Dungeon Deep Cuts #1

— Unknown, 19th century

Be sure to check out Dungeon Deep Cuts #0, in which I discuss the impetus behind this series as well as my criteria for assessing adventures.

Welcome to the inaugural installment of Dungeon Deep Cuts, in which I highlight my favorite lesser-known and un-reviewed adventures! This week I read twenty full-length adventures and an additional eight one-page or pamphlet adventures. Two stood out from the rest. (Reviews contain spoilers).

Born from the Sand

By Raphaël Parent
Into the Odd
Free on itch.io
Ten content pages; sixteen-room dungeon

Born from the Sand has no prior reviews. Although the author still intends to make some additions, corrections, and improvements, it’s still the best adventure I read this week. The dungeon is the interior of a “time and space vehicle shaped as an inverted pyramid,” which lies east of Bastion in a valley, where it had been raining sand for days. This is a decidedly science-fantasy adventure, complete with clone vats, a portal device, and an alien control deck—mess with it, and the characters might trigger the ship’s departure protocol!

Nearly every room of this dungeon features something or someone for the characters to interact with, including several solid puzzles. Highlights include:

• A lost archaeologist, whose soul has been trapped in a black pearl that can be found elsewhere in the dungeon;
• A psionic clam who yearns to be reunited with the pearl—her lover;
• And the Alchemist, a “hunched up, small cyclopean creature with a glass vase attached to its back. The vase contains a sandstorm.”

The monsters are all quite original and well-presented. Every being in the dungeon has a drive, and these drives often conflict. Several monsters can be circumvented or defeated in specific—but occasionally unintuitive—ways. There’s a nice mix of the deadly, the merely dangerous, and the potentially helpful.

The maps are simple but clear, and the layout is very user-friendly, with bulleted lists and bolded keywords. Gold text indicates monsters and stat blocks while blue text indicates arcana and descriptions thereof. While color coding can be garish or disorienting, the author keeps it minimal enough here to avoid those problems.

I can only make a few critiques of this adventure without having run it. First, there are a couple of bland moments, such as a room full of hanging chains and a run-of-the-mill dart trap. Second, there area few typos and inconsistencies scattered throughout the text, though I doubt any would severely hamper the referee. Finally, the hook is merely a rumor of treasure, and I prefer adventures that provide additional reasons for the characters to engage. Overall, Born from the Sand offers a level of interactivity, originality, and user-friendliness that’s absent from most adventures and earns my unreserved recommendation.

Parallel Dungeons

By Tamás Kisbali
System-agnostic, levels 3–4
PWYW on itch.io
Seven content pages; fifteen-room dungeon with three total variations

Parallel Dungeons was featured in issue #31 of The Glatisant but has not been reviewed. The main draw of this dungeon is its gimmick: three dungeons exist in parallel dimensions and all occupy a single cave system. The party has a device that allows them to hop between those dimensions and thus between the three parallel dungeons. One dungeon hosts demonic corsairs, another consists of a mined-out asteroid, and sages occupy the third.

The author leverages this gimmick to great effect. The dungeons feature a handful of open-ended obstacles; I can imagine several ways in which a clever party might overcome each one. The dungeons also offer a selection of flexible tools for the party to discover. The more the party explores each dungeon, the better equipped they will be to tackle the other two. It’s a great conceit that will reward lateral thinking and clever planning.

The room descriptions are arranged in a table so that the parallel versions of each room are described within a single row. While the author does provide examples of room dressing and random items the referee can use to inject the rooms with some flavor, the caverns themselves aren’t described—only their contents. Even these descriptions present close to minimum viable information in short, unembellished sentences and abbreviated fragments. See, for example:

Gas as in #5, filtrating from the crevices in the rock. Rich vein of platinum with yellow salt crystals on the S wall. Psychic characters feel urge to lick crystals, [save] to resist. Taste good, no other effect.

Or:

4 captives (merchant, imperial officer, spy, turncoat), chained to the wall, traumatized. Fear they will be killed, or worse.

The layout has a cluttered, bland appearance, but it’s quite functional. In fact, most referees should find both of this week’s adventures easy to run with minimal prep, if any. My main criticism of this adventure is that the third dungeon—”Tranquility & Transcendence”—presents virtually no danger and contains numerous boons for the party to collect at their leisure. There’s nothing to prevent the party from simply shifting to the third dungeon whenever they feel threatened or overwhelmed, and the party will likely feel safe to linger in this dungeon for as long as their supplies allow. To make matters worse, the other two dungeons aren’t especially deadly to begin with. This negates much of the time pressure and risk-versus-reward considerations that are hallmarks of dungeon crawling.

While Parallel Dungeons has its flaws, it’s well worth checking out for the unique premise alone—especially so, considering it’s a PWYW release. Groups willing to sacrifice a degree of danger in exchange for fun creative problem-solving opportunities will no doubt have a great time with Parallel Dungeons.

That’s All For This Week

Thanks for reading, and if you’ve written a dungeon that you’d like to see reviewed, please check out the Submissions page!