[Review] Wee Warriors Reprints, Part II: Dwarven Glory

The cool original cover...

Not to be mistaken with the unfortonately named Judges Guild classic Glory Hole Dwarven Mines, Dwarven Glory is the second Wee Warriors Dungeon Master Kit originally released in 1977. The module got a facelift when Pacesetter Games reprinted it in 2013 with an additional AD&D rewrite included.

V3 Dwarven Glory is 44 pages long, with color covers, and black and white interior. Visually the book is quite a disappointment. My biggest gripe is the cover - I have absolutely no idea why the excellent original illustration was replaced with something that looks like a cheap caricature of it. It's not only a downgrade aesthetically, but also feels disrespectful. The obvious answer would be for legal reasons, but as far as I know Pacesetter did reprint the book with the original cover before. My other issue is the obsession with the Vampire Queen. She is on the back cover of the book, on the first page, and she is glaring at me with her smug face from every page header. I know Palace of the Vampire Queen was a huge milestone and the first kit in the series, but she has absolutely nothing to do with Dwarven Glory - it's only good to mislead customers and hurt the module's identity. Let's give her a rest, shall we? Otherwise there are barely any illustrations within other than the maps, and those few pieces range between okay and meh.

The adventure takes us into the semmi-abandoned dwarven caverns within the mountain chain on the island of Baylor. The background  is summed up in less than a half page: the once thriving dwarven community was besieged and conquered by Mortoc and his 10 Orc Tribes, but there are still rooms they didn't penetrate, and survivors they didn't slaughter. It's a great setup, not only because it goes against the usual cliché of dwarves digging too deep, but because it also promises opposing factions - one of the cornerstones of turning your dungeon into a dynamic environment.

The caverns have 7 sections and 64 keyed rooms. Their presentation is unusal: the maps use hexes instead of squares, they are marked by letters ranging from B to G instead of numbers (curiously, there is no A), and there is no set order to them, although the introduction offers a sequence for beginners, and another for medium strength parties. The maps can be connected through their north and south ends, resulting in a long tunnel of thematic segments instead of the classic vertically aligned set of levels. Each section has branches and loops of their own, but due to their small size they don't make a meaningful difference in the exploration's overall flow.

The room descriptions in Dwarven Glory are a huge step forward compared to PotVQ. Each section has a theme outlined in one or two sentences, followed by terse summaries of the room entries which deliver more information than the predecessor's tables ever managed to. Of course the new approach is far from perfect: the entries often turn into a laundry lists of trivial objects, some of the details are unnecessary, and there is zero highlighting. Still, it's an improvement!

...and the crappy remake.

While it had a minimilastic presentation, PotVQ packed quite a punch with its varied and imaginative entries. The caverns of Dwarven Glory follow suite as its parts get introduced from the once busy cities entrance, through its monster-infested mines, to a desecrated temple of heretic stunties. The environment is the least interesting part of the module though: it's the NPCs where Dwarven Glory really shines. They have interesting relationships with each other, they have their own goals, and are mostly shameless opportunists who will try to take advantage of the adventurers. Some highlights include the thieves in the first tavern who want to poison and loot the party, pixies who blatantly lie about the magical properties of the clothes they sell, an ogre chess player who is a sour loser, heretics who summoned the Elenoin (see a Gods, Demi-gods, and Heroes or Deities & Demigods with the melnibonéan pantheon in it) to assassinate their own high priest, and so on.

My absolute favorite is the mess in Section F. There is a minotaur who will put a geas on the party to recover his son, two ogres in the neighbourhood who hate him, the minotaur's lost son with a gem of insanity around his neck on his way to kill the ogres, twenty ghouls working for the minotaur, ten lizardmen on friendly terms with the minotaur and a cave troll (to whom they will try to lure the party the bastards they are), and a lich who will put a geas on the visitors to recover the young minotaur's head. It's fucking brilliant. Shit like this is what make a dungeon come alive. When the players arrive the whole level is in the middle of a chain of events that unless stopped will make the place explode in a wave of violence. There is so much opportunity to roleplay and get slaughtered it's amazing. It makes me even forgive the relative small size and simple design of the level.

The loot is nothing extraordinary, but at least it's varied. The upper levels offer mostly gold and mundane valuables, but as further one ventures gems, magic items, and magic gems become more common. The module rewards exploration with some ludicrously precious hidden treasure, while other times it punishes with traps and cursed items. Needless to say, the descriptions of traps and new magic items is vague. A chest has a 6-hex chlorine gas trap on it. What does it do? No clue. Probably save or die, but at least you get a book that tells you the value of gems, which is nice.

Dwarven Glory's tone feels more lighthearted than PotVQ's, mostly because it lacks gory and disturbing scenes - no children drained dry or grinded into blood pudding this time. It has plenty of old-school quirkiness and humor, even some juvenile, like the former night club with posters of dwarven go-go-dancers, or the two bookcases of X-rated materials in the dwarven high priest's chambers. That wasn't meant to be criticism - I leave a healthy amount of naughty magazines and kinky statues in my adventures too for the sake of immersion and verisimilitude.

The AD&D version pisses me off even more than PotVQ's. Dozens of rooms were replaced with empty holes, encounters were watered down, the eccentric elements were mostly thrown out the window. The conversion strips down the charm of the original module and sacrifices cool roleplaying opportunities in favor of run-of-the-mill encounters. The only good idea is the extra detail the heretics receive: they are deviants who want to live in forests with elves, which is actually an idea fitting to the spirit of the original.

This time it's a no-brainer which version to choose if you want to run the adventure. The conversion is just deadweight to the original edition - it adds nothing of value while increasing the page count. Dwarven Glory is by no means a masterpiece, but it is a good module and an interesting historical curiosity, with some qualities many modern adventures should envy and take note of.

Part III: The Misty Isles coming soon (hopefully in less than two months).

Tl;dr: A solid old-school dungeon crawl with exceptionally well done NPCs and factions, accompanied by a weak conversion.

Where to find it: You can find the module in print and pdf in the Pacesetter Games & Simulations webshop. Some of their modules are alse available on DriveThruRPG in pdf, so I wouldn't be surprised if the above mentioned three would surface there in the near future.

Other parts of the series:
Part I: Palace of the Vampire Queen
Part III: The Misty Isles

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[Review] The Dragon's Secret

This is the ideal drakon body. You might not like it, but
this is what peak performance looks like.

The Dragon's Secret is a Swords & Wizardry Complete adventure for a party of 6-8 5th to 7th level adventurers. It's one of the biggest surprises of the year, for it is the first module released by industry veteran Jennell Jaquays in three decades. She worked as a game designer and artist of tabletop role-playing games and video games - including  names like Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia, Griffin Mountain, Age of Empires, Quake III. She wrote some of the finest dungeons the hobby has ever seen. What made them so great? Complex non-linear maps, vertical level design, interesting factions, and an attention to details, among others. The Alexandrian blog has a series of articles about the nuts and bolts of jaquayian dungeon design, which I consider a must read for every aspiring Dungeon Master.

The Dragon's Secret is not an entirely new product. It's based on salvaged dungeon maps from the seventies, and an abridged version was already published last year as part of the North Texas RPG Con fundraiser (Legends of Adventure, by Pacesetter Games & Simulations). The revamped version was originally part of the Dungeons of Doom IV Kickstarter campaign by Star Hat Miniatures, along with its sister product Quack Keep. After all the limited editions it's no wonder I got giddy with excitement when I saw it finally being released on DriveThruRPG. I was also a bit worried though. Does Jennell still has her edge after three decades?

The Dragon's Secret is a 52 pages long book. The cover is the most drool-inducing I saw recently. I have a soft spot for ugly dragons, dragons with beaks, dragons with ears, dragons with hair, and Jennell's artwork hits the mark in every way. If the art wasn't enough in selling the module, there are still blurbs, taglines, summaries to help you make up your mind. They have all the right words that make my D&D-senses tingling: dungeon, doom, dragon, mystery, hoard, treasure! I usually don't linger much on covers, but this is so well laid out, written, and illustrated, that I had to stay and praise it a bit more than I planned. Time to move on! The interior has a nice two-column layout, and great black and white art done by Jaquays, Darcy Perry, Rick Hershey. My favorites are the medieval etchings, and the cartography, which is easily on Dyson Logos level.

After the foreword we get a half page long backstory about how the Cathedral of the Golden Dragon has risen, and fallen. The whole institute started out as a scam: the gold dragon Aulde Dawne in reality was the sorceress Dawne Rozyfingers, polymorphed by her partner in crime Steed Bramble, who convinved the locals that keeping a gold dragon nearby at the cost of some golds and jewels would be beneficial. Fast forward an unknown amount of time, and you have a whole cathedral with acolytes worshipping the dragon. Bramble thought this would be the right time to get out, but died before he could finish the preparations. When Aulde Dawne learned the man who can polymorph her back to human form died she lost her marbles and devastated the countryside. Some heroes eventually hunted her down, but found little treasure in her lair.

The next four pages are about using the adventure. I found most of it unnecessary, especially the explanation of how room and NPC descriptions are divided, because it felt self-explanatory: each segment starts with a keyword, so even the long-winded texts are easy to browse. The section ends with hooks, that for some unknown reason are split, and continued at the end of the book. That irks me probably more than it should. Fortunately it's worth flipping a bit back and forth, because the hooks are great! They are many and varied, which already shows that there is a lot to do! Highlighting the involved locations and NPCs at the end of each hook is a nice touch. The only way I think it could have been better is including page numbers, or links in the pdf.

The adventure itself is divided into four major areas containing 34 rooms in all. It starts small with the The Cathedral of the Dragon and Connections, then once the players got their feet wet they characters reach Circular Illogic, which is bigger and more complex than the other three areas together. The final part, The Dragon's Horde, is just one large room - I'm sure you all know what that means... Reachig The Dragon's Horde will require a good deal of exploration. Opening the door requires finding the puzzle, its solution, and the two objects needed for it (optionally,ignoring the red herring). This won't be a linear romp from beginning to end. There are loops, branches, secret doors, illusion walls, and multiple connections between the levels - some of which can be discovered later. Vertical design isn't only used to connect the levels: several rooms are three dimensional, and get cross sections to make their layout clear.

Speaking of rooms, there are some fantastic ones among them! Even the mundane entries get something to spice them up, be it some obstacle, an interesting detail, or a hidden treasure. Then there are those which your players will talk about years later. A spherical room with gravity on its surfaces and a gem at the top, that when removed can disable the elevator to the surface, probably also angering the 39 kobolds with paralyzing sticks living nearby. A huge hangar containing a 30 feet tall clockwork automaton, operated from a hidden control room occupied by two wanted mages. A well guarded false treasury jam-packed with fake objects and massive zombie spiders. A deathtrap with illusion chests, phantasmal floor, and crushing phantasmal walls at its bottom.

A good dungeon needs memorable inhabitants too, and this is where Jennell kicks the ball out of the park. There are several factions and NPCs around the cathedral that can serve as valuable help, or annoying nuisance. Two apprentices who murdered their master are hiding down below. The senior was actually a member of the cult long ago, and hired two werewolf families to keep the place safe while he is away. A gurgle of gargoyles was cursed to guard Aulde Dawn's most valuable treasure. A group of fowl folk adventurers (mostly ducks) and a jerk aardvark are also looking for the dragon's riches, and aren't too fond of each other.

The most prominent NPCs have a whole page devoted to them with illustration, background, rumors, and personality. They have fun quirks and traits, which is what turns them from stat block with some background info into fantastic personalities. For example the werewolf leader Elder Worgg doesn't want to transform because it will ruin his clothes. Glyphic Three-Horn the gargoyle leader who wants to throw off the curse of her kin thinks she was a human before becoming a gargoyle. That sounds like an adventure hook right there! It's also noteworthy that the dungeon's denizens aren't just standing idly stuck in a room, frozen in time, but are on the move. They are parts of the random encounter tables, there are guides how they react to various crises, and the gargoyles even have specific routes that helps them navigate through the dungeon easier.

The book ends with supplemental content. There is a random curio table, which you can roll on whenever the room description says there is one. The table is filled with colorful items, and their value is a random roll on another table, so the results can be interesting, even downrigh ridiculous. The players might find a worthless jade flute, or an extremely valuable magical graffiti on the wall - it will be a joy to see how they will tansport that to the surface! We also get Swords & Wizardry stats for two new races: the fowl folk (ducks, geese, swans, and crows) and aardvarks. They get their own monster entries too, along with zombie spiders, living statues, and the horrible drakghuls, who are the children of Aulde Dawn and some other dragon (maybe?), that were born undead and are calling ghouls to the area with their song. Yes, surprisingly The Dragon's Horde was not a typo.

Surprisingly... The book captures the old-school Judges Guild feel in its editing too. It's full of typos, missing whitespaces, double or missing articles, gibberish sentences, and even Aulde Dawne is refered to as a brass dragon instead of gold somewhere. The room entries have some redundant information too. Another readthrough by someone, or hiring an editor would have helped a lot. Looking past these annoyances I found the writing style amusing, with a good amount of humor and wordplay thrown in.

In the end, it seems my fears were irrational. While The Dragon's Secret has some warts, it is a splendid adventure. It's fun, it's colorful, it's dynamic. It's not Dark Tower or Caverns of Thracia, but it is on par with a good module right out of Dungeoneer magazine. Jennell said this is but a fragment of her Thousand Worlds campaign setting, and more is coming soon. Well color me interested, I definitely want more of this! In the meantime, I will bang my head into my desk, because I didn't buy Quack Keep before it was taken down from DriveThruRPG for revision.

Tl;dr: Even with the bad editing The Dragon's Secret is a fun read, and a good example of how to design a complex and living dungeon. You can buy it HERE.

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Review: Underport: Abyssal Descent

Reading Crimhthan The Great's OD&D Blog reminded me I've bought a module called Underport: Abyssal Descent many months ago. Released by Direbane Publishing this adventure promises to be a vintage mega dungeon from the halcyon days of the hobby. It focuses on action, and does not give a shit about encounter balance. Sounds good! The dungeon was written for the Knights of the All Mind ruleset, which seems like an unholy mix of 3e and OD&D. It's unlikely anyone ever used this system other than its author. Thankfully it's easy to convert the stats to any editions of D&D.

Opening the book will immediately invoke the inimitable old-school feel thanks to a layout so bad, it makes even the LBBs look good. Single paragraph, shitty fonts, ugly stat blocks... I'm not sure if it's intentional, but well done! The foreword confirms that the adventure will be a huge mess, with changing styles and a wide variety of influences including Judges Guild, Arduin, and puberty (unless you've forgot about those years, the latter means violence, sex, drugs). We also learn important information like the average heights of tunnels, chambers, caverns, and why didn't the author include wandering monster charts: if the PCs make noise just pull the monsters from the nearest room, or throw them a gelatinous cube. That's a simple and elegant solution I was thinking about using too.

The adventure is 88 pages long, with a seperate 18 pages long file for the maps. The dungeon has more than a dozen levels, big and small ones alike. They are scans of old drawings that were never cleaned, full of stains and smudges. Until you get familiar with them it can take some effort to find out what's going on, and where the different labels are. Once you can see through the Chaos you will find a real gold mine! The maps are full of exciting names, like Tita Luigi Bomba's Castle Hold, Battle Caves, Prime Material Gate To Abyss. Names like these are a perfect way to pique my curiosity in no time. They sound interesting! I want to check them out! I want to know what's going on there! To make things even more olde school, there is a cross section of the levels too.

Not only there are many levels, but they are varied too. The module starts in an underground pirate hideout, then continues to the depths through a mining complex, a crossdresser overlord's castle, the battle caves, a monk's hold in a mushroom forest, a "multi-dimensional demiplane Hellscape prison", and other weird places until the aforementioned gate is reached at the bottom of the Eternal Pit.

The encounters are just as colorful as the environment. The adventurers can meet both classic and unique monsters during their delve. What I really love about them is that these creatures aren't just put in a room to be slaughtered: the book is full of scenes where something is actually happening! A bar with drinking skeletons! Drunken pirates causing fire! Hobgoblins planning a rebellion against their king! Fire giants having sex! An insectoid creature disguised as a crying little girl trying to lure victims to their doom! I could go on all day about all the amazing happenings of this dungeon.

The writing is short, rough, and goddamn evocative in the beggining. The descriptions could've been even more effective with more powerful choice of words, but they are still miles better than your average dungeon room read aloud text that gets bogged down by unnecessary details. It's a pity the style changes dramatically midway. The encounters become more static, the descriptions longer, the levels less interesting. Sometimes I felt the author being tired, maybe even a bit burnt out. This doesn't mean of course that the lower levels are rubbish, but they aren't as good as the upper ones.

I can wholeheartedly recommend this product to anyone interested in megadungeons and early homebrew adventures. It's my favorite historical artifact besides the Rythlondar chronicles. I wonder if the Necropolis of Chaos, a sequel promised at the end of the book will be released too one day.

Tl;dr: Underport is an authentic old-school megadungeon with exemplary upper levels, and a bit weaker lower levels. You can buy it on DriveThruRPG.

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Dark Souls and the Spirit of Old-School D&D

It seems my girlfriend is twice the man I am: a few weeks ago she finished Dark Souls. In case you were living under a rock and never heard about it, Dark Souls is a cruel japanese dark fantasy rpg where you will die a lot, usually because you suck at combat or you are careless. It's a game I adore, but never started playing seriously because it needs a lot of time, patience, and endurance. I usually lack all three of them nowadays.

Character sheet full of juicy details, and you haven't
seen the inventory screen yet!

But why is Dark Souls so interesting for a Dungeons & Dragons fan? Because the game cannot deny the influence of old-school D&D. Dark Souls is full of spells, items, monsters, game mechanics, and design principles a grognard will be familiar with  - even if some of them are hard to recognise thanks to weird twists and changes to the well known formula. Let's take a look at some of the most interesting and less obvious ones I've found so far. I'll leave out trivialities like "you can be a wizard Harry!", "OMG it has fireballz!", and "you can slay giant rats!" Those are pretty common fantasy clichés no one will be surprised to see in a crpg.

Experience for Gold: In D&D gold and experience are the two main resources needed for advancement. Interestingly in classic D&D most of the experience is awarded for the treasure the player character brings up from below, which makes XP seem a bit redundant. Dark Souls merges GP and XP into a single currency: souls, which are used both for payment and advancement. You can earn souls for defeating enemies, or you can find then as item, which esentially replaces the gemstones and jewelry of D&D. In Dark Souls your character and most NPCs are undead and demons, so it's fitting they use souls to trade and gain power. This is an amazing example about how you can make some weird game mechanic make sense in your setting.

Death Penalty: Every death means losing some progress in old-school D&D. While in Dark Souls you won't lose levels on death, you will lose all your unused souls and respawn at a bonfire. You can recover your dropped souls, but you have to be careful, because if you die again your previously lost souls will disappear. I've seen people lose souls enough for multiple level ups thanks to stupid mistakes.

Importance of Player Skill: Classic D&D puts a huge emphasis on player knowledge and skill. So does Dark Souls. Death is a harsh lesson. If you want to advance you have to learn from your errors. While good luck, improved stats, and quick reflexes are helpful, knowing the attack patterns of monsters, the signs of traps, or the small difference between normal chests and mimics is what will make the real difference between a successful and a bad player.

Familiar Monsters: Even if you ignore classic fantasy tropes like giant rats, giant spiders, dragons, undead, chimeras, hydras, hellhounds, snakemen, etc, you'll still find enemies that feel like gigerian reimaginations of Monster Manual entries. Mimics, myconids, slimes are no-brainers. Pisacas remind me of gricks. Phalanxes are lemures with spears and shields. Chaos Eaters are the nightmarish children of xorns and rust monsters. Chaos Witch Queelag is Lolth. The predecessor Demon's Souls had mind flayers. And there are probably more I didn't notice, yet.

Historical Arms: Unlike most crpgs nowadays Dark Souls has polearms, and they are downright awesome! Speaking of polearms, I've always found it strange how specific Gygax was with their names in AD&D while using only generic terms for the most iconic weapons of fantasy fiction: swords. Thankfully the developers of Dark Souls weren't so ignorant! Besides the generic swords you'll find Estocs, Claymores, Flamberges, Zweihanders, Iaitos, Uchigatanas on your adventures.

Weapons vs Armor: Do you remember AD&D 1st edition's unwieldy Armor Class Adjustement section of the weapon table? The game has something similar with different armor offering different amounts of protection versus each damage type. If you know what you're going to face it might be a good idea to dress and arm yourself for the occasion - unless you are one of those who like dodging around naked or attacking from distance.

Enchanted Equipment: Dark Souls uses the good old traditional plus symbol to mark weapon and armor upgrades, but also introduces different upgrade paths to make the system more complicated. These enchantments need special materials and expert blacksmith.

Looks like a good place to die.

Megadungeon: I've left the most important to the end. Dark Souls' Lordran is a colorful and
immense dungeon with multiple levels. The protagonist's journey goes through monumental castles, moldy catacombs, sparkling crystal caverns, fiery hellpits, gloomy forests, and even abstract places like a city in the past, or a world inside an ancient painting. These areas are not only huge, but they are full of secrets, loops, branches. They are also interconnected, thus the game is everything but linear. To make things even more complicated there are covenants you can join for different benefits and a few memorable NPCs who are far from static shopkeepers and questgivers: they have their own stories, they have goals, and your deeds will influence how they behave with you and even each other, which makes Dark Souls' environment feel alive.

A few years ago I thought Dark Souls was just a grim hack & slash for masochists, but after trying it myself and seeing the adventures of the Chosen Undead I had to realize how close it is to old-school dungeon crawls and roguelikes. It is a game worthy of sinking a good hundred hours into it. Unfortunately before I can do that I'll have to finish like a dozen other games. But who knows, maybe once I'm retired I'll be able to start my journey through the land of the Ancient Lords!