Someone Gave Me An Adventure…The Carnivorous Caverns

Less soulful cover though.

​A dungeon adventure by Phil Tucker, levels 2-4.
Written for OSE
  Ah, the living dungeon. Not a novel notion (indeed it’s 13th Age’s main gimmick), but often a novel implementation…with this new donation for the review pool, Mr. Tucker here is a reader (who I thank kindly) sending in his own module in that classic premise. He’s selling it for money, so I won’t be so kindly as I typically am with the freebies…now let’s see how we feel about The Carnivorous Caverns…
  Our plot is a very standard “hungry sentient dungeon who wants to eat you” plot, with the titular Caverns a fleshy, hungry magical organism that generates lures (in earlier eras some gold, then an inn, now a whole village) to try and induce souls to travel down into their depths and enter the pods, to be absorbed and then copied to lure more down beneath. There are a couple ways the Caverns try to get victims beneath the fake village, either with a special poison that compels characters to run beneath the earth or by the fake-villagers trying various ploys to convince the characters to go down a hole. This means the module is effectively divided into two different adventures, one a horror pod-person social adventure, and the other a squishy living-caves type dungeon. They go well together, but they don’t have to be run together.

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​  Looking at formatting, layout, and writing, the module is well-done. It’s a very colorful module, not overdone with it but with nice highlighting and sections shifting header color each time. I’m not an accessibility expert, but outside of the cheat sheets at the end I don’t think the colorblind will have an issue. That cheat sheet in the end is handy with all the new subsystems used listed, monsters all in the same place, treasure locations, etc. Unlike some of the worst OSE products, the text doesn’t go mad with bullet points and hyper-formatted sections everywhere. Your mileage, of course, may vary. Descriptions are loaded with what I think of as “Bryce Bait”, the kinds of phrases that trigger positivity from Bryce Lynch of tenfootpole reviewing fame, but that does mean scenes are very well-painted. Twenty-eight pages is a little indulgent for 2-5 sessions of content, but nothing stands out to me as particularly bloated. The art, by Toren Atkinson, is black-and-white and quite nice, just a few impactful pieces that can all be shown to the players to enhance at-the-table play.
  The first section, the fake village, is a nice little horror scenario. The only players who would be actually fooled by any of the extremely-suspicious villagers’ transparent ploys are genre-savvy role players who are extremely enthusiastic participants in their own buffaloing, but the social contract for a lot of tables does include a little purposeful dumbness that’ll play well with the creepy village. The named villagers can be snapped out of their delusions and made into highly-motivated henchmen for cavern exploration and nonsapient shadow-villagers can swarm and try to capture the PCs if things escalate. And…then there’s a weird Chutes & Ladders-esque minigame abstracting the chase, which is annoying, but that’s just a redundant way of saying “it’s a chase mechanic”, no chase mechanics are ever good. Outside of that, I can see myself running this as a Halloween one-shot and having a good time.
  Of course, if you have good players they’ll take the bait and descend into the dungeon itself, which is designed to be easy to enter but very hard to leave. Now we’re out of folk horror and gleefully jumping into body horror, with a decent-enough cavern map fully embracing the living dungeon trope in all the standard ways, with digestive acid “river”, fleshy tunnels, mites/dire tapeworm monsters, all the usual.
  Despite the rather typical living dungeon stuff, individual details are well-done. There’s a little faction of sentient but insane gut-people to chat with, the leader is involved with meat-tree dryad so you have the minimal diplomatic back-and-forth needed. Acid waterfall has good stuff to interact with, able to sphincter off the stream to open up another zone for decent loot inside the acid pools. If you like body horror, there are some fairly profound touches like an insane miserable druid girl with her head permanently stuck inside the guts of a giant mite who commands the swarming local mites. A lot of thought has gone into subsystems, like how damaging the caverns at certain areas brings everything up to a threshold where the Caverns just seal themselves off, and a symbiotic stat-boosting flesh curse to warp the PCs with. Admirable restraint is shown in letting the horror and the subsystems speak for themselves with only minimal commentary. 

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​   Treasure is all over the place, although the common OSE problem of “more magic than gold” will crop up when the time comes to tabulate XP. Village has some cash laying around, but it’s going to be hard to loot in between “these people are legit” and “shadow-zombies are chasing us to kill us”. The biggest hauls are from a way, way too high-level spirit naga who’s there to chat and absolutely murder a munchkin that’s getting too jumpy, and what the Mass Effect 3-ending-hologram-child the Caverns manifest offers if the PCs manage to scare them enough. An ending that, while remunerative, is about as satisfying as Mass Effect 3’s. The magic items are pretty decent, the best one being an intelligent sword that damages in a Fibonacci Sequence up to 144, then resets to 0.
  There are multiple ways to kill the Caverns, which is what most players will want to do, including giving them cancer, removing all the souls captured by their traps, and just setting the brain on fire. Surviving their destruction will be its own special little minigame, which actually could have used a chutes and ladders board. No XP total is given for “killing a sentient meat cave”. The fact that this thing was playtested does show up in a lot of scenarios and their resolutions.
  Ultimately, as much as I admire the module for what it’s doing, I think your own decision for use-or-not is going to be a matter of taste. OSE is a broad-appeal system so I’m sure there are Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Wormskin fans that will eat this up, while other groups less into the body horror probably won’t relish the vibe. Likewise, the village portion of the scenario requires a very specific type of player to take the bait in an ongoing campaign, while obviously playing this as a stand-alone 1-to-3 shot will mean “take this or we don’t play D&D tonight”. This thing is loaded with creativity, a credit to a designer who wants to actually play, but a lot of the elements and subsystems are fairly bespoke. So in the end…
  Final Rating? ****/***** with a star up or down depending on taste for actual play, but a firm handshake of congratulations for the skill and care in its execution.