Review: Temple of the Rotting Priest
Pleasantly Surprised
Temple of the Rotting Priest is an 8-page dungeon for OSE by Michael J. Patrick. A version for D&D 5E was originally published in March 2025, while the OSE version was published last week. I was a little hesitant going into this about how a 5E dungeon would translate to OSE, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I found here.
Whats It About?
The dungeon is an ancient tomb--classic setup--but here a priest of the old gods was sealed alive in the temple by invading soldiers of the new gods. Now, water flowing through the tomb has connected the ancient priest to creatures living here, allowing him to control them as zombies, and potentially passing that curse on to others. Players are hired by a kobold in a cowboy hat--possibly a little much for some tables, but I thought he was funny--to recover some stolen goods from a group hiding out at the temple. Inside is a tight 10-room setup with goblins, zombies, and zombie goblins ready to make trouble for the players in their quest.
Let's Talk About the Ideas?
I absolutely love the setup of the dead priest, sealed away in his sarcophagus, controlling creatures through the water here. It's gross, and it poses serious danger to the players if they get infected. I could see a lot of interesting play happening with that, especially with the clues sprinkled around to help them figure out what's going on. The ancient, defaced gods in the temple also make for juicy lore for players to try to investigate and understand what happened here. It all comes together to be a really nice setup for an interesting one-shot. All easily do-able in a single session, but not a boring "orcs in a hole" kind of thing either.
What About the Execution?
This is generally well done, it's got good ideas, a good map with solid loops and secrets to discover through exploration, and good layout and monster design. My main quibbles would be related to the "OSR Play style" as it is. Namely, there's no random encounters, and there's a few places where information is gated behind ability checks in a way most OSE tables wouldn't do. I take this to be part of the growing pains of coming from 5E, and neither is really a deal breaker for this adventure. It's easy enough to just provide information instead of calling for rolls, and adding a little random encounter table pulling from the creatures available would be simple too. In fact:
Two Frenzied Goblins fighting over a bag of gold.
A Goblin Ghostwalker running from a Frenzied Zombie.
Four Frenzied Zombies hunting for food.
A Frenzied Goblin runs by and splashes water on the lead party member (Save Vs. Spells or become charmed by Rotting Priest)
There you go!.
Art?
The art is sick. You've seen the cover above. It's so good. No other artist is credited, so I assume Michael did all of this, and he's awesome for it. Look at this stuff.
Summary!
I think this is great and well worth picking up to toss into your world somewhere or hold onto for a one-shot night. I'm excited to see what Michael does next as he's bringing more of his stuff over to OSE and looking toward writing original OSE adventures in the future.
This is part of my new and improved series of reviews where I'll be focusing each week on something that was recently released for free on Itch.io. I'll be making a point to pay the creators for what I review (when they accept payments), and you can help support that by chipping in a few bucks on Ko-Fi. Thanks for reading!