[Review] Dream-House of the Nether-Prince (AD&D 1e 3PP); Summit

[Adventure]
Dream-House of the Nether-Prince (2020)
Anthony Huso
Lvl 14+ (especially the +)

Once upon a time, in the OSR, there was an online game for AD&D 1e, involving all members of the Reviewer Holy Trinity, Grandees from all the corners of the OSR, ancient veterans steeped in the lore of AD&D. From it, the origins of NAP III were born. Many fell to scheduling and infighting, others saw it through to the end. They succeeded by a narrow margin, though by the adventure as written they should have fallen at the very end. I was in that game. This was the adventure.

I feel that I have enough background now to do it justice, though I lamentably have not read Necropolis by Gary Gygax, one of the few adventures that bears a comparison with this immeasurable behemoth of an adventure according to the foreword by Allen Grohe. Dream-House is a more serious version of H4, with the Black Metal and the Gygaxian dungeon design dialed up to something like 25. It attempts to answer the question: ‘What if Gary Gygax had been a Goth, and had lived on a diet of nothing but skittles and energy drink for his entire life?’ One moment you are getting shot at by Dretches manning 9 pounders firing bullets made of acidic snow, howling after you ran into a room filled with undead babies, running away from 1000 ghouls and Chiming open yet another horrifically trapped door because you don’t have time to deal with all of them, next you are fighting balors armed with Gamma World blaster cannons, an AC -10 death knight surrounded by a storm of animated weaponry while a pretty much solid carpet of asps covers the floor after you have interrupted a demonic feast with live food that is held on the ceiling of a vast room. This is the directed madness of Dream-House of the Nether Prince, Anthony Huso’s Magical Realm.

Pictured: Gangrel Gothgax (not included in the adventure)

Pictured: Post Redbull-sponsorship Gangrel Gothgax

We start with a 15-page Enchiridion of the demonic, and the nature of the Abyss. All prime material weapons and armor have their enchantment bonus lowered by 2. Detection magic is inhibited, as is summoning and most magic relying on the ethereal plane. No bags of holding. The second you arrive in the abyss you are blasted with nasty weather, maddening winds, corrosive snow, poisonous spores, mutating rain, earth tremors that swallow a man whole. Panzunia. 1st lair of the Abyss. You are going to break into Orcus’s Dream House and dunk a piece of elder-god flesh through something called the Golden Gate so your world does not get eaten. In addition, Orcus has kidnapped your closest companion. In additional addition, he has also stolen your car and killed your dog [1].

This is the home of the Demon. You will come to know the Demon in all its infinite varieties. By the end of the adventure, which can be very soon, you will be intimately acquiainted with the Demon. You will fear his Gate ability, his spell-like abilities, his ravenous apetite. Unlike you Huso loves the demon. He loves the demon so much he ported in the Goristro and the Malfera, invented an entirely new type, the Type VII, just for you. This is not counting the approximately fifteen thousand unique major demons, beasts, undead and godlings that also inhabit Old Goathoof’s summer palace that he also made up just for you, as a treat.

Huso introduces a whole system of Abyssal currency based on human fat. Coins of alien metals, possessed pieces of jet, cursed gemstones that can only be taken in groups of 6, eerie abyssal pearls that form around destroyed good aligned objects. Menace, horror and otherwordly power are your constant companions in Dream-House.

Matters like divination and scrying are left largely open, it is assumed the GM will have absorbed the adventure and is well versed enough in these matters to adjudicate accordingly. A complete list of demonic scumbags and their locations are provided in the back of the book to make it slightly easier to reference. As for the rest, you are on your own. This is an adventure that will tax both players and GM to their limits. Do you have enough power to juggle all these spell-like abilities? If you have the power, you have yourself a grand adventure.

Four ball-busting levels, multiple means of egress. Come in through the moat filled with Thunder Beasts, fly in via the Balcony, try your hand at the Ravens Eerie or be cheeky and try to enter through the front gate. Its an open-ended environment in the vein of something like G3, complete with secret doors, non-euclidean connected passageways, 35d6 + 100 cold damage pit traps, warded doors, zones that inhibit teleportation and all manner of unpleasant environmental hazards. Encounters are given a mark to indicate whether they are immediately hostile or merely curious. This is one area that I would have liked to see Huso cover a little bit. In our playthrough we were overtaken by a superstitious fear that any sort of bargaining or negotiation with a demon would constitute a possible alignment threat and thus we more or less either killed people or ran the hell away. In the end, this superstition almost proved to be our undoing, as bargaining with a demon is exactly what you need to do in order to complete it.

How to describe Dream-House? Isle of the Ape begins with a decapitation strike but then becomes a war of attrition, a punishing slog through fetid jungle, fighting dinosaurs while your equipment rots away. Labyrinth of Madness is coy, an intricate puzzle-box laced with hidden death. Return to the Tomb of Horror is a pressure cooker, slowly sapping your strength while trying to fell you with death traps.

Dream-House is a barrage, a never-ending onslaught of infinite variety. Monsters, traps, trick rooms everything. Encounters that would be the crowning piece in any other adventure follow one upon the other. Nothing is off limits. Items are targeted, levels are drained, diseases are bestowed, curses are inflicted, ageing is had, mutations are inflicted, max hp is lowered, insanities are gained. You do not have time to slog your way through this nightmare because if you explore incautiously you will stumble on something HIDEOUS BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS and you will get shredded. A Crow god, a primordial living phantasmal killer illusion, a major demon with a gaze that turns all to salt (no saving throw), a gigantic fat monster, a deformed and all but unstoppable Queen of Hearts.
Lose your spellcaster and you are trapped in the Abyss, good luck! Even without random encounters there is no solace and little safety. An adventure that is easily capable of killing or wearing down even the most tricked out, monty-haul characters. TRY kicking in the door in this one.

Pictured: A nice relaxing Anthony Huso encounter

There are instances when fighting in one area will draw combatants in other areas but the entire place is such a chaotic, ultra-violent cess-pit there is no mega-coordinated response to your intrusion, nor does there really need to be. The reason for this is given later on, as there are approximately 300 different ways to get detected by Orcus, who also already knows you are coming because he is a genius god.

Like a true inheritor of Gygax Huso understands that there is far more to a dungeon then getting struck with five simultaneous uninterruptable spellike abilities while the other demons spam chain-gate until they miss a roll. The idea of demonic amulets is fully embraced, nearly every major demon in the citadel has an amulet somewhere, gaining control of it means you can command the demon for 24 hours. The caveat is that they don’t radiate magic. There you go, an adventure that becomes vastly easier and even exploitable if you have precious information. You immediately have a reason to negotiate. And this is not counting the factional rivalry between Orcus’s girlfriends and court, the various trapped prisoners, both mortal and immortal and things far stranger. If the complaint with Halls of the Blood King was that it was simplistic and small, failing to live up to its cosmic premise, this adventure is the exact opposite. Although you might be legendary heroes, here you are on the defensive, easily overwhelmed if you do not exercise caution.

Notice highlighted areas, denoting certain effects.

The incredible variety in both monsters, dressing and items almost creates a pang of loss because smart players will likely avoid a lot of it and try to reach the Golden Gate with reasonable efficacy while gluttons will almost certainly bite off more then they can chew. As far as treasure is concerned, Huso is unsuprisingly generous, befitting the fortress of one of the most powerful demon princes. The reward is commesurate with the threat, and the combined value likely exceeds ten million. Characters will soon find themselves wielding Abyssal Halbeards +6, carrying a king’s ransom of occult (and possibly cursed) gemstones, all manner of treasures and maybe even a few artifacts. Dreamhouse introduces new magic items and spells in a profusion that is comparable only to Inferno, although mercifully most magic items are a bit less complex. But consider things like this:

Which is such an interesting extrapolation of the game begging to be used. And there are tonnes of spells and items like this.

As mentioned before there are plenty of grotesquely desecrated shrines, idols, strange machines and assorted weirdness to experiment with but the lethal nature of the fortress means that such experimentation is going to be inhibited, if anything. My personal favorite is a room that transports you onto a hex map where a war between Tiamats and Orcus’s forces is taking place. Dream-House always has some fresh horror to unleash upon you. It never feels formulaic or repetitive.

The most skub-worthy part of the adventure, and SPOILERS is likely to be the conclusion. If you actually make it to the Thighs of the North (as we did), beyond which lies the Golden Door, you essentially get roped in by Orcus. He has anticipated your arrival and used it for a plan of his own, letting you nuke his amulet, all in a gambit to lure in Demogorgon. Both demigods have only minimal retinues because of a paranoid fear of treachery. The PCs thus make the difference. Both Orcus and Demogorgon essentially pinky promise gigantic rewards and a bunch of other things if the PCs help them in their battle for extermination. If you tell them to go fuck themselves you are in for a beating. Is a paladin even allowed to make such a pact with a demon? This is what messed us up when we played the adventure. Requiring two PCs to sacrifice themselves to open the gate is also going to be a bit controversial. Suddenly we left 1e and are well into 2e land. I think some players would accept the worthy sacrifice of their beloved mega-PC, built up over years of diligent play, but to others it might come across as unfair. There is always the possibility of letting some of the prisoners take one for the team.

A second irritant is the inclusion of rules from the now out of print Primal Order tract from 1992. Huso’s work has previously included occasionally obscure references (dragon magazine articles etc.) but these could theoretically be obtained. To his credit, Huso does include some guidelines for running the princes without Primal Order, but the statt blocks clearly take their abilities into account. Knowing a bit more about how, say, Primal Shield works would have been good. Its not unuseable, merely annoying.

Useability is pretty good. Writing, though good, is edgy and on the purple side, but relevant information is highlighted, stat blocks are included in the description, and effects that pertain to the chamber are mentioned in the key so the GM does not have to juggle various effects while running an already very complex and taxxing adventure.

Dream-House of the Nether Prince is an absolutely marvelous tour-de-force, and a favorite for the coveted title of Best High Level Adventure Ever. It demonstrates, almost flawlessly, that such play is not only possible, but awesome. A masterpiece, mandatory for anyone interested in high level AD&D.

*****

[1] These last two are not correct