The Sunken Temple

By Mr Pilgrim Tomes
Self Published
OSE
"Expert Levels"

A sunken cathedral on a quiet mountain lake hides a long forgotten temple to Mathanoga, God of Knowledge and wizardry. Abandoned by Man for centuries ,  but protected by the legend of man-eating fishmen lurking in it.  Or until a few weeks ago the young wizad Elric embarked on its expedition. With help from the accademy of Greykeep he found the temple and began to explore it, hoping to uncover its ancient magical secrets. Now the wizard is missing and the accademy has put a bounty on its head: its weight in silver to whoever will find him and bring him home alive and well.

This twenty page adventure uses about eight pages to describe a temple complex with about fifteen rooms. It’s a basic adventure of this type, with basic encounters, non-evocative room descriptions and straightforward puzzles that are poorly described. I guess that means it’s inoffensive? Which is not a recommendation in any way.

Oh no! Some wizzo has gone missing! You’re sent by the guild to find him. As the intro tells us, the fishmen in the temple “have attacked Elric’s camp, fatally wounding the wizard.” To be clear, in this context, “fatally wounded” means that he’s made it through four or five of the temples rooms and then turned himself to stone. Which is a different definition of fatal then I would use, but whatever.

Let’s dig in to this, shall we! Room one is the upper lever, with the rest of the temple being underground. As yes, a room with a statue and an altar, with the altar having the inscription: “I’M KEY TO EVERY DOOR SOUGHT BY SAGES AND SEERS SINCE THE DAYS OF YORE”.” That’s it. What do you want to do? No, fucking with the statue and altar don’t do anything and there’s nothing else to find. What do you do? This is, obviously, a riddle. Answer the riddle. ANSWER THE FUCKING RIDDLE! Did you answer it? No, there are no clues. No, you cannot continue the adventure until you answer the riddle, because that’s what makes the secret door appear. At least Gandork knew there WAS a door. This, of course, a classic example of putting your adventure behind a skill roll/secret door/etc. You shouldn’t fucking do that. Yes, the DM can fudge it. Yes, the DM can also buy a different adventure, one that is actually good and doesn’t put the adventure behind a secret door. Anyway, the answer is at the bottom of this review if you’d like to play D&D tonight. 

But, hey, let’s move on to a different room, yes?  Let’s see “First Trail: The room is designed to test the intelligence of newcomers, and to remove those unfit for study.” Oh fuck me. It’s a trial dungeon. Great. I fucking hate trial dungerons. Lets are the weakest example of a pretext for an adventure. And, of course, we have the aside text telling us that the “first trial” room is a test to weed people out. No shit. Who woulda thunk it. Overly explaining and justifying rooms. Bleech.

How about another puzzle room them? This one has an orb in it. It has “the four alchemical symbols carved in it”  and on the four walls a dwarf head, a bird head, a flaming head and a fish head. So, yeah, I think pretty obvious. Except, of course, I’m not sure I know WHAT the four symbols are? If you asked me, I don’t know, I’d good the fifth element and steal from it? There’s no description of the symbols at all. The whole adventure is like this. It just seems to leave out pieces of information or hand wave past it. It’s weird as all fuck.

I don’t know, the combat encounters seem bullshitty to me also. They get stuck at the bottom of room descriptions, where they might be more appropriate in the middle IE: if there’s a statue and approaching it activates a monster then maybe we say that around the statue description instead of describing a hole bunch of other shit and then dropping the monster at the end. I think there’s another room with a statue in it with an inscription on it and if you read the inscription you get attacked by four monsters. This seems MAJORLY arbitrary and I think is the kind of shit that turns players in to bad players that are unwilling to engage with rooms .When something as simple as reading a statue inscription kills you … why read anything? Yeah yeah, explosive runes, etc. But this aint that. We WANT people interacting with the rooms, not doing some pavlov shit so they learn to not engage with them. Risk/RewardPush your luck are the goto’s, not arbitrary wandering table tables. 

I guess, ultimately, it’s inoffensive. Not bad, just not good at all. Oh, and, yeah, before I forget, PUT THE FUCKING LEVEL RANGE ON THE FUCKING ADVETURE.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/497244/the-sunken-temple?1892600

The Fucking riddle answer is Knowledge.