The Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos

By Every Lockhart

Melsonian Arts Council

OSR
Level ?

The snakes in her hair lie languid in sleep. She needs their warmth for her children, you see.   Swollen, ever-pregnant with memory, Metegorgos waddles about the dark, wet ruination of her ancient home. Long forgotten, she has not  been allowed to forget. Again and again, she births wretched reminders of her tragic past.  Untold ages has the cursed Queen suffered for the most cardinal of sins:  she dared to make herself powerful and better the world around her.  Such slights the awful gods do not forgive.  Still, above all else she is a mother. Still yet does Metegorgos love her torturous children, and so too do they love her.  And thus are they doubly dangerous.

This 32 page adventure has, I don’t know, five encounters? It’s got a great mythology and I though it was going to be be wonderful. It ended up being more vision than adventure, with too much, I don’t know, idea? And not enough execution.

We’ve got a kind of medusa myth here, really well done. Cursed by the gods and a kind of fertility thing going on, giving birth to monsters, living in darkness and filth. What’s the name of those little fertility statues that they find, the ancient ones? With wide hips and large saggy breasts? Whatever, that’s her form. Except she’s got a head full of snake hair. Having given birth to abominations, her first being a wyrm, sleeping curled around the outside entrance to her ruined tower. That publishers blurb does a decent job of converting her vibe. And it’s reinforced by the text in the adventure. You really get this kind of mythic cursed creature thing going on from the backstory. (See? I don’t totally ignore backstory.)I can’t emphasize enough the mythic nature that is laid down by it, for her, and her first son, the wyrm. And there are elements throughout that give it this air also, an amphora half filled with wine, with something in side of it, or a rotten gods wisdome tooth stuck in a different gods appendix, kept in a box under a bed, delicate and translucent obsidian. That’s all wonderful, yeah? It’s got that tragedy from myth mixed in with a heavy dose of the naturalistic, bringing it down in a realism, leveraging ancient cultural memories. 

Too bad it’s fucked in every other way.

There are a lot of issues I have with it, but mainly it doesn’t have any room to breathe. All of that backstory and all of the shit embedded in this is just garbage filler because there’s no chance to get it out in the open. You’re just dumped in to a forest and then the lair. And a lair with only a couple of rooms in it. There’s no build up. There’s no foreshadowing. It’s just another place to go and stab something. At 32 pages I would have expected a little bit of a lead in, and little more room in the lair, perhaps, or region, to build things up. To get the party shitting their pants and expose some of that mythology to the players to help get them in the mood. But there’s none of that here. So you end up just stabbing a fertility medusa and a wyrm and a few other things. I don’t really get it at all.

You’re dumped in to a forest that takes either 30 minutes or an hour to explore to find her lair, depending on your rolls. Every five minutes, real time, you fight some sad zombies. (No turning! Curse of the divine and all that jazz.) Once you kill 30 or so, on a tracker, they are all gone and you can continue. There’s this whole thing about how she turns people to stone and then birth stillborn replicas of them, the sad zombies who love her and are repulsed by affirmations of false love. That’s a great little bit! Too bad it’s all just explaining the whys and hows of the thing and has no impact on the game otherwise, because there’s no room for it to expand. There’s no slow burn here and no thrill of discovery.

Then we get her wyrm baby thing wrapped around her house. (tower? Cave? It’s not clear to me.) Kill it and move on, and forget about all that jazz about its mothers love and suckling its teats and all that shit. Inside you’ve got a sun demon standing just inside the doorway. Then some shit demons and some gnome things, some hags, and the medusa. All linear. All with very little description of the rooms.

This thing is trying to communicate a vibe. But it comes off all all vision. I really can’t emphasize enough how disorganized this thing is. How nonsensical. There’s no map, of course. At one point were told there might be something in the rubble. That’s right after the first room. Is it part of the first room? Is it a second room? We get section headings like “Is that a stairway heading deeper within, halfway back and to the right?” With the descriptions “Totes.” Ok, sure, I get it. But this is what passes for design now? 

I’m all for having a vision. I think you MUST have one, in fact. But then you have to bring that thing to life for the DM so they can bring it to life for the players. And this thing fails so utterly at that. The vision is expanded upon, but never brought down to earth. The text is confusing, the layout, the words. What am I reading? What relation does it have to everything else? I think the room descriptions, from what I can discern, are almost purple more than they are descriptions, but I’m not even sure purple is correct. Most of the time I’m not even sure you ARE reading a room description. And, recall, I LUV a room that uses vibes instead of descriptions. But this thing is so p in it’s own vision that it doesn’t really get anywhere.

This is a great myth here. But, ultimately, the encounters end up as just stabbing things, in various ways. There’s no exploration, no discovery, no mysteries to uncover. Enter room. Freaky monster. Kill it. Next room. The mythology, that clearly soooo much work went in to, is a failure because it doesn’t lead to anything in the game. 

An actual ruinous palace would have been a better setting.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing. I’d read it, at least the start, to get a great idea of that mythology, and then move on with your life and riff it to something more gameable. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/489257/the-ruinous-palace-of-the-metegorgos?1892600