Self-Consciously CAG: Slug House

A wizard’s mansion by Daniel Herz, art by Dan Sousa, levels 1-3
Written for B/X (with houserules, natch).
  Here’s a first, someone sent me a reviewer copy for his new module. His marketing copy mentions keywords like “Classic Adventure Gaming” and “adventure site” so I’m sure I’m in a few Discords with Mr. Herz here, but I don’t know his tag and that’s good, I’m happy to review this and maintain objectivity. I can’t promise a review to everyone, but hey, I’ll at least look at it if you send me your stuff.
  And Slug House is quite the chunk to look at, too. A hefty 66-page (A5) document outlining an 82-room wizard mansion, there’s a lot here on this one. My personal bugaboo gets tickled on a formatting note, with single-column, but it’s got clean, solid language, standard bolding-and-italics for emphasis, and credited playtesters, promising. A generous helping of original art is also expanding the page count somewhat.
  I’ll discuss the art for a moment as an aside…it’s really good. I don’t feel qualified to judge art and I’m going to typically examine adventures based on how they run at the table, less their aesthetics, but Dan Sousa (contact linked in module) not only makes the fun and very colorful cover, but absolutely knocks it out of the park with the interior B&W pieces. Not an expert on these things and I’m not an Art Reviewer, but this stuff seems like it’ll really help convey scenes to players. Just look at what greets them as they enter the courtyard:

​  Our basic module plot isn’t going to shock anyone. Wizard has a mansion. Wizard likes experimenting with polymorphing. Wizard turns himself into a giant slug. Wizard’s home is taken over by experiments while he wanders the halls as a maddened slug. Wizard’s guards continue to hang out in the front area of the mansion, enjoying it as a hideout for low-level petty criminal activities. Hobbit moves in next door and opens bistro catering to the guard/bandit gang. Sorceress seduces gang leader and hangs out with her girls while bilking them dry. Everything here is perfect for a fine urban adventure site, established factions and motivations and everything else all delivered in a nicely organic fashion. As an aside, the author says in the intro blurb that this wizard house could also be set in the wilderness but no way, this is the most urban city adventure that has ever urban city’d. All to the good, just don’t lie to me able trying to place this in the middle of Mirkwood.
  Before I dive into the meat, a quibble about information organization…I like starting with a brief background and the factions, but the monster roster and system conversion notes being in the front while the maps are in the very back rankles my sense of order. It rankles, sir. Nothing fatal and probably better for a print product but it’s just an annoyance.
  The maps, once we find them, are quite good. Two-story main mansion and a basement beneath, decently spacious without being absurdly unrealistic. Everything is nice and clean, traps and doors clearly laid out with lock/secret door indicators only taking me about two seconds to grasp. There’s a nice flow throughout the mansion with plenty of loops both vertical and horizontal, clear zonal distinction, and some alternate means of ingress/egress. This thing works as a map and I’ll bet it’s not too hard on the mappers, either. 

  The initial entry to the mansion is that very nice open courtyard, which is open every day except for ​those sacred to the moon goddess (full moon and new moon), and less occupied in the rain. The aforementioned gang is still in their old barracks on the west side of the courtyard and they don’t mess with the main house, while the halflings have set up a restaurant on the east side that clings like a barnacle to the mansion and only connects via secret tunnel. There’s a well with sounds occasionally coming from it in the middle of the courtyard that leads to the basement, the main door is wizard-locked, and the gang’s barracks is pretty heavily occupied. I’d place bets that most groups default to getting in to the mansion via the halflings’ tunnel, because they want spices from the mansion’s garden (for a 6sp pittance). The NPCs are built so that they support long-term play over multiple sessions, with the courtyard as the typical starting area to be negotiated around each visit. Good setup, like an urban adventure version of the Keep in B2: Keep on the Borderland. Obviously, murder is always an option.

​  Once we get into the mansion past the courtyard (via secret doors, scaling ivy, well, tunnel, or main door, good variety), then we’re in “dungeon mode”, with the resultant random encounter rolls and all the rest. The random encounter table is nice and dynamic with lots of if-then stuff responding to player actions despite only having d8 entries, the only screw-you result is the titular slug-wizard himself, who is gigantic and vomits acid like a dragon’s breath weapon. The only mercy is that the first shot of the acid breath always misses because the slug is rangefinding…this is where I note that while the module is 1-3, the playtest apparently had 6-9 PCs, which means that yes, this sucker is going to melt some newbies. A lot of the combat for the module is generated by these random encounters (1d6 every two exploring turns, but a lot of noisy stuff provoking extra rolls), so the table is very important. Being a slug, salt is the preferred method of executing the dungeon boss with an average of nine pounds of it required to kill him off fast. Do you know how much salt costs in B/X? You’ll be figuring it out by the end of Slug House.
  The mansion, proper, is chock full of “weird wizard’s tower” type stuff. Oddball magic items that nevertheless feel natural and magical, often with costs that feel organic. For example, at the entry there’s a table with spaces for six magical bells, with a few of them missing (to be found elsewhere). Ringing them opens various doors or grants various nice magical effects, but of course that’s loud and so random encounter check is automatic. It’s good, and there are multiple effects like this.

Seriously, this art is great.

​  Traps and magical effects are sparse, but typically make sense. Rotting floor drops you into the poop chute (and hey, more connectivity). In the upstairs there are a couple corridors with magical stairs, leading to one another. It’s basically a teleporter to open up the map, of course, but rather than being a magic circle or whatever, it’s just go up stairs in 39B, wind up landing in 38B. Smooth, naturalistic. Also covered with slug slime, gross touch that takes on real menace if slug-wizard-dude has already been encountered and melted Dave’s promising 17-strength fighter.
  Monsters are also a decent variety of challenges and types, from butterfly-stirges (they look like lovely calm butterflies, but they suck your blood), to skullhounds (hounds with skullfaces), to the usual mélange of bugs and undead and magic elementals and homunculi and That One Imp that you expect in an abandoned wizard home. Troglodytes snuck in from below and are just chillin’ in a couple places.  Outside of the slug himself there’s nothing too egregious for levels 2-3, I will once again reiterate that level 1s are going to sustain some losses.
   Our initial spiel informed us that there’s a total of 21,000gp in the whole mansion, but it’s wildly scattered around. There are the occasional parsimonious hauls of a couple dozen silver, there are tiled rooms where scraping all twenty-one decorative tiles yields up a little over 100gp, and then there are decent-size hauls like buried treasure under the back garden tree being worth a couple thousand. The biggest single chunk is in the basement’s vault with some nice magic items too, guarded by obvious locks and a subtle trap on the helm of telepathy. There’s a nice balance of risk=reward in most of the loot retrievals, with a few unguarded bits protected instead with obscuring stuff like a dirt-caked bell or a magic sword tucked under a moldy bed. Magic items that get identified get a long writeup in Appendix II, would be indulgent in the key but it’s nice in the back matter. Mr. Lynch will approve.
  The only other thing of note in the appendices is the very nice Appendix III, “Handouts”, which has a list of the fourteen notes that can be found while exploring the mansion. Just hand the PCs each one as it comes and you get a nice little in-world bit of story, also usually containing hints about what’s going on for the clever players to be either helped or go off on some quixotic quest extrapolating wrongly. Nice touch.

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  As you can tell I’m sure I’m very impressed with the entirety of this module, it is a rollicking good time from top to bottom. My skepticism about sending in level 1’s and my scoffing about placing this in the wilderness aside, there really are no major misses. I like the aesthetics of course and the occasional dry wit that breaks through even the non-American English language, but I’m always first and foremost going to look at an adventure module for how it’s designed for table play, and this one is golden.
  Final rating of *****/*****, one of the finest city-based adventure sites I’ve ever seen. See it here.