Review: Delve

Today we're looking at Delve by Robert “Bob World Builder" Mason and the folks at Eventyr Games. It bills itself as "a complete guide to building and surviving deadly dungeons with 200+ pages of dungeon-building tools and plug-and-play dungeons – and more monsters, treasures, player options, and traps than you can shake a 10-foot pole at!"

This is a 5e conversion. The publisher and designers make 5e products. But they changed the cover from color to grayscale so I'm sure they nailed it.

I'm going to take a closer look at some of the 12 dungeons included, but I want to address one thing first: "Delve" is a misnomer, in that none of these dungeons is very deep. The room counts are between 5 and 16 and the vast majority have 10 or fewer. I'm going to quote Gus L. again:

"To make exploration meaningful the act of moving through dungeon locations needs to create a sense of ‘risk’ - tension and anticipation. In a scene or encounter based adventure tension builds as the narrative rises towards confrontation and the story advances towards climax - much like a novel or film. In a location based game the progress of the party in exploring the location creates tension without expected end point or climax: unraveling secrets, delving deeper, discovering its dangers and its potential rewards while steadily exhausting their resources." 

You can certainly have a fun adventure with a 10-room dungeon. But it's too small to make exploration-based gameplay to really hum. It's too small to create a real risk to the PCs - they probably won't run out of torches, inventory slots or even hit points or spells. Because there will be very little risk, there will also be very little tension.

This is why Time, Darkness and Gear are the first three things listed under the Shadowdark Core Ethos. It's a game that's designed around procedural dungeon crawls that create risk and tension from the scarcity of these things. 

The designers of Delve must have known that their dungeons weren't built for exploration, because they impose a narrative structure on several of the dungeons, where the focus is on a series of encounters and scenes that build tension, rather than the act of exploring itself. Even though Delve invokes legendary modules like Tomb of Horrors and Caverns of Thracia, it denies the power thereof. 

So while these are, I guess, technically dungeons, if you were looking for something meaty to really take advantage of Shadowdark's focus on exploration-focused gameplay, this ain't it. 

Before we even get to the dungeons, we have 20 pages of history, theory and a random dungeon generator. These are all fine, but also a bit perfunctory, and the same topics are covered elsewhere with greater depth and analysis (and for free, or in the Shadowdark core rules).  Then there are several ancestries, classes and other players options. My personal take is that Shadowdark already has all the player options it will ever need, so I didn't read that part. I will point out that none of the credited designers have much in the way of Shadowdark experience, but they do have a lot of YouTube experience and I'm sure it's the same thing. 

Delve does live up to its claim that these dungeons could be run with minimal prep. The layout and formatting is very easy to follow, and the writing is very clear in ways that the Arcane Library terseness simply can't be. It's obvious that great care was taken to make them easy on the GM, with a couple of notable exceptions.

The stats for all monsters and traps are relegated to the back of the book. It's not uncommon to see this done for monsters (although I greatly prefer to have them in the room keys themselves) but I've never seen it done with traps. And I think it's a remarkably poor choice. If you are told that a room has "putrid water" you have to flip to a completely different section of the book and read an overlong description to find out what that means, rather than just including something like "putrid water - if drunk, DC 12 CON or 1d4 CON damage. Repeat each day until cured". It really hamstrings the usability. 

 

Ok, enough of that. Let's get to the heart of the matter. Are these dungeons any good? I'm going to review 3 of the 12. The first is Lair of the Frog King, wherein our band of intrepid adventures will cleanse the 5-room temple of a sea goddess from the filth-worshipping frog people that now dwell within. Let's look at the first area key:

We're told there is the main entrance and also two entrances in the top of the cliff to areas 2 and 3. You just need to break the bars and climb down 20 feet. Or you can just walk in through the front door. I suppose these entrances are there to give PCs an option to avoid the pillar trap that guards the main entrance, but the tell for that trap is only apparent after you trigger it by approaching and examining the pillars. Let's imagine the possible ways this could go:

1. You are a kind GM. Before your PCs get close enough to trigger it, you say to the Priest, "you recognize the symbol of the deity Selia. It's customary to fill your mouth with water when entering her holy places." Ok they do that. They have avoided the trap without any effort or interaction on their part, simply because the GM told them what to do.
2. You tell the players that the pillars have carved images. Maybe you even tell them that the fish has a hole in its mouth. "Oh shit," the thief thinks, "maybe this is trap. GM, I'd like to carefully inspect the pillar for traps, and maybe see if I can block the hole in the fish's mouth". Then you say, "a ridiculously high pressure spray of water comes out as you approach, roll DEX." 
3. You tell the players that pillars flank the entrance. Maybe they just decide to walk up, maybe they even say they want to examine the pillars more closely. Either way, you say "everyone roll DEX". 

I guess what I'm saying is, the likelihood of the players thinking they need to use those extra entrances is severely reduced by the nature of the trap. And the trap itself built such that normal practices of trap detection and disarming don't work. It's designed so that the only way to avoid it is for the GM to just tell the players what's up.

Furthermore, the boss room is locked by a puzzle that includes unplugging a fountain, playing music and bargaining with a water spirit (that is antagonistic towards the frog people, btw), so how do the froggies get in and out? Overall, the presentation of this adventure is very good, but the design is lacking - the central puzzle is a bit nonsensical and there isn't much to it beyond that - go to three rooms, collect some water after a short encounter or puzzle, and then fight the bad guys. I suppose it meets the criteria for a minimum viable dungeon but barely stakes a step beyond.

Crypt of the Oozing Dragon is about a diseased dragon that has come knocking on an elven crypt looking for sacred healing water. It's one of the book's longer dungeons at 12 rooms.

There is a problem with the stated level range of 4-7. Besides the level 7 dragon the other enemies are 12 level 1 kobolds and one level 3 kobold. You may remember that the big bad in Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur is also a level 7 monster. For a group of level 4s, this will be a cake walk. For a group of level 7s it will be a waste of time, even with the additional monsters and dragon hp suggested by the adventure.

The Shadowdark core rules suggest a ratio of 3 monster levels per character level at character level 4 for an average difficulty encounter. So four level fours should face off against ~12 levels of monsters. But the encounter with the dragon (which should probably be of higher difficultly than average) only has 9 total monster levels. So not only did they ignore the stat conversion advice, they ignored the encounter building advice that came straight from Shadowdark's designer. 

It looks like they just converted the 5e monster CR to Shadowdark monster level and kept the number of monsters per encounter the same. Throughout Delve, monsters have not been properly converted and encounter difficulty has not been recalculated, despite the vast differences between 5e and Shadowdark.

Getting back to Crypt of the Ooze Dragon - the titular dragon has been kicking around the crypt for two weeks and still hasn't been able to open the magic door - a task that will take the PCs about 30 seconds. That detracts from the location as a real, dynamic place and makes it feel like everyone is just waiting around for the party to show up. If the party bargains with the dragon, there is a sequence of events that is laid out for you that results in a big set piece battle with collapsing pillars. It seems like a cool encounter, but is a bit contrived. I think a slightly different approach would have been better. Maybe the dragon has just arrived, and the party has one hour real time before it figures out the door. The kobolds are looking for the solution and every one they kill adds 5 minutes to the clock. After that the dragon burns the place down. Something along those lines to make it feel like the world exists independently of the PCs, and will go on without them if they don't move quickly. 

Besides that, this dungeon and most of the dungeons in this book rely on the sort of logic puzzles that have only one solution. For example, tiles on the floor that must be stepped on in a certain order to open a door. In my experience as a GM, these sorts of puzzles are often either so simple as to be inconsequential, or difficult enough to engender frustration and immersion-breaking. Either way, it's an exercise in trying to read the designer's mind rather than creative problem-solving and decision-making. 

Goblin Punch wrote an excellent post on OSR-Style Challenges that give the players an opportunity to use creativity for solving more open-ended puzzles. . The criteria for this sort of challenge are:

 - has no easy solution.

 - has many difficult solutions.

 - requires no special tools.

 - can be solved with common sense.

 - isn't solvable through some ability someone has on their character sheet.

I find these types of challenges much more engaging than logic puzzle style challenges, and Delve is more or less bereft of them.

OK, moving on to our final dungeon - Tomb of the Timeless One. "A tomb holding a powerful demon in stasis has been damaged. To prevent the demon from escaping, the party must solve ancient puzzles, fight fearsome monsters, and travel through time itself!

This is one of the smallest dungeons, being only 5 rooms (although four of them have both a present and a past state). It is also the most narrative - the only way to really interact with the location is by follow a predetermined sequence of events. The part resets the time machine to two hours prior, gets a crystal to repair it so the demon doesn't get out, goes forward in time again but the demon gets out anyways, fight the demon, save the day, go home. It really has nothing to do with the dungeon in the classic sense, and would probably be better structured as a series of scenes rather than a location.

The time traveling is also totally wasted. Because you go backwards in time, nothing you do up to that point really matters. But if you instead went forward in time, you could structure some challenges in the future that are affected by the party's actions in the past. As it, the time travel brings an NPC back to life but otherwise doesn't really impact the players' choices in any way.

And then there's the balance problem again. The time demon is level 12. Looking back at the core rules (but seriously, who would ever read the rules of system they were designing adventures for? Nerds?) it suggests 5 monster levels per level 7 PC - so a party of four should face off against 20 levels for an average encounter. The book also warns that solo monsters can be too easy. But that advice is ignored, or more likely, was never heard in the first place. As a result, the party will humiliate the demon in short order.

I have run a lot of 5e, and read a lot of 5e dungeons and adventures. This looks and feels like a 5e product through and through. Delve ignores what makes dungeons fun and interesting, and it ignores the Shadowdark core ethos. The conversion from 5e is perfunctory at best and unusable at worst. The dungeons eschew supporting procedural exploration, risk and player choice in favor of weak narratives. The production value is high. Besides that, there is not much to recommend it.

On a scale of 2-12, Delve gets 4 stingbats.