By Michael H Self Published / (@the_fun_cube on twitter) Cairn
This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!
Lament the Wine Sea, with its pitiless tides and fearsome depths! Forlorn castaways are drawn to a lonesome island where lords and beggars alike scrounge to make the most of their terrible, drunken fate.
This eight page adventure details a seven room “palace” floating on a pile of jetsam in the middle of a bottle of giant wine. Yup, you read that right. It’s creative and well formatted enough to run … although not maximally so. I’d run the fucking place!
This one is weird, in the grand tradition of fantastic locations. Bottle City? The L:iving Room? How about a pocket dimension that is literally a giant half-filled bottle of rose wine. Floating in the middle of it is a pile of jetsam with a “palace” made of jetsam. On the shores of the tiny jetsam island, barely large enough to contain the palace, are a few fellow refugees that have been here awhile. All transported, as you were, by drinking a magic bottle of win. The palace is currently occupied by homunculi, in a kind of manic micky mouse sorcerer’s apprentice style of crazy going on inside. Wine dark sea, indeed!
This thing has got the right amount of crazy for me. Not gonzo, but fantastic and filled with that wonderful variety of nutso NPC’s that can truly bring a D&D game to life. We start with the hook, the way the party gets transported: a magical wine bottle that sends you there when you drink. With great advice like “don’t include it in a hoard, no sane adventurer drinks shit from a hoard. Instead, when they come back to the inn to celebrate, have the innkeep go in to his celler and produce the bottle of his finest wine. Excellent! (And, it translates well in to the other NPC”s the party members will meet. All of them also transported by a bottle of wine, some
Gifted” it by others …”) Whoever drank it ends up being plopped downin to the ocean, along with everything withing 10 feet of them, including party members who didn’t drink and what will become the jetsam of the Wine Sea. Clever eh, how it all works together to feed the core elements of t he adventure? That’s pretty fucking well constructed.
You see the island and swim towards itm being greeted by the NPCs huddled on its shores. There’s a great reference sheet, a page long, tha details them, their story, what they know, want, etc. It’s a great fucking resource and puts to shame those teeny tony NPC reference sheets from other adventures that provide minimal, and useless information. Everyone is a little drunk in the Wine Sea, since the sea provides nourishment. There’s sober sam, who ISNT drunk, and is dying because of it. There’s hobgoblins and goblins, relatively friendly by blamed for everything by everyone else. Lizardmen nobles, and another faction of artisans. Some humans round thingsout … and the mer-folk who are the bogeymen of the wine sea, attacking rafts, etc. And then there’s the palace, made up of ramshackle refuse … and currently being occupied by some crazed homunculi.
Inside we’ve got more NPC’s, and a variety of situations to get involved in. Rooms are a couple of pargarpghs long, in general, with good bolding to call attention to important features and descriptions. “The wrecked remains of a communal tavle, cabinets of domestic supplies (dining sets, games, books, etc) and beds for lizardmen nobles” read one bolded entry. “ The homunculi are going absolutely apeshit on the place.” Reads the next line. Nice! I can picture that! “If they spot the party they shriek like a dying cat and attack.” Like a dying cat. Again, something you can recognixze and work with.
The adventure does this, room after room. Providing brief little snippets of description, situations to be resolved, and well though out descriptions that paint vidi pictures. Exactly what it should do. Eventually it ends up with the chief instigator being found, and, perhaps, a way out of the bottle dimension being discovered … through a journey down in a diving bell to … the cork. 🙂
There’s more I could comment, on, Good treasure, described just enough and imaginative (and, including a double barrelled shotgun … something near and dear to my adventuring heart. Worry not gentle readers, this is not a gonzo adventure or full of lazer zappers.)
The basics of the adventure are pretty simple, the homunculi in the palace. The NPC’s, while vivid and fun, seem to play a much lesser degree of involvement then I perhaps implied they do. It’s not that that is bad, but, perhaps, it’s a lost opportunity. A little more in this area could have been welcome, a little more intrigue and so on. Oh, they are set up, in the NPC’s, for some involvement with each other but the general situation with the palace takeover seems almost to override this. Somehow involving them more, without it being forced or being contrived, could have added another dimension to the adventure. I imagine it is imagined to be run that way, it’s just not as well communicated through the text as it could be … even though, again, I believe its implied.
A great fun little environment to drop in to your game!
Snag a copy at:
Fourth paragraph, “All transported, as you were, by drinking a magic bottle of win.”
Now I need to create a magical item called the Magic Bottle of Win
I wrote something similar a while back:
Sparkling wine of premature celebration
All who toast a future endeavor in this wine fall under its spell. They will assume their success is a foregone conclusion and receive +2 to rolls for morale, individual initiative and other things that require reckless courage, until doubt sets in. Their hubris also costs them -2 to rolls for surprise, strategic initiative and other things that require doubt, diligence and careful attention. Saving throws, attack rolls etc. that that require both courage, care and luck are not affected.
If the wine is toasted in after victory someone will unfailingly propose some new risky endeavor to toast so that the spell can take hold.
My submission completely trounced again ?
Only happy accident
In honor of this adventure, the car wine this last weekend was a bubbling pink rose …
A sea of pink wine is good, reminds me of some boat trips I’ve been on and sounds like fun. I’d love to see more portal adventures as they let tables that aren’t as comfortable with setting outside the Gygaxian vernacular get a taste for more creative stuff.
I’m not so sure about transportation via downtime trickery though — especially “beyond the mists” with difficulty escaping — to me it always seems a bit damaging to mutual trust if the referee weaponizes downtime’s assumption of safety that way. Maybe during a tense negotiation with a contact from some shady faction? Anything that implies the party has some choice about the wine and that risk may be present.
Do you think ‘tables that are unable to think outside the Gygaxian vernacular’ represent the majority of tables in the OSR? Even more importantly, do you think those that are intimately familiar have not had a taste of the tepid bongwater of NuDnD?
I was going to ask whether or not he’s ever read any Gygax. Weird-ass demi-plane portals in the dungeon are his hallmark. It seems at times that he never ventured beyond Keep on the Borderlands and isn’t quite the D&D archeologist he pretends at.
Ah the endless petty malice of the nostalgia cult. Say the name Gygax and they just start squealing like pigs stuck with a Guisarme-Voulge.
For those who can stop their bad faith fawning. There’s worthwhile distinctions between contemporary D&D fantasy “Gygaxian vernacular” and some of his own work.Gygaxian vernacular is the kitschification of D&D’s early implied setting.
It’s that distillation of Appendix N, sieved through 50 years of popular culture and videogames into something that’s a general part of culture outside of D&D, but is expressed with ever more certainty in each D&D edition. Its how every 6 year old knows that goblins talk in high pitched voices and attack caravans, that liches glow blue, and that orcs a big brutish types who love war. It’s also the basic structure of cliche that is the 5E version of Forgotten Realms, and an impressive marker of D&D and Gygax’s influence on culture. Pretty sure we all know it.
I suspect Gygaxian Vernacular really coalesces around the implied setting of D&D as expressed in Appendixes A-H of the 1979 DMG (A very interesting effort at procedural generation), and B/X and BECMI’s adventures – especially for mid-period TSR. It’s easy and interesting to compare it to Gygax’s own advice in the same DMG – especially the section on “The Campaign”.
Gygax’s own adventures also don’t really contain the Gygaxian Vernacular (he’s the source of the cliche, not the endless repetition), though some are closer then others, and of course it’s hard to know what Gygax actually wrote and what he insisted on having his name attached to make sure he got his share of the royalties.
Also, yeah, I think players coming in from 5E could use some more portal adventures. Also more rust monsters.
Nah. You are unable to post without casting shade on Gygax; it’s become impulsive. It’s also rather embarrassing for you as a discernable tic. We get it: you started a garage band and it is *so important* to you that everyone knows that you feel The Ramones are overrated. Got it. You simply can’t help yourself.
The fact remains that you simply aren’t familiar with Gygax’s writing -perhaps your bias prevents you from actually reading it- which is why you continually plant foot firmly in mouth because you legitimately didn’t know that Gygax was far from vanilla and delightfully weird pocket-plane jaunts were his stock in trade. You commit the same nerd-dom faux pas over and over because you’ve arrived at your conclusion as to an Author’s work without having actually *read* the Author’s work yourself.
Gygax isn’t a titan in the hobby because his name was on all the books. It’s because his material is just so damn good. Even today, we have younger gamers trying to come up with new concepts only to learn that he had already set them down in the 1970s.
Case in point: You were unaware of Gary’s penchant for weird planar fun. Spoiler: What are your thoughts on roleplaying acorn PCs? 😉
Prove me wrong. Post productively *without* trying to punch up at Gygax’s ghost.
tl;dr
I tapped out halfway through, self-congratulatory smugness backed up by impenetrable gibberish. The man couldn’t give a concise response to save his life.
Like, i’ll help edit it.
“Ah the endless petty malice of the nostalgia cult. Say the name Gygax and they just start squealing like pigs stuck with a Guisarme-Voulge.”
Lol, you tried to get courtney campbell cancelled and quit your blog for 2 years over invisible nazis that you have yet to name.
“For those who can stop their bad faith fawning. There’s worthwhile distinctions between contemporary D&D fantasy “Gygaxian vernacular” and some of his own work.Gygaxian vernacular is the kitschification of D&D’s early implied setting.”
So that’s “For those who can stop their bad faith fawning:” and then you list the reason, generally more then one. The fact your already impenetrable screeds are hampered by baroque word choices and you have to clarify them in even longer screeds should serve as a warning sign but you lack faculties for introspection.
“It’s that distillation of Appendix N, sieved through 50 years of popular culture and videogames into something that’s a general part of culture outside of D&D, but is expressed with ever more certainty in each D&D edition. Its how every 6 year old knows that goblins talk in high pitched voices and attack caravans, that liches glow blue, and that orcs a big brutish types who love war. It’s also the basic structure of cliche that is the 5E version of Forgotten Realms, and an impressive marker of D&D and Gygax’s influence on culture. Pretty sure we all know it.”
And you think portals that go to other worlds represent a massive creative divergence from this?
“I suspect Gygaxian Vernacular really coalesces around the implied setting of D&D as expressed in Appendixes A-H of the 1979 DMG (A very interesting effort at procedural generation), and B/X and BECMI’s adventures – especially for mid-period TSR. It’s easy and interesting to compare it to Gygax’s own advice in the same DMG – especially the section on “The Campaign”.”
Irrelevant observation as you clearly did not mean, Gygaxian, you meant the contemporary distillation from various sources a.k.a vanilla fantasy stupid.
“Also, yeah, I think players coming in from 5E could use some more portal adventures. Also more rust monsters.”
This is the only sentence that is actually required to convey your point of view. You don’t have to type out an entire page every time you reply.
“The fact your already impenetrable screeds are hampered by baroque word choices and you have to clarify them in even longer screeds should serve as a warning sign but you lack faculties for introspection.”
It’s an effort to affect an elevated diction.
Any college-level writing course would squelch that. Less is always more. Always.
What you have to understand is that when Gus uses the word ‘Gygaxian’ he does not mean ‘As pertaining to Gary Gygax, late co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons’ he actually means ‘Not Gygaxian at all’ and if you do not catch on to that that is a rare sign of his immense intellectual superiority vis a vis the neckbeards that bullied him in high school.
Three anonymous post in rapid succession … has anyone done a wellness check on noted troll, Prince of Nothing? He may not be taking his anti-psychotics as prescribed.
Hallelujah! It is not even Easter yet, but bloodymage has already risen!
Buy some product, brethren.
I outsource most of my trolling these days. Hows the lights bloo?
Verily, the anti-psychotics (an ableist slur? cheeky!) flow like as wine. I will bequeath upon you their sacred wisdom;
The use of meaningless magic curse words like ‘troll’ preceded by the adjective ‘noted’ are easily countered by other magic curse words like ‘Zak S affiliate’ or ‘stupidbadwrongman.’ Spare me! In the end this is an anonymous comment’s section and like any comment’s section it can only be controlled by pitched battles. Strength must be demonstrated.
How often have we had to slog through a poorly thought out rant, leaving a sensible objection, only to have little boy Gus flouncing away in fits of apoplectic vanity, emitting smug self-congratulatory puffs of air while skipping over entirely any sort of substantiation of his resentful points? How often have we rolled our eyes as this bitter charlatan plays fast and loose with definitions in the hope his legerdermain will remain unnoticed? It is a streetside magician’s act, credible only to children and half-wits.
One cannot credibly pretend at intellectual superiority while refusing to engage with anyone interacting with your thoughts.
And on the third post he rested. Amen!
Three Princes?!! Excellent–no excuse then–you and your clones should have it done quickly—where is Vault of Oblivion?!
Drat! I am unmasked! I have a vacation coming up dark lord. I have no excuse to avoid working on it. I shall redouble my efforts!
Gonna run a pirate sandbox campaign using only the dungeons that have been summited to this contest
This is my idea too, its in progress and so far so good!
Appreciate the review, Bryce! And thank you for prompting me to create this with your contest… I had a lot of fun working on it and if I hadn’t seen your contest then I may have gone my whole life without ever writing an adventure!
And feedback taken about NPC interactivity – something to work on for the second edition!
Well done, sir!
*chef’s kiss!*
Looking forward to seeing what the second edition holds, other than rose wine. One wonders what adventure a pocket dimension containing a giant half full bottle of dandelion wine would provide…
And a ‘nuts&bolts’ suggestion, some tips for GMs wanting to depict drunkenness, I can think of most of the cliches (e.g hiccups, holding a hand over one eye to block out the double vision, etc), but some hints for out of the way stuff would be nice.
Thanks for the suggestion! I think that would definitely add an extra dimension of flavor. Will most certainly include some fun tables to help with the drunk NPCs!
Would be more interesting/fun if there was an added element to each “stereotype drunk” feature…
Hiccups= they are catching & spellcasters speaking with them save vs XYZ or hiccup during next encounter.
Holding one hand over eye= actually works so drunk pcs can halve/remove the combat penalty for drunkeness this way.
Maudlin drunk= will appreciate any pcs who try to pull him out of his funk and after expressing his love for them multiple times, actually show up to help out in next combat or leave them a boat/clue/escape route somewhere
Vomiting= attracts X monster but repels Y monster. 1-2 in 6 chance if you stay to help out a vomiter they vomit up an item of value. And insist you have it. Eww… but XP!
etc etc
Gotta ask: are these adventures being judged to the usual standard? Quite a few rando first-timers apparently churning out all-time greatness here.
I used to auto-buy anything rated Best but I think I’ll exclude contest adventures from now on…
A few things:
1) this site is haunted by older/long-time players and DMs;
2) quite a few have published other works; and
3) constant readers know what Bryce likes and doesn’t like.
I’m pretty sure all the contest winners are available to purchase at the very reasonable price of “free”. So all you’ve got to lose is the time it takes to download and read an 8 page adventure.
Sorry, that should be contest entries, not winners. We aren’t awarding participation prizes here!
#3: I think you misprounced “platonic truth”
BRYCE THE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ENNUI