Adventure Sites 3: Patracleo’s Peregrinating Pyramid of Peril

For Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, Levels 5-6
By Matthew Lake
Patracleo, a Late Kingdom princess of Old Ægypt, lived a short and tragic life. Her whirlwind romance with a Novo-Atlantean prince ended in civil war and suicide by snake bite.
Determined to enjoy her afterlife by indulging her passions for sight-seeing and blood sports, she now roams the world in a flying pyramid luring adventurers into a perilous gauntlet.
   Matthew Lake’s Tower in the Lake was ASC II’s winner, a brilliant module with tight design, clever construction, and a great story. Now we’re leaving the simplicity of lake-based wizard tower adventures behind to the surprisingly common trope of “flying pyramid”. Results are…confusing. But also wild. It’s a gauntlet/trick/funhouse dungeon that is technically within the page limit with only 2 pages of text but also has a nutty 5 pages of maps detailing the whole thing.
   Story is pretty standard. !notCleopatra, princess of !notEgypt, dies via snakebite in the traditional Anthony and Cleopatra manner, hopefully after a hilarious stream of snake jokes. She’s wandering around picking up poor innocent adventurers and “testing” them to retrieve nice magic items in return for some rather chintzy victory laurels (1k at best). There’s a nice little set of reskinned goblinoids in the form of “scarabites” to fight. C’mon, kids, let’s get to puzzling.
   The map. Oh the map. This map, you guys. I guess first I should say the things I appreciate…the side-view thing is appreciated, and should be done more often. Zooming the more complicated puzzle rooms in tighter is a must. The subliminal ankhs are cute. Overall, there is certainly a lot of complexity to explore. This leads to my fundamental issue, though, which is that this whole place is far too busy.

​   It’s a nutty madcap zone with extremely complex counters, often, that are relying on the map to get around word-count restrictions (#17 only the most egregious). I like the dice-puzzle room, that’s cool, but the full-up multi-stage area fight with multiple fighter factions…yeah, this is going to be hard to run in 4 hours. 7VoZ is a simple system, but, well, let’s just quote the map key: “10′ grid. Status fields are rainbow shaded areas. Anti-gravity field is purple shaded area. Red dots are enemies, circled dots are leaders. Portals are marked with ’P’.”

   That’s the grumbling out the way, now let’s be a little more cheerful. Individual encounters and puzzles are great, once you take a long careful look at each one to figure it out. Gravity puzzles, reflecting pools spawning doppelgangers, pivoting stairs, stasis fields with monsters in bubbles, a mummy room with a sprinkler system that can be loaded with holy water, conductive glass/copper wire lightning rod room, dice-pip-counting riddle/puzzle…each individual room is fun and zany and high-energy. Great. Just relentless and madcap, as well. Pretty punishing random encounter table. Altitude sickness and chilling cold environmental effects further nerf characters, normal enough.
   Similarly, as expected with Lake, there are interesting interactions with the people here. The area factions are all-vs-all so there’s a fun fight to have on that. A crew of berserkers are here hanging out just tired of all this crap and wanting to go home. The !notCleopatra mummy in the middle will be playful and cajoling and isn’t automatically hostile, although the second the party sees that she’s offering just a single 1k payout for a Staff of Lightning, a Mask of Illusion, and an intelligence scimitar, boy you know they’re going to start a fighting. Well and good.
   I’m a light under-impressed by the loot outside of aforementioned special (awesome) game-show-reward items. Jewels, gold statues, lapis lazuli tiles…a thorough looting of the pyramids will have nice rewards but that kind of flies in the face of the whole game show thing. Not sure how many metal victory laurels she has sitting around, that should be extra loot, not hand-waved. Of course REAL loot is the flying magic pyramid. My players, if they did not managed to crash this thing and kill a million innocent civilians with it, would first and foremost be obsessed with capturing the magic flying pyramid. There’s nothing to stop this in the module, either. Which, okay, wow, admirable. But whew. No XP for stealing the magic flying pyramid.
   How do you put this in your game? On the one hand, it’s awesome, I love the puzzles and tricks. On the other hand, it’s also a logistical nightmare to place in any ongoing campaign with the gonzo-levels set below “Anomalous Subsurface Environment”. Honestly, I’d be most likely to either trip rooms for one-off puzzle use or run it at a convention as a competitive module. It’d be great as a competition module. Very tough to site as an adventure site, though. 

My players are going to try to capture this.