Adventure Site Contest 2: Arena Æmilia

Written by Zed
B/X (+silver standard), levels 4-6
City Arena.
  Such notices hang in ever town of the region, and every 15th of the month plebeians and nobles alike from all over the frontier province flock to the amphitheater, for some well-earned distraction from the toils of imperial expansion. The arena has been around for some years now, and the novel directorial style of Titus, a decorated war veteran of the northern expansion, has proven to be exactly what the colonists needed.
  Cities are always best for adventure at their most decedent, and there’s not much more decadent than late-empire Rome. Or late-empire New Rome (Constantinople). And if you’re going all in on Rome…why not Coliseum? Zed’s answer is “sure, why not?” and he delivers a private arena/theatre in a Not-Rome, a popular place where gladiatorial fights take logical advantage of D&D healing rates and turn the fights into a WWE-esque storyline spectacle, complete with comedy and drama beats. This arena/manor also has shops out front, a training yard, Coliseum-esque below-arena elevators, ladies of the night-rooms with attendant rich barroom…it’s a compact location with a lot going on in it, probably a little too compact…
   …because there’s not a direct motivation given for a party of thieves, rogues, and magicians. The whole area is loaded with verisimilitude, but there’s not a direct reason to be there. It’s a very realistic-seeming (more important than realism) location that a lot of parties would have less reason to approach as a crawl target or an objective-heist by default than the titular Keep on the borderlands in B2. “Insert motivation here” is going to annoy some judges, it matters less to me than some others.
  The map is tight, those 10ft squares packing a realistic amount of content into each area, but it’s going to feel small to D&D players. As I’ve mentioned before, for a site built more for heists than dungeon exploration, having logically discernable layout is important for planning and this one is set up pretty well for reconnoiter shenanigans. I’d have personally gone a little busier with the map key highlighting things like a roof trapdoor, possible windows, etc, the clear and clean map could easily get a little more information added without hurting. There’s also an issue with the stairs going to 27 but the map says “to 28” but that’s easy enough to fix. Nice site map.

​  And now in NPCs we reach the part where I’m going to really want more from the module. Or maybe, information conveyed in a different way. A lot of page space is devoted to the personalities of the arena-owner, his servants, affiliated merchants, and semi-slave gladiators, but tracking where they live and move day-to-day is going to be a nightmare for any infiltration and/or social ruse, a lot of notes needed. Assuming a heist, alarm, or crawl, you’d also want an order of battle for when the whole place is turned out to fight or flee from a homicidal pack of unhoused people like the PCs.
  Going down to the actual monsters I do love how book monsters are used but reskinned. Household lares (Roman petty hearth gods) are pixies, the obese old gladiator trainer is an ogress, the exotic captured outsider slave is a neanderthal…this is good, everything has its own flavor and that flavor is extremely Roman. Most are humanoids, although there are a nice collection of large beasts in the lower basement (crocodiles, wolves, pythons, white apes) and summonable skeletons, some elementals…two of the household are magic-users, so there’s a light magic sheen on a couple fights, gives some magic traps a reason for existing too.
  Silver standard keeps tripping me up, but even multiplying the treasure take x10 there’s a pretty sad amount for a 4-6 group, except for a bank note worth 15k which only has a 1-in-6 chance of being found searching for a turn in the office. I love the flavor here, it’s dripping with Roman/Classic vibes like valuable tiles, olive oil amphorae, marble busts, a written comedy manuscript…love the flavor, and easy enough to fix amount, but still and issue. Magic loot is arms and armor in a few cases plus potions and scrolls, but also numen statuettes that give healing or other curative effects. It’s a low-magic “realistic” setting by default, so everything’s pretty subtle for the B/X baseline.
  This site frustrates me in the way only something with real potential can; it’s a great site, but to turn it into an adventure site there’s a lot of work needed. The flavor is wonderful and very distinctive, but any campaign that has Sword & Sorcery roots won’t find the highly-focused Roman flavor hard to integrate. I think it’s worth the effort, just keep seeing more ways to punch it up…probably the best approach would be to design an adventure with a specific goal to be pursued within the site, running through what would be needed for that particular goal would lead to outlining the information that’s needed for any goal pursued in the site.