Adventure Calls Book Club: Against the Cult of the Reptile God
This writing assumes you have read Against the Cult of the Reptile God, TSR 1982, Douglas Niles. Spoilers ahead if you have not.
The Adventure Calls book club started strong with an agreed-upon classic, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, which we read for January. The adventure is not without flaws, mostly in the form of a DMPC and the comparatively weak finish to a very strong start once the party leaves the cult-infiltrated town of Orlane for the dangers of a dungeon, but is still considered one of the best offerings from early TSR. I’m here to write about the thing which makes the opening segment in the town some of the best adventure writing I’ve ever read.
My background is in the theater and one of my favorite classes was script analysis – figuring out what keeps the blood pumping in any story is an important part of criticism and the writing process, but in theater it’s also vital for understanding how you would stage the thing. This has served me very well in the hobby (and in fact I based Toilet Skeleton on one of my favorite script analysis texts, David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards). Since plays are meant to be performed, with exceptions for closet dramas and some sicko artistic movements, this is great practice for roleplaying games: what do I need to be thinking about, while reading this module, for actual play? And so we move to the most important part of opening a work of drama, whether that drama is on a stage or on a kitchen table with some funny-looking dice: what are the stakes here?
“Stakes” are what actors and directors talk about when they ask “what does your character want?” Is your character working to accomplish their goals? It contains both the idea of what drives them and what they stand to lose – the poker chips they put on the table. So one of the questions that propels analysis is wrapped up with this idea: why today? Why does this story have to take place right now, what about these characters and desires colliding have created the circumstances for this drama to play itself out? What will happen if one or the other side gets what they want? This is the basis of compelling storytelling and it’s also the number one thing that adventure modules fuck up real bad. Reptile God absolutely nails this, and that’s why I love it.
The adventure has a clear timeline. Every week or so, the cult manages to turn another person and they’ll eventually grab everybody. This timer ticks along in the background and is meant to compel the players to figure out what the hell is going on sooner rather than later as allies disappear and leads dry up. The actions the other side takes are constant and consistent with their goals. Eventually, they’ll grab one or more of the player characters if they fail to act quickly enough and it’ll be nobody’s fault but their own. The town has a stasis which cannot be altered except by the actions of the PCs. This is the essence of great storytelling because it answers that question from earlier, “why today?” It happens today because the sole group of people with the skill of arms and deductive reasoning capacity able to put it happen to be in town right now. I genuinely feel that a good adventure should center this facet of play on the player party without making them the most special people to ever live; there are a bunch of people in Orlane (the mayor, the wizard, the two elves, and the ranger) who could band together and address this but none of them know if they can trust each other, so it’s up to this random outside factor to deal with it.
Any good adventure needs a stasis that the party disrupts and stakes which require them to do so: Against the Cult of the Reptile God is a great adventure because it does both.
And then it’s got a dungeon that kind of fucks that all up but I’m not writing about that.