A question I’m asked with surprising regularity is, “Why do you waste money on adventure modules?” It’s a question generally voiced with varying degrees of disdain, and the not-so-hidden subtext lying behind it is that published adventure modules are worthless. There are different reasons proffered for why they should be ignored, but they generally boil down to a couple of core variations:

(1) Published adventures are for people too stupid or uncreative to make up their own adventures.

(2) Published adventures are crap.

The former makes about as much sense to me as saying, “Published novels are for people too stupid or uncreative to write their own stories.” And the latter seems to be derived entirely from an ignorance of Sturgeon’s Law.

On the other hand, I look at my multiple bookcases of gaming material and I know with an absolute certainty that I own more adventure modules than I could ever hope to play in my entire lifetime. (And that’s assuming that I never use any of my own material.)

So why do I keep buying more?

There are a lot of answers to that. But a major one lies in the fact that I usually manage to find a lot of value even in the modules that I don’t use.

Take, for example, Serpent Amphora 1: Serpent in the Fold. While being far from the worst module I’ve ever read (having been forced to wade through some true dreck during my days as a freelance reviewer), Serpent in the Fold is a completely dysfunctional product. It’s virtually unsalvageable, since any legitimate attempt to run the module would necessitate completely replacing or drastically overhauling at least 90% of the content.

A QUICK REVIEW

The only thing worse than a railroaded adventure is a railroaded adventure with poorly constructed tracks.

For example, it’s virtually a truism that whenever a module says “the PCs are very likely to [do X]” that it’s code for “the GM is about to get screwed“. (Personally, I can’t predict what my PCs are “very likely to do” 9 times out of 10, and I’m sitting at the same table with them every other week. How likely is it that some guy in Georgia is going to puzzle it out?) But Serpent in the Fold keeps repeating this phrase over and over again. And to make matters worse, the co-authors seem to be in a competition with each other to find the most absurd use of the phrase.

(My personal winner would be the assumption that the PCs are likely to see a group of known enemies casting a spell and — instead of immediately attacking — they will wait for them to finish casting the spell so that they can spy on the results.)

Serpent in the Fold gets bonus points for including an explicit discussion telling the GM to avoid “the use of deus ex machina” because it “limits the PCs”… immediately before presenting a railroaded adventure in which the gods literally appear half a dozen times to interfere with the PCs and create pre-determined outcomes.

The module then raises the stakes by encouraging the DM to engage in punitive railroading: Ergo, when the PCs are instructed by the GM’s sock puppet to immediately go to location A it encourages the GM to have the PCs make a Diplomacy check to convince a ship captain to attempt dangerous night sailing in order to get to their destination 12 days faster than if the captain plays it safe. The outcome of the die roll, however, is irrelevant because the PCs will arrive only mere moments after the villains do whether they traveled quickly or not. On the other hand, if the PCs ignore the GM’s sock puppet and instead go to location B first for “even a few days” then “they will have failed” the entire module.

So, on the macro-level, the module is structurally unsound. But its failures extend to the specific utility of individual sequences, as well: The authors are apparently intent on padding their word count, so virtually all of the material is bloated and unfocused in a way that would make the module incredibly painful to use during actual play.

The authors are also apparently incapable of reading the rulebooks. For example, they have one of the villains use scrying to open a two-way conversation with one of their minions. (The spell doesn’t work like that.)  More troublesome is when the PCs get the MacGuffin of the adventure (a tome of lore) and the module confidently announced that it has been sealed with an arcane lock spell cast by a 20th level caster and, therefore, the PCs won’t be able to open it. The only problem is that arcane lock isn’t improved by caster level and the spell can be trivially countered by a simple casting of knock.

The all-too-easy-to-open “Unopenable” Tome is also an example of the authors engaging in another pet peeve of mine: Writing the module as if it were a mystery story to be enjoyed by the GM. Even the GM isn’t allowed to know what the tome contains, so when the PCs do manage to open it despite the inept “precautions” of the authors he’ll be totally screwed. And the tome isn’t the only example of this: The text is filled with “cliffhangers” that only serve to make the GM’s job more difficult. The authors actually seem to revel in serial-style “tune in next week to find out the shocking truth!” nonsense.

Maps that don’t match the text are another bit of garden-variety incompetence to be found in Serpent in the Fold, but the authors raise it to the next level by choosing to include a dungeon crawl in which only half the dungeon is mapped. The other half consists of semi-random encounters strewn around an unmapped area of wreckage which are too “haphazard” to map and key. Despite this, the encounters all feature very specific topographical detail that the authors are then forced to spend multiple paragraphs describing in minute detail. (Maps, like pictures, really are worth a thousand words.)

As if to balance out this odd negligence, the authors proceed to round out the final “chapter” of the adventure by providing an exhaustive key to a mansion/castle with 50+ rooms… which the GM is than advised to ignore. (And I mean this quite literally: “In order to [“get right to the action”] have them notice the bloodstains in the entry foyer, and thus, likely, find the bodies. Make the trail that leads to the infirmary a bit more obvious […] it should be easy to keep the PCs moving up the stairs and to the final confrontation with Amra.”) In this case, the advice is quite right: The pace of the adventure is better served if the PCs don’t go slogging through a bunch of inconsequential rooms. But why is a third of the module dedicated to providing a detailed key that will never be used?

Round out the package with a handful of key continuity errors and elaborate back-stories and side-dramas featuring NPCs that the PCs will never get to learn about (another pet peeve of mine) to complete the picture of abject failure.

THE STRIP MINE

I tracked down the Serpent Amphora trilogy of modules in the hope that I would be able to plug them into a potential gap in my Ptolus campaign. Unfortunately, it turned out that the material was conceptually unsuited for my needs and functionally unusable in its execution. So that was a complete waste of my money, right?

Not quite.

To invent a nomenclature, I generally think of adventure modules in terms of their utility:

Tier One modules are scenarios that I can use completely “out of the box”. There aren’t many of these, but a few examples would include: Caverns of Thracia, Three Days to Kill, In the Belly of the Beast, Death in Freeport, Rappan Athuk, and The Masks of Nyarlathotep. Tier One modules might receive some minor customization to fit them into my personal campaign world or plugged into a larger structure, but their actual content is essentially untouched.

Tier Two modules are scenarios that I use 80-90% of. The core content and over-arcing structure of these scenarios remains completely recognizable, but they also require significant revision in order to make them workable according to my standards. High quality examples include The Night of Dissolution, Banewarrrens, Tomb of Horrors, The Paxton Gambit, Beyond the Mountains of Madness, and Darkness Revealed. (For a more extreme version of a Tier Two module, see my remix notes for Keep on the Shadowfell.)

Serpent in the Fold is a Tier Three module: These are the modules which are either too boring or too flawed for me to use, but in which specific elements can be stripped out and reused.

(Tier Four modules are the ones with interesting concepts rendered inoperable through poor execution. Virtually nothing of worth is to be found here, since you’re largely doing the equivalent of taking the back cover text from a book and writing a new novel around the same concept. Tier Five modules are those rare and complete failures in which absolutely nothing of value can be found; the less said of them, the better.)

For example, consider that mansion with high quality maps and a detailed key for 50+ rooms.

That mansion is practically plug-‘n-play. Less than 5% of it is adventure specific. That’s an incredibly invaluable resource to have for an urban campaign (like the one I’m currently running).

But the usefulness of Serpent in the Fold doesn’t end there. I’ll be quite systematic in ripping out the useful bits of a Tier Three module (since I have little interest in revisiting the material again). Starting from the beginning of the module, I find:

Inside Cover: A usable map of a simple cave system.

Page 10: Three adventuring companies are detailed. (These are particularly useful to me because Ptolus feature a Delvers’ Guild full of wandering heroes responding to the dungeon-esque gold rush of the city. Ergo, there’s plenty of opportunities for the PCs to bump into competitors or hear about their exploits. Such groups are useful for stocking the common room of an inn or pub in any campaign.)

Page 25: An interesting mini-system for climbing a mountain. It features a base climbing time and a system for randomly generating the terrain to be climbed (prompting potential Climb checks which can add or subtract from the base climbing time). I’d probably look to modify the system to allow additional Survival or Knowledge (nature) checks to plot the course of ascent (to modify or contribute to the largely random system presented here).

Page 27: A very nice illustration that I can quickly Photoshop and re-purpose as a handout depicting a subterranean ruin.

(As a tangential note: I wish more modules would purpose their illustrations so that they could be used as visual aids at the gaming table. You can make your product visually appealing and useful at the same time, and you’re already spending the money to commission the illustration in any case.)

Page 33: Another useful illustration that can be quickly turned into a handout.

Page 54-55: A new monster and the new spell required to create them.

The module also features countless stat blocks, random encounter tables, and similar generic resources that can be quickly ripped out and rapidly re-purposed.

So even in a module that I found largely useless and poorly constructed, I’ve still found resources that will save me hours of independent work.

When you’re dealing with a module like Serpent in the Fold that you have no intention of ever using, these strip-mining techniques can be used to suck out every last drop of useful information without any particular care for the husk of detritus you leave behind. But similar measures can also be employed to harvest useful material from any module, even those you’ve used before or plan to use in the future.

I often think of Gateway as being the last great hurrah of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Although published in 1977, to me it has always felt like a Campbellian classic — as if it should be a contemporary of Childhood’s End or the Foundation Trilogy. A throwback to the 1950’s.

I probably wouldn’t have that impression if I had been reading science fiction when Gateway was published, but there it is.

And there’s really no denying, in my opinion, that Gateway‘s crowning achievement is the perfect melding of multiple branches of the science fiction tree.

On the one hand there is the Big Concept: The Gateway itself. A concept so breathtakingly original that people have been imitating it ever since. (Basically, it goes like this: Humans find a space station abandoned by aliens. Inside they find hundreds of ships. They don’t know how the ships work, but they can operate the auto-pilot. Brave prospectors board the ships, hit a button, and go God-knows-where in the search for Heechee technology.)

Hidden within that Big Concept are the hints of space opera: Small bands of adventurous heroes journeying into the unknown on missions of thrilling exploration.

But while Pohl teases us with the structure of space opera, he weds it to the best literary traditions of hard science fiction: His prospectors are exploring the cold, hard worlds and braving the impossible terrors laid bare by the cutting edge of science. And rather than proving indulgences, the carefully extrapolated detail of the milieu is instead used to provide dramatic sauce for the goose.

Meanwhile, wrapped around all of this, Pohl is tapping the alternative literary structures and deep, psychological characterizations of the New Wave to illuminate the personal struggles of Robin Broadhead, one of the richest and most rewarding characters in science fiction.

The plot of Gateway doesn’t merely happen; it is made painfully relevant by the effect it has on Broadhead. Indeed, the greatest triumph of the novel is the creation of Broadhead: A deeply sympathetic, flawed, and yet (on some very real level) noble human being. His transformation — revealed through complex and interwoven flashbacks and flashforwards — is the heart and soul of the book, lending true meaning to the amazing universe that Pohl has crafted.

In short, Gateway pushes all the buttons. It’s a true highlight of what the science fiction genre is capable of achieving.

GRADE: A+

Frederik Pohl
Published: 1977
Publisher: Del Rey
Cover Price: $14.95
ISBN: 0345475836
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Steven Brust’s Khaavren Romances comprise three novels spread across five volumes: The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, and The Viscount of Adrilankha (published as The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra Lavode). As the titles might suggest, Brust wrote the entire series as a pastiche of Alexander Dumas (and, most notably, his tales of the Three Musketeers).

This is not to say that the novels are merely fantasy regurgitations of Dumas. Far from it. Although the first chunk of The Phoenix Guards is heavily inspired by The Three Musketteers, from that point forward the tales diverge quite rapidly. Brust is merely using the stylings of Dumas to tell his own tale. A tale which, in point of fact, becomes increasingly remarkable as the series continues.

The strength of the series is that it captures the swashbuckling fervor and derring-do of Dumas’ tales, adapts it for its own purposes, and then raises the stakes. Much as Brust’s Jhereg takes the trappings of Raymond Chandler, weds them to high fantasy, and then prefects the resulting gestalt into something unique and powerful, so the Khaavren Romances make Dumas’ stylings their own.

The overwhelming weakness of the series, however, is that it also whole-heartedly embraces Dumas’ weaknesses as a novelist.

There are two unpleasant truths when it comes to the work of Dumas:

(1) He was part of a tradition among many 19th century authors — such as Victor Hugo and Herman Melville — in which the phrase “show your work” was taken to be some sort of holy writ. Their ability to interrupt their own stories in order to engage in long factual discourses with only the most tangential relationship to the surrounding text is truly astounding. The term “infodump” cannot satisfactorily summarize these turgid pace-killers, some of which could persist for the length of an entire chapter before finally drawing to a close.

Such works are aptly parodied in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, in which the conceit is that Goldman is not actually writing the novel, but rather presenting the “good parts” of a novel by the 19th century author S. Morgenstern. The footnotes in which Goldman describes the material he’s “cutting” for our benefit are made even funnier if you’ve suffered through such passages in Dumas, Hugo, Melville, and their like.

At first, I thought Brust was going for a similar sense of parody. But it quickly became apparent that he was, in fact, embracing the tradition. He succeeds in making it more generally palatable (mostly by limiting the interminable length of such passages), but he is not always wholly successful in his efforts.

(2) Similarly, it is important to understand that Dumas was effectively paid by the word. And Dumas was quite adept at wringing as many words as he possibly could from his work. Brust enthusiastically captures this “art” in passages like this one:

“If there is a conspiracy around me, Jurabin,” said the Emperor, “I am unable to see it.”
“It is not, perhaps, a conspiracy, Sire,” said the Prime Minister.
“It is not?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Then, you are saying that perhaps it is?”
“That is not precisely my meaning either, Sire.”
“Well then,” said the Emperor, “What is your meaning?”
“To speak plainly—”
“The Gods!” His Majesty burst out. “It is nearly time for you to do so!”
“I believe that many of the Deputies are, quite simply, afraid to appear.”
“Afraid?” cried the Emperor. “Come, tell me what you mean. Are they afraid of me, do you think?”
“Not you, Sire; rather, of each other.”
“Jurabin, I confess that I am as confused as ever.”
“Shall I explain?”
“Shards and splinters, it is an hour since I asked for anything else!”
“Well, then, this is how I see it.”
“Go on. You perceive that you have my full attention.”

The first time I read such a passage I thought to myself, “Ha, ha! Very funny! You have aptly parodied Dumas there!”

The ninth time I read such a passage, the joke had worn itself thoroughly thin.

The ninetieth time I read such a passage, I wanted to scoop out my eyeballs with a rusty spoon.

The nine-hundredth time I read such a passage, I decided it was actually Steven Brust’s eyeballs I wanted to scoop out with the rusty spoon.

It’s simply bloat. It’s not funny. It’s not clever. It’s not stylistic. It’s just copy-and-paste, by-the-numbers, rubber-stamped bloat. It’s a form for rapidly generating empty verbiage so that you can fill up your quota for the weekly serial, get paid, and head down to the local tavern.

So why did I keep reading — even after I had long since perfected the art of detecting passages like this and adroitly skimming ahead a page or two pages in order to get the next bit of pertinent narrative?

Because the stories are, in point of fact, quite compelling. The plot is epic in its scope and fascinating for the depth of insight it gives you into the Dragaeran Empire. The action is both exciting and humorous. The characters are charming, endearing, and memorable.

In short, despite their rather systematic failings, I have no hesitation in recommending the Khaavren Romances.

I would, however, heartily recommend starting with the Vlad Taltos novels. A good deal of the fascination I had for the setting derived from my knowledge of the Taltos series, and I’m not sure I would have actually persevered if I did not have the context of the Taltos novels in which to root the Khaavren Romances.

GRADES:

THE PHOENIX GUARDS: B-
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER: B-
THE PATHS OF THE DEAD: B-
THE LORD OF CASTLE BLACK: B-
SETHRA LAVODE: B-

Steven Brust
Published: 1992 / 1995 / 2003 / 2004 / 2005
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0812506898 / 0812515226 / 0812534174 / 0812534190 / 0812534182
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The worst writing I have ever read.

(And I write that as someone who has suffered through multiple readings of the Eye of Argon.)

A sample:

Her hair had the sheen of the sea beneath an eclipsed moon. It was the color of a leopard’s tongue, of oiled mahogany. It was terra cotta, bay and chestnut. Her hair was a helmet, a hood, the cowl of the monk, magician or cobra.

Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon. The scent of fresh snow. Her eyes were dark birds in fresh snow. They were the birds’ shadows, they were mirrors; they were the legends on old charts. They were antique armor and the tears of dragons. Her brows were a raptor’s sharp, anxious wings. They were a pair of scythes. Her ears were a puzzle carved in ivory. Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips.

You really have to read it out loud to appreciate just how mind-numbingly awful it is. I found, when reading it to myself, that my subconscious brain just started skimming over things. It was only when I started reading it out loud that the Cthulhuian mind-rending began.

This is taken, by the way, from a published novel: Silk and Steel by Ron Miller.

I’m also fairly enamored of this pictorial rendition of the subject of the passage (although you really need to click through and read the full thing to appreciate it fully).

This has been making the rounds for a couple of months now, so I’m probably not the first person to note the similarity between this misbegotten narrative excess and the Song of Solomon. I suspect this is not merely an accidental resemblance: One of the characters, you’ll note, is named Spikenard. While many reading the passage dismiss this as merely some horrible fantasy name, Spikenard is actually the name of a flower which is mentioned twice in the Song of Solomon.

By pure synchronicity, a couple of days after reading this for the first time, I was reading 3:16 – Bible Text Illuminated by Donald E. Knuth, which expanded insightfully on the topic while discussing the Song of Solomon (pg. 96):

These songlets are examples of an ancient type of love poem called a wa?f, in which a beloved’s body is praised part by part, often making use of extravagant and far-fetched metaphors. For example, an Egyptian papyrus from about 1250 B.C. contains a fragment of a wa?f that says, “my sister’s mouth is a lotus; her breasts are mandrakes”. Wa?f songs appear several times in the Thousand and One Nights, and they are still popular in modern Arab poetry. A 19th-century wa?f includes the line: “Her bosom is like polished marble tablets, as ships bring them to Sidon; like pomegranates topped with piles of glittering jewels.”

So there is clearly a very specific effect that Ron Miller is going for. Does this make it better? Not really. I’d even argue it makes it worse. Miller has clearly put a lot of thought and care into rendering something that, in its actual execution, ends up being a mockery of the very thing it sought to create.

Understanding what Miller was attempting to create helps us to understand where it all went horribly, horribly wrong. But the skidmarks don’t negate the car crash.

I came to this novel by way of Gary Gygax by way of Appendix N of the 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide by way of James Maliszewski at Grognardia.

I think it’s safe to say that, if not for that rather remarkable (and lengthy) chain of recommendations, I would probably have never read this slim volume — which, as far as I know, was published in 1963 and never seen again.

Sign of the Labrys is a post-apocalyptic tale of the sort commonly found in mid-20th century science fiction. What sets it apart is that it is also, although it doesn’t strictly look like it at first, science fantasy. (This becomes clear fairly quickly, but the exact reasons for its fantastical nature constitute a spoiler so drastic that I won’t even hint at it here.)

The ways in which Sign of the Labrys inspired Gygax’s dungeoncraft become both rapidly and intriguingly apparent: Sam Sewell, the protagonist of the tale, lives in a vast underground complex of modified caverns that was built as a refuge before the collapse of civilization. The apocalypse thinned out the population (killing nine in ten) and eradicated central authority, leaving behind vast catacombs of uninhabited space which small, spontaneous societies have repurposed in a variety of ways.

In short, Sign of the Labrys reads like a strange hybrid of Dungeons & Dragons and Metamorphosis Alpha. Here we find a clear predecessor of Castle Greyhawk: A multi-cultural, subterranean menagerie laid out in a pattern of levels and sub-levels connected by both the well-known thoroughfares and a plentitude of secret passages and hidden ladders.

This, by itself, would have made Sign of the Labrys a fascinating and worthwhile novel for a D&D afficionado like myself. But I also found the novel to be very entertaining in its own right. Addictive, in fact. It’s got a page-turning, pulpy pace mixed together with some nigh-poetic language and a strange, enigmatic mystery that leaves you yearning to know the answer.

Stylistically Sign of the Labrys reminds me quite favorably of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. It possesses the strange, otherworldly, and fantastical approach to matters of science fiction which characterizes the best of their work. Particularly Moore’s. Like Moore’s classic Jirel of Joiry stories, Sign of the Labrys reminds me of Alice in Wonderland smashed through the broken mirror of another genre’s conceits and set pieces. If I were to say that Sign of the Labrys periodically reads as if the author had taken a tab of LSD before sitting down at her typewriter it would not be wholly inaccurate. (It would, however, be rather less than charitable, as St. Clair’s writing is not merely a drug-induced rambling. In fact, it works consistently towards a larger stylistic and revelatory purpose.)

In the end, I found Sign of the Labrys to be delightfully entertaining. And since, like me, you are unlikely to encounter it by chance, I shall pass on the same recommendation that was given to me: From Gygax to AD&D to Grognardia to me to the Alexandrian and thus to you…

Find a copy if you can.

GRADE: B-

Margaret St. Clair
Published: 1963
Publisher: Bantam Books
Cover Price: $0.60
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