[Review] A Fabled City of Brass (3PP 1e AD&D); Into the Great Beyond

[Adventure]
A Fabled City of Brass (2017)
Anthony Huso
Lvl 12+

Now at last, we begin our exploration of the deeper mysteries. As I have hopefully demonstrated, the number of good high-level adventures is small, with the number of plane-hopping adventures even smaller. The combination of rare occurrence in the wild, coupled with a high complexity sets the bar quite high. But in our tortured, co-opted, ignorant OSR, one man still carries the sacred fire.

With Fabled City of Brass, Huso boldly tackles the City of Brass, a location frequently alluded too in old DnD, yet never actually explored in print. In the D20 era, Necromancer Games produced a grand campaign setting and adventure location, more or less faithful to the original source material, which eventually received a conversion to S&W. Huso’s version is explicitly a re-imagining: its origins in Tales of 1001 Nights have been emphasized, its vision of the homebase of the Efreet rejected. Instead we have a desolate city on the edge of the planes of earth and magma, built by a dead race with Efreeti slave labor, home to infinite splendor, delights and horrors beyond imagining.

The principles of the adventure’s design are ingenious and follow the concept of the Planes themselves: Like the Planes, the city is too vast and dangerous to ever fully explore. It requires immense effort to enter the City of Brass, whilst the characters are exploring it they are besieged by a strength-sapping musk, inviting sleep, the inhabitants are so deadly that prolonged exploration will quickly deplete, maim or kill even the hardiest adventurers, and upon their leave of the City of Brass, five years will have passed in the real world, inviting a system shock roll and all sorts of calamities. The draw is riches beyond the dreams of avarice and artifacts and magic items of supra-mundane power, and pre-emptively cataloguing just how much the characters can carry while exploring this haunted place will be the first thing any GM should do before deciding to run it. It puts pressure on high level characters in the best way: You have almost infinite resources, but the price of each delve into the city is so high that there is no time to be lost, and the pressure is intense.

A grand beast of a module. 96 pages, with an appendix containing new creatures, spells, magic items and treasures that is 61 pages long. It is low on preamble, containing a single page of whispered legend, and suggests using a less well known published adventure To the City of Brass by Rob Kuntz for GM’s wanting to devote time to the journey to the city. The ancient statue of a sphinx awaits, and all those who offer a precious jewel suddenly espy, on the horizon, the jet-black line of the City of Brass, suspended above a great sea of flame. After this, it is pure gameable content of a rare, majestic kind.

Behold: The map of maps. The godmap.

This might be my favorite Huso adventure yet. Dream House was great but it was, by design, constricting. Tunnels, wizard-locked doors, traps, natural barriers. A fortress that must be infiltrated and is explored with a single objective in mind. In City of Brass the time pressure is arguably more intense, but in return it is far more open, more in line with oldschool sensibilities. The city is sprawling, divided into zones by grand walls, towers and enchanted bridges over an infinite flaming abyss. It is always possible to pass over such walls, but never cost-free, as the myriad arrow slits in the city will disgorge hails of missiles at all those who attempt to fly above the line of the city. Although there is a history to the city, and the possibility of discovering the cause of its demise, its personages, its enemies (and eventually overcoming much of these dangers) the objective is still going to be the recovery of vast amounts of treasure and magic. This open-ended nature, combined with the verticality and opulent and otherworldly appearance of the city might pose some challenges for the more left-brained GM, and figuring out what areas can be seen from where is going to be something that the GM will have to learn, although the adventure will provide additional crucial hints (e.g. the hoard of the Dragon Al-lahab can be seen from the stairway E-12). Teleporters, swimmable canals, climbable walls, it is hard to overstress how open the city truly is.

What Fabled City of Brass does well is follow in the footsteps of something like S3 and make information a precious resource in its own right. Many of the more consistent threats (such as the omnipresent Brass Men), or the arrows, or the myriad psionic and magic protections that guard the opulent manors and grand palaces of the long-dead Gringlings can be bypassed or disabled, vastly increasing the possibilities of a successful expedition. The difference between a perfect expedition, and an average one is going to be immense, rewarding intelligent and skillful play. The City will punish the incautious and the dithering alike.

As is to be expected, the City throws numerous challenges at the players, using a tasteful stable of thematically appropriate creatures, often with minor modifications, and augmenting these with all new terrors. Mobs of chain-gating stone-throwing devil apes, a phoenix Peacock that is reborn from its own fiery death throes, a golden gorgon whose breath turns men into gold, or the deadly and hypnotic pastel Cobra are but a few of the formidable adversaries that populate the city. Some of the challenges can easily lead to a TPK if tackled incautiously (take, say, Samin Dha’hab), and Huso is not above combining them with the occasional brutal environmental hazard. Yeah fight the monster in a room filled with oil vapor. Yeah fight the dragon in its lair (item saving throws apply). Its great. Its D&D at its finest.

It is interesting to contrast the wildly creative but thematically appropriate bestiary of the City of Brass with the sort of unstructured creative flurry of an artpunk bestiary like Veins of the Earth. Each creature in AFCOB is still thematically pleasing, but you are never under any illusion this is a playing piece, a creature that plays a role in the adventure. Their abilities are seamlessly integrated into the framework of AD&D. You get the idea of a person that is versed in the language of Ad&d, capable of eloquently expressing himself through its mechanics, but not bound only by existing strictures. I do still feel a hint of trepidation when confronted with Huso’s interpretation of the AD&D rules, which allows for the simultaneous employment of attacks, spellike abilities and psionics, all in one round, which makes for phenomenally devastating and intense combats but I have no doubt such a system can be made to work if applied to both players and NPCs. It probably would have been a good idea to mark any hetrodox assumptions regarding D&D in the prelude of the adventure, but as is, no great violence will be done if the suggestions are taken as is, though many of the encounters will be formidable indeed.

Appropriate for an oldschool adventure, there are plenty of things to talk to, ally as well as kill in this perilous realm where everything is just a bit too tempting and beautiful for mortal men, but it does not take the faction play to extremes, staying closer to the Gygaxian standard. Nevertheless, there are plentiful prisoners to free, interplanar visitors to converse and bargain with and even the odd survivor of the lost Elder race to interact with. As is also no more then appropriate, not all is what it seems, and some who seem friendly are in fact treacherous foes.

This epic sense, this sense of dealing with forces that are beyond you, and that dwarf you despite your vast ability, is reinforced in other ways. You can stride into temples and come face to face with planar lords; Asmodeus, Imix, Geryon, to bargain with them at a terrible cost or become a target for their wrath. There are objects and artifacts which can either alter a character, or leave them mutilated or dead. Stone which if gazed upon will imprint a man with an awareness of the infinite vastness of the multiverse and leave a man mad. Artifacts of such beauty that they drive the possessor mad. This is how to do it, the truly epic. Artifacts like the Codex of the Planes or the Jacinth of Inestimable Beauty give the wielder almost god-like power, but every time they are used there is terrible risk of doom. Such powers can be wielded only briefly by mortal hands. The cautious but inquisitive can leave the city just a bit above mortal man, while those gluttinous for power will never leave. The Clock of Flame, if approached, asks you “Darest Thou to waste what remains of this, thy final hour, in pursuit of what no man can hold?” If you say yes, it asks you if you are sure.

This is ultimately what makes Fabled City of Brass so powerful. It is not the strength of any individual entry (although again, there are dozens of interesting new spells and items, the Blade Enigma, a magic bed that makes you immune to a particular element for 8 hours, the psionitech items of the gringlings, the hideously addictive honey of Celestial Bees, the necklace of Quadim which causes an invisible cranky old man to appear on someone’s back, a mirror that makes you waste away, gazing forever in its depths) but their composition, their harmony, the way each piece works towards a greater whole. THIS is gamedesign. THIS is how you do it. Creativity that is bridled and yoked to the golden chariot of DnD, not the inverse!

So too the boundless wealth. It is not hard for a party to fill their bags of holding with 2.000 lbs worth of lavish furnishings to make an imperial court seem like shanty but to get at the truly exquisite riches, discernment and skill is required. But perhaps you will delve too deep. Perhaps you will inadvertently suffer the curse of the invisible mausoleum of the spurned beloved of Caliph Iblis Occam himself!
It is even possible to fill your bags with transplants of outer-planar flora, Abyssal roses, Appels of Samarkand, Golden Dates and Saffron Crocuses, each with their own magical effects. Another example where a bit of exploratory horticulture will drastically impact the chance of a successful expedition.

This is not something you run on a lazy afternoon for a group of half-drunk ruffians because you did not feel like prepping something yourself. But as an open-ended location, existing somewhere on the planes, a fabled place of legend and boundless wealth, it is sublime.

Layout is over-emphasized in the OSR to compensate for the weakness and emptiness of the content but it does deserve some consideration. This is not ultra-terse. Description is divided into Players and GM, providing read-aloud, essential in an adventure of this richness and size. Statt blocks are included in each individual encounter. Locked doors and the position of brass men is helpfully indicated. Nevertheless, only a fool would attempt to run this on the fly. The frequent reprints of the map on its myriad pages make sense in such an open-ended work, but I wonder if it would not be simpler to re-discover pullout map technology and save several rainforests worth of trees and ink that way.

As an example of a planar adventure location, and a high level adventure location done right, in full alignment with oldschool gaming, A Fabled City of Brass is a masterful example of a seamless alloy of pressure, game-design, atmosphere and fantasy projected through the prism of AD&D. Eroticism, death, boundless riches and the secrets of the elders await. Dare you claim them?

Also, if you attempt to damage the walls and structures of the city, a gigantic turban-wearing bare-chested ebony titan will appear to punish interlopers.

*****