The Rot King’s Sanctum Review

Image Credit, The Rot King’s Sanctum by Emiel Boven

3/14/2025

I can unequivocally say that I not only love this dungeon, but that it’s so compact while hinting at a greater world beyond, that I now include it in nearly all of my D&D worlds somewhere.

Is it perfect? Depends on what you mean. Is it as good as can be reasonably asked for? Absolutely, and any fair metric would say so.

Just as a reminder, I only review these if I’ve played them, so trust me when I say its good.

This is The Rot King’s Sanctum by Emiel Boven.

Plot: “A cult of filth in the sewers up to no good (what’s new?)”

There’s a cult to the chaos god Nithis, god of decay. They live in the sewers under Cliff’s End (generic city, can be replaced by anything, I put it under the Keep on the Borderlands and had the evil priest in that adventure be related to this cult). They are evil and have treasure. Go get them!

The only reason I docked points from the plot was because there was no explicit reason to come down here, nor how the secret cult base was actually hidden at all in the sewers (it just seems to be an alley off-shoot). For our game I made it a secret door that was revealed by following the Eyes of Nithis (the cult’s symbol) that all pointed inevitably towards the entrance.

This is covered for by the end blurb next to the Rot King himself where it says that the cult has its hands in different pies throughout the city and the region. It hints that this should be the culminating dungeon of another adventure, and had this not been an OSR product it probably would have been.

Other than that, you get a short blurb on Nithis and his sister goddess Kcyra, goddess of healing, and their conflict, and you get a dungeon that’s layout makes sense. There’s beds for people, there’s food storage, there’s a pit with a monster in it (a-la the Rankor from Jabba’s Palace), it all helps with the verisimilitude!

Content: “There is no fat, it’s all MEAT”

No notes. This dungeon has it all:

• Room with a few elite monsters? Check.
• Room with a bunch of chump monsters? Check.
• Room with passive monsters? Check.
• Room with traps that help you make interesting decisions and don’t just deal damage? Check.
• Room with people to save? Check.
• Room with magic items? Check.
• Treasure room? Check.
• Essentially empty room? Check.
• Multiple entrances/exits? Check.
• Monster pit? Check.
• Secret doors? Check.
• Fun-house mechanics that just show you the world is weird and magical? Check.
• Moats of acid? Check.
• A big boss? Check.
• A super-duper secret ending with a secret boss and treasure room that can only be found if you’re really inquisitive, curious, and paying attention? Check.
• Even more stuff than this? Check.
• And does it all make sense? Check.

We did it boys, that’s a 10-outta-10 content score. I don’t have much else to say!

Art: “The Emiel Special”

Emiel Boven’s art style has always been cool to me. I like DURF and I love Electrum Archive. However, what really shines in this module is the layout. The dungeon is beautifully illustrated, the Rot King is very well drawn, in the itch.io page there’s an image of the arm-switching-statue that you wouldn’t recognize until you’ve read pretty far into the adventure.

It’s great. It’s not gaudy. It’s a 10-outta-10 art. Beautiful, well laid-out, great design.

Usability: *takes notes furiously*

You get an overview of the dungeon right away (it all fits on one page) with all the rooms keyed, the random encounters present, the monster stat blocks present, and the general features of the dungeon there so you can get a vibe. Anytime a monster is mentioned its stat block is present. Anytime a room is explained in greater you get a zoom in of the map and that room outlined (hell yeah). At the bottom of every page are the numbers of which rooms are explained on this page.

All of the stat blocks are done using ascending and descending AC to make your job as the GM easier. There’s even a THAC0 for each monster. Insane!

Everything is easy to read. There is nothing left to confusion throughout this enter module, it’s solid through-and-through, 10-outta-10.

Conclusion: “A Modern Classic”

I’ve read a lot of “modern classics” but so many of them boil down to vague statements with weird ideas that are difficult to fit into your game (prime example, Maze of the Blue Medusa). This dungeon on the other hand? This is a perfect example of a module.

It’s not too weird, not too crazy, it’s a perfectly reasonable dungeon. I think something the OSR leaned into that a lot of 5e adventure’s don’t is the avant-garde weirdness. I think if more OSR adventures (more of the good, high-production one’s anyway) were just simple things like an orc or goblin fortress, they would sell like hot-cakes. I love weird fantasy adventures, but I like my game world to be a little… dare I say, generic fantasy?

If there’s a city in my campaign, you better believe the Cult of Nithis is in the sewers causing mischief from now on. It’s just too good, to reasonable not to include.

Great job Emiel, keep it up!

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Thank you for reading!

Until we meet again,

GOOD LUCK ON YOUR ADVENTURES