Lost in the Desert: Does Dungeon Module B4's Hook Work?

The setup for Dungeon Module B4: The Lost City is as follows:

The player characters are traveling with a desert caravan when a sandstorm separates them and causes them to become lost. They wander the desert for days. Their mounts die, and they drink all of their water and eat all of their food. They stumble upon a ruined city with a pyramid at its center. An open door leads inside. With no provisions and nowhere else to go, the party has no choice but to enter.

This is a pretty good setup for a dungeon-focused module with just 30-some pages of content. It gets the characters to the dungeon and forces them to go inside and explore it. For low level characters, the dungeon is the default mode of play, so it makes sense to just plop them down in front of it right away and get on with it. 

The fact that the characters are stuck in the desert with only the dungeon as a source of shelter and provisions is emphasized several times in the text:

It's a neat idea for a scenario, but in my reading of the module, I found that this bore little fruit. In the beginning, you get stuff like this (Room 4):

Aside from the coinage itself, the full water bottle will probably feel like a sick score for the players, who are constantly being reminded how thirsty their characters are. I will assume that a "full water bottle" is enough water to sustain one character for one day, so not a huge get considering B4 recommends a party of 6 to 10 characters:

But then that's the only mention of food and water as treasure until we get to Room 11, which says:

This is the Brotherhood of Gorm's forward operating post in the upper levels of the pyramid. They keep their food and water here. How much food and water? Well...enough. This is repeated in other areas in which members of the factions are found. There are five Brothers of Gorm here, so if the players decide to fight them, we might say they have enough food and water in this room to provision five people for a day or something of that nature.

But the point of this is not necessarily to kill the Brothers and take their food and water. Rather, if the party joins the Brotherhood (or one of the dungeon's other factions), then the faction will be able to provide them with a sustainable source of food and water (and other supplies), as indicated here:

We later find out that each faction has a proper stronghold in the underground Lost City and that they have secret means of traveling between it and the pyramid:

It only takes half a day for messengers from one of the factions to travel back and forth:

The characters can also (at the DM's option) safely rest in the areas controlled by each faction. 

This incentivizes the players to align themselves with one of the factions quickly.  This then forces difficult situations on them down the road when they encounter the other factions:

Except that savvy players will already know that aligning themselves with a faction is advantageous regardless of whether or not they have provisions. Maybe I'm being unfair. This is, after all, a basic adventure aimed at players new to the game, so some extra scaffolding might be needed to point the players towards social play and away from murder-hoboism.

My issue is that the whole "You're lost in the desert and must rely on the dungeon for provisions" scenario is pretty much immediately negated by giving the party potentially limitless access to said provisions.

That in itself is not so much of a problem. I find the food and water provisioning aspect of D&D to be only somewhat engaging and often quickly handwave-able. 

Provisioning is often cited as a logistical challenge players must overcome to engage in wilderness expeditions, so let's assume we're running a scenario like that. If the party crosses over or is traveling alongside a river or stream (of which there are often several in my games, because they present the characters with both obstacles as well as a secondary type of "road" to aid their navigation), then I assume they fill their water skins. The party usually has a chunk of the day between traveling overland and actually sleeping during which they can hunt and forage, which provides them with a (uncertain) source of food. Once they have a mule or some other pack animal (which they could easily come to possess before even setting out on their first adventure), I assume they're packing ample food and water unless said mule gets carried off by a giant bird or something. 

The dramatic question is rarely if ever "Can the party afford enough food and water for their expedition?" and far more often "Can the party carry enough food and water for their expedition?" Once they have some pack animals, the dramatic question is handily answered so long as said animals remain alive and in their possession.

There are also spells which can purify or create food and water. The decision to commit your one spell per day to something like that is somewhat interesting, but only briefly, while spells per day are scarce (though it must be said that in OD&D this is limited to the cleric's 1st level purify food and water spell, then the 4th level create water and the 5th level create food, which are costly spells indeed).

All that is to say that I don't really care that B4 quickly gives the DM an excuse to provide the player characters with as much food and water as they need. It does, however, raise the question as to whether the setup is necessary at all. This becomes pertinent when you consider other complications which the scenario creates.

Namely, how is XP for treasure supposed to be awarded? Or, more aptly, when is it awarded? In Dungeon Module B1, for example, we're told that XP is awarded for treasure only when said treasure is removed from the dungeon (and presumably brought back to town):

This is the same rule of thumb used in B2:

This is preserved in OSE as well:

So, how is this addressed in B4? Well, it isn't. The module never explains how the DM is meant to award XP within these unusual circumstances. Do the characters get XP as soon as they find treasure? Do they have to bring it back somewhere? If so, where?

The easiest solution is to go back to the bit about characters joining factions. If the characters join a faction, the DM might rule that the faction's headquarters are "safe" from wandering monsters and that the party can rest there. So we might say that the characters are awarded XP when they bring the treasure back to that location. It is apparently trivially easy for the factions to travel to and from the Lost City (which is, after all, a city), so perhaps they are safely storing the party's treasure in their stronghold as it comes flowing in.

This works well enough, but I do find it a bit unsatisfying. Take, for example, this:

2,000 silver pieces weighs as much as four suits of plate mail. In a normal scenario, bringing this back to town to get the XP might require its own trip, distributing the weight across multiple party members, or the use of pack animals or porters, all of which introduce their own complications. But this treasure is in Room 7, and the Brotherhood of Gorm is in Room 11 (right next door), so what could be a meaningful logistical challenge instead turns into only a minor delay if the party has joined the Brotherhood.

(As an aside, the treasure in Room 7 belongs to the Brotherhood of Gorm and is guarded by killer bees who have somehow been trained to recognize the Brothers, so presumably the Brothers will not be happy to learn that the party has murdered their bees, stolen their treasure, and brought it back for safekeeping on the party's behalf. That is to say, I'm aware that the example is not a good one, but the general point I'm making is hopefully still salient, which is that moving treasure from one room of a dungeon to another to be safeguarded by NPCs is considerably easier than bringing the same treasure from the dungeon back to town yourself.)

These large amounts of coin are encountered very often in the dungeon:

Since the faction headquarters are found in the early levels of the dungeon, this becomes less of a problem as the party delves deeper. That is, they will still have to backtrack quite a bit to bring the treasure to a "safe" place. However, taking into consideration that the party moves five times as fast when retracing a previously mapped route through the dungeon, it still isn't such a huge drawback.

What if the party angers the faction which holds all their treasure? What if the faction is treacherous? They can still lose access to the treasure, but the XP has already been gained. Was the treasure ever really secured?

Let's say that we're okay with handwaving food and water once the party joins a faction and we're comfortable letting the party offload the responsibility of transporting treasure to said faction. What else is lost when we trap the party in a dungeon as in B4?

When the players decide to return to town (to bring back their treasure for XP, to heal, or to reprovision), they must engage in a risk-reward calculation. Is it worth it to leave the dungeon now, and can the risk of doing so be tolerated? 

One possibility they must account for is that the dungeon might change while they're away. If they have allies in the dungeon, perhaps their enemies will act against said allies while they're gone. A room which they previously cleared of monsters might become reoccupied. A rival adventuring party might claim some of the dungeon's treasure for themselves. 

The dungeon is alive, and while the party is gone, it breathes and eats and bleeds. There's still opportunity for this if the party is resting in a faction's lair, but returning to town every so often takes more time, which provides more time for the dungeon to change.

Another possible risk is that of outdoor encounters. If the way from the dungeon back to town is known, the party still must contend with outdoor encounters on their forays back and forth. Is it worth it to bring this amount of treasure back to town now, knowing that along the way the party might encounter a gang of teenaged dragons or a warband of 100 orcs? Every trek through the wilderness is a gamble with fate. When the party spends the entire campaign in the dungeon, the game lacks the variety and high stakes posed by these expeditions.

Lastly, it's worth mentioning that trapping the party in the dungeon greatly limits the variety of play environments with which the players can engage. There is no wilderness. There is no settlement play. There are no outdoor monster lairs. There are no strongholds. All of these environments contribute their own unique play experiences to the campaign, and a campaign feels somewhat incomplete without representation for all of them.

That being said, the Lost City itself has some potential as a sandbox which the players can explore once they delve deep enough. It is a City, after all. It has strongholds:

It has monster lairs:

It has wilderness:

I think this could work a bit better if the party could access the Lost City more quickly. Since the factions can travel back and forth to the Lost City quite easily, I don't see why the party couldn't befriend them enough to gain access to those same secret routes, which would open up more gameplay possibilities much sooner. The factions' secret passages are not shown on the dungeon map, however, presumably because the Lost City is left unfinished, and allowing the party to use those passages might present too much of a burden for the beginner DM.

I think there are two ways forward for Dungeon Module B4 if I were to consider running it myself. 

Option 1 is to disregard the "lost in the desert" scenario hook entirely. Instead, place the dungeon in a proper sandbox and have the dungeon recently unearthed in the desert, with a gold rush of adventurers hurrying to explore it and claim its treasures. Place settlements, other dungeons, monster lairs, and strongholds as you normally would.

Option 2 is to keep the "lost in the desert" hook, but focus on developing the Lost City itself into a miniature sandbox, ensuring that it has all the appropriate location types to explore. Then, once the party joins one of the module's factions and earns their trust somehow, give them access to the City and let them run wild down there. The module has a few suggestions for further adventures once the party reaches the City.

Option 2 appeals to me, since Option 1 requires finishing the module anyway as well as adding a whole other level on top of it in the form of the "overworld" sandbox. Still, I do vastly prefer making the party trek back and forth overland between delves. Getting a faction to escort them back and forth to the City feels a bit easy, but it would also be easier from a prepping perspective.

Overall, I think B4 is a bit too ambitious for its own restraints. The dungeon itself is good, until you get to the lower levels which are entirely undeveloped in the module. Fortunately, these are optional, but the fact that developing the titular Lost City itself is entirely up to the DM is a major tease and a disappointment. It presents a great opportunity for a sicko like me, but I can imagine it being a source of frustration for a beginner DM (or someone who just doesn't have a lot of time) who wants a more complete package from a module.

The "lost in the desert" hook is an evocative one, but I'm not entirely sure it works. I like that it incentivizes the players to make nice with at least one faction (and in so doing, pits them against the others), but I dislike how much of D&D's variety is omitted as a result. That being said, if you developed the Lost City itself into a proper sandbox (as the module suggests you should) and gave the players access to all it has to offer much sooner, I think B4 could make a strong foundation for a more long-term sandbox campaign.