Retro Review of X6 Quagmire! By Merle M. Rasmussen For Expert Dungeons and Dragons & Your Old School Campaigns

 Swamp creatures! They surround you now as you move slowly through the gurgling muck. How will you reach Quagmire now? Each day, the hungry sea swallows more of the ancient port city. A fierce fever ravages its people, and now - these foul monsters! Their beady eyes glimmer from deep within the tangled vines.

Are these the creatures that have blockaded the city, turning away the ships that are the city's lifeline? Are these the scum that are starving the people of Quagmire, threatening an entire race with extinction? These creeps? Let's clean this jungle out!


You Can Grab It Here

 Lately with the retro reviews I've been indulging quite a few of my friends and I decided to return to one of my favorite mid level Dungeons and Dragons Expert modules. X6: "Quagmire!" (1984), by Merle M. Rasmussen is a pulpy and dark roving look into the heart of a sinking bug infested hell hole of a swamp that features some very in depth exploration of some of the lowest recesses of Mystara. "The characters must travel through a monster-infested swamp to get to the city, which is being slowly swallowed into the sea.^[2] Quagmire is a whelk-shaped "spiral city", built by a dead race in the Serpent Peninsula", yeah at least that's the break down according to Wiki.  What X6 actually does in solid terms is to create a very dangerous and deadly intense wilderness crawl with a viable ecosystem, rules on disease, complete environment crawl through on every level. That's exactly what X6 does in spades. This is a damn fine module to use and download.


The real secret to X6 Quagmire! is the fact that half of the adventure is taken up by wilderness crawling and the second half is the shell city. The adventure also includes new magic items and a special, expanded monsters section many of which are available in a wide variety of retroclone systems including Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea. I've used X6 Quagmire to introduce the Picts from AS&SH more then a few times now using Robert Howard's Serpent Men and Lovecraft's Lizard men using geological and ecological slow wars against one another. Quagmire presents a perfect city to introduce shadow half serpent men into the mix as NPC allies and antagonists. Realms of Crawling Chaos from Goblinoid Games works quite well to back this sort of an adventure up with both Lovecraftian PC races and optional antagonists. Deep One Hybrid fighters and thieves can help with many of the incredibly intensive underwater encounters and monsters.


As I said the Shell city was the real center piece of this adventure and is a perfect place to encounter some of the incredibly dangerous and horrid aspects of the serpent men of Lovecraft and Robert Howard. A recent piece of OSR material that can help with to flesh out the development of the serpent men's religion to some of Quagmire!'s NPC's is Obscene Serpent Religion From  Neoplastic Press

The reason for all of this dungeon master slight of hand is so that the Spiral City can be fleshed out with a solid Lovecraftian background to fit straight right into a sword and sorcery setting with little issue. It also helps to solidify the other worldly quality of X6 which is present in my opinion throughout the module.There are several real world swamplands that can easily take the place of the X6 environs, these would be perfect stands in for using Quagmire with either Dark Albion or Lamentations of the Flame Princess in the 1500 or 1600's. Another possibility is to send the characters into another epoch entirely of Earth during one of Lovecraft's many world cycles with the mechanism to return them to the campaign present in the spiral city. Many of the monsters, treasures, and game elements are very dark and dangerous perfect suited into Lamentations style games!

Because of the very nature of X6 a dungeon master could expand it into a complete mini campaign and really expand it as they want. This DYI aspect of many of the early modules was an excellent selling point for me. Look at the material here; "The wilderness of "Quagmire!" includes a pair of large hex maps; 17 location-keyed encounters; an additional 25 encounters that can be placed as desired upon appropriate terrain; multiple wandering monster tables; and even some notes on weather. All told, the wilderness takes up somewhere more than half of the adventure, a fact that's unusual even for Expert-level adventures."  That's what makes this an excellent piece of OSR fodder now. The adventure material isn't all that well known today and just about anything can be placed within the bounds of Quagmire!

Two More Freebie Adventures & How To Create A Mini Sword & Sorcery Swamp OSR Campaign To Go!

"The Frog Idol has stood in the Black Mire for ages untold – an idol of an ancient and forgotten god who now only manifests through this ancient rock in a forgotten place. However, with the conquest of the dwarven citadel of Kuln by the giants, adventurers have been seen again in the city of Coruvon. And from Coruvon, the Black Mire is always in sight. This adventure is designed as a site-based adventure setting for a party of characters of levels 3-6 set in the Black Mire west of the city of Coruvon."




So I'm just catching up with the cancellation of GaryCon because of the pandemic & the fall out from the table top convention season. Sorry for all my friends who have had their plans changed & I hope that you stay healthy. Last night after I got home at five A.M. from gaming & what not I was poking around Dyson Logos site. I came across one of his older adventures done for the Fat Frog Challenge called “Challenge of the Frog Idol”, 'it is a 21-page digest-format PDF which is bit of a hex crawl with some railroad options built in (it comes equipped with a quest, but feel free to ignore it)'. We're gonna do a bit more then that today & that's because I was looking at Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea last night. 
“Challenge of the Frog Idol” makes an excellent addition to 'The Black Moss Hag of Lug' starting adventure in the AS&SH rule book especially as the town of Swampgate makes a beautiful adventure addendum to city of Coruvon. The Black Mire  featured in the “Challenge of the Frog Idol” fits the AS&SH narrative of  the 'Green Death'.  Because this is a Labyrinth Lord adventure it slots easily into the AS&SH system. The source of the Ironflow river could in fact be the source of swamps of Swampgate. Further dungeons could be placed within this area with little issue.



With a bit of campaign juggling on the dungeon master's part this whole adventure pattern could be used to tie the Iron Flow river into the villages of the NPC's that appear in Ben Ball's AS&SH adventure Beneath the Comet! 
Beneath the comet is on sale right on Drivethrurpg.



I always loved the Peter Mullen cover on Beneath the Comet.

Now if the events of Beneath the Comet conclude & the adventurers want to get sucked into the area around 'Swamp Gate' Dyson's The Tomb of Durahn Oakenshield. This adventure has all of the hallmarks to keep this swamp filled Viking style adventure Hellromp going. 

If the dungeon master wanted to keep up the theme of fetid swamp filled old school adventure then  Merle M. Rasmussen's X6 Quagmire fills the bill nicely for the areas around Swampgate to be filled in with lots of adventure locations. This even includes a race of lost men ala another group of Hyperboreans deep in the peat filled hellscape of  AS&SH.



So to recap for this adventure path it would be: 

1. 'The Black Moss Hag of Lug' from the AS&SH rule book 
2.  Dyson's The Tomb of Durahn Oakenshield
3. “Challenge of the Frog Idol”
4. Ben Ball's AS&SH adventure Beneath the Comet! 
5.  Merle M. Rasmussen's X6 Quagmire 

This adventure path should with little issue take the PCs from level one through ten. Anything beyond that is up to the DM. But this fetid mini campaign should last a couple of months at least or longer! 

Review & Commentary On The Free OSR Resource DFF33 Stele of the Silver Thane By Greg Daley For AD&D 1st Edition or Your Old School Campaigns

Violence and adventure await your PC's in the marsh lands as your part ventures into the world of Stele of the Silver Thane By Greg Daley

An ambitious sorcerer schemes to hold sway over a fragmented eastern marchlands. An adventure for 1st or 2nd level characters.

Alright I just ran across  DFF33 Stele of the Silver Thane By Greg Daley over on Dragon's Foot, I had a feeling that new AD&D first edition module was out but the nice part about this module is that its geared for a first level party of adventurers in a marshland setting.
GRAB IT RIGHT HERE

The nice part of this module is that its been put together for first level characters with a scheming sorcerer and his amitions are grand. The PC's are going to find themselves in way over their heads and this module features a bit of everything some wilderness, a bit of dungeon crawling, and lots of opportunity to plug this module right within their own campaign worlds. Reading through this adventure I was reminded of my review of Quagmire!
There's plenty of opportunity to plug in and DYI Stele of the Silver Thane into your own campaigns, it contains everything you need to run it including random encounter tables, background, and more all in fifty six pages of old school goodness. The nice thing is the ecology and Gygaxian ideas are peppered throughout and the marshlands are pretty nicely fleshed out enabling a drop and go to be done into the back end of your own old school campaigns.


Stele of the Silver Thane By Greg Daley creates a sustainable atmosphere for adventuring in and can be added to or subtracted from with adventure elements as needed even though there is a viable plot structure and ideas within the adventure's bounds. This is an adventure with clear cut goals and solid backing for its monsters. This gives the DM all of the reasons he needs to expand on the ideas presented within Stele of the Silver Thane. This is part of the reason why I can actually see using Stele of the Silver Thane as a part of an Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea module where the adventure elements help to set up and expand upon vile villains motives. Parts of this adventure reminded me of Robert Howard's Cthulhu Mythos cycle of stories and that alone made me want to adapt it for a retroclone style system. 



The artwork and maps are nicely done and can be used to flesh out some of the sword and sorcery aspects that give the DM quite a bit of latitude to work with. There are several swamplands within Russia and Romania that could be used if the DM wants to adapt this module for a Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure or as a part of a Dark Albion campaign. There's more then enough to keep things very interesting and I personally think that this is a well worth downloading adventure for old school gaming.

1d6 Additional Sinister Swamp Encounters Table For X6 Quagmire! Adventure For Expert D&D and AD&D 1st Edition Campaigns

Recently I reviewed X6 Quagmire and someone I know wanted some deep swamp land encounters from the Serpent Peninsula for their AD&D 1st edition game. These are made to create the Lovecraftian veneer of the campaign adventure notes from the other day. 
Note that the level of these encounters reflects the 4-10 rating of the adventure.



 
1d6 Additional Sinister Swamp Encounters Table

1. 1d6 Aquatic swamp ghouls hunting among the shoals and swamp trees; the swamp water perfectly camouflages this hunting pack of undead fiends who prowls along the bottom edges of the water ready to pull down prey and drown them. They attack in pairs of two sometimes waiting for prey to have a moment alone. 
2. A mated pair of bone snappers who are searching for suitable prey for their young in a nearby nest. They use pack tactics and flanking to get the drop on their prey. They work quickly and viciously to break limbs and finish off resistance as quickly as possible . 
3. Three hunting canoes belonging to a war party of pig faced swamp orcs searching for easy prey for their nearby village. They are armed with short bows, poisoned darts, blow guns, and wooden shields in addition to iron wood short swords. There are 1d4 of the mad bastards hopped up on war fungus drugs. 
4. 1d6 giant swamp leeches moving through the water attracted by the movement from a nearby hollow lair. These horrors are twice the normal hit points and very hungry. 
5. Swamp underwater trolls with a nearby lair filled with the remains of three travelers and a small cache of 3000 gold coins worth of gems. They are vicious and very violent monsters who have a fresh hunger for travelers. 
6. Swamp dwelling Eye of The Deep, who is served by three Deep One henchmen armed with poison darts and blow guns. They take sacrifices for their master who in turn worships and serves Cthulhu in the form of a black idol in the middle of a far off corner of the swamp land. There is 30,000 gold piece sacrifice pile of loot that has poisonous swamp serpents that dwell on it.
   
   

Retro Review of X6 Quagmire! By Merle M. Rasmussen For Expert Dungeons and Dragons & Your Old School Campaigns

Swamp creatures! They surround you now as you move slowly through the gurgling muck. How will you reach Quagmire now? Each day, the hungry sea swallows more of the ancient port city. A fierce fever ravages its people, and now - these foul monsters! Their beady eyes glimmer from deep within the tangled vines.

Are these the creatures that have blockaded the city, turning away the ships that are the city's lifeline? Are these the scum that are starving the people of Quagmire, threatening an entire race with extinction? These creeps? Let's clean this jungle out!


You Can Grab It Here

 Lately with the retro reviews I've been indulging quite a few of my friends and I decided to return to one of my favorite mid level Dungeons and Dragons Expert modules. X6: "Quagmire!" (1984), by Merle M. Rasmussen is a pulpy and dark roving look into the heart of a sinking bug infested hell hole of a swamp that features some very in depth exploration of some of the lowest recesses of Mystara. "The characters must travel through a monster-infested swamp to get to the city, which is being slowly swallowed into the sea.^[2] Quagmire is a whelk-shaped "spiral city", built by a dead race in the Serpent Peninsula", yeah at least that's the break down according to Wiki.  What X6 actually does in solid terms is to create a very dangerous and deadly intense wilderness crawl with a viable ecosystem, rules on disease, complete environment crawl through on every level. That's exactly what X6 does in spades. This is a damn fine module to use and download.


The real secret to X6 Quagmire! is the fact that half of the adventure is taken up by wilderness crawling and the second half is the shell city. The adventure also includes new magic items and a special, expanded monsters section many of which are available in a wide variety of retroclone systems including Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea. I've used X6 Quagmire to introduce the Picts from AS&SH more then a few times now using Robert Howard's Serpent Men and Lovecraft's Lizard men using geological and ecological slow wars against one another. Quagmire presents a perfect city to introduce shadow half serpent men into the mix as NPC allies and antagonists. Realms of Crawling Chaos from Goblinoid Games works quite well to back this sort of an adventure up with both Lovecraftian PC races and optional antagonists. Deep One Hybrid fighters and thieves can help with many of the incredibly intensive underwater encounters and monsters.


As I said the Shell city was the real center piece of this adventure and is a perfect place to encounter some of the incredibly dangerous and horrid aspects of the serpent men of Lovecraft and Robert Howard. A recent piece of OSR material that can help with to flesh out the development of the serpent men's religion to some of Quagmire!'s NPC's is Obscene Serpent Religion From  Neoplastic Press

The reason for all of this dungeon master slight of hand is so that the Spiral City can be fleshed out with a solid Lovecraftian background to fit straight right into a sword and sorcery setting with little issue. It also helps to solidify the other worldly quality of X6 which is present in my opinion throughout the module.There are several real world swamplands that can easily take the place of the X6 environs, these would be perfect stands in for using Quagmire with either Dark Albion or Lamentations of the Flame Princess in the 1500 or 1600's. Another possibility is to send the characters into another epoch entirely of Earth during one of Lovecraft's many world cycles with the mechanism to return them to the campaign present in the spiral city. Many of the monsters, treasures, and game elements are very dark and dangerous perfect suited into Lamentations style games!

Because of the very nature of X6 a dungeon master could expand it into a complete mini campaign and really expand it as they want. This DYI aspect of many of the early modules was an excellent selling point for me. Look at the material here; "The wilderness of "Quagmire!" includes a pair of large hex maps; 17 location-keyed encounters; an additional 25 encounters that can be placed as desired upon appropriate terrain; multiple wandering monster tables; and even some notes on weather. All told, the wilderness takes up somewhere more than half of the adventure, a fact that's unusual even for Expert-level adventures."  That's what makes this an excellent piece of OSR fodder now. The adventure material isn't all that well known today and just about anything can be placed within the bounds of Quagmire!