My reviews of submissions for the Adventure Site Contest 2 are complete, my scores are turned in, and I've spent some time reflecting on what I learned from the experience, both as judge and adventure site designer.
Thanks to the other judges: Ben Gibson, BX Blackrazor, Owen Edwards, and Grützi for their kind and fair words about this adventure, and for all the hard work they put in to conduct their contest reviews. I was honored to be asked to judge, and I hope I brought something helpful to the table.
Also, congratulations to all the contest entrants. I've said before that it takes a lot of guts to write something and put it out there for other randos to critique. I have respect for every author and encourage everyone to keep writing, as all the entries had good, creative stuff in them.
Yes, my reviews were nit-picky, far more than I am in "real life," and yes, they were long-winded, but I believe it's more important for the author to hear what doesn't work than it is to hear what does. Criticism, not praise, is the entire point of the editorial (judging) process. And to make sure the criticism is sound, you have to dig into the details and tear things apart to get at them.
I went through each submission with a fine-toothed comb and double-checked the rulebooks (where I could) to form my critical questions. Often, I found the answers; sometimes, I found new questions. I put everything out there in terms of what I noticed, even if it was nit-picky, off-base, or purely personal opinion. Everyone's tastes are different and I'm just some guy on the internet, so the stakes of my criticism are low. My only goal was to give an honest and thorough evaluation of each site, from the perspective of a DM preparing to run it in a few hours.
The most valuable lessons about professional writing I ever learned were from the experienced editors who were hardest on my work. Their lessons stay with you, help you recognize the same mistakes next time before you make them. I certainly carry them over into my own editorial duties, contest or otherwise, and I hope all the authors take my reviews in that spirit.
In the spirit of accountability, on the other hand, I thought it would be fun to apply some of the same critical standards I used for the contest submissions to my own work. I won't be scoring the categories numerically, of course, because I already think my adventure is GREAT! 5 out of 5!!
Kidding, of course. There are actually lots of flaws and things that bothered me about my entry, regrets big and small, and could-have-beens that I forced myself to live with to meet the contest guidelines. Instead of giving it a score, I'll discuss my personal satisfaction with the results. I'm also including some design notes and elaborating on the original writeup. Stuff that might help someone trying to run it better understand my intentions.
Since the methods I use for judging are subjective, I'm going to apply some
of the questions/criticisms from other judges to test my creative premises. This is for no other reason than
to have something to bounce off as a discussion point, because it represents
something in my writeup that probably needs clarification. I accept their critique as 100% valid and agree with most of it—and much of it was positive—but where I can provide an explanation for my creative choices, I will.
Onward!
Owlbear Hill
Author: Scott_M
System: AD&D
Party Size: 4-7
Level Range: 5-7
There’s a spot back in the woods they call Ol’ Bare Hill. Used to be a Chaos temple on top way back when, but then the Law came and knocked it down. We don’t go there…ever. These troubles that are going on…it’s that hill, I’m telling you.
You will probably enjoy this long-ass screed more if you download the adventure and follow along.
In preparing for the contest, I went through my folder of already-written adventures where I keep dozens of little "lurid lairs" and unfinished ideas that are ripe for development into full adventure sites. This is exactly what what I did for last year's entry. This time. I picked an owlbear lair I created a few years ago for my 5e Frozen North campaign (and then reused for my Gloomy Forest campaign).
My players in that campaign had encountered wandering owlbears and declared their intent to track the creatures back to their den, so between sessions I wrote out the lair (with a secret tomb area). I recall that the players had a great time assaulting it, so I borrowed all of it (including the bloodhawks outside) for this contest. But since it was written for 5e I had some conversion work to do. While reading through the owlbear's description in the AD&D Monster Manual, I lingered over this sentence:
The horrible owlbear is probably the result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard.
The owlbear den was naturalistic in the 5e version of this adventure, but I couldn't get the image of the evil wizard out of my head. Some of the criticism of my entry last year mentioned that it was a bit one-note, just spiders and ettercaps, so I wanted a broader mix of monsters for this year's submission. I kept flipping through the MM, then my eyes wandered over this sentence in the bulette's description:
The bulette (or landshark) was thought to be extinct until recently when this horror reappeared. It was the result of a mad wizard's experimental cross breeding of a snapping turtle and armadillo with infusions of demons' ichor.
Boom. I had my theme: "Mad wizard's hybrid-monster lab." The intro text above came out of my head as written after sketching out the dungeon levels with blobs and lines. I looked for monsters with similar descriptions of arcane creation, but really only found the homunculus in the MM (and it's a different sort of thing, but I ended up using it anyway).
The gelatinous cube certainly seems like a manufactured monster, so I filed that away as a possibility. Flipping through the Fiend Folio only turned up the gorillabear, which makes no explicit mention of wizardly origin but is identical in construction to the owlbear. I also considered displacer beasts and manticores but they are clearly not of artificial manufacture. That's the point where I began concocting my own combinations. A panther combined with a scorpion, or a bear with a skunk... now we're talking!
The original owlbear den was a cavernous network under a hill where, coincidentally, a fallen warrior had been buried many years before in a sealed cave deep within. In this new version, the hill became much smaller—more of a barrow mound—and later, a chaos temple was built on top (and underneath). The temple was subsequently destroyed in the eternal battle between good and evil. Much later still, an insane warlock took over the site and bent the temple's chaos energies into fuel for his arcane transmogrification machines. The owlbears he created now dwell in the old caves below.
I sketched out a more accurate map on the grid, deciding on a ruined upper level (the chaos temple), a middle level (the temple undercroft/cellars), and then two layers of temple offices and dormitories, part of which connected to the caves that form the owlbear den and exit at the base of the hill. The burial chamber of the warrior sits between the upper and lower dungeon levels, where the evil of the place caused his spirit to rise as a haunting spectre. The tomb was known to the cultists but not to the warlock.
I had a lot of available rooms, most of which I intended to be empty (save for wandering monsters), but even when writing out my handful of initial ideas, the document came out to 7–8 pages of 10-point Times NR with 12-point paragraph breaks. I had to start carving and hacking lots of good material out of the manuscript, which was my first hint that this site was not going to work well as a contest submission. I was losing so much context and flavor in service of brevity.
Foremost among the cut sections was a series of rooms I called "The Slime Labs." There was also a storeroom full of living but failed hybrids, and the warlock's workshop had some more details. Even after losing a big chunk of all that, I was still at 4+ pages. My biggest regret, looking back, is that I didn't shelve it at this point and write a completely different entry. I could expand the adventure now that the contest is over, but that seems antithetical to the whole point of the creative exercise. The 3-page version that made it into the judges' hands is the Owlbear Hill adventure.
I continued whittling down the text, using every spacing and layout trick at my disposal in Word. I got it to three pages and then began the final editing stages. I'm pretty happy with what came out, though it feels both overstuffed and incomplete. I was set to playtest it in December, but didn't want to interrupt our regular weekly game night and had difficulty scheduling additional sessions. Then one of my main guys had to go in for surgery, and then the holidays came, and that was all she wrote. I'm still not quite sure how this site plays out at the table, but I think it will run okay.
Most of this year's critiques stated that the site was too big and the players would be spending too much time exploring empty rooms. In hindsight, I agree. My assumption while mapping/writing was that the players would start out exploring this way using standard protocols, but after going through some empty rooms and then finding a room with something obvious to do in it, they would be prompted to pay less attention to the empty rooms and focus more on finding and exploring rooms with things in them.
Frequent wandering encounters would also play into the need to hurry up. Once the warlock becomes aware of the party and retreats to the control room, his constant taunting and dispatching of creatures into the dungeon would turn up the heat even more. I could be completely wrong as to how this would go, but these are my assumptions about how my particular players would likely act (the guys I've gamed with for 35 years).
One of the lessons I learned from judging this year's contest is that we tend to bring these kinds of personal assumptions into our writeups, counting on the reader to understand what to do or correctly guess our intent. I saw quite a few of this year's authors commenting on Discord about their original assumptions and how they didn't translate into the work when the judges read them. I realize now that it's better to be explicit about how something is supposed to work, and if you can't do it with just a few words in the allotted space, then maybe question whether you should be doing it at all.
My site works "better" if the DM treats it less like a standard dungeon for the party to explore, and more like a Doom-style labyrinth into which the warlock sends waves of his beasts to actively hunt down the party. I never state that anywhere in the final draft, though, assuming (hoping) that prospective DMs would intuit it from the various pieces of content. The judges' consistent remarks about scope-creep and time-sinks constitute a failure of my assumptions. It's a great lesson.
Returning to the read-through of the manuscript, after the intro text I provide some Overview bullets to tell the DM exactly what's going on here and who the various parties are. Relevant to the paragraphs above, I think an overview is critical in writing an adventure site as you need to get the DM onboard and synced in immediately. Collect all relevant information about "the big picture" in one place and lay everything out, so as to avoid wasting page space later explaining things or repeating the same information.
Next I give some Background information on the scenario from the players' perspective, as they enter the picture—a "Here's What YOU Know" section. This content can be doled out as rumors, but for an adventure site, I prefer to just give players the information they would learn after asking around town, without actually spending session time to do it. If I felt like stretching this piece out or including a more investigatory approach to finding the hill, its easy to do. That's why I wrote six pieces of Background information (not counting the clues in the intro text), so as to make for a quick rumor table if desired.
The background bullets feature several hooks and some specific details to follow up on if the DM wants to string out the info dump, depending on whatever motivations the players bring to the table. Owlbears have been spotted in the fields lately, preying upon livestock in the middle of the night then retreating into the woods before dawn. A hunter snared and killed an owlbear cub, but was also slain in the effort. These events are causing unrest among the peasantry, prompting local officials to offer a bounty on the creatures.
The pot is sweetened further by accounts of a magic-user who spent a great sum to purchase the young owlbear's pin feathers, highly-prized for their utility as fine-quality writing quills (particularly in the creation of magic scrolls). Legends of hidden treasure and a king's tomb further appeal to the party's desire to earn. There's no mention whatsoever of the insane magic-user operating below the hill because no one knows of him yet, but reports of the activities of his gnoll mercenaries in the nearby woods provide players with a clue to track down if the DM doesn't intend to start them at the dungeon.
Elsewhere, they may also discover a narrow, barred tunnel leading into the hillside halfway up the slope—a conduit to the temple's former gongpit, where an olive slime (MM2) lurks on the ceiling and drips on unsuspecting characters. The latrine hole in the gongpit's ceiling provides a secret way into the temple cellars, but the climber can accidentally make contact with the plant-based slime, which turns their bodies into a cellulose zombie over time. To be clear for squeamish DMs, this facility is ages-old; there is no bodily waste present here, only a plant-based slime monster.
By taking the temple path, the party could be seen by a few gnolls loitering in the rubble pile at the crown of the hill. The gnolls are supposed to be keeping watch, but they're lazy and inattentive. If the party climbs the "back" part of the hill instead, the gnolls won't spot them and the PCs can attain the ruins or enter the owlbear cave or gongpit tunnel undetected.
If the gnolls spot the party coming up the path, they shoot arrows then retreat to the cellars to warn their brethren. The old Chaos temple was reduced to big piles of rubble, now just a crumbling shell with fragments of the original walls and columns still evident. Portions of the interior have been cleared away, forming pathways through the debris. There's also an evil altar of putrid stone that reduces the Wisdom of Good characters if they linger here too long. A stairway hidden by the rubble leads down to the temple's undercroft and cellars.
The walls down here are covered with garish carvings depicting Bosch-like hellscapes—"scenes of wanton murder and sadistic orgies." A lot of wall details got cut in the final writeup, but like the altar stone, the carvings emanate chaotic evil energies that weaken Good characters and power the warlock's arcane machines.
I'm a huge fan of telling the story of a place diegetically through dungeon features like statuary, carvings, and inscriptions, and letting players piece together information through the passive setting details. It's a great way to maintain player attention when they're actively listening for clues in the descriptions you give them. I was able to include some of the carving descriptions in the text, and I brought the curse effect into one chamber, but most of it was lost. Sad because it was flavorful stuff, but also non-essential and took up too much space.
So, a band of twelve gnolls camps down in the temple cellars with their alpha, a flind (FF). Some of the gnolls' context was lost in the editing process, but they are a band of hunters working for the crazy warlock, not only protecting the place but also procuring animals in the forest for his experiments (and to feed his pets). If the party can ambush the gnoll sentries in the temple ruins, they can reduce enemy numbers and possibly prevent the rest of the gnolls from being alerted.
I had to cut most of the cellar gnolls' order-of-battle, but hoped a proper way to run it would be obvious from the text that remained. If the gnolls are warned and have time, they scatter the bear traps around the room and conceal them with debris. When the party descends to the main room, one group of gnolls would draw the party into the north end of the room (possibly triggering the traps), while two other groups will use the chambers to the east and west to flank the party. The flind would also join this fight with his Net of Entrapment (a randomly-rolled magic item that felt perfectly thematic... I was pleased with the dice gods that day). If the gnolls begin to lose, they retreat to the vestry where a curse effect may hamper Good party members.
Mention was made of the gnolls' atypical choice of weapons—spears and short bows. Mea culpa, I was incorporating a hunter motif but this does reduce the baseline gnoll's normal damage output in combat. A great point for which I have no good answer. I picked flavor over substance, and unconsciously brought my own homebrew campaign ideas about gnolls into the writeup. My world's gnolls are explicit hyena-men, roaming forests and grasslands like pack scavengers, living and fighting more primitively than the official MM description.
To the east of the gnolls' chambers are some old storerooms and the old latrine entrance. In one of the storerooms is a mechanical elevator platform raised and lowered by a windlass winch. Too much weight on the platform can cause the elevator chains to break and crash to the floor below. The gnolls use it to winch subdued beasts (either alive or dead) down to the warlock's workshop. If the party goes this way, there's a chance the warlock is in the workshop; otherwise, this route allows the party to reach the upper dungeon level without being seen by the warlock's homunculus watching the main entrance (and, by proxy, alerting the warlock to the party's presence).
From the vestry, a flight of stairs descends to the Upper Dungeon level, which shares the same broken and disturbing characteristics of the cellar level. I add a few more notes here about environmental details: strong bestial odors, weird animalistic noises, a whiff of ammonia and ozone in the air. My original writeup, naturally, included more weird and unsettling effects down here, such as shifting patterns of light with no apparent source, torchlight shadows that don't reflect the characters' movements, vibrations in the stone and the muffled hum of machinery, etc.
The doors on this level are not made of wood and have no hinges or handles. They are iron panels instead, sliding open mechanically (Star Trek-style) with the flipping of a switch on either side. They are poorly maintained though, and the metal gears make a lot of noise as the panels open and close. Half of them are open at any time and, of course, they open automatically for monsters so the party hears the occasional racket from elsewhere in the dungeon. The doors can be forced open with a crowbar but can't be "kicked in." Secret doors are heavy stone panels on spring-loaded hinges, operated with a hidden stud.
Notes about the warlock, Zerod Xorex, explain that he is an utterly evil and insane magic-user bent on unleashing his monstrous creations into the surrounding civilized territories to subjugate their populations through fear and intimidation. As part of his master plan, he has acquired spells that make him capable of molding flesh into monsters and imposing his will upon them. Why did I make him only 8th level? I don't have a solid reason, I just felt like 5th-level spells and higher would put him in a whole 'nother class of enemy that would be overpowered for this party and this place. Gut instinct and personal preferences drove the decision.
The warlock is in a randomized dungeon location when the party arrives. From there the party's actions play out in terms of alerting him to their presence. If they're careful and quiet, they can move around unnoticed, possibly encountering the warlock outside his safe zone and vulnerable to ambush. If they are incautious or loud, the warlock retreats to the control room where he will release his vicious minions into the dungeon and watch them battle the party.
He is always accompanied by a pair of loyal gorillabears who aggressively protect him (per the Charm Monster spell description). In the original writeup, I described them as "plate-armored," wearing actual suits of fitted plate armor. Then I realized that only increases the monster's innate AC by one, so I cut that to save a bit of page space (and monster movement speed).
Next, I describe a key dungeon feature. Each chamber on the upper dungeon level (and one room on the lower level) has a "hidden camera"—a small bronze eye, through which the warlock can watch the party's progress from his control room. If the party finds these hidden eyes, they can smash them, blinding the warlock in that area. He can also release his monstrous creations from their pens to roam the dungeon and repel intruders (though he is loathe to put them at risk because none are yet self-reproducing and represent the only surviving specimens of his experiments). Again, this is all valuable context lost during editing that I trusted (hoped) would be intuitive. Yet more evidence that I should have shelved this and done something different.
Down the stairs from the unholy vestry, the party enters a pillared hall lined with leering (inanimate) gargoyles. Keeping a watch on this entrance is the warlock's homunculus who will telepathically alert the magic-user then shadow the party while its master makes his way to the control room. The homunculus will stay as out-of-sight as possible, since its death would severely harm its creator. A secret door at the bottom of the stairs gives access to the main laboratory chamber as well as a set of stairs to the lower dungeon level. In the original version, gnoll tracks could be found coming down the stairs and going into the wall (if anyone bothered to check). The gnolls use this route to feed the hybrids (see below).
Once on the dungeon level, the party may encounter wandering monsters, most often small groups of failed-hybrids—pitiful chimeras made of various animals. They are in pain and typically hostile, desperate for release from their torment. The warlock occasionally releases his successful hybrids into the dungeon to get exercise by hunting the failed-hybrids, so the party may encounter them randomly as well. Most chambers and passages are empty, so there are only a few areas of interest on the level. The outer "ring" hall on the upper level is lined with anchorite alcoves where the cultists once lived and performed their evil prayers.
The central chamber of the upper level—once the cult's ritual hall—is now the warlock's laboratory, where he conducts experiments using his arcane equipment. I cut some sentences explaining the process of creating the hybrids because the "how" wasn't central to anything. Originally, there was some cultist iconography and other elements here to which the warlock had hooked up his machinery, so as to emphasize the chaotic energies powering the equipment. There was some interactivity present here with the cultist symbols and statuary as well. I chopped all that, as well.
When the party enters the lab, two beasts are prepped and in the targeting cages, while the machines are primed and readied for the warlock to begin the process. There is a big mistake here that I guess crept in during the editing-down process, but I didn't notice until I reviewed the text for this post. I discuss the process further below under the Theme category, but the basic idea is that the machines focus the warlock's Polymorph Other spells to create the hybrids, and he has to cast both of them for the machine to operate. Two Polymorph Other spells are in the warlock's current memorized spell list.
If the party starts fooling with the machines, however, there's a table to resolve possible malfunctions, one of which is that the process is successful and a hybrid monster is created (and released by an unlatched cage door). But how did the machines work properly if the polymorph spells have not been cast yet? Chaos magick! But no, it's a mistake in the dungeon logic that I didn't catch. Following the loose process I imagined originally, he should have cast the Polymorph Other spells the previous day, then memorized his Charm Monster spells for today, in order to tame the beast that results from the operation. The error isn't too obvious if you don't put it together, but now I can't un-notice it.
Three of the machinery cabinets contain strapped-up quasits being drained of their blood (a callback to the "demon ichor" reference in the bulette's description). It makes logical process sense here as the demons are innate, at-will shape changers. Quasit juice helps the machines work. I chopped a sentence or two about how the quasits claim to want revenge against the warlock, but really what they want is to trick the party into taking down the magic-user and his beasts. They will then turn on the survivors and eat their souls.
Four adjacent areas are open to the lab but closed off by portcullis gates—essentially animal pens where the warlock keeps his successful hybrids. Using the concept of "owl + bear = owlbear," I thought up different combinations of animals that sounded as cool: boarhawks, scorpupines, porcupanthers, and two forms of "wolf + snake"—wolfsnakes and snakewolves. I desperately want to see Erol Otus' interpretations of these.
Why don't they attack each other, or the other hybrid species? Because it's not fun or interesting, and won't provide any challenge or experience to the party. It's a fair question I didn't bother answering in the text because the fact doesn't impact gameplay, and I think it's easy enough to come up with a sufficient rationalization for it, given the theme. Maybe the machines amplify the Charm Monster spells as well and give the warlock more direct control over his creations. It would not be a bad bit to add, to make things clearer, but there is no room for it.
Who feeds these things? What do they eat? Great questions, the answers to which were all excised to squeeze this adventure into three pages. That's part of what the gnolls do: hunt game and nearby livestock to feed the hybrids. They lower carcasses on the elevator lift from the temple cellars down to the warlock's workshop, then use the secret door at the vestry stairs to enter the lab and toss gobs of meat through the pen gates. If gnolls are present on the level when the monsters are loose, the beasts will attack them.
The warlock's workshop is just off the main lab. This is one of the areas where there's a chance he is present. The original version of the workshop had more stuff to fiddle with, but I kept the casks of oil for the party to use potentially against the hybrids (especially useful against the bulette if the characters can get it to eat one). The lift from the cellar lands here. Originally, I had a sentence about a bloody trail leading from the platform to the hybrid pens.
Also off the lab (in another direction) is a room with shelves that are lined with jars filled with failed, hideously-deformed specimens. Flapping around in here is a unique hybrid, a bearowl. The main point to this room was to provide the party with evidence that the warlock has been at this experimentation a while, as part of a greater effort. I had a kernel of an idea for something else to do here, but could never define it to my satisfaction. I still included the room to provide information, and kept the bearowl just because I thought it was a fun reversal of his attempts to make an owlbear. This room falls a bit flat for me, admittedly.
A pair of portcullis gates arranged airlock-style blocks off a ramp from the specimen lab down to the owlbear caves on the lower dungeon level. Around the corner from the specimen lab, a staircase also leads down to the lower dungeon level. Just beyond, the hallway ends in an anomalous wooden door—actually an intelligent (i.e., talking) mimic that is also charmed by the warlock. It thinks of the magic-user as its pet and protects his private chambers zealously.
The bedchamber beyond is stark and punishing. The warlock is obsessed with his work and lives like a zealot, resting only upon a bed of nails. His mad scrawlings cover the walls like graffiti—obscene arcane formulae painted with his bodily fluids (yuk!). If the warlock is in the control room, his ferocious gorillabears wait here, alerted by the mimic's activity and ready to attack the party. A secret door leads to the control room where some more magical equipment allows the warlock to view every chamber and manipulate the dungeon doors and portcullis gates (also the pit chute described further below).
It's all operated from a control panel that contains a glaring continuity error, but one which exists for space purposes. In the original version, it is made clear that the bronze eyes were not installed by the warlock but were original to the temple ruins. He simply found the control room and figured out how to activate the panel to view the dungeon rooms in the magic mirror. Originally, the eyes were in every room and passage on BOTH dungeon levels, covering the entire facility.
Parts of the lower level have collapsed, but there were intended to be more chambers beyond the collapsed passages that could be dug out and explored. When these buttons on the panel were pushed, the viewer would see only darkness in the mirror, though one room had something glowing in it—permitting a glimpse into a location the PCs can't access without excavating. These would have been untouched vaults containing, among other things, the temple riches alluded to in the Background section, along with some other chthonic monster. (Yes, I know! This is way too much to have crammed into an adventure site! I'm painfully aware...)
The full operational details of the control room just took up too much space and had to be cut out, so I limited the panel to only 20 buttons for each of the chambers on the upper level and one room on the lower level. This still bugs the hell out of me, but it was the only way I could make it all fit. I also made it a pain-in-the-ass for others to use because I failed to provide a helpful sub-key on the map so the DM could quickly tell which button applied to which room. This is one of those things where I encourage designers to help the prospective DM as much as possible. This would have been an easy thing for me to add to speed things up at the table for any DM who wants to run it. Boo! I'm dissatisfied with how this room turned out, even though it still does most of what I needed it to.
Zerod's spellbook, worth a princely sum, rests on a table in the control room along with notes and other books, some of which contain instructions for operating the polymorphing machines. I covered that with a mention in the lab itself, so I cut out a repeating statement here for space purposes (though I think it could still use one, just to reinforce the importance of the documents). A box of owlbear pinfeather quills on the table is intended to signal their purpose, as described in the owlbear caves.
One room is closed off and contains a gaggle of failed-hybrids who are wounded or sickly, thrown here by the warlock to be used as food for the bulette on the lower dungeon level (just below this room, in fact). The entire floor is a pit trap that drops anyone in the room into a chute, which dumps them into the sandpit on the lower dungeon level where the bulette is kept. The trap is triggered by 500 lbs. of weight on the pit doors, or the warlock can activate it from the control room. One judge questioned what the warlock feeds the bulette and the (unstated) answer is the same as for the other creatures here: The gnolls hunt for food and throw it into this room, where the warlock drops it into his pet's pen. Not made explicit but hopefully inferred.
The last keyed room on this level is meant as a dungeon trick. When the door slides open, there's a 20x20 room with a 20' high ceiling, apparently empty save for a pile of treasure heaped in the center of the floor. The vault-like room is completely filled with a transparent, quadruple-sized gelatinous cube, rendered "dormant" (somehow) by the sorcerer. If someone is dumb enough to enter the room, they are automatically drawn into the cube and paralyzed for digestion.
In the original writeup, this room was part of "The Slime Labs" that got cut. In that version, the warlock created the cube and kept it confined in this chamber, rendering it inert by drip-feeding it just enough nutrient bath to keep it alive but too weak to be "active." The warlock stores his treasure within the cube, but because it isn't active and churning up the treasure in its body, the loot has all settled into a pile in the center of the room. The warlock was also withdrawing samples of the gelatinous cube's material, using it as a "starter" (like for making bread dough) to infuse its biology into other ooze creatures.
From this, the slime labs manufactured miniature (3x3x3) cubes with the gelatinous cube's transparency, but the attack form of the other ooze monster (so, like a black pudding cube that is mostly invisible but has the pudding's corrosive touch instead of paralysis). These cubes would be able to merge together to form full-sized (or bigger) cubes, as well. It was a full adventure site's worth of material. Chopped!
The giant gelatinous cube and the detail about the loot on the floor are the only remaining pieces of that content in the final version, but I saved the rest of it and will use it for something else. The main reason I kept the gelatinous cube is that some folks on the CAG server were giving them a hard time as an ineffective monster. I like cubes, though, so I wanted to give a good example of one way to use them (I'm also fond of putting gelatinous cubes at the bottom of pits or in ceiling traps).
This particular one is equivalent to four normal-sized cubes, which gives it greater hit points but otherwise functions the same. When a character is drawn into the cube (or if it is harmed while dormant), the sudden infusion of protein (or gelatinous adrenaline) awakens it. The cube will pursue more food (e.g., the party) into the dungeon. I pictured a shuggoth kind of pursuit, in which the creature squirms through corridors too narrow for its full bulk. To provide some randomness to its movement, I gave the full-sized cube a 1-in-6 chance to "surge" forward like toothpaste exploding from a tube, doubling its movement speed for the round. Any characters who tarry behind to strike the otherwise slow-moving cube could get caught up in the surge. Sustained damage causes the giant cube to shrink in size, eventually becoming a normal 10x10 cube until it is killed.
I want to mention an unkeyed room on this level that may prompt a question (and did for one judge). There is a small chamber behind a secret door in the northeast quadrant of the upper level. This was originally a keyed room where there was no bronze eye present—a "dead zone" for the control room's surveillance system. In my imagination, it was once a room where cultist elders could meet without being spied upon. In practical terms for the party, it was meant as a possible redoubt they could escape to if necessary because the beasts can't open the secret door. There was something else about a magic candle in here, but I can't remember what that was. When I chopped it I should have removed the secret door from the map to eliminate confusion, but by then I was so used to seeing it that it just didn't occur to me.
The lower dungeon level, sans the owlbear caves/warrior's tomb sections, became mostly irrelevant once I realized I wouldn't have enough page space to develop it as envisioned. I kept it for two reasons: One, it maintained the integrity of the pit trap into the bulette lair; and two, it allowed the party a vertical route if they wanted to get from one side of the upper dungeon to the other while avoiding something roaming the top level (like the gelatinous cube).
The only room of substance on the temple's lower level is the bulette lair, which is designed like an arena pit. It's a cylinder in the ground, lined with iron plates and two-thirds filled with sand. Completely bullshit-architecture and called out as such by one judge, though in nicer terms. Guilty as charged, but still a perfectly acceptable D&D room to me. Who knows what the cult used the room for originally? Maybe it was they and not the warlock who lined it with iron and/or filled it with sand. Maybe the husk of some other vicious monster lies on the sunken floor of the pit and the warlock simply appropriated it for his new pet. Probably no one cares... roll initiative!
The size of the bulette is unspecified, though I refer to it as a "young" one. A clarification of its size would be helpful. According to the Monster Manual description, an adult bulette is about 9' high and 12' long, has 9 HD, and does 3–18 damage with each of 2 claws and 4–48 with its bite. This one is still-growing/not ready to be released at 6 HD and 2–12/2–12/3–24 damage for its attack routines.
I figure the young bulette is 5–6' in height and 8–9' in length (two thirds of full size), and occupies a cylindrical volume of roughly 176 cu. ft. The 20' deep sand pit occupies a cylindrical volume of almost 40,000 cu. ft. meaning the bulette has plenty of room to "swim" around. Again, these are details I had to cut out but hoped to imply by virtue of the stat block numbers.
Between the upper and lower dungeon levels is the warrior's crypt. I probably could have lopped this whole piece off, but left it in partly to honor the original 5e adventure and partly because I love secret areas. It was also a good opportunity to throw in a monster completely unrelated to the other shenanigans going on here, along with a small treasure hoard to boot.
The final section is the owlbear caves, open to the outside via a cave entrance at the base of the hill, and connected to the lower dungeon level via a gated ramp. A sleuth of eight owlbears live here: two helpless hatchlings, two young (but still dangerous), three females (smaller than full size but vicious), and a massive male. An unhatched egg rests in one of the female's nests. A normal adult owlbear has 5+2 HD, but since I was leaning heavily into the biology/reproductive angle here, I wanted to represent owlbears of different strengths to better indicate the hierarchy of male, females, and young by altering the baseline hit dice.
That it might make some of the young and females more vulnerable to certain spells doesn't bother me too much, though it's a great point and one I hadn't considered when porting this in from 5e, where such things are the norm. If I were to rewrite this, I would probably take the judge's advice on making the females full HD but at the lower end of the hit point range. Makes total sense. The beefed-up male packs a meaner-than-expected punch so it kind of balances out for me. Gold piece values for the egg and young come straight out of the MM.
Total treasure found here is ~42,000 gpv/xpv. Magic item xp runs another ~36,000 while monster xp adds another ~17,000 for a total adventure site value of ~95,000 xp, or around 19,000 xp apiece for a party of five characters. If the party sells all the magic items and the warlock's spellbook, total xp doubles to more than 190,000 or a little over 38,000 xp apiece.
The lower individual amount (19,000 xp) would be enough to take the core character classes from about two-thirds to most-of the way from 5th to 6th level, or between one-third to one-half of the way from 6th to 7th level. The higher amount would take the same characters most or all of the way from 6th to 7th, though it's unlikely the party would sell all the magic items. The spellbook alone is worth more than 40,000 gpv.
1) THEME
(How strong/consistent is the adventure's premise, flavor, and setting?)
I feel good about the theme of this one. I was leaning into sword-and-sorcerous-science tropes and Harryhausen-influenced monstrosities. I think the core idea of my site is solid, even though I lacked sufficient space to make the theme shine as fully as intended.
The Background section introduces the idea of someone important (and rich!) buried beneath the mound. I wrote the name of the hill in the intro as "Ol' Bare Hill" (or Old Bare Hill) as an obvious homonym for Owlbear Hill. The name of the entombed warrior is meant to be pronounced Ohl-bayr not Ohl-burt, which I intended as a double homonym to further tie in to the origin of the site's name. Lack of space forced me to cut the pronunciation guide, which I think weakens the impact of its meaning.
The mound's original name was "Olbert's Hill," which became "Ol Bare Hill" after the temple construction removed the hill's crown down to exposed rock. It has only recently been referred to as "Owlbear Hill" with the onset of the monsters' attacks. These details don't really matter to anyone except me, obviously, but knowing them makes the site feel more real to me.
On a related note, one judge remarked that the warlock's surname is "Xerox" spelled backward and credited me with an "on-the-nose" joke about making copies of animals. That's a great observation, but it was completely unconscious on my part (whereas Olbert was an intentional pun). Ever since I was a kid, I've had a habit of pronouncing words backwards for fun (mostly in my head), and I used to operate a Xerox DocuTech back in the 90s. It's possible the word "xorex" has been floating around my noggin this whole time, but I swear I didn't name him that by design.
In my original text, there was a sentence or two about how Xerod's arcane machines only "focus" the casting of the warlock's polymorph spells, allowing him to take two different targets and merge them together into one form, but limiting the new form to only aspects of either target form. The entire operation is driven by his Polymorph Other and Charm Monster spells, and he can cast two of the 4th-level spells per day.
I imagined the transmogrification process as a multi-day operation, requiring the casting of two Polymorph Other spells into the machine, one for each target. The machine holds the magic until the following day, allowing the warlock to memorize two Charm Monster spells. He then activates the machinery, and if the operation is successful, he charms the resulting creature and imprints himself as its master. If both charm attempts fail, he keeps the creature caged in the lab until he can re-memorize the spells (and succeeds). The process is neither quick nor foolproof, so if the party needs to quit the dungeon temporarily, the warlock won't be able to replenish many of his monsters (if any).
One judge objected to an 8th-level magic-user being able to fabricate such things, and he's correct in that it requires 11th level to fabricate magic items. But these machines are purely for flavor and don't confer any advantage whatsoever to the magic-user against the PCs other than being a source of monsters. I could have just as easily changed the machines into a unique spell the warlock had developed during his long years of research devoted to becoming the Master of Hybrid-beasts! Machines are just more fun and thematic to the idea of "genetic research" and "experimental cross breeding." The machines also provide the players with opportunities for interactivity which I always like to exploit.
Two reviewers expressed issues with the types of animals represented here thematically, vis-a-vis the adventure site's setting. The only explicit setting details I mentioned were "forest," "ranches" (which suggests fields, pastures, grasslands, etc.), and a "town." If we throw in the "hill" and its "knee-high weeds" and "bushy shrubs," that's all we have in terms of environment. But those descriptors cover quite a broad range of climate zones (including tropical). For the record, my version of this adventure imagines a standard temperate zone, similar to the region of the globe I occupy in real life (the southeastern US).
All of the creatures listed as part of a hybrid—except the gorillas—are fully represented on the "Temperate and Sub-Tropical" encounter table in the DMG. Black panthers are called out as improbable/impossible, and that's true if we assume North America/Southern Europe as the baseline for a standard temperate zones. There are rumors of black panthers being spotted in Lousiana, but they are typically found only in sub-tropical zones (like in Central America and Africa). There's nothing special about a "black panther," however, other than a melanin adaptation. They're actually just regular old jaguars with dark fur between their spots.
We have plenty of (non-black) panthers in my parts, though we call them mountain lions, cougars, or catamounts. I saw one dead on the side of the highway last week. The Carolina Panthers are named that precisely because they're common around here (and they're even black on the logo). Jaguars, as well, are common in the southern US, particularly Florida (hence, the Jacksonville Jaguars). Finally, a mountain lion is a sub-species described under Lion in the Monster Manual as "inhabit[ing] forests" among other biomes.
That's my case to the jury... I throw myself on your mercy. Actually, screw it! Black panthers look cooler and "scorpanther" sounds way more bad-ass than "scorpountain lion" so I'm invoking the goddess of creative license.
Scorpions might seem questionable as they are only listed on the "Tropical and Near-Tropical" encounter table, but in the real world, scorpions are found all over the place (including my backyard). No, gorillas are the only "problematic" animal listed here, so if a justification is required, let's say the warlock first polymorphed his two faithful war dogs into gorillas and then put them through the hybridization process. "Problem" solved.
One judge wondered why gnolls would be serving the magic-user and why
they wouldn't just kill him. Good questions. The main reason I picked
gnolls is because they are Chaotic Evil humanoids, like the warlock (and the earlier cult). As
to why they cooperate, I mention in the writeup that the warlock casts
periodic Charm Monster spells on most of the monsters in the dungeon.
This includes the gnoll's flind leader, which gives the warlock de facto (but not
actual) control over the rest of the pack. The Charm lasts until
broken, and the 2+3 HD flind has a 10% chance per week to break the
spell spontaneously.
Does the warlock have enough 5th-level spells available to recast Charm Monster every week on every creature? Nope, but he wouldn't have to. For some creatures, he can affect multiple targets with a single casting, and there's only a maximum 25% chance per week for the charm to fail spontaneously. The weekly chance is based on HD, which is typically 10–15% for most of the monsters represented in this site.
When a monster breaks its influence, it would (maybe?) act aggressively toward the warlock. Luckily he keeps them penned up and can perform a new casting without much risk. I imagine over time he would be smart enough to develop a scheduled process to keep the spells going for a minimum of individual castings, so as to preserve his 5th-level spells for polymorphing experiments. Once he releases the monsters into the wilderness (as he has with the owlbears), he has no need or desire to continue charming them. Let chaos reign! Muah-ha-ha-hah!
THOUGHTS ON THEME = I feel really good about this element of the site, though I acknowledge some informational issues exist, caused mostly by an out-of-control project scope.
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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?)
I'm very happy with the results, though there is a major error if you count grid squares. The diameter of the upper dungeon is equal to the diameter of the hill at that elevation, meaning the outer wall of the ring corridor would either be exposed at or just below the surface of the hillside.
I only realized the error after I'd finalized the maps. Compressing it would have required an entire redraw of either the hill or both dungeon levels, so I tried accounting for it in the text, with the outermost wall of the ring corridor being described as angled to the ceiling, sort of a right triangle in shape. But then I had to cut the description for space, so the error is just sitting there... mocking me. Don't tell anyone.
Also on the hill map, I should have included height indicators for the piles of rubble around the interior of the old temple. I intended these to be 10–15' high heaps of shifting rubble. I also mentioned earlier about wishing I had numbered the dungeon-level rooms with bronze eyes in them, to make using the control room panel easier for the DM.
I included a link on the map page to download individual, full-sized maps and a cheat sheet with monster stat blocks and gp/xp numbers. My submission last year got dinged for putting an encounter table on the map page, which seemed reasonable in hindsight. That's game material and belongs in the writeup. The only text that should be on the map page are scale and directional indicators, location labels, legend details, or any other map-related content.
My link was to a share folder where I dropped in the individual level maps, both keyed and unkeyed. The cheat sheet was something I made for my planned playtest so I figured I would drop it in the map folder as a handy reference. I considered whether it was appropriate to include the link and decided I wouldn't ding another entry for the same thing. It seemed map-adjacent enough to qualify.
THOUGHTS ON THE MAP = Fully-satisfied.
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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 format, justified, with three-quarter-inch outside margins and a quarter-inch gutter. Font is 10-point Calibri, with an 18-point, centered title and 11-point, all-caps section titles. Titles and important details are bolded; names and magic items/spells are capitalized and italicized.
Details are bulleted under each overview paragraph. Lines are single-spaced with bullet/paragraph breaks of either 3- or 6-point height. Monster names are in all-caps. Book monsters identify their source and include their hit points. Unique monsters are given a full stat block.
When I was done, the text still spilled over onto a fourth page by less than a half-dozen lines. To fit it to three pages, I had to condense the character spacing to 0.7 point, smooshing the text together slightly. I didn't like having to do it and still think it looks terrible, but I could live with it so as to not have to cut anything else out.
THOUGHTS ON CLARITY = Mildly dissatisfied/ashamed.
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4) INTERACTIVITY/INNOVATION
(How well does the adventure use the rules to create interesting play?)
This is a combat-heavy adventure site, with no faction play or reaction-based interaction. There are some secret doors and a pit trap, the ever-present collapse hazard, and the trick with the gelatinous cube. There are several mechanisms to experiment with in here: The elevator platform, the transmogrification equipment (with a random table of effects for fiddling around), and the control room panel—but nothing that requires a great deal of dungeoneering effort to figure out. Much of the interactivity will involve learning to quickly navigate the dungeon in order to locate the warlock and put an end to his creatures. Finding alternate entrances into the dungeon is part of this, as well.
As an aside here, I want to address the inclusion of latrines (or privies, cesspits, loos, whatever) in an adventure (any adventure, not just this one), a topic I discussed briefly in my review of Cleft in the Crag. Some DMs believe that "forcing" characters to venture into such disgusting areas is somehow humiliating or degrading to players. For me, these kinds of areas are about engaging the players' "ick factor" to increase tension, same as when they walk into a room I might describe as "painted with blood and viscera" or "reeking of decomposing flesh."
It's meant to stimulate player revulsion and signal danger. Once players are confronted with the ick, gameplay should offer them the opportunity to get outside their comfort zones in order to overcome some dungeon obstacle or gain an advantage. Fiction—especially fantasy and adventure fiction—is full of examples of this type of thing. There's an entire AD&D adventure that takes place in an active, open sewer. The reason grossness is used so often and is so effective is because disgust is as powerful an emotion as fear or anger. Why would a DM ever want to give up such a useful tool? Prudishness? Bah!
On the other hand, from my perspective as a player, if I decide to take a route through a gross or nasty environment only to discover a dungeon secret or hidden treasure, the emotion I feel isn't humiliation. Instead, the rush of success or discovery washes away any feelings of squeamishness or doubt I may have had about entering the area (for me, at least...I may be an outlier).
You can definitely overdo these types of areas, and it wouldn't be hard to lapse into over-the-top degradation if you're not careful, but if that's happening regularly in your adventures, there are deeper problems at play than bad taste. A dollop of grossness can make for a fun time and help give the dungeon setting a splash of reality, especially when there is an ultimate party benefit to (playfully) enduring it. In this specific case, no one is forcing anyone to do anything; the secret gongpit entrance is simply an alternate entrance into the dungeon—a structure where no bodily waste is present, only a plant monster and a "sour odor" (also the plant monster).
Moving on... As an example of using rules properly, one judge took issue with the warlock casting Charm Monster to control his beasts, not only in terms of numbers but also means of command. I discussed the numbers issue earlier, but as for the level of control, the spell description says outright that:
...any affected creature regards the spell caster as friendly, an ally or companion to be treated well or guarded from harm.
That's good enough for the warlock. He's chaotic evil and insane, he doesn't deign to communicate with his creations. Having no interest in "commanding" the creatures, he only needs to prevent them from killing him until he can unleash them on the world to wreak havoc. The spell description gives more than enough book justification for it to work here, in my opinion. That context is included in the final text, but it's not explicitly stated as a blanket explanation. It's a fair question though, just one for which I believe there is a good answer.
One other note on spells and veracity: I made sure Zerod's spellbook contained the three spells required for a magic-user to create an homunculus (Mending, Mirror Image, and Wizard Eye).
THOUGHTS ON INTERACTIVITY = I know what could have been if I had chosen to write this as a full-on adventure, so I'm somewhat disappointed in the level of interactivity, but I like what's here.
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5) MODULARITY
(How easy would it be to drop/integrate the adventure into an existing campaign?)
The site is fairly modular, I think. It's written pretty much by the book, barring certain cosmetic flourishes, and there's nothing tying it to a specific environment, so you should be able to drop this in anywhere or adapt it to any setting. Some of the tech may be a limiting factor for certain campaigns, but as I said earlier, you can change the machines to a unique spell and still achieve the same result.
SCORE (MODULARITY) = I'm happy with it.
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6) USABILITY
(How much work will the referee have to do to run this adventure at the table tonight?)
I feel the site is well laid out and you shouldn't need to do any additional work unless you just want to. You could easily increase the treasure amounts or expand some of the uncharted or unkeyed areas with your own ideas. The layout and writeup provide lots of opportunities for that.
SCORE (USABILITY) = I'm satisfied with what I produced.
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7) OVERALL THOUGHTS
I think it's a good adventure gone a little amok. As written, it's certainly not my favorite adventure I've ever come up with. To a man, the judges said it was too much content for this contest and I have to agree. I believe I would have been much happier with what would have come out of writing it as a normal dungeon instead of an adventure site.
It spilled out of a flood of ideas that I really liked, but at a volume that was not ideal for the contest. It's my overreaching sophomore double-LP. I like it enough that I'll definitely playtest it at some point, and I'm sure my original notes and ideas will weigh into those sessions.
And I'm already working on my ASC 3 entry, wiser and more finely-honed as a designer after reviewing these 30 worthwhile entries.
I'd definitely call Owlbear Hill a "playable" adventure...which is different from (my view of) half the ASCII submissions.
ReplyDelete; )
Good work judging: I think you gave all the authors plenty of feedback for how they can improve their writing. I'll be interested to see the how the results tally up!
Thanks! And thanks again for your feedback. It was definitely useful and had some great insights for me to consider. The owlbear hit dice issue was a lightbulb going off, for sure. I liked 5e's flexibility with scaling monsters, but forgot some of the consequences of doing that in AD&D. It's not just hit points, it's a whole series of other factors. Cheers!
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