am pleased to note that my commentary of last year’s entry has had a suitable totemic effect. If Hankjawin was raw creativity burning with all the untempered fury of a collapsing star, Mt. Peikon succeeds at being, if not the poster child for adherence to contest stipulations, then certainly a playable and downright fascinating advocate for home-cooking. They don’t make em like this in the OSE mines that is for damn sure.

Picture a dwarven prison, hollowed out of a mountain, constructed around a cylinder of impenetrable black material, made to house their worst criminals and staffed by Priests of the grim dwarven god of dungeons and artifice. Time and erosion weaken its defences, and a new inmate, suffering from a terrible curse, causes havoc and mayhem. In the meantime, a party of men descend from the top via airship, and a terrible monster has wormed its way inside through cracks under the earth. Enter the PCs.

This one is a little nuts but I low-key love it. I cannot suppress my poet’s joy at raw unleashed creativity. Multiple hooks allow for different starting areas in the dungeon, possibly leading to a radically different experience. Anything from entering via the mountain top, replacing the adventurers on the airship, to coming in as lost adventurers from the caverns below via underground river works. The level recommendation of 3-8 is probably too broad but I can see something like 3-6 work here reasonably well. With that let me introduce the map, or probably more appropriately THE MAP.

And then your jaw goes slack for a second before you scoff and say, ‘But prince, what is this Artpunk nonsense. That map isn’t possibly made for actual play.’ And then you see this.

And whatever the cryptic ‘one movement for a human’ is will sort itself out and can be re-engineered from the actual measurements of the thing. Yes it works. Yes those are multiple entrances into the accursed place, with splendid, patrician use of verticality to bolster the whole. Cue Space Odyssey monolith music. Magnificent map. Weird fucking elevators, rivers, ladders, barriers too.

Can the PCs overcome not just the deadly peril of the Dwarven Gaolers, the Priests of Laduger, each imbued with a single spell and armed with magical weaponry (jesus christ what?), the Night Dwarves, the unleashed power of the Death foam but also myriad intruders; The corrupted druid Hortegrammos and his retinue of bird-faced harpies whose songs only work on birds (yes I know how that sounds just go with it), or a party of sacred warriors from the nearby village, seeking to learn the fate of a lost child, protected by a sacred ritual of ever-burning flame. Will they reach the root cause of the monsters invading via the tunnels, the terrible victim of Dracomorphosis, a monstrous illness that befalls dwarves that dig too deep?

That hissing sound you heard was the contest stipulations flash-vaporising upon contact with this module. Mr. Wagner is possessed not only of an astonishingly fecund imagination but of a keen legalistic intellect. Technically Mt. Peikon has only one new creature, the Dwarf Dragon, a 9 HD shape-shifting behemoth possessed of spell like abilities, a breath weapon that spits oil, a cthonic form of telepathy that allows it to see all inside areas for OH I DON’T KNOW 10 MILES and the ability to hypnotize anyone who puts their hand to the fucking stone. This curse is so hideous it is KNOWLEDGE OF ITS VERY EXISTENCE IS OFFICIALLY SUPRESSED BY ALL MAJOR DWARVEN RELIGIONS. NOT ENOUGH EXCLAMATION POINTS. There are, however, and I am keeping count 1) a druid with altered abilities teaming up with harpies with altered abilities who can summon an evil night spirit (a Bodak) 2) Night-dwarves, which are dwarves with the ability to polymorph into inanimate objects, 3) there are globs of the Death Foam (a brand new environmental hazard distilled from clams??? used by the prison to quench an outbreak AND YES YOU CAN GAIN ACCESS TO THE MACHINERY AND FLOOD 1/3 OF IT WITH MATTER-EATING DEATH-FOAM) which operate as Grey oozes with a deadlier (?) touch, 4) there are Clerics of Laduger who each have a single spell from their head priest and operate as fighters, 5) a troll that has been touched by Death Foam and now no longer regenerates but bleeds death foam if hurt and so on.

But other then that, how was the play Ms. Braun? I LOVED IT. Well, wait up. Organization could be much tighter. There are two random encounter tables, one for the original inhabitants and the complex and one for the hideous monsters of death pouring through the tunnels from room 11 where A GIANT PURPLE WORM, triggering the alarm and getting part of the complex flooded with death foam, and one of them has entries like Dwarves tee hee, most NPCs and the various parties that have also come to explore the damned complex and which are meant to be depletable if I interpret them correctly and the other has fun things like 20-40 GOBLINS, CRYSMALS, THOUGHT EATER, SNYADS (ff!) and ANOTHER PURPLE WORM and I don’t quite know when to roll what. In addition, thought the Dwarf-dragon is assuredly behind everything, a paragraph on his effects would have been nice. You have an effect for the TIME-TRAVELLING OUT OF PHASE WIZARD EXPLORING THE COMPLEX WITH SUMMONED MONSTERS after all. Organization is sort of ramshackle but with the general chaos infecting the complex this is somewhat believable, and some checkpoints are manned and defended intelligently.

Speaking of which, this is an example of a perfectly normal encounter (every room has handdrawn art) that is quite good. Next time try to consider what happens to people falling in the river, but otherwise this is good. You find this often, a lot of time has been spent considering why things are there (at times too much), and intelligent creatures are never without motivation. I feel this is a style that helps if there is a lot of interaction, which, to the module’s credit, it does try to facilitate. Take something like this.

It’s a little disorganized but it does contain most of the information you require. Or another part where there is a Black Mesa style military elevator operated by pulleys guarded by a group of dwarves that have prepared wooden cages filled with fucking rust monsters. Other groups tend to have an agenda or a reason, but the description can be tighter. There is at times not enough attention paid to how the players will interact with something. It’s a river, okay, what happens if you fall in or try to ford it? There is a room filled with coal that is kept continually burning to feed the Bound 16 HD Fire Elemental that powers the strange Mortal Kombat 2 style stone spheres that serve as elevators and you could probably put that out, or you could unleash the maddened fire elemental (thereby disabling the elevators) and have it rampage through the complex looking for the killer and presumably burning everything in its way. Okay, what happens if I put out that fire? What happens if I move in the room? Interaction with sentient creatures is usually handled reasonably well, it’s the interaction with inanimate objects that sometimes needs a little work. As an example there’s a room with a grell presiding over its larvae in a pool of slime but its not automatically hostile, has no treasure (?), and if you communicate with it it will warn you of the telepathic influence of the Dwarf-dragon, though it does not know its source.

Treasure, well, it’s a bit of a mess. Occasionally we get damn near appropriate treasure, properly hidden too, although the gold is very low (and it would be because of the wide level range) and it is a bit heavy on the unique magical items for a party of level 3-8. But then the druid has nothing, or the Grells, or the mundane Dwarf guards. I’d be suprised if an enterprising party can squeeze together 10.000 gp out of this adventure and just by reading it now I realize that the Prison also has a form of defence where there are several brothers of Laduger standing by, and if the lower levels fall, they will pour Decanters of Endless waters down a well and drown everyone there. Put stuff like this in a paragraph above the room key, so the GM is always aware of it. Make a seperate section on how the Complex as a whole responds to intruders, or, like a programming exercise, set the trigger for flooding the complex in a specific room or set of rooms so it is easy to follow. To give you an example this is the rival adventuring party.

I suspect the low gp totals are an artifact of playing primarily 2e. Consider adding something like hit point totals or giving them some exceptional abilities. Also those are a robot and a custom form of repeater crossbow I believe 😛

There are plenty of fascinating entries like a hallway with fake doors, a hidden shrine to Abbathor with the head priest with a checkerboard floor either color of which he can decide to make permeable, causing people to fall down (falling height not noted but its high) to the floor below, a giant stone head with the ball prison serving as a disposal facility for the Dwarf-Dragons via a breach high up in the impenetrable cylinder. I feel I could almost do a room by room overview and it would be captivating, but we have limited time.

This has the potential to be very good and unlike last year’s Hankjawin, I don’t believe a great deal of work would have to be done to get it in playable shape, it is really sort of there already. It would be a matter of codifying the way the complex responds to intruders, tightening up some of the environmental effects, clarifying how the random encounters would have to be used, and so on. Here are my major points of critique.

* Treasure is low for a party of 3-8 on the one hand, and too many magic items on the other
* It operates entirely on its own plane with almost callous disregard for the strictures of DnD (and by extension my poor contest strictures). A level 4 high priest can forge +2 magic weaponry for all the monk brothers, everything has custom powers and so on. That is exciting but at the same time, it sort of fucks people up if it is used too often. Breaking the rules is okay on rare occasion, as an exception or surprise, but if one does it on a grand scale there is a procedure or delineation that must be followed. If everything is unique, players can never prepare or anticipate, or develop a frame of reference. Rampant magic weapon use by the enemy should probably be avoided, or preceded with the extremely cowardly non-magical +2 and then you make it some sort of rare ore or pillar material or something.
* It is pretty chaotic. There are many things going on, invading forces, telepathic dwarf-dragon influencing his gaolers, the ghost of a murdered child looking for its killer, monsters flooding in, the goal’s protection systems having flooded part of the dungeon etc. etc. The chaos makes it feel very lively but that means that some organization or procedure is needed to sort of handle the chaos and make it possible for the GM to run.
* How the final encounter unfolds is not quite clear to me. How do the adventurers even find the Dwarf-Dragon? Will it come down if some of the priests are slain? Very interesting.
* Level range of 3-8 is…well probably fair given how widely the random encounters vary in strength, and how the party is going to tackle things. Still I think anyone stepping into Mt. Peikon without at least 5 levels under their belt is going to get smeared across the corridors pretty soon.
* Some rooms run into 4 paragraphs of text, which can happen for very complex reasons but is not often justified. Watch excess verbiage and try to rein it in. The Hallway of Entrance is a good example of a room that is actually the correct length, as it describes 11 doors, most of which are trapped and fake. Conversely, the Barracks of Laduger has this as the second paragraph:

The room has a breach into ROOM 9 like temple of Abbathor does, but it has been almost colpetly sealed. Only a well-like hole remains, from which the monk-brothers listen to hall below, and hear any loud commotion which may happen there. They do it with a giant, ear-shaped apparatus – from which multiple fishing lines dangle from. These lines amplify sound, allowing a listener to hear everything that happens below as if he was standing in the room. There is however, only a 50% chance that the device is manned by a monk-brother, due to general crisis going around. The other machine by the wellhole is a giant, downward-shaped tuba, that amplifies speakers voice. It is used to warn guards of deathfoam machines activation. using it however takes away the speaker’s voice after they have spoken. On the side of this machine, on special golden tray lies a Decanter of Endless waters (DMG, p. 142) that monk-brothers use to provide themselves with liquids. under the tray is a vast collection of herbs that are used in dwarven art of cold-tea making (worth 800 g for dwarwen enthusiast of this art). In case of dwarf-dragon outbreak, the monk-brothers will also use the decanter to drown the lower parts of complex, so that escaping dwarf-dragons may not escape to lower levels. This is however done as a last resort, and only if the guards of lower level are proven to be defeated to last dwarf or turned traitorous.

Which probably could be tightened up.

There is a well-like hole in the southwest corner of the room. Above it is placed a giant ear-trumpet, from which dangle multiple lines into the hole, a downward-shaped tuba and a golden tray (worth 150 gp) on which is placed a decanter of endless water. Anyone putting his ear on the trumpet can hear anything going on in room 12 as if he were standing in the room. Anyone speaking into the tuba can be heard throughout the lower complex (e.g. rooms 4-12), though he will be unable to speak afterward for 1d6 turns. Under the gold tray is a great collection of rare dwarven tea-herbs (worth 800 gp to a dwarven enthusiast of the art)

There is a 50% a Monk-brother is manning the post because of the general confusion. He will use the horn to warn any of the guards in the lower complex when the Death-foam will be employed. To prevent the Dwarf Dragon from escaping or if the lower levels have fallen, the Monk will use the Decanter of Endless water to flood the lower levels [something something 7-15, include some description of how many turns it would take for this process to resolve]. This is done as a last resort.

And so on.

This is what I really liked.
* The map is magnificent, and does fall into actually useful territory if you get the scale right.
* There is a wild creative energy to this that is great if channelled properly. A time-travelling out of phase wizard with a custom spell, the death foam, weird evil dwarf god temples etc. etc. Good use of extant monsters, rust monsters in wooden cages, decanter of endless water death trap, troll breaking through the walls trying to capture people etc. etc.
* There is an underlying (if at times slightly demented) organization and logic to the complex. It works by its own rules and exists as a place in itself. This extends to the inhabitants, who exist as creatures with goals rather then blobs of hp to impede progress. There is a PURPOSE to this place and that purpose is being kept secret and must be hidden.
* The environment was very interactive: things could be set free, extinguished, disabled, and you can flood the complex and kill a lot of inhabitants, which is no small luxury considering some of the monsters on the Deep random encounter table. Plentiful factions should keep it very fresh.

As a last idle notion, I think the fiery interior of the Cylinder would make for an exciting, if very perilous, entry into some sort of hidden hollow world where the Dwarf-dragons have been banished, and must contend with any other inhabitants. Very cool. On the verge of disqualification (yes Becker we know) and the fundamentals could be tighter but very cool. Praise the gods that Weirdo DnD is alive and flailing!