By Wayne Rossi Initiative One games OSR Levels 1-3
Bandits have been using a cave as a base to raid caravans, but the learned know that ancient secrets lurk beneath the mountain, and that it was where the ancient sorcerer Eibon was last hiding before his disappearance to far-distant Cykranosh. Unearth the secret!
This is a six page cave/dungeon containing eleven rooms. It’s got a little bit of everything, the way an adventure should! You’re not gonna hate your life, either playing it or running it.
Caravans are going missing, blah blah blah. It’s a cave, let’s get our fucking noses in to it an explore! Inside you’ll find a eleven room dyson map from 2015 … which makes sense because this adventure was written in 2015. I don’t know, it finally popped on my list. ANyway, a nice little Dyson map. Some caves, finished rooms, same level stairs, features on the map, tunnels running under another part of the map and a well that leads down in to a lake. Frankly, one of the better Dyson maps I’ve seen. That Exploration pillar that WotC used to like to tout means more than simple box rooms connected by lines. All of those features I mentioned help develop a sense of exploration while playing that puts players in the right frame of mind. In addition to providing features that can work for, or against, the characters during play. Good map, for it’s (small) size.
So let’s get to it! Room one is: “The entrance to the dungeon appears to be a natural cave …” Oh, fuck. Ok, so, yeah. That’s a lot of fucking padding. Telling us what the obvious feature is, the entrance, as well as a great appears to be appearance. The room continues “steps have been hewn into a natural tunnel. The limestone cave is empty and contains natural stalactites and stalagmites. “ That’s quite a bit better. We’re not winning any awards here, but it’s terse (even with the padding) and it does paint a decent little picture. I’m not mad at it once the knee-jerk loathing of padding is accounted for.
And you’re gonna find much of the same in all of the rooms descriptions in this. It does make an attempt to describe every little thing that Dyson stuck onhis map. So, a room with an irregular back wall gets this descriptions “This room bears the scars of heavy objects having been moved through it, but has not been occupied for some time. The well in the center opens a chute to the small lake below. The niche on the back wall has a 3’ wide octagonal scar on it.” That description is significantly weaker than the opening room, with all of the rooms falling somewhere in that spectrum that those two create. Note also the 3’ niche, an attempt to describe that feature on the map … without really doing anything with it. That’s common here … a brief throw away line without it really impacting the adventure … which means that it probably shouldn’t be appearing as words in the adventure.
There is a decent variety to the encounters here. A puzzle or two. Shit sitting at the bottom of a lake … I love it when exploration is rewarded. You’ve got the bandits running around … which for the purposes of this adventure means “everyone is sitting in one room around a big table.” And then there’s a wizard with his pals looking to do a blood sacrifice. Some evil temple stuff, Some vermin. And … a sealed coffin! Little bits, here and there, that add variety to the adventure without it actually feeling like everything is just thrown in randomly. Just enough to tie things together.
Sure, the bandits don’t make sense. All huddled together in one room. And the wizzo is camped out in the other side of the dungeon, seemingly at peace with the bandits in their lair. Things are just a little bit too zoy and those bandits a little too uninquisitive.
We’re not winning any awards here. But, neither are we making the players or the DM hate their lives and rethink their most treasured hobby. Would I run this? Meh. I wouldn’t walk away from it. The issue with many decent adventures continues to be “there’s something better to run.” So I’m not going out of my way to run this. But, as something you are throwing out to the world? It’s not terrible.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/163302/The-Secret-of-Cykranosh?1892600