Jungle Tomb of the Mummy Bride

By Levi Combs
Planet X Games
5e
Levels 5-7

Tales of the cursed pyramid and the sleeping tomb of the Mummy Bride have long been a traveler’s tale, passed along by wayward explorers and greedy plunderers alike. Deep within the verdant jungles of the south, amidst a Green Hell of impenetrable jungle, savage cannibals and ancient myth, lies the shattered remnants of a once-powerful civilization and the terrible gods who ruled over them. Rumors swirl of untold riches and un-plundered magic for those brave (or foolish!) enough to claim it. Will your players survive… and what will be left of them?

This 87 page adventure presents a three level jungle temple dungeon with about thirty rooms in about nineteen pages. Full of fun tropes, and leaning hard toward combat and looooong encounters.

To understand this adventure you need to understand Cannibalvision. This is the vibe, presented in a page description up front, of B movie exploitation tropes. Perhaps most readily accessible by that opening scene in the first Indiana Jones. The temple. The natives. The snake in the cockpit. “Nudity that would make a 1980’s National Geographic blush”, we are told. Or “When describing the jungle and its “lost in time” inhabitants, remember that everything in this ancient world is bigger than it should be and that goes double for the freakiness factor. Mosquitoes the size of a puppy or ridiculous swarms of giant leeches should be the norm.” There are some hits and misses in this advice. I get the vibe that the designer is trying for though, and it comes through pretty well, in total. You just have to overlook the hamfisted account of the quaint natives. And you, gentle reader, don’t go pulling your fucking holier than thou shit; you can get a vibe across without resorting to the worst of caricatures. That’s the job of the designer. 

The maps here are a bit simplistic. Just a some simple hallway lines ending in rooms without much complexity. The first level has about two thirds of the rooms with the other two being essentially perfunctory maps or just a couple of numbered encounters. A standard temple layout. Which does tend to be some of the worst dungeon map design. They tend to the simplistic.

The adventure does have some great vignettes though, referencing back to the tropes that we’re all familiar with, and done/written in an evocative manner. At one point you encounter a corpse/mummy. It is mumbling something … but can’t talk because its lips are sewn shut. Cutting them free causes him to continually mutter a slight prayer/saying. That great! It’s great imagery and somewhat scar, giving that push your luck mechanism that should always be a part of a dungeon. And the adventure does this sort of thing over and over again. Even better, there’s some design behind this. Pushing your luck here, by cutting open the mouth to hear the chant, allows you to use the prayer in another room to help bypass the danger there. That is EXACTLY what should happen. Or, in another case, a room full of statues, arms crossed in front of their chests. Triggering them causes their hands to uncover the chests, revealing holes, in which crawling hands flood out. Scarabs anyone? That’s a clear appeal to a trope and some great imagery as well.

And in many other ways the adventure falls down. Wanderers are perfunctory, with such descriptions as this one for a giant spider “ This variety of spider does not spin webs, but is very adept at jumping.” Sure. Bt also there’s no real energy to this, or the others. And while the adventure is magnificent in its specificity in some places, it also engages in the abstraction that frustrating to see “The ancient civilization that once prospered here was not completely eradicated. A savage, cannibalistic tribe of hunters remain nearby, offering up forbidden and bloody tribute to the evil gods within and echoing the decadent, terrible habits of their ancestors.” a tribe. An ancient civilization. Name names man! Give me some bloody tribute! Get in there and revel in it! And you don’t even have to use more words, just different words. The Jaffa hate the Shol’va! And it’s full of minor annoyances, such as presenting us with a step pyramid … without any indication of what you find when you climb the steps (the entrance is at the base.) I can’t imagine the playtest groups never climbed to the top.

But, the main crime here is one of verbosity. The entries are long. Three, or four to a page. A simple spear trap takes four paragraphs to describe. Four! Paragraph after paragraph of words for rooms. And much of it padded out with useless words or phrases or some backstory, and usually all of the above. Rooms APPEAR to be things. “Crouching about, gnawing on split, cracked bones and scuttling around on the floor looking for ragged scraps of flesh are 2d6 ghouls” is a great description of ghoul behaviour. But the description after it is backstory and the one before, of the room proper, full of abstractions and history. It makes it a serious pain to dig through.

I believe this, while for 5e, has its roots in DCC. And it shows. A good DCC adventure thrives on experiences and that is what this has. It’s just a chore to work with and frustrating in its inconsistencies.

This is $12 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. You get to see the first two rooms, which is good, and the abstracted nature of the wanderers and rumours, as well as the Cannibalvision advice.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/259238/jungle-tomb-of-the-mummy-bride?1892600