Ten Foot Pole

By Shanklimb
Self Published
Domenwood
Levels 2-3

A desperate mother, Brala, approaches the PCs – in a tavern, on the road, etc. When she awoke this morning, her infant was gone. Searching the woods around her cottage, she found tracks of hoof-marks, which she can lead you to. Crookhorns stole her baby, Lilith, and you need to find her before she becomes breakfast! 

This six page adventure uses three pages to describe ten rooms in a small cave lair. Weirdly incomprehensible in places, there’s no lead in so there’s no pay off. 

Hey, get an editor. If it’s not a real editor then have your worst enemy read over your adventure before you push the publish button. You want someone else to see what you’ve put down on paper. You’re too close to it. You already KNOW what you meant so your brain is filling in context that the rest of us fuckwits don’t have. And not your mom. You don’t want someone saying “its great!” You want someone to rip you apart. You don’t have to take every comment they make to heart but you want them making all of those comments.

Case in point. In one of the last rooms of the this adventure, nine or ten I think, there’s this witch buried under the dirt floor. Fuck if I know why. Anyway, if the witch Gwendolyne is with the party then the witch uncoverers herself and helps the party. There is no witch named Gwendolyn in the adventure. The name Gwendolyn doesn’t appear in the adventure anywhere except that sentence. And no, there’s no Gwen or anything like that. Have someone who hates you read the adventure. 

This next point is probably not relevant to anyone except me, who finds it very interesting. How much can you ‘lie’ in an adventure if it serves a purpose? This adventure is using the OSE description style, which some fuckwits overly hate on. But, anyway, in one of the early rooms, an entry tunnel, it read “Narrow (unsupported ceiling)”  I hate this. I hate it because of the hypocrisy it reveals. It is fucking dumb. Of course it’s unsupported. No other ceiling reads as supported. It’s not important to the adventure. It’s like putting (alive) after every creature and NPC description in an adventure in which that doesn’t matter in any special way. It’s fucking bullshit nonsense. Oh, yeah, and also it does accomplish the purpose of writing, which is to communicate a feeling to the reader. Narrow and unsupported certainly lends to a claustrophobic kind of vibe, yeah? I think the unsupported word helps conjure up a certain kind of imagery of the scene in the DMs head in a way that simply “Narrow” doesn’t communicate. So, it’s doing a great job, adding the superfluous Unsupported word, using the language in a way needed to communicate the overall vibe of the encounter. It just FEELS wrong to see it, although it’s just as right if you were to scan this in order to run it. You are allowed to twist and turn and push and pull the language in any way needed in order to communicate the overall impact the description is supposed to have. My ‘padding!’ hat hates it and yet I cannot deny that it is effective.

Looking at that tunnel entry, the description reads “Narrow (unsupported ceiling). Four

dead crookhorns (throats carefully slit, blood still fresh). Two dead women (adolescent, impaled)” I find that some striking imagery. Throats slit. Adolescent impaled women. That’s pretty nice. Vivid. A pretty decent description. And, also, when you imagine impalement, that’s some vlad stuff, right? With the pole in the ground? No, I don’t think so. While the description is quite vivid I THINK that the women were just speared, like in the middle of battle. Later, we find some other witches in the complex and I think its clear from their entries that they attempted a raid and that there was a battle in that tunnel, the witches doing some throat slitting and a couple of them getting stabbed with spears. So, striking imagery, but, perhaps, not quite accurate. 

The set up here is a little confusing. A woman finds you and says her baby was just taken. It’s suggested that this could be in a tavern, but I don’t think that makes sense, from a How a Community Reacts standpoint, the other option being on the road which I think works much better. Anyway, there’s some QUITE confusing text that follows. I think the witches kidnapped the baby, took it to their cave lair (the dungeon) and then it was invaded by the Crookhorns and their leader, let’s call her a hag. They want to kill witches and/or convert them in to their messiah. And, anyway, they don’t care about the baby AND the witches were mistaken, the baby they kidnapped was the wrong one. Actually, I think the witches think the baby is their messiah also. It’s a confusing mess and after several read-throughs I’m still not sure I have things straight.  There’s little lead in here, just the frantic woman and some tracks. This, I suspect, does not bode well for the complex situation that I think the designer is trying to get across across here, with the various goals and the creature factions mistaken identities, the lair invasion, etc. But the ‘thrust in to the middle of it’ thing doesn’t work well without the context needed, or any buy in. Not the greatest fault for a site based adventure, but, also, no real stakes except maybe for the baby, motivating the party to do anything other than just putting everyone to the torch.

Other than this, the adventure is mostly a hack. You can talk to some of the witches, and rescue some/all of them that are left alive, but no mention of rewards for their troubles. I think, maybe, three rooms with encounters, maybe more if you just start stabbing captured/trapped witches. They seem to want to talk a bit, but evasive about answers, which, in Brycelandia means you get to tell your story to Odin.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The preview is three pages, which shows you the overview and the first page of four encounters, so, good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/584721/the-baby-in-the-briar-a-dolmenwood-adventure?1892600

By Ron Meischker
Orange Cat Games
Castles & Crusades
Levels 4-6

An ancient tomb. A fading bard. A new generation of heroes. The venerable adventurer, Targan the Bard, has learned about a long-forgotten ancient tomb and has chosen your adventuring party to explore it. He is only asking one thing in return… Are you ready to make history?

This sixteen page adventure uses six pages to describe nine rooms in a linear tomb dungeon. Long italics second-person read-aloud. Linear. Long DM text. And, ultimately, Just Another Tomb Adventure.

It’s a nine room linear tomb dungeon that turns out to be A Test To See If You’re Worthy, the 1,936,736 Test/Challenge dungeon I’ve reviewed in this blogs short history. Seriously, it feels like there’s more of these things than there are orcs in a hole. At this point it’s all rote: linear dungeon. Some trap rooms. Some guardians. But, we must judge each thing on their own merits, so, how about this iteration of the nine linear room trap/guardian challenge/test dungeon tomb? 

I’m not sure I have much interesting to say. It’s got a lot of read-aloud, which is not good. People don’t pay attention when long sections of read-aloud come trotting out. The read-aloud is in italics, sometimes almost half a column, which is not good. Long sections of italics, or any funky font, are hard to read for the DM. It’s using a second person writing style, with lots of “you”, which is not good. It robs the room of immersion as it ignores the varied style of play that individual parties will engage in. “None of us have eyes you clod!” is hyperbolic but gets the point across. I do, however, admire the ability of the party to all have built-in DeWalt leaser measurement devices so they know from the read-aloud that a ceiling is 18.5” feet high in the first sentence. Whatever. Nothing to see, move along, move along.

The DM text is long and padded out. I think in one room I counter three times that the party will need light to see. Do they need oxygen to breathe? I know, it sounds nit-picky. But it’s pure padding. It’s like saying they need air to breathe or some other obvious statement. Multiple times. This kind of shit gets in the way. It gets in the way of the DM scanning the text to find the information they need and it gets in the way of the designer, who is distracted by this nonsense instead of working the room harder. 

And the DM padding. Oh my. “ENTERING THE TOMB – This is the first challenge the party will face. The party encounters an obstacle immediately upon reaching the tomb: a massive obstruction blocking the entrance. The party will need to find a way to move the slab.” This is all preamble. Then there’s the read-aloud. Then theres the actual DM text of the blockage. There’s no point of the preamble. And it’s like this everywhere. Just repetition for the sake of repetition. 

The flooding chamber trap. The stone crush trap. The mirror of opposition trap. The water weird in the fountain. The required false tomb. The mummy that wears an amulet that makes it immune to turn undead. (Thanks B2!) 

It’s a small linear tomb test dungeon, just like all of the small linear tomb test dungeons that have come before. I am annoyed by how cookie cutter it is.

The one thing that isn’t cookie cutter is the build. It’s packed dirt and peat moss and bog wood. You know, the kind of wood that is sunken and preserved and turns to like iron? The adventure makes a big deal of the lack of stone and how the bog wood is the major construction item. But it’s not to any end. It doesn’t play any part in the dungeon at all. Also, isn’t that wood super expensive, and always has been? Mining the dungeon for the wood would be of great profit. Why base the entire dungeon on this window dressing if you’re not ging to do anything with it?

So, just the standard straight line tomb, with all of the seemingly required parts of that. Nothing special. But, lots of padding and a read-aloud that make it hard to dig through and run.

This is $12 at DriveThru. There is no preview. There needs to be a preview, showing a few encounters, so a potential buyer can get a sense of things before they commit to the spend. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/569173/tomb-of-the-ancient-moor-king-castles-and-crusades?1892600

By Scott_M
First Era Adventures
OSRIC
Levels 1-2

Clinging to a rugged mountainside, this once-magnificent palace of a self-styled empress stands burned-out and abandoned, though its dire ivory tower yet stands, unblemished. Beneath the toppled estate sprawls a maze of chambers dedicated to the mad Empress Helene’s perverse delectations. Within may be found wondrous treasures and terrible dangers alike. Only the foolhardy dare venture there now. The few brave explorers who tested it did return with riches—and a steadfast refusal to ever try their luck in the dungeon again.

This ten page adventure presents one level of an old school megadungeon. A solid work with good ideas, it captures the spirit of OSR play, even if the theming is light.

What an interesting dungeon level! This is the first level (although it seems like there’s an “outside” level also) of a megadungeon. Mumble mumble Imperial Queen mumble mumble. Anyway, this thing is doing a pretty decent job in presenting an old school megadungeon level. There’s a mix between traps, secrets, hacking, and specials. This FEELS like a dungeon out of the early days. 

Level one has some orcs and “evil men” (berserkers) having invaded the level and pushing the hobgoblins down to level two. This is the major level theme, with a few undead and vermin and such scattered about also. One of the first rooms reads “Fragments of rotting wall tapestries dangle from iron rods. A torch gutters on the NE wall. Room is filled with flies and stinks of death from 3 hobgoblins impaled on wooden stakes (dead ~3 weeks, stripped and mutilated, facing S wall). N door is locked and barred (–1 Open Doors).” There are two components here, the writing style and the mechanics. The mechanics here are terse. There’s enough facts and numbers for the DM to get a rough idea of what is going on and then to interpret for themselves. I like this style. As a DM I want a little guidance on how to frame things, how hard things should be, etc, but I don’t want a full on prescriptive page of guidance for every detail of the thing, be it a room, door, or magic item. The room description is decent enough. A GUTTERing torch. IMPALED bodies. ROTTing and DANGLing. Flies and the stink of death. It’s doing a good job of sticking in adjectives and adverbs to help bring life and specificity to the rooms objects. In another room we have “The room reeks of sweat and smoke. Three filthy, degenerate hillmen squat around a copper brazier, poking at smoldering coals.”Reeking of sweat and smoke is a good sentence. And I love a good berserker description that calls them filthy and degenerate hillmen. It didn’t call them berserkers. Instead it described the people. I wish every adventure described how the party interacted with something instead of just slamming in a monster type. It feels visceral, yeah? It’s doing a pretty good job keeping the single-column room descriptions short and evocative. It’s not rock star quality but it  is solid solid work, room after room.

There are a variety of specials in this as well, but which I think I mean interactivity beyond stabbin. Traps blah blah blah. But, also, a Wizard Vault “Heavy iron door (–2 Open Doors) has 3 separate locks and is also Wizard-locked (at 12th level).” There’s something for the party to come back to later, yeah?  In another room “The walls are decorated with bas reliefs depicting the cutthroat adventures of a frog-headed knight in plate mail wielding a military pick” First, I love that. Frog-headed. Military pick. CUTTHROAT adventures. Nice job on that little bit. There’s a fountain in the room  with murky scummy water with a frog statue spitting water in to it. Opening the mouth reveals loot. Purifying the water causes a suit of +1 plat mail (with the head of a frog) to rise, all Excalibur like, from the pool (where it otherwise is not present.) Hidden depth, yeah? Fuck with shit. Do the right thing. Be rewarded. There are teleport hallways, a secret door middle chamber. Hidden loot inside of little niches, statues to mess with. It’s not set pieces or a funhouse, but rather those kinds of weird dungeon things that you find in old school exploratory dungeons. There are a few weird creatures as well for the party to figure out, like a vortex in ajar that is a little whirlwind that will trap someone inside of it. Yes yes, everything has been done before, but its not mainstream and I like it as a great example of dungeon weirdness that still makes sense.

The map is relatively complex, with, I think, five sets of stairs on it? Teleport hallways, pits, secret doors abound. Loops. I could quibble with there not being monsters on the map, always on features no on the page, or a lack of dungeon environments on the map, like same level stairs, etc, to liven things up. Those would all improve things but the map is also not doing anything wrong and is large enough to encourage exploratory play, which is more than welcome. 

There are some areas in this in which things could be more visceral and/or an appeal to mechanics is made when descriptive text would be better. I think the classic example is with a trapped chest: “The handle is trapped with contact poison.” That’s pretty classic. But, also, generic. I might trap is bubonic plague, or cyanide, or cholera shit smeared on thorns. Those are all much more grounded, much more specific, than a generic “contact poison.” Is contact poison bad? No. But cholera is always better. 

There’s also a bit of, oh I don’t know, genericism, in the level proper. What we;re looking at here is one level in a megadungeon and thusly it suffers from that episodic nature. The theming here is “ weird dungeon level one.” So, the elements of classic OSR weirdness are present but they don’t really serve a purpose. I’m not sure I understand the above ground portion or the levels before this, or get a sense of what they could be. There seems to be a lack of continuity, only in that I don’t really see what continuity there could be given the themeless nature of the level. 

To this end, I’m probably not going to review another level of this. I’ll instead wait a bit and grab all the rest of the levels and review it as whole the time I visit. And I WILL be doing that. This is a classic megadungeon level and I LUV a good megadungeon and good megadungeon level. I got no regerts on this one, and may bump it when I see the rest.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The whole thing is in the preview also, so, check it out.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582765/the-hurricane-dungeon-the-upper-works-level-1?1892600

By Howard Shirley
Parzoval Games
OSR
Level 1

A beautiful bride, a handsome groom, a starlit wedding… and GOBLINS! At least you have a wedding present for the young couple— a promise to rescue the kidnapped groom!

This 26 page adventure uses about six pages to describe ten rooms in a small goblin lair. Lots of read-aloud. Lots of stabbin. Lots of text, in general. Oh, also, your level ones get to save the world. *YAWN*

You’re at a wedding. You’ve haven’t brought your weapons and you’re not wearing you’re armor because you’re at a wedding. I mean, because you’re stooopid. The murder hobo trope wasn’t started by the players. Bad DM’s and bad designers are to blame, when when all you’ve ever cared about has been butchered. Anyway, the designer wants you to grab a smith hammer or the spit the pig is on, or a butcher knife and go chasing after the goblins who crash in and steal the groom. Goblins, a lot of them, wolf riders, shivving the old people. This is all the shitty hook, related over three agonizingly long pages of DM text and read-aloud. Anyway, you stab stab stab but you can’t win since it’s the hook and the groom gerd stolen by them and oh no you’ve got no weapons or armor and have to pick up what you can find and give chase to the goblins. 

Ok, so, second scene, you head in to the woods to give chase and come across two goblin wolf riders. Stab stab stab. Again. You keep going. You come to the goblins lair, a cave with a door in the mouth. You now have ten rooms to explore. You pull aggro if you’re loud at the front door, otherwise you just stab stab stab in every room. In the last stab stab stab room you meet the goblin shaman. The groom is on a throne in a trance and the shaman is doing his ritual thing. It takes him like a full hour to do it, after which The Evil One gets summoned in to the grooms body. Like, a level 36 evil cleric. Anyway, it takes an hour from then the party shows up at the rooms door, so, no hurry. You stab a bunch.

The text is single column and this thing is the poster child for why that’s a bad idea. The whole eye fatigue thing form scanning all the way right an left. Yeah yeah, it sounds like minor shit but it’s a real effect. And then the read-aloud is LONG. Like quarter page long. No one cares. After two or three sentences peoples attention starts to drift. You gotta keep the read-aloud short. And the text is LONG, in general. The goblin raid on the wedding takes like three pages to describe For goblins on wolf back to snag the groom. And then, in the cave section, it starts with like a ¾ page overview of what a captured goblin might know. With no formatting at all so it’s just read the entire fucking thing and hope you stumble across whatever the party is asking about. START THE FUCKING SHOT WITH A BOLDED WORD. Jesus, man. 

Oh, what else, you start with a locate object spell, I guess to find the cave? Although the tracks are easy to follow? You also start with a very high level dispel magic scroll tht can be used to break the ritual. You know, whenever you find a bunch of potions of water breathing laying by the side of the road then its time to head up in to the hills. You GOTTA write an adventure where you don’t need this deus ex shit. Why the fuck does it have to be the end of the world at level one, at the first adventure?! (Although … that’s a fun campaign. EVERY session has the party saving the world. Betty the housekeeper. Frank the night soil dude, EVERYONE is trying to end the world. TO save it you must end them all. Everyone in the world!)  You can fuck around and break the conventions, but do it for a reason. Give them six of every magic item in game one. But on purpose. Because the resulting power struggles are the campaign. But, no, no Staves of Power at level one because you need that to overcome some specific challenge. Write the fucking adventure without needing that shit. 

So, you wade through a lot of poorly formatted and overly long text in a railroad setup, for no reason, in order to just stab a bunch of goblins. I’m not real sure what goes through peoples heads when they write these things. Its easy to say that the vision and implementation didn’t align. But, that should be obvious from looking at it, right? So why not work it harder instead of just pressing publish?

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. The last four are the hook and the goblin chase. They are a decent representation of what you’ll find inside. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582262/the-night-of-the-goblin?1892600

Also, you should see Night of the Hunter if you’ve not. It’s no Night of the Goblin, but, you know, what can be?

By M. Allen Hall
Self Published
OSE
Levels 2-3

The disappearance of Old Ilfen has left the wizard’s tower at the center of a power struggle. Lord Cargan wants to tear the tower down and replace it with a lighthouse. Skaarn and his pixie war band want to raid the dungeon below the tower and recover a magic item Ilfen once stole from them. Ilfen wants someone to help him get his body back. And at the bottom of the dungeon, the Green Ooze King wants to be left alone so it can seed other worlds with its spawn. Whether they want to help Cargan, Skaarn, Ilfen, or only themselves, your players’ characters will be drawn into Ilfen’s Halls to face the Green Ooze King and its minions.

This 34 page adventure presents twelve hexes and a small dungeon with twenty rooms in an “abandoned” wizards tower. It does a decent job of setting up a wizardly lair and in presenting several factions working against each other. Faction play follow through could be a bit better, and the hex and room descriptions get long in places, but the weirdo ooze monsters are a highlight.

Lord Rob is a decent dude. He also HATES the local wizard “made all the worse by the fact that the wizard seems oblivious to his hatred”, which makes him hate him even more. Wizard dude disappears so the lord decides to use the site of his island tower to build a lighthouse cause of all the shipwrecks. This in spite of the fact that there are better places on the island to build it. That is an excellent bit of pettiness there, love it. He’s sent a work crew, led by a foreman (who’d rather building in the better spot on the isle) and the work crew is having trouble. Explosions while working on the tower. Monsters coming out of the forest to attack the camp. Sometimes the tower, being unblocked from the top, seems to regrow. There are some pixies hanging about, unknown to anyone, who are trying to get in the tower to recover a magic crown, and they are the cause of the shadow monsters coming out of the forest. The wizard, of course, if not dead. His body is in the Ooze King in the basement and his head is floating around the rest of the dungeon, unable to communicate but REALLY wanting to be reunited with his body once the ooze king is dead. Thus we have the laborers, mercenaries hired to protect the laborers, the fey, and then the wizard head all mucking about the area with different goals. Add to this The Party. I do love a good fireworks show in a gasoline factory. 

The wizard tower in particular, and the rest of the island generally, has a decent amount of stuff to fuck with. Weird machines to repair, stone circles and ley lines to teleport with, places to get your soul sucked out and, of course, a few small missions from the pixies, in particular, to augment the greater goals the factions have. There are some decent little moments as well, such as when mercenary guards question the party, as laborours, if they are allowed to be in the area. Just a sentence and it does a good job prompting the DM in such a way to add life to the game. The monsters, mostly things that can only be hurt by fire, add a nice little puzzle element to the combat as the party tries to figure out how to hurt ooze things.

Hexes are about a page and dungeon keys are about a column, in general. This is where things start to get rough for me. Formatting is decent with bullets and bolding and indents, but there is only so much cognitive space for a DM to have. It’s a tricky problem, rooms with depth add so much to the game, rooms with multiple elements, but then the challenge becomes the ability of the DM to handle all of the information. The hexes, in particular, tend to run a bit long and complicated to run, or, perhaps, to keep all of the elements straight in ones head. 

For all of the potential that the faction play provides it falls down in the execution. While the factions have these major goals there is not a lot, if any, provided for handling the consequences of play. How do the laborers react, or the mercs, or the pixies. Raw violence? How? Surely they are not standing still while the party works against them and they find out. This sort of guidance is just not present. And yet it would add so much to play and the use of the factions in such a small environment. 

The concept here is an old one: making things seem like they are real. Giving the appearance of depth. This allows for a certain kind of immersion, and buy in from the PLAYERS in to the game world situation. This is what an evocative room description does, it helps the DM bring that to life. This is what realistic motivations with NPCs does, the relatability helps. That specificity that I’m always harping on and on about, it enables it. It’s not detail. Detail alone is almost always useless. A DM can make up detail, especially if the designer has done their job well in relating a room and/or situation. But the specificity, that is core to the designer bringing their ideas to life. Looking at the merc situation, above, that I mentioned, the mercs challenging the party. You’re getting hassled man. By the cops. By the mall security guard. By the doorman. Who can’t relate to this, both personally and in the many media depictions? It’s a petty annoyance and it GRATES on you. Fucking POS, how about I just stab you 196 times in the throat and then we’ll see who authorized to be in this area. And that’s in the case where I AM authorized to be in the area. It’s one fucking sentence, but it IMPLIES so much more. That’s good writing. That’s a good situation. That’s exactly the sort of specificity that adventures should put forward. Why the fuck do I care about a dudes eye color or hairstyle, unless its pertinent to the game? No, the fact that he’s a bully, or holds a petty grudge or something, that’s what brings the noise. 

It’s an ok adventure. Which means very little makes it stand out except that it’s not a disaster of an adventure. But it’s also not a good adventure that I get excited about when I think about running it. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. M. Allen Hall, why do you hate us, and freedom? Why do you think we should not see a couple of encounters before we spend our hard earned cash on this adventure? Stick in a few pages of preview. A hex or two and a room or two. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582152/the-green-ooze-king-for-cairn-and-ose?1892600

By Stadtjaeger
Self Published
Generic/Universal
"Low/Mid Levels"

Something went quiet in Frostholm. The mining outpost stopped sending word weeks ago. Company says it’s the weather. Locals won’t go check. A mother’s paying good money to anyone willing to find her son — a scholar who went up chasing some old civilization and never came back.

This thirty page adventure presents a small village investigation and a dev le in to a mine with about eight rooms, plus a couple of overland events before and after. It’s more of a scene based “Experience” than an adventure, with the designer describing it as no-win. The writing is purple and there is no loot to be gained. 

This has elements of War Against the Chtorr, in that an alien organisms is trying to chtorraform the planet. You head up to a snowy mining camp that no one has heard from and have a few spooky things happen along the way. At the camp you poke around the buildings and find bodies and more eerie stuff. You survive (presumably) a night attack by a swarm of alien insects and head to the mine the next day. There you might get infected with spores in the weird crystal/plant environment and find a dude in an alien pod. If you free him then an unbeatable monster appears. Fleeing from it you fight hordes of crystal block constructs. You’re supposed to figure out to seal the mine shaft with some explosives you find. On the way back down the mountain, with the dude you found, a different unbeatable monster appears, klils the dude, and takes off for the stars. The dude you found has a book and if you perform the ritual in it then a portal opens in which armies of alien life forms come through to finish chtorraforming the planet. 

The vibe here is similar to those killer LotFP adventures. You know, you delve in and try to get loot while avoiding the doomsday scenario that is sure to happen. Maybe mix in a little Call oc Cthulhu where messing with books will fuck you up. Except, there’s not really any loot here. I find this annoying and it makes me want to put this solidly in to the Modern Adventure category where you’re just fucking around together at a table instead of gaming. Yeah yeah, there are different ways to have fun, but I prefer the one where the story is the one the party makes. But, with that in mind …

This is also a generic/universal adventure. Which means a lack of stats. You get some general “there should be twice as many creatures as party members” and other story based mechanics like “the attacks last until dawn” kind of stuff with a few “they should take one hit to kill” sorts of things thrown in. This, again, contributes to the more story based approach that the adventure is taking. 

It DOES do a fairly decent job with the investigation and lead in to the mine. You get a few eerie things happening on the trail to the mining town, dogs nervous, a body frozen in the snow and so on. And the town investigation is also likewise eerie. Strange scratch marks covering all of the buildings, skeletons huddled in corners stripped of their flesh or other clearly holed up and waited to die. The whole “meal still on the table” sort of thing. At one point you can’t get in to tone of the village buildings and have to go in a window to find the door blockaded. Nice.The whole preamble to the ride os decently done, in what is presented if not in its form.

Any by form, I mention that because of the writing style. It’s very much heavy with first this thing happens and then this thing happens and keep the party from doing X and so on. This is then exacerbated by a certain conversational style of writing, HEAVY with purple text. “The walls have stopped pretending to be stone. What covers them now is something else, layered thick like scar tissue over a wound that never closed — glistening, faintly pink where the light catches it, soft enough that you do not want to touch it and cannot stop noticing that you have to.” Or something like “Something is coming, but not in a hurry, It doesnt need to.” That least bit being a read-aloud line. 

While this MIGHT work in in the village/investigation portion, it breaks down in the mine where it tends to continue. The mine is mostly just poking around on a museum trip, looking at the weird plant life that might infect you with something only very high level magic can cure. There are a couple of light problem solving situations, like getting down the central shaft, but you’re not doing much until you find the dude in the alien pod thingy.

At this point all of the stillness disappears. The unbeatable monster appears as well as the hordes of lesser crystal golems. You’re supposed to run away. That’s the point of the entire adventure. Run away, beat off the crystal golems while ascending the shaft and, hopefully, sealing it lest the horrors are loosed upon the world. 

This is all, essentially, a railroad. It’s an experience. Follow the tracks laid down and survive and “win” by escaping with a sealed shaft,. If you don’t guess what the designer wants you you to do then die 

The conversational writing style makes running it difficult, and the purple prose if so bad that I’m not sure I could read it with a straight face. Even when it’s not read-aloud the DM will need to wade through it and try to translate it to something evocative for the party, which is not going to be easy.

The generic/Universal curse strikes again. Just write it traditionally and stat it for B/X and STILL call it generic/universal. Once you get good, as a writer, THEN you can branch out to more experimental styles. But you gotta learn to walk first.

This is $4 at DriveThru.The preview is the first three pages, which are all, essentially, designer notes. A few encounters needed to be included so a potential buyer can get a sense of what they are buying before they do so.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/578991/they-come-at-night?1892600

By Oliver Müller, Prizren Buçpapaj
Voltaria Games
OSE
Level 1

A village is silent. None dares to speak out loud anymore, for fear of invoking the curse of the bell. A nun was burned 300 years ago, because she was accused of having consorted with a demon who stole the voices of his victims. The same demon who is bound to the bell of the ancient belltower in the center of the village. Will your party of adventurers brave the depths of the old catacombs to lift the curse and right the wrongs from the past, or will they accidentally unleash an even greater evil?

This twelve page adventure presents eleven rooms on two levels of a small dungeon under a ruined monastery. It’s a little dull and lacks flavour but is far from the worst things ever written. 

Man, my compliments are really getting out of hand, aren’t they? But, seriously, something seems to have happened with adventures. Some of them don’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. Now, I’m not saying they are good, or even regertful, but, they don’t just absolutely suck ass. I don’t know how many times in, what, fifteen years, that I’ve seen stuff that is just Meh, but I’ve been seeing it a lot lately. Yeah! The world is getting better! “You won’t hate everything about your life if you purchase this adventure!” That’s right, I’m available for writing ad copy! If this trend continues I may be out of a non-job. Because as much as I love a good adventure the blog only exists because I REALLY hate bad ones. “Not writing crap” seems like such a simple idea, at least in theory.

You show in a village. The people won’t talk to you. They will grunt at you. They will make arm gestures. Some will write notes. (Booo literacy!) But they won’t talk. Every time someone tells a lie then the bell in the old ruined monastery rings, louder and louder. Popping on over you can go up the bell tower, which contains only the bell, or you can go down in to the dungeon and it’s small handful of rooms. Down there you will fight a few 1hp undead, a few skeletons, and meet the ghost of a chick burned alive who cursed the monks. The bell contains the essence of a demon, which is why the monastery exists. The chick was a part of the monastery, the monks lied and got her burned. The curse infected the bell. Destroy the bell and the demon gets out. Kill the ghost of the chick and the bell cracks and the demon gets out. You’re supposed to find the one-charge hammer of banishment and use it on the ghost, putting her to rest while the bell remains intact and freeing it of the “lie and the bell rings” curse. 

The hooks are the usual low-effort stuff of get hired, with one having the party just arriving at the village and stumbling in to things. One of the best parts of the adventures is a throw away line in that hook that has an old woman attacking the party with a broom if they speak. That’s the kind of specificity that makes an adventure shine. It’s short and fits in perfectly with a bunch of scared villagers. Another line has advice to the DM in making the bell ring every time someone in the party tells a lie. A nice touch. Finally, n the dungeon are a number of cubbies with bones in them, catacombs like. In one cubby the skeletons still have jewelry on them! Time to get a lootin! Except it’s a cube, the remains of other adventurers in it. Very nice integration of a classic monster in to an adventure in such a way that makes it a surprise. All of those “empty” bone reliquaries pay off in a nice monster attack. That’s how you lure a party in to a classic monster.

The descriptions here are not terrible, although they are not really evocative either. The Sacrist reads “8. SACRISTY Wardrobe: There is a rotting wardrobe containing 1d4 robes for mess. They are damp and filled with holes, but they will prevent the skeletons from attacking.  Box: Used to store religious tools for the mess, which have been hidden in the secret treasure room when the monastery was abandoned.” This has some line breaks in it, I’m condensing it here. It’s easy enough to follow and, while the length is not great it’s also not a burden. It comes across as rather mundane, and doesn’t really do a great job of painting an evocative picture of the room, being more fact based than impressions. Note that there is no room summary, and in some places this gets awkward, such as in one room with zombies that only show up at the last sections. These sorts of things, the most obvious thing or something likely to be of import immediately, should really ne higher up in a description. “Oh, yeah, there are also some zombies here” is not the way to run a D&D game. This means takingin the entire room description before relying it to the party rather than a descriptive style that builds with first impressions and follow on detail. Thus the text length does come  to play when as being of note.

It doesn’t feel like a spooky monastery with shit going on, although thats what it is. The titular bell tower, while having the mostimportant thing in the adventure, the bell, is almost an afterthought, with the focus being the dungeon under the tower. The bell tolling helps, but it needed more build up or, interestingly, less, almost as an aafterthought. Either would have worked better, I think.

This is an EASL adventure, with some AI to help with the translation, the adventure discloses. This is probably fine. I suspect some of the mundanity in the descriptions comes from its EASL nature, but that’s to be expected.  “Grave chamber: It is an undecorated tomb with a single simple grave in the middle.” is a good example. Like, a dug grave, in a catacomb? I suspect we mean a stone sarcophagus? But, also, not exactly the height of evocative writing. There’s not a whole lot wrong here, it just doesn’t stand out as something I’d like to run. Also, put the level range is IN the adventure. Put it on the cover or in the marketing blurb.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is the first three pages. Another page of encounters would have been nice, to get a true sense of the adventure keys.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/581426/lies-at-the-bell-tower?1892600

Vestiges?
Self Publised
OSR? 5e.
Level 2

Every night, someone climbs down into a burial mound sealed for sixty years and declared “inactive.” He’s counting something on a wall, in chalk. No one knows who, or why — and the answer reaches far beyond one lone surveyor.

This 21 page adventure uses four pages to describe six scenes, one having five rooms. Is it AI slop? It is pretentious? You now longer have to choose, now it can be both! It’s also barely comprehensible. 

This was a request, but the designer, as it turns out. I’m always a little bemused when someone wants ME to review something they wrote. Any publicity is good publicity? I mean, there are more than a handful of reviewers that will just give you five stars, why not go there? 

And then there’s the statement in the request that the line drawings are AI. Sure, ok. I don’t actually care about AI. I feel about it the way I feel about Mork Borg: there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, it just turns out it’s enabling a lot of garbage. Because, you see, while the designer disclosed the use of AI art to me, the adventure has this disclaimer at he bottom of the title page: “The illustrations in this work were created using generative AI tools, under art direction. Part of the content was developed with the help of AI, which was also used for proofreading and for translation. The whole — setting, rules, text — was conceived, directed, reviewed and approved by its author.” So, you used AI to write it and then write a deceptive missive to me in order to get me to review it because, I suspect, you knew that the use of AI in writing would be a no go. Except I don/t care about the use of AI. I care about the end result, and the fact that you engaged in a deceptive practice. I know, damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right? I note that the last sentence in that disclaimer basically just says “I used AI” using different words and notably does NOT say that someone write this. Just that they directed the writing of it. Having saif all that, I don’t understand WHY someone would use AI in a creative work. Isn’t that the point, the process of creation? Isn’t that a major joy in life? If it’s not then why the fuck are you engaging in it? Like most modern shams, this is hollow. Nice art. Nice page layouts and backgrounds. The APPEARANCE of quality. And it’s all to the end of hiding the word-guesser slop underneath. 

The text here just positively drips with AI mannerisms. Which is a euphemism for overwritten purple prose. It anyone wants to be a failed fantasy author, it’s the AI agents. “A Cabinet station: plain, functional, without a single ornament. It is not a tomb, it is an instrument, and it still works. At this depth nothing explains itself at first glance” Uh huh. Purple slop. “But he can read a depth, feel a draught and tell when a corridor is lying, which is worth more than a map.” Uh huh.Purple slop. “The threshold says it to anyone who looks: a sword bent double, a crushed helm, scattered iron filings — everything that carried iron and came too close” Purple slop. 

It doesn’t help that this is some walking simulator. “It is also a way into Vestiges, a game of archaeological fantasy in which you do not loot dungeons: you survey what dead worlds left behind, and you decide what to do with what you have understood.” I decide to sell it for money and power. “A Guild of scholars, the League of Nyméria, funds the expeditions, buys up the finds, and decides what the world is allowed to know.” Wrong! My sword decides that. “The scenario is not won by killing Orin. It is played by deciding what to do with a man who counts in spite of himself, and to whom the count is handed.” But, it’s a lot easier, I’d say, if I just stab him? So, pretentious setting. Oh, oh, also, you get the famous “ask the party a deep question” bullshit. In this case “Why do you go underground, when sensible people stay up top?” I do it as escapism for a shitty middle class wage slave life in order to have fun and as a pretext to spend time with friends. Why the fuck did you shortcut one of the few meaningful things in life, the act of creation, and instead resort to AI slop?

With pretentious interactivity. I’m not sure you actually DO anything in this. There is certainly no conflict. There are a few die rolls, which you can’t really roll to continue with. I guess, once you walk to the end you get to decide who to seel the COUNTER out to, if anyone? It’s not meaningful though. There’s not real consequence for anything. 

Bolding is used seemingly at random. The entire text is nigh incomprehensible because of the AI. I THINK I could give a somewhat accurate overview, although none of the motivations make sense. At some point in one of the railroad scenes it says something like “The real thread is pulled at a College cartographer’s, who sells copies of old surveys.” So, this is out of nowhere, I think, after you pursue the clue given to you at the start, which is a dead end/fake. How you end up at the Cartographers COllege, which has not been mentioned previously, is beyond me. At the end, during your one choice, you get this text “The return is the real fight, and it is fought without weapons. Three parties learn, within a few days, that the group went down — and each of them wants the count. Bring them in in that order” Bring them in WHAT order? The people mentioned, the table the table that follows, there is little in the way of consistency that would let you figure out what is going on here. 

This is just a mess. An AI mess. A pretentious AI mess. Even if you are in to walking simulator D&D this is a shitty version of it.

This is Name Your Own Price at Itch.

https://sylkaen.itch.io/rpg-sylkaen-en-the-hand-that-counts-en

By Close Reader
Oriental Mandarin Legend
OSE
Levels 1-2

In order to thank the PC for killing the monsters in his territory, the Boold[sic] Baron invited the players to come to the bright Red castle he built on the Wild Eagle Mountain.

This 28 page adventure presents seven-ish rooms in a scripted human sacrifice ceremony dungeon/scene/event. It has both EASL issues and is overly scripted. 

Disclaimer: I think this is a difficult review to write. I suspect strongly, based on the chinese characters in the text, that this is an EASL adventure and, further, an asian one. I love seeing non-tolkein fantasy and I don’t want to do anything to discourage EASL adventures, particularly from our chinese friends. But, also, there are EASL issues. The imagery in the writing doesn’t hit at all which is a problem given the subject matter and there are some areas, in the overview in particular, in which the language could be clearer on what is supposed to be going on, plot-wise. I’m not going to mention these things again in the review and encourage the designer to continue writing florid text, and, certainly, to continue writing adventures. 

You’re invited to the barons castle. Except, he didn’t actually invite you. It turns out that a priest, a spy in the castle, issued you the invitation. But, a carriage from the baron shows up to pick you up and you’re let in anyway. There’s a big banquet going down, but, right at the start this priest/spy dude tells you to go to your rooms and pack, and the baron reluctantly agrees. Also, the baron has drugged all of the food and wine and he and his cultists, also present as guests,will be capturing everyone to drag them below to sacrifice to their god. Also, the priest/spy invited you because he wanted a back up plan in case HE failed to stop the cult/sacrifices. Also, something else is going on with the ceremony because if you stop it then the cthulhu monster the worship will be freed and if you DONT stop it then his bonds are strengthened … so both the Blood baron cult leader AND the priest/spy are wrong about what will happen. Got it? Barely? Ok we’re on the same page.

The set up here makes little sense, from the invitation, to the baron excusing the party to their rooms. I’m not saying every setup has to be perfect, but there’s got to be some reasonableness to it for the party to buy in and for the DM to be able to expand upon things and run the situation. 

The hook, the carriage ride, arriving at the castle, the dinner, up to the party going to their rooms is all handled in a “first this and then this” kind of situation. It’s ALL hook. The presentation is not ideal and the “adventure” won’t really begin in a meaningful way until the party is in their room packing. At that point you can go explore the other bedroom on the second floor (and awfully small castle …) or go back to the main room to see the “end” of the feast and people getting hauled away, as well at the priest/spy getting gacked. Oh, and no leaving early, there’s some handwaving about there being “towers” with crossbowmen on them ready to shoot anyone who leaves. And it really is handwaving. This is not presented in any way as a tactical problem or in anyway a raid/sneak kind of thing, There are some minor notes, a sentence or two, to handle “the party eats the food” or “the party doesn’t go back to their rooms.”

The five room dungeon under the banquet hall (no maps of the upper floors/castle are provided) are the only traditional adventuring environment. Basically you fight giant worm things, a kind of body horror environment is attempted to be described, which doesn’t come across very well. I’ve generally pretty forgiving of EASL issues, but in this case the descriptions are critical to bringing about the full vibe of body horror and it’s just not present in a meaningful way. Since this is just a hack, hacking worms and finally the cultsists in their ceremony chamber, this is unfortunate.

I might call the first part just similar to an outline of an adventure and the five room dungeon portion a hack. I’m sure te language issues can be overcome with some more work, but the overall structure and flow of the adventure, getting the party in to it, the under-reliance of the tactical/free will element to the party and lack of exploration elements are just fundamental design issues. I’m excited to see more coming from asia though. And the attempts at formatting here, while not perfect, do show some understanding of layout and orienting the text to the DM who is running it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3. The preview is three pages. In chinese. Which is great for our chinese audience, I guess? 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/455035/blood-castle?1892600

By Demi ElGato
Possum Print Games
OSE
Levels 3-6

Verzogen Vald is a twisted forest surrounded by impassable, jagged peaks. Folk that go in almost never come back out. One man has, but in his two weeks in those woods, he looks to have aged decades. His memory is not completely reliable, and his fellow lumberjacks think him insane. Though, they are disconcerted by his unnaturally fast aging, and his stories of what lurks in those woods. Every two hours, the great Green Dragon, Viridis, flies over the Vald, her domain. This is enough to keep all but the most foolish wanderers away. One of the most foolish, the heir apparent to the throne, 12 year old Prince Lukas, delved into those woods one week ago, alone. The King has posted a standing reward of 5,000gp for any brave enough to retrieve him. So far, none have been that brave…or that desperate.

This twelve page adventure uses five pages to describe ten point crawl locations in a fanciful forest. It seems a little pointless, the combination of fetch quests with a dragon at the end. But, if you’re ok with that, then fight on, it’s not bad except for the lack of adventure.

“Too Much stabbin!” or “Not enough stabbin!” Stabbing is a means to end, the ultimate way to get the treasure and remove obstacles when all else fails, or you just feel like today. A typical adventure needs a good balance. Situations and all types of conflict vs the expediency of a good stabbin. You can stab all adventure, with a good sneak in and magical plot to get in deeper and tactical assault/lair raid. You can do no stabbin with some situations good enough with nuance to for the party to work their way around … and stab their way out of. But, generally, you gotta think the whole thing through, as a designer, and work out a way for things to include the potential for stabbin and not stabbin.

This adventure don’t do that, mostly. You see from the intro that the kings kid is missing. In to the forest you go, to look for him and get the reward, while avoiding the dragon that flies overhead every two hours. Unlike Gon FIshin’, there is no stream of do gooders out for a reward; it’s just you in the forest. Not the best set up, but, we’ll forget that for the sake of expediency, while wishin for some Fishin. 

Most of the adventure has you visiting points in the forest with someone who wants something and has something. The vampire (yes, vampire) has wine and wants a goat. The goatherd has a goat but wants a lot of gold and/or some nearby bears killed. The kobolds want to be vassals of the dragon again and.or some silks. They all wants something and have something. Mixed in an occasional combat like an undead dude or two and some plants, that’s about it. So, you gonna run around and give the blue key to Bob who will give you a Red key to give to Sally and so on. It’s all a little too set. Combine that with the lack of specific numbers of kobolds, etc in the adventure and its clear you’re supposed to talk to people and do some horse tradin. No stabin. Except when explicitly told you can stab, like the rando undead or plants.

Reaching the last point, the dragons lair, this all comes to a head. The dragon wants followers. Like the kobolds. The dragon has a lot of gold. And the kings son, the prince. Critically, if you get the dragon what it wants it will let you leave, but not the prince. There IS no solution here, ultimately, for the dragon and prince, except stabbin. Everything else you do accomplished nothing. Oh, sure, if the elves teach the cavemen to sing then tey will teach you to read some glyphs which will help the wizard trying to decrypt some glyphs which will cause him to toss you a gem of seeing. But that didn’t help kill the dragon. It is an adventure in two parts. Wander around the woods performing fetch quests and then stab a dragon. The two are essentially unrelated. This irks me. The kabuki.

There’s another mechanism at play here that mixes in. Every two hours the party will age ninety days. It takes, essentially, one hour to cross a tiles borders. This means that if you go straight to the dragon and stab it then you age six months, based on the initial map. But that’s not going to happen, right? The party is going to fuck around with the side quests. And then, also, the map shifts every two hours, like a maze. So you’re gonna have to figure that out, perhaps with some clues from the adventure. Figuratively, and perhaps literally, a waster of time. There is a clue, up front, that the forest ages you, but the maze situation, as well as the social commentary on the ultimate futility of the struggles of life, well, that one you entirely.

The maze, fetch quests, dragon, and aging don’t mesh well together, I don’t think. Other than the assisination, though, the play is fine. A barbed wire fence, that you can catch tetanus from! I love scary real world shit tossed in a game. Dragonpos can go fuck itself but TETNUS resonates, yeah? And, frankly, a lot of the fetch quest shit is not bad. Maybe a little simplistic and lacking, ahum, alternate solutions, but it IS there, if a little overt for my tastes. Telegraphed, I guess. The fanciful nature of them is a little off, in my opinion. A vampire that wears a sun hat out. A kobold that speaks seven languages in a kobold village that sounds more like a halfling village. A wizard who teleports in and out of the forrest every hour, but can’t do a comprehend languages. It’s just straining thinsg a bit too much. I hate to bring up comparison adventures, but THAT OTHER ONE had a somewhat fanciful nature as well. But it was clear there was some farce. And it was grounded. People were idiots. The fanciful stuff seemed to mesh well in tha the elements it used did no seem random. 

I don’t know. I guess this one is ok. I mean, I hate a lot about it, but, at least you can comprehend what is going on and follow along and there IS something to do. Hmmm, I guess I mean there are situations here, even if I do think they are simplistic, and that helps a lot.

Sucker! Ain’t no stats for the dragon! Ha! Got ya!

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3.33. There’s no fucking preview. Put in a fucking preview that shows us some of the content before we have to spend money on the thing!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/581381/the-matriarch-of-verzogen-vald?1892600

Lixu
Lixuni Gaming
OSE
Levels 1-6 (ha!)

Centuries ago, a mortal Myrenean queen named Nimuanne used forbidden rites at a sacred menhir field to transcend death, splitting her essence into three fragments upon her final death: Body, Mind, and Spirit. Grave robbers broke open the funerary urn containing these fragments, plunging the region into a desperate crisis.

This 79 page adventure presents four or five dungeons with ten to twenty locations each, plus a few small towns in a small region that is having some troubles. Its abstracted text seems out of place given the page count, with a lack of anything specific going on in the adventure.

Ok, so, I got some things to say. And this adventure probably doesn’t deserve to be the one I go off on. It’s not a disaster.

But, also, this sentence appears in the adventure: “That independence became its undoing: no walls, no militia, no warning before its own monks were the first to fall when the Mind Stone took root beneath them, spreading house to house until the entire town turned in what may have been a single night.”  I have a blind spot when it comes to spotting AI. But, the triple negative is a a hallmark of AI. I’m not even going to mention the end of that sentence, just focusing on the triple negative. It stands out like a sore thumb. And it’s listed as human created with no AI. I’m no “AI is the bogeyman and everywhere!” kind of person, but this sticks out.

I think, though, what stood out the mot for me in this adventure was the page count vs the dungeon content. I’m not sure how to frame this so people will understand. The dungeons here are relatively small, ten to twenty rooms. The room descriptions are rather minimal, a sentence or two. “Cell 3. A single unlabeled potion of climbing, tucked behind a loose stone, easy to miss without a search.” Or, for a longer room “Storeroom. Broken crates, moldering sacks, the smell of old grain gone to rot. 2 Shambling Husks stir. Loot: a locked strongbox (30gp), and a scroll of protection from undead, wax seal still faintly intact.” Even that is pretty light. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But, that also means that the dungeon keys fit on a page or maybe a little more, for a ten room dungeon. And there are only, I don’t know, four or so dungeons in this? That’s only a small number of pages. But this is an eight page adventure. I have no idea, honestly, no idea, what those pages are being used for. Stat blocks at the end, tables at the end, maps, I guess. It’s just so offputting. To see a large page count and then see the size of the dungeons and the minimal room descriptions. 

Because the rest of the content, those in between pages, are not exactly stellar. The local lord is having a dream about three locations. Go check em out and defeat the evil one. I know, I know, i’m hyperbolic, but this is almost the extent of what you get to help launch the adventure. Go ahead and get the party moving based on that. Because that’s about all you’re getting. Oh, there’s a fuck ton of explaining and backstory and so on, but I think thats being confused for gaeable content. The actually hooks in, the specificity, is not there at all. This is supposed to be a sandbox like thing. Do the three in any order and then end up at the final dungeon. But its all so very loose. Maybe, I mean abstracted. “Hey, there’s a ransacked village with some pod people in it. You need the party to en up at the local monastery.” Again, hyperbolic, but not by much. But, then, also, augment that with a whole lot of backstory that isn’t really relevant to the game at the table. 

The emphasis here is on the wrong things. You can, as Stonhell demonstrated, get away with some minimal keying. But you do this by adding context and specificity around the general situation in the area. There are things going on, the place is alive, as noted in the general notes for the level/area. This allows for a rather shorter dungeon key entry. But, importantly, we cannot mistake historical background for “current situation.” Or even, the current situation for “this shit will impact game play.” If it’s not impacting game play then it’s just padding. A line or two od padding, thrown in here or there, might be fine. You can’t lose sight of the goal: supporting the game at the table. In looking at a page long NPC description, does it matter that dude grew up an orphan? Almost certainly not. 

This misses the mark with nearly everything. Yes, it does have some interconnected dungeons that are coherent enough to run. But any specificity, in town, in the hook, in the wilderness, outside the dungeon, inside the dungeon, is essentially absent. Anything that could tie things together well and help the DM create the feelings of immersion that a ten session adventure would rely upon is not present. 

Also, it’s mostly stabbin. 

There is supposed to be a whole pod person thing going on in one area that can bleed over in to others. None of that comes through well. The interconnections and theming between the sites, doesn’t come across. And, finally, the last dungeon has three separate version, only one of which will be used. This would seem to be a waste.

It’s just weird, in the way it abstracted the content and yet is STILL quite lengthy. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages. You’ll get some general overview, and none of the dungeons. That overview is, honesty, the most information you’re going to get about the hook and linking things together.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/580488/the-unleashing-of-st-nimuanne?1892600

By Jeremy Farkas
Troll Lord Games
Castles & Crusades
Level ... 3?

Dare you cross the vast desert and seek out the great red mesa where the near-mythical mine is rumored to lie? Dare you plunge the darksome depths of the labyrinth and wrest fortune and glory from its yawning chasm? Dare you seek out the legendary hammer Earthrender, which bestows lordship upon any dwarf who holds it aloft? Dare you discover the fate of the great wyrm Morglax the Bold, who brought her great host of bandits and monsters up from the south to snuff out Lord Ahidl-Mor and his kin?

This eighteen page adventure uses about fourteen pages to describe a thee levels dwarf “orcs in a hole” with about 35 rooms. Stuffed with humanoids, it uses a conversational style to present a lot of things to stab. 

I’m not sure what to say here. You know all of those adventures that have a bunch of humanoids in a dungeon with some kind of backstory? This is one of those. In this case the humanoids are kobolds, goblins, orcs and bugmeans. Along with the required vermin, an abomination or two, and a young dragon at the end. And in this case the dungeon is a three level Lonely Mountain, with thew dwarves pushed out by orcs and a dragon and the old dwarf king leaving a clue where the entrance was, up to and including a secret entrance on a ledge. The required “broken dwarf elevator” is present. 

Look, I don’t have anything positive to say. I guess I’ve got some negative things to point out. But, overall, there’s just not a lot here. This was a tourney module and then they added some content to try and expand it. I’m going to ignore the expanded content, a village and preamble adventure. I don’t think they really add anything interesting and are just padded out. If you just want to, I don’t know, enter a few rooms and kill a few things then I’ve got some great news for you about this adventure. It even has a few environmental things and light puzzels to solve! You gotta find the yellow control crystal to make the elevator work again! Uh. That didn’t come across well. If you want to stab things then you can, and there a few things to break up the stabbin.

Look, I know people like to stab. It is not lost on me that Chainmail exists. Chainmail, 3e, 3.5, 4e, the whole range, devoted to stabbin.I like to stab also. I like to stab as a means to an end. B/X is my favorite edition because of the balance there between stabbin as a means to an end rather than a tactical minis simulation. Ultimately I’m looking for something with a decent exploratory vibe, some roleplaying, and other interactivity in addition to the stabbin. And it has to be something  a little more interesting than “find the gold key to open the gold lock.”  And the adventure here is not altogether great in areas other than things to stab.

I’m also more than a little irked by many aspects of the C&C house style. Is any one thing terrible? No. Does it all annoy me? Yes. Like, no level range anywhere. I guess you just rush out and dump money at the new C&C adventure rather than looking for a specific adventure for a specific level range? Man, stick a fucking level range on it somewhere.

And the read-aloud here. You know the drill, fancy fonts with long italics make things hard t read. But, further, the read-aloud is all mixed up. We’ve got the famous second person stuff, with lots of “As you draw nearer, you clearly see …” writing, which should never be used. But, then, the bold/italics shifts. While read-aloud is in bolded italics so it DM text! Or, maybe its also read-aloud? It will just suddenly have what is obviously DM only information in the same bolded/italics. Huh? What’s the point then?

And then it’s padded ALL the fuck out. The house style loves to pad, but then the adventure does also. Creature stat blocks are long with phrasing like “Their primary attributes are physical. Their special abilities are dark vision and light sensitivity. In battle they use military forks that deal 1d8 damage, or short swords that deal 1d6 damage” As I get older the sublime majesty of the ready ref sheets becomes more and more apparent. No? You don’t agree? How about a very conversational tone in the writing, which forces you to wade through mountains of padding when locating information? “If for some reason the PCs feel compelled to loot Ahidl’s grave, “ Oh come on. What’s the point there?

And then in other places the information is absurdly out of order. AFTER a room description we get this little note “When the PCs get within 10 feet of the chamber prior, they must cross a steel tripwire just 6 inches off the ground.” That should, I think we can all agree, come BEFORE the room so the DM notices it before the party gets to the room. “Knock has no effect” ah, jesus man. It’s a low level adventure. Let the wizard use his fucking knock spell. It’s one less sleep he’ll have memorized, which is the entire point of utility spells. I can bypass this ther kind of challenge if I give up nuking a room of monsters. What’s wrong with that? Sounds like the D&D circle of life to me. 

I’m looking at room 33 right now, titled Dragon Bones. There’s a paragraph of bolded italics read-aloud. Then there are five paragraphs of DM text that follow. There is nothing in those those five paragraphs related to the room, in play. The past sentence is “Searching the room will yield no secrets or great treasures.” It’s all backstory. A quarter page, or more? For one room? 

I can excuse a lot of things as I’m Not In To That Style Of Play. But I can recognize how someone else might be. But, all of that text, for nothing? Wasted effort? Aimed at readers? Distracting from the purpose of the designer AND the purpose of a DM? Nope.

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is about a dozen pages, which includes a sizable number of rooms as well as some preamble text. More than enough to see what you’re getting yourself in to.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/579756/castles-crusades-ahidl-s-keep?1892600

By Noah Green
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 2-3

he shattered remains of the arch-wizard Rakius’s tower have long stood silent—until now. Gnoll fugitives seeking refuge have unwittingly unleashed the restless horrors that linger in the ruin. Can players unravel the wizard’s forgotten doom and escape his labs with arcane treasures and their souls intact?

This 24 page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe 25 rooms in s small five level ruined mage tower. You’re running around doing things for the undead as you stab some abominations. It’s trying to keep som themes running, but it feels disconnected from itself.

Meh. It’s a small ruined wizards tower. Inside you’ve got these gnolls, hiding out after they stole some gnoll artifacts. Except, all but one are now possessed by spirits that were in the tower. They now all hate each other, or have some quest inside the tower for you to go on, which could be something like “kill the other spirit Bob” or maybe “cleanse the tower of the abominations”! Because, yes, as a wizard tower there are some weird fleshy abominations. (Nice art for them!) 

I am just so Meh about this one. I can only point to a bunch of trifling things. There is a decent little outside portion, with multiple entrances inside and windows and thicket holes entrances and so on. There’s a little read-aloud section and then some decent little interactivity in places. Let’s open up the cold dome and find some brains and put them back in to skulls with bejeweled eyes! Or a toad statue in a fountain with a gemstone hidden in an eye, all in a kind of overgrown garden setting. Or, even, a room with paintings in it, one of which is a famous missing work! This should all be decent. I mean, even the shades and their entire fetch quest little bullshitty things, that should be fine also, right? Bring me the Jade Monkey! And I shall give you, I don’t know,  a necklace hidden in a fireplace nearby. 

And, some of the magic items are not bad at all. “Leonard: A life-sized, bald human male head sculpted of rubbery material. Pulling the nose or an ear causes it to scream for 1d6 rounds; all nearby suffer a –2 penalty to attack rolls.” Or a little bonsai tree with litte fruits on it that provide full size rations. Not everything here is great, there are boring old +1’s, but, it does have some objects with some creativity

But there’s just something missing to all of it. Some life? Some joy? Some completeness?

Let’s revisit that painting. It’s in a room with like twelve other paintings. It’s the only one mentioned, at like 200go, but, are the other worth something? It’s like they don’t exist. The whole possessed gnoll thing, and the stuff they stole, it just feel random. Why gnolls? Why possessed? Why do we care about the gnoll artifacts? The spirits, and their goals and wants and stuff, It just feels disconnected from itself. Maybe I mean passive? The spirits don’t seem to give a shit about anything. And not in a cool “Im from th beyond the grave” sort of way. Yeah yeah, go kill my brother. Yeah yeah, maybe rid the place of monsters. They’re boring. The entire thing is boring?

I don’t know why. A lack of active verbing? I mean, even in B2 the place didn’t FEEL boring. It felt dynamic. Dudes were up to shit. Free room and board. Toss a bag of gold through the door.  The spirits, here, are the main “person” interactivity. And they have some sort of enemies, friends, things they want done. At least theoretically. And I guess their rooms note what they could engage the party on. But there’s nothing in this beyond that. They just don’t seem particularly interested in getting what they want. As for the rest, it’s just vermin and abominations. Oh, oh, there’s a gnoll, a single gnoll left not taken over by the spirits. He’d hiding in a garden room. The one with the fish statue/fountain. It’s got some blood moths in it, think of them as stirge. They’ll attack him and if you save him then he;ll tell you that the eye of Utnapishtim is in the fish statues eye socket. It’s all in one room. There’s nothing larger or more grand, for the most part, than whats right in front of you. 

In another place you slap the brain of a dude back in a skull. That’s it. No fun interactivity that it enables. No places to unlock. There’s literally nothing else. 

So, I don’t know. Is there some room interactivity? Yes. Is there some NPC interactivity? Yes. Are the room descriptions disasters? No. Is the formatting a disaster? No. Do I care about anything in this and/or am excited to run it? No. As I noted, it feels disconnected, like the rooms exist in isolation, in spite of a few rooms, especially with the spirits, being tied loosely to to other rooms. 

It’s not bad. It doesn’t make me want to claw my own eyes out. So, you know, good job?

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, with a handful of rooms in the dungeon at he end of it. More than enough, i think, to get  a sense of the dungeon. And my malaise.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/580706/quick-delve-4-shadows-and-flesh?1892600

By Richard Barton
XRP
OSRIC
Levels 2-4

Rumors of a lost tomb lying deep within the New Forest are starting to trickle into the ears of adventurers in Gosterwick and Newmarket. While the source – and thus the veracity – of these whispered stories remains uncertain, all of the third-hand accounts suggest that the tomb was the product of the Archontean golden age, and not a simple tomb delved by the local Thorcinga. A few rumors even imply that the tomb displays the type of exceptional craftsmanship usually associated with dwarven master masons. Could this lost tomb be the work of the great Zhorak? or of Zhorak’s legendary master, the lesser-known Grishia Basalt? If Grishia was involved, might this tomb shed light on the location of the fabled Egg of Creation? Regardless of its creator, the tomb is sure to be filled with the treasure and lore of the ancients!

This one hundred page adventure uses about six pages to detail ten rooms in the Tomb of Kallia. There is also extensive coverage of a nearby wilderness area. Extensive being the watchword with this, as eighty words are generally used where one will do. Padded with backstory, I am bewildered by Arden Vul.

Yo, notably there is no map, at all, in this.You have to download a separate map pack, The Maps of Arden Vul, which is  free download containing all of the Arden Vul maps and all related regions. 

So, my summary is off. While this is titled the Tomb of Kallia that section makes up just a small portion of it. The tomb is actually sitting in the middle of a larger slavers camp which has about twenty locations and then about ten locations for the tomb proper, plus  few more in the slavers section for a false tomb. The bulk of this is a forest with about thirty locations, many with a small handful of sublocations. Thusly the adventure here is really the various intrigues taking place in the region that will eventually lead the party to the slavers camp and/or the tomb that is a relatively minor part of the product.

And there is quite a bit going on in the region. There are a couple of groups with some larger intrigues, like the slavers, and a several smaller things going on, such as some scammy bills of lading related to a quarry and humanoid band with, ahem, elective raiding, that loosely, or strictly hint at the larger “slaver” plot, with slaver in quotes because of the various schemes going on. As a regional supplement, sandboxy, it has a decent amount going on in it. The level range here is, I think, a bit misleading when you look at things like all of the level sevens and nines in the slavers camp, which the adventure warns you about. The wilderness sites ARE dangerous as well, so this feels like a long slow adventure with lots of retreats to regain strength and recruit again, slowly making progress in clearing things and finding more sites. 

Look man, I know we’re going to get in to it on these next comments. There are readers who will love this. There are fanboys who love this. There are contrarians who have an identity based on disagreeing and ignoring meaning. My platonic ideal of an adventure includes it being easy to run. That is the purpose of an adventure. To be run at the table. Ideally with little to no prep required. “You can run it without reading it!” is hyperbolic but also the unreachable goal to shoot for. “Easy” to run. What is easy? We’re not going to agree, some of you. I recognize that we read adventures before hand, we take notes and highlight things. We have to puzzle out the connections in the adventure and make reference sheets and all of that shit. How much of that should you have to do to run it? How much of that should, in fact, be on the designer to solve before it reaches your hand? The writer, designer, editor, it has to be “easy” to run. We can disagree on the nuance here, but not on the premise. Except now I’ll walk that back, there ARE adventures that come along, rarely, that are obtuse and ABSOLUTELY worth it to puzzle out and spend a lot of time prepping. And those adventures are exceedingly rare. It is far, far more likely that an adventure will be a disaster of writing, layout etc and not be “easy” to run and not worth the effort you will put in. And that is, I think, the case with all of the Arden Vul products I’ve seen so far. The fucking thing fights you, for no reason, and ultimately I’m going to turn to some other product to run instead of this. Because the content, while decent, just isn’t worth devoting my life to in order to make it to the table. I’d have to go look at Thicket and Arden Vul proper to verify, but my recollection is that it’s been the same with all of them.

The writing here is dense, almost to wall of text territory. It’s padded out with backstory inline and descriptions of why and irrelevant descriptions. You have to fight through mountains of text and loosely formatted paragraphs in order to suss out what’s pertinent in the various locations.

One section has a palisade with watchtowers. Palisades get an inordinate degree of attention in this. “The palisade is 9’ tall and made of new wood bound together with vines, rope, and interior support timbers.”9’ tall? Sure. The rest of it, is that important?  How about a description of the watchtowers? “Four observation and firing platforms are found along the length of the wall. These small platforms are 5’ above the ground and accessible by ladders. They allow guards to watch the approaches to the compound.” Well, I guess we’ve defined what watchtowers are, yes? These, yanked out of context, don’t seem terrible, but it is just relentless in the degree of detail everything is described in. How about an NPC? NPC’s routinely get a quarter page description. “Personality: Orphaned at an early age, Happy was taken in, raised, and trained by one of the Elder Brothers of the Benevolent Brotherhood of Arcturus.” Is this relevant to the adventure? No, it’s not. Sometimes, like the palisade detail, these things can be used to add color to areas. But you can’t do it everywhere. You can’t take every single thing in the adventure fully describe it. 

I don’t know. Maybe you can. But you gotta WORK that formatting to do it. And this don’t do that. We’re relying on paragraphs here with some underlining and some light indentation in places. And then there are these long ass sections of supplemental information that just appear thrown in willy-nilly. You’ll be in a room description and suddenly it will ballon to multiple pages and there will be this cumbersome page and half table just tossed in. How you can keep a train of thought here is beyond me. It’s almost a wall of text broken by weird presentations of information.

There is something here. More so, i think, than The Thicket. But it is so hard to get at that I can’t possibly, after multiple read-throughs, think of a situation in which I’d be pleased or excited to run this. 

This is $20 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. This HAS to have a preview. You HAVE to know what you are getting in to before purchasing this.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/577509/the-tomb-of-kallia?1892600

By E.S. Wynn
Cairn
Self Published

This 210 page supplement is a collection of one hundred two page dungeon zones. More toolkit than adventure, you stick them together, in a modular fashion, to create your own megadungeon. That’s bs, but the zones themselves are fairly interesting, if small. It channels soe decent OSR zone spirit. Putting some thought in to it would have turned out a decent adventure/megadungeon.

Is it a megadungeon or is it a toolkit? This is almost certainly a toolkit for constructing a megadungeon. It presents one hundred zones that you could stitch together in to something larger and/or drop in as sub-levels to another dungeon. You have to think of it as a kind of dungeon geomorphs project. Each section has a number of entrances/exits that you could link up to other areas, with a few being targeted at main entrances/exits to a dungeon. It’s laid out in a “facing pages” format, with the map and a little overview on one page and the keys on the other. This limits things to about twelve or so rooms per page, maximum, and zone designs that are none too complex, from a mapping standpoint. Each zone will have a few rooms related to the zone, theming wise, and generally a few more not directly related to the theme.

There is a very fine “OSR spirit” present in many of the rooms. One of rooms reads “Ominous Vault: An impenetrable door of warm stone bars access to this room. Three locks are arranged in a triangle on its face, each accessible only with a Branch Key. Inside, a cursed, deathless humanoid like those in the sarcophagi waits, bound in leather straps and desiccated, but still aware. It will wait until someone comes close enough to bite. Stat as a Vampire (Cairn Bestiary.) It may be reasoned with (or bartered with) eventually, becoming a source of information, but is currently crazed with hunger.” So, a vampire. But you’re not just walking in here, it’s triple locked. It gives the party a reason to revisit the one or at least get some knock spells agoing. Once in we’ve got a nice little description of dessicated and bound in leather straps. And then, the vampire, it does have this “you got too close thing” but also it becomes a situation. Can you bargain with the dude to get some info? Will you dump some blood at it?It’s a resource to exploit. It is a fairly involved room for being a short-ish description, with lots of interactivity possible for the party to exploit, or be exploited by. And that’s a good room. 

In other zones you’ve got some goblins running a kidnapping for ransom thing. Will you get kidnapped, or will you exploit them to get them to kidnap someone else for you? An undead zone has a lich who wants to finally get to read his big ol book collection. (I’m sure many of us can sympathize,) Are you gonna piss him off? Are you going to manage to use him to your own ends by bargaining a book? He’s testy at being interrupted. This things manages to put in an impressive number of situations in the dungeon, and not just the parties relationship with the various denizens. 

Writing is generally good, there are a decent number of evocative description, rooms that feel imagined first and statted second, the way it should feel. That vampire being desiccated and bound in leather being a decent example. It does rely on “strange” and “weird” a little too ofton; we should be striving to write a description that avoids conclusions like that and gets more visceral, to the point the PLAYERs think “huh. That’s weird.” But it’s ok in general, especially given the sheer number of rooms.

The issue here, as with nearly every geomorph type product, is that there is little in the way of a larger picture. These areas are in isolation. “He seeks revenge against whatever pushed them out of their old home in an adjoining area and will pay with a random relic,” That guy, and his situation, with his cult, would be better if he had a specific vendetta against a specific group, that was played with in both zones. The interconnections between zones, and I’m not talking mapping, just are not there. And, i think, by design. There are some possibilities, like a dude who has a bronze tablet that “someone else wants”, but then it would be better if there were, say, some cross-references with ideas for linking areas. Or, just forgo the entire geomorph thing and spend the extra effort to put this thing together into a unified whole. That shouldn’t be THAT much more effort for the designer, already familiar with its two hundred pages of dungeon. Then you’ve have a real product here.

And some areas ARE weak, or have weak aspects to them. “A Maze of rough-hewn mine tunnels carved into the living rock …” This is just a few standard rooms layouts, as one would find in any dungeon, nothing minelike or mazelike about them. 

I really like the vibe here. Strong OSR situations in the zones. Terse descriptions that still give the DM a lot to work with. But, then, I’m doing the Bryce thing. I bought a geomorphy thing and now I’m gonna complain that its a geomorphy thing. But it is! And it would be such a strong product if the designer did the work to tie the zones together and create a cohesive whole instead of explicitly noting that the DM is free to link these as they wish. Lean in to some cross-references, at least, to suggest possibilities! Oh, also, it’s Cairn, so, you have to adjust treasure appropriately and I’m not overly happy withthe magic items.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $10. The preview appears broken.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/572362/the-underbranching-cairn-megadungeon?1892600

By Fabiano R de Azevedo
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-3

A witch burns. A curse remains. The fate of an entire village rests in your hands. The peaceful village of Torfjell is about to witness the execution of a convicted witch. Whether the adventurers intervene or stand by, the outcome is the same: a terrible curse is unleashed, bringing sickness, madness, and mysterious deaths to the village. With each passing day, more lives are claimed. The only hope lies within an ancient legend: the forgotten Tome of the Light Shaman, hidden deep beneath Mount Inhaltyr in a long-lost dungeon guarded by dangers far older than the village itself. The heroes must uncover the truth behind a centuries-old myth, explore a dungeon filled with secrets and meaningful choices, and confront the creature that protects the tome. But legends are rarely as simple as they seem, and not every monster is truly evil.

This thirty page adventure uses about six pages to describe fifteen rooms in a small dungeon with a manticore. It’s got a nice little set up but the dungeon, proper, makes little sense. 

The set up to this one is interesting. As the party enters a village they comes across, live and in progress, the village major just pronouncing sentence of witchcraft on a woman tied to a stake and about to be burnt. If they do nothing then the village burns her and she does the old “pronounce a curse while burning” routine on the entire village. Which now includes the party. Oops. If they free her then she goes off and kills someone and curses the party for their troubles.  She is a witch and she DID murder a couple of innocent people. She has to kill three people to extend her life and she had already killed a mother and child, so, you know, it’s D&D and “shes a witch who did bad things” can, actually be true. Noice play on the trope. Anyway, one person a day dies from the curse. Ouchies. Turns out though you can go get a book in a dungeon nearby which will take care of the curse; this shit happened before long ago and the village elders know about the book. So off you go the dungeon.I love the play on the trope and the party getting whats coming to them for meddling in local affairs. Sure, WE know there’s no way out of the hook, but the set up is still a nice one, with a decent curse. 

The dungeon is a weird one though. There’s a convoluted backstory that has mom & dad turning their son in to a manticore and the dungeon gets built and the holy book with the curse cure is placed in it. Both mom and dad have “rooms” where a stone golem resides that the party can animate, one to attack the manticore and one to defend th party while fighting the manticore. Got it? Dungeon, purpose built, manticore in it, a couple of golems to help the party out. 

But then the place is designed, weird? This is more than a random other monster appearing. In one room there’s a sconce on the wall and if pull it then it casts animate dead on the skeletons in the room. Huh? Why do you do this? Why build a dungeon to HELP defeat the manticore and breaks the sons curse/put him to rest and then include a hidden sconce pull that animates dead? I’m not a fan of the “the tripwire cats a spell that then … “ stuff, it’s trying to explain WHY and you don’t need to do that, but, more than that, why put this kind of … trap? in the dungeon. And why does it have this hidden trigger mechanism? There’s more things like this in the dungeon that just don’t make sense, from a dungeon design standpoint. There’s no hint of something gone wrong over the years, or anything like that. 

This is more than natural aging of a dungeon. There’s a decent “bandits attack while you cross a rickety bridge” on the way to the dungeon, always a classic, although there are no hints of bandits even though the bridge is close to the village. There’s a room with a collapsed floor and monster at the bottom, also a classic and I love the classics. Those fit in. But the out of left field stuff is just jarring. Offputting. Looks, it’s a dungeon, not everything has to make sense, but this stuff just doesn’t match up with the rest of the vibe of the dungeon. Why is there a skeleton throne room? And why is the skeleton wearing a golden crown? If this were some kind of rando dungeon, ok, but its supposed to have been purpose built. Remember mom and dad?

Formatting here is all bullets. Bullets can help bring clarity. The EXCLUSIVE use of bullets, though, is seldom a good thing. If everything is important then nothing is. 

It’s an ok adventure. The premise is nice. There are some ok elements to manage, like the collapsed room/pit and bandits on the bridge. The formatting isn’t great and dungeon doesn’t make sense, as a whole, which I think is a problem for parties trying to do a thoughtful exploration. Treasure is quite light. Descriptions are bland. Meh.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is three dungeon pages, so, good preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/578862/a-cursed-fate-for-torfjell?1892600

By Dylan Hyatt
Rampaging Snail
Shadowdark
Level 1

It’s Sunday and I try to watch a detective mystery on Sundays. SO you’re getting a detective adventure review.

In ‘The Swan Hollow Intrigue’, the adventuring party must solve the mystery of the murder of a monk from the Silverhelm Monasteey. The village’s two inns are close to open confrontation, and what has the haunted ruin of Tamwoth Manor to do with mystery?

This 52 page adventure presents a small murder mystery in a halfling village. It understands what a traditional D&D mystery is, its various parts and aspects, and it gets there in spite of leaning heavily on mechanics and exposition.  Lot of classic village/inn tropes are present to lean on.

Hey, charming cover! I don’t do bonus points, but if I did I’d give you one for it.

So, Brother Lothario, up at the monastery, comes in to town A LOT to flirt with the innkeepers daughter. One night he comes in to the village to flirt with her and then ends up dead in an alley. Lothario’s brother runs the other inn in town, and is calling for justice! He wants the barkeep/dad hung! He obviously did it! Mayor McCheese wants you to gather evidence. Turns out the barkeep/dad run out after Loathrio when chasing him out on the night in question. And had a big cudgel in his hand when he did it. And someone say him in the area and throwing the cudgel over a wall to get rid of it. Oh, and Lotharios brother seems to have hated him. And Lotharios throat was cut. And he stinks of fish. And he gave waitress Cocktease a note about an abandoned ruin nearby. And … you get the picture. In reality this is a Name of the Rose situation. Lothario stumbled upon the secret bookshelves, learned something about the abbey, and the abbot has the librarian hire a lowlife fisherman to kill Lothario. Also, the secret is that the last group of human monks in the monastery made a deal with the devil, literally, to stave of the plague from themselves and now the old abbot from 300 years ago is a ghoul in the basement. So, you know, pretty please? 

There are some classic elements at play here in the events going on. There’s a drinking contest in a bar, and a bar fight, and someone wants a drink paid for to talk, and there’s a chase scene and there’s a village mob. All of the things one would expect to see in a village inn. And this extends a bit in to the adventure as well, a minor haunting can be resolved by placing a child’s ragdoll on her childhood bed. You know ol Bryce is a big softie, so I’m down for all of these classic elements. The overall mystery investigation is not a bad one. A couple of things to discover and leads to follow up on. It’s not really complex in ANY way. It is supported by a coupe of events, like a village mob and a chase of a suspect through the village. Both of these are good in concept to add, just handled rather poorly in execution.

Alas, the implementation of all of this is not great. If it WERE great then it would simply be Yet Another Mystery adventure.

There’s A LOT of text here for such a simple adventure. There is a long background, most of which is unneeded. There are long stretches of read-aloud, in italics. Read-aloud should never be long and italics should never be long. Long read-aloud causes players to loose focus and pull out their phones. They don’t pay attention. Long italics is hard to read, cognitively. Together they are a nightmare for both the DM and players. 

There are long bouts of exposition in here, everywhere. A lot of explaining and detail that just s not relevant to what’s going on. Well, I mean, it is, but only in a tangential way. You want to include things that are directly related to the adventure, to play at the table. More is not better. That shit, that trivia, it gets in the way of the DM finding the information they need to run the adventure. Further, instead of including that shit and spending time on it you COULD be making the core of the adventure, the actual things relevant to play at the table, better. The same goes for mechanics. We’ve got mechanics for a bar fight, mechanics for drinking contests, mechanics for a chase scene, mechanics for … and, yes, this is to be expected to some extent. But there is an appropriate level of detail to mechanics. You don’t want to drone on and on and on and be prescriptive about them. You’re not in charge of the game. You don’t know the specifics of the table. You want to give the DM some guidelines and let them run the thing. 

There is, I think, often great confusion about details vs specifics. In this context detail is bad. It is trivia. It explains why’s or how’s that we don’t need to know, or almost certainly don’t need to know. Specificity, though, are those things that inspire us to greatness in running the game. It is terse, meaning it doesn’t get in the way of scanning an adventure and it doesn’t require a long pause to read while in the midst of running a game. It is the sort of thing that once you read it it stays with you. You grok it immediately. If a picture is worth a thousand words then one well written specific sentence is worth more than a page of details. It communicates exactly the vibe the DM should be going for. 

In this adventure there is a wandering traveller table for one of the inns. One of the entries is for a Quack selling (dubious) portion of healing. That’s the entry on the table. That (dubious) in parens tells us a lot. There’s a decent sized paragraph expanding upon this one liner, which adds little of value except perhaps “Vagdoran” is his name and he’s got a wooden case with six vials in it and that by the time the party discovers the scam he’ll be far away. Not nearly enough snake oil in D&D games, ya know? Anyway, we’ve got something specific here. Still far too long for what it is, but this in the same neighborhood. Compared with “generic pilgrims” or “generic travelling merchants” it’s the spice of life.This is why something like those quick adjectives/adverbs used to describe NPCs hit so well. And it’s why putting in a long section of italics read-aloud for each NPC that is supposed to communicate their personality fails. I need to know Kylo Rens personality in half a second, not struggle through a bunch of second person dialog in italics. I get that they both get us to the same place, but one is much more effective during gameplay.

Mechanically the thing falls down a bit also. In one place we need to make a DC check to tell the innkeeps wife is not being exactly honest with us. However, with regards to the innkeep proper, there is no such opportunity to detect his honesty/dishonesty. I’m not arguing for either case to be correct, but noting that the inconsistency here is the issue. Are we rolling for this shit or not? And this is not an isolated example. There might be another example with the ghost of a child, that I mentioned earlier. We’ve got some specific (convoluted) say a prayer/perform a rite shit that is detailed, and noted about replacing a specific doll on her bed. Rather than the specifics of a rite that the party has absolutely no fucking chance of figuring out, all that mechanical detail can be removed with just some advice to let a party that seems to be doing the right thing/making an effort succeed. (Hmmm, does a Bless need to be sincere, or can you just Constantine the thing?)

The dungeon, proper, is quite small. Just a few rooms with a few undead, and, in fact, may not actually be a part of the adventure. Do you go underneath and kill the old abbot/ghoul? Well, maybe. If things play out the right way I guess so. So, right to handle it as a kind of an aside but the detail, again, gets in the way of anything memorable happening. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages so you get to see miles of backstory. The preview should show us some of the actual adventure text so we, as potential buyers and DMs, can judge if the writing is something we can hack or not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/574699/the-swan-hollow-intrigue?1892600

By Ian Hickey
Gravity Realms
2e
Levels 1-2

Do you dare venture into the Stronghold of the Mad Dwarf? Its dark corridors and forgotten halls hold horrors beyond your mind’s comprehension. For centuries the Tome of Many Verses has been locked away, along with the horrors it has created.

This 44 page adventure uses 22 pages to describe four small dungeon levels and one larger one, the larger one having about 23 rooms. It is padded out and tries to theme areas, to no great advantage, but has several classic elements to it that help it rise above the typical dreck. Its heart is in the right place, even though it doesn’t succeed very well.

This one falls in to the “classic dungeon” category. There’s a small outside area, a small antechamber level, a larger “main” dungeon of 23 rooms, a couple of very small levels under that, and then a map in the classic megadungeon side-view noting other are levels yet to be detailed/left for the DM. The main theme here is an old dwarf complex, dug too far, and the main treasure being a book of demon summoning guarded by a kind of gibbering mouther made of dwarf parts. The vibe here is classic dungeon, with spiders, mad dwarves, and a few oddball creatures in a mix of “empty” dungeon rooms and some larger spaces with more interesting things going on. It’s also “kill based” XP, as it’s 2e Not gold=xp here, with coinage limited as a result. We’re going to ignore the hooks as well since they are just the usual “you’re hired” couple of lines and this is, in the end, a site based adventure in the classic dungeon style.

There’s a small outside area right in front of the doors, which you can think of a much smaller version of the Stonehell outside. A few ruins and a couple of monsters. You’ll get to a small antechamber level of a couple of rooms, and then down in to the core dungeon of 23 rooms. Under that is a small cavern level of a few rooms and the dwarf spider pens level.

The entry in to the core dungeon is the lift shaft. The platform having failed a long time ago, you’re faced with a pit, 180 feet deep, to navigate your way down. No solution is give, nor should there one be! The adventurers are left to tie those ropes together and go in through thepit, classic style. The dungeon does this sort of classic element stuff in a few places, with another standing out being a locked door with an open window grate in it. The key is in the keyhole on the other side. That’s it, nothing else suggested. Again, the adventurers are left to their own solution, as they should be. I love these sort of classic obstacles, without spoon feeding the DM on solutions. When the adventure is doing this is channeling those classic dungeons of old; twelve in one blow!

There are, at times, some decent room descriptions as well. “The roof to the common room has collapsed and is blocking the entrance. Inside chunks of broken furniture, tables and chairs are half buried in rubble.” Another environmental obstacle! Rubble, half buried furniture, all turning an otherwise empty room in to something a little more interesting.  When the adventure is hitting on all cylinders it does a pretty decent job. That main room you descend in to from the pit has sixteen pillars and a 15 foot vaulted ceiling, with rubble under the pit from the platform and mechanism which has collapsed from above. And a floor covered in guano. Ought oh! 1-100 bats! Hope you’re not making a lot of noise! In another large cavern we’ve got the classic flowstone and mite/tite situation, along with a giant cave clam blending in surrounded by treasure it has coughed up. Does it make sense? No. But it sure recalls those classic D&D exploration of caverns illustrations.

Let us not get attached though. The padding is hard with this one. Not to an excessive degree, but it is present in nearly every passage. This room once served as. The main entryway is open for business. This used to be. These phrases do nothing for the adventure and clog up the DMs ability to scan the text to find the entries they actually need. “The locked door at which the adventurers stand is the old entrance to the stronghold before the new additions were added above.” That is a perfect example. It is irrelevant. It is trivia. It adds nothing. 

It also gets weird about the creatures in places. In one room there is a small amount of read aloud that describes one of the mad dwarves attacking. Another room has a full on room description and no description of occupants, except it then stat blocks two of the ad dwarves. Elsewhere the adventure “might” encounter a giant rat nest in this room.  The spider pens level simply notes, at the beginning, that there are 3-30 spiders on the level, with no further mention of them. This is maddening. There CAN be a place for creatures sometimes being present, or for a level having a total number of creatures on it, but this is not how you do that. Boxed text is not present everywhere, which is fine either way, but it can get long in places, causing the players to lose interest and pull out phones. 

And then there are the mad dwarves. Not undead, just maddened. And when you’re close to them you need to make a save vs spalls or be paralyzed for 1d6 rounds. Ouch. Area attack. Multiple dwarves in an encounter. OSR. Run away. But, also, i feel like Fear and Paralysis are some HEFTY shit to be throwing at a party at level one. I remember several near TPKs from level four to six parties who fear’d away or got paralyzed. Those are some BAD. ASS. EFFECTS. I’m not sure about this in a level one, but we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

The adventure is a little slow. Some of the rooms are memorable, and there’s a decent number of things to poke and prod at, but it feels a little drab. The descriptions could be better, more consistent, and the environment feels quite static. But, other than the padding, it’s not really doing much wrong. I just don’t think that the classic elements, when they appear, are enough to carry it. 

This is $13 at DriveThru. There is no preview. How are you gonna have your pudding if you don’t have a preview?! Put in a preview, show some rooms, let us get an idea of the content we are purchasing before we push the buy button.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/572215/stronghold-of-the-mad-dwarf-ad-d-2e-version?1892600

By Patrick Stuart
False Machine Publishing
Tunnels & Trolls

A mysterious Inn at the end of the world, an evil sorcerer, a talking shadow on the wall, a door down into the dark. The world must be saved and only this particular group of weirdoes (who happened to be staying overnight), can do it! They have until the Doom of the Dark is fulfilled! (Roughly six hours real-time, but you should be able to get it done in two). They also have a Turne-Spytte Dogge, his utility so far unknown.

This 35 page one-shot adventure details a twelve room fucked up dark fairy-tale save the world adventure in a … weird inn basement? T&T is light, and it matches for the adventure. Great ideas and everything that filthy casual crowd wants out of their D&D clone systems and games.

Man, I always forget about Tunnels and Trolls, even though some of my favorite of the original era adventures were written for it. T&T is great for the same reason B/X is great. They are simple and don’t get in the way of actually playing the game with all that min/max rules lawyer shit. It;s got that beer & pretzels vibe that makes it great for a game with filthy casuals. Con games. A one shot at the game store. All your stoner friends coming over for game night. I don’t know if you can do more with T&T, but just like classic CoC, it’s perfect for one-shots.  And the actual content of this adventure, man, it’s like Pan’s Labyrinth mashed up with some of those “core” AI fantasy TikToks. Stuart knows how to bring a vibe.

It’s not a traditional adventure, he states up front. More of a storybook kind of thing. I might call it original old world fair tales, with arms falling down chimneys and shit. There are some cutesy LOOKING things, but everything here is ready to fuck you up in a weird way that is just so thematically appropriate to them/their setting. 

You’re staying at an inn, in the attic or in the barn nearby. You wake up in the middle of the night. “Now you awaken to the distant sound of laughter, counting, and the

clattering of coins.” There is no light. NONE. Like, bottom of a cave no light. EXCEPT you can see some coming from the inn/downstairs. Your own light sources, WHATEVER they are, don’t shed any light at all. That’s not good. The main room of the inn has a lamp anging from the rafters, shedding the light you’ve seen, the innkeeper frozen in solid bronze, a pair of green eyes in an ash tray, the skin of a man draped over a chair whimpering, and a mangy dog licking the bloody hem of the skin. ““Ignore it.” Whispers a voice. This is the Shadow-Man.” The shadow man flits from shadow to shadow in the room, cast by the light. He tells you he’s the shadow of a wizard who came to the innThe sorcerer is trying to steal the 13,000 coins that the original True Night originally was bribed with to sleep forever.  His shadow disagreed wit him so he cut it away with a silver knife. His eyes disagreed with him so he cut them out and replaced them with silver coins. His very flesh protested so it cut it away and there it hags now. Uh, yeah, so that’s why wizards rule. None of the rest of you fucks have that kind of dedication. 

I don’t even know how to describe that. Storybook? Fable? I think it hits that Mythic Underworld thing; things are certainly different. Cutting away the shadow with a silver knife. Plucking out eyes. Silver coins. How many culturally significant things can you load on to something? This is the vibe you are getting with this adventure. 

Yo, did you pick up that the shadow, skin, and eyes could be your allies, if you take them along? I mean, they must have really disliked him for him to cut off his skin, right? Anyway, you make your way in to the dungeon under the inn. All the while you can get the clatter of coins and an ominous countdown, from like 13,000. There’s a handy dandy chart that says something like “four hours of game time has elapsed, so the countdown is now about 4,600 is the players ask” and so on. Thusly, a real-time game limit. When it hits 0 the robbery is complete and, the True Night, finding the bargain broken, makes sure there is never light again. This is all handled wel, is easy to follow to add colour to the game.

The encounters here fanciful as well. We’ve got moon goblins out of some art deco nightmare, and their heads can be squeezed for juice which will shrink you. This there are a couple of ways to handle rooms, either full size of shrunk, which can last six hours or so, the length of this adventure. Adding to this are challenges easier is shrunk, or impacts that are different. The Mice Knights are running around and set against the Black Rats … who don’t necessarily need to be your enemy and could even be your ally. The environments, scenes and interactivity here is fanciful, and is of that perfect type of you being able to interact or just stab the fuck out people. 

The descriptions here get a little long. It’s not a typical formatting, it’s communicating the vibe and feeling of the place through text meant for the DM. There are bullets in the right places, along with italic and such, but this is not the typical room/key layout. It can work but its more of a read-ahead and really understand what the room is trying to do sort of thing, that tries to remain sticky in your head. Some portions could be communicated directly to the pliers while others are more an overall kind of feeling of the place. Not literally, but that’s what the text is trying to communicate. Thee are places where the text falls down as well, I’m looking at you “large rectangular stone room”, but those are minimal and don’t really detract from the situation going on in the room. 

This is a good one shot. It’s everything a casual one-shot, that we see so often for sale for minor OSR systems, are trying to do. Its got solid theming. The rooms hit, room after room and challenge after challenge. It’s not one dimensional and presents alternate paths for resolution. The non-traditional formatting (which those familiar with Stuart’s style should recognize) does mean that you’re going to have to do a little more prep work up front, but it certainly a memorable piece and reminds me of one of my favorite one-shots, In Media Res, for CoC in Unspeakable Oath.

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview here is seven pages. It more of the intro and lead in to the adventure, and because of that it has a style that is not the same as the rooms, proper. I would not be scared off by it but would have liked to see a room as well, to get a better read on how the core content is presented.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/578297/doom-of-the-dark?1892600

By Eric Jones
Ludibrium Games
OSR
Level 1

Tragedy has befallen the Kingdom of Ambarge—the king is dead; long live the king! Yet strife in the realm has only just begun, for the sole heir is nowhere to be found. The fate of the entire kingdom now rests with the grit and guile of a few humble caravan guards in a far-off land.

This 32 page adventure presents a ten events caravan journey It feels more generic than perhaps it should, given the subject and the NPC’s. Almost as if it’s one step away from the specificity that would bring the entire thing home.

This is a reissue of the 2011 adventure Kingmaker, “significantly expanded and revised from the original version.” It looks like I reviewed Kingmaker ages ago. I’m going to review this and then go back and read my other review. Let’s see how a new reissue compares to an old review?

After the death of the king the royal consort/mom smuggles her son, the heir, out of the kingdom to get him out of the way is assisination attempts. Mom and son are in disguise as a wealthy merchant/son and taking a caravan to Another Kingdom. They’ve got a few hired guards, none of who know who they are. Oh, hey, Mr Party, how about we hire you also? A few more never hurt. The caravan is almost immediately discovered by a witches familiar, part of a band of mercs to hunt the boy down, and then nine more scenes play out until the next town is reached. It’s the party and their merc caravan against the witch and her mercs, as she tries to get at the boy and/or whittle down the caravans guards. 

The NPC’s, the good guys and the bad guys, are all covered up front. There’s a little description and a stat block. Something like “Mundencain’s partner, Oading Whitebones, would be tall but for a terrible hunch. The road-weary but loyal soldier has accompanied Mundencain on various adventures since they were small boys dueling with wooden swords.” I’m just having a hard time getting behind them. Road-weary, loyal, hunchback. That I can do. As a quick reference its lacking.

The encounters are decently open ended, in general. The DM is given a situation, maybe half a page or so, and then  you run it. Importantly, the evil party and the NPC’s in the caravan are not really covered. Well, they are, here and there, but it’s minor issues or just leading to something else. For the most part , if the room description was something like “orc main room with cooking fire and six orcs” and nothing more, then I’ll let you, the DM, determine how the previous information about the NPCs, good and evil, fit in to that. The entries are not that short, but, the point I’m making is that they generally do not deal much with the NPC’s.

You must cross a raging river. You meet merchants. There is a cart full of bodies on the road. How the party wishes to overcome these things is up to them. How they wish to use it against the party following them. How it gets used against them by the evil party to harass the good party. The adventure is not going to give you much to work with here except some personalities and general goals, spiced up by some specific remarks here and there,

As event based adventures go it’s not the worst. There’s no real railroad here, except for maybe the first encounter where a bird flies by, discovering the party for the witch. You can kill off good caravan members, or do pretty much anything. If the kid dies, or you turn him over early or something, well, I hope you got paid well for it by the witch? Just beyond the ten static events is a little section on other events that the DM can toss in. Less events, i think, and more how to handle party actions, like, we want to talk to the baddies, or other actions to toss in to spice things up. This is all then further augmented by a terrain and weather table to add additional spice. So, a lot of tools, from good guy npcs, rto baddies, to terrain, to weather, to static encounters to tossed in encounters, all to mix in together for an adventure.

The only thing that REALLY doesn’t work for me is one of the early encounters, a gnome, polymorphed, controlling animals via a potion/fungus, attacking the party. Meh. It’s a little prescriptive and renfaire fantasy for my tastes. 

I think, though, this comes off a little bland. The evil mercs are mostly just dudes. Fire arrows. Hit and run. The personalities are not there to sell a desperate chase. Nd I’m not sure tha the personalities for the good guys are there, cemented enough, either. Yeah yeah, dour, tacitern, boisterous, the obligatory traitor. I think, though, in the years since this was first published, other adventures have come along and done the evil party chasing us thing better. 

This isn’t a bad adventure. It’s certainly easy to read and follow. I just can’t get in to it at all. There’s a little too much work on the DM, I think, and/or that lack of specificity that I enjoy. I’m not mad at this, I just don’t see a reason to run it.

This is $8 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Boo! Boo! Stick in a preview Eric! (Also, I seem to recall loving Ironwood Gorge?)

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555687/queen-s-gambit-osr-version?1892600