I played Quagmire in the 80s. I liked the sunken city and rhino hunting. The adventure gave me a love of lizard men, which I immediately wanted to play - and soon got to! As a DM a decade ago, I recognized the slog and only ran the best parts.
"Everyone said I was daft to build a spire on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up."
I’ve heard both negative and positive things about this module. I enjoy wilderness exploration-type adventures, especially ones set in swamps, and there are very few Expert adventures of this kind, so I bought it and I’m looking forward to DMing it.
I've owned this module for decades. I've played it once and DM'd it exactly twice. I ultimately found that I had to do too much doctoring and railroading to keep it interesting though so I started harvesting parts of it for use in my homebrew campaigns (all in Mystara). There are a few nice gems if you read it through.
I have not GMed Quagmire, and I admit that I just only skimmed through it. The feeling I get is that the cities themselves are very half-baked, with most of the attention of the module on the travel part. Basically, they wrote the travel part and then realized that they were running out of time and pages, and threw the rest together in a hurry. No doubt it can be mined for good ideas, but yeah, it needs more fleshing out. That being said, Journey to the Rock holds a special dislike for me, and I think I would prefer this module to that one. At least here there seems to be good ideas that can be developed further. But yeah, the escort mission should be at least ten times as many people (so 420, if not more), and the travel to the new city should be the important travel part, not the getting to Quagmire. Add some interesting NPCs and interpersonal drama and it might be very fun to play.
The fix for that module is to just run all three paths back to back to back. It doesn't save it from being a bad module but at least it gives the party more to do
@@RichardtheDungeonCrawler The concept sounds good, but the structure of it - a staircase rising into the sky - means it's the ultimate railroad. The cover art is also awful. I gather it was one of the big three 80's TSR artists, but whoever it was was rushed and didn't like the result, so gave it the default "I don't like how it turned out" fake name attribution.
You are correct. I have reviewed it it is awful. It's pretty much a walking simulator with no monsters. And worse it's by Ed greenwood. I hope you like boxed text.
@@Mr_Welchboxed text is useful for those of us who are busy with things in life other than RPGs. We don’t have time to devote to working out how to translate unboxed text into a blurb to say to players.
I think a series of 'worst ever modules' sounds like a fun idea - but, like all 'knowingly ironic humour' the joke would wear thin rather quickly. Then you'd be left with just some bad modules.
I remember reading a blog post about this module which claimed there was a lot of Executive Meddling with it. Sounds as if there was a germ of a good idea here, but it got ruined in the edit. And of course it all got ret-conned a few years later by the Princess Ark!
DMing in the 80s I picked this one up. After reading thru, I determined never ever to run it. So boring. Lost City, Castle Amber, Horror on the Hill, Ravenloft, now those were adventures.
Agreed. I own this, read through it back in the day and never played it. Zero loot and a lot of boring encounters. Replayed Castle Amber or Drums on Fire Mountain instead.
So Mr. Welch just reviewed this module, and I commented there with some additional thoughts, that I thought to cross-post here, too: Skimming the adventure again, there is a point in it where the PCs might end up slaughtering the people that they are supposed to rescue. Simply because the residents are paranoid idiots. I would definitely change that encounter so that the PCs don't have to disarm themselves (something that in my experience the players are very loathe to do in an adventure setting), but can instead show the message / bring out the rescued messenger and avoid that fight. The Adventure Hook is a bit weak, to be honest, a trading city with no ships to evacuate their population? It would be better if they were isolationist, even a bit xenophobic, which would explain why they are now in dire straits, with hostile neighbors. I would likely remove the disease, too, since in my experience that tends to make the players leery: "Travel to a plague-ridden city? Great, where do I sign up, said no one ever!" Also, I think the map of the handout doesn't pinpoint the location of the city, which feels like an oversight, even if the city itself is supposed to be a famous trade city (which I would change, as I said earlier). One problem with making the population larger is that it becomes harder for the PCs to bring enough food for it to matter. One way to get around that is to claim that due to the deaths that have happened, the food stores are enough to tide the remaining population over for longer. It is also easy enough to scale the 'city' up by a factor of three (feet to yards): this increases the area by a factor of 9, so the area per person is almost the same, and makes the place feel more grand. Some of the floors could be subdivided into two (or even three) levels, giving 'apartments' for these people rather than putting all 300 women and children into the same room, which would actually increase the available space even more. It would be easy enough to have a 'mall', with the housing on the outer rim around a wide, tall plaza, illuminated either by magic or by tall, narrow windows between the apartments. And while the three cities are identical, I am not too bothered by that. It can even an interesting experience, when the dungeon-delvers know exactly what the floorplan is going to be like. And it would be easy enough to make small changes, adding a secret door here and there, etc. In short, I stand by my original assessment: The module as it is feels half-done. There is some good material here that will act as writing prompts to flesh it out more and make it more interesting. Mr. Welch made also a very pertinent comment that the module doesn't include rules for underwater exploration nor combat, despite half of the target city being submerged and all of one of the three is fully submerged.
Actually, it just occurred to me that the scale in the shell city maps is way too small: 5 feet per square. This means that the 'family rooms' are 5 feet by 10 feet, 50 sqft, for the whole family. There are 12 such family rooms at the moment, for 42 people. That's quite tight packing, even by medieval standards. The rented quarters are even worse, you could barely fit a 6' long bed in those closets. Making the scale the good old 10' per square would help to alleviate many of those problems as it is, although as I said, if the population will be increased by ten-fold, this might not be enough. However, if the height is scaled up by two as well, in that case you have 24 such rooms and probably can change one of the rented floors into family rooms, too. Thus, 36 rooms, and we can even repurpose more of them. Finally, in my currently still hypothetical rewrite, we can push the walls out significantly more (like half a mile radius or something like that), and claim that land as farmsteads before the flooding. Then we can turn the remaining public areas in the spire into refugee camp style of temporary shelters, hammering in the fact that the Spiral city was not intended to house all of them. Indeed, I would be tempted to turn the "Spiral City" itself into more of a palace, which has now been converted into a refuge for the population fleeing their flooded homes. I probably still would increase the scale by two in all three dimensions, just to make space for that larger population, but change those many 'apartments' into more hall-like structures, which have been repurposed as barracks. Speaking of barracks, I would add at least a handful of actual warriors, too. Even if some of them have been sent out as messengers, there ought to still be a handful in here, helping to protect the civilians and the King. Also, move that treasury up to the King.
I just watched Mr. Welch’s review. I really didn’t think about how small the floor plans were for the cities. I think you are right that the shell cities would make a better palace. You should work on a rewrite. I would like to see the adventure fixed up!
@@RichardtheDungeonCrawler I didn't think about it either before I started thinking about the scaling and checking how much space it had for people, only to find out how cramped it was! The King's apartment is palatial compared to the commoners, but still very awkwardly shaped. I'd be tempted to move him at least one floor down and make 10th floor more of a treasury. Fixing the whole adventure might be a bit beyond my current capabilities (and time), although I am seriously tempted to give it a try! Maybe start a thread on the Piazza to compile some of my above ideas and then slowly work on them some more. I am already doing it for B10 (which was a very good module to start with, probably the best one I have seen), fixing some minor issues that I thought were wrong there. Are you active on that Forum, if you don't mind me asking?
Modules should be good by themselves. You pay the designer for ideas you couldn't think by yourself and guidelines to make it fun. I can fill blank spaces in a map, and run generic monsters that fight until kill by myself. Most BECMI adventures understood this and went hard on page optimization, factions, new monsters, and maps. So, no "Any good DM can make it work" doesn't work here.
It was kind of meh.... Today I can appreciate the potential but it would need a lot of work to make it more engaging. That means expanding the cities and the population, creating interesting NPCs. Maybe come up with an infamous pirate ship in the area. But back in the 80s I mostly played adventures as written. And there is not too much to gain there that way.
This is one of the few BECMI modules I never owned, ran, or played. Too bad I don't have a copy, it looks like it would be fun. The three cities being essentially the same map are no big deal in my mind. It's not like the players are going to be making detailed maps or notes on each location.
Quagmire is the worst module lol, for years my friends would say Quest for the Heartstone was the worst, but that's only cause of it's very railroady nature, I actually love that adventure.... but yeah Quagmire is the worst i think.
I'm unfamiliar with this one in particular, but I am very familiar with the absurd logistic elements in a lot of BECMI and AD&D modules... How were like 42 people holding out against 600 lizardmen? That's wild to me🤣 It sounds like one writer wanted to make a sandbox and somebody over their head said: "no it needs a linear plot, and the deadline is 3 days from yesterday btw"
I had planned to run this, but the other dm decided to jump settings as he couldn't keep what little of his campaign straight because of his critical role obsession. Shame really his original campaign was miles better, but he genuinely was incapable of running even the one shots his campaign had devolved into.
I don't like tropical adventures because everyone should just die of malaria or yellow fever. Plate & padded armor is too hot and heavy for the tropics, but who cares about dehydration, right? I was totally unfamiliar with X6 before watching our review, but you made it sound like a gem in the rough. You compared it to some real classic pioneering adventure modules. I think it is now more recognized this stuff is really hard to write and needs review, play-testing, and editing.
I loved this module, one of the first i ever bought. Sorry it didn’t work for you :-(
No I am sorry. I tried not to bash it and I talked about things I liked about it.
I played Quagmire in the 80s. I liked the sunken city and rhino hunting. The adventure gave me a love of lizard men, which I immediately wanted to play - and soon got to! As a DM a decade ago, I recognized the slog and only ran the best parts.
Quagmire is one of my favourites! The Sunken City, Lizardmen. My players enjoyed this one!
Building a giant spire in a swamp feels like a bad idea no matter what else is going on.
"Everyone said I was daft to build a spire on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up."
If the spire is built on pilings that go down to bedrock it wouldn't be an issue.
@@singledad1313 Now I'm wondering how many wizards that took and how much they charged.
I’ve heard both negative and positive things about this module.
I enjoy wilderness exploration-type adventures, especially ones set in swamps, and there are very few Expert adventures of this kind, so I bought it and I’m looking forward to DMing it.
Have you ran X-9 Savage Coast? It is another wilderness adventure. I prefer it to quagmire.
I've owned this module for decades. I've played it once and DM'd it exactly twice. I ultimately found that I had to do too much doctoring and railroading to keep it interesting though so I started harvesting parts of it for use in my homebrew campaigns (all in Mystara). There are a few nice gems if you read it through.
I have not GMed Quagmire, and I admit that I just only skimmed through it. The feeling I get is that the cities themselves are very half-baked, with most of the attention of the module on the travel part. Basically, they wrote the travel part and then realized that they were running out of time and pages, and threw the rest together in a hurry. No doubt it can be mined for good ideas, but yeah, it needs more fleshing out.
That being said, Journey to the Rock holds a special dislike for me, and I think I would prefer this module to that one. At least here there seems to be good ideas that can be developed further.
But yeah, the escort mission should be at least ten times as many people (so 420, if not more), and the travel to the new city should be the important travel part, not the getting to Quagmire. Add some interesting NPCs and interpersonal drama and it might be very fun to play.
The fix for that module is to just run all three paths back to back to back. It doesn't save it from being a bad module but at least it gives the party more to do
@@Mr_Welch Agreed. It still leaves the Rock itself very underwhelming.
I never went into modules, but I've heard that CM8, The Endless Stair, was the worst!
I never heard of this module. But I want to check it out now!
@@RichardtheDungeonCrawler The concept sounds good, but the structure of it - a staircase rising into the sky - means it's the ultimate railroad. The cover art is also awful. I gather it was one of the big three 80's TSR artists, but whoever it was was rushed and didn't like the result, so gave it the default "I don't like how it turned out" fake name attribution.
You are correct. I have reviewed it it is awful. It's pretty much a walking simulator with no monsters. And worse it's by Ed greenwood. I hope you like boxed text.
@Mr_Welch OK. I watched your video and it sounds horrible. Back then I had to save up to by modules. I'm so glad I skipped this one.
@@Mr_Welchboxed text is useful for those of us who are busy with things in life other than RPGs. We don’t have time to devote to working out how to translate unboxed text into a blurb to say to players.
I think a series of 'worst ever modules' sounds like a fun idea - but, like all 'knowingly ironic humour' the joke would wear thin rather quickly. Then you'd be left with just some bad modules.
1 gp to cross a river may be affordable to adventurers, maybe, but comparing it to average prices for lodging and food, it does seem very overpriced.
Your right. But I admire the hustle!
It needed work but Quagmire was ok. Journey to the Rock and The Endless Stair were simply awful as I recall.
I remember reading a blog post about this module which claimed there was a lot of Executive Meddling with it. Sounds as if there was a germ of a good idea here, but it got ruined in the edit. And of course it all got ret-conned a few years later by the Princess Ark!
DMing in the 80s I picked this one up. After reading thru, I determined never ever to run it. So boring. Lost City, Castle Amber, Horror on the Hill, Ravenloft, now those were adventures.
Those are some great adventures. Lost city is my all time favorite.
Agreed. I own this, read through it back in the day and never played it. Zero loot and a lot of boring encounters. Replayed Castle Amber or Drums on Fire Mountain instead.
Castle Amber was a classic. I played drums of fire mountain but I don't really remember too much of it. I'll check it out again.
So Mr. Welch just reviewed this module, and I commented there with some additional thoughts, that I thought to cross-post here, too:
Skimming the adventure again, there is a point in it where the PCs might end up slaughtering the people that they are supposed to rescue. Simply because the residents are paranoid idiots. I would definitely change that encounter so that the PCs don't have to disarm themselves (something that in my experience the players are very loathe to do in an adventure setting), but can instead show the message / bring out the rescued messenger and avoid that fight.
The Adventure Hook is a bit weak, to be honest, a trading city with no ships to evacuate their population? It would be better if they were isolationist, even a bit xenophobic, which would explain why they are now in dire straits, with hostile neighbors. I would likely remove the disease, too, since in my experience that tends to make the players leery: "Travel to a plague-ridden city? Great, where do I sign up, said no one ever!" Also, I think the map of the handout doesn't pinpoint the location of the city, which feels like an oversight, even if the city itself is supposed to be a famous trade city (which I would change, as I said earlier).
One problem with making the population larger is that it becomes harder for the PCs to bring enough food for it to matter. One way to get around that is to claim that due to the deaths that have happened, the food stores are enough to tide the remaining population over for longer. It is also easy enough to scale the 'city' up by a factor of three (feet to yards): this increases the area by a factor of 9, so the area per person is almost the same, and makes the place feel more grand. Some of the floors could be subdivided into two (or even three) levels, giving 'apartments' for these people rather than putting all 300 women and children into the same room, which would actually increase the available space even more. It would be easy enough to have a 'mall', with the housing on the outer rim around a wide, tall plaza, illuminated either by magic or by tall, narrow windows between the apartments. And while the three cities are identical, I am not too bothered by that. It can even an interesting experience, when the dungeon-delvers know exactly what the floorplan is going to be like. And it would be easy enough to make small changes, adding a secret door here and there, etc.
In short, I stand by my original assessment:
The module as it is feels half-done. There is some good material here that will act as writing prompts to flesh it out more and make it more interesting.
Mr. Welch made also a very pertinent comment that the module doesn't include rules for underwater exploration nor combat, despite half of the target city being submerged and all of one of the three is fully submerged.
Actually, it just occurred to me that the scale in the shell city maps is way too small:
5 feet per square. This means that the 'family rooms' are 5 feet by 10 feet, 50 sqft, for the whole family. There are 12 such family rooms at the moment, for 42 people. That's quite tight packing, even by medieval standards. The rented quarters are even worse, you could barely fit a 6' long bed in those closets.
Making the scale the good old 10' per square would help to alleviate many of those problems as it is, although as I said, if the population will be increased by ten-fold, this might not be enough. However, if the height is scaled up by two as well, in that case you have 24 such rooms and probably can change one of the rented floors into family rooms, too. Thus, 36 rooms, and we can even repurpose more of them.
Finally, in my currently still hypothetical rewrite, we can push the walls out significantly more (like half a mile radius or something like that), and claim that land as farmsteads before the flooding. Then we can turn the remaining public areas in the spire into refugee camp style of temporary shelters, hammering in the fact that the Spiral city was not intended to house all of them. Indeed, I would be tempted to turn the "Spiral City" itself into more of a palace, which has now been converted into a refuge for the population fleeing their flooded homes. I probably still would increase the scale by two in all three dimensions, just to make space for that larger population, but change those many 'apartments' into more hall-like structures, which have been repurposed as barracks.
Speaking of barracks, I would add at least a handful of actual warriors, too. Even if some of them have been sent out as messengers, there ought to still be a handful in here, helping to protect the civilians and the King.
Also, move that treasury up to the King.
I just watched Mr. Welch’s review. I really didn’t think about how small the floor plans were for the cities. I think you are right that the shell cities would make a better palace. You should work on a rewrite. I would like to see the adventure fixed up!
@@RichardtheDungeonCrawler I didn't think about it either before I started thinking about the scaling and checking how much space it had for people, only to find out how cramped it was! The King's apartment is palatial compared to the commoners, but still very awkwardly shaped. I'd be tempted to move him at least one floor down and make 10th floor more of a treasury.
Fixing the whole adventure might be a bit beyond my current capabilities (and time), although I am seriously tempted to give it a try! Maybe start a thread on the Piazza to compile some of my above ideas and then slowly work on them some more. I am already doing it for B10 (which was a very good module to start with, probably the best one I have seen), fixing some minor issues that I thought were wrong there. Are you active on that Forum, if you don't mind me asking?
Modules should be good by themselves. You pay the designer for ideas you couldn't think by yourself and guidelines to make it fun. I can fill blank spaces in a map, and run generic monsters that fight until kill by myself. Most BECMI adventures understood this and went hard on page optimization, factions, new monsters, and maps.
So, no "Any good DM can make it work" doesn't work here.
It was kind of meh.... Today I can appreciate the potential but it would need a lot of work to make it more engaging. That means expanding the cities and the population, creating interesting NPCs. Maybe come up with an infamous pirate ship in the area. But back in the 80s I mostly played adventures as written. And there is not too much to gain there that way.
I totally agree with you. I like the infamous pirate idea.
Giggedy
Had to scroll to long for that!
This is one of the few BECMI modules I never owned, ran, or played. Too bad I don't have a copy, it looks like it would be fun. The three cities being essentially the same map are no big deal in my mind. It's not like the players are going to be making detailed maps or notes on each location.
Quagmire is the worst module lol, for years my friends would say Quest for the Heartstone was the worst, but that's only cause of it's very railroady nature, I actually love that adventure.... but yeah Quagmire is the worst i think.
I was disappointed in Quest of the Heartstone. Did you have those figures. I wanted war Duke so bad.
@@RichardtheDungeonCrawler No I didn't have the figures, but my DM has them so I get to check them out haha
Sounds cool but poorly executed. Just from what you reviewed I could make a fun adventure out of it. Maybe 10 sessions, levels 3-6
Ya. It's just low effort rather than really bad. But I bet you can fix it up!
Forest oracle was worse
@Arnsteel634 I never played this one. But I saw ye old geeks video and it sounds really bad.
"My name is Richard - and I'm the Dungeon Crawler" - or "I'm Richard, the Dungeon Crawler."
I'm unfamiliar with this one in particular, but I am very familiar with the absurd logistic elements in a lot of BECMI and AD&D modules... How were like 42 people holding out against 600 lizardmen? That's wild to me🤣 It sounds like one writer wanted to make a sandbox and somebody over their head said: "no it needs a linear plot, and the deadline is 3 days from yesterday btw"
Great comment. I would definitely like to know the story on how this module was created.
I had planned to run this, but the other dm decided to jump settings as he couldn't keep what little of his campaign straight because of his critical role obsession.
Shame really his original campaign was miles better, but he genuinely was incapable of running even the one shots his campaign had devolved into.
I don't like tropical adventures because everyone should just die of malaria or yellow fever. Plate & padded armor is too hot and heavy for the tropics, but who cares about dehydration, right?
I was totally unfamiliar with X6 before watching our review, but you made it sound like a gem in the rough. You compared it to some real classic pioneering adventure modules. I think it is now more recognized this stuff is really hard to write and needs review, play-testing, and editing.
Great comment! I totally agree with you.
@@RichardtheDungeonCrawler 🙂