Here's the random encounter table for this dungeon

Basically roll on this every 10 minutes they're in the prison and every time they make some especially loud noise or just dawdle for a really long time. When they overcome an encounter, cross it off and write a new one. That's what the lettered encounters are.

1. the slime dragon HP ?? AC ?? Attacks ?? Special Attack SLIME BREATH, damage unknown Damage reduction ?? Movement 5' Special Movement: extend a slime pseudopod up to 60' and whip its entire body that length in an instant
2. d20 drunk prison guards. they jokingly arrest and imprison the players, haha!
2a. same prison guards, now sober. They are escorting a new prisoner, he is a blue-skinned meditating man floating in a pink crystal orb. The guards are very nervous and cranky and want to get to the inn. When they see the PCs they go, “Hey! Take this fellow to the cages in the big room. We’ve got work to do.” They are bristling with steel, and among them is MID SERGEANT ROBER LORB, who out-ranks the PCs by one (he has a badge to show it). If they don’t follow his orders he’ll report them to TALTRATH YRBICORN, who will write them up for insubordination. THE PRISONER: is COSEY NIO. As soon as he is alone he escapes his cell and gets added to the encounter list here, where he immediately flees anyone who sees him.
2b Cosey Nio. HP 30 AC ?? Speed 40, can blink 40' as a reaction when hit Attacks ?? Spells encountered: EXCEPTIONAL KNIFE: a giant glowing blue force-knife whirls around him for 10 rounds. Anyone within 10’ or who starts their turn there takes 4d6 force damage (DEX save 20 for half) and is pushed out of the area. If concentration is broken, the knife goes shooting off in a random direction, damaging everyone in its path, and shatters at the end in a 20’ radius explosion.
3. d4+1 prison knights. HP ?? AC Plate mail and shield attacks: Halberd, Longbow, shackles, nets, torches, ?? movement 30 They mistake the players for an escaped prisoner and arrest them.
3a. ??
4.  an escaped prisoner is sneaking! stalking him is a ghoul, who will catch and eat him in d6 turns. Ghoul: HP 12 AC 12 Bite+5 1d6+1 and Con save DC 15 or ?? Movement 30 Special movement ??
4a. ??
5. ??
6. ??
7. ??
8. ??
9. d20+8 HUNGRY AND CUNNING DOGS. As level 3 thieves. HP 12, AC 13, Bite +5 1d4+1 and sneak attack 2d6. Thieves skills: ?? Movement 30
9a. ??
9b. ??
9c. DOGS LEAD SOMETHING HORRIBLE YOUR WAY: barking and yipping, the room floods with dogs that run away as fast as possible, hot on their tail is: 1. the dragon 2. ?? 3. ?? 4. ??
9d. ??
9e. ??
9f. THE DOGS HATE YOU: at the next NPC encounter, there are a few of these dogs there hanging out with the locals. when the PCs engage, the dogs make threatening noises, and the NPCs immediately begin to hate and distrust the PCs. All charisma checks made at -5.
10. Lantern out of oil! It goes out.
10a. ??
11. Hungry! Eat or become fatigued
12. ??
13. Next room is a blessed or ??? room
14. Nothing
15. Nothing
16. Nothing
17. Nothing
18. The witch HOPE (a wretched crone) is searching for a demon head. She will answer one question in exchange for a taste of blood and a fond memory. HP ?? AC ?? Movement ?? Attacks ?? Spells ??
18a. ??
19. d4+1 dark-knights. they carry anti-torches that prevent normal light from functioning. HD 5 Fighters AC 18 2 Attacks +6 1d8+2/1d8+2 Movement 30
19a. d4+1 dead dark-knights. their anti-torches are nearby.
20. a LORD OF CHANGE  in the shape of a rotting, feathered man with a vulture’s head and a rotting wood staff accompanied by ??d?? cultists of urizen. DEMON: HP ?? AC ?? Special Defenses ?? Attacks ?? Special Attacks ?? Movement ?? Special: 1/round at random: 1. Room is now underwater 2. ?? 3. ?? 4. Polymorph into ?? or Elderly 5. ?? 6. ?? 7. ?? 8. ??

When under the influence of HORSEHEAD, 50% chance any of these encounters is replaced by d20 glowing radioactive skeletons. HP 5 AC 11 Attack: Claw +5 1d4+1, also 1d6 damage per round to all within 15’, if a player takes 6 damage at once this way they gain a random mutation.

Good luck!

Here's how I do it

steal a hexmap somewhere online, google "hexmap" until I find one I like
get Zak to send me giant hexlists years ago so I don't have to do all the work myself and copy paste them in over half a decade or so
spend a long time in 2013 using Logan Knight's random generator factory at http://www.lastgaspgrimoire.com/generators/the-seventh-order-of-the-random-generator/ to make a hex generators 
forget that I did that and just write a bunch whole-cloth around where my players are
then use cedric howe's hexkit program to completely remake my hexmap, and then accidentally save over it, and facepalm in the middle of a game when I try to open it up and realize what I did, and just go back to using the random janky online one I started using in the first place
when they say "let's go to X place where there's a dungeon" I go "time to write a dungeon"
go to http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/dungeon/ and mess around til it makes a dungeon map I like
google castle maps until I learn that dyson logos himself made a useful numbered keep on the borderlands map
find an online copy of keep on the borderlands and re-write everything to make it weird
literally everything actually
give every NPC a blurb or two to say when PCs interact with them.
for instance: "smithy and armorer DARKBAN OPEN, a skinny guy with upset stomach . . . 'THIS TORTURE EQUIPMENT IS DEPRESSING THAT I NEVER KNOW WHAT ITS BEEN USED ON.' " or "Provisioner. BLAD OKLEBY. . . . 'I WISH I HAD A WAY TO SEE THE SUN IN HERE' " 
this is so if I'm too drunk or at a loss there's something I can blurt out
I don't know where I get the names
let's see what else
I try to put treasure and secrets everywhere, sometimes nested. so there's secrets hidden inside secrets. and I make it so some NPCs want something specific and concrete and some want something abstract and some want something random ("I LOST MY LUCKY DICE IN THE SKULL CRATER EAST OF HERE WHILE I WAS ON MY EXERCISES.”) and some want something that can't be fulfilled and some want something that can be easily fulfilled. so there's plenty of variation. and I try to make it so nothing found is purely helpful, there's almost always some kind of catch. and I try to make it so no one is purely good or sane. and I try to make it so there are multiple ways in to everywhere, but there is no no-cost path. every path has some kind of cost--it's about choosing which one, and finding the most fortuitous way at the moment, which takes luck.
like for instance this prison is layered. there's a part of the prison that's more or less public, it has an inn and a smithy and a tattoo shop and a wizard and a cleric and stuff like that. and then there's a more private part where the warden and guards live, you have to get special clearance to get inside that. and then inside that part is the actual dungeon, with its own layers. there are multiple paths into all of these layers, but the most obvious path is in this case heavily guarded. my players opted to become prison guards (their idea) and went through an application and interview process. but there are other ways in.
anyway then I have a like 80 room dungeon and I just go into a fugue state and write it
here are some techniques I use:
go to a coffee shop and get really caffeinated and handwrite rooms
when that fails I write directly on the map
or I open up a jpeg of the map and write stuff on it
for this one I had been excited about Zelda and decided to put zelda type stuff like a BIG CHEST and BOSSES and a BIG KEY and stuff like that, so that got written directly on the map and the ideas are folded in
and I know who the leaders of the multiple factions are, so I think about the implications of their factions and write that down and use it as a guide
then I make a random encounter list that has some really deadly possibilities and a couple bosses and and a few nothing entries and also some really weird stuff they haven't encountered yet
and then.... I just write it down in the text file
and do the "one more thing" technique when the going gets tough
and also do the "anything can be inspiration" technique when the going gets tough
and the "actual research provides insane ideas you would never think of" technique also when the going gets tough 
(i would never have come up with the idea that the hand of glory candle can only be put out by milk)
and I hand-draw diagrams of complicated rooms, of course, but generally try to keep it to "one thing per room" since this is an online game and it's pretty hard to do complex rooms online
but google piranesi pictures because this is a gigantic labyrinthine fantasy prison and it would be just be a big fat missed opportunity if I didn't have insanely complicated and beautiful etchings to show my friends with stuff all over it they can point to it and go "what's that" and I can say "oh that's an ice sculpture with a brain at the middle of it"
and put secret treasure and magic items and gold and spells and secret doors and magic doors and weird NPCs and friendly NPCs and friendly places and totally hostile places and traps and mysterious stuff with hidden explanations, so that it feels really textured
the idea is to make it varied and textured. you want it so you never really know what's going to be in the next room, but it also sort of makes sense, and so that stuff that is similar is similar in a way that echoes pleasurably. like how the violence in twin peaks is never the same each time, but always reminds you of itself... or not
and it needs to feel unfathomably old, and like no one else really knows what's in there, or really cares, except maybe for the witches. witches always care about stuff like that.
and then i just steal ideas whole cloth from zak and jeff rients and patrick and scrap because, i mean, they're great ideas
and then I just do that over and over again between sessions until it's just insanely complex
honestly I think I'm too easy on my players. I could stand to put more treasure in there though, I'm pretty stingy still after all these years.
also the ways I make dungeons and adventures changes each time. I don't know what I'm gonna do for the next one. this is just how I did this one.

Some Names I Made Up For This Adventure

Torgun Ut
Algan Gorb
Tucker Lope
Rashal Von Der Butte
Darkban Open
Blad Okleby
Witch Captain Ogremonde
Prelate Mondi
Numran Orki
Curate Obscellan The Wise
Judicor Taltralth Yrbicorn
Terfcorm Abradec
Forstep Ankerstrom
Orben Oyl
His Honor Judge Worral Blunt
Dark-King Mornling Droc
Blordath Vorn
Kormleth Wunt
Orachai Kordul
Plotry Mundle
Normrod Eckstrom
Orlen Sindwe
Dund
Chord
Druk
Gorgon Wreck

THE THRICE-CURSED PRISON OF DENDRIC VAST

Built on the back of the cracked canyons of the Goblin Wastes, far enough to keep the prisoners sequestered. It is a great keep of blue stone, where traitors against Orostranthy (and its capital Solemn Cry) too politically dangerous or otherwise dangerous to kill were sent. 

The first curse was the dying words of King Gregs, who was usurped and kept in the castle dungeons and murdered by the wardens. So now the sun does not shine within the castle walls, from the outside it is as if the castle is within shadow, from the inside it is as if the whole world were night forever, sunlight simply does not enter the castle. Looking from the castle walls during the day is looking into a dark land, the castle is cold as winter, no plants grow, and fires are kept burning at all times for heat and light.

The curse of Prince Llolg, a rival of Solemn Cry, who was kept hostage in the prison from boyhood and died. His adult sisters, sorceresses from a western land, pronounced the curse. An immortal monster appeared in the castle. Like a dragon in appearance, but mucal and transparent, its slime corrodes, its wings cannot fly it, it is slow but cunning, and quick when hungry or malicious. It lives in the castle now and goes where it desires, and though when it grows too large the prison puts it to death (at great cost) it returns.

Then the curse of the sky. A stone fell and where it landed the ground was poisoned. Those who live in the castle too long begin to rot from the inside although their bodies seem to maintain consistency and health when they are cut open their bodies are filled with a pus. But the rock is beautiful and it is kept, according to the whims of Dendric Vast.

And Dendric Vast is insane and each day insists on new rules. And the prison is overflowing with the prisoners. And the central prison block has been added onto and added onto and no one person knows exactly what is inside anymore or how it is laid out or how deep the dungeons go. And it is forgotten who is kept prisoner, despite the efforts of the scribes, who toil to record their crimes. And the Prison Knights patrol the countryside searching for criminals, and they patrol the castle searching for criminals, and they patrol the prison searching for criminals. And the prisoners say that the true keepers of the castle are the blind medusa Malareth and Pallid Gross, Carnifex of the Church of Urizen, who are sequestered in opposite ends of the prison, and warring for control.

Here's my collected thoughts on the MAZE OF THE BLUE MEDUSA

I wrote a few posts on G+ about MAZE OF THE BLUE MEDUSA last Spring and Patrick Stuart the co-author is looking for public posts about it to link to. Here's the transcripts of those posts for easy reference. 

A. A "review?"

A few more (spoiler free) thoughts on THE MAZE OF THE BLUE MEDUSA now that I've read it all the way through, run it once, and spent some time mentally tracing my way through the labyrinth;

- this is the most dungeony dungeon. It has everything you'd expect in a big dungeon: different factions, shifting alliances, magic fountains, cursed treasures, teleportation, strange poisons, history, traps, trick doors, secret passages, rooms with no entrances, riddles, pits, everything.

- there is a lot of really deadly stuff in here, but I think even level one characters could survive and make it out with a good haul if they were smart and very careful.

- it was very easy to run for me. I had read the book through before playing (which the authors recommend) and sure enough it was simple to look at the picture on the painting and just remember what was inside, looking at the text for reference. The layout is ingenious: each section of the maze has a chapter with a labelled close-up that also shows nearby room numbers. Even on a PDF, flipping quickly back and forth between rooms was no problem, because on the zoomed out view the shapes of the rooms and the pictures in them are so vivid that i could identify them. Plus there's nothing egregious or lame that I would want to modify before playing. It's all high quality gameable stuff and has a similar aesthetic to the kinds of weird dark fantasy games i like to run. In the future I might want to tweak stuff here and there just for aesthetics and difficulty, but running it as-is seems like it would pose no problem.

- the hardest part of running this was the characters. I had a lot of trouble remembering exactly how each character got to be in the dungeon and why they were staying there, as well as remembering what they knew, what they would conceal, and what they would be willing to tell, as well as their relationships to the other characters. Information is as important to this dungeon as physical treasure, and I found myself defaulting to my old DM habit of drastically limiting information so as not to give too much away. Many of the character descriptions have specific instructions for which information they do and do not know, and still I had some trouble tracking it. Not to mention I kept getting the uncomfortable feeling that many of these characters were a lot smarter than me. I think the authors have done everything they possibly could to supply the necessary tools to run a huge cast of complex characters (there's literally an alphabetical character index in the back, complete with motivations and a short description)--it was still difficult on this first run.

- the dungeon itself is incredibly evocative and dense and interconnected. Almost every room has a unique feature or character, and a lot of them relate to another sometimes very distant room. In play, the denseness makes for slow going: we played for five hours and got about ten rooms deep with no treasure found, and I don't think I was rolling random encounters even as often as recommended. This isn't bad, just different from how I usually run dungeons, and I'm curious to see what this will feel like as time goes on.

- After my initial read-through I went back and traced my way through different parts of the labyrinth I was curious about, and found myself getting totally lost going between the different people and sections and trying to find the easiest way through the dungeon and the likeliest ways the players might take. You can flip to any one page and the references there (and geographical connections) can send the reader all over the book. It gives a kind of weird vertiginous effect.

- I've spent so much time with this book this weekend that I dreamed about it last night (specifically the exteriors, which don't exist in the book). The art and language and my own obsession for dungeons in particular adds up to an intensity of experience that I haven't found in many of the previous releases from Patrick and Zak, whose dungeons have been groundbreaking but nothing at this scale before. I think part of what makes it work the way it does is its smallness--RAPPAN ATHUK for instance is way too big for me to comprehend all at once, and ditto for most other dungeons that have more than two or three floors.

- I like it

B. Some advice:

Here's how I would work the Medusa Maze into a long-term campaign:

1. Introduce it with a simple and more or less easily attainable and concrete goal, probably something within the first ten rooms, or even the first five. Something that could be gotten within a session of play along with the necessary heist that unlocks the dungeon.

2. Give them a map to their destination, and tell them up front the dungeon's deal--I'd make the NPCs at the dungeon's entrance honest and helpful, or have the NPC giving the players their quest tell them exactly what the dungeon's deal is.

3. Give the players easy access to the entrance, so they can go back over and over more or less whenever they want.

4. Tie stuff outside the dungeon into the inside, so there's really good reason to take a trip inside to get exactly what you need and then escape.

And then I'd relax and let them do whatever. The dungeon is an excellent set up for a heist and is naturally resilient, but it's incredibly dense, dangerous, confusing, big, and scary to explore. And as the players level up and explore the dungeon, there are mechanisms written in which make the dungeon more difficult.

Giving them bite-sized chunks and clear outlines to start, and an easy in and out, would probably do a lot to make the dungeon appealing instead of overwhelming. I could even imagine the PCs clearing out a district, taking out one of the bosses, and installing themselves an HQ or as a faction in the dungeon.

Also I just really like the idea of my players carrying on their adventures a magical painting which leads to a lethal megadungeon whenever they feel brave enough.

C. And a couple play reports (caution, spoilers):

1.

Ran a five hour session of the MAZE OF THE BLUE MEDUSA with a couple friends tonight. Here's some highlights, spoilers galore: present were Jon as Northrop Grumman the Tiny Man With A Riding Dog Rogue and Nick as Melt Banana the Human Paladin of Trump, two thugs in the island city of Tcorsk, hired by Edgar Voad, an aesthete, to steal a painting from the estate of a recently deceased eccentric. Giant land shrimp hung in the palm trees, moonlight washed over the tropical waves. Melt Banana and Northrop Grumman bought forties. Melt Banana and Northrop Grumman pretended to be tax inspectors and bullied the estate manager into letting them in. Melt Banana and Northrop Grumman pretended to have to report the smutty painting False Chanterelle to the morality committee and lugged it back to Edgar Voad's house. Northrop Grumman bullied Edgar Voad into giving them more cash for the painting, while Melt Banana hid in the alley with Northrop Grumman's Rottweiler, Boeing. Edgar Voad, desperate to view his painting in the proper context, forked over the cash, payed them a fiver to hang the painting, and committed suicide in ecstasy when the bound woman came alive and asked them for help. Northrop Grumman cased the kitchen for salami and beer while Melt Banana licked his lips and watched the bound woman. They asked her some questions. She gave some confusing answers ("No don't leave! If you leave the magic will end ... No you mustn't go in the rooms beyond, they're filled with lizard men"). They freed her. They made her promise to sit and watch the other side of the painting while they explored. They re-chained her to the far wall and went inside ("Just an hour lady, if you leave, the magic will end"). They met the blue skinned woman who asked them for art. They went into the room where the shadows make you fall into pits. Northrop Grumman fell into a pit and Melt Banana helped him out. They met the bad king stabbed with swords and tried to bring him back to the blue-skinned woman as a work of art, but were attacked by chameleon women and the king ran away. They went to the room where the mosaic poses a rhyme and if you don't listen, she won't repeat it ("Is this art?" they dead panned). They didn't listen and Northrop Grumman was bitten in half and dragged into the mosaic by the mosaic, and Boeing the Dog as well. Melt Banana ran across the rope bridges and met ("Okay Jon, you can rejoin the game as soon as you have your character sheet") King Hu Harpagos, an idiot and mute reptile man monk who meditated his way into the Medusa Maze in search of his ancestors. King Hu and Melt Banana met the screaming snakechild being mind controlled by chess pieces. King Hu threw napalm on the chess pieces and Melt Banana body slammed them. They found the white room with a single black line down the middle ("Let's stay away from the crazy line room"). They found the black room with the jade tiles that paralyze you. They each got paralyzed and then they made it through. King Hu examined the giant snail for sexual organs ("You find no genitalia"). They drank the bad wine. The end. What a dense dungeon.

Deaths so far: 1.

2.

Session two in the MAZE OF THE BLUE MEDUSA (spoilers ahead): King Hu the Reptile Man and Melt Banana aka "The Knave of Swords" a Paladin of Trump meet Chronia Torn, a naked woman and everything around her is rotting and ancient and weathered and her babbling insect pet with six radial legs trundles across her room and bites King Hu and King Hu likes it and they play together and it bites King Hu and King Hu likes it more and playfully bites back and it bites King Hu and Melt Banana asks Chronia Torn to stop her pet from killing King Hu and she says "Come" and it does. She asks them to bring her silks. She asks them if they've seen, you know, anybody, around. They haven't. She puts on a silk robe and it disintegrates off her body. They want to find treasure. They go into the art galleries. 13 drunk orchidmen stumble out. King Hu tries to burn them with napalm and sets the creepy staring arch of goat skulls on fire. The orchidmen run away. The orchidmen go into the room where the naked critics are. The orchidmen eat some of the bloody critics and the critics stand around and criticize them. King Hu and Melt Banana kill some critics in order to get XP. King Hu vomits slime on the orchidmen. The orchidmen surround King Hu. "They get two attacks each." King Hu is torn apart by orchidmen and his body is digested by plants. Melt Banana runs away. He looks at the room where the tank of bubbling frothing milk and meat chunks is. Melt Banana steals some light-stealing roses from a tangled garden. "I cut a whole bush and carry it around." Melt Banana befriends a scattered group of men in bird masks who call themselves bird gods. They can't agree on whether to help Melt Banana Make The Maze Great Again by building a wall to keep the orchidmen out, and some of them start getting drunk on the bad wine. Vetchling the bird god man agrees to help though. Enter Edogawa Ranpo the Drow Bard. Edogawa Rabpo insults the birdmengods. Edogawa Ranpo insults Melt Banana. Edogawa Ranpo insults a lecturing and argumentative man hung by a noose who starts screaming and attracts the attention of Torgos Zooth, who has a moon for a head and makes them tell the truth. Torgos Zooth asks them questions and appears to not have been paid by his boss in five or ten thousand years, but nonetheless is desperately loyal to her, but wants to rescue his sons from where he thinks they're imprisoned by an invisible mathematician in the Reptile Archives, but doesn't want to go there because the archives and the reptiles and the mummies are her property, and he's breaking the rules by wandering off shift in the first place, and he cries fat moon tears at how stuck he is in life. He offers them food and drink, but they want a crossbow. Edogawa Ranpo insults him and he teleports them to room (roll roll; they say "That's a lot of dice") 247 where a pale guy with vampire fangs is chained between two dim Suns. "Free me... I'm not... a vampire... I'll help you in, your quest... I'll be, helpful to you..." They stake him and decide to rest up there and then they see the hummingbird made of jewels which looks at them and flies away. Melt Banana says "I should definitely not go after the thing that looks like it wants me to go after it." They decide to take a break.
Deaths: 2
Treasure found: Still Zero

Oops

Here's a couple critical miss tables for when you roll a one!

CRITICAL MISS TABLE

2 Uh-oh, snake-eyes! Either critical hit yourself or roll on the disaster table. 

3 Drop what you’re holding 

4 Trip and fall

5 Trip and fall on your face, you have a bloody nose and take 1d4 damage

6 Throw what you’re holding 1d4x10’ away (roll d4) 1-2 straight ahead  or  3-4 straight behind you 

7 Stop punching yourself! Make an attack roll against you

8 Make an attack roll against another person next to your target, if there aren’t any make one against yourself

9 Weapon breaks in some minor way (string snaps, handle falls off), broken until you get a chance to fix it

10 Jam your hand, ow! Disadvantage with that hand for next round

11 Twist your ankle! Speed is 10 until you’re healed

12 Total fuck-up, lose your next turn. You narrate why.

DISASTER TABLE

2 Your insane fuck-up is so shameful that you’re now blighted from the sight of the gods. You can no longer cast divine magic, and divine magic no longer affects you. Animals attack you on sight. This lasts until you perform an over-the-top ritual obeisance worth 1d6x100 gold.

3 Your armor gets nicked in a crucial point. Next time your armor would stop an attack, it breaks and you take a critical hit

4 Your weapon gets nicked in a crucial point. Next time you hit with an attack, your weapon shatters into pieces. You and everyone around you needs to make a Dexterity save DC 18 or take 1d4 damage.

5 You fall and break your dominant arm. You just can’t use it until you’re healed or its splinted, and then you’re at disadvantage with that arm until you rest for a week and make a Constitution save DC 15

6 Your weapon nicks an artery. You take 1d8 damage and 1d8 damage at the start of each turn unless the bleeding is somehow stopped. 

7 Your weapon clangs or scrapes super loud. A random encounter immediately joins the fray

8 Your pack breaks and your entire inventory falls onto the floor, anything fragile has a 25% chance of breaking

9 A level 10 thief backstabs you. Where’d he come from???

10 You fall and get a concussion. Unconscious for 1d10 rounds, and take 1d6 damage to all stats.

11 Sorry, you still critical hit yourself, except now you fall down too

12 Earthquake! It goes for 1d6 rounds. Everyone has to make a Dexterity save DC 20 immediately or fall down and can't get up until it's over, even if they don’t they can only move at half speed.  Within 50 miles buildings collapse, avalanches occur, roads are wiped out, bridges crumble. If you’re underground, then every round you take 2d6 damage from the ceiling falling, Dex save 15. Walls and hallways collapse. 5% chance of tsunami.

I review FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON by Scrap Princess and Patrick Stuart

This is my favorite book to come out of the OSR next to Zak Sabbath’s VORNHEIM and I want to tell you about it. 

1. It’s an original and useful bestiary

There’s like a hundred original monsters here. They’re super individual. They’re cheeky and weird. Some of them are sad and some of them are funny. There’s a lot of birds, a handful of variants on classic D&D monsters, a bunch of organizations, some bugs, and just a whole lot of monsters. Each one has a picture by Scrap with a description by Patrick. He’ll describe very carefully and clearly what it looks like, what it does, what makes it special, and what other people and monsters think of it.

Here’s some examples, they’re ridiculous:

BOA CONSTRUCTOR. FLAMMEOUS LADS. MONSTER MAIDEN. ATROCIOUS CROWS. BOA BOY. SHRINE-OH. PRIEST OF HOOKS.

There is such a range of monsters, it’s impossible to tell what’s next. Most of them would not be out of place in any D&D game and have an obvious use. They range from monster-y NPCs like the ABHORRER and MONSTER MAIDEN to grunts like the STAR GROOLS and FLAMMEOUS LADS to powerful brutes like the IMPERATOR APE to bizarre uniques like the ICE AGE EYE and EOCHIAN WYRM. 

There’s like a hundred of them. There’s no stats, thank God. These days stats in a monster book just confuses me since whatever system I use will be so hacked that any stats a book has will be completely invalid. 

They have powers like “Laws and social norms cannot be broken nearby” and “Cannot be touched” and “can get inside your vision which means that you see it constantly but can’t touch it until it decides to get out of your vision” and “creates chains of ice out of its eye that it uses to bind natural features in chains of ice.” 

2. It’s beautiful

Oh my God, it’s so beautiful. Patrick’s descriptions are musical and detail oriented. Some of his sentences are blunt, some of them are fluid. He moves from sentence to sentence so lightly and beautifully. He describes the monsters with sentences like “She will eat a special reed and with this she can speak and sing beautifully in a low soft whispering voice” and “From afar the head of the Imperator seems like a featureless black axe, relentless and blind” and “They are hard to harm with fire and feel very little pain, but they can be chopped up, smashed, drowned, and salted.” Notice the specificity, this is a level of specificity on par with the best literature.

Scrap’s pictures ooze insane intentions. Her monsters crouch, leap, stand, squat, look at you, look at nothing, grin, and think evil thoughts. A lot of them are smiling and it’s scary. Some of them look like they could have just been a gesture but instead they’re a skinny crane or a loathsome wisp. Some of them are dense scribbles with menacing form. A lot of them are grinning or screaming or look like they’re thinking about something sad. There’s something that looks like a dog with a scorpion’s tail kind of, there’s one that looks like a chandelier or a mobile, the color monster looks ready to befriend and jump away. Most of them are black and white but sometimes there’s color. The PRIEST-OF-HOOKS is red and surrounded by pages of black drawings on black backgrounds (except for the red skull of the PREDATOR SAINT) and its red looks otherwordly and on-purpose. The PREDATOR SAINT’s skull just looks evil.

Patrick describes her drawings in each description of the monster, usually almost literally. The way the monster is, is like the way the monster looks. It as if the drawings and the words have grown together. Which I’m sure is what happened. The effect is a pleasant mirroring. My mind goes back and forth between the words and the pictures and the words and the pictures. The words make the picture more real, the picture makes the words worthwhile and energetic. I tried to imagine the book without the pictures.

The backgrounds are complex. Pattern, density, texture, sometimes it’s like looking into another world the monster’s resting on, sometimes there’s a sense of geography (a horizon maybe or city patterns) and sometimes it’s like you’re looking at something alive magnified, sometimes it’s black broken by scratches or folds or patterns, sometimes there’s a form or shape. The DUMBSMOKE has these prismatic distortions around it that look like possibly the world looks like when you’re looking through the DUMBSMOKE. The backgrounds are as complex and varied as any zine I’ve read.

I’m so proud to own this fucking book and have it on my bookshelf or coffee table, seriously it just looks so good.

3. I’m a sucker for zine culture

I’ve read a lot of zines and I make my own zines. My friends make zines. This is some top-notch zine work. I love it when people make their own book out of scraps and collages and marker and scan it on the work printer and give it to their friends. This is like that except it’s ten times longer than any zine and it’s about monsters. I was born to love this book for that reason alone.

4. Unusual themes 

Some of the themes explored (and Patrick and Scrap really explore them really thoroughly) in this extraordinary and completely over-the-top book:

Deep Time

Birds

Isolation

Bugs

Monsters

Extraplanar Civilizations That May Be Our Own World From Another Perspective

What If This Monster Actually Existed, What Would That Be Like

Competing Perspectives Of The Same Reality

Language And Words 

Evil

5. Reading it is like reading a collection of beautiful fairy-tales, except not

If you want you can read it like you read a story-book. I do. When I get to a part I like I go, “Oh my God, here comes the part I like!” and then I read it and remember and get chills. You can flip through it and go to something that looks interesting and read about it and it won’t take too long because each part is only a page or two long. You can do that during breakfast, or if you’re trying to take a break from something else you’re doing. Each monster description is its own little journey that’s exactly as long as it needs to be to incarnate its idea. 

Except it’s not like a book of fairy-tales because it’s a book of monsters, except it’s not like the book of monsters you’d find in the YA section of your bookstore because the themes and ideas and images are so violent and unusual, and it’s obviously meant to be used in a game. Except even though it’s obviously meant to be used in a game, it’s shockingly beautiful and satisfying to simply read, but reading it makes me want to use it in a game, and that’s part of what’s so satisfying about it. Seriously it is completely unique from any other book I’ve ever read.

6. You can buy it at http://www.lulu.com/us/en/shop/scrap-princess-and-patrick-stuart/fire-on-the-velvet-horizon/paperback/product-22807768.html and I hope you do so that Patrick and Scrap can make more incredible books like this one and make me happier.