The Incandescent Grottoes (2021) is the first official adventure for Old-School Essentials, and it is, appropriately, by OSE’s mastermind Gavin Norman (with disarmingly charming illustrations by Nate Treme). It’s gauged for beginning characters, level one and two, and it is a really nice example of a Jaquays-style dungeon.

The cave complex encompasses a number of distinct zones across two levels — trog caves, a temple complex, crypts and the deep caverns. These line up, mostly, with the dominant factions. A disorganized band of troglodyte raiders inhabits their caves, the remnants of an ooze cult stick to the temple, a necromancer’s experiments roam the crypts and a neat dragon variant lives in the deep caverns. A renegade mage has also staked out part of the depths, much to the dragon’s annoyance. Each section has a number of ins and outs, same as diplomatic relations with the various factions. Lots of awful traps and strange encounters round out the experience.

There isn’t a ton to write about, honestly. Grottoes is all potential energy — it’s about what happens when folks wander its tunnels and halls. It asks quite a lot of players for a first and second level adventure, too — folks used to hacking their way through a dungeon are going to be annihilated. There is much more utility in stealth and parlay. But even the assumption that this small dungeon can be cleaned out, let alone in one go, is an over-ambitious one. I love this. The place exists. What players decided to do with it is on them, as are any consequences.

The environment is doubly hard to judge because the identifiable monsters share space with many new ones. All of them adhere to the often bizarre ecologies of the dungeon, but Norman definitely gets weird with it. Again, the core of OSE is as clean and standard as it comes, but Grottoes, through the pretty standard template of a dungeon crawl, shows just how flexible the system can be for getting strange. That’s only going to increase the rest of the week.