Messy Review - The Dream Shrine
Rating: 🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱
The Dream Shrine is a surreal 10-room dungeon by Brad Kerr and Skullfungus statted for OSE but with easy conversion notes for Cairn as well. I finally got around to reading it since it was a deal if the day on DTRPG but I had been meaning too for much longer since I love what both of them do.
This dungeon does not disappoint.
It’s incredibly fucking weird, but in the best way, and more importantly it’s just a solidly designed dungeon.
Adventurers are invited to sleep ina bed for six and enter into a strange space on the back of a giant moving wooly mammoth. Rooms throughout feature oddities such as a giant face with a living room in its mouth, a ballroom that lets you fly if you’re dancing, or a clown pumping up tiny elephants into balloons. The main monster is a creepy crocodile-clown-like thing that eats teeth!
The surreal is brought to life incredibly by the illustrations, which have an odd way of grounding it in a way that’s understandable juxtaposed to the more incomprehensible dream-like text.
What I really love most is that it’s not just wacky with no substance, but has solid dungeon elements driving it underneath. For one, it’s a good simple dungeon design with solid loops. For two, it makes excellent use of soft locks with tools as described excellently today by Derek B over at Widderhins Wanderings. Challenges, such as a mouth that will chomp you if you try to go through it or a door 30 ft. up the wall, have tools hidden in other rooms—a machine that eats teeth and a tool to turn anything into a balloon that could lift you up. But the tools themselves could also have so many other uses.
As any good dungeon should, it also has a Wierd little freak in the form of an adventurer who likes it here and wants to stay. He himself also becomes a tool for a different soft lock later as the dream-granting goddess trapped in here needs someone to take her place so she can leave.
I feel obligated to supply some critiques, so I’ll do that too. For one, I wish it was a bit bigger. It does a lot with the space it has, but I feel it could be that much better with just 5 more rooms to spread things out and maybe make space for more faction-play with some other actors moving around.
For two, the consequences of releasing the goddess from the shrine—which I think a lot of parties would do—are world altering in a way I think it would be difficult to manage coherently as a GM. It’s interesting to think about, but the scale of what all would change is mind-boggling. Sure, you can run this as a one-shot, but it feels perfect to throw into an ongoing campaign as a Wierd interlude, but it then becomes less bottle episode and more jumping the shark if handled incorrectly.
There’s also a bonus adventure in a forest with living trees in the back but I am reading this on my phone sitting with my dying grandmother right now while she sleeps and the text was too small to read comfortably. That’s not a real critique, but an explanation for why I’m not taking about it.