[No-Artpunk] Review of #16 Slyth Hive (AD&D 1e)

Slyth Hive
PrinceofNothing
AD&D 1e
Level 14+
Nr. of pages: 81 + 19 maps (duplicates in the back for ease of reference)
Classification: Gloriana-Class Battleship

This review obviously contains massive spoilers

For real this time. An author’s review of his own work might have some minor objectivity issues so consider this more of an elaborate expose, a glorified advertisement, a designer diary where I run everyone through the choices I made and some of the reasoning behind them. Without further ado, lets dig in.

Slyth Hive was based on an old adventure idea I describe here , in greatly altered form and is centered around a single concept: What would it be like to fight an enemy that adapts to you? Plenty of examples exist in fiction: The Borg, the Tyranid, the Bugs, the Slivers and Phyrexians from MtG etc. The idea of adaptation existed before in minor ways (take, say, The Infernal from the D20 Epic Handbook) but always as something relatively incidental. Here, the entire adventure was going to be about fighting a hive of creatures (The Slyth) that would metamorphically adapt to the player’s tactics, forcing them to alter tactics or risk destruction.

This ties into my earlier observations r.e. high level gaming regarding the effective use of pressure. The adaptation mechanism is based on a percentile roll and tied to the number of rounds that the characters are engaged in combat. The number of mutations that can be gained by the bugs is capped at 1 per day and take 1 day to implement. Other balancing mechanisms and elaborations have been implemented (say, a max number of mutations for different types of Slyth) but during playtesting, my players had moved through the hive relatively quickly and stealthily, yet some of the largest advantages of the players had already been negated. This adaptation is combined with weekly replenishment. Here too there are elaborations. Hidden defence mechanisms which are formidable until it is discovered how they work, after which they can easily be circumvented. Vulnerabilities that can be exposed by clever players to reduce the strength of the hive peacemail. In return, the Hive has its countermeasures, domesticated worms patrol the earth, preventing tunneling efforts, assassins are sent out to attack the party at their base if they idle too long, and specialized psychic breeds patrol the ethereal plane to deter scouting parties. Idle too long and the Slyth will even start attacking neighbouring towns, depriving the characters of support.
These counter-measures can themselves often be circumvented by clever players. What nerfing of abilities exists (a type of psychic interference that makes scrying and teleportation more difficult) can also be bypassed.

I did not take my adventure to the planes. But then in order for the adventure to make sense in the context of the standard D&D assumptions, I had to conceive of a reason for such a formidable enemy to exist, yet not be well known and dominant by this point. I accordingly placed their origins in the distant, primordial past, near extinct, a last queen egg having escaped the devastation of a primordial conflict between a race of hideous abominations from the deepest chasms of the earth and the Axototli, the advanced aztec/atlantean humans who were the masters of the Slyth. A brilliant cultic high-priest, the Yul-brenner-like Pharnabazus, unearths these long forgotten origins, and sojourns to Old Agoiah in the backwater region of the Bracken with his band of evil men. The party is motivated by immense rewards from all lawful religions, portents of doom, legend lore or the fortune of Baron Azmod IX, who calls in an old debt that the character’s ancestors owe to his.

I wanted an assumed gameplay mode that allowed for a variety of approaches. Starting characters have a full compliment of retainers at their disposal (I do recommend supply costs be tallied for them to keep momentum, although several delves will gain enough gold to more or less trivialize this cost). A full frontal assault on Mount Agoiah and the Slyth Hive is fully accounted for, and is likely to inflict a few nasty surprises on these bold players. I have seen a small party attempt a frontal assault, I have not yet seen a full scale army invasion. There are notes on the amounts of mercenaries available in the region, and recommendations to use the EoPT rules for mass combat. Aspiring playtesters wanting to explore Slyth Hive, consider going for a frontal mass assault!

So a good idea does not a good adventure make. What I also wanted to go for is escalating and varying challenges and, gasp, experiences, that ramp up as characters descend deeper into the Slyth Hive. The first layer is an impossible subterranean jungle, inhabited by simulacra of animals, dinosaurs, cavemen and narrow tunnels filled with blind albinoid cobra-like creatures. Although intelligent use of the many items and abilities at the character’s disposal should make overcoming this challenge relatively trivial, it is still quite possible to die here, and in honor of WG6 I too start my adventure with a massive all-out throat-cutting attack involving hundreds of parasitically controlled animals to weed out casual players. Stealth and even negotiation with some enigmatic NPCs are possible alternatives, but if you do not enjoy the flashy use of destructive abilities to overcome powerful foes then this is not your adventure. The narrow tunnels of the Burrowers offer little treasure, although there is an alternate entrance. In the beginning the threat is engimatic, mysterious. But the timer is already ticking, and the adaptation is already ongoing.

Mass combat with many hundreds of Slyth soon ensues if the players keep following the regular route. I wanted to uphold good dungeon design principles (secret rooms/vaults, loopy-doopy, multiple modes of egress etc.) so here too it is possible to come in via a back entrance, and to bypass certain layers. There is even a secret sub-level that is extremely dangerous but high lucrative and completion of which renders the exploration of the rest of the Hive considerably easier. (I am currently rethinking my last minute decision to connect level 3 to level 4 instead of 6, something for the revised edition no doubt). My dungeon mapping is hovering at a 7/10 so I could use some improvement but during play it felt sprawling enough, there were always other places to go.

For combat I sort of assumed that the superheroic part of high level D&D that many shirk, where the battlefield is a modern hell of intersecting energies from spells and devices, and characters have massive reconnaisance and mobility options is actually desirable and the encounters are made accordingly. On the one hand, variety is the name of the game. I have tried to attack the players in as many ways as possible. Mass attacks, combined encounters, traps, flanking, fortifications, psionic abilities, deception, environmental hazards (say, an entire section of The Fungal Warrens is coated in overlapping layers of brown/yellow and russet mould), linked shrieker alarm systems etc. I took inspiration from 40k’s Tyranid, where individually weak creatures were guided by overseer creatures that made them much more formidable. The different clades of Slyth are gradually unveiled as the characters descend deeper, each one a new horrific suprise (although of course, the characters are by no means obligated to follow the progression I had envisioned for them). The point was to make something that was robust, and would not fall apart if the characters cleverly bypassed a single defence or encounter.

Very often a carefully prepared party would still obliterate most of the things I threw at them, but that preparation comes at the cost of time. I tried to avoid artpunking too much and turning every single encounter into some sort of customized artistic set piece, so you will see a bit of repetition, but the repetition is only on the level of the single encounter. I tried to make them part of a greater whole, components in an engine of death. Despite the Slyth being the main threat, I ended up using quite a few monsters from official sources, and crucially, not everything you encounter in the Slyth Hive is aligned to the Slyth, so there are options for diplomacy, parley, reconnaisance, exploration etc.

In the lower levels, obstacles become crueller and crueller. Where at first the Slyth attempt to hold the party on an open field, deeper levels are heavily fortified, entirely submerged, or covered with an anti-magic field. This is all an extension of the adaptive principle. It is not enough to find a single workable combination of items and spells. You must switch up your routine to adapt to new circumstances. A tactic, once found, does not stay evergreen. You are racing against the clock.

While most of the encounters do not rely on brute force, I could not resist littering the lower levels with some absolute ballbuster encounters that can be overwhelming if blundered into. These include the likes of the Leviathans, the carefully sealed Hideous Thing (which my players sadly did not free), the three guardians of the three gates into the Inner Sanctum (one of which my players did manage to overcome with careful planning) and of course Pharnabazus and his evil adventuring party (who were overcome in a formidable battle that left two men dead and was poised on a knife’s edge). On these lower levels the defences have been breached, and the dungeon opens up, and some tasteful weird is sprinkled throughout the areas. I will offer some sort of reward to anyone who can tell me if they ever fought the Perfect Avatar and actually defeated him. Here too, there is often an alternative way of dealing with an encounter to reward more thoughtful play, although some players migh not be able to resist just wading in.

So on the one hand you are performing a systematic extermination campaign, but while you are at it you can still do all the exciting things that adventurers get up too. Why not take a break from exterminating an ancient species brought back with cultic sorcery and indulge in a bit of underwater cavern archeology?

A challenge with a module of this size and complexity is to render it useful. A certain amount of comprehension complexity cannot be avoided. I have not explained basic procedures and rules of AD&D. You are running a high level game, such familiarity will either be yours, or will be forced on the aspiring DM during the course of play. What I have done is hopefully provided summaries of information that must be kept track off during the game, placed information pertinent to an entire level on that level and so on. Encounters are accompanied by statt blocks and prerolled hit points to make it easier to run during play. Premades are provided so you have something to calibrate the module against when running it for your own characters. Nevertheless, you will still be required to familiarize yourself with many of the entries in the MM before the game.

Treasure is high, comparatively stingy at first, but accumulating rapidly as you descend deeper into the Hive. I have tried to strike a balance between excessive description on the one hand and boring (1000 gp worth of jewels) on the other hand, and w.r.t. to fidelity to the contest stipulations, this is where I have been at my best behavior. Nearly all the treasure is from Unearthed Arcana and the DMG, with a few tasteful pieces being drawn from the original Empire of the Petal Throne (what else would be a good stand-in for Aztec Atlanteans) and three unique items, two of which are powerful artifacts.

In my ardour and since I would not myself be victorious in the contest, I have transgressed against my own contest stipulations in numerous ways. My adventure is longer then the permitted 50 pages by a considerable margin. I have introduced more new creatures, and although I could shave some of these off, I believe the adventure is certainly the stronger for it and I have used content from an illegal supplement. Nevertheless, I believe my entry to be spiritually worthy to be counted among the greatest of the entries we have seen so far, and to provide an integral part of the rebirth of high level gaming by introducing several new concepts. Time will tell whether I have succeeded.

Premades are fully loaded, well equipped, each an intricate killing machine capable of dealing dozens of ways of death, armed with potent items, consumables, trinkets to support multiple approaches. I have herein tried to channel the spirit of that old high level game, where capabilities are immense and challenge comes as much from mastering an intricate set of precision tools as it comes from using your environment

My current version is available for purchase and will become freely available with the release of NAP III. I intend to use the funds for my own aggrandisement and to get revenge on my enemies, but I do also intend to Kickstarter a version with a proper art budget, with a few minor edits and quality of life improvements, and hopefully, if interest is present, several additional levels to consist of the following:

* The Cask of Horrors: Cavern complex holding vaults, protecting weapons, creatures and secrets the Axototli deemed too dangerous to see the light of day. This periphery of the Hive has become a battleground between the Slyth and other underdark races. Sentient magic doors (many of them mad), haywire Cthonic golems, were-jaguar super-soldiers and the terrifying Egg of Cthoon are but a few of the things that may be encountered here.

* Sheol. A demi-plane where the Axototli would meet with the gods and learn their wishes. Very hard to find experimental level that holds the embassies of both cthuloid and aztec powers, and will have as the challenges deadly and mystical games as the characters bargain with the fickle and bloodthirsty powers of an extinct civilization. Immense power can be had at immense risk.

* The Uttermost Pits. In my adventure I include a creature that is more horrible then the Slyth, the downfall of the Axototli. Clearly some of them have survived. But how many, and where do they hail from? Below the Slyth Hive lies a gnawing abyss…

* The Throat. The top of the mountain remain undefined. A sprawling vertical level, lined with winding stairs that allows for an alternative form of eggress, and all manner of unwholesome inhabitants.

If you are asking why you should buy a penultimate version now instead of waiting for the final one, don’t be alarmed, we will update the PDF so people that support the original version can receive the final product. A print version is another matter of course.

This was a great exercise and it probably would not have gone nearly as far if I had not forgotten my customary supply of books before I went on a holiday. Playing it was as much fun as writing it, and I was thrilled to have convinced at least one of my players to see the light of AD&D. For those who are interested, the same player is kindly working on a full fledged Foundry conversion so the adventure may be enjoyed with all the benefits of modern technology. Hell yes.

Currently smoking:  Gurkha Royal Courtesan Cigar along with aerosolized essence de ma propre odeur corporelle