By Vanessa Nairn
Snail Song Studios
OSE
"Low Levels"
Jebediah Bigby is a meadmaker extraordinaire, famous throughout the region for his delicious mead. The secret to his success is simple, ‘Big Bees make better honey.’ However, rumours run wild as to the true secret of Bigby’s success. Now that shipments have started going missing, it’s your job to delve into the meadery and find out!
This 34 page adventure presents an underground brewery with bees and goblins with a small above ground section. A rather A rather standard fare that doesn’t overstay, with the usual issues. Where ‘standard fare’ has the usual low-interest meaning.
So, there’s nothing special about this adventure. It’s the usual go in a room and stan things kind of affair. This comes along with poor text/descriptions, etc saving grace being the text doesn’t drone on and on. But, also, I had this idea …
What’s going on here is the halfling Bigby (no relation) runs a meadery. Another halfling meader rival, Penelope Smallby, hires a hobgoblin and his goblin band to raid it and get the secret recipe. It’s not Love. Turns out ol Bigby has been running his mead through a fishtank with slopfish in it, which infuses an unnatural happiness in his mead. And in stronger doses it makes you not be able to feel ANYTHING ut joy, even during the greatest tragedies. Also, Penelope doesn’t want to pay the goblins. Also, Bigby is cheery and morbidly obese. There’s an entry on the (aboveground) wandering monster table that has a group of halfing nature enthusiasts about and about enjoying watching the bees. The giant bees. … I hope you’re thinking what I’m thinking! There was an opportunity here, that I initially thought the adventure was going to go down, for a REALLY good adventure. Murder, betrayal, suicides in town. Extortion. Bribes. Cover-ups! All of the seediness of a small town coming out and being amplified. You can imagine Poirot at the end emphasizing “And all for a mead recipe!” The cheeriness of the halflings. The absurdity of the situation, juxtaposed with the awfulness of the consequences of the actions taken. That’s an awesome fucking adventure!
But this one is just your normal fare. Walk in to rooms in an underground area. Meet a goblin. Or rat. Or bee. Maybe talk to a goblin. Stab everything else, probably. The height of interactivity is finding a key behind a painting (nice!) or following some pipes behind a wall. Again, nice. But these are very isolated examples. The vast majority of it is just walking to a room with very little for the DM to work with. You know the deal, just one thing in the room. And the thing is simple. And it usually doesn’t have implications for things further/deeper in to the dungeon. There’s no build up or mystery.
This isn’t helped much by the words. What we get, time after time, is some text that looks like read-aloud but is really a kind of narrator’s commentary in a movie or tv show. “Normally, the ground floor of Bigby’s Meadery is well kept and serves as a bar and storefront. However, ever since Glurgak’s band took over, it looks like a hurricane has hit it, with broken bottles and furniture scattered about” I can imagine the narrator in those old Discworld Tv Movies. Or “A decorative garden that offers one of the sources of pollen for Bigby’s Giant Bees.” That’s more of a name, rather than a description? The text should inspire the DM to greatness, to plant a solid idea in their head that they can then riff off of, making it more than the sum of the its words.
This isn’t an offensive dungeon. It’s hard to imagine something this simplistic to be offensive. I’m not even sure its a dull dungeon. It’s more of a … staid dungeon and/or adventure? I wish it were more. I wish the giant bee/honey/mead thing was more prevalent in more rooms, and really lent a vibe of being immersed in it. But the descriptions just aren’t evocative enough for that.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages. That gives you the background info that I though would be great as a tragedy, but it needed to also show some rooms so we can get a sense of what the core of the adventure looks like.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/491923/trouble-at-bigby-s-meadery?1892600
Isn’t the use of “Bigby” in a D&D context going to be a breach of the OGL, and a breach of copyright law?
Can’t breach the OGL if you don’t sign up for the OGL. And it’s system neutral, so they might not have.
Of course copyright is a separate issue, but “Jeremiah Bigby, halfling mead brewer” might fall under a call-back not a copyright infringement. I am of course not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but it might just be vague enough it’s not worth Ha$bro/Wot¢’s time to chase down.
The map in preview is actually acceptable for it’s size. Not fully jacquayed, but that’s hard to do within a small map, and I do see a secret tunnel on it.
That and it probably falls under parody because it’s ‘Big Bee’, gettit?
I actually did not get it. The shame. That’s what I get for AYCshully’ing while starting my coffee instead of after finishing it.
Can’t copyright a name bro. You could maybe trademark it.
I think you cannot use Bigby, as in THE Bigby who created the spells in the same context (or the spells themselves). But having said that, I wouldn’t risk the trouble. Who knows what WotC lawyers would go for.