Review: Tower of Hapshut

Today we're looking at Tower of Hapshut by Fenris-77. It consists of a small 5-hex region and a 29-room dungeon for levels 6-8 and was written for their Shadows of Empire setting. It could easily be dropped into other settings, even if you just take the dungeon.

The primary adventure site is a temple currently occupied by an undead warlord. We aren't given any particularly compelling reason to go there - he doesn't have any nefarious plans that are about to come to fruition and no local leaders are offering a reward for his extermination. But there's reputedly some treasure inside, and in a game where gold = xp, perhaps that's enough.

The layout is exemplary. Clear, attractive and informative. It smacks of effort and care. It can't have been easy to fit everything together this well, but sweating the details paid off and I wouldn't feel terribly intimidated running this sight-unseen. The text gets a little verbose in places and the writing overall has a very conversational tone, but in return we're treated with some vivid descriptions and evocative details that contribute a lot towards making this an immersive location. "Crocodile-headed avatars of Sobek... formed of thick, heavy bones, possiblyogre bones, bound together with silver wire and densely painted with glyphs and runes." Usually these details are kept out of the main room description, so you're players won't be rolling their eyes but it does mean that some of the room details will take a few beats to parse.

Overall these details create a wonderful image of the location, and it's easy to picture it in the mind's eye. The themes are strong and the author didn't take any shortcuts - the enemies, treasure, and other accoutrements are bespoke. 

The structure of the dungeon is pretty straightforward. There's a brief exploration of the surface level that terminates in a tower with a locked door. The key must be retrieved from the catacombs below. The keys are in strange order - rather than being in the order that they will be played (surface -> catacombs -> tower) it goes surface -> tower-> catacombs. A small change, but that would make it easier to follow.

In addition to random encounters of the typical sort, we also have a table of "evocative moments", such as "Chill emanating from the black

stone walls makes you shiver." These little events can be a nice way to spice things up and reinforce the themes of the dungeon, but it's important to do what the author here has done and use them to augment random encounters, not replace them. We can have room for flavorful but non-impactful things, but the pressure and risk/reward decisions that actual random encounters bring should be preserved. So, kudos for that. 

Hapshut interacts with the mechanics and assumptions very well - better than most. In one place the PCs have a chance to spill flammable liquid. If the torchbearer fails everyone is set on fire. When digging through a rancid larder, you must pass a CON check or waste a round coughing and retching. These kinds of obvious interactions with some of the core tenets of Shadowdark (light and time) wouldn't be notable except that they're often left out. Often there's no risk for failing a check, even if it's just lost time. And while a competent GM will probably make these rulings it's nice to have them spelled out.

The rooms themselves are decently interactive and give the PCs more to do besides "I stab the bad guy" or "I search for treasure". But they don't interact with each other. That is, something you learn or find in one room probably won't help you navigate any other rooms or overcome their challenges. Although there is some strong lore here, the very best adventures will make the lore relevant, i.e. learning it will provide the PCs with some kind of advantage or solution to solving the dungeon and plundering its most valuable treasures. 

Neither does the dungeon really present any interesting situations to the players. I use the word 'dilemma' a lot but I really think that's the juice of a meaty adventure. There are no difficult choices here. The PCs won't have to give anything up in order to advance towards their goals, or decide between competing factions. Really there are only two NPCs in the dungeon to interact with, and neither offers much besides a brief conversation or a fight. The monsters and traps themselves are good, but maybe not enough to keep high-level party engaged. It might be forgiven if the combat encounters were a bit more exciting. But most of them, even the boss battle, are essentially pitched battles with few dynamic elements.

Tower of Hapshut is, in many ways, a very well made adventure. But it also highlights some of the pitfalls of high level adventure design. Something that's difficult to design, and that I don't see it very often, is an open-ended challenge or an obstacle that's engaging regardless of the PCs' level.

It's exactly why something like ye olde Keep on the Borderlands could be so engaging for a low-level party, despite the fact that it's pretty bare-bones and doesn't look all that exciting on paper. Every decision the players make is life or death and you can't face-tank your way through those caves. 

So you have a couple of options when designing a high-level adventure. Option A is just to make the monsters tougher. But it doesn't seem to really scale linearly and, at least in my experience, it becomes harder to gauge encounter difficulty as levels go up. As a campaign goes on a lot of variables are introduced by way of magic items and boons and whatever. 

And option B is what I said above. Design the sorts of challenges and dilemmas that aren't based on how many hit points you have or what spells you've learned. But if it were easy, everyone would do it. Instead we get a giant pile of level 1-3 adventures while we starve for high-level stuff. One obvious reason is that people play a lot more low-level adventures. But I also think they're just harder to write. 

Tower of Hapshut does a lot right. Great layout and visual design. Rich environmental detail and atmosphere. Even the public domain art is well-chosen. I think if it were tuned down to level 3ish, it would be a lot more compelling and challenging. But a party that's been around the proverbial block a few times might be looking for something more. 

On a scale of 2-12, Temple of Hapshut gets 7 stingbats. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/534226/tower-of-hapshut-a-shadows-of-empire-adventure