Whew boy. Out of the simple little B2 complex, into the Great Grandaddy of Dungeons, a husky four-level complex (with generous sublevels) sprawling over complex pages and pages of eye-hurting Judges’ Guild cheap ink. The community term “Jacquaying” comes out of a cargo cult built around these wonderfully interlinked and looping maps, often perhaps not understanding what really makes them good. The original maps are a bit rough to even parse, but even redrawn they’re very complex: Daggum. There’s a lot of ambiguity in the image here. The first thing that screams for attention are those huge tears; structural damage makes everything about the map going forward look weathered, ancient, falling (literally) into ruin. It’s a welcome naturalistic touch for an environment that actually does struggle with appearing somewhat artificial…something about the room layout does give a vague impression of “this is a game first” rather than the flow I would first expect to see in a living architectural space. Lower down, the palace and crypt complex for levels 3-4 are more naturalistic, with the resultant drop in exploration complexity. Most of the difficulty groking the maps comes less from their artistry and more from their design, however…so A- for presentation. Conceptually, what we have here is the ur-dungeon. A winding, echoing environment with most straight stone halls broken up by occasional natural rock features, cleanly separated into “zones” with plenty of cross-connection. There are really two dungeons here, the first that upper pair of fallen halls with all the crevasses, the second the weirdo minotaur palace/trees/undercrypts…both concepts are solid, of course. The incorporation of each section together feels a little artificial (and actually makes me wonder if the author had two different dungeons being combined). B+ for concept, only because of the disjoint really. All of these quibbles rapidly fade away, however, when we get down to the actual pen and paper. Look at the design shown even in the very first room…there are two options presented immediately, but there’s also a blocked third that indicates the complex is big, and yet also fallen. Then you have the obvious draw of #2 as the next spot, but the way that it interacts with the hallway in #6 also tips off the players that they need to be looking for secret doors, setting up for a jaunt to #9 after an otherwise simple little side-loop. It’s actually doing a good job of making a very limited first section that teaches the explorers the methods to Thracia’s madness. And then, we go all over the place. A sloping hallway going down a level…secret passages leading to hidden rooms…more secret passages giving shortcuts…chasms allowing rope-using PCs up and down access…subsections that going up and down and all around…it’s a crazy exercise in exploration and discovering, rewarding careful mappers with geometry juuust symmetrical enough to hint at the unnumerable secret passages. As a pure exercise of just mapping, the upper half of Caverns of Thracia is a delight. Then we go down the elevator to Level 3 and we’re in a whole different module. Bereft of all the interesting atmospheric descriptions, the “outdoor” area is dismayingly simplistic. Wander around a bunch of flora, then assault a pretty “flat” palace that’s rather symmetrical and linear (judging by the standards of what came before), and if you are even so-so at looking at geometry then you’re not having any issue at all in making your way down to the final level. The fourth level is fine as a module adventure section but it’s a lot simpler as a map. One branchy loop, then two more big branches with their own little sub-branches…I’m not mad about it, but there are far fewer choices in exploratory gameplay. After all the early training to look for hidden passages and secret loops, the players are going to find them only rarely, a notable shift for a bunch of explorers hardened in the fires of the first few maps. After the front-loaded brilliance, the later maps are merely…okay. Still, A for execution overall. I wonder if there’s some hidden wisdom here, in the end. As the PCs level up, the initial cautious exploratory gameplay can be dispensed with more often for frontal assaults of plate-wearing supersoldiers backed by high-level magic. As nice as brilliant maps with chasms and crevasses are, those gaping maws are a lot less scary when someone in the party can fall light feathers, or tame flying monsters, or teleport…just as new gameplay opens up with leveling, I think Caverns of Thracia also shows that there are old aspects of gameplay that start to take a back seat as high level demigods stride the lands. Cartographic design principles do in fact need to change as high-level powers come online, shown starkly in this adventure as the “decent into the underworld” leads to maps that are simpler, not more complex. That’s not really a critique, but it is definitely something to keep in mind lest we descend into cargo-cult worship of “The Loops” without seeing that even one of the most influential cartographers in the hobby dispenses with them as the adventurers grow in power and options.
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AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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