By Martin Cubas
Weird Adventures
Castles 7 Crusades
Levels 5-7
An undead family on the path of revenge. A haunted cemetery. And creeping horrors at every turn. Prepare for a hell of a family reunion.
This 75 page adventure uses about 33 pages describe about fourteen ‘areas’ in a graveyard. Long room descriptions will add to the tedium of Just Stabbing Dudes as you battle through hordes of meaningless undead.
You’re walking down a path when a villager runs up to you. “Oh please sirs! An undead just came out of the graveyard! We killed it but the militia is scared to go in! Please help us!” You mosey over to see a ten foot high wall surrounding a HUGE graveyard and a barricaded front gate with militia around it … and a dead dude. A first level cleric runs up and dumps a pile of holy and undead-killing weapons at your feet. In you go! Based on that, how the fuck do YOU think this adventure is going to go?
Ok, its full of fucking undead, so lets get the turning thing out of the way. Castles & Crusades is a Wisdom check vs the undead HD. Beating it by two means a turn and if you’re five levels higher you destroy the undead. The undead here range from 3HD to about five or six HD, on average, so lets call it a 50/50 chance to turn 1d12 undead each turn. The graveyard has three zones in it. The first zone has 42 undead roaming around the graveyard proper, ready to burst out and fuck you up, with another 27 in their crypt locations (three or four rooms in zone one, if I recall correctly.) So, seventy undead of around 5HD on average, vs your levels 5-7 party. Just in zone one of three. I guess just stuffing your adventure with high level “average” undead is one way to handle the clerics turning. Everyone surrounds the cleric and parry’s so the cleric can, on average, turn 6 undead a turn? That’s exciting D&D play.
Not to worry though. The entire graveyard is covered in a heavy mist. You can’t see more than 5’ in front of you .Yes. FIVE FEET. Was it playtested at all? Obviously not.
Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. .Dad is the feudal lord in charge. He’s got some kids. They are evil little brats who eventually make a pact with the devil and become TRULY evil little shits. They grow up and one of the chicks sacrifices a peasant girl. The peasants hang all of the kids while dad is away. Except for the eldest son. Dad pardons the peasants and disappears. The son comes back as an evil undead, raises his sisters (I assume there are incestous undertones here, while not explicitly mentioned. One brother, a bunch of sisters, and he does care for them a bit too much.) Now he’s going to turn the entire graveyard in to undead and kill everyone in town as revenge for killing his sisters. A bunch of bullshit to justify “there’s a graveyard with a bunch of high level indeed in it.”
Let’s see, mist with 5’ visibility, a 10’ high wall that I guess is adequate for keeping out several hundred 5HD undead, a level one cleric with a literally shit ton of undead killing magic items he dumps on you … what am I missing?
Rooms average a page to a page and half in length, each. Here’s some read-aloud for you to mad-lib your own review of: “Before you rises an ancient turret with cracked, darkened walls. Several skeletal figures stand motionless near the entrance, their clothing rotted to rags by time. Although they do not move immediately, a sense of vigilance hangs in the air—as if they are waiting for the right moment to strike. Above the doorway, an elaborate inscription reads “Frida Stranholt.” A carved relief on the wall depicts a short, slender woman wielding a bow and arrow.” How many cinema sins can you count? Purple prose? Absolutely. Second person text? Absolutely. Overreveal? Absolutely.
After that read-aloud for the outside of the crypt, we get read-aloud for the inside of the crypt. Then we get Castle Keepers Notes.” In this case: “A group of Skeletal Wretches has been stationed outside this tower to prevent entry. The interior holds a far greater threat. The Fountain Room is a trap Frida uses to eliminate intruders by sealing the exits and releasing deadly poison gas” Ok so, this is all padding. It adds NOTHING. You’ve already told us twice about the guards outside. I don’t need her motivation. Her motivation is that shes a dick. Further, she’s been alive for, what, three days now? And she’s building traps to eliminate intruders like it’s Tomb of Horrors?
So, anyway. Overwrought text. Way Way WAY too much text. Padded. Purple. Over-reveal. No real interactivity except for stabbing undead. Yeah yeah, you can talk to a couple. YAWN. All it leads to it more stabbing. Of them. Of them helping you stab. Etc.
I KNOW people play D&D like this. I’ve sat in the games. Home games. Con games. I’ve had a miserable fucking time. And I’m not talking 3e/4e/5e era stuff. 1e/2e games that play like this. I try to understand others stances on things, but I just really can’t understand this style of play at all. I’d like to say born from cRPG world, but I’m absolutely certain that this existed in the early 80’s.
But, even beyond it being a hack adventure, you could be in to that … I mean, is it a GOOD hack adventure? No, obviously. The presentation sucks donkey balls. It uses way too much text to cover basic details. Its prose is purple. It obfuscates the information you need to know to run the hack. And, most of all, surrounding the cleric in boredom while everyone waits for the cleric to roll this rounds Turn is not a very exciting way to play D&D. 5’ fucking foot visibility the entire adventure, indeed. Pffft.
This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. You get to see the start, with the dumping of the magic items, as well as an overview of the roaming underneath in each zone. But you DO NOT get to see a typical room. Which means this is a bad preview indeed.
Todays Question: Was Charles Ingalls a l0ser, moving his family around a lot, or did he just enter farming at the wrong time, during the great locust plagues and was never able to recover?
Charles Ingalls was a ne’er do well loser, but with good hair as in the show.
As for the no real interactivity stabbing games, that existed in the early 1980’s and probably the 1970’s from what I’ve reviewed. The game was new and most of the fun was turning the corner and facing a new monster to slay – until you learned all the monsters and the game got boring. Personally, my games got more interesting when I turned 17 in the late 1980’s. But somehow adults of all D&D editions still play the non-interactive stabbing game type they were first exposed to (many as children/teens) and never evolve from there. Sad.
What modules did you review, B2? Try Tamoachan, Barrier Peaks, Hill Giant Steading, Tomb of Horrors, we could go on and on. One of the elements of old school play was conservation; “clearing the dungeon” was not a goal and fights were to be avoided if possible (I love how the original players kept “hunk of meat” on their PC’s sheet to offer to wandering monsters and they generally tried to parlay with everything that could be parlayed with). I think stabby -stab is a direct result of video game mentality.
My playing started before modules were popular. DM’s read the rules and made their own dungeons. Clearing the dungeon of treasure and monsters was definitely a goal and a lot of PCs died in the process. Parlay is more advanced play, and the DM has to permit it (not to mention allowing a monster to be interested in a dead hunk of meat as opposed to live prey. You could argue that most monsters want live moving prey, which is why they are monsters, and the original players had a kind DM that allowed it). Most players don’t initially see an orc, ogre, or zombie and say let’s talk to it. Examples of play in the basic book and DM guide include exploration and battle, not talking with the enemy and making friends.
Take a look at some of the early tournament adventures that were not widely published – a lot of hack & slash. In fact, my own circle called these “monster per room” dungeons. You open a door to a room, see a monster(s), decide whether to attack or avoid to come back later. And this process generally repeats. I was so disappointed to see a module like this in 1989, B11 King’s Festival. It was like TSR learned nothing over 15 years and the map was horrible. You could walk straight down a snaking hall to the last room with the boss if you chose not to open any side doors along the way.
We called them “Monster Zoos” or “Monster Mashes,” but I think, Palace of the Vampire Queen aside, TSR’s publishing history says otherwise and I respectfully note that both S1, G1 and C1 are “early tournament modules” – 1975 and 1978 (x2)).
I can only personally go back to 1981, but we tried to talk to everything that we could, it’s literally in the rules and the point of the Charisma stat.
1989 was late, borderline 2E-era and, I concur, the modules were pretty terrible. “Gargoyle,” anyone?
Bueller?
My copy of Gargoyle came from a book exchange in a London train station. I didnt leave anything in return. I was ripped off.