Adventure Site Contest 2: The Grand Retreat

THE GLASSES, THEY DO NOTHING.

​Written by Thanateros777
B/X, mid-level (whatever that means)
Funhouse wizard retreat
  Beneath a ruined resort is an underground complex created by a bygone sage for his personal amusement and examination, accessible only by a small outbuilding long overgrown and ruined. Deep inside may be fortunes and perils alike, as the Great Sage was an eccentric, if not abnormal man. What mysteries and riches may the eccentric wizard’s sanctum hold?
  So it took a long time, but here in the penultimate adventure site we’ve finally hit it…font so weird and cramped and scribbly that I have to go up to 100% zoom. Then 125% zoom. Then 150% zoom. Then just copy-paste into a word document with all formatting removed. It was rough. Single column, all bolded, highlighting done via color…whew. It’s not going to be fatal, but it was definitely something that triggered me even more than the introductory text using the word “funhouse”.
  The plot, thin as it is, is complete bog standard for a funhouse dungeon…weirdo powerful wizard makes his strange lair “up in the hills”, abandons it, now its ripe for the looting. The hook does a clever thing, in a hoard of loot or by other happenstance the party comes into possession of a coin-sized silver talisman that grants them access to said funhouse, a cult wants this and sends an illusionist hit-squad to take it. Once you get in, it’s the usual room-by-room succession of challenges and interesting things to play with.
  The map almost doesn’t matter in a funhouse like this, there’s very little rhyme or reason here so as loopy-doopy as it is, there’s not a lot of exploratory gameplay. You’re going from room to room without linkages or the order mattering much, and the secret doors aren’t something that mapping really tells much. I do like how there are dangly bits that can be tied into different content, this is almost a “site” to be added to a megadungeon and there are connections for that. Good mapping software used, looks really nice and clean. Having a little side-spur with a “add more dungeon here” is a decent move.

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  These kinds of funhouse adventures live or die based on the quality of the individual rooms/encounters, and these are mostly…fine. The initial ambush with a six-illusionist hit squad (each one has a single first-level spell and a book with said spell) is a fun idea, there’s some real personality to it and I can see it being memorable, with decent loot in the form of those books. Some individual fights will be a bit challenging, like a spiral maze with displacer beasts, a water room filled with swimming shocker lizards, a gelantinous cube with an acid-resistance ring inside it, just about as interesting a bunch of set-pieces as you can get in B/X. There’s also stuff like a leprechaun in a BDSM dungeon and starving trolls in a closet, nasty and not particularly interesting. Not a lot of talking to critters here.
  Also, a bunch of those critters aren't in B/X. I speak D&D 3rd Edition, I see your assassin vines and shocker lizards.
  Traps, as expected, will be mostly silly and forget verisimilitude but they’re fine in isolation. What is a dead end with two levers labeled “Fame” and “Fortune”, one giving an appearance curse and the other giving gold coins that hurt…is that a trap, or a treasure? What it is, however, is definitely not a thing that fits in most campaigns. A lot of decent risk/reward tradeoff encounters that are fine in isolation, just kind of exhausting all in a row.
  Treasure is, as expected by now, kind of all over the place. Hefty furniture, neat stacks of platinum pieces, “random jewelry” worth 8k…total rewards aren’t bad for a level 3 dungeon, terrible for a level 6, and we don’t know what the actual range is. So that’s hard to judge. Magic items are weirdo and some are genuinely fun, I’m fond of the bone monocle that shows humanoids below a certain INT threshold, that’s useful for certain spells’ targeting.
  I could never see myself using this thing as an adventure site, whole. That being said, like the apocryphal buffalo, most parts are very usable in isolation. I can see taking a room here, an item there, an encounter here, a trap there, and sprinkling them around in other dungeons or sites that have a bit more preexistence within an organic world. Although please consult your eye doctor before attempting to parse the content.