It's been a while since your beloved old Uncle Bloody reviewed stuff. As you might know, Uncle Bloody is a well-meaning but rather disfunctional old-school roleplayer. In fact, he's putting the "senile" in "old-school".
Which makes the Tomb of the Serpent Kings, written by Skerples, a perfect match to Uncle's analytic skills.
Let's start.
WHEN YOU FIRST START UP Super Mario Bros., the game doesn't give you any instructions. The first level is cunningly designed to teach you the rules: jump on enemies, pick up mushrooms, look for secrets, get coins, avoid pits. There is no tutorial; the game itself is the tutorial.
From the very first lines, the adventure gives us the feeling of classic Skerples forget-the-facts style. I mean, Super Mario Bros definitely did have an instruction, teaching you how to do this.
And also this.
It also tells us what happens
And informs us that coins should be gathered, because
So basically, all the things that Skerples claimed you had to find out in the game itself, because there is no tutorial.
\This tutorial.
This has nothing to do with the adventure itself, but truth be told, reading the Super Mario Bros instruction booklet is as much fun as reading the Tomb of the Serpent Kings, so your nostalgic Uncle Bloody got distracted for a while.
Back to the review at hand.
After sharing with us the conspiracy theory that Super Mario Bros doesn't have a tutorial, Skerples moves on to explain that the Tomb of the Serpent Kings
is designed to be “classic” without being full of callbacks and nostalgia.
Now, Uncle Bloody is as classic as they get, and he's so full of nostalgia it sometimes spills over. Which is how being classic works - first, it's something good (or at least, as in Uncle's case, something so bad that it's good), and second, it's something old. Arthurian legends are classic, modern fantasy novels based on Arthurian lore are taking the classic approach.
There's nothing wrong with not following the good old ways and being, as Uncle likes to call it, innovating. And also nothing wrong with using the tried and true old tricks and tropes. But let's face it - putting a group of adventurers in a buried tomb full of traps and monsters is closer to callbacks and nostalgia than to innovation.
Nothing to be ashamed of, dear author. No need to apologize.
Before moving to the description of the dungeon, Skerples adds that
Chances are pretty good that an experienced GM will disagree with a few lessons, traps, or encounters in this dungeon. That’s completely fine!
Uncle Bloody sincerely agrees with this! If you don't like something in any RPG product, it's a good thing. It means you, as the player/gamemaster/whatever you like to call yourself, have a perfectly good excuse to tweak and fix the game and make it better for yourself and your gaming buddies.... Somehow it feels like a bizarre case of "agree to disagree".
The whole next section seems redundant, because it's about "balance" and how tough the adventure is for a low-level party or a mid-level party, and we've just been told to go ahead and change the dungeon anyway we like. Also, to quote Zak, "life is too short for balance".
To make it more fun, roll a d6 and do just that one thing.
On a 6, play a different adventure.
Next we have some plot hooks, which are conveniently 6 in number, so you can roll another d6 to pick a reason for your party to get to the tomb. If your dice falls under the table and you cannot find it, then the reason why the party goes to the tomb is "Because it is there".
Another half a page of Skerples explaining why they wrote this adventure and what are "lessons" and that you can and should add your own stuff...
I describe this section of the adventure with words like
"redundant", "useless", and "waste of everyone's time".
Finally, we arrive at page 3 where we're given something concrete, namely the map (drawn by JANON). There's a lot of numbers on the map. These numbers mark the rooms that are described further on.
All right, so the party is in the shoddy, chipped, damp root cellar with roots. Some useful stuff is described - hollow statues, poison traps, cursed ring. Would've saved a page if the information about the useful stuff was put on the map itself - and we really don't need to know that "you can get from room A to room B" when we can clearly see on the map that, yes, this is where you get when you decide to step from the chipped damp room A and see what other shoddy root cellar awaits behind the door.
There are more descriptions of rooms and corridors and monsters and treasure - nostalgic, I'd say. The nice thing is that the monsters and situations are easily enough tweaked to make them more fun. There are several moving parts of a mummy in this room - but wait, what if they're parts of several mummies who hate each other? Hoo hoo, Uncle Bloody is on a roll!
Hey, I think this magic ring had solved your problem
of having both eyes in your eye sockets! Yay, magic!
There's frequent repetition in the "lessons" parts - "traps can be deadly" "no, seriously, traps CAN be deadly!" - yes, I know, Biography of a Grizzly was my favourite book at school! It was my favourite book!
Hurm. And I thought the mummification went perfectly well,
based on what you just told us about him being BADLY MUMMIFIED.
Sure, it is your adventure, and you offer it to the world for free (Uncle Bloody, being the greedy old bastard that he is, always appreciates free stuff). But you don't have to make your free adventure wordier and longer and duller than absolutely necessary, especially since you specifically ask the reader to read the whole module before playing.
Yum, pudding. It's time for Uncle to have a little snack.
Where was I?
Being repetetive is one flaw. The other is being needlessly specific. It's a good thing to set a couple traps that are not just falling rocks and snapping jaws, but, say, a prepared spell. Showing that a trap can be anything - a pit, a mechanism, a spell, a curse, a creature.
It's less useful to just say this.
That's a moving story, trap! I'm not crying - I've just got something in my eye...
And so on, and so on. Descriptions of rooms - monsters - a random table for wandering monsters and/or signs of their presence, which is nice - repetition - repetition.
Some people tend to repeat things two times on the same page. Two times!
Which is why it's hard to do what Skerples asks you to do and read this whole thing. As Uncle Bloody reaches page 15, his eyes turn glassy like from that cursed ring back at page 3 when things were still fresh and new.
The rest of the module is made of description of monsters (some of which are interesting), the same map only with short descriptions of rooms next to it (because giving it to you two times is... frankly, I don't know how it is better).
And some art in Scrap Princess's usual style.
I'm not an art critic.
To summarize...
Yes. It's a good thing to advise your readers to disagree with you. It's not such a good thing to make it that easy for the readers. Let them have their own ideas about the best way to deal with an ignorant half-snake lich - not about how to get to the end of your module without falling asleep, all because of the stuff that either repeats itself, or wasn't needed at all.
This is Uncle Bloody, and now I want more pudding.
