This review came from my substack which is located here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/twilightdreams/p/critique-of-demon-bone-sarcophagus?r=48ejp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
----------------------------------
Demon Bone Sarcophagus (DBS) is a 129 page system neutral (although decidedly OSR) adventure by Patrick Stuart with art by Scrap Princess. Patrick Stuart is one of the more well known authors in the OSR scene, having completed several books in the past that I own and enjoy and which are highly regarded critically.
It’s with some reluctance I can’t say the same for DBS. I will get the easy things out of the way first. The highs in it are very high but the lows are very low and overall it’s a bit frustrating where the book feels about 80% complete.
There seems to be at least one editing mistake on every page. If polished a bit more it could have been very good, perhaps even a masterpiece, but as it stands it feels kind of incomplete. Beyond the simple editing mistakes, if I were to run this it would require a lot of prep to help smooth over the frustrating parts.
After reading it I have done a lot of thinking about it. To this end I’d thought I’d write a more in-depth critique rather than a simple review. Mainly, to see how I would have done things differently in my own adventure writing. So lets begin.
Backstory
To begin, DBS is the first adventure in a 3 part series (of which I do hope the other 2 do get published despite my frustrations with this first volume). DBS starts off with a 3 page history about the Nobility of Fire and the Empress of Fire. The Empress of Fire is the character within the Demon Bone Sarcophagus and is entombed in a trap and trick filled dungeon that is the main meat of this adventure.
While 3 pages may not seem like a lot for a backstory, it’s broken up into multiple sections, spans a fair amount of time with various characters, factions, and summarized historical plot points.
It’s a lot to digest and remember. So much so, that beyond the basics I really don’t remember much even after reading it twice.
Most of it seems not super pertinent to the adventure at hand. It may be referenced in the later adventures in the trilogy, but it is a fairly large information dump up front. Overall I think it would have been better to really try and modularize this information. To maybe give us the most recent events in this adventure and then as we get to the second or third adventures give us more of the backstory once we have encountered and understood the events and characters referenced in this one.
I also think the adventure could have done a little better at showing and not simply telling. That information presented at the beginning could have been broken up and presented better during the adventure. The adventure does attempt to do this to some degree. There are cultural artifacts within the dungeon that come from the Fire Nobility, but they don’t exactly exposit the presented backstory. There are NPCs you can meet within the dungeon which were involved in the history in the backstory but the text kind of just says they can answer questions regarding the history etc. The actual book doesn’t really do a lot to break up this text for you (like in bullet points or something) and I imagine involve a lot of flipping to at the table, scanning, and trying to figure out how much or how little to tell the players.
Additionally, the backstory at the beginning feels a bit self-indulgent where it feels a bit overcomplex and overwritten. Overall, I am of the opinion, that narrative in RPGs should be short, and fairly dramatic. Think Shakespearian plays. They very often only have a handful of main characters and maybe 3 intertwined plots at most. In Shakespearian plays It’s also fairly easy to determine who’s the good guy, who’s the bad guy, who’s the clown, the character relations, what everyone’s goal is, etc.
There is a fairly tight five act structure and they usually take place in one overall locale. While events may have happened in the past, there is an emphasis on the present and how things are coming to a head. While the plot and characters may seem simple when you summarize them, there’s a surprising amount of depth to them.
I think RPG narrative is best this way simply because it’s very hard to communicate complex plot to the players. Tabletop RPGs are primarily an oral tradition. So is theater in this manner where you’re watching, but mostly listening to characters dialogue and understanding a story in real time through the spoken word.
The Opening
DBS probably starts with one of the best openings I’ve read in any RPG. The adventuring party comes across the remains of a couple of factions which have mascaraed each other in the desert. It’s very obvious that there was some kind of misunderstanding, that something has gone wrong, that all hell broke loose and you’re left trying to figure out what happened.
In reality, it involves “four groups of conspirators, plus two different groups of security operatives, plus a giant sloth“. This feels like waaaay to much to me. The Alexandrian has a three clue rule. I’d like to propose some kind of inverse law. Like, the only three factions at a time rule. I find if there are any more, especially if they’re kind of entwined in some previous plot like the above listed groups, it quickly becomes very hard for the players to piece together who’s on who’s side and what the fuck is actually going on. There is such thing as too many clues, too many things going on.
Three factions is all you need. Three. If you have two they quickly become a duality of good guys vs bad guys. But three, that helps kind of keep some ambiguity. Six? Six, is way to much and just feels overcomplicated. Why have two different conspircies’. Just have one. If you have to much the players will have a hard time figuring out and understanding things and if they have a hard time figuring out and understanding things they’ll stop caring about things. I think less is more in this regard.
The Implied Setting
The implied setting of DBS was kind of confusing to me at first. Every adventure, whether it likes it or not has an implied setting. While I came to kind of understand it better after reading through it all, there were a couple of things that felt kind of strange and random to me about the various groups in the opening. One of them wore only wooden armor and seemed tribal themed. Another of them were agents of a powerful corporation. Another was a guy with a bunch of trained baboons.
This kind of felt incongruent to me at first. Like what’s the general level of technology? Stone age? Medieval? High renaissance? Where are we and how connected is the setting? We seem to be in the desert but the women warriors are tribal themed? Is there a jungle nearby? For the corporation, are we talking East India themed? Or like more modern as the agents kind of seem like the Pinkertons or something? What’s the general culture of the area? European? American West? Colonial?
While it may seem like I’m being nitpicky, and this is probably a critique that’s more my personal preference than anything. I always like my adventures to have a fairly understandable implied setting. Like, medieval Europe, or 17th century, or East Asia, Lord of the Rings, Dreamlands, etc. I don’t care what it is in particular, or even if it fits with my current campaign world. But something known. This is even more important for adventures that are weird, which DBS is and which I enjoy.
The reason I like this is because it provides a common language of tropes, ideas, images, and terms for me and my players to grasp onto. Everyone knows what an elf is. Everyone knows what a spaceship is. Or what a wild west town is.
Roleplaying is about creating an emerging narrative together. It’s very hard to do so if your implied setting feels very random. If it’s too random, like oh, you’re all popcorn people in a land with twin suns that was ruled over by ancient squid people, then the players don’t really have much of an opportunity to come up and set their own goals and has to kind of just go along with whatever the GM has planned. And the GM doesn’t really have much of a choice but to go on what the adventure says as there’s little for them to expand and extrapolate on with their own imagination based on what they already know.
Now to be clear, DBS isn’t that bad in this regard. Some of what I read, like the wooden armour made sense as I read further on (or well I think it does. I think some characters are wearing wooden armour because it seems like metal doesn’t work or is bad in the Zone? Which appears in a future adventure?). But overall the implied setting that I got from DBS was that of something like Dr. Who. Where it is interesting, but kind of a mishmash of a lot of different genres and things, all treated like normal.
Which to be completely honest, isn’t my favourite kind of implied setting but some people seem to like it so your mileage may vary.
The Disjointed Nature of the Adventure and Lack of Motivation
As mentioned previously the adventure starts off in the aftermath of 6 different factions facing off because of two different conspiracies. The ground breaks open during the fighting and a bunch of characters from these factions fall into the Tomb of the Empress of Fire.
These characters are all chasing each other in the Tomb of the Empress of Fire. The conspiracies they are all involved in seem to involve the Frictionless Blue Glass Merchant company and it’s very valuable frictionless blue glass. Frictionless blue glass seems to come from the plane of fire or was invented by the Fire nobility or some such thing. I
So these two discrete elements, the characters and conspiracies (active element) and the tomb (passive element) seem to be connected in a very roundabout way but as far as I can tell (I may be wholly wrong, I’ve only read through it once) I don’t think there is a direct connection.
That is to say, the conspirators just happened by random chance to fall into the tomb. They don’t know what the tomb is about or really care to be in it. What they desire is to get each other.
And while the tomb is very interesting, and probably contains a lot of information about further things in the 2nd or 3rd adventure, it’s kind of, in the present of the 1st adventure, unrelated to the conspiracies and conspirators.
This I kind of find disjointed and a bit of a problem as it provides very little motivation for the players to really explore either of these two elements. I think either they’re going to learn about and decide to get involved in the conspiracies and fuck off from the tomb which seems to be a deathtrap anyways, or they’re going to think the tomb is cool and not really care much about the characters within it who are involved in some kind of conspiracy and trying to get each other.
In putting these elements in competition with each other I think it does a disservice to both, especially because two other adventures are supposed to follow this one. If the players become interested in the tomb, and either disregard or kill all the conspiracy characters stumbling around the tomb, where is the motivation for them to become involved in the conspiracies involving blue glass and the Zone that seem to be present in the 2nd adventure? And likewise, if they abandon the tomb and simply head out to the Zone after siding with a character within the tomb, they probably won’t learn much about the Empress of Fire, her history, and the Fire nobility, things that seem heavily involved in the third adventure.
To some degree I think in play this might not be a huge issue. Most players probably explore the tomb a bit and explore the different characters and conspiracies enough running around in it. But I can’t help but feel that it’s going to lead to both elements half explored and the importance of stuff lost on the players, which may lead to the importance of further things lost on the players. Not so much through their own actions, but because two different elements were vying for their attention and interest and while they had no way of knowing at the time, both turned out to be of importance.
The Random Dynamicism within the Tomb
Now we’re kind of getting to the nitty-gritty. The tomb is comprised of a bunch of rooms. Every room has some kind of fixed element that (most of the time) is something the players can interact with. There is also an encounter in every room with a monster or a character involved in a conspiracy or an NPC monster. However, all these encounters are random. Where you roll on a little table and it’s like character X is doing Yin this room. Like just entering it, or fighting this other character, or investigating thing Z.
I think I kind of get what Patrick Stuart was trying to do. A bunch of characters have fallen into the tomb haphazardly. They stumbling about it and are trying to find and/or kill each other. Instead of having them in fixed locations where they ‘come alive’ when the players enter their specific room, they can be found throughout the tomb and seem to move about.
This is all fine, but when I think about what would happen in play it feels a bit frustrating. The first reason is every time the players enter a room I have to stop play, roll a dice, check on the table, see what monster/character is in the room and what they are doing. And these aren’t simple monster/characters like an angry Orc boss who is eating some mutton. They’re interesting and complex characters who all have a full page spread in a different section of the book about what they’re about and who they are allied with etc.
So most likely after rolling on the table I’m going to have to flip to their character page and be like who the fuck is this guy again? Is he allied/enemies with someone the players have met already?
Additionally, I feel like I’d kind of be on thin ice after a few rooms and repeated characters. Like oh, the players met this character two rooms ago. What if they killed them? Do I roll again? How did they just enter from the far door when the room they met that character in is behind the characters? Oh, they’re going to attack the characters again? But they had to run away last time? Or they’re supposed to attack but previously became allied with the characters.
I know the easy answer to this is just simply make stuff up based on what seems sensible. But I really kind of feel like it might get hard after a few rooms. As I’m essentially not making stuff up about what they’re doing. That would be easy. The table provides that. Instead I’m left to make stuff up about why they’re doing what the table says they’re doing. Especially when it contradicts what happened in previous interactions with the characters. Now that is much harder. Especially when these aren’t simple one or two line characters. They’re complex characters with their own backstories and motivations.
So while the dungeon may seem more dynamic because the conspiracy characters that have fallen into it are dynamically stumbling about it, the mechanism which they do so has added a lot of cognitive load to me as the GM. And I’m not sure if the effort is worth the payoff.
Fact Based Rooms
About 90% of rooms within the tomb are highly imaginative, interesting, and well designed. About 10% are not. They seem highly imaginative and interesting at first glance, but lack interaction and are basically just ‘fact’ or ‘history’ rooms.
An example that really stuck out to me is R36-Histories and Historians. The first paragraph and general read out-loud is:
“The room is lined with thick clay jars, the floor coated with a fine layer of ash.“
The text goes on further to explain that some jars are small, some large. They are all sealed. The large ones contain the ash of historians who studied the primordial Demon wars, powerful but corrupting knowledge that draws the attention of powerful beings. The small ones contain the ash of the histories of these wars. The souls of the historians are bound within these jars so they cannot be summoned etc.
Now overall this is a fantastic and interesting idea. But it feels more like the kernel of an idea than a fully fleshed out room. As so far we’ve simply provided some background facts or history for what in reality, and more importantly, what the players will immediately experience, is just a room full of clay jars.
There’s really not much to telegraph the history of these jars or suggest possible avenues of interaction. Yes, I can probably improvise if the players decide to do stuff like cast speak with dead on the ash. But as far as I can tell there’s really nothing about the lay jars that even suggest there’s the ash of important people in them.
Very little of the interesting things about this room is telegraphed to the players. And very little support is given for further implications. It’s all very abstract. Like if a player does cast speak with dead on the ash of the historian, what does the historian look like? What languages do they speak? Will they willingly divulge what they know? Does speaking what they know cause a demon to appear?
Yeah I can make all this up, and yeah the initial idea is very interesting, but in general the details of the room are written more in a fact based way than a perspective of someone who is seeing the room for the firs time and interacting with shit.
Should I buy this?
Overall I don’t regret buying DBS. I love Patrick Stuart’s work and as frustrating as DBS is, it’s still very imaginative. I also know DBS had a very troubled production history. Multiple things went wrong outside of Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess’ control and I get the feeling it left them burnt out and probably not making a ton of money off this project. However, I also kind of feel like it unfortunately kind of comes across in the end result.
The book isn’t necessarily bad, poorly written, or poorly designed, as much as it just simply feels unfinished. If more attention had been paid to the various editing errors, more rooms been polished a bit more, more feedback given to some of the design, I think it could have been a masterpiece. But as it stands now, it’s simply not.
I do truly hope that Patrick Stuart does the other two books in this trilogy. I don’t know if I’d ever run the first as it stands now. It would require a fair amount of prep and I’m not sure if it would be worth the payoff. However, if this adventure did lead into other more polished adventures I could see it being worth it. I also feel like if I had the full arc of the three adventures it would be easier to see what I could tweak and re-arrange and scrap without the whole house coming down.
Still it’s worth the read. It’s one of the more imaginative things I’ve read all year and does kind of stick in your head.
