Monastery of Misanthropy

By Thom Wilson
ThrowiGames
Shadowdark
"Low Levels"

Be it known that the evil wizard Kuzax, having performed cruel and twisted experiments on the living and dead, is wanted for crimes against humanity. A bounty of 100 gold coins is offered to any who can capture and produce the wizard, dead or alive, to the captain of the guard of Draxmoor. Kuzax was last seen heading toward the abandoned mountain monastery in the north.

This forty page adventure uses about 25 pages to describe a vertical monastery full of abominations with about forty rooms. The vertical map from Logos is good, but poorly utilized, and while the beginning  has an good idea or three it quickly turns to dungeon-crawling “what abomination are we stabbin in the room THIS time.” 

I liked the marketing blurb on this one and I seem to recall not hating Throwi, which is why we’re reviewing a Shadowdark today.

I like the bounty thing in the marketing blurb. Good ol Emirikrol, bout time someone brought his head in. If the authorities can be after the party then they can be after Kuzax also and, stands to reason, that if you’re desperate enough to go in a hole in the ground to find gold then making the leap to amateur bounty-hunter, for the plebiscite, shouldn’t be that hard. Image the local quest board had no rats in the basement or lost puppies and instead only People We Want You To Kill/(ok, sure, you can bring them in alive.) Harvest is looking a little poor. Ma needs medicine after the baby, let’s go see who to kill. Anyway, nice to see a bounty play out.

So, for some reason you are approaching a monastery, long abandoned, and, yet, somehow not looted. I don’t know why. But, also, there’s this cliff that you’re at the bottom of. There’s a waterfall and some buildings running up both side of the waterfall, connected by a bridge in the middle.  There’s a ladder, little more than hammered pegs in the wall, that gets you from the ground up in to room one. It says several hundred feet of pegs to get to the buildings, but, whatever I guess. Anyway, at the base you see a young hireling! He’s “nearly out of food, water, and patience.” Wunderbar! He’s got the official bounty notice for capture of the wizard and his employers went up in to the monastery a few days ago with no word since. That’s fun! A hireling watching the horses who is fed up. Whens the last time an adventure gave a nod to what actually happens in D&D play? So far we’re doing pretty good here in the framing and intro.

Climbing up we reach a small clearing with the monastery building door about fifteen feet away. Or, as the room one entry tells us: “Short platform. Fifteen feet of level ground between stairs and front door. Grisly remains. Young adventurer, missing a leg, crawled away from door, leaving a bloody trail behind. Spiked door. Covered in dozens of iron spikes, door ajar. Something hidden keeps it open. Reeking stench. Awful odor emanates from within monastery.” Well that’s a fine how to do! Nice missing leg, bloody trail from crawling. A bullet (there are three, describing the adventurers body, the spiked door, and the smell) tells us that the door is held propper open with the adventurers missing leg. Ouch! But, also, good thing! You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.

The map here is the Dyson “waterfall” map, two vertical sacks of buildings, one on either side of the waterfall. I think this is the third adventure I’ve reviewed that uses it. It can be small and a little cramped but i like it. Round stairs going up and down, bridges, windows and balconies overlooking the waterfall and a little room for some cramped non-standard room layouts. One of the better Logos small maps even if it is, essentially, linear. The waterfall and the bridge over it, balconies and so on isn’t really taken advantage of well. Only one crossing, a note explicitly saying we can’t jump or fly over. There is a room that is “slick with spray” from open windows … and, somehow, you can slip and go over the edge? I guess I might call that a doorway instead of a window. Yeah, you get attacked on the bridge between the two sides. 

There’s some editing mistakes that come from  confusion, I think. The very first room tells us that “Stairs. Circular and narrow, lead downward..” Uh. No? Those stairs lead up since we are on the lowest level. Or else I REALLY misunderstood the map. That I’ve seen multiple times in multiple reviews. Anyway, there’s a slip up or three like that in this adventure but none of it is impossible to overcome after an initial read-through; they stick out. We might ask for a partial refund from the editor attached? 

Formatting is fine. There’s an initial description paragraph that does a decent jon delaying an environment and then some bolding to call out some bulleted information. The bolding is not too bold though and doesn’t really help much, it needed a better stroke weight. And the bolded words don’t really lead to you to the bullets, you have to find the bullet related to the bolding since the bullets don’t have a title/intro/reference back to the bolding except in the free test description. 

The interactivity is a little one note. You enter a room. It is old and abandoned. There are bones, a mess, and sometimes an abomination, from the wizards experiments (which, ultimately, killed him.) You’ll find a grisly lair, a messed up room, or some dead monks. There is the usual religious puzzle or two, say the magic word in front of the temple statue and get a magic spear. 

I’m left, much like my last review, in being a little non-plussed here. It starts off well with the framing and dead adventurer but becomes a little staid, even with the abominations. Good use of unique monsters, although I don’t think the weight of them settles in. There’s little inherently wrong here, and it’s nice to see a vertical map, something different than the usual “flat”, even if we’ve seen it before multiple times. It just feels more like a rote “enter room, look around, sometimes stab” kind of journey, which is not helped by the mostly linear nature of the map. This would be a fine drop in but I can’t see it being a cornerstone. The effort feels phoned in, although the phone call was very clear.

This is $5 at DriveThru. Alas, no preview. 🙁 Give us a preview. Pretty please?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561983/monastery-of-misanthropy-ea2?1892600