Classic D&D adventure module review

Slave Pits of the Undercity, by David Cook – Advanced D&D, 1980

An adventure for character levels 4-7

24 pages plus the separate cover with maps on the inside faces. The adventure has over 40 numbered areas on two dungeon levels, and there are two new monsters: the aspis (humanoid insects) and the giant sundew (monster plant).

This module was originally written as a tournament adventure, and there are several pages of information on running it as a tournament adventure, including 2 pages for the tournament Player Characters, a page on tournament scoring, and 2 pages for the tournament versions of the maps. There are also notes in the first pages and throughout the main text on how to handle the encounters in a tournament game. Its origin as a tournament adventure is the biggest problem with this module.

The concept for the module works fine as a general campaign adventure, but there was no rewriting to make the overall setting work in a logical way for campaign play. The author added more rooms and encounters, between and around the limited tournament encounter areas, but they don’t work together in any logical way.

The adventure setting is a ruined temple being used as a slave depot in the middle of a monster-controlled city. The biggest omission is any information on the city itself. All the text gives a DM is:

Highport was once a human city, but the land and town have been overrun by humanoids — orcs, goblins, kobolds, ogres, and gnolls. Looted, burned, and ill-kept, the city has become a base for human outcasts wishing to deal with these unsavory creatures.

This description does serve to stir the imagination, but really, this setting needs more than just two sentences. This city sounds like a whole campaign setting for adventure, but the text only offers it as a vague backdrop for the dungeon adventure.

But even the dungeon setting, itself, is given only a vague description, with the maps showing only part of the ruined temple. The maps, and the room and encounter text, only show and describe the main temple proper and the underground passages around part of the city’s sewer system. The maps and text suggest much more beyond what is shown and explained, but it is up to the DM to figure out and detail.

Most tournament modules were designed for a party to just be at the first encounter area and to work their way through the dungeon in a set time limit, and this is acceptable for a tournament game. But for campaign play, most Player Character parties don’t just magically appear in front of the dungeon, and they don’t complete the whole thing in one day of adventure. Campaign parties have to get to the location, and probably will have to pull out of the dungeon to rest and recuperate at least once during the adventure. This module gives no information or guidance on the greater setting of the dungeon. This gives details on just two parts of a larger location in the middle of a monster city. It’s like the module author said, “Here’s two levels of a bigger location set in the middle of a monster town. You can create the rest of the location and the town.”

The dungeon levels and rooms and encounters just fail in overall unity. Some of the individual areas and encounters are quite interesting and challenging, but when looked at as parts of the greater whole they are supposed to be, they have no logic or sense. The overall structure is supposed to be a slaver fort, where slave buyers come to look at and purchase slaves. But when you look at the layout, you see that there are no safe routes through the fortress. There are monsters and traps everywhere, such that it is impossible for the inhabitants (guard patrols, slave chain gangs, and legitimate [evil] visitors) to actually get around the place.

Wild ghouls, wights, and even basilisks wander the same halls (as wandering monsters) as orc guards and slavers. (There’s a 4th-level cleric and a 6th-level cleric in the fortress, but there’s no information or indication that they control the undead.)

Ruin Encounter Table (roll d6)
Encounter occurs 1 in 6 (d6), check each turn.
1.-2. Orcs (special); see below
3. 1-2 Basilisks
4. 2-8 Ghouls
5. Wight
6. Slavers (special); see below

And then some of the area encounters, though interestingly set up, make no sense as a part of the overall fortress. Taken as separate, set piece challenges, some of the encounters are fun and clever, but they just boggle the mind when you consider them in total.

I’m sure that tournament players don’t have time or the inclination to think about the fortress as a whole, because they are just playing to see how far they can get through the challenges faster than other teams. But in a normal game, campaign experience, players will notice the stupidity of having encounters grouped in illogical ways.

I ran this adventure twice, a few years apart, and both times, with different groups, the players started noticing the wonkiness of the dungeon setting. They started asking questions of the fortress denizens, and since the module text gives no help in this regard, I was at a loss to have the NPCs answer the questions. I mean, questions to orc guards as simple as, “How did you get into this room?” and “How do we get to the slave pens?” left me looking at the map and text with a dumb look on my face.

As a whole, this adventure module is bad. The various room encounters read like they were written by different people with no concept of what the next room was, or what the overall environment was. A pure hack-and-slash group of players, who don’t think of the adventure beyond the room they are currently attacking may not cause any problems for a DM. But a group of players who put any thought into their infiltration plans, or try to conceptualize the overall layout of the fortress, or try to question the denizens of the place will cause a DM a bunch of headaches.

You could probably mine this module for cool individual encounters to pull out and drop into other adventures, but don’t try to run this as a logical, unified setting. It’s like a bunch of random room encounters thrown together and connected with five-feet-wide corridors.

Bullgrit

Here’s a copy of my oldest Dungeons & Dragons character sheet.

This isn’t my first D&D character, just the oldest stat sheet I still have.

This is a Basic D&D character from around 1981. The stats were rolled up with 3d6, in order, and thieves had d4 hit points in BD&D.

Rarkon adventured through the Basic D&D adventure B3 Palace of the Silver Princess, where he made third level, and then the Advanced D&D adventure U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh where the campaign fell apart for reasons I don’t remember.

The DM for that campaign was really wild (read: “psycho”), and the whole experience was too crazy and weird to relate. I’m just showing this old character sheet for the nostalgic warm fuzzy it gives me.

Notice how optimistic I was with writing out the whole range of thieves’ abilities all the way up to level 10.

I had neat handwriting at age 14.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

The party:
Human cleric 9
Human barbarian/sorcerer/eldritch knight 1/6/1
Elf fighter (archer) 8
Human cleric 5 [NPC]

The group was back down in the secret sewer complex trying to finish up their mission. They found a large chamber with a chest at the far end, on the other side of a glowing summoning circle. The cleric 9 and eldritch knight entered the room while the archer covered them through the door way, and the cleric 5 stayed back out of the way.

When the cleric 9 got near the circle, the glow increased and a huge fire elemental erupted into the room. The resulting fight sent the eldritch knight and cleric 9 running out the door, badly hurt, burned, and on fire. They both jumped into the sewer water to put themselves out. The fire elemental disappeared from the room.

The party regrouped, planned, and charged back in. They killed the elemental in pretty short order.

That’s the kind of encounter that I really like, as a DM. Something jumps up and seriously smashes the PCs, but they managed to withdraw, without a death; the party regroups and returns to thrash the monster. The fact that the PCs had to jump into sewer water to escape just adds a chuckle for me.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

The party:
Human cleric 8
Human barbarian/sorcerer 1/6
Elf fighter (archer) 7
Human cleric 4 [NPC]

Important note about the campaign: The PCs are “Eternal Heroes”: they can raise themselves from the dead the morning after they die. They all know this, and the barbarian/sorcerer has risen from death twice before this game session. (The penalty is identical to the raise dead spell, but they can come back even without a body.)

The group was searching a sewer complex for the McGuffin, and they’d had an unpleasant experience so far. They came to a chamber where they fought and killed two gibbering mouthers. Beyond that chamber was another, in which they saw a large chest surrounded by a shifting dark cloud. In the cloud they got glimpses of eyes, tentacles, claws, mouths, and chaotic colors. The 8th-level cleric identified (Knowledge Planes) the cloud as a planar bleed, but didn’t know the plane.

They stayed back out of the room and lassoed the chest. When they started pulling it, the cloud belched out a mass of tentacles and claws: a chaos beast (though the 8th-level cleric failed to identify it). The fight was short (just two rounds), but the barbarian/sorcerer got clawed and affected by the creature’s corporeal instability. He fell into an amorphous blob, flopping around on the floor. Everyone in the group was stunned—no one knew anything about the creature or its powers.

After a few rounds, the barb/sorc pulled himself together (with a Charisma check), but he had lost some Wisdom. There was discussion about the situation, and two Players considered the end result of whatever was happening to the barb/sorc might be worse than death—especially since he can come back from death. The suggestion of killing the barb/sorc was mentioned, but no one attempted to act on the idea. The 8th-level cleric deduced (Spellcraft check with help from Knowledge Planes) that a restoration spell might help, but he didn’t have the spell prepared for the day.

After a minute, the barb/sorc fell back into the blob state, but made his Charisma check again after just a few rounds. The barb/sorc ran from the chamber and through the sewer tunnels. The elf followed on his heels, but the clerics were held up by environmental obstacles. The barb/sorc, with the elf following, ran all the way back to the entrance of the sewers. The elf then suggested running out into the sunlight. They both ran out into the city street, but nothing changed.

The elf had a weapon ready to slay the barb/sorc, but held back using it. The fear that the barb/sorc would eventually turn into a chaos beast was mentioned at the table. When the barb/sorc dropped to blob again, still the elf held off killing him. The barb/sorc had never consented to being killed.

A couple rounds later, the barb/sorc went from sloppy blob to chaotic monster and attacked the elf. The brief fight ended with the elf falling to a blob state, and the new chaos beast running off into the city.

The elf eventually made a Charisma check to take his normal form. He asked how near the local temple was (for a restoration spell), and I had him roll 1d6 for the number of minutes it would take for him to get there. Three minutes. He ran through the city but fell to a blob after the first minute. He managed to make another Charisma check, and took off again toward the temple. But then he fell to a blob after another minute of safety, and a couple rounds later, he became yet another chaos beast loose in the city.

By the time the two clerics emerged from the sewers, a general alarm had sounded through the city. Citizens were hiding in their homes and businesses, and the town guards and soldiers were patrolling looking for the dangers. I described a scene of a guard patrol killing a “blobbed” soldier.

I called the session to end at that point. Now I’ve got to consider what happens when two chaos beasts run amok in a populated city. The results could be catastrophic. I’m considering have the “secondary” beasts die after an hour or something. That way the “plague” is limited to only a few people. I never, ever, considered that the PCs would bring a chaos beast into the city, much less bring two!

They had the answer to the problem, but no one did what they had already admitted was necessary. Why didn’t they kill the barb/sorc when they talked about it? Why did the barb/sorc run out of the sewers and into the city? Why didn’t they kill the barb/sorc in the city street? Why didn’t the elf kill himself when he had two chances?

Now, I could understand if they were playing low Wisdom (the affliction drains Wisdom each round), but no one mentioned they were doing that. No one mentioned anything about the lowering Wisdom other than to speculate what would happen when all their Wisdom was drained.

* * *

Several years ago, as a Player, myself, my party encountered a chaos beast in my first D&D3 campaign. We were a group of five 5th-level PCs, and none of us knew what a chaos beast did. But when the monk got afflicted (my dwarf cleric got hit twice, but made his saves) and turned to a blob, we had the same concern that the above Players had: would he turn into a chaos beast? We decided to execute the monk. We then took the monk’s body to a temple and had him raised.

I remembered the encounter as very exciting and memorable. It didn’t affect the world outside our party; it didn’t wipe out half the party and set the stage for a city-wide epidemic.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com