[Adventure]
The Jewel of Khadim Bey (2021)
Morten Braten (Xoth.net publishing)
Lvl 2-3
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Braten delivers once again. My complaints are the same as always: An occasional tendency towards vagueness, a baffling system choice (5e with household majordomos with 65 hit points and 3 attacks per round), occasionally pointless rolls for material that is either mandatory or trivial. My strong points are also the same: Great atmosphere, suprisingly solid OSR adventure design principles and a candidate for effortless conversion to a civilized system. This is a low level adventure that feels exactly like an S&S short story without employing too much railroading.
The characters are approached by Sahiba the thief, who has stolen a gemstone of great value from the Bey of Zul-Bazzir. She claims she was betrayed by her partner and is now looking for some strong-arms to get the gemstone back and split the winnings. He meets his compatriots in the ruined temple of Yadar, a day’s travel from town by horse, she says. There is far more to the plot, Sahiba is in the pay of a band of renegade nobles seeking to discredit the bey, her alleged partner is actually an agent of the padishah and this is all a ruse to get him killed. Ruined temples dedicated to extinct murder gods, pet jaguars, swaggering city guards, an opium parlor, the opulent manor of a corrupt general addicted to the lotus, this adventure has it all really.
24 pages, a little chunky with the introductions and so on, good for a solid evening of extremely patrician S&S gaming. The overview of Zul-bazir falls into the trap of genericism but at the same time this does not actually matter. Everything gets a short description so you know what it is and there are some notes on what goods may be purchased where, with slight gameables. There is even a barebones random encounter table with different results depending on district and time of day. Not the strongest gazzeteer ever but it will serve. What you do get is the ATMOSPHERE. You see the swaggering Khazistani officers and their desultory foreign mercenary troops. You get the danger of the old districts. The bazaar! The pleasure district!
After that its pretty much hit after solid hit. The jewels get stolen, the PCs get roped into the adventure by being roughly handled by assholish guards. After that the PCs are approached by a sultry-eyed middle-eastern beauty with a sob story and promises of gigantic gemstones. Who in his right mind would say no?
The gameplay isn’t quite OSR dungeon-crawling, the dungeons are far too small for that, more like Tradgame dungeon-crawling only with the requisite secret doors, poison needle traps, pits and hidden treasure to make it instantly recognizable and digestible to fans of OSR games. If you like Zzarchov Kowolski’s little adventures you might find this to your liking.
You get to the temple. There’s the minimum of two ways to get to room 4., but what matters here is the encounter proper. There’s a complication, Oshan has a Pet Leopard that can suprise you if you used light sources or did not come in via the secret entrance. The guards and Oshan have a fall back position in chamber 5, the two guards wait on either side of the entrance, Oshan fires arrows. Great. A little bit of extra fuckery and a nod to the Tale of Sattampra Zeiros with the, entirely optional, giant statue with the bowl and secret chamber in 7. It would be even better if there was some sort of experience based system to incentivize players acting like greedy S&S thieves instead of trusting on genre emulation but beggars cannot be choosers. Monsters throughout the entire adventure consist of over 50% humans and use bog standard templates (veteran, bandit) with a human type templated onto it (decadent, civilized etc.), we have as our monsters the Leopard, a venomous serpent and a terrible Grey Ooze and I would not have it any other way.
Already the adventure can go different ways. It discusses, properly, the possibility of the PCs either capturing or perhaps even negotiating with Oshan and thus joining him. If they shoot first and ask questions later, that’s quite alright too. The point is that it is likely the PCs will want to go back and ask some hard hitting questions of Sahiba. Also, as you leave, it turns out the location is occasionally used by the BROTHERHOOD OF THE RED SEAL A CANNIBALISTIC CULT, which meets here every new moon to sacrifice victims. The adventure beautifully avoids minimalism (THERE ARE 20 OF THEM), adds complications (like say, if they discover your horse or no), gives the cult leader a single magic item that is hella cool and will make life difficult for the players, gives the PCs a chance to notice the cult, considers how to handle sneaking past the cult (a Stealth check but its nice to at least consider the matter) and adds some captives to boot (and it is a Braten module so the captives are generic). Can 20 Khazjirite Cultists even harm a party of lvl 2-3 characters in 5e?
Then! If the PCs retardedly go back and just meet Sahiba at the agreed upon rendevous they face Asshole the city guard and his 12 men. This ambush is assumed to be quite overwhelming so no map is provided of the ruined tomb, which inexplicably sucks. The adventure recommends you that if they are captured, to give the players a chance to escape before they are tortured to death in the prison cells of Zul-ba-zair, but points out the guards will not hesitate to use lethal force if they are seriously threatened. Excellent.
The interesting part is the non-retarded path. If you are smart you ask around and you can find out the name of a dingy opium parlor in the Slums that is frequented by Sahiba and her Ikunoid companion Ibo. The place is guarded by filthy thugs, and you can’t come in with weapons and armor. Do you smuggle a weapon inside? Do you bribe the guards? Very engaging. You are looking for this woman, do you ask the bartender? There’s illegal pitfighting, private booths with dancing girls (do you take the offer of the ‘private show’, games, all sorts of ways to get into trouble. You did too well at the armwrestling/knife throwing? 1d3+2 locals pick a fight with you. I love it! It has a tangible sense of menace, it feels open-ended despite having only 10 rooms (including a secret escape tunnel if the shit hits the fan!) and there’s stuff to do, discover and steal. A wonderful little adventuring segment.
Do you perhaps follow Sahiba and her companion out of the Den? You better fucking hope so because she doesn’t have the gemstone! Another thread added. The mansion of General Melik Khan, complete with white walls with bas-reliefs, an inner garden, an adulterous wife and a treacherous one-eyed arab eunuch running the household. Have you already chopped off Osams head and now decide to switch sides? This you can do! Note instructions in case of disturbance, tiny precautions, cache of trapped valuables, tiny moments that have potential like this encounter:
With the mansion, you can climb the walls, you could climb the inner courtyard, there is a secret password so the guards will just let you in, it is again more open then it seems. It it a little tiny? 120 feet by 100 is not too shabby for your average manor. Would I have enjoyed more cheetahs roaming the garden at night? This goes without saying. But these are minor nitpicks.
The conclusion is neccesarily open-ended but in a good way, where Braten considers the ramifications of either helping out the Bey and making a bunch of enemies in Zul-Ba-Sair or perhaps joining the rebellious nobles in a coup attempt. I think having a more concrete reward for joining the rebel side (besides vague promises of power) would have been nice, but as is so often the case, it is not really neccessary. This is a good example of an adventure that gives you enough to go with so it clicks. What do they offer you? A place in the new regime of course! You get it.
Is Morten breaking his habit of leaving things too vague and adding just that little extra spice you need to give the adventure what it needs and leave the rest to you, the GM blessed with an S&S oasis in a post-appendix N fantasy desert? Very cool. Ignore 5e trappings, 27 hp dancing girls, 10 HD majordomo with multiattack, port in gold for XP, use 1e, 7VoZ or ASSH, blast the Conan soundtrack on max volume, play for a fine evening of S&S fun, alongside Temple of Lies.
****
Check out here. An adventure of such marvel that if it were written with a needle on the corner of the eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.
Age of Dusk 
Nice to see someone producing 5e content not kowtowing to the “sensibilities” of “modern audiences”.
I’ve run two very successful mock-Arabian Nights campaigns, and this gets me pumped up for a third one. I, however, would have like more fantastical element (is “sandcore” a thing?)
>>>Can 20 Khazjirite Cultists even harm a party of lvl 2-3 characters in 5e?
Oh sweet summer child. 5e generally favors big crowds, and even at 3rd level, the entire party is going to be KILLED TO DEATH unless they are extremely lucky or squeeze out every possible advantage.
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I’ve played less then 10 sessions of 5e so while I grasp the central gameplay, these sorts of factors are hard to estimate. Thank you for clarifying!
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Thanks for the detailed review!
You’ve pointed out the “generic captives” issue a couple of times now, so I have made a mental note about improving this in the future…
As for the “baffling system choice (5e)”, let’s just say I’m on a mission to bring Sword & Sorcery to the masses, and if I can reach more people via 5E, then so be it! 🙂
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R.e. the Captives.
There is a bit of a translation issue that must be addressed. In the old game, those prisoners would at times form a source of new retainers but the use of retainers is not that common in 5e. There are still a host of other possibilities: (reward, temporary ally, treacherous, quest hook etc. etc.).
As for 5e, take it as gentle ribbing. I am sure it would still be quite entertaining to play it for the current system. This one is tempting me into running it if I ever find the spare time so I will put some conversion notes on my blog if this is the case.
Glad to hear you have not thrown in the towel!
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Good points regarding the captives. In 5E (and 3E for that matter), adding extra henchmen to the party is somewhat of a hassle (and potentially balance-breaking). But giving some concrete examples of rewards, info they can provide, lies they can tell, new adventures they can trigger, etc will definitely add value to the module.
Personally, I started playing (and GMing) in the heydays of 2E, but would also use 1E materials as little or no conversion was required. Then in a transition period I would read up on (but not actually play) such diverse systems as BRP, CoC, Nephilim and Vampire: The Dark Ages. I then GMed a short GURPS campaign (set in the Hyborian Age), but found the system at the same time too bland and too detailed.
Then came 3E (and Pathfinder, and even the Conan d20 game), which at the time I felt cleaned up and fixed a lot of 2E baggage. And the OGL was great, of course. I wrote a big book (Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia) for 3E, and after that started developing the World of Xoth (initially for 3E, then switched to Pathfinder). But after a while the third edition system became bloated with supplements and I became tired of the mass of detailed rules for everything and the super-long statblocks.
I hadn’t really paid attention to 5E until several years after its release, but when I realized it was a (sort of) simplified combo of 2E and 3E, I jumped onto that as my system of choice for GMing and writing modules. (I also have a great interest in 1E, ASSH, DCC, ShadowDark, etc; but only academic so far, and as a source of inspiration; I’ve just read these, not played them, sadly.)
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