Slug House

By Daniel Herz
Stromberg Press
B/X
Levels 1-3

“Thou shalt drink one too many potions my dear” she said “any find thyself crawling around like an overgrown earthworm.” The brazen cheek! I will begin my experiments again, and make myself the very subject! A beautiful mansion was once occupied by Uzul Balashi, a powerful wizard who mysteriously disappeared many years ago. His house is said to be full of treasure and magic items, but also dangerous traps and monsters
This 66 page adventure presents a wizards home in a city with three levels; two up and one down, with about eighty rooms. Parts of this match, exactly, what I am looking for in an adventure. It is, I think, difficult to keep that up through every room, and that shows in this adventure. More refinement in the text, from editing to layout, would also help. But, hey, I wouldn’t be mad running this.
So, Frank the wizzo has a house in town. A kind of U shaped building, with the fourth side being a courtyard open to the street, with gate. He’s got some human guards working for him. They stay in one of the courtyard wings, a leg of the U. Then Frank goes missing. The guards hag around, now little more than thugs. Some halfings start serving food, and the courtyard now becomes something like a hang out, the stoop everyone sits on and drinks booze and eats and whores and games. This section, the first dozen or so keys, is really REALLY well done. No body really cares if you hang out. You can gamble with the dudes. They are kind of bandits? More lazy unemployed men with swords. There are some hookers about that they keep around. It’s got this very “collapse of society” thing going on that I’m real in to. Nothing is pushed too far. Sure, you can brawl in the courtyard, no one really cares, except when weapons come out. I guess you’re kind of hanging out with all of the mean ass bullies in school, or something. Maybe some fights, maybe some drugs, you can hang around, some chicks, but no one is just stabbing anyone who wanders in. The vibe here is perfect. Those first dozen or so rooms, all contributing the scene, really do well this kind of grey area between banditry and not. Both from the guards pov AND from the pov of the party, who will perhaps just start killing them. This section can hold up and go toe to toe with some of the best content written. It’s not perfect, but the overall situation here is exactly what I mean when I say I’m looking for situations and not encounters. And did I mention the balconies and open areas on the maps? Nicely done.
The inside of the home drops off somewhat from this high praise. We get a pretty decent wizard home. There are plenty of mundane rooms and rooms with just a little bit more going on in them. The interactivity can feel a little slow in places, creatures are few and far between, it feels like, in places. There are some decent secret doors and so on to find, turning levers and the like is always fun. I’m fond on the “tax writeoff” skeleton accountant. The slug wanders around, and the party can free a shadow which can show up on the wanderer table if the uncover The Black Mirror. We’re not going to win any interactivity awards, but its also a cut above your typical fare. Monsters pound on doors. That shadow you free creeping around. The designer is taking the “normal” interactivity, or the usual stuff, and doing about as much as you can with it. Give a hint to some magic items existing and then hide things around the house. The shelf full of vials and potions that do things. Extending to the monsters, there’s are quite large butterflies in the garden. And when they gently land on you .. they stick in a needle and start sucking stirge style! Very nicely done. And, while the monster descriptions are generally present but not earth shattering, the art that goes with the adventure is a cut above and turns “hound with a skull face” in to something much much better in the art.
The writing here can tend to the long side in places. Or, perhaps, it feels long. The descriptions are trying to bring an evocative flair to things but don’t succeed perhaps as much as they think they do, those monster descriptions being a good example of that. It feels like more than a token effort was made, but they still were not really successful in the way, perhaps, the designer wanted them to be. And, magic items get a decent description in the appendix that doesn’t overstay its welcome. We get descriptions like ”A mouldy billiard table sits stoically in a seething sea of crawling centipedes. A constant sickening sound of thousands of moist vermin writhing. Atop the table remain a few forlorn billiard balls.” Stoically and forlorn are a bit much here, but moist vermin writhing is great! The constant sickening sound is better example, we know whats meant but it still doesn’t come through great. A more typical description for an emptyish room might be “Grimy sinks and a table covered in old mouldy cloths. A small cupboard contains a bucket of wood ash, soapwort, vinegar and a small vial of universal solvent (see appendix II).” I get, again, whats being tried for. Grimy. Old cloth. But it feels a little rote. As if we need to stick in an adjective from a thesaurus.
The formatting can, at times, be weird. Treasure, monsters, and Exits will, at times, be called out in separate headings in a room. I’m not sure this is really working the way the designer wants it to. The creatures, in particular, don’t feel integrated in to the room. The Exits section is less jarring, contains perhaps sounds from them or How The Secret Door Opens. The secrets, in particular, avoid the traps and door porn syndrome and give enough information to add some spice. He’s done a nice job with this section, including it when appropriate and using it to add variety.
In the world of haunted mansions we can point to Tegal, Xyntillian, Shadowbrook. Maybe Amber. This feels a little more grounded than those. A little less fanciful. It’s still present, but not pushed in flavour. Or, at least, that’s the way it feels. There is a giant garden. A giant slug, a shadow running around, and a body laid out on a slab in the basement. Teleporters and magic bells abound. But it FEELS a little more grounded.
I’m not mad at this. I wish the writing were a little tighter. And I wish the writing hit more, in terms of being evocative. And while there are a decent number of situations and things to fuck with, nothing, I think, every quite reaches the heights of the initial bandit/courtyard thing. The imp running around. The slug. The shadow. None of it really hits the way the opening does. But, Also, I’m gonna stick this in my starting city in Dungeonland. This is a good adventure.
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. You’re going to get to see the first ten rooms, which should get you fine examples of the formatting and how it is used, as well as the writing style. As a bonus, you also get to see part of that opening section I like so much, although you miss their intro, which adds a lot.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/491255/slug-house?1892600