[No-Artpunk] #15 Chateau Montgrise (AD&D 1e)

Chateau Montgrise
Dick Sprinkles
AD&D 1e
Lvl 9 (on average)
Pages: 43 + 5 maps
Classification: The Bucentaure

Aaah D&D. The crumbling ruins, open steppes, monster haunted catacombs. The ziggurats, the swordplay, the sorcerers, the dragons, the bare-chested nubile women bound to altars of basalt sculpted by prehuman hands. I love sword & sorcery. But sometimes we want a change of pace. Sometimes we want something a bit more sophisticated.

Enter Chateau Montgrise by the pseudonymically titled Dick Sprinkles is a tasteful, eloquent foray into high-level adventure gaming that does away with some of the more tired, plebian tropes that have come to cling to this more obscure format and seeks to instill it with the patrician dignity, class and exclusivity that truly seperates high level gaming from the literal lower ranks. Although some, and here I hesitate to call them people, might enjoy crawling through the muck and chucking lamp oil at shit-covered rats for coppers, for some time is a precious resource, spent only on the choicest morsels.

The premise is completely relatable. Uncle Larrimore of a well-to do family living in the countryside has sought to excavate a larger cellar for the family’s prestigious and highly valuable wine collection only to inadvertently open a doorway to hell. With their uncle dissapeared and great embaressment at risk, the family is paralysed. Only a tip from a local clues the PCs in on the grand opportunities that awaits them, if they manage to tastefully convince the family of both their breeding and ability, by sneaking into the cellars at night and retrieving a certain exquisite vintage…

As an elaborate bit of buffoonery Chateau Montgrise delivers but what cinches it and what makes its japery not only defensible but downright admirable is that at its core, Montgrise betrays an attention to detail and a familiarity with the fundamentals of AD&D that is positively delightful and makes for a fairly solid adventure, despite some unconventional choices.

In the first part of the adventure the party will have to avoid faux pas which can cause all manner of inconveniences and interact with the inhabitants of the chateau, possibly get embroiled in a dalliance with a lusty chamber maid, get attacked by the Lord’s ferocious and overenthusiastic wolfhounds and get clued in that something is afoot by his rather creepy children. In this entire section, you would expect massive amounts of jewelry hidden everywhere but this is tastefully avoided, and a section that mentions jewelry but neglects to provide the exact amount makes it abundantly clear that such actions are for 1st level thieves with nothing to lose, not aspiring lordlings seeking to impress their betters and gain great wealth. Actually getting into the cellar requires a bit of finesse, with guard schedules and occupants laid out, and the PCs not posing as upper class having to sleep outside the chateau, although for a 9th level party, this should not prove very difficult and there are multiple ways suggested in the key. A time limit and a chance to get caught does complicate matters, which is another tasteful choice. Note also the little details, the bonuses to reaction rolls to impress the lady of the house for characters that are unusually brawny or tall.

The adventure then proceeds to make heavy use of AD&D’s unarmed combat rules for its hordes of humanoids and animals, omitting the vestigial second percentile modifier die (a sign of discerning intellect and superlative taste) use narrow spaces and flanking to enforce weapon selection, enforces saves vs crushing blow where appropriate, and specifies intelligent tactics (using, say telekinesis) for the demons leading the hordes of humanoids, tastefully named Dweezil, Chuckles and Sneed. There are elaborate tactical scenarios for the different bands of humanoids (hobgoblin slaves, drunk goblins and cross-dressing borderline transgendered bugbears) attached to each area, hindered only by the way the information is presented at the back of the level. Probably some sort of color coding or other visual indicator would have helped to match tactic to area but this is no critical loss. Recovering the barrels requires that they first be discovered and then retrieved (500 pound weight) without damaging them. Secret door placement is, you will find, a tad amateuristic, allowing an observant mapper to tease their location out of the geometry with relative ease. If not, there is always locate object a tool for the discerning player.

There are a few quixotic decisions w.r.t dungeon adjudication and information presentation that I don’t wholly endorse. The random encounter mechanic is to my eyes unneccessarily baroque for what should be a simple exploding diceroll table meant to increase time pressure and simulate the movement of inhabitants through the dungeon. Monsters are not highlighted and hp is not prerolled. By now you know the refrain, this does not render the adventure unusable but a greater degree of memorization or some note-taking will have to be done before the adventure can be run on the fly or quickly referenced during play. Information that is vital (what is Snead’s turf, what is Dweezil’s turf) is hard to differentiate from information that is incidental. This could of course be attributed to early-onset dementia resulting from reading too much Artpunk but I believe such re-organization would be of benefit even to illi sine layout.

There are admirable qualities, the loopy-doopeable nature of the whole, the refined descriptions and their at times almost wodehousian wit, the many tasteful ways of egress, some of them via the latrine, into the multiple levels. The way challenges are not neccessarily composed of brute force but are the product of combining different types of adversary, restricted geometry, environmental features or unconventional tactics, each layered atop the other like the folds of a hattori hanzo sword. Sprinkle with occasionally vicious traps for color. The actual demons and their retinues are suitably formidable, an appropriate challenge for mere 9th level PCs. This is something the italians refer to as fare sesso gay.

My concern, and this is a matter of decorum, would be the somewhat scandalous lack of treasure during the adventure followed by a flood afterwards. I don’t mean the lack of reward, if they are succefull the PCs can walk away with something on the order of a preposterous 3 million gp worth of truly rare wine (less if they damage certain valuable barrels near the final confrontation or fuck up in other, discrete ways) and the special vintages (each lovingly furnished with an elaborate backstory), if recovered serve as essentially limited use magic items to great effect. I am concerned the by now well-ingrained player character instinct for on site resource procurement shall go haywire when confronted with such a relative dearth of available treasure during the course of the adventure, even if the final reward is positively gluttinous.

There is a general lack of beating about the bush, an earnest joie de vivre, a gamut of truly interesting encounters and all of it using tasteful entries from the Monster Manuals (Neo-Otyughs, Stench Kows, Rutterkin paired with Wolverines, minotaur lizards) and knowledge of the rules that inclines me to overlook some of the more unwieldy excesses of presentation, verbosity and organization that predominate Chateau Montgrise as well as some of the eccentricities. And look at the wit, the savoir faire, the espirit du corps. My god. Look at this description of the rare CHÂTEAU DE LA GUIMAUVE 1123.

Magnifique! Chef’s kiss! And then, for starting characters, the minimalist ‘use characters from G1.’ A last, utterly pragmatic, minimalist finish.

What Chateau montgrise lacks in sheer awe, potency and scope it attempts to make up for in sophistication, an unconventional premise, a certain elan, a certain charisma, a certain je ne sais quois. Don’t run this one as a first exposure to high level gaming, but run this one if you want to instill in your players, not just challenge and mastery of the real game of AD&D but taste, like a fine merlot, like sipping pinot noir in the afternoon sun on a terrace in the provance.

Delightful.