By Lazy Litch
Lazy Litches Loot
B/X
Level: 4? Maybe?
The Artificer is dead! The Hermit Queen has dispatched you on the royal dragonfly to seize his living arcane weapons before her enemies do. Deep in the geometric desert, the Artificer’s tower is unraveling: traps are gaining sentience, micro dimensions are fusing, and a ticking mana reactor whispers on the brink of collapse. The meltdown will soon sink the tower into churning cubic sands. If you fail, another kingdom will wield the weapons to rule for centuries.
This 43 page adventure is full of batshit crazy concepts, with associated opulent descriptive text. Stuffed full, it perhaps needs just a little more room to breathe, the rest of us not being able to handle as much opium AND run the game at the same time. But, man, this thing does channel a vibe! Which means if you think Elmore is the pinnacle of fantasy RPG then you might want to move on …
This is, from time to time, an rpg or adventure that tries to explore a kind of bio-mechanical vibe and/or a luxurious opulence in the setting. Byzantine in the art style, with an implied lore that is, it seems, is very deep. Several of the Monte Cook RPG’s, a few of those Psychedelic Fantasy adventures, Rifts: Atlantis. Heresy: Kingdom Come. They generally fall short of the expectations they set, coming off as bolted on paper mache. This adventure does not fall in to that trap and is one of the more successful translations of that byzantine and opulent deep lore biomechanical vision. But … that also has implications. If the cover were in full colour it would better communicate the vibe of whats inside. As it is that cover communicates a kind of lower-end adventure, as does the Mana Meltdown title. The artwork samples, though, on the DriveThru product page do a much better job of communicating what’s to come.
The Hermit Queen. The royal dragonfly. The geometric desert. Churning cubic sands. How does that fit in to your campaign? The Hermit Queen? “She paints the skies with painful sovereign static; folk flee underground, crawling into tunnel towns to escape the burning noise. A ruby reign: regal, regenerative, and repressive.” You down? You got room for that? Meaning that this is either a one-shot or you’ve gone all Living Room/Bottle City. This is not a trip through the local high fantasy dungeon or even a brief excursion to the coral reef undersea lair. We’re got a fully realized vision here, or at least it will appear that way to the players, and the ability for them to integrate in to the environment, and the loot found to continue during the game as the character return to their homeland, is something to consider. The default assumption is that you are doing this for the Hermit Queen, for some unnamed reason, and thus we’re gonna need to be in a position to have her make that request, at least through her advisors, to the characters. None of which is covered, so, yeah, Dungeon & Dragons Ride, I guess.
We start out with the flight to the prismatic field around the artificers tower. Looks like other factions want the shit inside also! Thus, you’re in a flying race to get there first. You can make some stat checks to do various things to speed up The Royal Dragonfly and/or hinder your opponents. This will determine the order the factions, and characters, arrive at the tower. Or, more specifically, where folks arrive in the timeline of progress that is given. Earlier is better, with the other factions having less time to meddle.
Oh, yeah, the other factions. We’ve got The Royal Dragonfly “Powered by: Narcissism.” More praise means it flies faster. And its entomologist pilot is jealous of the Dragonfly. So, you know. It’s got a lantern hanging on it’s tail. In case of serious accident you are instructed to trace the run on it. Which immolates the captured fairy inside. And then you sprinkle the dust on the dragonflies body to get a featherfall effect. Jesus H …
Anyway, the other factions is where I was going. One of them is a living weapon. “She travels to the Geometric Desert on top of a vast flying jellyfish embedded with parasitic bone engines. Her presence is announced by chilling sensations in the fluid of characters’ spines.” Also “The jellyfish has a self destructive desire for a poetic end by flying into one of the sinkholes” Uh. The Telemetry Twins, servants of the Far Away god, travel on a “piece of ground where his apostle ascended now levitates and transports the faithful along a precisely calculated prayer path “ Armed with their Suture Cable and Mnemonic Blade.
I could go on, but, I think you get the idea. I used to summarize my thinking here with “you want realism in a game in which elves shoot fireballs from their asses?” This is perhaps the best implementation of that meaning. AND YOU”RE NOT EVEN IN THE TOWER YET. Inside we to even more abstracted concepts, like The Trap Parliament – “Locked door [spiral steps descend into large circular room] Stone benches [razor thin, floating in concentric rings, some folded into sinister origami statues, others blank with scorch marks], Banners [torn sheets drift overhead, looping in silent orbit], Floor [central speaker’s sigil-podium emits broken voices debating in an unknown language, phrases linger like ghosts semi-visible in the air” Abstraction brought to life to a major theme in this adventure. Obviously. The language used is decent. Very complex ideas are attempting to be described. Razor thin stone benches? Ok. “The tower breaks the horizon, encased in a shimmering prism, held aloft by vast spider tendrils clawing from the cubic sand” Sure thing. What’s cubed sand? Fuck if I know. Let’s hope no one asks and they just bask in the description. And that’s both a strength and a weakness.
In terms of interactivity, we start with that race mini-game, which advances a timeline of events, and then you get to the dungeon proper. The other factions are running around inside, as well as the ghost of the Artificer. And, Death, who is not happy that dude has managed to avoid him and is meddling in the Artificers meddling. Decent fighting inside. A doorway inside of a bag of seeds held by a flesh construct gardener that leads to level one: The Flesh Garden. But to get there, proper, you need to first gain access to the tower. Which means making it through the prismatic field, doing fifteen points in one turn to collapse the field. And then: “two entrances: a light side door and a dark side door. One door leads out the other unless at least one person enters from both sides at the same time.” We can see the patterns here, these are not exactly the most original concepts, but I think they integrate well here. If you need to break through a field, or enter two doors simultaneously then this is the way you do it, not all of those other ways you’ve seen before. It fits, naturally. Some of the interactivity is complex, and none of it has a mural on the wall with a riddle written on it.
There is a decent amount of support information in the form of reference tables for the DM to work from, random shit, reference material and so on. This is great and shows an understanding of what the DM needs when running the actual adventure. Also, there’s a nice little reference diagram of how the adventure fits together. This sort of framing context helps a lot, getting the DM oriented correctly before the flood of information starts.
I think this is a good adventure, and I’m going to Best it. But, also, I don’t think it’s going to be an EASY adventure to run. There are a lot of moving parts here. The rival factions. The timeline. The special effects in the dungeon. The ghost, and Death fucking with the ghost And THEN the special On effects for a dungeon level. And then the room. Which is going to have some complex elements to work out in a dungeon full of abstracted concepts. They are, in the end, relatively simple to run, but interesting. But grasping a Memetic Blade and running it on the fly? Those are the things that are a tad more difficult. Magnificent adventuring facade wrapped around what are some interesting interactivity concepts … like a room where copies of the PC’s, each with a part of an object, run away from them in fear of being destroyed. Or, on the more difficult side of things: “Jealous Walls: The more it is used, the more hostile the corridor becomes. Envious of players’ functioning bodies, it begins to create gravitational anomalies in attempts to impale them on bone spikes so it can cannibalize them.” Run that. Oof.
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is 25 pages. More than enough to get the lore, the style, to be influenced by the art, and see more than few rooms and specials. Great preview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530305/mana-meltdown?1892600
I looked up the sand. Cubic sand is nothing. Cubed sand is something. It’s used to prepare cement for testing, or something? I still have no idea what it is. That’s a read aloud?
Cubic Sand would be sand with cubic grains presumably.
Aesthetically its very distinct, and its about something, so that’s good. The map in the preview did make me sick. I think this looks interesting enough to check out.
adventure disclaimer: contact Prince for explanation of read-aloud.
I was just picturing cubes of floating sand that formed impossible cubes and stayed in that shape, possibly floating, joined at the corners with cubes of nothingness in between.
If questioned further: don’t be too literal, think more beetlejuicy.
Wouldn’t “cubic sand” basically just look like a big pile of brown salt? Folks are really overthinking this.
Cubic sand wouldn’t all be the same color: surely a large chessboard grid with each ‘cube’ being a different kind of sand. Green sand, yellow sand, red sand, black sand, purple sand, white sand etc
I was wondering what would happen if a character took one colored sand from one cube and poured it on another
I meant if the grains are cubic, and it’s mixed together. Regular beach sand grains aren’t all the same color, but they all come together to make the classic “sandy brown” color.
Doesn’t help that the author didn’t specify what the heck “cubic sand” is supposed to be – giant cubes of sand? Cubic grains of sand? Checkerboard patterns of sand? A cube-shaped plateau of sand?
Good fit for an UVG (or adjacent setting) campaign. One of those where every sentence implies something (crazy or psychedelic) about the world.
This is an astute observation: sentences imply something about the world but don’t explain it. A tough line to walk. Cubic sand does it for me
One thing your review does not mention, are the maps. I have been let down so many times by high-concept adventures with terrible or nonexistent maps. The preview lauded by you does not show any. How are the maps?
I have picked up a couple of Lazy Lich offerings. They are pretty and I do like the writing. The maps tend to be on the artistic, as opposed to useful, side. Any erstwhile DM, however, must be aware that the scenarios are going to be be bananas-level odd (there’s a magic ladder in a lake that leads down to a dungeon underwater), so they may not fit a more traditional low-fantasy campaign or are one-shots. As one-shots, these have played well at the table.
Cubic sand could make for a wretched surface to walk on. It sits in the form of small, say 4-6 inch cubes that break apart when stepped on. Once the foot is removed, the cube reforms over a few rounds, restoring the extremely difficult terrain behind the characters. If the party (and monsters other than gastropods) tries to run on the cubes, they will likely fall flat on their faces.
Hmm, that is an interesting terrain complication.
I was imagining Minecraft sand.
Well ok. wtf is minecraft sand- is anyone over 30 supposed to know?
40-year-old here; in Minecraft, everything is in block form. So cubes of compacted sand, basically.
I think everyone should try Minecraft at least once, no matter your age. It’s more than just a game the younglings meme on. I know genuine geezers who play it too. It’s kind of like having a world built of freeform Legos you can disassemble and rearrange at will.
I have a problem with full 360-degree movement games in my tottering old age; I get motion sickness. I did, however, play some Minecraft with my kids and I could easily see how addictive and fun it is.
40-year olds playing mincraft is peak reddit, and hearing adults relate their minecraft experiences is ever more peak reddit. This is a hobby space and everyone needs a pasttime but dear god man, have some fucking dignity.
I assume it means “cubist” sand — sand that visibly presents in four dimensions.
Pablo Picassand