Review: Lair of the Forgotten Queen
In the first dungeon, Grotto of Gelid Flame, rooms and hazards feel somewhat disjointed. Quicksand sort of makes sense in an underground sea grotto, but fire spouts don't. There's a sense that the dungeons are randomly generated. This is not a bad thing per se, but it's sometimes difficult to take randomly generated results and mold them into a cohesive location. So you end up with a bunch of rooms that feel separate from the others.
Sean McCoy (creator of Mothership) wrote an excellent blog post earlier this year called Writing Rooms in Pairs. You should go read it. Then go read the rest of the blog because it's extremely helpful in many different ways. Anyways, Mr. McCoy proposes to connect each room of a dungeon to at least one other room, and says "You can think of these rooms as sequels and prequels to the rooms you’ve already come up with. Setups and punch lines. Writing in pairs builds connectivity and halves the amount of work you have to do. This gets you in the mindset inherently of connecting your spaces rather than thinking of a dungeon as like thirty different themed rooms."
I love connectivity in a dungeon. It lends credibility to the location. It rewards players that are paying attention and looking for clues and it drives them to explore and interact. It's difficult to pull off - kind of like one of those puzzles where you have to fit all the pieces together all at once - but it separates the dungeons that have been generated versus those that have been designed.
The second dungeon, The Warren of Scales is a better in this regard. Here we have a couple of factions that each span multiple rooms. But it is missing some crucial details on how the factions will respond to each other and to invaders, and what they each want. There are some interesting encounters here and the dungeon feels dynamic by giving all of its inhabitants to do besides standing around waiting to get stabbed by an adventurer. But It will be up to the GM to decide what the bandits and gnolls are doing here and how they feel about anything. When I reviewed The Zircon Zephyr I mentioned how simply giving the bandits and their leader interesting names is a nice jumping off point for the GM. Something similar would be welcome here.
Dungeon #3 is a short climb to an abandoned roc nest. It's a similar situation - some really solid ideas but lacking in cohesion. Although putting winged rams at the top of a mountain is *chef's kiss* .
The 4th dungeon shows up with a lot going for it. We've got a dragon trapped by dark magic that has been reduced to a giant mole rat. Cannibal kobolds. Beleaguered beastman adventurers. False lizardman heirs to the aforementioned dragon.
These factions will lead to some compelling situations and decisions for the players. And beyond that, there is a lot of creativity with some of the rooms. But we again run into the problem of those rooms being siloed. There's an anti-magic room that is unlikely to have any impact unless the PCs have a random encounter in that location. We have a divination chamber with nothing to divine. Another place is haunted by some "unfortunate souls" with no clue as to who they were or what may lay them to rest (besides violence).
Let me give an example of what kind of connectivity I'm talking about. In one room, the PCs can find a broken teleportation rune that they can fix with a DC 18 INT check. There's already a library in the dungeon - what if the secret to repairing the rune was there, instead? A simple change that gives a the PCs a little sidequest and helps to make the dungeon feel like a real location with history.
There are also a few places across all of the dungeons where the information for certain traps and hazards is incomplete. We are told there is a net trap but given no details on what triggers it or what it does. There is an advancing wall of flame that crosses one room, but no information on how long it takes before resetting.
One of the highlights are the magic items. "MASK OF SADISM Flawless gold mask in the visage of a beautiful woman, inlaid with a ruby teardrop. Benefit. Whenever you deal at least 5 damage to an enemy, regain 1 HP. Curse. The first time you put on the mask, it burns and adheres to your flesh. A drop of blood leaks from each eyehole, leaving rusty stains across both cheeks. Only releases grip on death. DISADV on CHA." Wonderful.
On a scale of 2-12, Lair of the Forgotten Queen gets 6 stingbats.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/522738/lair-of-the-forgotten-queen
From a GM standpoint, I think cohesion is so necessary to herlp visualize actually running it.
ReplyDeleteIt's much easier to fill in the inevitable blanks when the place has a strong sense of identity
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