The Snake’s Nest

By Mr. Pilgrim Tomes
Self Published
OSE
Levels 2-3

The Malatir tribe has escaped the goblin hordes that invaded their home after a catastrophic defeat. They have since found refuge in a narrow canyon, occupying some ancient ruins. With them, they have brought six wyvern cubs, a holy creature to the Malatir. However, the canyon is not empty. On the opposite end of the canyon a group of snake-men have occupied an old dam where they conduct blood rituals and sacrifices to their ancient god, the Anathema. Now the Malatir are in dire straits, too weak to defend themselves and with the perfect sacrifice for the Anathema in their home. Without help the Malatir are destined to vanish in the throes of a gruesome ritual, their souls lost to an horrid god hunger.

This eleven page adventure uses four pages to describe eleven rooms in a small complex full of yuan-ti. Simplistic rooms with little interactivity beyond stabbing the snakeman in the room. The boring snakemen in the room.

Ohs Nos! The hunter gatherer tribe had three people kidnapped by the snakemen! If you go save them then they will give you a rope! I swear to fucking god. This is the most boring tribe ever. You get nothing. They are a gunter gatherer tribe and they have five little wyverns. That’s all you get to work with. And I’m not fucking around here, there is no other information to work with. Nothing. No chief. No matriarchal society. Nothing else. This has got to be one of the thinnest pretexts I’ve ever seen. Again, you don’t need a fucking hook, but when the point of the adventure is to save the fucking people then one might expect that you interact with the fucking people a bit and thusly there might be just the brest shed of information to help the DM bring that to life. But no.

The descriptions here are frustrating. We don’t get the steaming jungle motif frequent with snake men. Instead they are hold up in a dam. And that’s ok, we don’t have to trope it out. But, also, the dam descriptions don’t really work for me. We get occasional references to “machinery” in some of the rooms, but no real evocative descriptions of them. “A giant broken machine injected with bronze tubes lies motionless on the northern wall, a once powerful turbine, now useless.” And that’s a good one, relatively speaking. The descriptions repeat items from the map, sometimes incorrectly referring to the map features, and there is the occasional reference to room purpose that does nothing but pad out the description with no impact, such as “The room is used to extract information, screams and organs from the snakemen’s captives, a procedure done by their leader Ssilviss.” The prison tells us “This small room with barred doors houses

the snakemen’s prisoners awaiting the ritual. They are beaten up and cannot fight, but are still conscious” No real squalor or anything else that could be evocative. 

Interactivity is limited to stabbing snakemen and occasionally opening a valve to flood a room/complex. At one point we’ve got a lookout in the text, buried deep inside a description, that shold be able to se ethe party approaching the dam, but no real indication hes there WHEN the party is approaching, or any order of battle which would reflect the nakemen reacting to the party, in that case or any other. I might note, also, that the bestiary gives us the stats for “snakemen” and then in that description gives us a one liner that modifies them for purebloods … while there are no snakemen, just purebloods in the adventure. And no mention at all of the “thralls” that sometimes inhabit the rooms, either in stat, description or how they react. The dam, proper, with its turbines … does nothing? 

Simplistic descriptions that are not very evocative and basic interactivity. It’s a raid mission, not exploratory, so some of that is ok. But it just seems like there be so much more to support that type of adventure. Lookouts, reactions, some intrigue, maybe? A basic adventure that isn’t really making a lot of mistakes, but also isn’t really doing anything too interesting.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.46. The preview is four pages and the last page shows you two of the, quite basic, rooms. So, decent preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/495235/the-snake-s-nest?1892600