Demon in the Mirror Review

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In my review of Ghostfire Gaming’s The Seeker’s Guide to Twisted Taverns, I outlined what made for a good Hex Feature. The Demon in the Mirror is not any of those. The Arcane Library’s release is purely a dungeon adventure. Designed for 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, the adventure is for a group of 5th Level Player Characters. The premise is that the characters are being coerced by the crown to enter a cursed mirror to retrieve a person of interest. When I adapted it into my game, I dropped all of that preface in favour of a cursed mirror that the party may delve into. With the entirety of the adventure occuring within a mirror, there’s a lot of leeway for where you would like to place this within your game world.

Modularly Place the Mirror

I am not going to hit my players over their heads with a story hook, as the purpose of a Sandbox game is to faciliate play. If they go a particular person or place, I can slide this adventure into place. Stumble into a cave? I can easily have the cursed mirror propped up in a corner. Investigation on disappearing servants? Entering this dungeon can act as one hell of a climax when the investigation concludes the servants have fallen into this mirror and not run away due to poor morale. That can lead to another plot hook after discovering the Demon’s mirror was newly purchased from an estate auction, leading to possibly looking into cursed objects distributed far and wide.

I showered praise onto directsun’s Aberrant Reflections due to formatting and I see that Kelsey Dionne, the author, has a similar pedigree. Each room is at most one page, easily read and understood. This adventure is not the pillars of text you need to assail with mercenaries to understand which is typical for Wizards of the Coast products. Dense, descriptive text is not useful when you’re running an adventure. One part that I think will aid newer Directors is each room ends with a dramatic question. “Will the PCs find out what the librarians are doing?”; “Can the PCs safely cross the floor?” and “Will the PCs destroy the mirror?” are some examples. Dionne is telling you what to emphasize with each room, driving your players towards some kind of conclusion.

The Demon in the Mirror stakes its claim as part of the exploratory pillar of Dungeons and Dragons. Players will cautiously advance in a nightmare realm that offers up spooky frights. Unfortunately, the map isn’t as easily found as I saw in Aberrant Reflections. The final page, if you were to get this printed, are story blocks of important NPCs and a randomizer chart. I find the listed consequences of completing the adventure to be the most intriguing, as they offer an excellent jumping off point if you were to insert this into a Narrative campaign or in the case of a Sandbox, interesting recurring villains.

When it comes for a Page to Prep count, The Demon in the Mirror has 22 pages dedicated to running the adventure. When I converted the module into my notes, I managed to squeeze it down to two-and-a-half pages. In comparison, my Page to Prep count for Aberrant Reflections’ was a 23 page adventure I summarized down to three pages. Aberrant Reflections has a lot of art pages that I excluded from that count but I would be lying if I didn’t state that they helped me understand the dungeon better. directsun’s dungeon is modeled after Legend of Zelda adventure design, Dionne is going more for a creepy horror aesthetic that is appropriate for a one shot you’d run in October.

Tinkering Done to the Adventure

The monsters are all unique, which I do like, as I find that is an excellent way to delineate you’re not in Kansas any more. The two major threats are the Mirror Demon and the Reflection Demon, which aren’t the most inspiring names but they get the job done. I’ve learned that it is far scarier to describe a monster than say what it is, so I am learning to live with such generic names. My preference is for a unique name with Fiends being listed with their lineage but sometimes simple is best. I could not take the third main threat seriously. Named a ‘Ceiling Creep’, my imagination immediately jumped to an overly handsy dudebro not taking no for an answer who is too obnoxious to listen to gravity in the club.

Luckily, I knew of a good replacement. Mr. Tarrasque, collaborating with Dungeon Dad, WallyDM and JVC Parry, made the ambitiously titled The Quintessential Guide to Monster Encounters. If the adventure takes place in a nightmare realm, I would like to go with a less incongruent monster than a gravity defying Night at the Roxbury imitator. On page 108, JVC Parry with WallyDM came up with a far better option — the Sensory Demon. It also crawls along the ceiling with Spider Climb but what makes these Fiends interesting is that they attack the senses. The adventurers can probably withstand the damage but the Sensory Demon aims to disrupt sight, smell and hearing. Dungeons and Dragons is a resource management game disguised as a role-playing wargame. The idea of watching the horror of players burning Lesser Restoration on a host of ailments makes me cackle. I can see some of the fun role play potential when some of the party is deaf due to curing blindness but they didn’t have enough to go around.

The purpose of the Creeps is to force interaction with a room, the Sensory Demons counteract that and I’m fine with it. First, I find horror to be far more compelling when your players decide to interact with a scary object under their own volition. Second, I like the pressure the Sensory Demons exert on your players by attacking from an unusual and therefore interesting angle. Lastly, they’re Demons — they should naturally not be very synergistic because they’re selfish, wishing to exact agony from mortals their way and only a bigger, mightier boot brings them to heel by grinding on the Demon’s neck.

Production Value Values

Example of Spooky Mirror Stock Image

I must praise the Arcane Library’s lack of AI Art when it comes to production of the module. I have noticed that a lot of cheap adventure options have been spewing Midjourney art. As much as writers want their audience to be attracted to their work through the writer’s ingenuity, the unfortunate truth is that art drives and sells books. Evocative art is one of the fastest ways for word of mouth to spread. That’s the painful lesson I learned through the production of The Mad House. Dionne uses a lot of fantasy stock footage which is the best you can do with a product that wasn’t gone through the rigamarole of spending an insane advertising budget in the hopes of a kicking off a massive Kickstarter.

So, is it worth it?

Here we have to have a conversation about words. Cheap and inexpensive mean the same thing but alter your perception of the product. When you describe someone as frugal, it evokes a different paradigm than someone being cheap. A cheap car elicits your imagination to picture problems that an identical but labeled as inexpensive car probably also contends with; however, the more sophisticated language shields your mind from the potential pitfalls. The Demon in the Mirror is $5 USD.

Compared to my other reviews with the standard price for an adventure seemingly $10 USD, I want to say that the adventure is cheap but I don’t want the ‘shoddy craftsmanship’ baggage. Inexpensive conveys good but surprisingly affordable which I feel isn’t quite accurate either. The Demon in the Mirror does what it set out to do and does it well; however, the art is definitely lacking. I find this easily justifible as Dionne is not part of a major company, neither launched a Kickstarter to fund this module. I appreciate her decision to have an accessible price point by skimming on original art. If you demand excellence with each and every product, this adventure is not for you. If you are economically minded, the dungeon adventure is a welcome surprise.

Like and Subscribe

If I have sold you on The Demon in the Mirror, it is available for purchase at the Arcane Library’s website. Dionne has not placed her products on Drive Thru RPG, so I do not have the possibility of using some kind of Affiliate Link. The Arcane Library did not pay me to make this review, I did it because I was looking for a mirror themed adventure which I found through Matt Colville’s Adventure Lookup.

I run a West Marches Hexcrawl where my players range between levels 3 to 10, with retirement happening if a character makes it to level 11. On my Patreon, I include a summarized version of my notes which expands the adventure to be appropriate up to an APL calculation of 13. There was no extra creative effort for myself, so the post is available if you join for free. That way I can possibly entice you with a paid membership if I show enough ankle, y’know?

If you found this helpful and wish to offer support, in addition to my Patreon, you can make purchases on Drive Thru RPG through my Affiliate Links. I have used and recommend Mr. Tarrasque’s The Quinessential Guide to Monster Encounters which I receive a portion of the sale. I promise to use the proceeds of the sale to fuel my crippling addiction to shelter and sustenance. If you are unable to provide financial support, words of encourage down below or sharing this with your fellow RPG addicts would mean a lot to me.