[Review] Hole In The Oak
Old School Essentials
A hole in an old oak tree leads characters down to a maze of twisting, root-riddled passageways, the chambers of an ancient wizard-complex, and the banks of an underground river where once a reptile cult built their temples.
An adventure for characters of 1st-2nd level.
Author: Gavin Norman
Other reviews: ENWorld, Sami Yuhas, Questing Beast, PM Schramm, Prince, Antonios S, Bryce Lynch
Text And Formatting
The book is 45 pages and includes 60 keyed areas, which is fantastic. The language is evocative but terse, formatted in Gavin’s house style. Here are some excerpts:
Root faces (covering the walls and ceiling). All shapes and sizes (old codgers, young pipsqueaks, dashing youths). Glowing green moss (covering the faces).
Stone blocks (walls, ceiling 8', and floor). Weeping fish-man statue (in the east alcove; weeping milky tears). Weeping mantis-man statue (in the west alcove; weeping milky tears). Smashed crossbow (discarded on the floor between the statues).
I found these easier to read than natural language, being something of an evolution of Courtney Campbell's Style. I have three main criticisms here:
1. Inconsistent Information Availability
How does one interpret the above format?
For instance, take the following:
Stone blocks (walls, ceiling 10', and floor). Archway (8' high). Skull carvings (arches carved in the form of stacked skulls). Skeleton of dead warrior (lying in the arch in a pool of dried blood).
In Campbell’s original suggestion, the bolded words are for first-glance information, and arrows separate layers of interaction. If we apply that philosophy directly, we could reformat this as:
Stone Blocks→walls, ceiling (10'), floor
Archway→8' high
Skull Carvings→stacked skulls carved on arch
Skeleton→dead warrior→in arch→pool of dried blood
In natural language, we might narrate: “The passage ahead is made of stone blocks, but is interrupted by a shorter archway. There are skull carvings and a skeleton”.
This is, more or less, reading off the detail given by the bolded words, and saving the information in parenthesis for follow-up questions from the players. The trouble is that I think sometimes the information in the parenthesis is very important for a coherent first description, and sometimes isn’t. This means that I have to read the information in parenthesis every time and then decide on-the-fly which to say and which to ignore.
In the example above, I think it would much better to mention right away that the skull carvings are on the archway, that the skeleton is in the archway, and that it’s lying in a pool of dried blood. Further, the hallway being made out of stone blocks isn’t critical.
Here’s my take:
Archway→8' high
| Skull Carvings On Archway→carved stacked skulls
| Skeleton→dead warrior→sliced
| Pool of Dried Blood
Or, the OSE format:
Archway (8' high). Skull carvings on Arches (carved in the form of stacked skulls). Skeleton of dead warrior lying in arch (sliced). Pool of dried blood under skeleton.
This makes the bolded sections longer, but now we’re not trying to figure out which things are landmarks, hidden, or secret.
2. Brown Subsections
Gavin uses these brown subsections for potential combat encounters but also to break out more complicated features of a room key into its own hierarchy. This caught me more than a couple of times as I’d narrate the main room description then realize I’d forgotten to detail one of the brown subsections and have to go back and correct it.
3. References
I would have loved to have the stats for monsters repeated (rather than page 31 telling me to refer to stats on page 19) or for the book to include a condensed bestiary similar to Stonehell that I can print out (along with the random encounters and map). On the upside, the PDF is well-linked.
I would have also appreciated GM notes reminding me about how stuff in other rooms is intended to interact. For instance, Area 43 has a key that opens the door to Area 25, but Area 25’s description doesn’t mention that a key is in Area 43.
Area 24 has a lever that de-activates the golden light in Area 29, but Area 29 does not reference this lever.
The Map
The map is gorgeous and the color coding makes it extremely easy to use (though I would have preferred 10ft gridlines instead of 5ft).
Here’s the Overlay to create a Melan Diagram:
Brimming with loops! Stellar.
Content
Rumors
The first contact is the with the rumor table! My philosophy is that true rumors are generally better than partially true or false rumors, and that false rumors need to drive interesting play and have some way to be investigated.
A great wizard once dwelt in the caverns beneath the oak. Beware his deadly bronze golem! (P)
The gnomes who live down there worship an idol of solid emerald. (F)
An underground river flows through those caverns. Rotting corpses of the drowned stalk the banks in search of flesh.
A holy chalice with the power to reverse death is guarded by a silent evil. (P)
A great warrior of The White League was entombed in those caverns.
All the statues in the dungeon turn to solid gold once a day! (F)
A water dragon lairs in a great submerged cavern. (F)
A mutant ogre guards a complex of slave pens and wizard experiments. (P)
Giant lizards guard an ancient shrine with long-lost treasures.
The most delectable night-tomatoes grow down there.
#1 does a great job - they party can find a bronze statue (which they might mistake for a Golem) “guarding” sapphire chalice in Area 29. That said, I would be annoyed if I brought a bunch of golem precautions with me and then spent time setting up an elaborate scheme to defeat the golem only to learn that it was always just a harmless statue.
#2 is also good - once they find the Gnome Home, they’ll be jonesing to get to the stump area for that idol. The gnomes themselves can correct the rumor “Hey I’d like to see the emerald Idol ya’ll worship. What emerald Idol? We worship the great stump!”
#4 is potentially devastating. If the players assume the rumor is true, they might use the chalice to resurrect a friend. Then, they might plan around having that resurrection as a resource only to find out that it was the water that was magic and not the chalice, which would be really annoying.
#5 is really cool. The players can find out this is false by just watching the statues, so it’s mostly harmless, and they get the “ah-ha” moment if they figure out how the levers in Area 24 works.
#7 is bad. Players don’t know which secret rooms they haven’t found yet. None of the NPCs will know what they’re talking about if they ask about a water dragon or submerged cavern. There aren’t any submerged caverns.
#8 is borderline. The players might search for this complex but it doesn’t exist and that could be disappointing.
Special note, the last clue offered by The Faces of the Deep: “If you find the black jungle, make sure you bring a shovel.” is potentially extremely annoying. If the party explores Area 28 (Jet black soil, Large black plants, Black thorned ivy, Jet black fruits) they might think that they’re in the ‘black jungle’, and start digging. This is, as far as I can tell, a red herring. The actual ‘black jungle’ they need to dig in is Area 29 which has roughly the same description.
Area 29 only has a 1/6th chance on any given turn of turning up something valuable when digging, so until they hit treasure they don’t know which place is the right place. There’s a ~10% chance that they dig in the right place for 2 hours straight and don’t find anything, which is a really weird mechanic. I’d probably give them an indication of success the first turn.
Random Encounters
20 encounters are listed; 10 are potential combat encounters and 10 aren’t. These encounters occur 1/6th of the time at the end of a turn. In play, I had a lot of trouble incorporating many of these encounters (or they were duds).
For instance, #1 says
A root burrows out of the floor, wall, or ceiling. It points in a random direction with a finger-like appendage. A distant chuckling is heard.
and #10 says
A root burrows out of the floor, wall, or ceiling. It points towards the nearest danger with a finger-like appendage. A distant chuckling is heard.
Which means that half of the time a root burrows out of the floor and points, it’s a total red herring and the other half of the time it points, it’s pointing at “danger”. There’s already enough red herrings (nolly’s kingdom, random chess pieces, lost gloves/boots, mysterious jars, ominous rumbles)!
For #3
A sudden, swirling gust of wind extinguishes torches and candles. Lanterns have a 3-in-6 chance of remaining alight.
This is a nothingburger unless the PCs are in the middle of a combat encounter or similar. In play, the Lantern didn’t go out, and if it did, the players would have relit it without trouble.
All of the mysterious chuckling and whatnot are red herrings (as far as I can tell).
My players hyper fixated on how the small burping lizard was purple, and how the vortex was also purple and thus they must be related. No one went into the vortex either of the 2 times it spawned.
For potential combat encounters, it felt difficult to incorporate or dangerous to play as written. For instance:
1d4 elixir-addled lizard men daubed with blue paint, sneaking to the sacred caverns beyond the waterfall (Area 50).
What does “elixir-addled” mean? Why would Lizard-men who are sneaking to the sacred caverns be near the Gnome Home? What happens when the players follow the Lizard men (either sneakily or because a good reaction was rolled) to the sacred caverns, but the GM hasn’t made that area yet and the book doesn’t describe it?
Keyed Encounters
The flavor of the encounters themselves are a lot of fun; nice mix of whimsy and weird! The traps are sensical and well-telegraphed. The secret doors describe how they’re found or opened. The enemies are generally intelligent with clear (most factions just want food) motives.
My largest playability gripe is how frequently the dungeon leads to things that don’t exist (and would require the GM to invent) rather than being more self-contained.
For instance, here’s (presumably) the treasure that “the horned (the ogre is not described with horns) ogre possesses but does not understand”:
Touching the skull: A disembodied consciousness named Huugal-Barathk is awakened if touched by a Neutral character.
It can speak Common in a spooky whisper. It seeks to be reunited with its body (in the hidden crypts of the lizard temple in the city) and grants +1 INT and CHA to a person who aids it.
What city? What lizard temple? What crypts?
In the slimy vestibule:
Clearing the lettering: If the algae is cleared, the text can be read (written in Common): “PRAY FOR THE BENEDICTION OF KEZEK. THE BLESSED MAY PASS THE FALL AND COME TO THE DEEP SHRINE”.
What deep shrine? This is the second reference to a temple past the waterfall (the first was in a random encounter description). The third reference is at the end of the book, in the “Expanding the Dungeon” section:
Beyond the waterfall: The pathway in Area 49 continues past the waterfall in Area 50 and down to the deeper temple of the reptile cult. This is a good location to insert a second level of the dungeon, populated with lizard men and giant reptiles.
What reptile cult? What deeper temple?
On the other hand, I dig the explicit reference on how to easily insert Incandescent Grottoes, since that exists. I don’t want a module author giving me random encounters and explicit hints that pigeon-hole me into creating a dungeon that doesn’t exist yet.
Treasure and XP
The adventure contains 17457 gold. This is easy to figure because the adventure explicitly lists it on a treasure page at the front!
There are 60 areas to explore. If we estimate that they take ~1 turn each, then exploring those takes ~60 turns. We can only explore every 5 in 6 turns (the 6th turn is for rest), so 72 turns. There are 24 keyed encounters, with a handful more showing up on a 2-in-6, so call it ~26. Of those, ~12 are against chaotic beings (faun, ogre, gnomes, trogs) and the rest are against neutral beings (beetles, spiders, black skeletons, etc).
If the party kills everything, that takes another ~26 turns, which brings us up to 98 turns. If the party kills only the chaotic stuff, that puts us at at 84 turns. We get an encounter on 1/6th of our turns, and a potentially hostile encounter on half of the random results, so another ~8 hostile encounters for a full clear (which takes 8 more turns), and another 7 potentially hostile encounters on an evil clear. These both trigger ~1 more hostile encounters (since having a fight takes a turn and you roll another encounter check afterwards) for a total of 107 and 92 turns respectively.
Defeating everything (whether through violence, diplomacy, or trickery) nets 4171 XP from the keyed encounters, and another ~260 XP from the random encounters (most random encounters are pulled from the dungeon denizens). This comes out to ~21.6k XP. For a party of 4 adventurers and 2 hirelings, this works out to the adventurers getting 4.3k XP, enough to put many classes to level 3, and all classes to level 2.
Magic item wise, we get:
Potion of Invisibility
Scroll of Charm Person, Detect Evil, Phantasmal Force
Scroll of Dimunition
Dagger +1
Addictive Healing Potions (Black Fruits)
Sword +1
Scroll of Invisibility
Mirror of Turning
5 Arrows +1
Ring of +1 CON
Chainmail +1
Shield +1
This feels like a big haul. The three trogs don’t seem to form a Lair (which would normally be 5d8). The ghouls probably do constitute a lair, which would be treasure type B, and that gives a 10%: 1 magic sword, suit of armour, or weapon. So we got lucky on the ghoul’s +1 Dagger.
The gnomes are likewise a Lair, listed as Treasure Type C, which gives a 10% chance of 2 magic items (the +1 Chain and the +1 Shield). Now we’re in 1-in-100 territory.
The tuatara also represent a Lair, with Treasure Type V. 5% of one magic item (The ring of +1 CON). Now we’re in 1-in-2000 territory.
The Wight is technically enough to represent a Lair, with Treasure Type B, same as the ghouls (The +1 sword). Now we’re in 1-in-20000 territory. Numbers have been fudged!
Conclusion
Buy and Run! Plenty of ideas to mine if you don’t run it as written. Fun as written.
For modifications:
I’d recommend giving out less permanent magic items (I’d leave the +1 con ring and the wight’s sword but take out everything else).
Be very ready to create a Kezek-themed behind-the-waterfall temple.
Switch some of the factions motivations to something other than food.
Very useful analysis and I feel more confident running this - thanks