As promised on tenfootpole.org, I have decided to set out to facilitate the birth of the worst adventure ever by Bryce-lynchean (and any sane persons) standards, using his own blog for its black genesis. Since there is no single adventure that can embody all principles of The Best, I surmise that the same holds true for its Adversary. In order to account for the various ways in which an adventure can be terrible so the end product may be all the more fell and abominable, I have decided to adopt the nine-level structure of Dante's Inferno, with each terrible level flowing inexorably into the next (as any good railroad should). An outline is to follow. Please list all terrible design decisions so they may all be incorporated into the end result.
1. First Lair; It begins as an innocuous Sinister Secrets of Saltmarsh clone, but already one can tell things are slightly off. Long ISotU esque descriptions of room furnishings, chairs, cutlery and other mundane oddities make everything flow a tad bit slower. Illegible maps, generic gemstones worth 1000 gp, illusions and sahuagin that attack on sight, and did Saltmarsh have a 15th level LG Paladin that shows up to bail out the party whenever they make a mistake, but only if they ask super nicely? The reveal that there is an evil cult inside the light-house is sure to titillate and excite the elderly as well as people entirely new to dungeons and dragons. The first hallway has several traps, which persist throughout all of hell, ensuring the game will slow down to a crawl of tedious prodding and poking. Before the players enter the second lair, an old man warns them not to proceed, but any attempt to deviate from the plotted course will be dissuaded with increasingly heavy-handed railroading. This is hell. You are damned.
2. Sewer-cove; The lighthouse leads down into a confusing network of underwater sewers. Players will be forced to memorize a laundry list of spells and optional rules that will be all but forgotten after they discover a cache containing a cloak of the manta ray, potions of waterbreathing, a helm of underwater action, 4 rings of freedom of movement and a permanent airy water spell in the second room. The antagonists start out as generic underwater monsters but will quickly be replaced with orcs, giant rats and giant centipedes all wearing rings of freedom of movement and underwater breathing that only work for them. Other adventurers wander this sterile artifical landscape, desperately searching for something that excites or amazes, but exist only as statts and are unable to communicate without rolling a skill check, having forgotten even their names.
3. Dungeons of Logghoreon; below the sewers lies the dungeon of Logghoreon, where the true test begins. Gnash your way through boxed text descriptions taking up half a page as you are endlessly assailed by banal monstrosities that would make psychologists groan. Struggle to focus as you encounter endless collections of furniture that would put an Ikea catalogue to shame. The torment is all the more heartrending for Kuntzian style hidden depth concealed in some of the mundane items, but so cryptically and deeply that no amount of searching will ever reveal it. Magic mouths whisper incessantly of the wonders and hidden realms that remain forever beyond one's reach.
4. Unwonder-land; One must pass through a vast mirror in the heart of Loggoreon in order to reach the 4th lair, desperate for an escape from the endless banality, not knowing their torment only increases. Room descriptions in Unwonderland defy all attempts at analysis. Corridors and rooms blundered through in dreamlike fashion as the histories of entire dead civilizations are trotted out to describe even a single door. NPCs predominate, but for all their lengthy description and excessive monologues, it is never clear what they are meant to represent and what their purpose is here. At times details will emerge from beneath the weight of irrelevant history, but the detail always refers to something that is happening off-screen or even in some other game. A mohawked titan is endlessly scourged by three furies in this timeless place, protesting his innocence, but people believe it not.
5. The Forsaken City; In the heart of the Unwonder-land, the Forsaken City seems a haven at first, a reimagining of the City-State of the Invincible Overlord. As soon as PCs attempt to explore the place, they are cruelly railroaded to assist in a murder mystery. A LG Gnomish Illusionist has lost his sister and puts a Geas on the party to help them find him. He already knows she could be in one of three locations and what people to ask, so the Geas will prevent the PCs from talking to any of the thousands of compelling NPCs that are setting out for myriad quests. The various clues are either stupidly obvious or impossibly obtuse, but when the adventure has been brought to a grinding halt because of a single missed clue five tedious interviews or murder locations back, a deus ex machina reveals the identity of the killer, rendering all the PCs prior efforts useless. Any assault on the villain as well as any attempt to interrupt the monologue fails because of a ridiculously unlikely series of countermeasures and escape devices, perpetuating an endless linear manhunt. A crimson smirking moon glares down in mockery at would-be investigators in a night-sky that never sees the sun.
EDIT: Fixed that right up for ya.
1. First Lair; It begins as an innocuous Sinister Secrets of Saltmarsh clone, but already one can tell things are slightly off. Long ISotU esque descriptions of room furnishings, chairs, cutlery and other mundane oddities make everything flow a tad bit slower. Illegible maps, generic gemstones worth 1000 gp, illusions and sahuagin that attack on sight, and did Saltmarsh have a 15th level LG Paladin that shows up to bail out the party whenever they make a mistake, but only if they ask super nicely? The reveal that there is an evil cult inside the light-house is sure to titillate and excite the elderly as well as people entirely new to dungeons and dragons. The first hallway has several traps, which persist throughout all of hell, ensuring the game will slow down to a crawl of tedious prodding and poking. Before the players enter the second lair, an old man warns them not to proceed, but any attempt to deviate from the plotted course will be dissuaded with increasingly heavy-handed railroading. This is hell. You are damned.
2. Sewer-cove; The lighthouse leads down into a confusing network of underwater sewers. Players will be forced to memorize a laundry list of spells and optional rules that will be all but forgotten after they discover a cache containing a cloak of the manta ray, potions of waterbreathing, a helm of underwater action, 4 rings of freedom of movement and a permanent airy water spell in the second room. The antagonists start out as generic underwater monsters but will quickly be replaced with orcs, giant rats and giant centipedes all wearing rings of freedom of movement and underwater breathing that only work for them. Other adventurers wander this sterile artifical landscape, desperately searching for something that excites or amazes, but exist only as statts and are unable to communicate without rolling a skill check, having forgotten even their names.
3. Dungeons of Logghoreon; below the sewers lies the dungeon of Logghoreon, where the true test begins. Gnash your way through boxed text descriptions taking up half a page as you are endlessly assailed by banal monstrosities that would make psychologists groan. Struggle to focus as you encounter endless collections of furniture that would put an Ikea catalogue to shame. The torment is all the more heartrending for Kuntzian style hidden depth concealed in some of the mundane items, but so cryptically and deeply that no amount of searching will ever reveal it. Magic mouths whisper incessantly of the wonders and hidden realms that remain forever beyond one's reach.
4. Unwonder-land; One must pass through a vast mirror in the heart of Loggoreon in order to reach the 4th lair, desperate for an escape from the endless banality, not knowing their torment only increases. Room descriptions in Unwonderland defy all attempts at analysis. Corridors and rooms blundered through in dreamlike fashion as the histories of entire dead civilizations are trotted out to describe even a single door. NPCs predominate, but for all their lengthy description and excessive monologues, it is never clear what they are meant to represent and what their purpose is here. At times details will emerge from beneath the weight of irrelevant history, but the detail always refers to something that is happening off-screen or even in some other game. A mohawked titan is endlessly scourged by three furies in this timeless place, protesting his innocence, but people believe it not.
5. The Forsaken City; In the heart of the Unwonder-land, the Forsaken City seems a haven at first, a reimagining of the City-State of the Invincible Overlord. As soon as PCs attempt to explore the place, they are cruelly railroaded to assist in a murder mystery. A LG Gnomish Illusionist has lost his sister and puts a Geas on the party to help them find him. He already knows she could be in one of three locations and what people to ask, so the Geas will prevent the PCs from talking to any of the thousands of compelling NPCs that are setting out for myriad quests. The various clues are either stupidly obvious or impossibly obtuse, but when the adventure has been brought to a grinding halt because of a single missed clue five tedious interviews or murder locations back, a deus ex machina reveals the identity of the killer, rendering all the PCs prior efforts useless. Any assault on the villain as well as any attempt to interrupt the monologue fails because of a ridiculously unlikely series of countermeasures and escape devices, perpetuating an endless linear manhunt. A crimson smirking moon glares down in mockery at would-be investigators in a night-sky that never sees the sun.
EDIT: Fixed that right up for ya.
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