by Matt Finch
Knockspell Magazine
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 2-4
Knockspell #3 is quite the little guy. Three great adventures AND a city from Gabor Lux. Sweet Issue!
I apologize in advance; I’m back from a three martini lunch. This is an adventure in a two-level wizards tower. There’s lots of weird wizard stuff to play with in the rooms. It’s not one of the designers strongest, but a sucky Ai Weiwei is still an Ai Weiwei.
Ought oh! There’s been no activity at the wizards tower for a week, since that weird earthquake … Time to loot it! Woo Hoo!
Hmmm, what to say, what to say … this little work-a-day adventure is sprinkled with two or three types of rooms. As the characters explore they will encounter rooms with weird wizard stuff and rooms with clues as to what happened in the tower. The clues are really necessary to playing the adventure, they probably just assist a bit in the finale room and provide the players ‘stuff to figure out.’ That’s not a bad thing, at all. Players LUV to figure out what is going on. They love to feel like they are getting one over on the DM and that they’ve figured out the internal logic of the adventure. Any decent party is going to come out of this adventure with a pretty good idea of what happened in the tower, and why, as well as figuring out, maybe, a way to use the tower to their advantage. This is often interwoven with the weird wizard stuff rooms and, in at least one case, an open-ended puzzle. You see, the tower is actually four level but the upper two levels are full of corrosive gas. If the players can clear it out they can explore it, or maybe take it over as their home base. Except it’s in the middle of town and clearing it out probably means flooding parts of the town with corrosive poison gas. Just the kind of stuff that encourages players to come up with crazy schemes and leads to other adventure ideas in town, from tax issues to poison gas fallout. Locating this tower in town open ALL sorts of possibilities for further play and I love to see that. It’s not just “ye old corridor that leads to the DM’s own dungeon” but the whole host of town possibilities and the fun fun fun social work that goes along with it. Levels 2-4 may be a little low to give the players a home base, but it also gives them a reason to keep looking for loot.
The weird wizard stuff is nice & weird, although sometimes … inconsistent? There are spider bots in one room with mechanical legs and bodies made up of glass globes with sloshing greenish liquid. That’s a GREAT monster, very evocative. It instantly communicates DANGER, in much the way big fangs dripping with ichor does, but somehow in more terrifying way (to me anyway.) When the adventure is doing things like that then it’s wonderful. Half stone raving lunatics with independent sides are another example of a great monster that brings to pain. Goofy lab rats with weird mutations work well also. Up against this the more mundane monsters, stone dogs and stirges, seem tame by comparison. There are pipes and gasses to play with, broken traps to scare the shit out of the layers, and a giant tentacle beast with a name right out of Iron Maiden: Gorthorog. There are alchemical vats with potions in them, and weird magical sediment., and spell books galore. There’s a nice samovar to loot, mundane good to take home, lab gear to sell, and a statue to pluck the jeweled eyes out of.
You could easily insert this in the way Death Love Doom worked its hook, but without all of the shock-value viscera of that adventure.
This is available on DriveThru.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/88794/Knockspell-Magazine-3?affiliate_id=1892600
I cannot tell how much you like this. I can tell you don’t think it’s trash. It’s not a “best” though?