By Dale L Houston
Duck and Crow Press
OSR
Level "Veteran"
A festering swamp steeped in ancient mystery, treasure-hungry lake pirates scouring the region, angry alligator people defending their holy sites, and weird dungeons exuding a sense of impending doom. Seriously – what more do you want from an adventure? Explore and plunder the ruins of the Athenaeum of Ilth before it is too late!
This 48 page adventure presents a faction-laden “alien” complex with an overgrown swamp persona. You can see hints of greatness in the factions, although the room descriptions tend to have a weird lack of overall vibe while noting specifics well. Needs a little shit-stirring with the factions to give the dungeon some pep.
Ok, we got this BIG ass lake with a swamp over on one side of it. Rumor has it there’s loot in them there hills! Or, there was a giant light beam that shot out in to the dark sky, or there are pirates there. The people in town on the west side say that there ARE pirates to the west of the lake. Oh, and to watch out for crocs. Turns out there are some crocodile people living in some ruins in the swamp. Very interesting ruins. A giant ziggurat eventually, but some minor sites before you find the ziggurat. O, and the pirates are there looting (with a pirate town provided !Yo ho ho!) So, you gonna wander around till you find the swamp ruins, go in and out of them, meet pirates and crocodile people and so on. Until the AI in order detects trouble in the alien ruins and beams down some creatures to ‘decontaminate’ the site. AKA: monsters kill absolutely everything in a few hexes. Turns out the croc-people were once far more advanced than they are now. Oh, and maybe they created humans by feeding magic potions to apes. Shades of that last Alien movie I saw with the engineers and black goo and shit.
What this brings to the table is some mini-ruins of a few rooms, a larger ziggurat complex, cros-people with a couple of factions, pirates with maybe a couple of factions, a stranded/captive linguist, and enough room to breathe, for the most part, to let all of this play out. The adventure provides some wandering tables for different regions, to support you travelling to the nearest settlement and then on the adventuring sites, either by boat or foot. And the wandering tables and rumors slot in the adventure well, theming it pretty decently. From there perhaps you discover a ruined campsite, and the ruins nearby. Which MIGHt kick off clues to other sites or start the party on the “decontamination” part of the adventure, the timer to finish things off with. You may find out about the pirate camp, or even the pirate town, opening up new opportunities that are supported by the adventure. Or meet the croc-people, learning they have two factions. And then perhaps they bring out the captured linguist, who can tell you they refer to all humans as “talking food.” Well, that certainly recontextualizes our relationship with the friendly faction … The more you explore ruins the greater the chance the decon protocol gets triggered and monsters start beaming down. Forcing everyone to once again look at their priorities, who they will befriend and what they will allow. Ith hex travel taking a day, and “exploration” rolls revealing multiple levels of information in a hex, maybe four smaller ruin sites, a pirate camp, town, pirate town, croc-people village, the main ziggurat site and the decon process there’s enough room and time for relationships to change. This is the kind of sandbox-type environment, with relationships, that you need to support this more in-depth and complex play style.
The rumors tables are different based on who you are talking to. There’s a pages of DM support checklists to track faction relationships and progress to decontamination, as well as a host of other things. Paying attention leads to clues to other things. For, maybe, fifty rooms total in about fifty pages the hexes and relationships make this a potentially dynamic environment in which the usual “page count to encounter count” ratio I look at breaks down. The support information ALL contributes to the actual adventure and is a part of the adventure rather than just being useless fluff.
The descriptions of the locations are a little hit and miss. Or, rather, they don’t start off strong but their individual elements have that specificity I’m looking for that brings a site to life. There’s a brief offset section at the start of each location that has some descriptive bullets, followed by some DM information. So, for one of the ruin locations, we get this as an “outside” description: “A leaning, 2-story tower in the center of a reedy pool. Crude struts hold it in place.” That’s some good details. Reedy. Struts. And then for the DM information we get “Entrance: The first floor is damp, but not flooded. A rusted iron gate (open with a Standard Strength Check) blocks stairs leading down.” These are ok. Terse, tells you what you need to know. But, also, you don’t really get “ruins in a swamp” out of it very well. And that’s what I mean by the general environment just doesn’t come through very well. The more general atmosphere for each location just isn’t there. Not that it doesn’t hit, it just isn’t there. In another nearby room inside we get “This chamber is rather warm. Horse-sized stones with flat tops scattered evenly.” The chamber, proper, isn’t present in that description. There are some general notes about “Inside the ruins all surfaces are metal. Corridors are 10’ wide and the ceiling in all areas, unless otherwise noted, is 12’ high.” But, again, those general notes don’t hit in combination with the room description.
And this weirdly continues in areas like treasure. I think it’s quite low. Yeah yeah, compatible with all OSR systems. It’s Veteran level, we need some cash. And yet when we look at the Power Cores, looting central to the adventure, “Each core is a cone 8” long. The base
is a 5” diameter circle stamped with cuneiform of the station name (Adap, Kish, or Lagash) or a numerical code. Each core is worth 1500$.” As a curio? “A pillar displaying a golden mesh.” How much for the gold? No clue.
So, for the croc-people we get some great specificity like “Even basic and failed attempts speaking their Ilthtori will be well received.” That’s great! But time and again it feels like there is just a little bit missing, in almost every aspect. One room will have waist-high water leaking from the ceiling, or unidentifiable shapes scurry away under the water. Another will have “An enormous corpse covered in scavenging creatures” and nothing else about it. The factions are laid out well, and you can get very excited them. But they lack dynamism. Great overviews. Long term plans. But the short to mid term plans of them are missing a few ideas to get the DM going.
Blarg. Duck & Crow, and Dale, are doing some great things here. There’s just a little bit missing, a little bit out of place, keeping these from being some of the best
This is $12.50 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages. You get to see those referee tools, the factions, some overland, pretty much everything EXCEPT a few rooms. It really need to include a few of those to be a great preview. Still, I think the preview is enough to get you excited, just not enough to let you know what to expect.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540651/plundering-the-athenaeum-of-ilth?1892600