Whenever I heard people talk about Holy Mountain Shaker, they seemed to converge on the same conclusion-- that it's a beautifully illustrated, well-written, and competent adventure which strains against the terse OSE house style. Rip to the others, I said, because I'm different. I love a countrycrawl, a regioncrawl, an advanced take on the pointcrawl. So I picked up the adventure and ran it, and found that I had those exact issues. But Holy Mountain Shaker is really good! And its exploration procedure feels like a stepping stone on the way to some new authoritatively great exploration procedure that marries the grandeur of vast settings with the problem-solving of the dungeon game. A review of sorts follows.
I initially imagined each region would be analogous to investigating a cluttered dungeon zone, but often it's less clear what "signposts" there are to show what to investigate. In a dungeon chamber you might see a bed, a cauldron, and an ivory idol, so you can be pointed in your inquiry-- you can look under the bed, jump in the bed, feel along the headboard, or even just give it some comprehensive investigation. Holy Mountain Shaker tends to order discoveries by saying that initial exploration of a region finds one or two points of interest, and further exploration finds one or two more. This works okay, but often means players are just committing themselves to exploring because they know it's how they advance, but without having a clear idea of what they're doing. There are points where they have more concrete choices that feel better, like choosing between wandering a temple complex and exploring the pillared thoroughfares that outly it.
In my Holy Mountain Shaker game, the party was usually just exploring-in-general, and because exploring takes two watches and therefore has two encounters, it's a lot of time spent without a concrete sense of the characters' doings. I appreciate that the module can let people just sort of meander into finding more interesting sights, because the regions are awfully large and strange, but my advice for similar works would be to create weenies, something to draw the eye for every apparent point of interest and route out of the region. After the game ended, players said that they were often confused about where points of interest were in relation to each other. This feels like it's kind of the point-- there's something appealing about wandering lost in a limestone cave complex until you find a dragon skeleton, an abandoned marvel hidden by the labyrinth. Hearing from my players that they didn't like this part makes me want to figure out a better way to convey the feeling. I'm convinced the Holy Mountain regioncrawl has a lot of creative potential, but on this point I want to work on unlocking it.
The procedures could be a little clearer, e.g. how does exploration(!!!) work? We know it takes two watches to "explore a new path or region", and that exploring a region (usually) reveals a point of interest, while more exploring reveals a second one. I found I kept going back and forth between making it take two full watches to find one point of interest or to full explore the region, essentially giving one point of interest right away and saving more for more later watches spent exploring. Especially when you’re required to rest every three watches, progress wasn't exactly slow but it did necessitate a bit of busywork that didn't usually result in interesting resource management or tension. One sentence of explanation could have gone a long way.
Each region can be categorized by how its points of interests relate to each other. Most regions have features with indistinct relationships, which makes sense for the size and complexity of the zones, but it's also common for features to be nested. For example, a region's description gives a staccato list of a lake, an island, and a temple. From context you're supposed to infer it's a temple on an island in a lake. I messed up and put the temple on the shore. You have to study the whole region carefully. Sometimes the party will emerge from a secret door into a specific point of interest, so you don't always get to warm up by going from the outside in. If you misplace a point of interest, you might leave the place it's supposed to be oddly bare-- in my example, the temple is supposed to house a potent and clearly-meaningful artifact, but in my confusion I realized the party had explored the temple already so I improvised another structure on the island where the temple was supposed to go and put the artifact there.
Speaking of this artifact, it's a great example of how the module gives this great depth of detail. On a skim, you might see the robots and fish people and bottle mummies and think this is something of a blown-up funhouse dungeon, but while its mixed-up strata of civilizations is intentional haphazard, the result of cosmically bubbling up with the god fish that sustains the dungeon, there is real purpose to everything you find. The island temple contains a secret door that leads down to an ancient meteorite with a handprint that contains a magic chime. The people who worshipped the god fish in ancient days used it to calm calamities and avert natural disasters, a perfect function for the dungeon itself, which is constantly wracked with earthquakes and avalanches. When the PCs returned to town and showed the magic chime to the priests, it felt so obvious that this was some gift of fate, a divine purpose that blessed the party's expedition. One player remarked that the temple was "obviously" a plot-essential area and mused that they must have sequence-broken the adventure a bit by getting the chime before actually learning about it. But in fact every hidden area is like this! The chime and the temple are special to the world-- they have a past and a purpose. They are not special to the game-- examples of a dozen locations that evoke wonder, provide challenge and reward, and communicate the mountain's character.
The encounter table has a very important detail. On a roll of 6 to 9 on 2d6, you encounter a region-specific monster or event. But on later rolls once that event is dealt with, you instead hint at or foreshadow undiscovered features, driving play to constantly shift. Because you roll for an encounter on every watch, this keeps things moving nicely. More often than not, your initial exploration of a region starts off by introducing its dangerous inhabitants, and later exploration yields more clues and sense of place, with the occasional threat still lurking in potential.
The d20 minor treasure table you can use to add minor trinkets and magic items is very good for punctuating the little spaces you improvise. Often the players will find some area that feels like it should have something in it, and sure enough you can always ensure it does.
Resting every third Turn feels weird. It makes sense that you'd want to take a break after four hours of clambering up rock shelfs, but in the real-world that might only have been fifteen minute ago.
Many hazards and events may delay you by like 1d6 Turns. This is weird to introduce when you're adjudicating exploration in two-hour-long increments. Surely the DM will consider ignoring a 20-minute delay when you're tracking time in 240-minute increments, right? Sometimes it's relevant, like if it draws the attention of a monster or something, but it feels weird if the PCs are frequently getting submerged in avalanches of gravel and rubble, digging each other out, and carrying on without issue more than once. This gets more awkward in the conclusion of the adventure, where the dungeon is collapsing totally. You roll on a cascading collapse track, with unique events tied to each region, and it feels really cool in aggregate. There is serious tension in whether the PCs will be able to escape, and they don't have time to rest, so every 1d8 damage from rock shrapnel threatens their odds of making it out. The problem is that I as the DM have to roll on the collapse event chart literally like 36 times in a row. The players made no decisions except to keep going during this time, and many of the table results, such as tremors kicking up dust clouds that make ranged attacks slightly harder, didn't affect their situation. They knew that if they rested or explored or did anything else but keep trying to leave, they were toast. It's a great event to play out in concept, but it would have been cool if the players were faces with interesting navigational hurdles as the dungeon collapsed rather than hearing me try to put some mustard on the fourth description of hairline fractures or momentary tripping hazards.
After the game, we mused about how the dungeon would be different if you were exploring it for simple treasure-hunting reasons, and there was no ticking clock, only discovering that there was a source to the dungeon and its hazards when they happen upon it. Certainly players would be more likely to fully explore regions, and you'd want more gold (criminally little treasure if you want to level up) and more consistent encounters with monsters. My players were surprised to learn that they had only passed through like a third of the dungeon's regions, and indeed it almost feels like the god fish, the dungeon's endpoint, was placed to be easily located relatively early.
A final consideration that stuck out to me in running the module was the difficulty of the monster encounters. If you follow the level suggestions for PCs, make sure they have a large party with appropriate magic items. At the end of the first session, my party faced a numerically superior troupe of water wights, who have almost as much HP as the average PC of their level and a potent stunning attack. The death of one PC as the rest were set to flight was dramatic, but posed an interesting problem for the rest of the adventure. One moderately bad fight at 6th level can injure the party sufficiently that it kind of "needs" to leave the dungeon and take several days off, but the ticking clock of the module doesn't allow this. Of course we're all pious OSRheads here, but if the party ever fails to avoid a fight in a mid-level OSE dungeon like this, they're likely expended for a very long time. I don't know that this is a particular fault of the module-- it's fun to see reskinned monsters that aren't often used, like the rhagodessa or the giant sturgeon-- but it's definitely a problem I'll ponder for my own future works.
I would recommend this module to anyone fond of adventures with a relentless but well-considered focus on exploration, knowing that the DM's old duties of improvisation and knowing when to ignore a step or two in a procedure will go a long way. Despite describing in detail my sense that the core procedure of Holy Mountain Shaker just isn't right yet, I and my players enjoyed ourselves, and it feels like many of the best moments were elevated by the great content of the book, not merely the joy of friends playing a game. To my knowledge, author Luka Rejec has published a few more works, but perhaps nothing that could be said to be a progression from Holy Mountain Shaker. That's something I'd really like to see. A luminary like Rejec must constantly be honing his thoughts, and I bet that if he does something else in the vein of Holy Mountain Shaker, it will be something even more special.
This ends the review. This begins the creation of a symbolism and vocabulary to chart Holy Mountain Shaker-style regions.
After the second session, I got tired of misplacing landmarks and made little diagrams for each region (see top of article). A region is a box in the diagram, with circles representing points of interest, which get squished together or put inside each other to show adjacency or nesting. I put little arrows into or out of a region to show connections to other regions, and if there's a point of interest at these connections it makes a semicircle on the border. Then I just use some dungeon map shorthand I know and like. An "S" in a wall indicates a secret route, a keyhole signifies a locked route, and so on. The chart I made up for Holy Mountain Shaker was just for practice-- you could check and see that the actual dungeon isn't laid out like that. But I don't think you necessarily want to make a big huge chart connecting all of these regions up. An advantage of the regioncrawl is that you can batch information, only dealing with one region at a time. It could be handy to have the diagram in a region's spread, perhaps even as a watermark, for quick reference.
Region Types (By arrangement of points of interest within them)
- Homogenous (no points of interest)
- Martini (exactly one point of interest which can be circumvented.)
- Meatball (two or more points, all can be circumvented)
- Bullseye (each point of interest within all previous, in the sense that you first have to go into one, then the next, and so on. The points can be circumvented by staying at the margins.)
- Checkpoint (points of interest must be entered in sequence to traverse the region.)
Additionally, we observe that most regions will have general contents outside any major points of interest. Perhaps the region is a jungle, and you want to note what happens if you climb a tree and look around, or maybe you want to say there's inhabitants that will seek out and interact with the PCs.
Some Point of Interest types
- Tower (disconnected from other points of interest, freely avoidable.)
- Hidden (no apparent sign of it, thus avoided unknowingly by default)
- Nested (full contained within another point
- Bridge (cannot be accessed except by two or more points of interest.)
- Locked (cannot be entered without special means)
- Vestibule (serves as a connection between regions. To get from one to the next you must enter the vestibule)
- Edged (other points are defined as being on an edge or outskirt of this one. You can go between them without passing through space in the general region)
In general, define a point of interest by its default state. A tower could move and sit on top of another point of interest, becoming nested. A hidden route may reveal that a vestibule is not the only way from one region to another. Define points of interest for ease of reference when you're coming to grips with a region. Don't insist on terminology if you can communicate these basic facts easily in other ways
Finally, a prompt generator for making Holy Mountain Shaker-style region. I've added a spark table pulled straight from Loch and Louis' monster generator. This machine doesn't generate weenies for you or anything, so consider using a spark from each point of interest to come up with one. I balanced the number of routes on the assumption that you might already be coming into it from another already-generated region-- generally there should be no dead-end regions and all should have 2+ connections.
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