Occluded Keep of the Doomed Elementalist

By Eon Fontes-May
YouCanBreatheNow Games
OSR
Levels 3-4

For as long as we can remember, the landmark has been a facade of solid stone. False windows and doors carved into the rock. But Sly Diego found a way inside. He says it’s hollow, there’s a whole building in there. And now he’s telling anyone and everyone the way in. So… who will be the first to plunder the creations of the mad elementalist and discover his strange fate?

This eleven page adventure uses four pages to describe about thirty locations on a four level wizard home/tower. It avoids a most traditional wizard tower mistake but is padded out with bland writing. 

The old wizzo home is slowly being turned in to stone, from the outside in. Hence it looks like a stone facade. Dude found a way in through an underground river coming up through a well and has been selling the location. Thus we have an adventure in a small two-story home with a connected wizard tower. And when I said “avoids a mistake” I meant that part, the layout of the map. Instead of just a tower we’ve got the attached home as well. We’ve got some good secret doors in the place, some secret tunnels for the servants, teleport circle, extradimensional biomes. It’s doing a good job of trying to combat the traditional issues that a small tower has ni terms of map complexity. It’s still not gonna be the greatest exploration ever. It is, after all, a house. But it does well with what it has for the size to jazz the travel between locations up just a little bit. A mural of a classic garden, and if you push the door handle then you find the secret door in to the wardrobe in the next room. Nifty! 

There’s also a pretty decent magic item or two, like an ever-glowing coal. Which is exactly what it sounds like. What kind of shenanigans can you get up to with something like that? I can think of a lot! And I love magic items like that. Not just a mechanical bonus but something that you can use, creatively, as a player. There’s another adventuring party also and their descriptions are pretty decent as well. “Unarmored and keenly aware of it” or “a bit too brave” or “a real cutthroat.” That’s pretty much what I need in order to riff on it. I’m down for this. 

I mentioned the other adventuring party. A great deal of the play in this, I suspect, is that party interacting with the party. The environment here is a little static and without the other party there to add some hit and run tension then I suspect its going to be a rather unassuming adventure. There’s very little on the other party, but there are designers notes on them. I suspect that, instead of the designery notes that could have been replaced with a tip or two on their hit & run stuff, or a couple of ideas. This falls in line with a desire for the designer to provide the DM options and tools to make the game fun.

And then there’s the rest of the thing.

The map is hand drawn and a bit hard to grok. I don’t like “hard to grok.” One of the major conceits in tenfootpolelandia is that things shouldnt be hard to grok. The monster descriptions are kind of meh. There’s a whole page of them and they just don’t really have descriptions at all. At least not really about how they look, act, etc. It’s more backstory than relevant to play at the table. Make those monsters scary and give them great things to do! 

And, the descriptions are generally poor and padded out. We learn tha the house was built over a small cave with a river in it that they use for fresh water and to dump their sewage in to. That’s pretty obvious from the “Well” thing in the kitchen and the cave being the way in. We’re told that one of the rooms was once the loading room where they stored good, but is now empty. Where have I heard that one before? As, yes, the platonic example, the war trophy room that went on and on only to end with “and now its empty.” Or, for the winter biome, noting that water magic was always the dudes weakest elemental magic so he made it solid water, snow, in order to help him control it. Great. No gameplay effect. There’s a “dread windmill that inspires fear!” but, really, the next sentence then describes the windmill and shows us, instead of telling us, about what it is that causes that fear. “A skilled thief can bypass the door lock and trap, of course.” Yeah, that’s what they do. And a fighter can stab the monster, of course. It must be that every room here is padded out with this sort of thing. This makes the entries long and confusing. 

Not that there’s a whole lot going on here anyway. As I noted, that other party is going to have play a HUGE part of the adventure. There’s some stuff to interact with but also it feels more like one of those museum tour adventures. The “turning to stone” thing isn’t used very well beyond window dressing. A room where dude was growing a gibberring mouther now is all stone and looks like freaky flesh sculpture walls. That’s all. And, we’ve got a lot of stone guardians and the like to battle.

The passage elements here are pretty nice. And, thirtyish rooms in four pages is not bad. But it lacks the verve that good writing brings to the game, inspiring the DM and planting an image in their head. And the interactivity just feels … sullen?

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing, so good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/478704/occluded-keep-of-the-doomed-elementalist?1892600