Dungeon Discussion: Lair of the Lamb

Gaming
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Let’s discuss a dungeon! Specifically, Lair of the Lamb (freely available in the link). I’m sure you’re familiar with it. Any aspect is up for discussion.

My overall thoughts:

  • I like the minimal worldbuilding, makes is suitable for painless transplant into your world
  • LOVE the weird thingies in there (Davok, ghouls, lamb). Breaks many expectations on how your usual dungeon inhabitants behave (esp. the ghouls)
  • Tons of interactivity (Akina, ghouls)

More specific comments:

  • Some “lock and key” type solutions, of varying success. For example, bowling with isopods to take out ghost fence, the ballista. I think it’s interesting that some keys have clear locks (isopod-fence), but not all (ballista-?door?crushing hallway?lamb?). I think the more open ended, the better.
  • Perhaps controversially, I have some fondness for the tumbler puzzle. It’s not an “OSR puzzle” per se, but I think it mixes up the types of challenges in the dungeon in an interesting way. It’s interesting because there’s no resource management that goes on, it’s all puzzle. I think switching up how you’re thinking about the challenge is fun.

I might think of more and come back with more comments.

What do others think?

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I enjoyed this, but I didn’t love it. Obviously the whole situation with the lamb is very tense and top notch. I feel like everything else kind of drops off if the players find a way to deal with the lamb. The ghouls are alright, but I felt that the adventure kind of lost steam at that point. It also kind of has that modern “jewel box” thing where everything is pretty cramped, and there’s a lot of material that seems pretty threatening to players, so my group at least kind of did a breadth-first-search of rooms, got weirded out by everything, and kind of clammed up.

The amount of torches do limit endless stalling a tad, but I think the amount of discussion players can have about being cautious around the weird elements is pretty high.

That’s just based on my experience of only running it once, as an initial start of a campaign.

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I haven’t ran it before, but reading it through it seems good for a funhouse escape dungeon. I was surprised how much advice and rules info there is also, but I guess that explains its purpoase as an entry point to an OSR-style game.

I think the main challenge for it might be that it seems a bit large for also being fairly one-dimensional–there’s one main threat, the lamb, and other dangerous stuff as well, but the lamb is sorta the whole theme. That is in the name, though, so it’s not like it’s necessarily a problem. Aside from that, maybe one concern is that it’s also a bit linear. It would be interesting, for example, if there were more ways out of the dungeon or if the phases/levels could be approached from different orders. That aspect of linearity does sort of come with the conceit of doing a funhouse escape dungeon (especially an intro one), though, so not sure if it’s entirely unavoidable.

I really like the disparate and weird room content, but I was wondering a bit about the relationships between different stuff in the dungeon, like how the giant crab in 43 feel about the lamb? I suppose you can infer some things by reading into the different entries on Vandoh, but something along those lines could provide other points of leverage for dealing with the lamb.

Overall, I’m trying to think about whether I’d prefer it to skerples’ Tomb of the Serpent King, which is the main other “intro to OSR” module I’ve ran for new players. I think I might still slightly prefer TotSK but this might be better for a more-specifically halloween vibe.

I am also slightly conflicted about “intro-to-OSR” dungeons in the first place, though. They occupy a sort of strange place of trying to introduce people to a new style of play, but then sometimes end up (necessarily) being a bit on the rails in terms of what’s happening.

Perhaps controversially, I have some fondness for the tumbler puzzle. It’s not an “OSR puzzle” per se, but I think it mixes up the types of challenges in the dungeon in an interesting way. It’s interesting because there’s no resource management that goes on, it’s all puzzle. I think switching up how you’re thinking about the challenge is fun.

I liked this puzzle from reading it as well. It also doesn’t seem impossible that they could solve it in some other way, through inspecting the disk mechanism more closely or getting hints from the lamb or other stuff in the dungeon.

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I have yet to read, play or run it… It comes up often, but somehow I’ve never gotten around to checking it out properly.

I wonder how it compares to The God That Crawls.

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I’ve run Lair of the Lamb many times, but only the first ~20 rooms or so, right up to the ghouls being the end and the escape route for the PCs. I’ve run from the first draft 4-13-2020 (still available). This offers a ~3 hour one-shot funnel experience that has always been tense and fun.

They are both different style “teaching” dungeons. TotSK teaches GMs first, players second. The text is rife with design notes. I’ve run for first-time old schoolers coming from 5e to great success. Trial by fire to great affect. LotL focuses more on the resource management of play. It’s way less forgiving, but players pick up on the danger quicker since it is obvious that they are in a survival horror situation with next to nothing on them to start. “Lair” is a teaching dungeon for players first, GMs second. I think new GMs might have a bit of a hard time with it, but that’s just my guess.

I actually revised this puzzle so that it did take the resource management theme into account. The drip clue just requires too many cognitive leaps for players at the table, IMO. I’ve never run the puzzle as written though, so I don’t know for sure.

To sum up, love Lair of the Lamb as the short funnel version. I will continue to run it when I feel like scaring the crap out of my players.

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Only ever ran the first part of LotL, whereas I’ve run players through most of TotSK.

I like both, but there are 2 ways in which I prefer TotSK over LotL.

The first is that it is way easier to run TotSK as an open table sort of deal (which is how I ran it last).

The second is that TotSK feels easier to plop down wherever, no rewriting required. Canonically LotL is in a major city (not an ideal place imo to start players out in). It isn’t hard to change location, but a surprising amount of the dungeon implies its metropolitan location.

As a teacher the concept is still really cool to me. I’d love to see more people take a stab at it.

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