Product Review: BENEATH: The Inverted Church

BENEATH: The Inverted Church


For: System Agonistic (your choice of OSR/ D&D Clone)

By: Justin Sirios

Cost: 15.99 print 6.66 kindle edition

http://www.severedbooks.com/ (redirects to amazon for purchasing)

This is an adventure; so spoilers ahead.

The book itself had some wonderful cover art of the primary NPC, and is bound a the unique size of 8.5 x 8.5 inches.  The pages are a newsprint pulpy paper which gives it a rough feel and slightly grey coloration to the pages, but it wasn't off putting, as the pages felt durable.  The black and white interior art is crisp and detailed as well.  As a result from the moment you pick up and flip through the book you FEEL like this is going to be a different product.  It is clearly labeled as an 18+ product, and it is.  As a change of pace from many "adult" products the art is not what makes the book adult.  The actual content of the adventure and the choices the players have to make are.

The adventure starts off with the hook to get the players involved, and doesn't fall into the trope of a map or a McGuffin the players are to quest for.  Rather, something very strange and horrible has happened and it gets the PCs to start questioning what has happened.

The adventure has a good mix of combat, traps, and non-combat encounters.  The primary shtick of the dungeon is that lewd acts have to be performed to advance through mirror-doors throughout the dungeon.

The "big bad" at the end of the adventure has been luring people into the dungeon and converting them to a hedonistic path as part of a plan to breed the perfect race- by having everyone blended.  I like this because the monster isn't just a thing that is fought, it is the reason for the story.
As a result the majority of the encounters within are the very townspeople that the players should be saving.  Only a few of them are willing to be saved and can leave on their own, meaning the players are stuck between killing them or taking a bunch of unwilling prisoners as they continue on and THEN have to deal with the real combat encounters.

The book has a convenient list of tables and information at the end as well as important information in bold or otherwise marked as you go through the adventure so you don't miss something important.

The book does have some drawbacks though.
The first is formatting.  Section headers are on occasion the last thing on a page and Tables are often cut off part way though a page requiring you to flip pages to use them effectively.

The second is that the end feels cheap.  There is more to the UnDungeon but the players are prevented from entering it by the very same mirror-door they have been encountering the whole dungeon but it just doesn't work.  This is further aggravated by a bunch of soldiers from a nearby battle showing up and descending into the dungeon.

Then you are hit with it "to be continued" Yes this is listed as book 1 from the title page, but I've never met with something so game disturbing.  The adventure leaves off at such a point, that I can't logically get the players to go and adventure somewhere else and I can't do anything else here without voiding what will occur in the future books.  So until future books come out I expect it would be better to just tie off the adventure by letting the party kill the monsters and ending the threat.

There are some situations that are oddly presented in the book.  Like being exposed early in the UnDungeon to people who don't know how the UnDungeon works only to later encouter other townspeople who are hanging out just beyond a trap with no good reason to be.  I mean did they walk there and someone set the trap behind them? Were they all just lucky and didn't set them off when undoubtedly the players will?  I get it I'm nit-picking now, but the lack of logic bothers me, and I'm going to have to come up with a reason that makes sense within the context of the game.

My final gripe is some special encounters.  These are random and require a special trigger to occur but the monster design is just infuriating.  The area regenerates the players, and some of the encounters have 250 or more hit points.  As a result the game will be reduced to a long slog fest of boring combat rounds unless they think to escape the fight. all together. The end feeling is that these battles are not meant to be won, just an excuse to kill PCs in the most un-creative way the adventure has to offer.

Maybe my gripes will be answered in future books as right now we only get to see a fraction of the whole idea.

All this being said, the adventure has some really neat and novel ideas.  Presents some easy to convey visually stunning moments for players to encounter, and will definitely be unlike anything a party has previously encountered. It does a decent job of trying to tell a story even if it leaves it unfinished at the moment, which thankfully can be easily corrected with the production of the rest of the trilogy.