Tagma Angelikon

By Christopher Letzelter
Anachronistes Press
1e
Levels 3-7

Player characters are called upon to remove invaders taking up residence in the land recently granted to a local nobleman. After his surveyors and retainers were killed or driven out, it’s obvious that this problem is bigger than just a band of upstart humanoids – does your adventuring party have the brains, brawn and grit to secure the place?

This 48 page adventure presents a ruined abbey and grounds with around ninety rooms on several levels. It’s gt a great realism vibe and the 1e crowd will be thrilled. It’s also more than a little wordy with the DM text, with all that entails for usability.

Sir Useless has a new land grant and sends in his surveyors. They make it to the site of an old abandoned abbey that everyone knows about. One dude returns, everyone else slaughtered. Sire Useless sends in his men to clean up the humanoid problem. Only two return, everyone else slaughtered, so he gets some specialists. The abbey has some grounds, also detailed, and is mostly ruined, so you get a couple of old parts of the abbey, ruins, an upper floor and a couple of dungeon levels which represents their basement area and some catacombs. This is supported by some nicely clean and gone maps. It gives the impressions of realism while the ruined walls, collapsed areas and the like provide ample opportunity to adventure. Nice CC maps, I think, without going overboard, exactly the right mix of legibility and art. Or, would be if it had reacting monsters on it. Cause I’m gonna print out the map and mark reacting monsters on it so I can run the adventure. WHich means that the designer should do something like that for me.

I want to call out this encounter description on the abbey grounds, which I think exemplifies the spirit of the adventure. The read-aloud is “Copses of hardwoods grow at the long ends of a stagnant rainwater pond. Algae and pond scum float on its surface among reeds and cattails.” and then the first line of the DM notes: “The water surface is about five feet below level land, exposing roughly twenty feet of muck and mud all around its perimeter.” It goes on a bit more for the DM notes but that’s a decent little description both for the players and then a little more to help the DM bring the encounter location to life with the ring of muck. Pretty nice. Oh, hey, yeah, the reason I’m calling this out is because the GREEN SLIME in the water!! Dude told you it was there! Stagnant. Algae and pond scum floating. And you stuck your fucking hand in it?! After wading through the fucking mud?! This is a perfect example of verisimilitude working in an adventure. The creature chosen fits in to the environment perfectly. Abandoned abbey grounds, so we get the stagnant pool, and then the perfect monster choice for the stagnant pool, placed in a way that is obvious in retrospect. That’s good. And while not every encounter reached these heights there are enough of them trying to do this that this kind of “fantasy realism” comes through. Enough to have fun but not enough to be boring.

The village description, where Sir useless has his manor, gets the following description: “traveler-friendly amenities include the tavern, an inn/ procurement house/brewery, a temple (aligned with NG or LN deities), and Sir Feris’ estate (there is a modest guest cottage on the grounds of his walled estate);” That’s fine. This isn’t a village adventure. It hits pretty much what the DM needs. I could quibble about inserting a fun name or fact, but it’s good enough. What the adventure does do, though, is go through a little description of the seven or eight strangers that have passed through this off-the-beaten-track village in the last couple of months. Perfect! If you ask around about strangers, as one might, then this is what you’re going to learn. That IS where most of the effort in the village should lie. Or, at least IN THIS CASE. We provide what the DM needs in the situation they need it in, not as a rote exercise in all cases. 

The abbey grounds are fine, as I mentioned before. A little fighting, a few things to puzzle out. Undead in the catacombs, unaligned necromancer in the upper floors with with retinue of hired NPC’s and gnolls, with a few natural creatures/monsters tossed in. Decent little en vironmental things. Treasure feels a little light on coins in a gold=xp game, but a decent number of magic items also. It all kind of channels that spirit of the sample dungeon in the 1 DMG, from the secret door to the scroll in the stream. 

But, it’s not for me. Maybe for you. But not for me. And you know why. Mucho Texto, along with some very basic formatting that does little to alleviate the text overflow. There’s bold for the read-aloud, and super-duper bold for more emphasis, with italics. It’s all pretty basic and a little overwhelming to the eye, making it seem like EVERYTHING is important. But, meh, not my fav but I could I guess get over that.

The degree of text present here is quite large. And I don’t mean “relevant text.” There is a substantial amount of backstory present just about everywhere in this adventure. Most of the abbey is a ruin because local villagers took the stones, but left most of the main abbey intact because of superstitious fear. Ok. Does this matter expect to explain WHY the abbey is partially ruined? I don’t think so. And there is almost never a reason in a D&D adventure to explain and/or justify something. Yet we see that over and over again in this. In addition there this is kind of appeal to the historical abbey and its usage. “These fields were used for combat practice – the north for equestrian use, the south for melee training. The path was built of tightly-fitted slate flagstones; most of them have been removed, the rest carpeted by a century of dirt and grass overgrowth.” None of that text matters. The flagstone doesn’t exist or can’t be seen. This is straight out of the Dungeon Magazine trophy room nonsense description, the worst room description of all time, or at least in this aspect. 

I can appreciate that this is a pretty damn good historical abbey ground. (And, again, nice map!) And I DO find the stone removal for houses appealing at some level. Yeah, this is the way things work. But it, and so much more here, has no impact on the adventure beyond really leaning in to that historically accurate thing. But you have to balance that with usability. And making the DM dig through a lot of not-pertinent information that is interesting trivia in order to get to and/or not emphasize the important parts of the rooms shows a lack of understanding of how a room entry is used and, in fact, what its purpose is. Some of the rooms approach wall of text territory, and no matter how much the “well _I_ like that stuff” crowd want to crow, wall of text territory is not good. 

This is an ok adventure and it has that kind of lower-fantasy vibe that I find appealing. Maybe a little too staid, with the appeals to THE FANTASTIC coming mostly through churchy shit. But, I can see people wanting that. What I’m having a hard time with is that there are NUMEROUS other adventure that one could select that DONT have the wordiness/usability issues this has. I would almost always pick up one of those and select it rather than this one. I could quibble about monster reactions, coinage, level fives, and so on, but, in a world in which every adventure ever written is available, why torment yourself?

This is $8.50 at DriveThru. There’s no previews. You gotta put in a preview man! At least showing a few encounters so a prospective buyer can get a sense of your writing and formatting style so they can make an informed decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/551514/tagma-angelikon-ap009?1892600