Adventure Site Contest 3: Lost Shrine of the Snake Goddess

Written by Matthew T. Austin
For Savage Swords RPG levels...?
Ruined Snake Temple
Deep in the jungles of Hasua a lost temple to a forgotten goddess lies in ruins. Hasuan witch doctors tell tales of an evil cult cursed by the gods where a serpent crown worth a king’s ransom lies hidden. Natives fear the place for a terrible creature lurks within the ruins hunting those who get too close.    
   Ah, good, another one got the memo about this year being all shrines and temples. Unfortunately, the memo about closely hewing to the originals and retroclones seems to have got a little garbled in transmission; this is written for Red Room’s Savage Swords RPG, which appears to be an independently developed TTRPG system. It gives me a good chance to talk about the value of specificity, though, so I appreciate that.
   I don’t know Savage Swords RPG, not really. I can tell from name, trade dress, and overall vibe that we’re looking at something optimized for the Sword & Sorcery genre, more Conan than Hobbit. I can dig that, but unlike with, say, ACKS, I don’t immediately understand the core math and how it translates to B/X for example. So monster manual page references and direct stats don’t help me in the running…but, and this is crucial, those monsters are extant and statted, which means I can easily fill in my own system of choice. I don’t have to understand his vampire bat stats to see these are single-hit-die creatures with a mild weakening poison (or disease) bite. That’s easy to swap in. I don’t know what a Strength check with a 15TN is exactly but I understand order-of-magnitude to translate to a bend bars check. In all cases, having a specific system in mind is better than “generic/OSR”, even if it’s not a retroclone that precisely translates. Cool. Also gold values are specified.
   The site’s story is, now stop me if you’ve heard this one…ancient temple to a snake goddess with the potential to have its goddess reborn into a horrifying avatar. Yup. It’s like history, it rhymes. This one’s not being actively inhabited by an incense-burning snakeman cult, rather more on the “passive location” side of the scale, but the temple’s there, it’s got a lot of loot, so what more reasons did your PCs really need to go delving?
   The map has a most pleasing look, and it pleases me to see verticality as well. Unfortunately I had to squint a bit to find a few key features (notably the spiral staircase) and it was also thus a bit of a hassle to sync the tear in the upper floor down with the lower. Beyond that bit of confusion, though, it’s a fine exploration environment, which a nice mix of loops-with-spokes, some solid navigation hazards, and of course the S&S-required dead-end traps cropping up here and there too. A good approach here; make a simple walls n’ halls initial sketch, then add an earthquake or giant’s tantrum to rip and tear the whole area a little. Four and a half stars, would explore again.
   Traps and hazards, as you’d hope for a crumbling snake-temple, are mostly in the “fall and slide” or “whoops, now there’s a snake in your hand” vein. Favorite of those is a pool where a statue’s mouth opens and disgorges a stream of vipers, nice. Yes, there are vines hanging from the ceiling to swing over the crevice with, what are we, barbarians? In most cases the traps don’t deal direct damage, just inflict a monster on our victim. This is fitting.
   In addition to the usual vipers and pythons and a cool cyclopean cobra, the verminous enemies are a special named giant spider and a giant squid. Once again, very easy to find in your system of choice’s default monster manual and insert the appropriate monster. The cobra is a particularly funny fight/interaction…if a PC is willing to strip naked and bow, the thing just slithers up and “gently” bites the PC, conferring a blessing of venom immunity and snake-friendliness. This won’t usually happen. Other fights are zombies, a mummy, and of course the goddess herself if someone puts a crown on her statue’s head, and that fight is a properly horrifying nightmare. Good S&S style of monster fights, pity there’s not a ton of talking unless you put the loot on the loot with that goddess-summoning.
   Loot is fine, by and large, mostly standard-issue gold and silver coins plus jewelry. I like the decent pile of loot being worn by priestly corpses that, naturally, makes them rise as zombies if it is taken. A few misses for me personally are no magic items/loot to be found on the goddess if she gets animated, nothing in the pool with the nasty giant squid, and nothing in the hard-to-reach mummy’s coffin. Considering he’s making a single-minded beeline to go animate the goddess, that’s a big miss not dangling something cool in front of the characters to delay them chasing him. Still, what’s there is neat.
   This thing can be placed in any campaign, of course. It’s another ruined snake temple, there are literally zero reasons to not place more ruined snake temples in your game. Personally, I’m fond of the idea of a place that can be visited multiple times, perhaps with an initial exploration and then a later return to fight the big bad. Regardless, this thing is going on my map, just a pity it needs a little more homework to make it run at its very best. 

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