Doom Desert in the Decanter of Delirium
A downloadable Adventure Module
The Doom Desert in the Decanter of Delirium is an exotic OSR romp through a mysterious world of riddles, puzzles, inscrutable denizens. 5e compatible, this love letter to psychedelia is as vivid and beautiful as exciting and surreal. Designed for four to six characters of level 2 this adventure can be completed in four to six hours.
Get wrapped up in conversation with the dead drunks at the last saloon on earth, solve the sphinx riddle and discover the secrets of the Ziggurat, or break bread and wine with whispering harpies or the sun itself.
This compelling narrative is written by Austin Holm and captures the exploration, social, and challenge pillars of a great game with the deft prose of a poet. With art by Maya Bee that captures the essence of the adventures many stunning scenes and characters.
Your players will thank you for this one.
Music Playlist Inspiration
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Development log
- Added links and Bookmarks to Zine Version.Aug 30, 2023
- Zine Revision 2Aug 19, 2023
- Print Version & Pico-8 Adventure Game?Jan 12, 2022
Comments
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I ran this module the other day; it went very well! The players were scared of the city of silence so they never entered, and after bumping into the band convinced them to go check it out (for it's amazing acoustics on the outskirts!).
They hadn't even encountered the harpies, so when they went back to check in on the band they were horrified to find the harpies ripping them apart. It was golden.
I was afraid it might go on for a long time with all of the combat, but my group is pretty good at not pissing people off so they only ended up doing one combat (freeing Malydra unknowingly) even though they visited almost all locations. It would have been two with the big climax, but to keep it from spilling into another session I skipped that one.
It was great though, the players wanted to kick Karazar's ass the entire time, and made a lot of friends complaining about him. Fun for me, fun for them!
The only thing that was a bit hard during planning was figuring out how to handle skipping the players ahead to Karazar's place. It felt like it would be a bit weird to montage the investigation. Luckily my group decided to give gold to an addict and followed him directly to Karazar, so I got out of dealing with that haha.
Another thing that was a bit of a bummer is that a player ended up grabbing Karazar's poetry book, which is hilarious but also she seemed bummed. They're heading to a city full of posers soon so I'm going to let her sell it to some hipster that hates mainstream poetry. If I did it again I'd probably swap that out with something valuable. I liked the varying qualities of loot, just not the valueless one.
Everything inside the bottle though was golden, very very good.
Wow, thank you for the kind words!
Hey there, are you able to provide a link to Maya Beaenbeu's work? I'd love to see more of it but haven't had any luck when I google her name.
https://www.instagram.com/feraltuft/ is her instagram. I need to go through and do a correction on this, her name is: Maya Babeanu.
Thank you so much :)
This adventure is absolutely crazy - honestly one of the coolest modules I have ever had the fortune of reading! The characters are colourful and lively, the puzzles are clever and engaging, and the fighting encounters are playful and exciting. What's more, the world in which it's all set (a bottle universe, so to speak) is just so rich and full, it makes it super easy to immerse yourself in the story - and frankly, very hard to put this module down.
Reading this over, I can already tell I'm going to get my money's worth - it's huge! There's no way in hell my friends are gonna find everything the first time around. This is obviously either a multi-night adventure, and/or I'm definitely keeping some of these tables for later use. No spoilers but... No way I'm going to let my players accidentally miss meeting Django! ;)