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Bluffside Ruins Series: Mogrith’s Lair is a d20 pdf adventure from The Explorers Guild.
Bluffside Ruins Series: Mogrith’s Lair presents a ready to use dungeon for 3rd to 6th level characters. It is a 32-page product, with the 2 pages covering the open gaming license while another 3 contain the maps.
From the product: “Have an adventure but need a dungeon? Have a campaign going, but nothing to do this Wednesday night? Looking for something to pass the time while you flesh out a city? This supplement and all others in this series are for you. Designed to work in any fantasy setting without breaking your bank account, it's the Bluffside Ruins Series from The Explorers' Guild. This supplement can be run as the culmination of an adventure, a random site, or just an old-fashioned dungeon crawl.
In Mogrith's Lair, a ruined tower and dungeon is populated by creatures led by a minotaur. This band has been attacking caravans and travelers on the roads that run between Bluffside and the cities of Perten and Kirkwood.
Bluffside Ruins Series: Mogrith's Lair is 32 pages with cover. The CC2 Pro maps are included with the pdf and can be viewed and printed with either CC2 Pro or the free viewer/printer from ProFantasy.
You will also receive a link to a bonus mini-adventure called The Myist Mausoleum.
Keep an eye out for the Fantasy Grounds version of Mogrith's Lair.”
The product does not lie about what it is or what it aims to accomplish. It is a fast dungeon with a minimal backstory that ties to Bluffside, aiming to facilitate the DM with a side-trek or provide a point for the DM to insert elements from his own campaign. Set in the region of Bluffside, the adventure appears to be easily adaptable to other worlds and campaigns.
Having no major plot the adventure is presented through the presentation of the rooms of the dungeon, as they are to be encountered by the characters. The statistics for all NPCs and monsters are not located in the main body of the adventure, but in an appendix at its end, meaning that flipping back and forth will be needed.
Mogrith’s Lair is typo free, funnily enough though the adventure that is to be offered for free to the purchasers of the pdf has a different name than the one in the advertisement. Rules wise it looks solid, since this is not a playtest review though I haven’t checked the NPCs in real working conditions. Reading them thoroughly does not raise any obvious red flags.
One noticeable thing is the amount of treasure, which, for my standards, is relatively high without reaching ludicrous levels. The explanation given is that many adventurers or occupants lost their lives with nobody claiming the loot. That wouldn’t have been unusual, were the dungeon not currently occupied by a gang of robbers, who presumably might have searched their own surroundings for valuables (and there are many of them).
A second issue is the use of particular runes during the adventure. Although the key is provided at the end of the adventure, there is no indication of how the characters are to stumble upon the key, or, if not, how to guess what the runes mean. I am wondering whether the runes are something described in a different product relating to Bluffside and the designer put them there without bothering to explain whether they are fairly common knowledge or not.
For a second time for an Explorers Guild product, the relatively bland and not easy to read maps constitute a poor point. They are drawn in black and white with a strong shade of grey without a legend about what their symbols mean. There are two dungeon maps, one for the players and one for the DM, however I only notice one difference, not to mention why the players would have in advance such a map in their procession. Additionally, the room placement returns us to the time of Gygaxian dungeons, with non-sensical long corridors serving no purpose and other clichés of engineering madness.
In conclusion, this product succeeds in what it aims to do without being groundbreaking or innovative. If the map was better, the treasure was more low key and the story (or lack of it) made sense, it would have been a more solid transliteration of an old school dungeon into the 3.5 era.
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The 2011 re-examination: Not outright bad, but kind of meh. There are tons of products like this on the market. Not necessarily a bad deal if found discounted in one of the rpg pdf stores.
