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 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
Thanks for taking the time to review my competition entry. I appreciate all your feedback.
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure...it was a fun read!
DeleteYou're going to wear yourself out with reviews this thorough! Nice theme, John, and good luck in the contest.
ReplyDeleteI wrote much of this review before I knew there were going to be 30 entries! I may need to dial it down a bit if I want to finish sometime this decade.
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