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did every bandit ringleader come to possess glass armor and daedric weapons the world may never know it is important to recognize that these assumptions have an impact on the game however if the players can rest easy knowing that most encounters are scaled to their level they are much more likely to enter combat frequently and confidently the world including dungeons also becomes much less scary and dangerous as a result however if the players know that the difficulty of encounters is up to the dice i think it encourages them to play with much more caution and creativity this lack of level scaling encourages investigative and careful play in my experience though really given the presence of some degree of level scaling in early d d it seems to me that most folks would likely use both of these measures when it comes to number appearing and challenge rating why not list both posted by warklegnaw at 7 00 am 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday june 23 2021 review castle xyntillan i write this review after running castle xyntillan for about eight months using a slightly house ruled version of basic fantasy rpg if you re reading this review you ve likely already seen questing beast s review or bryce lynch s review if you haven t already i recommend you check those out i bought this adventure on their recommendation this review contains spoilers for the adventure only dungeon masters past this point please good things overall i think castle xyntillan cx is a very strong adventure perhaps the most noticeable strength of cx as other reviewers have noted is its formatting cx uses a concise bullet point style formatting of its room descriptions to ease use of the text at the table to see what i m talking about see the example below this is probably some of the best formatting i ve seen in a published product reminiscent of gavin norman s work in the hole in the oak and winter s daughter it first provides an overview of the situation with interactive bits highlighted in bold then an explanation of the interactivity below relevant stats for creatures are also provided close at hand for ease of reference admittedly there are some instances where some relevant information is hidden in the bulleted text for example in the example above i think the animated hammer should definitely be referenced in the overview paragraph as pcs would notice it immediately when entering the room and perhaps even beforehand due to the noise it makes these instances are generally few and far between however and i would say the descriptions overall are exceptionally well formatted i wish every dungeon was formatted this way furthermore beyond the layout of the writing the writing itself is genuinely good there are many things for the players to investigate and interact with it s not all bust down the door and kill things though players certainly could try that the tone is a mix of fairy tale fancy and grimdark macabre which i think tends to work well i often find myself rewriting parts of published modules to make them more dynamic and interactive when i can tell the authors got lazy i had to do very little of that with cx though the rooms were generally fun and interesting to run as written cx is also very well constructed in terms of its blueprint you could say castle xyntillan is significantly jacquayed there are plenty of directional options for the players a variety of room shapes it s not all 30ft square rooms and loops connections between sections one thing i would have liked to see would be a sort of theme for each region to clue players in when they re entering a new section ex a color theme for each wing of the castle or something but overall the castle s blueprint shows thoughtful and careful design as a dungeon another strength about the maps is the different digital formats the pdf version i downloaded came with labelled and unlabeled digital versions of the maps it also provided a map optimized for use with virtual tabletops as well as explicit instructions for how to upload it to your virtual tabletop of choice this was my first time seeing that sort of support in a published module and i thought it was stellar things to change or add my most significant criticism of cx is its lack of high level support the referee while it does a great job facilitating play at the table with its formatting i found that cx offered very little support for the referee out of session one significant thing i missed was some overall explanation of what s going on or how the castle got this way admittedly the author gabor lux responded to this omission in the very first paragraph of the adventure s foreword castle xyntillan makes no claim to either realism or narrative consistency it is a storehouse of the macabre and the whimsical founded on dream logic and loose association and striving to be confounding and entertaining above all else and yet it is not formless you may note places where its elements form apparent patterns or at least seem to rhyme but it will be up to you to make the connections and interpret them according to your ideas as well as the needs of your campaign so basically what i interpreted the above statement to mean is that the adventure wants you to make it up yourself when it comes to what happened or what s going on now personally i found that unsatisfying and i think the inconsistency deprived my players of a sense of discovery in their explorations they could not figure out what was going on through their explorations as ultimately there was nothing larger going on at least not as written the dungeon just kind of is there being weird there s nothing to make sense of because there is no sense behind the situations this issue with the lack of support extends beyond the backstory to the npcs themselves while cx provides a good appendix of npcs at the back of the book it provides little description of their wants and motivations or what they think of one another as a result i found it difficult to run them particularly when players would try to talk to them and ask them questions about the castle as it s hard to get a sense of what each npc would know also as a brief aside the adventure made little distinction between intelligent and unintelligent undead which made it a bit difficult to tell whether the pcs could talk to certain npcs or not i ultimately ruled that the pcs could talk to most undead family members including skeletons but some guidance here would have been helpful i am not the first person to experience this issue with the lack of support for running the npcs someone else noted it in a comment on bryce s review and the author melan responded i understand melan s point here that a web of all the npcs would have been unwieldy however a relationship map of the half dozen most significant npcs ex the count countess the beast a list of the folks allied with them and what each major npc thinks of the others could have taken only something like a two page spread for an example of what i m talking about you can reference this relationship matrix from woodfall while i do think the one from woodfall is a bit too dense having just a half dozen factions or important npcs would make it much more manageable more information about the npcs would have encouraged faction based play facilitating a dynamic environment for the pcs to explore where the castle s denizens react to the actions of the pcs it would give me a better idea of what each npc wants if the pcs offer to complete a quest for them it would also give me direction on how the castle might change over time as the different factions try to achieve their goals as written the npcs are basically all just standing around waiting for the pcs to walk into their room they have no plots plans or aspirations you may be thinking well why not just that make that stuff yourself like the adventure says however i find two issues with that suggestion 1 i buy published modules to do this work for me and save me time if the author tells me to write this content myself that defeats the purpose of me buying the module 2 castle xyntillan is so large that having purchased it rather than written it creating a sense of what happened here or a write up for each faction would require me to put in hours of work and study which i think is exactly what the concise room npc descriptions were trying to prevent reading and annotating the entire module seems to negate the value of having short descriptions i can run with little prep since i would have to closely study them anyway conclusions overall i would say castle xyntillan is an excellent dungeon on the micro level its room entries are written perfectly for low prep session level play and it provides great support for the referee to run the game at the table it has fun and interesting encounters that are concisely written with little wasted text i would like to see more adventures emulate its format however i would like to have seen greater support for the referee at the macro level this adventure does not have a consolidated description of what npcs want or how they relate to each other it has no high level explanation of what s going on or what happened here for the referee the text tells you to come up with those parts yourself which disappointed me and defeated the purpose of buying a published product in my opinion ultimately i could compare castle xyntillan to a bag of m ms each m m room description tastes good on its own however the only thing that holds the m ms together is the fact that they re in the same bag i e in the same castle with a mega dungeon like castle xyntillan where the pcs will explore the same location across many sessions i found myself needing greater cohesion between its disparate parts to turn the castle into something satisfying that sort of nonsensical play got tired and unfulfilling after a few months turning the castle into something more than a weird inexplicable funhouse proved too difficult time consuming for me considering the lack of support in the text overall i would recommend this adventure if you re interested in a well formatted funhouse dungeon that s easy to run with little prep understand that it really is a true funhouse dungeon however meaning that there is little sense to make of it or mysteries to uncover beyond hidden objects to find players who enjoy that sense of discovery and figuring things out likely will feel unfulfilled unless you invest the time and effort to provide those things yourself for me it was fun for a while but lost its zest quicker than i expected 4 5 stars posted by warklegnaw at 7 08 am 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday november 25 2020 lair of the lamb summary recently i ran two and a half players through the adventure lair of the lamb by arnold k we had a damn good time of it or i did at least this adventure is free to download though arnold asked that anyone who runs it provide a summary of their experience this is that summary beware spoilers for the lair of the lamb obviously i also made several errors while running this adventure you may notice them while reading i don t think they lessened our enjoyment of the adventure but they do make our experience with it less true to text i will likely reflect on these errors in a future post for now i will try to keep this post descriptive and non evaluative each player made four characters player one created lyrathil arthuit legoland and lizbeth player two made benny thomas oswald and martha their characters awoke in a dark chamber all of them were hogtied with ropes except one who found a knife trapped beneath her they began cutting their ropes and working their way free when a creature came down the hall smelling of ammonia they couldn t see the creature but the characters in one bowl felt oswald s entrails spill out and heard oswald scream as he got eaten the survivors ran towards the light at the end of the hall at the end of the hall they found a lit torch the characters then carefully travelled east around a pit and north to a fountain where they found water the fountain was a dead end however as they exited the fountain they saw a mud covered shape moving and crying out in the bottom of the pit panicked they ran east through the crab mural and busted down a locked door beyond they found a group of sleeping prune skinned priests bathing in pools of warm water curious one of the characters reached out and tried to rouse one of the priests the priest shouted in alarm as the priests raisin like bodies jumped from the pools the characters raced up a set of stairs to the east atop the stairs the characters came to a pair of heavy doors bound with chains the priests caught up as the characters tried to pull the doors open a battle ensued some characters held the priests off while the others escaped one of the priests spells reduced lyrathil to dust breathless the surviving characters slammed the doors shut behind them on the other side they found two sallow skinned humanoids dressed in fine clothes staring at them they looked undead frightened benny bolted down a hallway to the east but quickly disappeared down a trapdoor with a splashing sound thinking quickly the rest of the characters offered to let the undead eat benny if the rest of them could go the characters even offered to help the undead get benny out of the pit the undead agreed as benny would be even juicier after soaking in the pit s water one of the undead left and returned with a rope while one undead held the trapdoor open the other undead worked with the characters to lower a rope into the pit where benny swam just as benny emerged from the hole the characters pushed one of the undead into the pit the other shrieked we ended the first session there we had a third player join us for the second session considering that the first two players each had three characters left we let him roll up three characters they were dwarf sisters named dimira durthina and dundra just as the characters shoved the undead humanoid down the trapdoor these three dwarf sisters came through the heavy doors to the west in the ensuing chaos the creature killed dimira as it ate her corpse the rest of the party jumped across the pit benny originally fell in safely on the other side of the trap they continued down the hallway they encountered another pit similar to the first thomas and durthina fell inside landing in water at the bottom while the rest of the party jumped across successfully jumping over another pit the remaining party members found a coffer with a green mushroom atop it they ignored it and proceeded north there they found a 20ft wide pit with a rope strung across it spiked into the wall one party member successfully climbed across using the rope but not before a massive crab claw reached from the water and tried to grab them not wanting to risk getting grabbed one party member...