The Lost Tomb of Kazcuk Mot the Undying

By Greg Gawron
Advanced Fantasy Games
OSRIC
Levels 2-4

Hidden within a long-forgotten cemetery stands an abandoned mausoleum, once a place of grand splendor and solemn reverence. Now it lies broken and rotting — its roof collapsed, headstones shattered, and its glory buried beneath decades of neglect. But decay has not left this place empty. A new evil has claimed the ruin as its lair, and by fate or folly, you have found its resting place… and it now awaits your party of adventurers in The Lost Tomb of Kazcuk Mot the Undying™.

This 28 page adventure presents a small tomb with fourteen rooms that is primarily aimed at tournament play. There is a certain, physicality? to it that I find interesting, however, it’s a bad tournament adventure, with mucho read-aloud and padded out DM text with rather simplistic challenges. 

It’s not every day you see someone thanking both Finch AND Taormino in the same breathe, like the credits page to this one does. I assume he went to a con and they both said some kind of Gandhi shit to inspire him to publish? I hope that’s the case. I don’t know, Taormina cranks his shit piles out so maybe it was publishing tips? Anyway, this is a tournament adventure. Tournament adventures need a few things special going on so you can judge them similarly, fairly, amongst different tables. I think that’s all bullshit and it’s like comparing a Rothko to a Picasso. “You get a prize!” Fuck that shit. 

And, therein, is the issue, at least with regards to the tournament aspect to this. Let us consider two different scoring systems for a dungeon. In the first, I give you one point for each room you enter. In the second I roll a d6 for every room you enter and if it comes up a ‘1’ then I give you a point. IE: what are we measuring? The ability to penetrate the dungeon by any means possible or are we measuring how lucky the dice are for the party? Further, we must be up front with the players on what we are measuring. SHould they be tearing the place apart looking for treasure, or defeating monsters, or “winning” the plot, or trying to roll as high as they can on their dice? This adventure, of course, does not disclose the scoring to the party other than to say you get a point for accomplishments and lose a point for mishaps. And then it does things like “if you search the room then roll a d6. If you roll a 1 then the party finds a pearl necklace. They get a point.”  I seem to recall that some tourney adventures went so far as to have die rolls prepared for the DM in order to make things as fair as possible across tables. Rothko does not approve. So, as a tournament adventure I think this fails to do a decent job with the scoring. The answer is not more prepared die roll and less randomness, but a different axis of scoring, I think.

Ok, so, the adventure intro also says we can use this as a stand-along adventure. How was the play Mrs Lincoln? Not as bad as one might think, given the murder of the president.

I’m not happy with the adventure, or the interactivity as a whole, but there is a certain physicality to the interactivity that I think works well. One of the entry rooms has a door under a sarcophagus that flips up. There’s a grate in the floor to go down. There’s a portcullis to lift. There’s a decent amount of this kind of physical interactivity in the adventure. Or, maybe, environmental? Whatever. There are other classic elements as well, such as yellow mold, the old water monster in a pool of water thing, and so on. They don’t feel tired in this, but I’m also open to this being because the amount of text that surrounds them. Interactivity, beyond that physicality, is generally limited to stabbing. And, even that is a bit iffy. The wanderers are bats, rats, and centipedes and they show up a decent amount. One wonders at the boredom of it all. 

Otherwise, the adventure has some of the long standing usual problems with the untrained. The read-aloud can be quite long. And, of course, players don’t listen to long read aloud. It’s not a new thing. You’re boring them with read-aloud. Keep it short. It’s the designers job to figure out how. Further, the read-aloud over-reveals the rooms contents. You want the read-aloud to hint at things for the players to have their characters follow up on, not to just expo dump every little detail. at the party. You want the back and forth. 

EVerything here is padded out. Every read-aloud ends with “WHAT DO YOU DO” and then immediately we get a “DM NOTES” heading. Yeah, got it man. It’s not read-aloud so it’s DM notes. Yeah, got it, the read-aloud is over so now the party and do things. The first trap takes like three paragraphs to describe, and it’s a simple stair foot pit. Ok, so, I take it back. Four paragraphs. This is a quarter of a page. For a simple trap. It’s not complex. It’s just padded out. The wanderer text is padded out. “Inside the mausoleum the characters will find ample space to move about and it may appear to be a safe place to rest and take shelter. It is not.” Jesus man, that did nothing for the adventure. It is just worthless text. You didn’t actually say anything. All you’re doing is adding words to the adventure. And these filler words and paragraphs get in the way of the ACTUAL meaningful text that the DM needs to locate in order to run it at the table. The DM needs to be able to quickly scan the text, and right now they have to dig through shit like that in order to get to the stuff that matters. 

It’s just relentless. The editor is the designer, which is either magnificent, if the designer knows what the fuck they are doing, or a disaster is they do not. The designer was not born with some a priori knowledge of how to write an adventure and do layout and what makes it fun and so on. Ideally, an editor, a decent one anyway, can help with some of that. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. You might be a decent DM. You are probably an ok guy But YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. Seek help. Seek an editor. Learn what makes an adventure a good adventure and also an easy to run adventure. 

This is $20 at DriveThru. I think that’s because it was kickstarted. I’m going to, rather generously for me, NOT say this is a fucking cash grab, even though the first thing published was kickstarted at $20. That advice above? Learning what makes a good adventure, getting an editor, etc? You can ignore that. You can go down the path of filthy lucre. Just crank shit out on kickstarter the most efficiently possible and build your market. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/562629/the-lost-tomb-of-kazcuk-mot-the-undying-osric?1892600