By M. Allen Hall
Self Published
OSE
Levels 2-3
The disappearance of Old Ilfen has left the wizard’s tower at the center of a power struggle. Lord Cargan wants to tear the tower down and replace it with a lighthouse. Skaarn and his pixie war band want to raid the dungeon below the tower and recover a magic item Ilfen once stole from them. Ilfen wants someone to help him get his body back. And at the bottom of the dungeon, the Green Ooze King wants to be left alone so it can seed other worlds with its spawn. Whether they want to help Cargan, Skaarn, Ilfen, or only themselves, your players’ characters will be drawn into Ilfen’s Halls to face the Green Ooze King and its minions.
This 34 page adventure presents twelve hexes and a small dungeon with twenty rooms in an “abandoned” wizards tower. It does a decent job of setting up a wizardly lair and in presenting several factions working against each other. Faction play follow through could be a bit better, and the hex and room descriptions get long in places, but the weirdo ooze monsters are a highlight.
Lord Rob is a decent dude. He also HATES the local wizard “made all the worse by the fact that the wizard seems oblivious to his hatred”, which makes him hate him even more. Wizard dude disappears so the lord decides to use the site of his island tower to build a lighthouse cause of all the shipwrecks. This in spite of the fact that there are better places on the island to build it. That is an excellent bit of pettiness there, love it. He’s sent a work crew, led by a foreman (who’d rather building in the better spot on the isle) and the work crew is having trouble. Explosions while working on the tower. Monsters coming out of the forest to attack the camp. Sometimes the tower, being unblocked from the top, seems to regrow. There are some pixies hanging about, unknown to anyone, who are trying to get in the tower to recover a magic crown, and they are the cause of the shadow monsters coming out of the forest. The wizard, of course, if not dead. His body is in the Ooze King in the basement and his head is floating around the rest of the dungeon, unable to communicate but REALLY wanting to be reunited with his body once the ooze king is dead. Thus we have the laborers, mercenaries hired to protect the laborers, the fey, and then the wizard head all mucking about the area with different goals. Add to this The Party. I do love a good fireworks show in a gasoline factory.
The wizard tower in particular, and the rest of the island generally, has a decent amount of stuff to fuck with. Weird machines to repair, stone circles and ley lines to teleport with, places to get your soul sucked out and, of course, a few small missions from the pixies, in particular, to augment the greater goals the factions have. There are some decent little moments as well, such as when mercenary guards question the party, as laborours, if they are allowed to be in the area. Just a sentence and it does a good job prompting the DM in such a way to add life to the game. The monsters, mostly things that can only be hurt by fire, add a nice little puzzle element to the combat as the party tries to figure out how to hurt ooze things.
Hexes are about a page and dungeon keys are about a column, in general. This is where things start to get rough for me. Formatting is decent with bullets and bolding and indents, but there is only so much cognitive space for a DM to have. It’s a tricky problem, rooms with depth add so much to the game, rooms with multiple elements, but then the challenge becomes the ability of the DM to handle all of the information. The hexes, in particular, tend to run a bit long and complicated to run, or, perhaps, to keep all of the elements straight in ones head.
For all of the potential that the faction play provides it falls down in the execution. While the factions have these major goals there is not a lot, if any, provided for handling the consequences of play. How do the laborers react, or the mercs, or the pixies. Raw violence? How? Surely they are not standing still while the party works against them and they find out. This sort of guidance is just not present. And yet it would add so much to play and the use of the factions in such a small environment.
The concept here is an old one: making things seem like they are real. Giving the appearance of depth. This allows for a certain kind of immersion, and buy in from the PLAYERS in to the game world situation. This is what an evocative room description does, it helps the DM bring that to life. This is what realistic motivations with NPCs does, the relatability helps. That specificity that I’m always harping on and on about, it enables it. It’s not detail. Detail alone is almost always useless. A DM can make up detail, especially if the designer has done their job well in relating a room and/or situation. But the specificity, that is core to the designer bringing their ideas to life. Looking at the merc situation, above, that I mentioned, the mercs challenging the party. You’re getting hassled man. By the cops. By the mall security guard. By the doorman. Who can’t relate to this, both personally and in the many media depictions? It’s a petty annoyance and it GRATES on you. Fucking POS, how about I just stab you 196 times in the throat and then we’ll see who authorized to be in this area. And that’s in the case where I AM authorized to be in the area. It’s one fucking sentence, but it IMPLIES so much more. That’s good writing. That’s a good situation. That’s exactly the sort of specificity that adventures should put forward. Why the fuck do I care about a dudes eye color or hairstyle, unless its pertinent to the game? No, the fact that he’s a bully, or holds a petty grudge or something, that’s what brings the noise.
It’s an ok adventure. Which means very little makes it stand out except that it’s not a disaster of an adventure. But it’s also not a good adventure that I get excited about when I think about running it.
This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. M. Allen Hall, why do you hate us, and freedom? Why do you think we should not see a couple of encounters before we spend our hard earned cash on this adventure? Stick in a few pages of preview. A hex or two and a room or two.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582152/the-green-ooze-king-for-cairn-and-ose?1892600