Beneath the Silver Spire

By Todd Lyons
Basic Fantasy Project
Basic Fantasy
Levels 5-8

Four priceless artifacts have been stolen, and the reclusive collectors who owned them have promised to reward anyone who can return their items safely with anything in their power to grant.  The items include Crescent, a golden sickle; Bloodthistle, a crimson morningstar; Soulfang, a silver scimitar; and Tickler, an ebony scythe.  Are you clever and stalwart enough to win this great reward?

This 65 page adventure uses about forty pages to describe about fifty rooms in an infernal punishment prison, with a White Plume “stolen weapons” pretext. We, personally, are in Upper Hell as there is little care here for play without self-indulgence. That means forced encounters, wordiness to an EXTREME in a conversational style, and no real interactivity. But you do get to see punishment vignettes before stabbing. Yeah?

Well, this is certainly from another time. And not a good one. There is some pretext here where four magic weapons have gone missing and you go to this mountain to go find them. I’m not real sure why. I guess you find a note sent by Lareth The Beautiful. Anyway, you go to the dungeon in the mountain only to be immediately sleep gassed (no save) and then find yourself in a some version of Dante’s Inferno, in 52 rooms. Lareth is in room 51 with the last magic weapon in room 52. 

I don’t really know where to begin in hating this. The set up makes no sense. Not that it really has to, but, when you include twenty pages of setup prep then SOMETHING should come from it. The whole “stolen weapons” thing is not covered at all. Who owned them, meeting them, etc. Nothing. Again, not that I’ve overly attached to the hook, but, the designer included it and mentions it over and over and over again. Even telling us what will happen if “the owners” don’t get them back. And we get full page write ups of the weapons, each, for the party to keep them, even though they are not supposed to. But the generic never mentioned people who own the weapons. And then there’s the NPC cleric in town. Or they can be at the farm you pass on the way to the dungeon if you want, we’re told. Like a level seven or something. Who wants a full fucking share but will do no fighting. And claims to have info on the dungeon but that is not followed up on at all. But we do get reams of text of what happens if the cleric dies in the dungeon and all of the ills that will befall the party. Pet NPC maybe/? I don’t know. The whole intro is just fucking weird. It’s long as fuck, twenty pages as I mentioned, and it doesn’t really SAY anything. The amount of gameable content is near zero. Generic town write up, the whole thing. With nothing really noteworthy to warrant the page count. Well, I guess except for the full page weapon write up? Also, you find the first weapon outside the dungeon, wielded by a scarecrow in a field. So, you know … Oh! Oh! No hirelings in town. Except for the Pet NPC. No on ein town will go to the dungeon with you. There’s not one black lotus addict looking for a fix? The whole thing is just designer fiat with little appeal to anything that would make sense. Not that it has to, elves farting out fireballs and all that, but there must be something to illicit a suspension of disbelief. 

Ok, we’re at the dungeon! Room two “Once all are inside the room, any inspections of their bodies or casting of spells will provoke the instantaneous release of a powerful sleeping gas from the demons’ mouths, no save.” And thus the nonsense really begins. You’re dragging in to a reception room and tied to a chair. An imp takes your names. Another dude sees you and gives you a token. It seems you are in an infernal prison and the token lets you cross the boundaries between circles. Err, zones. You will not wander through room after room of nonsense vignettes. In one room you see a hot tub. There’s a sign on the wall that says “the management is not responsible for lost items.” No, that’s not a hint. Maybe it is? There are some rot grubs in the hot tub along with a few coins. Else where is the orgy room, with the succubus, where “The “young and beautiful people” in this room are kept in a state of paralife, so that they may endure a perpetual cycle of forced pleasure and brutal punishment.” So, yeah, we get a lot of backstory in the rooms. And they have these little vignettes in them. One is a hotel lobby where some people look at the art on the wall and others fall from the spiral staircase on the reception desk, over and over again. So, yeah. No, nothing else is going on here. That’s what we get, just these little vignettes. And then someone invariably yells at you and the stabbing starts.

“There is nothing to do in this room except be thankful that you are not one of its prisoners. At the GM’s option, there may be coins or other dropped treasure on the floor” This then, a line from the adventure, is the best description of the thing. There’s a lot of this, the whole “the DM could put something here” going on. I can, in fact, do a lot of things, including doing whatever I want in an adventure and I don’t need to be told that. Especially in a high level adventure.

This sort of conversational style is prevalent throughout the adventure. This is how we get mountains of read-aloud and page long sections of DM text. Asides to the DM, the designer letting us know how clever they are. It’s just one huge morass of text. And, little in the way of actually evocative descriptions of the creatures of the treasure. “Anklet 200gp.” I am dazzled!

And, in the last room is the power behind everything, Lareth, who has not been encountered till now and only mildly hinted at. “I’m angry Lareth hasn’t promoted me in 700 years, here’s a zome passing token.” 

This is like it’s out of late 80’s or 90’s with the amount of text that is coming from it, to no real gameable effect. It’s wild that this would be something coming out in 2025. There is, I guess, no accounting for taste.

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/514756/beneath-the-silver-spire?1892600