By Onslaught Six, Roz Leahy, Maeve Murray
Tidal Wave Games
OSE
Level 2?
Engage with multiple factions of orcs, beastmen, rodentia, and cults. Infiltrate the followers of a doomed machine. Fall prey to a vampiric lord. Escape from the moat monster. Fight deadly monsters of chaos. Get treasure. Get out alive.
This 44 page digest presents one level of a dungeon with seventeen lairs comprising about 120 rooms. It’s a weirdly worded and padded out hack with secret doors being your only exploration, in spite of a balrog AND demon lord both being present.
There’s this old template complex and blah blah blah a year ago something happens and monsters move in. There are now seventeen different “zones” in this dungeon, each with about five or rooms in them. Yeah man, like I said, a year. And seventeen zones worth of monsters. So, you know, they’re motivated, I guess?
So, the map. One level. It’s got loops? No? Maybe? The seventeen or so zones are all like little mini-maps. Imagine you took seventeen dungeon geomorph tiles, each of which had five or six rooms on it. Then, connect those geomorph tiles with, like, a hallway in to it and a hallway out of it. I think a few of them actually have a THIRD hallway leading in/out of them. Pretty cool stuff, eh! No? Not? Not. And, then, I want you to use the TINIEST fucking font on earth to label each room. Chill? Sounds like a great idea. Yeah yeah, “bryce has old eyes” Fuck you. Well, maybe. But, also, more than one thing can be true at the same time. The fucking font here is TONY for the map keys. There is absolutely no way someone looked at this and said “yup, looks great!” which means that no one looked at it. Also, the map lists “0.1, 0.2” and so on but the text lists “a.1 and a.2.”
How about the room entries Mrs Lincoln? “This room contains a library of tomes purported to contain magical secrets. Taking the time to read the books reveals they are all hoaxes or inaccurate. Empty hooks, designed to hold shields and weaponry, line the walls of this room.” That is a typical room entry. If there’s a monster in the room then there would be a stat block also. So it’s not really read-aloud. And I’m not sure it’s really DM text either. The concept of a room? The concept of 120 rooms? How about “Rotting wood shelves endure upon the walls Hurrath “ Nice and purple, yes? Or “The Beastlord resides here, commanding his underlings to capture the Muroids and put them to work.”
This is a kind of interesting style of abstraction that pops up from time to time. It’s not the normal generic abstraction that shows up usually but more of a, oh, I don’t know, I think I’ve compared it to writers note for an episodic tv series. “Kirk is a brash officer, a ladies man born in iowa who was the only person ever to pass the blah blah blah.” So, it’s kind of painting a general picture of what’s going on. And, to a degree, that is the point of writing a room, you want to give the DM an idea of what is going on there so the DM can then take the reigns and run it. But it’s almost as if the room is forgotten, the specifics of playing a D&D adventure are forgotten. If we look at the room descriptions “The Beastlord resides here, commanding his underlings to capture the Muroids and put them to work” then you get a decent idea. Yes, that is what is going on here, in general, as in that is the kind of activities that take place here. Maybe we could summative it as “throne room” or “command center. “ That tells us the same thing. But, also, not, what the fucking is going on in the room? If he directing his legions and the the party runs in ala New Hope? Does he have a sand table he is standing over? What the adventure has provided are some very general writers notes. As if it were then to be handed to a different writer who would then create a room, the specifics, from it. “Lou! I need two paragraphs by Tuesday about a room that some dude called the Beastlord oversees his attempts to capture the Myredions.” That’s not a room description. It’s the IDEA for a room description. Not chill.
Let’s see. We’ve got a zombie ogre in this place. He has a pot on his fireplace bubbling away. Can zombies do that? He’s smart? I guess He’s got a pet gelatinous cube. Wait, what?! Nothing means anything anymore. My kobold has a pet Zeus on a leash. The LG Lich is fighting against the forces of Nirvana and their commander Asmodeaus. Look, man, bend things is you will but you gotta have SOME kind of logic to them. And why the fuck do we need to know that the zombie dude feeds the cube limbs and pieces of its victims. That’s backstory. Better if the cube is guarding something, some passage or some way its stuck, and there’s a crate of limbs and bodies in another room with obvious limbs hacked/torn off. Then it makes some kind of sense.
Essentially each room is just a combat. The various zone leaders DO have some goals. Like “Bob wats the eye of moloch” but the roleplaying notes and faction issues really are not present much, except maybe in an occasional note like “Mary hates everyone. Thus, each room is just the concept of a room. You go in and kill something. You pick up some genero treasure. “An unusual hat made of peculiar material.” YES. Not why the fuck is the hat unusual and what’s it made of?!!?!!!?!?!? A foppish beret made of liquid jade. There, done. See how I named the hate and why it was unusual, instead of just saying its a weird hat made of something unusual? That’s the fucking difference.
Hack hack hack. Abstracted text.
Oh, also, 2d6 wizards are summoning a balrog in this, who WILL show up, as well as some cultists summoning Moloch Archduke of Hell. Who will then go on a tear killing like every following of Tenebrous in the dungeon and then the world. So, you know, better to just kill everyone then talk to them anyway, about their goals and what their needs are.
Little to no interactivity beyond stabbing. Abstracted room and treasure descriptions. Move along move along nothing to see here.
This is $10 at DriveThru. Taint got no preview. Boo! Boo I say! Show us what the fuck we are buying, a sample of it, before I spend my assistant crack whore trainee monies on it.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/562586/monster-condo?1892600