There are five official judges in this contest. Unfortunately, I can only link to two reviews. Owen Edwards and Grutzi at Tiny Pink Tentacle just didn’t get to my entry in time. No shade on them, there were just a lot of entries this year. JB at B/X Blackrazor apparently has a beef with ACKS and phoned in his reviews of the ACKS entries. Worse, his review of my entry was literally just him abusing the Lord’s name. I’m not linking to it and I recommend praying for him.
The remaining two reviewers wrote very good, insightful reviews. Ben Gibson’s is here, and Shocktohp’s is here. I’ll go through my takeaways from both at the same time.
The Good
The Hypogean Oracle
Both Ben and Shocktohp enjoyed the titular magic item. I was worried reviewers would find it a bit verbose - it takes up a fair amount of space with its custom spell effect.
Story Web + Random Encounter Compatibility
Shocktohp liked the inclusion of story web connections. Both reviewers appreciated the option of dropping in randomly or placing ahead of time with rumors. For me, this was a big part of how I wanted to make the site valuable for real GMs. With the flexibility to seed it into your sandbox in an area where you can use rumors to point to it, or to use it to cover random encounters, the site can be useful in more campaigns.
Regular Good Stuff
Ben notes the map flow with multiple exploration options, and interesting monster interactions.
The Bad
Pushing the Page Limit
I received the frowny-face of Commodore for putting the random encounter table and Hag repertoire on the map page. In my defence, even some previous years’ winners put encounter tables and extra fiddly stuff on their map pages (see for example Etta Capp’s Cottage and Lipply’s Tavern from ASC I). Maybe the repertoire was pushing it.
Level Range
Shocktohp had two major complaints and this was the first one. I didn’t give a level range, and he said it wasn’t clear when/where players are supposed to encounter it. A second part of this complaint is that the Oracle would be more useful around levels 4-6 when clearing wilderness, but hags are very tough for characters of that level range.
I didn’t give a level range because I don’t use them. Hag lairs come up on the wilderness encounter tables in ACKS. When you travel the outlands, you can run into a hag lair whether you’re level 4 or 14, and per MM, hag lairs always contain 3 hags. I also think the danger level of the site is pretty well telegraphed by the 8HD galdrtre at the entrance.
Now if we’re following the JJ setting construction guidelines, we roughly divide sites into low, medium and high levels. In that framework, this would probably be considered a high-level site. I could’ve labelled it as such.
The criticism about the oracle being more valuable at mid levels is valid. One caveat though is that the oracle can discover underground locations. These might not be normal wilderness locations. They could easily be locations missed during the process of clearing the wilderness because they’re dormant. They could be parts of the underdark or mythic underworld totally unsuited to mid-level play. Obviously setting dependent, but I wouldn’t write it off at high levels.
Expected Treasure Value
Shocktohp’s second complaint was that the treasure value is kind of light, and he is definitely correct. He added it up and got 16,500, which is exactly right if you don’t count the very heavy workshop equipment. That stuff is worth another 10k but isn’t easily portable.
Harder to directly value is the regrowing crystal. ACKS being the greatest TTRPG ever made, of course there is a correct answer to the present value of 500gp per month given the game economy’s assumed interest rate of 3% per month (yes of course I’m serious, it’s in the Judge’s Journal Appendix E: Economics). The math is just 500 / 0.03 = 16,667gp.
Total monster xp is right around 10,000, so the rough expected treasure value is 40,000gp. And if you include the cheesy justification above, there’s 43,167gp of treasure. But yes, including the future value of components is a bit of a stretch, so I could easily add ~15,000gp of treasure to this site.
Of course another solution would be to reduce the lair to a single hag. It neatly solves both Shocktohp’s complaints, with the only downside being that it doesn’t fit the criteria of an MM hag lair.
Weak Helpers
Shocktohp pointed out that the potential help from the galdrtre and cave bear are not likely to be very useful, since hags can deal with a cave bear with a single spell, and a galdrtre is too big to enter the dungeon. I’d push back on this a bit. A spell that turns a cave bear to dust isn’t turning a PC to dust after all, and that character is also potentially useful as a source of information or a future henchman. The galdrtre can’t enter the basement, but it can provide information, and can deal with hags outside, potentially ambushing them with the PCs.
Yes, most players slaughter the bear and fight the tree, but that’s ok, the option is there. I don’t think I’d change anything here.
Oracle Missing Apparent Value
Yep, just a mistake on my part.
Hags Missing Spells
Shocktohp notes that the hags don’t have Rune of Warding or Illumination, Perpetual in their repertoires. This was intentional and I think it makes sense. As witches, hags are studious spellcasters, and they can swap out those spells after casting them. Unless I’m missing something (very possible) there’s no requirement to keep a perpetual spell in the caster’s repertoire in order to maintain it.
Coming Revisions
With all this considered, a v2 for this site is planned, with the following minor revisions:
Add magic item apparent value
Add map scale
Increase treasure values
