The GURPS PDF Challenge Review: DF Adventures 3: Deep Night and the Star

The fourth PDF to unlock in the GURPS PDF Challenge was Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 3: Deep Night and the Star.

Now, this one leaves me at a disadvantage.  Yes, I've played Dungeon Fantasy, though no more than a few sessions at a time.  While I own most of the books, and I wouldn't hesitate to run it, I'm not the sort of man that runs many adventures out of a book.  I also tend to lean more heavily towards "Tell a heroic narrative" side of the fantasy spectrum than the "kill monsters and take their stuff" side of the spectrum, which means that people like Dell'Orto will probably do a better job of telling you if the adventure is well balanced and such.  Thus, with that caveat, let's explore!

The book is broken up into two chapters (though in practice it feels like three)

• Prologue
• Atoep

In Atoep, they have a final section on "new monsters" which I would have treated as its own (one page) section.

The prologue explains the premise: the stars are misaligned and demons and eldritch things pour out of the darkness.  These come from some eldritch space-think, and the wise old sage has created a portal that allows the heroes to reach it.  They must go there, and kill it by delving into three different living dungeons. That will end the eldritch incursion.

I like the premise of the adventure well enough, but I feel like the execution falls flat and risks being repetitive.  I think it's a good idea, but it feels more like the seed of an adventure than a proper adventure.  Would I recommend it? I'm less confident in it than the others, but for $3, it's hard to say no.  I just wouldn't expect too much out of it.

Thoughts on the Premise

So, this continues a trend I've noticed in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy of "psychic swords vs eldritch evil" that I think gives DF a rather unique flavor that I don't get from other fighting fantasy works.  This feels less like a typical D&D adventure, and more like a weird eldritch horror game with pulp-fantasy heroes fighting back against it.

This is reinforced by several interesting choices.  The "Dungeon" is a living, "blind idiot god" that moves between the stars.  The "surface" of the dungeon is just an accumulation of space debris, and the dungeons delve into the upper structures of its living body, to destroy and burn out parts of it.  There was an expedition that went before you, and you can see their remains half dissolved in walls, and the echoes of their personalities, slowly being digested by Atoep, whispering nonsensical madness in certain chambers.

And then the art.  I mean, wow.  Look at that!  This whole series has great artwork.

The problem I have with this is the above is pretty much it.  Who's the big bad guy orchestrating all of this? Nobody, it's just a think that happened.  Can you talk to Atoep? Nope.  There are cultists. What do they believe? I dunno, doesn't say.  Can you cast spells with the power of Atoep? Nope.  Are their eldritch secrets to be found sketched onto the walls of Ateop's heaving innards? Nope. You just go to this weird world, go into psuedo-dungeons, kill some monsters, burn out the final area of each, rinse and repeat twice more, job done.  There is a reference to a cool skyship/spaceship that the players can adventure on, and you can get it, but it's pretty scant on details.  Like many other things in the book, it saves wordcount by pointing us in another direction, likely towards the Fantasy Vehicles book I don't yet have.

Like Riggsby's other PDF Challenge book, I don't mind the ideas here at all, I would just have rathered paid double or triple the price for more.  It feels less like an idea than a seed of an idea. And that's fine, but for my purposes, I couldn't use this "out of the box." I'd have to greatly expand it, and that limits its utility to me.

Thoughts on the Adventure

I can't really tell you if you the adventure is "good" in the sense of well-balanced and with interesting elements or not, but I can give my less-experienced impression. 

First, all three dungeons have exactly the same layout.  If you have mapped one, you have mapped them all.  This may be justified by the fact that organs can repeat across an organism: you're basically going into Atoep's eyes, and the inside of one eye is basically the same as another eye, so fine.  But the result is that if the players have seen it once, they have seen it three times.  That, IMO, risks making it feel tedious.

The monsters tend to be the same few monsters over and over again too.  We see a lot of Demons from Between the Stars, No Brainers, Neuroids, and Double-Devourers (a new monster).  Later on, we'll see some Flying Squid Monsters and a single Mind Warper.  While the encounters vary from dungeon to dungeon, they don't vary that much.  One dungeon has some molds in it, another has more cultists, but beyond that, they tend to be pretty similar.  This might also increase the sense of tedium.

The adventure is set up to create a nice sense of escalation, though.  The new monsters, the Cleansing Crabs and the Double Devourers, are conceived of as the "immune response" of Atoep (and there are others, like rising water levels or "fever," etc).  If you cause collateral damage (with all your fireballing and machine-gunning arrows at people), it's possible you'll trigger an immune response, aka a nasty addition to the current encounter.  This chance increases the more damage you've done to Atoep, so the third dungeon, whichever it is, will be _much_ harder than the first, and this is the real point of difference, which might be enough to solve the tedium of the above two: by keeping everything the same except for the introduction of worse and worse conditions for your encounters, you can escalate the game without confusing your players.

But I'd worry a lot that the players would feel like they're doing the same thing over and over again and fighting the same monsters over and over again.  I think I would have integrated clearer "themes" to each dungeon.  Sure, they'd all be variations on the "eldritch" theme, but they'd make each location more distinct.  I'd also have had different layouts for each dungeon: hit up the "eye," the "intestine" and "the voice box" or something. 

I'd have also given the players more personalities to interact with.  Sure, DF players just want to kill monsters and take their stuff, but my experience is that they at least want to pretend that they're doing more than just killing monsters and taking their stuff, and some Mind Warper taunting them with its plans to take over their world and then a race between them and the Mind Warper and its Cultists to get to the Skyship before Atoep died would have been a lot of fun.

I think this brings us to the core problem with this work, and a theme I think we'll run into often with these: the premise of a lot of these supplements are more ambitious than the page limit really allows. If you doubled the size of this text, the additional detail would go a long way from making this a bare-bones, workable adventure into something really memorable.

Conclusion

It's... it's fine. I think I'd call it the "first disappointment of the series," which feels like a harsh thing to say, but let me clarify what I mean.  When I read what it's about, I got very excited.  By the time I was done, I was much less excited. That doesn't mean it's bad.  I think I might even try to run this adventure, as the premise is very compelling. I just wouldn't run it "as is."  I don't know how you, dear reader, feel about that, but I think $3 for a sketch of a very good idea with some good, basic work put into it isn't a bad buy.  So I would tentatively recommend it.