Friday Fantasy: Violence for Votishal

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #4: Violence for Votishal is a scenario for Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and the third scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. Scenarios for Dungeon Crawl Classics tend be darker, grimmer, and even pulpier than traditional Dungeons & Dragons scenarios, even veering close to the Swords & Sorcery subgenre. Scenarios for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set are set in and around the City of the Black Toga, Lankhmar, the home to the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the creation of author Fritz Leiber. The city is described as an urban jungle, rife with cutpurses and corruption, guilds and graft, temples and trouble, whores and wonders, and more. Under the cover the frequent fogs and smogs, the streets of the city are home to thieves, pickpockets, burglars, cutpurses, muggers, and anyone else who would skulk in the night! Which includes the Player Characters. And it is these roles which the Player Characters get to be in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #4: Violence for Votishal, small time crooks trying to make a living and a name for themselves, but without attracting the attention of either the city constabulary or worse, the Thieves’ Guild! The job in this scenario is a night spent prowling around a temple on a murder investigation.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #4: Violence for Votishal is a longer, location-based scenario which should take between two and three sessions to play. Designed for two to three Player Characters of Fourth Level, it opens with them being approached by a gagged priest. The priest passes them a message to go to the temple of Votishal the Silent—a god dedicated to silence, self-improvement, discipline, and getting what one deserves—on the Street of the Gods. Worship of the god has been on the increase of late and so it has come to occupy the second-best temple on the street. However, its priests and worshippers have been driven out of the building due to their high priest having been murdered, followed by other priests on subsequent nights. The Player Characters are hired to enter the temple and catch and deal with the murderer when he returns that night. The priest—who only has a few minutes to speak according to the tenets of his faith—promises to pay well, but not before presenting the Player Characters with their first problem. The temple is now locked to prevent robberies with it now being vacant and non-priests cannot have a key. So, the Player Characters will have to break into the building in order to investigate and stop the murderer. This being Lankhmar and the Player Characters being thieves, this is not really a problem, but it must be a first, being paid by a client to break into his own building!

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #4: Violence for Votishal is all about the temple to Votishal. This is a large, two-storey building with connected sewers and catacombs below. Over half of the scenario is dedicated to describing the building and its contents, including the floorplans for each storey. Numerous means are given for the Player Characters gaining access to the building, including via the sewers, and once inside, they find a baroque building dedicated to silence. They will also find that someone has got their before them and like them, is taking advantage of the quiet and the fact that nobody else is meant to be in the temple. There are thieves and assassins—and given that is the City of the Black Toga, their presence should be anything other than a surprise—skulking in the halls and rooms of the temple in their search for valuables and victims respectively. Yet, there is also something else, something whose presence suggests that the temple and worship of Votishal is more fractious than their gagged and silent façade suggests. It all lends itself to an eerie atmosphere, the hallowed silence inside the temple walls contrasting with the hubbub that the Player Characters are used to out on the streets outside.

As the Player Characters explore and investigate the temple, the Judge is provided with some great set pieces that she will definitely want to include if she can. For example, an attempt to garrote a Player Character from the floor above, which is not intended to kill the Player Character, but provide a fraught cinematic scene. There is also an encounter with the main threat in the scenario where breaking the silence will get the Player Characters into deadly danger and lastly with the ratfolk of Lankhmar, also seen in previous scenarios for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. Primarily an exploration and investigation scenario, there is relatively little roleplaying in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #4: Violence for Votishal in comparison to earlier scenarios, such as Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar and Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar. Thieves will be in their element, especially as the Player Characters explore the building and begin to discover some of the secrets that the priests of Votishal have been hiding within the walls of the temple.

Unfortunately, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #4: Violence for Votishal does have a quite complex background, not all of which may become apparent during the scenario. However, for the Judge, the back story becomes more apparent as she reads deeper into the scenario. The description of the temple of Votishal is quite detailed, so the Judge will need to pay careful attention to these details as part of her preparation. There is advice for the Judge in terms of hooks for getting the Player Characters involved, roleplaying the primary antagonist for the scenario, and adjusting the scenario to be run with four or five players rather then two to three. The scenario ends with an epilogue listing possible adventure ideas based on the discoveries that the Player Characters might have made in their exploration of the temple and expulsion of the various intruders.

Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #4: Violence for Votishal is as decently presented as you would expect from Goodman Games. It is well written, the handouts nice and clear, and the cartography decent. The floorplans of the temple would work very well on a virtual tabletop with their secrets and numbers excised.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #4: Violence for Votishal is a solid edition to the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. It is not as exciting or as fun as the earlier Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar and Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #3: Acting Up In Lankhmar, instead a situation that owes much to the traditional style of play of Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. However, mix in the religious and criminal elements of Lankhmar—and Votishal, in particular—and what you have in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #4: Violence for Votishal is an eerie, even creepy ‘temple crawl’.