I’m posting this early to beat the kickstarter deadline. If you want to back the project, which has now reached its funding target, you will need to act quickly – you have less than 52 hours!

Background

A week or so ago, relative to the publication date of this article, Campaign Mastery received an invitation to review a ‘new’ product from Signal Fire Studios, “A Delve In The Cave”, a D&D 5e -compatible adventure.

The author, Jamie Chambers, was forced by a health issue within his family to put his 20 years of tabletop RPG creativity on hold for a few years, and finds himself starting over. This is his first product since that career interruption was resolved (happily, all is now well).

I was both flattered and gratified that several fans recommended that Jamie reach out to me for a review or a mention.

Disclaimer: I have backed Kickstarters from Signal Fire Studios in the past. For whatever that may be worth in terms of bias, readers should take that into account.

I’ve always felt that there is a responsibility associated with having been around for this long in the RPG-related blogosphere, part of which expresses itself as a need to do my share to maintain the health of the industry. Even had I not been sympathetic to Jamie’s situation (he shared more details than I have related here), that would have encouraged me to accede to his request.

Of course, I immediately replied that I would be happy to do so, but integrity compelled me to share a couple of caveats.

    Caveats

    First, this product is associated with a Kickstarter that is due to end in just a few days – so I’m rushing to try and get this article out early.

    Fortunately, the pledge levels for the product, while modest, make it seem very likely that the equally-modest target of the Kickstarter will be achieved. So I don’t feel that I have taken on the responsibility of making-or-breaking its success.

    Secondly, while I did take part in the play-testing, I don’t have a copy of 5e (Campaign Mastery doesn’t pay enough for that) and have never run a campaign using the system, which would limit the utility of the resulting article in terms of its review content.

    (I’m sharing these because I feel the reader should also take them into account when reading the article. Integrity, again.)

I did float the notion of holding off until the Kickstarter had run its course and the product was in its final form – more on that in a moment – and presumably for sale.

Despite these caveats, Jamie indicated that if I could do so, he’d be most appreciative of any additional buzz I could create about his work now, without waiting – even if it couldn’t be published before the Kickstarter campaign closed (Jamie admitted that he’d dropped the ball on the Press/Publicity side of things even before the campaign started – a forgivable mistake, especially under the circumstances, that I doubt he’ll make again).

So here we are…

What Am I Reviewing In This Article?

What I’m looking at is the Early Access version of the product, which premiered at the Origins Game Fair in 2017, and which is now available from DriveThru RPG as a PDF for $3.99 or Softcover B&W book for $9.99 (prices presumed to be US$).

If you buy the PDF, you will automatically be upgraded to the final version when it is released.

I’ll also be looking briefly at the Kickstarter and what has been announced as included in the final version.

Because this is a pre-release version, the artwork is interim, and there will be substantial enhancements to the content, in particular focusing on the story content and the town near the titular cave.

Because I haven’t seen this content, I can’t judge it, and don’t consider it fair to judge the pre-release version on the basis of what’s not there (but will be).

All clear? Good!

The Collision Between Dungeons and Story

Even without the circumstances described in the Background section above, I would have been inclined to accept the offer anyway. Explaining why seems like a good place to start, because it’s from there that the title of this article derives.

“A Delve In The Cave” was described by Jamie as “a D&D 5th Edition compatible adventure published under the Open Game License, one that layers story and mystery with a classic dungeon crawl in a natural cavern. The idea is to be an homage to classic adventures from the early days but with a more modern presentation and style.” The Kickstarter phrases it, “a cavern crawl built to please hack-and-slash groups and storytellers alike!”

    The Plausibility Disconnect

    Now, every GM has strengths and weaknesses, areas that they know they struggle with. One of mine is rationalizing “dungeons” in terms of verisimilitude.

    One or two, I could cope with (and have done so in the past), especially if I broadened the concept of a “dungeon”. But there’s a psychological disconnect in my head between “above ground” and “dungeon” that stretches credibility to the breaking point whenever I think of the latter.

    Part of the problem is that there are supposed to be something like three dungeons to a character level, at least in the old school mentality. More if there’s character lethality and characters starting over at 1st level – also a very old-school tenet. Over 20 levels, that’s a minimum of 60 dungeons, probably more – and that just pushes plausibility too far for my comfort.

    The Shards Solution

    I solved this problem in my Shards Of Divinity campaign by defining dungeons as “Drow Underground Terrorist Camps” – a double-meaning to the term “Underground”, you see. The first dungeon they explored was actually a prison designed by Lolth to contain her ex-lover and stepping-stone to her authority over the Drow, still just a (forbidden) cult within the Elves. She’d have gotten rid of the Drow Prince if she could have, but to get to where she wanted to be, she had needed to ride his coattails and that entailed buffing him up to the point where he was a match for her. When the PCs released him, he was (officially) grateful, and rewarded them with the location of a Drow treasure cache, which was the second dungeon of the campaign. What he didn’t tell them was that their entrance would awaken thousands of his most fanatical followers who had been bound into unnatural slumber by the same Order of Paladins who had been (unknowingly) Lolth’s instruments in confining the Prince.

    The Fumanor Solutions

    In my Fumanor campaign, most traditional dungeons were the creations of the Chaos Powers, places where they could brew up monstrosities, some of which adapted to the outside world and escaped to become permanent residents. Since these were – effectively – anti-Gods, this ‘divine’ origin sidestepped the plausibility problem.

    The other solution implemented in that campaign was to treat each “level” of a dungeon as a society, and the “story” was understanding and relating to that society. So you had the Elves on the surface, and a Troll-Kobold society (Kobolds ascendant and REALLY nasty compared to The Book) residing in abandoned Dwarfish tunnels beneath them (and off to one side a bit), then a Minotaur-Goblin Society (Goblin ascendant), then Dwarves, then Shadow Dragons, then a society of Abberations, and then the Drow themselves. Each of these dungeon “levels” may have contained a number of physical levels, but the narrative thread was all about the society and what the PCs had to do to earn, or force, their way through to the next “level”, which involved understanding the society in question and how they had adapted their living spaces to their needs.

    NOT a traditional dungeon-crawl, through it borrowed some elements from them. Again, it was a way of sidestepping the plausibility disconnect.

So you could see why I’m perpetually going to be interested in anything that purports to bridge that divide and bring “story” to the classic “dungeon crawl”. The more credentialed and respectable the source, the more strongly I would be interested.

The Author’s Credentials

So, what are the author’s credentials?

Actually, Jamie’s story could well have been mine, had I been born in the US. He started gaming in 1982 at 7 years of age (I started in 1981 at 19). He “stumbled into a career publishing supplements and adventures along with designing RPG systems” some years later – something that wasn’t an option for me due to geography – but it was at about the same time that I was looking for a change of career.

Jamie is the founder of Signal Fire Studios and the primary writer and project manager of “A Delve In The Cave”. Signal Fire Studios published the card game Building An Elder God, the
parody book The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar, and most recently 5th Edition of Metamorphosis Alpha. Before that he ran Margaret Weis Productions and Sovereign Press, wrote and designed the Serenity Roleplaying Game, Battlestar Galactica RPG, Supernatural RPG, and was in charge of the Dragonlance game line for 5 years.

That gives him a lot of credibility, making interest in the adventure acute. But it also raises expectations, so I guess it’s time to see whether or not the product lives up to them.

A Delve In The Cave

“Something lurks in the shadows inside the caverns under the hill called Brin Brenin. Ancient enemies of mankind have returned for revenge, starting with the tomb of a long-forgotten hero. Somewhere inside are answers to forgotten questions, deadly monsters, and hidden treasures.” Sounds good.

Right away, it becomes clear that the story elements all derive from the treatment of the dungeon as a society that is interacting in various ways with the surface-world, and which has also done so in the past (though the details have largely been forgotten since). Jamie has done a masterful job of conveying a rich palette of choices for plot hooks leading to the dungeon, with some extremely rich characterization to draw from. However, there is an immediate sense of anticlimax as the identity of the “something” in the quoted description can easily be learned within the town. This information would be better moved into a new sub-section dealing with the town’s reaction to revelations by the PCs after they learn the truth – that’s when the backstory can be learned and appreciated by the PCs.

That implies at least two separate expeditions into the Cave – learn the source of the problems afflicting the town, go back to warn them (and get the backstory) only to be disbelieved by the populace, leaving it all up to them to confront the town’s enemies.

Learning that backstory is the next flaw that I observe – while the backstory is interesting, coherent, and relevant to the adventure, discovering it seems to be made too difficult through a series of die rolls. I would have made the backstory more readily available (once the right questions were asked in roleplay) because it has the sort of heroic mythic structure that would preserve it in the minds and lore of the town. Obscure details may have been lost, to be recoverable only with success on die rolls, but there aren’t many of those provided.

Right away, I can see that while the concepts and story are well done, there are some plot elements that I would revise, were I to run this as an adventure. Fortunately, the supplement gives me enough of the information I would need to be able to do so, and the final version will provide still more.

This organic process of revelation conflicts with the section on Random Encounters because it presumes that the cats-paw of the true villains of the adventure (speaking circumspectly to avoid spoilers) has begun his activities by the time the PCs arrive. I would prefer to have preparations still underway during the “first delve” referred to, with the real countdown to disaster starting while the PCs are back in town learning the backstory.

To facilitate that, I would have the crypt of the hero of the backstory accessible very quickly, but for it to have been despoiled and his bones removed to the altar from which he performed the deeds that made him a legend. This would require areas 2 and 3 to refer to different parts of the same cave (currently area 2), so that the existing area 3 can be re-purposed, and the existing area 4 then re-purposed to describe the link between the combined 2/3 area and the new area 3. The reason for all this is so that the PCs have the clues to the right questions to ask back in town so that they get the backstory.

My next quibble is that there doesn’t seem to be enough use of misdirection on the part of the …beings… attempting to prevent disruption of their plans by the PCs. Their goal would be well served by concealing entrances and creating a circuitous path that doesn’t actually take the PCs anywhere near anything “sensitive”. Their primary tactics are to ambush the PCs and then run in the wrong direction, not a very sophisticated solution – in fact, given the sophistication of the rest of their plans, this seems incongruous.

Speaking of which, location 8 involves – amongst perhaps other things – a swarm of bats. I would have the bad guys use illusions to create the impression of a vampire’s ghost to (a) enhance the atmosphere, and (b) make the encounter scarier than it actually is, in hopes (once again) of driving the PCs away.

Later in the module, there’s a Riddle to solve in order to gain the hero’s “most prized possessions” for the “defense of man’s realm”. I hate this approach; the riddles seem altogether too easy, but worse still, a puzzle or challenge that is supposed to be about purpose and intent can be solved with an INT check, or by the players being clever. No, No, No! It should be a moral challenge – a choice between (illusory) wealth or the “treasured possessions” (which appear to be relatively valueless except for their potential to aid in the overarching plotline of the adventure. Choose wrongly (the illusion) and you get nothing; choose rightly and you not only get the goodies (which might be substantially better than the impression given by them) but the real wealth as well. This is all about the Hero perpetuating his victory and preparing the way for those who will need to follow in his footsteps (the PCs); anyone sufficiently prescient to have done that would have done it right.

Finally, the ending of the adventure. While it’s described as possible for the PCs to succeed, the greater probability is suggested that they don’t do so in time or at all, escalating the situation faced to a whole new level. There is nowhere near enough information on what happens then and how things can be set to rights once more. This leaves the adventure feeling like it stops right before detailing the boss encounter that resolves the adventure. In fact, it feels a lot like the first half of an adventure – it feels incomplete.

There’s a lot of good content here to work with. Compared with a number of other adventure modules that I have read from small publishers, it is solid and coherent, conceptually, and contains plenty for the GM to work with. The tweaks suggested above are minor and trivial compared with those that I have had to make in order to render other modules playable – this is already playable, and the tweaks are intended to make it better.

The Kickstarter

On top of that, there are a number of goodies that are part of the basic package through the kickstarter. But it’s the additional content that is going to be most valuable – more details about the town, and its people, and the connections between the town and the adventure. Plus a color map and a t-shirt, if you’re so inclined. And more art, I expect.

Verdict

And so, to the bottom line: Is it worth the price?

Absolutely, an unqualified yes.

The writing is of a very high standard, and most of the plotting exemplary. There is an inherent similarity to a succession of natural caverns that has been overcome very effectively to give each area its own flavor, and the backstory and underpinning narrative are coherent and excellent.

On the plus-side on top of that, what’s provided is surprisingly system-agnostic. I wouldn’t hesitate to run it under any FRP game system, including Pathfinder and 3.x in general. I could even adapt it to a superhero genre on the fly, with minimal prep.

You can access the Kickstarter via the direct link above or by the dedicated url, http://www.delveinthecave.com/. I presume that after the fundraising campaign closes, it will redirect to another site from which the adventure can be purchased. This one’s definitely worth your time and money, people. And a great lesson in how to integrate story and dungeon-bash; it turns out that my Fumanor approach wasn’t so far off the mark, after all. Good to know!


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