Tomb of Tog

By Arman Bohn
Distropilis Goods
OSE
Levels 1-3

A town, overrun with rabbits and on the brink of starvation, offers its only clue to the source of its suffering: a book known  as the Tome of Tog. Locals claim the titular mage has been a nuisance for years. The pages of the book have been torn out, save for a map that leads the party on a winding, hallucinogenic path through a dense wood to the TOMB OF TOG.

This 24 page adventure presents eleven rooms in a wizards Challenge Dungeon. With Grimtoothian machinations the party faces snarky challenges with no rewards. As challenges go they are ok, but I loathe the subgenre and the suspension of pretext so much that it’s hard to say much nice about this.

 Yeah, so, arrogant wizard makes a challenge dungeon. You defeat all eight rooms, one for each school of magic. You then face the ninth school of magic. Your reward is a map to another Tog dungeon. That’s the ONLY reward. Good luck leveling. So, this is one of those “have an experience” hippy mork borg dungeon “activities” instead of a D&D adventure. If you’re in to this kind of shit, then, yeah you. I’m not. I want to play a game. A game in a campaign. And I’m using the words game and campaign very explicitly. I acknowledge, though, that a significant number of people DO engage in RPG’s as an activity. So, if you are a l000ser, is this adventure for you?

Yeah, I mean, probably. There’s no real pretext here for adventure other than “the wizard did it”, which is the lame ass meme. [And, as a rant, I would like to mention something here. “What happens when someone is gifted with a wellspring of power but is completely incompetent?” That’s not a fucking wizard. That’s one of those fuckwits who are born with power or make a pact with an entity to get power. Some kind of power fantasy YA novel bullshit crap where you’re A Special Flower. Wizards wrest knowledge from the universe through hard work. Also, wizard is my favorite of the three classes …] 

Ok, so, interactivity. You gotta go through each of the nine rooms. They each have some kind of challenge devised by the wizard. The challenges are going to be framed with a certain wryness. So, in the clearest example, to get in to the dungeon you have to answer a couple of riddles. The riddler begins with “ Here, we celebrate the glory of Tog the Inexorable, Tog the Impossible, Tog the Immutable, Tog the Intangible. Who is the greatest wizard of all?” The answer, of course, is Tog. That’s funny. Ok, humor is subjective and _I_ find it funny. There’s a bit of a wink from the designer in this. It never quite falls in to being a joke adventure, which are all shitty as fuck. It instead remains in the realm of those early adventures like Dungeon of the Bear and Grimtooth. Not in a deathtrap way, or punny way, but with a kind of hint toward both. 

The first room, “Illusion” is a good example. When you go in you are immediately turned invisible (and, of fucking course, the fucking door slams shut behind you. Fucking challenge dungeon bullshit.) Bound to the room is a VISIBLE stalker. Who is depressed. “Unable to see its victims, the creature has suffered countless humiliating encounters. It now uses small talk as both a form of therapy and a method to pinpoint the location of intruders.” It’s taken the normal encounter and kind of turned it ninety degrees, yes? Is it s a gimmick? Absolutely. But, it’s a challenge dungeon. 

The rest of the encounters replicate this kind of obtuse encounter type. Things are more than a bit askew in here. In terms of a challenge dungeon it is certainly in the realm, if we squint hard enough, of Tower of Gygax. The dungeon throws the players off balance in various ways, with a little (snark?) mixed in. I am MUCH more down for this type of challenge dungeon than a simple series of skill checks and combats. There is an air of Grimtooth room traps about the place. Not really traps, but in the setup of the rooms. And this includes a couple of meta things, like “Each player must secretly write down a single word describing their character’s current emotional state, without discussing it with the other players, and pass it to the GM.” Which then builds an Emotions Golem in the room. I always raise my eyebrows at the emo stuff, but this is a decent implementation of it.

Formatting is meh. The background of the pages are a beige parchment color with the text being light grey and the font something with some flourishes and varying stroke weight. This combines to make things harder than it should be to read the thing, but it’s not impossible. When some words show up in italics it’s a pain though, given this combination. There tends to be a little read-aloud section offset in a darker grey, and then a longish section of DM text that explains the room, with several very short paragraphs following that expand on things. It does an ok job, a little subpar, and is on the edge of being a pain but not quite there, especially given the obtuse nature of the rooms. 

So it’s a challenge dungeon, maybe most similar to White Plume with just a little meta and snark thrown in. Maybe “the California Style” will be recognizable, and never really goes full on jokey or too meta. I’m allergic to all challenge dungeons, but if I were looking for one for a one shot sort of thing as an activity this one WOULD come to mind, chiefly because of the askew nature of the challenges.

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is eight spread pages (the PDF is spreads also. ARG!) so you get about thirteen pages of content, enough to show a large portion of the dungeon. A brief perusal will show the Grimtooth Rooms as diagrams, and the PDF is more than apt in showing you what to expect, so good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/573505/tomb-of-tog?1892600