Review: Sapphire Seas

Today we're looking at Sapphire Seas by Alfie & Charlie Lintzgy and published by Menagerie Press. In Sapphire Seas we will "Explore Phoenician-inspired isles, recover long-lost treasure, fight mythic battles, and sail the seas in this level 1-10 campaign." 

"Campaign" is a loaded word in the TTRPG space. In the loosest terms, it just means the sum total of whatever happened across a series of play sessions. But as a product it has a very specific meaning and carries certain expectations. If you tell your table you're running a campaign, images of Curse of Strahd or Tomb of Annihilation will pop up - campaigns where the party has a clear goal pretty early on, and where there's a loose structure of events that leads to the eventual achievement of that goal.

Sapphire Seas is not a campaign in that sense. The current latest comment on the Kickstarter pretty well sums it up: "Where is the 'First complete level 1-10 adventure for Shadowdark RPG[ located in the book? The pdf is mostly full of locations with no hooks, and there is no mention anywhere that I can find about an overarching campaign framework, as described in the product description. Don't get me wrong, the location details are great, but where's the 'level 1-10 campaign'? Is it coming in a separate document?"

So it's not what it says on the tin, and if you're looking for a 5e or Pathfinder-style adventure path for your Shadowdark game you're likely to come away disappointed. But in various places the publisher has also described it as a sandbox. And to be honest, that is certainly more desirable to myself and probably to most of the Shadowdark community than a railroaded campaign. So how does it fare in that regard? Well, we'll get to that.

First let's talk about what Sapphire Seas actually is. You get a hexmap with several small islands. There are some new ancestries and some rules for maritime travel. For each of the islands you get details on the settlements and dungeons there. Regarding the dungeons, there are more than 20, ranging in size from a few rooms up to 30. At 400 pages, you can't accuse the designers of skimping on content. 

Unfortunately the layout makes this massive amount of content very difficult to navigate. One thing I can say about 3rd party Shadowdark products is that the layout is usually very good. Or at least good enough that I don't notice it. Arcane Library set a great example, and there are free or low cost templates available for virtually every publishing software platform out there.

Sapphire Seas ignores all of that. The table of contents is 16 pages long and includes a reference to every single room key. There are widows and orphans everywhere (stranded text at the beginning or end of a page). Random chunks of white space in the middle of a page. Headings and subheadings use the same format so its impossible to differentiate. Actually it appears as though everything were dumped into a two-column word doc and no effort on layout at all. I want to call it amateurish but there are plenty of amateurs that knock this aspect of adventure design out of the park. So I have to go with lazy. 

As a result, navigating this behemoth is a chore. The table of contents is so dense as to become useless. And scanning the text itself is often baffling. At least it is hyperlinked and keyword search works. God help you if you have the print version.

The island maps also need some work. The regional map has hexes, but the maps of individual islands that include POIs does not. I can't imagine why the individual island maps do not include hexes but it would make adjudicating travel much more difficult than it needs to be.

And none of the locations have a suggested level range. Before you respond with "balaNce DOesn't MATteR in ShadOwdARK" ask yourself why every Arcane Library adventure includes a level range, and why the core rules include advice for encounter building and treasure amounts based on level. It's important for the GM to know what is the potential difficulty and danger of level of the dungeons. Doubly so if these locations are to have any sort of modularity.  My mistake - there is a table showing a level range for each island and, presumably, the dungeons on that island.

Speaking of those locations, I don't have the time to review all 20 but let's take a look at a couple, starting with Keep of the Sorceress. This is a 16-room dungeon that houses a young and beautiful being possessed by a crone. The crone also uses a magical stone to enthrall the various denizens of the keep.

It's an interesting situation, but the gameplay will consist mostly of going room to room and killing the crone's bewitched thralls that attack on site. There isn't much else to interact with besides the sorceress herself, whom we are told is "quick to anger" and "prone to violence."

Like so many other aspects of this product, the problems come down to a lack of information. There's a trapped door that causes a portcullis to drop and the ceiling to lower, crushing everyone in the room. The only way to avoid it is to learn the crone's true name, and the only way to learn that name is to find and befriend a crow elsewhere in the dungeon. So the solution is a bit obscure. I'm not opposed to this in principle, but there's a big difference between using a puzzle like this to lock a door, and using a puzzle like this to avoid a trap that is likely to kill some PCs. 

Then there is a door locked by a talking face that can only be opened by speaking the name of the king's daughter. But there is no way, in-world, for the players to learn this and no reason, I think, for them to come to that conclusion on their own. We're told that "If cajoled, the door drops hints about the phrase". So basically the GM will have to tell them the solution. The name itself is found on an obelisk on an entirely different island.

And there's no way to learn the secret of the sorceress and the crone without killing one of them. And the adventure presumes we will kill the sorceress first because it doesn't tell us what happens to her if the party finds and kills the crone's comatose true body instead. There was an opportunity here to give the PCs the choice to save the sorceress, but the only resolution presented in the text is violence.

Next we've got Ziggurat of the Beast, a 31-room dungeon built to trap an "eldritch thing" that turns out to be a dude with a lion head. 

This one's a bit disjointed with more than a dash of the old-school funhouse. We've got wo rooms with traps that are triggered by taking coins from a treasury, a couple magic mirrors, a quicksilver monkey, a random drider and sphinx that will quiz the PCs on fun facts about the Sapphire Seas all split the rent. Some decent ideas and good interactivity if you can suspend your disbelief for a few moments. 

There's also room where a rakshasa is shackled, but no details on the shackles or chains themselves, like whether and how they may be broken. And we're told the rakshasa wants "entertainment". Really? She doesn't want to be freed?

In the ziggurat PCs are more likely to captured than killed, and forced to fight in an arena to entertain The Beast and his harem. Very cool stuff, but it's set up so that the strongest PC will face the level 16 champion. I think the math strongly favors the champion in that 1v1 matchup. 

But the biggest issue isn't the dungeon itself. Actually you could probably grab any of the locations from this adventure, fill in a few details and have a pretty good time. The issue is that there's no reason for the PCs to go here. No clues or hints will lead them to the Ziggurat. I suppose they may come across it during the course of their travels, and may want to know what's inside. Fair play. But I think folks who buy a book billing itself as a "campaign" or even a "sandbox" are looking for a little more connective tissue.

Take the thematically similar Secret of the Black Crag as an example. That is a sandbox with some kinetic energy. First you have tons of rumors, some of which lead to specific adventure sites. Then the settlement has random encounters that lead the PCs to important NPCs. And those NPCs have hooks and information. Make a few rolls and the adventure becomes self-propelled.

Sapphire Seas lacks those tools for creating hooks and providing the party with some direction. There are no rumors and each island is lucky to have one random encounter that will lead to a point of interest. This is sort of minimum viable product sandbox. It gives you a lot of locations but not much else. In light of other sandboxes like the aforementioned Secret of the Black Crag or even Dolmenwood, where the GM is provided those tools in abundance, Sapphire Seas would require the GM to carefully read through 400 poorly-laid out pages in order to extract the information needed to write their own rumors and hooks. 

The interesting thing is that our Kickstarter commenter above wasn't entirely correct, and the designer clearly intended for there to be a sort of sequence of events. But this isn't communicated to the GM in any effective sort of way, and if the GM doesn't know about it, they can't convey it to the players. On one island there are 5 monoliths, each activated by an artifact that is found in one of the region's dungeons. Once all five are complete, a cave opens and the PCs can grab the one weapon that can slay the BBEG, Baal. Then they have to take the dagger to four elemental conduits to power it up before heading to the where Baal imprisoned to stab him in the eye and kill him.

It's not a bad setup, if a little video-gamey. Why this isn't outlined somewhere in the beginning is a mystery. There is virtually nothing in-world to guide the PCs along this path. There are two NPCs that know the whole plot - one is an imprisoned gorgon and the other is a sorcerer king. Both of them are about 30 rooms deep in high level dungeons, and there isn't really a good reason for the PCs to visit either of them. The gorgon has worshippers that want her freed but they offer something that is only of value to the PCs after they know they need to power up the dagger. So as a hook that one kinda shoots itself in the foot. 

The other person that can guide the PCs is the Sorcerer-King Mithon, who is by all accounts a bad dude and not someone they might be inclined to help. He's also in castle literally buried at the bottom of the sea and surrounded by high-level baddies. So it's not a location the party is likely to visit early on. 

All this is to say, the designers included a campaign framework but it's up to the GM to tease it out and to plant the hooks. The connections to all the required tasks and locations are paper thin and will basically require an NPC to tell the PCs what to do, because there are precious few clues for them to uncover otherwise.

And most crucially, the text fails to provide a why to any of this. All of the powerful NPCs are not only jerks, but they offer nothing in return for help - no gold, no boons. Throughout the book we're told what the NPCs want but not what they're willing to trade to get it. Even altruism doesn't work as a motivator. Sure it would be bad if Baal got out, but he's been trapped for thousands of years and there's no indication that he's going to escape any time soon. 

There's a fix for this - it's already stated that party arrives through a magical gate that closes right after their passage, and they need to open it to return home. Normally doing this requires visiting only one location. I would change it so each of the major factions had a different means for opening the gate that required visiting multiple locations. Plant some rumors that the various faction heads have information the PCs need to get home. Bosh.

So between the vey rough layout and the , the whole thing comes across as undercooked. There are a lot of locations, some of them decently interesting. But it lacks the structure of most published campaigns and the interconnectedness of a good sandbox. If you're willing to put in the work you could mold this into something that would support an entire 1-10 campaign, but given the layout problems and sheer size of the thing it would be a lot of work. I think it's best use would be to grab a few of the locations and drop them into your own campaign as needed.

On a scale of 2-12, Sapphire Seas gets 6 stingbats.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/534134/sapphire-seas-for-shadowdark-rpg