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Tomb of the Serpent Kings - Deluxe Print Edition
Publisher: Skerples
by Michael E. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/17/2022 08:53:30

Tomb of the Serpent Kings opens with a blurb about the need for a good tutorial for OSR-style play, drawing an allusion to the self-explanatory nature of World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. As the players begin the dungeon, they are immediately faced with an example of this brand of tutorialization: after a few seemingly uninteresting terra-cotta snakemen, the players come across a clay statue with a silver ring – a ring that can only be pried from the statue's finger by breaking the statue entirely, and, in the process, unleashing a cloud of poison gas and revealing yet more treasure hidden inside the hollow shell. The players prompty revisit the other terra-cotta tombs, this time taking steps to avoid the poison, and being rewarded with additional hidden treasures. And so they learn their first lessons, about hidden treasure, hidden traps, and the patterns that will allow them to discover both.

It's also their last lesson, because everything else in the dungeon is completely obtuse. Most other "lessons" outlined in the book are not telegraphed to the players in any meaningful way, and would-be patterns are applied inconsistently so as to preclude any possibility of the players noticing them. Case in point: the silver ring that the players obtain from that first clay statue gives them a poison-damage attack, which is completely useless against the undead, constructs, and oozes that are the only enemies in the first two floors of the dungeon. By the time the players encounter an enemy that they can actually use this attack against, they may well have forgotten that it even exists.

The clay statues appear again later, but this time they are part of an unrelated "statues are placed over secret doors" pattern, and so they don't feature poison traps or treasure. As a result, this room undermines the sole previously successful lesson, leading the players to actively distrust apparent patterns.

A substantial trove of treasure is hidden at the bottom of an opaque pit full of toxic water – with no indication of anything of value, and no way for the players to later learn that they missed anything. It's fair enough to expect "danger = treasure" if you're a seasoned dungeoneer, but the pattern up to this point is instead "treasure is fairly slim, regardless of the extent of the danger", and so this lesson is completely lost on new players.

An early-on deadly trap (almost certain to kill someone who isn't expecting it – quite harsh for a "tutorial" level) is placed next to a combat encounter in the hopes that the players will use it against those foes, and learn about exploiting the environment. Problem is, the trap operates on a delayed trigger that depends on hefting heavy objects to set and activate – so it's tricky at best to get it to actually fire off in a way that successfully hurts those enemies. Players end up taking the exact opposite lesson: that traps are designed just for them, and that they're not meant to be used against the monsters.

A very detailed encounter with a basilisk features some clever and surprising solutions with fun rewards – but by the time the players encounter it, the only things they'll have seen and fought will have been mindless undead, and so they won't have it in mind to try to deal with the basilisk as a living creature with real needs. Worse still, the actual materials necessary to deal with the basilisk in a creative way aren't provided to the players until much later in the dungeon, so again, they have forgotten about it by then, and don't make the connection. Fine enough for a seasoned group – they should know better. But for a neophyte party? These are precisely the ideas that need to be spelled out, and instead they're actively obfuscated.

These are just a few stand-out examples from my runs with TotSK, but the dungeon is absolutely rife with failed or even counter-productive "lessons". When I've had occasion to debrief with my players, they would often complain about the fact that they actually clued in to many of the "lessons", only for their ideas to fail because the dungeon appears to be specifically designed to frustrated, rather than reinforce, those ideas. I can't imagine a worse condemnation of a tutorial than having a smart player correctly figure out what they're supposed to do, and then have the dungeon tell them they are wrong and should re-think it.

As a standard OSR dungeon for experienced players, I think Tomb of the Serpent Kings is basically a "C+". It's more or less solid, but with a lot of weird and unnecessary flaws: The attempt to act as a tutorial results in the dungeon being a little too straightforward in ways that a more seasoned group may find boring. The descriptions of certain specifics in the dungeon are often inadequate in ways that will force the GM to make up new material to fill in the gaps. Some important details get split off into different portions of the book with no internal cross-referencing, so you may find yourself accidentally skipping info that the players ought to know. The touted compatibility is actually very poor – I had to spend several hours scouring the book in order to convert it to my system of choice – TotSK makes assumptions about all sorts of mechanics that didn't exist in said system, so I had to invent a few workarounds from whole cloth in order to get the encounters to actually manifest properly.

The biggest problem with TotSK, by far, is the fact that if it's measured as an actual tutorial, in the vein of SMB World 1-1, it's an abject failure. It doesn't teach. It expects the players to already know the lessons, instead, which makes the "teaching" totally redundant. Sometimes, the dungeon will punish the players for not knowing a lesson in advance, which allows them to learn it retroactively (although whether or not they get another opportunity to apply each lesson later on is very hit-or-miss), but more often than not it won't even alert them to the fact that they missed something or made a mistake. It's not a guiding hand that introduces, reinforces, and then tests key lessons – it's more like a sheer cliff with no purchase.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
Tomb of the Serpent Kings - Deluxe Print Edition
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