Ten Foot Pole

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

By Onslaught Six, Roz Leahy, Maeve Murray
Tidal Wave Games
OSE
Level 2?

Engage with multiple factions of orcs, beastmen, rodentia, and cults. Infiltrate the followers of a doomed machine. Fall prey to a vampiric lord. Escape from the moat monster. Fight deadly monsters of chaos. Get treasure. Get out alive.

This 44 page digest presents one level of a dungeon with seventeen lairs comprising about 120 rooms. It’s a weirdly worded and padded out hack with secret doors being your only exploration, in spite of a balrog AND demon lord both being present. 

There’s this old template complex and blah blah blah a year ago something happens and monsters move in. There are now seventeen different “zones” in this dungeon, each with about five or rooms in them. Yeah man, like I said, a year. And seventeen zones worth of monsters. So, you know, they’re motivated, I guess? 

So, the map. One level. It’s got loops? No? Maybe? The seventeen or so zones are all like little mini-maps. Imagine you took seventeen dungeon geomorph tiles, each of which had five or six rooms on it. Then, connect those geomorph tiles with, like, a hallway in to it and a hallway out of it. I think a few of them actually have a THIRD hallway leading in/out of them. Pretty cool stuff, eh! No? Not? Not. And, then, I want you to use the TINIEST fucking font on earth to label each room. Chill? Sounds like a great idea. Yeah yeah, “bryce has old eyes” Fuck you. Well, maybe. But, also, more than one thing can be true at the same time. The fucking font here is TONY for the map keys. There is absolutely no way someone looked at this and said “yup, looks great!” which means that no one looked at it. Also, the map lists “0.1, 0.2” and so on but the text lists “a.1 and a.2.”  

How about the room entries Mrs Lincoln? “This room contains a library of tomes purported to contain magical secrets. Taking the time to read the books reveals they are all hoaxes or inaccurate. Empty hooks, designed to hold shields and weaponry, line the walls of this room.” That is a typical room entry. If there’s a monster in the room then there would be a stat block also. So it’s not really read-aloud. And I’m not sure it’s really DM text either. The concept of a room? The concept of 120 rooms? How about “Rotting wood shelves endure upon the walls Hurrath “ Nice and purple, yes? Or “The Beastlord resides here, commanding his underlings to capture the Muroids and put them to work.”

This is a kind of interesting style of abstraction that pops up from time to time. It’s not the normal generic abstraction that shows up usually but more of a, oh, I don’t know, I think I’ve compared it to writers note for an episodic tv series. “Kirk is a brash officer, a ladies man born in iowa who was the only person ever to pass the blah blah blah.” So, it’s kind of painting a general picture of what’s going on. And, to a degree, that is the point of writing a room, you want to give the DM an idea of what is going on there so the DM can then take the reigns and run it. But it’s almost as if the room is forgotten, the specifics of playing a D&D adventure are forgotten. If we look at the room descriptions “The Beastlord resides here, commanding his underlings to capture the Muroids and put them to work” then you get a decent idea. Yes, that is what is going on here, in general, as in that is the kind of activities that take place here. Maybe we could summative it as “throne room” or “command center. “ That tells us the same thing. But, also, not, what the fucking is going on in the room? If he directing his legions and the the party runs in ala New Hope? Does he have a  sand table he is standing over? What the adventure has provided are some very general writers notes. As if it were then to be handed to a different writer who would then create a room, the specifics, from it. “Lou! I need two paragraphs by Tuesday about a room that some dude called the Beastlord oversees his attempts to capture the Myredions.” That’s not a room description. It’s the IDEA for a room description. Not chill.

Let’s see. We’ve got a zombie ogre in this place. He has a pot on his fireplace bubbling away. Can zombies do that? He’s smart? I guess He’s got a pet gelatinous cube.  Wait, what?! Nothing means anything anymore. My kobold has a pet Zeus on a leash. The LG Lich is fighting against the forces of Nirvana and their commander Asmodeaus. Look, man, bend things is you will but you gotta have SOME kind of logic to them. And why the fuck do we need to know that the zombie dude feeds the cube limbs and pieces of its victims. That’s backstory. Better if the cube is guarding something, some passage or some way its stuck, and there’s a crate of limbs and bodies in another room with obvious limbs hacked/torn off. Then it makes some kind of sense.

Essentially each room is just a combat. The various zone leaders DO have some goals. Like “Bob wats the eye of moloch” but the roleplaying notes and faction issues really are not present much, except maybe in an occasional note like “Mary hates everyone. Thus, each room is just the concept of a room. You go in and kill something. You pick up some genero treasure. “An unusual hat made of peculiar material.” YES. Not why the fuck is the hat unusual and what’s it made of?!!?!!!?!?!? A foppish beret made of liquid jade. There, done. See how I named the hate and why it was unusual, instead of just saying its a weird hat made of something unusual? That’s the fucking difference.

Hack hack hack. Abstracted text.

Oh, also, 2d6 wizards are summoning a balrog in this, who WILL show up, as well as some cultists summoning Moloch Archduke of Hell. Who will then go on a tear killing like every following of Tenebrous in the dungeon and then the world. So, you know, better to just kill everyone then talk to them anyway, about their goals and what their needs are.

Little to no interactivity beyond stabbing. Abstracted room and treasure descriptions. Move along move along nothing to see here.

This is $10 at DriveThru. Taint got no preview. Boo! Boo I say! Show us what the fuck we are buying, a sample of it, before I spend my assistant crack whore trainee monies on it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/562586/monster-condo?1892600

By Nickolas Zachary Brown
Five Cataclysms
Five Cataclysms
Level 1

Souls trespassing into the rogue plane of Akiandor are captured and trapped here, doomed to be tormented by the dark denizens of this place, their souls slowly whittled down to fuel distant engines of preposterous design. This dark and terrible place is full of necromantic monsters built to instill terror, and vicious mechanical traps wrought to imbue fear in every step. Flesh will be torn. Limbs will be severed. Lives will come to a brutal end again and again, only to be cruelly revived by the light of Tirazen, locked in an eternal loop until the day their soul is so tattered from repeat sunderings that their quivering essence joins the chorus of mournful wailing in the chasm of souls.

This 72 page adventure presents a single dungeon level with about 120 rooms in a touch dungeon with lots of challenges, varied and interesting. Imaginative and creative, as is usual with Five Cataclysms, it’s also more than a little askew with a strong funhouse vibe that never turns in to farce.

This is a classic Tower of Gygax dungeon. You’re on another plane, and each time you tie in the dungeon you get brought back to life in the lobby area, perhaps with a little signal degradation, so to speak. You’ve met a black blog in the lobby who has a key to level two, but it’s only giving it to you if you bring it The MacGuffin, somewhere on level one. This is the absolute barest of pretexts for a dungeon designer to be a “starter dungeon for a group of master-level players.“

Ok, sure. And that differs from White Plume how? And thusly we come to everyone’s relationship with funhouse dungeons and/or how much pretext we need to adventure. How much verisimilitude do you need to get going?  Is that even a designers job? Isn’t it YOUR job, the players, to find a reason to adventure? Fuck if I know the meaning of life, but we’ll take my attitudes towards it as the norm for players and dms and run with it while examining adventures. 

And thusly, how much pretext do I need? How much funhouse can be in the funhouse? How much should the map be an exploratory map and how much is it allowed to be a pointcrawl map? This is not a zany dungeon. I’m not even sure it’s fair to call this a funhouse dungeon. There is not the meta or snark that, say, Tomb of Tog had. I think, maybe, it’s more classic dungeon encounters, over and over again. Maybe an analogy would be Dragon’s Lair? 

The individual encounters here are pretty damn nice. There’s a degree of real life to them. Not just verisimilitude but something both simpler and more complex than that. I’m remembering one of the rooms, let me go find it. Ok, so, it’s a tenfoot wide hallway, forty feet long, door on both sides. The door opens only slightly, revealing charred and dented crates just beyond the door. There’s a fucking heavy crate in front of the door. And/or a hallway full of them. This is nuts. I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me in real life. Well, ok, maybe not the dented and charred part (IE: pay the fuck attention to the trap that was just telegraphed to you Excellent work there!) But the whole “a fucking spatula has gotten out of place and now I can’t open the fucking utensil fucking drawer.” It’s so simple. It’s so immensely relatable. 

And it feels like that’s what this adventure, and most stuff by Brown, does. Over and over and over again. There is this ability to create a relatable situation, as if the situation was imagined first, by someone who has never played D&D or heard about it, and then it’s put in the adventure and maybe a mechanic or two attached. Imagination without the influence of the weight of Tolkien and all of that fantasy literature and media since then that has standardized it. I would normally refer to this as “the OD&D way”, but I think it’s a little different here. “Barbed Pillar Atop a multi-tiered pillar is a scepter that radiates magical power. However, the pillar is covered in sharp iron spikes and barbs, many of these strung up with strings & chain with little brass bells suspended upon them. The pillar itself rests on a platform surrounded by the dark streams of liquid. “ This is not a full on 4e set piece, but it is a Special, I think, if we were looking at this from a dungeon population table. 

I frequently draw analogies to the Tower of Gygax for some funhouses. It is, I think, because of the ratio of specials to other rooms. When the ratio gets too high then you’re trending to funhouse. There is some kind of middle ground where we find Dungeon of the Bear and other entries like it. 

I like almost every encounter in this. They are unusual, varied, many are relatable. I am envious of Browns ability to come sup with these and hit time and time again. And it’s not just the encounters. When it comes to monsters we’ve got “A ramshackle blob of corpses stitched and bolted together, bound with chains and hooks and cords. Stands 8’ tall and roughly 6’ wide, hobbles on 3 stumps of rotten flesh. As it shambles, the clanking of its chains resonate down the halls.” Well, there you go! Great description! But,also, hey, it’s an abomination. How about something more mundane? “A humanoid skeleton whose hands have been replaced with rusted meathooks, or similar. Curiously, they smell like, really bad.” Well, yes, duh, of course! Rusted metal claw hooks for hands. That hits in the imagery department and it hits HARD! Why didn’t you think of that? I guess I’m just a 4e DM and don’t deserve love since I have no creativity at all.

Formatting is good enough, terse and easy enough to follow. Writing is quite evocative, even with a more than a few second person thrown in. Map is decent, large, lots of loops, lots of features. Blah blah blah

I am fascinated by this. Or, perhaps, the question raises. While I admire the raw creativity here and think Brown is one of the best, there is something else going on that I can’t get ahold of. I suddenly realize my own mortality: the line of pretext. Every room a special? Ok. Not much of a setup, or, one that doesn’t make sense? So what. How grounded does an adventure have to be for you to buy in to it? And, if you don’t buy in to it then is it then that arch-heretic: an activity? Damn you Nickolas Zachary Brown! Damn you all to hell! 

Meh. Encounters are great. Imagery and creativity is great. I love it them to death. I must also condemn thee to Regerts. Maybe it’s a zones issue?

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is eleven pages. You get to see about seven rooms at the end and all the intro. You’re going to have to make a determination from that, and you should be able to.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/574403/enkori-s-dark-descent-vestibule?1892600

(Actually, I do know the meaning of life, so, you know,)

By Arman Bohn
Distropilis Goods
OSE
Levels 1-3

A town, overrun with rabbits and on the brink of starvation, offers its only clue to the source of its suffering: a book known  as the Tome of Tog. Locals claim the titular mage has been a nuisance for years. The pages of the book have been torn out, save for a map that leads the party on a winding, hallucinogenic path through a dense wood to the TOMB OF TOG.

This 24 page adventure presents eleven rooms in a wizards Challenge Dungeon. With Grimtoothian machinations the party faces snarky challenges with no rewards. As challenges go they are ok, but I loathe the subgenre and the suspension of pretext so much that it’s hard to say much nice about this.

 Yeah, so, arrogant wizard makes a challenge dungeon. You defeat all eight rooms, one for each school of magic. You then face the ninth school of magic. Your reward is a map to another Tog dungeon. That’s the ONLY reward. Good luck leveling. So, this is one of those “have an experience” hippy mork borg dungeon “activities” instead of a D&D adventure. If you’re in to this kind of shit, then, yeah you. I’m not. I want to play a game. A game in a campaign. And I’m using the words game and campaign very explicitly. I acknowledge, though, that a significant number of people DO engage in RPG’s as an activity. So, if you are a l000ser, is this adventure for you?

Yeah, I mean, probably. There’s no real pretext here for adventure other than “the wizard did it”, which is the lame ass meme. [And, as a rant, I would like to mention something here. “What happens when someone is gifted with a wellspring of power but is completely incompetent?” That’s not a fucking wizard. That’s one of those fuckwits who are born with power or make a pact with an entity to get power. Some kind of power fantasy YA novel bullshit crap where you’re A Special Flower. Wizards wrest knowledge from the universe through hard work. Also, wizard is my favorite of the three classes …] 

Ok, so, interactivity. You gotta go through each of the nine rooms. They each have some kind of challenge devised by the wizard. The challenges are going to be framed with a certain wryness. So, in the clearest example, to get in to the dungeon you have to answer a couple of riddles. The riddler begins with “ Here, we celebrate the glory of Tog the Inexorable, Tog the Impossible, Tog the Immutable, Tog the Intangible. Who is the greatest wizard of all?” The answer, of course, is Tog. That’s funny. Ok, humor is subjective and _I_ find it funny. There’s a bit of a wink from the designer in this. It never quite falls in to being a joke adventure, which are all shitty as fuck. It instead remains in the realm of those early adventures like Dungeon of the Bear and Grimtooth. Not in a deathtrap way, or punny way, but with a kind of hint toward both. 

The first room, “Illusion” is a good example. When you go in you are immediately turned invisible (and, of fucking course, the fucking door slams shut behind you. Fucking challenge dungeon bullshit.) Bound to the room is a VISIBLE stalker. Who is depressed. “Unable to see its victims, the creature has suffered countless humiliating encounters. It now uses small talk as both a form of therapy and a method to pinpoint the location of intruders.” It’s taken the normal encounter and kind of turned it ninety degrees, yes? Is it s a gimmick? Absolutely. But, it’s a challenge dungeon. 

The rest of the encounters replicate this kind of obtuse encounter type. Things are more than a bit askew in here. In terms of a challenge dungeon it is certainly in the realm, if we squint hard enough, of Tower of Gygax. The dungeon throws the players off balance in various ways, with a little (snark?) mixed in. I am MUCH more down for this type of challenge dungeon than a simple series of skill checks and combats. There is an air of Grimtooth room traps about the place. Not really traps, but in the setup of the rooms. And this includes a couple of meta things, like “Each player must secretly write down a single word describing their character’s current emotional state, without discussing it with the other players, and pass it to the GM.” Which then builds an Emotions Golem in the room. I always raise my eyebrows at the emo stuff, but this is a decent implementation of it.

Formatting is meh. The background of the pages are a beige parchment color with the text being light grey and the font something with some flourishes and varying stroke weight. This combines to make things harder than it should be to read the thing, but it’s not impossible. When some words show up in italics it’s a pain though, given this combination. There tends to be a little read-aloud section offset in a darker grey, and then a longish section of DM text that explains the room, with several very short paragraphs following that expand on things. It does an ok job, a little subpar, and is on the edge of being a pain but not quite there, especially given the obtuse nature of the rooms. 

So it’s a challenge dungeon, maybe most similar to White Plume with just a little meta and snark thrown in. Maybe “the California Style” will be recognizable, and never really goes full on jokey or too meta. I’m allergic to all challenge dungeons, but if I were looking for one for a one shot sort of thing as an activity this one WOULD come to mind, chiefly because of the askew nature of the challenges.

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is eight spread pages (the PDF is spreads also. ARG!) so you get about thirteen pages of content, enough to show a large portion of the dungeon. A brief perusal will show the Grimtooth Rooms as diagrams, and the PDF is more than apt in showing you what to expect, so good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/573505/tomb-of-tog?1892600

By Gina Marie Funk
Witch Pleas Publishing
OSR/5e/DCC
Level 5

As the ashes of the last battle between Sydonia’s Sidereal Sailors and the Unseen Web settle, the Gods of the Pantheon stir within Mentius. And into this crucible of epic conflict, with the globe’s fate in the balance, come the player characters.

Holy Fuckballs!

This 57 page bat shit crazy adventure uses 55 pages to describe four levels, each with about seventeen rooms, in an “abandoned” power-center of the greco-roman gods. It’s laid out clearly and described well, but fuck all that shit. It is bat shit crazy from start to finish in the best way possible. This is a fucking adventure for level fives!

Look man, I’m gonna do my best here but I’m gonna fail.

There are factions here. This was/is a place of power for the greco-roman gods. Kind of an R&R spot. Being the greco-roman gods, there was a lot of backstabbing, jealousy, cheating, plotting and the like. The place kind of falls, in an epic way. At some point some aliens, who look like thri-kreen, show up on our world and are not secretly manipulating it for the ends of their galaxy-spanning powerful empire. A sorceress finds out, manages to not die, and is now plotting to toss them out. To do that she’s going to tap in to the power of the place, which is currently being limited by an artifact on the lowest of the four levels, along with her space-pirate minions. They’ve just finished a big battle which has broken the back of the alien dudes in the complex. “Wow, that’s a lot Bryce!” Fuck you man, I’m just getting started! She’s also got allies in the Blackfire goblins, who the aliens have started a rebellion in as a last desperate act. Also, they have a couple of spies in her inner circle, including a lover and a daughter. And then, of course, the gods have various feuds and plots going on. The party can get mixed up in ALL of this, leading to various outcomes, some of which might result in the party having power bases in the complex, as in Domain play bases, at the end. Before I got in all this the adventure noted fifteen  to twelve sessions of play with the party potentially rising to nine. “Pfft!” I thought, “that’s bullshit.“ Then I got in to all of it. Fuck me man, this thing GOES HARD. (Spoilers: Mankind/Spiderkind left the gods behind for a reason; almost every outcome is better if the gods gets fucked over hard. Don’t trust a word they say. Or, do, just know they don’t give a fuck an will, in the end, fuck over mortals fuck shit over.) Oh, hey, check that, I mean the best outcome is prob just killing everyone in the place.

During my review process I go through the thing, copying and pasting examples of shit I see, good and bad. This is from the very first room, the entrance “Rusted iron gates, cyclopean in size, leading into a palatial wall. Flanked by stained, cracked statues of the 12 Gods of the Pantheon, in knee-high water. Stairs lead to the gates, submerged in up to 40’ of sea water. A cave octopus ambushes from a 80’ deep sinkhole at the foot of the stairs.” Cyclopean, ruster, palatial. Flanked, cracked. Great use of words to paint a picture. Not every room is like this, but more than enough of them are, in a terse format, to make the impact of room after room felt. 

Further, looking at the overall encounter, this great water filled pit partially submerging the stairs you need to use, and the watch in the water lurking there, setting up a reimagined Moria scene. EVen the whole 80 foot deep thing, with a place for the creature to flee to when morale breaks and hiding his treasure in lair. Treasure? The Crown of King Hyperion and the Sunbeam Banded Mail. Good use of banded mail in greco-roman theming. Oh, also, that mail? “it depicts Helios bedding a woman on the breastplate.”  yeah yeah, coins and shit also, but golden magic crown and sunbeam banded mail that sheds lght? Count me in!

Strong fantasy vibes here. Strong grec-roman vibes. And some of that weird technology shit. Space pirates in a space trireme floating off the ground. Blaster rifles. The spider aliens have armed the goblin rebels with blaster rifles. “12’ tall mantid with 8 spider-like limbs and an arachnid head with massive mandibles. Clad in iridescent high-tech armor, it wields 4 plasma swords.” I know this is a turn off for some of you, but, man, it rocks and I don’t think it goes too hard. Maybe a bit Thundarr, if you lean a little more fantasy.  This is., by farm the wackiest thing “A stone-faced time traveler from 1980s America with a mane of dark hair, eyepatch and sleeveless shirt. Lover of Pele and Magic User with a lionness cub familiar, Spoon.” That one goes a little hard, but s by far the worst of it. 

There is so much here to negotiate your way through, literally and figuratively. Sure, you can talk to some people. Other attack first and may take captives. In other areas we get to the figurative, with obstacles and scenes to pick your way through and find solutions, or those pseudo set-pieces, like the entrance octopus. Venus is trapped under the net of Hephaestus. Wanna talk with Jupiter and do something for him? Underwater sections. Circe. The Kraken. And man it all fits in well and doesn’t come across as just being tossed in out of nowhere. 

If you can handle the techno influence of the space pirates then this one is a no fucking brainer. I lost count of how many mythic figures, and even gods, you could get to stabbin if circumstance or whim calls out to you. It mentions Thracia and Dark Tower in the marketing and those vibes are spot on. 

I am SO fucking down! Complex mid level adventuring.

This is $16 at DriveThru. There’s no fucking preview! That’s a crime against humanity! Show a couple of rooms to us before we buy so we can know it’s a good fit!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/578722/the-mouth-of-mentius-ose-pdf?1892600

By Inkblot Gibberling
Self Published
OSE/5E
"Low Levels"

The Bragazzi crime family runs the Backstage, an illegal casino and mushroom-juicing drug laboratory hidden behind an opera-costume shop. Steal their stuff.

This fourteen page adventure presents about twenty locations in an illicit gambling establishment. It wants to be a heist movie. It doesn’t provide you the tools needed to be a heist movie. It’s also clearly 5e.

I’ve got a lot of issues. And ten also this adventure is a mess. It’s going for some Oshean 11 vibes. It doesn’t know how to pull that off. It’s got a couple of tone issues. It’s trying to get fancy with the formatting and not pulling it off. And it is not OSE.

Let us start with this statement from the adventure “This module attempts to be system-agnostic. Where relevant, combat statistics are offered for” Someone clearly has written a blog post recently about how 5e and OSE are the same power level because I’ve seen a recent trend of adventures being listed as 5e and OSE and generic/universal all in the same breathe. I guess, yes, it’s generic/universal in the same way that every adventure is generic/universal if you just ignore the stats and skill checks. There’s a reference to both a 5e monster and an OSR monster (fighter 4 or Tough Boss MM25.) In other places we get things like “Safe: Locked with an arcane lock to increase lockpicking difficulty [+10].” I guess that 5e? I’m not morally opposed to a fantasy gambling location that is roughly universal and stats thrown in as examples, but the skill check thing throws it off every time. Also, one of the guards is invisible, and drinks a potion every hour to stay invisible. This says something about the game world and is perhaps the most jarring. You can reskin cat-people to be humans but something like the prevalence of magic, and relying on it for a core part of the adventure, just throws things off. (To be clear, there are no cat people in this adventure, or any other ren-faire tropes.) 

The core conceit here is a heist. It’s in the title. One of the hooks involves getting a bank teller out who is currently being coerced by the mob, by punching him in the face, to give the gang the security features of the bank. You’re told, by your patron “The rescue can’t involve any bodies and can’t involve any Bragazzi seeing anything suspicious. His escape must appear to be a series of plausible coincidences.” This is one of the hooks. Another hook is just a straight up robbery. The heist, the plausible deniability, these imply some things that the adventure should have that it just lacks. You want to case the place, right? The classic heist involves a casing. Scoping it out and then coming up with a wacky plan to execute that will inevitably go wrong, as these things do in D&D. The guards are noted on the map, which is good. A few have a routine (with two dudes taking leaks with a frequency that makes my BPH look like a dream.) This is about the extent of the support you get here. Working against this is the current goings-on in the gambling den. The teller is actively getting the shit beaten out of him. The NPC’s, the notable other gamblers, are, I guess, just always there, in your case and during your heist. There is a degree of randomness as well, for people present in hallways, that works against a heist. Sure, things can go wrong. “Oh no, I wasn’t expecting the wine delivery!” but there needs to be some degree of consistency that the degree of randomness in the people present in locations, randomly, works against. This makes the adventure much less of a heist and much more of the usual “lets just try something and start hacking when things go wrong” sort of loosy goosy approach that most adventure raids have. There too much in the writing that frames it as HAPPENING RIGHT NOW instead of COULD HAPPEN DURING THE HEIST. And the entire premise of the “coincidences”, I think, works against the level range here. It would require a lot of skills and magic items and spells that just are not going to be present at low levels. 

Tonally this is off also, in places. I’m not thrilled that the old ‘italians are mobsters” thing is relied upon. There’s no reason for that in a generically fantasy rpg. Pulp Fiction was fine without relying on these tropes. Further, there is, I think, generally a more light-hearted tone to a heist. And that is pretty consistent throughout this. After all, these are gamblers, right? As far as things go, screwing the tax man is a time honored tradition. But then, in the drug den upstairs, we get the gang doing some weird vivisection/bleeding of people to drain juice from them as a drug. This is probably a bridge too far. We have crossed the boundary from simple gambling and drug dealing to torture. We’re not even soylent greening here, more to the point of Thorns prediction about being raised as cattle.  We are now in the “muder every last one of them” category, even in my skewed murder hobo vision of D&D. It’s not that either tone is wrong, but it’s the mixing of them. You CAN discover something more evil afoot in an adventure, but then you have to be prepared for the consequences. And they here for a zany madcap ending in which you free them and they run around every which direction in some kind of 1930’s madcap comedy manner. You can manage finding the EVIL HORRIBLE THING in the pickpockets house, but then the adventure needs to support that. And this doesn’t. 

There’s a page or so up front that tells you how to read the formatting being used. Nothing too special here or weird; bolding, room names, etc. I would note though that if you need a page to describe your formatting them its probably not intuitive formatting. In practice, though, I think the formatting has issues. It’s hard to see room breaks, or sub-area breaks, and things tend to seem to run together. I think some line breaks are really what’s needed here in order to provide some additional separation between different sub-areas of room and concepts. The bolding tends to run together otherwise and the sub-areas get lost. 

I don’t think it’s a heist, as least not with the content provided. The tone stuff, with the mushroom, seems off to me and not supported either. 

 This is free at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing. I would maybe look at page seven of the preview for an idea of the jumble. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/571925/the-backstage-heist?1892600

By Don J Headrick
Grognard Games
OSRIC
Levels 9-12

For centuries the Tomb of the Lich Queen has lain hidden within a vast wasteland of cliffs, canyons and chasms. Now it has been found, and its legendary lost treasures have drawn adventurers from across the realms. Can you navigate deadly traps, fearsome guardians, and age-old puzzles to claim the prize?

This twelve page “death-trap” dungeon features eight rooms with a lich at the end. It’s just the usual low-effort dungeon, not particularly challenging, over hyped, and undelivered on. There are Grimtooth overtones, if Grimtooth was a pussy.

It’s eight linear rooms. Do you want a dungeon with eight linear rooms? At level twelve? There’s a map, but I’m not sure why one was even included. You go the only way you can go.  In through one door and out through another. Is that a level twelve adventure? Is that worth $6.50?

The marketing blurb says we have a legendary tomb and adventurers from across the realm. I love luv LUV Gone FIshin because of this! A steady stream of others fumbling about, royal currying favor and mud farmers full of pox and starving children desperate for coin. That’s fun! None of that happens here, of course. That would be fun. And imaginative. 

After several pages of backstory that are meaningless to the adventure you’re dumped in medias res in front of a door. Or, as the adventure puts it “You have penetrated the pyramid and braved its outer defenses defeating ancient guardians and have finally found the sarcophagus of the Lich Queen “ Fortunately, you are still at full strength in every way. Anyway,  “Suddenly gouts of green poisonous gas erupt behind you filling the passage, you have no choice but to hurry into the chamber.” We can see here several classic themes of bad adventure writing. There’s the use of second person writing throughout. This is the “you/your” phrasing. This is not appropriate. It is either a crutch for weak writing, which should be improved, or an attempt at immersive dramatic writing, which should not be done this way, if at all. Gouts of green poison gas! Oh no! The entire party is immune to poison, why would we flee? For some reason there’s this idea that you have to force the party. They are there to adventure. You don’t need to force them anywhere. Suddenly, being forced, doors slamming shut … you’re not writing a movie here. You’re providing a backdrop in which the players, through the party, along with DM are given a place to engage in play. They are, together, creating a narrative, in real time. DONT FUCKING FORCE IT! Shipwrecking the party may be ok for the first level one in a new campaign on an island. It’s not ok later on when the party has the means and desire to make decisions. That’s the fun. Making the decisions. “Beyond the moon door you see” I don’t have eyes you insensitive clod!

Rooms here average about a column or so each. This is for fairly basic rooms. Read-aloud over explains “Adorned with frescoes capturing the highlights of the Lich Queens depraved rule. There are scenes of her subjects bowing before her. Depictions of her pacts.” Frescoes, if we must, and then when the party examines them we can respond with detail from the DM an then the party will ask follow up questions and take actions and the DM will respond. This is the core RPG loop. Over-explaning in the read-aloud shows a basic lack of understanding for what an RPG game is. 

Writing is padded out “There appears to be no exit from this room.” Uh huh. Appears is almost never a word to use in adventure writing. It is or it isn’t, from the parties perspective. And from the DMs perspective they have perfect knows. Everything the party has ever experienced in a game “appears to be …” Stating this is just padding. There is little to no theming here.

From the interactivity standpoint we have this fine gem “If the players are having an easy go of it, throw some more Salamanders/Mephits or the Dragon at them.” The height of adventure writing. Lazy adventure writing. What’s the point here? It’s the designers job to write interesting encounters. That’s what we’re paying for. Or, you know, I guess just don’t.

The adventure is marketed as a death-trap dungeon. “ Bring 3 characters. You’ll need them.” The first room is a 1d6 pit trap with 1d6 damage from spikes at the bottom. There’s a gel cube in the bottom. I’m not sure this is a death trap. Much is made of the room slightly sloping down toward the pit and maneuvering in the dark toward the pit because of the slope. This sounds oddly specific for an eventuality that is unlikely? Room two is the classic rolling bounder trap in a hallway, with a pit to jump in to avoid it, with a 1d6 damage spike in it also. Again, not sure this is a death trap. And so it goes. Eventually there’s an efreet and maybe a dragon, along with two stone golems and a lich at the end. No one has any treasure, just the staff of power/wizardry at the end. Also, one room is empty/a recovery room. This isn’t even grimtooth levels of traps. A level nine, not to mention a level twelve, is going to have extensive magics available. I’m not sure a level twelve party would even encounter ANY of these rooms.

There is a secret door in a pit, which I always love. This is the non-obvious/’of course that’s where it is’ thing that is always a delight to see executed in adventures.. 

It’s just another low-effort dungeon. You have to really work these things. Every adventure ever in the history of the world is now available for a DM to run. When you’re producing something one must ask if this is possibly the best thing ever? If it’s not then what’s the point? You gotta pour yourself in to these to make them stand out. 

This is $6.50 at DriveThru. There is no preview. You need to offer a preview so a potential buyer can see a few rooms before they spend money on a purchase.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/574184/tomb-of-the-lich-queen?1892600

By Devin MacKay
THorium 90 Prductions
OSR/Shadowdark
Level 1

People in the poorer, more crowded neighbourhoods of the City of Copven are getting sick. Disease is spreading and swarms of biting and stinging insects have been reported frequently in the homes of the most afflicted. Sightings of these creatures emerging from the sewer grates and drains below have prompted the city to send workers down below to investigate. When these workers did not return, a group of city guards followed. As a last ditch effort to get to the bottom of this, the Commander of the City Watch and scraped the bottom of his jails and come up with you, all of who are here convicted of a criminal offense. The deal is simple, learn the truth stop the problem, and you leave the sewers free, if not, then you don’t leave at all. Can you win your freedom and survive the Lair of the Rot King?

This ten page adventure uses three pages to describe nine rooms in the sewers. It’s exactly what you think it is. Hubris got to me. Mea Culpa. 

Hey man, the name of the publisher is Thorium 90. I’m not made of stone. I’ve been on a good run, and some of the Shadowdark stuff has been decent even as a crossover to OSE. What do you want from me, a studied and insightful knowledge of history that I learn from?

The town has a plague. Oh no! The party are prisoners. Oh no! You get your freedom is you Do The Thing. Yeah! There’s a little table to support this, giving reasons why you are a prisoner. You spit in a lord’s food. You dug up a grave to steal the silver fillings. You riffled the pockets of a passed out drunk. You forged the name of a guild leader to get access to a fancy party. This is some great petty crimes and I’m fully supportive of hyperrealism of the crimes and punishments. Mind your betters, eh?

The plague thing is interesting also. I love a good plague. Turns out there have been swarms of insects and vermin in the rooms with the people dying. Tracked back to … duh DUh DUH: THE SEWERS! Well, this isn’t exactly true. The party will not be involved in any of that. The plague, the suffering and misery of man. An investigation and tracking back of the issue to the sewers. Nah, you’re just shoved down the sewer hole so you can start hacking at shit. I know it’s a little hackneyed to have an investigation and then a lair crawl, but, man, it’s that way for a reason. If you are building an exploration dungeon with fifty rooms, several levels and so on then, sure, the dungeon is the adventure. But when your dungeon is nine rooms then it feels a little off to have that be the totality of the adventure, hence the investigation. 

Yeah, ok, so, an essentially linear dungeon in a sewer. Kill some centipedes. Kill some swarms. You know the deal. Don’t worry, you can’t escape because there are grates in the main sewer pipe that you can’t get through because of [REASONS.] Just hack. In fact, come to think of it, there are a number of grates in the floor and a well and grates in the sewer line. None of which you can explore. It’s like putting in a waterfall with nothing behind it. Why? Why put in a well IN A SEWER if you’re not going to do something with it? They are MADE to go down. Grates are MADE to be pulled up. It’s almost like no one cared …

Did I mention that treasure is not placed? “Roll on the minor treasure table three times.” Fucking put in a god damn treasure. It’s your fucking job as designer. Put in the treasure, make it make some sense to the area its in and describe it in a few words. Fuck me man. What exactly is the point of a designer if its not that?

The adventure ends with Lareth. In the final room Lareth hides. He monologues and then attacks. How many times must Lareth appear in an adventure? Your baddie needs to be foreshadowed. There is no impact from the bing bad if he’s just another thing to hack down in the dungeon. Yes, I understand, you’ve got a monologue in there. That doesn’t help. By the time the party meets the evil high priest they should already know what the monogie is likely to be, so that the baddie need not give it. Did I mention that Rot Priest Angren Murrian has a whole backstory and history? Only to be cut down immediately and without hesitation …

I can be an ass. Surprise! I know, right. One day I’m going to be in a particularly petulant mood and not really give a shit that I’m ruining everyone else’s time at the table. I’m going to take one of these throw-away villains and really dive deep in to them. Explore, during the game as a player, their entire history. Track down people who knew them, their life experiences. Every place they went and everything that made them up. The full Rosebud treatment. I’ll never stop, always thinking that here must be MORE. There could be MORE! What conspiracies hide here?! I mean, there must be, give that named person appeared, with a monologue, and a half page of backstory. There MUST be more, right?!

Yeah, so, I’m an idiot. It’s just a throw-away adventure. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. You need a preview so potential buyers can make an informed decision prior to an actual purchase.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/574339/the-lair-of-the-rot-priest?1892600

By Peter Jewicz
Mellow Golem Games
"OSR"
Level 5?

This twelve page adventure uses about three pages to describe four rooms in a hag lair. It sufferers from the generic/universal curse and relies on tables for a substantial portion of the adventure. Abstracted content with little specificity to help bring it alive. 

The legend of the beast is persistent in these parts, a terrible force that dwells deep in the swamp and strikes fear into the hearts of those who live nearby. Little do they know, the beast is but a pawn, for something far more sinister lurks within the bowls of the swamp.

Ah, the generic/universal adventure. They seldom fail to not disappoint, even when statted for “OSR”, as this one is. There is something about them that makes a designer seemingly fearful of providing anything concrete to it. The designer wanted an adventure in which the party shows up to a village on the edge of a swamp. Fearful and superstitious locals. Talk of The Beast, everywhere, the cause of all ills. And then a journey through a swamp, full of dread, before finally arriving at the beasts lair, only to find out Muhahahahaha! The beast is the pet of a swamp hag! 

Instead, we get little of that.

Adventure writing can be hard. As a designer you have to get out of your head what you are imagining and get that down on paper so that when someone reads it they can get close to what you intended. We get what the designer wanted here because they out right tell us “To get the full effect for this mini-adventure, make sure to play up the townsfolk’s fear of the beast.” That is, in principle, great! You want a town that seems immersive to that point. The adventure designer needs to help bring that about. This doesn’t do that. The village is quite minimal, just one line or so about the town being on stilts and moldy. That’s fine, but, what isn’t fine is the lack of the The Best present in their ramblings. Or any rambling at all. We might look to the rumors table, but all we get is abstracted information like “1 The swamp has been especially active lately.” or that the swamp spirits are angry. There’s nothing much here at all about The Beast. I love that it’s called The Beast, but there’s nothing more. None of its misdeeds or lame calves or anything. The designer needs to bring an adventure alive through specificity for things like this. Yes, the DMs job is to run with it and expand on it but you have to give them SOMETHING to work with. 

Then we get to the swamp. This also is abstracted away. Just roll on a page full of random tables. “3 A large depression that collects rainwater.” or a smell that “A salty taste, similar to being near an ocean.”  That’s what you have to work with here; it’s totally abstracted away. There IS an encounter table, or single line entries or so, and it does show some decent things in it. “A series of stick figures are attached to the trees. Until they are destroyed, those traversing this area of the swamp walk in circles always arriving back at the figures.” That’s creepy as all fuck. And it deserves more than a line on a d12 encounter table. The swamp needed to be fixed encounters, or a pointcrawl or something, with the entries worked to bring them to life. 

The lair, proper, is four rooms. You get The Beast room, a Catoblepas, and then a potion room. In the potion room you get told EXPLICITLY how to make a potion, by a journal, that gets you through a bramble corridor. Then you hit, surprise, Lareth the Beautiful! Err a swamp hag. No hints of a hag up to this point at all. It’s all wasted. 

Make the town afraid. Make the swamp a real area and bring life to the best of the encounters on the table. Hint at creepy things to foreshadow the hag. 

Tables ruin adventures. Yes, old school uses tables and randomness, but not to create the entire adventure from. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. You get to see the “village” and the “swamp”, or at least the dressing for it. The preview should have shown a bit more of the adventure, a lair page, for example. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/571424/lair-of-the-swamp-beast?1892600

By Gordy Higgens
Self Published
OSE
Levels 4-6

The ‘Toymaker’ has gone missing – and nobility across the realm are scrambling to get their hands on his highly sought-after dolls. Hauntingly beautiful, and scarily well made.

His workshop is hidden, deep within the ‘Whispering Woods’. A dark and desolate forest, that locals warn all who dare enter, never return… that is, all except the Toymaker. To find his workshop, you must navigate the pitch black wood, haunted by imprisoned demons, zealous lumberjack wardens, cursed werewolves, possessed dolls, an entitled elf prince and a gaggle of other monstrous horrors. The balance of power in the woods is shifting – will the evils that lay trapped here be released unto the world?

This 52 page adventure presents about thirteen hexes and a couple of dungeons with about thirty rooms total in a dark forest kind of fairytale vibe. Sinister plots abound while the party tries to navigate a lot of competing goals in an adventure built to run.

Ok, so, as I’m describing what’s going on I’m going to have to ask you put aside certain feelings you have. Like, when I say “toymaster” or “puppets.” I know we’ve all been indoctrinated to expect certain things from the use of those themes. I promise this one isn’t like those others. Also, I suspect that the cover art might be a bit offputting. The designer is also the artist, so, hey, sorry man! I think the interior art is fine but the cover, along with the title “master of puppets” both sort of lean in to some tonal and historical implications that we are ALL bad people for having but which are true nonetheless.

Let’s think of a dark forest fairy tale vibe, maybe with a touch of farce in it, similar to Gone Fishin. And there’s a lot going on in this place. The Whispering Woods are a kind of dark forest/mirkwood stand in. All ancient and old and dark and foreboding with rumors of ancient battles and demons. And that the woods will whisper to you. There are woodcutters in the forest, who were once a kind of border guard keeping an eye on the woods but over time are perhaps a little financially focused. Especially since their funding was cut. Funding? Yes, the elves used to fund them. Let’s think a more Fey-like elf than a Tolkein-elf. ANyway, the border guards get their funding cut and now the mission has degenerated. Why does it need border guards it’s a literal demon forest, the trees are demons. Some old elf king defeated an invading demon army long ago and turned them all to trees. His magic axe, along with his bloody handprint, is embedded in a tree stump in the middle of the woods. Also, the trees can’t be cut down. Let’s think a super strong ironwood. In to this comes the Toymaker, who lives in the woods and makes wooden dolls. Expensive wooden dolls. That everyone just loves to get for their rich ass trust fund kids, like some fairy tale stanley cup. Yeah, he figured out a way to cut down the trees and makes dolls from them and lets the border force sell the remaining wood. Also the dolls whisper things, an attempt by the toymaker to embed his little chukies in to the nobility in order to influence them and gain power because, yeah, the demon from the tree is now in the doll, kind of, bound by the doll clothes. A couple of the dolls get loose and the toymaker goes looking for them, only to get killed by some werewolves in the forest. Werewolves that are turning the border guards and whose curse starts from a different fey-elf that was kicked out of elflandia, is 143 in line for the throne, and now wants to take over the wood and thinks that a perfect way to start that is kicking everyone out starting with the border guards. I think I just wrote a page on that shit? And theres more people/groups running around in there. A slightly different framing of the toymaker would have hit better, but it all kind of makes sense in an evil consequences kind of way and is not as “pretext” as the length of description might otherwise imply. These are just things following from others naturally, if pushed just a little. 

The hooks are the usual lame hired/dream shit, but the first one reads “A local Count wants the doll he ordered for his daughter’s birthday, but the Toymaker failed to make his delivery last week.” This one, I think, could have been pushed more and be the center of the adventure, much the way Gone Fishin was. A little expansion, a little more farce. And it’s gonna fit in well with people you meet in the forest, cavalier mercenaries who are sent by THEIR patrons to get toys for THEIR kids. A little push here in the writing, the absurdity, a tinge of evil, future chukie foreshadowing, insane offers, this would have lent a nice opening vibe that would frame the rest of the adventure instead of having just some genero stuff. 

There are a decent number of NPC’s in this. They are well organized with wants, needs, knows, offers to the party, along with short little descriptions like “Wild red hair. Always shouts, unable to speak at a reasonable volume” or “A nude, 2’ tall, crudely made wooden puppet. Exclaims ‘oh boy!’ frequently.” Perfect little nudges for the DM. You can talk to a lot of people and things, including a termite queen who can be particularly useful in a forest full of evil wooden chuckies. Not everyone is friendly, and a lot of the situations are tense and almost all can lead to some combat, but the talky talky option is there for a smartie partie. Think of the cavalier mercenaries, as an example of talking and fighting. 

Magic items are decent. “Royal Ceremonial Sword – +2 Elven Glass Blade, with gold leaf details. Used in knighting ceremonies. On a critical hit (19-20) it shatters, doing maximum damage. Repairs itself in 1d6 turns” and “Thief’s Lantern – Emits an area of light only visible to the wielder, and others that touch them.” These are nice little examples. Interesting effects to be sure. Useful, fun, unusual. They FEEL magical, especially the lantern. 

The entries start with a little overview that could be a read-aloud (In fucking italics! Don’t do that!) with certain words underlined and bolded (I’d do one or the other, not both) and those bolded/underlined words are then followed up with in their own sections with more details. A Sentence or two for each keeps them each to scan and run. Descriptions are not winning awards but are still pretty good. “A large open-cut marble quarry. Filling with water from a spring on the northern cliff face. A dull glow emanates from the loudly bubbling depths. Red handprints cover a nearby marble boulder. “ I don’t like “large”, but, not a bad little description and it hints at many things to follow up an examination on. 

There is A LOT to get in to trouble with in this, mostly from the party fucking around. Not in a Museum Tour kind of way but just the party doing normal shit. The locations can be fantastic, like a buried titanic statue you enter through a mouth, filled with stac/tags inside. Some of the wanderers seem rough, like 2d6 werewolves, but, hey, it’s OSR. You’re going to be doing a lot of freeing people, questioning them, and so on to get information you need to find the workshop, itself a twenty room dungeon. All without getting screwed over by the captives and/or people you meet along the way. Can you, having discovered termites, put together that this is an excellent resource to take advantage of in a wood themed adventure? If so, the designer was ready for you. Or, you can just stab them. How shall you navigate the mercenary knights? “Contract knights, mounted on warhorses. Equipped with expensive weapons and armour. Annoyed they couldn’t just pay someone beneath them to fulfill their quest “ Overemployment has always been a thing man.

This is $10.50 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages, showing rooms keys. Great preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/569545/the-master-of-puppets?1892600

By ND Hobbies, Ulises Martinez, Mauricio Rosel
ND Hobbies
1e
Levels 7-9

In the majestic dwarven capital of Runekaatara, the miners’ guild has made an unprecedented discovery. What are these dwarven miners hiding from the city authorities, and why are they desperately seeking the help of a group of adventurers who have just arrived in the capital? In The Hidden Citadel, adventurers will embark on a classic dungeon-crawling subterranean adventure to discover the secrets that an ancient citadel holds, the dangers that protect these secrets, and the reason why the citadel fell into disgrace in the first place

This 32 page adventure is a simple hack on a simple simple map with underpowered monsters and a weird tonal imbalance. Grist for the gristmill.

The cover blurb here says “A group of mining dwarves found the remains of an old and forgotten underground city. Everything indicates that it is a lost and ancestral citadel of dwarven origin.” So, of course the heads of the dwarf mining guild, in the dwarf capitol city, looking for the dwarf ancestral citadel of dwarven origin, hires non-dwarves to go find it. Also, the dwarf ancestral capitol and origin is like six levels, each with, I don’t know, about six rooms? Anyway, we’re gonna forget about all of that and look at the rest of the adventure.

So you end up in dwarflandia and in the marketplace you overhear shit like  “The governor doesn’t have to find out” “They say the pay is crazy” “It’s the discovery of the century, whoever goes there will be remembered forever” “What if Is there something down there?” and most importantly “They are in the Anvil tavern. Shall we venture?” This is from people in the market, all members of the miners guild, who beat the characters away from them. But, also, direct them to the Miners Guild inn if they need a place to stay. I do like the overheard snippets of conversation; it smacks of the in-voice rumor tables that I love that I think add a lot of color and framing for a DM to play off of. Arriving at the inn a dwarf, who turns out to be the guildmaster in disguise, drops a bag of gold in front of the party while passing through the room. If you return it to him then you’re honest and he wants you to go on the adventure. If you steal it then it shows daring and he wants you to go on the adventure. If you ignore it then a thief picks it up and runs over the parties table to get out, no doubt prompting the party to intervene, which shows the parties [something] and the guildmaster wants you to go on the adventure. Tell me again, is the illusion of choice a good thing or a bad thing in an adventure? I guess it’s just the hook. Hey, also, they only want 10% of the loot you find in the ancient dwarven capitol origin. For realisies. Anyway, we’re gonna forget about all of that and look at the rest of the adventure.

I’ve mentioned that the map levels are rather small. Five rooms on a level, six rooms on a level. One has like thirteen rooms, an anomaly. They are done in a faux-art style so you’ve got cracks in the stonework and so on. The end result is that it’s hard to make out doorways and other features that you need to run the adventure. What’s a portcullis? What’s a door? What’s an open doorway? Good luck to you. Level entry/exits are not the clearest, from the maps, but there is an “overview” map in the back that has all of the levels on it and has some lines showing stairs from one location going to entry on another floor, so, that helps. But, also, putting it on the single page maps would have been better. The text says things like “ Room 2 is locked behind a closed portcullis and only accessible through Room 1.” Uh … no? Yes? Technically? The adventure seems to do this a lot. In another place we’re told “To continue delving into the dungeon, the adventurers will have to open the titanium gates that block the way to the Great Stairs.” Uh. I’m level nine? So, I guess the meaning of the text is that ONE of the room two entries has a portcullis in front of it and the other entrance is just open, the one from room one. It’s a strange way of writing it though. I’m sure there are EASL issues here, which I generally give a wide allowance for, but I think in this case it’s something else. It’s something like a lack of acknowledgement that you can go through the portcullis? Or the gates to the stairs to level two? There are no additional details, like bend bars/lift gates, or spells or anything. Which I guess you don’t need, it’s just a weird phrasing. Over and over again. Anyway, we’re gonna forget about all of that and look at the rest of the adventure.

Looking at the enemies we’ve got a two hit die ooze. And a one hit die giant rat. ONE one hit die rat and ONE two hit die ooze. Eventually you get to fight like FIVE two hit die creatures. There’s a 4 hit die ghost. What’s the turning rules again? TWO three hit die orbs? There’s a gold golem. I guess he’s seven hit die. The boss is a twelver. I understand that we normally look at dungeon encounters that are tough, and give the “it’s OSR, run away” answer, but I’m not sure what we do in the opposite direction? There is the usual “doors slam shut’ stuff. Anyway, we’re gonna forget about all of that and look at the rest of the adventure.

Writing is dull. The usual padding. “This room has several armored corpses, which in the past were dwarven guards.” THIS ROOM HAS is all padding. And then we run in to the usual historical survey of what the room was. It’s dull, long, multi paragraph with little in the way of formatting to help scan and run the adventure. Interactivity is generally stabbing something or a trap or “pull the two levels on the level to unlock the door to the next level.” I mentioned a gold golem earlier. Here is the entirety of that room: “This room is filled with gold and valuables, as if the noble dwarves had put their riches here to protect them in desperation. If someone takes a coin, several of them take on a humanoid form and will turn into a gold golem that protects this treasure.. Upon death, the golem becomes 355 gold coins.” That’s it. Nothing more. What do you think filled with gold and valuables means? 355 gold coins? Does it seem weird to mention the 355? Everything is like this. Missing information. Dull writing. Lengthy writing that leads to nothing. Anyway, we’re gonna forget about all of that and look at the rest of the adventure.

And then the tone changes, in one place. “This room is full of bags and suitcases, all arranged in a pile. Inside the suitcases there are souvenirs, family portraits, letters, and books. Everything is mundane, but each object represents someone who died in this place.” Uh …. The next room has a bunch of people in it, skeletons, bodies. Children sitting on mothers laps. People huddled. With the marks of slit wrists where they all killed themselves. Jesus man! So, yeah, there’s an emotional impact there. The antechamber, with the luggage, clearly is culturally overloaded. A mass suicide scene would not have as much impact as a mass suicide scene with some hints beforehand to really foreshadow and bring home the horror. “And we looted it?!” It’s the Lareth principal, done right. But, also, Jesus man! Here I was just killing rats and oozes and stabbing shit and pulling levers and you dump this on the players? But, whatever, it was good design even if tonally it is out of place.

There are also a few decent art pieces in this. Good art, in an adventure,helps the DM run the adventure. It helps clarify a room, or sets the mood for them, helping them riff on it. It’s evocative. David Arcila and Diana Rex are credited. I don’t know which one it is but I like them  for the purpose of inspiring the adventure. A nice barrier peaks vibe to it, that pulls you in. It’s not all the art, maybe four pieces or so, but those are good.

So, just kind of  generic adventure for the most part. Nothing very stand out in the writing or the room interactivity, with a notable exception. I’m not overly upset by it, but it’s just another of the large number of marginally poor adventures that flood the market.

This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no preview, but you do get to see some page layout on the product marketing page. It needs a real preview, that shows real rooms, so potential buyers can get a read on if they want to purchase it or not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/482182/hidden-citadel?1892600

By Jesse Winter
Slime Mind Studio
BECMI/Shadowdark
Levels 1-3

The mountain bled. Now powers from beyond slake their thirst. Bordering the long-abandoned Brackenhoorg mines, a lone gatehouse suffers both from the churn of a mysterious ooze and the encroaching domain of a fey lord. Test your mettle against a dungeon swamped by a potent arcane ooze and conniving fey vying for power. Will your players learn the secrets of the ooze—or need enough treasure to afford a priest?

This forty page adventures uses about 25 pages to describe about fifty rooms in a two level dungeon features slime, fey, and insects. And dwarves? It’s full of fantastic elements and does a good job with formatting even though I think the overall attempt at a “Timeline of events” doesn’t work very well. A good journeyman adventure.

I think this adventure is fascinating. First off, it’s an ok adventure. Which means I guess it’s great? In the sea of filth I usually see it’s not one of those. It’s doing almost everything right. I don’t think I’m excited to run it. And I think that sucks because it IS doing almost everything right and when you compare it to the absolute dreck that people publish it is light years beyond that shit. I mean, the designer deserves some admiration for that. If this was plopped down in front of me at a table and I was told to run it then I would and it would go great and I’d have a great time. I just don’t think I’d ever reach for this of my own free will. Maybe it’s something like marketing. I’m not saying it is marketing, but I’m drawing an analogy. Nothing made me excited by this. Except for the meta-discussion that it doesn’t suck. I’m super excited by that. Seriously. If every adventure in the world were as good as this one then I wouldn’t have the tenfootpole blog. Technically, it’s great. It just lacks a certain joie de vivre. That sucks. It’s like working for one of those shit ass companies in which being competent isn’t good enough. You have to suck off the boss verbally and engage in the kabuki of mouthpiecing the the mission, blah blah blah even though you’re really only there because hookers and blow cost money and you need money. That seems unfair?

The formatting here is nigh perfect. “Oh, Bryce cares too much about formatting!” No, dipshit, I do not. But I do seem to understand, which many of you do not, that formatting IS the great downfall of many adventures. My standards are quite low. Can I run the adventure? Ok, you get to squeak by. You can write the worlds best adventure and have shitty formatting and I’m still gonna call it the worlds the best adventure and grumble and recommend it. But, if you write a mediocre adventure and do a shit job at helping me run it then you can burn. The entries are clear and easy to scan. A little summary/read-aloud  with some words blended that are then called out with more detail in the bulleted sections below. Just a few sentences each. It’s also using a ? ? layout, so ? of the page, the left “column” is used for the keys while the right ? “column” is used for notes and other called out detail, like monster stats and so on. I think the format here is perfect. Easy to scan. It’s clear. It’s easy to find things, and to follow up on information. No notes. Well, ok. You can have your preferences with formats. You can prefer a paragraph style over say an OSE style. Both a paragraph style and an OSE style can be implemented poorly. But, ultimately, many formats styles can be used, anything, really, as long as they succeed in their purpose and this one does. It could, perhaps, be terser in paragraph form. Less whitespace and all of that. But it’s not overly long the way it is and it’s dumping three or four rooms to a digest page in this format, while maintaining an easy to read font size. It’s fucking good. Formatting.

And the map is decent also. Dyson is credited. I’m not sure if these are his free maps or this was a commission. They look a little more involved than I’ve seen many of his free maps. A little more complex, a little more involved. Same level stairs, tunnels present, and they even run above and below other passages. A kind of rubble-vibe to them.  Monsters are noted on the map, as well as entry/exit locations. (The level one map has six, I think, exist/entrances on it, out of 22 rooms total. That’s some decent map interconnectivity!) Monsters and traps are also noted on the map, and the lettering is generally clear with the keys, proper, being very clear. And the wandering table is ON the map also. This thing is close to being platonic! Maybe just tending a little bit to be busy, but, I’d take a look at the adventure just to see the maps in it and how they are done. Little minimaps are included on each page to orient you toward the room and exits. 

Descriptions are pretty decent, above average for sure. Terse, but evocative enough. “An emerald waterfall, frozen in time, suspends loose rock and a charred body. Green, soot-stained metal encrusts the floor and walls.” or “Green liquid oozes from a cracked stone wall and marble bricks ju??ing from the ceiling. It pools around a toppled stone statue “ These aren’t bad. Like, not rock star but certainly pretty good as a short description goes. The bricks jut and the liquid oozes. Dislodging a brick “spews warm verdigrint.” Spew. And warm. Ewwww! 

The rooms get noise and light pointers to rooms nearby, so you can hear things from the right or to the east or some such. Love it. Same with monsters reacting in certain situations. Attention is paid to the dungeon as a whole rather than a more room by room orientation. (Which, I suppose, is also mirrored in the entry/exits, both in quantity and in noting them on the map.)  There’s also this thing the adventure does with blocking exits. Normally we’d see a door. But in this there is a frozen emerald waterfall, as noted in the quote above. It blocks an exit if you hack it loose or unfreeze it. In another place there’s this kind of giant mass of flowers in a corridor … which it turns out is blocking a kind of Y intersection, growing in all directions. These particular flowers regrow FAST when fed blood and there just happens to be a dead body in the intersection that it can suck blood from. An interesting problem, yes? (Also, I really liked the art piece that went along with this. A kind of grayscale/monochrome  image of a ruined hallway with a mass of giant flower in it, with the petals done in a kind of muted red. It very much delivers the kind of striking impression that I think this encounter was going for.) There’s decent interactivity here. 

Randomly, the page count is misleading, there is almost NO padding in this at all. Excess pages are NPC descriptions for the dungeon. These are little paragraphs with  wants, fears and secrets called out and some keywords to help the DM quickly. “MYREROSE – SPITEFUL QUEEN. CALMLY SADISTIC. Master alchemist. Retains her fairy form by bathing in Blood Honey (made from perish lily pollen). The Gardener is her pawn: She gives him Blood Honey, lying that it will restore his True Name. Suspects Shiv, not Slaveral, created this mess. She rules from Bleedspire (V1) “

And those NPC’s are, I think, the downfall of the adventure, if it can be said to have one. Yeah, sure, the designer didn’t put the fucking level range in the marketing page or on the cover. Yeah, the hooks are fucking lameo hiring shit and the framing of the adventure could have had a little more thought. But, the NPC’s are the only thing here that I think doesn’t work well. 

The idea is that we’ve got this old mine/complex that hit an ooze vein and was abandoned. And then some shit went down in Fey land a group/manor of them got cursed in to bug-like creatures (again, good art!) and somehow their manor is now level two of this place. There is supposed to be intrigue among the fey, hence the wants/needs/secrets and expanded NPC sections for them. There’s even a timeline of events. But I don’t think ANY of it works AT ALL. Some individual encounters work out ok, like a room with covered mirrors and a dude can/will reach through an uncovered one to pull someone in if they can. But the lager intrigue thing just doesn’t come together. And the timeline doesn’t really impact the dungeon environs or the party in such a way as to impact play/the party to care about. “Meck accidentally blows up Lalizar. The cultists disband. Slaveral and Meck fly away to find Meck’s mother “ Sure thing. I guess fewer things to stab then? I mean, whats the impact in intrigue and, ultimately, the party interaction? 

There is also an overall … I don’t know, lack of … intent? Recall the dungeons exits and blocking exits and sounds/reactions, etc, all of which kind of give the dungeon a more wholistic feel. But, also, that wholistic feel is lacking in the way the dungeon rooms work together. The theming, of the fey anyway, doesn’t come through very well. The entire place, as a whole, isn’t left with an overall feeling. Yeah yeah, that a shit explanation. But, also, I wonder if thats not why I’m saying that the pace lacks a certain amount of joy and/or glee in it? My lack of enthusiasm for the place? 

This is doing almost everything right. It’s a good adventure. I’m going to dump this in to two categories until I can decide what I actually think about it. I’m happy to run this. I’m just not sure I’d go out of my way to run this. I think it is absolutely worth checking out.

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is thirteen pages, the first thirteen. You get to see the map, the NPC’s, the timeline, and three rooms. That’s a decent enough preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/566187/outcast-unseelie-and-the-ooze-between?1892600

By Jon Brackin
Brackin Adventuring Company
BECMI
Levels 3-5

On the hottest night of summer… it begins to snow. For as long as anyone can remember, the quiet village of Frosthollow has celebrated The Night of Falling Snow, an ancient midsummer festival unlike any other. White ribbons flutter from old trees. Candles burn in every window. Gifts are exchanged beneath a blazing summer sun while soft snow falls from a cloudless sky. The villagers call it a miracle. They have forgotten that it is a warning. This year, the snow arrives early… and it does not stop. As impossible winter spreads across the countryside, travelers find themselves drawn into a mystery buried beneath centuries of tradition. Forgotten journals, hidden chambers, and an ancient ritual reveal a terrifying truth: the festival was never meant to celebrate the snowfall. It was created to keep something from crossing the threshold into the world. And at the center of it all waits a smiling traveler known only as The Pale Guest. Will the heroes uncover the truth before midnight, restore a ritual no one remembers, or unknowingly open the door to an ancient horror?

This seventeen page adventure uses about eleven pages to describe about ten areas in a village about to reawaken an ancient entity. It’s sparse, with little specificity. There is an outline of an adventure but little to ground the characters actions or the DMs responses. 

I am continually mystified at the lack of adventure that passes for adventures. The barest outline of an adventure is somehow expanded to twenty pages and then a few dollar price tag slapped on it. We get little more than DM notes, time and again, the kind scribbled on my party tracker page ten minutes beforehand to run tonight’s game. What ends up being published is just anything that anyone could come up, with all of the specificity and adventure just not present, the stuff the designer SHOULD be working on to  help the DM bring the game alive. Yes, the DM needs to do work, but the designer is there to inspire them to greatness and provide the tools to do so. 

There’s this village where it snows on a day in the summer every year. The villagers hold this festival with a couple of traditions attached to it. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the snow doesn’t stop this year and gets VERY heavy. The party is there for [the usual lame reasons.] Oh no, people are missing! Poking about you find the basement of the inn has some old records, and the traditions are bastardized versions of a yearly ritual that has to be done to keep THE VISITOR away. The party must convince everyone in the village does a Whoville song and dance number and the entity will sleep for another year. Or, just stab the 12HD dude till it dies. 

The most specific thing in the adventure is, what a coincidence, also the most interesting. The villagers hang ribbons from a tree in the village with their names on it. (And, the missing villagers have ribbons there also, with their names faded away. I’m not sure how you know that given that the names are no longer there, but the concept is decent.) This is great. It’s like a line of text. It’s specific. It grounds the DM and gives them something to build on. This is by far the most interesting thing in the adventure.

The actual locations are given this description style that is … poetic? An attempt to be poetic? Let’s look at “Chamber Two: The Ice Archive”

A chamber sealed within magical frost.

Contains stone tablets.

These preserve the complete ritual.

Uh. Ok. How about another room, for comparison? The Hall of Forgotten Names:

Thousands of names carved into walls.

Reading them aloud causes spectral figures to appear.

Most are harmless.

Three become Snow Wraiths.

Meh. This borders on pretension. It’s the fucking idea for a room being sold as a room. Put in a fucking description. Look, I’m supportive of new ideas but also you gotta recognize when they don’t work and this don’t work. There’s nothing there! At some point we’re told “Eventually clues point toward old records beneath the inn.” What are these clues? Not present. Nothing. The DM gets to make them up. This is just some notes on a napkin about some major beats in a potential adventure. How about monsters? Here’s notes about an attack by Candle Guardians. Or,, maybe, Frostbound Remnants, both phrases are used: “Four Frostbound Remnants attack as soon as the door closes behind any person entering. “ What the fuck is a Candle Guardian? 

This is a ridiculously low effort adventure. I’m sure some work was put in to it, but its like the designer has somehow never seen what an actual adventure is and what one needs to run an adventure. Like what the fuck a monster is. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. There is no preview. You gotta put in a preview man, so we can make an informed decision to purchase or not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/573268/the-night-of-falling-snow?1892600

By Greg Ferris
Talaraska
Generic/Universal
Level ... 3?

The hills making up the Archian border with Caledos are pocked with dozens of abandoned mines. These leave a lasting reminder of the rush for silver in the years prior to the rise of the Graun Empire. Without drawing much attention from local officials, a nebulous consortium of investors has been purchasing old dig sites throughout the region. The mine at Mt. Morris was one such purchase. About 12 months ago, a group of ten men reopened the dig, which locals were sure was folly. After spending a couple of weeks repairing the base camp, the team resumed the dig. None but the foreman had any previous mining experience. Most of the “miners” were farmhands or former members of the stevedores’ guild. None were strangers to hard work, but they were a motley crew to be certain. However, the strangers who came and offered them the job assured them that they would be paid handsomely. The past year had been difficult. The team had failed to find any substantial amount of ore and they often assumed that their work would soon come to an end. Despite this, the paymaster and his retinue of guards would appear every month and the dig continued.

This nine page adventure presents eleven rooms in an old mining camp & camp that has been “overrun” with undead. It’s pretty basic, with not much going on. 

I’m not super sure how this made it on my list. It must have either been in the OSR section on DriveThru or a request? I don’t think I see a request, so it must have been in the OSR section at DriveThru at one time, even though it’s labeled Generic/Universal. The marketing blurb advertises it as a flesh out adventure hook, but the adventure, proper, lists itself as an adventure. I don’t know, some way of framing it not having stats? I don’t think that matters. In any event, it has more life to it than the vast majority of adventures and even manages to present more rooms than the number of pages in the adventure. How far have we fallen to have that be some standard of success? What’s a spud to do? Anyway, ignoring most of the intro there’s a small adventure hidden in here that is relatively inoffensive. There’s not much interesting about it either, but, hey, it’s 2026 and I’m in a morose mood because somehow an uninteresting adventure with eleven rooms in nine pages somehow is better than most if the garbage I review. So, no stats and no treasure, just some “place treasure appropriate to your system” notes here and there.

There are some pretext reasons here for exploring, nothing very interesting. Hired to do blah blah blah, or local priest has visions blah blah blah. Getting to the site you find four outbuildings and then seven rooms in the mine. There are bodies about, partially eaten. A stable has horse bodies, and one stall padlocked with a living horse in it and extra water that has run out. One of the buildings has a survivor barricaded inside of it with a confusing story that doesn’t make sense. The idea is that the party will use the stable clue, as well as another clue in the bunkhouse, to understand that the dude knows more than he is saying and that they’ll press him for details. The details are not altogether interesting given the small size and stand along nature of the adventure combined with the generic/unival vibe. He was hired to run a mining crew, looking for a diary in a buried complex. He did some research on his own and found out that the dude was a necromancer and used animated bodies as guards. When the miners found a wall he gave his horse some water and locked himself in, fearing the worst. The miners break in, undead get out, the worst happens, everyone dies but him and his horse. It’s an interesting way to present a clue, without having to resort to a diary or monologue. And by interesting” I mean “correct.” We get to see the results of actions taken in the past that help explain the now, rather than listen to a droning monologue. The players gets to use their brains to put things together. Or not. 

The rooms inside the mine are uneventful. Generic alter room. Generic crypt. “There are 8 sarcophagi in this room. Four of these are open and empty. The remaining four are closed and hold inanimate skeletons. There is a small stone altar along the western wall. Beside it rests an open chest filled with gold and any treasures that would be appropriate for your game. “  Nothing really evocative about them, inside the mine or out. Nothing really stands out. A few ghouls/ghasts. Entries are padded out with things like “As the party moves in this direction, they are assailed by [an odor.]” There’s like five pages of intro to go with the four pages of room keys. There’s just nothing to this. “First, do no harm”, the slogan goes. And, for the most part, that was accomplished here. Sure, some padding, a decent amount of it. But, also, the rooms are still relatively terse and easy to scan. There’s still no way I would run this, there’s just nothing to it, but it IS still better than most adventures because it IS doing no harm.

This is $2 at DriveThru. There is no preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/571820/the-mine-at-mt-morris?1892600

By Kirk Kahoe
Crimson River Games LLC
Generic/Universal
Levels: Any

Warning! This is as close as you can get to being a Heartbreaker without actua;;y being a Heartbreaker.

An eternal horror haunts the woods, reaping an endless harvest of woe from those foolish or desperate enough to travel through them. Tired and injured, the party will have to not only face an endless onslaught from the horror but fatigue and madness as well, for there is no sleep in the Old Man’s realm other than the sleep of death.

This 169 page adventure is an overwritten railroad in which the best solution is leaving the table to have explosive bloody diarrhea in your hosts bathroom and then going home. Ok, that was mean. It’s a 169 pages of railroaded atmosphere in which you have no choices to make as a player and the DM must wade through an excruciating amount of text to run even the simplest encounters.

Page twenty of the intro text tells the DM that they should Describe, not define and then follows this statement up with “A shambling and decaying humanoid creature that stinks of ammonia is scary. Labeling this creature “Zombie” and adding specific statistics is a game mechanism. It is thus no longer a scary monster but a set of numbers to crunch and probabilities to consider.”  This is 100% correct. Not only does it follow the show and don’t tell mantra, but it adds that air of mystery that RPGs thrive on. I’m a big big fan of this attitude and it bolstered my spirits seeing it. 

Oh! Oh! I forgot! You can get Hep! That’s right! Hep! That’s BAD AZZ! “So, what did I get? Another plague? Yellow squirting zombie fever or something?” “No, you got Hep.” Fucking christ ma! That’s great! I love it! Next time you roll through a village you find out 15% of them are dead from cholera. That’s nicely visceral and I do love a reaction from the players. Which, I might note, is exactly what the adventure is trying to do with its horror. 

Great, I’ve said something nice, even if I did include the backhanded “page twenty” reference. 

There’s a dude who is the only worshipper of a god and he’s constructed this obtuse parallel reality death trap in a forest to select sacrifices worthy of his god. As the adventure tells us “Due to the depth of role-playing required to deliver the Old Man and the complexity of fatigue’s impact on gameplay …” It’s a test/challenge dungeon. That’s it. 169 pages of test/challenge dungeon. You know how those things work. It’s an alternate reality blah blah blah, you can’t leave, blah blah blah, he controls everything blah blah blah. “In the event (which happens often) that the Old Man (or his copies) are somehow killed in any of the encounters before the final encounter at his hovel, he is instead fully healed and moved to the subsequent encounter.” Cause hes wearing this fucking ring that brings him back. Worry not, DM afraid the railroad will stop, “In all cases, the presence of the ring should not be noted due to the grime and darkness until the last encounter.” Ain’t nothing like having no choices that really brings home the immersion. Time and again we see this. This reliance on a test/challenge environment as a pretext for all of the setup the baddie has done. Time and again we see these mechanical contrivances, like the ring, used as an excuse to justify an effect. Time and again we see these railroads as an attempt to tell a story and get an effect. You can’t fucking do it that way. One of the keys to a roleplaying game is the ability to make choices. Once you take that away you might as well be watching a movie with a predetermined outcome. Sure, I can roll a die. Will the DM let me die or force me to suffer through the entirety of their story? Players check out when they can’t do anything. When they can’t make a decision. Sure, there’s a time and a place for “the RPG adventure as an Activity” instead of “the RPG adventure as a Game”, but, Baron Munchhausen did this a long long time ago. 

In spite of the adventures words implying it’s a show don’t tell piece, it relies on mechanics and read-aloud to bring the horror, telling instead of showing. A fatigue mechanic. Mountains and mountains and mountains of read-aloud. No one wants to listen to your half page read-aloud man. You don’t set a mood by using a lot of read-aloud. Yes, the writing should be evocative, but it should not be lengthy. You get a few sentences, three or four, and that’s it. You need to really work those sentences to bring the effect, the impact you are going for. Yes, it is not easy. It is, I think, the hardest part of adventure writing. More is not better. Player attention drifts. You make it harder on the DM to focus. You can’t use mechanics to fill in either. Sanity, in CoC, is just another pull of hit points, campaign hit points, as to say. It is up to the designer to put something together that FEELS like fatigue without relying on mechanics to accomplish that.

So, yeah, railroad. The adventure starts at a little trade town. Caravans leaving, to go over the pass. Wanna join? SURE you don’t want to join? Ok, so, no, you decide to wait at the trade town over the winter? Ok, then bandits keep attacking. Eventually you see over a 100 bandits about to attack and the entire town, whats left, flee in to the hill. Along the caravan route. Heh. So, yeah, you’re going on the adventure. Then you’re in the alternate reality shit where the dude controls everything and you’ve got exactly one path to go on. Just follow it and make skill check after skill check as: there’s a rock fall. There’s a bridge collapse. The wagon is stuck. Blah blah blah. I don’t know, there’s about fifty locations, between the overland and like a manor and such. 

There is an EXTENSIVE amount of information presented for each area. There’s a section for environment, then a section for topography. Then a boxed text section for the read-aloud, then a section for monsters/traps, then a section for encounter mechanics, then a section for notes, and a section for treasure, and a section for game master notes. There is EXTENSIVE repetition, which is great because with so much information, a long paragraph or more for each section, the area is then spread across multiple pages. There is NO WAY a DM can keep this shit together for a meaningful encounter. And this stuff is present for almost every area. Time and again, DO NOT use such a rigid format. Leave shit out if you don’t need it. Do NOT do shit like tell us the door, walls, light, smell, taste for each and every room. The purpose of formatting is to help bring clarity and help a DM when they scan the adventure looking for pertinent information. Used in mechanical fashion though, as it is here, is instead obfuscates and works against the goals it is trying to achieve.

It’s just weird, the way things come together in this. In one read-aloud section it says “They have knowledge of the mountains and what supplies are needed, and they can provide basic information about the mountain road. This sound slike DM notes, not read-aloud. And that’s not an isolated example, I’m not cherry picking. In another section there is a Treasure heading that reads “Treasure – Supplies from the abandoned wagons (See Treasure section).” Isn’t THIS the treasure section? (Turns out, no. It’s _A_ treasure section. FLipping to an appendix we can find a Treasure appendix with a listing for “Wagon Contents” which is full of mundane supplies.)

It’s just crammed with so much extraneous and repetitive information. And then the encounters are so humdrum. Oh, make a skill check! Ok, get a fatigue. Yawn. The final battle with th dude is anticlimactic as fuck. He attacks, eventually you drive him off. You find him in his hut and kill him there. End. Given this is 170 pages long and like almost fifty railroad encounters I would have expected just a little more in the way of flavour than a couple of sentences saying “he attacks you.” The horror element here just doesn’t work, hardly anywhere in the adventure. Mechanics and read-aloud doesn’t do it. The Hep C cant save an overwritten adventure in which the horror element is reduced to mechanics. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first seventeen pages. Which doesn’t show any of the encounters because there’s a LONG intro and background info and so on and so on and so on. A preview needs to show some of the encounters so a buyer can make an informed decision about the purchase. That’s the purpose of the preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/564568/the-old-man-of-the-woods?1892600

By Demi ElGato
Possum Print Games
OSE
Level 1?

The Delta has long been a dangerous place. Most citizens tend not to stray too far from the port city of Mirkell. When times were not so tough, barges, caravans and other travelers braving the wilds of the province would be well staffed with armed guards. However, as coin purses lightened, the extra expense couldn’t always be justified. Opportunists, both men and monsters, take every chance for an easy payday, or an easy meal.

This 120 page adventure presents a small region with about ten adventuring sites (taking about forty pages), a couple of towns, and a few other locations.  I love the premise and setup of the region but the core dungeon locations are beset with clumsy writing and lacks a certain life to the encounters. 

Ok, look, I’ll get to the review, but I need a moment to diatribe first. In this we’ve got a new king, a Good Guy” “He established a parliament, limiting his own powers, and fully recognized the citizens of the Delta as members of the kingdom.” Kings don’t do this. Well, they do, but only when their barons have quite strong armies and are not pleased with the king. That’s just not what the job of king entails, giving away your absolute rights derived from god. But, then, also “Recently talks of secession have been heard in the Delta. King Nicolai will not abide such murmurings.” Well king dipshit, what the fuck does your parliment have to say about that? After all, you ceded rights to them. We’re gonna ignore this little bit of contradictory realpolitik for the rest of the review; it’s really the only truly dumb ass thing the adventure says. Not being internally consistent breaks immersion. Pick a direction and go, for real reasons that are relatable, not this scattershot shit. But, again, not a big deal, which is why I’m leading off with it and ranting about it ?

The really strong point to this adventure is the factions and their timelines. You’ve got loyalists and successionists, anti-humans, researchers, nihilist death cult, and the Old Guard Rich & Powerful. Oh, look, the Teamsters (The Delta works best when we say Union Yes!) want more money and better conditions. Oh, look, the old boys club isn’t happy about changes to the status quo. Oh, and some agtators who think the Delta would be better without a remote king. And the kings men who disagree. Oh, and now there’s a death cult type thing mixing in with crowds and throwing firebombs, literally and metaphorically. This amps up feelings on all sides. And mixed in to this we’ve got some rc town assholes and dedicated researchers and the usual array of bandits. There’s a rough timeline of events that can kind of help set the tone during the game, such as “A police force, only answering to the Noble Stewards, is established in Mirkell. The Secessionists have a protest outside of Town Hall in Mirkell. The Cult of Saint Hideo will begin attacking and burning barges on the river. The Segregationists will begin importing mass amounts of arms and armor.” This isn’t a set of specific events but it does outline the general situation and the vibe. I SUSPECT thats enough. Just reading that I can think of a lot of things I can drop in to a game as little side things, and that’s generally what I’m looking for from a designer: enough to get ME going to create and drop in things. We can see crackdowns, brutality both accidental and intentional, accidents that are real and imagined. What do you do when a crate of bows spills out of a wagon? “Uh, it’s for fishing” says the fisherman hailing it. It’s a great little set up thing and a good way to use a death cult. “Yeah, there were death cult agitators in the crowd.”  “Yeah, that’s what you WOULD say! Death cult! As if!”  I love it when the party explores “Big Als Fireworks & Open Barrel of Gasoline Emporium.” 

There are other tidbits here and there that are great as well. There’s a rival adventuring party that shows up form time to time in the wanderers table and in other places. “They are always kind and helpful unless given reason not to be. They travel with their mule, Bee,and little treasure (hoard type D).” Their mule, Bee. That’s a nice touch. Good grounding. And good job sprinkling them in to places to give the world that lived in feel. Good design. And, here’s a magic item “The Golden Eel Mouthpiece An exquisite, hollow golden eel. When held in the mouth, the wielder can breath underwater and swim twice as fast as usual. However, these effects only work in saltwater.” That feels real, yeah? The description, proper, is quite short but great, and while it mentions an effect it doesn’t belabour mechanics. Great magic item!

There are a few things that seem out of place, before I get to my major issue.

There are these graves of saints scattered around. Maybe twenty of them? Basically if you show up and do something for them then you get a magic item or boon or something. It feels a little … I don’t know, video-gamey? In that they are all basically the same mechanic? Or slight variations on the same mechanic? It’s like you’re touching all the totems on the map in Far Cry 19. And, then, one of them has a very specific morality test they ask you. “A poor beggar child is caught stealing bread. He is arrested by the town guard and hung for his crimes. Who committed wrong here? The child? The guard? The hangman?” Bonus test: this is a saint of the god Zakon, who believes that “cultural tradition and legal authority are inherently holy.” Make a guess. Did you guess? I SAID FUCKING GUESS! The child and guard are wrong but the hangman acted justly. I guess there’s room for interpretation in the holy tenets, even among the sainted of Zakon. 

All of the intro and supporting information (and there is a lot of it, given that only about forty pages are dungeon) in this is either easily ignored or pretty decent. I wish, perhaps, it were trimmed back. A LOT. But, it is what it is and it’s generally inoffensive when its not great.

The dungeons, though, are something else. Maybe, I don’t know, about twenty rooms in each of the ten dungeon locations? There’s something weird going on with the entries, but, also, it’s hard to point to what exactly. Here’s an example “Bloody Hall The scrabble on the floor here

makes quiet movement nearly impossible. The stalactites here are smaller and are not dripping.

There is a bloody Drag mark here, leading to Room 4. There is also a Pile of stones along the northern wall.” (Bold has more information) So, this should be pretty chill. Bloody drag marks. The text above is the “at a glance’ information, so, not exactly read-aloud. It’s just … blah. “There is a …” repeated multiple times. The tites are smaller and not dripping. “Here makes quiet movement …” I don’t know. Here is a blah Here is a blah Here is a blah. Here is not a blah. The core here, though, I think you can recognize from what I’ve pasted in, is not bad. Hard to be quite, tites, and bloody tracks.  Somehow, though, the language, and the follow up language, diminishes the interactivity in te room. Or the evocative nature? It’s weird. I’m not sure I see this too often.” It’s like having a decent idea and putting it down on paper in the most uninspiring manner possible while the concept still comes through. It’s not padded out in a meaningless way, maybe just in an … ignorant way? As in the designer didn’t know a better way to phrase what the room looked like in a more dynamic manner? And room after room is like this. The neato things going on are just so … BLEH. The follow on, for the bolded words, are fine, and the formatting is fine. It’s just all so, I don’t know, both padded out with pad phrasing and then, uninspiring? The formatting is fine. The interactivity is varied. I just have NO desire. 

The dungeons, and the adventure might be fine but I’d rather run something else. It’s all just cumbersome. The NPC’s are listed in the back of the book, and are relatively terse, but there’s no way I’m flipping back there to run them. The dungeon are ok, but lack enthusiasm. Even something like the stricture of the regions and adventures. There are hooks for the ten adventures, or, perhaps, ways to get involved. I’d just list them all up front, rather than right in front of the adventure, as shit going non in town or the village or something. Everything all at once, or tied to the timeline. Cut a shit load of text and instead focus on putting the NPC’s together with the timeline together with the hooks, to make the entire regional flow together better as a cohesive flow. 

This is, I think, the designers first real adventure/publication. And, given that, it shows. The rooms are not overly written, while the regions is perhaps a little excessively written. The rooms ARE padded out with simple language padding while the regional data has some decent specificity here and there. A strong focus on specificity in the region, trimming a lot of the boilerplate fantasy stuff, and reworking the rooms in the dungeons to eliminate padded out phrasing and bring in more adjective and specificity would make this pretty decent.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $7.77. The preview is 25 pages and mostly fluff. Page 19/14 has the factions and their timeline, which is the best of the more interesting possibilities with this. It should really have had a few dungeon pages as well. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/569417/danger-in-the-delta?1892600

By Greg Daley
Tarichan Games
B/X
Level 3

In the delta city of Portic, the heralds walk the bridges and call for the brave to save the settlement from the pernicious Thieve’s Guild. Papyri offering rewards in the thousands of gold pieces are handed out to the armed, the weaselly, and the wise. Advertising had its effect and dozens of applicants turned up at the Lighthouse. Even after describing the undead infested island, and the underground trap maze expected to confront them, four groups of adventurers drew lots to select which night they enter. The party is assembled, with retainers in tow, as the sun sinks west on the third day. No one has yet emerged from the Odd’s Sink (the Island of the Death). Straps are tightened, supplies checked, and holy symbols kissed as the guards move the barricade on the pontoon bridge.

This 26 page adventure uses about sixteen pages to present forty rooms in two tomb/undead themed dungeons. It is … obscure? In a good way. Full of tomb encounters that are familiar and yet not boring old vanilla tomb encounters. This feels like a lived-in world. That needs an editor in charge of formatting and layout.

You’ve read the marketing blurb, above, and it sounds a little early days to me. Like, 1972 early days. But, let’s back up a minutes and cover what has lead to that marketing blurb, above. We’ve got an old city. The nobility want to revolt cause they don’t like the current .gov. Revolts cost money. They get a loan from the local Guild Bank. This is a legitimate front for the thieves guild, which the current .gov kind of telerates. Revolution successful, there’s a new .gov in charge. Oh, the nobles have a VERY large sum to pay back to the Guild bank. And don’t want to. And the new .gov HATES thieves. Thus starts a pogrom against the thieves and the guild bank, which has an air of neighborhood watch death squads to it, an/or citizen checkpoints/militias. The last of the guild has been tracked to the Isle of the Dead, a funerary isle for the city. Chill during the day for burials, at night the undead walk about and giant beam of blue light shoots up into the sky. And the last of the guild was seen descending in to a tomb tha the light shoots up from. NOW you can go to the lighthouse and apply to root out the last of the guild … and you’re third in line to do so after drawing lots. Needless to say, your turns pops.

There are two dungeons to explore, each with about twenty or so rooms with a “tomb” or catacombs theme to both of them. Supplementing this is a small handful of other encounters nearby. A ship anchored offshore that could be aligned with the guild. Another, with a letter of marque, bringing in smugglers and pirates. Not exactly an adventure locale but more support for play AFTER the tombs are entered and the party returns out again, either successful or taking a break before they reenter. IE: things to support downtime, and such. This is further supplemented by eight or so “events.” Each takes up about a quarter of a page and details some things that could happen to complicate things. If the party returns out of the dungeon then maybe they get approached by someone and a conversation is had and an alternative entrance is offered, or bribes, or so on. 

I’m hoping, from all of that, you take away of a kind of context tha the designer has provided for the adventure. A context that all directly relates to things going in the adventure that a DM can use to add interesting things going on in the real world, to riff on and further enhance play. Specifics. It gives the world a kind of lived-in feel. The dungeon encounters, also, have a kind of lived-in feel to them, but its done in a different way. One room is kind of partially flooded. Below the water, is a grate that shifts if any step on it. (That, alone, is pretty nifty room feature. The use of a shifting grate implies things that a static grate does not.) “The Red Tree brigade, who entered the vaults first, are still here. They move through the water, their mail and robes torn, the wizened and twisted shapes no longer alive. They thrash through the water toward the warm meat of the party. – Red Tree Brigade Ghoul (3) “ The flooded room. The grate in the floor. The SHIFTING grate, and then the former party. It’s layered, and feels real to me. And the adventure does this over and over again. I think tomb dungeons can usually feel boring. But this has more of an undercity vibe, with tombs, vibe thing going on. Not completely, but there’s enough that it does bring a freshness to it. Ye Olde Slamming Locke Door is present as a trap room in this, but the room fills with smoke, a real life hazard that is quite seldom used. And this in spite of the twenty-ish room size of each of the dungeons. 

And this thing is a PAIN. I mentioned “obscure”, yes?

It’s like, all over the place. Sometimes we get a “you” in the descriptions. “A set of creatures clunks toward you, heavily decayed, skull domes showing. …” Sometimes there’s a random monster stats in a room that IN NO WAY mentions a creature. The rooms are inconsistently written, not clear in many places, or similar features described different ways, in the same room, making you wonder if you’re missing something. The text is … obdurate. Lengthy, maybe with a touch of self-indulgence, but not falling in to any clearly recognizable sin, like backstory, trap and door porn, or explaining why. Maybe a little of the if/then style. It’s just hard to dig through it all. Hard, but not unrewarding.

I am waffling, back and forth, on the Tarichan adventures. Best. No Regerts. I’m going to Best this one, I think. But, also, you know what I really wish? That Daley keep writing. Keep working on his products. And every day go back and edit the manuscript to this adventure for ten minutes or so. Every day. Not with the intent to publish it again but just to rework it and try to clean it up. Call it a daley trip to the adventure formatting and writing gym. Just to kind of get in the practice of seeing what’s possible, without any pressure to produce.

Anyway, good little necropolis adventure. and, frankly, I think Daley is about at the point in which he’s on an auto-buy list.

This is $3.50 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, more than enough to get a sense of the piece. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/570696/wmc-vaults-of-urpiram?1892600

By B. Wraven Wright
2Die10 Games
Dolmenwood
Levels 4-5

Four months ago, Father Wolfgang and several other members of the Church of St Pastery’ clergy were having strange dreams that all had one thing in common: a call of pilgrimage from The One True God. Father Dobey, Vicar of Lankshorn, initially had these strange dreams also but they faded in frequency and severity for him while the opposite was happening to Father Wolfgang and the others. Having been compelled into blind pilgrimage towards the direction of Hags Addle, Father Wolfgang and those afflicted with these dreams were confronted by Father Dobey, who declared these dreams as heresy. In doing so, the pilgrims openly questioned his piousness as well as his status of Vicar of Lankshorn. Father Dobey, eager to avoid conflict, decided to let the pilgrims go on the condition that they return in one month’s time. The pilgrims agreed and took their leave with the vicar’s blessing. One month has come and gone, with Father Dobey wanting to know what happened to the pilgrims for a host of reasons…

This seventeen page adventure uses about five pages to describe 27 rooms in a small dungeon. Hack till you drop and do little else as you explore the monotony of uninspiring rooms. 

I was quite disappointed with this one. Dolmenwood has been hitting at a decent rate, but, I guess, as a sign of its success, “more is coming out now.” I would hope you can understand the euphemism. The map, also, looks promising. It’s a larger Dyson affair with forty or so rooms on it, only about thirty of which are keyed in the his adventure. Some columns, stairs, curtains, an overhead passage and murder holes. Almost none of which is taken advantage of in te text. ?

The local clergy been having God dreams. The vicars gives them permission to go on a pilgrimage to their dreamed of site. They don’t come back so in you go to find them. 

“The One True God who weeps in the temple underneath the dolmen” is pretty strong flavour. There is no preamble to the adventure, no investigation, so there’s no build up to this before you get to the dungeon. Once in the dungeon the theming, of The One True God, and the weeping, is essentially not present either. You will find a weeping statue face (with decent art piece to accompany it) but that’s it. What you WILL find are a bunch of clergy/clerics. They are all scaly bipedal wolfmen. 

Why are they scaly wolfmen? No clue. You just show up and there are these empty, or mostly empty rooms and more than a few of them have these scaly wolf men in them that are doing clericy shit. And they attack you. In fact, everything and everyone attacks you in this. Monsters attack you and in a couple of rooms there’s a false floor that breaks away in to pit things. That’s it. That’s your interactivity. 

I cannot emphasize that enough. “You see 4 beings standing, frantically “reading” scrolls out loud in a hissing, barking language.” Thats your room. Oh, also, in the description for BEINGS, “Four LUPINE CLERGY stop praying and attack on sight.” Mystery. Wonder. Exploration. Not present. Just stabbing things that attack, which are the scaly wolfmen clergy and some black blobs that are in a few rooms. More than a little one-note. Oh, and the “break through the false floor” pits, Order of battle, for our clergy? Nope. They just sit in their rooms and get stabbed. Stab stab stab. Stab stab stab. Stab stab for the fun of it, stab stab for the fun of it, stab atb for the fun of it stab stab for the fun of it!

There’s little to no treasure present. The last room of the dungeon has Lareth in it. There is not hint, anywhere, that Lareth is about. “As you get close enough to the tapestry to make out the material it’s made of, you see that the ground starting in front of you winding all the way around the room to the pillars on the other side, is freshly turned earth that has a strong sickly-sweet smell of vinegar.” That’s Lareth for you, all vinegar-smelling! So, an earth wyrm pops out of the dirt and then attacks. LARETH WAS BEHIND EVERYTHING THE ENTIRE TIME!!! Oh, Lareth, such a card. No hint. No build up. Nothing that means anything. Just stab some scaly bipedal wolf clerics and then in the last room a wyrm pops up from the ground and you kill it. 

Formatting is ok. Headers, color changing, underlines, bolding. You can find things well enough. It also notes the door, light conditions, and exits in the rooms. I am not amused by anything done by rote. I think, that, unless told otherwise, we can assume darkness, or light, depending on the mood of the individual dungeon. Note what’s different, 

I don’t know, man. It’s just a VERY basic and simplistic dungeon. It;s padded out, with doors, and light and exits. It’s got some formatting to make it scan nicer. But the core of what’s going on it is quite simplistic. The One True God is not played up. The wolf dudes get nothing. The Lareth behind the curtain is not hinted at. There’s no build up. There’s no really e octave room descriptions, just a bunch of They Attack!s. There’s no insidious presence in town. There’s nothing really to EXPLORE ot interact with in the dungeon, proper. Even the scaly wolf dudes just sit around waiting to die with no order of battle. 

This is different than, say, a raid. In that case you know what you are doing and the various encounters and environments are engineered by the designer to support the raid. This is just … basic and static?

This is $1 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Sucker.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/570825/under-the-dolmens-delve-3-a-one-shot-dungeon-for-levels-4-5-adventurers-in-the-dolmenwood-setting?1892600

By Nikoline
Self Published
OSR
Levels 3-8

As above, so below. Above, Tell Arn is abandoned, the Hyrkossi kings ashamed of what is buried there. Below, stranger kings hold greater shames, and greater terrors are locked away. The mistakes of lost civilisations repeat on one another in the dark, holding a delicate, unruly balance. Tip the scales, break the seal, and let the Lions drink deep.

This 81 page adventure presents two more levels of Tell Arn with about a hundred numbered major rooms and probably as many sub-a/sub-b rooms. Complex maps. Great writing. Interesting environments to adventure in. An adventure that can stand toe to toe with Dark Tower/Thracia/Hyqueous/Xyntillian/The Bowman Levels. Buy the hard copy now.

One of the two level maps The Upper right corner

I think, perhaps, I’d like to examine this adventure through one small portion of a zone, in the northeast of the map. The map, alone, should be enough to get you excited. Water, tunnels, above and below, weird shapes, and a complexity that naturally lends itself to exploration. It FEELS like a ruined city, yes? Looking at the small area in the upper right, a kind of cavern. IN the middle is a pit. There’s this long corridor off to 39a, and a broken set of stairs clinging to a wall leading up to 28a. Rough caves to 29, with secrets in that room, multiple secret doors! Pools in 31, with more secrets, but the entrance to the 31 hallway from 28 is a ledge up on the wall. Rooms. Caverns. Pits. Ledges. Stairs. Exits. Secrets. An almost bewildering number and type of environments. Fucking great map! A place for an adventure!

The rooms start with a kind of vibe overview. Room 28 is “Lower Hydra Nest”. How much more classic can you get than a hydra in a ruined city? It makes my mouth water just thinking about the deliciousness of the encounter! Then the entry reads “Sickly stench; grease and putrescence. A ledge (40’ up) to the south (to 31). Water and blood drips from above” It’s kind of orienting the DM to the room. Room 29, the Putrescent Larder reads “The detritus thickens; half-rotted carcasses in great mounds. Sweet stench of death. Lit by guttering blue corpse-fires, burning at random. Sucking steps.” Got it. Ewww! Or, maybe room 21, the Upper Gallery “Reprieve from the miasma. Crashing water. Blue light through fine mist. Hollow on the north wall leads to 29. “ Crashing water, sweeter air, a blue light in a fine mist. GUTTERING. Or SUCKING STEPS. These descriptions feel imagined. They feel like someone called up a mental image in their head, lived the room, and then were able to get that down on paper, and down on paper in such a way that you, the DM reading it, can pick it up and run with it just as the designer imagined in their head. That IS the goal of good writing. A sucking step. Anyone in the mud, bog, fen, swampy environments knows what that is like. It’s a perfect description for that kind of thing. You KNOW what it is. The descriptions here range from good to excellent, across the board.

But wait, there’s more! This is not the end of things.We expand, when entering from room 17, the trail narrows, the stone crumbling, there’s a 30’ ledge to the floor below, with pitted walls. Pitted. The room? A ruined amphitheatre, buried in filth. Corroded pillars break the surface. They are gnawed and scored with deep claw marks. Detritus is 10 deep, bone, plasma, cave-slime, guano. I fucking love that amphitheater description. 

Heyt man, how about that pit? Let’s look at that bullet “In the centre of the amphitheatre, a sunken pit (40’ across, 20’ deep). The floor is thick with golden slime. Inspection reveals twisting movement below. A colossal gold-faced bust (3000c/300lb) rests against the west edge. Bringing fire nearby alerts the hydra: 4d6 HYDRA SPAWN surge into 28 to defend it. “ Golden slime. Twisting below. Jesus fucking christ! I’m not going near that thing! I see your colossal gold-faced bust, but the hand AND eye had better be clearly visible to get me to go there! Great fucking environment. And remember, we’ve still got “A broken set of stairs winding 20’ up the wall. At the top, a dark hollow “ and other things in here. Depth. Multiple things going on. Multiple things to look at, explore, interact with. 

Expanding this hydra room even more, there are mechanics to help the DM out. That 10’ deep filth? “The filth halves all movement in 28/29 “ Wanna dig through it? There’s a short table for that. Oh, hey, remember that pit with the golden slime and twisting movement? How about this as fucking follow up to that description: “If the slime-floor is broken (like the skin of a water-bed), it reveals a knotted, fused mass of hydra-flesh. A thousand blind eyes swivel into life. 1d10x10 HYDRA SPAWN burst out after 1 turn. “ Like the skin of a water bed. A thr\ousand blind eyes SWIVEL into life. A knotted and fused mass of hydra flesh. Fucking a man, this is a fucking adventure right here! 

We saw that colossal gold-faced bust, as treasure. Digging about in the filth could get you “Seventh Binding. (300c). A scabbard faced with moulded silver plates depicting the slaughter of seven giants. Inside, it is choked with black blood. “Nice little description. CHoked with black blood is a good touch also. No blade kept within will dull or rust. That’s a decent effect without relying on mechanics. And, then also “7 charges. The bearer can negate a mundane attack dealing ?8hp. The wound scars over, one of the seven giants rots to bones, and the scabbard fills with the blood that would have been spilled. “ Ewwww! Noice! Love it!  Magic item that FEELS like a magic item. 

Hey, how about another room? How about that upper gallery, with the blue mist? “Softly phosphorescent lichen coats the walls. It is thicker to the south, growing elaborate tendrils, swaying. On close inspection, see the form of a halfling, splayed out and subsumed by the algae. Its skull is stripped bare; a jewelled holy symbol (200c) of a sapphire rose embedded in the socket. “ Uh. Ok. And also “A stream of water cascades from above into a shallow pool. The pool is white with foam. It breaks off into a stream running down to 30. The water is bright blue and bitter. Small blind fish swim within. “ And then each of those two things, which are major bullets, have a minor bullet like “If bathed in, the water (highly alkaline) causes 1hp damage, drinking it 1d6hp. It cleans anything washed in it to a mirror sheen.”

Formatting wise, we’re seeing a vibe overview that’s highly evocative. Then a few major bullets with details on things from the overview. Then a sub-bullet or two with mechanical-like impacts from those bullets. Bolding and italics are used to effect to draw the eye to certain words, but not overused. Evocative treasure with good descriptions, terse but much more interesting than a Sword, +1. 

These rooms hit, over and over again. There are zones in this places, “themed” areas, if you will. There are a couple of major factions running around with wants and needs and goals, as well as theming around hunger, in particular, with a ravenous hydra and ghouls. The amount of repetition of rooms is close to zero, nothing really feels like it’s just thrown in, or padding out the adventure. Room after room and description after description feels intentional, as if absolutely everything in the is adding to the adventure, building it up with intention. 

Dense. Complex. Thrilling. Full of awe and wonder and horror the way an exploration adventure should be. You are a FOOL if you don’t check this out. For all the crap being published, today and every year, there is always someone out there with a singular vision who drives it to completion. This is the OSR.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. That’s absurd. This thing is great and you need a physical copy. The preview is twenty pages. You get to see a great map and lots of dungeon entries. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530112/the-lions-of-tell-arn-part-ii?1892600

By Scott_m
First Era Adventures
OSRIC
Levels 2-4

Ten years ago, the new rector went insane and burned down the town chapel, killing his fellow priests. No one knows why he did it, but superstitious townsfolk just wanted the whole sad affair to go away, so they turned a blind eye. The scene of this terrible crime was abandoned, yet evil abides. Locals believe the site remains cursed, haunted by ghosts of the murdered priests. Now, after mysterious events have befallen the town in recent weeks, many look to the ruined chapel as the source of their ill fortune. Somewhere below the ruins, the fate of the temple’s holy relic may hold the answer to this disturbing mystery.

This 21 page adventure presents a burned out chapel and undercroft with about fifty locations. There are a couple of interesting subplots going on, with evocative descriptions, decent interactivity, and it being well formatted. A fine adventure. How often do I get to say that?

You know that bag of potatoes in your pantry? The one that’s been for awhile? You know how it’s begun to rot and stink up the place? Clean up your fucking churchs when they burn down!

I don’t know where to start. I want to talk about a couple of points, but I think I should cover the heart of the adventure first. There is a little background and a few hooks that kind of paint a scene of the surrounding town, but it’s VERY minimal. This is, essentially, just a site to adventure in with almost not surrounding info. And that’s fine. This works well as a site-based adventure that you can drop in almost anywhere and there IS just enough to hook it in a little deeper. The reeves teen boy  is missing and someone you find in the dungeon could be the kid. And, really, not much more than this and the local legend in the marketing blurb. 

The language use here is pretty decent. “Rusted iron gates screech open onto a flagstone courtyard, its edges overtaken with dirt and weeds. The stones are broken and shifted; tall weeds clump in the cracks.” Overtaken, edges, shifted, rusted. The words chosen are good. In another place there is this as a description “Dusty paths encircle scores of old gravestones squatting among the dry, rustling grass.” That could, I think, almost be the platonic ideal of a decent room description. It’s terse, evocative. It uses its word count wisely. It’s the kind of description that makes me think someone who was VERY adept with their vocab imagined a scene and then wrote it down, rather than working the other way around. “Hmmm, graveyard, what words can I use?” There’s a kind of ease that comes from the descriptions, as if they were effortlessly written. The words click together well to build on each other. That’s evocative writing. It does slip in a purple word now and again, like that “rusted iron gates SCREECH open upon” … that’s not read-aloud or second person, it’s trying to use an adverb. I applaud the attempt and I think adverb usage can REALLY work well, but it’s either a smash hit or a failure in my experience in a description. Still, there’s not much of it. 

Formatting is good also. This is a standard paragraph style, with certain words bolded to cal attention to them, like creatures or other things that the party might notice, a glint ,a marble font, etc. Each paragraph might have two or three sentences with a room averaging one to two paragraphs. And, those paragraphs are well written. They are not padded out. The important stuff comes up front. One room, I’m thinking of, stretches to a column of text, quite unusual for this adventure. But, it’s quite manageable. It builds. It’s easy to locate information. One paragraph might have the “marble font” bolded and then the very next describes the font encounter information. I don’t know, maybe it’s an accident, but I doubt it. It is, for lack of a better phrase, subtly formatted and organized. 

The maps,supporting play, range from great to good. The outside map, of the ruined chapel and grounds, is really nice. Almost an overlay on top of an art piece that doesn’t loose it ability to be clear. The undercroft map is clear as well, although it has a kind of symmetrical vibe to it that I almost always have a visceral response to. It’s NOT wholly symmetrical, but, also, when a map tends to the symmetrical I do enjoy seeing a secret placed on the map that rewards players who pay attention. A fully mapped dungeon, the known areas, would reveal one curious space unaccounted for, leading to a major treasure. Monsters are noted on the map, which is great for helping a DM react to noisy characters. There is a third level, some rat tunnels, that is a neato little extra, simple but nice to have also. Exit locations, and where they lead to, are noted as well, with … six entry/exits to the undercroft. Sweet!

There is some interesting interactivity as well. I’m going to note one of them, as an example. Up top, in the grounds, is a cemetery. At one point you can find four broken in to tombs of knights, with their heraldry, names, etc. Down below you can meet four skeleton knights, and by paying attention and drawing some inferences, they are the same dudes. Calling out to them with their names, etc, can let anyone kind of “turn” them, with a chance. This is the old trope of “i know the real you is really in there!” Finally, if you do the right thing and return their bones to their crypts then a golden trumpet appears midair. A nice kind of symbolism there with the knights and a church. And it turns out to be a horn of valhalla, allowing you to summon them 1d4 4hd knights. It all works together, and builds upon itself. OF COURSE that will happen, right? It what you WANT to happen, as a D&D player. Another example is an skull icon that cn talk (oh, Mort, you cast a long shadow) and if you say a prayer, give alms, etc, then you are rewarded. Again, a kind of free-flowing interactive play, not necessarily tied to casting the right spell but just doing what SHOULD be done. And then the skull responds “Your gesture comforts my eternal soul; Brother Denton has something for you” … so keep an eye open for his ossuary. In the main ruined church. “The cavernous interior space once soared to (60’h) down the center line. Huge rubble piles obscure sightlines deeper into the hall unless someone mounts one of the heaps” And some notes on the “valleys” between the rubble and on climbing them. A pretty good environment. 

There’s a place or two that I would have liked an extra word or two. “Scattered on the basin’s bottom are the bones of two missing townsfolk.” That could have used a couple of words more, a missing teen couple dating or some such. Nothing wrong here, but just a yearning for more specificity, given the quality of the rest of the adventure it seems out of place.

Lastly, I want to talk a little bit about the setup. This site is a fine stand-alone adventuring site and doesn’t need more, a surrounding town or some such. But, it’s teased a little, and, again, that makes me want more. “Livestock and stores have gone missing; shadowy, hooded figures are said to roam the fields at night; ghostly lights were seen (from a distance) in the chapel ruins, etc. Worse still, quite a few locals and itinerant laborers have gone missing over the last few weeks.” This is pretty much a platonic setup for a small village getting creeped out. Bad omens and strange happenings. Throw in some sour milk and a lame calf and you’ve got the motherload. This nothing more to this, in the adventure, than what I pasted in and, sure, I’d like to see some specificity here, but, it does make me wonder. I’ve not really been impressed by those “101 subplots for game!” type products, the content never turns out to be what I want. (Well, other than Pembrocktonshire and Petty Gods.) A giant compendium of quick hits for a game, with specificity. Full of lame calves, sour milk, disappearing teens, sudden appearance of hoof and mouth, hank the drunk saw a weird shadow stumbling home. Perfect little quick hits, with specificity, for a DM to tosses in to their games to help bring the context around these site adventures to life. 

Anyway, enough rambling. This adventure reminds me of the nostalgia of the original adventures. Not what they actually were, but what you remember them to be, the same as the old sledding hill being flour feet tall when you remember it being humongous. This adventure lives up to the memories of the old ones, meaning it exceeds them. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages and you get to see themain maps and several encounters. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/567410/the-heart-of-st-althus?1892600