The Wizard Remains

By Sean Ferrell
Hangry Dwarf Press
OSE/5e
Level 6. Ha! 

There used to be a wizards tower here, but an earthquake changed that. The tower fell, and no one ever heard from the old wizard again. Some say he was responsible for the quake. Some say he left powerful magic behind. Some say he was conducting terrible experiments. Some say all of the rumors are true.

This ten page adventure uses five pages to describe about 21 rooms in a funhouse dungeon. It smacks of just throwing shit in for the fuck of it all. I find the lack of pretext disturbing. I do not like it Sam-I-Am. 

I like pretext. I like a suspension of disbelief. We could all just sit around the table and have the DM roll on the wilderness tables until we go back to “safe place” to heal and repeat until we get enough loot from the random rolls that we can level. Or, we can just do the same thing in randomly generated after randomly generated map. I like a decent pretext. I like the suspension of disbelief that comes from making things work together, to bring them together to something larger than the sum of their parts. To discover the gatehouse at Stonehell and the clues it provides as well as the framing of what’s to come. 

There’s a room here that has the read-aloud “An empty room that is covered by burn marks. “. Another just has a pedestal in it with a gargoyle statue on it. The challenges here are not that of a dungeon at the base of a wizards tower. The challenges here are just a bunch of shit that was thrown together. Random, in the poorer sense of the word, in that there is no rhyme or reason as to why they are there. I guess this is the “A Wizard did it!” nonsense. I wanna get in to the mood. Discover something. Put something together. Say Oh yeah, that makes sense! Yeah yeah, I like Dungeon of the Bear. Fuck off.

The room titles here are pure funhouse. “Dont be Shelf-ish” or “What a Boar” This is all solidly in the realm of funhouse, even if the lack of pretext room encounters lead you in the same direction. But what stands out here are the encounters themselves. An empty room with scorched walls. Obviously a challenge room. A room with a pedestal on it with a gargoyle statue on it – obviously a challenge room. A room with a sign on the door that says “Remember to bring the right tool for the right job” – obviously a challenge room. And, I can, in some circumstances, get behind a funhouse dungeon. Some of them fit and work together. White Plume or Inverness, or even Bear. But, then there are things like this, that jut seem to be a bunch of stuff in a bunch of rooms that are all disconnected to each other. 

The usual nonsense about conversions apply here. It says you can do this in 5e or OSR. Which means it’s a 5e adventure and stated for 5e and, more importantly, TREASURED for 5e. You might be going home with less than a thousand gp for this one and no Blackrazor to show for it. 

But, back to the dungeon. When the read-alouds are not being inanely terse they are instead being overly descriptive. “Six statues made of wax—all amazingly rendered to look like actual people—stand about the room.” Well now, you’ve just destroyed a crucial part of the game. The back and forth between DM and player. No one gets to ask questions about those statues now, not what they are made of anyway. You told us in the read-aloud. You want to the read-aloud to help contribute to the interactivity between player and DM that is the core process of the game. The players ask, the DM answers and the players ask more based on that answer. If I tell them everything in the opening text crawl then that critical element is greatly diminished. 

Oh no! Burning oil got lit! Oh no! The gargoyle came to life and attacks you if the party has a MU in it! Oh, also, it comes to life and attacks you if the party doesn’t have a MU in it. Oh no! Take 1d6 slashing damage from the trap in the hallway! Oh No! Ok, I’m bored of that now. This is not a level six adventure. 5e? I don’t know. Or care. There is the BARE  minimum at the end of the adventure related to scaling. Look, just fucking design the fucking thing for 5e or OSR. Fuck me, it’s 2024, you can publish both versions … I mean, you know the differences between the two systems, right? What, at the core, makes them tik? Like … gold for XP in a certain family of games? 

No, tentacle worms will not save this. No, the racoon pig will not save this. It’s just a series of random rooms poorly balanced and badly described.

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview shows you four rooms, so, good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/501913/the-wizard-remains-5e-knave-2e-osr?1892600

You gonna be my teenage dream tonight, baby?