First Steps – Descent into Madness

By Nickolas Z Brown
Five Cataclysms
OSR
Levels: "Low to Mid"

Deep within the Sunken Fort is a stairway. This stairway leads into an unknowable and chaotic underworld: the Descent into Madness. Alien creatures, chaotic magic, formless order and untold treasures await the intrepid and the bold. They will not return the same as they entered.

This 72 page adventure uses 69 pages to describe 252 rooms in “the first level” of a megadungeon. It is creative, deadly, off kilter, and comes at things from a “creativity first” rather than “rules first” standpoint. One of the best examples of a funhouse, ever, for every overloaded context of the word funhouse when describing a dungeon.

I know a secret. Maybe you will also after today. Keep the secret, there must have been a reason, there’s no reason to run your fucking mouth. 

As soon as you crack this you know you’re in for a ride. During our small obligatory hooks section we get “Someone’s father was turned into a tree in room 55 and needs rescued. All the relatives know is that they were last seen entering this place” or “The Headsman of room 72 could be emerging from the dungeon to take people’s heads and convert them into trophies to hang on his walls” What’s a headsman? Turned in to a tree? Well, those are things you don’t see everyday. Except they are rather classic, yes? A dude in a black hood dragging a big axe and beheading people to collect their heads? I’m not even sure there IS a more classic trope than that one? And getting turned in to a tree? Shades of so many folklore tales. Nope, there’s nothing folklore about this adventure though, it’s far too random, in a funhouse manner, for that.

There’s no pretext here, we just have a couple of words about interdimensional blah blah blah and then we’re in to the keys, as that page count would imply. A page of maps, a page of wanderers for the first area and we’re in to keys. With no fucking appendices. This thing manages to put everything int he text. Monster stats. Descriptions. Magic items. Fuck you and fuck your appendices. Fuck you and fuck your bullshit pretext of a intro. It’s a dungeon, the designer provided the rooms and the fucking DM can get the characters there. Rock on man! None of this 96 page adventure is only six pages of room keys. Every ounce of creativity, every ounce of effort, went in to this dungeon with none wasted on bullshit (not that extra shit is always bullshit, it just almost always is bullshit.) We shall begin now our exploration of the Descent in to Madness with the entrance area: The Maw of Madness.

“This is the entrance of the Descent into Madness. It is the domain of living teeth which are born from a fallen giant, animated by a tooth fairy. They have an irrational fear of sugar and must roll morale or flee if sugar is thrown at them”

Well, well, well. Aren’t you feeling like a worthless piece of shit right now, you high and mighty dungeon designer? You will NEVER be able to match this. EVER. Duh. Of course. The Tooth Fairy. Giant. Maw of Madness. And not one of us has ever done anything like this. Room one? Ok. “: Four Giant Incisors hover around a large stone slab upon which gold and gems are heaped.” If you steal any of that treasure, The Tooth Fairies, by the way, then all of your teeth fall out and roll along the floor under the door to room three. Then, other parts of your body begin converting in to teeth and falling off and rolling away in the same manner. Jesus man! In room one! Four giant floating incisors! A pile of treasure, oh so tempting, and a fucking CURSE. Fuck your quest or save or die shit, man that thing is brutal!

“Behind the bars is a giant wisdom tooth, inlaid with a bejeweled golden filling worth 4000gp. However, the tooth is heavily stained and looks quite dead. If anyone touches the bars, a tooth-specter will pop out of the tooth and lunge at the person touching the bars.” Duh. Yeah. Of course. Now what the fuck did you think was going to happen? There’s some place else where there’s a pile of something burning, making purple smoke, that is taking the vague form of a spectre that says things like “You are doomed! Beware! Your fate awaits!” Nothing else, no encounter. Oh, except, If you snort the smoke you gain +2 wisdom. 

THIS ALL MAKES SENSE. It makes sense in some kind of weird New York Times Crossword puzzle way, but it makes sense. Like in the way the clue “Peter Parker” means banana hammock. That ghost from the dead wisdom tooth, the one behind bars? It can’t get at you. The bars stop it. The ghost thinks it’s still alive and thus can’t get through the bars. Of course. That’s what fucking ghosts do right? They don’t know they are dead? But then some jackass party member is going to say that out loud, and the ghost will recognize it, and then it can come through the bars. There is an internal logic here, from the tooth fairy being in the tooth area, to the ghost, to the sugar vulnerability. Yes, it’s more than a little absurd than normal D&D, but it also has an internal logic to all of it that is so much stronger than the vast majority of D&D adventures. We see hints of this in other adventures, with well written humans, bandits, humanoids, villagers, who do what is normal, or could be, in a situation. This is so much stronger than the run of the mill adventures that don’t do anything like this.

This is 100% a funhouse. There are zones here, so the tooth/maw area is only the entrance area and you progress to other areas. But it’s 100% a funhouse. The zones prevent it from being abstracted away to just a node/line drawing of some completely different vignette in a different room. You can follow, and exploit, the logic of the different areas. And then, of course, on the topic of funhouses, we have the required creatures out of place/Anachronisms. Like the ogre potters, including the one who doesn’t want to do poetry anymore but wants to turn it in to a restaurant and inn.  

I’m a fan, as well, of the kind of, I don’t know, basic originality that’s found in this? There’s this manner of viewing the world that doesn’t seem corrupted by Lord of the Rings or forty years of bog standard RPG supplements. It channels a kind of wonder of just a slightly off-kilter world that I typically associate with good OD&D works. I understand that “slightly off-kilter” and “wisdom tooth ghost” don’t go together, but there are many, many examples of other encounters that are not, perhaps, so out there. “There is a barred-off chamber to the south, a large metal door to the north with a button beside it, and a ring tied to a string hangs upside down from the floor as if effected by reverse gravity.” A ring, hanging upside down from the floor, tied to a string, floating there? That’s OD&D as all fuck. Of course, it then goes on “if a person actually wears it, their fingernail will tear off and begin attacking as an HD1 AC10 creature whilst screaming about all the horrible things its owner has done to it. If they are wearing a glove, there will be muffled screaming and wriggling after a brief painful sensation.” So, you know … but the ring floating on a string? Great! Well, both parts are great, just in different ways. There’s a tap, a metal tap! You know, like a sap tap? I don’t think I’ve EVER seen a tree tap in an adventure, ever. 

I should touch on the format a little. We get a short little intro to each room of a sentence or two. Not quite read-aloud, but enough for the DM to riff from. A kind of introduction to the room. A word or two may be bolded and then those will get their paragraphs below. Maybe, four more sentences per? It’s an effective text based format, not really using bullets or whitespace, but just leveraging bolding and terse written sections, short enough to take in quickly and run from while you digest more of the room. There is an effort to separate rooms by lines between the keys, but I don’t think this works super well. The room numbers are not bolded … maybe that would help? It’s a minor point but its there. It causes a kind of “eyes glazed over” effect.I would not that the monsters get descriptions that ARE effective. Too many times the appendix has the monster and it’s all ecology bullshit. No. The DM doesn’t need the winter feeding habits of hte creature when the party encounters them in summer. The DM needs the monster description. What the party is experiencing RIGHT. NOW. “2 x BEAR BALL – A bear that ate the spherical fruit

and became a ball. Moves by bouncing around, and bites with its teeth” or “3 x OVERBITER Disfigured humanoid head with no lower jaw, dripping blood. Its teeth are crooked and rotten. The flesh is pale” or  even “LAPIS LAZULI ALLIGATOR – It’s a big-ass alligator made from lapis lazuli, do you really need a description?!?” Decent description. Like the rooms it’s not overly evocative but it gets the job done, like a well-written 70’s description. We even get a unique attack in the bouncing bear. More than a retheming, the new monster gets a new way to attack. One might argue that this IS the purpose of a new monster. 

It’s all very efficient. It’s all very effective. “Pit – (20′ deep. At the bottom are 3 animal-hide sleeping rolls. These are mimics that’ll attack anyone who enters the pit. They do not climb the ladder.)” DUH! Sleeping rolls in the bottom of a pit?! Of course it’s a set up! Animal hides? You mean, like, maybe an animal? DUH! This is the very height of design, telegraphing EXACTLY what is going to happen to the players and then STILL having it be a surprise. 

This is, perhaps, the most put together funhouse dungeon I’ve seen. It has all of the elements, from new monsters to out of place creatures to bizarre areas. But it all has an internal logic. It’s all got just a bit of a twist on it so it FEELS fresh. The floating ring. The pit. Even the fucking headsman. Why didn’t you think of this? It’s perhaps a little too efficient, needing just a few more words here and there to bring things more to life, but it’s not overly bad in this area and some of the descriptions are more than decent: “In the center are 3 curved white pillars that meet at the top, forming a triple-archway. Their stone glows with purple and blue veins. From this triple-arch there comes a dribble of motes of light that fall into a shallow pool of shimmering light. Clumps of moss hang from the walls on all sides of the room.” 

Ultimately, you gonna give or die by the funhouse label on this one. And, because you should always be slamming shit, this IS the adventure you want to play, in D&D, if you are somehow attracted to the Mork Borg crowd. This is exactly what they all want to be doing, with their creativity at least. Rater than another eight room minimal mork borg dungeon with one concept that is ultimately a hollow experience surrounded by too much emphasis on production, try a black text on a white background adventure that really has some depth to it. 

For everyone else? Well, there’s that secret. That You Will NOT be sharing in public. At least not here. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages, which includes the map and two pages of keys, five rooms in total. This gets you solidly in to The Maw and you should be able from that to figure out if this is right for you, both in tone and in design.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/284503/descent-into-madness-first-steps?1892600