Adventure Squared
General/Universal/OSR - But really 5e
"Low Levels" - Ha!
Who are the Snake Monks? What is the Blood Cradle? Why are the villages being terrorised? Uncover the answers to all of this and more when you explore the Blood Cradle of the Snake Monks!
This 36 page adventure uses about nineteen pages to describe fifty rooms in dungeon full of … serpent people! The rooms contain a variety of challenges, classic and not, with conceptually decent, if fun house, ideas. But its all done in a weird flat bullet minimal format … that is somehow also quite long? Also, someone REALLY liked the snake scene in Raiders.
“It’s art if the creator says it’s art!” No, it’s not. This is labeled as a generic/universal adventure compatible with OSR blah blah blah. It’s actually a 5e adventure, mostly. Just because creatures have HP and AC doesn’t make it OSR. Even if, tonally, you can manage something akin to the OSR, and even if you dump in enough cash for a gold=xp payoff, there is a WILDLY different power balance going on. The boss here has like AC18 and 180HP. A far cry from the 20HD monsters of B/X and 1e. What is that, like, forty or fifty HD? “Low levels” my ass. This is 5e. Oh, oh, but it also says things like, in the monster appendix “We put in some modifiers for you to use if you wish”, which means creatures have a line that says something like “+3, +1, -1.” This is just a fucking dystopian hellscape. Write it for 5e or write it for the OSR. Fucking christ.
This thing sucks ass in every single way. Except one. It’s got some pretty decent room concepts. A room with a valley/put that is LOADED full of snakes down there. A room full of treasure chests and urns and things that rearrange themselves to block the exits. The room with three apple trees … with apples … A room where you move some portable walls around to literally wall off a deadly fog. The super dark room where torches only light 1 foot around you. A room full of ethereal whisps swirling around … which are snakes. There are quite a high number of these ‘specials.’ Certainly no one can accuse the designer of just having a room with a monster in it to stab.
I don’t know what to say about them. They suck? None of them really realize their potential. This takes a variety of forms, with things sabotaging the rooms concepts, but in its most fundamental form, they are presented as nothing more than concepts. Imagine sitting around with your friends, drinking, brainstorming ideas for a dungeon. “There could be a room with a pit in it full of snakes!” or “How about a room that sucks up the light full of shadow monsters!” or “You could get trapped by the treasure you want”! This is what this adventure is doing. The opposite, I guess, of trap and door porn. You can go too far, and most adventures do, in the mechanics and descriptions of the effect of an area. You want just jus the right amount of detail, of the critical pieces, to help the DM run the room without being prescriptive. And then there the opposite end of the spectrum, where this lies, which only gives the BAREST concept of a room concept. These are essentially one liners of each room. And relatively short one-liners at that.
This is not to say that the actual room keys are one line long. Oh no. They are going to take up about a third of a page to half a page each. How can this be?! Well, the formatting sucks ass. First, it’s single column. And it’s using a very terse bullet like formatting for the rooms. This means A LOT of whitespace for something like seventy to eighty percent of a line. Then, it’s padded out. A room name, A three word description. Room dimensions. And a bullet system that only a mother would say is good.
22- Crystal Caverns
Natural cavern approx. 70x100ft. High ceiling (70ft).
Uneven natural rock floor interspersed with stalagmites and stalactites jutting from the floor and ceiling.
-Crystals
• Grow from all of the surfaces but mainly concentrated on the walls.
• Refract light in mesmerising patterns.
• Valuable- 1KG is worth 50GP.
• Extremely sharp when broken and can be carved into cutting tools or weapons.
You can see, from that, two types of bullets, a hyphen and a traditional round one. The hyphens are the major headings with the bullets containing additional information for the hyphen item. What’s missing is the indent. And we can see, here, from this room key, the three descriptions of the room. “Crystal Caverns/Natural Caverns” and then the “Uneven natural rock” line, and then the “refract light” line. These are all very business-like descriptions. There’s no real joy or inspiration in them. Yes, on some level you have described the room, but the room isn’t sticky, there’s no firing of the imagination. It’s a fucking giant crystal room full of dazzling lights. You need to witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational english language. Oh, and sections are hyperlinked. That room full of chests? It’s hyperlinked to a “Chest Table.” Which actually takes you to the “effects of the fog” table. The actual chest table doesn’t exist, but there is a “treasure table” full of things like “50sp” and “200cp” and “shovel” or “flask of oil.” I think, perhaps, we differ on the definition of the word avarice. And, of course, the improper use of randomness is prevalent throughout. “Here are six things that could be in the drawer!!’ is not the proper use of randomness
Rooms in concept only, no real room descriptions of note, and a format that makes no sense at all. Triple word score for AVOID.
This is $4 at DriveThru. There is no preview Sucker!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/519371/blood-cradle-of-the-snake-monks?1892600