TL;DR, I had a blast running Brad Kerr’s The Sunbathers from Old School Essentials Adventure Anthology 1 at a convention. It’s not quite your traditional dungeon crawl; there’s plenty of space for hijinx on the little island of Fos Imeras. I highly recommend it.
Summary
The famed hero Orsilochus was last seen on his magic boat, The Eleftheria, seeking a legendary temple of healers on the isle of Fos Imeras. When you arrive on the beach, you discover not all is as it seems. Can you find the lost hero and escape the island before you end up stuck yourselves? An adventure for 3rd level characters.
After my review, I break down how I ran the adventure, what I changed, and highlights from the session.
Review
Positives
- This adventure uses the usual Necrotic Gnome Old School Essentials layout.
- The NPCs are characterized enough to run them off the cuff in a compelling fashion, and there are enough “factions” for the players to find someone to ally with, even if some are lone individuals.
- There was a nonlethal trap that I really liked, a hypnotic walking track. It didn’t directly harm characters, but it could delay them long enough to trigger additional random encounter checks, and give them an obstacle to think around or use against enemies.
- I also really appreciated having the small island to explore with a handful of locations as a non-dungeon area. It even included multiple entrances into the dungeon. While my players didn’t fully explore it, it provided a kind of warmup to the adventure.
- The dungeon rooms generally had notable and interesting encounters or unusual situations to play out. Before running it I didn’t notice how the dungeon map was partitioned to make it harder to reach the big bad. There are three different ways to reach her, each requiring different skills: a climb to an inaccessible balcony, travel through a trapped room, or a fight through harpies.
- Since the enemy faction has a uniform there’s potential for stealthy parties to sneak and bluff through a large portion of the adventure.
- There’s a somewhat optional riddle included in the adventure that is more of a scavenger hunt than a headscratcher.
Negatives
- There were a couple of labeled island map areas with no entries. I ended up adding my own (under “Changes I made”).
- I felt there weren’t enough magic items, though a good amount of gold. Having more magic items is probably overkill in campaign play. but I wanted more since I used the adventure as a convention one-shot.
- It was kind of unfortunate that a lot of the more puzzle-y elements of the adventure were clustered together at the back of the dungeon; my players didn’t find them until nearly the end: the riddle on the magic boat rudder, the meditation walking path trap, and the magically dark room with a narrow winding path across it.
- While I ended up using the one random encounter table (intended for the temple interior) for both inside the temple and on the island. I would have liked a separate table; I admittedly only used about half of the entries regardless.
Overall, I highly recommend this adventure; I ran it for a full party of 8 players. I would like to run it another time or two to see how other groups approach it.
Play Report
Details on Running
I ran an 8-player game at a gaming convention in a four hour slot using Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy. To keep things moving, I used the optional caller and mapper roles along with side-based initiative in combat. I recommended the mapper not worry about exact measurements and focus on how rooms connected. Including an initial rules explanation and character sheet overview that took about 30 minutes, we wrapped up with an epilogue after the final fight with ~15 minutes to spare. All but one of the players had previously played at least 1st edition AD&D if not B/X, and I appreciated hearing the new player’s exclamations of surprise and confusion, especially at the death of the dwarf when he hit 0 HP (he’s just dead?!?). The new player was familiar with RPGs, and had experience with at least D&D 5E.
I made a pregen of every class from the book and Carcass Crawler zines (and some multi-class combos) with 5k experience. I used this generator for the level 1 single class characters. I started them on a small boat around the island. To begin I said the party circled the island once to see its major features, so I gave them a copy of the island map to choose where they landed. The hook I used was that a King Agon sent the group in search of the missing hero Orsilochus. By the end of the adventure only one character died. Here’s the party breakdown:
- Elf Fighter/Magic-User/Thief (levels 1/1/2)
- Gnome Illusionist/Thief (levels 2/3)
- Dwarf Fighter/Cleric (levels 2/2) - RIP I forgot to remind the player about the house rule I use, “Shields shall be splintered”, so the character may have been able to survive.
- Human Ranger (level 3)
- Human Arcane Bard (level 3)
- Human Knight (level 3)
- Human Beast Master (level 3)
- Human Cleric (level 3)
Changes I made
Funny enough, out of all the things I changed, the only thing the party encountered were the boots of levitation.
- I added encounters to the olive grove and ruins since they’re labeled on the map with no encounters in the adventure.
- Ruins: A gaunt, wild-haired man with black hair who believed he was Orsilochus. He even had Orsilochus’s famed spear of lightning.
- Olive Grove: A dryad offers the party a seed that rapidly grows into a tree once planted in soil in exchange for shooing the lions out of the grove.
- I added magic items around the island as Orsilochus’s magical gear:
- Boots of levitation - The NPC, Timo the halfling thief, was holding onto these but they didn’t fit her. She gave them up in exchange for a promised transport off the island.
- A spear of lightning - I made it more durable than a javelin of lightning (usable 1/day). I gave it to the mad man hiding in the ruins.
- Bracers of armor - A mindless NPC bard was wearing them while playing for other patients in the temple.
- A horn of blasting - This was in a cave of lions along with a ring of invisibility (replacing a potion of invisibility).
Highlights (spoilers)
What’s Really Going On?
An oracle named Sebasteia has taken over the healing temple with her cult to a goddess of oblivion, Lethe, along with some harpies. Patients on the island are given the Tears of Lethe to drink and bathe in, which puts them in a blissful state while draining their intelligence. Eventually, their individuality is literally smoothed away along with their features and they become mindless and faceless “purified ones”.
Highlights
- The players really latched on to the hero Orsilochus. I ended up playing him a bit like Brian Blessed’s character in Flash Gordon. His booming voice and demeanor made sneaking through the rest of the temple harder and drew at least one encounter with enemy physicians. I forgot to have him take a turn in the first couple of combats, so the players began to doubt his heroism as he kept apologizing and saying how he’d help in the next fight.
- The arcane bard’s anti-charm ability was a great counter to the harpies’ charm.
- The player of the gnome illusionist/thief played up his character’s low wisdom and quaffed a proffered “healing draught” from the island’s physicians lowering his intelligence a bit for four hours. He recovered by the end of the adventure.
- Players used the boots of levitation to good effect. In one area, there’s an inaccessible balcony overlooking a gymnasium that they just floated up to. The ranger also used them to stay out of the fray with his bow.
- When the party found the oracle alone with her white lion guardian in her room, she lied confidently. She told the party her visions showed they could not harm her, and it seemed to put the party on the back foot temporarily (they didn’t immediately attack). She offered them treasure in exchange for leaving her alone. She said she’d lead the group to the treasure vault as she casually walked past them out of the room (though she planned to take them to the mausoleum to be swarmed by the purified ones gathered there). The group argued whether or not to attack her as she turned her back. Once she exited the room they finally launched missile weapons at her, and she fled while her white lion fought in the doorway until it died.
- Afterward, they found the crystal ball and map from her chest (I gave them a copy of the temple map with an x for the treasure), and they believed she was actually heading to the treasure vault and tried to beat her there by going a different, quicker route.
- There’s a circular meditation walking path that hypnotizes anyone who see the patterns on the walls to walk laps around the path. Several of the party were caught in it, and even more were caught as they tried to save the ones already entranced. Orsilochus ended up stuck in it too, of course.
- Once the group retrieved the treasure, including the rudder of the magical boat The Eleftheria, they used the crystal ball with the aid of the map to determine Sebasteia had ended up in the mausoleum. The group discussed whether she might serve to cover a couple of criteria for the riddle on the rudder (they sought something old and an enemy’s rib), and Orsilochus said he wouldn’t leave until she had been stopped in any event.
- The final fight in the mausoleum ended up quite tense as the group just walked past the purified ones in the crypts on the way to the mausoleum and ended up surrounded by ~15 of them in the final room. This is where the dwarf died, and I think more would have followed if they hadn’t ended the fight when they did.