Messy Review and Report: Varanus Lair and Mangayaw

06 May, 2025

Rating: 🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛

Varanus Lair is a tri-fold pamphlet dungeon by Renata Sumadinata and Harbowoputra of Agarwood Studio. It’s statted for B/X or other similar OSR games, but I ran it as the first session of my new Mangayaw campaign, and I’ve included converted stats at the end of this post.

It’s an 8-room dungeon in a cave, with the primary faction being a large monitor lizard and her hatchlings occupying half the rooms. There’s also a giant centipede and her swarm of young, and a priest with two guards in the middle of a ritual. There’s plenty of treasure either as offerings left by previous visitors or on the half eaten bodies of those unlucky enough to die in the cave.

Simply put, this is just a really solid dungeon. It’s minimally described, but has enough to make the rooms work, and the room stocking plus random encounters makes for a lot of interesting possibilities and more than enough to fill a session of play. There’s also a good use of naturally hidden pathways, including an underwater tunnel, a room only accessible through quicksand, and a tiny craw space that can collapse if you’re not careful.

In our session, they passed first through the room with the underwater tunnel, which was easy enough for the otterfolk character to deal with. They had a short but brutal combat with some lizard hatchlings in a side room and then ultimately turned around when finding the large lizard in the next room. They made their way to the priest and briefly skirmished before rushing off through the crawl space, which collapsed behind them from a poor save roll. That took them to the “Pepper Nook” an empty room where they rested a while. They finally found the centipede eggs they were looking for and set the swarm of centipedes on fire after they filled and reanimated a corpse in that room. All in all they made out alright with a fair bit of treasure.

Apart from the theme, which is perfect for Mangayaw, my favorite part of the dungeon was how the design led to different patterns of movement. Between the underwater tunnel and the collapsed space and the forks with clear signs of what would be to either side, there were always interesting choices to make, and the space never felt as small as it is on paper.

I also love Mangayaw. I knew I would being a Cairn fan, but the changes from Cairn itself are very good. The backgrounds are so flavorful and tie into the setting tightly. The magic system is also subtly but importantly different. In this session they were able to ultimately make it out of the dungeon by using a spell to control the monitor lizard and have it attack the priest and his guard. But the spellcasters has now taken two Ganid (greed) conditions, which take up inventory slots and will require their own mini-quests in game to clear. This is an improvement to me over the standard fatigue cost for magic from Cairn and should be more interesting in play.

That’s all for now. Mangayaw is great and I’ll continue reporting on how our sessions go. And you should absolutely pick up Varanus Lair. It’s a steal at only $3.33.

Converted Stats

The Varanus 9 HP, 14 STR, 14 DEX, 10 WIL Bite d6, Tail d8 Crit: Poison d4 damage per round

Hatchling 4 HP, 8 STR, 8 DEX, 8 WIL, Bite d6

Mother Centipede 9 HP, 12 STR, 10 DEX, 10 WIL Bite d6 Crit: Entangle d4 damage per round

Centipede Swarm 6 HP, 12 STR, 10 DEX, 10 WIL (detachment) Swarm d6