MDBC 29: Complete Roslof Keep Campaign (Folio 2)
After a week to wrap up Grande Temple of Jing, Megadungeon Book Club is moving on to The Complete Roslof Keep Campaign!
We're gonna break up each week into each of the 6 Folios that make up the text. This week is all of Folio 2.
Folio 2
Intro and Background
We get more background on the town around the dungeon as well as some 'tips' for DMs on running the campaign that are really just a list of expected story requirements that the campaign should be meeting at the beginning of Folio 2. It would have been pretty helpful to have some of these in Folio 1! We do get a bit of text about some of the contents of the later Folios shortly after, so I suppose lack of foreshadowing might have been brought up as feedback after Folio 1.
The content added to the town is very standard and trope-y fare as would be expected after reading Folio 1. A brothel full of gossip and rumors? A market bazaar where you can find all manner of goods? A poor section of town where there exists a Thieves' Guild of sorts? Quite daring and innovative I must say!
Dungeon Floor 2
So the intended aesthetic style comes through a bit better in the art for this floor, but the actual floor itself is much worse than floor 1. Nearly every room is a monster-closet style ambush with very little possibility of negotiation or diplomacy. The smaller and lower-leveled version on the first floor felt better with its balance of traps and ambushes, like perhaps it had potential. This is just 30-odd combat encounters in a row before you can go to the next floor. There's maybe a handful of objects to interact with that aren't explicitly hostile creatures on this floor, and even fewer if you don't count treasure objects.
Bonus Adventure: Test of the Tower
This is a "test" for magic-users that boils down to "the magic-user rolls WIS and INT repeatedly and the DM improvs the rest of the test." It's OK if the magic-user fails the rolls, because the failure consequence for many of the rooms is just combat with generic monsters. The rewards for succeeding at the text is a pile of magic items that provide numeric bonuses and nebulous access to powerful spells, both of which the party was likely to obtain anyway during their adventure.
I found the proctor character ("Molo Nine Wives") to come across as distasteful as well, the prospect of enslaving a player character as his "tenth wife" just because they chose to play a femme magic-user comes across as not something I'd ever do at my table or hear about at any of my friends' tables.
Folio 2 Conclusion
Much worse than Folio 1, and Folio 1 was already merely average and tasteless at best. I don't recommend this piece of Roslof Keep.