Cloudex

The Curse of Mizzling Grove

Reading 'zines goes so much more quickly when they're not 100 pages. I spent Sunday afternoon dozing, listening to 70s smooth rock, and reading through The Curse of Mizzling Grove by Idle Cartulary from Playful Void. Mizzling Grove has you explore a tower full of ghosts, figurative and literal, set in a storm-drenched grove. It's not built for any specific system, but with a little work is compatible with any B/X-derived game.

The hook's interesting enough. The tower's been cursed by a god, who has trapped the residents' spirits inside the tower as ghosts and skeletons. If you can repair the god's shrine, the curse is lifted and the dead can be laid to rest. Along the way, player characters will be treated to all sorts of oddities, from clockwork snakes to astronomer golems to soul-stealing loungers.

Layout's pretty strong for a 'zine, with Idle Cartulary using a two column format, but weighting the columns so information about a given room takes-up the majority of the page while lesser info is placed to the side, in the margins. If you've ever looked at a Numenera book, this will be familiar. I kind of wish the tower's maps had been included in either the back or front of the 'zine for quick reference, but Cartulary does a good job inserting individual floors next to room descriptions.

I really want to see how this plays in a game, because at a glance it feels real swingy. Most encounters aren't especially hostile, but they alternate between 2 HD eyeball crabs that do 1d4 damage (and which you have to collect to clear the curse) and 6 HD crystal snakes that attack twice, do 2d6 damage on a hit, and inflict a slow petrification disease. There's also ghosts who drain five-years of a character's life on hit, 20 HD golems, and more. At the same time, outside of the snakes and eyeball crabs, you don't have to fight most residents of the tower. Unless you aggravate a resident - and their tells are telegraphed pretty well - you probably won't have to fight most of them.

That makes actual threats feel dangerous, but doesn't really play into the typical exploration loop of a dungeon game. You're not bleeding resources as you try and push further-and-further into the dungeon. Instead, the atmosphere is more relaxed, giving plenty of time to puzzle out the history and nature of the curse, before you're faced with potentially lethal threats.

Overall, neat 'zine! It would make a great site to drop on a hex-map, especially since much of the adventure is solving a mystery that isn't affected by the passage of time. It will always be raining in Mizzling Grove, and it will always be haunted by the cursed dead.

#ttrpg