A dungeon by Atanamar, level nill. Written for Troika I think my theory that a Dyson map can generally save things is not up to the challenge of Troika. In the Elegy of The Sapphire Adept the author manages to splay ten rooms across thirty-two pages. Troika, ladies and gentlemen. Now it’s single-column with huge text, but even so…whew. The map has the usual itch.io problem of the weird impulse to scribble all over the nice clean Dyson initial sketch, of course, but there are other organizational sins…the map is also 20 pages in, after plot, massive page after massive page of the weird and whacky monsters, and the two(!) random encounter tables for the tiny little dungeon. This thing needs 40-50 rooms at minimum, but here we are. Plot is pretty convoluted for ten rooms. Blue vines with delicious fruit that causes painful farts (yes, this is in the adventure) are erupting throughout the city, wrecking All the Stuff, so “you are hired for 100 silver each” to go into the dungeon to fix things. The dungeon is an extraplanar laboratory of a sorcerer who loved to “flesh shape” who died to his creations and has recently been breached by the Sapphire Adept, a blue android who is very nice and sweet and kind, who tried to escape and dissolved herself in a blue pool and if now oozing vines out into the main world and all the creations are insane and angry and kind of gross and there’s nobody to rescue and the PCs are trapped in the lab by DM-fiat and it makes me sad and angry and kind of pukey. Bleh. What I like is that the personalities of all the inhabitants are fully fleshed out* and their motivations and rivalries are present to encourage interaction**. The map, scribbles aside, is fine for its size*** and has some geometry to it. Right. What can be improved first in the asterisks; you didn’t need to take ten pages to flesh out personalities* of these monsters that have apparently been in perfect balance for a decade ** in a <200ft wide complex***, widening the zone or drastically narrowing the timescale would have fixed this issue. The thick random encounter tables are mostly non-interactive, with the non-interactive encounters not even signposting much. More thought on rumors and hooks would help, as would not locking the PCs into the dungeon. These hacks aren’t just offensive from a “player agency” point of view, they also show a clumsy lack of thought into integrating the adventure into anything remotely like a wider campaign world. Playtesting would probably help in this case. Best use case for this is thus unfortunately as a spiteful punishment to inflict upon a table of players, probably because they lobbied to play Troika. Which, fair. There’s not much that can be harvested in terms of content here, so all we really have is a miserable slump of a dungeon to be shocked by (it’s not very shocking). Final rating? */***** because there’s nothing doing saving this one.
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AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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