Dungeon Crawl Classics #1: Idylls of the Rat King

Remember the golden days of role playing, when adventures were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level? Well, those days are back. Dungeon Crawl Classics feature bloody combat, intriguing dungeons, and no NPCs who aren't meant to be killed. Each adventure is 100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with the monsters you know, the traps you fear, and the secret doors you know must be there somewhere.

In Idylls of the Rat King, goblin bandits are once again attacking the silver caravans, killing innocent miners and stealing cargo. The goblins have taken up residence in an abandoned mine northwest of Silverton. Someone must get rid of them. But this is no ordinary abandoned mine. It was deliberately barricaded generations ago when the Gannu family, founders of Silverton, discovered an unspeakable evil on its lowest levels. And these are no ordinary goblins, for the curse of the Gannu family courses through their veins...

Dungeon Crawl Classics can be inserted easily into any fantasy setting.

Idylls of the Rat King is trying to do what others before it have; capture the good old glory of the dungeon crawl. Necromancer Games and Kenzer and Co. both know that there is nothing wrong with the Dungeon Crawl and that it is a perfectly viable form of entertainment. If you don’t believe that, there’s no need to read any further because that’s what Idylls of the Rat King strives for, not only in terms of what it presents, but how it presents it.

Remember those old blue gridline maps? Check. Remember the interior artwork? Very similar here. How about the dynamic covers with the text all about it? Check. Bad news is that Goodman’s not the first to do this. As noted, Necromancer and Kenzer, as well as a few others, have all already jumped not only on this bandwagon, but on a similiar format and style to 1st edition modules. Means that it doesn’t stand out too much in a crowd.

What about the dungeon though? It’s easy enough to get the party introduced. There are a few different methods of bringing the players into the dungeon, some background notes on how the curse came to the town and four different levels of mines for the players to explore. It’s got a lot going on.

Now for the dreaded spoiler alert:

Seems that in Silverton, a silver mining town, the people did one of the old owners bad back in the day, killed him and cursed his family to wererats. Now the grandson is back to claim his vengeance. Only thing is though, the mines that his grandfather owned aren’t exactly empty and have a gnome necromancer and his undead minions already working the pipes.

This gives Lawrence, the wererat leader, an ally and helps set the tone of the module for you see, Lawrence was ambushed by hobgoblins on his way to the mines and turned them into his minions. This allows the GM to bust out the standard low level creatures, goblinoids, dire rats, and of course, wererats. Use is made of the wererat template on a few beings and some of the more challenging encounters are with goblins with class levels like Hogah the wizard. Surprisingly, the book goes real old school with a challenge that a party of this level might not be able to take. See the real ancient terror that caused all the problems in the first place was never destroyed, just banished and she’s still around for the players to find.

In addition to numerous encounters and different goals for the players, the module offers some advice for GMs, which is refreshing. For example, what happens if a player is knocked out? He’s thrown into a prison cell and his items taken. If he dies? He gets reanimated and his goods taken.

Outside of the module, the Silverton area is covered briefly in appendix 1. This thorp is small, but has all the standards that a normal adventuring party needs to get healed and get provisions to continue their delves deeper into the mines.

In terms of thinking outside of the adventure, it didn’t do much for me. Goodman Games recently came out with a Complete Guide to Wererats and that material isn’t in use here from the background to the abilities. Some non-gaming issues also arise. For example, the gnome necromancer is animating zombies and controlling them mentally all over the silver mine. In game mechanics, he doesn’t have the ability to do so. Not a terrible thing for the adventure but terrible in the design. Proclaim the place an unholy site or something that allows the ability for a necromancer to animate the dead; don’t simply allow him to do it at will.

The book uses the interior covers for the four levels of maps. One page is used for the table of contents with the credits. Another page for the OGL and Open Content. This leaves a lot of interior material as pure adventure. Bad news? Dungeon, in full color, is probably still a better buy. More bad news? At 32 pages, it’s a dying breed and is $1 more than average prices. Good news? Margins are good, text spacing is good, editing is good and layout is good. Price wise it may be a little higher but there’s no fluff here.

If you’re looking to start off a new campaign and do it in the old fashion style with a good old dungeon crawl, than Idylls of the Rat King is for you.

"Remember the golden days of role playing, when adventures were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level?"

No! I don’t! Back then, as a very young boy, friends and I made do with homebrewed game systems because D&D was too expensive (so far out of pocket money range) and rubbish.

So it seems very likely that this reviewer is going to rubbish Idylls of the Rat King as well, after all, this "Dungeon Crawl Classic" strives to be just like 1st edition D&D. That’s not going to happen though, Idylls of the Rat King oozes with innocent retro charm and really is a bit of fun. It’s easy to get into and simple to play. The product delivers exactly what it promises and does it pretty well. I just can’t rubbish the rat king, I have to sit back and enjoy the dungeon crawl for the jolly good fun that it is.

Regular readers of GameWyrd reviews might think I’ve gone mad. What sort of dungeon crawl could possibly get a better than poor rating – even if its a "does what it says on the tin" product? Regular readers won’t be surprised to discover that there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. When Idylls of the Rat King tries to be like a 1st edition D&D book it really does try. The covers (front and back) look so much like a 1st edition product that the Goodman Games logo seems spooky alien. The cover has text, a mini blurb on, just as the "good old" games did, there’s a yellow stripe across the top corner just as I remember the original pre-written adventures having. The maps inside appear on the inside front and back covers and are in blue ink and use basic grid design.

It is a bit of a gimmick, I suppose, but as with all good gimmicks, it works. The fact that it works probably explains why other publishers have already dipped into this pool of nostalgia and why Goodman Games has joined them. Necromancer and Kenzer have both taken this route and perhaps if I were more familiar with their products the Idylls of the Rat King would have less of a novelty appeal on me. As it is, the book is boldly labelled as Dungeon Crawl Classics #1 and I’ll have to see just how many more classic dungeon crawls the line can support before the charm starts to wane. Goodman’s retro feel classic is 32 pages long and costs US $11.00. I think that’s about right, I couldn’t be bothered with anything smaller but I wouldn’t want to pay any more either.

Spoilers. If you think its possible to spoil a dungeon crawl by giving the plot away – sling your hook now.

The plot is a classic to. Silverton has silver mines and they’re now infested with goblins. Silverton’s history tells how the townspeople chased the man who discovered the silver and funded the initial mines and his family out. They chased him off because the miners awoke an evil in the mines and they blamed and cursed him for this. The curse ensured that his grandson would be a fully-fledged wererat. The wererat grandson is back and he’s teamed up with the goblins. We’ve got goblins and wererat-goblins in those mines. As it happens the wererat found a gnome necromancer already working in the mines, using zombies as miners. The pair of them teamed up. Neither of them, though, has discovered the ancient evil, actually a vampire, that’s still buried there.

As the player characters explore down the four levels of mines they’ll encounter increasingly difficult groups of monsters and win larger amounts of loot. There’s some classically cheesy moments; one adventure hook involves a wounded nobleman who had been guarding a caravan stumbling into town and the mines are described as rooms with stone walls. There’s even a tomb of a good guy from the spookily named Soulgrave city down in the mines too and the players earn extra XP if they don’t desecrate it. But it’s an uncomplicated dungeon crawl, we laugh with, rather than at, the fact these few tunnels (rooms with stone walls!) contain zombies, wererats, necromantic gnomes, goblins, vampires, secret passageways, dire rats, fiendish dire rats and ancient tombs.

There are some terrible moments. Characters can come across mines filled with cowering goblin children and a few female goblins trying to hide them. The hit points for these wretched creatures are noted down as duly as the stats for attacking dire rats. That’s terrible only in the sense of the uncomplicated, Old Testament, brutality of this sort of dungeon crawl.

There are some nice touches too. GMs can actually read out the bite sized paragraphs of descriptions and encounters. The players may get fed up of the phrase "naked weapon" but never does the read-allowed text make the mistake of telling the players what their characters are doing. In fact, Jeffery Quinn, the writer, is on top form here. His writing style seems to have tucked in a little, retaining the flavour but creating it more precisely. This might also be the work of a good editor. There are player handouts in the back of the book; nothing so fancy as actual props to photocopy and distribute but handouts that can be downloaded in single-page versions from Goodman Games.

This reviewer, someone who’d not normally touch a dungeon crawl with a pointy stick, can honestly put his hands up and say that Idylls of the Rat King scores a hit; it’s on the ball. I can see Idylls providing an easy evening of fun. I suspect it’s quite likely that gamers older than me, or those with a real fondness for the "golden days" will simply love the Rat King.

* This Idylls of the Rat King review was first published at GameWyrd.

Some products perk your interest simply based on the cover. Usually, it's the nature or quality of the illustration. In the case of The Idylls of the Rat King, it is the cover's layout. Indeed, the product tries to imitate the first edition modules in every way imaginable.

When you open the book, you see that the multi-level dungeon's maps are printed on the inside cover. I like this. Not only is it reminiscent of "old school",but it's convenient! The interior illustrations also seem somewhat first edition in "feel". In fact, The Idylls of the Rat King oozes with this attempt to get this original look. The graphic designer does give credit where due saying on the first page the layout is done with "all due respect to the early-80s modules that inspired it". There are indeed many pieces that make up this product that seems to be like these "early-80s modules".

Let's take a look at this piece-by-piece then.

The cover: It is simply not good. In fact, I would say it is bad. I don't even understand it. Why is one side colored all gold and the other side purple? It's apparent that the illustrator tried to catch the glow of the coal(?) in the pit located in the lower right corner, but he does a very poor job. It does not even have a unique look to it. It doesn't even look old school at all. It is just bad art.

The interior art: The interior art is better than the cover art. The pieces do seem to succeed in having an old school look. It's not spectacular, but not bad either. I'd say from a purely artistic perspective, it is below-average. The problem is that there is VERY little of it. I counted exactly FIVE interior art pieces. And they are all very small. That is simply not acceptable.

The layout: The font size is huge. This is a 32-page adventure, but could easily fit into 16 pages if it had to. I really felt like I was reading one of those large print books for the elderly. It's apparent that there was just not enough material for 32 pages and the text was thus stretched out accordingly. Why didn't the author spend more time on the background? Why not talk about more adventure possibilities? It's just not there. Also, a lot of the stat blocks are repeated over and over almost exactly. Do we really need the same Medium Zombie stat blocks again and again, just because the hit points happen to be different? This could have been easily solved by listing "Medium Zombies, hp: 10, 11, 12."

The text: The writing is decent and the story itself is okay. It is not anything special though. This is really something most anyone could come up within a few hours. After reading this adventure or module or whatever you want to call it, I don't think I'd remember anything from it. It is mostly going into an abandoned mine and hacking and slashing through goblins and wererats and zombies. Nothing more there, really.

So, The Idylls of the Rat King is not bad, but it's just not good either. At a price of $11, it is very expensive especially when you take into consideration the text density, the poor cover art, the lack of interior art pieces, and the very average writing. D+

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I originally posted this review under a different pseudonym at RPGNow.Com on 12 August, 2003. Goodman Games thought well enough of my review to cite it on their website, so it occurred to me that some good might be served by making the review available here as well. Since the original review appeared, Thomas Edwards has pointed out that one of the adventure's main villains needs a level adjustment to justify his summonings in the story, and that certain clerics have had their domains and spell lists accidentally omitted. Despite these minor flaws, easily and quickly corrected by an aware DM, I stand by my original assessment of the adventure, which follows: 


"Retro-feel" dungeons seem to be back in these days, but this module is more than just nostalgia-massage for the old-time gamers.

Idylls of the Rat King demonstrates *why* old-school style D&D adventures can be preferable to modern, bloated. pseudo-epics:

1. It's your adventure, for your game world. The adventure setting is only as detailed as it needs to be. The starting town, it's inhabitants, and the relevant adventure areas outside the town are all properly detailed. The authors don't try to force a "melieu" or a setting on you -- the default "heroic fantasy" setting the core rulebooks imply is also implied here. If you want to darken the setting, deepen it with detail, add millenia of campaign history, or otherwise customize or "weird-ify" the setting, that's *your* perogative as DM, when preparing the module -- as well it should be!

2. It's a streamlined adventure, without being simplistic. As above, if you want to add side-treks or extended character bits while running this adventure, then more power to you as a genuine DM. The authors of Idylls of the Rat King concentrate on giving you a site-based plot with one or two genuinely good twists. It's "linear" insofar as it's site based, but linearity done properly does not mean that the players are led by the nose, or forced to act in ways they don't choose. Idylls of the Rat King offers a clear "mission", and the adventure has a beginning. a middle, and an end, with some suspense and some twists along the way. That's good linearity. That's "The Lord of the Rings"-style linearity. That's one of the oldest and most popular structures of storytelling on Earth..

3. It's not stupid. Sure, many of the things Grandpapa Gygax and his crew created for the early D&D adventures were extremely fun -- but at the risk of being put to death for heresy -- some of the stuff was just, well, stupid.
Gygax's penchant for one-roll-live-or-die lethal traps is infamous, and some of the scenarios in the early modules confounded even fantasy-world logic (Why are all these monsters living peaceably side-by-side in this dungeon? How does the dragon eat, sequestered in that small subterranean cave far underground? Why are there so many monsters thriving near a substantial settlement of gnome fighters?).
Idylls of the Rat King manages to avoid design stupidity without bogging the adventure down in unnecessary or irrelevant explanation in the process.

4. It's a an adventure for first-level characters which isn't boring! How often does *that* happen in the modern age of D&D?

With crisp, clean artwork and layout, plus an engaging story, Idylls of the Rat King is one of the best D&D adventures I've seen in a while. Goodman Games has managed to resurrect all the good qualities of first-edition D&D here, while leaving all the dross behind. No pretention; no dead-weight detail -- just straight-ahead, sword-and-sorcery fun.

I give it my highest recommendation.