Secret Vault of the Windswept Island

31 Oct, 2024

CW: Suicide

I continue to work through my backlog of tabletop 'zines this week with Secret Vault of the Windswept Island, an adventure designed for Old-School Essentials. And I'm going to be real - I don't know what to do with this one. It says on the cover it's a deadly adventurer, and sure enough it is.

At its core, Secret Vault is a small dungeon with a clever gimmick. On the titular Windswept Island is a secret dungeon vault devoted to a god of death. Inside the vault, behind layers of traps and hordes of skeletons, is a powerful magic sword. To retrieve the sword, you have to follow steps presented on a mural at the entrance to the vault (and helpfully illustrated on a postcard included with the 'zine). The catch? The first step is to have one of the adventurers kill themselves.

Once killed, an adventurer becomes a ghost who is on a timer. If the group can retrieve the magic sword and destroy the relic that's turned them into a ghost before the timer runs out, they can return to life. But that timer is ticking down and every action the ghost takes - pulling levers, casting spells - ticks it down. When it runs out, that character is dead.

This dynamic drives the rest of the dungeon design. Advertised for parties of level 1-3 characters (but going off of the sample characters included in the back, tuned for level 3 adventurers), every threat is built to kill. Swarms of man-eating ants, spiked pits that hide gelatinous cubes at the bottom, and hallways that evoke the X-Men's Danger Room. Most threats do multiple dice of damage - 2d10 spikes you can fall on, skulls that shoot 6d6 magical bolts - and it's clear that the expectation is you're going to die.

That's fine - again, the adventure says on the cover that it is deadly. But what do I do with that? Just like I wouldn't drop The Tomb of Horrors into the middle of a campaign,¹ I'm not sure inserting an adventure where players are expected to die and only have a chance to come back is gonna be a fun time. My first instinct was to drop it in a hex map, similar to The Curse of Mizzling Grove and Castle Elkenstone. But even if I telegraph through rumors just how deadly the Vault is, I don't know if players will enjoy excavating it. After all, the treasure in the dungeon is all stat-reducing cursed rings and a powerful sword that craves violence and blood. I'm not sure it's worth risking a total party kill for that and a handful of gold coins.

And I know I am complaining about character death in a B/X-derived adventure, but the approach the designers have taken with death in Secret Vault is a kind of "old-school" play that's never worked for me. I like dungeons and adventures where as much of the excitement is encountering residents and factions and being able to talk with them as it is traps or fell beasts. A lot of how I think B/X D&D is meant to be run clicked into place when I ran two separate sessions of B11 King's Festival. The first time, I ran it as the adventure instructed, with all the bandits holed-up in a cave hostile to the adventurers. It was a bloodbath. We couldn't keep the party in player-characters and resorted to recycling deceased characters to keep the session moving along.

The second time I ran it, I ignored the adventure's direction and opted to use reaction rolls, a core mechanic that the adventure bafflingly chose to jettison. It changed the entire game. Characters still died, but it wasn't in waves and the party could wheel-and-deal, avoiding some encounters that killed the previous group or hire some characters on as help. It was an amazing time, and such the opposite experience of that first run.

And Secret Vault is much more in-line with that first session of King's Festival that I ran. It tells you up-front, it isn't concerned with character's dying, even that it is expected in-order to complete the scenario. And with the right group and the right GM, I bet that shines. I don't think I'm that GM and I don't tend to play with a lot of folks who are that group.

So I'm left here, scratching my head. I legitimately do like the conceit of "The players become ghosts when they die," and have liked it since I saw it used as a plot point in an old Knights of the Dinner Table comic I read as a teen. The art in the 'zine is gorgeous - high-quality black-and-white pieces that nail the tone of a group of adventuring weirdos who are here for secrets and treasure - and the layout is solid-enough. But the execution just doesn't work for me.

I think if I ever run this, it will be as a Dungeon Crawl Classics character funnel. Going in with the idea that the bloodbath is the start of a campaign works better for me than having it disrupt a game that's been trekking along for months. It'd take some work to adapt - I might have to reduce how long a ghost can stick around and I'd absolutely want to change out the bland cursed rings in favor of more interesting rewards - but that's easy enough to tweak. The core of Secret Vault is strong, it just does a thing that doesn't quite work for me on its own.

#old-school essentials #suicide #ttrpg