One of the first requests I see when people pick up an OSR ruleset are suggestions for a first dungeon to show them off. Many of the games come with excellent opening scenarios such as The Hole In The Oak or Lost Citadel of The Scarlet Minotaur. Some folks use it as an opportunity to revisit classics like Keep on the Borderlands or Temple of Elemental Evil. Prison of the Hated Pretender from Gus L. and Hydra Cooperative, offers players new to the scene not just an entry level adventure but some advice on how to capture the feel of that style of play for Fifth Edition games or any OSE title. Did adventuring in the prison feel freeing? Let’s play to find out.
Spoilers for the adventures are below. Bottom line: As a guide to running tough but fair OSR adventures, Prison of the Hated Pretender is a fantastic resource, especially as one that’s currently Pay What You Want.
The adventure sets up two locations for the story. The first is Broken Huts, a miserable little village in the middle of nowhere. It’s mostly there for players to snatch a few rumors about the dungeon and move on to the main event. The dungeon is the Prison of the Hated Pretender. It’s a small, 10 room affair that can be fully explored in a session or two but offers a lot of elements that could impact an ongoing campaign.
The dungeon features a pair of monster types that are built to teach players about not attacking dungeons as action set pieces all the time. The first monster is the Hated Pretender, an exiled noble cursed with immortality as part of his punishment. He may be undead but can be bargained with should the players take the time to talk with him rather than try to kill him (which doesn;t stick. The other monsters are phantasms of the souls the Pretender wronged during their life. They act as guards and tormentors that painfully tear the Prisoner apart every day so that he reforms every night and the cycle goes on for eternity. They are a lesson to new players that some monsters can’t be tackled at their level but they can be avoided or redirected if they think about it.
The weakest part of the adventure is Broken Huts. I get that they want to focus on the dungeon but the town is so sad that I wonder why they even included it at all. In a campaign I would put this as a discoverable location next to a more useful hub like Hommlet or The Keep. I could also see it as a fixer upper for groups interested in bastion building but none of that is part of the text.
What is part of the text are several designer sidebars explaining the choices they made about parts of the adventure. Some of it is in service to the Fifth Edition monster stats included in the back but overall it nails the “harsh, but fair” vibe that the best OSR stuff has. This adventure is built to teach players to be careful and observant but also isn’t afraid to squash them like bugs if they mess up.
There are a lot of unanswered questions in the text. Why is the Pretender locked up? Who is the thief that stole his biggest treasure? What god locked him up here? These were meant as elements for the GM to thread into their campaign. With so much excellent advice, I was disappointed there weren’t hooks or other discussion on potential answers to these questions to help new GMs out. If I were in charge of revising this document, I’d probably take the town out and put some discussion on threads and story hooks in.
