Mad Mask Spire

By Nickolas Zachary Brown
Five Cataclysms
Five Cataclysms
"Mid levels" ... 8?

The Spire has stood as a bastion of evil for centuries, and now under the rulership of the dread witch, Hagatha, the evil blossoms anew. Over the years, many noble heroes have found their minds twisted by the evil here, drawn in by their lust for dark power. Will the heroes of today fare any better?

This 45 page adventure presents a tower with sixish levels and about sixty rooms. It is best described, perhaps, as a grosser Tegal: house themed, somewhat welcoming, but an unmistakably evil locale. A fine little place to bop in to, if you can handle its flaws.

I’m going to do my best this morning. Sometimes, when you are descending in to the depths of the earth or going stonehelling, you stumble upon MonsterTown. Businesses and so on mingle about in an area. Thoroughly evil, but also a little chill. Sometimes monstertown has someone in charge who is also evil but chill. Hey, jst don’t go looking behind the sign that says Employees Only, ok? This also pops up from time to time when you are invading Lord Evils castle … there’s are parts of it that are kind of chill to visit. Evil, but not outright KILL THE INTRUDERS hostile.

There is something similar going on in this adventure. Maybe not explicitly, but that’s the vibe.

I’m not super in to the cover, but that’s the dungeon layout. It’s a spire with these giant mask faces carved in to it. There’s a smaller illustration further in to the adventure that I think better depicts the place. Anyway, there’s your mad masks of the spire. You enter up a slimy ramp/tongue in to a mouth to get inside what would otherwise ne a “normal” dungeon. Where “normal” means some dudes without heads but faces in their chests, dumb but numerous. FLying brainsstill dripping blood, or a read mist floating around as wanderers, among others. THis place is … weird? I don’t know how to describe the vibe. It’s a normal place … but the rooms and creatures are abbynormal. I don’t know, not body horror, but in the same neighborhood in that you see/meet something on the more visceral (sometimes literally …) end of the spectrum in a somewhat otherwise normal environment. We will leave the build up and release of tension theory to those that know better,

Ok, let’s see here, room five. A dining room. The swell-dressed keleton butler comes in to take your order as he recites the menu. “Baby back-ribs”, Heartdevoire, Oculemon, or Manling Dumplings. I note that you’ve not yet reached the kitchens, or their meat locker where “Dozens of the bodies of children hang from chains, skewered on meat hooks, their heads and several ribs removed. Bits of flesh, rotting and fresh, are scattered all about the floor. Pieces of flesh have been haphazardly torn from the bodies here. “ The ribs are indeed baby back ribs. And the adventure des this quite a bit. The main enemy is a witch, but we can squint to see a hag. Perhaps a bit less swamp hag but with the same sort of evil showing through. The adventure has no problem “going there.” I don’t think it’s ever inappropriate, but, it does do a decent job of noting that, hey, these people are evil. 

“Thump, thump, thumping, the beating of hearts, dozens of them, fills your ears. They are chained to the walls, little tubes sticking out of them, as blood flows through the tubes and all around the room.” Oh, also, a giant heart behind glass in this room, also chained to the wall with tubes sticking out of it. And, in another room, the lab experiments room, some tables with specimens on it “A horse corpse covered in blue shrooms; a man with a shrunken head, intellect reduced to 1; a corpse wrought by severe necrosis; a man with blind eyes; a badger with teeth so long it can’t close its mouth; a person whose legs appear to be made of worms.” Helga the witches devotion to the scientific method could be better, but you can’t fault her innovation. I think, from these descriptions, you can get a feel for the vibe here.  There is a little bit of a lighthearted vibe mixed in here and there, not comedy but more of a slight absurdity to the goings on. Our minions are so dumb that they frequently bring anyone they capture to the nearest boss create (Which, would be a complaint; it’s up to DM to locate the nearest on their own without assistance.) So we get this bumbling threat of the hulking dudes with faces in their chests, keystone copping their way through dealing with the party, until the party meets a unique creature. 

The main map page is not my favorite, it’s too small to be useful, but there are some break out maps that are slightly better. I gotta be able to see the map to run the map. And treasure can be a bit low also, for an gold=xp game at level ten, anyway. There are other little bits, like amy doors causing you 1d6 damage just to open. Formatting is ok, decent for the text length if a little basic. And interactivity is … fine? There’s a lot of “turns out there was something interesting at the bottom of this barrel of pimple juice” sort of thing.

And, thusly, formatting that is not terrible. Descriptions that are not terrible (in spite of “appears to be” appearing a little too often.) An adventuring environment that is more neutral based, ut certainly still full of hostile creatures, with a theme of “search the gross thing” in order to get some loot. There are a few fetch quests in this, a little too explicitly in some cases, with ghost children demanding toys, for example. Thus we have the setting to fall back on as a kind of stand out. And stand out it does, with the viscera. In this respect we’ve got something like the place, oh, the Psychedelic Fantasies adventures with the teeth and bubble/membrane shit. It’s a more unusual environment, but the interactivity certainly isn’t quite as varied as some more traditional dungeons … but that environment IS a selling point. No the best that FiveC has produced, but an unusual place without going over the top.

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/281441/mad-mask-spire?1892600