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By Heidi Gygax Garland, Erik Garland, Adapted by Bill Silvey
GAXLAND
1e
Levels 5-7

The mission: A local elder dwarf has commissioned you to find the long abandoned underground tomb of the legendary Dundel Chief, R?ta V?kara. As no dwarven folk are allowed beyond the South Gate of the city of Sørholde, you have been entrusted to retrieve a long lost and priceless document that your benefactor maintains would free the dwarven folk from their obligation to maintain the city of Sørholde and reinstate the great dwarven mines of the Dundel once again.

This 64 page adventure presents what is essentially a linear tomb with around forty rooms. Very long winded, lots of read-aloud, and no real interactivity beyond traps and combat. It is quite the amateurish effort for $35.

I’m gong to start by saying something nice. “Thieves’ Tools can always be improvised with items from the adventuring packs (i.e. a hammer and piton) but the improvised tools and lock will be destroyed in the process.” I like this kind of framing about thieves tools. I think the natural assumption is thieves tools are lockpics and other delicate instruments. I don’t really like thieves as written in most (all?) systems and this aligns with my view of crowbars and sledgehammers being standard dungeon equipment. One day maybe I’ll work up a thief class in which their find/remove abilities are just rerolls, given anyone can find/remove a traps, open doors, etc. Anyway, thieves tools being higher quality crowbars and sledgehammers make sense to me, lasting more than one attempt, etc. 

Otherwise, man, this thing is rough. Lots of read-aloud, mounds of paddings, a mostly linear dungeon and low-powered opponents. I shall assume the best of intentions and these are just enthusiastic amateurs who wrote for, say, 5e, and had Bill localize it to 1e. But that localize was just not done well at all.

The adventure starts off in medias res with the parties wagon train being attacked by five skeletons. Yes, five skeletons. At levels five through seven. This is a recurring problem with the adventure. Very low level enemies, in small quantities, in general, but skeletons in particular. Oh, but these are special skeletons! They have TWO HD!!!!! Level five is an auto-turn and level seven is an auto destroy. So, yes, please, put in five skeletons. Or some giant rats. Yeah, sure, something like a hundred or a thousand skeletons, rats, stirge, et, can become an obstacle for the party, A hazard or environmental feature if not a straight up combat. When you finally make it to the last room of the dungeon you face off against the titular undead Dundel chief himself! Who I’m pretty sure is a 2HD skeleton. The read-aloud says he rises to attack. And that other skeletons nearby rise to attack. And it gives us stats for a 2HD skeleton right there. And no stats for the chieftain. Was there supposed to be stats for the big bad? Did they all fuck this up? Both writers credited? Both editors credited? The conversion person credited? The two proofreaders credited? Or is he supposed to be a 2HD skeleton? I wonder if anyone cared?

It engages in LONG, like, REALLY LONG sections of read-aloud. For everything. Once again, no one wants long read-aloud. Nobody cares about it. The DM doesn’t. The players HATE it. That’s when the phones come out. If you don’t run a shitty shitty game then people will be engaged and the phones will NOT come out. More than two or three sentences of read-aloud, SHORT sentences, is all you can get away with. If half your page is read-aloud text, as it is here in a not uncommon occurrence, then you are CLEARLY FAILING. In many pages there is far FAR less DM text on a page then there is read-aloud. 

Second person read-aloud. Don’t do that. Don’t make assumptions about the party. They are all 50’ tall and incorporeal in my game, so your shitty long second-person read-aloud doesn’t fucking apply. This also applies to that shtity in medias res opening. You’re part of a caravan, a wagon train, to the tomb. Earthquakes! Skeleton attacks! “Uh, we flew there.” Uh huh. Unspeakable Oath did an CoC adventure that started with the lights out in the players actual game space, then the DM flicked them on and one of them spat out a piece of hotdog. (His tongue, as it turns out.) THAT was a fucking in medias res fucking openening! For a one shot. If you are not the Unspeakable Oath and doing a one shot then maybe think twice before doing this.

You are on your way to the tomb of the dundel chief. Some dwarves hired you. They want you to go find a deed in it that gives them the right to open a mine and they are not allowed in/through the gateway city. A piece of paper. The dwarves think that a piece of paper is what they need. To coopt a quote, who, exactly, is going to enforce the judiciaries decision? Jesus gonna come down and smite the city elders for not obeying the piece of paper? Emperor Whatits, that maybe both the city and the dwarves pay homage to (If that were the case?) WHo does he like best? Is he trying to curry favor with one or the other party? But, sure, whatever. That’s a dwarf probem, I guess, YOUVE got a piece of paper that lets you go explore the tomb. That doesn’t belong to the dwarves. 

Strangely, the dundel people, who still exist and are all around, are ok with you plundering and robbing and desecrating the tomb of their greatest chief. “The Dundel people will be friendly and will answer questions if able.” Like, in ALL ways. Sure thing man, plunder away! 

DM text is quite poor. ‘Wait, we just started and we already have earthquakes and are under attack by the undead? Let’s go back a few days for a bit of a flashback.” Wonderful. Conversational. “If gear is left in the tunnel above or a rope is left hanging into the chamber it will be untouched when the time comes to return to the surface.” Is the sun still burning when we return? Is the air outside still breathable when we return? Room names are that cringe stuff that turns punny sometimes like “Encounter 3F: What’s Down Here?” 

Mechanics wise get things like a column of text to describe a pit trap. A simple pit trap with a clowning lid. A column of text. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how you used to get away with just drawing an X on the map and saying nothing about it. 

“The slabs are extremely heavy and cannot be moved or damaged in any meaningful way.” Uh huh. How about “The padlock cannot be broken, but it may be picked” I think, perhaps, you underestimate my players. One of my proudest moments as a father is when my kids, knowing there was a basement to a house but not being able to find a way in, pulled out their tools and started to work on the wood floor. And those were first level tweens. I think my aging level seven wizard can find a way through, if not the bevy of magic items the level five through sevens carry. It’s fucking absurd. Half the fucking spell lists in 1e are devoted to shit like this.

One room takes three pages to describe.

The dungeon is linear. You come down in to a room with eight doors, one open. You explore that section of the dungeon and at the end of it you can then go explore the next section of the dungeon and so on. IE: linear. Of those eight sections, about halfway through the text, you get an interlude that describes the nomad camp outside the dungeon that you camp in. Seriously. Like, after room twenty, here’s a description of the nomad camp outside, and then it starts in on room 21. No, this was not an editing or layout error. It was intentional. Because just sticking rando shit in the middle of other rando shit is CLEARLY the best way to organize things. That’s my, in my own dictionary, the letters M are placed between the letters Q and D. 

Quantum rooms? IE: the dreaded if/then padding? Check. “If the party explores to the North, they will find the walkway leads to a section of bridge that crosses to a door. If they continue North, they find a dead end and the source of the fast- moving stream, emerging through a heavy iron grate from the darkness beyond.” 

Dumb ass interactivity/? Check. “The answer to the riddle is: Eye. As soon as the answer is spoken …” No sphynx there. Just a room. Yu’re just saying the answer out loud. 

The final insult may be the hyperlink included at the end for downloadable content. It’s broken. Doesn’t work. As in it takes you a page on their website that says “No page found.” I went digging elsewhere on their website for the content. It’s not present. 

It’s linear, stuffed with excessive read-aloud, DM notes that are excessive in some places and lacking in other place, to the point I’m questioning if there was a layout/edit error that removed information that was supposed to be present. It is essentially traps and combat with a lot of irrelevant combat encounters and a few 7 HD dudes here and there. This is not a strong showing. For $35.

This is $35 at DriveThru. The preview is only three pages with none of the dungeon. A good preview should show a potential buyer what to expect, and the core encounters are a part of that. Still, you get a look at the read-aloud on a couple of the lighter pages. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/446899/tomb-of-the-dundel-chief-1e-special-edition?1892600

By The Danger Forge
Self Published
OSE
Levels 6-8

Tales of Atan-Thu are told to frighten both the bold and the meek alike. Necromancer without peer. Merciless tyrant of Zahal Keep. His evil stretched across the land like a malignant shadow. Though long dead, his legend persists. Ancient texts speak of a vast sepulcher hidden deep in the Dhar Voromal Mountains, where Atan-Thu and his immeasurable wealth and artifacts of power were entombed. But rumors hint that Atan-Thu yet survives, sustained by his dark necromancy. Protected by hideous guardians and diabolical traps, he waits for the very brave or the very foolish to enter his lair.  Do you dare venture into his ancient crypt and explore this testament to Atan-Thu’s power, malice, and madness?

This 68 page adventure uses about twenty two pages to describe about seventy rooms in a tomb/puzzle/challenge dungeon. Long-winded tomb of horrors, at levels 6-8, with impossible puzzles and overpowered opponents. 

I knew I was trouble upon first cracking it open. Triple column. Small font. You are free, brothers and sisters, of the constraints of the print publishing world! You can make your product 6,000 pages long! Because it’s a PDF and no one gonna buy the print copy anyway. And if they are then they REALLY want to so you don’t have to cram your product in to some artificial page count constraint. 

Lets see here … background information about scary dude, history b lah blah blah, overland area that briefly describes some large general regions with no real mention or support of overlands play, small village generically described with no import … more background information. Bulshit bullshit bullshit, madness and horror throw-away rules cause dungeon is so scary, bullshit bullshit bullshit … Ok, the dungeon starts after ten pages of padding.

Room two: You’ve got seven stone heads. Three face inward from the west wall, three from the east, and a seventh looms at the north end of the hall. Two doors, the one you came in and another one on the far side. The doors are immune to physical damage and are wizard locked at level 18. At the base of each stone head is a small bowl and in the center of the room seven orbs float above a seven pointed star, each inlaid with a different symbol. You put the orbs in correct bowl and the door unlocks. First failure and the doors lock. Second and ichor streams in to the room. Third and everyone takes 3d6 damage per round until you get it right. There are no hints. The symbols on the  orbs? There are no corresponding symbols anywhere. It’s the second room of the dungeon (in a line until it opens up later), you’ve learned nothing yet. It is truly random. You’ve level 6-8. How much divination do you truly have? 

Did I mention that there’s a level 7 undead dude running around, with dimension door and a wand of lightning bolts? He’s doing hit and runs on your party. Oh, yeah, there are four of them, one in each quadrant of the dungeon. How the room with NINE 8HD AC2 dudes to fight? For your level 6-8’s. At one point you’re potentially attacked by 1d6 wights per turn. Which is fun except you auto-turn those at level 7 and turn on, what, a 4, at level six? 

My point here is that this was not playtested. At all. I suspect the designer doesn’t even play D&D. I don’t see how you can and come up with this stuff. No one playtested room two. It can’t be. I don’t see how anyone is living through it. A party of six level eight clerics who filled their spell slots with divinations? Let’s see, from 1e  (sorry, My kool aid stained 1e is at hand, not OSE…) that’s 3 3 3 3 2 spells at level eight. That’s three Augery and two Divination per cleric, or eighteen Augury and twelve Divinations. For room two that’s … a seven factorial? About 5,000 combinations?  

But, hey man, the treasure rooms has about 16k in gold and a ring with one wish. So, it was the friends we made along that was the real treasure!

Man, fuck this fucking shit! 

Worthless fucking garbage. 

Did you try? What is the definition of trying? There are words on a page. Someone used a professional map making tool to make the dungeon map. It looks nice. But it clearly wasn’t playtested. And I’m not even sure there’s a basic understanding of what a level six (or eight …) character is capable of. Rocks fall. Everybody dies.All of that fucking preamble bullshit is worthless. All of that appendix shit is worthless. The use of fucking italics is garbage. Long read-aloud is fucking garbage. No fucking treasure. Overpowered fucking combats. I’m supposed to believe that this was lovingly handcrafted?! Backstory in the fucking dungeon rooms. 

There is a nice bit. The dungeon map is in four quadrants. A mat surrounds three of them. That’s a nice touch, a little flavor and challenge to leverage for the party. Those 1d6 weights shows up for every 100 feet traveled on it. 

Sometimes I come across dungeons that could serve as platonic examples of what NOT to do. This is one of them. Looky there at that cover. And the layout inside. Pretty fucking nice.  But I will take a handwritten scrawl over this shit any day of the week. This is the chinese box. Emulation rather than understanding. 

I’m sure someone, somewhere, is making a bundle cranking this shit out at Kickstarter. “Look! Just like the olden days! “ Indeed. Fuck nostalgia. And fucking reading shit. D&D is for playing. A high 2E dungeon. Is there a worse insult?

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, You get to see the map, which is nice, but otherwise it’s just the generic padding shit and little dungeon overview bit. Shitty preview. It needs to show some encounters so we can understand what the core of the writing is about before we make a purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/554398/the-crypt-of-atan-thu-old-school-essentials?src=newest_recent?1892600

Legendary RPG author and designer Rob Kuntz is adding TWO very sought-after PDF products to his Three Line Studio Store, after those products recently sold out as popular print releases elsewhere on the web (DATG at TLB Games, and DD at Chaotic Henchmen Productions)...

Rob's seminal treatise Dave Arneson's True Genius, and iconic RPG adventure module Dark Druids, have now joined our range of downloadable digital (PDF) products!

 

And here's the double-whammy to all our fans and friends: if you purchase DATG and DD together as a bundle — The DATG Dark Druids Bundle — you will get 20% off your order (*valid until 5th July 2023). Now that's regal!

Good Day to You All!

There is no better way to start off a New Year than with -- not just one but TWO -- brand-new, never-before-published creative, exciting products!  Even better, when such creative, exciting products are about a CELEBRATION...

Throughout 2023, Rob Kuntz and Three Line Studio will be celebrating 50 years since the inception and playtesting of the world's first commercial RPG in 1973!

And there is no better way to celebrate than to reward YOU, Rob's loyal fanbase, with our launch of Gargax's Glorious Gewgaws and Pryce's Price, both available to purchase exclusively from our newly-launched Three Line Studio Store!  Please note that for the very first time, we are 'going' digital as those two products are published in professional high-quality full-colour PDF format, printable and viewable on all electronic devices, PC/MAC/Android.  Cartography, interior art and Gewgaws cover art by are by a promising young Italian graphic artist, Davide Gambarara, who did a stirling job!  Davide brought a crisp line work to both Gewgaws and Pryce.  We cannot praise him enough and can already hint at the fact that Davide will be involved in forthcoming TLS projects!  https://www.facebook.com/dagamarts/
More information about Davide from our TLS Facebook post.

Rob's two celebratory releases are part of Three Line Studio's Red Book™ collection, and are send-ups to Gary Gygax:

Gargax's Glorious Gewgaws is divided into two sections.  The first part references in detail some special magic items, while the second part features the films, literature and authors that historically inspired the beginning of the RPG form.  Pryce's Price is a very exciting and captivating action-packed adventure module with gothic undertones, described as "one of the most fantastic adventures written by Rob Kuntz to date!"  Gewgaws and Pryce are sure to brighten up your day... and your game!  Head off to our store -- only one click away -- and while there please also make sure to download Rob's latest FREE (26-page long) Newsletter: https://threelinestudiostore.company.site/ If you wish to purchase Gewgaws and Pryce together, why not take advantage of our SPECIAL OFFER on the Gewgaws Pryce Bundle and save 25%! Happy Celebrations!
 

Download the first issue of Cepheus Journal. There is an article about CE skills, part one of a scifi adventure on salvage and recovery, a Sword of Cepheus NPC, a description of a free trader with deckplans, a small pseudolizard species to encounter, a piece on modern war, tech level comparisons and more. We want … Continue reading Cepheus Journal Issue #001

Rosalis Cluster is Sector generated using the Cepheus Engine rules. It can now be downloaded from the downloads page. The download includes a huge PNG-image (4227 x 5305 pixels), and two text-files with the UWPs and the XML-data. In the map of the sector we can see two multi subsector empires. The Raniera Worlds and … Continue reading Rosalis Cluster

You are rolling up a new Traveller character and you aren't sure which Background Skills to choose. In this article, I will show you the best background skills for your Traveller character.

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The Cepheus Journal is a free and ad-free Fanzine. We are looking for submissions. While we wait for the first issue, these mock-up covers might provide some inspiration.

Looking for sci-fi RPG adventure seeds for your next game of Cepheus Engine or Traveller? Check out The Missing Survey Vessel.

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My players needed something larger than the standard air/raft, so I created this civilian g-carrier for them.

The eighth and final live Traveller player panel for Mayday Traveller RPG Day 2020.  The Crew discusses more Traveller character backstories.

The eighth Interview for Mayday Traveller RPG Day 2020 is Marc MIller of Far Future Enterprises.  We discuss the origins of Traveller with the creator himself!

The seventh live Traveller player panel for Mayday Traveller RPG Day 2020.  The Crew discusses more Traveller character backstories.

The seventh Interview for Mayday Traveller RPG Day 2020 is Matthew Sprange of Mongoose Publishing.  We discuss the origins of Mongoose and the Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition.

The sixth live Traveller player panel for Mayday Traveller RPG Day 2020.  The Crew discusses more Traveller character backstories.

The sixth Interview for Mayday Traveller RPG Day 2020 is Mike Leonard of El Cheapo Products.  We discuss Traveller RPG Paper Minis, starship deck plans, and other great sci-fi expansions.

The fifth live Traveller player panel for Mayday Traveller RPG Day 2020.  The Crew discusses more Traveller character backstories.

LINK to Description and Ordering:  https://www.tlbgames.com/collections/the-red-book-line/products/merlynd-the-magician