Ooze There? is the first Adventurers League-legal CCC adventure created in Singapore. Designed by Darryl Ho and Jason Koh, it presents a delve into the sewers for level 1-4 characters, in search of missing people. There may be oozes involved.
Scratch that: there are a LOT of oozes for the players to fight. The adventure begins with Gray Oozes, then moves on to present Gelatinous Cubes, Ochre Jellies, Gibbering Mouthers and even a Mimic. Strong parties can encounter a Black Pudding. The adventure is combat-heavy, and melee characters are likely to be entirely sick of the damage done to their weapons by the acidic oozes.
There’s a modicum of role-playing in the adventure, and not much exploration – well, the party are going into the unknown depths of the sewers, but there aren’t a lot of features to interact with apart from the oozes. The backstory makes sense, and the adventure sets up a greater threat for future adventures. There’s a lot of promise here.
It’s also a dangerously lethal adventure to run for characters of levels 1 and 2. The scaling adjustments typically suggest reducing monster hit points, which doesn’t help when monsters deal lethal damage with single hits. For instance, the Gibbering Mouther deals 17 average damage with its bite. I’ve heard of more than a few player character deaths with this adventure. When I ran it, for a group mostly of level 1 characters, I adjusted the monster damage significantly downwards. The final fight, against a 12th level Wizard and her two gibbering mouther friends, could be tremendously challenging. At least the wizard has used most of her higher-level spells! This combat isn’t quite as unbalanced as it might seem, but I took special care as it ran to adjust the monsters to fit the party better.
Some of the boxed text, especially that introducing the final encounter, is overlong, but the writing is generally good. There are a few lapses; the descriptions don’t always seem to fit the map, and the fate of the kidnapped people is only mentioned in a sidebar and not apparent to the characters. I would have liked to see more evocative descriptions for the final sequence of locations, named the “Forgotten Fane”. As it stands, the exploration of these chambers doesn’t alert the players to how special the final area is.
The motivations of the villain are excellent, and there’s the possibility of a short conversation with her, although there’s also a strong possibility the players may come out none the wiser as to what was occurring.
There’s a lot to like about the adventure, but it could benefit from a little more development. Recommended.