The Rat King’s Sanctum

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• A module that bills itself as being designed for OSR rules, but then instructs a STR save in the first room is dubious...

• JB over at B/X Blackrazor did a Rat Themed adventure contest. Not sure if this is one of the entries but we might see rats flood the OSR adventure scene for a bit.

• Now I want to write a rat/temple/sewer adventure but with tiddies and Lovecraft references

  • Do it!

• I think I'd love a sewer rat temple adventure if it was well done. I don't care if it's been done before, it's a classic trope, like the B2 Module. So, thanks for taking one for the team and filtering out this one as being sucky.

• I had some hopes for this one, the cover looks nice and I like rat cults I guess?

  It strikes me that the NSR or Post-OSR or whatever we wish to call it is often relearning or reinventing the same things that the OSR struggled through for 2006 - 2019. Often the starting place is 5E or indie culture not 90's TSR adventure paths, but the same questions arise: "How far can you deviate from the cliches of D&D?", "How much control does the designer need and what can be safely placed with the players?", "How much detail is too much or too little?", "How dangerous should the adventure be?"

  Now I suspect I'm known for having little time or love for nostalgia around old D&D, but it really does seem like so much of the knowledge and expertise that was hashed out and developed during the OSR years -- either new or distilled from the old tomes -- just isn't getting passed on to the newer generation of designers, even those that claim to use AD&D with rigor, and that's a shame.

  Oh well.

  I hope folks will figure out how to run/write a procedural dungeon crawl again for my 50th birthday and hopefully the answers will be different then those of 1976 or 2012 in an interesting way.

  • I recently ran 2 games at a convention in which I converted an OSR adventure that I wrote in 1989 to 5E. The 12 players were highly enthusiastic about it. There were a lot of off beat challenges in it that they liked which weren’t all tied to magic and they actually enjoyed having to fight a dragon in it (which is unfortunately too rare in D&D adventures). I think the 5E players are craving to get away from these rat sewer dungeons and pure hack & slash stuff generally out there. So much of the 5E stuff feels more like Shadowrun (modern setting/culture with fantasy tropes dropped in it) vs. AD&D (ancient/medieval setting/culture with fantasy tropes). Although the Romans had sewers, an extensive sewer system dungeon feels more like something from the 19th century onward to me. I enjoy playing the game, but it does not transport me to a different place in time the same way that exploring a castle does.

    • It's always good to hear stories of 5E folks enjoying dungeon crawls and problem solving, and I think there's a desire for it within the Contemporary Traditional space ... the crawl has a lot to offer. I also agree that many players (5E or otherwise) want to get away from the WotC's Gygaxian vernacular, anodyne fantasy, and orc (or rats) in a hole style setting. The thing that's making me feel jaded is that so much of the design knowledge and experimentation of the OSR (whichever part you like - revival, renaissance or even rate of return) just doesn't seem to be getting passed on.

      Some of it goes down to the toxicity of scene: gatekeeping, bad actors, etc driving people off or making them dismissive.

      Some of it is an understandable desire by newcomers to make things their own way.

      Yet I think there's a place for people who have been running these style games and writing these style adventures since 1989 or whenever to pass the fun of it on, to help newer designers learn how it all works ... but I don't see enough of it.

      Also - yeah sewers are a tricky thing. I think they can work, but you have to push past the Waterdeep public works and wererats sort of nonsense and either go super weird or really takes some time looking at urban sanitation and water systems. Never seen a good Qanat adventure, or one that properly referenced Cloacina, or the cisterns of Byzantium. I suspect Rat temples have much broader possibilities then just the sewers though.

      @Squeen
      If the past three years have taught me anything it's that times arrow is a property of entropy alone.

  • Gus! You are sounding old---pining for the early OSR days and shaking your head at what the new kids are doing wrong!

    And so it goes...:P

    • I mean, the glory days of OSR are already about a decade behind us.
      Who knows, maybe in a few years we'll se a Renaissance Revival. :p

    • "Some of it goes down to the toxicity of scene: gatekeeping, bad actors, etc driving people off or making them dismissive."

      I know. There were actors that would go onto Dragonsfoot and call random people Nazis, try to imply Courtney Campbell, a single father and bernie sanders voter was a Nazi for working with Alexander Macris, and who are still calling Melan a bigot on the Discord. Come to think of it, you are those people.

      • Macris? You mean the gamergater who managed a sieg-heiling Brietbart pundit and most recently got in the news for promoting the Jan 6th Coup?

        Melan? Not that innocent angel who thinks using pronouns will bring back the gulag and wrote a game with ethnic and antisemitic stereotypes as the races?

        So odd someone might think these folks or the people that work with them are bigots.

  • I think there might be an issue with communicating the principles and discoveries to new audiences. Where are the people who have something to teach and making an effort to do so?
    They do exist, but I don't see them frequenting the same places where new players and GMs are exchanging their ideas.
    I also think OSR had an underlying culture of "kids these days..." and "get off my lawn!". That's not how you get anyone to listen to what you have to teach.
    Outreach would have to take forms that reach the target audience, and approach it by promoting something to add to their play experience, not taking something away.

    • It is exactly reversed. The current batch of new players has been conditioned to think that grognard == badwrongman by a creepy group of wanna-be luminaries and as a result the culture actively discourages interest in old games.

      • So strange that people might think OSR was full of nasty hateful grognards even with Prince of Nothing repeatedly posting the same tired bullshit every time Gus comments here. i am so shocked.

• Any plans for a sewer rat dungeon contest?

  • Oh, yes. Already got a couple of crazy ideas.

• This person made an adventure on here before yeah? Maybe the cover art and font look super similar Deers Sanctum or something like that Seers idk

  ALSO HELLO HAPPY DAY NIGHT AFTERNOON

• This adventure was published in Knock! #2, the zine that many OSR players rave about, so I thought it had promise. I guess not all of the Knock! content is top-notch.

  • There's too much glad handing and rump kissing in the RPG scene these days. That's painfully evident by how many crappy adventures and supplements get 4 and 5 star ratings on drivethrurpg

• Eh you would have misspelt it anyway xx.

• Orcs...in a hole, you say? Intriguing. Now if maybe there was some sort of pit trap...