The ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination. The gray mass quobbled and quivered, and swelled perpetually – and from within it, in manifold fission, were spawned anatomies that crept away on every side through the grotto. Here there were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with the fines of fishes; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous. And those that escaped not swiftly ashore when they fell from the pool of the Beast were devoured by mouths that gaped in the parent bulk.

A pool of grayish, horrid mass – a choking river of mud marled with obscene offal. A horrid protean mass of dark muck. Such is the form of Abhoth, the Source of All Filth and Lord of the Zaug.

THE CHILDREN OF ABHOTH: “And from the broken, turgid mass there is given life of dark bounty.”

Those Who Have Gazed Upon Filth (as the Parchments of Bido pronounce them), describe obscene monsters which crawl constantly from Abhoth’s gray mass. These warped and twisted progeny can assume many forms – from the half-functional to mammoth-like horrors. Abhoth’s tentacles and “many-formed limbs” are described as seizing many of these creations and dragging them back into the depths of its bulk. Of those that escape, a few are described as “attendants of the rivulets of muck”, while others wander into the “dark cracks of the world’s black heart”.

THE DARK MIND: The mind of Abhoth is a warped, twisted, and cynical thing. It gives forth great telepathic waves, and Those Who Have Gazed Upon Filth speak of their thoughts being filled with “black rivulets of nether birth” – twisted forms of mental energy that squalm forth from creature’s mind even as its twisted progeny rip their way out of the creature’s viscous body.

LORD OF THE ZAUG: Among those titles given to Abhoth, “Lord of the Zaug” is given often. It is even possible that Abhoth is responsible for their creation. Some, including the Xillian Fragments, even describe the zaug as being “infested with the filth of All Filth”.

THE RAT GOD: Among the ratmen, Abhoth is worshipped as the “Rat God”. But this is nothing more than a guise behind which Abhoth’s true form can be worshipped.

…. a loathsome, night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents’ slime is spread its dark mind and mass like a septic contagion.

– The Dasha Codex

UBBO-SATHLA: Even older texts speak of an entity known as Ubbo-Sathla, the Unbegotten Source. Like Abhoth, Ubbo-Sathla is described as a huge, protoplasmic mass resting in deep grottoes beneath the “frozen surface of man’s mind”. Some texts treat this as metaphor, others as literal truth. A few scholars have apparently tried to rectify the discrepancy between these descriptions and those which place Ubbo-Sathla in the “gray-litten crypts of Y’qaa” or “beneath the depths of four-coned Mithradeth”.

In some myths, Ubbo-Sathla is said to have “spawned all life”, yet “whatever her touch lay upon was blighted and no life could be seen in it again”. Other texts limit the extent of her creation to “all life which is dark”. Other speak of her as “the womb of all demon-kin”.

Still other prophecies, such as the Visions of Dezzerak’s Blood, say that Ubbo-Sathla shall one day “take back into her breast the life of all living things” – that all life will be reabsorbed into her mass.

The ultimate identity of Ubbo-Sathla, however, remains hopelessly confused. There are those who see Ubbo-Sathla and Abhoth as the same entity viewed in different epochs and under different names. But there are also other texts that refer to Ubbo-Sathla as the “Mother of All Filth” and Abhoth as the “Father of All Filth”, suggesting some foul and horrid mating between the two. Others describe them as siblings or even as schisms of the same being.

THE TABLETS: “About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the demon gods.” Ubbo-Sathla (and thus, perhaps, Abhoth) is also said to serve as “murky guardian” to tablets containing secrets of the Demon Gods – “lore lost to all mortal minds and kept in secret lest it be turned against them before the End of Days”.

Fuller records of these tablets (or even the tablets themselves) have been oft-sought by sorcerers and scholars, but none is known to have yet succeeded in acquiring them.

Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror. And loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing.

DESIGN NOTES

Abhoth can be found extensively in Ptolus and The Night of Dissolution, but was originally created by Clark Ashton Smith. Ubbo-Sathla has been lifted from the short story of the same name, also by Clark Ashton Smith. The reference to “Dezzerak” is to an entity from The Book of Fiends (more on that later).

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Review Originally Published March 13th, 2002

Most of the buzz around Mystic Eye Games which has come my way has focused on their Nightmares & books or the The Hunt: Rise of Evil campaign setting. Not very much attention, it seems, has turned to their modules – such as The Pit of Loch-Durnan, an adventure for characters of 2nd to 4th level.

And maybe there’s a good reason for: The Pit of Loch-Durnan has a lot of problems. But we’ll come back to that. First, let’s take a quick peek at the plot.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for The Pit of Loch-Durnan. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

At first glance, The Pit of Loch-Durnan appears to be a pretty straight forward, clichéd fantasy adventure: The PCs are approached by two villagers, who tell them that the village mine has been infested by goblins. “Won’t you please come save us?” they beg. The PCs come to the village, clean out the mine, and there is much rejoicing.

But things are a little more complicated than that: In point of fact, the village mine is not just infested with goblins. It is also infested with a very powerful, imprisoned demon who is attempting to escape. The demon has enslaved the entire population of the village and the PCs are actually falling victim to an elaborate trap designed to bring them under the demon’s control.

Abandoned in the titular pit (the village’s mine), the PCs must fight their way past undead minions, defeat goblin slaves, destroy the demon’s crystal, escape into the mansion of the twin brothers responsible for freeing the demon, defeat the brothers, and free the village.

Fun stuff.

BAD STUFF

Those who have followed my reviews over the years know that they tend to follow a common pattern: A synopsis of the content, a review of the good stuff, a review of the bad stuff, and then a conclusion.

In this case, however, I’m going to break from tradition by discussing the bad stuff first. Because there’s a lot of it.

The biggest and most glaring problem is apparent the instant you open this book up: The layout is atrocious. The illustrations are god-awful. The entire product reeks of amateurism from one end to the other. Radically different fonts are rammed up against each other; bold, italic, and underline text is rampantly overused; paragraph spacing is inconsistent at best, illegible at worst; and on and on and on. The only point of solace in the entire sorry mess is the front cover: If the entire product has been as good as the cover illustration there would have been spontaneous dancing in the streets when this module was released. (I may be exaggerating slightly there.)

I playtested this module. Before I playtested it, though, I sat down and revised it. Extensively.

Now, generally, I’m pretty leery of reviews that talk about how the reviewer would have written a product (rather than actually dealing with the actual product). In this case, though, I think it’s the easiest way to demonstrate everything that’s wrong with The Pit of Loch-Durnan:

1. First off, I stripped out all the silly and oddly jarring names which have been given to the NPCs in this module. Gormon? Warphit? Sheepo the Goblin? Tippi the Ghoul? On the plus side, they’re pronounceable (unlike so many bad fantasy names). On the down side, I felt like I had been teleported into some sort of bizarre Sesame Street of Horrors.

2. I provided a logical reason for why the demon in the Pit would want to bring adventurers to the town. (The more powerful the people it enslaves, the more powerful it can become. Therefore, it wants people as powerful as possible – but not so powerful it thinks it can’t defeat them.) I also provided an explanation for enslaving the PCs that involves dumping them in a pit and giving them a mission to kill the goblins… who are also slaves of the demon.

3. I pumped up the elements of betrayal in the townsfolk. This is a nice theme (as I discussed above), but if you run the adventure as written the PCs will literally never, ever know that the whole mission is a sham until after they’ve destroyed the demon. As a result, there is no mystery or build to the adventure: Just a yawn-fest of a dungeon crawl cliché, followed by an incomprehensible attack by the townsfolk. I honestly don’t understand why Doug Herring and Andrew Thompson tossed aside one of the best elements of the adventure.

4. I did this by having the PCs get fed a sleeping poison during the night. There was always the chance that they wouldn’t be affected by the poison (in which case they would be lowered into the pit normally, but would not be raised back up again) – but if they were affected by the poison, the villagers would strip them of all their possessions before dumping them into the pit. This added a survival element to the module, which also helped strengthen the “kill all the goblins plot”.

5. Barlan’s back story was given a degree of credibility and self-consistency. In the module as written there is absolutely no explanation of how Barlan knows any of the information he gives to the PCs.

6. The goblins are given a reason for being in the Pit. For some reason, the authors neglect to explain why the goblins are there; how they got there; etc. There is some sense that they have also been enslaved by the demon, just like the townsfolk, but its not clear how that happened, why, or what purpose they serve in the dungeon.

7. The reaction tables needed some tidying up to make them practical/useful for the final confrontation with the demon crystal. The module also neglects to take into consideration what the villagers are going to do at the end of the scenario.

Those are the major highlights. Basically, the common theme here is simple: There’s a lot of raw material here, but it’s like unmolded clay… you’re going to have to work it if you expect to have anything resembling a sculpture at the end of the day.

GOOD STUFF

The good stuff here is the raw material itself:

1. The maps. The pit itself is well thought out, with some strong encounters. I would’ve liked to see the goblins be a little more proactive, but I have yet to see a module take the simple step of providing a comprehensive analysis of how an actual colony of intelligent humanoids would react to an assault by an adventuring party.

2. The basic concept. Villagers hiring PCs to save the village, only to have it revealed that the whole scenario (the most basic cliché of adventure gaming) is an elaborate trap designed to enslave the PCs to the will of a demon. It’s necessary to seriously beat the adventure into shape in order to bring this out, but it’s there.

3. The characters. There are some really strong NPCs here – both antagonists and victims. There is a scene towards the end of the module that’s a classic: The PCs have rescued a family of villagers who were taken prisoner after they proved resistant to the demon crystal. Their five year old son was tortured to death before their eyes. As the PCs work their way through the mansion, their son suddenly appears! …a decayed and rotting zombie. The PCs need to physically restrain the father from going to his son’s corpse (which will tear out his throat if given half a chance).

The Pit of Loch-Durnan needs a lot of spit and polish… and patching… and reconstructive surgery. But it’s worth it if you’re willing to put the work into it.

CONCLUSION

The Pit of Loch-Durnan has a lot of problem. A lot of problems. But it’s salvageable. And there’s enough material to chew on here that, if you’re willing to put a little elbow grease into it, this can be a highly entertaining module for you and your group.

That being said: There are definitely better D20 modules on the market right now. Personally, I’m happy with The Pit of Loch-Durnan in large part because it slotted very nicely into one of the D&D campaigns I’m currently running. Despite the massive amount of revision I needed to do, I felt I got a decent bang for my buck.

Could Mystic Eye Games have done better? Oh, God, yes. By the same token, however, there’s enough of merit here that I really hope that Mystic Eye Games does do better in the future – because it would be a shame to see the value of some of the raw material I see here go to waste.

Style: 2
Substance: 2

Authors: Doug Herring, Andrew Thompson
Company: Mystic Eye Games
Price: $11.95
ISBN: 0-9708265-1-6
Production Code: MYG0002
Pages: 72

Revisiting this review, I’m forced to conclude that my effort to explain the adventure’s many, many failures by explaining everything I changed in trying to fix them doesn’t seem to work. Feels like you need to have already read the adventure for my laundry list to mean anything.

What I remember about The Pit of Loch-Durnan is that it’s quite likely the worst published adventure I’ve ever run. The conflict is that — after writing up 35 pages of revisions to fix the thing — we had a really fantastic time playing the adventure at the table. The deconstruction of the standard dungeon is such a cool concept that, if you pull it off (in exactly the way the published adventure doesn’t), you’ll get a really memorable experience.

Oddly, the bit about the really great looking cover causing “dancing in the streets” was sort of prophetic: The first wave of reviews absolutely raved about this adventure. It was even nominated for the Best Adventure ENnie Award in 2001 (the first  year of the Ennies) — a decision which made it rather difficult for me to take the Ennies seriously for many years. This was really quite inexplicable, and later reviews (my own among them) have generally been more accurate in their assessment.

My review was also a huge “scandal” when it came out. A number of different free RPG review sites had popped up in the wake of RPGNet, and I decided to start cross-posting my reviews at multiple sites. This include ENWorld and a defunct site called d20reviews.com. The “problem” was that these different sites used different rubrics. I forget the details at this point, but whereas RPGNet used Style & Substance, for example, you might have another site using X out of 5 Stars and another that included scores for Playability, Mechanics, and Graphics, or whatever. In cross-posting the review, I would also rate it according to the local rubric. This caused consternation because if I gave it 2/5 + 2/5 at RPGNet, then why had I given it 1 out of 5 stars somewhere else? The argument was that this should be a simple mathematical conversion. My position was (and remains) that if you’re scoring for different things, you should not expect those scores to equal each other across multiple criteria.

What was really driving the “scandal” was that Mystic Eye Games was furious that I had attempted to “tank” their review scores. They started by contacting me privately and demanding that I remove the reviews, otherwise they wouldn’t send me review copies in the future. When I refused, they went public with the “math” to claim that I was biased. They were successful in creating a kerfluffle and making me waste a bunch of time responding to a lot of nonsense. (Wouldn’t be the last time.)

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

The Blood that I shed do I devote to serve within the eternal Train of Souls.

The Eyes of Flesh do I sacrifice for the gift of that immortal Eye which shall view all destruction.

The Mortal Soul do I forsake to the void which shall be filled.

My voice I raise until it shall be heard in the Paean of Destruction. My deeds shall become those of the Titan. My life shall become One Aspect of the Thousand Eyes.

The scroll describes a series of defiling rites which prepare the faithful soul of an acolyte to perform a human sacrifice (also described in precise detail) which will bind them to a greater force of chaos, becoming an Aspect of the Many Eyes and housing a “shard of the sleeping titan” in their soul.

During this final ritual and oath-taking, the acolyte cuts out their own eyes. If their faith is rewarded, a third eye opens upon their forehead from which the power of the Destroyer can be made manifest.

The brothers of the Divided Eye believe that this Third Eye of the Destroyer binds them to the Eyes of Legion, and that when the “murder of craven eyes” has been “restored through mortal flesh” the “Many-Eyed Prelate of the Blooded Death shall awake”.

THE THIRD EYE OF THE DESTROYER

(Feat)

Prerequisite: Must sacrifice both eyes and perform the Oath of the Divided Eye.

Benefit: You a gain a third eye which gifts you with darkvision 60 ft. Once per day, you can open the inner eye of the destroyer allowing you to use chaos hammer, as per the spell.

Special: This feat can be taken more than once. Each time you take the feat, double the range of your darkvision and you daily uses of chaos hammer.

Some material on this page is covered by the Open Gaming License.

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B. asks:

I just finished the first session of a new campaign. One of my players pitched a character who was “very strange, but in a charming way.” In the first scene she told the chief of police that his eyes reminded her of her dead mother, then she ran in circles around another NPC, sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of him, and asked what his favorite color was.

Both NPCs reacted poorly. Not hostile. But definitely “I don’t want to talk to this nutjob.” My player then reminded me that, while her character is strange, other people are supposed to find the strangeness charming.

I’m not sure what to do. This PC is a stranger in town and she basically just accosted these people. I had the NPCs react the way that I thought they would naturally react to someone behaving like this.

What should I do? Should I just have NPCs find her antics charming, even if I don’t?

I suspect your player is aiming for what I think of as the “feral weirdo” or “hyper-kooky” archetype, often seen in anime. Examples off the top of my head include:

• Edward from Cowboy Bebop
• Mako from Kill la Kill
• Naruto from Naruto (particularly in the first couple arcs, then he socializes a bit)
• Anya from Spy x Family

Non-anime examples include Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter.

There’s a wide range to these characters and the types of stories they can exist in, but the less comical the tone, the more delicate the balance is.

Assuming that this is what your player is aiming for:

If you don’t think this is an archetype you can support at the table, then you need to have a frank discussion with the player. Try to avoid being judgmental. I don’t think this player did anything wrong by aiming for this archetype, but the tonal mismatch between what you’re running and the character they want to play is going to make for a frustrating experience.

If, understanding the archetype, you want to support the player, I think you’ll still need to have a frank discussion with them: Yes, there are people who will find the feral hyper-weirdo charming. But there will also be people (often lots of people) who don’t. Often even people who end up being the hyper-weirdo’s best friends will initially be, “WTF?”

This is a two-way contract: The player needs to make sure that their antics do, in fact, have a charming, whimsical quality to them. The player also needs to accept that not everyone will like them — Luna Lovegood has to interact with Draco Malfoy; Mako with Nanon and Nui; etc. On the other hand, you’ll be promising that there will be characters who DO accept them and find them charming. If you can’t do that, then circle back to, “I can’t support this archetype in this game.”

The more general tip here is, if you don’t understand a character concept or the actions that a player is taking in your game, it can be very useful to cut straight to the point and ask them what their goal is. Using analogies to characters from other mediums isn’t the only way to figure things out, but it can be a very effective way of quickly understanding what the player is aiming for and the types of responses and outcomes they expect their actions to have.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #1

This long scroll of human skin has been stitched into a moebius strip. It speaks of dark and blasphemous rites:

In the days before the Slumber, the One Who is of Many Doors came unto those who saw the truth of annihilation. And they who drank of the Truth of Blood reached through the Mouth of the Void and grasped the Worm of Which There is One and Many, and drew it forth from that place unto this. And in that birth-death of separation-completion, the arc of wisdom leapt.

These cultists – referred to as the Followers of the Forgotten Worm – would graft the worms taken from the Mouth of the Void onto themselves and others. “And those who were touched by wisdom were one with wisdom and one with the Mouth. Their hearts were as the hearts of demons.” The cult grew strong and the scroll speaks of a time when entire cities were “enthralled to wisdom”.

Then comes the time of “the Slumber”, after which it apparently became more difficult to gain access to the Mouth of the Void. Long passages are given over to the care and breeding of the Worms that remained, but these were apparently difficult or even impossible efforts. The power of the cult was broken and their cities were overthrown.

The cult apparently now exists in small sects, perhaps prospering among the jungle isles of the southern Teeth of Light. And although the Mouth has withdrawn from this plane of existence, contact with him does not seem wholly impossible: “As he is beyond time, beyond beginning, beyond ending – so like a fractured mirror which is yet whole can he be seen beyond the borders of the possible.” References are made to a rite referred to as the “Shadow Harbinging”, although the details are not to be found here.

So he serves as the stalking herald of the Shadow That Never Passes. And those who are touched by his wisdom are blessed by that which is seldom seen in the light of darkened  days.

The end of the scroll transitions from concerns of the present into vague prophecies of a dark and terrible future culminating in “the time of greatest congregation which shall become the communion of worlds”.

So shall it be when the corona of the obscured sun shall reveal the stars which are never seen. Such shall presage the end of all slumbers.

And then, through the twisting of the scroll, the end becomes the beginning and the “time of greatest congregation” becomes the “days before the Slumber” and the scroll begins again.

DESIGN NOTES

This cult worships Dhar Rhyth (Chaositech, p. 97). I’m fairly certain that I came up with the epithet Worm of the Void and the name Followers of the Forgotten Worm, and this is another example of a chaos cult not currently active in Ptolus. (Or, at least, not connected to Wuntad’s activities.)

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