Review: Lovely Jade Necropolis

 

Today we're looking at Lovely Jade Necropolis by Joseph R. Lewis.  After tackling 5e and then OSE, Mr. Lewis has added Shadowdark to his repertoire. This is a 100 location adventure for level 3-5 PCs. It's inspired by the works of Clark Ashton Smith and that is exactly my jam.

The eponymous necropolis was once the site of a beautiful garden built by the fey for their human friends. The humans betrayed the fey, were summarily killed, and now the garden is a place where the dead cannot rest. A couple of necromancers have moved in and now they're fighting. Plus the fey aren't thrilled about the new tenants so they're trying to kick them both out. It's a nice whirlwind of intrigue and violence for the party to get mixed up in. We get some nice hooks and rumors and we're off!

Okay, one more thing and then we're off. The fey and undead are given a few little twists from how they're usually presented. Rather than mindless fodder, we're told that the zombies retain their memories from life, but must obey the commands of their creator. And that they may be able interpret those commands in a way that allows them to act more freely. They are also repelled by salt. The fey have three weaknesses - sunlight, true iron (sometimes called "cold iron") and a secret name that has a 2:6 chance of stunning them. These are small things that open up some interesting things for the players to discover and build strategies around. It also allows for some interesting hazards and tools for the PCs to take advantage of, like a cold iron bear trap and stained glass skylights.

We begin with a pointcrawl through 11 potential locations. These locations do exactly as they should - foreshadowing the necropolis, teaching the players some strategies for dealing with what's inside and just being fun and interesting. There's no padding here. Each one is an interesting situation that all helps to build the world. Whether it's a fey-haunted daffodil shrine, or a doom priest begging for death, each one is an engaging situation that all helps to build the world and will likely have an impact later on.

The necropolis is split into four locations - the central citadel occupied by necromancer A, the west wing occupied by necromancer B and the east wing occupied by the fey and the drake-ridden labyrinth underneath it all.

The area descriptions and room keys themselves aren't breaking new ground in terms of layout but they are clear and concise and beefy. Bear in mind that their are 100 locations. No minimal keying here. Most of them take up half a page and have multiple things worth investigating, stealing or fighting. 

I harp about interactivity a lot, and it's kind of a nebulous term. So if you want an example of what good interactivity looks like, this is your textbook. It starts with the situation itself. Lewis laid the foundation by setting up the location with multiple factions that have competing desires (even the zombies!) with many potential resolutions that are interesting, but where none is clearly "better" than another. This will cause most players to think twice before entering every room sword-first. Almost every room creates another branching path leading to a zillion ways the adventure might play out. It won't take the party very long to find them at odds with one or more of the dungeon's various factions.

On the one hand it has a slight funhouse dungeon feel, with many disparate and strange rooms. But on the other hand, the overarching themes, history and current situation of the place ties it all nicely together. Nothing feels out of place. And as with the pointcrawl, nothing is wasted.

There are simply too many cool things to recount here. Flip to a random page. What's on it is awesome. Okay I'm gonna roll a d100. Hey, 99 - it's a ruby dragon skull that trades the locations of deadly weapons for fresh body parts. Let's do it again: 27 - the boudoir of a woman trying to seduce one of the necromancers. There's a wand that turns blood puddles into loyal blood spiders. Last one: 65 - a cursed knight with a tree growing from his 100 year-old, still-living body.

Not only are these rooms cool, creative little situations for the party to get involved in, but what they do might have consequences that ripple throughout the necropolis. There's an open-endedness that can result in all sorts of consequences, in this adventure and beyond.

It might take some work to coordinate all the dynamic elements of Jade Necropolis but this is the sort of thing that's self-propelled. Unless your players are asleep they'll find something to something to hook them in and keep the action moving forward.

But it's not all sunshine and daffodils. I think many of the problems I have with Jade Necropolis can be traced back to the fact that it was written for Shadowdark and OSE and Cairn and is a hair's breadth away from being system neutral. I think the right move is to publish separate versions of the same adventure. But that means doing two different layouts and splitting your sales up across multiple products, so it might not get that "platinum seller" boost or whatever. So maybe write three variations and include them all in the purchase. But if you're not going to do that, just write it for OSE. B/X is the lingua franca of the OSR and at least that gives people something concrete to convert from. Instead, we're on shaky ground.

There were a few things in the intro section that threw up red flags. Under random encounters, it says "Your game system probably asks you to roll a d6, and on a 1, you then roll again for a monster, right? Well, in this adventure, you can simply roll a d20 on the encounter table whenever you want. The results include monster attacks, but also sights, sounds, gusts of wind, dripping water, hazards, and even remains to loot!"

I find this offensive. Random encounters exist to push time pressure on the party and to allow them to take calculated risks. They can stay in the dungeon a bit longer, or undertake a time-consuming activity, and they know what are the odds of having an unfortunate run-in with the dungeon's denizens. But placing this important part of the risk economy at the whims of the GM robs the players of they ability to calculate those risks and removes part of their agency. 

Elsewhere when speaking of saving throws, it says "I’m leaving this choice in your capable GM hands. What do you want your players to roll? What is the target

number? Trust your gut!" I paid for this and I'm running it because I want to know what's in your gut, dear author. Of course I know I can make stuff up. Don't use that as an excuse to abdicate your responsibility as a designer to design the encounters, hazards and traps found in the dungeon. 

So the adventure is pretty light on mechanics. For example, in one room we have: "THORNS. 1 foot tall, razor sharp, too dense to step around." No specifics on how much damage per foot traveled, how many HP should we try to destroy them, etc. All that's left for the GM to sort out. One baddie wields a huge scythe named Hellrazor. Sounds pretty cool but we don't get a single detail about what strange powers it might have. Maybe it's a casualty of writing for three systems at once but there is a lot left open to mechanical interpretation in Jade Necropolis. More than I would like. Then again, in another place there's a magic handle with fingers that burn like candles for 10 minutes. Something that Shadowdark, Cairn and OSE all have in common is tracking time in rounds and turns. So maybe that would have been more appropriate than minutes in this case. 

There's also a sort of abstraction of monster stats. A bone spider made of four human skeletons and an 8-foot tall reaper knight in spiked plate armor share a stat block. There are only 11 unique stat blocks in total. I guess I shouldn't be surprised since the author has a YouTube video called "How many monsters?" where he advocates for writing adventures with as few unique monsters as possible. Even really smart people are wrong sometimes. To me it seems like a wasted opportunity to take some of the creativity that is so apparent in the dungeon itself and apply it to monster design. But this is another area where it will be up to the GM to add some variety.

Treasure is the same way. A lot of it boils down to "roll on the loot table" and we're also told that everything on the loot table is worth 25gp, whether it's a steel gauntlet or a ruby pendant.

There was an entry on the Arcane Library blog a while back called "Imagine First, Design Second". https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/blogs/news/imagine-first-design-second. It has great advice on the importance of imagining a fantastical space before getting down to the nitty gritty of mechanics:

"Before you begin writing, you must see the titanic, black-glass mountain towering overhead like a rearing leviathan. You must smell the sultry jungle mist, redolent with flowers and the stench of nearby corpses. You must feel the rat bones pop beneath your boots as you stalk across the damp flagstone into the vine-draped halls of the monkey god.

Only then are you ready to add a Dex save to avoid falling into a 10-foot deep pit trap."

Lewis got the imagination part brilliantly and beautifully right. But he stopped a little short when it came to the design part. I fully intend to run this and I expect my table will have a blast. But I do feel that the experience will be hampered a bit because as a GM I'll miss opportunities for imagination and mechanics to interact in ways that I would not suppose. The rulings I'll make on the fly will fall short of the more intentional rules a talented designer would create after careful consideration. And the difference will probably be imperceptible to my players so I should probably let it go. But I think a lack of solid mechanics is what holds this adventure back from being a masterwork and relegates it to mere excellence.

Make no mistake, though. Jade Necropolis is excellent. This is exactly the kind of huge, juicy dungeon Shadowdark has been waiting for.

On a scale of 2-12, Lovely Jade Necropolis gets 10 stingbats.

https://josephrlewis.itch.io/lovely-jade-necropolis