Shrine of the Jaguar Princess by Sersa Victory

A Shadowdark adventure designed for 4th level PCs. I ran this in Shadowdark for a group of five level 4-6 PCs, and made some slight changes to the adventure (running it in West Marches instead of a one-shot). It was decent, but not great, and suffers from an absolute TPK factor, with lots of instant death and unbeatable fights. It also has zany, badly designed magic items and treasure. Do not recommend without substantial finessing.

Play Time: Four 2-hour sessions, until I had to retire this adventure because it was too gonzo.

General Thoughts: Sersa Victory gets high marks. Hey, it’s an ENNIE-award winner, so it must be good, right? But it’s not. There’s a fight with eight vampire spawn at once. There’s a fight with an epic jaguar gibbering mouther that has 8 attacks per round and causes confusion. There’s a vorpal axe and mounds and mounds of gold. And there’s just enough of a disconnect in the writing that Jaguar Princess falls flat. I can’t recommend it without revisions, ENNIE be damned.

I ran this for my West Marches Shadowdark game, probably four sessions total – until I had to retire it because it’s just so damn over-the-top hard to survive. I didn’t use the poison gas tokens and let the adventurers come and go freely, as I had set the Jaguar Princess temple within a bigger megadungeon, my Pits of Brund (they’re located in the Deeper Caves.) My group never made it to the second level of the dungeon, they got wiped out on level one.

Even with that said, this adventure is a total annihilator. Half the fights on the first dungeon level alone are brutal and swiftly lead into likely TPKs. I get consequences, but I have no idea how a party is supposed to survive this deathtrap dungeon.

Also, different stages unlock via actions and events, but there’s no timeline or outline provided, so you as GM are left to puzzle through events. “OK, the eight vampire thralls manifest when the central skull in one of the monoliths is pressed” is left to infer via (multiple) readings.

I get that Victory was breaking new ground with this and his other adventures, but there’s some other gaps. For example, one room has “a mosaic of a feathered serpent” which is marked on the serviceable, but sparse map. But there’s no bite to this feature. There’s frequently nothing to poke, to prod, to explore in lots of these rooms – I feel this was a design gap, because adding in more interactive features would have gone a long ways towards reducing the sting of the uneven challenges. Granted, there’s a lot of moments where there are things to whack, nudge, and push – but as a GM running someone else’s work, I want a dungeon that has Lego-like parts to fiddle with.

Sera put out a list of books he recommends for adventure designers. This was really a great list, I’ve read some of them on audiobook. I will say that game design audiobooks leave a lot to be desired, and most of the books on the list are only available as expensive textbooks, but it’s helpful to have some vetted works to tangibly improve your craft. Big points for this.

Available on itch.com: https://sersavictory.itch.io/shrine-of-the-jaguar-princess