Wow! What a depraved, terrifying, magnificent adventure. It's wonderful and horrible, deeply unpleasant in the best possible way. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it, in terms of sheer nastiness. It gave me actual physical goosebumps to read. It's a good thing its also hilarious, or it might be pretty tough to get through Poor innocent little me, I didn't know you could get gaming materials like this. I also thought I was past being shocked, but I had much to learn, it seems.
This the kind of story that has characters with names like Big Murder and Lord Yun-Gaga the Twice Depraved. There is nervous laughter on every page. Yet the adventure itself is simple, payable straight-up D&D with no frills extras or needless new prestige classes. It takes an old adventure classic and stands it on its head.
Somewhere up in the highest mountains in the world, stands the Maze of Screaming Silence. No one seems to know anything about its builders, except that they weren't at all nice. For ages the only slightly less cruel wicked and decadent Yagga-Kong Empire have watched over the Maze and offered a massive prize to whoever can enter it and walk out again alive. This is not an impossible task, and the Yagga-Kong are sometimes forced to pay up as often as once a century. What Player could pass it up?
The Maze is at an altitude that would slowly kill most visitors and the weather is a constant threat to the Players as they try to claim the prize. But that's not the worst problem. An encampment of scum, killers and hopeless wretches has grown up around the Yagga-Kong redoubt that watches over the maze and to call it a dangerous place would be a serious understatement. They call it the City of the Damned, which is weird, because it's more of a large village than a city. Indescribable things happen there. A lot of scenarios tell you that this or that city is an evil place, where wicked things happen. But this one delivers. It shows you in excruciating and very funny detail why a community of chaotic evil people just wouldn't work.
The City of the Damned is the kind of place where a naked man lying in the frozen mud might accost the Players and tell them that he eats dirt "You like? You like?" Before the players can stop him he stuffs wads of gritty filth in his mouth, gulping it down with gusto, and then demands that the Players pay him for getting to watch! If they don't give him a coin he looks shocked and offended and screams "But I ATE DIRT for you!" and an angry mob starts to gather
It the kind of place where soldiers stop people on the street and tell them there's a three GP Foreigner Tax "Four gold for ugly foreigners. You owe me five, you're so ugly."
It's the kind of place where you can bet on dueling babies in a pit! This last encounter somehow manages to be as funny as it is horrible.
And yet as awful and outrageous and as hopeless as this nightmare-place is, the Players still have a chance to do some real good here, if they try. Sometimes it will blow up in their faces but other times it will turn out to have been worth trying to do a good deed. Kind of like the way it is in real life.
To the south of the "city" is the home of a truly vile sorcerer they call the Smiling Man. Trust me, you don't want to know why. To the North stands the House of the Worm, about which the less said the better.
And as if this all wasn't bad enough, Lord Yun-Gaga the Twice Depraved, who runs the redoubt, has gone completely mad. He's brought his beautiful, dainty, horrible niece to live in the Redoubt him Her idea of a good time is to write a mocking note to a dead child's grieving parents on a piece of the child's skin, and then trick a Player Character into delivering it. The note reads "Dear Mom and Dad, though I am dead, don't let your sorrow die."
This is just a fraction of the stuff in the city. The Players are free to wander around and get embroiled in all kinds of awful things. Or they can stay clear of everything and just go straight to the Maze.
The Maze itself works like a game within a game, and there's a cunning trick to beating it. In fact the players' whole objective is to get as much information about the contest as they can before it starts, to give them the best possible chance of living through the encounter. If they make it, the Players will have to cope with the fact that they are now the richest people in the City of the Damned and everyone knows it! You can already hear them sharpening their knives.
The Yagga-Kong Empire is a remarkable creation. A totally exotic, alien, fully realized culture that just happens to be incredibly disturbing and ghastly. You don't want to believe in them, but they make a frightening kind of sense. They remind me a lot of something by Jack Vance.
Physically, this is a well-produced, handsome book, with great illustrations by somebody named William O'Conner. There are however a surprising number of typos in the text for something this slickly made, and one place where a sidebar has gone wandering off onto an unrelated page. The maps are good, but they don't look like the illustrations. It's almost like the artists weren't communicating and had slightly different visions of what the City of the Damned should look like. That's either trippy or annoying.
When will we see more from this author? My Players and I can't wait for him to do more terrible things to us.
Katsumi approves!
