By Ron Meischker
Orange Cat Games
Castles & Crusades
Levels 4-6
An ancient tomb. A fading bard. A new generation of heroes. The venerable adventurer, Targan the Bard, has learned about a long-forgotten ancient tomb and has chosen your adventuring party to explore it. He is only asking one thing in return… Are you ready to make history?
This sixteen page adventure uses six pages to describe nine rooms in a linear tomb dungeon. Long italics second-person read-aloud. Linear. Long DM text. And, ultimately, Just Another Tomb Adventure.
It’s a nine room linear tomb dungeon that turns out to be A Test To See If You’re Worthy, the 1,936,736 Test/Challenge dungeon I’ve reviewed in this blogs short history. Seriously, it feels like there’s more of these things than there are orcs in a hole. At this point it’s all rote: linear dungeon. Some trap rooms. Some guardians. But, we must judge each thing on their own merits, so, how about this iteration of the nine linear room trap/guardian challenge/test dungeon tomb?
I’m not sure I have much interesting to say. It’s got a lot of read-aloud, which is not good. People don’t pay attention when long sections of read-aloud come trotting out. The read-aloud is in italics, sometimes almost half a column, which is not good. Long sections of italics, or any funky font, are hard to read for the DM. It’s using a second person writing style, with lots of “you”, which is not good. It robs the room of immersion as it ignores the varied style of play that individual parties will engage in. “None of us have eyes you clod!” is hyperbolic but gets the point across. I do, however, admire the ability of the party to all have built-in DeWalt leaser measurement devices so they know from the read-aloud that a ceiling is 18.5” feet high in the first sentence. Whatever. Nothing to see, move along, move along.
The DM text is long and padded out. I think in one room I counter three times that the party will need light to see. Do they need oxygen to breathe? I know, it sounds nit-picky. But it’s pure padding. It’s like saying they need air to breathe or some other obvious statement. Multiple times. This kind of shit gets in the way. It gets in the way of the DM scanning the text to find the information they need and it gets in the way of the designer, who is distracted by this nonsense instead of working the room harder.
And the DM padding. Oh my. “ENTERING THE TOMB – This is the first challenge the party will face. The party encounters an obstacle immediately upon reaching the tomb: a massive obstruction blocking the entrance. The party will need to find a way to move the slab.” This is all preamble. Then there’s the read-aloud. Then theres the actual DM text of the blockage. There’s no point of the preamble. And it’s like this everywhere. Just repetition for the sake of repetition.
The flooding chamber trap. The stone crush trap. The mirror of opposition trap. The water weird in the fountain. The required false tomb. The mummy that wears an amulet that makes it immune to turn undead. (Thanks B2!)
It’s a small linear tomb test dungeon, just like all of the small linear tomb test dungeons that have come before. I am annoyed by how cookie cutter it is.
The one thing that isn’t cookie cutter is the build. It’s packed dirt and peat moss and bog wood. You know, the kind of wood that is sunken and preserved and turns to like iron? The adventure makes a big deal of the lack of stone and how the bog wood is the major construction item. But it’s not to any end. It doesn’t play any part in the dungeon at all. Also, isn’t that wood super expensive, and always has been? Mining the dungeon for the wood would be of great profit. Why base the entire dungeon on this window dressing if you’re not ging to do anything with it?
So, just the standard straight line tomb, with all of the seemingly required parts of that. Nothing special. But, lots of padding and a read-aloud that make it hard to dig through and run.
This is $12 at DriveThru. There is no preview. There needs to be a preview, showing a few encounters, so a potential buyer can get a sense of things before they commit to the spend.