Ten Foot Pole

By Brendan Barnett
Self Published
Generic/Universal
"Lower Levels"

If legends of the Golden Gargoyle are true it could mean infinite wealth for any who possess it. Trouble is, nobody has a clue where to find it.  That is, until a goblin falls out of the sky with a pouch of gold dust and a map to a hidden cave, high in the mountains. What you can make out amongst the blood splatters is very promising.

This forty page adventure uses sixteen pages to describe eight rooms in a low-conflict cave full of goblins. It’s meh, mostly because it uses forty pages to describe eight rooms in a low-conlift cave full of goblins. 

Great looking little pdf. And I assume print book? Nice cover. Pretty little isometric map inside that is itself an art piece, like you might see as a two page special insert in Dragon or Mad Magazine. Nice illustrations and a layout style that looks pretty with its use of word color and boxes and highlights and so forth. And not garish, in spite of its use of pinks and purples. Nice accomplishment there!

Did you want to buy a coffee table book? Cause this is an awfully nice looking coffee table book.

It’s just real hard to take this seriously as an actual adventure given the page count to encounter ratio. Forty pages. Eight rooms. In spreads, of course. What is it that the designer wanted to do? DId they want to write an adventure or did they want to make a great looking book? Room one. This is all of the text on the first page of room one: A large rectangular chamber. In the centre a stone gargoyle statue sits atop a tall pillar with the word ‘umop’ roughly carved into it. The word ‘uado’ is scratched above each of two sealed stone doors to the north and west. The ceiling (30′ up) is covered in spikes. The floor is littered with broken bones. Searching the floor yields 10gp in assorted coins and a silver ring (40gp). It bears the image of a human figure immersed in a river.” There’s some line breaks in there. The second page has open and down in normal and reverse print. Yeah, the words are mirrors and one opens the doors while the other does an anti-gravity. Two fucking pages. Two fucking pages for this. And this is the norm for the adventure. Simple rooms, spread out over two pages.

We can, I suppose, ignore this. We can simply accept that the designer decided two pages per room. What we get, then, is eight (or nine, for an A/B room) are some relatively simplistic rooms. The interactivity here is basic. I’m pretty sure there’s one ‘fight’, with Vampire Kinght[sic] Armour. Nobody present really cares that you are nosing around in the caves. I can’t help but think that this could have been much better i it were larger. The goblins, cultists, bats, tomb, all with zones in the dungeon, expanding the thing to something with more going on and room for the adventure to breathe. 

The language used, for the room descriptions. Is rather plain. A large rectangular room. THis is not the height of language use to evoke imagery. The exception is the isometric map. It’s a pretty great art piece, harkening back to all of those Bat Cave and Hall of Justice isometric pieces from comics, or, the Starship Warden piece I have hanging on my call. Very evocative, but not exactly something you can run from. (There is a more traditional map as well, to run from, the isometric piece not being the most clear on room connections.) 

I can’t say it’s true or not, but it certainly FEELS like the isometric map was the starting point of this adventure. As if it were created and then the rooms followed on. Like the adventure, proper, was secondary to this and/or inspired by the art piece. That doesn’t have to be bad, but in this case the adventure just doesn’t feel worked enough. 

It remains interesting to me the many ways that the various subcultures produce bad adventures. Starting from bland, or assembly line, or wordy, or mini combats, or rote, or art, or layout, or, or, or.

https://pocket-sized-perils.itch.io/grotto-of

This is $5, Aussie, at Itch.io

By Greg Daley
Tarichan Games
1e
Levels 2-3

Dead bodies turn up, purple with poison. Word reaches the village that a pair of bodies have been found at the ford of a lonely vale, slashed and bloated. A wyvern has been seen on the mountain nearby. The adventurers explore the valley below the mountain, on the search for the killer. Can the characters defeat a threat from the frigid mountains? Will they defeat the creature and overcome the curse of the peak?

This 55 page adventure presents a small wilderness area and a four level dungeon with about 75 rooms, with the dungeon proper using about sixteen pages. There’s a conspiracy afoot, or two, all caused by the dwarves in the dungeon that the party will no doubt get mixed up in. You might think of this as a “normal” dungeon that then has some framing to it to spice it up by way of the conspiracies. While not particularly evocative, it’s a solid little bit of adventure that perhaps illustrates how to add emerging plot to an otherwise “normal” dungeon.

The marketing blurb above lays out the basic situation that the party stumbles upon. Two imperial tax collectors turn up dead, fat with poison and covered in wounds and a wyvern has been seen flying about in the mountains nearby. If you poke about the wilderness some you find a few unusual things. A stream full of grey silty runoff. A farm near the mountains has had some improvements. A nerid is pissed her pond is now polluted with the grey runoff. There’s also a trio of ogres and their minions who have taken up residence on a small hill, waylaying passersby that the party can run afoul of. 

In the mountains there was an old dwarf diamond mine that suffered a cave in and has been shut for a long time. A clan has moved back in and restarted the mine, surreptitiously. That’s causing the runoff. The farmer is working with them in exchange for his brand new roof and some new dwarf tools he has, as well as a future payoff. So far, just run of the mill stuff. But, the dwarves DID poison the tax collectors, who were getting too close to their secret, and have been flying a wyvern kit to scare folk off. Which is a tad complicated because there IS a young wyvern nearby as well. So, the party can kill a wyvern and the killings continue, which puts the party in bad with th (not really detailed) town. Not nice dwarves. Talking to the dwarves reveals a problem, there are monsters in the mine, could you pretty please? This is a trap, with the dwarves planning, through several subterfuges (including drugged food; breaking Host law! Forshame!) to kill off the party. The monster in the mine is a rock dude who is overseeing a nursery of rockling eggs that the dwarves fucked with and thus he’s been causing tremors to drive the dwarves away. Finally, the dwarves stole of “gem seeds” from him, and they are playing to make the underlying kindof dormant magma/volcano erupt to score a big diamond haul from the gem seeds. Which is also going to result in the nearby town and settlements getting ravaged from the eruption. And then, a dimensional dude is going to show up who wants the gem seeds also to create a gem warrior army for his rebellion efforts back home in his own dimension.

It sounds like a lot going on and maybe a bit convoluted, but I assure it is not. Instead, it is CONSTRUCTED, with what’s going on being the goals of the various entities. Let’s start by, say, building a dwarf mine/home/dungeon. They’ve moved back in to reopen a family holding and, being greedy fucks, don’t want to pay taxes and want to keep their secrets. So we’ve got a level or so of their clanhome and workings. And then have some abandoned parts with more verminy type creatures and a creature on the bottom causing them major problems. All pretty standard, yeah? And grounded in some real motivations, those yahoos who hate the gubberment and their taxes. Which fits in perfectly with the greedy dwarf thing. I love that it is playing to that, not just stout humans, but greedy fucking dwarves. And this is causing the killings, the wyvern thing, the fucking with the rock dudes nursery, the trick violations of host law,  and finally the potential eruption. Who gives a fuck about the people nearby? We care about our clan .. and gems. Really nice implementation of demihumans as an alien culture that LOOKS normal until you dig deeper, and, one of the dwarf themed adventure I think I’ve ever seen. 

Then, lets take that and build in the killings as a hook, and the required wilderness/overland portion to support the investigation of the “wyvern” attacks. We put in some clues for those paying attention, and dump in the nearest farmer as a further clue as they need a little support in their mine and have paid him off ‘in kind.’ We expand that wilderness a little also with the ogre fort to throw in some extra danger as the party tools around and then add the real juvenile wyvern as a decoy/aside to complicate the situation further. Everything is built around and supports the initial idea: the dwarf clan home/mine. Really excellent job constructing the supporting situations around the central conceit, which is itself built on the solid greedy dwarf foundation.

The encounter style is relatively terse. There some summary up front of the overall situation which helps frame the terse encounters. That summary could be clearer, it’s a little scattered, but it’s fine; one read through and you’ve got it. This allows for a wilderness encounter that reads: “3/Grey Brook- This stream is filled with a grey, cloudy silt. Dwarves or other underground creatures may identify the contaminant as dust from crushed rock. Those who have mined previously may identify this as mine tailings, from a process which pulverises rock.” That’s it. It’s a clue to more going on, a fact for the DM to build on. Or, a freshly hewn fence at the farm. A creek near the farm with a gangway hidden in bushes on one side and a cart hidden on the other side. Hmmm. Why’s that there? A body, killed by the “wyvern” may reveal stomach swelling … ingested poison. But you’ve got to pay attention, both as a player and as a DM to build on these little dropped facts and make it your own … in exactly the way a DM should in an adventure.

On the downside, the summary/intro is a little bit of a mess. It’s not a disaster, but things are scattered, repeated, and so on. It needs a hard edit with some laser focus to make it really stellar, but, again, not a disaster by any means. There’s not much for the town AT ALL, and a little bit more there in terms of personalities or complications would have gone a long way to supporting this part of the adventure. It’s essentially nonexistent. And the “adventures” presented in this section are really more of telling the DM the arc of how the designer expects things to happen. Investigating the killings, hunting the wyvern, finding the dwarves, getting fucked over by them maybe, the rock dude and dimension guy showing up … potentially the party being led there by the dwarves, and the potential eruption. The dwarves don’t really have an organized order of battle for when/if things go south with them. More of arcs or milestones than “adventures.” And, then the scale on the overland map is fucked up I think? It’s putting everything pretty much on top of each other if the “one square equals 20 feet” legend is to be believed. The writing could be a bit more evocative also. The rooms are fact based, maybe with a sentence or two on usage which is not supremely relevant. For example “7/Ablution Rooms These are a set of sparse washing rooms, divided for female and male dwarves. “Beard” dwarves wash with their sisters, for modesty. The rooms contain each contain three sets of chambers. The first is for dry clothes and towels, the next contains (cold) showers, and baths. The final room is for necessary (if unpleasant) functions. All of the rooms are solid, stone hewn, and work with hidden mechanisms, hiding unnecessary pipes, levers, or drains. “ No great sins here, but also nothing too evocative. The greater situations in the complex lend themselves to this fact-based descriptions, still allowing the greater play opportunities. 

Pretty solid. Maybe a little cumbersome in places, which more focus would help with, but I suspect that comes with time and practive.

This is $3.50 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages with a decent variety in there. Good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/553089/em3-wyvern-of-whitepeak-old-school?1892600

By John Webb
Self Published
OSR/5E
Level 2

[…] Years later, a band of opportunistic brigands took shelter in the manor ruins. In the depths below, their leader, Halren Pike, discovered the dagger and fell under its influence. Compelled by its will, he now seeks out elves and half-elves, testing their blood in search of a surviving bastard heir to House Thalanor. Though the bandits themselves are not uniformly cruel, their leader’s fixation has led to kidnappings, imprisonment, and worse. Some captives are released after being “tested.” Others are not so fortunate.

This twenty page adventure uses about seven pages to present sixteen rooms, six above and the rest below, in the ruins of a manor occupied by bandits. It’s a tactical deathtrap as your small band charges in to a mesatop fortress with a lot of lookouts and bandits present. It’s a raid, with nothing going on beside that. 

I dunno know. Either the designer asked for a review or it was in the OSR category trying to Puffery its way in to a few more sales. Ok, so, a long time ago there was an elf noble house that was mean to its subjects. People rise up and the lord kill himself and his family when things go south. His god is pissed at that. (So, you can be a despot and have a chill god but killing yourself and family so you won’t be taken is just a step too far.) Bandits move in a long time later. Their leader finds a dagger, cursed, that makes him test elves and half-elves by cutting them to see if they are the heirs to the elf noble house. This entire nonsense of stuff I find lame, with despotic elf nobles and the like. Man, just make them human. The whole “Demihumans are humans with pointy ears” thing is kind of lame. Where’s Jorune when you need it?  

Back to this, the designer tells us, up front: “With a mere sixteen rooms, this adventure’s complexity lies not in a vast sprawl, but more so in the behavior of its inhabitants and the unpredictability of its emergent narrative. Will the party fight, bluff, negotiate, or sneak their way into the lower level? Will they seek a peaceful resolution, or simply kill all in their path? Will they rescue prisoners at the expense of time and stealth, or leave them to an unjust fate? These are the questions that must be answered, Gamemaster, over the course of play. Alas, I cannot prescribe them nor would I, even if I were so capable! “  Just to be clear, none of that really exists in any practical manner.  I mean, yes, there are prisoners to rescue, but they are not really troublesome other than wanting to leave, just like all prisoners freed are. Nothing mentioned in that section is anything other than the normal course of play. Nothing special is going on. In fact, there’s a lot less special in this adventure than in most adventures. I don’t know. I guess if you play Napoleonic Miniatures and someone introduces a dungeon it might be remarkable, so, if you play D&D in hardcore 4e tactics mode then “Look! You can roleplay also!” might be interesting? 

“Wood Door: AC 13, 18 Hit Points, and immunity to Poison and Psychic damage.” Oh, how I have missed this nonsense. There’s nothing funnier than then when pay-per-word padding becomes the de rigueur standard because people grow up with it. But doctor… I am Pagliacci!. And, of course, married to that are explicit illumination notes in each room. This is so dumb. I’m not sure who these things are being written for that this kind of garbage has to be included. Well, no, I guess I stated it above. It’s written for someone paying by the word. But the designer writing THIS adventure doesn’t know that. They think that’s how you write an adventure. The sins of PF Changs Pad Thai run deep. That’s not real Pad Thai, but you don’t know that. Once you have the real thing you’ll never be fooled again. 

This is a frontal assault. There are nineteen bandits present, but six start not-at-home and return 10-40 minutes after the party starts fucking shit up. There’s not a super good description of the outside ruins environs, but from the map it looks like a cliff face with a landing on it ten or twenty feet up with fortress ruins on it. There’s a broad stair case up running parallel to the cliff face that then turns 90 degrees to run perpendicular to in to it. There are the remains of three watchtowers on the cliff “landing” ruins. There’s a bandit in the towers watching the approaches. There’s guard dogs sniffing shit out. The bandits have planted shriekers on the “unused” cliff edges as an alarm bell. There’s also a patrolling bandit, watching specifically the approach of the stairs, walking along the cliffside it is on looking for intruders. I’m afraid this is a tough nut to crack, even for my “burn it down and reroute the river method of murder-hoboing. There is a 10% chance a guard is asleep. Yeah? And, there is a secret door in. Right in playing view of all of the guards, on the stair landing where it turns 90 degrees. You gonna have to search for it and then make a history check at DC14 to recall the password. I don’t see how you do this under the guards’ noses. This all seems a bit much at level two. Well, for anything other than a pitched battle. Which is fine, but, it looks like a death trap to me with that approach. You could silence the shriekers … if you knew about them? And had access to level two spells? The secret door doesn’t seem reasonable. I guess that leaves bluffing your way to the top? I don’t know man. This feels like a hack … with the odds stacked against the party.

Inside it’s more of a hack, although not quite in the same “its a trap!” set up. There IS a curse you can break. You need to make an offering to a goddess of the correct type. Then commune with here. Then make a DC14 check. Then you’ll get a scroll that of remove curse. Then you gotta figure out that there IS a curse on the bandit leader and use the scroll. Yeah! Now they are just a normal group of bandits instead of a group of bandits that also “test” elves and half-elves by cutting them. Uh. Ok? Or, just stab the bandits? Oh no! The bloodthirsty demon has acne! Good thing you have him some zit creme, now he can get on with his reign of terror AND look good for his portraits! 

None of this shit makes much sense, and, it’s just a hack. I have no idea why it is in the OSR section of DriveThru. Usually that means Shadowdark, but not this one. I mean, it’s basically just a 4e adventure. And you KNOW that’s not a compliment. More minis combat min-maxing then RPG.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview gets you eight real pages, including some keys. Good preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/564113/the-ruins-of-manor-thalanor?1892600

By Operant Game Lab
Self Published
OSR/Rovers & Riches
Level ??

Even the most ignorant children know the realm is divided by a massive, transparent wall. Everything outside the wall is “normal.” Everything that lies inside is “wrong.” The “wrong” lands are called Zu. Today, we take a field trip into strangest Zu…

This 35 page decently-sized hexcrawl adventure presents a bunch of hexes in Zu, a weirdo land full of bizarre things going on in a fantasy/post-apoc/PoMo mashup. The hexes can be interesting and are certainly creative, but they lack tension.

Let’s call this a farcical Rifts setting. A giant glass wall separates the Normal lands from the Weirdo place beyond the wall, which everyone calls Zu. There’s a break in the wall at Happy Town, to let you in. Tonally, a giant mecha made of junk is on the wanderers table and is described as “It powered by a dozen subjects running on human treadwheels. Six troopers (p. 24) with scoped rifles float from balloons lashed to the giant’s shoulders, poised to rain down leaden death.” 

This thing has a niche audience and it’s not me. And I mean this in two regards. First, the setting. It might be closest to that 4e D&D version of Gamma World, the Paranoia Zap of gamma worlds. Those things like Troika and Mork Borg come to mind as well.There is a strong element of absurdity here, maybe even Theater of the Absurd if I get a little meta. There’s an old school with a janitor in it and a teddy bear that needs stories read to it. Or, a water slide aqueduct trickling water to an empty pool where cleric chicks covered in sponge suits dole out the water to bedraggled people standing in line ala Fury Road. Happy Town itself is ruled by a little twilight zone Anthony with a wand of transmutation who turns people in to stuff if she doesn’t get her way, so the people there only make candy and cakes and force smiles here in Peaksville. Tonally, you’re going to have to be ok with this kind of content being your game if you want to use this, and I suspect the more niche sides of the OSR are where this is aimed. You not gonna be happy with this if you don’t like zaniness.

I’m struggling to find a way to frame this second point. There is, in my mind, a difference in game play in certain systems. D&D, of the classic OSR style, leans more towards a game. You are typing to stay alive and level. There’s an inherent tension in that, and staying alive and leveling is ‘winning’ at D&D. It lends itself to campaign play well since there is continuity, your character. This is one of the reasons that ‘museum adventures’ are so frustrating to me; you are actively discouraged to interact, which works against what you are playing. Other RPGs fall more in to an Activity. Baron Muchausen is the classic example. Your enjoyment comes from something different. And that, I think, is where this adventure lies.

The hexes in this have two general types of encounters. First there are some filler hexes, making up about half of the hexes. Short, with only two-three sentences, they provide some flavor. A hex full of wines, walking through them wakes them up, and they feel the party members and pat them on the back before opening up to allow them to pass. Freaky? Absolutely. But nothing else going on.

The second type of hex, representing the other half of the hexes, take about a page or so each. There is more text and whats happening is more involved. But, i would assert, to the same end. There’s nothing really TO DO. Oh, you can get involved, but why? Touching things and getting involved brings trouble. And there’s not really anything to exploit, as one might in a traditional hex crawl game. If you were just trying to interact to have a good time then you’re chill, yeah, freaky things will happen. But no one is going out out their way to gack you (other than perhaps the wanderers) and there’s not really treasure to loot to exploit, at least in a traditional sense. Some of the hooks DO send you on the hunt for something. Happy Town wants you to go get a candle. Ok, so, I guess we can explore and look for that. SOme hexes ARE mentioned in other hexes, but they are not really interconnected, either explicitly or, I would assert, implicitly, in that you can, say, break the dam in hex X to flood the orc caves in hex Y, or some other wacky scheme that the party were to come up with. You enter a hex, have a wacky encounter, and move on to repeat.

For the more Activity-based RPG”s this is going to be a great adventure. I think it serves everything they need to get in to wacky situations. But for a more campaign/game based game I’m not sure its overly useful. (Not that you can’t campaign Mork Borg or Troika or DCC, but I don’t think it works out that way in practice.) 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. PWYW and then preview is the entire thing, so good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/483434/field-trip-to-zu?1892600

By Dale Houston
Duck & Crow Press
OSR
Levels: Low/"Rookies"

Under a raging river of turbulent, caustic water that melts organic material in moments lies the decrepit remains of a nefarious wizard’s lair. Opening a passage under the river would mean commerce and prosperity, and every brave adventurer worth their salt knows that a wizard’s den is guaranteed to have some reality-bending magical loot! Get ready for some liquefactive necrosis.

This 32 page adventure uses about eight pages to describe seventeen rooms in a wizard lair/passage under a river. Great specificity. Good challenges. Good formatting. A good and solid basic adventure that, white not exactly the most memorable, is setting everything up for success.

This is the first adventure in Dale’s Undying Expanse series. It’s not Thundarr, or even gonzo, but there are absolutely hints of it, at least in this adventure. The premise here is that there was once this fortress spanning a river. The river is caustic, like, full on acid. Up and down the river for ten miles along both banks is a prismatic wall. One of the former fortress dwellers was a wizard who hated the locals, it seems. Anyway, time passes, wizard dies, fortress collapses, and now there are just some crumbling remains, a passage UNDER the river. Trade routes anyone? And, as usual, there are some bandits hole up and some wizard leftovers. 

The rumors here are interesting. You get about a page of them, sixty, arrayed in ten tables of six each, by topic. So, each village, the bandits, the river, etc. That’s a nice way to zero in on various topics the party may be asking about. The villages in the surrounding area map are tied in to the hooks and half about a column each; a couple of notable businesses that an adventurer might visit and a couple of people, all don in a manner that’s easy to follow, terse, and full of flavor. “Big Hierome: Always laughing, compulsively eats sweets; this brute manages the bulls when they get a bit too feisty” The hooks, likewise, are short but have that specificity to them that helps a DM bring them alive. “Magistrate Yeldo of Flont will pay the crew six month’s wage to open the passage.” or “Jane Blood, local crime boss in Rockton, will forgive your incredible debt if you open the passage. She wants it to be a toll road.” One of these is exactly a “pay the party” thing, but its founded in something realistic, wanting to open a trade road. This helps elevate it beyond the normal old “someone hires you” hook that people toss out. And the crime boss one is grounded in her entry in the village, “Unassuming and simply dressed local business woman; rumored to be a heartless psychopath in charge of a criminal gang, has a large number of ‘cousins’ always nearby. “ There is MORE than enough there to make Jane a mainstay of the adventurers life, both in this adventure and in future ones. You can really riff on that and yet it’s terse. That’s good writing. It’s specific. Cousins. The rumor. Dale hits these very well and is certainly in the top tier of folks when it comes to that part of the adventure. 

Each room entry is offset in a little light green box with an entry that could be read-aloud or room details to summarize to the players, and then some well formatted bullets, starting with a bolded keyword, to help focus the DMs attention in on the things of import in the room. There are little embedded tables or “tracker boxes” present as well, where appropriate. Nothing goes on for more than a couple of sentences, making it easy to scan and parse information at the table during play. A little “modern” in terms of generous whitespace, with rooms taking between a third of a page or a full page to describe, but it’s all easy to use. 

The text does a decent job of being evocative as well. “Low oily fires giving little light” or “Cauldron: A mess of “villager stew” is thickening in the cauldron. “ or “Tarp: Made of human skin leather, faces and hair still intact. It is recently made and still a bit damp. “ Still intact. A bit damp. It’s a tarp. Good word choices to really bring these things to life. 

Interactivity is decent as well, both in terms of individual rooms and in the larger context. One room has a trapped demon in it. Pulling a lever in an earlier room releases the demon and he starts to move throughout the dungeon. Peepholes show you other places. An initial room has a bunch of skeletons on stakes in it … it’s full of crude traps (think jugs of river water and sharp sticks) … but the skeletons face the individual traps, so you can use them to help navigate across the room. Of course that’s how the bandits inside navigate it. There are consequences for your actions. It’s not world ending, but you can feel them. You could do enough damage to collapse the ceiling and flood the place. Oops. No trade route. And if the demon gets loose then there are some notes on what happens in the game world; not the end of the world but trouble for a while. Coming out of the dungeon on the other side of the river “This is where some of the “bad” kids from Rockton come to smoke, drink, and make out.” and you freak the kids out. Drunk bandits. Stripping magic inlaid circles of their inlaid silver. The rooms have consequences, many of which are telegraphed in subtle ways for those paying attention. A rubble filled room with gold braziers stuck in the rubble. Dig em out? What about those crumbling walls, signs of impending collapse? Prisoners of the bandits to free, connected to the town (and, potentially, hooks.) You’ve got the dungeon environment to interact with, the walls and rubble and leaks and such. You’ve got the bandits and their ogre boss at the beginning. You’ve got old wizard shit. Lots to do.

Things are also supported well. There are a couple of art handouts, one of which cleverly conceals some imps hiding that negates surprise if you notice them in the drawing. Handwritten notes. A good hex map, new monsters, notes on the dungeon map about “always on” things like the leaking walls, so the DM can emphasize them

The dungeon map, proper, is a little busy and not the easiest to read. While the use of color to highlight text is done well through the rest of the adventure, the dark maroon keying blends in a bit much, and the “art” use of shading on the map, with rubble, makes things a little less clear then I would prefer. It’s not a disaster in any sense, just not as clear as I would prefer. And, we get a little sloppy with the use of the word “turns.” That skeleton/trap room “Following the paths takes 3 Turns to get to any other wall, 4 turns if moving cautiously” Thirty to forty minutes, or three to four actions, you think? 

These are just nits. This is a solid adventure. Easy to use, evocative, interactive, with lots of fun specificity. There’s a 4HD ogre and an 8HD demon, so, challenging for a level one group, but it does a solid job. 

This is $12.50 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, showing you the intro, hooks, rumors, villages, and numerous dungeon rooms. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540645/under-the-caustic-river-ahnd?1892600

By Jason Youngdale
Youngdale Productions
DCC/OSR
Levels 1-2

Long ago, beneath the fertile valleys south of Castle Dragonwater, a minor baron swore fealty to the Starved King, a demonic entity of hunger. In exchange, the baron’s land flourished with endless crops and fattened livestock. When the baron died, his descendants sealed the King’s shrine in terror—but the hunger below never ended. Now, farmers near Horndale report crops rotting overnight and livestock turning feral. Strange lights flicker in the old Granary Hill Mound, and the smell of roasted meat fills the night air. The locals beg the adventurers to descend into the forgotten vault and end the demonic banquet once and for all.

This twenty page adventure uses about four pages to describe twelve boring rooms of boringness using single-column formatting. Here are words that should be a contradiction: it’s a boring DCC adventure.

The turn of the millennia was an exciting time in RPG’s.the 3.0 explosion, indie RPG’s everywhere. I remember Polaris. Or, rather Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North. Conflict can be ended by someone saying “Thou are but a warrior …” Yeah, that’s tragedy all right. Your force of arms can do nothing here to resolve things. Noice! You know ol Brycy Bryce loves some human relatability and complexity in his game. Not to punish the party for wrong choices but to muddle the affairs of the way the word REALLY works in to an RPG and still have it be fun. Let us imaging, though, after saying this the party then stabs the NPC. And then they go all Lancelot-at-the-wedding and stab the king, queen, prince, half-brother, wedding guests, and everyone else in a ten mile radius. Ha! Damn skippy I’m a warrior biatch! I’m not sure that one is playing Polaris then, even though you might be using the Polaris rules. Blah blah blah its art is the creator calls it art blah blah blah. Whatever. It’s lost the point of Polaris. 

And thusly this adventure and DCC. Let us imagine a DCC adventure with three 30×30 rooms in a row. No doors. 4 orcs in each room. Each room is otherwise empty. Is this DCC? It’s stat’d for DCC. Does that make it DCC? Sure. But it has lost the point of what a DCC game is. What is it, Mighty Deeds or something, where you can describe using what’s in the room to do cool shit? That’s the point of DCC. It makes cool shit happen. The halfling, the thief, the mage, the fighter, they are all built around making cool shit happen ORGANICALLY. The person has an ability, but the environment and set up is there for the party to riff on. The designer takes us to the McDonalds PlayPlace and the fighter drowns someone in the ball pit. Except. What if there is no ball pit? Or slide. Or anything else. It’s just an empty room. I’ve played in DCC games like this at cons and the difference is marked. 

Examining this adventure, room 1 save or vomit. Room 2 save or eat dirt. Room 3 is a ghost kitchen with nothing to use to fight in. Room 4 has a banquet table to fight in. Room 5, finally, is larder is hanging hooks to fight in. Room 6, pantry of jars to fight in. Room 7 had a bed to fight in. Rooms 8 and 9 have nothing but saves. You get it. There’s is little to build on here. What the fuck am I supposed to Might Deed in a ghost kitchen in which nothing is real? The banquet table isnt fucking stupendious but at least it has a table, and the same goes for the larder, at least there are hooks with shit hanging on them. Not exactly a complex environment but at least its SOMETHING. 

And the save rooms. Ug. Save or vomit. Save or eat some dirt. These have no meaningful impact on the game. It’s window dressing. Just a reason to roll dice. It’s fucking lame. 

The locals are starving, crops withering, livestock fading away. “The locals beg the adventurers to descend into the forgotten vault and end the demonic …” WHat about them? DId they try and fail? No? We don’t care about them? Because we don’t care about the adventure? It’s just a flimsy pretext for a VERY lightly themed “hunger” dungeon? Yeah, I know, because it comes off like that. There’s no immersion here. All these pages. Nothing.

“Giant rats could also be in this room, waiting to attack any intruders.” Wonderful. “Four ghouls here jerk their heads sharply as you approach.” Great, embedded tenses in the summaries. “This appears to be a” Padded out wording. It’s only four fucking pages rooms and it’s still padded out. 

Nothing to see. Move along. Move along.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is the first three pages and shows you nothing but the credit and table of contents. You can’t make a purchasing decision based on that, so it fails at being a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555500/the-banquet-of-the-starved-king?1892600

By Taron Pounds, Lawrence Schick
Landof the Blind
OSR
Levels 5-10

Three relics have been stolen from their owners, and worries have spread about the power one person would have with all three in their possession. Word of a substantial reward for their return spread, with a poem as the only clue. 

This 36 page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe the eighteen rooms of White Plume Mountain. A homage/updated version with the serial numbers scrubbed off, it is trying hard on the ease of use front but loses the charm of White Plume by under-describing. 

I’m down with the overall goal here. Updating some of the classics to improve upon them seems like a fine idea. I mean, I still have several Dungeon adventures on my ToDo list to overhaul and update for when watching paint drying becomes too exciting for me. As an experiment to understand layout and formatting and what’s important I think it’s an interesting idea. It also gets some eyes on older adventures, many of which forged new conceptual ground. And then also I suspect time would be better spent on new adventures, but, who am I to tell someone how to spend their few remaining precious moments of life? There’s another aspect to this as well: the system-neutral thing. It’s not really system-neutral, it’s aimed at D&D-like systems, with stat blocks to prove it. I’ve never really found a problem using adventures for other systems in whatever I’m running (which is generally B/X based with a heavy bend to oD&D) however I suspect there is a certain market limitation, or advantage, to saying “Works with Mork Borg!” in any event, I think this is the proper way to do it; stat it for a B/X as the foundation of most systems follows, and then note what it can be used/adapted for. Perhaps a little disingenuous in the marketing, but, meh, at least you planted a stake in the ground. 

It’s pretty obvious what they doing with the formatting. Bolding, bullets, icons, headers and so on. There’s a little intro section, a few sentences or so with some bolded words and then some bullets to follow up on those. The icons are probably overkill, meant to tell you “this is a trap” or “this is a monster.” All in all, I think there’s too much here. The pages end up busy and your eyes tend to glaze over a bit. This is a not uncommon problem in some adventures. Folks recognize that formatting and layout can bring clarity but they they take it too far and it can contribute to obfuscation. If everything is important then nothing is, or something similar to that saying. I’m going to list the lighting condition, door, stone texture, etc in every room, would be a similar problem. No. You have to craft these things carefully. Adventure design, or, room formatting and layout, is not a one size fits all issue. You can have go to techniques but you have to use them carefully to highlight certain aspects to bring clarity. When something becomes rote and is generically applied then it can lead to problems. 

But the major problem here is that this comes off more than a little soulless. There was a charm in White Plume that came through and this doesn’t feel like it has that. This feels like a bunch of rooms with challenges in it and little else whereas White Plume had just a little bit more going on to ground the rooms and encounters. S2 has a rather mangy and bedraggles sphinx squatting in the water. This, however has “a sphynx stands on the other side” [of the forcefield.] This has six globes of silver dangling from the ceiling, with bullets for their contents. S2 had silvered glass globes dangling from the ceiling on unbreakable wires, that a good crack would shatter, dumping their contents in to the muck below. It’s a much fuller picture and paints a much more evocative scene than just a mostly fact-based list of the challenges in the room. And this is not cherry picking, it happens over and over again. I ofton encourage folks to think about the room, devoid of mechanics, and create it, then adding mechanics, instead of the mechanics leading the charge. This is how we get the slim strands they hang from and the good crack and the dumping the contents in to the muck. Further, we can see a word choice in S2, spartan but present, that brings this room to life, and that just isn’t present in this adventure respin. While we do get the “silvered” globes, it feels like an extra adjective was just thrown in for the sake of having one rather than painting a complete and evocative picture of the room.

I do like the cover, but that art style is one I find personally appealing. And an attempt is made at the wanderers, with the gargoyles flying a corpse somewhere, for example. It lists factions, but, these are not really factions with a factions game and things they want, it’s just a list of major monsters. I not, also, there is a disconnect between the text and the supplementary pointcrawl map. (The adventure has a “real” map also.” The pointcrawl map point out rooms with the mucky water in them, but it disagrees with the text on rooms 13/14. No so great when the reference material is off. 

So, it’s White Plume, explicitly, with updated text and layout and the serial numbers filed off. But the updated text has removed the specificity that brought White Plume to life. Thus, it is just the wacko room challenges boiled down to mostly mechanics. And that’s not the vibe I’m looking for in an adventure. 

This is $5 at Drivethru. The preview is the whole thing. Yah! Great preview. I might suggest checking out page ten of the preview/page six of the product. That is the Globe room. I think it encapsulates the formatting/layout and the derth of specificity in the descriptions.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561058/ghost-crest-peak?1892600

By The Crafty DM
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-3

Arriving with little coin and no reputation, the player characters must earn their place through action, not titles. The town is wary, its people practical, and its problems real. Strange signs gather along the docks, the nearby wilds grow unstable, and something stirs beneath the waterline. Through investigation, negotiation, and hard-earned victories, the party builds trust with the townsfolk while uncovering the first threads of a larger danger.

This 39 page adventure presents three mostly scripted fights mini-quests in a small fishing town. They follow a pretty rigid outline with some kabuki of interactivity that amount to monologue, fight, monologue. It seems to have some U-series overtones. 

We’re not starting out strong with this one. The pretext here is that the party is new to town and they have to do a bunch of mini-quests to gain the town’s trust. Then, in another module in the series the town will trust them enough to give them an actual task.This strikes me as aking to the asshole quest-giver tropes who treats the party like shit and still expects them to run errands. The implicit assumption is that you can treat the PC’s like shit and that they have no free will. Yes, we all want to play D&D tonight but how many hoops do we need to jump through before they just go somewhere else to seek their fortune? The party has free will. This is followed up with bythe designer with a comments “Not all of these quests are presented with full detail in this module. This is intentional, allowing you to tailor certain tasks to the personalities, abilities, and backstories of your players.” I see this sometimes in adventures. This is inevitably NOT a sealed off passage for the DM to expand upon. It is instead getting ahead of criticism by saying the flaws exist on purpose. The whole It;s Up To The DM To Bring Life To The Game thing. Which, while true, ignores the central tenant of adventure writing for others: you’re supposed to be helping the DM out. Leaving a sealed off passage is great. Flaws in execution are not.

You’re in town, arriving in a bar in the opening read-aloud. What follows is a series of mini-quests that all follow the same outline. Some comes up to you to ask you to do something. You talk to them. You go to a location and maybe roll some dice in a performative way to “investigate.” You get in a fight. You talk to the person who gave you the quest. I know, this sounds kind of like the platonic outline of a quest, but, the difference is that this is three scenes. Someone runs to get you. You talk to a fisherman and look at a body and talk to an old lady. You might roll some dice to look at a body. You go back to the docks at night (I hope …) and get in a fight. You talk to more people the next morning and are told you did a good job. You talk to someone about a druid. You go looking and fight some woodland beasts in three waves. You talk to the druid and do the performative thing. It’s all a really simple pattern here. 

There is nothing really to fail, except I guess the combat. If you don’t do the thing you are railroaded in to then you’re instructed to modify the end monologue but to keep the arc going. On the docs, the Sea Devils you fight are looking for the body you examined, and that get stolen no matter what you do. I guess if you have it strapped to your chest and chained to you it still gets stolen? 

It’s just so … obvious? Low effort? Read a bunch of text. Lots of read-aloud and lots of italics. Everything just follows along the “plot” without any deviation, no matter your actions. Your actions and die rolls don’t really matter. What’s the point of this? 

It’s just a railroad of an adventure with a VERY simple outline of a pattern that repeats. I mean, again, I get it. We;re playing D&D tonight. But the meaninglessness of it all. Rolling dice for no reason. No pretext of choice at all. Yes, the DM can fill in and bring it to life. But you have to give them something to work with.

A haunted house on a hill. Sea Devils Lizardmen, The house in this is red herring, not even really covered. The lizardmen are friendly. But it’s the same elements as the U series. It’s fine, I guess. You get to reimagine and respin the classics. Well, if done right. And this isn’t done right. Perhaps the platonic example of a low-effort adventure that one might throw together on the back of a napkin in three minutes before the game starts?

There is no price of trust in the adventure. And I’m not sure I’d come back for anothe rgame if this were the campaign kickoff.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. There is an annoying youtube promo. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563326/sinister-secrets-the-price-of-trust?1892600

By Nicole Mattos, Icaro Agostino, Davide Tramma
Angry Golem Games
OSE
Levels 2-4

After being denied recognition as the supreme lord, Severo cursed the region, bringing a devastating drought to the Village of Rangdum. In desperation, a Council of Elders performed a forbidden ritual, sacrificing a young woman who became a Rusalka, bound to preserve the lake through a hidden artifact deep beneath its waters. After being denied recognition as the supreme lord, Severo cursed the region, bringing a devastating drought to the Village of Rangdum. In desperation, a Council of Elders performed a forbidden ritual, sacrificing a young woman who became a Rusalka, bound to preserve the lake through a hidden artifact deep beneath its waters.

This fifteen page document is the outline of an adventure, in which most of what’s presented doesn’t make much sense given two seconds of thought about it. It’s just the usual low effort crap that gets churned out. 

Ohs Nos! People are disappearing down by the lake! There’s singing coming from the lake. Nobody knows whats going on! People are moving out! The village is dying! Blah Blah Blah. No one mentions that the villagers sacrificed a young woman awhile back. To the lake. To keep the lake fruitful. 

There are some timeline issues here. It’s not really apparent how long ago the sacrifice took place. It’s implied, and stated in one place I think, that the Council of Elders are the only ones who remember. But, also, how long as chickcula been doing this? Since day one? Did it start suddenly? Did the lake go from Dying to Healthy But You Never Approach It Or She Kills You in like two hours? None of the backstory makes any sense, which is gonna make an investigation pretty difficult to conduct. Oh, also, the lake is, I think, called “Cursed Lake.” Anyone? Anyone? No? No ideas? Ok, gee, I don’t know then, why people are disappearing in to the lake called Cursed Lake, that you hear singing from, that the elders know they sacrificed a young virgin to for prosperity. 

Not that it hatters, there’s not really anything to investigate. The Council of Elders are not mentioned in any detail, even by name, and  have no personality other than NEVER talk about the sacrifice. No one in the village has a name or personality. There’s a short six entry rumor table of abstracted information but that’s it. There’s one dude, in a cabin, a level five magic user who shoots lightning bolts at you and then sleeps the entire party and captures them. He’s the only one with a name, or any information. He’s also extremely paranoid, so, you know, good luck with that. 

Besides the MU cabin there’s also an abandoned tower i the wilderness. It gets no map, just a text description like “On the first floor of the Tower there is a guard room, along with a small fireplace and a spiral staircase.” and so on. PUT IN A FUCKING MAP!!! Jesus Christ, the effort is minimal. Just stop phoning it in and do it. 

Not that I would suggest wandering too much. The table has things like 1d6 wraiths on it. Civilization this is not. If they don’t get you then the bears will. This is a rough table to put right outside a town that you NEED the party to push through to explore. Oh, fuck, did I mention that the hook table is a 1d4 table? Fucking people who don’t understand the point of a table in an adventure. I guess its just de rigueur these days to slap a table in for this, nit that it matters, it just irks me. 

It’s an EASL adventure, I’m pretty sure, and that’s ok. There’s an awkward turn of phrase here and there like “The sight of the Village is devastating.” There’s no real expansion on WHY the sight of the village is devastating, just it looks a little abandoned. I am going to say this is NOT an EASL issue, but rather a general adventure writing issue, not providing any descriptions that are concrete, specific, etc.

At some point, I think maybe in the Lake entry, there are notes on how to kill the monster. Like a stab its shadow with cold iron sort of thing. We are told we can learn this trick from the council of elders or the MU. But, would it not be better to put that information in the entry of the place we learn it from? 

The adventure is rife with these sorts of basic disorganization issues. With missing descriptions. With a lack of specificity that would tie things together and bring it alive. This is just a hand wave of text balh blah blah monster in the lake blah blah blah. It’s just an idea of an adventure, some napkin notes that don’t really introduce anything interesting to the “lake sacrifice” genre. I think I’m done with the Angry Golem for awhile, especially since their liner notes say that their adventure have been well received. These designers to write this. Pffft.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The review is eight pages and doesn’t really show you anything of note. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563628/fortnightly-adventures-7-the-singing-lake-ose?1892600

By Martin Cubas
Weird Adventures by Martin A. Cubas
Castles & Crusades
Levels 2-3

They can’t see you. They don’t need to. A colony of blind, grotesque predators has infested an abandoned temple deep inside a canyon. They hunt by sound. They move in packs. And they’re starving.

This thirty page adventure uses about fourteen pages to describe seven rooms. Obviously long-winded and padded out, you kill a few monsters. Also, it’s not dark.

Oh lop-sided page count, where have you been? I’ve missed you. Look, I get it, PDF pages are “free”; you’re not paying to print them. Why not put in a bunch of appendices, and lead in, and backstory, and everything else? It’s free! Academically, I agree. But, in practice, what I see time and time again is a poor adventure with a low “core” page count with a whole lot of extra information. While a bit hyperbolic, one must ask oneself, is the designer interested in writing an adventure or ar they interested in world building and the adventure is just a pretext for that? Again, I don’t care if you world build. I don’t care if the page count ration is one adventure page per one hundred pages of backstory. But if you’re selling me an adventure then it had better be a ROCK. FUCKING. SOLID. Adventure. And it almost never is. The designer is distracted by the fluff. They spend their effort there instead of in the core adventure text. What pops out the other end is just another crappy adventure surrounded by a bunch of backstory and appendices. Who would like to guess if this is in the one in a thousand adventure in which there is a lot of fluff and a solid adventure? We all know the fucking answer already. You have to AGONIZE over the adventure text. It should be the best possible, that you are capable of (… ) and more. 

Ok, so, we’ve got some eyeless creatures in a cave. There’s a long backstory here about bandits, a holy order, orcs, and so on but all that really matters is that there are eyeless creatures in a cave. They hunt by sound. This whole “shrieks in the dark” thing doesn’t really matter. They can use a sonic attack, but the party is never limited on light. So, you’re just stabbing some monsters in a cave. The central conceit, of these creatures who can hunt without sight, is never capitalized on. We get long monster ecologies (in fucking italics …) who nothing about them putting out lights, etc. So, you’re fighting 5HD orcs in a cave that have a sonic attack. 

Room descriptions average a couple of pages each. There’s no need for that. Nothing that interesting is going on. “The disc was collected by the Shrieklings along with other debris from the caverns and has no special significance to them.” Great. You want me to etll you about the pile of shit I collected this morning? It has no bearing on anything, so why not? Backstory, meaningless trivia. Overexplained things. “The Shrieklings’ thick, mucus-coated skin produces a scent that naturally repels the barracuda, allowing them to swim and hunt freely.” Explanations on ecology. Great. That’s not coming up during play, so it’s a great thing it’s in there clogging up the descriptions (as my aforementioned shit this morning may have the toilet?)  These are simple rooms with simple interactivity that are just padded out in what amounts to a wall of text. Bullet point up the main issues, but if the bullet is half a page then what’s the point? Sixty some words to describe “+4 to move silently when within 15’ of the waterfall.” 

The designer notes that this is inspired by the a Dungeon Design Framework. Monsters have patterns and routines, etc. There are a couple of charts to help with the monsters wandering patrol paths. I’m not saying they are wrong, but they are poorly done, not noting the creatures locations. Just dots and blips that you must then interpret and expand on. Hooks are all “you are hired to “ nonsense. And, in particular, the claim that “Inside, you’ll find tightly written areas built around meaningful encounters, and systems that keep the dungeon active between player actions.” would not be true. Tightly written. Meaningful encounters. I think not.

This is likely the last Cubas review, joining Mohr, Filbar, Elven Tower and the rest.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. Meaning nine pages of background/fluff/intro and one that starts to show the first room. (There’s another full page of room one info.) Take a look at that Gannt chart like thing. The blue and reds could be handled much better to show current location, not moves. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563481/c-c-shrieks-in-the-dark-c-c-edition?1892600

By Dougal Cochrane
Self Published
Dolmenwood
Level 2

South of Fog Lake, where the Cave Path plunges into the Ballow-Clefts, the horizon narrows to a ravine of glistening wet stone, steeped in shadow. Pale yellow celandine flowers bloom ankle-high in the gloom, their petals never fully opening except at noon when the sun shines in. Narrow clefts riddle the rock, most shallow and choked with roots. From one fissure seeps the earthy scent of moss and the sickly odour of mildew. The cavern leads down into the Grotto of Grundlow Greenteeth.

This 22 page adventure uses about nine pages to describe twelve rooms in an underground troll den/garden. It’s wordy, cutsy, and has both too much going on and not enough at the same time. 

Can you be nicely formatted and STILL have wall of text issues? Why, yes, I think, now, that you can, after reading this. Is it wall of text, actually? I’m not so sure. It is certain A LOT of text. Because A LOT is going on. And the text, while not in traditional straight paragraph wall of text format, does repeat certain patterns that obfuscates. 

But first, our setup. There’s a two-headed troll in a cave, with a grumpy head and a romantic head. He eats moss. He’s got a mossling cook enslaved. Mossling hates grumpy head and is in love with romantic head. Mossling grows herbs and puts grumpy head to sleep. Thus the Bog Red Button. Don’t wake the grumpy troll head … that you generally don’t know exists. Then, there’s a dude with a body switching thing. He’s trying to dig up a gate in the troll cave. He’s made several people switch bodies and minds. And a gang of skeleton thieves (as in, they are skeletons who are thieves.) is trying to knock off a prospector for his emeralds … and the prospector and his donkey have both been mind-switched. And, there’s a slumbering demon who does NOT give eternal youth when awakened. All that shit, and more, is in twelve rooms. 

There’s A LOT going on in here. Rooms can range from a column to a page. And this is where things start to get rough. Rooms start with a little description in an offset box that is easy to locate. Let’s say, something like this: “Dark, earthen tunnel (wet stone floor) tangled with thick tree roots (beaded with dripping water). Several wooden buckets (half-filled) sit beneath the largest roots, placed to catch water. A skull is wedged in a crevice halfway along the tunnel.” So, king od a mashup from OSE style to paragraph style. I’m not sure it works. If this had been a paragraph, without parens, or terse OSE, I think it would have gone better. The sentences with lots of parens distracts. I mean, not a bad description by any means, I’m nitpicking here. Certainly better and more evocative than the vast majority of adventures.

And then we move on to the details of the contents of the rooms. And this is, I think, where things start to get rough in terms or formatting. There is a bolded heading and bullets with more details on what to see and do. Maybe a couple of words of description or explanation or mechanics or whatever. And they are nested, so, looking at one thing that has more subparts SHOULD be fine. 

I think the issue here is sheer quantity and the use of the bold/bullet/indent format on, essentially, everything. Let us assume I have a bookshelf with 24 books on it. Each book gets a bolded heading/bullet, a sentence or two, and then I move on to the next. A few get a few indents and a mechanic or two. Everything is relatively mundane. Book eleven kills you when you open it. Meh, bad example. You REALLY need to know book eleven is there and it is the only book that does something meaningful, most of the rest is trivia, or else meaningless more or less to the adventure. Should book eleven be in the exact same format as everything else? Should it be highlighted? I’m not sure of my example, here, but I know the principle involved: when everything is special nothing is. I’m looking at a page of, I don’t know, a couple of major headings with read-aloud, major bolded headings, several subheadings, bolding at the start of major sections and in the paragraph text. It’s too much. EVERYTHING is calling for attention. You know how garbage adventures tell you what ‘AC” means and what “read-aloud” looks like? This may be the first adventure in which I think I actually have failed to understand the formatting involved. Everything is calling for your attention. What should I pay attention to? I’m not willing to say this format doesn’t work for complicated rooms, but I am willing to say that it doesn’t work HERE, on THESE rooms. 

I don’t know what to say about interactivity. Don’t wakey wakey the grumpy troll head. Feed people sleeping herbs. Maybe do a deal with the skeleton dudes or the wizzo doing the body/mind swaps. I think it’s hard to dig through here and figure out what’s going on. I’m thinking of a room with a kind of west garbage pit in it. I’m thinking like the Trash Compactor scene from Star Wars. There’s a description. There’s a columns of bullets and bolding and sentences. And then there’s this note that a major NPC (mind swapped in to a donkey) is “braying piteously and thrashing to stay afloat in the muck.” Well fuck me man. That’s obviously the reason the room exists. Don’t you think maybe I should know about it sooner, and the party should as well? Why go through all this trouble of description and mechanics of staying afloat and then bury the lead? Most rooms are like this; something important is in there and it’s almost certainly NOT getting called to your attention in any meaningful way. 

There’s a lot going on here in a short amount of space over a short amount of time. And, yet, it’s not written to run as a kind of madcap adventure, as that would imply. There’s not enough room for everything going on and there’s both too much going on in the room descriptions while, at heart, not an extreme level of interactivity. It LOOKS like there is, due to all the herbal concoctions and hooks and ind swaps and so on. But I don’t think any of it really means much at all. I’m not going to commit fully to that opinion, this thing is a bear to dig through and that may be impacting my judgement. But, also, I’m pretty sure I’m right. Just fucking walk around and stab everybody and everything is solved and you’re much safer in the end. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Boo! Hiis! We need a preview to make an informed purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563700/troubled-troll-grotto?1892600

By Pat_Sagor
Pat_Co Productions
Nimble/OSR
Level 3

In the heart of a volcanic wasteland, the Tower rises amid fire and ash, a slender edifice of stone. Its citizens never leave the Tower, and keep their mysterious traditions out of sight from the outside world. But they have gained immense wealth trading wondrous artifacts extracted from the depths below the Tower… Outside the Tower, Baron Hugues DeMort’s massive army has been laying siege for over a month. Unable to breach its impervious gates, frustrated and desperate, he has devised a plan to infiltrate the Tower, and he just heard of a group of adventurers that are brave, capable, and … expendable. The perfect team to send on a probably suicidal mission!

Greetins Green Level adventurers! Friend baron has a new, fun, and exciting adventure for you! This fifty page adventure describes about twelve scenes inside a gigantic tower/city that is under siege. The party travels through a rigid caste-based society that really be in a 70’s social commentary scifi movie instead. Follow the script, stab the bosses and then … win?

Ok, so, Baron von Evil is laying siege to the massive tower city and sends the party in through some lower cave/tunnels to get to the city gates and blow them up with the bombs he’s devised for you to carry. You get in and find a massively caste-based society. The tower/city has four levels. The lowest, black are the workers, then the level above has the red managers, then the golden enforcers and judges above that, and then the white intelligentsia above that. We’ll let you decide if Black=Worst and White=Best has any meaning here. Anyway, it’s right out of a scifi movie and, in fact, this probably should have been a Gamma World adventure but, then, of course, it wouldn’t sell any copies at all. Ok, so, anyway, you’re in this city on the lowest levels. You gotta get ahold of some levitation bands to Ascend through the central shaft. Along the way you meet rebels, learns about the rape of an 8 year old by a cop, and find out that hte whites are not white, they are all really just one lich in charge of everything. 

The designer kind of knows they’ve written a railroad and has some words on advice on how to make it not a railroad and more interactive. There are some very basic maps of the city regions, but, ultimately, the adventure comes down to the twelve or so scenes/events that make up the plot here. You’re in the tunnels and then watch some cops kill a couple of citizens just minding their own business. You watch an Ascension, where citizens are promoted to the next color up. You meet a rebel and then get arrested by the ol “four more show up every turn” trick. Youre in the middle of the Barons army invading the tower, you boss fight Golden Centurion Marigold 1 (that’s one of the tower peoples names. Like I said, SciFi) who covered up the rape of the little girl. Let’s see, one of the lich’s victims telepathics you, and then you fight the lich. Let’s see … have I bitched about rape yet? Of a child? Why are people putting this shit in their adventures? This is supposed to be fun. You know what’s not fun? Child rape. People just seem to toss that shit around the way they toss around Hitler when arguing. Maybe give it a rest and find something else for the cops to cover up? Maybe Soylent Green is people. That’s fun. Can you  imagine? People love it. They riot over it. And it’s actually people. And, notably, not child rape. (and murder! Don’t forget the murder after the child rape.) 

The adventure gives you a list of NPC’s, a list of scenes, and a list of locations. There’s a decent number of summaries and background information as well, but, really, it is the people, places, and events that drives this.

Well, I say people drive it, but it tends to be more of a “Guest Star of the Week” kind of the thing. You get an NPC in a scene or situation and then you’ll be lucky if they continue to show up. Thus there is a relatively large number of named NPC’s, each with decently long NPC descriptions. Those descriptions are fairly well done but at some point you’ve got to ask yourself why we have so many people. You can’t possibly form a bond with any of them, not in the amount of time they are showing up. There is supposed to be this underlying theme pr regression, rebelling against order, blind adherence to order and the neutral observers to it all that is handicapped (Let’s see the judiciary enforce their decisions when enforcement power belongs to the people they are ruling against.) And then, of course, ultimately the entire system comes from corruption at the very top, the farce of the liches leadership. 

We’ve all seen a lot of liches. Party liches, grim liches. We’ve got a master manipulator here, that shows up a couple of times in public ceremonies impersonating a “white,” Possessing, really. And he has some tells. He raises his hands to his face and says “Actually …” a lot. There’s a fun little gimmick to get the party wondering, This is just slightly farcical and one of the better parts of the adventure.

Looks, it is essentially a railroaded scenebased adventure. The designer tries to help it not be that with some locations and a tad bit of free will, but that’s what it is. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is, I suspect, how the vast majority of people play D&D, some derivations of scene based with a lot of hand-waving. Not my favorite type, but I get it. If you’re gonna have scenes then lean in and write a scene based adventure. If you want your location based adventure to have events then dump those in. This adventure never fully commit to either and is the worse for it. Devo says you need to Sartre this baby up! This needed to be all events/scenes or a location based adventure with “secrets” to discover and a few events thrown in. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggest price of $1. The preview is eleven pages and gives you a good cross-section of different aspects of the adventure. Good preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563227/the-tower-for-nimble?1892600

By Scott_M
First Era Adventures
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

Few now recall King Aethelberd’s name, but in his time, he was rightly feared. His ruthless crusade against criminals and sinners took thousands of lives… many by the king’s own hand. The ancient lord’s body now rests somewhere below his ruined keep, his legacy all but forgotten. Rumors, however, tell of a trove of kingly treasure buried within Aethelberd’s tomb, along with his legendary weapon: Angbolt – The Mallet of Justice.

This thirteen page adventure presents a dungeon/tomb with about twenty locations. A ‘standard dungeon’ with a few different situations going on, it is relatively wordy for the degree of content present, coming out to about four keys per page or so for a mix of vermin, undead, and bandits. 

I’m rather fond of the setup of this one, or, perhaps, the framing. There are some ruins on a hill in a wood. And I mean ruins; almost nothing left but a few walls. Once the tomb of majestic figure,eons past and nothing is left of Ozymandius (by Shelley you cetin! God how I love Frisky Dingo.) but two legs. And, now on the road through the wood you come upon a dying man and a ransacked cart. “Tracks in the dirt indicate that three humans in boots led a woman and child off into the woods, along with a heavily-laden mule or pony.” Low bandits, now hold up in the topside walls of the tomb of a lord known for justice, too scared to venture down the stairs.  I find this framing rather poetic. No highborn rebels or a bandit-king with airs and plans, just the meanest and most low of ruffians, picking on a man and his woman/child brutally. Too common to even venture in to the hole in the ground in search of gold, camped in a place of utter ruin, of former majesty that they have no knowledge of. This is all handled rather briefly.

The rest of the adventure is not bad, but it doesn’t come close to that poetry. It is a relatively standard dungeon crawl, perhaps a bit above the usual average, with not a lot to distinguish itself and a few things that could be done better. This is not an Orcs in a Hole problem, but perhaps a sign of a hobby in which every adventure ever written is available immediately to you. How does one stand out in a crowded marketplace? [By each adventure having the unrealistic expectations of being a masterpiece, duh! If the premise of the blog is that common mistakes are repeated time and again then the secret hope is that those eventually get resolved and concentration can be done on more in-depth stuff.]

The bandits are huddled in the upper ruins, little more than a few crumbling walls. They’ve set a slack guard during the day and wall themselves in at night by moving boards. There’s a nice earthiness to this. They see the stairs, and have stuffed the women and child in a cellar room, where they whimper, but are too scared to venture any further. I might emphasize their condition, of both the captives and … beastiality? of the bandits a bit more, but the quick mentions of their fear and how they wall themselves in to the ruins is good. 

The map supporting this is fine for it’s size. The hill, ruins and wood around it are covered fine, and the dungeon proper has a variety of features, caves, water, worked areas, streams, statues, same level stairs. It is clear and has creature notations on it, which I always find very useful when running an adventure to keep the surrounding dungeon context front and center when running an encounter/noise in a room. Good job, and something I wish more adventures did to help me out at the table.

The dungeon entries, proper, are where my hang ups mostly lie. And I have no idea how to describe what I think is wrong about them. They do tend to be a bit long, four paragraphs is not uncommon. There’s an occasional bolded words or ALL CAPS monster reference, which shows some awareness of trying to call the DMs attention to things. But, for all the world, I can’t figure out why the entries are long. Typical problems in other adventures might be backstory embedded in them, or victorian laundry lists of contents, overly describing, trap & door porn or explaining WHY. None of that really seems to be present here, and yet the entries tend to the long side, particularly for what they are. 

I’m looking at an entry for room eight, The False Tomb, which I think is fair representation of the other rooms as well. There’s three paragraphs of general description. The first is the overall room, then one touching on some alcoves and frescoes, then one about the body in the room under a shroud, and its treasure, and the skeletons it triggers, and then one about a bronze chest and its loot. I can’t really fault any one of them for being there. The first paragraph reads “The shrouded body of a long-dead warrior is laid out upon a stone bier. The floor surrounding it is covered with various burial offerings: Ratgnawed baskets, sealed crockeries of seed oil and spoiled wine, moldering furniture and tapestries, graven idols of old gods, etc. (no value). Among the funeral goods stands a squat bronze chest” This is not the most evocative thing ever, but it’s trying and I recognize that. It’s also, I think, not lingering too much on the mundane. I can’t particularly fault the description of the body and chest and their treasures either. 

So the descriptions are not in and of themselves problems. And the formatting is not terrible. It’s certainly not wall of text and there is an occasional bolded word to direct the DM to more information. The closest I think I can come is that there seems to be a disconnect between the length and the … mundanity of the interactivity. There are some traps here that are more than just a pit. (Flaming oil jet!) Rats, centipedes, skeletons, wraiths, shadow, zombie dog. The more special undead have a note or two to bring them to life. And there’s an otyugh in a well, ala Moria. 

I don’t know why, but maybe the absence of more exploratory interactivity, but it feels plain to me. I’m not excited by this. It’s not bad. I just don’t look at it and and can’t wait to run it. Specificity? I’m going to assume this is a me thing.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, which shows you the setup, the maps, and a few dungeon rooms. Good preview. Take a look and see if you can nail the descriptions thing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561573/aethelberd-s-tomb?1892600

By Craig Turner
Aspire2Hope
Generic/Universal
Levels: Ghouls as an ememy

In Faynford at the Staple, tension simmers beneath the smell of hearth smoke and fresh bread. Old fears stir as food grows scarce, livestock go missing, and whispers spread—of sickness, of shadows, of the dead no longer resting easy. Beyond the river bends and chalk downs, the Hundred is holding its breath. The boundaries between custom and survival, welcome and warning, are wearing thin. Something hungers in the dark, and the quiet strength of this land may not be enough to hold it back. Your road has led here. Whether by duty, kinship, or necessity, you have arrived on the edge of a story that will not wait. Will you uncover the truth before Faynford at the  Staple falls to fear—and to what walks in its shadow?

This twenty page horror-ish adventure describes a bucolic village, and the refugee situation that is unfolding as they absorb villages who have been displaced by war. It is quite long-winded and verbose for what is essentially an outline of an adventure. The outline part is ok, but the long-windedness results in confusion of the overall situation. Too much time on vibes and not enough time on specifics. 

I’m a sucker for Harn-like settings for adventures. Call something A Hundred and I’m drooling, for some reason. I guess it was 100 Bushels of Rye. Whatever. We’re here today because of that. And, then, we mix in, from the marketing blurb, what appears to be a horror element. I think horror translates well because of the emphasis on situations that it fosters. I can restart a monster, but the vibes and plot and horror elements are for the designer. I love my classic exploratory dungeons, but the journey to and from the dungeon, and shit going on in town, has always been a part of D&D and these little situations are great for dropping in to spice up the “downtime.” 

So, we got this village. Humans, halflings. The halflings were refugees about fifty years ago and have settled in. More war has caused an influx of new refugees. The locals kind of recognize kinship to them, accents, mannerisms, far less alien than the halflings were. Then a lamb goes missing. And a couple of people die from a new disease, ashskin. Things are tense. The local sheriff wants to relocate the refugees a little farther down the valley. This is the pretext for the adventure. It turns out that a local seedy patriarch is an agent for a foreign power and ashskin? That’s people turning in to ghouls. Did you recognize it by the name ashskin? I didn’t at first. And I love that kind of shit .Where you describe something to peoples faces and they don’t get it. They drop some gnawed bones and bodies here and there, and once you get to the graveyard and find out the graves were dug out from the INSIDE, well, the undead is up, so to speak. 

The adventure wants to outline a situation. It’s trying to present a map with various locations on it and then explaining what is going on at those locales. It provides some NPC overviews with mannerisms and goals, for the DM to drop in to the game and use as the party comes across them or seeks them out. It flirts with doing the right thing. And then it fucks everything up.

The NPC descriptions fit, maybe, two to three to a column. There’s a bullet for Appearance, Personality, Goal/Motivation, Quick, Disposition, and What they know. Maybe somewhere from three words to a dozen or so, and then the person ends with a little quote. This is all too much. It’s on the right track, a quick, a goal, what they know, but then it muddies it up with too much information that one needs to dig through. And this is going to be a theme here.

The locales, a half dozen or so, stretch on for a column or page, and then have their NPC’s, in the same format as above. It starts with a setting prompt, in bullet form: Light, Sights, Sounds, Smells. This is too much. Shortening this to  a sentence or two, including all of them in it, to give a little vibe would have been better. There’s a brief couple of paragraph description of the locations “the fields are well tended, it’s maintained through diligence.” Again, too much. The diligence comment it meta, and the whole location description is hard to sort through, I suspect, during play.  Terse. Hit. Get out. We want a quick vibe if its not super-important to the location to have details. Then we have a section called Plot. I’m looking at seven paragraphs, one or two just a sentence, like “Corwin is dead” or “Pip knows what that means, even if he struggles to say it properly.”  The plot section, what is happening, the meat of the location, what the party can find out and do and so on, is all muddled by this. This is NOT the time to get flowery with your language and clever with your descriptions. And yet it does, over and over again. This is a nightmare to dig through. This would have been the PERFECT time for all of those bullets. 

The overall plot, what leads to what and who’s doing what, is confused because of all of this. Cognitively it’s a problem. After a couple of times through this I’m still not sure I can explain the hows and wherefore and whats connected. I THINK 

The elements it wants to emphasize, the contention between the refugees, the more established refugees from fifty years ago and so on, these are not well handled at all. There’s little to bring these to life. The tension that should be going on isn’t added to by specifics. We’re not looking for everything spelled out and scripted, but vignettes, specificity, to drop in to make that tension come alive. Even the spying, it’s not really brought home. 

This was a good idea. Blaming The Others should be relatable to the players. The mixing in of the ghouls and people turning. Great potential there. But this would need a lot of effort to bring to the table. It knows to outline a situation, and it knows the major elements to hit, it just fails in doing that in a way that can be run or in bringing it truly to life.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages, not quite enough to get a good vibe check on it. Only the last page really gives you an idea of what to start to expect in terms of writing and presentation. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/562279/the-quiet-hunger?1892600

By James Desborough
Portmortem Studios
LotFP
Levels 2-4

A high-concept adventure beneath the bone-white hills of Southern England:. […] The hearthstone tilts forward as the ground beneath it gives way, and the fire collapses inward with a choked sigh. A black seam splits across the floor, racing between boots and table legs, widening in the stretch of a blink. Tankards slide. A bench tips and crashes onto its side. The air fills with a grinding roar as chalk collapses in vast, dry heaves beneath the inn. The far wall lurches downward, its timbers shrieking and daub shattering to powder and horsehair as it tears loose. Cold night air floods briefly in through the widening fracture, carrying the smell of wet earth Elinor cries out as the boards beneath her feet dip and tear apart, and she vanishes into the dark. Outside, horses scream, their hooves beating against nothing […]

This 62 page adventure presents seventeen rooms of pitch blackness in a “lair of the sub-humans” tunnel complex. The designer had an idea and tried to implement it, but has no idea of what an adventure is or how to write one. Thus a confused over-wordy mess that, I think, doesn’t understand the Lamentations game system either. The pretension, in the face of this, is interesting to see.

You’re sitting in a bar. Oh no! The tavern collapses in to the earth. It’s very dark. TOTAL darkness, not even infravision or magical sight works. Subhumans start killing the other survivors who fell in also. Thus starts a little over a dozen rooms of groping about and smelling your way to the mystical ate that gets you back to freedom while you suffer -2 hit, +2 to be hit, blah blah blah. 

This is garbage. It didn’t have to be.

The designer here is a Clever Boy. We know that because he tells us that in page after page of introductory text that amounts to See How Bad Ass I Am? I don’t know, he’s scared of the dark, he obviously met Raggi once somewhere and they are basically the same person and now he wants to suck him off by name dropping and it’s not a Fuck You dungoen its actually just hard the way OSR dungeons should be. “This is Atypical You’re not going to find any of the typical adventure-book fare here.” Uh huh. Listen to the voice saying Follow Me, says Frankie. As it has always been, the person shouting the loudest is generally engaged in flim-flam. 

“Perhaps the best/ worst example of this was The Tomb of Horrors, but the ‘fuck you’ is now used as a condemnatory slur directed at anything with even slightly elevated deadliness or Old School sensibilities.” No asshat, it is not. But you didn’t write this for the OSR, did you? You throw some words down on paper, with painfully little care, in order to slap a price tag on it and make a buck or three from whatever followers you have and test the waters for more from the OSR crowd. Alas, at least from your viewpoint, you will find little purchase here. I suggest one of the more niche circles for your medicine show.

Name calling? Ad hominem attacks? That’s not this blog. Or, rather, it’s reserved for the worst of the worst, the money grab people. Let’s see just why this adventure is garbage.

There is, at a minimum, column long section of text up front defending hard dungeons ala the Fuck You dungeon, and, of course, noting that this is not a Fuck You dungeon. This is wrong. It is a Fuck You dungeon. Further, it’s a Fuck You dungeon that, I suspect, has never actually been much less playtested. The mechanics in this just don’t work. The presentation doesn’t work. That’s how I know this. Perhaps one of the very earliest examples of this, in the text, is what happens when the tavern collapses. You have to make a save or take 2d6 damage. That’s gonna be a 16+. We’re looking at between 5 and 18 HP for a party of mixed classes for levels two to four. And you’re gonna take seven damage. AND THEN YOU NEED TO MAKE ANOTHER 16+ SAVE OR TAKE ANOTHER 2d6! These are not optional. They represent the collapse of the inn into the chasm belowground. That is, on average, fourteen damage, with a fighter, on average, having eighteen hit points at fourth level. And you want me to believe that you have play tested this? Run this? Believe you know how D&D works? No. I loathe mechanics. I loathe an appeal to balance. But I also know that the lack of understanding of low hit points, saves, and turning undead are the absolute tells of fuckwit medicine men. [As in, all medicine men are fuckwits, not an adjective to describe certain medicine men.] The designer does not, in any non-trivial manner, understand the game system that they are writing for. The snake oil is strong with this one. 

How else do we know? The read-aloud. The read aloud here is long. VERY long. Like, a page long in some sections. A column, or a good chunk of one, is not uncommon in most places. James Desborough has never read that text aloud to anyone playing this game. Because if they had then it wouldn’t be that long. James would have seen his players turning on their portable gaming systems, watching tiktoks, going to get a beer, swiping on tinder, or whatever. No one pays attention. We know this. It’s common knowledge. You don’t monologue a villain. The players don’t pay attention. You don’t write long read-aloud, the players get bored. This is not a player issue. This is a designer issue. The WotC study, the article about it read-aloud and attention spans, should be well known by this point. And, as I noted, even if it were not the complete lack of player attention as you spew more and more irrelevant flowery text at them should have been a major hint to the designer. If it has been play tested, of course. Or even run for someone. Does it work for the players? Do you CARE that it works for the players?

How about the DM? Do you even care if it works for the DM? Or is this just a payday for you? You see, gentle reader, the text here is in italics. And in a funky fucking font in italics. No one, ever, in the fucking history of the world has ever said “Oh boy! I hope I get to struggle through a long section of flowery text in a font that is hard to read!” Long sections of italics are hard to read. This is, or should be, common knowledge. Funky fucking fonts can be hard to read. Funky fucking font in fucking long sections of italics are VERY hard to read. It’s a fucking cognitive issue in much the same way that single-column text causes more fatigue than double-column. Not that YOU give a fuck. 

Let us move on to formatting. The text here is in a kind of long conversational paragraph styling. The only straight appeal to formatting is a bolded word like “Smell” or “Taste.” That’s good. It helps direct the DM attention to those needs. You know what else the DM needs? To know how many creatures there are in the room. Room one in this is where the adventure starts, so to speak, the pit the tavern and everyone has fallen in to. There’s some vignette shit where the party hears gurgles and screams as the Bone Tomahawks slit throats and cut hamstrings and the like. And, of course, there’s a fight for the party to take part in. It doesn’t actually say. Ever. Some of the people in the inn survive the fall and there’s a little section for each of them that describes their current state. Related, there’s a brief “event” that is the attack, and in the text of one of them, relating the attack on one of the fallen NPC’s, there is a note that says “If they kill both the attackers …” That’s all you’re fucking getting. Pretty fucking basic, isn’t it? How many enemies are in the room? No? You wanted to write some story game bullshit and slap an OSR label on it? Or, are you just incompetent as a writer after all these years? Or, given up and doing a money grab?

How now brown cow, let us look at immersion. There is little. What there is, though, is designer fiat. Why can you not see in the dark? A Wizard did it. Why is X? A wizard did it. I’ve been writing three reviews a week for, what, fifteen years now? The amount of contempt the designer has for their audience is beyond compare. Yes, fuckwit, we are all playing D&D. We know that if we want to play D&D tonight then take the hook. We know that everything in the fucking game is made up. And we rely on designers to provide the verisimilitude that does not break the fourth wall and does not drag us out of the vibe. You didn’t even fucking try. You just wanted X to happen. I don’t need explanations. Those suck also. A contingency spell goes off that triggers a magic mouth that says a spell trigger word. That’s bullshit also. Explanations suck. But immersion in the game does NOT suck. It’s a major fucking point of RPG play. But you don’t give a fuck about that do you? Cha ching! Given that no one makes any money in RPG’s I must then assume this is and ego boost for your self-described “high concept” pretentious adventure of little imagination.

There’s a reference sheet at the end with some mechanics on it. That’s good. There are also a series of NPCs who you end up with in the tunnels/pit. The descriptions of these are in three parts. A read-aloud (ug) and a paragraph or so of information that is full of background as well as mannerisms. The mannerisms are good, the backgrounds less so, and in most cases could have been eliminated or GREATLY reduced. Then there’s “their condition after falling in.” The mannerisms and condition information should have, also, been included on the reference sheet, in an abbreviated manner. There’s a nod to this, but just in terms of a name and tracking their alive/dead status. A few extra words here, on mannerisms, would have gone a long way. IE: how to use them in play. 

Otherwise, this is just a series of encounters in the dark with little interactivity beyond that. There’s a lot of room in the OSR, from the RAW 1e crowd to those smaller games that lean more towards streamlined mechanics. I don’t see this as fitting anywhere in the spectrum.

This is $13 at DriveThru. There is no level range mentioned until you get in to the meat of the product, that should have appeared on the cover or the marketing page on DriveThru. The preview is six pages, the first six, so you get to see a good deal of the initial pretension. It should have included a page or two of encounters to give the potential buyer an idea of what they are purchasing. That is the purpose of a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561839/kingdom?1892600

By G. Hawkins
Mythmere Games
OSRIC
Levels 9-12

At Grathen Rift, the Ice Lich Vathudnar built a great fortress-tomb, populating the frozen ice-halls with his servants before sending his spirit out into the planes and strange dimensions beyond the material world. Thus far, no adventurers have dared to assault this legendary fortress … until now.

Hawk & Finch? What’s next, Calithena and Sham? 

This 44 page adventure describes an ice fortress of eighty or so keyed entries that is full of cold-themed undead. And a lich. I hope you earned those twelve levels cause you’re gonna need all of your skill to get through this hack with your lives somewhat intact. Great map, a dangerous backdoor, and a soul gem only a lich mother could love. 

G1 was a hack. But it wasn’t a BORING hack. It had the sleeping guards, the battle royale, the lothario, the orc rebellion and general weirdness in the basement, not to mention the inside.outside vibes. It’s a hack but it did present other elements to bring life to the hack. And this is doing that in much the same way. No, it’s not G1, but for being a high level hack it’s doing a decent job.

The background crap here is short and focused. Just what you need. After a short “historical background section”” it ends with “To this day the snow barbarian tribes still pay homage to the spirit and malice of Vathudnar, invoking his name for strength and favour” That’s a fun thing to work in! And, then, the rumor table is combined with a kind of hook table of a couple of entries, all motivated to get the party interested. Something like “The bands of snow barbarians that still worship the dreadful Lich King Vathudnar are rumoured to be active again, raiding the warm lands to the south. Some say that Vathudnar the Ice Lich has returned and stirred up his ancient followers, while others say that this is all a lie, and the lich’s fortress is ripe for pillaging, his followers hunting wide in search of a band of raiders that defiled his tomb.” Again, this is both clearly focused on working in to your game (war, and rumors of war …” as well as providing some colour to help bring things alive. We’re not gimping the party too much, and what there is makes sense. None of this “he cast 327 wish spells” shit. The place is made up of ice so there are slime cold effects and “how to handle fire/magical fire” is covered (which, should almost be a requirement for VERY adventure, honestly, based on adventurers proclivity to use mans oldest ally.) 

The map here is a good one. Sufficiently large. Balconies, rifts and chasms, same level stairs and shafts. We get a few small water features and some nearby caverns that, ideally, a party could use to bypass the front door and maybe even shortcut to the lich lair. That way is not without its own dangers and annoyances (fucking fey …) but making friends and not mudering the little shits for their jokes can get you a decent way. I am absolutely THRILLED to see an adventure with a real map. 

As with the Great Hall in G1, there are a couple of set pieces in this. The front door, main hall, and lich sanctum hall are all multi-level battles with interesting elevation features and challenges to overcome to turn them in to more interesting battles, again, thanks to the map. 

There’s read-aloud, that’s kept to just a couple of sentences. It’s in second-person, with some “you’s” thrown in, but, it looks like some care has been taken and it is not generally railroady or prescriptive to how the party has entered, just a casual. It’s not common and is just the occasional “you can see …” type of phrase here and there. It’s walking the line well. It’s also pretty fact based, with entries like “Two dragon skeletons, encased in ice and snow, are entwined around each other, curling around the walls of this room. The ceiling is carved with a basrelief depicting a robed giant petting two dragons.” Pretty straight forward and committing no sins or over-revealing. It’s a spartan description, in terms of evocative writing, and I would prefer a word or two more of embellishment, but I also recognize that this is one of the harder parts of adventure writing and I’ll take a decent description like this adventure has over a more long-winded or poorer one. 

Formatting is good, with the occasional use of a bolded word or two to call the DMs attention to it followed by a sentence or two. It’s easy to scan at the table, and thus easy to locate the information you need in the moment. Creatures, secret doors, major features are all highlighted appropriately. 

There can be a decent amount of hacking in this. I hope you brought a cleric or three, the numbers are high. 11 HD undead giants are all over the place. But it’s not just a straight hack. There’s some nuance going on here. I want to call out a specific encounter earlier on that I think communicates the meat of the adventure. This is one of the longest read-alouds in the adventure “The interior of the building is frigidly cold. The high ceiling is covered in icicles, and drifts of snow collect at the base of the walls. In the centre of the chamber stands an altar of solid ice. Some dark substance stains the top and sides (dried blood). Behind the altar rises a frosted black obsidian idol of a regal skeletal figure with red gemstone eyeWs. Its hands clasp the sides of an old woman’s head, a living person whose emaciated body is held to the statue in encasing ice. Her pupilless eyes burn with a low blue light, but her gaze darts around blindly. A reeking stench flows out from a gaping pit at the back of the shrine. “ [That eyeWs type is a part of the adventure, not my usual carelessness. It’s the only type that stood out.] So, old crone encased mostly in ice with state hands clasping (great word choice!)  each side of her head. She’s an oracle, and, yes, if you stab her then she has a couple of powers. But this doesn’t HAVE to be a hack. But, also, in particular, did you catch the reeking stench? There’s a frozen pit behind her with a lot of frozen crones bodies in it, previous oracles. That’s a nice touch, great Verisimilitude. But, also, the reeking. Ghasts. Twenty of them. YOU WERE TOLD THERE WERE GHASTS. It’s reeking bodies that are frozen, what did you expect? There is absolutely nothing better than telling the party straight up what is going to happen, hinting to them, and watching them fumble it and realize in retrospect that it was obvious. THATS fucking good. A blood sacrifice on the altar gets you a free pass here, one of a couple of places that can happen. It doesn’t clarify if it’s a cut palm or a full on Death of a Living Being thin. I’d maybe lean to full on living sacrifice, or hint at it, and then let the party do a palm cut, etc, to get by. Great little set of rooms here, working together, and a high point of the adventure.

There’s another section that I really like also, near the lich lair, proper. A series of kind of trophy rooms or his vanquished foes. A skeleton with a gold crown beaten in to an collar around the neck. Yup, that’s the kind of shit that an evil lich conquerer does. And, then, a captured demon that MIGHT be helpful, although, it is a demon after all. Or the bodies of a half dozen vanquished giant foes, kept as trophies that whisper to you when you enter. They want revenge and a clever party can turn them to their side for help in the final battle. 

If I zoned this out I might mention the front door and palace/fortress sections, which is a fucking hack-a-thon, as one would expect a front door to be. And then the back door/passage that is dangerous in its own right and more similar to a classic exploratory dungeon section. And then the area near the sanctum, trophies, potential allies, and the like, with lots to ‘play with.’ 

On the down side, I wish the writing were just a bit more evocative. I understand there is some personal preference involved, and that this is one of the harder parts of writing. Just a little beefing up of this area would do wonders and still, I think, not interfere too much with personal preferences and the like. There’s also an area or two that is cumbersome. From the top of my head, there’s a set of stairs you have to go up, and you get shot at from the top. SOme notations on the map, or otherwise, to call this out would be helpful. Also, the lich will call in reinforcements from certain areas when his sanctum is breached. A play aid here would have been useful, to keep track of those areas specifically and who’s ‘alive.’ “Eight ghoul wolves from area 44.” Fuck! Are they still alive?! Did I take notes? Finally, I suspect this is not a single foray in to the fortress. A short paragraph about camping, returning, dangers, etc, ala G1, maybe mentioning a few complications also.

But, a decent high level adventure! Yeah! ‘Experienced players’ with experienced characters should prevail, but it’s going to be a real challenge. Which is exactly what you want in a high level adventure.

This is $10 at DriveThru. No preview. Boo! Boo! I wonder what the thinking was there? They should both know that a few encounters would go a long way. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/554810/fortress-tomb-of-the-ice-lich?1892600

I wonder what you have to do to become THE ice lich instead of just ‘an’ ice lich?

By Operant Game Lab
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-2

Decades ago, there were two adventuring bros—Thom the Mighty and Oolnor the Weird. After much questing and looting and war against the hated bone men of the North, they carved for themselves a dungeon fortress one day’s march from the nearest village. Here, in this righteous bro cave (RBC), they stationed their henchmen, stashed their gold, and hosted epic parties. But there has been no trace of Thom or Oolnor for ten years now. A brave few have trespassed into their RBC, lusting for the riches that no doubt reside there. None have returned, for no force could be mightier than Thom and Oolnor’s eternal, bloodthirsty friendship. 

This ten page adventure describes about 32 rooms in a “double adventurer” lair much akin, and a homage, to B1. It’s trying hard, and has some decent formatting and a writing style that is, in form if not function, almost consistently great. And, also, it comes off a bit staid and disconnected from itself. You getting close there, Operant Game Lab.

The set up here is much the same as B1, on purpose. Two adventuring buddies build a fortress to live together and then they disappear for over ten years now. Inside you’ll find some things harkening back to B, like pools, as well as some mushroom men wandering around, “the bone men”, a tribe of barbarians trying to retrieve the bones of their ancestors that were stolen by the dynamic due, and  some leftover orc servants trying to fend off the bone men incursion. 

I talk sometimes about good writing and great writing and how there is a way of writing in which more is implied than the written word. If I can write three words and it makes you think of some kind of misty forest glen, coming alive in your minds eye, then I’ve done a good job. But if you can build the rest of the forest from that then I’ve done an even better job. A good room description may bring a room to life and an even better one brings the SITUATION to life, or the NPC, or so on. And, one hopes, it is tersely written, helping us scan the page and run the game at the table, the whole idea being using words to their maximum effectiveness, implying more than the words themselves describe. At one point in this adventure you come across some orc officers, planning to repel the bone-men barbarians. They will talk, but want to make sure you are “orc tough” and “they are willing to generously split the resulting bone-men meat 50-50.” This is very good writing. You know EXACT:LY the tone that the designer is going for with this encounter. From this you, as the DM, know how to run this encounter perfectly. You can ad-lib and fill in the gaps of the encounter, and, because of this, can turn it in to something quite memorable for the party, something they will recall in stories for sessions to come. More than just imaging the environment of the room, it has communicated tone and a situation. And that is the very highest form of evocative writing. That certain wryness comes through in other places in this adventure as well, so while not consistently hitting, it’s not an accident either. One of the wandering encounters, on a roll of 00,  has the two adventurers, “Thom and Oolnor, returning home at long last” with their seven giant golden idols. Well there’s a sticky wicket to toss in!

The writing here tends to be terse, but not overly so. Formatting and layout is done paragraph style, with a a few short intro sentences and a word or two bolded and then followed up in their own paragraphs, with rooms given names next to their key numbers in order to help frame the text for the DM. This is all great, easy to scan at the table while running. 

Encounters can be, in places, well done. Outside the entrance we get a couple of sentences that ends with “Every few minutes, a gust of wind blows away the humidity and mosquitos.” More than just padding and setting the scene, if you listen to the wind you you catch the faint sounds of a flute, following it leads you to where the bone-men have made their encampment and their lon guard killing time playing his flute. This, obviously, helps the party, giving them clues as to whats to come. Depth, following up on what the DM has related to the party leads to more information and revelations. And that’s what you want in a room description. 

In another spot, the treasure room, we get “Piles of Gold. On the scale of Scrooge McDuck, one could swim through these stacks of silver and gold coins. All told, there are 2,834 silver pieces and 198 gold pieces (many of them stained with the old blood of their previous owners)” On the Scale of Scrooge McDuck, this gives us an immediately visual image to work from as a DM. (As an aside, is that many coins really a hoard ala Smaug the Golden/Scrooge McDuck? The imagery works well but I’ve not sure I’ve ever seen an adventure in which the actual coinage lives us to that imagery. Or maybe I just don’t know what 2800 coins looks like in real life?) Other wry things include a room with an effigy of a woman in it, a crude statue built. “Parading the false wife around in “civilized” settlements confers a -1 ongoing penalty due to its creepiness.” That’s solid. The use of parading, civilized in quotes, creepiness. Great use of descriptive words to help nail the vibe.

There are some decent vignettes in this. Bone-men stacking up chairs and climbing on each other to get to their ancestors bones hanging from the ceiling in the great hall. A wounded bone-man, with his buddies keeping watch, that drank from a pool and hulked out and got wounded badly. In spite of this though I’m not going to even Regerts this. It’s close, but there are a few things that keep me from that. The entire thing feels, sparse? Staid? Disconnected from itself? Static? Maybe static. It’s not that there’s a lot of empty rooms, that can be cool in a dungeoncrawl. But it just doesn’t feel like a unified whole. There are little linkages, the bone-men through, the orc sector, the previously mentioned wounded bone-man from the pool. Certainly no order of battle though, or anything overly dynamic in the environment. It doesn’t feel like a place that is alive. The overall vibe of the place just doesn’t come through well. I wish I could put my finger on it. It doesn’t feel like a bone-man incursion to a place and the orc servants repelling them and the mushroom men adding trouble in a place that is already a little weird, being an adventurer home. Certainly all of those elements are present but they don’t feel like they are working together to create a unified whole. I’m thinking of this in terms of, say, the first level of Stonehell. Stonehell level one, or even the outside, feels like an empty dungeon but the overall emptiness, exploration, and creatures there make it, all together, feel like a certain place with a certain something going on. 

I’m certainly not angry about this. Most adventures are piss-poor wastes of paper and this is not that. The overall environment just doesn’t get me excited to run this. I think it’s close, though, to being something worthwhile. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The preview is ten pages, essentially the entire thing. Great preview. I’d check out, maybe room 3, 12, and 25 for an example of some of the better rooms. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561741/righteous-bro-cave?1892600

By GMaia
Knight of the Lake Games
OSR
Levels 4-8

[…] A bold entrepreneur decided to reopen the “cursed” stage, now renamed the Daggerpierce Theater, and revive what was hailed as the greatest play ever written, and at the same time the one everyone wished never to see again. The from the Côte d’Écume, were not fully aware of the rumors surrounding the theater, the play, and its infamous author. Ignoring those who begged to keep the Daggerpierce Theater shut, the troupe accepted the job and sealed its fate along with that of The Tragedy of Gus de Montagne. The play was cut short just Wave fled Pont-Verre without leaving a single word or trace behind.

This 48 page adventure has a few locations in and around a theater with a curse. It’s pretty obvious what the adventure WANTS to be and it’s also pretty obvious that it is doing VERY little to make that happen. Maybe something like “This 48 page adventure presents some napkin notes that could one day be an adventure.” Oh, and it’s fucking pretentious.

Life. You try to make some money then you die. A symphony that is bittersweet. And this adventure explores that. The theater (always a good sign when there’s a theater in an adventure) is cursed. “the curse can only be broken when the play’s profound message is understood and performed with the sole purpose of teaching the people to value what truly matters.” Yeah, I guess The Verve is wrong because “as long as the work brings success and enriches actors and theater owners, it will remain misunderstood, and its performances will claim lives.” I don’t know, it’s love or selflessness or some shit like that. The playwright’s lover got framed by rich people to draw attention away from their counterfeiting. (Which, shows an incorrect view of counterfeiting. You don’t get away with fucking with the States money supply no matter who you are.) Anyway the designer, or playwright or someone somewhere, knows the meaning of life and The Verve’s more nuanced view can go fuck itself. This leads us to this interaction near the end where THE ENTITY asks the party questions. And you better get them right, or else! ““What would you have done for him, knowing he was innocent?” Examples: Refuse to be passive before injustice; vow to place life above wealth. 2. “What truth have you hidden for material gain that you could confess?” Examples: Based on PC story, reveal a secret of greed or betrayal. 3. “What act of justice would you perform now, even at great cost?” Examples: Cut off a hand that committed a selfish act; blind an eye that witnessed corruption.”  So, yeah, childish morality. Which means I can take the stance that this is the designer attempting to impose their own childish value system on the rest of us, and their players, in a game night that is supposed to be fun, or ITS ON PURPOSE!!, the standard artist cop-out. In this case that would appear as something like the intent of the curser, the playwright, his beliefs, and curse following that and the characters needing to figure that out so they can navigate his bullshit reality correctly. But we all know that’s not what is going on here. It’s designer imposing their morality on the rest of us and punishing us for not following it. This is absolute fucking bullshit. You can stick in all the fucking orc babies you want, you just can’t punish people for not holding whatever bullshit views you do. ESPECIALLY when there is a god of evil in the game who is ACTIVELY rewarding their followers for evil acts. Fucking bullshit.

Hey, you want a challenge, how about this one? “Two to eight (2d4) energy discs hover in the air, half a meter wide, razor-thin,crackling with electricity.” There’s your fucking combat. I guess fighting rats might make a statement about man’s subjugation of the natural world. Far better to die by crackling electric discs. 

The adventure is fucking garbage, what there is of it. I can make a decent case that this isn’t an adventure at all, just an outline of one, if that.  You get a few locations, you get some NPC”s with motivations and the rough outline of a plot. GO!. This leads to discovering clues like “Torn letter referencing a mysterious debt – Actually belongs to Auguste, proving his ties to a shady merchant guild.” How’s that for evocative gameplay?! No more to this. Just that. No letter. No details. No specifics. That’s all you get. And everything in this is like that. Just a few general ideas and notes. No specifics on how to use things. It’s weird, how detached it is. You’d think, with actors, customers, and so on that you might have some vignettes or something, but, no. Nothing. Dads house has a couple of sentences on background and then three bullets of clues. “Empty painting frame in the bedroom – Points to the diary hidden in the Red Hills hideout.” How the fuck you make that jump I have no idea. Everything is like that, half finished? Just an idea? I think it might be referring to this? “Concealed inside a magic mirror hanging on the wall, framed identically to the empty frame found in Edwin’s house (Clue #1)” So. I don’t know? Is that a clue? Am I just being obtuse? Anyway, given the page count here the lack of specificity of ANYTHING resembling a plot or details is confounding. 

The formatting is … well, an interesting choice was made. It’s doing a “facing pages” layout thing. Hardcoded in to the PDF. Ug. Not cool. Anyway, the left page is a more traditional text based description while the right is essentially a cliffs notes version of the same text. As the designer notes “this is to test whether presenting the same content twice can serve both those who enjoy a full,detail-rich reading experience and those who prefer concise keywords and minimal description.” I would take exception to this statement, The two are not mutually exclusive. Well, ok, maybe they are if we take “detail-rich reading experience” to mean “people who buy adventures to read instead of to play.” In which case, Fuck You. But I’m going to go with that the designer is taking the view that somehow full text and usable text are mutually exclusive. I think we all know, from numerous Best examples from this very blog, that is not he case. 

In any event, this experiment fails. The facing page “terse view” is a disaster. The font is in some faux-handwriting thing, which immediately destroys readability. And then its in a light blue text, which makes it even hard to read. Then it slapped down on some “lined paper” background, which again interferes. IF something sane had been chosen to put the “bullet points” in then maybe this would have worked. But not as presented. Which is too bad because every once in awhile the summary information IS good. The theater producer, in his “full on” text has a line that says something like “Does not believe in the daggerpiece curse.” But, in his summary it says “The curse does not exist.” This is interesting, presenting what is essentially the same idea in two different manners., using two different wordings. Which conveys two different attitudes. The summary version “the curse does not exist” is, I think, far better, giving a much more solid foundation on which to roleplay the manager from. 

The level range here appears to be arbitrary, with no real reason you’re level eight are fucking around with a playhouse. Also, the fucking overland map is a disaster with hard to read fonts on it. Why legibility” remains a barrier in 2026 is beyond me. And, for the final cinema sin, there’s a fucking expo dump in a fucking diary. It explains everything. Lame. LAME. DON”T PUT IN FUCKING DIARIES! DONT EXPO DUMP! Figure out how to convey information naturally through the game, if it even NEEDS to be conveyed. 

This is $1 at DriveThru. There is no preview. You make baby jesus cry when there is no preview. You don’t want to make baby jesus cry do you?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558386/a-grinning-ghost-s-grim-tale?1892600

By Taron Pounds
Land of the Blind
OSR/Vagabond
Levels 6-10

An explosion rocks a nearby mountain range. Once the dust clears, two twisted and screaming towers remain: one black and one white. Ominous seals appear on the moon and stars. A wicked smile spreads across the eye-spotted black tower’s upper story, capped by a witch hat-like roof. Its upper and lower floors appear to be separated, with arcs of blue lightning emanating from its center. The white tower is a bastille of pale stone, with an otherworldly blue fire burning at its top. Windows of stained glass bend without breaking along the white tower’s exterior, and eyes of madness follow those who approach the black. A flock of winged serpents fly around these profanities of architecture. No one knows where these towers came from, and what has corrupted the celestial bodies. It is up to the heroes to uncover the mystery to stop a cataclysm that has been unfolding for centuries in secret.

This 44 page dungeon presents two towers with about nineteen rooms between them. It’s a funhouse dungeon in which the world ends. That’s fun! Also, you don’t actually need to do anything here but go to the top floor and pull a lever. That’s fun! I don’t see a reason to go inside.

The gods have trapped one of their own in a magic prison. Dude wants out and finally is about to break free, thanks to his two followers, each of whom built a tower. You don’t know any of this. You’ve just got some generic rando hooks that come down to “you see these two weird towers.” I hope you go inside, because if you don’t then the world ends. That’s rough. Anyway, you go inside and find a funhouse dungeon, the two towers connected to each other with some magic pathways and normal stairs and so on. Turns out that if “the steamworks” is functioning inside the tower, and someone has had their soul aged in the aging room, then if you pull the level at the top of one of the towers then the trapped god will go back to jail. There’s a friendly phoenix, powering the steamworks through a portal to the elemental plane of water, that will tell you all of this who is at the top of the other tower. Anyway, so, the steamworks already works. And someone has already given their soul to the aging room. So, just pull the level in the other tower. 

To get there you will need to … ignore everything. Basically. Whatever is in the room, just ignore it and go up the stairs or through a door. Yeah! You’ve overcome that challenge. I’m not sure anything really attacks you in this unless you go fucking with shit. Oh, wait, hang on, there’s a death knight. “Motionless at first, but disappears if vision on him breaks and he then stalks the party.” I don’t know what the whole “disappears and then stalks” thing is about. I guess that’s for the DM to handle. So, I guess you gotta fight him? I THINK that’s the only required combat. Also, “required” is a loose word; I think you can make your way through the tower without having to go in to the throne room where he sits. 

Let’s double check my theory. Room one, walk backwards down a mirror hall. No consequences for not doing that. Room two, touch nothing and go up the stairs. No consequences for not doing that. Room three, go up the stairs and don’t touch the floating books. Room four, ignore the tree and go through one of the doors. Room five ignore everything. Room six, go through a door. Room seven, go up the stairs. Room eight, go up the stairs. Room nine, go up the stairs. Room ten, meet the phoenix. That’s one full tower and half the rooms. Congrats. The second tower, to my recollection, is more of the same. 

But, hey, you can still make the world end. Every time you use a spell or a magic item or go through a magic portal in the tower then the DM rolls a die. The third time they roll a one the dude breaks free and immediately destroys the universe. You get a warning though, you hear an owl screeching, which, obviously, means the universe is going to end if you cast another spell. This mechanic also ties in to a fun “weird things happen!” table, with entries like “Unluckiest PC must save or their limbs become accordions for 1 Minute.” or some blobs teleport in, loudly fart, and then teleport out again. Fun! … Humor, gentle readers, is highly subjective and doesn’t translate well.

We lead off with three paragraphs of italics read-aloud. We get read-aloud like “This room appears to have been built to keep a phoenix in a consecrated prison.” Appears to be. And how the fuck do we know it’s a prison? Or that it’s consecrated? It’s just garbage. In one room you find some masks. “Each is Cursed and Sentient, but only speaks while worn.” We’re referred to a table telling us what they do. “The wearer fails Checks against surprise.” Dazzling. Sublime. You didn’t even bother to give the mask a name or a personality or anything else. 

I’m not a fan of the zany funhouse, but this isn’t that. I’m also not a fan of the museum trip, and this is more in that vein. Just don’t touch anything and look at the scenery and you’ll be fine. But, also, the whole “lets nerf the party” and “oops! The world ended! Guess you didn’t figure out that was going on!” is VERY time. You need to communicate that the party is racing against time or else it’s not a race against time. It just ends up being the wandering damage table and rocks fall, everyone dies. Weird that’s not fun. And if you need to nerf the party then you wrote the adventure for the wrong level range.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you nothing of import. Poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561060/the-rook-the-crook?1892600

By Shanklimb
Self Published
OSR
Levels 4-6

In recent months, strange mushrooms have erupted across a corner just outside the Mulchgrove. Local foragers reported vivid, peculiar dreams after extracting them – visions of mosslings sharing tea with mammoths, a boulder tucked in for naptime, and other odd sights. Now the dreams are coming uninvited, in daylight, to people who never touched the mushrooms at all.  The mosslings of Mulchgrove are divided. Most believe the fungi are a divine offering – though no two can agree which god sent them, or why. But it’s to be sure: someone, or something, is broadcasting.

This eleven page adventure describes fifteen rooms, mostly linear, in some caves. Low on interesting, you get some sub-standard descriptions of slime mold rooms. Nothing to see here, move along, move along. 

The locals have discovered a new type of mushroom. You’re hired to check it out. You find some caves with some friendly trolls in them. They grow moss. In beds fertilized with corpses. Looks like slime molds have attacked their caves. You go kill the slime molds.

Aimless, perhaps, is how I would describe this. There just isn’t much motivating going on in any sense. The situation in the local village is “oh, look, new mushrooms!” with no real sense of urgency behind it. The hooks are all Hiring in one sense or another, usually with a “I’d some of that new mushroom variety …” There’s little personal motivation in any of that, just a blatant appeal to your desire to play D&D tonight or go to a bar instead. There’s not much of a hunt for an entrance, I guess all of the locals are blind or something, just “here’s the hole in the ground!” and then, once inside it’s more of the same. You enter a room with moss in it. This room has trolls and moss. The trolls are friendly. They don’t care. Well, one room has some sleeping trolls in it who are not pleased at being woken up, if you hang around. I wouldn’t be either. Anyway, they don’t care. Yeah, they are fertilizing their ground with corpses, but there’s no indication they are KILLING people. The descriptions are entirely neutral on that point. “Investigating the corpses: Human commonfolk, arranged with almost ceremonial care. Their hands are folded, mouths held agape with sticks. No possessions of any value.” Sure thing man. No one cares. Well, the trolls are not happy that their moss tunnels have now been invaded by slime molds. Pretty please? This puts us, I don’t know, halfway through the encounters? So you wander around looking at moss and trolls until you reach the barricades that block off the other half of the rooms. Once there things change. You kill gelatinous hulks and other mindless blob things. Yeah! You did it! ‘ 

The last half of the room, eight rooms, are handled in two pages. So, two pages of content here. Two pages of things to do. You enjoy yourself here.

Room descriptions are in the old OSE style and meh. “The Threshold Black walls (thicker roots). Translucent threads (hang from ceiling, like a curtain).” This is ok, but not great. It’s just not very evocative, but, at least, it’s not overly long, thank god. 

There’s just not much here. Stab the blob things. Maybe don’t touch the pools that are obviously acidic. It’s like The Adventure Of Getting Inzto My Condo! Avoid the church people in the drive and hit the open gate button on the app. Don’t yell at the old person driving slowly in front of you. Open the garage door with the opener. Park in the garage being careful not to hit the concrete post on one side. Roll 1d6, if you get a 1-3 then the car on the other side is present also and you should not hit it. Push the elevator button. Wait forever. 1-3:d6 other people get off on floor one, slowing your ascent. Yeah. Ok. I guess things happen. I guess? Do they matter? No. 

Also, I’m annoyed that the numbers on the map are in a black font in purple background blobs. This is my usual Hard To Read rant. And, then, the dungeon proper, “This dungeon is made up of an expanding fungal root-system, the roots of which form mid-sized tunnels and rooms.” I guess the roots are hollow?

Nothing here. Move along. Move along. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/560343/corpse-husbandry-an-adventure-in-dolmenwood?1892600