Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: The Lair of the Lamia

The Lair of the Lamia

Author: J. Blasso-Gieseke
System: OSE
Party Size: 4-6
Level Range: 4-6

In a nearby pine forest, a granite monadnock rises 5,000' in the air: a travelers landmark known as the Watcher that local legends claim is haunted by devils. Large “birds” circle on thermals around the summit, where a mysterious red flash winks. Lately, travelers passing along the road have disappeared. The local merchants guild offers the party 25,000 gp to clear the threat. 

The description of the monadnock serves as the adventure intro. From it, we derive some other key details: The birds at the summit are perytons; there's a strange red flashing at the top; the missing travelers were lured into the woods by leucrotta cries; there's a den of leucrottas at the base of the mountain that leads into the ruins of an old monastery; a lamia lairs in the ruins and she has enthralled the leucrottas to bring her human meat; the merchant's guild is aware of "the threat" and offers a large reward to deal with it. It's unclear how much of any of this information is known by the merchants guild and/or the PCs.

The reward amount offered is a powerful incentive for a mid-level group to risk a side venture on their way to somewhere else. Having strong motivation can help drive an adventure site where the risk-reward ratio is not always obvious to players. They at least know they'll walk away from this with a ~4–5k gp payday. It's a lot of money but whether that's a good or bad thing is up to your personal taste and thoughts on your campaign's economy.

This adventure site features an outdoor component (a pseudo-journey) plus a 12-area/8-location keyed dungeon. I call it a pseudo-journey because the party doesn't really "travel" anywhere in the "wilderness exploration" sense of things. They either wander up and down the road to investigate some ambush sites (and possibly trigger a leucrotta attack), or they surmise that the weird-ass mountain with a blinking red light is the problem and head there straightaway. In either case, the party winds up at the mountain which we're told takes two hours by foot. There are no wandering encounters (though the leucrotta ambush may be mistaken for one by the party).

The map legend gives the definition of "monadnock" as: "a small, lone mountain rising from a level plain." The intro says the monadnock is "haunted by devils" – a "devil's tower," as it were. Here's where the site gets fantastic, perhaps accidentally. In geologic terms, there is a difference between a mountain's "elevation"—which is its height above sea level—and its "prominence," which is its true height from an established base to an established summit point. As written and drawn, the monadnock is more than five times higher than the real Devil's Tower Monument, which has a prominence of 867 feet (264 m) according to wikipedia. There's nothing wrong or bad about any of this because we're describing a fantasy world. I simply point it out to relate how colossal this thing is. I also bring it up because I don't think some of the details given below take the mountain's scale into account.

The party can see the mountain from any point on the road, so they can see the huge "birds" and the "winking red light" near the summit (I have my doubts, but let's roll with it, we're here to game). A party would likely leave the road the moment they enter the hex map, well before the first potential leucrotta ambush site. When they arrive at the base of the mountain, they will have to decide whether to climb it or circle around it. In addition to being 5,000 ft. high, the mountain is described as 5,000' in diameter with a circumference of 15,708', or 2.97 miles. 

Given the scale, I doubt any group of rational players is going to opt for the climbing route, but if they do it (only) takes 5 hours. It is likely a death sentence for at least one player, however, possibly a TPK given the escalating odds of encountering perytons as the party climbs (see below). Maybe they reach the summit and the peryton nests via this route, but it seems like a pretty daunting task. The effort is rewarded with not only a gigantic loot haul (over 63k gp) and some cursed magic items, but also a teleport rune into the monastery below, by which the party can possibly surprise the lamia if they act quickly (though the one-person-per-round limit of the teleportal will lessen the impact of this strategy).

If the party decides to circumnavigate the base, which will take another 2-4 hours depending on movement rate and terrain, they eventually come to the leucrotta's cave den on the south face of the mountain. Here, they can find more than 13k gp in treasure plus more (curse-free) magic items. At the back of the cave are timber doors with rusty hinges (their creaking alerts the lamia). 

Beyond the doors is an abandoned monastery occupied by the lamia and her human thralls—spear-wielding guards dressed in rags who, if they survive and are freed of the lamia's charm, retain full memories of being forced to eat the lamia's scraps (their former comrades). A grim detail but it gives the adventure some emotional heft. It's a straight-shot and only about 20 paces from the front door to the lamia's chamber and she's right there, so it's pretty much game-on as soon as the party enters. Details are given about her actions if alerted to the party's presence, as well as what she does if she faces defeat in battle, which are all good to include.
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1) THEME
(How strong/consistent is the adventure's premise, flavor, and setting?) 

There's not much of a theme going on with this adventure site—essentially just three monster lairs and a couple of puzzles—but it is definitely an interesting location. The monks studied astrology/astronomy, making the monadnock's summit the perfect observatory. The astrological flavor of the monastery only becomes apparent as one reads through the text, but any explicit background to the site is ignored for the most part. An in-depth backstory isn't necessary here, but cluing the DM in to the context of the ruins with a sentence or two at the start would be helpful.

There are some good descriptions of the interior areas: various tracks, some not human, lead into the lamia's den; an isolated peryton nest contains a pair of dead perytons and a rotten egg (clues to the cursed periapt found among the treasure); urns filled with monk cremains in the columbarium; etc. Leucrottas, perytons, and lamias are not in the OSE bestiary, but they are in the Advanced OSE supplement (more on that below). The description of the lamia is different from the AOSE version and is more like the Fiend Folio's lamia noble with a serpentine body instead of a beast's body, which is truer to the mythological creature. I also like her use of illusion to hide her true nature from the PCs. She makes for a potentially great villain; unfortunately, the way the adventure is set up, the party has no idea she exists until they enter the dungeon, whereupon they immediately deal with her. There is literally no opportunity to set up the depths of her villainy (and she is quite vile).

The treasure is flavorful and often supports the astrological flavor of the monastery: a brass spyglass, a silver scroll case, gold and silver inks, a set of quadrants and compasses, star charts—even a meteorite of star metal worth 90,000 gp! There's also a Book of the Black Gate that describes a future cataclysm, and a ruby and diamond necklace worth 50,000 gp called the Heart of the Mountain (the source of the winking red light on the summit). Both these items include some additional details that a DM can use, if desired, to develop campaign events after the adventure is over.

The amount of treasure is likely to be an issue for a lot of DMs. There is a total of 236,855 gpv in loot to be recovered, though in fairness, more than half that amount is tied up in two items (see above) that are difficult to attain, and one of which (the necklace) the party may choose not sell but use to curry favor with a dwarf realm instead. If we take those two items out, then the xp haul for treasure is a more reasonable 90k xp (about 18k apiece for a party of 5). Still, be prepared for at least one of these items to be found and cashed in for an epic haul.

SCORE (THEME) = 3 / 5
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2) MAP AND ART
(How complex/useful is the map and/or art? How easy is it to grok the layout?)

We're given no scale on the outdoor hex map to calculate alternate movement rates, only a time-factor we can use to extrapolate if necessary. The side view of the monadnock (scale 1,000') helps visualize the spire's height and slope relative to the surrounding forest, but doesn't give a true sense of scale (the tops of the forest trees apparently soar to more than 1,000 ft. high in places, according to the rendering).

The monastery level (scale 10') is a fairly-simplistic, highly-symmetric layout. The architecture serves to quickly move the party from one linear location to the other. There are no doors, save for a pair of secret portals each activated by solving a puzzle.

The adventure loses a point here for listing treasure values and monster stat blocks on the map page. These are useful pieces of info and their inclusion is much appreciated, but they count as body text and should have been on one of the three content pages instead. The inclusion of the constellation patterns on the map is perfectly acceptable.

SCORE (MAP/ART) = 2 / 5
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3) CLARITY
(How easy is the writeup to read/parse quickly? How well does the information flow?)

The cover page says this is written for OSE, but the monsters and some of the magic treasure come out of Advanced OSE, which is a separate book. It's not a deal-breaker, but could be really confusing if the DM has no idea what a leucrotta is, or how a Gem of Monster Attraction works. Monster stat blocks are provided, but those are meant as shorthand for a DM who is at least marginally familiar with the creature in question. There should be some indication that AOSE is necessary to run this.

The adventure is in need of some serious information re-organization, particularly at the beginning. The text follows a rough flow, but frequently intersperses player- and DM-oriented details, making it tricky sometimes to parse out what info you're supposed to give to the players. There is also a section where the keyed descriptions start, then jumps back outside to cover details about climbing the mountain, then resumes the keyed descriptions again. It's jarring to read and the section on scaling the mountain is not where one would logically expect it.

On the positive side, the information is all pertinent and cleanly written. The margins are tight, which can make the left-aligned text a tad hard to read, but not too much so—and this is a personal taste thing. When text columns are this close to each other, a justified alignment opens up the line kerning and is easier on the reader's eyes (mine, at least). Added details like treasure value totals and monster xp always make the DM's job easier and are a welcome inclusion.

SCORE (CLARITY) = 2 / 5
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4) INTERACTIVITY/INNOVATION
(How well does the adventure use the rules to create interesting play?)

There are a lot of attempts at interactivity in this one, starting with the leucrotta ambush. The order-of-battle includes an unnecessary script that eats up valuable page space. Using a trick to lure the PCs into doing something (entering a forest ambush site in this case) requires subtlety on the part of a DM to simply describe what the party hears ("a man/lady screaming," "a child crying," etc.) The second you start reading from a script, the players will immediately smell a trap. Being purposefully vague and letting the players draw out what they're hearing by asking questions makes it sound like the DM is improvising a random encounter. If you simply describe the tenor of the sounds—fearful men and women...even children... screaming for help—the players may still suspect something, but they'll probably at least investigate. Just cutting that section out would save 5-7 lines of text, which are worth gold in a contest like this. The space is better used elsewhere.

The note about the perytons swooping in and feasting on the PCs' leucrotta kills is a nice touch. It drives interesting interaction because players could deal with this encounter many different ways. Nothing happens if they let the beasts feed, but if the party kills the perytons here, they can then scale the spire unmolested and without failure. This brings us to the next big piece of interactivity: scaling the outside of the monadnock.

The summit description establishes that the active peryton nests face east, southeast, and south, which seems like a wasted opportunity to enable the party to climb the northerly and westerly slopes to avoid being seen by the perytons. Instead, regardless of which slope the party chooses to climb, you're rolling 1d6 for every 1000' of elevation, with a 1:6 chance of the perytons noticing. This chance increase by +1 per additional 1000' climbed (i.e., 1–2:6 at 2,000' elevation; 1–3:6 at 3,000'; etc.) There are five such rolls to reach the top, with the final one being a 1–5:6 chance to be noticed; i.e., the party WILL have an encounter with all six perytons unless they are extremely lucky.

The perytons attack different targets (THAC0 16 for 4-16 damage) and defenders will be unable to counterattack and use a shield. Presumably, casters can't cast spells with somatic components while climbing. EACH round a character is in combat, they must make a "DEX Save" (presumably a DEX check instead), or slide 10–60 ft. back down the slope for 1–4 damage. The slide distance doesn't add or detract from the length of time indicated it takes to climb the mountain (~5 hours), so what's the point of calculating the distance lost? Maybe to track party member separation in terms of spell ranges/effects, etc.? (I can buy that.) Curiously, there are no mechanics for outright falling/being knocked off the rock face, nor guidelines about what happens if the party members are (likely) tied together. A 5,000 foot distance with a 30-degree slope off vertical is a STEEP-as-hell climb, so simply sliding down a bit is a pretty generous result for failing, but its not unforgivable (merciful, even).

At the top, the party discovers that the "winking red flash" seen from the road is a 50k gpv ruby, the "Heart of the Mountain," which is a sacred (and obviously lost) artifact of an unnamed dwarf clan, which can be leveraged for goodwill with the clan. I have an issue with how this is described. As the DM, you learn this info halfway down page 2 (the actual midway point of the manuscript). Until this point, I was imagining a Great Gatsby-like beacon blinking on and off in a regular pattern. What I imagined to be some sort of magical interaction turns out to be the sun "glinting" off a gem (albeit a doozy of a gem, well worth the climb). This is a quibble (and maybe belongs under the Clarity section), but this reveal threw my expectations off, and not in a good way. That aside, I like the idea of this treasure quite a bit, and a quest to find this hard-to-attain jewel could even be used as a hook for the adventure.

The lamia's human thralls are interesting: some are obedient guards; others are emaciated women and children squatting in dirty alcoves who are compelled to shriek in alarm if anyone passes nearby. All of these humans are going to have some serious mental issues when freed from the lamia's charm, and the concept of a human alarm (and the moral quandry of how to silence them) is a neat idea, but all of this detail will likely prove pointless as BOTH entrances to the monastery are within the line of sight of the lamia.

The scale/layout of the dungeon means that if the party enters area 2 (the main entrance), they are only 75 ft. away from the lamia, who sits in the center of room 5 according to the text. If they teleport from the summit and appear in area 7, they are a mere 40 ft. from her. In either case, she can see them and they can see her because room 5 is "well lit." Any interaction begins immediately. Maybe that is the intention, but it doesn't offer any opportunity for exploration/info gathering before the party is engaged in the "boss fight." In addition, the small size of area 5 (40' x 40') makes for a crowded battle area with 8 guards, the lamia, and the party. 

Her escape plan through the teleporter to the summit is helpful, but seems like a huge risk on her part. She can only charm a single 4 HD peryton at a time and she won't be able to give them direct commands as she doesn't speak their language. The target also gets a save, so what if the peryton makes it? Would the other perytons attack the lamia before she could mount a charmed peryton? I acknowledge that the DM can hand-wave all this, but my players would definitely call shenanigans if I just let her get away like that.

There are two astrologically-themed puzzles that try hard but fall a little short of good. The first involves a series of "star(s) on the floor." No real description of what that means, so we'll assume they're designs carved into the stone. They're apparently obvious, as nothing is required to notice them. If they are all properly mapped, the party may correlate the pattern to an identical constellation ("The Gate") found in one room. When this constellation is touched, a secret door opens giving access to a teleport rune to the summit. Neat! But if you were just looking at the stars on the floor, however, you probably wouldn't correlate the pattern to the constellation. There's also nothing stopping someone from simply touching all 60 constellation patterns to eventually open the secret door, as there is no penalty for touching the wrong one.

The second puzzle relates back to my criticism about not providing any context to the adventure site. Four pillars are each carved with a single constellation pattern: Crown, Ox, Swan, and Bow (all recognizable to the PCs according to the text). If they touch the constellations in an order that corresponds to the acronym of the monastic order: The Cenobitic Order of the Starry Brotherhood (C-O-S-B), they gain access to a sub-chamber containing the 90k gp meteorite. The only place the order is mentioned (other than the sub-title on the cover page) is on the star charts in the library, an easily-overlooked clue. It's not a terrible idea, but again there is nothing preventing a party from simply brute-forcing the secret code.

Both puzzles feel pertinent to the author's home campaign maybe, but they have little reference to the adventure unless the DM sets the context up first. As written, the second trap is too oblique to work effectively. It's totally cool to hide such a valuable treasure behind a difficult-to-open door, but this one doesn't really work for me.

SCORE (INTERACTIVITY) = 2 / 5
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5) MODULARITY
(How easy would it be to drop/integrate the adventure into an existing campaign?)

This adventure site could be easily modified and dropped in anywhere for a quick monster lair, or as a mysterious location for a quick mission/side quest.

SCORE (MODULARITY) = 4 / 5
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6) USABILITY
(How much work will the referee have to do to run this adventure at the table tonight?)

Not much work needs to be done to fix most of the glaring problems, maybe reducing the amount of treasure, and weaving some history/contextual background into the location so some of the clues make more immediate sense to the DM and players. If I were running it, I would also reduce the scale of the spire to 1,000 ft. (or less) and consider making the lamia fight less immediate, perhaps by adding doors to close off area 5.

Run as-is, the DM will have to read carefully and maybe highlight some of the clues that come into the text after the resolution of the puzzles is described. 

SCORE (USABILITY) = 3 / 5
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7) OVERALL THOUGHTS

This adventure has a lot going for it, despite my issues. It meets many of the criteria for what makes a good adventure site and I like much of what the author is doing here. Just fixing the presentation by reordering the text would do wonders for clarity, and the puzzles could be much better with just a few tweaks and some starting context for the players to sync into the location's vibe. The added context could also strengthen the loose-as-written astrology theme.

I would love to see a second draft of this manuscript.

FINAL SCORE = 2.7 / 5

Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: The Caverns of Despair

Continuing my reviews of the submissions for the second-annual Adventure Site Contest.

The Caverns of Despair

Author: Kurt
System: AD&D (Oriental Adventures)
Party Size: 6+
Level Range: 4–7

Deep in the swamps, a deadly evil festers within the ancient caves of Feng Hua - a small army of chaotic bandits, led by a gargantuan man, wielder of a legendary black longsword with a fist-sized nacre embedded within its hilt. The sleepy frontier town of Pai Lo, perched on the edge of civilization, lies a mere ten miles from these accursed caves. For months, it has suffered under relentless raids, as have its neighbouring hamlets to the east and west. Crops are burned, livestock slaughtered, and children taken in the dead of night. The town's leaders, weary and desperate, have turned to the only solution left: hiring mercenaries and adventurers to cleanse the caves of the evil that has taken root within.

Awesome...an Oriental Adventure! Or is it?

The intro is all a pretty standard D&D setup. The villagers pay the PCs 12,000 GP in loot plus the hands of the village shaman’s three daughters to take care of the bandits. A list of six rumors is offered, two of which are false. I don't care much for false rumors unless the DM provides the fake info to the players via a source that the players would have reason to doubt. Actually-false rumors tend to produce pointless, session-wasting efforts and create confusion among the players who believe the DM is giving them legit game information. Worse still, one of the "false" rumors in this case is that the bandit chieftain (an ogre mage) is "skilled in the art of shapechanging." One of the ogre mage's chief abilities is polymorphing, so what is false about that rumor? Granted, this discrepancy will be invisible to players, but it's a discrepancy nonetheless.

Despite this, the rumors establish some important adventure points: The bandits are led by a shapeshifter; they are allied with demons; they worship the "god-killer" Ma Yuan (nice inclusion from the Deities & Demigods book); and they have monstrous pets, though the "wolf-monkey" description is likely to draw blank stares from the players. So far, we have many of the elements of a classic (if generic) oriental adventure.

There's no information about the area surrounding the site, other than that the caves are deep in a swamp 10 miles from the starting village, so you'll have to figure out how the party gets there and finds the entrances. The dungeon itself is a full-on network of caves with 13 encounter areas. Using one of the two main entrances is going to find the party immediately fighting either a pack of 24 goblins, or 6 trolls and a 9 HD troll chieftain. From there, the party can push deeper into the lair to confront a small army of bandits led by a low-level cleric and then, ultimately, the oni and his bugbear guards. There's some order-of-battle notes but not many, which makes the encounter areas feel fairly static and lifeless.

There's ~35,000 xp to be earned in treasure and monster kills, which will be around 5,800 xp apiece for a party of six. That's a decent amount for a 4th level character but pretty paltry at the higher levels of the suggested range.
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1) THEME
(How strong/consistent is the adventure's premise, flavor, and setting?)

As an adventure setting, the caves are okay but nothing about them really fuels the theme. Patches of bio-luminescent fungi gives certain caves an otherworldly ambience, and a few of the descriptions provide some decent atmosphere, but there's not a lot of this sort of thing. Most of the dungeon inhabitants merely "occupy" or "make their home" in the keyed locations, and there are no wandering encounters, so the cave system doesn't feel very alive (or oriental).

The mix of enemies includes men (bandits), goblins (also bandits), yaoguai (troll overseers), a kennel of su-monsters (the "wolf-monkeys"), and their leader, an ogre mage and his cadre of bugbear bodyguards. There are also three wights that the oni controls somehow, guarding his treasure stash. Really disappointed that none of the creatures in the OA book makes an appearance, nor are there any OA classes represented here (the bandit leader is a bog-standard cleric with no OA spells). Granted, the OA classes are Japanese flavored, not Chinese, but an effort needs to be made to integrate at least some of this material if you're going to write an "OA" adventure.

There is some faction play, as the yaoguai can be bribed to "fight for" the party against the bandits, with whom the yaoguai have only an "uneasy" alliance. Presumably, however, the alliance was established by the oni boss, so killing his human minions would become a major problem for the yaoguai wouldn't it? Also, can the yaoguai command the su-monsters and would they join the fight against the bandits?

I have a problem with how the su-monsters were used (or weren't, to be more accurate). There are five of the creatures kept in a smelly, unlit cave as "pets" of the bandits. Its not entirely clear whose pets they are, but the yaoguai are described as tending to the creatures. The cave environment already deprives the su-monsters of a primary attack ability, which is to hang by their tail and slash prey with all four clawed limbs. So now they're just slightly meaner carnivorous apes, except according to the Monster Manual:

If more than 4 are encountered it is likely (50%) that the group will be a male, female, and young... The female will fight at double value for six turns if the young are attacked, and the male will fight at double value for four turns if the female is attacked.

There's a debate about what "double value" means. Some think it means to double the creature's HD for attack roll purposes while others think it means double damage (some believe it means BOTH). In any case, these details can transform this encounter dramatically and they've been left out of the description. If they're all males, then being su-monsters doesn't amount to much in this case (unless someone in the party happens to have psionics). I applaud the author for including a rarely-used classic monster, but they lend very little to this adventure's theme. Same with the yaoguai. Making them merely re-skinned trolls is weak compared to accounts of the real-world mythological creature. I would have loved to see the author come up with a new original monster to really infuse some oriental flavor.

Most of the treasure is fairly generic while most of the magic items are straight from the DMG, which is fine but doesn't give the theme any juice. A few valuables have some flavor (e.g., a jade tiger, a bead necklace, silk draperies, etc.) but more would help sell the setting. The armory contains a "variety of spears, swords, shields, and armour." Some specifics would have been nice here, as this gear could be quite valuable in large amounts (it would also give the PCs a potential clue as to what they're up against with the size of the bandit force in the next cave).

The big prize (seemingly) is the oni's weapon: a Dancing Greatsword of Lightning with a Pearl of Fire Protection in the hilt. Kudos for pulling this weapon from the DDG book, which is chockful of neat magic items and monsters that often go overlooked by designers. I love combining magical items together, and earning one of these unique and powerful relics can be a major hallmark in a character's career. One problem with this: According to the DDG, the sword "...performs as a normal sword when held by mortals." Enjoy your Pearl of Fire Protection, I guess. (More kudos for using at least one OA magic item.) Despite the bait-and-switch, the item itself is thematic and appropriately epic for an oni boss fight.

One last thematic quibble: The bandits (and the oni in particular) worship the evil god, Ma Yuan. There's not much in Ma Yuan's description that suggests bandits would find him an appealing patron, although a case could be made for a powerful oni being attracted to a god-killing deity. The difficulty with this choice of gods is that ogre magi are Lawful Evil while Ma Yuan is Chaotic Evil. The bandits are also described as "chaotic" in the intro, which doesn't preclude the oni from lording over them but creates an incongruity with the gang.

SCORE (THEME) = 2 / 5
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2) MAP AND ART
(How complex/useful is the map and/or art? How easy is it to grok the layout?)

The hand-drawn map is a slightly blurry cell phone picture rather than a scan, so the grid has a slightly- angled perspective and parts of the legend are illegible. At first glance, the map looks properly maze-like, but upon closer inspection, the entire southern half of the caves funnels into a single route that enters the heart of the lair where the bandits dwell. Most of the other tunnels arrive at either a single cul-de-sac cave or one of many dead-ends. The northern half is better, with a few interesting loops, but the party will need to fight a huge battle first for the chance to explore it.

The key indicates three entrances, but no details about how they appear from the outside. These are caves in a swamp, so presumably this is a hill of some kind. How many entrances are visible/detectable? Two entrances lead into the southern portion of the cave system, but a third entrance leads straight into the oni's secret throne room...can the party come in that way?

There is a confusing measurement system in the manuscript, using the (") symbol to mean 1 foot (e.g., 20" = 20 feet). The map scale is given as 5" (5'), meaning most of the connecting tunnels are about 1–2' wide according to the rendering. Armored characters are going to have a difficult time passing through, much less fighting in, these tunnels. Mass combat in the tunnels will be impossible.

SCORE (MAP/ART) = 2 / 5
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3) CLARITY
(How easy is the writeup to read/parse quickly? How well does the information flow?)

The manuscript is written in two-column format, with wide margins and lots of white space, making it fairly easy on the eyes and a breeze to locate a room description quickly. Key descriptions are typically a single paragraph, with the longest being about one full page column. The text could use a reasonable edit to tighten it all up, but there aren't any typos or major grammar issues to report.

There are organizational issues in the occupied caves in which the occupants/order-of-battle notes appears first, before the description of the cave proper, which is not ideal. The basic room description should come right after the title, then the details about the occupants and their responses, then any room details that require closer inspection, and finally the treasure details. This may seem like a fairly minor structural point but good, consistent information flow helps make the adventure easier to run at the table by an order of magnitude. You want your text to build muscle-memory for the DM's eyes and brain.

SCORE (CLARITY) = 3 / 5
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4) INTERACTIVITY/INNOVATION
(How well does the adventure use the rules to create interesting play?)

Many of the interactive elements in this one fall flat, I'm sorry to say. There is a statue carved of stone with a hollow inside that holds a magical Staff of Striking (good, thematic weapon). In the text, the only way to retrieve it is to smash open the statue, but doing more than 8 points of damage in smashing it also destroys the staff. Why force players to jump through these session-wasting hoops? The players have no way to gauge how much force is required to smash the statue and not break its contents, and they can't mechanically modulate their damage output in any case. Most players will just smash it on the ground or try to chisel it open, so how much damage is that? If anything, the item should get a save—which it is likely to make—rather than suffer automatic destruction if the player rolls decent damage. But why do it at all?

Better to just keep it simple: If they handle the statue (which can already be a dangerous thing to do in D&D), they hear something rattle inside. If they search it closely, they find a concealed cap. Open it and presto, you found a magic staff...satisfying and quick, without burning a lot of table time for something you want the players to attain. That's much better than going through a bunch of rolls and then saying: "Oh, you went to all that trouble but only the broken pieces of a magic staff tumble out of the wreckage." Boo!

Another example is the su-monster cave, which is filled with a powerful stench that causes "checks made to concentrate on spells and the like...twice as likely to fail." I like the stench as a casting hazard, though this would have been a more effective trick in, say, the yaoguai cave where spell casting could be critical to victory. Here though, it calls for a concentration check when none exists in AD&D. Better to call for a save vs. Poison to be able to cast/maintain concentration, though what "twice as likely to fail" means is unclear. I suspect this adventure may have started life in 5e and been converted over (which is fine...my ASC 1 submission was a rewritten 5e adventure site, so no snobbery intended). This theory might also better explain the inclusion of the su-monsters, which are much different in 5e.

Secret doors are present in the natural caves with no explanation of their engineering or their method of opening given. One airlock-style set of secret doors to the treasure vault features a pit with death-poison spikes. A potent trap, but it is placed between two of the oni's personal chambers instead of at the vault's other entrance from a common area. The oni has to traverse this pit every time he wants to visit his vault from the throne room and vice versa. Granted, the oni can just fly over it, but the whole placement of the pit makes no sense. These are nitpicks, but dungeon features should have a relatively obvious purpose and make sense to the setting to help bring the overall theme together.

There are some prisoners to rescue, which is nice but not particularly useful because the party will have already waded through the meat of the adventure's enemies to reach the prison cave. In fact, it's very possible their rescue will be an afterthought at the adventure's conclusion and any info/aid they could have supplied will be of little use. I suppose if some of the party is taken prisoner, they could ultimately meet these people and learn something useful. Maybe...

The adventure's centerpiece battle occurs when the party transitions from the southern half of the map to the northern half, where they pass into a huge central cavern containing a camp of 80 (!) human bandits. There's no way to avoid this cave or sneak around it, and unless the party is scouting ahead, they will simply emerge into the chamber. There is nothing written about how this area is lit (no fungus is indicated on the map, and there is no mention of torches or lamps). There are no details about what the bandits are doing, either. Obviously, everyone isn't just sitting around the pitch-black cave, fully-armed and armored, waiting for the PCs to arrive—but that's how it reads. So what is going on here? What is the bandits' daily schedule? When do they raid? How many are likely to be here at any time? A few notes here would be really useful to a DM.

As written, the PCs will engage in a huge battle against eighty 0-level opponents in full kit, most of whom can be killed with a single decent weapon blow. Still, that's a lot of attack rolls to contend with. Order-of-battle states that one bandit will flee to warn the captain and his men, bringing another 6 bandits and a 4th-level cleric after a few rounds. A guardroom with 3 more bandits is within 30–40 ft. of the common room, so add those in and the party is now dealing with a fight against 90 opponents, including a spell caster. This doesn't take into account the ogre mage and his personal guard, who seem unlikely to just sit in the throne room while his gang repels the party. (And this is where the question of what do the traitorous yaoguai do when the boss-man shows up may come into play.) If everyone joins the fray, the party is going to have a bad day. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the battle kind of brings everything left in the dungeon to bear in a single combat.

This is also where the cave layout becomes a glaring design issue. The bottleneck at the cave entrance means the bandits can't maneuver around and flank the party unless they exit the entire lair via the oni's secret exit, circle around, and re-enter the lair from the other main entrances. The party—unless they're stupid—are unlikely to just wade into the room either, maybe making a shield wall at the (1' wide) tunnel entrance and allowing the magic-user to open up with area effect spells instead. The layout just doesn't lend itself to a dynamic, interesting fight.

The order-of-battle guidelines suggest that the designer's expectation is for the party to whittle down the bandits in multiple forays, culminating in a showdown with the captain and his men, AND THEN the party enters the throne room for a final showdown with the "big boss." It's one way to run it, but doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially because, by this reckoning, it's entirely possible that the party will miss the oni's throne room located behind secret doors.

SCORE (INTERACTIVITY) = 2 / 5
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5) MODULARITY
(How easy would it be to drop/integrate the adventure into an existing campaign?)

While written for Oriental Adventures, there's nothing about this site that couldn't be easily reskinned and plopped into your campaign. Bandits led by an ogre mage could be a fun little side venture or hexcrawl locale without much prompting necessary.

SCORE (MODULARITY) = 3 / 5
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6) USABILITY
(How much work will the referee have to do to run this adventure at the table tonight?)

This adventure needs a good polishing with some additional details about the exterior of the caves, the daily routine of the bandits, and some tweaking of the map to provide more access routes and bypasses. The tunnels could also be widened to make them passable by normal people, and maybe split the central bandit cavern into several smaller caves with more manageable battles and the possibility of sneaking by some areas (rather than being funneled into a meat grinder). On the plus side, this shouldn't represent a lot of work on the DM's part.

If you want to keep this as an OA site, there are some decent bones laid out here but it's begging for more OA-specific content.

SCORE (USABILITY) = 3 / 5
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7) OVERALL THOUGHTS

There's nothing bad about this site, but it's only just okay. In the hands of a competent DM, the lair could be made into a vibrant environment for a fantasy hit-and-run assault, but its otherwise just a static stab-fest that will likely culminate in a singular battle for all the marbles. I got really excited when I saw Oriental Adventures, and then disappointed when I realized it was just a normal old bandit lair.

My advice to the author is to take this good premise and rewash it through the OA book to soak up some specific details. Look into some Chinese mythology for ideas about creating your own thematic monsters to replace the ordinary goblins, trolls, and su-monsters. Add some martial arts action. Add some exotic spells and items. Add more flavor. Put more Oriental in this Adventure.

FINAL SCORE = 2.5 / 5

Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: Sausages of the Devil Swine

I was invited to help review and judge the submissions to Coldlight Press's second-annual Adventure Site Contest. Last year's competition resulted in the Adventure Sites I compilation of the top-rated submissions, which included my own adventure. There were 30 (!) submissions to this year's contest, so here is my review of the first adventure on my list (and my first review of someone else's work).

Sausages of the Devil Swine

Author: John Nash
System: BX
Party Size: 4
Level Range: 5

A curse afflicts the good people of Piggton. Insatiable hunger drives them to eat until they are sick and no one knows where the compulsion comes from, nor why some are affected and others not. At night, snuffling and grunting is heard outside. Those who go out to investigate vanish. 

The setup for this adventure site involves a town built on the ruins of an ancient settlement. Lately, many townsfolk have fallen ill with a strange malady that causes them to eat so much that they get sick, but no one knows why. The priests in the temple are completely overwhelmed with the victims. In "unrelated news," the rivalry between the town's two butchers has driven one of them to extremes: He sells sausages at such a low cost that his competition is in danger of going out of business. Worst of all, monsters from the nearby ruins have begun ravaging the town at night. Their depredations are causing the townsfolk and local merchants much angst. Won't someone do something?

Plugging a party into this adventure could be a little tricky, as the hooks may not be that attractive to any but the most highly-motivated party. The temple is offering 610 (?) gp to investigate the source of the mystery ailment, while the merchant's guild pitches in another 500 gp if the party will investigate the monsters roaming the town after dark. Finally, the other butcher offers 60 gp if the party can figure out where his rival gets the meat for his cheap sausages. Following up on any of these hooks eventually leads the party to the highly thematic dungeon—a bloody abattoir hiding a dark secret—where this adventure really shines.

The site ("Porcusoppidum") was once a cultist temple dedicated to Porcus, the Demon Prince of Swine. The butcher Higbald has begun using the temple to summon devil swine, hellish hogs fit for slaughter and processing into "low-cost" sausages that are also the source of the hunger curse. The rooms and passages of the ruins are populated by porcs (pig-faced orcs) and devil swine, culminating in an encounter with Porcus himself in the evil shrine below.

Great...let's dig in!

1) THEME
(How strong/consistent is the adventure's premise, flavor, and setting?) 

The author picked a pork theme and ran with it. The text features good, evocative language with lots of nice piggly details: a pigtail key, padlocks fashioned like pig snouts, a half-eaten ham sandwich, a soiled leather curtain, lingering smells of bacon, a fetid stench of blood and excrement, bloody trails on the floor, etc.

The entire place is horrifically described with plenty of gore for an adventure involving demonic butchery, but the author doesn't wallow in it. You get just enough detail to describe the general goriness, then let the players' imaginations take it from there. One room features "A Porc swineherd drawing pails of offal from a well and feeding it to 5 Devil Swine" (yes!), while another has "8 Porcs and 3 Devil Swine jostling each other as they eat from a trough of slop." (I imagine pigs and porcs all in the jostle...yes!!) In yet another room, "(h)eaps of offal, buzzing with flies" (YES!!)

Treasure is on theme and seems perfectly reasonable for the setting. Obtaining much of the loot requires the players to put in solid dungeoneering work, which is always preferable to simply finding a pile of coins and gems. One nice piece of cumbersome treasure—a silver feeding trough—is a challenge to haul around, but also useful to pile stuff in and carry as a litter. Porcus wields a +2 pig skull mace that turns its victims into a devil swine, but in the hands of a mere mortal turns its victims into a dead pig instead (awesome!) Characters who dare to climb down into the bloody offal pits are rewarded with the discovery of a +1 sword/+3 vs. porcine creatures named Aprum Interfectorem, "The Boar Killer"—a weapon that could become instrumental to defeating Porcus (excellent!). 

Monsters are similarly thematic and unique. The devil swine* are tough, hell-spawned boars (3 HD with limited regeneration), while the porcs ("once commonly seen across the lands, but now a rarity") are bog-standard orcs with tracking by scent. Porcus is an 8 HD pig-headed demon and sufficiently difficult for an under-equipped party, with the possibility of being encountered with up to 4 devil swine. To complicate things, anyone struck by the demon's claws contracts wereboar-lycanthropy while anyone slain by his mace turns into a devil swine under his control. The final battle could get out of hand very quickly if the party isn't careful and/or has a few rolls drop the wrong way.

*BX already has a devil swine monster, but it is a 9 HD lycanthrope with a powerful charm effect.

SCORE (THEME) = 5 / 5
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2) MAP AND ART
(How complex/useful is the map and/or art? How easy is it to grok the layout?)

The scan of the hand-drawn map is clear and legible. There are two entrances to the dungeon level—devil swine tracks lead to a (mostly) bricked-up tunnel on the edge of town, but investigators who poke around Higbald's shop when he's away may discover a second entrance in the cellar. A map scale is given (10 ft.), which a lot of modern adventures fail to include. 

The dungeon feels properly maze-like and makes good use of stairs and pits to split one level into three elevations to challenge mapmakers. Cleverly, each entrance opens into a different "route" through the dungeon, separated by a rusty portcullis which I talk more about under Interactivity below. 

SCORE (MAP/ART) = 4 / 5
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3) CLARITY
(How easy is the writeup to read/parse quickly? How well does the information flow?)

Dungeon key descriptions are impressively short and efficient. The margins are tight but give the interior of the page lots of white space, making the text easy to scan quickly to find information. There are some minor issues with information organization (for example, the Hooks and Rewards section comes first but references specific details given in Rumors, which is the section after; flip the order of those sections and the information flow becomes smoother).

Good notes are provided on Higbald the butcher's schedule and whereabouts. The inhabitants of the dungeon rooms are actively doing something when the PCs encounter them, and there is a proper order of battle/retreat conditions given in many cases. All this is handled in a few concise sentences for each area and well done.

A few minor details are missing here and there (e.g., how many crystal goblets in area 7? how many devilled sausages in area 8? etc.) It's also not clear if wandering creatures encountered outside keyed locations are deducted from the total population or if they are considered "extra" monsters. If it's the former, then a single wandering encounter could wipe out a significant number of those creatures in the dungeon. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just important to establish and is unclear from the writeup.

The porcs' relationship to Higbald the butcher is not described. Do they serve him? Tolerate him? Why are they here? Porcus's relationship to Higbald is also unclear. From the text, Higbald (a commoner?) can command Porcus to attack the party. Assuming this is possible due to the occult cookbooks, what else can Higbald have Porcus do other than summon devil swine for him to butcher? 

If Higbald is Porcus's servant instead, the first thing the demon should do is turn him into a wereboar (making for a deadlier encounter with the butcher). When first encountered, Porcus is standing inside a pentagram, but is he contained inside it? If so, how can he attack the party? These are easy issues for a referee to resolve on the fly, but a note or two on what exactly is going on would help.

A big piece of missing information concerns the devilled sausages: specifically, what happens when someone (such as a PC) eats one. We get a description that the eater becomes cursed with unrelenting hunger that makes them sick, but what does that mean? Do they eat until they die? How long do they remain ill? Is there a saving throw? Does a Cure Disease spell work, or does it require a Remove Curse? Also, the strings of finished sausages hanging in Higbald's cellar are 1 HD monsters capable of attacking someone by choking them...are these the same ones that curse you if eaten? If these are the same links, why don't they choke the customers who buy them? They are certainly capable of overcoming a 0-level human.

While these are simple questions for a referee to answer as the session unspools, designers can help a lot by thinking through some of the basic things a normal player is going to do or ask about, and providing some simple guidance upfront. The less I have to do as an adventure-buying ref to keep the game humming, the better.

SCORE (CLARITY) = 3 / 5
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4) INTERACTIVITY/INNOVATION
(How well does the adventure use the rules to create interesting play?)

The adventure has plenty of satisfying interactive bits: a map that suggests a secret room; a poison gas trap; a pigtail key that opens a pig-shaped chest missing a tail found in another area.

There is a "rusted-shut" portcullis near both entrances that effectively divides the dungeon into two distinct starting "routes." The routes connect deeper in the dungeon, but this portcullis is a clever way to show the players a tantalizingly-inaccessible area, juicing them up to explore and figure out how to get there. BX lacks a "Lift Gates" roll, but the adventure provides a mechanic for lifting the portcullis: Roll 1 + STR bonus or less on 1d10 (e.g., 1–4 for an 18 STR). This is pretty generous (40% success rate for 18 STR). By comparison, an 18 STR in AD&D has a 14% chance to lift a regular (non-rusted) gate. The writeup doesn't account for multiple people attempting to lift it, but presumably one would add the target numbers (or at least bonuses) together. If the intention is for this gate to be difficult to overcome, then changing the roll to a d20 and maybe applying only STR bonuses, instead of adding to a base 1, would make opening it a lot harder (or impossible for 14 or less STR).

Another area features a riddle that isn't too hard to answer if players keep the obvious theme in mind (this is very good, as riddles have a bad habit of bringing play to a screeching halt). I enjoy creating riddles, but they can't be too obscure or tricksy; this one smartly plays on a familiar and thematic idiom and requires an obvious act to trigger the "reward." Most groups will figure this one out in a satisfying way, and that's what you want as a designer. In this case, solving the riddle (and doing the thing) is rewarded by transforming the puzzle-solver's nose into a pig snout with an excellent sense of smell. I love interactivity that can alter a character permanently, for good or bad. It can make tampering with things attractive to a player, but there's always that risk of something bad happening. I think this particular outcome would be seen as a negative for most people, but open-minded players willing to work with the ugly pig nose may gain some benefit from their enhanced sense (as detailed under the description of the Porc).

A couple of minor missteps include an inexplicably-placed spear trap in the pigsty (though the feces-covered, disease-causing spikes are nice – good trap, weird spot), and the aforementioned pig-shaped chest, which is trapped with an alarm that goes off whether or not one uses the pigtail key to open it. It would be more satisfying for players (and make more sense from the chest owner's perspective) to have the key deactivate the alarm, which should only go off when someone tries to pick the lock/force the lid open. Discoveries that yield rewards are the dopamine fix players crave, so adventure writers should take opportunities to make things like finding a key and figuring out which lock it opens matter to the outcome. The chest alarm is a missed opportunity to not only make finding the key beneficial to the players, but also keep them eagerly hunting for more stuff like it. Both of these issues are easily fixed, however. 

SCORE (INTERACTIVITY) = 3 /5
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5) MODULARITY
(How easy would it be to drop/integrate the adventure into an existing campaign?)

The introduction states the adventure is a town and 17-room dungeon for a party of four 5th-level player characters, containing 14,404 gp worth of treasure.

There is not much of a town described here other than a few very specific details: There is a temple to Ing, a Merchants Guild, and two rival butchers. There is no other description of town buildings or NPCs, nor any account of local authorities who are notably absent in dealing with the situation. This lack of detail gives referees a lot of flexibility to plug this adventure as written into any village, town, or even urban setting. Some work may be desired/need to be done in terms of the locale and party motivation, but not an egregious amount.

The inclusion of the total amount of treasure is handy, although the number given includes all three town rewards (1,170 gpv), which technically don't count as "treasure" for XP purposes (real XP value = 13,234). Monster XP is approximately 3,300*, for an adjusted total of 16,534 XP. For the recommended party of characters, this equates to ~4,100 XP per character (~20-25% of the amount needed to reach 6th level).

*This is where the detail about monster population is important. If wandering monsters are in addition to the dungeon's keyed population, then the monster XP total could be potentially much higher. I think the designer's intent was on a fixed monster population, but another referee may understand it differently without clear direction.

SCORE (MODULARITY) = 4 / 5
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6) USABILITY
(How much work will the referee have to do to run this adventure at the table tonight?)

As mentioned—unless this is intended just as a fun one-shot, or you have a group of players who go with the flow and don't question the referee's every statement—the opening of the adventure may need some tweaking to get players motivated. While reading, I found myself completely rewriting the entire intro/premise, but the good news is that it was pretty easy to create an alternate scenario from the bones of the intro that would still prompt exploration of the dungeon setting while staying true to the author's flavor and theme.

Other than addressing some of the points described elsewhere, there's not much else a referee needs to do to run this adventure. Even where the answers weren't provided, it's not hard to figure out the designer's intent or come up with a workable solution.

SCORE (USABILITY) = 3 / 5
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7) FINAL THOUGHTS

This is a solid, profitable adventure site, despite the clunky opening. The rumors about the feuding butchers and Higbald's cheap sausages are on-the-nose, so there's not much mystery here (the most obvious guy is the culprit). I would have liked to see the involvement of the town butcheries be revealed as part of the investigative process, perhaps with some false clues to the source of the curse presented (Is the well water poisoned? Did a witch curse the villagers? etc.) Then, after some legwork, suspicion falls upon the only butcher in town (famous for his delicious sausages that everyone gobbles up).

Better yet, why not present the opportunity for the party to dine in the inn with the option of eating the sausages ("best in these parts") for dinner, so they can experience the curse firsthand. Racing the clock to remove the curse before they eat themselves to death would be a powerful motivation for the party to deal with this situation.

Same thing with the upfront rumor about the underground ruins. Their existence would have been more interesting had the party discovered the entrance and then one person in town (the elder, the mayor, etc.) could have acknowledged: "Oh...well, Piggton is built on the sunken ruins of Porcusoppidum..." Learning the information at the start as a matter of course is simply a flashing neon sign reading "Go Here!" (That is also not necessarily a bad thing if you want to skip the investigation and get things rolling.)

It would also have been nice for the butcher to have had a more explicit connection to Porcus. Perhaps he is a cultist priest using the guise of a humble butcher to enthrall the townsfolk with demonic sausages, or maybe he is Porcus in disguise, which would make for a dramatic reveal in the temple.

In any case, these are minor narrative quibbles. It would be pretty easy to plug the basic scenario presented here into any number of different sockets. Once the party enters the dungeon, it's absolutely a good time. That's the hallmark of a great adventure site, and Sausages of the Devil Swine rises well above the benchmark.

TOTAL SCORE: 3.7 / 5