Shadows and Flesh

By Noah Green
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 2-3

he shattered remains of the arch-wizard Rakius’s tower have long stood silent—until now. Gnoll fugitives seeking refuge have unwittingly unleashed the restless horrors that linger in the ruin. Can players unravel the wizard’s forgotten doom and escape his labs with arcane treasures and their souls intact?

This 24 page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe 25 rooms in s small five level ruined mage tower. You’re running around doing things for the undead as you stab some abominations. It’s trying to keep som themes running, but it feels disconnected from itself.

Meh. It’s a small ruined wizards tower. Inside you’ve got these gnolls, hiding out after they stole some gnoll artifacts. Except, all but one are now possessed by spirits that were in the tower. They now all hate each other, or have some quest inside the tower for you to go on, which could be something like “kill the other spirit Bob” or maybe “cleanse the tower of the abominations”! Because, yes, as a wizard tower there are some weird fleshy abominations. (Nice art for them!) 

I am just so Meh about this one. I can only point to a bunch of trifling things. There is a decent little outside portion, with multiple entrances inside and windows and thicket holes entrances and so on. There’s a little read-aloud section and then some decent little interactivity in places. Let’s open up the cold dome and find some brains and put them back in to skulls with bejeweled eyes! Or a toad statue in a fountain with a gemstone hidden in an eye, all in a kind of overgrown garden setting. Or, even, a room with paintings in it, one of which is a famous missing work! This should all be decent. I mean, even the shades and their entire fetch quest little bullshitty things, that should be fine also, right? Bring me the Jade Monkey! And I shall give you, I don’t know,  a necklace hidden in a fireplace nearby. 

And, some of the magic items are not bad at all. “Leonard: A life-sized, bald human male head sculpted of rubbery material. Pulling the nose or an ear causes it to scream for 1d6 rounds; all nearby suffer a –2 penalty to attack rolls.” Or a little bonsai tree with litte fruits on it that provide full size rations. Not everything here is great, there are boring old +1’s, but, it does have some objects with some creativity

But there’s just something missing to all of it. Some life? Some joy? Some completeness?

Let’s revisit that painting. It’s in a room with like twelve other paintings. It’s the only one mentioned, at like 200go, but, are the other worth something? It’s like they don’t exist. The whole possessed gnoll thing, and the stuff they stole, it just feel random. Why gnolls? Why possessed? Why do we care about the gnoll artifacts? The spirits, and their goals and wants and stuff, It just feels disconnected from itself. Maybe I mean passive? The spirits don’t seem to give a shit about anything. And not in a cool “Im from th beyond the grave” sort of way. Yeah yeah, go kill my brother. Yeah yeah, maybe rid the place of monsters. They’re boring. The entire thing is boring?

I don’t know why. A lack of active verbing? I mean, even in B2 the place didn’t FEEL boring. It felt dynamic. Dudes were up to shit. Free room and board. Toss a bag of gold through the door.  The spirits, here, are the main “person” interactivity. And they have some sort of enemies, friends, things they want done. At least theoretically. And I guess their rooms note what they could engage the party on. But there’s nothing in this beyond that. They just don’t seem particularly interested in getting what they want. As for the rest, it’s just vermin and abominations. Oh, oh, there’s a gnoll, a single gnoll left not taken over by the spirits. He’d hiding in a garden room. The one with the fish statue/fountain. It’s got some blood moths in it, think of them as stirge. They’ll attack him and if you save him then he;ll tell you that the eye of Utnapishtim is in the fish statues eye socket. It’s all in one room. There’s nothing larger or more grand, for the most part, than whats right in front of you. 

In another place you slap the brain of a dude back in a skull. That’s it. No fun interactivity that it enables. No places to unlock. There’s literally nothing else. 

So, I don’t know. Is there some room interactivity? Yes. Is there some NPC interactivity? Yes. Are the room descriptions disasters? No. Is the formatting a disaster? No. Do I care about anything in this and/or am excited to run it? No. As I noted, it feels disconnected, like the rooms exist in isolation, in spite of a few rooms, especially with the spirits, being tied loosely to to other rooms. 

It’s not bad. It doesn’t make me want to claw my own eyes out. So, you know, good job?

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, with a handful of rooms in the dungeon at he end of it. More than enough, i think, to get  a sense of the dungeon. And my malaise.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/580706/quick-delve-4-shadows-and-flesh?1892600