Ten Foot Pole

By Joseph Bloch
BRW Games
1e
Levels 1-12

But a few scant leagues from the walls of the bustling town of Greyheim lay the crumbling ruins known as the Castle of the Mad Archmage, Jophob Schlech, long shunned by the local townsfolk. Decades ago, a series of vast treasure hoards were discovered in the twisting mazes beneath the castle proper, along with hungry beasts and deadly traps aplenty. Legends were made in that time; the names of those early explorers will live on for centuries. Eventually, though, the dungeons lost their luster as the treasures became smaller and harder to win, the traps were dismantled, and the monsters slain; eventually only the desperate or jaded dared enter the dungeons beneath the castle. Recently, however, reports have surfaced of renewed stockpiles of wealth in the dank passages and chambers beneath the hillock upon which the stillruined castle rests. Regions once deemed devoid of monstrous habitation have been reported to teem with renewed activity. Traps both magical and mundane have once more brought explorers to their doom. Changes both subtle and gross have been noted in the very layout of the passages and chambers, rendering old maps and knowledge dangerously unreliable if not outright useless. Something is definitely afoot, and most honest folk in the nearby city find the prospect an unnerving one indeed. To the bold and daring, however, only one message needs to be heard. The castle and its dungeons are once more ripe for exploration, and new legends are ready to be made beneath The Castle of the Mad Archmage!

This 322 page adventure presents a megadungeon with about fourteen levels and at least a thousand rooms. A true example of the genre, it does a decent job mimicking what a classic era megadungeon may have looked like, combining large extensive level maps with a writing style and encounter mix that feels like it’s out 79-81. It’s also vaguely disconnected from itself, feeling more like a series of random rooms, in spite of having factions and zones and level themes. 

Bloch and BRW is interesting. I have, up to this point, not reviewed any of the various of Mad Archmage available. What I know Bloch from is some EXCELLENT marketing which seems to draw me in time and again to his products via the covers and the DriveThru pages. And then crushing disappointment as I see yet another what appears to be a low effort offering that makes little sense. The Castle of the Mad Archmage though is a little different. This version, I assume, is the one that hit kickstarter for something like $50k. The maps are exactly what one expect if you said large Gygaxian megadungeon level, perhaps without the “lines for walls” from the famous snippet. But, several hundred rooms per level and a complexity to them that is absolutely present. And encounters straight out of the classic era Gygax, without, though, the guiding vision of a level that results in these feeling disconnected from themselves and perhaps a little staid and/or generic. It’s a colossal effort, just not one that I would ever feel the desire to run because of the … aimlessness?

The adventure has a lot of elements straight out of early play. You will recall, in the G series, a brief sentence in the intro noting that if the party looks around they can find a cave, etc to home base out of, a camp to rest and rover in as they raid the dungeon. We can see in this one a small appeal to that as well. There are several small farmsteads in the area that the party could base out of. (This is in addition to several other areas in the surrounding lands, a fairy forest, etc, to add some play options as the party mucks about in the region through the extended and repeated forays in to the dungeon that a megadungeon would imply.) I note, as well, that these have something going on also, or at least something colorful to add. After all, if you’re going to base out of Farmer Browns farm then having a little bit to spice up play there, during your repeated visits, is a great addition. One farm houses two brothers and their families … who hate each other and will get angry if the party interact with the other half of the family. Ongoing fun! And then another has an old patriarch … and a son who just wishes the old man would die already so he can take over. “Paulus’s eldest son is Doran, who resents his father’s seemingly stubborn refusal to depart this world.” That’s a pretty simple sentence that is overloaded with opportunities for play. This is exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for in a homebase description: just a line, almost a throwaway, that can be used to riff off of. You get the idea immediately and can leverage the situation to spice some things up while the party rests. 

There are also a decent number of bandits and “caretakers” present in the dungeon and the environs. They will charge you to go in and down the stairs to the next levels. Or, others will hiit you on the way out, looking for easy marks loaded down with treasure, wounded and unable to dump fireballs at them. These are, again, classic examples from older play that have been included and bring in that more dynamic element of play. We so often see the journey to the dungeon, or back home, just hand waved, but these appeals to the older play add an extra elements to help bring alive what could be routine in a megadungeon: getting in and going out again.

Other classic elements are present as well. Notably, we see a large number of levels, fourteen. And a decent number of them sport those large and complex maps that we get glimpses of in Barrier Peaks or Mordenkainen. A hundred, a hundred and fifty rooms to a level Loops, complex mapping, small zones and interconnections. We get a side view of the entire dungeon and a diagram showing the various connections to the surface. (Although, I note that WHERE on the surface is not noted, a serious lapse.) This is all quite excellent and something seldom seen in dungeons. There is room to breathe here. The denizens can have zones or control, and there can be buffer zones between them. This is exactly what you want in large expansive dungeon levels. 

And it comes replete with The Greyhawk Construction Company. Err, the Greyheim Construction Company, I mean. Orcs and ogres in safety vests building the dungeon in a kind of pocket dimension. Orange cones. Blueprints. This was another classic element of play, a meta way for the DM to say “hey, that part of the dungeon? I haven’t finished mapping and stating it yet. Maybe ring again later?” Not quite a funhouse element, you’re not really interacting with them, ala “trap reset kobolds”, but more of a eta reference and acknowledgement to how the game, and its dungeons, developed. Although, I think two pages are devoted to it here … In any event, there are a lot of classical elements here that were oft present in earlier games and, in particular, megadungeon games. 

The various encounters could have been written and/or pulled from some of the earliest published adventures. They range from the minimal to the slightly more than minimal. There’s a mix of combat and what we might call Specials. The Fountain of Snakes stands out as one of thoseSpecial type encounters: “FOUNTAIN OF SNAKES. A fountain with a shallow basin dominates the middle of this room. A small, barred window looks into area #128, where two orc guards are always posted. The fountain itself is shaped like four intertwining snakes. Every round that someone is in this room, a snake will issue forth from this enchanted fountain, with  snakes coming out of a different mouth of the statue:” That’s a decent little special, and as a bonus it includes that small barred window. This sort of “see something from somewhere else” is something that Thracia did to great effect. Specials are one of the favorite things, when handled right. You need not too many of them and they need to written in a rather neutral way, a thing in the dungeon that the party could be impacted by or could leverage to their own ends if managed correctly. 

44. LAUGHING SKULL. If this room is entered, a human skull rises from the floor laughing hysterically for 1 minute. It then floats gently to the floor. The room is otherwise empty. The skull will lose its enchantment if removed from this room.

45. EMPTY ROOM. Table and 4 chairs.

46. SPIDER! A huge spider (AC(D) 6; AC(A) 14; MV 180’/min.; HD 2+2; 11 h.p. each; #AT 1; DAM 1-6; SA poison, leap 30’) dwells here, in the corpse of an unlucky elf from whence it will leap to attack. The elf’s corpse has 85 g.p.

That little run of rooms stood out to me. We see there as special, in the skull, an empty room, and then a creature encounter. This little selection stood out to me because I think it exemplifies the kind of things you’ll find in this megadungeon. The “special” there is nothing much, just something bizarre in the dungeon. And if we’re going to criticize the Dwimmermount chess players then this gets criticized as well. There are a fair number of these sorts of “empty specials” in the Mad Archmage. It’s just something weird pulled out and put in the dungeon. I suppose there’s the possibility of the party using it, but it’s just there and doesn’t seem t contribute much. There’s an entry in the ruins aboveground of a ghostly echo of horse hooves in the stable. To no end, but, you can exorcise it to get rid of it, the text tells us. But it’s nothing. It doesn’t really set a mood. It doesn’t have an impact on the party, It just feels too … disconnected from the rest of the adventure. Just as most of the specials do here. 

The empty room here is fine. Especially in a larger work you need some space. A buffer zone for monsters. A place for the party to spin their wheels or rest in. Every room stuffed full just doesn’t make sense in some of the larger dungeons. 

And the creature encounter here stands out. The spider is IN the corpse. I think perhaps I would have liked a bloated elf body or some such, something to add color to the description, but placing the creature in the body, and a spider at that, elevates this from a boring old “there’s a spider on the ceiling encounter.” Again, I think this little run of rooms is a good example of what you can find here, both good and bad. A little bland in the descriptions, overall terse, a little random and aimless, and perhaps the selected format could have been done a little differently given the way the spiders stat block, fully inline, detracts from the overall comprehension of the room when scanning it. 

And then there are the more straightforward funhouse rooms. “DUCK! There is a large (4’ tall at the head) bright yellow statue of a duck in the middle of this room. 1 minute after the room is entered, buzz saw blades will slice through the place at a height of 4’ 2”.” Or, perhaps the honeytrap room where a bunch of honey falls on someone. This is all classic funhouse dungeon. Something weird, meta, out of time, showing up in the dungeon. An explicit acknowledgement that we are all playing a game and the designer and DM can and will include anything. Tonally out of place in a more classic adventuring environment, but, we’re talking megadungeon here. You gonna need some things in there to mix things up. You’ve been in this dungeon for 196 gaming sessions and little fun in that environment is probably ok. And it makes more sense to me than, say, the isolated laughing skull or the horse hoof exorcism. 

I have compared this si the older adventures but there is something missing. It just doesn’t feel connected to itself the way older adventures do. G1 felt like a unified whole. The dinner party. The sleeping guards, the lothario, the orc servants both loyal and in revolt.  There was this overall theme that ran through it. Even in something MUCH larger, like S3, it all felt connected to itself. You could follow along. Things in one place meant something somewhere else. And it just doesn’t FEEL that way here. Yes, there are some factions on each level, and they have a zone of control, and there’s some space and some conflict. And levels have some overall theming. The barracks levels. The storage level. The arena level. But there’s not LIFE to much, if any, of it. I don’t mean creatures, there are plenty. Or weird shit going on. There’s that also. It just doesn’t feel like there’s a hiding hand here. Not quite random, but also not working together to paint a broader picture of the dungeon. I don’t really know how to describe this.  It has something to do, perhaps, with a combination of the tone and the vibe? Let us assume we were turning an Ikea in to a dungeon. Each of the little vignettes is their own room. (Rooms within rooms within rooms!) So, the theme here is Ikea rooms, and each of the rooms makes a direct appeal to that. But one is empty. And another is a fairy tea party. And another that ghastly abomination known as Tuscan Kitchen. Space aliens are in a room with kindergarten chairs and some suburban mom is picking out a plant in another, unaware of anything. They are all rooms, what are you complaining about? Is there some overriding theme that runs throughout? Ultimately, the theme is that the mad archmage, a stand in for the DM, is on the bottom level and jokes with you, gives you gifts, and then sends you to the other side off world. Why, the party asks, is this all here? ? “Well, how else would I have met you folks?! [the party]” I know that the adventure path and plot thing have scared us all, but this opposite effect is a little too meta for me. There is no theme. There is no interconnection. There is nothing going on that binds the adventure, or the levels together. There is barely very much to tie the levels to themselves, as standalones.  Ultimately this is just a big funhouse dungeon. The Duck encounter, with a tad more theming than, say, a bunch of isolated rooms floating in a void, each with a wildly different genre going on. Stonehell, with its level interconnections, level summaries, and interconnections was, for all of its minimalism, a hundred times better when it came to giving the things life and in making it feel like each component was a part of a whole. And, for all the funhouse nature of the rooms, there just doesn’t seem to be any joy present in the adventure. It feels quite a bit more like drudgery than joy or wonder. If we took the spirit of Grimtooth, without the sly winks, then perhaps that? I’m not suggesting there are deathtraps or rube goldbergs or anything like that. But a certain isolation combined with a routine … blandness and smallmindedness?

I can, also, mention the padding present. This is Bloch special. There is the long section at the start that tells you how to read a block and that AC means Armor Class, among other how to roleplay introductory text. I wonder what the set is of people who purchased this and don’t know what an RPG is? And then of course the entries are padded out. “Home to the Rory family, a pair of brothers and their families, with a total of eight people living here. Adam  (human F0; 7 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL NG) and his wife Melissa (human F0; 4 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL NG) and their twin teenage boys, Paulus and Renulf (human F0; 6 h.p. each; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL NG) live in one of the farmhouses on the land. John (human F0; 6 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL CG) and his wife Regina (human F0; 4 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL CG) live in the other house with their widowed daughter Trudy (human F0; 3 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL LG) and her infant son Rex.” Not only do the inline stat blocks make the entry hard to read, they are all just zero level AC10 humans with nothing special going on. This calls to mind the trap of layout/publishing guidelines. They exist to add clarity, not to be followed rigidly in to the abyss. If the guidelines say to bold monster names, and you do so and it looks like that is MORE confusing, then don’t do that. Most of the padding comes up front, in the region and the text before the dungeon starts, so at least the keys are relatively free of that, 

“BLACKSMITH’S SHOP. This sagging cottage, built against the sturdy stone of the inner keep, was once the blacksmith’s shop. The long-disused forge is evident, but where the anvil and tools would be expected are only rusty stains (a rust monster had found the place years ago and gorged itself). The thatched roof is mostly intact.

ARMORY. This smallish room was used to store arrows for the use of archers who might use the balistraria in the adjacent hallway. The spiral staircase behind the secret door leads to area #108 on Level 1 Core: The Storage Rooms, while the secret passage leading through the wall ends in a one-way secret door that can only be opened from the inside. Its existence was one of the castle’s most closely guarded secrets. Today it holds empty barrels which contain a few broken arrows or forgotten arrowheads.”

Those two entries are excellent examples of how to not write entries. The Blacksmiths “was once’ and we get the rust monster backstory, that isn’t going to ever come up in play. The armory smacks of that Dungeon room, the worst one ever written. After a paragraph or two describing it ended with something like “but today the room is empty.” Focus your writing on the now, focus it on the party interacting with the room. Sure, you can throw in a random line of backstory or something to punch up the writing. Who doesn’t like those snide little DM aside comments that designers sometimes throw in? But, mostly, focus the writing on the interactivity you are enabling in the room for the party to explore, not a booklet from a small county historical society museum on the various uses of the living room in John Holmes palm beach home between 1962 and 1983. 

There are other rando bits. A decent number of weird saves, 8HD level monsters on level 2, which is kindof nice, A disturbing number of rooms fall in to the format “XNUMBER MONSTERTYPE are here.” Meh. it is what it is, I guess.

It is hard to regard this as more than a curiosity. The dedication to the early encounter style is interesting, but not so much that the lack of a feeling of interconnectedness, (or purpose?) … the aimlessness of the levels, even though there are factions and themes. It feels like a hollow effort to explore

This is $25 at DriveThru. There is no preview. SUCKER!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/462133/ma1-castle-of-the-mad-archmage-the-core-levels?1892600

By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 9-12

During the War of the Heavens, it is said that an acrchangel of Janu deseneded from the skies like a great meteor, striking the known world with a sacred war hammer, laying the devils and demons low. The very earth trembled at the blow, cracking the surface and pushing up the mountains. The land of Stygina was created, as the continent was shattered and the Frostholm Sea was formed. And it is said that this mighty weapon is still buried in the ice in the frozen north..

This 198 page booklet presents The Frozen North, full of generic vikings (with one cultural exception) and uses about sixteen pages to describe a dungeon with 24 rooms containing an angels warhammer. And angel. Its entries are full of padded backstory explaining the why and histories of everything, and ultimately the various encounters are just stabbing of the generic variety. Imagine writing 198 pages of generic padding and then including “Roll on table H for the dragons hoard.”

I know I’m supposed to be taking more time with these longer adventures, but this booklet has the vast majority of its space taken up by generic cultural shit and generic viking encampments that lack any color. The whole purpose here seems to be going to get a magic warhammer, part of a longer/larger campaign arc with this adventure just being the latest in the series. But the warhammer thing only takes up the last bit of the book, thirty pages with the main attraction, the dungeon, being about sixteen or so? It’s hard to evaluate 130 pages of generic viking stuff. And I don’t mean Harn levels of culture; it’s just boring old stuff that any old DM could come up with if I just said “Vikings in the north.” 

I frequently call this The Kitchen issue, although it should be renamed the Fantasy Inn issue given the frequency of it making an appearance there. E all know what a kitchen looks like. I’m sure that we could all even describe a fantasy kitchen, or, perhaps, a medieval kitchen in a manor. Including Mrs Patmore. It’s been burned the fuck in to you by every piece of media you have ever consumed. Cartoons, books, tv, movies, everything ever produced by the BBC.  Every telenueve. You, and everyone else on the fucking planet, knows what that damn kitchen looks like in the manor house. So why the fuck did the designer just spend two paragraphs telling you what a medeivel kitchen looks like? Oh, look, two more paragraphs on what a little roadside inn looks like with another two on the jolly little rotund barkeep. Fireplace,soft light through the windows, smoke from the chimney, a murmur from outside, maybe a jaunty tune here and there, farmers a couple of merchants. Simple but hearty fare. Blah blah blah. Got it. The Prancing Pony. Just like every other of the 10,000 fantasy inn descriptions i’ve read, watched, and consumed over my life. 

The designer needs to communicate The Prancing Pony very succinctly and then proceed to tell us how THIS Prancing Pony differs from every other Prancing Pony. Cozy Inn. Seedy Inn. Serves slop. Maybe, instead of describing the inn, you could instead tell us about the smuggling ring that hangs out there? How the innkeeps family is weirdly leaning in to in to the Church of the New God? It doesn’t have to be bizarre, but including a subplot here is much better than wasting our time with Just Another Inn. If you have to have one then just tell us it’s a normal old inn called The Prancing Pony, or The Green Dragon, or whatever. A quirk or two is great. 

Likewise, the viking realm in this adventure. These are just vikings. Not Harn vikings, or realistic one, just plain old fantasy vikings. There is nothing special going on here. Nothing about the inns or settlements that makes them special. (Well, except for that mass human sacrifice thing …) And yet the adventure goes on and on about viking land. And not the vikings riding mastodons SO METAL of the only fantasy map you’ll ever need. Just generic vikings. No Grondusmoots and other local customs that might come up in the adventure or be central to a certain point. Just gener-o-vikings. It’s a fantasy village. But everyone is dressed like a viking,.A hundred and some pages of this. Even, for a gazetteer, this is a bit much for the local color, or lack thereof, that you get. The closest you get is a small wandering event table to spice up your short stay in the city. With an example below …

There is an exception to the generic stuff. The vikings up here have a ritual. Well, a holiday like festival. “In the past, as many as 10,000 slaves, prisoners, and various livestock have been sacrificed during the weeklong Festival of Aesa.” Hmmm. In the past, right? Well, no. They are still doing it and the party arrives during it. It’s part of the adventure. While you’re watching the head priestess slaughter slaves and prisoners, ritually, she reads the parties minds and that’s how we kick off an audience with the king. Lest you think you can escape with some abstraction here, there are a few random city encounters that bring it home. A slave child finds you and tells you that her owner is about to have her brother sacrificed and begs for you to do something.

Look man, I’ve had a shitty day at work. I’m here for the beer and pretzels and friends and a few laughs maybe. I do NOT fucking need a slave child. I don’t her pleading with me to do something. And I especially don’t need the ritual murder of a bunch of people in with the group that I’m supposed to be interacting with as if they were any other generic villager.

“The only words that can describe it is barbaric evil. But this is a gross misunderstanding of the Styginian belief system, as a whole. The Styginians are not evil as, for instance, the orcs of the Rok-Skull tribes. Orcs are inherently evil. The Styginian people are simply honoring their Gods in the manner that their Gods demand.” Big big fan of alignment being cosmically evil. It lets us hand wave a lot of things. But, dude, this is some Zone of Interest shit. Tht’s fucking evil, not a cultural quirk. This is supposed to be fun? I don’t see any need to collaborate to get a warhammer to stop an archdevil. We’ll find another way. Let’s skip this adventure. I don’t know what the fuck people are thinking including shit like this. That one with the halfling plantation owners. The one with the baddies all being obviously mentally ill. Yeah yeah, midwesterner. Whatever. This is not fun. I’m pretty sure I would launch an attack, get killed, leave, and then have a talk with the DM about what “fun” means. The fucking game is not a simulation of the barbarity of history. It’s a fucking game for christs sake. I’m not the biggest fan of trigger warnings, but including this kind of shit deserves it. I take it back, if you reach MY level of trigger warning then maybe DONT PUT THE FUCKING SHIT IN THE GAME!! Its not even fucking necessary for the adventure. There’s no call back. There’s no weight to it or significance. It’s basically just local color, like, they all wear tweed hats or some shit. Except its here and the designer has decided to spring it on the party as the hook/lead in to the hunt for the warhammer. You know what we do? We make the people mass sacrificing children EVIL, and we use them as the bad guys and we don’t force the party to collaborate with them. And we especially don’t make them participate, implicitly or explicitly. I D3 were on our way to kill their god and it’s all abstracted; THAT seems like a worthy reason for passing through. Yeah, we want to know our baddies are evil. But these people are not the baddies in the adventure and are just presented like a cultural norm. I’m really not happy about this. I’m going to continue the review of this garbage only because you can leave EVERYTHING out about it and still do the adventure with your plain old mercantile, murderous, raiding vikings. 

“For the Styginian people, this is mostly considered true, though they will not openly state such a thing. Only by immersing one’s self in the Styginian culture will one find this to be an overall truth. The Gods of both pantheons play an everyday role in Styginian society and every person, giant or Styginian, is devoutly religious. Every man, woman, and child, giant or otherwise, wears a token of a God that is believed to have some forbearance on that individual’s life. Gifts are given to the Gods on their holy days and sacrifices are made during the midsummer solstice, in the capital of Olafsvellir.” Speaking of gazeteer, the vast majority of this reads like an early travelogue. It’s in a rather dry style which is only exacerbated by the genericism of the content. 

And everybody and everything has a backstory. It’s everywhere. And it’s integrated in to the descriptions. “Large two story manor: Originally built by some of Arnvid’s generals after the sack of Miraslava, these two large manor houses were later added on to, becoming what is today known as the Capsizer Inn. Wood sign over the door: While the sign does not name the inn as such, every regular to Miraslava knows the carved relief of a longship tipping to the side in a large wave. The sign is stained in a deep burgundy that many claim is from the blood that was spilled when Arnvid came to power. These are most likely nothing more than tall tales.” There’s nothing to any of that. It’s just preamble to a fucking inn. Hey, you know one of those Black Demon Knight things? Lord Soth? There’s one of those in the adventure, in some room in the dungeon. He gets a backstory also. And when you walk in he immediately attacks and does nothing but fight. So, what’s the point of the backstory? I guess if you just want to read the adventure and imagine all of the games you’ll run then it’s great. But running the adventure? All of this nonsense padding just gets in the way of the DM locating the information they DO need in order to run the room. You have to wade through the dross in order to find what interactivity you need to respond to the party. And, it pisses me off. Because the effort spent on this backstory nonsense, this justifying and explaining the whys and wherefore, is effort that should have spent on the actual adventure, the interactivity, the shit that WILL matter at the table. That’s what the fuck the adventure is for, running it at the table.

The adventure, proper, is just a hack with a few traps. Sail on a ship. Fight a giant squid (with backstory.) Walk across some snow. Fight some frost giants. Go in a cave. Three levels, about eight rooms per level. Fight some ice trolls. Fight some other shit. Fall in a pit. Fight a bunch of 12HD druids. Yeah, it’s putin the middle of nowhere but there are all of these 12HD druid hanging around, protecting the place. I don’t need toilets and a mess hall, but SOME allowance for them as something other than a generic stat block would be nice. No names, just a bunch of 12 HD druids. There are a couple of groups of them. One group just fought some frost giants. The giants got past them so they are just standing there in the same room, not giving chase or anything. Joy. Injured? Missing spells? Nope. It’s just a stat block to stab.

And what stat blocks! It’s not unusual to see a full column of them! This is right out of 4e, with all of their special abilities present. Trolls? Why they are known to set traps, so we gotta include that in the stat block! It doesn’t matter that they just wandered in and have had no time, it’s in the creature stat block so it gets included. I don’t need Ready Ref one liners here, but, man, use some common sense. Don’t be beholding to your style guide. Include what’s needed and lave out what’s not. A trivial creature encounter takes up LOADS of space here. (It’s OSE, so none of that only four 12HD druids in the world shit. Although, I still find that rather romantic …)

Then there’s what’s NOT included. In a dragons lair, with dragon: “Glittering piles of treasure: Piles of coins litter the floor of this chamber. Sparkling gems are interspersed through these pile, marking a near incalculable wealth at first glance.” And the treasure? “Treasure: In addition to Izyntainth’s hoard, there is an additional 100pp, 5,000gp, 1,000ep, 2,000sp, 6,000cp, and 100 gems worth 10gp each.” BUT THERES NO HOARD DESCRIPTION! Jesus christ man, that’s what you SHOULD be including! How about a more differenter dragon? “Treasure: The entirety of Rirglazic’s hoard, from Treasure Table H, can be found here.” This is my life. This is what I signed up to do. Where’s that other entry? Oh, here. The Dangerous Shark. An inn in town. Like, eight pages to describe it. A fairly typical seaside bar/inn. But everyone looks like a viking. It includes a description, taking most of a column, of the owners bedroom. There’s nothing special about the bedroom. Just a normal simple innkeeper one. There’s nothing special about the inn. No hidden cults or anything like that which would make the innkeeper’s room interesting. But you know what we do get? This, in the OSE style: “Heavy door (this heavy wood door is good at blocking noise; locked).” And then, cause we gotta follow up, “Heavy door: Kalf installed a thick wood door on the master bedroom that deadens the sound from within and without. “When we’re in here, I don’t want to hear or know what you girls are doing out there, and I don’t want you to hear or know what we’re doing in here!” The door is locked. Both Kalf and Gudny have skeleton keys to all the locks on the second floor.” Is there a point here? Is the designer implying that the daughters are fucking and the parents know? I mean, that must be it?! BECAUSE WHY ELSE WOULD THAT BE IN THE ADVENTURE? This is the kind of trivial bullcrap that gets included. But, the dragons treasure trove? Nope. In what POSSIBLE frame of mind do you have to be to include that shit about the door, or all the other minutia in the descriptions of the bullshit parts of the adventure, and then NT include the treasure in a dragons hoard? That was your fucking decition that you made here? 

Oh, shit, I was bitching about the dungeon. Anyway, lots of stabbing. Nothing really makes sense or “clicks.” It’s just stuffing in some monsters in a lot of rooms for you to stab and finding a pretext for them to be herein their backstories. Nothing special about the stabbing. A few traps, nothing really special about them, not in a “specials” kind of way. Everything is very straightforward. It makes no sense, but its straightforward. 

It’s done in a kind of OSE style, with the descriptions. I know people have strong opinions about that. I think its effective when done well. Guess what? It’s not done well here . Emphasis on the wrong things, too long in its keywords, not very evocative. Blech.

But, that’s not the major problem here. I am hesitant to review fluff. I don’t know what makes fluff good, or, perhaps, there is less, from a technical writing viewpoint, about to critique in a fluff sourcebook. And most of this is just a regional guide to the land of Stygia, full of vikings. But it doesn’t approach it from a historical viewpoint. And it doesn’t approach it from a Metal standpoint. It’s just mostly a typical fantasy setting, with people dressed up as vikings. I have a hard time believing this is what folks want from a regional guide. After all, you know what a kitchen looks like. The focus on the mundane and trivial doesn’t hit what IM looking for in a regional guide, but maybe its for you? I don’t know, like I said, I don’t know fluff. 

Can you read this map and make out the detail or the text?

On the adventuring side of things though, there are several problems that drag this down. The emphasis on stabbing and “normal” traps. There’s not much special here. Certainly there’s a place for a raid, but this just seems like a level noe dungeon scaled up to levels 9-12, and not a very interesting level one dungeon at that. Nothing fits together well. The depth is quite shallow and there’s little to learn or figure out. The added emphasis on the DM coming up with their own content for, say, the dragons hoards, is just icing on that little cake. I find the inclusion of the human sacrifice thing very distasteful. It doesn’t meet the moral compass test of either making them the baddies OR even raising interesting questions of complicity. (That would be a much harder line to walk and I’m not suggesting that anyone SHOULD walk it in a D&D game, but it’s the available out if you are going to do something like this. Gaeta during the Cylon occupation comes to mind. But, then, how much of this is appropriate for a fun game?)  I can’t see much in the value here.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The review is eight genero-background pages on culture, etc. You have to squint some, but the entire booklet is like that, to certain degrees. A few encounter pages would have been good to include. Not a great preview, although, it does tell you what to expect …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/509390/stygina-the-land-of-ice-and-plunder?1892600

By Leo Hunt
Published by Joel Hines
OSE
Level 1?

The Shrike is a world of decay – rusted iron, crumbling stone, saltwater, blood, and fog – surrounded by a roiling ocean, a lifeless archipelago, pewter-hued clouds, seabirds, and pitiless stars. In this infernal Galapagos, players will encounter masked Devils, blood which gives life to things which should not have it, stones which give life to people who do not want it, terrible and stranded monsters, perilous locations, and wonderous treasures from across the planes.

This 169 page sandbox provides for about seventy locations in five zones in one of the better representations of a dante-like hell. It riffs on suffering without becoming grecian about it, presenting a picture of many desperate people trying to survive with hopes of either escape or despair. It does try to do everything to everyone, presenting several options for the direction of the goals the party might chase/factions they support/ends they want to obtain, and suffers somewhat for it. Lots of situations, with  a lot of people who want something.

Welcome to Hell! Literally! Well, a part of Hell, anyway. Well, a part of Hell that is no longer a part of Hell. It’s a G I A N T chunk of ragged metal surrounded by ocean and it has a god impaled on top of it, dying for all of eternity. You know, just like your morning commute feels. Anway, Hell being what it is, sometimes shit happens and chunks break away, detaching from Hell proper. And that’s happened here. You’ve got some sinners here, serving out their normal old sin of divine punishment, as well as some devils (five factions worth) overseeing things, a few other beings of power, and then some inanimate objects that have been turned in to people by the dying gods blood. Hmmm, something sounds familiar … Anyway, if the sinners die they get reborn the next day; death isn’t the end of things for them. Oh, and nearly everyone is starving. As the booklet says, play them like they are one meal away from starving to death. So, almost everyone is a cannibal. Sure hope you’re not a player character who ends up here; that create food and water spell is looking pretty good about right now! This part of hell is laid out like a pointcrawl, in about five zones with maybe fifteen areas per done, and maybe a dungeon per zone with about another rooms. 

One of the highlights of the adventure, and the reason I think it does such a good job modeling a kind of hell from Dante, is the focus on the normal every day old sinners. Sure, the place exists because of the dying god impaled on top, his blood animating things, but it’s the normal people that bring the grimness and false hope to life. 

First, everyone IS starving to death and almost everyone is a cannibal. You’ve got your friendly folk in caves playing their violins, who turn out to be cannibals. You’ve got your villages, who have a ritualized combat every night where the loser gets eaten. You’ve got your run of the mill cannibal gangs. There’s a line in this about the people living near the shore being able to eat fish, but that’ not what is going on here. There is no food for almost everyone. Everyone is a cannibal. But, it’s more the false hopes and resignments that I mean when I say it strikes well on the Hell front. In one encounter “Another hour’s walk and one comes across a great grove of silver trees, deep-rooted within the coastal stone, each branch holding countless sputtering candles. Careful observation reveals the candles are slowly going out, extinguished by harsh winds and drizzling rain.” You’ve got these two sinners, an old man and a young teen, huddled, living in a cave nearby, scared of the party. But they have to keep the candles lit. For if they can do that then they will be saved! “He believes Pin to be his daughter and the Candle Grove to be their penance. Each tree must remain lit, to demonstrate their faith in salvation.” She wants to journey to an island nearby, where she sees a green flame, believing it stays alight forever and they can use it to light all of the candles and win their salvation. If the party does not agree then she slips away in the night to do it. (Only to end up a thrall to it, but that’s another locale.) And, the party being the party, what if they manage to help out and light every candle?!?! “When they are not immediately freed from their suffering, Herot loses hope completely, becoming a Husk (p.148) within days. Pin will follow the PCs from this point on, whether they invite her to or not.” Well now, that’s depressing. Crushed expectations and disillusionment abound. People believe in things, they give themselves hope and are sustained by it. We must follow the devils orders explicitly to be saved. We must defy them at every turn to be saved from this place. At one point you see a MASSIVE chain coming out of the sky. Following it up leads to a floating ship  inhabited by people who think it will leave and take them away. A wizard is trapped here and constructs a bathosphere to escape through what he thinks is a hole to the abyss at the bottom of the ocean. These things sustain them through eternity. And invariably they want the parties help. And … some of them ARE true, Which do you think? And who is going to be devastated when you, the party, bring the crushing truth of reality in to what they have been clinging to for hope to sustain them through eternity? It is this, the hope and futility, that really shines here. Gonna harden your heart?  Gonna swallow your tears? Do you become like The Ghoul? Do you give them hope? Help them? Shit on them? How do you decide which ones MIGHT be on to something? Eternity is a long time to figure things out. 

Take, for example, the dead god. Forgotten name. No one knows his crime, blah blah blah. He’s got an avatar, created using his last strength. The devils would sorely like to capture and destroy it. It’s only a disembodied voice. And its working to free the god. Shall you help? Get the heads of the five devil houses to show up at the top of the spire in the Garden Incomparable and have them all five vote to free him. Which will free him. His avatar doesn’t tell you that doing so will destroy the Shrike and everyone in it, immortal or not. So, you know, I hope you pick the right people to cozy up with.

We come then to the sandbox nature of the adventure. The party ends up here somehow. The motivations for doing so are loose, but the mechanisms are the more interesting part. Beyond thepbvious “you died” and a journey by sea, we are presented with a false burial, in an iron coffin, replete with someone giving a false eulogy listing all of your sins and lapses. Buried in sand as the tide rolls in, you end up on a beach in an iron coffin as the tide rolls out, in the Shrike. There’s some local color for you! Or, perhaps, you would travel by traitor goat? “When a goat has performed this duty for seven years, it is slain by impalement, and its blood daubed upon a door made from iron, bone, silver, stone, and gold.” I think there are like two sentences to this, but which provide oh so much color. Great specificity and a good example of what TO color. 

The adventure keys and locations provide little in way of goals. For that, and perhaps in your reason for coming to the Shrike, we rely on another page in the front of the book. Escape and general exploration are covered, but then also working to free the nameless god or agents for the infernal court, working for unity, or against, to sow discord amongst them. It is one of these that is suggested as a goal for the arty, with the keys and locations proper remaining rather neutral in their orientation. There are some clunky rules for GOLD=XP, dumping them in to the mouths of idols to Mammon or offering them to one of the five devil leaders as tribute. Both seem clunky to me, as stand ins for “spending it in town”, since there are no towns, but, you can always ignore the “spend” part. Once in the mix most of the folks want something that the party could do. That bathosphere wizard needs a bunch of parts obtained for the construction. Him being level one makes it difficult for him (A great example of the consequences of a teleportation accident!) “The Abyss is pitch-black. We must have supernatural radiance to guide our path.” And then it’s up to you to find something, somewhere to help with that. There IS something provided, in the DM notes, but it’s also left openended as a problem to solve any way the party can. Continual Light isn’t mentioned, but hey, you’re the DM. And thus with a giant iron vessel to ride in (the kettles in one locations?) or something else the party comes up with. Looking at the Candle Tree situation, that’s open ended as well, as are most of the problems to be solved. They do, mostly, feel disconnected from each other. Vignettes, with the occasional “I’d really like a X”, or “I hope Y suffers.” In one of the devil courts you can interact with some random imps: “Have you all seen the light over in the Lantern Isle? Loads of stupid Sinners dance around it. We should go up there and steal that light from them.’ Two Imps of Salt will accompany you to the Lantern Isle (p.53) to steal the Wormwood Lantern.” Colorful, fun, and fits in with the imps. And a little quest-givery. This is the problem with an open-ended sandbox. You can do what you want and join any side but then also most things are written to be quite neutral and disconnected from each other with only tenuous ties. That’s not my favorite, I prefer something open ended and yet with a clear direction it is going, but I see how the framework can be appealing to some.

The maps for the five zones are all pointcrawl, with notes in each location about the various exits. “If you walk along the beach ,,,’ There is a small dungeon in each zone of, say, twelve rooms? The layout is not going be award winning. It’s better than a lair dungeon but not by much. 

There are parts of this that are quite quite good. “A tablet of stone containing the spell: The Storm Speaks Through Me (Lightning Bolt)” That’s the kind of thing I like, color. It evokes a vibe of thunderstorms and holding your arms outstretched and grey beards. Or was that Moses? Anyway, good local color. But, that doesn’t carry through the work. It lacks, I don’t know, cohesion? Falls apart at the devils? Some combination of the two?

The devils in this here part of hell are not exactly what you might call Go Getters. The locations of the devils courts and the devils proper tend to be rather static. There is some weirdness about, and some minor devilry, like those imps wanting to steal the sinners green party light, but the Grand Game is off. There is no VIBE of devilry here. The leaders of the devil courts are suitably weirdos, and most are willing to talk to you if you’re not immediately hostile. But it really just feels like a facade. There’s no life to them or their courts. And, no, this isn’t Marie NDiaye, this is an RPG adventure, it’s not on purpose. 

That is a pretty serious disconnect here. While the sinner, proper, including the forgotten god, feel suitable mythic and sisyphean without being too much in your face about it, the devils themselves, just about everything about them, lack that mythic nature. Or, pretty much any nature at all. They seem almost completely disconnected from the rest of the locales. You will recall I noted the lack of an overall thrust to this adventure. This is, I think, one of the ways a sandbox can fall down. Yes, we want an open environment, but, also, there should be a few things to hang your hat on. 80% of games will go like this … well, then lets write for that 80% while not explicitly excluding the other 20%. I might make an analogy to the Generic/Universal adventures. They are so afraid of doing anything specific that they come off as bland. Pick a path and go with it and then throw in a few extra words here and there on alternatives. Aimlessness is not a virtue. The locales have some wants, but they generally seem just that, local. La Grande Campagne does not exist here, or even a mini version of it. 

It does an absolutely excellent job of creating those little mini encounters, mini locales, mini situations. Everyone seems to have a want or need. (Maybe too many sometimes. Now what the fuck does THIS guy want?) But those connections between sites are weak and shallow. Local Troubles, as they say, if even that. More like uncles lightbulb is out. 

I seldom bitch about money. I’m willing to pay a lot for a good adventure, no matter the page count. I am not thrilled to be paying $30 for a PDF for encounters that are mostly isolated. Accepting its flaws, it’s a decent enough little thing for what it is. But that doesn’t correlate to $30 to me. It’s missing purpose. It’s missing a vitality, at least in the devils. 

This is $29 at DriveThru. The preview is 37 pages. You get to the overview of the devil courts, the various background information, hooks, endings, and so on. But, you don’t get to see any of the encounters or locales. That’s too bad. Those ARE the strength of the booklet. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/501615/the-shrike?1892600

By Morgan Finley, Jack Cæsar, Chris Cæsar
Caesar Ink
Doomsong.

THE FIRST SEAL IS BROKEN AND PESTILENCE SPILLS FORTH.

THE KINGDOM OF LETHE FALLS BEFORE ITS FOETID LORD,

… but the Gravediggers’ Guild does not kneel to heretic gods.

Half a lifetime ago, the border kingdom of Lethe vanished in the blink of an eye. Its fate has long been a source of fear and resentment for the Church of the Divine Corpse — the disappearance of an entire kingdom implies a power far beyond what the Ecclesiarchy likes to contemplate…

This 347 page adventure uses about 180 pages to describe … fifty? Locations in a semi-realistic medeivel setting that has been overcome by plague. In some ways a better Barovia than Browvia, it has quite the large scope while consistently providing the framework for eeriness and a general unease grounded in reality. It also feels like the world is not populated, has a bunch of editing issues, and can be capricious. You can undertake an epic quest! And you can fail. I think it’s interesting, and like a lot of things I think are interesting I’m going to spend too much time talking about its faults and do a terrible job on its strengths.

There’s a vibe going on here, and for me to get anywhere near to talking about it then you’re going to need an overview. We’ve got some kind of mudcore setting. Medieval, lots of grit in the vibe. One LARGE region of the land disappeared awhile back. Your group of Gravediggers (literally) is travelling when they are pulled in to this disappeared land: The plaguescape. We’ve got a map, maybe six squares by eight, of the the region, it taking a day to travel one square and there being about one setting location per square. Would you like to go home? There are a couple of questgiver locations to move people along, including the Gravediggers Guildhall. 

It’s in the OSR section and for some system called Doomsong. I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t immediately recognize the reskin, if that’s what it is. I guess ‘OSR” is the ‘Misc’ category now in DriveThru? Anyway, I’m ignoring the whole rule system shit. You’re gonna need to stat it. 

There is an epic, oh, sandbox quest? present in this. You’ve got Plague, THE Plague, who has shown up awhile back and is responsible for yanking the land away in to this pocket dimension like place, separate from the rest of the characters reality. He’s present. He’s also got a chief follower, the daughter of the local lord, who is now a minor power also running around causing trouble. Beyond this we have a number of major supernatural entities of Plague, and a few others, as well as a few people working against Plague, some locals, or who would be if they weren’t currently in trouble … like a lordling addicted to bug juice/excretions straight out of a greek myth. There are objects of power that can help defeat plague that you can go get, and there are shrines to Plague that you can disrupt. The shrines are ,perhaps, the most pronounced example of the game. Each contains a token, a tongue, the left hand of someone, a sewn up stomach stuffed with dates and oats. If you destroy the token then you weaken Plague. (There are, if I recall correctly, seven of the shrines.) There is a cryptic message at each shrine. For the one in which you find the stomach we get “‘He stole my last meal, meagre morsel to share with truest love.’” From this we deduce ….? Well, one day you MIGHT find dungeons underneath the local lords castle. And therein find a dude locked in a cag who is ravenously hungry. Feeding him the stomach contents destroys this token. Yeah! It is not guaranteed you’ll visit the castle Or find the dungeon. And it’s not unlikely that you will kill the dude first. And then you’re gonna have to put two and two together that this is the true love in question. Other tokens have other ambiguous references: graves, bells … could be lots of those, yeah? Which witch is which? I’m not complaining, I’m pointing out a strength here: you can fail. Accidentally or on purpose, it is not guaranteed you will find a bit of information or put things together, or not fuck something up in a way that you can’t come back from. But these are all, in a way, side quests towards getting home and/or killing Plague. The key point being there are things you can do to weaken him/his allies. Strengthen yourself. Help your allies. But the plot, such that there is (going home/killing Plague) doesn’t rely on the success of any of them.  Nicely done. A sandbox to run around in, ala a video game, in which the side-quests don’t FEEL like side-quests. (That’s, what, only the second time I’ve ever made a positive video game comparison? Vista Overviews in Fallout) And, I hope from the summary I’ve given its obvious that it is NOT obvious what you are supposed to be doing. There’s a line or two about someone carrying a token being given certain dreams and portents, but thats with a kindly DM feeding you the right dream.  You gonna have to figure shit out along the way. Noice! 

[ED: Tell everyone it’s a mudcore adventure. At least in vibe if not practice. That it’s this kind of, idk, romanticized low medieval period. Maybe a church belltower and manor but lots of hovels. Except, that’s not ACTUALLY what’s going on, what with an orphanage being present and so on. But that’s the vibe, the feeling of the place. Make sure and mention that this is, no doubt, achieved by leaning on several good bits of imagery and side references. “Hundreds of bird corpses dangle from the treetops, strung up with red woollen cords.” Well now, that’s given this thing a kind of grounded earthy vibe to things, yes? Use that as an example. This imagery that kind of tugs on a shared cultural myth and story. Too much Blair Witch or too much Turnip Princess? Or, this kind of an appeal to old school witchery “For each of them, she has made a poppet dolly (lh:332) in his or her image; the orphans carry their doll with them wherever they go. These items put them under the control of Granny Redwork. To free them, a character must cut the child’s hair out of the doll’s scalp and burn it.” And to be clear, Point out that Weapons came out after this. Oh, and make sure and mention Spoilers before you say that. And then finish by saying something like Tomorrowland is the future that never was. Nevernever land is the childhood we all remember, and this setting channels all of D&D Europe before the scientific method ruined everything. People eat that shit up]

You are all members of the gravediggers guild which is, I take it, the gimmick of the system, Doomsong. You’re a part of a guild and that’s a part of the game here. Once you find the local gravediggers guild (there’s a slight problem with a dead member of the signmakers guild …) then they give you a map of the region, with all locations already on it. The local guildmaster also has a series of tasks for the party to undertake, to get things moving. And then there’s also a little minigame of rebuilding the guild. You can take on roles like florist or chaplain or scribe, and you can expand the guildhall. Want to cut down the old hanging tree to use its wood to hasten construction! Great! You speed up by a week … and unleash a ghost. Oops. It’s kind of an interesting base idea, brining in ideas from the higher levels of D&D and maybe melding the a bit with base construction in modern video games. You know, build the granite carver studio and get XXX bonus. Most of it doesn’t feel videogamey at all though. It integrates pretty well, and is also not forced down your throat so you don’t have to engage in that aspect if you don’t want to. Then again, you gain the BOLSTERED condition if you plan your next outing at the Guildmasters planning table … The inclusion of a small down time mechanism is a nice addition. For a lot of games, the realism and immersion of the game is enhanced when the innkeeper has a name and, more importantly, is having an affair with the millers wife, which the party gets to watch unfold in real time in weeks as the campaign progresses. I don’t need a lot here, but if the players are plopping their asses down on a map that takes a week to cross, and which they will need to criss-cross several times, then we better have a little more to go on to help out for those moments of NOT sheer terror. I don’t need a fully developed town, that’s a waste. But these little idles add a lot in a longer game. (Which this is; see again, the map size.)

The Guildhall thing is interesting on several fronts. It also reveals more than little about some flaws in this booklet. Essentially, everything (wrong?) with Lord Have Mercy Upon Us can be seen in the Guildhall. I would specifically note the depopulated feeling (and not in a good way), the disconnected between various elements in the text, literally, and a kind of abstraction of detail that is particularly interesting given that this is 350 page adventure. 

Abstracted text is something I touch on frequently in reviews. Specificity is the soul of a narrative. It provides the color of the world, often a key to evocative writing. I quoted a section above about the dead birds hanging from the trees with red woolen cords. And yet you don’t want to drone on and on and on. We know what a kitchen looks like and what should be in a kitchen. A solid vibe for the forest is nice, to cement it, if needed, but we don’t need to drone on about it and not every forest needs more unless, perhaps, its a core part of the encounter, environment, or vibe you want to set. Too few is minimalism and too many is padding. We want to target something solid that gives that vibe and that the DM can then riff on well. This needs to be balanced against the degree of detail needed and the purpose of the description. The most basic example is the typical room/key format. A standard, for good reason, and yet not appropriate for all seasons. I most frequently cite the example of a village where the purpose is not going room to have an encounter. The village is used for a different purpose, so even though it might USE a room/key format it is clear that other things are important here. Likewise, there is a type of adventuring environment that doesn’t really need full blown descriptions. A dinner party at a mansion, or a ship that is not being explored can get away with some more basic and general descriptions, much closer to minimalism, because of this. It’s serving as a framework in which other things are going on, social or otherwise.

Which brings us to how this is described. Caste Lethe is one of the sites in the adventure, the home of the lord. What we can see from this a framework. Not a traditional room/key, although its laid out like that. And, yet, it almost certainly iS a traditional room/key exploration. No one is home. The party will be exploring this unknown environment just like any other dungeon they have invaded. But the descriptions are pretty utilitarian. Like I might expect if this castle were hosting a murder mystery or the ship the party is travelling on. The specificity is lacking in these. There is little here. Two entries, the Scarred Cook and Mouldering Bodies, get a little paragraph follow up, and you get some “Echoes”, ghostly vignettes, to toss in. (A diary, in essence, showing you what has happened and perhaps helping you understand that stomach lovers last meal, or, at least, might in some circumstances let you eventually jump to that conclusion.) But beyond that there is little here to base an adventuring locale  on. And I’m not talking about the standard loot, monster, traps, and specials framing. We can acknowledge that an empty ghostly castle, forlorn, with ghostly vignettes and a catatonic cook can be a thing. But there’s nothing to sell that vibe. We have almost, if not totally, generic descriptions. There is almost nothing n the way of help to the DM  to sell that forlorn vibe. This is hard, as a designer, to communicate your vision to a page in such a way that the a DM can pick it up and run it the way you envision. And, yet, that IS the goal of the designer. And this just doesn’t do that. It comes off as generic. Abstracted. And the adventure in play will suffer for it. You must inspire the DM with the environment. And that is not happening here. Evocative writing and specificity sells the adventuring locale. And this is the manner in which it feels like the majority of the locations are described in this. It is not the one-pager that has failed but the context in which the one pager is presented, along with the actual descriptions of the environments. 

It felt empty, yes? And that is the way this entire game world feels. This is an entire fiefdom, ripped from normal reality. Eight days to cross on foot in one direction and six days in the other. Lots of locations to visit. A gracediggers guild, with people in it, implying therefore that there are MORE people than are in the Gravediggers guild. And, yet, no one is home. But only the lords manor and a single village seem to be what we normally expect to find, and then only the village has a few people. Tavern, mayor, church, and … Dentist. Is it bustling? No idea. Full of disease? No idea. It indicates that there are hovels and the like, but the movements of peoples is strangely absent with almost no indication that they exist. Either in the village OR in the greater region. We shall ignore tha the plague doesn’t kill everyone, after all maybe THE plague does, but, still … bodies? None. Signs of the plague? None. People? Almost none. The entirety of this place is devoid of life. I guess that’s ok? I just find it a strange decision. Except, I don’t think it was a decision because of that village. I applaud spending your word budget on the bits that are important and dirt farmers are not important, but, still, you need to set the vibe of a place. Bodies in the streets? Paranoia? Cult vibes? People drinking bleach? Just a sentence or two and it would have been fixed. 

This extends somewhat to the actual encounters. I don’t know anything about Doomsong, the system, so it culd be that it takes a more … studied approach than Ye Normal D&D. But the encounters here are few and far between, and the chances for combat perhaps even less so. There might be one hostile per location, This isnt quite a Shadow of the Colossus situation, but it is a slower pace than most would be accustomed to, making Stargazer look like a hackfest. This doesn’t have to be bad, but, again, I think it doesn’t quite work here. If you’re going to have these slow build ups to these tension relieving moments, the combats, then you are going to actually have to have these slow tension build ups. And the adventure here, as I’ve stated time and again to the point of nausea, just doesn’t have the chops to support this. It’s almost minimalistic in its descriptive style. It is NOT supporting the DM in carrying these eerie, plague, tension filled build ups. Which just seems to be madness for a 350 page adventure.

There is a lot wrong, mechanically, as well. The Castle Lethe tv show, which is just a stand in for a diary. “The magpies (lh:266) nest in great numbers here. The Tithe Barn contains all property that has ever been stolen by this kind of bird” ala Hoard of the Dragon Queen, you will enjoy the lack of anything meaningful behind that statement. “The sound of bells reverberate for miles, audible as far as Castle Lethe when the wind is blowing northward. Their cacophony is constant, originating from the top of a stone tower in No-Fly Forest.” better to be told about this BEFORE I reach the belltower, yes? So the DM can add the build up? No? Not gonna happen? And there are a disturbing number of high death situations that come with no warning. High death is cool. But if it is seemingly random then the players that that there is no point. No amount of play will save them. And thus we lose buy in to life. (Hmmm … sounds too familiar?) You can’t just do a save or die party wide effect out of the blue. (At least not at this level. We can discuss the impact of divination on lowering the combat effectiveness of wizards by draining off their spell slots) It’s arbitrary, and arbitrary is not a good thing. 

Just two quick notes about formatting, beyond the whole “one pager” thing. I’m looking at the PDF version and it switches between spreads and single page. I fucking hate this. Zoom in, zoom out, fuck with the scroll bars. Not cool man. Pick a poison and go with it, nothing here dictates the need for a spread. And, then, there’s a fucking index. Thank fucking god! Designer of the year just for including that!

Again, a larger adventure with an interestingly large, and open-ended, scope. The pace here could be slower, with a mundane world suddenly punctuated by madness. In each. square. moved. But, also, not a whole lot to riff on well and sell the vibe. It intricate, and openended. And it relies a little too much on quest givers. The scale and the sparseness also works against it in way, as implemented. Plague, for instance, goes on rampages, as one dies, when the party destroys his tokens/shrines. Will you ever hear about the destroyed village thats a long way away? Consequences should generally be seen to be impactful to the game, just as decision points of importance should be clear. I think, perhaps, this is one of those cases where it might play better … the slow burn. But, also, in spite of the page count the resources for the DM to support a meaningful game world in a slow burn environment are generally not present. 

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is one page, showing the map that the players eventually get. Maybe more in the video? I don’t watch videos. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499568/doomsong-lord-have-mercy-upon-us?1892600

By Christopher Willett
Agamemnon Press
OSE
Level 1?

Prepare your trembling synapses to enter the Painted Wastelands, the ENnie award winning tabletop roleplaying adventure designed for Old School Essentials. Dive headfirst into a strange hexcrawl set in a bizarre world teeming with desert weirdos, ravenous ghouls, and teeth-stealing dream-beasts. The land is a vibrant kaleidoscope of rainbow-colored sand and crumbling ruins.Wander from place to place, skipping across reality like a stone tossed along the surface of a pool of ectoplasm. You’ll encounter the unspeakable entities of the desert, sweaty pilgrims desperate for absolution, and strange sorcerers meditating in a haze of ectoplasmic smoke. You’ll plumb the depths of ruins forgotten by untold millenia and hopefully survive the wrath of vengeful nightmares given life. 

This 152 page adventure uses about 88 pages to describe 36 hexes in a gonzo land. It answers the question of what happens when you mash up Jorune, Tekumel, and non-laser rifle gamma world and then turns up the tentacle-faced cigar smoking crap-shooting wizards to eleven. Beyond the setting, though, it feels like it’s weird for the sake of being weird, with page long hexes not providing a few connected experience that one would expect. 

At first glance there is a lot to like here. And we can start with that Tim Molly art style. It’s got a Moebius vibe going on that I just totally dig. I don’t know, I’m not an art dude. The color pa;ette, the style, the imagery of a weird land with some slight anachronisms. It does a pretty decent job of just GOING THERE and does what art in an adventure should do: get you in the mood for it and add more than to the written word. Rebecca Curran has done the layout and, aside from a raised eyebrow about the choice of purple/magenta for section headings, it’s clean and clear. There’s adequate use of whitespace and section headings and various bolding, etc, to help things stand out and call attention during play. It does start to fall down a bit when the text runs on for, say, three paragraphs that fill most of a column, but for a work this large I guess we can expect things to fall down occasionally. It’s generally Good Enough. 

I can be an ass about page count, as a ratio to encounters/situations. This being a more in-depth hex crawl in a weird new world, I can acknowledge that providing a lot of new monsters, environmental shit and so on for a new land is going to take some space. The core hexes, though, are about two pages here, give or take. This raises the question of what a hex crawl is and, in particular, what a hex crawl is in the context of page or two page long hexes. 

The traditional standard for a hex crawl was set some time ago back in the olden days. I’m not married to it, but it does provide a baseline for expectations and how those might change. Wilderlands being the classic example, a large hex map with certain of the hexes having a description, maybe a paragraph or a couple of sentences, describing what is going on in the hex. In a perfect world its something like a situation. A halfling village under the heel of the barbarian lod ragnar the wicked. There is not much in the way of plot, although a few hexes may be directly connected in some way. The party wanders around, exploiting what they can and getting in to trouble, interacting with whats around. Let’s get those giant beavers we helped a few days ago to bust up that dam in that one hex and flood those orc caves in that hex over there! There’s no real purpose to the exploration and adventuring, other than what builds organically through play. Another type of hex based adventure is the wilderness journey. You want to get to The Hidden Fortress but you don’t know exactly where it is, so you wander around the hexes looking it, for clues, and having adventures along the way. There is more of a purpose, built in to the hexes/adventure, by the designer. If you squint a little then Dread is an early example, with its secret volcano lair. 

This, though, is something different. The framing is that you’re tossed in to this world somehow. Drunked bender, etc. I’m not sure I need a framing for SOMEPLACE ELSE, but there you are. And there are no real connections between the hexss. You’re not trying to go somewhere, the secret volcano lair, or anything like that. And yet, at a page or two per hex, this isn’t the quick hit ‘expanded by the DM’ free-ranging scope of the Wilderlands standard. It IS aimless, as Wilderlands is, in that it doesn’t tell you to do anything. (Well, except perhaps for a thread of a Void cult that reappears in several places. But that seems like just some background noise.) We have long hexes, meaning that they are essentially standalone things. 

This is where the Weird for the sake of Weird comes in to play. The hexes themselves seem … useless? Not in the way that the Carcosa -like hexes were. “There is a giant bird here with red legs.” It’s more that they are are individual little encounters where nothing much happens. Do you smoke weed with the weirdo? “A group of gutter wizards hide behind an outcropping. They’ve noticed you. They wave you over to join them. They try to shush you and speak in hushed whispers. Danger is close. They are hunting sky jellies so that they can pickle them and sell them at the Sorcerer’s Marketplace.” Ok. Sure. Kill the giant sky jelly and harvest its meat and maybe eat it. Or the lair of some Albino Bat Demons? That’s a page. (Well a column, with the other being art.) It’s just some monsters to kill and loot. It’s just all so disconnected. Or, I’m shallow and am not falling in love with the anachronisms as a contrivance for adventuring. 

The forgotten king nailed to a cross. If you will kill him he will tell you of his secret treasure room, off of his abandoned throne room, that contains his greatest treasure. Going there you find a bunch of music tapes. Oh, and he had a jam band. Again and again and again and again this hits. And it’s just too much for me. Having said that, I know a lot of people who run a casual pick up game now and again who would just eat this shit up. But that’s not what I’m doing and I can’t use this. It’s like saying that the party found some kjdfdhfg and now they get to use their imaginations to find a way for the oiweru people to use the kjdfdhfg. Yeah, I recognize the form. “But Bryce, this is a hidden gem!” No, it’s not. It’s just random stoner stuff. (Hmmm, now that I think of it, those people I know running those pick up games …)  

My notes say “Nonsense goals and how you leverage them.” And this is true. You see the pattern, yes? It’s ALL D&D in the end. Elves farting fireballs and you leveraging that to your characters own end. How is that different than The Gamma World stopsigns for shields? How is that different from the Skyrealms or Subways in the undercity? How is that different from the forgotten kings 8-track collection for this jam band? All I know is that Gamma World can go too far, and it sucks when played for laughs. Perhaps there is no gravitas? Not quite the fiat of deus ex, but a parallel view where nothing REALLY matters. If you can leverage dhgfjhsdgf to sell to the kjsdhfdk, then you can also a handful of pebbles to a passing farmer. Somehow I’m yanked out of the game when I can see behind the curtain; I have to buy in. This was my issue with Lacuna/Blue City. If anything can happen then I’ve no buy in. If a death star and gallactus show up, then the fucking game had better sell me on it. And i just don’t see how that’s possible in a series of disconnected hexes. I’m not slamming Algol. But the continuity seems off here. I know, I know, I’m all over the place here. But at least its’ something new to talk about.

There is an art to writing a sentence for a game world. A way of writing a sentence that implies more than is on the written page. I usually use this when refer to evocative writing and using cultural subtexts to conjure and leverage imagery. But there’s another way it’s used. Rarely, but sometimes. Something where the writing implies things about the game world. I think it came up last in the discussion about cubic sand. Back in the Mana Meltdown review? I wish I knew how to describe this more. “You’re stranded upon the ragged edge of the infinite worlds of dreaming.”, “The various denizens of the Lower Ethereal speak Dreamtongue, also known as “The Language of the Dead” by certain gutter wizards. It is a complex language based on telepathic thoughts and metaphors.” There are things implied here, things that cannot be articulated. I think it shifts the DMin to a certain mindset, helping them to riff on situations that arise. This is, I think, related to the principal of Not Explaining. There should be mystery. The imagination thrives on that, on the unknown, as the brain races and tries to fill in the gaps. We’re not talking about who killed Mrs McGivens, or even “No one knows who built these ancient monoliths”, although that gets closer to the subject. When its done badly it’s clumsy and obvious and when done well it melds in effortlessly to the sentence and the background. When this adventure is at its very best it’s doing things like that, although its very inconsistent.

You’re much more likely to get “The albino bat demon leaves behind a plastic toy shaped like a golden baby worth 125 ectos. It is a restaurant promotional tie-in for Legend of thenGolden Child.” or “Swarm of Imago Sprites: Self-Loathing Gaze: Anyone meeting an imago sprite’s gaze must save vs spells or take 1d4 CHA damage as they succumb to self-loathing and imposter syndrome. The character realizes they are garbage and no one will ever love them. Love is worthless anyway.” This is so reminiscent of the worst of 4e character abilities. “Absolute Annihilation Curse of the World Devourer. Take 1d2 damage.” 

It’s disconnected. It drags you out of gameplay and immersion. Im not saying I’m looking for some kind of Joyce shit here, but I need a pretext to hang on to. I’ve go to have a little buy in for what I’m doing or I just don’t give a fuck. It becomes an activity instead of a game, and I’m looking for a game.

Oh, that zany skull Mort shows up in the starting hex and offers little asides in a lot of places as you carry him with you. Yeah. I can’t decide if this is meant to be real or just a framing for DM notes. I guess we can all tell I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with DM pets in the past.

We can take a look at one of the more standard hex encounters that has few of the gonzo hallmarks. This is a full page encounter, although half of it is taken up by artwork. At its core it’s just a ghoul attack with maybe someone going berserk … all for 250gp … and all as the central feature of a hex. I think we can all determine, from the page, what the designer is trying to go for here. Creepy dig vibes. Maybe a little horror, the stumbling zombie, an eerie skeleton. “Quartermass! What’s going on in the subway!” There is a disconnect though. The vibe that I think we can recognize is not really supported by the text. There’s little there to actually help you run a creep encounter. Some tension is necessary … and that’s not supported. And, of course, it IS just a simple encounter padded out to a page/column. Delicious bone marrow. The Mort shit. Even the “Ghoula can camouflage themselves” paragraph. Great. Is THIS one camouflaging itself? Because it looks to me, from the text, like the intent is that it just stumbles up. It is the worst of 3e habits, printing long stat block shit. I get MAYBE the immune to crits/disease/poison shit. That seems relevant. But the camo/rest/eat/drink stuff is dumb to include. Fuck me, I think maybe the Ready Refs just aid “undead immunity” or something like that. I don’t know, what do YOU the actual fucking DM, think should happen when you poison a skeleton/ Maybe make that Ruling instead of relying on Rule? (sorry, my OD&D is showing again.) I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s just a ghoul attack. It’s not like something complicated is going on. I guess it annoys me because something more in depth COULD be going on. The wasted space COULD be used to add some tension. Expectations and possibilities as dream killers, I guess. The death of all possible futures when this one is realized. The Mort bit and the self-referential comic are the only hints of the wackiness inherent in the adventure. 

The Capsule Machine, another example. A full page. Note the “let’s Smash It!” paragraph. Almost all padding. From the Smash it title, to the “Players will obviously …” clauses, it’s just padding. You can absolutely bring some liveliness to your writing. You can add asides. You can insert from designer-to-dm snark and commentary. But when it becomes the norm, when it overtakes the actual adventure writing, this is where things go wrong. The fucking adventure is the main thing. I know, it seems obvious. And yet, it also seems a very high barrier, to actual concentrate ones efforts on the situation and the characters role in it. Everything else in the hex? Again, taking up too much space for what it is. But, man, it sure does look pretty … (To be clear, there are multi-location hexes as well, with several subareas to a hex.)

Look, I’m clearly not happy with the tone here. I think a major part of the project was to connect an adventure to existing artwork, or at least the vibe of it. And that influences the tone, so much of my ranting is a bit unfair. Well, at least the tone is disclosed so you can gravitate that way or not, depending on your predilections, needs and wants. But the more serious criticism is the disconnection from a hex crawl, the purplessness of it all, the disconnection of the “Forge your own way” hexcrawl gameplay and the “hex as wilderness to an end” gameplay. The disconnection of the hexes from each other, combined with the length of the hexes. This, I think, leaves the adventure firmly in the realm of the casual/pick up game. The Mork Borgs of the world, with weed games in the basement and no real opportunities, other than the fever dreams of a hopeful DM, of continuing a game past a few sessions, if that. I just don’t see how this is conducive to a longer gameplay mode. I can recognize that people play this way, and wish them well, but I am fundamentally tied in to more of a longer running GAME. I don’t want to sound mean by this statement, because I don’t think there was ill intent here, but if you take a minimally keyed adventure, expand the encounters to a page each, change the monsters to something new, with appendices, and do some top notch art and layout. But, in the end, it’s still a minimally keyed zany adventure, with little beyond what is right in front of you,  with all that implies.  Focus on the adventure.

This is $35 at DriveThru. The preview is the first thirteen pages. There’s a “Strange Encounters” table that, I think, embodies the hollowness. You really need to see a standalone hex to understand, though.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/498797/the-painted-wastelands?1892600

By Andy Castillo Jr
Celestial Skunkworks
1e/2e/OSRIC
Levels 5-8

An ancient evil and its zombie horde attacks the city of Genepa. Hundreds fall and the survivors retreat behind her walls. In their distress, the city council summon the heroes and charges them with a desperate mission to recover the Book of The Unholy. With it, the Temple of Azrael hopes to learn how to disperse the undead which are acting with unusual cohesiveness and cunning. The party must locate the fabled Temple of Corruption and bring the book back to Genepa before the city gates fail and the zombie horde forces its way in. You must hurry! Time is short.

This 106 page adventure fucking suks.

This has been working well. I get to get to longer adventures, and the longer time helps with my inability to focus for long periods of time, taking advantage of the periods of lucidity I have. The longer adventures have more interesting things to talk about and I go in to some detail. Or, they did. And when I encountered the title page I instead just took a bunch of Oxy. Let’s GOOOOO!!!!!!

[Bryce here – It’s the next day. It looks like I thought it would be a great ide to do a review that contained only screenshots with captions featuring WAP lyrics. Go figure. Let’s see if i can decipher what I meant.]

I said CERTIFIED FREAK!

[BL – I think it’s obvious, from the above screencap, what I thought the issue was … and what it portended. Occasionally an adventure pops up in which the publisher has some house style guide that they are following that has an extensive use of colour. The intent, we can assume, is to help the DM locate information. The actual effect though is to produce something VERY busy. That business distracts the eyes though and makes it cognitively difficult to figure out what is going on. There just appears to be a radical disconnect here in including the color coding and the actual impact of a table of contents. I mean, that’s he purpose, right? To show you the organization of the text? That’s what there is a chapter heading, indents, bullets, titles and page numbers? Even more than that, it’s clear that “Random encounters” is listed first in each section right after the map. So … then why color code them? “Because that’s what my style guide says!” An overly rigid style guide, or, perhaps, an over attention to following the style guide, can be as bad as no organization at all. ENDOFLINE]

[BL – Hey, I’m returning to this section from deeper in to the review. Take a close look at that table of contents. I don’t mean that’s there’s something hidden there or a mistake, but look at each chapter and the various sections. Now, take an extra moment to look at the last chapter, 7, Temple of Corruption.] Ok, that other section of my review will make more sense now. ENDOFLINE]

Seven days a week!

[BL – Again, it seems clear to me that that I’m trying to make a point about the cognitive burden of deciphering the text of a product. We see a few more issues here. The most obvious, I think, other than the overall effect, is the impact of the background image. yeah, the pages have a background watermark type on them. And that gets in the way of the text. We can also see how the color of that watermark, a kind of … beige? Light gold? Mixes in with the text box color that has been selected, a kind of beige. I’m guessing that watermark came in at the last second and now we all get to live with it. We also see the impact of too much formatting. The reverse text, white in a black box for section headings, is odious to readability/scalability, having exactly the opposite of its intended effect. And there’s too much bolding, again making everything just run together. Not much in the way of line breaks, which along with the color issues gives us that steller Wall of Text effect that we all know and love so much.

I might also add that neither of these pages bodes well for the content to come. I get a lot of feedback on how ‘Bryce doesnt care about anything other than usability/scanability!’, mostly, I think, from my refusal to suck off Night Wolf Inn. Like all good memes, this does have some truth in it. If you’ve written a mediocre adventure then it better be easy for me to use. A GREAT adventure, though, doesn’t need to be perfect. We’re looking at some sliding scale of how much utility there is, how good the onctent is, and so on, vs how much of a pain in the fucking ass its gonna be to run. This is not an academic argument. I’m not talking out of my ass sitting in a darkened room illuminated only by a monitor with /osr on it. I’m running a fucking game. I’ve got a social fucking life, a couple of hobbies, a theoretical job and so on. You’re gonna have to be good enough to for me to devote more time to grokking it and less time to The Journal of Foreign Affairs and learning to calculate the length of an arc. The number one complaint with adventure is now, and will almost certainly always be, that they are difficult to run. And that fucking WANDERING MONSTER TABLE page is a n abomination that is not coming from out of nowhere in this adventure.]

Bring a bucket and a mop!

[BL – Well, first, it looks like I managed to actually grab the 1e turn version and didn’t laz out. But, also, level five, the minimum for this adventure, is an auto turn of zombies, almost a destroy. This fucking shit is a joke. Either this is some Storyteller nonsense where the DM is “telling a story” and thus justifies shit, or it was never playtested. The standard MO here is to put in a bunch of high HD special undead to keep the “balance” in check. Lots of undead in this adventure. Lots of auto-turn and auto-destroy. I get the power-fantasy/cinematic aspect of weeding out enemies, ] but come on, which fucking party doesn’t have a cleric in it?]

I want you to park that big mac truck right in this little garage!

[BL – This screencap, coming on the heels of the other one, seems to be about the actual adventure. Which in itself is strange since I tend to normally put a recap up front in the reviews so you don’t have to do what you are being forced to do now — wade through my garbage to find something out. Also, I decided that em-dashes are my new lifestyle, just to add a little chaos to the world, AND I’ve taken more pills. We’re all in this together. Duh. Anyway – this review is turning out to be worse than the adventure, if that’s even possible. The adventure starts with some bullshit mythic quote crap that features the phrase They Hunger. Then there’s some archangel Michael nonsense that seems biblically inspired. Soooo glad effort was spent on that crap instead of the adventure. Then you get the first actual page of the adventure, the one with the introduction and all that shit. It tells us that zombies are attacking each night and you should rush for the gate — the screencap above with the highlighter is from this section. The very next page, at the start of the column, is the last screencap, with the whole Holy Order of Necro-Hunter nonsense. ]

[BL – Now, I need for you to brace yourselves — This, those two little screencaps and maybe one more paragraph before them, is the adventure. In this giant 106 page adventure that is the only description that you will have of what is going on in this adventure. There ARE a couple of “dungeons” in it, which I will get to, but you can see that you’re sent to the Temple of Corruption from that second screencap. Remember that table of contents? The Temple of Corruption is eight. pages. long. The rest of the booklet is gazetteer type information. Different region descriptions. Those fabulous wandering monster tables. There is NO other information on the actual adventure anywhere else. Nothing about the flow of the adventure, or summaries, or “you find the map in the ogres lair that shows the temple.” NOTHING. Just those brief sections on the first-ish page and the temple keys. I believe I’ve already bored folks, at length, about the page count vs room key ratio. It’s not a perfect system, their are notable exceptions both directions, but when the content of the adventure skews SOOO wildly from the page count then it generally indicates a problem. A designer too involved in their own game world. Not enough attention paid to the actual adventure instead of useless trivia. Slave over your actual adventure. Rework those keys until you hate your fucking life and ever discovering D&D. Drink too much, go on safari, find a new partner, get a divorce and then rework the keys some more. WORK THE FUCKING ADVENTURE.]

#NotAllEvil

[BL – I must assume, from these screen-caps, that I am somehow belaboring a point about padding and content. A shop description that is bland and generic and adds nothing to a game. A page about the DM Personal Philosophy. Year over year population growth in a city. All thrilling content for a Monday night game. Also, I seem to have stopped with the WAP lyrics.]

[BL – Ah, now this I remember! Danial Jackson tells us that we need two points to plot a course. So, let’s see, can we find the Temple of Corruption, our destination? No? Ok, I’ve got a couple of more …]

[BL – So, put them all together. Great. You found it, and you’ve discovered, I hope, how the six area maps work together? Wonderful. Now find Genepa, your starting point. May the journey IS the destination that we made along the way! Hey! That Gorgatha Lair place looks chill! Don’t worry, it’s not in the Table of Contents. ]

[BL – The last lines on the previous page were “After they enter, the doors lock smoothly behind them with a satisfying click.” Ignoring that this is the dumbest piece of shit fucking thing that still appears in adventures, that does add some context to the first words on the screencapd page. But what then? How do you put that together with the text on column two? What fucking poison? No, I spent time looking, there is not a “every room has poison” thing going on. I don’t know man. This then is a typical page in the Temple of Corruption. Busy, poorly laid out, confusing in its editing and overly simplistic. It’s just monsters that attack and dumb ass traps like the “doors lock behind you and now there’s sleep gas. ” Which, I must say, must be the dumbest fucking trap ever. “Frank, you don’t get to play anymore for the next 3d4 hours.” Great. ]

[BL – Allow me to diverge just a bit. The Temple of Corruption has nineteen rooms. Here is a list of every encounter in which there is LESS than a 70% chance of your cleric auto-winning: . Ok, that’s it. Hassim Al Sayed, Plague Walker, the big bad, is 6+3HD. Everything else is less. Whatever. It’s a shit adventure in which all you do is stab shit and save vs poison for gas and arrow traps.]

“Once it is opened, it reveals, a room that once was” So, let’s talk about padding … Which is the cue for most readers to skip this. These are all meaningless words. They add nothing. They just fill space. It’s how you get your paper to the required three pages. It confuses, it obfuscates, it makes it harder to scan the text for what you NEED to see. I want to reiterate how you run a room in D&D: the characters open a door. You glance down and scan a sentence or two from “room 4” and start to relate it to the placers, all in a couple of seconds. While they fuck around trying to decide what to do you continue to scan the room to be able to run the fucking thing, glancing back at that point at the room only for details like trap damage, monster stats, treasure, or some other detail.  THATS how you run a room from an adventure. You’re glancing down for a VERY brief amount of time. The room needs to be related quickly, at least first impressions of it. 

Ok, that’s it for former Bryce providing screencaps and I’m getting tired. Let me finish up with …

As they approach this temple, they see inscriptions on the face of temple, identifying it as the Temple of Despair. It is identical to the Temple of Corruption, with all the same encounters. You as the DM will have to repopulate it with slightly different loot and minor details, indicating this realm exists elsewhere in the multi-verse and is simply a dark-leaning simulacrum of the player’s universe of Thrae (or whichever campaign world you are playing this module with)

[BL – A hundred fucking pages and you have to populate one of the two places you need to go? I think not. This shit pops up form time to time ‘Place whatever treasure you wish.’ What are people thinking?! That the strength of the ‘story’, the plot, was so strong that I would fall to my knees weeping and, of course I would put it upon myself to filling the obnoxious little things like loot and encounters! This is totally different, than, say, putting in a door to an optional dungeon level. There we have expansion opportunities for a DM. This is just laziness.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is twenty pages and shows you MORE than enough to make a judgement call on this, althoughm there are no encounter pages …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/395635/gma2-they-devour-for-1e-2e-osric?1892600

By Nickolas Z Brown
Five Cataclysms
OSR
Levels: "Low to Mid"

Deep within the Sunken Fort is a stairway. This stairway leads into an unknowable and chaotic underworld: the Descent into Madness. Alien creatures, chaotic magic, formless order and untold treasures await the intrepid and the bold. They will not return the same as they entered.

This 72 page adventure uses 69 pages to describe 252 rooms in “the first level” of a megadungeon. It is creative, deadly, off kilter, and comes at things from a “creativity first” rather than “rules first” standpoint. One of the best examples of a funhouse, ever, for every overloaded context of the word funhouse when describing a dungeon.

I know a secret. Maybe you will also after today. Keep the secret, there must have been a reason, there’s no reason to run your fucking mouth. 

As soon as you crack this you know you’re in for a ride. During our small obligatory hooks section we get “Someone’s father was turned into a tree in room 55 and needs rescued. All the relatives know is that they were last seen entering this place” or “The Headsman of room 72 could be emerging from the dungeon to take people’s heads and convert them into trophies to hang on his walls” What’s a headsman? Turned in to a tree? Well, those are things you don’t see everyday. Except they are rather classic, yes? A dude in a black hood dragging a big axe and beheading people to collect their heads? I’m not even sure there IS a more classic trope than that one? And getting turned in to a tree? Shades of so many folklore tales. Nope, there’s nothing folklore about this adventure though, it’s far too random, in a funhouse manner, for that.

There’s no pretext here, we just have a couple of words about interdimensional blah blah blah and then we’re in to the keys, as that page count would imply. A page of maps, a page of wanderers for the first area and we’re in to keys. With no fucking appendices. This thing manages to put everything int he text. Monster stats. Descriptions. Magic items. Fuck you and fuck your appendices. Fuck you and fuck your bullshit pretext of a intro. It’s a dungeon, the designer provided the rooms and the fucking DM can get the characters there. Rock on man! None of this 96 page adventure is only six pages of room keys. Every ounce of creativity, every ounce of effort, went in to this dungeon with none wasted on bullshit (not that extra shit is always bullshit, it just almost always is bullshit.) We shall begin now our exploration of the Descent in to Madness with the entrance area: The Maw of Madness.

“This is the entrance of the Descent into Madness. It is the domain of living teeth which are born from a fallen giant, animated by a tooth fairy. They have an irrational fear of sugar and must roll morale or flee if sugar is thrown at them”

Well, well, well. Aren’t you feeling like a worthless piece of shit right now, you high and mighty dungeon designer? You will NEVER be able to match this. EVER. Duh. Of course. The Tooth Fairy. Giant. Maw of Madness. And not one of us has ever done anything like this. Room one? Ok. “: Four Giant Incisors hover around a large stone slab upon which gold and gems are heaped.” If you steal any of that treasure, The Tooth Fairies, by the way, then all of your teeth fall out and roll along the floor under the door to room three. Then, other parts of your body begin converting in to teeth and falling off and rolling away in the same manner. Jesus man! In room one! Four giant floating incisors! A pile of treasure, oh so tempting, and a fucking CURSE. Fuck your quest or save or die shit, man that thing is brutal!

“Behind the bars is a giant wisdom tooth, inlaid with a bejeweled golden filling worth 4000gp. However, the tooth is heavily stained and looks quite dead. If anyone touches the bars, a tooth-specter will pop out of the tooth and lunge at the person touching the bars.” Duh. Yeah. Of course. Now what the fuck did you think was going to happen? There’s some place else where there’s a pile of something burning, making purple smoke, that is taking the vague form of a spectre that says things like “You are doomed! Beware! Your fate awaits!” Nothing else, no encounter. Oh, except, If you snort the smoke you gain +2 wisdom. 

THIS ALL MAKES SENSE. It makes sense in some kind of weird New York Times Crossword puzzle way, but it makes sense. Like in the way the clue “Peter Parker” means banana hammock. That ghost from the dead wisdom tooth, the one behind bars? It can’t get at you. The bars stop it. The ghost thinks it’s still alive and thus can’t get through the bars. Of course. That’s what fucking ghosts do right? They don’t know they are dead? But then some jackass party member is going to say that out loud, and the ghost will recognize it, and then it can come through the bars. There is an internal logic here, from the tooth fairy being in the tooth area, to the ghost, to the sugar vulnerability. Yes, it’s more than a little absurd than normal D&D, but it also has an internal logic to all of it that is so much stronger than the vast majority of D&D adventures. We see hints of this in other adventures, with well written humans, bandits, humanoids, villagers, who do what is normal, or could be, in a situation. This is so much stronger than the run of the mill adventures that don’t do anything like this.

This is 100% a funhouse. There are zones here, so the tooth/maw area is only the entrance area and you progress to other areas. But it’s 100% a funhouse. The zones prevent it from being abstracted away to just a node/line drawing of some completely different vignette in a different room. You can follow, and exploit, the logic of the different areas. And then, of course, on the topic of funhouses, we have the required creatures out of place/Anachronisms. Like the ogre potters, including the one who doesn’t want to do poetry anymore but wants to turn it in to a restaurant and inn.  

I’m a fan, as well, of the kind of, I don’t know, basic originality that’s found in this? There’s this manner of viewing the world that doesn’t seem corrupted by Lord of the Rings or forty years of bog standard RPG supplements. It channels a kind of wonder of just a slightly off-kilter world that I typically associate with good OD&D works. I understand that “slightly off-kilter” and “wisdom tooth ghost” don’t go together, but there are many, many examples of other encounters that are not, perhaps, so out there. “There is a barred-off chamber to the south, a large metal door to the north with a button beside it, and a ring tied to a string hangs upside down from the floor as if effected by reverse gravity.” A ring, hanging upside down from the floor, tied to a string, floating there? That’s OD&D as all fuck. Of course, it then goes on “if a person actually wears it, their fingernail will tear off and begin attacking as an HD1 AC10 creature whilst screaming about all the horrible things its owner has done to it. If they are wearing a glove, there will be muffled screaming and wriggling after a brief painful sensation.” So, you know … but the ring floating on a string? Great! Well, both parts are great, just in different ways. There’s a tap, a metal tap! You know, like a sap tap? I don’t think I’ve EVER seen a tree tap in an adventure, ever. 

I should touch on the format a little. We get a short little intro to each room of a sentence or two. Not quite read-aloud, but enough for the DM to riff from. A kind of introduction to the room. A word or two may be bolded and then those will get their paragraphs below. Maybe, four more sentences per? It’s an effective text based format, not really using bullets or whitespace, but just leveraging bolding and terse written sections, short enough to take in quickly and run from while you digest more of the room. There is an effort to separate rooms by lines between the keys, but I don’t think this works super well. The room numbers are not bolded … maybe that would help? It’s a minor point but its there. It causes a kind of “eyes glazed over” effect.I would not that the monsters get descriptions that ARE effective. Too many times the appendix has the monster and it’s all ecology bullshit. No. The DM doesn’t need the winter feeding habits of hte creature when the party encounters them in summer. The DM needs the monster description. What the party is experiencing RIGHT. NOW. “2 x BEAR BALL – A bear that ate the spherical fruit

and became a ball. Moves by bouncing around, and bites with its teeth” or “3 x OVERBITER Disfigured humanoid head with no lower jaw, dripping blood. Its teeth are crooked and rotten. The flesh is pale” or  even “LAPIS LAZULI ALLIGATOR – It’s a big-ass alligator made from lapis lazuli, do you really need a description?!?” Decent description. Like the rooms it’s not overly evocative but it gets the job done, like a well-written 70’s description. We even get a unique attack in the bouncing bear. More than a retheming, the new monster gets a new way to attack. One might argue that this IS the purpose of a new monster. 

It’s all very efficient. It’s all very effective. “Pit – (20′ deep. At the bottom are 3 animal-hide sleeping rolls. These are mimics that’ll attack anyone who enters the pit. They do not climb the ladder.)” DUH! Sleeping rolls in the bottom of a pit?! Of course it’s a set up! Animal hides? You mean, like, maybe an animal? DUH! This is the very height of design, telegraphing EXACTLY what is going to happen to the players and then STILL having it be a surprise. 

This is, perhaps, the most put together funhouse dungeon I’ve seen. It has all of the elements, from new monsters to out of place creatures to bizarre areas. But it all has an internal logic. It’s all got just a bit of a twist on it so it FEELS fresh. The floating ring. The pit. Even the fucking headsman. Why didn’t you think of this? It’s perhaps a little too efficient, needing just a few more words here and there to bring things more to life, but it’s not overly bad in this area and some of the descriptions are more than decent: “In the center are 3 curved white pillars that meet at the top, forming a triple-archway. Their stone glows with purple and blue veins. From this triple-arch there comes a dribble of motes of light that fall into a shallow pool of shimmering light. Clumps of moss hang from the walls on all sides of the room.” 

Ultimately, you gonna give or die by the funhouse label on this one. And, because you should always be slamming shit, this IS the adventure you want to play, in D&D, if you are somehow attracted to the Mork Borg crowd. This is exactly what they all want to be doing, with their creativity at least. Rater than another eight room minimal mork borg dungeon with one concept that is ultimately a hollow experience surrounded by too much emphasis on production, try a black text on a white background adventure that really has some depth to it. 

For everyone else? Well, there’s that secret. That You Will NOT be sharing in public. At least not here. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages, which includes the map and two pages of keys, five rooms in total. This gets you solidly in to The Maw and you should be able from that to figure out if this is right for you, both in tone and in design.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/284503/descent-into-madness-first-steps?1892600

By Jim Pinto
Port World Games
Generic/Universal
Level- Ha!

The Valley of Brycshire has been infested with a foreign and strange problem for a quarter of a century. This alone is not unique to fantasy gaming. Most adventures start with, “There’s something rotten in Denmark.” But it is for this very reason King for a Day works so well. It starts simple enough with an errand or a missing woman, concepts PCs can easily understand and want to solve. The hook is baited and slowly they come to realize there are a lot of problems in Brycshire. Too many, in fact. And no one seems interested in fixing them. There are nonhuman tribes fighting a war no one can see. There are two groups of cultists, shockingly similar, yet with nothing in common. There’s a local Baron, unable to think straight and unconcerned with the impending extinction of his people. Underneath it all, keeping their intentions hidden, is the Dagon Cult. The cult is fixated on serving three masters who in turn serve a disguised god, who is lying to everyone, including the cultists and puppet masters. Every layer of the mystery is buried under another lie. The enemy at the end of the story is never named. Not in this edition and not in the previous one. I thought it was obvious who it was. But some people didn’t agree and fabricated endings I didn’t intend. And that lie makes me happier than any truth I could reveal.

This 373 page book attempts to paint a picture of a small region with a cult problem and many other intrigues. It is, instead, an unusable mess that spends a lot of time either touting itself or being purposefully ambiguous. 

This frequently comes up on lists of Best Adventures. I’m gonna assume this appealed to the Pathfinder Adventure Path crowd and that they were amazed to see a sandbox? Otherwise I just don’t understand why people think this is a good adventure. A quick google to learn its history instead turned up people say it was SUCH a good adventure or people saying something like “I’ve read through this book several times, made pages and pages of notes & scribblings, and have been working for over a year on bringing this into a playable adventure that I can DM for my group. All during this time, I have been wishing repeatedly that there was an index at the back of the book rather than all my Post-It page markers with notes on them sticking out everywhere around the edges of the book.” A lot of people seem to be saying how great this is … but there are not a lot of Played comments. This causes me to raise an eyebrow. Either this (Revised) edition fucked up the origional (as, say, kickstarted Rappen Athuk did), or peple are just reading this instead of playing it, or It Was A Radical Departure from the ham-fisted adventure paths at the time. This version, that I’m looking at right here, is not playable. There are some good sandbox adventures and many more acceptable or not terrible ones. I can’t see anything radically different in this one that would make it more appealing than those.

The region has a lot going on in it but the core of this is a cult playing the long game, poisoning the water supply, slowly turning the people apathetic. They just don’t care about anything anymore. And it’s not in a radical way, something obvious, but, if your kids go missing you should give a shit, yeah? They don’t. Parallels to the modern pharmaceutical industry and its pills, removing both the highs and the lows from list so everything is just kind of bleh? Well, no probably not. There are, listed, 39 storylines in this. 39 separate things/plots/etc going on that range from minor to full on campaign themes. There’s a lot going on here, probably too much even if the product was perfect. That does give the DM the ability to pick and choose and perhaps use this as the basis for SEVERAL campaigns, and it also means that a good deal of space was wasted in other circumstances. Although, I do think it would be fun to run this, like, three times, name changes and the like, dropping in different plot elements, all eventually ending in the same way/cult. “Jesus fucking christ! It’s the same campaign!” Always down for a good “appeal to the player not the character. I’ll speak to those later.

There are going to be many issues with this adventure, but the most immediately obvious is the conversational tone in the writing combined with the smugness of the designer. What A Clever Boy Am I gets real old real fast. And the designer speaks to the reader directly and frequently, if not continually. “The gamemaster must see everything at once. The PCs want to see everything at once, but the act of discovery is everything. The more the gamemaster knows and understands about the environment, the more she can ‘wing it’ when the PCs go off course. After all, a great percentage of roleplaying is improvisation, but sandbox play can be more demanding on a gamemaster’s freewheeling spirit. Gamemasters that aren’t comfortable with this style of play should map out each scene or segment of play ahead of time, drawing players through the story by the nose. And if this is your intention, I recommend not playing this adventure at all.” That the designer condescends to allow us his secrets is a great honor indeed! I suppose I could get over the smugness if it were not married to the conversational writing style. As a reminder, I’m looking for four things in an adventure: usability at the table, evocative writing, interactivity, and overall design. If you’ve really created a masterpiece of design then I can be forgiving in some of the other areas, and it’s an easy c- if you can use what you’ve created at the table. All stabbing is going to be frowned upon, generally, as is Victorian laundry lists rooms, extreme minimalism, and purple prose. Conversational text gets in the way of locating information in the adventure. I’m not dying on any hill; it’s theoretically possible that you could write an adventure using conversational text and that it will still turn ok. But possible and probably do not have the same definitions. Adventure writing is, at its core, technical writing. It MUST assist the DM in running it. That’s why it exists, its entire reason for existing. And the conversational writing leads to both padding of the text, making it harder to locate information, burying the important parts of text in surrounding walls of conversational tone, and a cognitive difficulty in parsing the text to pull out the portions you need for the game RIGHT NOW. I mean, you don’t seriously expect me to keep 370 pages of text in my head, right? I’m going to hit this again and again and again in this review. A book filled with underlines, highlights, post it notes, and separate notebooks of data and excel spreadsheets is not a success. It means that the designer has fundamentally failed in the core purpose of the adventure. I don’t care. It’s its written in iambic pentameter in inuit then, maybe, it shouldn’t fucking be written in iambic pentameter in inuit? 

Let’s talk storylines. Plots. Whatever. These start on page 290. Of 373. “Border Disputes” is a minor plot. It takes, oh, a page and a quarter to describe. Humanoid tribes have turf and they put up rocks to mark the edges of their turf. A border marker gets vandalized and no one knows the graffiti of the new tribe. A couple of villages are suggested as places remote enough for warring tribes to fight over. That’s it. There’s nothing else here. Oh, there’s preaching: “While this is not an important storyline, certain players come to expect combat with humanoid species as a staple of fantasy gaming. Border Disputes provides an organic method to introduce physical threats to the campaign. Without this storyline (and a few others), the gamemaster can ignore most of the humanoids in the valley, especially if it seems unlikely Brycshire could support so many creatures.” But anything else? That’s on the DM. This is, at best, a series of events in a better written adventure. But, hey, want to run it. Let’s turn to page 556, where the locations start. Hmmm, a footnote for “Abandoned Farms” on page 59 tells us that “Goblins from the Carrembarrow Hills have been spotted on the edge of Thursley Bog. Someone from Osathorpe travels to Halford in order to report it.” That seems useful. Ashley Forest is described starting on page 60. It has a small note about two tribes using the southern tip to trade, as well as a couple of other events related to the forest, a wild boy a dead orc, humanoid on humanoid ambush. Seems like something to remember. Ah! “Avendeep, a couple of sentences on page 64 about a locale in the forest. It has “another passage into the orc tunnels.” Basing Hall has a note about the Roughskin tribe nesting there occasionally. Ah, Carrembarrow Hills. “Border Disputes and Warring Tribes. The Carrembarrow Hills are

where problems start, but the valley floor of Brycshire is where most fights seem to end.” Seems like a major site to me. Ok, an hour later I’ve scanned the location, up to page 146 and noted the places where humanoid tribe shit happens. I have now reached the orc Caves” section. That’s nine locations over two pages for the Blood Eye Orcs. Regale yourself with “3. cave stairs Massive stairs are cut straight from the earthen cave, breaking through into the natural cave entrance above.” This is all generic content. Ok, lets see, page 160 is people, let’s scan that also. Ah! Blood Eye Orcs appear on page 174. Wait, no, they belong to a major plotline, not the minor warring tribes plotline. Ah ha! Page 176 are the Bog’gog, a small tibe of peaceful goblins. Led by Bez. Is there an entry for Bez? Lets flip back and check. Ah, yes, there is! /4 page to tell us he’s a pacifist. “He now understands the value of life and death.” Seeems lie that could be said in less than ¾ of a page, but what do I know? Ok, back to the Bog’ogog. Nothing relly good here. Ah, Broken Fangs on page 178, aggressive warline Gnolls. Led by Remmock, we’ll need to go look that up later. Another ¾ page to tell us about some gnoll names and other trivia, and that they will blame the tribe of eight in border wars. Ok. Ah, yes, page 249, their leader does have a separate entry. Hates Snygg. Better go look that up. “Alpha, Intelligent, Hunter” hat’s fucking boring. Hmmm, ok, lets grab a map, print off a copy and note the tribes on it and locations on it, maybe with territories? Seems like a good idea. Oh! Looks like page 51 has a list of factions and MAYBE the tribes are on it? Eight of them maybe? Ok, lets pop out the handouts PDF. It’s got all of the locations in it and who appears. Ashley Forest says “Duncan Fangrin Gnolls Gremock Spearfang Order Of The Serpent Snygg Tribe Of Eigt Viviene” Ok, some of those looks humanoid. Serpent? Oh, hmmm, those are hippies who dress up like snakes, not humanoids I guess. We can dig through the rest of these to try and find humanoid sounding names also. So, I’ve read everything, made by notes, stuck in post-its, and created maps and a kind of event timeline. I’m now ready, after a couple of hours, to include one of the more minor and throwaway plotlines! Yeah me! Remember this feeling. 

Obviously this is absurd. There is some kabuki regarding organization, cross references and the like, but it’s just that, kabuki. I don’t think it actually does anything to help you run this, or, mostly even, prep to run this. This is, likely, not an adventure. It’s a regional setting with a lot of suggestions and the possibility of a lot going on. It has, through its obtuseness, crossed the line from adventure and/or sandbox in to regional setting. And I don’t willingly pick out regional settings to review. I don’t know how to review fluff. 

As a regional setting the organization is still shit. But, clearly, you can see how this might be used as a starting regions for the players. They go about their business exploring dungeons and the like and the regicide, apathy, coups and other intrigues happen around them. That SHOULD have been how this was organized. It’s not though, there’s not nearly enough to the locales to support adventuring “down time.” 

Plus, there’s a very strong, explicit, Harn vibe going on. We are solidly anglo-saxon with this. Laets and Cnihts running around. You know what those are, right? How about compurgation? No? Shit is just thrown in to complicate things. This should have been a more generic setting instead of going hard core down the angle-saxon path. Yeah, it adds flavor. You’ve also got 30+ “storylines” to dump in. How much complexity do you want in a supplement? The hundred court. The shire court. All tools for you to use, but, also, not directly referenced anywhere in the adventure. COULD either of those show up as play elements? Yeah, there’s noble intrigue. Do they deserve all of the space they take up? No.

You can see why people got excited about this when it came out. And, even, why it might be interesting today. The scope here is quite large, with lots of people, places, and plotlines. And there’s always something quite impressive about these larger scope products. Rappan, Night Below, GDQ … the larger scope products have room to breathe. They are rare beasts and its hard to not be impressed when you see them. Even cynically, someone got it out the fucking door, no small feat in and of itself. You can FEEL the possibilities in these things, including this one, and that is a magnificent thing. If the purpose of fluff is to inspire then it got it right. I’m not sure it’s possible to pick this up and NOT feel that way. Time slips, but I suspect that in 2013 something like this would have been a revelation. Not just a single plot. Not just room bashing. A campaign in which to house your OTHER campaign. It’s in that weird category of a regional setting that has things to do. Not just geography and history, people and place names, useless trivia, but things that can happen. This is a dynamic home base. And that’s a great thing.

It’s also the case that this is pretty multifaceted. Once you wade through the self-aggrandizement and conversational tone, you get several levels to the plots going on. We’ve got the standard warring tribes thing, that I went through in detail. There are a few other things of this ilk going on, standardish humanoid trouble and the standard “normal” cult activity. Then we’ve got some politics; the dude in charge of the region is the Regent … and would to continue to rule. So we’ve got the spies, troops, noble shit going on, economic stuff. Then we’ve got the main troublemakers: the Dagon cult. Lots  and lots of things leading to this and lots of the humanoid and politics lead to this also. They have a subtle APATHY poison in the water supply, there are kidnappings, all sorts of machinations. A standard home base would have little of any of this, maybe some hand waving about orc tribes raiding and burned farmstead before you go off to stab them. Here it’s more integrated, and the consequences more integral. A great home base might have some politics in it. But, again, seldom to the degree this thing has, so we’re adding yet another level. And then there’s the real trouble in the region, the Dagon cult, underneath it all, doing their thing. Anywhere you dig in this you’re going to find something going on, from the straightforward to the subtle. The amount of actual fluff, beyond the anglo-saxon culture stuff, is at a minimum here, perhaps raising its head most prominently in the NPC descriptions. Again, the scope and layering here is impressive. 

There are few specifics here. What you get are outlines of things.Think of them mostly as events that could happen rather than locales, with a lot of unnecessary commentary and “questions for the DM”; how does the party react, what does Bjorn do, how they react is up to the DM. And the organization of the booklet, for that, is just no where near where it needs to be to run this effectively. Fuck me, it’s also nowhere near where it needs to be for a DM to just understand what is going on. The comments about a year of study with notes, highlights and post-its are spot on. 

I have led you down a path to a certain opinion, and no doubt several people have opinions. Let us consider that in view of (what I anticipate) to be the reactions of the last review of a similar product, Brink of Calamity. These are, essential, the same product. This booklets scope is substantially larger and Calamity is less of an series of plots and focused more on specifics. This is an outline format, almost a book of lists (a list of anglo-saxon terms. A list of NPC’s. A list of Places. A list of Plots) and Calamity beds more towards room/key. But they both require SUBSTANTIAL prep to get you to a home base type area that you can use with the party in the way in which they intend, rather than just stealing one or two plots. What for the difference? Other than circling the wagons for one and burning the other at the stake. 

I don’t see this adventure as being fixable at home; to do so would require a complete rewrite. You can steal parts, of course, but there’s nothing special here to steal, the magic comes from the depth, scope, and layering. An editor needs to eliminate the conversational style. The NPC’s need shortened immensely. The anglo-saxon/normal fantasy village shit needs to be cut; its flavour can be integrated in to the NPCs, places, and events. Cross references need to be prevalent. It’s needs a brief summary of the MAJOR plots, then a list of places with their plots in them/directly after them. This could be followed or preceded by the major area spanning plots. It needs a few other things also, like home base shit and some normal home base plots, Mike is having an affair with Mary the innkeepers dog, and so on. I know what a fantasy village looks like, I need the deets on the Mike/Mary thing and that Bill is a serial killer who worships the local orphanage. There should be an event timeline, or at least a suggestion if inserting things in a particular order in the background when the party if off on the other side of the region, so that when they come back they can see the school marm is missing, has been for a week, and none of the searchers can find her. Ignoring the socio-economic implications of what I’m about to say, if every megadungeon were scattered throughout this region, how do I drop some shit on the party in an effective way when they return to town, or pass through the village of Pigsty on their way to Stonehell? Oh, sorry, I mean when the party feahfang’s the local frith-borh to avoid the nithings being healsfanged by the gemot. It’s been a few years, maybe it’s time for a “You can actually use this one” edition on kickstarter?

And, quoting from the adventure, “And don’t be afraid to say, “There’s something really wrong here.” 

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages and shows a portion of the second booklet, the handouts and people/places reference. That’s a really shitty preview of the adventure. The preview should give a potential buyer a view of the product in a way that they can make an informed purchasing decision once looking at it. And this don’t do that at all.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/112514/king-for-a-day-revised-edition?1892600

By Trent Smith
Storm Fetish Productions
1e
Levels 1-6

The town of Warnell, straddling a trade route that crosses two great forests, seems at first like any other backwater on the borderland of civilization, but menace and mystery lurk beneath the surface: a rash of disappearances from the shanties outside the town walls, a ruthless drug cartel operating with impunity while the town watch are powerless to stop them, and marauding bands of brigands and slavers ravaging the countryside. Rumors point would-be heroes and fortune seekers to the enigmatic sanatorium and casino outside of town that draw strange and wealthy travelers from far-away lands, to the abandoned (and reportedly haunted or cursed) old salt mines, to a remote mist-shrouded logging camp with an unsavory reputation, and deep into the trackless primeval forest where the xenophobic elves have forbidden all trespassers. While these locations likely hold death and destruction for the careless and foolhardy, they may also hold the keys to drawing this afflicted town and its hapless inhabitants away from the brink of calamity. 

This 180 page supplement describes a region with a couple of dungeons, towns, bandit lairs, eleven woods and such to have adventures in. There is design behind it, which has always been a rare thing to see and is always wonderful to see. It is dense, vanilla, deep, and pig-headed.

Why was this published?

It obviously took a lot of time and effort. There’s a cover. A credits page. Art has been inserted. So, it was obviously meant for other people to look at, not just personal notes. Is it an appeal to the ego? To have people say “Man, that dude, he knows what he’s doing!” I’m sure some people will say that. Here’s some quotes from Dragonsfoot: “Looks cool. “, “Cheers!” “Wow! Sold!”, “What he said!” “It looks nice!” “Sweet! I’m interested in the print version!” “Looks neat! Printed copy for me!” That’s not for this adventure, that’s for Into the Mite Lair, a dreadful adventure. But fear not, I’m sure the same people will say the same thing about this adventure. So, again, why was this published? For people to use? From the intro: “Be advised that, contrary to contemporary fashion, this adventure is not designed to be run with minimal or zero preparation by the GM. The expectation rather is that the prospective GM will take the time to read and study the entire thing, or at least the appropriate chapter, and take notes as needed to help familiarize yourself with the material and how all of its pieces relate to each other to form a complete tapestry.” A well designed adventure, with depth, is not mutually exclusive with easy to run. I’m not blind, I know what the meme is. “Brycey Bryce only likes those zero prep adventures.” This is absurd. But, also, it is absolutely true that the number one complaint is that adventures are hard to run. There is no “modern fashion in easy to run adventures”, as my continual rants will prove out.

That’s my bookshelf. You see that big stack of shit on top of Arabian Knights? A complete set of Federation & Empire expansions, to complement the main box next to Der Untergang von Pompeji. The core rulebook alone is 166 pages of dense type that compares to the bible or a dictionary. The base game takes weeks to play and dominates an OVERSIZED table, with other tables serving as support, with thousands of counters. It’s never going to get played. This is no Acaeum collection, waiting to be pulped by my kids when I die. With the exception of F&E. Six  months in this has generated little to no buzz almost certainly because of the barrier to entry. The fuckwits will chime in about now with some anecdotal examples, but I stand by my statement. This SHOULD be the new home base, the new general environment from which adventures spring. But it’s not going to be. Because SOMEONE decided that their strict condemnation of a fucking MEME was more important than people enjoying this during play. You’re damn right I’m fucking angry. Because this is a good adventure.

Parts of this have been published before, I believe. Melonath Falls I’ve reviewed before and one of the other parts seems familiar although I see no mention in previous reviews. Essentially you’ve got a small region with a town, a couple of dungeons interconnected, a wilderness to explore, and a spa/casino rife for some infiltration. No, it’s not a magical ren faire vibe, it kind of fits in to a Road to Wellville kind of thing. The way to think of this, I think, is a base to operate from while you explore Other Adventures. In your downtime things will pop up as you interact with the folks and places in this setting. And that will lead to more intrigue, forays in to the dungeons and spa/casino, and journeys through the woods, where you slowly become entangled in the things going on in this adventure setting. It is rich, interconnected and deep, none of it being in your face but all of it available. 

A great deal of this drop in comes from the more vanilla vibe of this, combined with a kind of seediness. A kind of underground thug thieves guild, drugs (or the black lotus variety! A great appeal to the classics!), slaves, streetwalkers and gangs of children on the streets. RIval guards. The core of this is solidly in the human-centric approach to a base, punctuated with just slightly off humanoids: bullywugs, xvarts, some fox-people (in a non-odious way) and so on. Just enough to add some freshness to the creature encounters while still anchoring things solidly in bandits, thieves, and scoundrels. The Taggart Gang. The Golarossa Brigands (although I would rename them to the Gorarossa Free Rangers or something like that.) Intrigue is here, if you just open your eyes …

The writing is generally straightforward and is at its best when Trent is adding just a flourish that grounds the encounter in such a way that the DM can riff off of it easily. Age and eye color and cloaks are no match for “one Erasmus Prokilios, an owlish, perpetually-bothered middle-aged man who is seemingly always carrying a large sheaf of papers and much too busy to be bothered by anything of less than existential urgency.” That’s an NPC you know how to run, a sentence that cuts through all of the noise; you need nothing more about him to run with it. That’s when he’s at his best at descriptions.

Mostly, though, you’re going to get VERY in depth and detailed descriptions of things. Unlike a lot of adventure, a lot of the description here is to a purpose. If you pay attention you can learn things. ABout people. About places, and the descriptions, lng though tey are, are the cornerstone of this. It’s design, where things at this locale and a different one and different one add up to a larger picture and allow the smart party to figure things out. 

And smart you will need to be. Seventeen giant rats. Eleven wolves. These encounters are not for the meek. You’ll need your experienced players showing up to handle this, The deck isn’t stacked against them (with a single exception), it’s all coming from the neutral judge style in which difficulties are explained and then the party set loose to run their zany schemes to overcome them. That single exception is the casino, where magic columns, stone golems, and a captured daemon all protect the casino and vault. I get it, but, also, this is the one area in the adventure in which this kind of shit appears and I would have preferred a more solidly human/normal grounding. 

An example? Hey, you know all of those times you explored a mine? How many times has the designer put in rules for undermining a support beam? Never? Well Trent covers it. Clearly, a reaction to playtesting, this is the kind of thing that abounds in this adventure. Detail. Mostly aimed at what you can see were actual play. Which is how it should be. A fucking dock takes, what? A page? A column? Yet it is key to understanding a piece of what is going, for a clever party who is paying attention. “The strongbox is trapped with a needle that will prick the finger of anyone who attempts to force or pick the lock, who must then save vs. poison or the hand struck will swell up and become red and will be useless for one week.” Excellent!

I want to call out, in particular, the handling of the woods in this. The wilderness environment is one of the better ones, with the elves in it being maybe the best implementation I’ve seen. There’s a black dragon in the wilderness (I love black dragons. I don’t know why? They just seem to fit so much better than other types? A byproduct of DL1 conditioning maybe?) We’ve got all sort of magical creatures, dryads, and so on that fit in well. And elf communities. With a way to contact them. Maybe. Standoffish. Ready to fill you full of arrows. And then a corrupted elf settlement, with corrupted dryad and a fungus that works REALLY well together. The whole vibe of the elves in this is great. Not the super-powered problem-solvers we think of them from LoTR, but more isolated, coming though well, without being asshole xenophones. (Just , I don’t know, Appalachian standoffish?) 

The wanderers in this are great. Clearly influenced by the 1e DMG, they get little paragraphs that give some guidance for the DM to riff on. Hookers who are in with the waifs. You know how ACKS tried to do a whole econ/larger game world thing? This delivers in the solid 1e style that I’ve seen only a handful of times. No sages in this town! No seafarers, unless they are on their way somewhere else. Because the book says there might be sages, Trent is clarifying. Training and trainers, how many times have you seen that mentioned in relation to a home base? Well it’s fucking here. Because that’s 1e. This is more 1e than anything T$R every put out. Not the bullshit petty arguments over minutia or stodginess that reigns online, but 1e, the way it was meant to be. The SPIRIT of 1e oozes out of this, so much so that even my Skull Mountain OD&D lair needs to check to make sure its door is locked lest its owner be tempted by the Harlots table. 

The issues with this adventure are too numerous to list. Monster reactions are in their rooms rather than in the rooms they would react to. The hex map, in particular, is quite hard to read. I get the barrier to entry the digital tools present, but that thing needs cleaned up. The adventure is low on WONDER. I’m all for gonzo, but it needs to be anchored in the mundane, and this runs as much to the mundane as possible while still having dragons and the like in it. You’re just not gonna get the weirdness that punctuates the more grounded 1e adventures from T$R. I’m not even sure weirdness is the best right term. Specials? 

The major issue here is going to be the DMs ability to run this. I am opposed to the DM making major efforts to run an adventure, particular with highlighters and notes. And that’s just not possible here. This is dense and obtuse. On purpose. As I think back, I recall an index of major NPC names and a little brief section on which areas are appropriate for which levels. That may be the only assistance you’re getting. And this extends to section headings. I’m looking right now at the Government & Law section There are long sections of text punctuated by a NPC stat block. What you need to infer from this is the part of the city that person runs is detailed above their stat block. Like, write about a column of text, stick in a stat block, write a couple more paragraphs, stick in a stat block for an NPC and so on. From this you need to pull out that NPC is head of the forces detailed in that block section above them. No headings. No bolding. Just a giant blob of text. I’m not sure how throwing in a section title of “City Guard” or “Night Patrol” somehow undermines the clarity of vision that went in to this. The writing is not conversation and is not all useless, the closest example maybe being the writing in Tharizdun? Except much longer chunks. I’m not going to insult Trent and tell him he needs an editor, challenges to authorial vision and all that. But it does need to be trimmed, with more focus, without losing the sections of depth he’s provided. More section headings, a better section on how the adventure works together, and so on. In a perfect world we’d see more use of indents and bolding to help focus the text and the DMs attention where they need it. This is not a dumbing down of the adventure or an appeal to zero-prep. The only person who can hold a 180 page adventure in their head is the designer, proper. You like Guy, yeah? He’s got a series of articles on layout. 

The binders to the right of Dungeonquest is what I run my games from. The books to the left of Arabian Nights are the D&D supplements I have in print. Some of them are also obtuse. But they ALL get used; that’s why I have them in print and that’s why there are so few of them. My fear, my great fear, is that people will get this and then NOT use it. And the fault is not on them because they choose to not make their entire personality Running Brink of Calamity. 

I would champion the fuck out of a Deluxe Edition Kickstarter that kept the depth while trimming it and making it more usable. 

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview shows you some dungeon pages, and is probably a good preview for those sections. Mayhap a little misleading on the other sections though. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/508460/brink-of-calamity?1892600

Sorry to do this to you Trent, it’s unfair.  I’d love to clarify my points more but I’m not sure I’m able to. The reviews may be coming out a little slower. I’m still here but not at my best. Essentially every spare part that was inside my body is no longer there; if you can live without it then I don’t have it anymore. (Including a fucking molar? I went in WITHOUT any cracked teeth and came out with a cracked #31 for the Endodontist to refuse and send me to the in hospital oral surgeon!? Yeah, nothing happened, sure thing.) I’m going to try and use this time to cover some of the longer adventures that have built up on my Wishlist. I usually take about two days to do a thirty or so page adventure, with a longer one in progress as time permits. I’m going to switch to covering some of the longer ones, so you should expect things to come out a little slower until I recover from my System Shock roll. Not to worry, I got a +50 on multiple rolls of the Harlot table and have been giving generously to the Temple in Corinth for years; I’m well taken care of.

Archie Fields III, Matthew C. Funk
Witch Pleas Publishing
5e
Level 1

Set in the richly detailed settlement of Greenspires, a town nestled among the elven ruins of the Hinterwoods of Witch Pleas’ Legends of Lohre setting, this tale begins at the cozy Drunken Dragon Inn and escalates quickly. A goblins raid becomes an epidemic of the un-dead, with a zombified child stalking his cellar and a grieving father wielding dark magics. Old John Stuart’s Mill is more than a dungeon crawl. It’s a reckoning of morality, justice and consequence.

Before you go bitching, think a bit about my direct and indirect illocutionary force. 

This 28 page adventure is a rather simple and linear affair full of terrible choices when viewed through an OSR lens. Beyond the normal D&D stuff, two of the encounters provide an explicit challenge to the characters to solve, one simplistic and one more difficult, that involve morality in a more nuanced standpoint than it is generally covered in D&D. The more interesting one is worthy of inclusion in a game, perhaps, and fits in well to my People of Pembrocktonshire villager vibe.

This is a 5e adventure, but they stuck it in the OSR section of DriveThru. Normally I’d pass that by, but then they called it “John Stuart’s Mill.” Ever the sucker for marketing, I eagerly dove in. Who’s that Australian philosopher, you know, the one who posited that every time you drank something other than tap water you were making a decision to kill a child somewhere who doesn’t have access to clean water, because you could have spent that cash to help them/donate?

Just as we saw with the NASA adventure, our crossover friends may be perfectly competent in their own fields but have not been born with the innate ability to present an adventure in a useful way. This results in an effort that has a rather higher bar to run it than what I would prefer, or, even, when compared to other adventures from the more mainstream designers. These sorts of adventures, attempting to crossover to other audiences (in this case, classes and the like, using D&D to help ground philosophical concepts) face the added barrier of audiences new to the game, and thus needing that rigor that comes from good deign principles across the Bryce pillars. There are The Old Wounds: long sections of italic read-alouds. It has been known for quite some time that long sections of read-aloud causes players attention to drift. Phones come out. Limiting this to two to four sentences and making it interactive instead of exposition dump is the better choice. And, of course, there are studies showing the increased cognitive burden of long sections of italics. But, every adventure does it and thus the pattern repeats as new designers learn their mistakes from old mistakes. And the fucking font is small. Grrr…

But then the other issues: Eight linear encounters. We must agree to disagree on the modern trend of giving the players no agency in their lives. I recognize that this is the reality of the modern game, and yet I must insist that a game with agency is a more rewarding game. Decisions are, after all, the conceit of game theory, yes? (Ha! You see?! You see?! It a fucking activity and not a game!) 

Lest you think it’s all fun and games down this linear path of encounters, you will also get to enjoy a mary sue. I thought we had left this far, far behind us, but I do seem to be seeing a resurgence as of late? The sheriff is clearly a werewolf and, at one point, a giant wolf charges out to scare off some goblins attacking the party, reducing the number the party has to fight. Conan becomes king by his own hand. No, this is not a power gaming fantasy. This is design in which the players, running the characters at the table, get to be in control of the game with the DM as judge, not some Storyteller bullshit. Players in charge. And don’t go misinterpreting that statement in to Storygamer territory. My scorn here is somewhat lessened because the wolf attacks when the goblins are throwing their first firebombs, disrupting their attack. Telegraphing whats to come, for smart players paying attention, is generally good design. As presented here its rather a bit blatant, with no player skill required to figure out whats going on. Meh.

I can go on. Purple prose from novel writing instead of evocative descriptions from technical writing: “ Greenspires’ humble buildings huddle in the chill of the night, the brave little lights in their windows pressed against encroaching darkness, flickering faintly upon the antediluvian emerald spires of the elven ruins.” or “The scent of cedars, pine and oak permeates the night with a heavy impression of the Hinterwoods’ age.” At the mill there are various sounds; a hobgoblin butchering an animal that is screaming very loudly. Goblins arguing in the next room. These appear, though, in the rooms in question and NOT in the room in which you hear them. I can beat a dead horse here explaining ad nausea why this is  bad, just as I could spend time describing why the opening “run in to the bar to get help help” scene is unrealistic, bread immersion,  and ineffective in creating the emotional response that the designer is going for, or the backstory exposition that muddies up the DM notes sections of encounters making it harder for a DM to locate for what is the absolute most important thing in adventure design: running the adventure at the table. But, instead …

Let’s talk orc babies, in which my perfect knowledge of adventure design that can never be questioned instead turns in to shaky opinion. 

We gotta go in to this with a couple of statements. First, at some point things changed from Nature to Nurture in the role of Evil in a humanoids alignment. When there is a god of evil and you are born evil then many of our moral arguments fall apart.Slaughter thy orc babies as ye may, Old time is a-flying. You do have a soul, there is an afterlife, and you WILL be spending eternity being happy or punished up in Olympia or the Seven Heavens or wherever. Maybe figure out what Eru Lluvatar thinks the meaning of good is? I don’t care if you like the official changes WOTC made to humanoids and their relationship to evil, that assumption is where we have to start our discussion in the modern game. If it help you live with yourself, go look up the appropriate Aurelius quote about the othering and generalization of people in order to justify doing things to them you otherwise could not. While you suck him off. The moral question is more interesting in 5e than our pre-Nietzian OSR versions. 

Alignment, used in the way its used here, does NOT make the game fun. I don’t care what version the game is and I don’t care what your decision was in killing the orc babies, a DM that modifies the game based on morality is a bad DM. This adventure makes one damning statement in it: “Don’t decide who is ‘right’ among the players. Instead, let the world you craft respond to the players, ideally with deeply meaningful consequences to their actions.” Absolutely the fuck not. There is no place for morality in D&D. It’s supposed to fucking fun. Go story game activity if you want to trauma bond and moralize. I’m drinking beer and eating pretzels. I sucked diseased cocks all fucking day, eating literal shit, dealth with my commute, got bitched at at home by everyone on earth for not taking out the garbage, and, then, to relax, some fuckwit DM is gonna moralize at me? I think not. Do NOT do this in your game. Can there be consequences? Sure. Orcs don’t trust you. They sing songs about you. Whatever. But you must divorce it from moral decisions. Fortunately, the adventure doesn’t do this, in spite of that bullshit statement.

The philosophy portion appears twice, explicitly (although I believe you can see some shadows in other areas) in the adventure. The first is with two goblins attacking you. That have clearly been beat up. That are clearly incompetent. That are clearly going to, at a minimum, rob you. Except they don’t. What do you do with them? The adventure explicitly notes that it is designed around utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, and thus this encounter makes sense in that context. I mean, the entire goal of the adventure is to bring to life philosophical problems for discussion and debate, so, you know. It does that. This is the weaker of the two problems presented in the adventure. It’s rather straightforward and, I think, hamfisted. Designed, bluntly, for one reason, that stated debate.

And then there’s encounter two. John Stewart has braved the goblin attack, abandoning his wife and children, to run back in to his mill, under attack by the goblins. You find him in his basement, next to a boy. A boy with ashen skin, kneeling next to a goblin, still twitching in his death throes, tearing at it with his hands and teeth. ““Please…please don’t hurt my boy.” The man is John Stuart, and the zombified boy is his son, Emmett. Emmett is temporarily distracted from the PCs by feasting on the goblin’s corpse, so they have some time to talk to John.”

Jesu Christo! Nice touch there with the goblin still twitching and this being Ye Olde Flesh Eating Zombie. I mean, the gobbo was going to kill them, right? None of that ham fisted morality here, abstracted away in to academia. Dude is RIGHT in front of you. He loves his son and brought him back. Is it permissible for the chronically underfunded state school for orphans to have a pet tarrasque? What could possibly go wrong? The real world is messy as will be a discussion about what to do here. There are no right choices, only wrong ones. 

As a teaching adventure spur debate in a classroom, the two explicit philosophical situations do what they need to do. The overall packaging of those two is rather poor. It is going to be a hard adventure to pick up and run at a table,  accessible to those not overly familiar with D&D. As a teaching aid, this aspect needs to be approved substantially. Font, exposition, organization, you don’t have to go OSE style here here but you do need to make it much easier on someone WANTING to use it. As is the barrier to entry is rather large, which means a focus on trying to run the adventure instead of the adventure itself. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. Stick in a fucking preview and help a prole out so I can make an existential choice on if its worth buying or not! 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530608/old-john-stuart-s-mill-1st-level-d-d-5e-adventure?1892600

Ganz Vargle—(Neutral Evil, he/him) a human man in his early 50s with gray starting to set in his dark brown hair and beard. He tends to dress fairly well, reflecting fashions from more populous cities closer to the coast, though he’s not ostentatious. Ganz is friendly and outgoing, but he hides a dark past: in his adventuring days, he sought to summon a demon with whom he could bargain for power, power he could use to change the world for the better. He found the witch of the wood, Moldred, who furnished him with the forbidden knowledge and materials necessary to call the foul spirit. The demon demanded a terrible sacrifice: the lives of Ganz’s adventuring companions. Though Ganz cared for his companions, he believed their sacrifice would be worth the good that he might ultimately accomplish with his magical might. Ganz slaughtered them all in their sleep in a profane ritual, but the demon was as deceitful as he was cruel: after the deed was done, he told Ganz that the best thing that a blackguard who’d sacrifice his friends for power could do for the world was to die. The demon afflicted Ganz with a terrible curse that would gradually weaken his heart and lungs until they cease functioning, and Ganz has been trying ever since to find ways to alleviate and remove the curse. The powerful talisman possessed by the witch Moldred can remove his curse, but when he approached the witch for help, she told him that he’d doomed himself by his own wicked hand and that his end is well-deserved. He swore on that day that her talisman would be his— that if she wouldn’t give it to him, he’d return and take it by force.

https://www.lukesurl.com/archives/comic/281-auto-whats

I fucking love Kant in this. “Because the Monster Manual says so! Don’t pretend you don’t know what evil is!

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/23

By Michael J. Bojdys
GrantWerk
OSE
Level 1

You wake in a locked cellar, heads pounding, contract signed in spilled ale. A dagger’s gone missing. A debt must be paid. And something in the dark wants more than gold.

This 32 page adventure uses three pages to describe six rooms in an underground smugglers den. I guess it’s inoffensive. There’s a compliment for you. How does “meh. whatever” sound as a puff quote to list on the back cover?

I can’t stand what my life has become. Someone, somewhere, thought this was a good idea. An adventure that uses three pages out of 32. Or, perhaps, if we are generous with the page count, seven pages out of 32? But, certainly, only six rooms and only three pages to describe those six rooms. Pre gens, house rules, appendices, backstory, game world, all thrown in. I do this page count to room key comparison for one specific reason: to show what a farce these types of adventures are. It’s hard to argue that this ratio is inherently wrong, (or that anything is or is not wrong or right) but it’s certainly clear that MANY an adventure would have benefited by a much strong focus on the ACTUAL adventure and less docs on the supporting material. When these page counts get to fucking lopsided its clear that the designer doesn’t know wat they are doing and didn’t really want to write an adventure; they wanted to write their house rules and setting. 

But on to this particular set of trouble. So, yeah, you wake up in the dungeon. I guess you signed a contract drunk in a bar last night and agreed to go get a dagger in this smugglers lair. While I’m not a fan of these sorts of forced scenarios in which you have no agency, they are slightly less odious when they are very first adventure for a campaign. Setting up things to come, don’t you know. I still fucking hate them and wish different paths were chosen for the framing. Forcing the players in to, say, a desert island with limited water heat stroke rules for wearing armor feels more abusive to me then the agreed lie that this is what we are doing tonight to play D&D and outfitting out party for an expedition to the very same locale with the same issues. But, whatever, minor issue.

Ok, the dungeon has a zombie in it. Got it? That’s the only keyed encounter with a creature. It also has a ghost that wanders around and attacks you. Every turn there is a 50% chance that the ghost moves one room closer to the party from its random starting location. 2HD so we’re looking at a 9 to turn it. And you’re gonna need a magic weapon to hurt it. And there’s one magic weapon in the adventure, the +1 Dagger you were sent to get. I wonder if this adventure was playtested?

The background information for the DM is a mess. It’s a combination of intro for the players and their characters and a lot of backstory that is irrelevant to the game at the table. So you need to dig out things to tell the party from the larger info dump of useless trivia. Not the strongest start.

Rooms are … ok? Not ok? I mean, I’m gonna bitch. They aren’t done right. But, you can run them. Basically, each room is going to take up about a column. You’ll get quite the short description of the room before it moves on to a longer section telling us information that the map tells us: where the exist go. I’m glad to see that this important duplicative information takes up more column space than the room description. Then, running on from the exist information we will get some follow up on things in the room the party might examine, the contents of a chest or something. This is likely to take up half the column. You can follow it well, except for the contents kind of running on from the exits. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. 

The descriptions are fine. Not awfully inspiring but more than just facts. The designer has clearly tried to spice them up with adjectives and adverbs, and sometimes this runs in to being purple. “The air hangs cold.” Uh huh. I get what the designer is trying to do, and their heart is in the right place, there are just better ways. Like showing instead of telling. You can see your breathe. There’s a stillness. … Oh, wow, the air hangs cold, eek!

There’s not much in the way of interactivity. Search for a secret door. Stab the zombie and ghost. Jump over some sewage. It’s six fucking rooms. 

I’m annoyed that it took 32 pages to present these six rooms. This is just a throw away adventure attached to the rest of the campaign content, sold as an adventure. That annoys me. The actual adventure is nothing special. Id’ say it’s a typical six room lair, which means no room for anything to happen. It is written just slightly better than most of those, but that’s still the bottom of the adventure heap. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you the confused intro and the ghost. No rooms. Then again, if it showed you a room page then you’d see half the actual adventure … poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527981/signed-in-ale-sealed-in-wax?1892600

By Ian Hickey
Gravity Realms
2e/5e (For real this time!)
Levels 5-7

Mistress Lentel’itz-Abar, Matron Priestess of the Mother of Midnight and head of House Bu’Rin, was sent to the Rift under political pretence, ordered to prepare a waypoint to launch the next attack on the Dwarven city. Tragedy struck when the Great Rift flooded, killing nearly all. Her eldest son, Breet, a high wizard, survived by sealing off the lower levels of the house. Blaming rival houses for the disaster, Breet made a pact with the Mother of Midnight, seeking power to take revenge; he sought lichdom. Resurrecting his mother and sisters, he found the knowledge he sought, only for them to turn on him. Expecting it, he trapped them beneath the waters. Now a lich, Breet experiments in secret, while his undead family plots revenge from below. The Wraith Queen awaits!

This 95 page adventure uses about fifty pages to describe about a hundred rooms scattered across five levels and three bonus regions. This is a raid, with monster zones and empty spaces to recover in and leverage to your advantage. There is little beyond hacking to appeal, with only the occasional interesting area, but, when the monsters are stuffed with loot, hack on! The 2e min/max crowd will love this.

The pretext here is quite flimsy, enough so that it probably didn’t need to be included at all. Two deputies disappeared while searching near the “elf ruins” for the local lords son. The sheriff don’t wanna send in anybody else, but he can’t you from looking. Sounds like a dead sheriff to me, but whatever. You find signs of disturbed ground and follow it to the lake, or get attacked at night by a giant ice spider who abducts you to the underwater dungeon. And this is where an interesting thing happens …

Level one is almost all completely underwater. It’s inhabited by a bunch of wraiths. 5+HD with an eight and the 15HD wraith queen, as well as a few other creatures, eels, oysters and the ilk. But, also, there’s a tower with a stair inside of it that leads you the upper four levels, al NOT underwater. One of these has a lich in it, the rest of the levels under his control; a prison, servants quarter, a former  “magic school”. Doors lead to an outside area with a small mine area (along with the (Creature From The Depths”) and some orc/goblin caves, the former slaves of the household of which the lich and wraiths were once a part of who now are at odds. You have access, through the tower and the layout of the initial underwater level, to almost all levels immediately. 

This almost certainly leads to some interesting play. Water Breathing will be needed for that first level, and I suspect most parties will be without it, at least initially. This could lead to some interesting play as the party tries to find a way out, eventually finding the nearby tower/stairs up. This gains you access to the next level, with the upper levels being “locked” until you find some signet rings. Once you do then the upper levels, humanoid areas and mines and such become available. The party is almost trapped, searching for safe spaces and/or an exit to recoup and take a mental breather. We can imagine some desperate incursions in to the very dangerous first level or the safer second, finally finding the main entrance to get out or delving deeper to the upper levels and perhaps some safety with the humanoids or in the mines. But, of course, everyone is preying on weakness AND looking for some help with their situations. The lich needs a problem taken care of, the wraith queen wants revenge on her son, the lich, the goblins/orcs have some turmoil between them and are also looking for more living space … the lich and wraith levels. 

There are individual creatures on each level that can be tough, but, except for that first level, the levels are generally full of lower level creatures. Skeletons, zombies and ghouls will pose little challenge, and even the masses of orcs and goblins can be handled. This mitigates the level drain of the wraiths and provides a hostile environment but one that can be managed by a thinking party. For a raid/hack, it is a surprisingly interesting set of circumstances to manage.

There are, also, some issues. As there always are.

I am not exactly thrilled with the amount of exposition in this. “Along the way, the driver shares a tale from the region’s past, providing valuable background on the area and what lies ahead.” Yes, or he could just do it. As  recently mentioned, the designer doesn’t need to tell us what is going to happen right before it happens every single time. For a larger and more complex situation I’m open to this and enjoy the context for the framing to come. Then, many rooms have some exposition about them “This huge room was the main church for house Bu’Rin. Mass was held every morning, and it was mandatory for everyone to attend. Read the following to anyone seeing the room for the first time“ There is nothing in this that is gameable. Well, Bryce, maybe it helps the DM with the description, eh? To note old church features of the room? Sure. Maybe. Except the room is called “House Bu’Run Church”, the read-aloud describes a church, and the DM notes describe a church. I don’t think that even I (at least in the view of my detractors) need much more framing here to understand that its the House Bu’Rih church. Read-aloud can be long in places. Descriptions are not exactly the most evocative. The usual set of complaints. 

Moving on to more specific ones, though … There’s no real order of battle here. The notes on how the various groups react to organized incursions are a little sparse. Here and there we get a tidbit, like wraiths send out a super patrol if two of their patrols go missing.Kind of a lame response. Maybe they deserve to die? And then in other places the adventure is weirdly non-specific. A good example of this is the prison level where you can find an old drow prisoner. “The dark elf captive is a political prisoner sent from one of the lesser houses to liaise between the dark elf city and House Bu’Rin. He was quickly locked up and replaced with one of the mistresses’ daughters, allowing them to spy on the city. If needed, he can be used to replace a dead PC” It’s weird to not give him a name, or maybe a personality quirk or something? I guess the hand wave here is maybe its not needed since he can replace a dead PC? I mean, it’s even missing the required “stabs the party in the back” clause for drow. And then there’s this “An ancient suit of glowing elven chainmail bikini armour gleams on its busty mannequin: +3 suit of ancient elven mithril chainmail bikini armour” Ever the prude, I know.

But, then also, the design suffers a bit from that core interesting trapped situation. We’re told the first level is filled with water with a few air pockets … but get none of that in the adventure/map. I think the core setup here is super intriguing, what with henchmen perhaps being left behind while the party water breathes, or the spellcasters starting with depleted spell slots because they had cast water breathing (a tax upon the surface dwellers!) Huge masses of undead on the “outside” get little. The intrigue that is implied throughout is not given much attention except for a “they want new living quarters and might be open to negotiation” or something like that for each group. On the one hand it’s clear which direction to go, but, also, there’s little flavour or color to get there. Figuratively and literally “Just like the mess hall, both of these rooms are covered in moss and fungal growth.” Is that enough for you? It might be. I’m looking for just a few words more though. 

Interactivity here is limited. The core trapped/five level/faction thing carries a whole lot of weight here, in a good way. Beyond that you’re going to get, maybe, one elements per area. A straight out crossword-like riddle for one. A two-way portal. There is a great deal of lower-level interactivity though: bend bars/lift gates, doors to find a way to get past, non-obnoxious traps and the usual dungeon dressing. A piller to chase you around. “A ring made of 12 skeleton arms are nailed to the door, if someone other then Breet tries to open the door one of the arms will point a finger at the person shooting out a black ray of energy!” So, not really exploratory wonder interactivity but still enough to keep a hack/raid interesting.

I am moderately surprised by this 2e adventure. The core of it is quite good and its large enough to support enough play that the local town probably needed just a little more to it in order to support the party visiting a few times. It gets lengthy in places (that church is a page long, though its also a key room.) And it looks like this actually IS a 2e adventure that was then duel-stated for 5e. This is a decent enough adventure that I’m going to go look for others by the same designer to add to the list. If you’re in to 2e then this is a no-brainer.

This is $14 at DriveThru. There’s no PREEEEVIIIEEEW! I want a preview!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/526921/shadows-return-house-of-the-wraith-queen?1892600

By Tim Edmonson
Ghost Ape Games
2e
Levels 1-2

He was never meant to be a necromancer. He just had the grades for it. When the players stumble across the talking corpse of a failed wizard named Bob, things spiral fast. One page of an ancient entropy-powered grimoire is already inside him. Another waits on a savage island ruled by saurian warlords, wild elves, and ghost apes that don’t sleep. What begins as a weird jungle crawl becomes a siege defense, a dungeon delve, a psychedelic fever dream, and possibly the start of a reality-hopping campaign. Or they could just go home. If Bob lets them.

This 82 page single-column adventure details an episodic journey centering around a level-4 lich who thinks he’s a fun guy. I don’t really know what to say here. It is what it is? It’s an amateurish effort, but that’s ok. The tone, adventure-path nature, and basic mistakes in information delivery are really offputting, but only the information delivery issues are actual valid criticism?

In D&D’s long history there have been some shifts in how the game is played. These are communicated through the official rules, or through the published material like adventures, or through the way most people are actually engaging with the game, or with the visibility being communicated in online social platforms. There will be ad-nauseum arguments about the official play, the actual home play and so on, but for better or worse there are memes about the style of certain editions or eras. 2e is solidly in the plot & story area meme, and this adventure unabashedly follows that, noting it explicitly. You can’t really criticize a man for doing an episodic adventure when you buy a “story drive adventure”, or for the comedic elements when it’s communicated up front. I know the 2e crowd is fierce, so we’re going to talk a bit about this just to ensure there’s fair warning, and then I’m going to cover some of the more issues with the adventure that lead to a “but is it a GOOD story based adventure with comedy elements?”

You’re gonna start in a village of cat-people. When you reach the lich, Bob (yes, that’s his name) he’s gonna cast hold person on your group and then do some magic tricks for you before running away and escaping. He’ll later keep up a constant banter with you as you drag his dismembered body around the rest of the adventure. He throws in comments and so on. This is 100% a railroad, errr, episodic adventure adventure path. It is solidly High 2e. Are you chill with that? I’m not, but I bought it anyway and can’t really criticize a man for doing what he said he was gonna do in the sales pitch.

But Bryce’s pillars stand apart from that. This is a rather amateurish affair, and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s a single column effort, which remains difficult to read and comprehend. I know that the point seems trivial, but the eye travel study on comprehension is real, as is the anecdotal data for anyone who has had to use single-column. It’s just going to be a little more difficult to comprehend the adventure and use it. 

And then there are the asides. There are a lot of these. This one, early in the adventure, is a good representative example of what I’m talking about: “This episode is meant to open in media res—no meeting in a tavern, they start to learn how to be a team and how to play the game immediately. Characters either begin here in their home village or are here on personal business.” It explains what is about to happen. Is there a need to explain what is about to happen? I don’t think so. I’m a big fan of the designer framing what’s to come, in terms of how it works, but this isn’t that. It’s not explaining how the different areas work together or the tone, it’s instead just repeating everything that’s to come in a different tone of voice. And that’s just padding that is of no use and just gets in the way of running the adventure.

And then text grows overwrought and purple in places. “You find a patch of earth that hasn’t been claimed by vines. The river gurgles behind you, dark and sluggish. The trees here lean in, like they’re watching. The air smells like burnt grass and rotting fish. You can make camp. You can rest. But you are not welcome.” This isn’t consistent, but, also, it’s clearly trying for this epic adventure vibe (it says so explicitly) and I’m guessing that this is a part of that. The purple prose is not great. At all.

But it’s also not doing an altogether terrible job with the descriptions. If we take that purple section above, it’s not too bad. A gurgling river. A patch of earth not claimed by vines may be on the edge of purple, but the air smelling like burnt grass and rotting fish isn’t bad. In other places we get a decent description of mudmen attacking the village that ranges from te usual to very good. “A child screams. You hear the splash before you see the thing—humanoid, muddy, crawling on malformed limbs. It twitches like it’s listening to the ground. Someone yells, “It’s in the ground!” and you see dark veins stretching out from the water, moving in the soil, like the river itself is leaking something alive. As you watch, another mud creature forms before your eyes, first pseudopods made of stinking, corrupted soil, then something resembling a humanoid figure with arms and a large torso” I hate the pseudopod thing, in general, and corrupted soil is a conclusion that should be a show don’t tell thing. But, hey, not bad. We’re not saying “three mudmen attack”, it’s instead trying to describe them, something the adventure tries to do consistently, and that’s a good thing. I’m going to go out on a limb and make an assumption from this that dude is an ok dungeon master, just not a great adventure writer.

If we follow through with the mudmen encounter, this is the next thing that happens once they are defeated “When the last Mudman collapses into a puddle of inert sludge, the village is in shock. Farmers report rot in the irrigation ditches. The elders whisper about the water. Something is poisoning the land.“ This is a crude and amateurish attempt to have, I believe, a chaotic battle aftermath scene in the village. People all over the place, side conversations, helpful and unhelpful injections from by standers and so on. I think I am not alone in reading that in to the description provided? And, yet, that’s not a strong description of it or how to run it or anything close to it. And I’m sure we all know what I what I think about supporting the DM. 

In other places there’s a certain degree of disorganization of the text that requires you to be completely familiar with it in order to run it effectively. This comes to pass time to time; the designer has lived and breathed their adventure for months while any of us who have simply bought it to run and read and re-read it can never know it as well as the designer can. Thus, after entering the dungeon we get notes about a second entry point to the dungeon. I think, perhaps, it should be obvious to everyone that “Entering the Dungeon” comes after “Outside the Dungeon”, but not in the kind of stream of consciousness layout from a designer that knows the material inside and out. Likewise, somewhat later in the adventure we’ll get notes buried in a paragraph about how the second entry point is in this particular room being described right now. Perfect if you know the adventure inside and out and less perfect if that’s not the case; it just looks like throwing information in wherever … or almost a subcase of  room 54 reacting to the inclusion in room 1 … in the description of room 54. 

This is hardcore story mode 2e. It’s got a slapstick comedic element that, on going, that proves that the Mork Borg call is coming from the inside the house the entire time. But, beyond these tonal baselines, it’s also not the easiest to follow and run with as a DM. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is five pages. You get to see the mudman attack. This is enough to show the conversational tone, asides, and sometimes decent imagery and sometimes purple imagery that is conveyed. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530935/son-of-a-lich?1892600

By Sestermeron
Self Published
OSRLevel 3

On a rainy morning, the players take shelter in the tavern. Instead of finding a place to rest, they are greeted with an unpretentious invitation…

This nine page adventure uses three pages to describe ten rooms in an ultra-minimalistic caves of ONLY stabbing. Did you think Vampire Queen was too wordy? Have I got the adventure for you!

What the fuck is it lately? The bad stuff is just REALLY bad lately. Like REALLY bad. This garbage is listed as Classic D&D and 5e compatible. Great, that means, in my head, it’s …classic D&D and has some 5e conversions. Of course not. It’s a 5e adventure. There’s not a hint of classic D&D in this, from stats to tone to whatever.

Are there EASL issues? Maybe. “The people from the village celebrates the freedom …” That sounds more like a Bryceism of not giving a shit. “If you accept, I will go your group …” Come on now. That’s not EASL, right? That’s just not giving a shit?  

So, you’re in a bar. The bartender tells you that a nearby village is being terrorized by a monster. Do you want to join the bartender, Emi, in hunting it down? Oh good. Ready for the village? “A village with houses by the river, appearing abandoned, tied boats, and some people fishing nearby. Only women and the elderly remain; no men are present.” That’s the village. Don’t worry, nothing happens in the village. There IS no attack on Fishermans VIllage. Instead, your helpful bartender uses her tracking abilities and leads the way through the woods. There’s a cavern entrance. Somewhere. I don’t think it’s marked on the map. The level one caverns map, that is. 

The first level has nine rooms. There is no description. None. Zero. It’s just a fucking map. You know how I’m sometimes like “it would be nice to have monsters on the map so I know who can react to noise nearby”? Well, someone listened. But, perhaps, also, I need to say “Rooms should have descriptions.” There’s nothing here. I’m not making this up. Some rooms have a centipede icon on them that, I guess, means there’s a centipede in the room. I think there’s a chest in one room? I can’t exactly make it out on the map. But, also, there’s a second level to the dungeon (with one room) and there’s no entrance to the second level?

I have no fucking idea how you can be this lazy. No actual rooms descriptions. No real adventure. Nothing, really. I mean, and to then pad it out to nine pages? I get it, the one page dungeons are a kind of performance art thing, but, also, pushes you to do more with less and hopefully) focus in on what’s important. But this? Nine pages?!

I mean, this has got to be a scam. The final evolution? Can I build a generator to pump one of these out a week for, I don’t know, 5e, Shadowdark, Pathfinder? How much can I make in a month with morons buying it for the popular systems? This is a scam; it has to be, right? I mean, no one, ever, would think this is an actual adventure? No one would, on purpose, write something like this and publish it? 

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages. Enjoy that preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530839/the-attack-on-fishermen-s-village?1892600

By A. Umbral
Cthonic Creations
OSR
Level 1

Beneath the shadowed walls of Crow’s Keep, treason festers in whispered secrets and quiet deals. The war-weary King Uldred fights to hold his crumbling throne, while unseen forces conspire in the dark corners of noble halls. The city’s watchful Reeve has sent word to a handful of expendable operatives—those desperate enough to gamble their fate on a mission veiled in secrecy. Their charge? To infiltrate an uncharted cave deep in the foothills, where a bandit faction has taken root. But steel alone will not be enough. Beneath the carved ruins of forgotten empires, something far older stirs. A hidden temple lies buried under the earth, its walls heavy with serpentine scripture, its chambers thick with the weight of ancient curses. Lady Rinwolde’s network has already reached this place, her spies clawing at long-lost relics of unfathomable power. Blood will spill in the darkness. Trust will be tested in the fires of ambition. And in the ruins where mortal and monster meet, the truth is as sharp as the blades that gleam in the dying torchlight. Will you uncover the mystery before Crow’s Keep collapses into war? Or will you vanish beneath the earth, another forgotten name swallowed by history?

This thirty page adventure uses about four pages to describe about 45 rooms across two levels of a bandit lair/snakeman temple. Abstracted and minimalistic in the dungeon, while trying its best to hit all of the marks of a good adventure. I am generally left confused on the choices made for an adventure outline.

Communicating the vibe of something is hard. I generally push in to hyperbole, trusting that my intelligent, good looking, and humble readers can follow along. In this case, what if you had a Vampire Queen dungeon of 45 rooms over a few pages, that really aggressive minimalism that showed up there. And, then, as preamble I stuck in a modern intro and hex crawl and then in the appendix included a massive rumor table and monster stats and lore and so on. There would be this massive disconnect, right, between the amount of detail that The Main Event has vs the supporting information. It’s not that the dungeon MUST be the main event; it could be a village social thing or it could be a hex crawl thing, with the goal being a small dungeon or some such with The Thing in it you want to get. In these cases it would make more sense for more effort to be spent on the hex crawl or the social village elements or some such. But, if the dungeoncrawl IS the adventure then I must point out the obvious disconnect. COULD you write a five page dungeon that is great inside of thirty pages? Sure. Does this? No.

Ok, you’re level ones and the default hook is that the local reeve is sending you to check out some bandit caves. Seems you’re convicts and you get a pardon if you do well, whatever that is. You’re sent to spy, learn information, and so on. Absolutely nothing in the adventure is going to help you do that, that’s unsupported in every way, but that’s the pretext. You’re taken by a ferryman (with some decent read-aloud, all in italics, alas, but nicely done) across the water to your start point. You’ve got three days of iron rations and he’s coming back for you in five days, no more no less, and not waiting around for you. You’ve got a two day “hex crawl” in front of you till you reach the bandit lair. This is all looking a little rough for level ones … a strict timeline doesn’t really mesh well with the hit and run away vibe of squishy characters. It’s a very structured “hex crawl” in that the DM is essentially rolling for wanderers at the appropriate time but everything else is very controlled. Roll on the weather table. Heal a HP if the night was chill, you enter a mountain hex, etc. The wandering monster table for the dungeon is also a bit more than I expected. “1 Escaped Prisoner – caught by bandits. Could be adventurers, possibly allies.” or “Standing Water in Passage – water pit, 5 feet deep. Slows characters. “ These are both ok things. I’m in a pretty pleasant mood at this point and looking forward to the dungeon.

Then comes the dungeon map. This is a half page thing, full color, mage in Dungeongrapher or some such. Lots of textures and tables and shit on the map. It’s a disaster. Too small, too much detail and overlapping textures. There’s no real complexity to the map, but, also, it’s barely legible, which is a problem.

Next up comes a summary of the various rooms in the dungeon. This is something I sometimes come across. I understand the goal, but I think it seldom works out the way the designer wants. In this case, it’s presented in two column table format. The first table column has a room name and maybe a couple of details why the second table column has a few notes about the room. “Entrance Tunnel” and then “Narrow stone passage littered with old bones of animals. A makeshift barricade with a single guard.” So, sure, that’s fine. Sometimes the first column has a few more details, things that might be obvious to be seen and so on. 

Oh. 

Wait.

That’s not a summary.

That’s the actual dungeon.

Mind you, room two, which I’m about to quote, is INSIDE a cave: “Guard Watchpost – each tower has a Bandit Guard “ That’s the first column. Then column two of the table says “Elevated overlook where scouts track movement. Two small wooden towers.” Repetition. Minimalism. Abstraction. Sometimes monsters (bandits) show up in column one. Sometimes in column two. There are never more than a sentence or so of words. “12 Hall of Murals “ and “Bandits have partially uncovered ancient serpentfolk murals-some have begun whispering in their sleep. “ These are ideas, not encounters. You’re stabbing folks. There’s no infiltration here, there are not supporting notes for that of any type. Stab Stab Stab! Sure that’s fine, I guess. Sometimes. 

How about an EXTENSIVE rumor table! “Whispers from the Past” – “Superstition” “True (Cave Wraiths whisper in lost languages, and some bandits are driven to madness)” Uh. What? What’s the purpose of the rumor title? Am I missing something? There’s two fucking pages of these. I don’t know, forty, fifty of them? Like I said, a minimalism dungeon supported by everything you would want in a lot of detail. But, in a weird fucking way. I’m not sure I know how to use that rumor table. It’s like the heading title is supposed to have more information or something? But it doesn’t? I don’t know.

One of the rooms has a trap. “Door Locked with a simple trap.” That’s it. You want to know what the trap is? Do the work yourself I guess. No order of battle. No infiltration notes. No real tricks or traps, given a definition of what a trick or trap would generally be agreed to. 

Unless you REALLY know what you’re doing, pay attention to the main adventure. That’s where your effort should go. I’m at a loss as to how that can be a mystery, but, there you go.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see the intro, hex crawl, and the first seven rooms. No, that’s not a summary. That’s roughly 20% of the dungeons rooms. Good preview?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530730/cursed-blood-and-cold-steel?1892600

By Lazy Litch
Lazy Litches Loot
B/X
Level: 4? Maybe?

The Artificer is dead! The Hermit Queen has dispatched you on the royal dragonfly to seize his living arcane weapons before her enemies do.  Deep in the geometric desert, the Artificer’s tower is unraveling: traps are gaining sentience, micro dimensions are fusing, and a ticking mana reactor whispers on the brink of collapse.  The meltdown will soon sink the tower into churning cubic sands. If you fail, another kingdom will wield the weapons to rule for centuries.

This 43 page adventure is full of batshit crazy concepts, with associated opulent descriptive text. Stuffed full, it perhaps needs just a little more room to breathe, the rest of us not being able to handle as much opium AND run the game at the same time. But, man, this thing does channel a vibe! Which means if you think Elmore is the pinnacle of fantasy RPG then you might want to move on …

This is, from time to time, an rpg or adventure that tries to explore a kind of bio-mechanical vibe and/or a luxurious opulence in the setting. Byzantine in the art style, with an implied lore that is, it seems, is very deep. Several of the Monte Cook RPG’s, a few of those Psychedelic Fantasy adventures, Rifts: Atlantis. Heresy: Kingdom Come. They generally fall short of the expectations they set, coming off as bolted on paper mache. This adventure does not fall in to that trap and is one of the more successful translations of that byzantine and opulent deep lore biomechanical vision. But … that also has implications. If the cover were in full colour it would better communicate the vibe of whats inside. As it is that cover communicates a kind of lower-end adventure, as does the Mana Meltdown title. The artwork samples, though, on the DriveThru product page do a much better job of communicating what’s to come.

The Hermit Queen. The royal dragonfly. The geometric desert. Churning cubic sands. How does that fit in to your campaign? The Hermit Queen? “She paints the skies with painful sovereign static; folk flee underground, crawling into tunnel towns to escape the burning noise. A ruby reign: regal, regenerative, and repressive.” You down? You got room for that? Meaning that this is either a one-shot or you’ve gone all Living Room/Bottle City. This is not a trip through the local high fantasy dungeon or even a brief excursion to the coral reef undersea lair. We’re got a fully realized vision here, or at least it will appear that way to the players, and the ability for them to integrate in to the environment, and the loot found to continue during the game as the character return to their homeland, is something to consider. The default assumption is that you are doing this for the Hermit Queen, for some unnamed reason, and thus we’re gonna need to be in a position to have her make that request, at least through her advisors, to the characters. None of which is covered, so, yeah, Dungeon & Dragons Ride, I guess.

We start out with the flight to the prismatic field around the artificers tower. Looks like other factions want the shit inside also! Thus, you’re in a flying race to get there first. You can make some stat checks to do various things to speed up The Royal Dragonfly and/or hinder your opponents. This will determine the order the factions, and characters, arrive at the tower. Or, more specifically, where folks arrive in the timeline of progress that is given. Earlier is better, with the other factions having less time to meddle. 

Oh, yeah, the other factions. We’ve got The Royal Dragonfly “Powered by: Narcissism.” More praise means it flies faster. And its entomologist pilot is jealous of the Dragonfly. So, you know. It’s got a lantern hanging on it’s tail. In case of serious accident you are instructed to trace the run on it. Which immolates the captured fairy inside. And then you sprinkle the dust on the dragonflies body to get a featherfall effect. Jesus H …

Anyway, the other factions is where I was going. One of them is a living weapon. “She travels to the Geometric Desert on top of a vast flying jellyfish embedded with parasitic bone engines. Her presence is announced by chilling sensations in the fluid of characters’ spines.” Also “The jellyfish has a self destructive desire for a poetic end by flying into one of the sinkholes” Uh. The Telemetry Twins, servants of the Far Away god, travel on a “piece of ground where his apostle ascended now levitates and transports the faithful along a precisely calculated prayer path “ Armed with their Suture Cable and Mnemonic Blade. 

I could go on, but, I think you get the idea. I used to summarize my thinking here with “you want realism in a game in which elves shoot fireballs from their asses?” This is perhaps the best implementation of that meaning. AND YOU”RE NOT EVEN IN THE TOWER YET. Inside we to even more abstracted concepts, like The Trap Parliament – “Locked door [spiral steps descend into large circular room] Stone benches [razor thin, floating in concentric rings, some folded into sinister origami statues, others blank with scorch marks], Banners [torn sheets drift overhead, looping in silent orbit], Floor [central speaker’s sigil-podium emits broken voices debating in an unknown language, phrases linger like ghosts semi-visible in the air” Abstraction brought to life to a major theme in this adventure. Obviously. The language used is decent. Very complex ideas are attempting to be described. Razor thin stone benches? Ok. “The tower breaks the horizon, encased in a shimmering prism, held aloft by vast spider tendrils clawing from the cubic sand” Sure thing. What’s cubed sand? Fuck if I know. Let’s hope no one asks and they just bask in the description. And that’s both a strength and a weakness.

In terms of interactivity, we start with that race mini-game, which advances a timeline of events, and then you get to the dungeon proper. The other factions are running around inside, as well as the ghost of the Artificer. And, Death, who is not happy that dude has managed to avoid him and is meddling in the Artificers meddling. Decent fighting inside. A doorway inside of a bag of seeds held by a flesh construct gardener that leads to level one: The Flesh Garden. But to get there, proper, you need to first gain access to the tower. Which means making it through the prismatic field, doing fifteen points in one turn to collapse the field. And then: “two entrances: a light side door and a dark side door. One door leads out the other unless at least one person enters from both sides at the same time.” We can see the patterns here, these are not exactly the most original concepts, but I think they integrate well here. If you need to break through a field, or enter two doors simultaneously then this is the way you do it, not all of those other ways you’ve seen before. It fits, naturally. Some of the interactivity is complex, and none of it has a mural on the wall with a riddle written on it. 

There is a decent amount of support information in the form of reference tables for the DM to work from, random shit, reference material and so on. This is great and shows an understanding of what the DM needs when running the actual adventure. Also, there’s a nice little reference diagram of how the adventure fits together. This sort of framing context helps a lot, getting the DM oriented correctly before the flood of information starts.

I think this is a good adventure, and I’m going to Best it. But, also, I don’t think it’s going to be an EASY adventure to run. There are a lot of moving parts here. The rival factions. The timeline. The special effects in the dungeon. The ghost, and Death fucking with the ghost  And THEN the special On effects for a dungeon level. And then the room. Which is going to have some complex elements to work out in a dungeon full of abstracted concepts. They are, in the end, relatively simple to run, but interesting. But grasping a Memetic Blade and running it on the fly? Those are the things that are a tad more difficult. Magnificent adventuring facade wrapped around what are some interesting interactivity concepts … like a room where copies of the PC’s, each with a part of an object, run away from them in fear of being destroyed. Or, on the more difficult side of things: “Jealous Walls: The more it is used, the more hostile the corridor becomes. Envious of players’ functioning bodies, it begins to create gravitational anomalies in attempts to impale them on bone spikes so it can cannibalize them.” Run that. Oof. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is 25 pages. More than enough to get the lore, the style, to be influenced by the art, and see more than few rooms and specials. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530305/mana-meltdown?1892600

by Vasili Kaliman
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 2-4

IN THE CAVERNOUS DEPTHS of a mountain lies a lake of pure milk, inhabited by a tribe of peaceful merfolk. Their king and queen, aided by dwarf servants, use the milk to manufacture the most exquisite chocolate truffles in existence. The truffles are said to be so delicious as to soften even the most hardened of hearts. People from all over the world visit the lake to buy these irresistible creations. Recently, truffle production has mysteriously ceased, the dwarves have disappeared, and in nearby cities, scores of disreputable merchants have begun hawking

This sixteen page adventure features seventeen rooms in a merfolk chocolate factory where candy and chocolate golems are made by dwarves. That has been taken over by Willy Wonka. And her skeleton servants and apprentices. A simple stabby adventure, easy to run, with an odious premise. 

I guess I start with the Castle Greyhawk warning. I hate Castle Greyhawk. It is, perhaps, the first real betrayal in my life. Anything resembling Castle Greyhawk is going to not be met favorably by me. Independent of that, I don’t think comedy works in D&D. Or, perhaps, if you write for comedy its going to come off badly, while certain situations can get a pass. The comedy inherent in the way, say Gamma World 1/2e was run vs the way Gamma World 4e was presented. Front and Center doesn’t work. 

Merfolk live in a mountain that produces milk. They use the milk to make delicious chocolate truffles. With the aid of their dwarf friends, which have “Orange skin, green hair, and white eyebrows.” Not the only time there will be an appeal to Wonka in this adventure. Augustus Gloop shows up and takes the place over, there are chocolate golems and her apprentices and her skeletons who sing and dance and, most of all, now the chocolate is bad. (And by bad I’m sure the designer means that while they are cost optimized for a certain quality level and yet the pricing does not reflect this. Otherwise is to suggest that only the rich and powerful get access to chocolate, except, perhaps, when the merfolk dole out a bit to the general populace on the charity day they use to assuage their consciousness to tell themselves they are good people? A McDonald’s Cheeseburger is good at $.59 and bad at $6.) So, it’s a Willy Wonka adventure with merfolk, oompa-loompa dwarves, singing and dancing skeletons, and that kind of shit. I find this tone enormously offputting, but, I know (and have suffered through) many a local game in which the DM/friends loved it. Easier to play off a bad game as ‘just for fun!’, is my theory. 

Map is fine. The monsters are on it. The formatting is clear. It’s not the standard OSE ultra-terse keyword style, so, haters of that format will need to find something else to hate. “Library: A humid and stuffy cave with a 20? ceiling hung with long, jagged stalactites. Bookcases line much of the western wall. A hefty tome sits on a polished wooden lectern near the doorway.” A room name to start to frame whats to come, a decent but short description (which I wish were more evocative, but, it’s fine) and then some bolded keywords that are followed up in sections below. Good format. Appropriate bolding to highlight things. It doesn’t look at all like a rigorous railroad format, but that what needs to be done in the moment is done to bring clarity … in a generally consistent way. Which is perhaps the highest praise one can give with regard to formatting and layout and organization. ‘I follow some standards but I break them when it doesn’t make sense. Monsters all get descriptions right up front, instead of backstory and ecology and shit. This is how it should be. If I’m running the fuckign adventure I need to know what the things looks like RIGHT NOW. “Human magic-users clad in purple robes embroidered with a symbol of the Chocolatier’s trading house. Carry lanterns for light.” We’re not winning awards here, but, also, you don’t need to win an award with your evocative writing it just needs to be good enough. 

The adventure is mostly fighting. The first five rooms are “public” and you can nose your way through them. Then we switch to “you’re not supposed to be here!” with some occasional freeing of prisoners or talking to the merfolk king or freeing the merfolk queen. A couple of traps, maybe you eat some magic chocolate, but, mostly, you are fighting things. “Lit by chocolate candles in iron candelabras, flickering with a warm glow. 5 skeletons are engaged in a musical performance, merrily singing and playing instruments around an 8? solid chocolate mermaid statue.” So, stab some skeletons, stab some dwarves, stab some apprentices, stab some golems, stab Wonka. It’s a lair adventure except it has seventeen rooms. 

I’m not enthused about this one. Yeah, the tone is a turn off for me, so, maybe thats coloring my opinion too much. But the thing is a little too straight forward for me. The writing just not decent enough, the situations (if anything could be called a situation …) not interesting enough. No real order of battle for the apprentices. Yeah, formatting is great, but, in 2025, I’m gonna need just a little bit more. So, it gets a 6.99999999999999. It’s fine, and if you’re ok with the tone and just want stabbing then it doesn’t offend. Bleh. It’s bland. Bland with, perhaps, a veneer of trying to hard. 

.This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages. It shows you the intro and about eight dungeon rooms. More than enough to make a judgement call on the adventure, so, great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530085/quick-delve-1-milk?1892600

By Sean Audet
Self Published
Knave 2e
Level 1

Drawn to the light of the St. Peter’s Rock Lighthouse, a vast and ancient eldritch abomination has awoken. One night, lightkeepers Alistair MacNeil and Dylan O’Connell witnessed the creature rising from the water. It only took a glimpse to drive the two men mad. With the last of their sanity, they destroyed the lantern and made a pact to keep the lighthouse dark, no matter the cost. Four months have passed since then. A perpetual storm now lingers above the isle of St. Peter’s Rock, and dozens of ships have been lost to its cliffs. Several people have gone to investigate and relight the lantern, but none have returned.

This sixteen page adventure describes a lighthouse with seven rooms. It has TOP NOTCH atmosphere, providing a foreboding and eerie environment. There is a level two and level three baddie to face, the former keepers, and then the world ends. So, you know, maybe some pacing issues in what is quite the atmospheric adventure.

There is a general rule of thumb that the room count as a ratio to the page count is a general indicator of what’s to come. Lopsided in either directions usually a warning sign. Thus, opening this adventure I girded my loins. But, a rule of thumb is not a law and this adventure defies that meme. It uses layout and an art style, as well as its design, to create a brooding atmosphere that pretty perfectly matches the vibe I think it was going for. Horror adventures generally cross genre boundaries well, and it would be quite easy to move this one to a different RPG/time period. Also, I’m totally reviewing this because the title reminds me of a Peaches mashup with the Doors.

The initial pages, as a spread, detail the map with notable features on it. Almost the very first words, on that summary map, describing the outside of the lighthouse are “Fierce storm growing more violent by the minute, ship in the distance, door to the Keeper’s Cottage, locked door to the Storehouse, hidden locked door to the Cellar, lantern lens broken into 3 pieces, crane and pulley, miscellaneous hardware and tools, shipwrecked fishing vessel.” I am enchanted by those first two clauses. A fierce storm growing more violent by the minute, a lighthouse without a light, and a ship in the distance. There is an impending consequence, the ship, that immediately adds to the tension and environment of the growing storm. I sometimes talk about framing what is to come, and, generally, I’m talking about this from the DMs perspective, to help orient the DM. This turns that a bit and instead provides this immediate air of tension to the gameplay. When we talk about Lareth issues it’s usually in the sense of giving this more visceral vibe to the villain early on. But, also, it tends to to a more remote of passive sort of thing, signs of their violence and so on. (Else we run in to the fleeing villain issue.) I’m not sure I’ve seen something so immediately tension setting before. You KNOW whats going to happen, you can see it. It’s a slow motion disaster. The ticking time bomb ever present without it being a hamhanded literal countdown. Further we get “Night is fast approaching. • The storm has taken a turn for the worse. • A distant ship grows closer by the minute. • The silhouette of a man is visible in the Lantern Room.” Again, this sense of foreboding. The night, the storm, the ship … pressure. And then the silhouette in the window. A call to action and perhaps a threat. 

The adventure is great at this, setting the mood. The Lighthouse was an explicit influence and this does a great job of capturing some of that atmosphere. It’s coming at things from a more neutral approach, a real world grounding that adds to the immersion. “Dylan O’Connell appears from the shadows,  wielding a rusted knife or a broken oar, muttering incomprehensibly” That’s one of our crazed lighthouse keepers, with a rusty knife. “An open, two-story room. It smells of spoiled meat, tobacco, and coal. Sparsely furnished” Smells of spoiled meat, stale tobacco. Coal. That is exactly the vibe I want from some abandoned lighthouse horror/suspense. 

This is a simple adventure. Search a few rooms, get this sense of unfolding drama, and what has happened in the past, not through a diary or exposition but from the condition of the rooms, what you find, what you see, what you experience. Ultimately, you’re facing a level to and level three fighter, in the crazed former keepers, so the combat here is few and far between and almost certainly happening in the climax of the adventure. But, the journey is the real adventure, through the unfolding tension, driving by a wanderer-like table that instead increases the event timeline or adds some strange atmosphere “The wind begins to tear shingles and pieces of the roof from the lighthouse. Debris crashes through the upper levels. “ or “A flash of lightning illuminates the sea. For a brief moment, one of the PCs sees a massive shape beneath the waves. It disappears, but an overwhelming sense of dread lingers.” 

There are a few things to do other then experience things. There’s a dude to find and rescue, and perhaps add complications to your efforts as you also have to deal with his decrepitude. And, of course, the need to explore to find some lamp oil, etc, to get the beacon working again before that ship arrives.

The layout is clean. The summary map is quite good, you could almost run it from it alone. Or, at least, it gives that emission, of something that can actually help you at the table. The increasing tension/wandering table is easy to follow, clear, and provides decent interactivity in terms of avoid those falling shingles and so on. Minor things, but nice tension spikes. The rooms, proper, rely on a line break style of organization with occasional bolding. They do tend to the more “column sized” size of the spectrum, and I suspect bullets instead of line breaks, along with a few more formatting insights could have assisted here, but it is also using a ? ? layout, with some notes in that ? that help keep things on track. There’s a decent amount of stuff in each room that I suspect it just crosses the line in to needing a bit more thought. 

I’m not the biggest fan of the hooks. They are the rather basic sort or being hired, etc, but do include a “raising the Stakes” line in each that mentions things like “Raise the stakes: the PCs have a personal investment in the latest shipment” or “Raise the stakes: the PCs have a personal connection to the survivor.” I can see a certain appeal there in a well crafted one. Solving a problem, like the shipping issue, for one of the parties schemes seems like fair game, while I always raise an eyebrow at including the parties personal connections; this is why PCs don’t create those, as fodder for a DM to leverage … ever the hobo. 

The ending here leaves me a little nonplussed. Your goal is to light the beacon to warn away the ship. The keepers and hunt for oil adds complications. But, in doing so, we find that the keepers were right to douse it … lighting it summons an abomination from under the waves, the reason WHY they doused the light. I’m not gonna die on this hill, it’s not the end of the world. But you know the American spirit. Finally, PC’s tend to be resourceful. I suspect the storm mitigates the “light a different “approach, and if the party can find a way past that issue then more power to them. There are, also, some alternatives presented as opportunities, a flare, a seized up foghorn, that could be used to find a better way to manage the outcome. A few words of advice in this area could have been appreciated. Remember kids, when setting out to do something, always bring all the apres you need with you to do the minimum job, just in case the former keepers have hidden/used everything.

An excellent adventure. Small and high quality, providing alternative options to the party if they are smart enough to take advantage. The designer has two other publications, both for Mouseritter. I’m not generally interested in that, but I may take the plunge to see if they match the quality and can perhaps be “translated’ on the fly for more general audiences.

This is Pay What You Want at itch.io, with a suggested price of $2. There’s no explicit preview, but there are a few screenshots that give you an art style and layout vibe if you squint. (Although I think they are a bit misleading in the wrong way; you get an “art first’ vibe from them that I don’t actually think is present.) And, I guess, as PWYW, the entire thing could be considered a preview.

https://cloud-press-publishing.itch.io/turn-it-off

By Matthew Jennings
Missspire Publications
OSR
Levels 5-8

So, you have helped your brothers deliver your family’s hard cider all over these valleys and you’ve never even heard of Arcadia. When you asked the parents about helping Rigs out with a delivery, they dispar- aged the idea. Said it was “out past Broken Valley… straight up a mountain…in giant and barbarian territory … a bad idea”

This 129 page heartbreaker uses seventeen pages to describe a ruined village full of kobolds and a red dragon. Your level eights are helping a mary sue move and hew new house isn’t working out right. It is a classic heartbreaker, full of wall of text, extraneous detail, disorganized, and conversational. I’m not even sure how you run this. 

Ah, the heartbreaker. Let us wax poetic on the creations of a single designer with a vision of what they want, and falling far short of reaching it. I salute you, and your singular visions, even if I ant absolutely nothing to do with them. GenCon approaches, and I’ve always to have a booth where I just sell heartbreaks and my Worst list. There are many ways for me to not want to have anything to do with an adventure, and a heartbreaker is perhaps the saddest.

You’re old buddy RIgs wants you to help move Karen. You are levels five to eight, so, sure, why not? In this adventure your old buddy is a level 3 in like five different classes, Karen the Herbalist is a level seven magic user, and the old hag living on the mountainside is a Level eleven cleric and a level five illusionist. Which, maybe, makes sense because one of the towns has a golem factory where they make and export them. This is not my D&D style. It sets my teeth on edge and reminds me of the bad old days of adventures with Sphere of Annihilation garbage disposals. But, whatever you’re in to I guess.

This is a single column wall of text adventure and regional setting. I guess it describes “The Valleys” and then has a small adventure set in it. For level five through eights. Again, we can see that “delivering your families hard cider” and “levels five through eight” is clearly a sore point with me. Anyway, the first ninety or so pages describe, abstractly but in many words, the various locations in the valley. Then there’s the adventure of about twenty pages, and then a description of the various magic items and creatures. Is it a regional guide with an adventure in it? I don’t know, the product description makes it sounds an adventure.

I really can’t emphasize enough the mess of the text. Things are just dropped in to it without much thought. Your hooks, with your buddy RIggs, appears on page seventeen in the appropriate physical location where he might be found. And then seventy pages later comes the adventure. WHich then starts with “Karen will send the boychild that didn’t runaway on the porch off with a handful

of gold coins to fetch some lunch for her friends,” Uh. Ok. Sure. Time to refer back to page whatever earlier in the adventure to find Karens home, I guess. You’re gonna be doing a lot of flipping in this adventure.

So, the adventure. You show up, have a long and tedious lunch with Karen, who you are instructed to be as long-winded and rambling as possible, then you help Karen move in to her new home.  Which involves going through a trunk to the connected magic trunk, coming out in the ruined village, and fighting a bunch of kobolds and a 10HD red dragon. Oh, and Karen is with you the entire way. Invisible. And when you reach the dragon then “Karen ends the fight almost before it gets started with a lucky Polymorph Other, changing the dragon into a blood raven.” Groovy, I guess. That IS the role of a mary sue. Anyway, so you’re fighting kobolds. As level five through eights. A large group is the kobold common room with fifty in it. Fifteen males, 25 females and ten children. So, fifteen kobolds. Dump in a fireball, I guess? Anyway, the ruined town has about twelve locations, one being the clocktower with the dragon it. 

It is TEDIUM, beyond words, to wade through. Information is scattered everywhere. A section heading may be important or it may be just more background information. And, given the page count, it is almost always fluff. Unless of course you actually needed it. And the whole conversation tone of the long form paragraphs … There’s this thing that some event based adventures do. FIrst this happens and then this and then this and then this. This isn’t really scene based, in the way those are (and, I’m differentiating between scenes and the “first this then this” style) but the encounters, the various keys, many are in this format. And sometimes the format, the conversation, runs across rooms. And then there are just other things dropped in out of nowhere. “Karen will ask what the burned corpse smells like. If the answer is “cinnamon”, she’ll know there is a female red dragon involved” Uh. Ok. Does it, in fact, smell like cinnamon? I don’t know. I guess if I go wade through everything else I can see its a female red dragon somewhere in the adventure and then make the inference? It’s just bizarre, these random assumptions coming out of nowhere with no context to them. Second person read-aloud abounds “You pass an iron brazier upon entry that fills the room with the smell of sickly sweet herbs and incense but all you really notice is the idol of Naama on the far wall.” except it’s not really read-aloud, in the traditional sense? It’s not set apart and you really wouldn’t know its read-aloud except for the fact that there’s some second-person tenses to it. It’s all just a mass of text, with a running conversation throughout, changing tenses, changing tone, changing meaning and purpose, willy nilly. It’s a fucking stream of consciousness adventure. Which can be a fun way to write and deliver SOME sorts of entertainment information (like a review …) but is absolutely terrible in a piece of reference material. 

There’s not much here. It’s a regional setting, I guess. The actual adventure is a nightmare of finding information, scattered throughout the book seemingly at random. I know, I bitch about organization a lot, but this is just on a whole other level. Imagine I put half of the room one description on page 18 and the other half on page 86. The whole tone (which, I admit, is a matter of taste) is just off with the level 5-8 thing and the hard cider thing and the helping a chick move thing. The mary sue. The kobolds as enemies? Second person? I salute the hubris, but am horrified by the result. 

This is $4 at DriveThu. The preview is six pages, and is actually the first six pages of the actual adventure portion. So, decent job. Check it out. It really does a decent job of conveying in a nutshell the issues.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524001/the-valleys-a-grunions-and-flagons-mirrspire-module?1892600

EDIT: I take it back. It’s not a heartbreaker. Future Symbolism …

By Allan Bollinger
Black Dice Games
Cresthaven
Level 1

Something has awakened beneath Black Hollow, and the veil that once separated the world of men from deeper horrors is beginning to thin.

This twenty page adventure uses all twenty pages in a meaningless flaccid jerk off that never pays off in the end. Self-indulgent and purple prose with over explained situations that MEAN NOTHING. 

As I was going through this I had this great schtick I was going to use. I was going to quote various parts of te purple prose and then just say something like “I’m going to kill myself” after each section. And then I started to get worried. The page count kept creeping up. I suddenly only had two pages left and the adventure had not started. Ought oh. So, the designer has denied you, gentle reader, of my most excellent purple prose quoting and instead I get to do this.

FUCK YOU!

You know those fucking tick-toks that cut off the ending? All that edging and lead in and no pay off? Making you go watch part two (which is never fucking posted …) Fucking click bait piece of shits. Well guess what the fuck this adventure is? 

The adventure ends with instructions for the DM to conduct a survey! What fun!

• “What was your favorite moment from this session, and why?”
  • The part where it ended. Also, the moments of column long read-aloud allowed me time to rant about Connections. I appreciated that.
• “Was there anything that felt confusing or frustrating?
  • No. It was all pretty transparent. I mean, the whole Mayor Is An Imposter thing didn’t make sense at all, but that didn’t matter, so.
• “Did any part of the story or world-building pique your curiosity?”
  • I liked the part where the focus was on me and my character and my interaction with the game world. Oh, wait, there was none of that. 
• “On a scale of 1 to 10 …”
  • -9. Fuck you. Would rather sit through another six hours of simultaneous gallbladder and kidney stones.

A summary, I guess. Dude steps out of the shadows, is a prick, and tells you his boss wants to hire you. (He’s also a prick.) You maybe investigate a little, go to the village which is mostly abandoned, and only a day away, and question the four or five people left. To no actual end. You then go to the mine entrance and the adventure ends. It’s supposed to be horror themed. Building suspense and the like. It’s pretentious nonsense and fucking clickbait. 

THAT COSTS $20!!!!! I don’t like to mention price in reviews. It is what it is and I’ll pay a lot for a short adventure that is good. But, also, I resent the expensive adventures because I know they are gonna suck ass and spending $60/week on garbage kind of annoys me. I don’t have a good reason for this. It just feels wrong? But, also, This is 22 pages long, costs $20 and is not an actual adventure, in spite of what the naysayers will quote about lead in and roleplaying. I know how to do those fucking things. And I also know how to make an actual fucking adventure out of them. 

So, you gonna wander around your start village and ask some questions, maybe. Then you gonna go to the village in question and ask some questions. That’s the adventure. I guess there are some fire beetles you could disturb. And a Carrion Screecher Swarm, whatever that is. A little description might be nice. All we get is “As the party nears a ruined spiral-marked stone, a swarm bursts from the dead canopy.” Ok, sure, whatever. Just yell COMBAT and roll the dice, I guess. No creature description. No real encounter. Just getting attacked. Fun.

One of my favorite sections of the adventure is the “PURPOSE IN ADVENTURE STRUCTURE” notes that are pervasive in the text. Long, lengthy sections that tell us what the purpose of the encounter is. Which is inevitably build dread, foreshadow, offer subtle backstory. Over and over again the text takes, what, a quarter of a page each time, to explain what the fuck it is trying to do. Repetitiion is one thing, but fuck man, its repeated like a gazillion times in twenty different ways. I get it. Be creepy. Note, it’s not advice on HOW to be creepy, it just says the purpose is to be creepy. So, you know, worthless. “The Mayor’s House is a roleplaying-heavy location full of tension, contradictions, and concealed information.” Yup, just like every place in this adventure.

Column long read-aloud. Almost a page long in places. Purple prose. “The man is tall and pale, his features sharp as winter frost. His eyes are cloudy like river glass, and his black robes seem to drink in the fading light.” Ok, so, I know, I said write evocatively. There’s the “stick an adjective/adverb in front of each noun/verb” method of fucking that up, and then there’s the simile.metaphor method of fucking that up. There is so much of this that I was going to make it the entire review. “From the moment the characters leave Cresthaven, the sky above them hangs heavy and oppressive, a leaden gray promising no warmth” Jesus H Christ. “Only silence, and the growing sense that whatever lives here no longer remembers how to greet strangers.” I’m gonna kill myself. “The final pages are nothing but spirals. Something broke them. Something reached in and rewrote what they were.” If I had to sit through it then so do you. “A stern but sincere man, Father Harder warns against venturing into forgotten places. He’s begun leaving the chapel door unlocked at night, in case the light must Flee. “ In case the light must flee? 

Look, this is just a shit adventure. Or, as the initial observations noted, not an actual adventure at all. To put a cherry on top of it all, there are passages out of place in the text. As if there were a copy/paste error and chunks were just moved to other area. EASL I can forgive, but a final proof read? [Insert standard joke/comment here] I think not. Twenty fucking dollars for this. Twenty fucking dollars. For 22 pages of nothing.

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and shows you nothing but endless designer puffery.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/529970/echoes-of-black-hollow?1892600

I wonder if I’m still alive and out of surgery yet?