What do you think?
Rate this book
Halls of the blood king
Old-School Essentials: Official Adventure Scenario
With the rising of the Blood moon, the accursed abode of the Blood King returns to this world.
With the rising of the Blood moon, the accursed abode of the Blood King returns to this world.
48 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2021
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 26, 2024
Great mood setting descriptors and amazing art. Although art doesn't always match the description, my players and I were fine with that as both were great. I ran it over 2, 3 hour sessions but it ended in a TPK after the PCs cleared the first floor, so I didn't get to experience the whole dungeon in play. Nevertheless, my players loved it and I loved running it.
Positive points:
- Great variety in random encounters that add spooky ambient descriptions as well as theme fitting monsters.
- A list of 12 vampires each with their own quirky, yet very gameable motivations.
- Multiple entry points! Yes!
Other notes:
- My players were very cautious, but we're slightly under level, which lead to lots of missing and ultimately a TPK.
Positive points:
- Great variety in random encounters that add spooky ambient descriptions as well as theme fitting monsters.
- A list of 12 vampires each with their own quirky, yet very gameable motivations.
- Multiple entry points! Yes!
Other notes:
- My players were very cautious, but we're slightly under level, which lead to lots of missing and ultimately a TPK.
Read
April 24, 2022I was recently thinking about buying some reasonably priced D&D antiques -- from the 90s! -- when I thought "well, wouldn't it be nice to know the current state of the art?" (I mean, it's true I was also beaten in the auction for those D&D pieces, but I also let myself be beaten.) So, Exalted Funeral had a sale and someone recommended this Ennie Award-winning adventure, and I'd been curious about OSE, which is another of those D&D retroclones.
Oh, and spoilers, in case you planned to play this.
So what do we have here? ~56 pages of a small and very deadly dungeon hexcrawl that is a mansion of a vampire lord, a mansion that jumps from plane to plane collecting vampire guests and blood tithes. As the note in the intro says, this adventure is not balanced in any way, and your party will be ground up if they think they should just charge in to every room swinging.
But, while it's true that there are some factions here that can be somewhat turned on each other, I wonder how this actually plays in practice, since there's not a lot of clues at the beginning that this is the case. (Maybe one of the adventure hooks -- that the Princess of Blood has sent psychic dreams pretending to be a captured human -- might lead the PCs to think that, but what other clues are there? I mean, one of the factions here is vampire spiders, so what will the PCs do when they wander into that room?)
Reading this after, say, Masks, is a great reminder of what early OD&D adventures were like; that is, while Masks explicitly says "structure an adventure like a comic book story" and while even more modern-day D&D adventures have something like the shape of a story, those early adventures were often themeless and storyless, just big masses of monsters in 10' by 10' rooms. So if the OSR movement is an attempt to get back to some of the principles and practices of the earlier time, bravo on this adventure, which really has no pre-determined shape, and just a lot of encounters that can go one way or another.
But if this adventure doesn't have a theme, per se -- and like, I'm talking like middle-school English class theme, something like _freedom_ or _hope_ -- it has a hell of a coherent set of vampire-centric motifs: the monster at the heart of this dungeon is a vampire, so almost everything is blood and fangs. The walls? Pulse with blood. The locks on the doors? A lot of fanged mouths that try to bite if you try to open. The tub of blood? Oh, that's monster blood that also sucks blood, as do the spiders and the trees and plants -- and even the crazed vampire-hunter.
Now, there's a few things that stick out as not fitting in with that theme, and they are all pretty weird, and kinda align with the other big idea here: this is a vampire palace, but it's a planar-hopping vampire palace. So, for instance, there's a telescope that can see other worlds that might not be other worlds; and a model of the solar system that might not be a model; and vampires from other dimensions that are inhuman or even cyborg. Hmmm, now that I think of it, two of the three weird things don't feel planar so much as planetary, and I feel like there should be more planar wackiness to match how coherent the rest of the adventure is. Or maybe just one or two pieces of truly weird nonsense that doesn't fit, the way that Tom Bombadil and Shelob act to puncture (in some regards) the all-encompassing story of Sauron vs. good. Hmmm, so I guess this adventure raises some interesting questions for me.
One last note about the art: again, super-coherent, especially since it's almost all washed in purple-hues, and everything is fangs, blood, bones. One problem for me is that this level of metalness verges on camp or (less generously) self-parody, such that even the magic telescope is a collection of bones. But actually what really struck me was that some of the art, while full of flavor, didn't necessarily match some of the text descriptions, cf. the Princess of Blood, described as having bones braided in her hair, but pictured with a big helmet (if that is indeed her, and not just some random armored vampire).
Oh, and spoilers, in case you planned to play this.
So what do we have here? ~56 pages of a small and very deadly dungeon hexcrawl that is a mansion of a vampire lord, a mansion that jumps from plane to plane collecting vampire guests and blood tithes. As the note in the intro says, this adventure is not balanced in any way, and your party will be ground up if they think they should just charge in to every room swinging.
But, while it's true that there are some factions here that can be somewhat turned on each other, I wonder how this actually plays in practice, since there's not a lot of clues at the beginning that this is the case. (Maybe one of the adventure hooks -- that the Princess of Blood has sent psychic dreams pretending to be a captured human -- might lead the PCs to think that, but what other clues are there? I mean, one of the factions here is vampire spiders, so what will the PCs do when they wander into that room?)
Reading this after, say, Masks, is a great reminder of what early OD&D adventures were like; that is, while Masks explicitly says "structure an adventure like a comic book story" and while even more modern-day D&D adventures have something like the shape of a story, those early adventures were often themeless and storyless, just big masses of monsters in 10' by 10' rooms. So if the OSR movement is an attempt to get back to some of the principles and practices of the earlier time, bravo on this adventure, which really has no pre-determined shape, and just a lot of encounters that can go one way or another.
But if this adventure doesn't have a theme, per se -- and like, I'm talking like middle-school English class theme, something like _freedom_ or _hope_ -- it has a hell of a coherent set of vampire-centric motifs: the monster at the heart of this dungeon is a vampire, so almost everything is blood and fangs. The walls? Pulse with blood. The locks on the doors? A lot of fanged mouths that try to bite if you try to open. The tub of blood? Oh, that's monster blood that also sucks blood, as do the spiders and the trees and plants -- and even the crazed vampire-hunter.
Now, there's a few things that stick out as not fitting in with that theme, and they are all pretty weird, and kinda align with the other big idea here: this is a vampire palace, but it's a planar-hopping vampire palace. So, for instance, there's a telescope that can see other worlds that might not be other worlds; and a model of the solar system that might not be a model; and vampires from other dimensions that are inhuman or even cyborg. Hmmm, now that I think of it, two of the three weird things don't feel planar so much as planetary, and I feel like there should be more planar wackiness to match how coherent the rest of the adventure is. Or maybe just one or two pieces of truly weird nonsense that doesn't fit, the way that Tom Bombadil and Shelob act to puncture (in some regards) the all-encompassing story of Sauron vs. good. Hmmm, so I guess this adventure raises some interesting questions for me.
One last note about the art: again, super-coherent, especially since it's almost all washed in purple-hues, and everything is fangs, blood, bones. One problem for me is that this level of metalness verges on camp or (less generously) self-parody, such that even the magic telescope is a collection of bones. But actually what really struck me was that some of the art, while full of flavor, didn't necessarily match some of the text descriptions, cf. the Princess of Blood, described as having bones braided in her hair, but pictured with a big helmet (if that is indeed her, and not just some random armored vampire).
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews