Tomb of the Ancient Hero

By Will Flora
Prop Cor Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

The magic of Diathea sits in disarray! The Emerald Emperor and the Archmage of the Realms need a party of adventurers to uncover the secrets that lie within the Tomb of the Ancient Hero! Those who dare to wander into this mausoleum will find that it holds much more than bones…

THis 44 page adventure uses about fifteen pages to describe about fifteen rooms in a small two level dungeon. Loose text and wordiness, uneven enemy distribution. We’re on the Epic Adventure train here, but, hey, the weirdness in this is nice.

The Emerald Emperor had his magic sceptre stolen by The Evil Kingdom and now magic is falling apart. Elminster (who is called Twane in this adventure, for some reason)  sends you to the Emperor (AC4 HP14 … prime for stabbing. You keep what you kill, right?) who sends you to the tomb to “find out more information.” This is going to amount to a tablet with like six words on it, something like “Rock and Stone, Tree and Hill” or some nonsense. Oh, also, Elminster shows up on your way to the tomb to warn you about The Duke and give you healing potions and then disappear in classic Elminster fashion in a puff of smoke. 

This adventure has exactly one thing going for it: it is fucking WEIRD in places. It also has some classic elements that harken back to classic design, but it is those weird elements that stick out. I’m talking Dungeon of the Bear ‘Swallow the gem to turn in to a badger’ kind of shit. It is that classic “Imagine first, then design it” kind of philosophy that I think a lot of great adventures clearly come from. We’ve got a Hydra in this adventure … but it’s a Plant Hydra … which means a Giant Venus Flytrap. AC 6, 6HD, 6 Attacks … at level one? But, still nicely imagined! And then the trippiest of all things, in any adventure EVAR. I want you to think of every time you’ve seen mushrooms in an adventure. Eat a mushroom for an effect. Those classic art pieces of mushroom caverns with adventurers in them. The Vegipygmies or mushroom people of 5e. And then there’s this,  The Entirety of the Room 4 Description – “This room is separated in two by a large chasm. There are glowing fungi on the far side like in the crack in room 1. If the party manages to make it across the chasm, the mushrooms willall group up and move towards the boulder. If a party member offers them rations, they will eat the rations and hop onto their shoulders and travel with them. While the Fungi are with a character, they gain +5 feet to their battle movement. They will stay with the character indefinitely, but have a 5% chance of dying at the beginning of every day.” Have you no soul, gentle reader? And this is the artwork from the room, and I swear I did not edit it. This is magnificent.

Alas, though, these moments will be few and far between. For every pit trap that leads to a rushing river below, we get far more generic and uninteresting encounters. Which seldom make sense. Or, maybe, in a jr. high kind of way? On the way to the tomb, about fourteen six mile hexes away, is a wilderness wandering table. In which you can meet six cros. Are you living through that?! Or, better yet, a 1 in 6 chance of meeting a fucking dragon! There’s even a four entry dragon subtype table. I’m not super sure what the terrain type column is for. The terrain is on the hex map … the wandering monster table doesn’t care about terrain. But if you roll a 6 on the wandering table you get a dragon and then the dragon subtype table both has a terrain type AND a random roll? We need to take this not for what it is, as an isolated example, but rather indicative of the type of issues that plague the adventure.

You arrive outside the tomb after your croc and dragon wilderness crawl. You meet your Level four elves who won’t let you in. They guard the entrance. No worries, you got a ring that lets you pass. Except these fuck wit elves, who take their jobs soooo seriously (with,like fifteen more backup elves nearby, all level four) have let everybody and their uncle in to the fucking tomb. LIzard men wandering monsters. A fucking ogre who got in somehow. 

Oh, oh, those level four elves? And that 6 HD plant hydra? There’s also a fucking mummy in your final room that you need to defeat to get the fucking treasure. Levels 1-3. I’m not the biggest critic of power levels in adventure EXCEPT when they block your path and you’re railroaded in to the encounters. This is clearly not tested, at all.

I could talk about page long room descriptions. I could talk about the page and half of opening dialog, that comes in italics form. I think long term readers understand why this is bad, the lack of player focus for long read-aloud and the difficulty in reading long sections of italics. (Shade the fucking thing!) But, actually, I am going to talk about those room descriptions. 

I am going to pick on them. This is both nitpicking AND an example of a larger problem. You need to remember that the rooms do stretch to a page. The cumulative effect here is large. The room two description is: “Area 2 is the entry way hall. There are 2 torches on the wall illuminating the room enough to see clearly. There is nothing of note in this room.” The first and third sentences say nothing. Instead of “Room 2”, the same effect can be gained by saying “ 2 – Entry Hall – There are 2 torches illuminating the room enough to see clearly.” And I might even not be cool with that “enough to see clearly” clause. Writing that is padded out is hard to scan, and the ref NEEDS to be able to scan a room during play. They have to be able to see what’s going on in the room quickly so they can run it for the players. Another example is room three “This room connects the entry way to the rest of the upper complex. There are no torches lighting this room […]  If the players light a torch in this room and pay close attention to the floor, they will notice”. Again, telling us what is NOT  in the room would result in a very large room description indeed. 😉  But then, also, we see the classic if/then statement. IF you light a torch and IF you pay attention to the floor. NO! Beyond the hilarity of the quantum event here, it is far far better to just note that the description of the thing on the floor. 

And then theres room four, the first of the VERY long rooms: “Area 4 holds a great many secrets. There is a reflection pool along the southern wall that can grant a permanent increase to one stat of the characters choice. They must throw in a coin and make an audible wish for this to happen.” Obviously that first line is padding, but note the next sentences. It’s almost like they are in reverse order. And this sort of padding combined with an unusual illogical order of things in rooms follows for every room in the dungeon.

This does show some promise in imagination in areas. But the room descriptions are atrocious and not evocative at all. You have to suffer through the Epic Adventure nonsense, and that’s if you are, say, level 3-5? 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages of padding. You get nothing of the rooms, and thus have no way to tell what the adventure is actually like. Poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/515075/tomb-of-the-ancient-hero?1892600