Modern day dungeon crawls exist on an interesting spectrum. On the one end, there’s gritty, dirty cave runs with a wild mix of monsters. On the other end, there’s wild fantasy with sentient mushrooms and breathing caves. It shows how many authors have interpreted the classics in their own way. Classic D&D games could go from looting a cursed temple to exploring a crashed spaceship depending on the week. Everyone has their preferred mix of these elements and for me, I like what I usually get from the folks at Old School Essentials. I enjoyed many of their longer dungeons and was excited to pick up both volumes of their Adventure Anthologies sight unseen. Did the four locations inside get the flavor I crave just right? Let’s play to find out.
Old School Essentials Adventure Anthology 1 contains four adventures. The first three are medium sized dungeons that could be explored in a session or two, while the third adventure is a hex crawl set at higher levels. Each adventure is written in OSE’s clear house style featuring bullet points, clear maps and callout boxes for monsters and magic items. The clarity of the writups give these adventures usefulness for any system a Game Master prefers. I ran these dungeons using Shadowdark rather than OSE and they went very smoothly.
The rest of the review contains SPOILERS for the adventures in the anthology. Bottom Line: Old School Essentials Adventure Anthology 1 is a great collection for Dungeon Masters looking to drop in an adventure into their old school campaign.
“The Jeweller’s Sanctum” by Giuseppe Rotondo puts players on a quest handed to them by the son of a dead enchanter. He wants to restart the family business but he can’t because of the monsters that have taken over the basement of his dead father’s workshop along with the unknown magic that’s run unsupervised for years. The location features some fun traps, a few monster groups to slay or play against each other, and a treacherous apprentice that could become an ally or an enemy depending on how the players treat him. This is a great kickoff for a broader campaign and a solid introduction to an old school style of play for groups new to the experience.
Glynn Seal’s “The Curse Of The Maggot God” takes things in a slightly more sword and sorcery direction. There’s an evil priest, his troglodyte henchmen and the god they worship which might just be really, really big rather than some sort of deity. This takes place in a sewer that backs into a long lost Imperial bath house which gives the players a chance to keep an eye out for loot. This one works best when the players reach a campaign city and are looking for work.
Brad Keer ups the strangeness in “The Sunbathers” which takes place on the classic fantasy version of a vacation spa. This island getaway was dedicated to healing but a cult of Lethe has slowly corrupted that idea into forgetting painful memories as well and trying to perfect the mortal form. This adventure combines ancient Greek trappings with a bit of a “everything’s fine if you just surrender” style cult. This one is a higher level setup that could be made personal if a beloved NPC goes to the island or even a PC trying to get rid of a curse or other hard to shake affliction. In my run through, this was the place a PC went to to be resurrected with the ensuing adventure the price of being brought back from the Underworld.
The final adventure takes place on, of all places, the back of a comet. “The Comet That Time Forgot” from D.M. Wilson and Sarah Brunt throws the players through a magic portal onto the back of a comet careening through space. The comet also happens to be home to a Lost World style land full of tyrants, lizardmen and dinosaurs. The players have to hexcrawl to find their way home. It’s a good choice for Game Masters who want to end their campaign with a swing for the fences and send off their characters into retirement as barkeeps with an outrageous story nobody will believe.
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