Tyranny of the Crawl
Being a Review of Titan of the Verdant Maw Turned into a Reflection on Adventure Design
Titan of the Verdant Maw is an adventure for Old School Essentials by Daily Ritual Press.
This post has its origins in trying to review the adventure, but that very quickly turned into a larger question about adventure design for me. So, I’m eschewing the regular weekly review format here to talk about that mostly.
The issue at hand is that Titan of the Verdant Maw has some very good ideas within it that are stymied by the format it’s being fitted into.
The adventure puts players into dangerous jungle full of all manner of beasts—crab people, apes, saber tooth tigers, robots, corpse flowers—it’s absolutely dripping with pulpy jungle flavor with strong science fantasy influences. I can’t stress enough how good I think this aspect of it is. At the heart of it is a massive biomechanical beast causing havoc on the jungle, as well as the goblin cyborg scientist behind all of the mayhem. It’s great stuff. Even better, it comes with several custom OSE classes to fit the setting. More adventures should do that!
There’s just an awesome mix of ideas in this place, evocatively described in a way that makes me want to run it.
While I love the setting of the adventure though, I realized through reading it that I didn’t like the setup as a hexcrawl. What it comes down to is that the locations all feel a bit disconnected without clear information on how to navigate between them or make choices about exploration. A key example is a dangerous bridge over a chasm with a save or die situation to cross it.It feels like it’s designed as a choke point that players have to go through to get to something important. But it isn’t. You can just walk around it to go to the same place. So, what should be a really interesting choice over whether to cross this bridge or not becomes neutralized because it can be easily bypassed.
What I found as I stewed over how to review this adventure though, is that this isn’t the original version of the adventure. A version was released this week, but it was actually originally released earlier this year. That earlier version not only has some interesting and flavorful random event tables that are omitted in the recent version, but it also wasn’t a hexcrawl. It actually didn’t have a map at all, it was just a numbered list of locations.
I then saw in the comments that more than one person said they ran it as a pointcrawl, and the creator further said they just ran it originally as a list of locations in order. While they called that a pointcrawl, I’d point out that’s definitionally incorrect, since from the beginning pointcrawls have been about having points connected by paths that give players choices about how to navigate.
But, I think the real question to me here is, does this even need to be an adventure with a map? If a creator runs an adventure as a linear series of scenes over locations, should they have to turn that into a hexcrawl in order to publish it for OSE?
On the one hand, yes, crawls following exploration procedures are core to the OSR. I love them. OSE is made to run them. I get it.
In the other hand, should we be shackled to only running that format of adventure just because it’s OSE? I’d say no. While there’s other more procedural options you could reach for, like a depthcrawl, why not have some variety in our adventure formats?
In the case of this particular adventure, I think it would be vastly improved by the creator publishing it in the format they actually ran it in rather than porting it to a format it isn’t suited for. It’s not a good hexcrawl, but I think it is a good adventure. I would absolutely love being a player through the original linear version of it.
I guess this is all to say, I think we should all think a bit harder about adventure format rather than just defaulting to the classic setups. Yes, hexcrawls and other procedure-heavy setups work and drive explorative play. But it’s not the only thing out there, and we should be more open to the variety. New creators or creators with different personal tastes shouldn’t be put off from writing in the format that actually works for them at the table. On the contrary, I don’t think anyone should publish in a format that wouldn’t actually run an adventure in. Write what you know and do it well.
I suppose I’m assuming a lot here about why the creator changed this into a hexcrawl. But I also remember the pressure I felt when I started getting into this to publish the same type of thing I saw from others, even though that didn’t match my own style. I don’t think that’s healthy for us as a creative scene. We can do better.