Taglar’s Tomb

by Hereticwerks
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 1-3

An old plundered tomb where many a grave-robber got their start … now it’s your turn to spend the night.

This is an interesting little thing. It’s a three room cave. That’s 20 pages long. That’s usually the lead in to a Bryce Lynch monstrous ranting diatribe. Not in this case. This thing is like some academic treatise on how to add complications to an adventure. It seems like every possible avenue of additional complications has been added in .. and all in table format. The tabular format allows for quite a bit of additional use. This thing could almost stand in for every adventure ever written or to be written in the “small cave adventure” sub genre. It’s got a big font and doesn’t make the best use of its whitespace, but what it does have is A LOT of those little evocative things that I’m looking for. Those things that I believe are at the core of a good adventure, that a DM can riff off of for hours of content. It could use a bit of improvement in consistently providing those bits … or maybe I mean in consistently making them specific and actionable. The tabular data strays into “bizarre window dressing for the sake of window dressing” on more than one occasion. Those are the weakest parts of the adventure, but there is more than enough in the way of goodies to keep this fresh time and time again.

Three rooms. Each room has a loot table for things you may find. And who you might mind in the room when you arrive. And you might wander in while you there. And then usually something else like where does the crack go” or “what does the obelisk do.” In addition to the three rooms there’s also “the wilderness on the way to way to the caves”, which also tables for wanderers, bad weather, animal dens, and trail hazards. Finally there’s the section on town rumors and guides. Again, multiple tables for each. This is the primary way that the adventure fills those 20 pages and how it fills the role of several adventures in one. The adventure is almost completely table driven and, unlike almost every other adventure that is table driven, does it well.

The strength of the adventure is in the tables, or more precisely: specificity of the content in the tables. For example, there are six NPC guides offered. “Weird Willy. Seems normal enough.” or “That Blakely Boy. Not the brightest, probably not the best, but most folks figure he’s too dumb to lie.” Or Constance, the Harpy with a crippled wing that can’t climb or swim well. This is PERFECT. It’s just a sentence for each but it adds an enormous amount of potential energy to riff off of. This are all examples of the sorts of content I’m looking for. There’s this very small space between “too generic” and “too much information.” The examples I cited fall perfectly into that sweet spot. It’s the kick start the DM needs to get them going and add and build for the rest of the sessions. The tables go on and on this way. It’s wonderful. “Last trip out your guide was bit by a creature they were barely able to fight off. They aren’t sure if it was a lycanthrope or something else.” OMG! I can use that over and over again in an adventure to add life to the NPC. “A dead basilisk carcass, washed out of its burrow. If the lair was occupied then there is a viable egg in the nest …” Wonderful wonderful content.

Except when it’s not. A smaller percentage of the content is trivia. Content which is not actionable, which you can’t riff off of. Ok, I guess you can riff off of anything, but some content is better at this than other. Crystals are “warm to the touch and smooth”, “they appear to be … breathing?” Certainly interesting, especially the breathing one, but much more … high-level? and not quite as gameable.

I might mention that, similarly, the rumor table could use a bit of work. There IS one, which is great, and the core of the rumor content is pretty good also. And it all ends with “Any of these rumors might be true …” Well, now, that smacks of a “it was all just a dream” television episode. Cop. Out. Let me also say that while the rumors are quite good, as these things go, they could be quite a bit better. The last rumor is something like “This place makes a poor hide-out, as three separate bandit bands have learned to their great displeasure and loss.” Not bad. But SO much better if it were conveyed as something like “overheard in a bar: bertie’s boys didn’t come back from the cave last night. Yeah? Clint says Yanys got arrested but I heard they fled after half were mauled in the cave” or something like that. Just a bit more color.

Overall this is a great adventure toolkit. I’d be much happier paying money for this (it’s free, I believe) then I would a hundred other lengthier products.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131634/GL1-Taglars-Tomb-Revised?1892600