The Cursed Cave of One Billion Bats

By Dale L Houston
Duck and Crow press
OSR
Level 3? Tourney/One-Shot

You have a treasure map that strongly suggests there is a pile of loot for some forgotten god just waiting to be extracted from Nightmaw Cave. The locals are all like “don’t go in there because the cave is cursed.” WHo are you going to believe? Idiot villagers or your map. Grab your sword, ready your spells, ignore all better judgement and prepare to delve!

This twenty page adventure features about 21 rooms in a vertical dungeon with … billions of bats. As a tournament adventure it succeeds well, being interesting with special mechanics and a scoring system. Nicely evocative and with special encounters that don’t feel set-piecy, I feel the designers charms are lost on the tourney market.

If I write an adventure and tell you up front its AI slop with no real value and you should not buy it, then is it fair game to review it any other way? Likewise, if someone writes a tournament/one-shot adventure and advertise it that way is it fair for Brycy Bryce to bitch/review it any other way? Fuck if I know, but I do know that I’d love to see some real adventures from this designer and/or they are doing a right bangup job in being the GOLD standard of tournament play.

Cover? Fucking great. Love that bat on the left with the red mouth and the shocked expression. The map layout here? Fucking great. It’s got verticality to it. Either small rises between rooms, think climbing up to a ledge, or shafts up/down between rooms. A traditional map is supplemented by a pointcrawl map which is one of the better uses of a pointcrawl map, in this vertical environment.

The adventure introduces two new elements. The first is climbing/up down. Securing ropes through freeclimbing and/or the people behind you climbing those ropes. Basically an unsecured vs a secured climb, that can be an easy route or a hard route. We’re making some “climbing checks” here. Clever monkey, labeling it all OSR systems and then sticking in your favorite modern contrivances. Anyway, you’re doing some climbing in places. Then we’ve got this Bat Cloud mechanic. Certain rooms have LOTS of bats in them. The more light you carry the more likely you are to set them atwitter, which results in a Take Damage Every Round system. 1 point for a PC, 1d3 if you’ve got a light. So, maybe, you cut down on your light sources in order to have a lesser chance of setting them off. So, you’re going to maybe fall in a hole in the ground or miss a ceiling hole/climb/exit, or have more trouble “searching” by increasing the difficulty. Ahum. No, I have confirmed that there is no 5e version of this. There’s a few other weird things going on mostly through the wandering table, crystal rooms, “The Song of the Night” and such. It;s a good mix of eerie and mysterious. The entire adventure is supported by a one page town, if that, with the demeanor of “defeated” and a sheriff who will pay you 1000gp to NOT go in the dungeon and just leave. Cantankerous, clever, and always eating mutton or something else greasy. That’s a great fucking NPC! Or “Morgan Krawk: Minister of the Sepulcher of the Holy Carcass. Balding with long hair. Excellent elocution. Steals from offering plate. Doesn’t like Witch Gulbon and thinks Sheriff Johns is incompetent.” man, I wish every notable NPC in an adventure were written like this! And the town is really just a blow off, a a place to enjoy the rumors and get warned off by the sheriff, which, is a great little bit of preamble to the adventure. 

Rooms have a couple of sentences up front that summative them. And they can get purple sometimes “A sour smell of guano and fear wafts from the darkness.” Sour guano is great, but fear is a bit purple, yes? “The squeak of bats is deafening. Ankle-deep guano crawling with insects covers the floor. Stalagmites dot the chamber.” Noice! How about a creature description? “A billion bats, eyes glowing red, circle a towering creature. A humanoid-bat giant, a sword jammed into each eye, pivots enormous ears, and emits a piercing shriek!” And, same dude, in the appendix “15’ tall bat-human hybrid. Eyes have been gouged out with swords, wings are ragged, covered in filth; it sheds bloated maggots.” Maggots for the win! But, nice touch with the swords jammed in his eyes bit. Moving some of the appendix description to the room would have been better, I think, so we don’t have to consult two places, but, whatever. Descriptions are solid.

Magic items are great, although, I might comment, wasted on the fact that this is a oneshot and/or tourney adventure (with scoring provided! Get loot, explore the dungeon, break the curse)

There’s a miss here and there. One room has a living statue in it. Pretty much all we get is “The living statue can barely interact, its pro- gramming corrupted with age.” t’s supposed to be “standing guard” but there’s nothing like that present. It almost feels like something was left out. 

“The Stone: The hum and vibrations emanate from the oval stone, as do slight variations in temperature. This is the stone egg-coffin of an ancient Ophidian praefectus. Opening the egg-coffin will flood the chamber with malignant energy causing 1d10+10 damage to every living thing in this chamber each Turn. The bones of the praefectus will writhe and release this poison for 1000 years.” Well, that don’t seem good! This is, I think, a decent example of the interactivity present, as well, perhaps, that statue. There are things to look at. There are things to open and search. The Man Bat is introduced to you by a bloody rabbit carcass dropping to the floor at your feet from the ceiling. Perhaps, we might call it, a great intro song to entering the ring. The adventure does a great job with that, as well as with other things that seem weird to poke and prod and look at and wonder about. Which is to say, it’s a hack. I mean, yeah, you need to navigate the ups and downs and not trigger the bats, and it’s a tourney adventure, so, you know, ok I guess. It’s it certainly not, though, and empty guard room with 6 kobolds in it. As hacks go it does a decent job of presenting an interesting environment and interesting creatures with some fun bits here and there, like the dead rabbit, to introduce the combat. But, in terms of mysteries to solve and things to do, it’s a hack.

And I don’t think I’m complaining about that, at least not in a tourney adventure and not given the quality of the window dressing. This could, however, make things difficult, in future adventures, when moving over from a tourney/one-shot framing to a more exploratory/longer-term adventure mindset. But, that’s a bitch for a future review. I’m Regerting this one, just because Tourney/one-shot is niche, IMO. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages, a good mix, and shows you encounters and some additional specials. Good preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540652/bloodbath-dungeon-1-the-cursed-cave-of-one-billion-bats?1892600