Necropolis Book Club - Chapters 6 and 7 - Skimmed
Oh god oh fuck we're skipping ahead to chapter eight because this book is boring. Well in the practice of writing and blogging more, I'll jam out some quick highlights and lowlights as I skim through these chapters.
Chapter 6
The sceniario is set up to force them to come in as would actual persons in such a situation, not as ninja-commandos assailing the stronghold of a known foe!
But why, Gary, that sounds cool and fun.
Lot of annoying railroading. Direct approaches could easily be encouraged through social reasons, like not blowing your cover, but a better module would simply give advice on both approaches, not having teleport spells automatically blow up in your face.
I am fond of the opening to the Temple of Osiris, a long avenue set on either side by a variety of statues of sphinxes. They all bear gemstones eyes (cursed of course) but walking bravely and respectfully through the sphinxes gives a minor buff, while sneaking around or trying to avoid them curses the coward with a minor debuff. This is a nice example of something thematic, not too railroady, while still reinforcing the idea that bravery is rewarded here.
The temple itself struggles a bit from not just describing a dungeon, but a social situation on top of it, with prescriptive if-thens about how the party interacts with the false priests. These prescriptions and NPC motivations are written into the dungeon rooms, which makes parsing this a difficult proposition in play.
That being said, there are cool rooms in here, high in magical tricks and traps, full of loot and some deadly monsters. Funnily enough, the GP amounts feel very old school, and would be a legitimate temptation for an AD&D party.
On the other hand, this is basically looting, criminal, and wrong.
Uh, Gary, what game are we playing here? Yeah? I thought so.
The murals in this area are explicit and lascivious in the extreme. We will not offend the reader by describing their lustful and pornographic details.
That's horrible! What details? Where can I find these details so I know not to read them?
One nice recurring mechanic is that all those statues that PCs could get in chapter 3 come in handy here. From room to room, they may give fore-warnings of danger, occasional bonuses to AC or saving throws, or even immunity to some deadly traps, depending on the room and the deity of the figurine.
In general, once you get past the prescriptive NPCs and railroading, the boxed text almost disappears, and Gary actually gets into the rhythm of writing an honest to gods dungeon, filled with magic and treasure and monsters. The centerpiece of the dungeon, and probably why there's so much writing about the NPCs trying to lead the players here, is a magical reed boat that descends to the underworld, filled with nasty traps and monsters and puzzles. Gary even recommends taking out an actual Senet board to use for a combination puzzle combat/setpiece.
Is this a high quality dungeon? Not really. But until now not much of the module has inspired. But with the Temple of Osiris, I can feel some of the old Gary, wordy, frustrating, and occasionally offensive as he is, coming through to provide some honest to gods adventure. An aspiring DM would need to do some work on the social aspects of the adventure, and a random encounters table would spice up the exploration considerably. Even then, it's a bit of a death trap, but nevertheless a memorable one. I'm glad I didn't skip this chapter.
Chapter 7
Not much to say about this one. The setup had me excited: a twisting, branching gorge filled to the brim with ancient tombs, many looted, but the greatest are still sealed and trapped to the gills.
Unfortunately, it's quite half baked. Many of the tombs and temples are given vague encounter suggestions, but are lacking in either fleshed out contents or even interesting ideas. Gary recommends fleshing the place out for the party if they want to spend time exploring this place as a larger dungeon, but it feels like the expectation is unfortunately to hand-wave this place after a couple of random encounters.
The chapter is quite short, but could have been a lot more. Oh well.