A Dozen Dungeon Hazards
By Philip Reed
Published by Ronin Arts
Pages: 7
Fully bookmarked
Philip Reed helped to fill in a niche I never realized I needed filling. As a DM, it’s easy falling into the trap that your players always need some antagonists to rally against in order to provide interesting and challenging encounters. But in thinking back to the many games I’ve played in, it wasn’t the various hordes of orcs or dragons that I recall causing me to break out into a sweat at the game table. Rather, it was times like when my beloved and overconfident dwarven rogue decided to see if he could bypass that patch of yellowy growth covering the dungeon tiles to get at the warmly glittering bauble on the other side. Fergus Stoneheart, may you rest in peace.
A Dozen Dungeon Hazards seeks to arm the overburdened DM with a dozen more fogs, molds, slimes and fungi with which to add more variety to his or her game, both inside the dungeon and above it. The PDF is very much a meat-and-potatoes kind of affair. It weighs in at a slim seven pages, and unless you count the d20 logo beneath the title, there is no artwork to speak of, not even borders along the page edges. The first page contains an introduction, and the last the Open Game License. The text is in the standard two-column style, and is fully selectable, allowing you to easily copy-and-paste the various hazards into your own adventures and notes. I didn’t spot any obvious typos, and while there were a couple of sentences that I found to be grammatically awkward, it was nothing that I’m not occasionally guilty of myself. The remaining five pages are where it’s at, with twelve new hazards ranging from CR 2 through 5, broken down by type (fog, fungi, mold, and slime), with between two and four new hazards in each category. Where new rules are needed they are either included in the body of the entry or are introduced in an eye-catching box next to, or immediately following, the main text.
Without giving too much away, here are a few examples of some of the more interesting hazards contained within:
Necromantic fog is a thick, clingy mist that rises up from graveyards and the like. Merely passing through the fog allows it to seep into the pores of its victims and start eating away at their life energy. In many respects, the fog behaves as would a mindless undead, and creatures that die from the fog rise up soon after as zombies. To make matters worse (for the players, that is), the fog actively heals undead within its area each round.
Harmonic mushrooms look inoffensive enough, but they have a nasty habit in that they let loose a destructive peal of sound every few seconds, dealing damage to any nearby creatures. I suppose that’s what you get for trying to pick them. Of course, if you ignore the shattered rocks and other signs of obvious damage nearby, you deserve what you get.
If disturbed, scarlet mold releases a thick cloud of dangerous gas. Destroying the mold by fire results in the formation of another hazard, a crimson fog, which is mentioned at the start of the document. It makes for a nice one-two punch against adventurers who feel that fire is a failsafe cure for all the world’s ills.
Arcane slime looks and acts much like the traditional dungeon staple, green slime, but it is peculiarly drawn to arcane spellcasters and characters walking around with large piles of magical loot. Prolonged contact will have harried spellslinger losing spell slots, and their treasured magic items may be damaged or destroyed.
Starfallen slime has an otherworldly origin, arriving on fallen meteorites. Largely black in colour, it is extremely difficult to spot, but when it comes into contact with a creature, it seeks to enter the pores and make its way to the creature’s brain, where it will do no end of bad things. For those of you who remember the X-Files, think “alien black tar” and you’ve got a good idea of how to run with this one.
The rules associated with these various hazards largely look good, with a few exceptions. I would take some of the challenge ratings with a grain of salt. I suspect the CR for starfallen slime is too low. Unwary characters who encounter starfallen slime could easily die, regardless of level, unless the party healer is packing specific appropriate magics that day, and more importantly, thinks to use them. With that specific hazard, there are no saving throws to be made, so higher level characters don’t particularly benefit from their experience. A number of the hazards can be destroyed by fire, but others are invigorated by fire. Knowing what to use and when is an important element of overcoming these challenges. Unfortunately, the Knowledge skill in the PHB only specifically mentions setting DCs for creatures, and citing hit die as the scaling mechanic, which these hazards don’t use. A few of the hazards mention Knowledge skill DCs in their entries, or describe how difficult such a check would be, but by no means is this consistent across all the entries. One particular fungi, if disturbed, produces a black cloud of spores which immediately burst into flame. But the fungi in question is also “easily destroyed with fire”, which begs the question of how does it survive in the first place? And finally, the introduction page claims that the D&D Player’s Handbook is required to use the PDF, when really, what is needed is the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Perhaps that line is there just there to satisfy the d20 license, or some such, but it is still misleading. That said, none of these issues are game-breakers, and can be easily dealt with a little considered thought and preparation.
A Dozen Dungeon Hazards does a good job of expanding on the meager half page of material already presented in the DMG. It is straight and to the point, doing what it sets out to do, and by-and-large doing it well. If you are primarily a player in the game, or the subject matter doesn’t interest to you, then this product simply isn’t for you. But if you’re a DM on a budget looking for more unusual material with which to challenge your players and throw them into paroxysms of nail-biting tension, this will help you do it, and I heartily recommend it.
Reviewed by Scott Benoit
