The Barbican of Blood
Author: Mitch Hyde (aka dreadlord)
System: AD&D
Party Size: 4-8
Level Range: 6-8
Rumours suggest a Dark Lord has taken residence in an old ruined outpost, deep in a forest forlorn. Woodsmen and elves report that a 1st circle of druids have fled their stone circle, driven away by the harassment of a powerful figure. They will offer the use of their spells and agents in return for aid.
The "Dark Lord" in question is a ninth-level fighter who, with his retinue of henchmen, has occupied a ruined tower in the forest and driven out a local circle of druids. The druids ask the party to rid them of this menace and offer to assist their efforts. Unbeknownst to anyone, the Dark Lord and his men are actually charmed minions of an ancient vampire whose crypt is below the old fort. Awesome, classic setup.
When the party arrives at the site (to help the druids ostensibly, though the party has been offered no reward, only assistance with the task), the Dark Lord Sigebert rides out to parley with the party (the text says "parlay," which has a different meaning altogether) and challenges their fighter to a joust. If he wins, the party must leave. If he loses, he invites the party to a feast, offers them warhorses as a reward, and allows them to stay for two weeks. Stay, in a ruin... for two weeks. Then they must leave and never speak of this place again.
Inside the ruined keep, the party finds that Sigebert and his men have killed a young red dragon and flayed it in the courtyard. Naught remains but bloody bones and scraps of meat for the rats. He may share a strange tale of meeting "a very fine gentleman" to whom he "made a solemn oath to protect the barbican at all costs." His memory of what happened next is a little fuzzy, but his men keep disappearing, such that his retinue is down to just four. (Out of how many, one wonders?)
All five men are under the vampire's charm, but if the party can figure out the enchantment, they can dispel it. Sigebert will remember the vampire—and will offer the party 50,000 bucks and his daughter's hand in marriage to slay the creature—but he and his men "know nothing of the entrance to the dungeon."
If the party stays a while and the vampire shows up, he summons a pack of 3–18 wolves to attack them (consistent with the vampire's MM description, good), which an average party of six 7th-level characters will barely notice. Subsequently, the vampire will attempt to charm the PCs to serve as his guards.
Without this last bit of interaction, the adventure is likely to take a shallow trajectory. If the party loses the duel to Sigebert, honor would dictate that they leave (if they are Lawful, knightly PCs). If the party wins the duel, I think the odds that they accept Sigebert's invitation to stay are slim to none. Even so, unless they kill Sigebert and his men, they probably will not get an opportunity to explore the ruins and won't discover the existence of the crypt below. If they kill Sigebert and his men, and thoroughly explore his chambers, they still may not discover the secret door to the crypt.
In other words, there is a distinct possibility that the party comes here and then leaves without ever discovering the existence of the actual dungeon. There is a paragraph about the vampire's travels. He is often not at this site (by the adventure's measure, ~3/4 of the time), having flown to a distant city for a week or so. All of the above took one page to describe, so one-third of the adventure site may be all the party ever experiences.
If they do find the secret entrance, they enter a highly-linear dungeon environment that can be punishing. Rats scurry everywhere (and can be summoned to attack the party), and there is a 50% chance per hour to encounter the vampire down here (if he's present on-site, which he is likely not).
The first room uses fake surprise to trick the party into attacking a hollow clay gargoyle before they can realize it's only a statue. If they aren't surprised and "win initiative," the author assumes the party will rush it and attack, smashing the brittle clay and releasing a huge glug of green slime onto the idiot fighters. Gotcha!
A halfway-intelligent party won't just blindly enter an unexplored room; they'll hold at the doorway instead to brace spears and wait for the gargoyle to come to them. When it doesn't, the jig is up. The trickery with the initiative just doesn't work. What will happen after the weak jump-scare is that the PCs will discover the clay gargoyle is hollow and "filled with something." Do they smash it? Hell, yes. That's a decent green slime trap. All the fake surprise stuff does is telegraph to the PCs that this room is a trap. At 7th to 8th level though, a splash of green slime isn't much of a threat.
Past the gargoyle room, a dead-end passage with a hinged floor slides the party to the bottom where they get doused with flaming oil that does double normal damage for some reason. A brass vent on the wall is a 4" diameter pipe allowing the vampire to move quickly between sections of the crypt in gaseous form—a must-have for any decent vampire lair.
The party comes to a chamber with magic runes covering the walls. A "bare-chested barbarian" stands in the center of the room and challenges the party. With a cry of "Harold Harrod!" the barbarian attacks in a murderous fury. Nothing the party does seems to work. Their attacks miss and spells fail, while the insane and unstoppable barbarian rains blows down upon them, screaming: "Harold Harrod! "Harold Harrod!"
If a clever player figures out that they need to shout out their own name before attacking, they suddenly find success, for the room is cursed. The curse also eliminates aging, hunger, or the need for sleep, and provides immunity to paralysis or charm. Spells always fail within the room unless the spell has no verbal component, in which case the character may cast it successfully if they shout their name first. The vampire has promised the barbarian the gift of undeath if he serves him thusly. It's a fun megadungeon trick and I will probably steal it for my game.
There's a chess room with 20 (!) invisible coffer corpses in a state of stupor. This room should reek of decomposing flesh, but the text doesn't mention it. When the party attempts to cross, they bump and jostle the invisible corpses who will attack and become visible. These are 2 HD creatures with immunity to non-magic weapons and are turned as wraiths, meaning a cleric of the recommended level range would need to roll a '10' (at most) or a '4' (at a minimum) to turn. They shouldn't pose much of an obstacle. The chess theme has no bearing on the room's purpose, though the 32 heavy marble or onyx game pieces are worth decent money if the party can lug all 2.5 tons of them out.
On to the next room! The walls here are carved with goat-headed demons. A false door breathes fire, while two secret doors are opened by sticking your hand into a goat-demon's mouth and flipping a switch (so, find one and you'll find the other). One of the secret doors opens into a golem laboratory where a 7th-level magic-user and his 1 HD alchemist assistant are using a Manual of Golems to build a flesh golem for the vampire to deploy as a crypt guard. Their payment: 13 vials of the vampire's blood. That's neat! Is the vampire going to let this magic-user and alchemist leave with his blood and knowledge of his lair? A lone 7th-level magic-user won't last long against a vampire, so nah. Stupid NPC...
The golem is 3/8ths complete, meaning it probably won't come online unless the party leaves and then returns much later to finish exploring. If the construction time does elapse, however, then the DM needs to make a roll for the 7th-level magic-user to succeed. The DMG description of the Manual of Golems says:
It is assumed that the user of the manual is of 10th or higher level. For every level of experience under 10th there is a cumulative 10% chance that the golem will fall to pieces within 1 turn of completion of its construction due to the maker’s imperfect understanding.
That means there's a 30% chance of failure for this guy, so I hope he has a backup plan because the vampire is not going to be happy about this expensive project going tits up. In addition to the manual, the spell-caster has a load of money, some scrolls and potions, and a few choice magic items. This direction dead-ends here.
Taking the other secret door from the goat-demon room, the party enters a seriously deadly room in which illusory assassins "leap" from darkened portals and fling flurries of darts at the party. I may be wrong, but I don't think ranged assassination attempts are a thing, so why these are specifically called 5th-level assassins isn't clear. The spell is a Programmed Illusion, which I would normally quibble about but the adventure has already established that the vampire hires powerful spell-casters to magically fortify the crypt, so I can buy it.
Anyway, after delivering a potential hailstorm of darts (depending on how the surprise rolls shake out), the assassins leap back into the portals. One of these darkened portals is a Sphere of Annihilation. Eee-yikes! Again, I would normally quibble that the vampire (who we learn later is a former cleric) would be unable to mount such an arcane device, but it is reasonable to infer he simply hired a high-level magic-user to install it. Which makes me wonder why the magic-user didn't just destroy the vampire and keep the sphere (it's what I would do).
The other darkened portal continues into a summoning chamber where a plinth stands within a pentagram carved into the floor. Resting on the plinth is a diamond-studded platinum chalice filled with blood. The room is deathly cold and all flames go out. (Very cool—classic evil room setup here.) The chalice is worth 40,000 gp alone, but the plinth also has a secret compartment concealing a golden unholy symbol and info about a demonic cult in a nearby city. (Great material for future campaign developments if the DM wishes.) Crossing into the pentagram causes the trespasser to age by one year PER SEGMENT (!), requiring a quick snatch-and-grab to get the chalice. Even then, a System Shock roll is necessary to prevent the aged PC from dying. Good luck searching for the secret compartment.
An abyssal-themed wall mural may cause confusion for good-aligned characters, and there's a 1:6 chance each turn that a phantom manifests in the room and attacks. A final sentence describes what this room looks like on the astral plane—the courtyard of a demonic outpost occupied by a "Balor Sultan." Cool detail to have in your back pocket, on the off-chance the party looks into the astral plane.
From the summoning chamber, we can take one of two routes (both branching dead-ends off the main dungeon through-line). One route enters a treasure vault containing three valuable furnishings (a chaise, a lute, and an emerald-studded platinum statue) but no standard loot (coins, gems, jewelry, etc.) A secret door trapped with "Dust of Coughing and Sneezing" (sic) conceals a room containing a Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals filled with opals and silver bullets.
The other route leads into another staple of a good vampire lair: The false tomb—this one coffin-shaped. Within an upright sarcophagus stands a wax figure of a vampiric-looking fellow, and a Magic Mouth appears and makes a hissing sound. A quick-thinking party will plunge a stake into the awakening vampire's heart, piercing a container within the wax figure's chest and releasing a demonic mist that tries to possess a character and wreak havoc. This is another Gotcha! trap, but I like this one well enough. It seems suitably plausible and even the player-victims would have to admit its a good trick. The tiny vent to the vampire's true coffin is hidden behind the stone sarcophagus. (Perfect!)
The vampire's stats and details are provided at the end, along with a detail that he carries two "poisonous snake familiars" which he flings at enemies upon first meeting them (you can see the vipers in the cover art). The vampire is statted as a 5th-level cleric, so he can't even have ONE familiar, much less two, so we'll assume he's cast Snake Charm on them. I know it sounds like a nit-pick to point this out, but there's a perfectly gameable, rules-compatible spell to do what the author wants this villain to do. Use that instead! Don't confuse the issue by describing a clerical ability with a magic-user spell's term. The reward for killing the vampire: A talisman that gives the bearer domain over a mountain fief, and a bloodstone gem containing three wishes. Wow!
Treasure is non-standard but high value: About 278,000 gpv just in non-magical loot (much of it difficult to transport). There's also the golem-builder's spellbook which, according to Unearthed Arcana guidelines, is worth 22,000 gpv (or 11,000 XP), so we're up around 300k, or 50k each for an average recommended party of 6 characters. Magic items are varied and on the potent side, especially a few of the major items. Many (perhaps most) of the items will be kept because it's all good stuff, but some will likely be sold, so the gp/xp shares will rise commensurately.
Just the Manual of Golems, Manual of Stealthy Pilfering, Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals, Sphere of Annihilation, and Gem (Ring) of Three Wishes alone account for another 140,000 gpv if sold (or nearly 22,000 in XP if kept). Granted, the party is probably not going to be able to wrangle the Sphere of Annihilation, but they sure as hell are going to try.
Not a bad haul, and appropriate given how deadly this adventure can get.
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1) THEME
(How strong/consistent is the adventure's premise, flavor, and setting?)
This is a tough one on its surface, because what we typically think of as a strong "theme" (i.e., a powerful flavor or setting archetype) is not really laid out here. Instead, this adventure site is a style of dungeon called a gantlet. Though the trappings of this particular gantlet are those of a "vampire's tomb," many of the challenges presented here have little relationship to that.
The gantlet dungeon serves no other purpose than to protect an important story device (a vampire's coffin here) behind multiple layers of physical and magical security, represented by each of the successive room's puzzles and/or encounters. A gantlet is linear by nature; any branches or alternate routes still arrive at the same destination, where there is usually only one way into the sanctum sanctorum. Dungeon linearity is often criticized but can sometimes make perfect sense, especially for an "Adventure Site" built with quick-action/quick resolution gameplay in mind. The idol temple at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark is a perfect example of a linear gantlet dungeon served two ways: coming and going.
As a gantlet-style dungeon, this site functions near perfectly, though it may need some fine-tuning in terms of risk : reward. That's just a gut feeling, but the danger level in here ranges from relatively harmless green slime to a Sphere of Annihilation, not to mention the possible threat of a vampire lurking about. If he is here (and if I'm reading the text right, he's probably not here), then the party is going to have to deal with him ambushing them periodically, draining a few experience levels, and then gassing away out of the party's reach. A smart DM will wreak havoc on them in this setup.
I say that with respect... as a hard-ass dungeon assault for a bunch of hard-ass players, this site excels. If your players are disorganized or have a party makeup poorly matched to go toe-to-toe with a vampire in his lair, then the vampire should have his way with them and they'll soon be his slaves.
I'm not giving it a perfect '5' because there are some obvious ways this could have been given more flavor and consistent levels of challenge. I also think it would have been better to give some clues to the actual dungeon and the vampire's presence instead of hiding them behind a secret door and some shaky memories. We want the players to become aware of the dungeon and step inside.
SCORE (THEME) = 4 / 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?)
There are actually two maps: The titular barbican in the top-left, and the dungeon map below, all on the same grid. The text indicates the differing scales, using 10-yard squares for the barbican map and 10' squares for the dungeon level.
Simple, clean, readable. What's not to love?
SCORE (MAP/ART) = 5 / 5
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3) CLARITY
(How easy is the writeup to read/parse quickly? How well does the information flow?)
The text is written in two-column, justified format (Yes!) with wide margins and good line spacing. It could use some formatting to make the section and room breaks clearer, and sometimes information flow could be better organized, but the text is well-written and sprinkled with plenty of descriptive word choices and phrasing so it's interesting to read. Most importantly, it's easy to understand what's going on in each area. A final edit and some formatting would nail it shut.
SCORE (CLARITY) = 4 / 5
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4) INTERACTIVITY/INNOVATION
(How well does the adventure use the rules to create interesting play?)
The real-world gantlet was a type of punishment in which the guilty party had to run between two lines of men who would beat them with sticks as they passed by. A gantlet dungeon typically uses a series of tests to beat you with as you pass through it. Sometimes these tests are straight-up combat; sometimes a trick; other times a trap. Often, they come in pairs or all three at once. The primary reward is progress into the dungeon, with opportunities for treasure along the way and a big payoff at the end.
We start the adventure with an interaction that was quite common back in the primordial game: The lord's challenge. As the party approaches a fortification, the lord rides out to meet them and challenges their strongest fighter to a gentlemanly contest of domination. This leads to some potentially interesting NPC conversation or conflict, depending on how things go down.
Once inside the dungeon, the gantlet begins and the party must make their way through each layer of dungeon defense. Room 1 is a trick + monster; Room 2 is a trap; Room 3 is a trick + monster; Room 4 is a monster + treasure; Room 5 is a trap + tricks (secret doors); Room 6 is a monster; Room 7 is treasure; Room 8 is a double trick (illusion and darkness) + trap; Room 9 is a trick + trap + monster + treasure; Room 10 is a treasure + trap; and Room 11 is a trap + monster. The vampire is not tied to a specific location, so he can be encountered at any stage.
This gantlet features generous treasure throughout, but the biggest amounts remain in the vampire's inner chambers, protected in part by the Sphere of Annihilation. Most of the tricks and traps require the PCs to engage with the environment, and some of the crypt's dangers can be avoided completely. The mix of interactivity, while not deep, is fairly wide and there are a lot of different mechanical bits of core D&D employed here. You may not like gantlets and that's understandable. But if you do, this is a pretty darn good one.
SCORE (INTERACTIVITY) = 4 / 5
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5) MODULARITY
(How easy would it be to drop/integrate the adventure into an existing campaign?)
This is another difficult criterion to grade with this adventure site. On the one hand, the basic setup is simple and straightforward, and doesn't really rely on any specific terrain or setting (though the default is forest). The druid angle is incidental and easily removed/replaced. In fact, the start of this adventure could totally be a random wilderness encounter. You can plug it in anywhere. That's great!
But as written, the party could easily address the druid's (or whoever's) concerns by defeating the Dark Lord and then be on their way without ever realizing the adventure site is there. That's not great.
This adventure also drops a lot of very powerful items into your campaign all at once, so that may affect its suitability for your tastes.
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?)
My score here is related to the Modularity dilemma because I would want to make the party aware of the hidden dungeon, and maybe modulate the challenges and/or treasures. That should all be relatively easy to fix or modify to my satisfaction.
Despite what I may want to do, another DM could pick this up and run it as-is because the manuscript gives you everything you need. Just be prepared for the party to finish prematurely unless you help them out a bit when they miss the subtle clue that Sigebert is charmed.
SCORE (USABILITY) = 4 / 5
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7) OVERALL THOUGHTS
I have some small problems with the initial setup, and the various elements comprising the dungeon never quite fully cohere into a solid, unified theme. It functions very well for what it is designed to do, however, and as an "Adventure Site" this place more than lives up to the concept's ideals.
FINAL SCORE = 4.0 / 5
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