The Maze of Screaming Silence

[HalWhitewyrm]

High up in the mountains called the Wall of the World, where the air grows
scarce and the dome of the sky draws close, one may find the cruel and
mysterious Empire of Yagga Kong. The Yagga Kong rule a vast domain of gorges, crags, deep hidden valleys and desolate plateaus. It is said that they worship death and keep the bodies of their ancestors in their homes with them. They know many horrible secrets, use diabolical machines and fiendishly potent sorceries. No one really knows why they are so cruel. Perhaps the thin air and cold has driven them mad or perhaps it is the crazed Worm-Gods they revere.

The "City of the Damned" (it has no real name) sprawls at the feet of the Yagga-Kong's most remote outpost, the so-called Last Redoubt. The City has no real economy. It produces nothing and lives like a parasite on the skin of the Last Redoubt. For hundreds of years the Yagga Kong have offered a handsome reward to anyone who can enter the Labyrinth and emerge again alive. Every generation or so, someone lives to claim it. The Yagga Kong's motives for doing this are unclear-apart from cruel whimsy. Perhaps the Thing in the Labyrinth might get hungry if they didn't supply it with victims and the contest is the cheapest way of providing it with the sustenance and entertainment it craves.

Can you brave the Maze of Screaming Silence? Then come walk the crooked streets of the City of the Damned.

Maze of Screaming Silence is a D20 Adventure and City Sourcebook for 3rd to 4th Level Characters

 

[JoeGKushner]

The Maze of Screaming Silence by James Thomson is an adventure that takes place in a decadent city designed to challenge your 3rd-4th level characters.

I see a lot of potential in the set up. The party members have strange dreams and the dreams lead them to look for an ancient, evil city. A city. The location is in a distant mountain, easily placed into most campaigns, a remote outpost of the ancient, failing Empire of Yagga Kong. The city, the “City of the Damned”, is an uninviting place so high up in the mountains that players will suffer real game effects if they go there. The kicker though is that there is a dungeon in this City of the Damned that they challenge outsiders to best.

The book doesn't follow through with its promise.

The main problem is the book's organization. It starts off fine with the players having the strange, nightmarish dreams that need interpretation to answer, specifically from an oracle within the module. Things go bad as the oracle is dead and leaves only vague clues as to what the party must do next and that's move onto the City of the Damned.

The city is a violent place. A truly chaotic evil place where people die frequently. The section on the City suffers the organizational problems the most. For example, there is a section called sites and in that section Humble the Hobgoblin is introduced. Why isn't he in the optional encounters areas? Why aren't the sites incorporated into the city itself?

While the city is alive with encounters, most of them are fairly of the gore variety where the players with either quickly get used to it. “Gee, this one's after our teeth, this one our bones, this one our skulls.” or isolate themselves from the sheer insanity. Now if the party is playing an evil group, this might not be a bad thing but the author seems to be conflicted with himself because at times he talks about putting the line down on those evil characters even as he writes about the characters allying themselves with murderous bugbears and other hostile inhabitants. Either use the D&D alignment and stick with it, or run wild. Either option is fine, but don't punish evil PCs one second and then expect the players to ally with Riff and Raff the next.

Several of the encounters are filled with options though as the party can ally themselves with the NPC in question, hunt them down, pump them for information, or just bask in the glow of the city.

For me, the author's style was too informal. It's like he was a friend of mine telling me about the module instead of just allowing me to read the thing. For example, when talking about the slain vampire in the House of the Worm, “Won't the good citizens of the City of the Damned be disappointed!” Other such talk invades the product. Not a problem if you don't mind highly informal writing but for me, it was an issue.

I also disliked the multiple listing of stat blocks. Either put the character's name and hit points when first introduced and put all the stats in the Appendix, or present the character in the main body of the text, and the background in the Appendix.

Lastly, I had a hard time with the names of the character. Big Murder, Filthy Bugger, Hard Boy and others are all here and waiting to be killed or to kill. I just couldn't take their names, especially when talking about the Empire of Yagga Kong and the Worm-Gods and the other interesting names and twists on old classic pulp fantasy.

The Maze itself, is literally a maze. It's a one level maze that the characters run into and run out of, trying to avoid the minotaur that guards it. The treasure they can gain is fantastic too so be prepared for some serious issues with wealth if you allow the players the opportunity to take full advantage of the adventure.

The layout is standard two column but there is too often text pulled into sidebars. If sidebars are going to be used often, to insure that space is properly used, a three column format, like GURPS and Hero products use, would be more appropriate. Art is all handled by William O'Connor and he does a great job, but some of the art, like a pair of severed heads, is used too often.

To get three stars, there'd have to be some reorganization to this adventure and elimination of the redundant text and art. At $17.95 for 96 pages, it's priced right, but not with all the repetition. To get four stars, more would have to be done with the city itself, a larger map of the city and maps of more inhabitants and areas. More information on how these people survive at all when they're getting stabbed in the street in front of complete strangers.

If you like friendly talking when reading your adventurers and wide open options when dealing with flow of events with lots of encounters with weird individuals, then the Maze of Screaming Silence is for you.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Initial Comments: This is the harshest, darkest, meanest, most disturbing adventure I have ever read, and maybe the funniest It's way, way beyond the Book of Vile Darkness, Dark Conspiracy or even Kult. . This is the stuff the guys at White Wolf wish they could come up with.

As cruel and twisted as it is, it's also very funny. The warning label on the cover says it all: "Contains graphic descriptions of truly unpleasant things. Not for younger and less disturbed readers."

The Basics: This is both an adventure and a city sourcebook. The premise is simple. Let me quote from the text "For a thousand years the cruel Yagga Kong empire has offered a reward to anyone who can enter the Maze of Screaming Silence and come out alive Every century or so, someone succeeds."

Nobody knows who built the maze, which is so high in the mountains that nobody sane would live there. . There are some great descriptions of the effects of the constant cold and thin atmosphere and rules for how different races are impaired by it.

A solitary Yagga-Kong fortress watches over the maze and a decaying shantytown has grown up around it. The town doesn't have a name, so they call it "The City of the Damned". It's a very bad place to be. The local overlord (Yun-Gaga the Twice Depraved) is getting nutty and things are starting to fall apart. People get killed every day now and its just a matter of time before things go completely out of control

There are two ways to use the material. Either the players are here to take on the maze and get rich, or you can send them here on a quest for a magic artifact. Most parties will come to make money, but if you've got a party who like doing good for its own sake, there's an extra section you can stick in at the beginning to send them their way. The weird thing is, it totally changes the feel of the adventure if you use the quest option.

The quest is actually one of the book's best features. The players have a truly frightening series of dreams, which send them to an oracle, who has a horrendous but unclear prophecy, which sends them far, far away to the outskirts of the evil Yagga Kong empire to find a Thing That Has Been Lost.

The dreams are cool. They're disturbing, and they get the plot point across. but they also really feel like dreams. But the best thing about the quest is the way it comes together at the end. The PCs have saved a distant mountain kingdom that hasn't even been founded yet, and although the book doesn't tell you directly what happened, you and you're players will somehow just know. All the clues suddenly come together and you just get it, all at once.

You can either let the players run wild in the City of the Damned, smashing and pillaging however they want, or if they're on the quest you can hold them to higher moral standard. There are some hilarious suggestions on how to mess the players up (without looking like you're doing it on purpose!) if you're holding them to a higher standard, and plenty of diabolical (and also very funny) skullduggery they can get involved in of you're letting them run amok. Having run the adventure for three different groups, I can say that both options work really well.

Even if you use the quest option, there is no rigidly defined plot, the characters are free to wander around the City of the Damned and get into trouble, but all roads lead to the maze of Screaming Silence and they're sure to wind up there eventually. They will get rich and solve the quest, or they will die horribly. The weird thing is, your players will probably have a good time either way.

What I Liked: Where to begin? The writing style is totally great, clever and funny, wicked and cruel. Imagine Terry Pratchett on very, very bad drugs.

Even though the whole thing is tongue in cheek, it hangs together and makes sense. The Yagga Kong are truly scary, much worse than anything you've read about, say, the Drow , but their culture is fascinating. We get to see how an evil society might actually function (or fail to function).

The book is full of great villains, all of them totally different from one another. I can't even list all my favorites here, but some of the best are: The Smiling Man, a sorcerer whose smile is held in place with fishhooks, and who charges for his services in grisly mutilations.

A gang of disgusting cannibalistic bandits called the Bugger Brothers. Nasty Bugger, Rotten Bugger, Stupid Bugger, Wicked Bugger, Filthy Bugger, etc.-there are like twenty of them.

Humble the Hobgoblin, who constantly bellows out insane boasts and blasphemes the gods ("Hah! Crummy gods not am dare to strike Humble dead for he so much bigger than them! And his larder has more meat! And he have more slaves than them!" etc.)

Humble's arch-enemy, a Bugbear named Big Murde ("Murder by name, Murder by nature, so they tell me"), who talks like a psychopathic Director of Human Resources, and who the PCs may find themselves asking for a job! ("Regardless of your qualifications, we're sure we'll find a use for you" he says, just a s a human arm lolls out of his stewpot!)

His Crapulence Lord Yun-Gaga the Twice Depraved, a huge fat degenerate whose Face-Peelers keep his ceremonial wounds forever bloody ("Sweet loathings and comfortable cruelties to you all!"). Hard-Luck Skuk, who carves pieces of meat of sleeping people to feed his starving family (he has sworn a terrible oath to never watch another one of his children die).

I'm barely scratching the surface, here. There are at least twenty memorable NPCs in this scenario. Any one would stand out in most adventures.

There are instructions on how to roleplay each of the major characters, acting tips you can use to impersonate them. This is a great touch and incredibly useful.

The illustrations are great and go well with the text. The product looks really professional. The maps are good, too.

The scenario actually plays even better than it reads on the page, and that's pretty unusual. The City of the Damned scared the @#$%&*! out of my players, but it never actually killed any of them, even though they felt like they were in mortal danger the whole time they were there. The PCs will almost certainly live to see the final encounter, so whether they live or die the plot feels complete, but it never feels like they're having an easy time. Quite the reverse!

Best of all, I liked the Baby Fights. Baby Fights, you ask? Yes, you heard me right, the City of the damned is the kind of place where you can watch dueling babies with metal spurs attached to their chubby little wrists.

What I Didn't Like: As professional as this product looks, it has some typos that another edit could have smoothed out. One of the illustrations gets used twice. Whether or not it's by accident, that shouldn't happen. There is a location on the city map (the "House of Ineffable Delights") that doesn't appear anywhere in the text.

There is also one encounter (Jack Marrowbone's failed attempt to rescue Meg Rawney) that may actually go too far. At least it made me more unhappy and sick to my stomach than it amused me. That may be just my personal taste, though.

In Conclusion: This may be horrible, it may be insane, but it's undeniably superb. Who is James Thomson? Why can't find anything else by him anywhere? Is this a pseudonym? Has he been locked up for his own good? How can a book be so totally drenched in hopeless despair, and yet still be so much fun? He's found a way, and it's great. Get it before they ban it. You won't have long.

 

[Psion]

"Yes, you heard me right, the City of the damned is the kind of place where you can watch dueling babies with metal spurs attached to their chubby little wrists. "

I thought this was intensely stupid.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Gee, I thought it was intensely great, myself. Or at least intensely funny.

I guess all this really shows is that different guys have different tastes. And that's fine.

 

[Rockrattled]

My reaction was, "That's disturbing...” Then realized that it was probably the type of module that would get players to react emotionally. Something different that might actually make them think a little. It’s amazing how tolerant we've become, and how high we have to set the bar to get that crinkled mono-brow from our players.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Yeah, that's really true-it takes so much to break through the bubble anymore (kind of scary when I stop to think about it). The whole scenario is full of stuff like that, too. I guess I should say that it's also presented in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. I mean the baby-fight encounter is playable, but when you read it you can see that its supposed to be funny, too. Which is sort of the way the whole adventure is. Like I said, it's kind of like Terry Pratchett on crack.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Recently I read "The Maze of Screaming Silence," an excellent D20 sourcebook from Monkey God Enterprises. This book is without doubt one of the best D20 modules I have ever seen.

If you want to run another dull, boring D&D adventure, then don't use "The Maze of Screaming Silence." However, if you want to run an exciting adventure that will keep players on the edge of their seat and scare the pants off them, then buy this book!

The premise is simple: on the far side of the world, the cruel Empire of the Yagga Kong run a fiendishly clever contest--to see who can enter the deadly Maze of Screaming Silence and get out alive. There is a monetary reward for anyone who can go into the Maze and get out again, but a hideous Thing awaits within the Maze to devour the adventurers.

The Maze itself is of amazingly clever design and functions like a game within the game. It is a wonderfully innovative device and by itself makes the book worth purchasing.

However, at least as much fun is the town in which the Maze is located, called "The City of the Damned." A remote mountainous outpost of the Yagga Kong Empire, it is a particularly sordid and unsavory place, full of all sorts of unpleasant things, and almost worth an entire book by itself.

One of the good things about "The Maze of Screaming Silence" is the way in which its author makes the world come alive through description. A lot of modules and sourcebooks tend to be pretty sketchy, requiring the DM to fill in details. This book describes in rich detail the environment in which the players find themselves, reducing the amount of work that the DM has to do.

Another advantage to this book is that, although it is written for 3rd and 4th Level players, it includes statistics that enable the DM to scale the adventure for higher level players. There are game modifications for Levels 5-6, for Levels 7-9, and for Levels 10-12.

I should warn you that there are some things in it that some readers may find "objectionable," mainly involving blood and violence. Therefore I do not recommend this book for children. It is a better book for gamers of college age or older, provided they have a strong stomach.

So in conclusion, buy "The Maze of Screaming Silence"! It is an excellent Sourcebook, and well worth the purchase price.

 

[Frostmarrow]

[No message]

 

[Frostmarrow]

Oops. You need to type first and press the add-button after.

Anyways, I just finished reading this module and I intend to use it for Call of Cthulhu d20. I'll set it in the Himalayas and have the investigiators arrive there in the 1890s. I see no problems converting it.