The Mosidian Temple

By David Flor
Darklight Interactive
OSRIC
Levels 6-10

For over a hundred years, THE MOSIDIAN TEMPLE stood isolated and undisturbed in the desert to the southeast, a monument to the rulers of old that is visited only by a few obsessed cult followers of a group known as the Mosidian Order. Now the nearby towns are threatened with annihilation unless a set of artifacts are recovered from deep within the infamous temple. It is the time for an elite group of heroes to enter THE MOSIDIAN TEMPLE, navigate its secrets, and recover the artifacts from the temple’s depths.

This fifty page adventure uses about twenty pages to describe around twenty rooms in a smaller dungeon that leads to a a 3hirty-ish room larger dungeon. The challenges here are iconic, in a trophy way, once after another, but ultimately feel like a tournament dungeon instead of an exploration dungeon. And an overwritten one at that.

This is an unusual beast. It’s an adventure created by someone in their youth, in the days of 1e. Found, and converted to OSRIC, and, presumably, the text updated? If not, then the eleven year old gets designer of the year award for the 80’s! But, as a document to run a modern game from, it suffers from the usual wordiness that we see in a lot of published adventures. While it’s unclear if the text has been updated, I’m going to review it as if the room concepts were kept and the text updated. 

The exuberance of youth is on full display in the concepts of the various rooms here. You want a fire trap in a room? Great! How about it come from some dragon heads on the wall? Bridges over chasms. A giant dragon statue on a room (a small room. As the designer notes, sometimes the exuberance of youth takes over where some common sense could do better.) A silver mirror in a room transports people, and a collapsed hallway has a chest peeking out. A hall of doors and, of course, the demon summoning room with a potential Balor. A magic longsword driven in to an obsidian obelisk. And, of course, the required temple room is replete with cultists worshiping. All of those magnificent tropes from your youth. A statues eyes begin to glow red. Oh no! These are all great ideas and the adventure is chock full of them. And, in some cases, may have even had more. The designer notes that the earth elemental was going to be made of coal before they changed it in the revision. Boo! Boo I say sir! I want a coal earth elemental!

I talk sometimes about imagining a thing first and then figuring out later what mechanics to give it. Let the wonders of your mind roam without being burdened by mechanics and statistics, a world without D&D books, and then figure out how to stat the thing. And this thing FEELS like that in many places. The designer explicitly notes that this was not the case, entirely. He saw a cool dragon in the FIend Folio and wanted to stick it in his dungeon so he did. Whatever. Youthful exuberance, again, as the pretext for this working out mostly ok in this dungeon. It feels like you encounter wondrous things and situations, without them feeling forced or just thrown in for the sake of being there. (Even though they were. 😉

But I wouldn’t go whipping out the credit card yet. I might summarize this one as decent concepts poorly written up. The text drags on and on. In some places reaching column size or more, for relatively simple rooms. It is the usual suspects. A padding out of useless words. Appears to be. The statue is actually. The jewels can be removed from the statue with a dagger or similar tool. These are all paddings of one form or another. And it REALLY likes to pad things out. This leads to rooms with multiple paragraphs that are less clear than a tightly written few sentences would be. 

It’s not such a mess that you can’t run it, but, I’d have to ask why you would want to. This gets to the basic quandary in the market. Everything ever written is now available. Why are you selecting one product over another? My standards are high because of this. I’m not interested in a product that actively works against comprehension. I’m looking for something full of wonder, tight, evocative. A rare exception, like Thracia, might slip through, but only because of the heights that is reaches makes it worth it, even today, to put in the effort. While the contents here, the situations in the rooms, are fun in places, it doesn’t trump the slog through the text, and, thusly, remains a piece of nostalgia.

This is $13 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and you get to see a few of the wilderness areas. If you squint hard you can ell that the dungeon chambers will be more of the same, in terms of style. A few of those, a page or so, would have been nice to see also.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/486062/the-mosidian-temple-osric?1892600