JF1 - Salvador Deepbottom’s Green Jar of Diminution

I've decided to work on a relatively small, contained, OSR adventure (I'll be using B/X rules) with the goal of publishing it as a zine. 

Essentially, it's a magical item that shrinks adventurers and then sucks them into it. The adventure takes place in this "Jar of Diminution" which has a loose terrarium "ecology". An additional time pressure element is added by the fact that the adventurers will start growing larger over 24 hours, and thus potentially be crushed before they can make it out. 

This blog is there to track my progress. I'd like to simply share the draft on here, but I need to figure out how to best do that. For now I'll just say, it's still a bit of a mess. The first thing I did was have a look at some of the Merry Mushmen's adventures to get an idea of how to "best" lay an adventure out. I do think that they have some of the best layout (alongside the OSE books). I'm not sure that I'm totally sold on their minimalist keying approach though, so I also took a look at Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier by All Dead Generations, who's thinking I really value. I do think sometimes it's okay to write a bit more than the bare minimum in a key.

The first challenge I came up against is puzzling out the mechanisms of the Jar. The Jar does something fairly involved: it shrinks adventurers down and then somehow sucks them into it. At that point there's a good chance the Jar would be hanging in mid-air, so it also needs a way to safely float to the ground. Of course all of this could probably be covered by saying "a wizard did it", but I thought there was something interesting in having semi-plausible mechanisms for how that all happens. That way the adventurers have a bunch of stuff to play with, and I found the Dungeon's ecology/theme (as described by ADG here) emerged from that pretty nicely.

The Jar has moss with shrinking spores in it, the spores explode out when the jar is opened, the opening of the Jar triggers a teleportation mechanism, the teleportation mechanism is an undead Blink Hound eye which is forced to "blink" when the Jar is opened, a faerie servant then closes the Jar manually, magical silt worms with a power similar to feather fall prevent the Jar from crashing to the ground. It's all sort of ridiculous and convoluted, but every mechanism can be discovered in a diagetic way while playing the module. To account for the "gonzo" weirdness, I decided a Gnome tinkerer should be behind it. 

I feel like Gnome tinkerers are sort of hated in the community, and I sort of hate them myself. They're a steampunk insertion that is used to allow for non-fantasy elements in a fantasy game. But their technological achievements are always capped by an imaginary boundary which actually has more to do with what the designers want the gameworld to look like, than any in-game rationale. Really, gnome tinkerers, once let loose on a medieval fantasy world, would probably cause an insane level of technological accelerationism and "destroy" the world's aesthetic balance. But somehow in D&D they just get absorbed into its dreary neo-classical equilibrium. They really are annoying. But they're part of the game's landscape, so I thought why not make them annoying in-game, rather than conceptually? 

If a Gnome tinkerer is the dungeon architect, then I figured he'd design a lot of things in an annoying, contrived manner, and be all to pleased with his own cleverness. This would allow for an interesting dungeon environment that is sort of ridiculous in that OD&D way, without harming emersion. And that sort of ridiculous, contrived tinkering sort of mirrors how I'm thinking about this Jar that exists somewhere between real world mechanics and "a wizard did it", which I think is also where most attempts to explain stuff in AD&D2 games land without realising it. 

Look I don't know if it's a great idea, but I'm having fun with it. And having written it down now, I'm thinking I should double down on the Gnome tinkerer vibes of the Dungeon. If players roll their eyes at how contrived the traps are I think it's going in the right direction.