[Review] The Sepulchre of Seven (OSE); Pour Encourager Les Autres

[Adventure]
Sepulchre of the Seven (2020)
Hexagnome
Lvl 5 – 7

I did not want to switch topics without looking at one OSE adventure that was not junk. Sepulchre of the Seven is a free, high-production value, 39-room, 2 level dungeon for levels that are higher then 1-3. Its a bit too colorful and suffers from the usual OSE bugaboos but when the dust has settled, you could probably do worse then run an adventure in this thing.

A florid and somewhat convoluted backstory: 700 years ago there is a war between Faery and the realms of men. The realms of men are in luck, the deer-centaur-elf druid Jayne Half-Elven selects 6 mortal champions (some of which are elves which is confusing but not impossible) and together they take on the Sunnstead Sorceress, champion of the elves from a hidden Stronghold. Things don’t go quite well. The champion Rhain dreamdust is captured by the Sorceress and the rest prioritizes the war over his rescue, meaning a slow death by torture. Although the fae are driven back, the vengeful spirit of Rhain possesses each champion in turn to murder the others. Meanwhile, Constantine Kodiak the wizard constructs a tomb for lady Jaine and the gang seals it off with their signet rings. This does not quite go as planned because of the murders. 700 years of inexplicable inaction later, the PCs drop by and decide to loot the place, something the village in the area seems suprisingly chill with despite her saint status. Then a long list of hooks that are ok but seem a bit superfluous. Enter the PCs.

Hyper production value, triple-boosted and layout-maxxed, written in the OSE machine code language. In this case, the beginner’s mistake of every room having exactly one element to interact with is bypassed and the adventure for the most part has sufficient density and complexity to justify such tools. In terms of useability this is good stuff. There’s a few tells that betray this as the work of an enthusiastic neophyte or one who has been acquainted with the hobby mostly through the lens of modern OSR; the not quite loopy-doopied nature of the dungeon, the lack of an order of battle, the OSE trademark lack of gygaxian naturalism or occasional odd scaling issue (wandering 0th level peddlers traversing the wilderness with 500 gp), but when it comes down to brass taxx, Sepulchre of the Seven is pretty good, easily superior to Mausolean Maze.

The ho-hum map makes good, borderline excessive use of multiple entrances to both the first and the second level, telegraphing some in advance (chimney) while keeping others kind of low key. Good set piece at the entrance, weathered deer-centaur statue, surrounded by buried idols of their granted animal companions, secret entrance telegraphed by tracks. Some of the entrances are easily navigated, others present problems (swimming against the current of the river is very dangerous, for example). It doesn’t quite reach my preferred level of natural obstacles, but hey, a fortress with an underground river in it is already pretty sweet. There’s a few dungeon-wide elements, in particular, opening the portcullis doors in one section of the dungeon will alter the random encounter tables in the rest of the dungeon, a nice addition one and the table itself is extensive and contains lots of caveats where other monsters can be set free or vanquished etc. Maybe a bit excessive for 39 rooms spread over two levels but sure, pretty cool. The overarching objective of a keyhunt, requiring seven rings in order to gain access to Jaine’s Tomb is a bit artificial but serves to spur on exploration.

Sepulchre has a bit of an odd rhytm, with a bit more set piece encounters then your average adventure. That doesn’t have to be a problem, for 39 rooms you have to make it count, but one cannot escape a sense of the artificial, a common problem with OSE. Good variety. The first section is Tuckers kobolds, there is an order of battle, they shoot through arrow slits or throw burning oil, set traps, they will sally out and attack the PC’s camp etc. There’s a bunch of trolls later on with jeweled hearts that each have a desire (want pet spider back, searching for stone to carve into new troll etc.), implying you could perhaps negotiate with them, and several of the champions remain as undead (spectres, banshee, mummies) or as spirits inhabiting constructs (amber lion, bizarre beeswarm), each with a motivation so they too can be interacted with. I think this a good way to actualize your backstory, by creating an adventure that incentivizes players to interact with the various inhabitants of the dungeon. Good, effective notes on how they communicate and interact with the party in a way that is conducive to adventuring.
This is broken up by intermittent but effective use of guardian and vermin monsters, grey ooze, oil beetles, animated statues, tarantella’s etc, to prevent it from turning into tea party DnD. Organization, with the exception of the Kobolds in the first area, is sparse (even when it would be expected, as it is in the Grove), although the other intelligent living opponent, the trolls, also have a situation where they sound the alarm.

Sometimes I must admit a bit of skepticism at the calibration. Lady Jayne herself, a 6 HD spectre, is hardly a match for a party of 5-7th level characters, even with spellcasting powers. Conversely, the spiked banshee or the Dryad are almost sure to get off their potential insta kill charm (-2) or Wail powers.

There is an decent amount of secret doors, tricks, traps and weirdness, adding to the feel of robbing a tomb. There’s something about ornate doors, studded with precious metals as a moment of anticipation before the characters reach the tomb proper. Idols that allow teleportation. A floor covered with tar, highly flammable. A false door with a ceiling pittrap. Stuff that keeps you on your toes, and presents interesting navigational obstacles or challenges. And of course, the weird. Fae fruit, blue honey, the whispers of the imprisoned dead, which if laid to rest, can provide permanent boons. Good balance between positive and negative effects, stimulating interaction but punishing absolute recklessness.
Occasionally the damage on the traps is a bit wonky. A collapsing ceiling inflicts 1d10 damage. A falling slab on a double-locked door does 1d6. A very rare arrow that turns someone instantaneously into a tree allows a +4 save vs spell, making it comparatively ineffective for such a powerful one-use item. A trap that is analogous to something like yellow mould makes you save to avoid 1d8 points of damage. The characters are level 5-7. This is nuisance damage. Level 5-7 B/X characters are essentially gods, loaded down with countless magic items, healing spells and negative ACs.

You see it in other places too. A d12 with modifiers is used to handle negotiation with the trolls when you have an encounter reaction system. A wonky useage die (with, and this is not OSE brained, modifiers depending on load or if you hustle/are very slow) to handle the chance that a ladder will break. Nothing is gamebreaking but they seem like the type of errors you would make from inexperience. An Ice seed allows the user to rapidly freeze a 60 ft. sphere of water at 20 ft. diameter per round, but nothing about what happens if you get caught inside the effect (although what happens if it is chucked in the river at level 2 IS accounted for).

Treasure and room furnishings. First! It avoids the OSE trap of having only x amount of jewels or one item or whatever. These are nice, dense encounter keys. Feels meaty. Treasure, then maybe some hidden treasure for the extra credits, every once in a while a cursed item slips in. All custom work, but suprisingly avoiding the gigantic dearth of spell scrolls and consumables. There’s a spellbook, pathologically filled with new spells, some scrolls dotted here and there, a smattering of potions somewhat compensated for by all the magic weird stuff that can be eaten like the Blue Honey (addictive), and a lot of custom magic shit. Feels rich without being overly descriptive. Total treasure is (helpful treasure overview screen for Prince) a miserly 93k, split sixways and not accounting for henchmen it is just about enough to allow a 5th level thief to advance to the 6th level, god and gygax willing, provided every bit of precious metal is pried out from between the sarcophagi. Items are pretty sweet, and include enchanted honey, a staff drawn from a dryad’s arm, an intelligent sword etc. Rocks.

For an OSE adventure, pretty good, denser and more granular then the usual smoothbrained fare. The density of the format approaches (distantly) Secrets of the Nethercity, which at least shows that the author was not sleeping on the job. I suspect it might need some fine tuning for a party of level 5-7 adventurers (although for once this guy gets the use of Turn Undead). Some of the encounters (mass skeletons, two 5 HD statues) would be a cakewalk. The traps tend to the light side. Cloudkill on the wizards tomb seems very dangerous but for characters of level 5+ its just 1 damage per round, meaning they take E(x) = 1 point of damage and then they move out of the cloud. But then you have the Amber Golem Kodiak and the elf ghost, or the monsters that inflict debilitating debuffs like the mummy or the beetles so it might be just right.

Low ****. Well done.

And now we are going to end on a bit of a sour note to the festivities.

So I was originally referencing an earlier version of this free product. Dedication v1.1 and v1.3 literally everyone in the universe is credited. HE CREDITS THE FONTS.

With an especial reference to Melan and his variant energy drain rules.

But lo and behold when I got myself an up to date version (v1.5), which adds a few useability improvements like a cheatsheet but is otherwise unchanged, I noticed a curious omission:

Who was removed? Well look between Ben L. and Emmy Allen. How strange! Where is Melan? Everyone else is still on the train. And then said energy drain rules?

So obviously, instead of going off on wild speculation I contacted the author, assuming that he had made an innocent mistake and got this cryptic reply (don’t worry, his email is a matter of public record, and is in the adventure for feedback and questions):

When I pointed out that merely not using said rules is no reason to omit acknowledgements (after all, Zedieck Sew and Patrick stuart have never published anything useable ever, and they are included), the author was curiously reticent to answer. So I did some digging.

First off, the statement appears to be a boldfaced lie. He keeps using the energy drain rules suggested by Melan.
V1.3

v.1.5

I believe this is what we call in the OSR Retro-active plagiarism. Wait a minute. Retro-active plagiarism. Where have I heard that before?

Between Two Cairns. The Podcast of Yochai Gal and Brad Kerr. How fun! And they have an episode review about Sepulchre of the Seven.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4sDVmlxCVTc0UoJ0TRYP13

Now if you can withstand the akward, nervous, somewhat girlish energy, the reedy voice of Yochai Gal, the tortuous 20 minutes when they reveal they tried to understand this adventure but it was just too dense and Yochai could not make heads or tails of it, Brad bemoans the fact it is a free, they soy out about the layout like it was the new Marvel Movie, they talk about how much they love Matt Mercer and Yochai skittishly pointing out the inconsistencies around the books use of pronouns and genders (top content for an OSR review, very good), there it is, at 32:16 HE POINTS OUT MELAN IS PROBLEMATIC AND SEVEN SEPULCHRE REFERENCES HIM AND THAT’S NOT OKAY. AND THEN SAYS NOTHING ABOUT WHAT MELAN ACTUALLY DID TO AVOID LEGAL CULBABILITY AND BECAUSE OF HIS INHERENT COWARDICE.

In a later statement, Yochai also allegedly asked Hexagnome to ‘totally destroy’ the 3rd level of the Sepulchre, which was populated exclusively with Palestinian orphans and Red Cross officials.

ITS OUR OLD FRIEND YOCHAI. WHO DID RETROACTIVE PLAGIARISM ON JIM PARKIN. THE CAIRNMAN IS AT IT AGAIN.

Recap for the mucho-texto kids: Between v1.3 and v1.5, the improvements suggested by the Cairn podcast were added as confirmed by the publisher. Between the same editions all mention of Melan is erased. And Yochai mentions, among his various prononical quibbles, which the publisher admits to removing, that the problematic Melan is credited and that this is to be amended because it ‘isn’t done anymore’. So why the fuck won’t any of these spineless weasels simply admit what they have done? If Melan is so bad, why can’t anyone fucking say what it is he has done so everyone can join in on the unpersoning?

Now clearly Melan must have done something very terrible to merit complete unpersoning and zero-history-ing, not to mention appropriation of his rules for THE PEOPLE but for the life of me I can’t get Hexagnome to tell me what it is. Even Yochai doesn’t seem to really know. Obviously if Melan has committed some sort of sick genocidal magyar sexcrime the world deserves to know so we can all be in on the deplatforming. I mean Zedieck Sew is still in the acknowledgements so it must be pretty extreme if he is there but Melan is not. Clearly the only person who can provide answers is mr. Hexagnome, who may be reached here: sixsidedgnome@gmail.com to ‘share feedback and warstories.’ Please ask him if he can tell us what Melan did and why and then share feedback and warstories. The world needs to know.

Some style pointers:
1. Ensure that your communication is in accordance with local legislation, ethics and divine law. Do not commit actiona that are illegal, criminal or unethical. Do not harass, threaten, intimidate or cause distress to this person. Definetely.
2. Normally in an email, you tend to introduce yourself and why you are contacting this person. With Hexagnome, you kind of want to avoid that. He is a very busy man and he despises weakness, so just cut right to the chase and ask your questions.
3. Again, this is a very powerful, busy man so you want to make sure that he knows that you are also powerful and are not just some loser taking up his time. Here are some ways to introduce yourself.
a. I have powerful friends.
b. My father owns the Bank
c. I can physically and mentally overpower you. I can outrun you. I can outfight you with any weapon forged by man or nature. I can hold my breath longer then you. I sleep only 2 hours per day. I never forget a face. I have excellent grip strength. Women find me desirable and favourably estimate my sexual prowess. I have 20/20 vision. I heal injuries faster then a mortal man.
d. I am Eternal
4. Here you kind of want to chill out a bit and show him you are a cool dude and can level with him. Try an informal note. ‘Uh, so, like, what’s up with Melan my dude? Is he like, a heckin’ Hitlerino or something?’
5. Here you need like a call to action. All cool salespeople have this trick. You can’t just ask a question you have to do some expectation management. ‘I will expect your reply within 1 hour or I will take action.’ Bam!
6. Don’t forget to share feedback and warstories.

Am I not merciful? Good adventure though, and free.