Ten Foot Pole

By Jean Luc Lariviere-Lacombe, Todd Terwilliger The Dungeon's Key OSE Levels ... ? 1-5?

A millennium has passed since Kavlov imprisoned the demon Balthazar deep beneath the earth, binding themselves within the Halls of Dread to guarantee their success. However, as Kavlov’s power fades, so does the demon’s prison. Do you have what it takes to stop the ritual circles from being activated and prevent Balthazar’s escape? Or will you take on the role of the villain, seeking to unleash untold destruction on the world by freeing the demon from its bonds? Explore the dread-filled halls of Kavlov’s Sanctuary and uncover the ancient secrets and betrayals that could determine the fate of the world. But be warned, your actions have consequences, and the ultimate battle between good and evil is closer than ever before!

This 107 page digest adventure is a Caves of Chaos thing, done for Mork Borg and then respun in to OSE. It’s not the worst thing ever written, but tends to to the Shock Jock side of the spectrum, and combines minimal descriptions with an ability to expand the text in to paragraphs while still not providing value beyond the minimal descriptions. 

This is a Mork Borg thing. Sure, it’s been respun a bit in to OSE, but at its heart it’s Mork Borg. What’s unusual is that they’ve managed to write something longer. A full on dungeon with supporting wilderness and town. And, yes, it’s inspired by the Caves of Chaos. The wilderness map is evocative of it, as is the BX version of the main map: a valley with a lot of caves in the walls. You’ve got about ten dungeons here, in the same environment as the Caves of Chaos. Dwarflings, Cannibals, Barbarians, a Cyclops, Orcs, Lepers, Hobgoblins running an arena, a Gorgon, a Lab, a giant boar, a basilisk, a “wight crypt” full of vampires, and the Halls of Dread … a little temple area with a dude continually back the chaos void devil he imprisoned long ago. 

I guess I’ll describe the supporting problems before I get to the dungeon proper. The town is a few pages long. It’s mostly boring description of boring shops. There’s a throw off line here and there about someone in the main temple (thats runs the town) actually being an evil cultists, with a few entries elsewhere in the town about how they are in cahoots with the evil faction. There’s not really all that much to go on here, for the DM. It’s like I described a town of, oh, eighteen sites? In about five pages and then said something like “The second in charge at the temple is actually working against it, and has a few followers in town.” This is about what you’re going to get out of the town here. It is the old wound, my lord. If you’re going to say something then say something interesting. That’s what the content of the town should be concentrating on. Something for the DM to hang their hat on, otherwise, don’t bother describing it much, or at all. I’m not paying $15 to read about how the general store has general store items for sale. There is, I think, a significant missed opportunity in town. The walls of the temple bleed evil blood that the temple sometimes uses in their ceremonies. That’s interesting. It smacks vaguely of reality and could have been expanded upon more. Also, the town has a fuck ton of laws, almost their only laws, realted to the dead and burel thereof. And five, I think, of the buildings,, are guild halls for the dead. Morticians, gravediggers, coffin makers, etc. And that’s not really expanded upon at all. Something seems missing here. These are the areas that could have been expanded upon, that and the subplot. 

The wilderness is where things get a tad more interesting. And Mork Borgian. There’s a fey encounter. Except they wear the skin of the people they’ve enchanted. WoW! That’s new. And fits well for fey, I think. It even has a little section on them skinning the party alive and how the party can keep playing. More on this in a minute. There’s also a “Carnivorous Keep” that has no context or details except that it has stomach acid, a treasure in the basement, its only entrance is 40’ up, and it can thrown stones up to 200’ away for 2d6 damage. I truly can’t describe the confusing nature of this. It’s like someone had a cool idea and had four people jot down notes about it ad just threw all of thor notes in. None of it really works together or has context. And then there’s The Forest, which has five encounters in it. Not mapped out. Just things for the DM to throw at the party. All of this is supported by a wandering monster table that is both long and provides nothing for the wanderers to do to help the DM out. 

But that Fey thing, what about it? It’s the perfect example of what I think is wrong with this entire adventure. It presents this idea: the fey wear the skin of people they’ve captured and skinned alive. That’s pretty freaky! Very old world of them, I guess. But it does nothing with this. It’s a minor encounter. There’s no context. There’s no lead in. We simply take that description, that they are waring the skin of people, and do nothing more with it or the environment in which you encounter them. And, I’m down for some randomness in an adventure (and in, weird shit just happens, like meeting fey wearing skins) but its nothing more than combat here. This could have been so much more, but nothing more is done with it, ever. This lack of a greater context, a greater environmental “Feel” is a major problem with the caves, once you reach them.

“The walls appear to be caked in mud.” This is in the first sentence in the caves descriptions. An auspicious beginning, using the word appears to pad things out. What we’re ging to find in the caves is much the same as in B2. It’s a lot of hacking with an occasional fetch quest here and there to bring something back. The interactivity is limited to little more than that and, even  then, is a little disjointed. A secret door in one room leads to a cobweb covered arch in the next. “A minecart and boulders obscure a secret passage.” vs “thick cobwebs cover two small passages leading to the Mining tunnels …” So … a secret door? Or not? It’s this confusion which abounds.

There are weird misses, like a pixie in a lantern with its wings torn off, being used as a light. What if you free it? No notes for the DM, even though thi happens in multiple places, including a room with dudes actively tearing the wings off of them. These sorts of missed opportunities are all over the place. It’s focusing on the shock factor and not the interactivity that the situation could bring. Or, I should say, potential situation, since they are just all combats.

And this lack of depth and focus on the shock extends to most of the adventure in the caves. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a dude strapped down to a table with leprosy and have his eyes rotting out! Or, the barbarians have a rabid dog with them … which I guess is not rabid with them? Also, no rules for rabies? Fucking sticking some rabis in should send the party in to a terror fit. The cyclops cave is full of feral children as kind of servants … who he eats the fingers and toes off of when he gets too hungry and they are too slow to cook. But they don’t escape? And, again, there’s no larger context. The cannibal caves don’t feel like cannibal caves. It just feels like the designer wanted to put ina room with someone getting butchered in it. Even the dude feigning death and rushing out with a knife, which could be a great little scene, is not handled particularly effectively. 

“Upon closer inspection, the merchant’s eyelids and lips have been removed, exposing their weeping eyeballs and gums” This is shock value for no other purpose. The caves don’t really FEEL like the environments they are trying to present. The descriptions are minimal, although they are expanded upon at length to no effect. This is the major sin with this adventure.

The BX map, and town map, in the adventure booklet are so fuzzy as to be unreadable. Fortunately there is a separate map pack that makes them readable. But the individual cave maps in that are a monstrosity of some background image overlaid, no doubt from the Mork Borg heritage. Which makes them impossible to use. But the mini maps in the actual booklet are fine. The net effect here is that the excesses of the usual mork borg presentation values are generally avoided. 

The Mork Borgians managed to write a longer adventure. That’s good. The focus on shock value descriptions might have been ok if the actual locations FELT like what the individual descriptions were trying for. Interactivity beyond pure combat (which, I allow for, B2 had little of) and focusing on situations rather than encounters would have gone a long way here.

And stick in a fucking level range and some order of fucking battle. Jesus. Still, one of the best things to come out of that genre. I look forward to seeing the next one from this group.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is 31 pages. The end will show you the caves and the two page spread. It’s a nice emulation of the OSE format, although I think kits missed the mark with its minimal descriptions and using that format.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/453667/Kavlovs-Sanctuary–An-Old-School-Essentials-compatible-campaign-module?1892600

By Chris Carter Exotic World Designs OSR Level ?

The forest now known as the Blue Star Forest has existed from ?me immemorial. Decades ago a star was seen going across the sky and entering the forest – giving it its name – before that it had a name (to the elves) which translated as the Twilit Forest [“Tinduglad”].

This 34 page adventure uses twentish pages to describe a forest with ten encounters, including a wizards tower with about eight more. It is an amateurish effort, but, also, not without a certain underlying charm. Which makes me not hate it, but, also, its not worth checking out in any way.

This is somewhat what I was hoping it would be. I was hoping it would be a kind of amateurish product that didn’t touch on the tropes of 5e, Lord of the Rings, Pathfinder, or even D&D. That’s not quite what it actually is, but, also, it’s not too far away. It’s closer, I think, to a computer RPG  adventure and its tropes. There’s a certain kind of randomness in this that does give it a bit of the Anything Can Happen that one might expect in a old school fantasy forest wandering. It’s also plagues by a lack of understanding of how to write an actual adventure. 

There’s a brief table of hooks and rumors to go along with them. Each hook being tied to a single encounter in the adventure. Yes, you could hook away at encounter one in the forest and be done after that. There are some notes about how, after encounter one, you feel compelled to go deeper in to the forest, but, also, you get to make a save, so, you know, adventure over! There’s nothing too remarkable about the hooks, or the rumors, standard things really. There IS a brief little note about a Nemesis, a rival party that could be in the first also. There are not details, and no rival party available, but, this also is an older trope from the early days that makes an appearance here. A kind of “you could also do this” sort of thing, without anything else provided. This is not the Assist the DM attitude that I think an adventure should bring, but, also, it DOES recognize that this is available to the DM, which is something lost from a lot of modern adventures. Look, man, I’m trying hard here to find the charm.

The adventure is actually quite confused. At one point we’re told that a recent battle with an outlaw band killed to outlaws. It is IMMEDIATELY followed up with “no one was killed.”  Not that any of that matters since it’s just useless backstory, but, you get the idea. Like a map showing the tower layout of a wizards tower … which is then constricted by the actual encounter descriptions. There’s a lack of proof reading here that is frustrating. Not game ending, but just frustrating. 

The forest wandering table is four pages long but has nothing, really, except monster stats and monster ecology. Nothing specific at all. The actually encounters are many paragraphs long, four or so on average, and the descriptions usually amount ot something like “3 orcors live in crude huts near the pool” … and then four paragraphs that don’t actually describe anything at all. Some ecology. SOme backstory that doesn’t matter. There is painfully little about the actually encounter you are currently facing. I don’t mean tacticial, although that would satisfy me and give me something else to botch about, I guess. But there’s just NOTHING related to THIS encounter. 

And yet there are these hints about things that could have been. A meteor field with stone stress and metallic fruit. I’m always up for a nice blasted clearing in a wood. Or glowing a farmers field covered in blue mushrooms … and strange effect. Or a Elf dude who can turn in to a giant spider. That’s fun. And yet we never get more than what I just stated, and it’s always surrounded by tons and tons of … padding? Irrelevant detail? That’s not right. Ecology and background, I guess. It just doesn’t hit AT ALL.

A little fantasy forest would have been nice, and there are hints of the weird and unusual here, but the padded out nature along with the lack os specificity in the encounters is maddening.

This is $2 at DriveThru. There’s no preview, sucker!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/465027/Blue-Star-Forest?1892600

By Ben Thompson 99c Adventures OSR Level 4

The tiny village of Ostlund has long been home to a beautiful park, but, beginning around a year ago, the once-serene garden has become a very different – and much more sinister – place around sundown.  A mysterious dark curse now sees the village haunted by all manner of evil creatures that wreak havoc on the town and its people, causing destruction and mischief that is becoming increasingly more violent and frightening for the people living here.  Ostlund has managed to cope with this situation, for now, but with crops beginning to die, villagers going missing, and structures mysteriously catching fire at night, the people now seek help to free them from their torment. You must venture to Ostlund before the night of the Summer Solstice.  You will have just one night to wander the haunted park and cleanse it of the curse.  Succeed, and you will become the greatest heroes this small hamlet has ever seen.  Fail, and you doom these people to continue their cycle of misery for another grim year.

This 64 page adventure uses ten pages to describe fourteen areas in a small park that is about 300 feet on a side. No plants here, just endless read-aloud, too much DM text, and an obvious 5e adventure restated for the OSR to increase sales. 99c Adventures are now off the table. 

We start with a one page read-aloud; a letter to the party from a village pleading for help. Evil things in the park, crops failing, blah blah blah. Off you go. On the way you have a one and a half page encounter with a troll at a bridge. Nothing really special here; fight him or pay him off. There’s a night in the river underneath that you can recruit. Sir Eric. A kind of Gilderoy Lockhart type dude with a fawning fan club of women in the village you are going to. That’s fun. That’s ALL that is fun in this adventure.

A page and a half troll bridge encounter. What the fuck were you thinking man? With all that read-aloud? IN ITALICS so my fucking eyes would pop out of my head? And then ALL of that DMs text. For a fucking troll on a bridge. Why’d you do that? And none of it is interesting. None of it. It’s just troll bridge shit,all of it generic and nothing special or fun or unusual about it. It amazes me, the ability of people to pad shit encounters out with more shit.

Ok, then you get to town. There’s nothing fun in town, really. There are three Vampire Spawn, which are not vampires, but, close enough I guess. They don’t really do anything unless you hit on one of them (Hello Ladies!) And there’s the knights fanclub. I guess that’s fun. There are some druids you can talk to who will teach yo a spell to talk to the lake guarding in the park. Otherwise, it’s just generic shit and a few programmed combat/challenge encounters. 

Off to the park you go! There’s a giant statue head in the park. It’s the source of evil. How you know this I know not. You need to collect an incantation n the park and get the fabulous SUN SWORD, err, I mean Sunstone. The lake guardian thing can tell you to go get both. Otherwise , I don’t really know how you are figuring this one out. “You feel like there might be more to do” , I believe the encounters say. Yeah. That’s always a great sign. Telling the party outright they have more to do. Which, of course, means more of the DM running “INITIATIVE!” as monsters attack. There’s no real option to do anything but stab everything in the park. So, get stabbing boyo!

I really can’t get over this. Vampire Spawn in the broad daylight. Sixty four pages for just over a dozen encounters. Almost all just straight up combat encounters. It’s fucking absurd. Ridiculous amounts of read-aloud. Ridiculous amounts of DM text. Why would you attach your name to this?

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. Enjoy that intro read-aloud and the start of the troll encounter. Perfect preview, since you know nothing but pain is coming for you.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/464634/LC3-Garden-of-Terror?1892600

By R. Nelson Bailey Dungeoneers Guild Games OSRIC Levels 3-5

The annual caravan bound for Insarna Castle is weeks overdue. The lords who rule over this remote castle are worried that some grave calamity has befallen it. Since resupplying the garrison is of vital importance to the realm, this is highly alarming. They urgently seek a group of capable adventurers to locate the missing caravan somewhere in the wild expanse that surrounds the route to Insarna. Time grows short for the missing men and supplies. Can your party of adventurers solve this mystery before it is too late?

This 21 page  adventure has the party following a trail through the wilderness, fighting monsters, until you find an eighteen room cave system with more monsters in it. All you do is stab, in rooms with minimal description. Just a generic OSR “adventure”.

Some copper dragon has gotten itself possessed by an amulet with five demons in it. It attacked the caravan. You track it back, following a path of destruction and finding some people who fled from the caravan. Usually they are being held captive by gnolls, etc. Oh, also, the dragon has a wife who is flying around. She  might ask you to help out. She doesn’t do the job herself, of course. Why this is a part of the adventure I have no idea. The wifey thing does nothing. Well, she does have a cave and the cave has a nice hoard in it, so, youknow, time for a humanoid-centric view of the world. I guess, in the name of XP. Or, you can do your own goody two shoes thing. But, killing her and taking her eggs is more fun. And this adventure desperately needs more fun. 

You wander around this valley and have some wandering monster encounters on your way past the various monster lairs. All of the wandering monster encounters are essentially the same variation of “These wicked lizard folk ruthlessly attack all who cross their paths.” It’s boring as all fuck. It acknowledges that they SHOULD be doing something, but fails to recognize that “they attack ruthlessly”, at every encounter, is exactly the same as not having them do anything at all. 

The wilderness map has a wagon trail on it, so it’s pretty linear. The dungeon at the end with the evil dragon is essentially linear also. That’s always fun. Enter a room, kill who is in it and then go on to the next room to do the same thing. There is almost no interactivity in this beyond just killing what is in the room. 

Examples of the masterful evocative writing style include “Two firenewts each armed with a glaive guisarme stand guard here.” or “Two burst sacks looted form the caravan lie on the floor of this ordinary cave,” That’s D&D for you. An empty cave with two sacks lying on the floor. Is it dark? Moldy? Damp? Running water? Rocks from the ceiling everywhere? Path through it? Shadows? No? It’s just “an ordinary cave.” Abstracted and generic. Boring. 

The descriptions are generally not that short. They fall in to a kind of expanded minimalism category. This is hard to describe fully, but it’s when you wander on and on with the text to no real point. You pad it out with background and other useless trivia that does nothing to help run the adventure at the table. Here’s a great example, from which I have removed the inline stats: “Two aspis drone guards watch the passage that leads out of this cave into the deeper caverns to the south. Each one wields two clubs (1d6 damage each) and two shields which give them Armor Class 2. A wooden pen holds 17 giant aphids These harmless creatures have no means of defending themselves other than to flee if threatened. The insect men harvest the honeydew they produce as a food source (see AREA b, p. 12).”

Note how that description doesn’t really SAY anything. Two drone guard a passage. Yawn. It leads deeper in to the caves to the south. Boring description, and its just telling us what the map says, not adding anything to the action at the table. What they are armed with. Boring. Shield. Boring. A wooden pen is somewhat interesting. Note how its stuck way down in the description. That should probably be the first thing noticed. No way to defend themselves is useless, as is the honeydew background information that is completely irrelevant to the adventure. It’s a WHOLE lot of words that add nothing to play. 

When you finally meet the dragon you get to fight it. But, in addition to the stat block there you ALSO have to turn back to the beginning of the adventure to reference the rules for the demons possessing the dragon. Like, the possessor uses it’s THACO instead of the dragons. There’s a whole section, with table. But you have to use it AND the stat blocks at the end to make everything work right in the combat, That makes sense.

It’s just a boring old stab everything adventure with no real interactivity. Nothing very interesting happens. The same kind of generic stab adventure that has plagued the OSR since its beginning.

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/463632/The-Lost-Caravan-DUNGEON-DELVE-SIDE-QUEST-2?1892600

By Michele Toscan Self Published 5e Levels 3-4

The incessant floods engulfing the region have forced the young Maddalena Malatesta, the wicked Lord’s niece, to leave Montefiore Conca Castle without her cat, Cerasus. Since Maddalena was brought to the ancestral Malatesta residence, she has grown weaker and weaker, yearning only for the company of her little companion. The company of soldiers from the house, sent by her father Ferrantino to recover the cat, never returned from the mission. Psychic storms prevent any form of foresight around the castle, which has been shrouded in a shadow of terror for days. Lord Malatestino I Malatesta has decided to enlist a group of assorted heroes to retrieve little Cerasus. But is that his only objective? And why did the previous expedition never return?

It’s the holidays and I’m in a generally generous mood. So I decided to accept this review request. I have regrets.

This complete and utter mess of garbage uses … three pages? To describe … a castle? Maybe?  It uses very general terms to describe a few things that might happen. Except, my description is WAY too concrete to actually represent what the designer has done here. This isn’t even an outline of an adventure, or a summary of an outline. Maybe an idea for an outline would be a fitting description.

Ok, so, floods ravage the lands. Some dude hires you to go check out a castle of his and report back. Also, his daughters cat is missing in the castle and please bring it back. You might have an encounter on the way to the castle. Inside you meet some mercs. Underneath, in its dungeon, you find a cthulhu that has woken up. It’s served by some etruscans. It made friends with the cat. The end. 

Come now Bryce, you can do a better job os describing the adventure than that! Ah, but, gentle readers, I cannot. For that is not a summary of the adventure. That IS the adventure. I’m being serious.

The opening journey through the flooded lands tells us that “Feel free to add as many chance encounters as you like to the journey that begins on the Roman Flaminia road and then

climbs into the southern hills. The hills are full of bandits. An encounter with the ghosts of Guido del Cassero and Angiolello da Carignano might lead the character to understand Malatesta III has well deserved the name Guastafamiglia“. We get another paragraph when we arrive at the castle describing the mercs and how they sent out a messenger. The implication, I guess, is that he’s lost and you should find him. But there’s nothing more than that. No messenger notes or anything. Then it tells us that under the castle are etruscans and their leader, this cleric dude named Velma. Again, I’m no exaggerating to say that’s all there is. It’s another four sentences. That’s it. Then it just morphs in to a table, without any heading at all, to describe a kind of random element in the tunnels. IE: they have been abstracted and you roll on a table to discover the room you are now in and what happens in it, until you roll “the final room” and find the cat and his buddy the cthulhu. Let’s see, you are rolling a d20 and there are seven possibilities. Enjoy.

The rest of the adventure is six or so pages of pregens and monster stats and a three page background overview of the campaign setting. 

Did I mention that the read-aloud section is long and in italics? Did I mention that the entire thing is in some weird ass fucking font that’s hard to read? Or that it appears on some kind of background to give the appearance of an old and weather newspaper, which makes it even harder to read? I fucking HATE that fucking people do this. I’m not gonna struggle to try and comprehend the written fucking words of your adventure. Why not just write the fucking thing in Italian and make me struggle to figure it the fuck out? It’s the same fucking thing. I would love nothing more than to torture each of these people with each others adventures. Hand them some other dude artsy fartsy K0oL font and background adventure and sit them down in front of people and tell them to run the fucking thing. 

There’s no fucking adventure here. “Hey, there’s a castle with some mercs in it. Five of them. They sent a messenger to someone” That’s supposed to be a fucking adventure? No map? No real indication of how they treat the party? I didn’t even know they were baddies until I noted that their stat blocks lists them as Enemies. 

I don’t know what the fuck is going on here. This looks like an idea I might have for a nights play before I started fleshing it out, generally, with a few extra sentences scribbled down. It’s not a fucking adventure. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and you get to see the artsy fartsy background/newsprint and fancy font and a few paragraphs of text for the background. That should tell you more than enough to let you know to stay far FAR away from this.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/458682/Shadows-of-the-Sunken-Dread?1892600