Hans Joachim Alpers sucked as a scenario author, and the reason I say this at the very beginning is because level 1 room 1 of the adventure has the following riddle:
Q: what do Robert Zimmermann’s nineteenth nervous breakdown and an avalanche have in common?
A: the Rolling Stones.
No. Seriously. That’s in there. A riddle that not only uses obscure real world pop culture references, but in the German text also only works if you translate between German and English in multiple places.
This is grade A condescending bullshit. This doesn’t belong in a roleplaying scenario. I bet he read that somewhere in English and decided to directly put that into his module because he’s oh so smart. It doesn’t even make sense as written.
Ok. So this was the first room.
Ok, deep breaths.
The scenario continues on from the last one. In fact, instead of writing a new intro we get most of the one from the previous scenario, then a short reference to what happened in there.
It turns out 6 of the magic goblets made from the legendary sword Siebenstreich (Sevenstroke?) are hidden in various places in H’Rabaal. 3 of them are beneficial when someone drinks from them, 3 are harmful. The bad guys want to reforge the sword Siebenstreich from them, but luckily they’d need a seventh goblet.
Which we just brought.
Why did we do that?
But we have to find them, and they are each hidden in a room in that temple complex.
And how do we know that? Wasn’t it the bad guys who stole them and brought them here? How do we have that much intel about their operation?
Beats me. But the intro says its like that.
Later on we get more information about that benefit/harm property they have, and it’s… stupid. It is is completely random which goblet does what, and once you drink from it it loses that property for the rest of the adventure. Which leads to a probability game that’s really an exercise in practical stochastics.
I like the setting of the lizardman temple in the jungle. I like the whole idea of the seven goblets who are actually a magic sword. I even like the basic ideas of a lot of the encounters. There’s a really old school feeling one where the characters have to get a goblet from a pedestal, but every step up shrinks them by half, until they come into conflict with the otherwise harmless ants crawling around here.
There is an encounter with a giant ape that with some good roleplay can be brought to the characters’ side and literally move obstacles out of the way later.
In another bit of condescending real world bullshit intruding into this fantasy world the ape also has a job offer from Dino de Laurentiis to play King Kong as long as he brings one of the goblets to supplement production costs.
So, pro: a giant ape who actually is a fleshed out NPC with his own motivations. Negative: it’s a stupid motivation.
Like the stupid riddle from the first room this both was excised from the second edition the same year, but the fact it was in there at all speaks for a disdain the author had for his audience.
In the end we have gathered all the goblets and we put them into the purple magic flame in the last room and they are all magically transported back to where they belong.
What sort of resolution is that supposed to be?
I have the suspicion that he really took too much inspiration from DnD’s tournament modules. This reeks of it. It’s such a gamey situation where you know all the stakes and goals, and you have to deal with a bunch of different puzzle rooms that all seem rather dangerous. RPG tournaments never really took off in Germany, and were a bemusing oddity about the American scene whenever they were brought up in the 90s. But of course some of the tournament scenarios made it over. This does have a certain thematic closeness to The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, so maybe that was what Alpers was working from.
TLDR: I do not like this scenario. There are a few good ideas in here, but making them work would mean scrapping a large part of the scenario and replacing them with my own. Which is a pity, because in later years some ideas that were introduced in here were made central parts of the metaplot. It would be nice to introduce them like this. I just really don’t know if I ever would want to play this.
Luckily this was Alpers’ second to last adventure scenario, and the last one is a solo, which uses different writing skills.
*Imagine dramatic cue here*
Notes:
- This scenario was published in French, Italian, and Dutch as well.
- The DSA Wiki points out that nearly all illustrations in the scenario are either wrong, or depict things that do not happen in the scenario.
Running Tally:
- B2 Wald ohne Wiederkehr
- B1 Im Wirtshaus zum Schwarzen Keiler
- B3 Das Schiff der Verlorenen Seelen
- B4 Die Sieben Magischen Kelche