by John M. Stater
Knockspell Magazine
Swords 7 Wizardry
Level … 4?
This is a small “dungeoncrawl” through the catacombs under a major city. There are 14 or so encounters and a dozen or so unkeyed empty rooms. There’s an eclectic mix of encounter types that are not so much gonzo as their “weird fiction” of the Swords & Sorcery type. It’s a decent little crawl, though short.
There’s no real explanation or goal provided in the adventure background, a refreshingly small two paragraphs. I’m generally fine with that. Most backgrounds tend to be some overwrought nonsense full of crap that players have to strain to give a shit about. Someplace like this removes all of that and just presents the place as it is. I can drop in rumors of the seven sacred rings of Venduzulla or put it behind the trapdoor in the bars cellar. The designer doesn’t have to come up with some BS pretext and I don’t have to sigh when reading it. It’s a WIN-WIN.
Wandering monsters come from your book of choice and the map is … I don’t know. It LOOKS like the map is moderately complex but I’m not sure that’s the case. The complexity of map design that allows for more interesting play, varied terrain, interesting loops, etc, just doesn’t seem to be there. There’s also one of those “secret doors in the middle of nowhere” that I find frustrating. They may be cool at higher levels of play, where spells impact them, but at lower levels they might as well not exist; the party will never search the random 10′ section of wall in an otherwise meaningless corridor.
The encounters are an almost random assortment of weird things one might find in a dungeon. There’s “The Eye of Moloch”, a weak laser beam. There are trapped tombs with weird things in them and smugglers with scary traps to frighten off people. The smugglers have a captive girl. She’s “terribly bright and brave.” She also carries typhus. Oh, Stater! You’re a man after my heart! Oh, how about a swarm of emerald eyes behind a swirling maroon & black curtain of murky light! They swarm people and and can do level drains! ‘killing’ them causes them to fall to the ground as spherical emeralds! Cool! How about a a monster that actually a humanoid shaped hole in reality, complete with stars and galaxies displayed? If you kill him and reach inside you get an ioun stone. Cool! That’s the kind of game I want. One with wonder and whimsy and freaky deaky shit . The mundane treasure is great: silver ingots, a golden heart, soapstone figurines and the like. The magical treasure is lamer. +1 sling stones, an ioun stone and a wand of detect magic are not the droids I was looking for.
This is available on DriveThru.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/94955/Knockspell-6?affiliate_id=1892600
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I'd like to say thank you for reviewing all this stuff. Besides being pretty entertaining, these articles are very useful.
Also, if you'd like another great dungeon from John, I recommend checking out the fourth, fifth, and sixth issues of NOD, they include the first three levels of a dungeon, and they are very neat.