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.

Which Version of Palace of the Silver Princess Should You Run?

Over on Bluesky I did a readthrough of both the orange cover and green cover versions of Dungeon Module B3: Palace of the Silver Princess. My reading of the orange version was more in-depth, whereas my reading of the green version was more for the sake of comparison. I thought it would be productive to summarize my thoughts in an easily-digested blog post.

For those who don't know, the publication history of this module is a mess. The Wikipedia article about the module sums it up pretty well. Essentially, Jean Wells wrote the original, orange version of the module. For one reason or another, TSR waited until the day before the module's publication (when the copies arrived at the office for shipping) to decide that it was unacceptable. All of the copies were recalled or confiscated and destroyed.

The explanation at the time was that the illustration of "The Illusion of the Decapus" by Laura Rosloff was objectionable because it was overtly sexual and was exposing children to the S&M fetish. This was also in the midst of the Satanic Panic, so another explanation was that the illustration gave credence to the claim that D&D was promoting devil worship.

Since then, the story has changed. It is now widely believed that the actual objectionable image was Erol Otus's illustration of the ubues (three-headed, -armed, and -legged monsters with both male and female heads), which depicted the monsters with heads that were essentially caricatures of TSR executives (notably Brian and Kevin Blume, though accounts vary). Apparently, Wells had wanted to replace this illustration before the module went to print, but was told it was too late.

Whatever the exact reason, the end result was the same. The original version of this module was essentially memory-holed. Many players from that time are familiar with only the revised green version, which is the version that was officially released after the original underwent many significant revisions at the hands of Tom Moldvay. You can read Wizards of the Coast's own flawed hagiography and download the orange version for free here.

The original version was similar to Dungeon Module B1: In Search of the Unknown, with many rooms empty of monsters, traps, and treasure, with instructions for the DM to determine these elements their self (the quality of these empty rooms, in my opinion, is not quite as good as those found in B1).

Not every room was empty, however. The module also contained several intentionally designed encounters with unique monsters, among them the aforementioned ubues and decapus (pictured on the cover of both versions), sentient bubbles, a giant six-legged rat with a toothy duck bill and as many hit dice as an owlbear, an amoeba which disguises itself as a pool of water, paralyzes you, and dissolves you, a giant snake with an enchanting whistle, giant marmoset monkeys large enough to serve as mounts for halflings, and a moss that puts you to sleep and then grows over, suffocates, and devours your unconscious body.

The original module was a relatively straightforward site-based adventure - an ancient palace in ruins, and legends of a giant ruby still hidden within. What will you do with that information? Well, probably go explore the dungeon and try to find the ruby - classic D&D stuff.

In addition to the dungeon, there was a minimally-detailed map of the surrounding region with short entries about settlements and geographic features - a city ruled by a Chaotic baroness (the only living descendant of the titular Silver Princess, who wants the ruby for herself), a shire occupied and terrorized by the baroness's soldiers for unknown reasons, a halfling village which is home to escaped prisoners and slaves, a canton cut off from the barony by a dark and foreboding wood, a swamp inhabited by strange monsters, where spellcasting is unpredictable, a mountain range riddled with abandoned dwarven mines, and another range plagued by storm clouds conjured by an evil wizardess.

The module was filled with mystery. According to legend, the kingdom ruled by the Silver Princess fell into ruin when a stranger arrived at a party to see the Princess's ruby. A red dragon appeared over the valley and burned the land, a man in silver and blue armor upon its back. However, upon exploring the ruined palace, the players may find that the relationship between the Princess and the stranger was not as adversarial as it seemed - or, perhaps, she was corrupted by this sinister interloper. So what exactly happened?

The module does not provide an answer, because the DM was expected to. It is filled with unanswered questions. The land surrounding the Palace is wandered by a tinker in a special wagon that can float across rivers and lakes. Should the players have occasion to visit his home, they will find in his bedroom a suit of silver armor covered by a blanket, and a strange set of riding equipment too large for a horse - intriguing! Inside the dungeon is a chaotic cleric, Catharandamus, who has partnered with Aleigha, a werebear with a ruby sword, who is believed to be another descendant of the Princess. It is possible for the player characters to align themselves with the two, but it's unclear why they're at the Palace and what they're trying to accomplish. And what of the soldiers with the wolf insignia, who can be found on the random encounter tables? Who are they, and what are they doing here?

By comparison, the green version is much more focused and utterly non-mysterious. The region surrounding the Palace is totally omitted. Rather than being an ancient ruin, the Palace was recently besieged by Arik, an evil outsider akin to a godlike entity. The ruby is a vessel of sorts to Arik, which drove some of the Palace inhabitants mad, petrified the others, and trapped the Princess and the dragon-rider (who is unambiguously good in this version) inside the ruby itself. The Palace is held within in a stasis field while Catharandamus (teleported there by Arik's magic) tries to summon Arik into the world.

The party is visited in their dreams by the Protectors, a race of magical beings from the land of Faerie who beseech the player characters to enter the palace and free the Princess. (The Protectors are also in the original version, but they are simply magical guardians of the Palace's tower, warding it against evil so that the party can safely rest within.) Throughout the adventure, the Protectors serve as the voice of the DM, giving the players hints as to where to go next, how to destroy the ruby, and the like. If the Princess is freed, the land returns to normal, and all is more or less hunky dory.

Gone too are the module's original monsters (excepting only the decapus - which loses its ability to create hyper-specific and horrifying torture illusions - and some deadly plants). Instead, the magic of Arik has attracted the usual D&D fare - goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, and the like - to terrorize the place. These creatures were present in the original as well, but it is suggested that they are minions of Catharandamus, which he has brought there as an insurance policy against the berserkers who serve Aleigha. Although the two are aligned, the former does not trust the latter. 

There is a hint of faction play in the original. This nuance is totally absent from the green version. Aleigha and her dwarf henchmen are replaced by a werewolf and some orcs. Aleigha's ruby sword (a magical heirloom which introduces a complication to the evil baroness's claim to the Palace and ruby) is now the Sword of Arik, one of many MacGuffins which can be used to destroy the ruby and yield the module's happy ending. The mysterious tinker, himself a potential complicating piece of the puzzle, is omitted entirely.

I would be remiss not to mention Travis. In the orange version, he is a paranoid old adventurer who tortured and killed his party out of greed and now wanders the dungeon holding "court" - capturing, torturing, and killing adventurers to take their treasure. In the green version, he is instead a Palace guard driven mad by the magic of Arik, but otherwise doing more or less the same.

That all is not to say that the green version is without its merits. What might compel you to run one version over the other? Well...

If you want a classic old school D&D dungeon, run the orange version. In the orange version, the Palace is an ancient ruin filled with odd monsters, tricks, and traps. The party's goal is to go there and find the ruby, doing with it whatever they please. The player characters are not assumed to be do-gooders with any higher purpose to their motivations. It's a classic D&D smash-and-grab operation.

If you want a narrative-driven adventure or your player characters are assumed to be heroes, run the green version. The green version has more of a high fantasy vibe - an unambiguously good princess and her kingdom in peril at the hands of an unambiguously evil villain. There are magical fairies which can serve as the DM's voice to nudge the players along the intended path. If the player characters are victorious, they're heroes of the realm and earn a substantial reward, a day of thanksgiving in their honor, and even a ceremony where they're presented with medals.

If you want the Palace to be part of a larger world, run the orange version. The orange version includes a regional map with additional locations like the evil barony and its surrounding settlements, and mysterious wilderness locations like the Abaddon Woods, Misty Swamp, and Thunder Mountains. There are multiple factions suggested by the module's descriptions of these locations, which place the Palace within a larger context and give the players other activities to pursue before or after finding the ruby. The locations are minimally detailed, so you will have to do some legwork to bring them to life.

If you want the Palace to be self-contained (or want to drop it into an existing sandbox), well, you can probably run either version, but I would still lean towards the orange version. Both versions describe a decent dungeon, but I lean towards the orange one because of the Palace's age in that version, which lends itself towards being plopped down as just another ruin on the map. In the green version, the calamity is extremely recent and the kingdom is in immediate peril as a result. It seems harder to just drop that into any old sandbox.

If you want a dungeon that "makes sense", well, neither version really does. Whichever version you use, the dungeon layout is somewhat nonsensical and "random". The green version feels more "palatial" and provides names to all the rooms, which makes it easier to imagine what those places were originally used for, but there's also weird details like tapestries, mosaics, and paintings depicting the Princess and the dragon-rider. The dragon-rider apparently arrived at the Palace the day before Arik struck, so why is there so much artwork of him? This makes more sense in the orange version, where an indeterminate amount of time passed between the dragon-rider's arrival and the ruin of the Palace.

If you want to make the dungeon "yours", run the orange version. Several rooms in the dungeon have space for the DM to add monsters, traps, and treasure. This ensures that no two DMs' version of the dungeon will be the same. Likewise, many characters' motivations are not made explicitly clear. You will have to come up with these yourself, but by the end you will have your own private Palace of the Silver Princess.

If you want everything figured out for you, run the green version. This version's keying of the dungeon is much more complete. You won't have to do any prep beyond the usual or rolling to find out at the table, and you won't have to figure out what any NPC's "deal" is.

If you want original monsters, run the orange version. As I've already mentioned, this version of the module has some truly horrifying, memorable, and silly original monsters. I like the living bubbles that drown you, but if a six-legged duck-billed giant rat as tough as an owlbear is too goofy for you, you may not like this version as much.

If you want your standard D&D monsters, run the green version. While goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs aren't anything new, that doesn't mean they're bad. There are merits to every dungeon containing unique monsters, but there are also drawbacks. If your setting is otherwise plagued by monstrous humanoids, maybe you want your Palace to be overrun by them as well. It might be odd if your campaign features the usual D&D fare, only for this one location to randomly have very weird creatures that don't show up anywhere else in your game.

If you want faction play, run the orange version. The faction play in this version of the module is not especially strong, but it does exist. In the green version, basically everything in the Palace is a minion of Arik and united against the player characters. In the orange version, there is at least tension between Catharandamus and Aleigha and their respective minions. The ubues are a faction of their own and may play the party against Catharandamus, align themselves with him, or even help the party against him. That's not to mention the faction play you can have between the evil baroness and the other settlements in the region, plus Aleigha, who may also be the rightful heir to the Princess.

If you want to make Travis an imposing foe, run the green version. Travis the insane adventurer/palace guard is probably my favorite NPC here. I really like the idea of this crazy old fighter ruling a corner of the Palace like a kingdom, torturing intruders, holding court, and training giant apes to guard his treasure. In the orange version, Travis is a lone operator, a 1st level fighter, and has just 4 hit points. Shame! In the green version, he has 16 hit points, is a 3rd level fighter, and commands a retinue of orcs which he dresses in guard uniforms. Cute! He apparently hangs out in his office writing gibberish reports on the conditions of his orc troops, mimicking the behavior of the guard captain he slew. This is welcome additional detail. 

You could also easily take the suped up Travis and plant him in the orange version along with his orc guards. I probably would not have Travis wandering the dungeon all on his lonesome and relatively easy prey for adventurers - I'd have him fortified in his lair, sending his orcs out to round up intruders. It would be very cool if the orc guards captured the player characters and brought them before Travis for judgement.

To conclude, here's a random miscellany of other neat features from both versions:

• If you want your player characters to be able to hitch a ride on a wagon that floats across rivers and lakes, run the orange version (or add the Tinker to the green version if you're dropping it into a sandbox).
• If you love paralyzing your player characters and depriving them of air, run the orange version. Many monsters in the module have paralyzing attacks. There's a whole section in the introduction with drowning rules based on what armor the character is wearing, and many monsters and traps try to drown the characters or suffocate them.
• If you want snakes in unusual places, run either version.
• If you want "good" boxed text, run the green version. The orange version mixes the typical "at a glance" information with stuff that the players would only learn once their characters investigate an object in the room (the contents of buckets and barrels, for example). The green version's boxed text is much more consistent with what you'd usually expect from these descriptions.
• If you want your lady thieves to be HOT and evil and not just "above average-looking" and friendly, run the green version (or run the orange version but make the lady thieves HOT and evil).
• If you want your player characters to be able to capture and sell or tame a young cave bear, run the orange version.
• If you want a trap to drop 20 pounds of glitter on the player characters, run the orange version.
• If you want a harp made of ice that can magically calm any beast, run the orange version (or assign this property to the same harp in the green version, which in that version is just another MacGuffin that can destroy the ruby, rather than a more generally useful magic item).
• If you like strange eggs in unusual places, run the orange version.
• If you want to teach your players a lesson about robbing a Palace they're supposed to be saving, run the green version. When they free the Princess at the end of the module, she will get angry at them if they looted the Palace on their way, demanding that they return the stolen treasure and giving them a lesser reward. For a game like D&D (especially this era of D&D), this is quite cruel!

Overall, it probably sounds like I prefer the orange version...and I do! In fact, reading both versions has convinced me that there's little if any reason for the green one to exist at all. Obviously, Jean Wells was screwed over by TSR, thrown under the bus, and her work appropriated and basically erased entirely by the revision. 

The orange version is certainly incomplete, with unstocked rooms, dungeon history, and important NPC motivations left to the imagination of the DM, but this is pretty consistent with the trend in modules published at the time. There seems to be a belief that Moldvay was needed to "finish" the module, regardless of the other justifications for its burial, however I would argue that he does a poor job. This is not intended as a dig at Moldvay, who was put in a position which is probably not conducive to good adventure writing. 

What results is a module with an entirely different feel than the original. It is less unique and weird. It wields clumsy narrative devices in service of a black-and-white, linear adventure of unambiguous heroism which feels more at home among the content published by Wizards of the Coast today, rather than among the B series adventures of the time. 

The fault is not with Wells or Moldvay, Rosloff or Otis, but with TSR themselves. Whatever the actual reason for the reaction to the orange version, the failure is not one of imagination or execution, but of development and oversight. If there was objectionable material, it should have been identified before the module went to print, and it should have been the original authors, illustrators, and editors who were left to determine how to correct the issue, not another writer brought in to hastily patch and retcon the initial work in the eleventh hour.

As I have demonstrated, there are reasons why one might wish to run the green version over the original. I may have even convinced you that the green version is right for you, but I have not convinced myself. For me, it's Jean Wells's Palace of the Silver Princess all the way.

B1 and Toyetic Dungeon Rooms

Over on Bluesky, I did a walkthrough of B1: In Search of the Unknown. I already wrote about how B1 tells the story of Rogahn and Zelligar, two adventurers motivated "by greed and vague evil" who in their retirement became dungeon sickos and built Quasqueton, a labyrinthine dungeon stronghold, as a monument to their own egos and sadism, and as a middle finger to the upstart adventurers who would one day surely come to plunder its riches.

But how, exactly, does the module tell that story? Well, it's largely through its room descriptions.

By default, most of the rooms in Quasqueton are empty. A few contain incidental or major treasures, tricks, or traps. But, being a teaching/introductory module, the intention is for the DM to manually stock each of the rooms (excepting a few) with monsters or treasure from a provided list.

When I stocked my version of B1, I treated a roll of 1 or 2 on d6 as a monster. If there was no monster, a roll of 1 on d6 would indicate a treasure should be placed. This is based on OSE's stocking procedure, minus special rooms because those are already written into the module:

That still leaves something like 56% of rooms empty. My version of B1 ended up with 33 empty rooms out of 56 total rooms - that's 59% (here I'm counting traps and special rooms already written into the module as "empty" in the sense that I'm not adding anything that isn't already there - these are not strictly-speaking empty rooms, so the numbers aren't wholly accurate).

That number is fairly consistent with AD&D, where 60% of dungeon rooms are empty:

Overall, I was impressed by the quality of B1's rooms. Even without monsters, tricks, traps, or treasure, few of them are ever actually truly empty. This is consistent with modern OSR design philosophies, wherein empty rooms can be actionable, containing mundane items to use, clues to or warnings about encounters elsewhere in the dungeon, environmental storytelling in the form of artwork and other set dressings, or dangers other than monsters, tricks, and traps, such as hazards or obstacles.

Interestingly, despite what the common wisdom may be regarding empty rooms, there is some evidence to suggest that Gygax (in the earliest days, at least) imagined empty rooms as being truly empty - or at least, not worth detailing. Even so, truly empty space in a dungeon can still serve a purpose by facilitating tension or mystery, or by helping with the pace of the game, providing breathing room between dungeon factions or a safe place for the party to rest or think.

For the most part, B1's rooms, when empty, are of the mundane items and environmental storytelling variety. As my previous post describes, many of the rooms tell the story - by way of carvings, tapestries, paintings, torture devices, and manacled skeletons - of Rogahn and Zelligar's egos, cruelty, and paranoia. Many others are filled with mundane equipment and barrels, bottles, and casks of various unremarkable substances.

One thing that struck me when reading B1 was that even those rooms without prewritten tricks, traps, and treasure, when my stocking method revealed them to have no additional monsters or treasure, still ignited my imagination. Specifically, they made me imagine how these rooms might play if there was some additional element like a monster or treasure. That is, the descriptions made me imagine the rooms' potential.

Take for example Area II, the kitchen. You could easily just describe this room as "An old kitchen. Y'know, there's moldy food and utensils and crap all over, but there's nothing else here." And that's basically what the room is. There are two big cooking pits, a very narrow chimney, moldy food on the tables (including a "particularly noxious" chunk of cheese), hanging utensils, pots and pans, and a large cast iron kettle hanging from the ceiling by a chain.

The room isn't empty. It's got stuff in it. At the same time, none of the stuff here is particularly useful to adventurers (unless they want to cook a monster they kill later), it doesn't provide any clues about the rest of the dungeon, there isn't much in the way of environmental storytelling (besides establishing that people used to eat here a long time ago), and there are no other dangers present.

But I can't help but imagine what if there was something here. What if a huge spider hid in one of the cooking pits? What if giant centipedes nested in the chimney? What if you got into a food fight with some hobgoblins? Is the "particularly noxious" cheese an especially potent weapon? Would it have the same effect if the enemies were instead stinking troglodytes? What if you stabbed a goblin with a fork or smashed it over the head with a cooking pan? Could you use the kettle on a chain as a wrecking ball against a band of kobolds?

Or take Area X, the storeroom. This one contains barrels of stale but still edible foodstuffs. This room falls into the "mundane but useful stuff" category, since the party can provision itself here (albeit with old, nasty food), but the room takes on a different aspect if, for example, giant rats are currently getting their way into the barrels. Or, if the party does plunder the room's contents but isn't careful to avoid spillage or to reseal the barrels, vermin and monsters will be attracted to the place on future delves.

Or Area XXXVII, the recreation room. This is basically Rogahn's gym, complete with archery targets, barbells, a pullup bar, a climbing rope, very heavy weapons, and battered shields. The party might make use of some arrows, lug around a notched sword, or replace a broken shield with one in less than pristine condition. 

But I can't help but imagine if there were orcs in here. Would they challenge the party to some sort of sporting competition? A single player character would get exhausted if they tried to defeat the orcs - who are probably universally quite strong - in every competition themselves, so the whole party would have to get involved. A thief could likely win an archery contest or climb a rope pretty quickly, but what will the magic-user do?

And you might say, "That's all well and good, but the rooms are still 'empty'. They may have potential as the scene of such an encounter, but in the absence of one they're just places for the party to poke around for a bit, maybe pick up one or two useful items, take a breather, and move on. The potential isn't used!"

But that isn't true, because empty rooms might only be empty when the party first encounters them. If you're checking for wandering monsters (which you should), any one of those rooms could suddenly not be empty at the roll of a die. This is doubly true if you're restocking the dungeon or having the monsters that remain in the dungeon react to the party's actions in between delves - both of these practices can result in originally empty rooms becoming occupied.

If a room's dressing is simply barren, there's little creative juice to squeeze when and if a monster ends up being encountered there. The gnolls are simply passing through, camping out, or maybe looking for secret doors - what else could they be doing in a barren environment? But in the kitchen they might be roasting some slain gnomes in the cooking pit, in the storage room they might be reprovisioning, and in the recreation room they might be pumping iron.

What I'm getting at is that empty rooms should be "toyetic" - that is, they should contain lots of little elements that the players can mess around with like knobs and levers. I'm cribbing this particular term from Prismatic Wasteland's Encounter Checklist. That post describes a goblin encounter wherein each of the goblins has a sort of prop that invites interaction or experimentation by the players. The encounter should be designed "like a child’s playset—something with elements the characters can interact with. These can come in many forms: ladders, rope swings, trap doors, greased floors, functional stove tops, round boulders begging to be pushed, things that can be opened or locked or launched, etc., etc." That sounds a lot like a well-designed dungeon room!

The Encounter Checklist is in turn derived from Goblin Punch's Dungeon Checklist, which includes "Something to Experiment With". In the Dungeon Checklist, this role is filled by what we might ordinarily call a trick or special room, but those are relatively rare (1-in-6 rooms in OSE and 1-in-10 rooms in AD&D). 

What I'm arguing for in this post is that every room in your dungeon should have something to play with. That might be something more or less mundane like a bunch of adventurer's corpses to examine, a potentially valuable object like a nude statue of a bodacious babe to leer at, or a magical oddity like a mica formation you can chip pieces off of and eat for various magical effects. 

That might be all that's in the room, but if there does happen to be a monster or a treasure, the set dressing gives you something to riff on. There are kobolds picking over the bodies, orcs leering at the statue, or gnolls sticking pieces of rock in their mouths. One of the adventurer's corpses still has treasure, there's a jeweled pendant hanging from the statue's neck, or one of the pieces of mica transmutes itself into a valuable gemstone when removed.

Because B1 is a teaching module and is intended to be manually stocked with monsters and treasure by the new DM, it's especially important that each and every room has such elements to work with. There are certainly truly empty rooms in B1 - the second level of the dungeon in particular is filled with empty caverns, many of which are barely described - but they are few and far between. 

And that should be the norm. Design all of your dungeon rooms under the assumption that, even if there's no monster, treasure, or whatever there now, there could be something there later. In that case, you'll want there to be some toys with which to play.

Greed and Vague Evil: B1 and the Retired Adventurer as Dungeon-Brained Sicko

I did a fun little walkthrough of B1: In Search of the Unknown over on Bluesky. While you can read the detailed play by play over there (including my step by step stocking of each and every room per the module's instructions, with some interesting results), I thought I'd use the blog to discuss some more high-level impressions of the module's contents overall.

One thing that immediately struck me about this module is that it's essentially the embodiment of my blog post Retired Adventurers Long for the Dungeon. That is that high-level adventurers, upon retiring to their (typically) wilderness seats of power will, for whatever reason, feel compelled to construct "dungeon mazes thereunder." Dungeons are all that adventurers know. They stake their claim to power and wealth by plundering them, then apply that same wealth and experience to perpetuating their existence. Inadvertently or not, they create the proving grounds for the next generation of adventurers.

This is basically the premise of B1. Rogahn the fighter and Zelligar the magic-user built a single tower for lookout purposes, but it isn't detailed at all in the module and may not even still stand. Instead, the focus is on the mazelike dungeon beneath the tower, which contains all of the retired adventurers' living quarters and utility rooms.

But the dungeon isn't just a place where Rogahn and Zelligar once lived. It's also filled with impracticalities like needlessly long hallways, twisting corridors to nowhere, door labyrinths, pit traps, and portcullises which drop from the ceiling to trap hapless wanderers in dead end passages. The dungeon is not incidentally hazardous to plunderers, but intentionally so. Rogahn and Zelligar lived alongside these contrivances, presumably because they anticipated that one day, their spiritual successors would arrive to overcome the challenges they had created.

This can all be written off as dungeon weirdness typical of TSR modules of the time, but I think this would be a disservice to the legacy of the great Rogahn and Zelligar. The dungeon is not just a lair with some weirdness necessitated by gameplay expectations. Rather, it is a place that tells a story about who these two characters were - they had huge egos, were without moral scruples, and were massive trolls.

Rogahn and Zelligar are a perfect representation of the character of adventurers in D&D. "Their motives were based on greed and some kind of vague (or chaotic) evil." Using "the work of hundreds of slaves and laborers" they built their stronghold far from civilization, "since both men disliked visitors and intruders." 

They ventured out only occasionally to do adventurer stuff, until for some reason they emerged to defeat a barbarian horde which threatened the valley which the stronghold overlooked. This was either because they expected a substantial reward from the populace (which they did receive) or because their massive egos simply could not tolerate barbarians within their domain (this is my read on the situation). They then went on campaign in the barbarian lands, never to return.

But their stronghold, Quasqueton, remains, and it is a monument to both men's legacies. The place is thick with ego:

• The entrance corridor contains a pair of magic mouths which declare one after the other and then in unison: "WHO DARES ENTER THIS PLACE AND INTRUDE UPON THE SANCTUARY OF ITS INHABITANTS? ONLY A GROUP OF FOOLHARDY EXPLORERS DOOMED TO CERTAIN DEATH! WOE TO ANY WHO PASS THIS PLACE - THE WRATH OF ZELLIGAR AND ROGAHN WILL BE UPON THEM!" Then they both laugh as the enchantment fades away. Keep in mind that this effect would have been triggered any time anyone entered the stronghold even when Rogahn and Zelligar were still alive.
• Zelligar's chamber contains a 70-foot wall carving of himself casting the spell which turned away the barbarian horde. 
• His laboratory includes a wall hanging which reads "What mysterious happenings have their birth here? Only the greatest feats of wizardry, for which every element of earth, water, and sky is but a tool!" 
• The library has blocks of white granite in the floor which form "R&Z".
• Rogahn's mistress's chamber contains a tapestry depicting himself rescuing her from a burning village with enemies watching from afar.
• Rogahn's own chamber contains tapestries which depict him personally slaying a dragon (his companions are also there, but he is striking the killing blow), his and Zelligar's battle with the barbarians, he and his mistress holding hands on horseback, and him and Zelligar shaking hands atop the hill where the stronghold now sits.
• Rogahn and Zelligar gifted their advisor what is essentially an autographed painting of themselves which hangs in the advisor's chamber.
• The unfinished second level contains a museum dedicated to Rogahn and Zelligar's own lives and deeds. Who's to say how else the two would have managed to stroke their own egos had they lived to finish their construction?

Quasqueton is filled with indications of not only Rogahn and Zelligar's egos, but also their sinister nature:

• Rogahn and Zelligar used orc slaves in the stronghold's construction, and some of those slaves can still be found within the dungeon.
• Zelligar's laboratory contains a barbarian chieftain's skeleton hanging from the ceiling and also serves as a torture chamber.
• The stronghold's trophy room contains not just trophies from monsters but also a dwarf skeleton suspended in irons from the ceiling.
• The worship area contains an idol of a horned head with an evil visage.
• There is another barbarian skeleton on display in the museum on the second level.

Finally, Quasqueton contains many elements which seem to exist for the sole purpose of inconveniencing, annoying, or otherwise thwarting adventurers:

• The aforementioned needlessly long corridors, hallways to nowhere, and labyrinth of doors.
• The "wizard's annex" where Zelligar practiced his magic contains, for seemingly no reason, an illusory treasure hoard. It is not tied to a trap or any other element of danger which would justify its existence.
• Zelligar's laboratory contains a glass jar with a black cat in clear liquid. If someone opens the jar, the cat yowls, jumps out, and flees, even passing through closed doors, never to appear again. This is there explicitly "to surprise and/or mystify the adventurers."
• Two teleportation rooms in close proximity connected by winding hallways exist solely to confuse intruders attempting to map the dungeon.
• The room of pools contains some elements which might be of practical use, such as healing liquid, drinking water, and fish, but also acid, sickening syrup, wine which compels imbibers to drink to excess, liquid which puts the drinker to sleep, another illusory treasure hoard, and water which causes muteness.
• A guest chamber contains a false door which seemingly exists solely so that intruders will attract monsters while trying to open it.
• A hallway outside an empty utility room contains false steps which trick intruders into thinking they've descended a level.
• A statue on the second level points to a rocky outcropping of no significance.

There are other tricks and traps to be found in Quasqueton, but those which I haven't mentioned at least serve an apparent purpose in deterring intruders or meddlers who may have been present during Rogahn and Zelligar's lives. The poison needle trap on the nightstand in Zelligar's chamber is protection against thieving guards or apprentices. The portcullis or pit trap in the dead end hallways could be used to trap or kill visiting dignitaries or enemies. The treasure cave on the second level is guarded by animating statues because slaves working in the caves might stumble upon or know about and seek to plunder that room.

The tricks and traps listed above, however, seem to have been included with the assumption that one day Rogahn and Zelligar would be no more, and that upstart adventurers like they once were would come to rob the strongholds of its riches, just as Rogahn and Zelligar did to similar dungeons in their youth.

B1 is a good teaching module, not just for its advice for players and Dungeon Masters, but because it gives us a look into the psyche of the retired adventurer: reclusive, inscrutable, and egomaniacal. Maybe that's not the kind of retirement you as a player see for your character, and maybe as a DM you don't want all your retired adventurers to be this type, but it's an interesting place to start when thinking about what all those deserted castles are supposed to look like from a gameplay perspective.

As should always be the case when preparing to run a site-based adventure like a dungeon crawl, the place should tell a story. In the case of Quasqueton, with its elaborate tapestries, proudly displayed skeletons, and middle fingers to adventurers, B1 tells the strange story of Rogahn and Zelligar, dungeon-brained sickos.

Review: Mörk Borg Miscellany (Bloat, Devil's Tomb, the Hexed Gauntlet of Kagel-Secht, and Nurse the Rot)

What follows is a collection of reviews of four short adventures for Mörk Borg. Spoilers abound beyond this point.

Bloat

Bloat is a "A gluttonous dungeon for Mörk Borg". It is written by Greg Saunders, with an original map design by Dyson Logos and editing and art by Johan Nohr. It is a one-page dungeon and looks like this:

In print this takes up a two-page spread. It is quite easy to use at the table, and I was able to run it for my players in just one roughly two-hour session (albeit with a somewhat rushed anticlimax due to time constraints).

The premise is that a vagabond, Silas, stumbled upon a dungeon which was once the lair of a cult of bacchanalian priests dedicated to a goddess of fat and plenty. There he found a cursed set of cutlery which allows the wielder to eat anything and makes everything taste delicious, but also compels the wielder to eat. The dungeon is filled with fleshy ceramic automatons that kidnap villagers to feed to Silas.

The scenario suggests a few hooks:

• The PCs are recruited by the missing villagers' families or lord to find and rescue them
• The PCs seek shelter in the dungeon while hiding from something else
• The PCs are looking for Silas

Of these, the first appeals to me most. Have a lord post a reward for the problem to be dealt with and that should be sufficient motivation. The second option doesn't actually encourage exploration of the dungeon, and the third doesn't quite work unless you come up with a reason why Silas must be found (he is just a vagabond, after all). One possibility I toyed with was to instead make Silas an infamous highwayman, wayfarer, or the like, and to put a bounty on his head. However, this doesn't necessarily point in the direction of the dungeon, which is where the adventure is.

Since I ran this as a one-shot, I used option one. Villagers have gone missing, and a local lord has posted a reward to find them and resolve the problem. I added in that the lord's men had recently routed a band of brigands and that their leader, a killer named Silas, had escaped. Also, just outside the village there was an old temple once used by the Bacchanalists in certain dark rituals. Perhaps one or both are somehow responsible for the recent troubles? 

That seemed like enough set up for me - not that it mattered, because I had the players start at the dungeon anyway. If I were to instead run a sandbox and wanted to include this adventure therein, I think this framing would work well enough to get things moving.

The dungeon consists of six keyed rooms with a few notes about features in the areas between (discarded bones, a falling block trap, and a fountain of sweet water). The keyed rooms include a ratbadger's den, a larder where the automatons prepare feasts for Silas, a sewage pit where the automatons dump Silas's waste (and where it comes to life), a chapel where villagers are forced by the automatons to pray to a statue of the goddess of fat and plenty, an assembly area where automatons are created and stored, and the court of Silas, the Fattened King, whose corpulent form occupies the entire room, where he devours whatever the automatons bring him.

This is a neat little dungeon, if not a bit crowded. Every room has some sort of creature in it. Most are not explicitly hostile, so it need not be a combat-packed slog. Many of the dungeon's occupants are not given a suggested course of action, so the GM must use common sense or reaction rolls to determine how they respond to the PCs snooping around. Mörk Borg's core rules do include reaction rolls, so I view this as a design choice rather than an oversight.

When I ran it, most of the creatures were indifferent to the PCs. The ratbadger was asleep, so the PCs snuck past it (actually, one of the PCs had a scroll which allowed them to cast a sleep spell, which they used on the ratbadger to ensure it did not wake up when they passed it). I played the automatons as diligently focused on their assigned tasks so that they did not notice the PCs peeking around corners and into rooms. The animated waste in the sewage pit did menace them, but the players fed it scraps and then lured one of the automatons to the pit and threw it to the waste to be consumed. I played Silas as hostile only because I figured the cursed cutlery would compel him to eat the PCs.

There are a few interesting enemies here. The automatons have medium armor, do a medium amount of damage, and have quite a few hit points, but they are neutralized entirely when knocked down. The players were delighted once they realized that a good shove was an instant win (I made it an opposed Strength test, but the party's Fanged Deserter with +5 Strength had no issue with that). I added that the automatons were filled with congealed fat or grease and so were exceptionally flammable, which the players also took great advantage of. The animated waste is not particularly dangerous, but cannot be killed, only dissipated with water. 

Silas has a ton of hit points but no armor, but when damaged, he farts, which can cause the PCs to wretch and gag for several rounds. He can also grab the PCs and shove them into his mouth for extra damage. They covered him with grease and set him on fire, then had to run out with the villagers as fast as they could before he exploded in a blast of flaming farts. The newest character with just 1 hit point had to use all of their omens to survive that one damage roll.

It's a gross dungeon with plenty of room for crude, juvenile humor, which is some of my favorite gaming material. Definitely give this one a try! 

Bloat is available in print by way of Mörk Borg Cult: Heretic. It is also free on the Mörk Borg website (direct link). If you're into Mörk Borg, I highly recommend Heretic. It includes Sepulchre of the Swamp Witch, which I reviewed previously, as well as two of the other dungeons I review later in this post. It and Mörk Borg Cult: Feretory provide lots of gameable content which have together sustained multiple Mörk Borg games of mine for several months now.

Devil's Tomb

Devil's Tomb is a dungeon by Johan Nohr, made using the Mörk Borg digital dungeon generator, DNGNGEN, and it shows. I don't care for this dungeon generator at all, and feel that the GM is better served by simply making a dungeon in the B/X fashion or something similar (admittedly, I haven't yet made a Mörk Borg dungeon of my own and probably never will because the system doesn't offer much support for doing so).

That being said, this dungeon is alright. When I say that the use of the dungeon generator shows, I mean that there are a good deal of disparate elements jammed together in a way that only sometimes makes sense. There's a giant plant that has filled the place with psychoactive spores, a room with three goblins bickering over a sword, a lair of fish people, and a pit to Hell, most of which don't interact with each other in any meaningful way.

Anyway, here's what the dungeon looks like:

I ran this in my more sandbox-y Mörk Borg campaign, so I was able to let the dungeon breathe a little and didn't feel the need to jam it into a single session, which was nice because the players ended up in a very messy situation in the depths. It took us about two and a half three-hour sessions to get through it.

The dungeon overview says that the Eyes of the Icon of St Largoth have been stolen and brought to Devil's Tomb. They are magical eyes that grant the power of true sight, and the PCs are here to retrieve them. That's a decent enough hook. To make it a bit more tantalizing, I had the Church of the Twin-Headed Basilisk post a reward for the Eyes' return. My group had quite a few heretical priests among them, so they decided instead to retrieve the Eyes so that they could be destroyed or else used to lure representatives from the Church into a trap, which I thought was a fun idea and exactly the kind of thing that sandbox-style play is good for.

The main attraction here is the Plant of Life, a giant plant which has filled the dungeon with its spores and cherub-faced flowering vines. There are a few areas filled with spores, which require a Toughness test when inhaled to resist a number of effects. The effects are "weird" in a way that is not actually very gameable. They make the PCs see visions of death, or become dizzy, or hear voices. The effects are at worst inconvenient and at best something to handwave. (I instead gave them a charm/rapport spores effect, which I felt was easier to use. If the players weren't careful, it could escalate to total domination by the Plant.)

The Plant of Life is inside a hidden room partway down the Pit to Hell. The entrance can be seen through the Eyes of St Largoth which are, in turn, hidden in the Drowned's treasure hoard. I'm not sure how the PCs are meant to reach the entrance to the Plant's lair, which is on the opposite side of the Pit from the goblins' cave. Perhaps the gap is jumpable? Perhaps it is not so far down that it can't be climbed down via rope from the bridge above? Some rough approximations of distance would help!

I changed the Pit to Hell to a regular bottomless pit (which could still lead to Hell - the PCs didn't find out because none of them jumped in, even though I kept suggesting that there was only one way to know for sure how deep it went). I had the Plant's vines growing up and down the pit so that the PCs could climb up and down them as another means of vertically exploring the dungeon (all three levels connect to the Pit somewhere).

The Plant of Life is worshipped by the Drowned, amphibious humanoids who dwell in the dungeon's flooded lower levels (don't worry - the flooded area empties out into the Pit to Hell, so it's not flooded in any meaningful or interesting way, although the Drowned do freeze the water around them when they die, which causes some damage to those nearby). Belpheduk, a traitor to the Drowned, is locked in a cave at the top of the dungeon as punishment for killing another Drowned (it is not clear why she did this, but she wants to destroy the Plant of Life, and can provide information about its location).

There are 10 Drowned at the bottom of the dungeon, with 4 more arriving "soon" (when?), which is a lot of potential enemies for Mörk Borg, in my experience. Again, the dungeon does not describe their behavior, so I imagine that reaction rolls are meant to be used. My Drowned ended up being indifferent, so I split them up between the altar and lair chambers - those in the altar chamber were in silent prayer over their dead comrade, and those in the lair were sleeping in their "fleshy cocoons". This allowed the players to run around the dungeon scoping out the situation before deciding what to do. They could have easily snuck into the treasure room, stolen the Eyes, and snuck out again without fighting anyone.

Unfortunately for them, they still took an agonizingly long time making their choices, and ended up caught in the Drowned lair when the hunting party returned. They decided to ambush the hunting party (who were in the way of their escape), but ended up alerting all the rest of the Drowned in the process. They got caught between all three groups, with the hunting party in front, the Drowned from the altar at their flank, and those from the lair at their rear. A very long combat ensued, in which the players used all their omens, many of the Drowned fled, the rest died, and just one character was slain in the final round of combat due to consecutive critical failures.

The summary makes it sound thrilling, but it was quite a slog. Mörk Borg's combat simply isn't interesting enough to sustain a prolonged skirmish, so 10 to 14 enemies in a single area seems to me like bad design. That being said, my players definitely should not have started a fight here, so perhaps they are more to blame. Again, there is nothing to indicate that the Drowned are hostile to the PCs.

The PCs already had the Eyes, so they hurried out of there. They deliberated for a while about finding the Plant and destroying it, but decided to count themselves lucky instead. The Plant has a lot of hit points (but is too big to miss with an attack), and only has one interesting mechanic which is a tendril attack that must be escaped or else the target is restrained inside the Plant's mouth while being digested. The Plant can attack everyone nearby at once, so it has the potential to be very deadly. It's nice that the scenario does not require that the players defeat it.

Overall, this dungeon is fine, but it requires the GM to put in some work to tie the disparate elements together. The GM should also exercise some caution to prevent the adventure from grinding to a halt due to a combat slog in the lower levels, though there's no accounting for players doing player things.

You can download Devil's Tomb for free on the Mörk Borg website (direct link). It is not available in print.

The Hexed Gauntlet of Kagel-Secht

The Hexed Gauntlet of Kagel-Secht is a Mörk Borg "obituary dungeon" with art and story by Lukasz Kowalczuk, graphic design and text by Johan Nohr, and proofreading by Walton Wood. What is an "obituary dungeon"? I don't really know. It looks like this:

Basically, it's a comic strip/poster equivalent to roughly four letter-sized pages. It depicts a trio of characters going through a dungeon and dying to its various hazards. (Maybe that's what makes it an "obituary dungeon"?) The margins contain game information on monsters and traps, plus a mini map of the dungeon which clarifies how all of the areas connect. In other words, this is poster, comic strip, and dungeon all in one.

I love this thing! You just know there are people who hate this, who think it's everything wrong with Mörk Borg or art punk or indie RPGs or whatever sort of axe it is they have to grind. Admittedly, it's difficult to determine what exactly you're seeing at first, but once you figure out what it is and how the information is meant to flow, it's really cool. I for one can't wait to unfold this thing at the table and run it for my players.

The format leaves a few things to be desired. The mechanical marginalia does not address everything that happens in the comic. Is the giant statue that grabs the one character's head supposed to be an instant death trap? A monster? Can it be defeated without the power of the gauntlet? How am I meant to use the table of subterranean monsters? Why does the character who falls into the subterranean area transform into a raving mutant? What is the nature of Kagel-Secht the lich?

It's certainly not the greatest dungeon I've ever seen, but the unique presentation is enough for it to really sing to me.

The Hexed Gauntlet of Kagel-Secht is available in print by way of Mörk Borg Cult: Heretic. From what I can tell, no digital version is available (it is not included in the PDF version of Heretic). And really, this one is worth having a physical copy of.

Nurse the Rot

Nurse the Rot is a dungeon offered in the final pages of Mörk Borg Cult: Heretic. It is meant to showcase the two new monsters described in the preceding pages: the Borg Bitor (a giant centipede which lays its single black egg inside of a human infant, the infant in turn eventually transforms into an adult Bitor to perpetuate the grotesque cycle) and the Rotten Nurse (an invincible undead nurse guilty of horrendous crimes who traps her victims inside a "mental torture prison" until they either die or break free).

The two monsters and accompanying dungeon are written by Pelle Nilsson. The art and graphic design are by Johan Nohr. Nohr's art is, as always, evocative, simultaneous dark yet splashed with tactical neon color in his signature style:

The dungeon itself folds out from the description of the Rotten Nurse into a two-page spread:

This does not translate well to the PDF version of the book, but looks very cool in physical form.

The adventure takes place in Chapel Olundan, in which the PCs must find the Staff of Awful Light, or else the village of Tünstal will forever fall into darkness. Why do the cynical, nihilistic, rat bastard PCs typical created by Mörk Borg's random character creation care? Well, it was one of the PC's aunt's dying wish.

Yeah...it's not a great hook. Well the Staff of Awful Light is probably pretty cool. Maybe the PCs want to retrieve it for their own nefarious ends? Well, maybe. But for some reason, the scenario doesn't describe what the Staff actually is or does. You'll have to come up with your own hook for this one. Either figure out a compelling use for the Staff and send the PCs after it or tie a monetary reward to clearing out the place. 

The scenario details roughly six areas as well as a handful of corridors connecting them. Each room's description points to the room it describes. The descriptions of the north, east, and south corridors are fittingly at the top, right hand side, and bottom of the spread, respectively. 

It's a bit daunting to try to read the descriptions in any sort of "order" like one might a more traditional layout, but it seems it would be easy to follow along as the PCs move from one area to the next in an actual game. One issue is that connections between rooms are only detailed in one of the two rooms' descriptions, so to find out that a particular door is locked, you will need to read the description of the "correct" room. Otherwise that information is easily missed.

As the stars of the show here are the Borg Bitor and the Rotten Nurse, I'll focus on their roles in the scenario. 

The Borg Bitor is in its nest in area 6. For some reason, the PCs get better (Mörk Borg's version of leveling up) when they enter the room, which is not something I've seen in any other Mörk Borg scenario to date. It's not like the Bitor is particularly deadly - it has a medium amount of hit points, medium armor, a sticky glue which is DR 18 ("should not be possible", according to the core rulebook) to escape, and a save or die venom which is just DR 6 ("so simple people laugh at you for failing") to resist. It seems like an odd choice, is all.

Inside the Bitor's nest is the Staff of Awful Light, so the PCs will need to get past the Bitor to complete their objective. There should be three ways to access this area, but one way is through an "impossible to pass" blazing bone fire (unclear if the bones can be passed if the fire is extinguished) and the other is through an "impenetrable" sheet of skin. That leaves just the third path, which is a locked door. The key is in a murky canal guarded by a "starving Sludger" (whatever that is - the scenario isn't specific, but it has a lot of hit points, medium armor, and can destroy armor with its attacks). Why one would create a room with three means of ingress and make two of them impassible is beyond me. I would change that.

The Rotten Nurses are hidden in a secret room, which is undetectable unless the Nurses leave it. There are a few conditions which will cause the Nurses to leave the room, one of which is if the PCs touch the stairs leading to the locked door behind which is the Borg Bitor's nest. As I mentioned, as written, this is the only way to get to the Bitor, which guards the Staff, so the PCs will have to alert the Nurses if they hope to complete their objective.

If alerted, the Nurses move to a random room to investigate. Every 10 minutes, they move to another random room, presumably until they locate the PCs or the PCs escape. I like this dynamic element of the Nurses' behavior. What I don't like is that the scenario doesn't specify how many of them there are (the description of the room they hide in only says "a group of Rotten Nurses"). The description of the Rotten Nurses on the prior page says that there were originally two dozen of them, so maybe that's how many. That seems like a lot. You could maybe roll 6d4, 4d6, 3d8, or 2d12 to determine it.

Overall, this is an okay dungeon. It needs a good hook. I wish the Borg Bitor was a bit more fearsome (as is, it is overshadowed in its own spotlight scenario by the Sludger, which is much scarier), and I wish the "mental torture prison" power of the Rotten Nurse was a bit more interesting from a gameplay perspective than simply "roll ability tests until you succeed on one or die". Overall I think this would make a decent one-shot, although not as good of one as Bloat or the Hexed Gauntlet.

Nurse the Rot is available in print or PDF by way of Mörk Borg Cult: Heretic.