By Gabor Lux
EMDT
OSRIC
Levels 5-8
Linquar the Eternal has fallen, its palaces and temples decaying in the teeming jungles. Few dare to head for the misty island plateau where the ruins stand, and even fewer have succeeded in claiming its treasures from the savage ape-men who now rule in its citizens’ stead. The great city is largely forgotten, and even its name only refers to a squalid pirates’ nest that had once been its trading outpost. What had been the capital of the isles is known as a cursed and abandoned place that’s better left undisturbed. But more often, it is simply known by its current inhabitants… as the City of the Ape-Men!
This sixty page adventure is an Isle of Dread, but with ape-men in the lost city. A complex environment with large groups to challenge the parties looting efforts, it does a hex crawl with some locations being mini-dungeons. Bring those cargo ships to haul away the loot and avoid the pirates while dodging the secret masters manipulation of the apes. The logistics game is the only thing missing.
We’ve got the ol Dread here, a jungle island with some dinos and ‘big fucking snakes’, the former seat of an empire that prospered from the spice farmingo n the island. Their former slaves, the ape-men are now all that’s left, along with a smaller island off the coast that has a pirate town on it that can serve as a home base. You hex crawl the island looking for spice, pirate-loot, and the wonders of the fallen empire. Don’t worry, in spite of dinos and ape-men there are also a handful of giant frogs, frog-lizards and frogodiles.
The hex encounters, about twenty, range from the very small “R. The weird rock: A large stone with a spongy, greasy surface stands here with nuggets of a rare ore embedded in it (2500 gp).” to more involved paragraphs to handful (sixish) of mini-dungeons. These range from the “wildlife wants to eat you”, with flying manta rays and dinos and snakes and spiders, to monoliths and locales from the old empire, usually with some mythical bend to them. (Meditation on the holy ruins on the highest peak gives you a +1 to two stats … if you can make it to the top.)
Running throughout we’ve got LARGE groups of ape-men running around, like, in groups of five to forty. And then in their bases near the lost city, proper, groups of forty to seventy. Ouch! I love a large group of enemies to challenge high level parties in an open environment like this where the party can plan and plot, and flee in a crazed terror through the jungle when the masses appear.
The apes are divided in to three factions, buying for power. They hate each other, but, also, they hate all humans more. Like, ravenously hate them. They are taking instructions from their GODDESS, a talking statues. We’ve all seen Oz, so we know what’s up, Turns out that there are tunnels full of spider people who are the secret masters, subtly working the apes against each other to keep their numbers low. But, also, they are gonna make sure that nosey adventurers get fucked up hard. Once technologically advanced, their crashed spaceship is on the island also. Don’t worry, it doesn’t really go gonzo at all. The whole place is nice and sandboxy.
I do have a few issues though.
I can’t make much sense of the elevation contour lines on the map. I think the text says something like the island rises to 1200 feet high, and the map says that contour lines represent 1200’ feet. I assume there’s a typo in there somewhere, but, also, I’ve had a REAL hard time making sense of the contour lines on the map. There IS a separate map that just shows the contours, and it helps a lot, but that’s alot of referencing back and forth when trying to relay information to the party.
The hex crawl instructions are decent, and none of those fucking environment/humidty rules that I hate dealing with in crawls. “You can’t wear platemail!” Fuckoff. You’ll have to kiss me first. My major issue is, with most hex crawls and this one, the lack of mentioning how far you can see/landmarks when getting high up. It makes sense to climb a tree, or a plateau, to see what’s around (See also: the Fallout Red Glow At Night) and a sentence about that would have been nice.
Given that there is a high likelihood of this being a treasure extraction game, the pirate town could have used a little more as well. It’s covered in several pages and there are several factions there as well. A little more on off-loading the goods and/or a pirate ship/response to the party brining in loot would have been nice. A sample raiding ship or two, perhaps? There is enough, generally, to understand that there SHOULD be complications but a sentence or two, maybe a paragraph, on potential extraction play would have slotted in quite nicely for this one.I might quibble as well with their being simple ruins that are unlooted in a town full of destitutes, or bordellos opening at sundown in a lawless place, but those are just quibbles. It’s also full of good human nature type things like “Linquar’s beggars are downtrodden wretches begging for scraps. At night, more aggressive begging also takes place if the beggars outnumber the opposing party 2:1”
This is a better jungle crawl than Dread. Where Dread was a little sparse this contains the makings of a nice long game, with factions and complications, as well as a base, to help support that longer arc of a game. There are real rewards for dealing with a group of forty flying dinos, or making it through the ape-city, or climbing the highest peak. Intelligent play, by following ruined roads that see from up high, will help direct the party to most places. Three is a place to recruit and offload loot. The apes are presented as SO hateful, though, that it doesn’t leave much room at room for factions, other than, perhaps, subtly working them against each other.
This is $6.40 at DriveThru. The preview is the first thirteen pages, which shows the island map and some of the town and general instructions. That’s probably enough, although, as always a page of the island encounters or lost city encounters would have been nice as well.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/559570/city-of-the-ape-men?1892600
Wait, what do you mean, “ The apes are presented as SO hateful, though, that it doesn’t leave much room at room for factions, other than, perhaps, subtly working them against each other.”
There are secret tunnels and statues the apes treat as gods. That seems *perfect* for faction play! Great review.
And it encourages the players to magically disguise themselves as something other than human in interacting with the apes, like illusory fish, bird, or lobster people.
Gabor’s maps are ugly as shit and it’s disappointing he hasn’t improved his production values at all in 20+ years of doing this
I checked and actually the maps have got better.
What did you check? I just checked House of Rogat Demazien (deep cut) and it looks the same as what he’s publishing now. Also he literally admitted below that he’s been using the same software for 20+ years.
I checked and there are so so many worse presented products.
I checked and I don’t care because IMHO Gabor’s work is “high value for money” other than 95% of the available OSR stuff. Stop, just checked my enormous collection, let’s make it 99%.
Of course, easily top 1% by content. That’s why it’s disappointing. He’s like a silver fox in bellbottoms and a newsboy cap…
They’re legible. Could be clearer, could be worse. “Ugly” is not really on my score card for maps, instruction manuals, or screwdrivers.
100% agree. Can I actually read the map (Zak?), is the key and scale decipherable?
Bonus points for lighting and noise cues. Player maps. Or subsections included where relevant.
Zero fucks given if a map is pretty. Because so often an essential _functional_ feature is effed up by a desire for some aesthetic quality which does not help me , or even hinders my running of this adventure…
The outdoor map is actually a substantial improvement over the hand-drawn outdoor maps in some earlier products that were complete messes. Having said that, I generally love Milan’s stuff overall!
Thanks for that!
It would have been interesting to add some sort of stronger logistical/procedural element for the pirate town’s interactions with treasure extraction, but we didn’t do it that way, so it wasn’t much elaborated on. It did crop up in two out of three playtests. It didn’t happen in tournament play (since time was really tight, allowing for a single expedition). When the module was played in a campaign, the players overthrew the town’s pirate master with local allies, but did so before heading to the isle, securing a cooperative local government that owed them one. In the third playthrough, played as a module, the characters first had their boat stolen by local entrepreneurs, leaving them stranded on the island; and on a later expedition, a different bunch stole some of their incredible valuable property (from area G5, total value of 48,000 gp – too spoilery to discuss further) much the same way.
There was a lot of faction play in practice, and the campaign group ended up uniting the apes! So there’s a lot that can be done there, but it’s also easy to devolve into hostility (as it happened in the other playtests).
WRT contour lines and elevations, the module text says “The Isle of the Dream-Spices is arranged around a central plateau 1200’ above sea level, surrounded by steep cliffsides. ” Thus, there is a plateau (1200′ up) covering most of the island centre, and higher peaks rising from it (1200′ per extra contour line).
WRT “ugly maps”, I like the aesthetic, and have gotten quite used to AutoREALM, the ancient mapping programme I have been using for well over 20 years. AutoREALM is beauty, AutoREALM is life. Behead all those who insult AutoREALM. That said, if there are practical candidates for dungeon mapping apps which aren’t Campaign Cartographer, and are suitable for clean B&W maps, I am interested in hearing about them. Trouble is, most of them focus on a full-colour digital style I dislike, and find hard to use.
Have you checked out Dungeon Scrawl?
I have! It’s decent for smaller dungeon levels, but it doesn’t seem to scale up well. I wouldn’t want to do anything large and complex with it.
Gabor—
FWIW, the players in my current Greyhawk campaign have been mapping my levels using Dungeon Scrawl and Inkscape. Aron Clark posted an overview of DS at https://youtu.be/b9EIJiKR1kE if you’re interested in checking it out further. In the video (at ~7:20 mark), he specifically mentions that the canvas is infinite (that’s also where you start to see some of my first level, too).
Allan.
Great. Now I have to buy ANOTHER fantastic EMDT product.
😉
Asking to ask: will hard copy be an option?
I’m guessing he’s only selling it as a pdf because the international tariff fiasco has made it near impossible to ship out hardcover copies at a reasonable price. Thus we wait…
As normal the pdf is released a few months after the hard copy and international shipping is fine to normal countries
Some us stock at dark future
https://darkfuture.bigcartel.com/
Agree absolutely! Melan’s modules are outstanding!