[Review] Demon Bone Sarcophagus (OSR); Catastrophe

[Adventure]
Demon Bone Sarcophagus
Patrick Stuart & Scrapprincess
Generic OSR
Level who the fuck cares anymore?

It is my unenviable duty as a reviewer of oldschool games to occasionally step away from contemplating the pastoral beauty of the olden days and the idyllic works made in their image by earnest hobbyists and wade instead into the fetid sewers of the modern OSR and dredge up for observation and critique the reeking obscenities that they excrete periodically in exchange for kickstarter funds. One such cobbler is Patrick Stuart, the author of the critically acclaimed Deep Carbon Obervatory and fellow midwife of the overwritten Maze of the Blue medusa. I haven’t really followed Stuart’s recent work so returning to it there was a nonzero expectation that perhaps it would be good, that a fertile imagination and the ability to compose rich descriptions would compensate for a wavering grasp of adventure creation principles.

It is not so. Demon Bone Sarcophagus stands to terse evocative description as the Third Reich’s invasion of 1939 stands to Poland and represents a year’s worth of effort poured into the creation of a monument to vacuous excess and authorial hubris. Taking up a brobdignagian 144 pages to describe a tomb complex of 65 rooms, it is an exemplary illustration of the shortcomings of the Artpunk methodology whilst also exhibiting in its construction a series of entirely unique blunders that are without precedent. It is the reviewer’s fervent hope that it will stand the test of time and serve as a illustration of the utility of decades old dungeon design practices and the dangers of their omission for years to come.

Everything about Demon Bone Sarcophagus is an illustration of misaligned priorities, and feels remote from any consideration of actual play. Crucial rules are often absent or if present are included as an afterthought. Fundamental building blocks of the dungeon crawl are given lip service if at all. The flowery description accumulates with each page until it assails the senses with the shrieking intensity of a buzzsaw, and nausea sets in soon afterward. Much ado is made of the complexity of the adventure but it is at its heart a fairly simple tombcrawl with some factions, made needlessly obtuse by convolution and obfuscatory ornamentation more then any sort of structural properties. It really makes one wonder if there was no one to help pull the duo of disaster artists out of their creative nosedive early on in the project.

The introduction should serve as an early warning, neglecting to provide any sort of overview and instead treating us to a self-indulgent 3 pages worth of backstory that is so remote from the actual business of running the adventure it could have easily been fucked into the appendix or allowed to remain entirely implicit.

To briefly summarize this bit of convoluted pseudo-mythical doggerel; In the not-elemental plane of fire rules The Nobility of Fire. Two noble houses of elementals make contact with the mortal Empress Puh-Gna, ruling over a crater in a world that is beset by demons of Elemental Ice. With the help of the fire creatures, The Ice Demons are driven back. Then the Acid Barons, resentful thanes of the Nobility of Fire, start aiding the Ice demons and parity is restored. In the meantime, The Empress gives birth to children from the two fire nobles, which is all well and good until she gives birth to a Solun, the third gender (sigh), that is the true heir to the Fire People and thus creates some sort of dynastic crisis in fire land, which soon spills over into civil war. The Empress travels to fire land to ensure her child’s dynastic claim is well respected, emerges into this conflict and barely escapes, leaving behind her Solun child with its parent. Upon return, most of her councillors are dead, and she orders the gate to the fire realm closed. She then still defeats the Ice Demons, despite no longer having the aid of the Fire Nobility, and finally has her tomb constructed and some of her enemies (all of 3) imprisoned alongside her. THE PARTY BLUNDERS UPON THE TOMB FOR NO REASON ALONG WITH 6 OTHER FACTIONS. Enter the PCs I guess.

Resentful lip service is given to the process of running the adventure, for which it parses out a positively scroogian half page. The system is the loathsome ‘generic OSR’, a fine indication for the amount of care and consideration that was put into the game designing elements, the wheel is senselessly re-invented with explanations of what ‘armor as chain’ means, presumably for some sort of imaginary demographic of Generic OSR practitioners entirely unfamiliar with these concepts. Level range is cynically absent. Vague notes are included about the surrounding environs, a wasteland reminiscent of the old west, but given the assuredly massive deviation from D&D’s implied backdrop some sort of explanation of the contemporary situation or level of technology would have aided conversion or implementation, not that this is meant to be played. The one element that is expounded upon with any amount of detail is the Frictionless Blue Glass Merchant Company, a secretive omnipresent mercantile organization holding the secret of the creation of the aforementioned Blue Glass.

At this point multiple allusions have been made to future parts of the trilogy and I might as well invoke earlier trilogies by TSR, say, the Illithid and Sahuagin trilogies, and compare how matters were handled. To wit: Each part was clearly written as a standalone adventure first, the ultimate design behind the series is only revealed in the 3rd part, when it becomes relevant and references to future parts are reduced to the bare minimum for understanding only. I am mildly sympathetic, doing a trilogy is something I would love to do for Palace of Unquiet Repose and I understand a certain amount of giddiness at the prospect of finishing such a monumental effort is to be expected but pipe it down.

The adventure begins in medias res and relies upon a somewhat contrived coincidence: Two different conspiracies and their antagonists, for a total of 6 factions, blunder upon eachother in the middle of the desert and have a massive fight, right above the tomb, causing the giant sloth habiting there to also break through and join the melee, and leaving few alive. The survivors have stumbled into the tombs, enter the PCs.

At this point another two pages are gleefully sacrificed to describe a truncated lifepath system for the generation of character backgrounds based on Fantasy Flight’s Rogue Trader system, with the crucial difference of course being that that particular system would impose mechanical differentiation upon the characters thus created and DBS’s lifepath system neglects to do so entirely, consigning it to yet more ornamentation. Also, since it is optional, it should have been consigned too…you guessed it, the Appendix!

The adventure proper commences at around page 11, and takes the next 10 pages to describe the initial site of the massacre, the state of the bodies, the equipment that they carried and any surviving NPCs. Description is excessive, the style is reminiscent of a Joss Whedon or perhaps a Neil Gaimen phoning it in, each group incongruous and possessed of various quirky attributes that seem almost designed to irritate and serve to obfuscate the overal picture. A group of four Strong Independent Women, a band of tribal savages, a british weapon smuggler named Wesley Shrive, and two security forces of Blue Glass, one a bumbling constable with a magic ring, the other a group of inhuman monstrosities. I should point out that all enthnicities and genders are represented, really the most important consideration when writing an adventure, for which I raise a hearty glass. On the other hand, none have any relation or bearing to the contents of the tomb, a curious decision. In general it would have been easy to tie in both Blue Glass or any sort of freebooters to an exploration of the tomb, creating an automatic rivalry via similar objectives.

The important part are the several holes melted into the earth by the Glass Girls (constructs of delicate glass filled with acid, of which an unspecified amount wander the field) and the Sloth, providing egress into the tomb and the surviving NPCs. The adventure notes that during playtesting, PCs seemed reluctant to investigate the five million differently described bodies and gives a long list of bullet points with suggestions of adding some sort of pressure, from an oncoming dust storm to perhaps some local wolves. At this point I feel called to offer a helpful suggestion of my own.

This is Volume I of Dungeons & Dragons, a little known game invented by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. Not many people know this, but the OSR actually came about as a result of people playing and discussing this old game and its more Advanced successors. Over its lifespan, which now covers over half a century, many procedures, rules and rulings have been invented and tested, to handle just these sorts of situations. While innovation is certainly possible and even desirable, a casual study will reveal that many of these proposed solutions have already been tried in a span of 5 decades, and often come with considerable and unforeseen drawbacks. As such, when writing an adventure for an OSR ruleset, it can be helpful to read or even play at least one of the aforementioned versions of Dungeons and Dragons.

Confusion sets in fairly quickly in this section. The use of statt blocks to describe any still living NPCs, or the aforementioned Glass Girls is absent. One of the Strong Independent women is fatally wounded and crawling towards a still living soldier, trapped under the bulk of a dead giant sloth. When will she die? What if we try to heal her? These basic considerations are not covered. The equipment of each body is described individually. Valuable equipment is only assigned a value the appendix overview, a disastrously impractical conceit that the adventure, fortunately, breaks about 4 rooms into the tomb, when it starts simply providing gold piece values for the treasure in the entry. A tonne of unique equipment like Hardwood armor or Mahucatals are described, but no notes are given on their damage or AC value. High quality-steel dagger. What does that mean? Half a page would have sufficed.

When creating such a section, it can be helpful to consider its purpose. What are we trying to achieve? Consider the following first encounter from page 9. in B1 In Search of the Unknown.

Which is quite long but consider what it is doing. You get a (arguably brilliant) fake out in the beginning, setting everyone on edge, followed by the site of a massacre, signalling there is danger inside and setting the stage, and giving a slight trickle of treasure, just enough to whet the appetite. What is the purpose of this encounter in the beginning of DBS? Why does it need 10 pages? Is it vital we know all of the different factions from interrogating the NPCs before we go inside? How much money is all that gear worth if we just pick it up and head back to town? What would have happened if instead of 6 factions, we would have used 3? Etc. etc.
Being able to pick up multiple retainers of different factions from the survivors right off the getgo is kind of interesting, but you also immediately side-track the adventure and risk getting everything bogged down in interrogations, information gathering or possible factional infighting. I would envision something like this is generally done before the adventure commences, with different factions trying to woe the PCs and getting them over to their side while they equip themselves or gather information. Here it is all smushed together.

And then there is the map.

First:

But more succinctly: What is a map? What is the purpose of a map? Is it to be decorative and look cool? Or is it meant to be used? The uniformity of the triangle sizes and passageways allows you to bypass the fact that there is no scale. Ok, fair enough. Where is the fucking legend? This adventure makes use of secret doors, doors that have combination locks, doors with triskelion locks (which require three keys), doors with normal locks, there are sections that are collapsible and so on. Where the fuck are they on the map? I should be able to just look at the map and tell INSTANTLY what kind of doors there are. I can’t do that here because every entry is a smudgy, cluttered fucking mess filled with brown trash. Consider something like this.

You have made something that is inferior to 1970s technology. To compensate for that, every fucking room entry has notes on the types of doors there are. Fucking fifteen of these rooms note that the walls are crumbling and can be forced through into the Sloth tunnel. You could have explained that phenomenon once, then made a legend and noted it on the map, then basically just added a tag to the relevant rooms. The entrypoints are teeny tinsy red triangles, barely visible. I don’t even know what the blue arrows signify. Maybe they signify my desire to die, the sweet release of death, the light at the end of the tunnel?

The Tomb attempts several unique environmental hazards but rules implementation is always a problem. Features are described in the language of ideas and not the language of procedure. Consider the following page, say.

And consider here the question of the darkness. It seems to draw in the light. Okay, is there any effect on visibility? Well, no. Okay, no scrying I guess. What about other divination while in the tomb? What about augury? I don’t know if Stuart knows what those things are [1]. If the dragonbone staff is found, what happens then? Others might come, okay, is there any real in game effect? No. Okay. How do the rifts work? What does a dab of magic mean? How long does it take to pass through? Can I go back? It’s OSR LOL. NOTHING MATTERS. Mechanics in Demon Bone Sarcophagus are like the memory of a distant dream, or shapes painted in fog by the winds of time. That is Stuartese for saying that they needed someone, I am not saying someone in a Zak S mask, to threaten and harass Patrick Stuart via phone until he can automatically rattle off the mechanics to any of his ideas when prompted.

And then endless pages on murals, which are not recurring so they arguably do not matter, and different types of doors, which actually do matter. The conceit is that in the dungeon there are six keys, but if you obtain them by force they become magically heavy and weigh 160 pounds, so everyone will be fucking slow. That is actually a good idea. Then you have doors that require these keys, or even doors that require 3 of them, with a note you can pick the locks but you have to pick all three simultaneously. Okay? Do I need 3 thieves? Can I make the three lockpick roles seperately and then just have my buddy twist the handle? Its not a bad way to connect everything together but WHAT DOES IT MEAN IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE GAME. This is barely considered.

At this point we are 30 pages in and the adventure decides that now would be an excellent time to describe, in an aggressively illustrated full page each, all the NPCs and monsters of the Tomb. Unique items are of course described at the end of the book. In general one would expect all the monsters to be described at the end too but at this point I am just waiting for it to be over. It is exactly what you expect it to be so by 2014 standards you would probably have gotten some sort of award because every single monster and NPC in the book is unique and has unique abilties. Whoop-de-doo!

Good things first. The monsters are actually good. Weird but good. A weird witch made of bronze leaves that picks people up and pins them on an iron tree Shrike-style. Some sort ofchesire cat that is the heart of the Queen and can bit people to make them fall in love? Ice daemon spirits. Tiny construct knights. Flamethrower skelingtons. It exists in its own autistic ecosystem and does not really make sense in the hierarchy of power of DnD creatures but they do by and large work as creatures and are interesting. There are problems of organization (say, the Demons if disturbed gain in power and it is said they will rampage across the tomb before leaving but what this looks like is not considered). Orders of battle or sophisticated tactics of any kind are almost entirely absent. Some things are questionable, like the brazen use of nonstandard abilities for otherwise normal classes or, well, something like this:

Which is a freakish mutant stattblock and you should just pick a system and write for that and it will still be easier to convert then this ugly fraudulent cobbled together universalist mess.

How the monsters are integrated into the dungeon is questionable. Nearly every room has a seperate random encounter table. I don’t understand what could possess someone to do this, or if the purpose of a random encounter table has simply been entirely lost, or if there was perhaps so much time left after the editing budget had been entirely removed that all manner of occupations had to be found to justify the exorbitant budget but there you have it.

Every fucking 2 rooms or so. Is that neccessary? No. Writing out the permutations of how everyone responds to each unique room is a good example of work you can, emphasis mine, actually leave to the GM. Making some sort of single random encounter table, and possibly altering it based on interactions with the dungeon, like triggering the trap that unleashes the Pyroclastic Guardian, would have covered the bulk of this. Compartimentalizing for different areas could have been considered in extremis. Instead, endless extra bloat.

This carries over into the room descriptions. It is difficult to convey how much space is wasted for what is, when you boil it down, a dungeon that is no more complex then anything written in the last few decades. It is a set of trap rooms, with some doors that require keys, and a few factions. Lichway, C1, Tomb of Horrors, Mud Sorcerers Tomb these things are plentiful. There is no reason to spend a page on each room. Consider the following:

This is a room with a 2d6 pit trap and ash. There are two secret exits in the pit trap. This takes one page to convey. Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Or this room. One page for 5 pedestals with explosives.

Traps proper are remarkably light in terms of damage, often inflicting a single d6 or less. Since I don’t know the level the adventure was inteded for I can’t quite condemn that. I remember much ado being made about having to understand the culture of the dungeon in order to bypass the trap as some sort of unique feature? But this pays off exactly once [2], with a door marked with a kneeling woman offering her sword, and then magic fire comes forward and you bypass it by offering your blade. You would have expected complicated information being conveyed via murals and holy texts having to be interpreted to bypass the trap. Instead it’s the trap from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Do you think this is new? What about this?

The Barbarian King, Gabor Lux, P. 15.

Or this.

The Tomb-Complex of Ymmu M’Kursa, Gabor Lux, Fight On! #1

Or this if you want to get baroque as hell and have to actually study egyptian mythology to advance.

The Lost Pyramid of Imotep, P. 6., Alphonso Warden

And of course this rather excessive example

Necropolis, Gary Gygax, Dangerous Journeys edition P. 117

The point is that it would have been respectable had knowledge of the convoluted backstory and fictional culture actually contributed towards the resolution of the adventure. There would have been some sort of payoff to justify all this buildup and fucking writing, it would have been genuinely new. It’s not even that the adventure is bad, if you would trim it down to about 40 pages, and simultaneously made it useable, you would have an above average tombcrawl with some interesting features. Yeah the map is maybe trash but it’s a tomb, this can be overlooked, and at least it is sort of nonlinear. There is interaction with NPCs that are of dubious trustworthiness, probably too much interaction, actually, but it combines well with rooms with traps that must be circumnavigated. The queen’s chambers aren’t really guarded very well and they have a lot of loot but who cares? The inner sanctum has some protections and getting the keys to enter the final sanctum at least takes work. There’s a chance to set off some sort of chain reaction effect in the form of the ice-daemons, an escalating threat that gets worse the longer you allow it to persist.

Then there are the numerous examples where it is obvious the author is simply not thinking about the adventure in terms of DnD but is instead lost in reveries about cute boys or perhaps being carried off by some sort of stocky maori woman that can slam a brew better then you can and then burp loudly and you can make love during her break at the potash mine.

What the fuck does this even do? What level is this? Myriad examples like this. Everything is customized and additional details are revealed upon examination but at some point you have to wonder, what is the point of all this ornamentation? Does this contribute to a better adventure? This gemstone, does it really need to be 2 paragraphs long? What if this unique hook-lady with unique abilities and all these extra notes would have just been a wraith. Would the adventure be worse? And the answer is very often no. It would not be. A single line of short, terse description very often suffices because the essence, the purpose of the gygaxian building block, is not meaningfully altered by all this excessive ornamentation.

There’s probably a million other things that are worth noting, like the fact a wand of Bees is worth 50 gp per charge, or how reaching the Demonbone Sarcophagus feels almost anticlimactic after all the weird buildup, or how you can walk into the giant sloth lair, immediately grab a tonne of loot and just walk out but it doesn’t really alter the verdict, fundamentally. This approach, of building a million custom building blocks, each unique, is fatally flawed here because not enough energy is spent integrating them all into a coherent whole. Where are the potions and scrolls? They are not here because writing them is not new dopamine. And the result is something in many ways divorced from the core, the essence of DnD.

I want to give you one last example to get at the heart of the problem with Demon Bone Sarcophagus, that goes beyond the editing or the extreme verbosity. There is in the dungeon something called a Reverse Furnace. You can put ash in, there is some cold damage if you get too close, and a whole item comes out. Maybe it breaks down. This is considered for one room with a bunch of jars with ashes that can be reconstituted as valuables (which are noted in the appendix for some moronic reason). But in another room, in fact, in many other rooms, you will find the ashes of the dead, say, demonologists, with all manner of potential consequences. They are never even considered in combination with this device. In a normal, that is to say, a well designed, dungeon, this Reverse Furnace would be one of maybe three wondrous things inside. You would have all these different elements that could be combined with the Reversed Furnace, and players would still be finding new permutations for it. It would be an integral part of the dungeon, elevating it beyond the normal mixture of monsters, treasure and traps. Here it is just placed in a room, almost immediately discarded and forgotten about, as the author must flounce his creativity for yet another 64 other rooms. Such a waste.

At this point I have to ask, is this what you want to be doing? There is an abundance of resources out there, there is tenfootpole, there are forum articles going back almost a decade, there are plentiful practical examples on how to write a good adventure, certainly a good tomb. This is a disaster, moreso because no one of the veteran guys associated with this project was apparantly capable of challenging any of the bad decisions. Are you sure this is what you want? How can you innovate if you don’t understand what it is you are innovating on? Would it not be better if you just gave up, started writing adventures for Mork Borg or Troika, and abandoned even the pretense of greater aspirations? All these rules and extant materials, they are in your way.

There are two recommendations to be given should this travesty be allowed to continue, after all, the Illithiad started off rickety and there is no reason Broken Fire Regime can’t pull out of its nosedive. The first is to confront your editor, lock two hands firmly over his throat, squeeze with all of your might and stare him directly in the eyes as you do so. He will give a knowing smile and a nod like J.K. Simmons in the movie Whiplash as the candle of life is extinguished in his eyes and his soul departs for editor hell. This is obviously happening in some sort of rpg, where he is an elf. The second thing is perhaps much harder.

Go back. Make a dungeon for levels 1-3. Not an introductory dungeon, you can’t do that because you don’t understand this game well enough, but a dungeon for levels 1-3. You don’t get infinity, or different realities, or phased time, or planes. You get goblins, and a treasure chest, and pit traps. Can you do that in a way that it doesn’t completely suck? Then you are perhaps ready to consider manipulating one of these cosmic concepts.

Demon Bone Sarcophagus is hideously overwritten, nowhere near clever enough to justify its extreme verbosity and length and lacks attunement with the game it was supposedly written for. I keep asking the question, who is this for, and coming up short. If pared down to a tight 40 pages it would be acceptable. And for godsake lay off the purple prose. You are doing game design, not writing House of Leaves.


A low **.



[1] In the obscure and little known game of D&D that is sometimes peripherally associated with the OSR, it is possible to cast magic spells,one of which is known as augury, and is of the 2nd level, allowing one to determine the outcome, weal or woe, of the next action.
[2] There is a hydrogen lamp trap room where one of the solutions is to lie very close to the floor, which supposedly could be interpreted as a second solution, but since it has multiple means of resolving I decided not to count it.