Review: Sanctum of the Undertoad Queen

Today we're looking at Sanctum of the Undertoad Queen - a 3rd level adventure by Ross Mahler and Matthew Mahler. This one checks a lot of boxes on my personal "would I run this?" checklist. New and interesting monsters, creative environmental puzzles and hazards, a general competency in writing and layout, original art (just look at that gorgeous cover), a map with plenty of navigation options, A CUSTOM SOUNDTRACK, etc etc. Yes, there is room for improvement in a few areas but this is among the best 3rd party Shadowdark adventures I've seen.

The setup is simple - the party is asked to retrieve the Lost Eye of the Jaguar Sentinel that is believed to be in the possession of the titular undertoads. Loot the place, bring back the eye, you know the drill. The dungeon has 20 rooms and a strong swampy vibe.

We begin with a short hexcrawl with... 25' hexes?

Yeah, 25' hexes. This section is labeled "optional" and I'm going to recommend you consider leaving it out. This part of the adventure would have been better served by an area map, I think. The hexes obviously aren't big enough for overland travel procedures so dungeon crawling procedures would work fine. An interesting experiment maybe, but I don't think it adds anything in the way of player agency or resource management. And none of the locations or encounters adds much to the adventure.

Things start looking up when we get to the dungeon proper. We get a random encounter list with some great situations for the PCs to mess with, room keys that are easy to follow and everywhere you look some cool feature that is a gameable and really enhances the theme of the location. There are stalactites that are really wasp nests, giant lily pads to jump across, firefly breeding grounds and bubbles of flammable swamp gas. Each room feels like a great amount of care went into making something interactive that the players will need to reckon with, and into making a variety of challenges that still manage to fit nicely into the overall vibe.

The dungeon is also jam-packed with original monsters that are beautifully creative. You really can't beat toad-man snipers that use blowguns to shoot biting tadpoles. Or the Hexbeak, which casts mis-spells such as "Magic Armoire" and "Eject Thoughts". Shame those guys only have 4 hp because they probably won't live long enough for the party to have to deal with the effects of "Control Walter".

It's also a nice length. We get a lot of 10ish-room dungeons for Shadowdark, and even in those half the rooms seem to be effectively empty. This adventure makes every one of its 20 rooms count and is meaty enough for the PCs to start having to worry about running out of torches, spells, etc. It interacts with Shadowdark's mechanics in a deeper way than a short dungeon can. I would like to see even longer dungeons still.

The central puzzle of this adventure is that the party must fill a jar with firefly juice in order to open the door that leads to the Undertoad Queen and the Lost Eye of the Jaguar Sentinel. This is where I think the adventure could use a little tweaking. For one thing, the solution isn't really hinted at anywhere in the dungeon. There are a few places where the party will run into fireflies, and a few places where they *might* run into firefly juice, but the only way to solve the puzzle is by trial and error. It seems like one of those things that might seem obvious to the author but that might cause the players to bang their heads against the wall a bit.

My other issue is that the players won't know they need firefly juice until they've already traversed the entire dungeon. So that means a lot of backtracking. I'm not against backtracking per se, but I think there's a better way to use a puzzle to encourage exploration.

Let's take a look at a similar puzzle in Winter's Daughter. There is a locked door 3 rooms away from the entrance in a straight line. The door has a couple statues of dogs next to it and an engraving that says "Call to the Companions. The answer to the puzzle is pretty obvious and in the 3 times I've run it no one has ever struggled to figure out they must call out the dogs' names. To find the answer, the party must then thoroughly search the dungeon. Placing the central puzzle near the entrance and making it somewhat obvious gives the party a nice short-term goal a purpose to their dungeon exploration.

In the case of Sanctum of the Undertoad Queen, the fun part of the puzzle won't be putting a bunch of stuff in the jar until you find what works, it will be in the players' crazy ideas for catching 100 fireflies. That's the juice (pardon the pun), so I think this adventure would benefit from getting that info to the players faster and more clearly.

There are a couple of other nits to pick. There's a river that can be used to move through the dungeon but the raft is in the penultimate room. It doesn't matter too much because traveling the river upstream requires a DC 12 STR, or if you have a raft it requires a... DC 12 STR. There are also a couple of factions here but unfortunately they don't really come into play because just about everyone you encounter is dead, injured or otherwise incapacitated. And they don't really offer you a compelling reason to choose one side or the other. 

But overall, I think most tables will have a lot of fun with this adventure, and I will watch these authors' careers with great interest. There's tons of weird stuff for the PCs to mess with, some very memorable monsters and the opportunity to climb inside a giant toad. I don't know what else you could want. 

On a scale of 2-12, Sanctum of the Undertoad Queen gets 9 stingbats.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/528673/sanctum-of-the-undertoad-queen-shadowdark-adventure