The Moss Mother’s Maze

By Chris Bissette
Self Published
A Dungeon Game
Levels 1-3

Beneath a desolate moor lies an enigmatic maze, its twisted corridors teeming with treacherous traps and remnants of ill-fated adventurers who dared to tread its path. The Moss Mother guards her home against all intruders, but there are great rewards to be had for those who brave her hallways. Immerse yourself in a world of rot, rust, and rebirth, where the echoes of buried legends stalk your every move.

This 31 page adventure presents a maze with about thirty rooms in it. It leans heavily toward minimalism, in a bad way, with a few encounters that punch things up a bit. A slow affair, it feels like the tedium of a maze inflicted on the party.

Good Literature makes you feel something. Hence my rotting leg of lamb story. We empathize. Or, at least we should. But, what if the feelings we experience are unpleasant? What then? We can be excused for only reading Thieves World from then on, I suppose, being creatures of free will. And, what of an adventure? If I don’t have fun. If I am instead confronted simply with tedium. Am I allowed to say, forever and ever, that I don’t like D&D? The adventure, as a technical document. Meant to help the DM run the game. To facilitate the DM facilitating the players having fun. Inspiring the DM, but in a way that makes it easy for them. And providing the elements for the players to interact with so they can have fun. We ignore outside conditions, after all, a good DM could …

There are parts of this adventure that do a good job conveying the mood of a scene or providing an interesting environment. You can meet a formed adventurer, in town, missing an eye and both legs from the knee down. Ouchies! That’s fun! And, there is an occasional decent room description. “Long chains hang from the ceiling and trail across the ground, hundreds of them, so many that it’s impossible to make out details of the dimensions of the room or whether there are other exits.” or maybe “The gibbering head of a bearded man mounted on a barbed spear thrust into the iron floor with abominable force. His ribs rest on the floor, forming a cage around the base of the spear in which his lungs still flutter and his heart” These are, I think the best examples. And that last one a very good description. Gibberring. Bearded. Barbed. The rib cage on the floor, rotted away. That paints a magnificent picture of a scene. That’s exactly what a description should do! We get a real sense of the place. We feel something. And that allows th DM to then communicate that onward and riff on it to the players.

But alas, these are few and far between. Nothing reaches the heights of that spear scene. There are a couple of other rooms, maybe three others, with descriptions that, I would assert, actually exist. The rest of the room descriptions either do not exist or are so minimal so as to be little more than Empty Room. “Thick chains hang from hooks in the ceiling. They creak loudly if disturbed.”

And this is a problem. The rooms have little int he way of description. And little in the way of meaningful interactivity. We get traps in some of them, and, I think, four rooms with creature sin them? Although one of them has 1HD. So. You know. Does that count?  Other rooms are just … weird? A room with talking gargoyles that can’t otherwise move and taunt the players. A room with a dude hiding out on a platform, with no other use to him. It feels … hollow? Empty? Why is that encounter there? Certainly, not every encounter needs a reason, but some of them should make sense sense. Or fit in, perhaps? And I’m not sure that a lot of these contribute. 

The overall effect here is one of tedium. There’s just not much going on. Only, like, three or four rooms have creatures? And I’m not saying that hacking is the end all be all, but I’m looking for SOMETHING to interact with on a meaningful level. A few traps, sure. But you wander about the maze. And, eventually, the high HD dragon shows up and you need to RUN. (I note that I think FEAR/Running is a sure path to a TPK in a dungeon. Fleeing in to the unknown is a sure fire way to end up dead in an exploratory dungeon.) I get that there is supposed to be a stalked through the dungeon thing going on, but the speed of the dragon means that you have to run, not retreat, and running leads to death. The problem is that running, in this dungeon, is not a fail state. It’s just a quirk of the wanderer chart. That you can’t avoid BECAUSE ITS A MAZE.

I note two other points. That spear in that description? You can be killed by violence while wielding it. Holy shit! And, then, at the end, we get some advice that the magic lup of metal at the end of the adventure “if you intend to continue your campaign you may decide that

selling it requires finding a buyer. You may also wish to consider the ramifications on your campaign world of a sudden influx of highly toxic material into local economies, and how this might impact future sessions.” That’s not too bad, as advice goes. But a couple of specific examples would have been better. Specificity is always better. Not verbose, but specific. 

So, a couple of highlights but essentially tedium that has the deck stacked against you. 

This is 5 pounds at itch. You’ll be getting no preview, so SUCK IT L0SERS!

https://loottheroom.itch.io/moss-mother