The Temple of the Serpent Queen

by The Danger Forge
Self Published
Swords & Wizardry 
Levels 5-7

Khaliassa. The ancient Serpent Queen of lost Samarra. While her empire crumbled long ago, stories of her malice and cruelty have survived the passage of time Now hushed whispers are heard in the Free Cities of Thendar. They speak of the return of the Serpent Queen and the rise of her dark temple in the Forest of Jilan. Tales are told around campfires that her followers roam the land, capturing the innocent to offer as sacrifices at her altar The Prince of Belkan-Tir calls for the aid of a brave party of adventurers to travel to the village of Ilkuz and determine the cause of the local unrest Has Khaliassa truly returned? Or is some other agency operating under the shadow of her ancient legend Who knows what perils await in the dark temple of the Serpent Queen.

This sixty page adventure uses about thirty pages for an verland journey and raid on a serpant man temple. Small fonts, triple columns, long italic read-aloud and mostly just fighting. And, worse, no crumbling serpant man temple vibes. 

You travel to a village, getting attacked at a waystation along the way. Making it to the village, they are having trouble! You travel to a bandit camp and fight them. You travel through a forest to serpent man temple and fight them, across a couple of levels. Along the way you will do nothing other than stab things. 

I guess we can start with the most glaring obvious things: the presentation layer. It’s triple column. With a tiny font. There are few other formatting options selected, just an occasional bolded word in what is otherwise an unrelenting sea of text. You have to wade through it, drowning in it. Wall of text in an almost extreme way. I’m looking at s ection right now and I thought it was a full column of information without a break. I was wrong. There IS a slight indent for new paragraphs, but it’s hard to see. You just can’t pick anything out of it. And then there’s the read-aloud. In italics, of course, so it’s hard on the eyes to read. And it, also, tends to the long side more often than not, sometimes multiple paragraphs. Which means that the players lose interest in the monologue and pull out their phones and start  swiping left. Terse, evocative, punchy. Everything in the adventure contributes to the whole. 

Let’s pop on over to design. You start on a road to a village. It’s a kinbd of hex crawl journey, along the road. There’s only one populated hex along the way so the other hexes are just wanderer rolls. Each hex is two miles long and you make a wanderer check in each hex. That’s fifty wanderer checks. And you just start in the middle of the road. You’re not specifically coming FROM somewhere or something. Which means tha the designer specifically selected starting the party fifty wanderer checks away from the village they are heading to. I just don’t get this. It was obviously not run this way; there’s no way that makes it past playtesting, even by the designer. Worry not though, if youhave no positive checks for wanderers the designer advises just tossing some encounters at the party anyway in order to keep things interesting. There is clearly a disconnect here between modern gaming and OSR gaming, where you are specifically trying to avoid most fights and rolling dice because you are so squishy and take so long to heal. But, whatever. Oh, I’ll tell you whatever, it’s also a Race Against Time adventure! You get eight days to find the temple and then four more till the serpent queen makes it to full power. Get to hacking you fucks! Healbot gonna healbot, I guess …

Let’s look at the writing in the adventure. “In this 30′ x 15′ chamber, the priests of Sass’Ra conducted cleansing rituals prior to engaging in ceremonial activities. It also served as a storage space for potions and sacred fluids central to their practices.” Isn’t that fun! You learned about the history of the room! And the room dimension, already found on the map! The fucking adventure is FULL of backstory. EVERYTHING gets a backstory. It’s all in that tiny three column font shit and you never know what is relevent and what isn’t. I fucking hate it. I want to play the fucking game not learn history. The focus on the text should be on information that is gameable. Not on tangential information. Sure, you can drop some shit in here and there, especially if the DM can riff on it. But we’re not making a historical study of the fucking ruin. 

Worry nt though, the read-aloud text also over-reveals information. Why engage in the trivial back and forth between the DM and players that is the heart of the game when you can now get all of the details in the read-aloud and just concentrate on rolling the dice in order to kill whoever is in the room, that WILL attack immediatly. But, also, there’s no order of battle, so everyone is just standing in place and dying with no reactions to nearby rooms, etc. I guess that famous snake/yaun-ti hearing is fucked. All you’re doing here is killing shit. Walk in to a room and kill shit. Walk in to another room and kill shit. I understand that one of my favs, G1, was essentially the same, but somehow there was some variety there. The whip thing. The orc rebellion. The giant intrigue. This has noe of that. There’s no real crumbling jungle temple vibe. No real snake man vibe. Just enter a room and kill something. 

“shadows seem to push against your flickering light” I think not.

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages. More than enough to get a sense of the challenges you face as a DM.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/484979/the-temple-of-the-serpent-queen-swords-wizardry?1892600