What do you think?
Rate this book
The Book of Treasure Maps
One of the best Judges Guild products of all time, by legendary author and artist Paul Jaquays is back! A 48-page package of five small, versatile dungeon scenarios, or "mini-dungeons". All are set in the Judges Guild Wilderlands campaign setting, though they can easily be used in any campaign. Each one is a complete adventure and include separate maps for players and Judge, full backgrounds and accompanying rumors, all thoroughly illustrated in the Jaquays tradition. The Lost Temple, The Tomb of Aethering the Damned, The Lone Tower, Willchidar's Well, and the Crypts of Arcadia awaits the stalwart players.
52 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 1979
1 person is currently reading
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 15, 2024
This gets the full five stars just for the chaotic, intense, hilarious zombie apocalypse masterpiece that is Crypts of Arcadia.
The premise is innocuous enough: you're given a treasure map, leading down to a dungeon where an old cult stored vast piles of its lucre. You'll want to grab it, of course! The twist here is that your map doesn't really lead you to the treasure itself: it leads to another map, deep in the dungeon, that then takes you the whole rest of the way.
So you follow the map, find the body on which the rest of the map is, and discover that it's right on the other side of the dungeon. It's a bit annoying, but no big deal otherwise, right? Just a bit of a walk here, then a bit of a walk there, then we're home free. Right?
Ha!
Gaze upon this random encounter table for a while. Spend some time ruminating the numbers (one turn is ten minutes), and imagining just what it means for the adventure and its progress.
You creep onward along the labyrinthine burial tunnels, your flickering torch revealing more and more of the walls filled with dead bodies. It's deathly quiet. The dwarf comments about the state of these crypts, how he can feel them crumbling apart around him: he can barely raise his voice above a whisper, lest it echoed. And then you start to hear the shuffling, the groaning, from behind you...
Wherever you pass, the dead awaken. If you try to retreat through here a little while later (half an hour is nothing), you find that the way is shut. You have to keep moving, keep running around, keep finding another way through, lest you are pinned and overwhelmed.
And it gets worse: look, cave-ins are a random encounter. And since random encounters happen more likely and more often the longer you stay here... from here, though the book never explicitly states it, it's easy to extrapolate that the undead, whom you are stirring by your very presence, are bringing the roof down on you all just by waking up! The dwarf repeats what he said about this place being unsafely built, and this time you listen.
So you're following that second map, and suddenly find that the tunnel it takes you through has collapsed! Now what? Are you going to dig your way through, all the while harried by more and more of the living dead? Or would you rather try to circle around it, forcing you to a side trek into uncharted territory?
If you've only played 5th edition and other newer games, let it be known that random encounters used to be important - a big deal. They're not just a nuisance thrown at your way: their function is to keep you on your toes, keep you moving, never get truly comfortable with where you are, to get in the dungeon and out of it as quickly as you can. It often combines with vast treasure hoards, piles upon piles of gold and gems and weapons and armour, that you also need to figure out how to even cart out of here. Together these two form the core pillars of emergent old-school gameplay. And Crypts of Arcadia is one of the best examples of this used in action I've seen anywhere. The way it gradually puts more pressure on you is simply marvelous, caving in the dungeon bit by bit a great additional touch that adds to the claustrophobic feeling...
In many ways it's Death Frost Doom Lite: hell vomits its filth at you in increments, little by little, rather than all at once from zero to hundred. The sort of mounting horror, rather than one that just jumps at you out of nowhere. And you can survive it! If you're fast and cunning, with a good sword-arm.
When I ran this, the party ended up separated by the undead for a while, forced to go around the map to circumvent a cave-in, had a sort of a pseudo boss battle with a mummy encounter, and ultimately found themselves trapped in the treasure chamber with the swarm of the dead coming at them and absolutely no way out. Fortunately they had found a Wand of Digging from an earlier adventure: they made a new path for themselves through a wall, scooped what little they could out of the massive treasure pile, and hightailed their way out of there. It was one of the best adventures I've ever run.
Of the rest, The Lone Tower is also pretty good. Tense, atmospheric, and has a strict time limit with its full moon time-dilation stuff. We had a good time running it as well. The rest I haven't had the opportunity to try, nor do they look particularly noteworthy, but again, Crypts of Arcadia alone is worth the praise. Read it, run it, and teach your players the meaning of true survival horror hellscape.
The premise is innocuous enough: you're given a treasure map, leading down to a dungeon where an old cult stored vast piles of its lucre. You'll want to grab it, of course! The twist here is that your map doesn't really lead you to the treasure itself: it leads to another map, deep in the dungeon, that then takes you the whole rest of the way.
So you follow the map, find the body on which the rest of the map is, and discover that it's right on the other side of the dungeon. It's a bit annoying, but no big deal otherwise, right? Just a bit of a walk here, then a bit of a walk there, then we're home free. Right?
Ha!
Gaze upon this random encounter table for a while. Spend some time ruminating the numbers (one turn is ten minutes), and imagining just what it means for the adventure and its progress.
You creep onward along the labyrinthine burial tunnels, your flickering torch revealing more and more of the walls filled with dead bodies. It's deathly quiet. The dwarf comments about the state of these crypts, how he can feel them crumbling apart around him: he can barely raise his voice above a whisper, lest it echoed. And then you start to hear the shuffling, the groaning, from behind you...
Wherever you pass, the dead awaken. If you try to retreat through here a little while later (half an hour is nothing), you find that the way is shut. You have to keep moving, keep running around, keep finding another way through, lest you are pinned and overwhelmed.
And it gets worse: look, cave-ins are a random encounter. And since random encounters happen more likely and more often the longer you stay here... from here, though the book never explicitly states it, it's easy to extrapolate that the undead, whom you are stirring by your very presence, are bringing the roof down on you all just by waking up! The dwarf repeats what he said about this place being unsafely built, and this time you listen.
So you're following that second map, and suddenly find that the tunnel it takes you through has collapsed! Now what? Are you going to dig your way through, all the while harried by more and more of the living dead? Or would you rather try to circle around it, forcing you to a side trek into uncharted territory?
If you've only played 5th edition and other newer games, let it be known that random encounters used to be important - a big deal. They're not just a nuisance thrown at your way: their function is to keep you on your toes, keep you moving, never get truly comfortable with where you are, to get in the dungeon and out of it as quickly as you can. It often combines with vast treasure hoards, piles upon piles of gold and gems and weapons and armour, that you also need to figure out how to even cart out of here. Together these two form the core pillars of emergent old-school gameplay. And Crypts of Arcadia is one of the best examples of this used in action I've seen anywhere. The way it gradually puts more pressure on you is simply marvelous, caving in the dungeon bit by bit a great additional touch that adds to the claustrophobic feeling...
In many ways it's Death Frost Doom Lite: hell vomits its filth at you in increments, little by little, rather than all at once from zero to hundred. The sort of mounting horror, rather than one that just jumps at you out of nowhere. And you can survive it! If you're fast and cunning, with a good sword-arm.
When I ran this, the party ended up separated by the undead for a while, forced to go around the map to circumvent a cave-in, had a sort of a pseudo boss battle with a mummy encounter, and ultimately found themselves trapped in the treasure chamber with the swarm of the dead coming at them and absolutely no way out. Fortunately they had found a Wand of Digging from an earlier adventure: they made a new path for themselves through a wall, scooped what little they could out of the massive treasure pile, and hightailed their way out of there. It was one of the best adventures I've ever run.
Of the rest, The Lone Tower is also pretty good. Tense, atmospheric, and has a strict time limit with its full moon time-dilation stuff. We had a good time running it as well. The rest I haven't had the opportunity to try, nor do they look particularly noteworthy, but again, Crypts of Arcadia alone is worth the praise. Read it, run it, and teach your players the meaning of true survival horror hellscape.
Displaying 1 of 1 review