Tomb Robbers Review

Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier Review

This is an actual play review of the adventure module Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier by Gus L. I used the older edition that recommends using OSE as a reference, there’s a newer version that supports the Errant ruleset, I’ve never run or played Errant, so I’m only cursorily familiar with it, and so I can’t say how significant those changes might be.

Running it in Vaults of Vaarn

I ran the adventure using the Vaults of Vaarn setting/rules. The blend of western, fantasy, and science-fiction genres easily slides into Vaarn’s’ desert post-post-apocalyptic science-fantasy. I made certain NPCs mutants or new-beasts to give them a Vaarnish sheen, and made the Empyrions members of the former Autarch. At that point we were good to go in terms of establishing this as a place that belongs in the fiction of the game.

Mechanically there aren’t a lot of changes you need to make. Vaarn, being a Knave hack, doesn’t have saving throws, it just has attribute checks. These you can handle pretty intuitively. If you’re trying to dodge something, make a DEX check, if something is affecting your body make a CON check, when in doubt make a PSY check.

It is worth reviewing the random encounters. In particular the stylite eyes have a custom reaction to reaction rolls. Unlike the standard 2d6 (+CHA as applicable) roll of most OSR games, Vaarn does a 1d20 (+EGO as applicable) roll. I prefer the more unpredictable rolls of a d20 to the tends to the mean rolls of the 2d6 personally, but this does mean you need to do some adjusted math here.

Vaults of Vaarn doesn’t have dedicated rules for light management and darkness penalties since the default form of a Vaarnish adventure is an overworld point-crawl. Light management is very important in Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier however, it’s empahsized in multiple places. As such I just bolted OSE’s rules for it.

By far the trickiest thing to figure out was the economics of the adventure. Vaarn of course doesn’t have gold or coins. Everything has become a barter economy that revolves around rations of water. I settled on a conversion rate of 100 GP to 1 ration of water. Does this make any sense? Who know’s, but it was by far the easiest math to perform, so that made it best for running with.

One nuance of all this though is the initial hook for the adventure where the party will enter into a contract with Mab. In the original adventure Mab agrees to cover the parties’ rations/provisions. This makes sense in a standard D&D economy where food and drink is cheap. It makes less sense in the Vaarn economy where water is scarce and part of the time pressure for the party to keep moving forward. If Mab is generously covering their rations of a party of 5, but they only bring back a little over 10 water rations worth of treasure, then haven’t they wasted Mab’s time and resources? As such I added a clock, stating that the players had two days to accomplish their goals. This added a nice time pressure to the whole adventure that made the party really have to think about how to utilize long/short rests. It might have been better to have rethought the whole premise of the adventure hook, but there’s so much fun stuff with the tension of how players might try and pull a fast one on Mab that I opted to implement minimum viable adjustments.

There are some small things you might want to adjust for flavor. Instead of haunted spirits inhabiting crystals they can be the consciousness of the enemies of the state imprisioned within the crystals.

Vaarn’s mystic gifts and exotica also proved to work great as substitutes for D&D magic, and my players used them in this adventure in delightful ways.

I also just want to say this adventure, with its abundance of treasure to grab, really made the constrained inventory slot system of Vaarn sing. My players all praised how they really had to think hard about what to take, and what to leave behind. It is a really good problem for players to enjoy agonizing over.

The Setup

The setup for Tomb Robbers is quite nice. The party is approached by Mab and her gang, and offered a contract. There’s opportunities to negotiate the details of the contract (although my players were impressed enough with the terms as is they just went with it), and then while travelling to the site you have a chance to dispense with rumors. One of the rumors, the one about tomb crystal poisoning, is such an important detail that I just had an NPC practically monologue it to the party, but the rest can be teased out by interacting with the rest of the crew in a normal fashion.

The Dungeon

The dungeon rooms are very intricate in this adventure. Nearly every room has something to interact with.

Dangers are mostly well telegraphed. My players mostly avoided dangers that would have almost certainly been lethal (pit full of zombies, crystal traps, rooms that instantly incinerate you, etc.), and sort of unknowingly avoided the less obvious ones there is a room that projects lore images on the floor that can teach you about what happened here, but there are consequences if you view for an extended period of time, but my players peaced out after seeing the first one, greed is a more powerful motivator than knowledge I suppose.

There is far more stuff packed into this dungeon then the players will interact with unless you have a particularly thorough group. That’s probably a good thing though, one of the advantages of an adventure module over something you are just creating for your own group.

A common complaint I see in reviews of Tomb Robbers is the puzzle door… and I share the complaint! Although there are decent ways to bypass the puzzle, the intricacy and opaqueness of how the door is supposed to work reminds me of a lot of not very beloved puzzles from adventure games of yore. After my group gave it a decent college try, but was nowhere close to figuring out what even the objective of the puzzle was, I just told them how they could bypass it since it was all kind of nonsense.

Another weakness I would note is the Stylite’s motivations. It isn’t clear why he is just sitting in that strange room waiting for someone else to try to manipulate. Compared to the rest of the NPCs in the adventure, I felt his setup was less well realized.

I’ve seen other reviews complain that Gus’ writing style for the keys is too verbose. This complaint I don’t share. I found the text well organized, and it gave me the right amount of detail to allow the players to make informed decisions, and ask reasonable followup questions without necessarily having everything be revealed.

Running the Adventure

I don’t often run adventure modules as I find the content usually isn’t what I’m looking for either in terms of setting and vibe, or just overall what sort of stuff it would have the adventurers doing. Tomb Robbers takes what I imagine is a bit of extra prep work compared to some other contemporary adventures I’ve seen (I’m mostly thinking of the OSE house style adventures), but makes up for it with its evocative style. I think the book has some layout issues: having to flip back and forth between the encounter tables, the appendixes (which are not located at the end of the book, but at the end of the adventure) was awkward. It would have been nice to have those in easier to locate sections. There are also one or two sections where the keyed text doesn’t seem to match the details in the map, which can lead to awkwardness if you’re not prepared for it.

Conclusion

My group had a fantastic time playing this adventure, and it really showcases what’s great about the classic style of RPG play. It will certainly be a huge influence in thinking about how I design my own adventures, and works great as an introduction to this style of roleplaying game for players interested in seeing what else is out there beyond contemporary D&D.