The Sinister Secret of Peacock Point (Swords & Wizardry)
Yesterday I ran "The Sinister Secret of Peacock Point" for three players from the Dungeon Crawlers Discord. The adventure is part of the collection "Wyvern Songs" by Brad Kerr and focusses on the exploration of a thieves' guild hall that has been wiped out after having stolen a mysterious music box and releasing the insect demon therein.
This was a great adventure with a playful tone, thematic interactive locations and plenty of opportunities for players to both shine and spell their own doom. Presentation and organisation is great and was very easy to run at the table. A minor gripe I had with the lack of information of how the dungeon is connected to the lighthouse? There is no explicit statement and I just placed the entrance in the cellar. Aside from this not insignificant stumbling block at the start, the rest of the adventure ran very smoothly. The players noted in a small recap afterwards that this felt like a real old-school dungeon, as it had a row of what they perceived as empty rooms. These players were predominantly DCC players and are used to packed rooms, and some of the training rooms felt somewhat empty to them, I am sure that this is also due to their incredible luck, as I rolled for encounters every dungeon turn: it took them 14 of these to finish the dungeon but I only rolled one (!) random encounter. This encounter was the peacock, which immediately became the parties mascot after having upset the thief goddess and becoming blinded and causing havoc. I probably should have rolled this table more aggressively, as I am in retrospect sure that it is the element that fills the dungeon with more life. Also, this dungeon could have done with less doors, as my party was obsessed with inspecting and listening at doors after the first axe trap (which rarely came to anything). This could also have been due to the novelty of the system to both myself and the group and wanting to try out the mechanics. All in all this was a very memorable adventure site: couches crawling with bugs that slowly build into an enemy, a desperate thief on a shelf and a great mechanic for overcoming the final adversary (catching the gold bug). You will have a great time running this! 8/10