The Key of Amalantra

By Terke Nordiin
Svartnost
OSR
Levels ... ? 2?

The wizard Amalantra, known as the Master of Mirrors, is said to have hid all his secrets and treasures in a place that could only be accessed with a special key.

This nine page adventure describes a mirror that can lead to …six different rooms? There’s not much to it. Which makes the long form paragraph presentation all the worse. 

This is another of the Rope Trick adventures. Or, maybe they are Leomund’s Tiny Hut adventures? Anyway, you find a thing and it leads to a small extradimensional space that you explore. I’m aware that something like this has existed for quite some time, form the earliest dungeon Mr Living Room. I can’t help but wonder if anyone has ever done one of these that is not boring as all fuck?

You find a large mirror. It has five sides. Point it at a door and you can open the door in the mirror and step through to a different room. Stick the mirror on a different side and you open the door to a new room. Five sides, so five rooms in total, with another one if you open the door in darkness and another one if you are IN the other room and use the door in it that you just came through. What is that? Seven rooms? The point it at a door thing is interesting. Everything else is not.

There’s nothing new here. Nothing interesting. Nothing particularly well done. The environments are not wondrous. Or even well described. It’s all what you would expect. Shadows. Mirror images of yourself. A mirror golem, of course. It’s all long paragraph form with little formatting to break things up. Just mountains and mountains of text for what you are getting. This is prime one-pager territory.

I guess I’ve got two complaints here. The first is … Why? Why do this thing in the way it was done? It’s small. There’s just no room here to give life to anything that is inside of it. A couple of rooms? Disconnected by each other? You’ve got no space at all to anything interesting. There are SO many adventures like this. Rather than actually sit down and take the time to put something interesting together instead they take the one idea they had and do a six or seven room dungeon with it. If that much. That sucks ass. I’m sure its possible to do that well, but, its going to be far more interesting if you give yourself, and your creation a little breathing room. Let it expand. You need space to develop things. To give room for the kind of play that D&D thrives on. And a few isolated rooms doesn’t do that. Do you have to come up with something new? No. But you have to make an effort to do what you ARE doing well. I love a well-implemented trope. Well Implemented.

Why do this? Why do something mediocre? For the $2 that this thing is going to bring in? Wealth, beyond the dreams of avarice! Because of some compulsion to create? I can get behind that. But, something like this? This is what you felt compelled to create? I know I’m going a little harsh on this designer, but, also, you’re standing in for every designer that has even been or will be who does something like this. Why not let this grow? Develop it? Polish it? Build on it? Do something that you are really really proud of. Make sure that every aspect of it is exactly what you think it should be, that everything delivers on the promise of a new dawn, that everything will bring delight to those who explore it? 

I don;t know. Long paragraphs. Blah blah blah. No formatting to speak of. Blah blah blah. Anything mildly interesting, like the eyeball dude, not given enough room to breathe. No foreshadowing. Blah blah blah. Why would I ever try? To put effort in for something that had none to create?

This is $2 at DriveThru. The review is two pages. You get to see the first room and part of the second. Enjoy that wall of text.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/461510/The-Key-of-Amalantra?1892600