By Scott_M
First Era Adventures
OSRIC
Levels 1-2
Clinging to a rugged mountainside, this once-magnificent palace of a self-styled empress stands burned-out and abandoned, though its dire ivory tower yet stands, unblemished. Beneath the toppled estate sprawls a maze of chambers dedicated to the mad Empress Helene’s perverse delectations. Within may be found wondrous treasures and terrible dangers alike. Only the foolhardy dare venture there now. The few brave explorers who tested it did return with riches—and a steadfast refusal to ever try their luck in the dungeon again.
This ten page adventure presents one level of an old school megadungeon. A solid work with good ideas, it captures the spirit of OSR play, even if the theming is light.
What an interesting dungeon level! This is the first level (although it seems like there’s an “outside” level also) of a megadungeon. Mumble mumble Imperial Queen mumble mumble. Anyway, this thing is doing a pretty decent job in presenting an old school megadungeon level. There’s a mix between traps, secrets, hacking, and specials. This FEELS like a dungeon out of the early days.
Level one has some orcs and “evil men” (berserkers) having invaded the level and pushing the hobgoblins down to level two. This is the major level theme, with a few undead and vermin and such scattered about also. One of the first rooms reads “Fragments of rotting wall tapestries dangle from iron rods. A torch gutters on the NE wall. Room is filled with flies and stinks of death from 3 hobgoblins impaled on wooden stakes (dead ~3 weeks, stripped and mutilated, facing S wall). N door is locked and barred (–1 Open Doors).” There are two components here, the writing style and the mechanics. The mechanics here are terse. There’s enough facts and numbers for the DM to get a rough idea of what is going on and then to interpret for themselves. I like this style. As a DM I want a little guidance on how to frame things, how hard things should be, etc, but I don’t want a full on prescriptive page of guidance for every detail of the thing, be it a room, door, or magic item. The room description is decent enough. A GUTTERing torch. IMPALED bodies. ROTTing and DANGLing. Flies and the stink of death. It’s doing a good job of sticking in adjectives and adverbs to help bring life and specificity to the rooms objects. In another room we have “The room reeks of sweat and smoke. Three filthy, degenerate hillmen squat around a copper brazier, poking at smoldering coals.”Reeking of sweat and smoke is a good sentence. And I love a good berserker description that calls them filthy and degenerate hillmen. It didn’t call them berserkers. Instead it described the people. I wish every adventure described how the party interacted with something instead of just slamming in a monster type. It feels visceral, yeah? It’s doing a pretty good job keeping the single-column room descriptions short and evocative. It’s not rock star quality but it is solid solid work, room after room.
There are a variety of specials in this as well, but which I think I mean interactivity beyond stabbin. Traps blah blah blah. But, also, a Wizard Vault “Heavy iron door (–2 Open Doors) has 3 separate locks and is also Wizard-locked (at 12th level).” There’s something for the party to come back to later, yeah? In another room “The walls are decorated with bas reliefs depicting the cutthroat adventures of a frog-headed knight in plate mail wielding a military pick” First, I love that. Frog-headed. Military pick. CUTTHROAT adventures. Nice job on that little bit. There’s a fountain in the room with murky scummy water with a frog statue spitting water in to it. Opening the mouth reveals loot. Purifying the water causes a suit of +1 plat mail (with the head of a frog) to rise, all Excalibur like, from the pool (where it otherwise is not present.) Hidden depth, yeah? Fuck with shit. Do the right thing. Be rewarded. There are teleport hallways, a secret door middle chamber. Hidden loot inside of little niches, statues to mess with. It’s not set pieces or a funhouse, but rather those kinds of weird dungeon things that you find in old school exploratory dungeons. There are a few weird creatures as well for the party to figure out, like a vortex in ajar that is a little whirlwind that will trap someone inside of it. Yes yes, everything has been done before, but its not mainstream and I like it as a great example of dungeon weirdness that still makes sense.
The map is relatively complex, with, I think, five sets of stairs on it? Teleport hallways, pits, secret doors abound. Loops. I could quibble with there not being monsters on the map, always on features no on the page, or a lack of dungeon environments on the map, like same level stairs, etc, to liven things up. Those would all improve things but the map is also not doing anything wrong and is large enough to encourage exploratory play, which is more than welcome.
There are some areas in this in which things could be more visceral and/or an appeal to mechanics is made when descriptive text would be better. I think the classic example is with a trapped chest: “The handle is trapped with contact poison.” That’s pretty classic. But, also, generic. I might trap is bubonic plague, or cyanide, or cholera shit smeared on thorns. Those are all much more grounded, much more specific, than a generic “contact poison.” Is contact poison bad? No. But cholera is always better.
There’s also a bit of, oh I don’t know, genericism, in the level proper. What we;re looking at here is one level in a megadungeon and thusly it suffers from that episodic nature. The theming here is “ weird dungeon level one.” So, the elements of classic OSR weirdness are present but they don’t really serve a purpose. I’m not sure I understand the above ground portion or the levels before this, or get a sense of what they could be. There seems to be a lack of continuity, only in that I don’t really see what continuity there could be given the themeless nature of the level.
To this end, I’m probably not going to review another level of this. I’ll instead wait a bit and grab all the rest of the levels and review it as whole the time I visit. And I WILL be doing that. This is a classic megadungeon level and I LUV a good megadungeon and good megadungeon level. I got no regerts on this one, and may bump it when I see the rest.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The whole thing is in the preview also, so, check it out.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582765/the-hurricane-dungeon-the-upper-works-level-1?1892600