The Tomb of Kallia

By Richard Barton
XRP
OSRIC
Levels 2-4

Rumors of a lost tomb lying deep within the New Forest are starting to trickle into the ears of adventurers in Gosterwick and Newmarket. While the source – and thus the veracity – of these whispered stories remains uncertain, all of the third-hand accounts suggest that the tomb was the product of the Archontean golden age, and not a simple tomb delved by the local Thorcinga. A few rumors even imply that the tomb displays the type of exceptional craftsmanship usually associated with dwarven master masons. Could this lost tomb be the work of the great Zhorak? or of Zhorak’s legendary master, the lesser-known Grishia Basalt? If Grishia was involved, might this tomb shed light on the location of the fabled Egg of Creation? Regardless of its creator, the tomb is sure to be filled with the treasure and lore of the ancients!

This one hundred page adventure uses about six pages to detail ten rooms in the Tomb of Kallia. There is also extensive coverage of a nearby wilderness area. Extensive being the watchword with this, as eighty words are generally used where one will do. Padded with backstory, I am bewildered by Arden Vul.

Yo, notably there is no map, at all, in this.You have to download a separate map pack, The Maps of Arden Vul, which is  free download containing all of the Arden Vul maps and all related regions. 

So, my summary is off. While this is titled the Tomb of Kallia that section makes up just a small portion of it. The tomb is actually sitting in the middle of a larger slavers camp which has about twenty locations and then about ten locations for the tomb proper, plus  few more in the slavers section for a false tomb. The bulk of this is a forest with about thirty locations, many with a small handful of sublocations. Thusly the adventure here is really the various intrigues taking place in the region that will eventually lead the party to the slavers camp and/or the tomb that is a relatively minor part of the product.

And there is quite a bit going on in the region. There are a couple of groups with some larger intrigues, like the slavers, and a several smaller things going on, such as some scammy bills of lading related to a quarry and humanoid band with, ahem, elective raiding, that loosely, or strictly hint at the larger “slaver” plot, with slaver in quotes because of the various schemes going on. As a regional supplement, sandboxy, it has a decent amount going on in it. The level range here is, I think, a bit misleading when you look at things like all of the level sevens and nines in the slavers camp, which the adventure warns you about. The wilderness sites ARE dangerous as well, so this feels like a long slow adventure with lots of retreats to regain strength and recruit again, slowly making progress in clearing things and finding more sites. 

Look man, I know we’re going to get in to it on these next comments. There are readers who will love this. There are fanboys who love this. There are contrarians who have an identity based on disagreeing and ignoring meaning. My platonic ideal of an adventure includes it being easy to run. That is the purpose of an adventure. To be run at the table. Ideally with little to no prep required. “You can run it without reading it!” is hyperbolic but also the unreachable goal to shoot for. “Easy” to run. What is easy? We’re not going to agree, some of you. I recognize that we read adventures before hand, we take notes and highlight things. We have to puzzle out the connections in the adventure and make reference sheets and all of that shit. How much of that should you have to do to run it? How much of that should, in fact, be on the designer to solve before it reaches your hand? The writer, designer, editor, it has to be “easy” to run. We can disagree on the nuance here, but not on the premise. Except now I’ll walk that back, there ARE adventures that come along, rarely, that are obtuse and ABSOLUTELY worth it to puzzle out and spend a lot of time prepping. And those adventures are exceedingly rare. It is far, far more likely that an adventure will be a disaster of writing, layout etc and not be “easy” to run and not worth the effort you will put in. And that is, I think, the case with all of the Arden Vul products I’ve seen so far. The fucking thing fights you, for no reason, and ultimately I’m going to turn to some other product to run instead of this. Because the content, while decent, just isn’t worth devoting my life to in order to make it to the table. I’d have to go look at Thicket and Arden Vul proper to verify, but my recollection is that it’s been the same with all of them.

The writing here is dense, almost to wall of text territory. It’s padded out with backstory inline and descriptions of why and irrelevant descriptions. You have to fight through mountains of text and loosely formatted paragraphs in order to suss out what’s pertinent in the various locations.

One section has a palisade with watchtowers. Palisades get an inordinate degree of attention in this. “The palisade is 9’ tall and made of new wood bound together with vines, rope, and interior support timbers.”9’ tall? Sure. The rest of it, is that important?  How about a description of the watchtowers? “Four observation and firing platforms are found along the length of the wall. These small platforms are 5’ above the ground and accessible by ladders. They allow guards to watch the approaches to the compound.” Well, I guess we’ve defined what watchtowers are, yes? These, yanked out of context, don’t seem terrible, but it is just relentless in the degree of detail everything is described in. How about an NPC? NPC’s routinely get a quarter page description. “Personality: Orphaned at an early age, Happy was taken in, raised, and trained by one of the Elder Brothers of the Benevolent Brotherhood of Arcturus.” Is this relevant to the adventure? No, it’s not. Sometimes, like the palisade detail, these things can be used to add color to areas. But you can’t do it everywhere. You can’t take every single thing in the adventure fully describe it. 

I don’t know. Maybe you can. But you gotta WORK that formatting to do it. And this don’t do that. We’re relying on paragraphs here with some underlining and some light indentation in places. And then there are these long ass sections of supplemental information that just appear thrown in willy-nilly. You’ll be in a room description and suddenly it will ballon to multiple pages and there will be this cumbersome page and half table just tossed in. How you can keep a train of thought here is beyond me. It’s almost a wall of text broken by weird presentations of information.

There is something here. More so, i think, than The Thicket. But it is so hard to get at that I can’t possibly, after multiple read-throughs, think of a situation in which I’d be pleased or excited to run this. 

This is $20 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. This HAS to have a preview. You HAVE to know what you are getting in to before purchasing this.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/577509/the-tomb-of-kallia?1892600