Perilous Path of the Cursed Camel

by Joseph R Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
OSE, Cairn, Shadowdark
Levels 2-3

What do you say when a bizarre camel appears and says you’re doomed to have your soul eaten by witches… unless you can steal as many ancient Relics as possible from all over the world in the next few hours? Hopefully, you say: Let’s go!

This 25 page adventure features thirteen situations using a “teleport you to the next situation” gimmick. There’s a real-time element to this that, while core to the gimmick, I think really detracts from the overall adventure, as presented via the text. 

Bad day! The Evil Witches have randomly selected you to eat your souls! Or so says the weird camel that just showed up and told you that. You start doing the Sliders thing and every thirty minutes (of real time) jumping to a new reality, being dragged toward them. Rough one man! But, hey, if you can find some relics on the way then you can give them to the witches and they won’t eat YOUR soul! Good thing there are some relics that just happen to be hidden in every reality/situation you slide in to!

The parts that Lewis does well continue to be the parts that are done well. Formatting is top notch. Magic items are great and the evocative nature of things works well. There is a little callback to things that you recognize. Here’s the treasure list for the main encounter at the end, with the witches ” Under a rock in a dark corner is a dirty little cigar box. Relics: coffin nail (stab any creature to kill it instantly), piece of straw (place on a creature’s back to break their spine), copper penny (give to someone to learn everything they know), gray stone (throw to instantly kill the two nearest birds), severed green thumb (bury to grow a vast forest).” Folklorish indeed! I’m a big fan of these and how they are handled without droning on about mechanics and so on. These are the things that Twelve in One Blow are made of.

The environments that you slide in are the trope ones. The snowy one. The sea one. The Maze. The inside of a dragon haven been swallowed, it seems. But, also, Lewis does not lean in to the trope in a hard way. So, yes, it’s a snowy place. But there is a small hut with a hunters family. Mom and dad are suffering from the plague. Little Timmy is gonna need to be adopted. Perhaps by you? Lewis has a knack for bringing interesting elements to situations. In the Fey realm, a group of dungeoneers are looting. Not your usual fey encounters. And fey goblins lurk under the water ready to drown you. Noice! In the desert, a caravan is being attacked by giant scorpions with a mighty sandstorm on the horizon. Pretty topy. Oh, also, the caravan is full of vampires. Yikes! He takes the trope as a setting but then adds a twist or some such to it to make it much more than the trope; the trope is just the setting to navigate while working the other issues. He’s very good at it and they all stand out well 

Each site gets a page. And now we begin to see some cracks forming in this adventure. The giant scorpion/sandstorm thing is a lot. And then we toss in vampires. In thirty minutes of real time. Also, you’re looking for those relics, yeah? This can lead, I suspect in play, to a kind of madcap situation in which There’s this giant battle with scorpions, vampires about, severely injured and bleeding people crawling across the sand in desperation … and then the party shows up and starts madly searching the caravan. Or tossing the cabin of the hunter/plague couple while a mastodon trundles by and some snow raptors descend the place in to chaos. No time for all that! Let’s yoink everything out of that cabin to search it! As lLewis points out, you can’t really combat in 30 minutes very well (and he suggests not to, until the witch show down at the end.) The page count also constrains things a bit. You need a page, but also you’ve got multiple things going on. Certain things, such as the dungeon party. Each of the five get a two words description (beautiful, maniac) and then the party goal of robbing the PC’s, noting not necessarily killing them. 

I think the way this works is as a madcap sort of thing .You hit the first couple, discover you can’t really ‘explore’ before sliding away, and then begin to increasingly ignore the plight of others while you rip things apart looking for “relics.” (Which is a stand in for magic items like the ones I quoted.) With this in mind, I suspect it works well as that. Which probably works for Cairn and maybe Shadowdark? I am not as sure in an OSE/OSR context, giving the pacing one expects from fragility of body.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is twelve pages and does a good job of showing you what to expect, as always from Lewis.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/523835/perilous-pat?1892600