Review 36 - The Vaults of Torment
Back to the blood-encrusted realm of Mörk Borg! This week I will be reviewing The Vaults of Torment by Christian Eichhorn.
This one is a bit different from others that I've reviewed in the past, primarily in the sense that the dungeon itself is intended to be randomly generated. The physical edition includes a variety of dungeon tiles that are meant to be printed out and drawn from a pile as play progresses-- it also includes VTT assets for online play, which is how I ran it, using the base Mörk Borg rules.
Note: After I finished writing this whole dang review, it dawned on me that the most current version of The Vaults of Torment significantly changed how the adventure is presented. Rather than simply being a toolset for random generation, it has about 50 rooms laid out in an abstract map, with the set pieces mixed in. So, the review that follows will in all cases be referring to the "legacy content" that can be downloaded on the itch page.
Getting it to the Table
Given the way the adventure was written, it definitely felt like "on the fly" generation was going to be easier to manage when playing it at the table with physical tiles. For my online game I opted to use Roll20 and decided to pre-generate the dungeon levels rather than doing it in real time, simply because the Roll20 interface is kind of fiddly and dumb and it would be too time-consuming to try to do it during the game.
The adventure book opens with the "dungeon rules" which establish the unique play aspects that build upon the core Mörk Borg rules. First and foremost is the "zombification" mechanic, which adds a great element to the game and a sense of urgency to the exploration of the dungeons. Essentially, each time the party decides to rest (which is the most common way of recovering HP after fights in this system), they need to make a Toughness save or begin the zombification process. This is presented as a table of six traits that include having your eyeballs fall out, limbs wither and drop off, and other neat things. Some of these come with a benefit (like when your stomach and guts calcify and you no longer need food or drink), but once you get all six traits you are gone and must roll a new character.
Next is the dungeon generation procedure. As written, it's describing the physical "at the table" method, so I modified it slightly for my online preparation. The dungeon tiles are divided into categories (straight corridors, bends, intersections, crossroads, dead ends, and rooms), and you roll to see what category the next tile should be drawn from. The size of each dungeon level can vary widely, because as written it just goes on until you roll a 20 which indicates the stairs down to the next level. Being limited by the size of the Roll20 map page, I definitely leaned more towards making an interesting layout and just placed the stairs when it felt like I had made the level big enough. I defend this action by pointing out that Eichhorn noted in the procedure that "Randomization can only go so far. Deviate from the result of the dice whenever necessary." As for encounters, it recommends that you roll a d12 each time a tile is placed and that on a result of 1, a monster should be encountered. I made an additional modification to make the dungeon feel more populated-- on a 12 result, I had an "interesting thing" be on the tile instead of just a monster. I pulled these from the "Traps and Devilry", "Corpse Plundering", and "Sample Rooms" tables from the Mörk Borg rulebook. Mixed in with the random generation are Rooms and Set Pieces, which I'll discuss later.
Another interesting mechanic added to the normal dungeon exploration is the idea of "scrounging". In any tile, the players could declare their intent to scrounge and thus roll on a table which includes monster encounters, traps, nothing, or loot. There is also a procedure for determining how much edible meat can be found on monster corpses, which is always a fun time!
The final new mechanic in this adventure is the "Blood is Fuel" section, which I actually opted to not include in my game. The idea is that the GM keeps track of how much HP the PCs lose throughout play, and can "spend" this lost blood to create new encounters or hazards as they see fit. This felt a bit too board-gamey to me, and to be honest it did not feel like it was needed to make this a dangerous and interesting dungeon.
The bulk of the book is then dedicated to describing the Rooms and Set Pieces. The Rooms can occur randomly through the normal generation procedure and typically include valuable loot, helpful NPCs, dangerous monsters, deadly trap, or all four. Set Pieces are entire levels, and the intention is that they should be milestones in the journey to the depths of the vaults. This provides a way for the GM to set the scale of the dungeon-- it would be entirely possible to have a shorter game that only includes the seven set pieces one after another, or it could be a much vaster megadungeon with several randomly generated floors in between set pieces.
The adventure also includes a collection of new magic items that are typically found when defeating powerful monsters (usually located in the set pieces), all of which are pretty fun and interesting items that saw a lot of use in my game and were carried by the surviving PCs into further adventures.
What Worked?
- Incredibly modular! Regardless of how you actually go about generating your dungeon, there is a ton of flexibility to create the kind of game you want. You could eschew the need for rations and rest and eliminate zombification and just have an action-packed descent through the set pieces, or you could really ramp up the dungeoneering and have a tense, resource-driven crawl through hostile corridors, with players seeking out safe havens so they can retreat and resupply.
- Great set pieces! Each of these was a full mini-adventure in itself, with a good variety of combat and NPC interactions. Notable mention goes to the Demonkin Village where players could hire mercenaries or complete requests by NPCs to gain benefits.
- Evocative artifacts and stuff! If you're one of those GMs who loves to salvage content from one adventure to add to others, this is a perfect resource for you. The artifacts, monsters, NPCs, and locations are all things that could easily be borrowed and slotted into your own game.
What Didn't Work?
- "Too random" generation? This is a risk with anything where you're just rolling a die to generate things; when preparing my dungeon levels I would very often get the same tile type several times in a row. The solution, of course, is to just change things if it can't fit or doesn't make sense, and this is noted in the text, so it's not really a huge issue.
- Blood is Fuel. As I already mentioned, the whole mechanic felt too much like a board game and it felt too fiddly to be tracking HP loss over several sessions. It may work better for a shorter game, but I also didn't really feel the lack of it when I excluded it.
Final Thoughts
Overall, this is a fantastic adventure that created probably about a dozen sessions of play when I set it up. By its very nature, it is perfect for an open table game because all of the PCs are prisoners in this vast underground dungeon, fighting their way to the bottom in the hopes that slaying the Keeper will free all of the prisoners. It did take a bit more preparation up front for my online game, but I could definitely see it being a bit more free form and quick to do at the table for an in-person game.
You can get The Vaults of Torment from Christian Eichhorn's itch page. Note that the "Legacy Content" file includes the random generation that I refer to throughout this review, as that is the version that I actually ran. Thanks for reading!