The God Towers of the Elophant

by GMaia
Knight of the Lake Games
OSR
Levels 7-9

In the murky night of the past, none now can recall the dire events that led to the demise of Elophant and the onset of the epoch of incivility, wherein wisdom, wellbeing, and happiness were supplanted by fear, hatred, and ignorance. The few survivors who witnessed the impious assassination managed to erect a sanctuary, that Elophant might not fade into oblivion, nor the virtues it embodied be forgotten. In such an underground sanctuary, a balance has long existed that allowed coexistence between two incompatible social groups. The place provided both groups with the resources to survive without conflicts. Recently, this balance has been weakening due to the natural consequence of areas with limited resources: one of the two groups has increasingly fewer means of subsistence, bringing the situation to a critical level.

This seventeen page adventure uses three pages to describe about ten rooms on … a megadungeon level? It’s got a decent setup and a couple of nice general ideas, but it squanders it by not actually doing much with the setup in question.

Or the surrounding areas. Or the room descriptions. Or almost anything else in the adventure. Well, except the monster summary sheet. There is one of those and I appreciate that. But the adventure proper, yes? Or, at least the setup.

There is a level on a megadungeon. In the middle is a large lake. Over on one side of the lake are the caves of the Starry Eyed Cavemen. Degenerate humans, they are the descendants and guards off the sacred god towers of the elephant. It’s tusks. They been here a couple of millennia and are chill with it. Interestingly, they have some mental powers (hence the starry eyes) that focus on a lot of communication. It’s random, from a table, but most of the entries are like Read Emotions, or Understand language (but not speak it), or Transmit one word telepathically. You can see how this would play out when the party first meet them, with the random distribution of powers and the chance to misunderstand intent and so on. Nice! Ok, back to the lake. On the other side are some other caves, these inhabited by the Lime Trolls. They lick limestone as a food source. They are chill also. Well, they were chill, now they are not. They are running out of limestone formations to lick. But you know who has some? The Starry Eyed Cavemen.

This is a classic set up for a great level. I wanna lick your god towers and you don’t want me to. Some of the best dungeons ever designed have this sort of thing going on. Toss in a decent map so things can breathe and fill in some minor players and maybe a few hidden rooms and get those factions moving against each other! Get those party fireworks working in the gas factory!
But that doesn’t happen here. This most excellent of premices is squandered. There is no expansive dungeon map. A few caves for the trolls which amount to “the six troll families live in these caves.” Much the same for the cavemen caves, except you also get The Three Trials. Test your strength, purity, blah blah blah. That’s it. No other encounters. No other oom for things to happen. No causing trouble or getting help from others or anything like that. So, maybe, you can go all Yojimbo on it? Nope. There’s not really any personalities to key off of either, or any subplots by the subleader or shamen. It is what you see in the most obvious way. This is a great, great shame.

Sometimes the trolls attack the cavemen. There is a system to resolve that. 1d4+1 trolls attack. If they lose then “the GM must count 10% of the losing group as losses in terms of lives.” I have no fucking idea man. Also, on the other side, in one of the two ways the trolls can attack is “the entire village.” So, 10% of “the entire village I guess. This kind of weirdness is prevalent all throughout. I am somewhat curious if this is a case of EASL, but, also, EASL doesn’t cause the 10% thing. And, tere is someones name attached to this for revisions, so, … did they revise?
Some of the rooms are columns long. Some of them are, like, two sentences. In most cases they are not evocative descriptions AT ALL. The best is the soft white glow of the god towers in the dark; the elephant tusks. Oh! oh! The treasure room! “The GM can consider a type G treasure stored in this place.” Thanks the fuck a lot man! I am inspired!

I’ve been running across these weird adventures lately. They are bad in such interesting new ways! I know people want to blame other systems or some such, but I think it has to be the influence of other media, maybe? You have to have had SOMETHING that you’ve seen before that you subconsciously emulate. I don’t want to be a dick here, but, also, before you Jabberwocky maybe you should learn to spell?

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is four mostly useless pages. The last one has a small Background section that gets to the decent framing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524058/the-god-towers-of-the-elophant?1892600