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New comment on Item for GeekList "A Geeklist of Those Who Died in 2025"
Posted: Wed, 24 Dec 03:48:55
Rodger had just lost his home to the Southern California fires. Another BGGer (Gelb) and I assisted his widow and son to find a new home. Steve hopes to carry on with C3i.
Posted: Wed, 24 Dec 03:48:55
by soccerref
Related Item: Rodger B. MacGowan
Odiousmaximus wrote:
That's sad. I hadn't heard about Rodger's passing (nor Alan Emrich's). I own many games featuring his artwork.
Rodger had just lost his home to the Southern California fires. Another BGGer (Gelb) and I assisted his widow and son to find a new home. Steve hopes to carry on with C3i.
Review: Trial of the Slime Lord:: Well structured, slimy meatgrinder for Shadowdark
Posted: Wed, 24 Dec 03:31:04
About this adventure.
This is a level 0 adventure for Shadowdark RPG that describes the 17 rooms of a temple dedicated to an ancient necrotic slime. This is what Shadowdark calls a "gauntlet", but you might better know it as a "funnel": an adventure where each player will go in with multiple level-less commoners. A lot of those would-be adventurers will die horrible but hopefully highly entertaining deaths, but those who survive will emerge as level 1 heroes.
For the players, there are no adventure hooks or anything here. The PCs have been abducted by an evil slime cult. They awake in a pit, one torch lying on the ground shedding just enough light to read the inscription: "Welcome to dissolution. Escape or feed Raka Ooku." For a level 0 adventure, that's great. There's urgency and a pretty straightforward goal that requires the PCs to take action (if you stay where you are, you will die. You want to find an exit and live). Oh, and without getting too far ahead of myself here, Shadowdark is a GREAT system for this kind of adventure, because you'll immediately start the torch timer and the pressure is on.
The adventure has a nice amount of stuff going on. There are two secret exits (one of them only open to small characters) that can be found apart from the main one. There's a Gollum like hoarder, a survivor from an earlier sacrifice that went mad and stayed in the dungeon, that is moving around, as well as Raka Ooku itself that could make an entrance to gobble up a character and revive it as a skeleton. There are keys to secret chambers, a couple of magic items and other stuff to find as well as some riddles required to find the solution for opening the main door and flee.
The room descriptions are written in a bullet point style that is easy to scan - usually a sentence or two of description, then short descriptions of any points or items of interest as well as creatures with stat block. All in all, this is quite well organized. Nevertheless, you probably shouldn't try to run this directly from paper though as I foolishly did, as there are quite a couple of interactive elements, keys to find in one area that can be used in another one, etc. - these are most of the time pointed out just fine, but two closed areas lack the information where the keys to open them can be found (the info is in the description of the rooms with the keys, but it would be better to have it in two places).
In addition to the rooms themselves, you get a couple of random tables for loot, wandering monsters, random villagers and various slime effects (e.g. "1d4 Things That Happen When You Lick a Puddle in a Slime Dungeon"), a short overview of relevant monster stats and a page with player handouts, a map of the dungeon, and some really nice old-school pieces of art that fit the Shadowdark aesthetics quite well.
Oh, and have I mentioned that it is free?
Running the adventure
I ran this adventure over a 4 hour session with a group of RPG experienced Shadowdark newbies. It was their and my first funnel, and the total tally was 8 dead versus 8 living characters (if I remember correctly: one poked the demented halfling and got stabbed, one got eaten by the translucent ooze, one got killed by another dead adventurer reviving as a jellied skeleton, one got slain by the skeletons in the altar room, and four of them bit the dust fighting Raka Ooku). We had a lot of fun with this adventure and I would run it again for another group.
My criticisms of this adventure are fairly minor:
1) I think Raka Ooku could be beefier - my group was able to overwhelm him once they had some solid weapons without finding the really good magical stuff. Resistance against piercing damage helps, but 24 HP is not a lot for the big bad boss.
2) I'm not 100% sure how much I like the possibility of escaping through the first room. I mean, I'm all for the players finding clever solution to bypass dangerous areas, but we have signed up for an evening of dungeon crawling, haven't we? But then again, they need to find the hollow sounding tile in the first place, need something to smash it with and get past a pack of wolves on the other side of the passageway, so this might just be a non-problem.
3) The wolves and centipedes are missing from the monster stats page, I assume the reason is that they are taken directly from the core rulebook while the others are new variant monsters. Still, a full overview of all monsters would have been cool.
The bottom line
Very cool, well structured level 0 meatgrinder in a dungeon filled with the servants of an evil slime cult. Shadowdark needs more of these, the system is perfect to instill fear of the dark in the hearts of the feeble. Get it, it's free!
Trial of the Slime Lord by Jordan Rudd, published 2023 on itch.io.
Posted: Wed, 24 Dec 03:31:04
by gatekeeper86
It's December, it's flu season, and I have a 5 year old who goes to kindergarten, which means I'm basically battling all kinds of slime anyway. So I might as well write a review for an adventure about slimes and oozes that I ran some time ago.About this adventure.
This is a level 0 adventure for Shadowdark RPG that describes the 17 rooms of a temple dedicated to an ancient necrotic slime. This is what Shadowdark calls a "gauntlet", but you might better know it as a "funnel": an adventure where each player will go in with multiple level-less commoners. A lot of those would-be adventurers will die horrible but hopefully highly entertaining deaths, but those who survive will emerge as level 1 heroes.
For the players, there are no adventure hooks or anything here. The PCs have been abducted by an evil slime cult. They awake in a pit, one torch lying on the ground shedding just enough light to read the inscription: "Welcome to dissolution. Escape or feed Raka Ooku." For a level 0 adventure, that's great. There's urgency and a pretty straightforward goal that requires the PCs to take action (if you stay where you are, you will die. You want to find an exit and live). Oh, and without getting too far ahead of myself here, Shadowdark is a GREAT system for this kind of adventure, because you'll immediately start the torch timer and the pressure is on.
The adventure has a nice amount of stuff going on. There are two secret exits (one of them only open to small characters) that can be found apart from the main one. There's a Gollum like hoarder, a survivor from an earlier sacrifice that went mad and stayed in the dungeon, that is moving around, as well as Raka Ooku itself that could make an entrance to gobble up a character and revive it as a skeleton. There are keys to secret chambers, a couple of magic items and other stuff to find as well as some riddles required to find the solution for opening the main door and flee.
The room descriptions are written in a bullet point style that is easy to scan - usually a sentence or two of description, then short descriptions of any points or items of interest as well as creatures with stat block. All in all, this is quite well organized. Nevertheless, you probably shouldn't try to run this directly from paper though as I foolishly did, as there are quite a couple of interactive elements, keys to find in one area that can be used in another one, etc. - these are most of the time pointed out just fine, but two closed areas lack the information where the keys to open them can be found (the info is in the description of the rooms with the keys, but it would be better to have it in two places).
In addition to the rooms themselves, you get a couple of random tables for loot, wandering monsters, random villagers and various slime effects (e.g. "1d4 Things That Happen When You Lick a Puddle in a Slime Dungeon"), a short overview of relevant monster stats and a page with player handouts, a map of the dungeon, and some really nice old-school pieces of art that fit the Shadowdark aesthetics quite well.
Oh, and have I mentioned that it is free?
Running the adventure
I ran this adventure over a 4 hour session with a group of RPG experienced Shadowdark newbies. It was their and my first funnel, and the total tally was 8 dead versus 8 living characters (if I remember correctly: one poked the demented halfling and got stabbed, one got eaten by the translucent ooze, one got killed by another dead adventurer reviving as a jellied skeleton, one got slain by the skeletons in the altar room, and four of them bit the dust fighting Raka Ooku). We had a lot of fun with this adventure and I would run it again for another group.
My criticisms of this adventure are fairly minor:
1) I think Raka Ooku could be beefier - my group was able to overwhelm him once they had some solid weapons without finding the really good magical stuff. Resistance against piercing damage helps, but 24 HP is not a lot for the big bad boss.
2) I'm not 100% sure how much I like the possibility of escaping through the first room. I mean, I'm all for the players finding clever solution to bypass dangerous areas, but we have signed up for an evening of dungeon crawling, haven't we? But then again, they need to find the hollow sounding tile in the first place, need something to smash it with and get past a pack of wolves on the other side of the passageway, so this might just be a non-problem.
3) The wolves and centipedes are missing from the monster stats page, I assume the reason is that they are taken directly from the core rulebook while the others are new variant monsters. Still, a full overview of all monsters would have been cool.
The bottom line
Very cool, well structured level 0 meatgrinder in a dungeon filled with the servants of an evil slime cult. Shadowdark needs more of these, the system is perfect to instill fear of the dark in the hearts of the feeble. Get it, it's free!
Trial of the Slime Lord by Jordan Rudd, published 2023 on itch.io.
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