The Garden of Prosimya
Nick Alexander
AD&D 1e
Lvl 9 – 15
Pages: 49 + 5 maps
Classification: Super Dreadnought
The last, titanic entry in what has been the most formidable, impressive and daring NAP since its inception. If someone had wanted to usher in the rebirth of high level D&D, I can’t see him do it with a stronger start. Garden of Prosimya was filed under Alaskan time, technically within the deadline, with mere seconds on the clock and it has some of the rough edges to show for it. Yet I look upon it and I thank the numinous spirit of old school gaming, for what a mighty entry indeed.
A high level module in the Husoean mode, distinct from but reminiscent of City of Brass and perhaps a reflection of The Inferno. Add Dark Souls, probably. Somewhere on the material plane in some remote location is the Garden of Prosimya, a sort of garden of Eden lorded over by a mad angel, abandoned by the creator and corrupted by the evil of his own sin. The party sets out to venture into this seemingly idyllic realm of death, risking it all, with the possibility of grand rewards. Its a go hard or go home adventure, where you have to put some serious money on the table in order to play at all. In this case, anyone entering the stasis bubble that covers the idyllic place ages 1d20 years. Hell has been done so now you must contend with the corrupted Solar Prosimya, his still partially uncorrupted heavenly host, his half-mortal progeny, the denizens of this supernal realm and assorted visitors and pilgrims.
Note for editing 1: The keying lines up with the map, but references to some of the keys in the text do not. Perhaps this was altered later or shifted?
Someone has been paying attention. Soft countermeasures are in place against the easiest ways to break the adventure. A point crawl. Stepping onto the lawn or attempting to traipse through the flower beds introduces you to the DEADLY POISON that permeates much of this idyllic place. Fly around and you get shot by the golden cherub statues. Aerial patrols. Spatial distortion so it is hard to land in a particular space using flight. Secret pathways to nodes that can be detected via Truesight. You can (and indeed in some areas, must) use the Ethereal plane but the place has been liberally seeded with Phase spiders. At the same time, fuck it, if you are immune to poison, you can sequence break. You can fly for short periods of time if you want to risk it.
The power of Prosimya, who is dormant in half-mad slumber unless the players cause too much of a ruckus, is almost absolute within the sphere and extends over time and space so if you fill up the prosimy-o-meter (it is not called that) he resets time and all the things you have slain will come back to life (and he can exclude the PCs because fuck you). Crucially, all this stuff is part of a larger design, there is a grand story here that can be learned through gameplay and piecing it together vastly increases your chances of success. It is possible to disrupt this carefully arranged eternally regenerating tennisball cannon if you have sufficient information. Blundering through it you can still come away with a metric tonne of treasure, but anyone going for the finish line and taking on Prosimya has to pay close attention or get absolutely mauled. I tried something similar with Slyth Hive. The complexity is probably also high enough so that it cannot be instantly solved by casting FIND THE PATH.
There’s a rumor and a hooks table which is appreciated and quality but at this point, if knowing a place like this exists is not sufficient incentive then nothing might do the trick. If you ever wanted a chance at obtaining the most powerful items in the DMG, millions of GP, bonuses to primary ability scores, level 9 retainers and lord knows what else, this is the place to be. Also in keeping with this mode, it is not fooling around. It is kind enough to telegraph this by placing 100 harpies in the caves on the road to the damn place (which can of course just be avoided), while the time distortion effect is going dissuade you from taking a mercenary army.
This adventure is not above resorting to the Jonathan Becker school of high level challenge which means LARGE NUMBERS and TOUGH. Maybe sometimes it overdoes it. Shedu. Hordes of Needlemen. A death knight and 100 skelingtons. Manes. 1000 Ghouls. Modified Iron and Clay golems. 100 Grimlocks. Time Elementals. A 30 HD tesselhydra lurking in a lake surrounded by the undead. Beholders recast as wheels of eyes and fire, responding to intrusion. This is juxtaposed against locations of a grand and cosmic weirdness. A fusion of fantastic thematic imagery and OSR gameplay. I do not mean this in the perjorative sense, but in the sense that the pillars of osr dungeon design, which is faction play and weird interaction (the frequency of weirdness in the garden is high, higher then a gygaxian or husoean module, but then again you have Augury so this is just dandy). The objects are often deadly, but if handled smartly, can provide great boons. I’m not talking a cutesy weird shrine that gives you a blessing if you put a coin in there. I’m talking A PYRAMIDAL HELL PRISM THAT PROSIMYA HAS CREATED FOR HIS MAD DESIGN (THE PARRALAX ZONE!). Plutonium caverns filled with the Nephelim (here represented as modified Formorians and their offspring as Ogres, whew). There are a few very tactical encounters later on, say, the House of the Rakshasa Jahanet is loaded with traps and Jahanet himself has a complicated order of battle, but never so much that it becomes overwhelming. It also throws the book at you: Poison, curses, item destruction, level drain, insanity.
To offset this brutal gauntlet of exotic wrecking balls (and indeed, the adventure does admit that a straightforward encounter with Prosimya is a probable TPK) there are a great myriad NPCs in the adventure which may alternatively be befriended or otherwise persuaded to help overthrow Prosimya, interspersed with spies, unreliable allies, madmen etc. There’s prisoners to rescue, unreliable monster allies to free, artifacts of terrible power to recover etc. These NPCs represent a useful source of information, something that is of crucial value to those wishing to actually take on and end Prosimya. The point is that you have made an adventure where figuring out WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON is seamlessly tied to actually completing it, which rules!
Treasure is appropriately humongous, millions and millions of GP worth of treasure, but good fucking luck absconding with it. Interspersed with this are higher rewards. Methods to insulate yourself against some of the ageing, talismans of good that aid in navigating the Hacienda, the odd Wish etc. There’s a grand design to all of it but crucially, you are still playing DnD, and you can play this like any other (albeit deadly) dnd location. People that just want to loot can come away with vast amounts of treasure. If you want to get to the bottom and dig a bit deeper, you have to get stuck in and embroiled in what the fuck is going on.
The final section is a sort of surrealist masterstroke and like some of the stronger previous entries, after it has demonstrated that it knows the rulebook, it then throws the rulebook out of the window and gets STUCK IN. Maybe it comes a little too close to the sun. This is going to depend on the type of group you are playing with. You can only enter the Hacienda in ethereal shape. You end up in some sort of deranged planar node shaped like the Tree of Life from the Kaballah. Each node is essentially a sort of standalone encounter that transcends the material and goes metaphysical on that ass. Each move is also save vs magic or age, which is also insane but again there are countermeasures against this sort of thing.
What the fuck kind of encounters do you get. Well.
And these are not the strangest ones. You can get allegorically reborn in a cosmic vulva, or face a cunning illusory trap, or get imprisoned in another reality in england 1980 and have to escape the ogre asylum keepers etc. Its crazy. Its far out. Some people will absolutely hate that. Others will love it. I fall into the latter camp. You can go full metaphysical retard. But! You have to earn it. You have to build up to it. You can’t just spring it on people out of the blue. One last bizarre obstacle course between you and ultimate godpower. Do you blow up the Garden? Do you have the stones to face Prosimya and his legions? Do you have a guide? Do you have find the path (which you should probably disable here)?
There’s some definite problems with it too. Sometimes information is just ommitted and not everything has statt blocks in the key. Ok. A few scrolls here and there and some finishing touches I can overlook. It has the usual problem that sometimes information that should pertain to the entire area is contained within a key (like, say, the moratorium on teleportation). I think the final section is going to cause contention, and people will either love the shit out of it or hate it. This is also fine, and even great! I’m also a little suspicious of some of the encounter numbers (I’ve seen level 15+ characters tear through opponents and 100 is still no picnic). Perhaps counter-intuitively, contest stipulations are more or less maintained, even if I got very bitchy and started complaining about the reskinned Formorians, its under 10 I think. Occasional obscure Dragon magazine article monsters are used, excellent use of your full power.
But damn what an entry to cap off NAP III with. It was also playtested (which I suspect was one hell of a playtest), and the premades are a list of Gary’s PCs from Allen Grohe’s Blog (quite cool). Beek Gwenders etc. Very good. Very strong and somewhat incomplete entry. This is what I am fucking talking about. Well done.
The Great Work is done! Final judgement awaits! Who will be the victor? Who shall win fabulous prizes? Who will be left broken and molested in the dust? Stay tuned!
Age of Dusk 
Hey, now this is my kind of adventure.
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what happened to #20?
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Looks like there may have been two #16s in a row, which threw off the numbering.
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Presumably R stands for Ranger.
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That’s what I figured, also.
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Rangers but no thiefs? In captivity? Madness.
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You know, one of the earlier NAP3 entries gave me a kind of “return to Eden” vibe…Shangri La, maybe? Can’t remember. But whichever it was, I believe I liked it more than this one.
I must have liked it more, because I don’t like this one.
For all that I like about 1st edition AD&D, there’s quite a bit of the later publications that I DISlike; the UA, for example or the MoP or various Survival Guides. I work with a fairly minimal number of books…about five and a half…and they not only give me more game play than I effectively (probably) will ever need, but they allow me to avoid things I dislike from 1E’s decadent “latter days.”
The “half a book” is the MM2…a manual containing many entries that, for me, are a bit of a miss. It’s not just that I dislike individual creatures for [reasons]; it’s that some of them do things to the game’s premise in a way that I find “breaking.”
The various angelic monsters (devas, planetars, solars) are prime examples. That bias is probably part of my reason for disliking this. But only part.
I like Biblical, legendary, and mythic stylings. But on the scale that lies between “pandering” and “solid D&D” this seems to lie more towards the former than the latter. What possible reason do high level characters have to go to this hellhole? Because it’s there? Yes, it has millions and millions and millions of gold…a 10M diamond here, a half-million snake skin there, hundreds of thousands in uncut gems and massive golden statues you can just “chip” thousand gold piece ingots off. The sheer volume of loot renders the whole of it…I don’t know…unspectacular?
The review compares the adventure to Huso’s greats, but this feels closer to H4: Throne of Bloodstone, an adventure that just seems to say “F it. You want to fight a tarrasque with your 35th level characters? Orcus? Tiamat? Here…we’ve got it all here for you! And millions and millions of gold coins to boot…you’re rich bitch! Count your imaginary coins with glee! Have a +6 Holy Avenger sword to go with it!” H4 is CYNICAL high level D&D for the jaded play group, with a shitty Doug Niles storyline as a feeble attempt at making the thing palatable, at making the adolescent player not realize the mocking derision penned by an author who is sick-to-death of D&D gamers. Garden of Prosumya isn’t Throne of Bloodstone, but I get some of that “H4 feeling” reading over this review.
Where are the map scales? Does distance not matter? Does time not matter? It doesn’t appear to. But role-playing notes for Irma the “D8” or Jyri the “F9,” now that’s important. And their HP total.
Three ton diamonds. Dancing clay golems stuffed full of spectres. Golden ladders to the sun (can we steal the ladder? Is it worth 100M gold pieces?). Friendly giants that can forge magic weapons in half a dozen hours. Yeah…no.
I like metaphysics. I dig on mysticism. The Tree of Life is great (22 encounters areas is a nice touch…now if only they were synched up with the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot by encounter theme). Working stuff like this into the game is fun. But the game has to come first, the style second. Creativity has to be harnessed in service of substance.
This is a big, ambitious module penned by someone with a lot of creativity and energy. The wilderness map is pretty amazing. But this doesn’t look like my cup of tea.
Also: there’s no way Beek Gwenders of Croodle survives an attack of 1000 ghouls.
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[Scale]
So first of all: The map not only provides a scale (1 inch = 528 ft.) but also a heuristic (1 turn for movement between dots along the path) for quick resolution.
[Reason to adventure]
Several hooks are provided, from the new body that can be gained by way of the ultimate chrysanthemum, a divine command to wanting to find a strategic route through the pass the garden is perched in. I’d say if you’d just plunk it down the players would investigate it sooner or later.
[Volume of loot]
Here I’m inclined to favor the Husoean interpretation and compare it to the Fabled City of Brass. Its a place you are unlikely to be able to conquer (although as written it is possible), so instead you arrive there, get in, get your fill, and get out before you bite off more then you can chew.
[H4 comparison]
I don’t agree with the comparison. I agree that H4 sucks because of the overkill (here’s 100 liches, here’s a random tarrasque around a corner etc.) and a lot of what should be significant is just thrown at the player so it has little impact (offing Tiamat at the end is a good example).
Garden of Prosimya is not like that. The guy in charge is a fallen solar with powerful artifacts. Now even with some of his powers disabled and literally asleep (there’s an alert system) a direct confrontation without allies is going to plaster the PCs across the map. Powerful celestials are used sparingly. The planar gate out of the garden is watched by a single Planetar for example (I believe that’s the 2e term for the second most powerful celestial). There is indeed a single +6 Holy Avenger somewhere in the adventure, placed in such a way that it is every bit the prize it is meant to be be.
The loot (magic loot is harder to find but still great) is huge but this is not a place you are ever able to truly conquer. You go into an extremely dangerous place, you pay your dues and you do your work and you try to leave with as much stuff as you can carry off. There’s abundant loot and you can carry only so much of it. Inferno or City of Brass is like this. That’s why treasure WEIGHT is important here.
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Very well…with this additional information I will withdraw my H4 comparison (I really hate to compare anyone’s adventure to a Douglas Niles joint; NIles is to me as Zeb is to Settembrini). Still seems a little rough for the G-series of PC…but, as said, it was play-tested. I’ll have to check out the full pre-gens (haven’t scoped Grodog’s blog for a while).
RE Scale
That was unclear from the images.
RE Celestials
Planetars do indeed appear (as their own monster), in the MM2. 1E had ’em first.
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Here’s a response for the sake of posterity!
There’s a possible case for ‘R’ to stand for Ranger, but no, to my shame it stands for (R)ogue. A result of one too many 3.5 campaigns on my CV….’D’ is indeed a stand in for Druid. I avoided rangers, not being able to reconcile their wandering spirit with the fairly limited wilderness presented in the Garden. Yes, I suck.
Both maps were swiftly redrawn second versions – in fact, the main map went through 4 different takes. The keys ended up with some errors, most egregiously, as you noted, the lack of doors in the Rakshasa’s house. My memory of that last 17 hour shift, sleep deprived and stunned at how long the fucking stat blocks were taking, will stay with me forever.
On top of this, the textual issues were many: missing info that I’d imagined I’d delivered, but had in fact only dreamt; odd phrasing; references to map keys that had changed; repeated use of words in close proximity and so on.
I’ve been editing periodically since I submitted, so whatever the outcome of the competition, I’ll have something that I believe will be fundamentally sound in fairly short order.
Play testing has also continued. I think I might add two to the recommended level range. 12-17 seems right, depending upon how one engages with the place. It’s a wide range, but I think an accurate one.
Monster numbers were of constant concern to me, but ultimately I settled on verisimilitude.
To Becker’s remarks:
As Prince says, there are four major hooks, one for each of the primary character classes. The location needed to stand alone as a DO NOT GO HERE mark on the hex map (and thus attractive). It’s a place that doesn’t demand PCs venture there, but exists all the same. That said, I lavished some precious time on the hooks.
Most of the treasure is heavy and/or inconvenient. The occasional ludicrously valuable myth -scale treasure (eg. the obvious archetypal snake skin on an apple tree) represents something ‘grabbable’, that might be liberated with discernment.
There’s a map scale, although it’s a little more elastic than I would normally consider appropriate. I think this is a strength/weakness of the point crawl. There are actually a couple of mistakes in terms of distances as I initially conceived of them, and how they appear on the map. I am still ruminating on where to put my vote there: change the map, change how we think of scale, or change the numbers in the module (the quickest solution). Time & space do work differently there, but that feels like too much of a fudge for me.
So yeah, Time is a constant theme in the adventure. There are day and night cycles. There is time pressure. There are time workarounds and experiments that might be undertaken given possession of certain objects/communion with certain NPCs.
There are many NPCS … the section you highlight as being extraneous (in relation to the perceived lack of time as a factor in the module) represents my best shot at a swiftest shorthand for an entire village of ‘innocent’ weirdos. That section is its own thing. Information is presented in order to run the place and its people at a glance. Hopefully.
The tree of life as portrayed in the module, is but an echo. As far as it measuring up to the individual sephiroth, that was always on my mind, and as you read, you will discover some of this consideration. The means by which those rooms arrived certainly involved meditation and even a little divination (upon a theme/question).The results stand for themselves or do not. They are as authentically realised as I was able to muster. I accept this portion of the module represents the far reaches, but I think these reaches are the preserve and concern of AD&D. There is certainly a system for experiencing the environments presented therein.
Re: the golden ladder. If somebody wanted to steal a 3 mile high ethereal ladder of gold from a demi plane where objects are largely in place/created by the force of will of an archangel and the ministrations of his positive energy tech team, that would be a case for some gentle dungeon mastering (one way or the other). As laid down in the precis for the Haçienda, sections marked E, follow all rules as laid out in the MoP for the ethereal. Any matter in those places, likely exists only because Prosymia dreams/ wills/fears it. Do we not have three mile high golden ladders in dreams because we can’t put a GP value on the ladders? Or do we not do dream/dream worlds at all, unless they can be scaled within what I would argue, is an arbitrary limit? Of course, I would argue that!
Some other bits and bobs…
The diamond is super heavy because it is formed from the Solar’s doubt, not because it would be cool (though one might say it IS cool as a side effect). Gogol the Brute is a ‘friendly giant’ surrounded by almost certainly hostile psionic giants whose masterwork will kill him (and it requires some serious doing to grant him the materials). The time it takes him to create the weapon, I accept, was perhaps truncated. I debated over that and ultimately settled on ‘he’s as magic as smiths are going to get’, thus a miracle.
Beek probably dies if he plunges into the Ghoul dimension, sans protection and tries to kill 1000 ghouls. However, my feeling is that clever PCs will take precautions rendering them immune to such miserly attacks as the paralysing claws of living corpses. They’ve not tried yet!
As a parting shot, i chose to write this module hoping to utilise the unusable. Whether I succeeded or not, I hope to one day discover in play reports. My own sessions have been nothing if not fun… though i accept its easier to coax a module to sing if one wrote it. We shall see!
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Appreciate the elaboration. The excerpts posted by Prince do not tell the entire story. I suppose I could abstain from making ANY comments (I actually considered that, in this case), but thought that would be unfair when I’ve lavished my opinions on every other adventure.
; )
I look forward to reading the thing in its entirety. If it functions at your table, that is pretty much proof that it works. I think upping the levels to 12th – 17th is probably appropriate, given the challenges displayed (even an arch-mage is little match for most of the angelic monsters).
Also: completely understand about the time pressure / sleep deprivation / editing errors. Had a few of those myself, and am looking forward to fixing them (in my own adventure) before the book goes out.
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Dang, this ate my comment twice. Trying again.
Out of all the submissions, I think I’m most enthused to read this one: There’s a powerful energy radiating from it, and my next project is a kind of lost Atlantis floating city thing so the pointcrawl map is giving me all the right vibes. Nephilim? Gogol the Brute? Phase spider infestations? Yes, yes, and hell yes.
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