Review: The Devoured Labyrinth

Today we are looking at The Devoured Labyrinth published by Bite-Sized Gaming, with Andrew Bishkinskyi and Zac Goins as lead designers. It is a collection of 46 dungeons, the vast majority being 1-2 pages, spread across a 160-hex region map.

Let's address the elephant in the room: The Devoured Labyrinth is not a labyrinth or megadungeon. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it is, given the name. In fact the first two questions of the Kickstarter FAQ address this, where we are told "The 'Labyrinth' is a metaphor for interconnected buried ruins that have sunk underground." Ah, ok. It's a metaphor. So what it is, rather, collection of short 1-2 page dungeons that are loosely connected via themes and the overland hexmap. They are not connected literally. Maybe you shoulda come up with a different title.

Since there are 46 dungeons in this thing I'm not going to review of all them, but I will dive into a handful. 

First up is Doom Hold, a 12-room romp through the lair of an undead goblin zombie for levels 1-2. Let's go room by room: 

1. Nothing

2. Nothing

3. Searching garbage reveals monsters. No treasure.

4. Treasure

5. Nothing

6. Nothing

7. Random mundane weapons

8. Treasure and a zombie.

9. Trap

10. Nothing

11. Skeletons (# not given)

12. Treasure and zombie.

Half the rooms are effectively empty. I know there's some rule of thumb that a certain percentage of rooms should be "empty", but if you only have 12 rooms there had better be something interesting in every single one. The only connection between any two rooms is that the key for room 7 is in room 8. Total recoverable treasure is 100 gp, a potion of healing and a +1 shortsword. Normally I would say that's not enough but in this dungeon it's way too much. 

This is for levels 1-2 but there is also a lvl 7 Otyugh that the party may encounter randomly when searching a trash pile, with no warning whatsoever. An Otyugh has three attacks at +5 for 1d8/1d8/1d10 damage. So, pretty good odds of killing 3 first level characters in a single round.

Moving on to the The Lost Watch. The premise is that 6ish goblins and their level 4 boss are holed up in an old watchtower. There are two ghouls in basement. I guess the goblins are unable to deal with them, either by just barricading the door or tossing in a few molotov cocktails and closing the door. So they have to keep feeding them. Can ghouls starve?

There are five rooms that contain random amounts of treasure and monsters. Never understood the point of random numbers for fixed encounters. If I have to roll my own dungeon anyway, what am I paying you for?

Right before the party encounters the ghouls in the basement, they find this: "Corpse: broken neck from falling down stairs, several jagged wounds. INT DC 13 reveals bite marks." Why INT? Why DC 13? Why have a check at all? And what is this supposed to reveal to players? That they might encounter something that will stab them then bite them and push them down the stairs? Did the ghouls just take a nibble and decide they weren't actually that hungry? I'm struggling to understand what story this dead goblin is trying to tell, and what the players would do with this information.

Also the adventure keeps referring to the "Hungry Thing" but it's two ghouls. I'm not sure why those numbers don't agree but it's kinda confusing. At the end the party will find the Shortsword of the Thief - +2 atk/dmg, replenish a luck token 1/day. Helluva prize for a level 1-2 dungeon.

Ok how about A Glowing Evil - a glowing tower for also for level 1-2 with a couple zombies outside and a wight inside. The author really loves +1 daggers because there are 3 of them in 4 rooms. Also the wight has a dagger instead of a sword. Oops all daggers.

At the end is this masterfully designed magic item:

Orb of Wonder: Size of a human head, glows and hums with great power, drowning out the world.

Bonus: touching the orb allows one to speak with any close dragons.

Curse: test CHA DC 14 each round or become allured for 1 hour, seeing the awe-inspiring aura of the dragon doomed within. Fail twice and permanently allured.

How would you adjudicate that, exactly? Under what circumstances does the PC have to make the check? And in Shadowdark, 1 hour is usually measured in real time so is that player just out of the game for an hour? If it's not real time, then how much in-game time is that? What does "fail twice" mean? Twice in a row? Twice ever? Do you have to make the check every round for an hour? 

And what sort of risk/reward ratio is this? You risk permanent loss of your character in exchange for being able to talk to a dragon within close? CAN'T YOU ALREADY DO THAT?!

Let's flip ahead a bit and look at Temple of The Burning Cold for levels 3-5. It's an 11-room ancient temple with fissures that release a freezing gas. This could be an interesting mechanic except that it isn't really used. There's a single Viperian in a room with leaking gas, but he's already described as "distracted" has no allies to call and at level 3 will get curb-stomped anyway. So there's no reason to put a lot of effort into figuring out how to use the freezing gas. And there's also a single Viperian wizard near some gas in another location. Beyond that there really aren't any opportunities to use the dungeon's sole distinguishing feature to overcome any challenges or unlock any secrets. 

There is also a way to plug up the gas in order to cause the whole place to collapse. To what end, no one knows. Like most of these dungeons there are no stakes. Whether the dungeon remains or is destroyed makes no difference and there are no impactful choices for the players to make. Go from room to room, have a couple easy fights (by which I literally mean two, maybe three), take the loot and leave. 

Flip flip flip how about Sanctum of the Cosmic Magi? We've got an 8-room "manse" inside of a pocket dimension. In the first room there's a pool of liquid crystal that will drain the power from a magic item held by a PC that touches it. Later, there's a pool of obsidian liquid that will restore the power to that same magic item, or, if a PC tries to cross it without having had an item drained then all of their magic items are drained. There is no diegetic foreshadowing or explanation of this mechanic. It can only be found by random experimentation and has a chance of either a neutral or negative outcome. It serves no purpose and will only appear arbitrary and capricious to players. 

In the same room with the obsidian pool there's a secret door marked on the map but no mention of it in the room key. No explanation of how to find it or how to open it. That secret door happens to be the only potential reward for crossing the pool. Behind it lies a room only accessible by that door or by a time-bending corridor that takes a week to traverse. At the end is a single random spell scroll. Crap's sake. 

Everything in this place punishes the PCs for interaction. There are sarcophagi that have an 11:12 chance of containing a monster. Reading the plaques on ancient coffins releases a wraith and there is nothing else inside. There is a wizard in one place and a flesh golem in another. Neither guards any treasure nor offers anything else, even conversation, other than to be fought or ignored. 

The description for Sanctum states that "and getting out may not be quite as easy as getting in…" so I thought there might be some kind of challenge or puzzle the party needs to overcome before they can leave. Dear reader, there is nothing keeping them from just walking out the way they came in. 

Ok I think I've got one more in me. The finale is Her Majesty in Entropy, a 7-room palace that houses a cursed queen. Here we've got a couple of undead stone giants that just use regular stone giant stats and an ice giant wraith-priest that just use the regular wraith stat block. Would have been cool to come up with some unique statblocks for these cool-sounding monsters but that effort is not made here. 

So the queen is trapped in undeath and can only be laid to rest by replacing an artifact called the Elysian Accord before her throne. This artifact is not mentioned or included anywhere in the preceding 40 dungeons. The pieces of the artifact are located in 6 tombs that the GM is meant to place randomly on the map. So there are no clues as to this meta-plot anywhere else in the adventure. That seems really strange to me. Why not try to thread this all together in some way by planting bits of lore as well as the pieces themselves elsewhere?

Anyways the party will walk through a few rooms, fight a few monsters and read a lore dump about the Elysian Accord. There's a room where the moaning of sad ghosts inflicts disadvantage on all checks, but there's no reason to make a check in what is essentially a completely inert place. The end is a boss fight against a single level 12 foe. According to the core book, an average fight for a party of four level 7-9 adventurers should be 20 levels. We're told she can't be reasoned with because God forbid there should be anyone worth talking to in any of these dungeons. This adventure, like many of their others in The Devoured Labyrinth, will end in a bit of an anticlimax. 

This book has 46 dungeons in it, but they're basically free Dyson Logos maps filled out with core book monsters and core book random treasure rolls. Dyson Logos has been a tremendous blessing to this hobby, but also a curse. Their maps are perfect for whipping up a quick dungeon for your home game. But I think they can do more harm than good when you're designing a dungeon for publication. A few reviews ago I referenced this post https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/blogs/news/imagine-first-design-second on the Arcane Library blog about imagining first and designing second. Using a premade map swaps those priorities to a degree. The geography of the location has already been designed, so your imagination is bound by that design. There's tension between the area being described and the map that's being presented. A room described as "A massive vaulted library of great arcane 

magnificence which defies physics" is a 25' x 35' rectangle with a couple bookshelves. The massive throne of a storm giant queen is crammed into an 8' circle. Everywhere you look there are features in the text that don't match the map, and features on the map that don't match the text. 

So despite the prodigious amount of content, I wouldn't call it a terribly good value. If you grabbed a free Dyson Logos map and spent 20 minutes populating it, this is probably close to what the average GM will come up with. Many could probably do much better. The various authors aren't bringing a lot to the table here, and there's a notable lack of creative challenges to overcome or interesting dilemmas to puzzle out. It all feels a bit paint-by-numbers. The layout is clear and easy to follow, so I guess there's that.

On a scale of 2-12, The Devoured Labyrinth gets 5 stingbats.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/536338/the-devoured-labyrinth-for-the-shadowdark-rpg