Brine Lord Cassidy’s Tomb

By Malex, James Whitchurch, Johnny Normal
The Merciless Merchants
OSE
Levels 5-8

While visiting a sea-coast town, PCs hear a call for arms by several excited bards and minstrels! Korwyn, mighty hero of the lands, known for vanquishing the sea devil Dwormer and its minions, seeks experienced volunteers to assist him in recovering treasures from Brine Lord Cassidy’s Tomb! Korwyn claims he has a map to the fifty-year old tomb, a ship full of sailors, a sharpened sword, and wishes to set off at once! Volunteers receive a fair share of the plunder!

This seventy page adventure has a three level dungeon with about sixty rooms. It’s a real deal adventure. And, also, there’s something wrong with it that hurts my brain. Formatting? It’s busy. It fits, to a T, the definition of idiosyncratic adventure that people talk about in the future.

This is a tough nut to crack, literally and figuratively. The core of the adventure is the titular tomb, with 24 rooms. We might instead call it more of a dungeon crawl, rather than a tomb crawl, although in reality it is somewhere in between. The map, for the tomb in particular, is above average, with some decent variety on it, same-level stairs, water shown, notes on it, etc. 

So, the tomb, right? We’ve got statues. We’ve got secrets. We’ve got riddles. The fucking entrance is through a trap door in a cave ceiling that you can use the tide to help you get to. Giant fountain? Yup. Giant octopus statue in the middle of the mountain? Yup. Water spurting out its tentacles? Yup. Pull on a couple of the tentacles like levers to open secret doors? Yup! Rock on little gom jabbars! That’s what SHOULD happen. A ledge, in a partially flooded room, leads to another dungeon level. “ Halflings and gnomes can fit through the stream cave that leads to T#10.” There’s a variety here, and the environment FEELS natural. It feels like a real place. Of course a collapsed room floods and leads to a new dungeon level! I don’t give a fuck about fresh water sources. Or places for the monsters to shit. Or any of that other naturalism nonsense. But I do want my environment to make sense and feel right. So, shit to fight. Shit to fuck with. Shit to explore. Treasures to loot. Rock on man!

And then we start to add other elements. We’ve got a dungeon level above the tomb (which, I guess, is below the island proper, which has a few encounters on it. Eight or so?) So, a dungeon before you get to the dungeon. Awesome! And then, in the tomb, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a level UNDER that level. The tomb is a part of the world around it. Oh, and, also, there’s a demon and some demon fish on that level under the tomb. So, you know, there’s that. Oh, and, on that level above the tomb? There’s some alien jellyfish. They really don’t like the demon fish. They’d like you to go kill the demon lord, close the rift, etc. Oh, and, also, they crawl down your throat and possess you. And then the PC is like “Hey, lets all swim down this hallway full of weird jellyfish and maybe go kill some demons, yah?”  Yeah. And then there’s a sea voyage. So, tomb adventure. On an island. with levels above and below it. With a sea voyage. With some demon fish/alien possession jellyfish running around everywhere. And this gets us to what I am calling a real adventure.There’s context. A larger environment in which the adventure is taking place. Not the continent. Not a bunch of irrelevant shit. 

Oh, yeah, and the art is a bunch of hand drawn shit from amateurs. Fucking great! I love i! It really brings the homebrew vibe. Charming as all fuck!

However … 

Something the fuck is rotten is in the state. I’m struggling, a lot, with this adventure. My eyes glaze over at ever opportunity. It’s something, I think, with the formatting. We have, no doubt, grown bored with my “bold, bullet, whitespace” chant. However, what I’m actually chanting is usability, with those just being some common means to get there. However, can they be applied … incorrectly? Maybe? And maybe that’s what is going on here? It starts with the numbering scheme. “T#9” Meh. That seems a little busy, with the hash sign? And the letter in front of it? I know I know. It sounds like I’m just nitpicking. But. Combined with the bolding, whitespace and bullets, … I know, I know. I’m a terrible fucking person. But it’s hard to grok! I think we’re looking, in many cases, of encounters that are three quarters of a page or longer. And in those cases the formatting seems to wander around, with creatures and text intermixed. It’s hard to follow! And, then, add in the wanderers, and a couple of other special tables before each dungeon level. Rumour page for the level, Map page. A couple of pages of wanderers. THEN we can start the level … it’s all just a little … expansive? 

I think, what I’m seeing, is the merchants house style reaching about the limits of what it can accomplish, and even going further than it would allow. As things get larger, and longer, there need to be certain adjustments. And I’m not sure I see that here. Which is real fucking polite way of saying I don’t want to fight this text for the adventure underneath. Even though, i do think, that the adventure underneath is a good one. I mean, sure, I have some doubts about the mind-control jellyfish shit, but we’ll chalk that up to past trauma. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $8. The preview is a nice and long one. Check out pages three, four, five, six and seven to see what I’m talking about with the more expansive formatting used.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/397251/Brine-Lord-Cassidys-Tomb?1892600