Ten Foot Pole

By G. Hawkins
Mythmere Games
OSRIC
Levels 9-12

At Grathen Rift, the Ice Lich Vathudnar built a great fortress-tomb, populating the frozen ice-halls with his servants before sending his spirit out into the planes and strange dimensions beyond the material world. Thus far, no adventurers have dared to assault this legendary fortress … until now.

Hawk & Finch? What’s next, Calithena and Sham? 

This 44 page adventure describes an ice fortress of eighty or so keyed entries that is full of cold-themed undead. And a lich. I hope you earned those twelve levels cause you’re gonna need all of your skill to get through this hack with your lives somewhat intact. Great map, a dangerous backdoor, and a soul gem only a lich mother could love. 

G1 was a hack. But it wasn’t a BORING hack. It had the sleeping guards, the battle royale, the lothario, the orc rebellion and general weirdness in the basement, not to mention the inside.outside vibes. It’s a hack but it did present other elements to bring life to the hack. And this is doing that in much the same way. No, it’s not G1, but for being a high level hack it’s doing a decent job.

The background crap here is short and focused. Just what you need. After a short “historical background section”” it ends with “To this day the snow barbarian tribes still pay homage to the spirit and malice of Vathudnar, invoking his name for strength and favour” That’s a fun thing to work in! And, then, the rumor table is combined with a kind of hook table of a couple of entries, all motivated to get the party interested. Something like “The bands of snow barbarians that still worship the dreadful Lich King Vathudnar are rumoured to be active again, raiding the warm lands to the south. Some say that Vathudnar the Ice Lich has returned and stirred up his ancient followers, while others say that this is all a lie, and the lich’s fortress is ripe for pillaging, his followers hunting wide in search of a band of raiders that defiled his tomb.” Again, this is both clearly focused on working in to your game (war, and rumors of war …” as well as providing some colour to help bring things alive. We’re not gimping the party too much, and what there is makes sense. None of this “he cast 327 wish spells” shit. The place is made up of ice so there are slime cold effects and “how to handle fire/magical fire” is covered (which, should almost be a requirement for VERY adventure, honestly, based on adventurers proclivity to use mans oldest ally.) 

The map here is a good one. Sufficiently large. Balconies, rifts and chasms, same level stairs and shafts. We get a few small water features and some nearby caverns that, ideally, a party could use to bypass the front door and maybe even shortcut to the lich lair. That way is not without its own dangers and annoyances (fucking fey …) but making friends and not mudering the little shits for their jokes can get you a decent way. I am absolutely THRILLED to see an adventure with a real map. 

As with the Great Hall in G1, there are a couple of set pieces in this. The front door, main hall, and lich sanctum hall are all multi-level battles with interesting elevation features and challenges to overcome to turn them in to more interesting battles, again, thanks to the map. 

There’s read-aloud, that’s kept to just a couple of sentences. It’s in second-person, with some “you’s” thrown in, but, it looks like some care has been taken and it is not generally railroady or prescriptive to how the party has entered, just a casual. It’s not common and is just the occasional “you can see …” type of phrase here and there. It’s walking the line well. It’s also pretty fact based, with entries like “Two dragon skeletons, encased in ice and snow, are entwined around each other, curling around the walls of this room. The ceiling is carved with a basrelief depicting a robed giant petting two dragons.” Pretty straight forward and committing no sins or over-revealing. It’s a spartan description, in terms of evocative writing, and I would prefer a word or two more of embellishment, but I also recognize that this is one of the harder parts of adventure writing and I’ll take a decent description like this adventure has over a more long-winded or poorer one. 

Formatting is good, with the occasional use of a bolded word or two to call the DMs attention to it followed by a sentence or two. It’s easy to scan at the table, and thus easy to locate the information you need in the moment. Creatures, secret doors, major features are all highlighted appropriately. 

There can be a decent amount of hacking in this. I hope you brought a cleric or three, the numbers are high. 11 HD undead giants are all over the place. But it’s not just a straight hack. There’s some nuance going on here. I want to call out a specific encounter earlier on that I think communicates the meat of the adventure. This is one of the longest read-alouds in the adventure “The interior of the building is frigidly cold. The high ceiling is covered in icicles, and drifts of snow collect at the base of the walls. In the centre of the chamber stands an altar of solid ice. Some dark substance stains the top and sides (dried blood). Behind the altar rises a frosted black obsidian idol of a regal skeletal figure with red gemstone eyeWs. Its hands clasp the sides of an old woman’s head, a living person whose emaciated body is held to the statue in encasing ice. Her pupilless eyes burn with a low blue light, but her gaze darts around blindly. A reeking stench flows out from a gaping pit at the back of the shrine. “ [That eyeWs type is a part of the adventure, not my usual carelessness. It’s the only type that stood out.] So, old crone encased mostly in ice with state hands clasping (great word choice!)  each side of her head. She’s an oracle, and, yes, if you stab her then she has a couple of powers. But this doesn’t HAVE to be a hack. But, also, in particular, did you catch the reeking stench? There’s a frozen pit behind her with a lot of frozen crones bodies in it, previous oracles. That’s a nice touch, great Verisimilitude. But, also, the reeking. Ghasts. Twenty of them. YOU WERE TOLD THERE WERE GHASTS. It’s reeking bodies that are frozen, what did you expect? There is absolutely nothing better than telling the party straight up what is going to happen, hinting to them, and watching them fumble it and realize in retrospect that it was obvious. THATS fucking good. A blood sacrifice on the altar gets you a free pass here, one of a couple of places that can happen. It doesn’t clarify if it’s a cut palm or a full on Death of a Living Being thin. I’d maybe lean to full on living sacrifice, or hint at it, and then let the party do a palm cut, etc, to get by. Great little set of rooms here, working together, and a high point of the adventure.

There’s another section that I really like also, near the lich lair, proper. A series of kind of trophy rooms or his vanquished foes. A skeleton with a gold crown beaten in to an collar around the neck. Yup, that’s the kind of shit that an evil lich conquerer does. And, then, a captured demon that MIGHT be helpful, although, it is a demon after all. Or the bodies of a half dozen vanquished giant foes, kept as trophies that whisper to you when you enter. They want revenge and a clever party can turn them to their side for help in the final battle. 

If I zoned this out I might mention the front door and palace/fortress sections, which is a fucking hack-a-thon, as one would expect a front door to be. And then the back door/passage that is dangerous in its own right and more similar to a classic exploratory dungeon section. And then the area near the sanctum, trophies, potential allies, and the like, with lots to ‘play with.’ 

On the down side, I wish the writing were just a bit more evocative. I understand there is some personal preference involved, and that this is one of the harder parts of writing. Just a little beefing up of this area would do wonders and still, I think, not interfere too much with personal preferences and the like. There’s also an area or two that is cumbersome. From the top of my head, there’s a set of stairs you have to go up, and you get shot at from the top. SOme notations on the map, or otherwise, to call this out would be helpful. Also, the lich will call in reinforcements from certain areas when his sanctum is breached. A play aid here would have been useful, to keep track of those areas specifically and who’s ‘alive.’ “Eight ghoul wolves from area 44.” Fuck! Are they still alive?! Did I take notes? Finally, I suspect this is not a single foray in to the fortress. A short paragraph about camping, returning, dangers, etc, ala G1, maybe mentioning a few complications also.

But, a decent high level adventure! Yeah! ‘Experienced players’ with experienced characters should prevail, but it’s going to be a real challenge. Which is exactly what you want in a high level adventure.

This is $10 at DriveThru. No preview. Boo! Boo! I wonder what the thinking was there? They should both know that a few encounters would go a long way. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/554810/fortress-tomb-of-the-ice-lich?1892600

I wonder what you have to do to become THE ice lich instead of just ‘an’ ice lich?

By Operant Game Lab
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-2

Decades ago, there were two adventuring bros—Thom the Mighty and Oolnor the Weird. After much questing and looting and war against the hated bone men of the North, they carved for themselves a dungeon fortress one day’s march from the nearest village. Here, in this righteous bro cave (RBC), they stationed their henchmen, stashed their gold, and hosted epic parties. But there has been no trace of Thom or Oolnor for ten years now. A brave few have trespassed into their RBC, lusting for the riches that no doubt reside there. None have returned, for no force could be mightier than Thom and Oolnor’s eternal, bloodthirsty friendship. 

This ten page adventure describes about 32 rooms in a “double adventurer” lair much akin, and a homage, to B1. It’s trying hard, and has some decent formatting and a writing style that is, in form if not function, almost consistently great. And, also, it comes off a bit staid and disconnected from itself. You getting close there, Operant Game Lab.

The set up here is much the same as B1, on purpose. Two adventuring buddies build a fortress to live together and then they disappear for over ten years now. Inside you’ll find some things harkening back to B, like pools, as well as some mushroom men wandering around, “the bone men”, a tribe of barbarians trying to retrieve the bones of their ancestors that were stolen by the dynamic due, and  some leftover orc servants trying to fend off the bone men incursion. 

I talk sometimes about good writing and great writing and how there is a way of writing in which more is implied than the written word. If I can write three words and it makes you think of some kind of misty forest glen, coming alive in your minds eye, then I’ve done a good job. But if you can build the rest of the forest from that then I’ve done an even better job. A good room description may bring a room to life and an even better one brings the SITUATION to life, or the NPC, or so on. And, one hopes, it is tersely written, helping us scan the page and run the game at the table, the whole idea being using words to their maximum effectiveness, implying more than the words themselves describe. At one point in this adventure you come across some orc officers, planning to repel the bone-men barbarians. They will talk, but want to make sure you are “orc tough” and “they are willing to generously split the resulting bone-men meat 50-50.” This is very good writing. You know EXACT:LY the tone that the designer is going for with this encounter. From this you, as the DM, know how to run this encounter perfectly. You can ad-lib and fill in the gaps of the encounter, and, because of this, can turn it in to something quite memorable for the party, something they will recall in stories for sessions to come. More than just imaging the environment of the room, it has communicated tone and a situation. And that is the very highest form of evocative writing. That certain wryness comes through in other places in this adventure as well, so while not consistently hitting, it’s not an accident either. One of the wandering encounters, on a roll of 00,  has the two adventurers, “Thom and Oolnor, returning home at long last” with their seven giant golden idols. Well there’s a sticky wicket to toss in!

The writing here tends to be terse, but not overly so. Formatting and layout is done paragraph style, with a a few short intro sentences and a word or two bolded and then followed up in their own paragraphs, with rooms given names next to their key numbers in order to help frame the text for the DM. This is all great, easy to scan at the table while running. 

Encounters can be, in places, well done. Outside the entrance we get a couple of sentences that ends with “Every few minutes, a gust of wind blows away the humidity and mosquitos.” More than just padding and setting the scene, if you listen to the wind you you catch the faint sounds of a flute, following it leads you to where the bone-men have made their encampment and their lon guard killing time playing his flute. This, obviously, helps the party, giving them clues as to whats to come. Depth, following up on what the DM has related to the party leads to more information and revelations. And that’s what you want in a room description. 

In another spot, the treasure room, we get “Piles of Gold. On the scale of Scrooge McDuck, one could swim through these stacks of silver and gold coins. All told, there are 2,834 silver pieces and 198 gold pieces (many of them stained with the old blood of their previous owners)” On the Scale of Scrooge McDuck, this gives us an immediately visual image to work from as a DM. (As an aside, is that many coins really a hoard ala Smaug the Golden/Scrooge McDuck? The imagery works well but I’ve not sure I’ve ever seen an adventure in which the actual coinage lives us to that imagery. Or maybe I just don’t know what 2800 coins looks like in real life?) Other wry things include a room with an effigy of a woman in it, a crude statue built. “Parading the false wife around in “civilized” settlements confers a -1 ongoing penalty due to its creepiness.” That’s solid. The use of parading, civilized in quotes, creepiness. Great use of descriptive words to help nail the vibe.

There are some decent vignettes in this. Bone-men stacking up chairs and climbing on each other to get to their ancestors bones hanging from the ceiling in the great hall. A wounded bone-man, with his buddies keeping watch, that drank from a pool and hulked out and got wounded badly. In spite of this though I’m not going to even Regerts this. It’s close, but there are a few things that keep me from that. The entire thing feels, sparse? Staid? Disconnected from itself? Static? Maybe static. It’s not that there’s a lot of empty rooms, that can be cool in a dungeoncrawl. But it just doesn’t feel like a unified whole. There are little linkages, the bone-men through, the orc sector, the previously mentioned wounded bone-man from the pool. Certainly no order of battle though, or anything overly dynamic in the environment. It doesn’t feel like a place that is alive. The overall vibe of the place just doesn’t come through well. I wish I could put my finger on it. It doesn’t feel like a bone-man incursion to a place and the orc servants repelling them and the mushroom men adding trouble in a place that is already a little weird, being an adventurer home. Certainly all of those elements are present but they don’t feel like they are working together to create a unified whole. I’m thinking of this in terms of, say, the first level of Stonehell. Stonehell level one, or even the outside, feels like an empty dungeon but the overall emptiness, exploration, and creatures there make it, all together, feel like a certain place with a certain something going on. 

I’m certainly not angry about this. Most adventures are piss-poor wastes of paper and this is not that. The overall environment just doesn’t get me excited to run this. I think it’s close, though, to being something worthwhile. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The preview is ten pages, essentially the entire thing. Great preview. I’d check out, maybe room 3, 12, and 25 for an example of some of the better rooms. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561741/righteous-bro-cave?1892600

By GMaia
Knight of the Lake Games
OSR
Levels 4-8

[…] A bold entrepreneur decided to reopen the “cursed” stage, now renamed the Daggerpierce Theater, and revive what was hailed as the greatest play ever written, and at the same time the one everyone wished never to see again. The from the Côte d’Écume, were not fully aware of the rumors surrounding the theater, the play, and its infamous author. Ignoring those who begged to keep the Daggerpierce Theater shut, the troupe accepted the job and sealed its fate along with that of The Tragedy of Gus de Montagne. The play was cut short just Wave fled Pont-Verre without leaving a single word or trace behind.

This 48 page adventure has a few locations in and around a theater with a curse. It’s pretty obvious what the adventure WANTS to be and it’s also pretty obvious that it is doing VERY little to make that happen. Maybe something like “This 48 page adventure presents some napkin notes that could one day be an adventure.” Oh, and it’s fucking pretentious.

Life. You try to make some money then you die. A symphony that is bittersweet. And this adventure explores that. The theater (always a good sign when there’s a theater in an adventure) is cursed. “the curse can only be broken when the play’s profound message is understood and performed with the sole purpose of teaching the people to value what truly matters.” Yeah, I guess The Verve is wrong because “as long as the work brings success and enriches actors and theater owners, it will remain misunderstood, and its performances will claim lives.” I don’t know, it’s love or selflessness or some shit like that. The playwright’s lover got framed by rich people to draw attention away from their counterfeiting. (Which, shows an incorrect view of counterfeiting. You don’t get away with fucking with the States money supply no matter who you are.) Anyway the designer, or playwright or someone somewhere, knows the meaning of life and The Verve’s more nuanced view can go fuck itself. This leads us to this interaction near the end where THE ENTITY asks the party questions. And you better get them right, or else! ““What would you have done for him, knowing he was innocent?” Examples: Refuse to be passive before injustice; vow to place life above wealth. 2. “What truth have you hidden for material gain that you could confess?” Examples: Based on PC story, reveal a secret of greed or betrayal. 3. “What act of justice would you perform now, even at great cost?” Examples: Cut off a hand that committed a selfish act; blind an eye that witnessed corruption.”  So, yeah, childish morality. Which means I can take the stance that this is the designer attempting to impose their own childish value system on the rest of us, and their players, in a game night that is supposed to be fun, or ITS ON PURPOSE!!, the standard artist cop-out. In this case that would appear as something like the intent of the curser, the playwright, his beliefs, and curse following that and the characters needing to figure that out so they can navigate his bullshit reality correctly. But we all know that’s not what is going on here. It’s designer imposing their morality on the rest of us and punishing us for not following it. This is absolute fucking bullshit. You can stick in all the fucking orc babies you want, you just can’t punish people for not holding whatever bullshit views you do. ESPECIALLY when there is a god of evil in the game who is ACTIVELY rewarding their followers for evil acts. Fucking bullshit.

Hey, you want a challenge, how about this one? “Two to eight (2d4) energy discs hover in the air, half a meter wide, razor-thin,crackling with electricity.” There’s your fucking combat. I guess fighting rats might make a statement about man’s subjugation of the natural world. Far better to die by crackling electric discs. 

The adventure is fucking garbage, what there is of it. I can make a decent case that this isn’t an adventure at all, just an outline of one, if that.  You get a few locations, you get some NPC”s with motivations and the rough outline of a plot. GO!. This leads to discovering clues like “Torn letter referencing a mysterious debt – Actually belongs to Auguste, proving his ties to a shady merchant guild.” How’s that for evocative gameplay?! No more to this. Just that. No letter. No details. No specifics. That’s all you get. And everything in this is like that. Just a few general ideas and notes. No specifics on how to use things. It’s weird, how detached it is. You’d think, with actors, customers, and so on that you might have some vignettes or something, but, no. Nothing. Dads house has a couple of sentences on background and then three bullets of clues. “Empty painting frame in the bedroom – Points to the diary hidden in the Red Hills hideout.” How the fuck you make that jump I have no idea. Everything is like that, half finished? Just an idea? I think it might be referring to this? “Concealed inside a magic mirror hanging on the wall, framed identically to the empty frame found in Edwin’s house (Clue #1)” So. I don’t know? Is that a clue? Am I just being obtuse? Anyway, given the page count here the lack of specificity of ANYTHING resembling a plot or details is confounding. 

The formatting is … well, an interesting choice was made. It’s doing a “facing pages” layout thing. Hardcoded in to the PDF. Ug. Not cool. Anyway, the left page is a more traditional text based description while the right is essentially a cliffs notes version of the same text. As the designer notes “this is to test whether presenting the same content twice can serve both those who enjoy a full,detail-rich reading experience and those who prefer concise keywords and minimal description.” I would take exception to this statement, The two are not mutually exclusive. Well, ok, maybe they are if we take “detail-rich reading experience” to mean “people who buy adventures to read instead of to play.” In which case, Fuck You. But I’m going to go with that the designer is taking the view that somehow full text and usable text are mutually exclusive. I think we all know, from numerous Best examples from this very blog, that is not he case. 

In any event, this experiment fails. The facing page “terse view” is a disaster. The font is in some faux-handwriting thing, which immediately destroys readability. And then its in a light blue text, which makes it even hard to read. Then it slapped down on some “lined paper” background, which again interferes. IF something sane had been chosen to put the “bullet points” in then maybe this would have worked. But not as presented. Which is too bad because every once in awhile the summary information IS good. The theater producer, in his “full on” text has a line that says something like “Does not believe in the daggerpiece curse.” But, in his summary it says “The curse does not exist.” This is interesting, presenting what is essentially the same idea in two different manners., using two different wordings. Which conveys two different attitudes. The summary version “the curse does not exist” is, I think, far better, giving a much more solid foundation on which to roleplay the manager from. 

The level range here appears to be arbitrary, with no real reason you’re level eight are fucking around with a playhouse. Also, the fucking overland map is a disaster with hard to read fonts on it. Why legibility” remains a barrier in 2026 is beyond me. And, for the final cinema sin, there’s a fucking expo dump in a fucking diary. It explains everything. Lame. LAME. DON”T PUT IN FUCKING DIARIES! DONT EXPO DUMP! Figure out how to convey information naturally through the game, if it even NEEDS to be conveyed. 

This is $1 at DriveThru. There is no preview. You make baby jesus cry when there is no preview. You don’t want to make baby jesus cry do you?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558386/a-grinning-ghost-s-grim-tale?1892600

By Taron Pounds
Land of the Blind
OSR/Vagabond
Levels 6-10

An explosion rocks a nearby mountain range. Once the dust clears, two twisted and screaming towers remain: one black and one white. Ominous seals appear on the moon and stars. A wicked smile spreads across the eye-spotted black tower’s upper story, capped by a witch hat-like roof. Its upper and lower floors appear to be separated, with arcs of blue lightning emanating from its center. The white tower is a bastille of pale stone, with an otherworldly blue fire burning at its top. Windows of stained glass bend without breaking along the white tower’s exterior, and eyes of madness follow those who approach the black. A flock of winged serpents fly around these profanities of architecture. No one knows where these towers came from, and what has corrupted the celestial bodies. It is up to the heroes to uncover the mystery to stop a cataclysm that has been unfolding for centuries in secret.

This 44 page dungeon presents two towers with about nineteen rooms between them. It’s a funhouse dungeon in which the world ends. That’s fun! Also, you don’t actually need to do anything here but go to the top floor and pull a lever. That’s fun! I don’t see a reason to go inside.

The gods have trapped one of their own in a magic prison. Dude wants out and finally is about to break free, thanks to his two followers, each of whom built a tower. You don’t know any of this. You’ve just got some generic rando hooks that come down to “you see these two weird towers.” I hope you go inside, because if you don’t then the world ends. That’s rough. Anyway, you go inside and find a funhouse dungeon, the two towers connected to each other with some magic pathways and normal stairs and so on. Turns out that if “the steamworks” is functioning inside the tower, and someone has had their soul aged in the aging room, then if you pull the level at the top of one of the towers then the trapped god will go back to jail. There’s a friendly phoenix, powering the steamworks through a portal to the elemental plane of water, that will tell you all of this who is at the top of the other tower. Anyway, so, the steamworks already works. And someone has already given their soul to the aging room. So, just pull the level in the other tower. 

To get there you will need to … ignore everything. Basically. Whatever is in the room, just ignore it and go up the stairs or through a door. Yeah! You’ve overcome that challenge. I’m not sure anything really attacks you in this unless you go fucking with shit. Oh, wait, hang on, there’s a death knight. “Motionless at first, but disappears if vision on him breaks and he then stalks the party.” I don’t know what the whole “disappears and then stalks” thing is about. I guess that’s for the DM to handle. So, I guess you gotta fight him? I THINK that’s the only required combat. Also, “required” is a loose word; I think you can make your way through the tower without having to go in to the throne room where he sits. 

Let’s double check my theory. Room one, walk backwards down a mirror hall. No consequences for not doing that. Room two, touch nothing and go up the stairs. No consequences for not doing that. Room three, go up the stairs and don’t touch the floating books. Room four, ignore the tree and go through one of the doors. Room five ignore everything. Room six, go through a door. Room seven, go up the stairs. Room eight, go up the stairs. Room nine, go up the stairs. Room ten, meet the phoenix. That’s one full tower and half the rooms. Congrats. The second tower, to my recollection, is more of the same. 

But, hey, you can still make the world end. Every time you use a spell or a magic item or go through a magic portal in the tower then the DM rolls a die. The third time they roll a one the dude breaks free and immediately destroys the universe. You get a warning though, you hear an owl screeching, which, obviously, means the universe is going to end if you cast another spell. This mechanic also ties in to a fun “weird things happen!” table, with entries like “Unluckiest PC must save or their limbs become accordions for 1 Minute.” or some blobs teleport in, loudly fart, and then teleport out again. Fun! … Humor, gentle readers, is highly subjective and doesn’t translate well.

We lead off with three paragraphs of italics read-aloud. We get read-aloud like “This room appears to have been built to keep a phoenix in a consecrated prison.” Appears to be. And how the fuck do we know it’s a prison? Or that it’s consecrated? It’s just garbage. In one room you find some masks. “Each is Cursed and Sentient, but only speaks while worn.” We’re referred to a table telling us what they do. “The wearer fails Checks against surprise.” Dazzling. Sublime. You didn’t even bother to give the mask a name or a personality or anything else. 

I’m not a fan of the zany funhouse, but this isn’t that. I’m also not a fan of the museum trip, and this is more in that vein. Just don’t touch anything and look at the scenery and you’ll be fine. But, also, the whole “lets nerf the party” and “oops! The world ended! Guess you didn’t figure out that was going on!” is VERY time. You need to communicate that the party is racing against time or else it’s not a race against time. It just ends up being the wandering damage table and rocks fall, everyone dies. Weird that’s not fun. And if you need to nerf the party then you wrote the adventure for the wrong level range.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you nothing of import. Poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561060/the-rook-the-crook?1892600

By Shanklimb
Self Published
OSR
Levels 4-6

In recent months, strange mushrooms have erupted across a corner just outside the Mulchgrove. Local foragers reported vivid, peculiar dreams after extracting them – visions of mosslings sharing tea with mammoths, a boulder tucked in for naptime, and other odd sights. Now the dreams are coming uninvited, in daylight, to people who never touched the mushrooms at all.  The mosslings of Mulchgrove are divided. Most believe the fungi are a divine offering – though no two can agree which god sent them, or why. But it’s to be sure: someone, or something, is broadcasting.

This eleven page adventure describes fifteen rooms, mostly linear, in some caves. Low on interesting, you get some sub-standard descriptions of slime mold rooms. Nothing to see here, move along, move along. 

The locals have discovered a new type of mushroom. You’re hired to check it out. You find some caves with some friendly trolls in them. They grow moss. In beds fertilized with corpses. Looks like slime molds have attacked their caves. You go kill the slime molds.

Aimless, perhaps, is how I would describe this. There just isn’t much motivating going on in any sense. The situation in the local village is “oh, look, new mushrooms!” with no real sense of urgency behind it. The hooks are all Hiring in one sense or another, usually with a “I’d some of that new mushroom variety …” There’s little personal motivation in any of that, just a blatant appeal to your desire to play D&D tonight or go to a bar instead. There’s not much of a hunt for an entrance, I guess all of the locals are blind or something, just “here’s the hole in the ground!” and then, once inside it’s more of the same. You enter a room with moss in it. This room has trolls and moss. The trolls are friendly. They don’t care. Well, one room has some sleeping trolls in it who are not pleased at being woken up, if you hang around. I wouldn’t be either. Anyway, they don’t care. Yeah, they are fertilizing their ground with corpses, but there’s no indication they are KILLING people. The descriptions are entirely neutral on that point. “Investigating the corpses: Human commonfolk, arranged with almost ceremonial care. Their hands are folded, mouths held agape with sticks. No possessions of any value.” Sure thing man. No one cares. Well, the trolls are not happy that their moss tunnels have now been invaded by slime molds. Pretty please? This puts us, I don’t know, halfway through the encounters? So you wander around looking at moss and trolls until you reach the barricades that block off the other half of the rooms. Once there things change. You kill gelatinous hulks and other mindless blob things. Yeah! You did it! ‘ 

The last half of the room, eight rooms, are handled in two pages. So, two pages of content here. Two pages of things to do. You enjoy yourself here.

Room descriptions are in the old OSE style and meh. “The Threshold Black walls (thicker roots). Translucent threads (hang from ceiling, like a curtain).” This is ok, but not great. It’s just not very evocative, but, at least, it’s not overly long, thank god. 

There’s just not much here. Stab the blob things. Maybe don’t touch the pools that are obviously acidic. It’s like The Adventure Of Getting Inzto My Condo! Avoid the church people in the drive and hit the open gate button on the app. Don’t yell at the old person driving slowly in front of you. Open the garage door with the opener. Park in the garage being careful not to hit the concrete post on one side. Roll 1d6, if you get a 1-3 then the car on the other side is present also and you should not hit it. Push the elevator button. Wait forever. 1-3:d6 other people get off on floor one, slowing your ascent. Yeah. Ok. I guess things happen. I guess? Do they matter? No. 

Also, I’m annoyed that the numbers on the map are in a black font in purple background blobs. This is my usual Hard To Read rant. And, then, the dungeon proper, “This dungeon is made up of an expanding fungal root-system, the roots of which form mid-sized tunnels and rooms.” I guess the roots are hollow?

Nothing here. Move along. Move along. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/560343/corpse-husbandry-an-adventure-in-dolmenwood?1892600

By Gabor Lux
EMDT
OSRIC
Levels 5-8

Linquar the Eternal has fallen, its palaces and temples decaying in the teeming jungles. Few dare to head for the misty island plateau where the ruins stand, and even fewer have succeeded in claiming its treasures from the savage ape-men who now rule in its citizens’ stead. The great city is largely forgotten, and even its name only refers to a squalid pirates’ nest that had once been its trading outpost. What had been the capital of the isles is known as a cursed and abandoned place that’s better left undisturbed. But more often, it is simply known by its current inhabitants… as the City of the Ape-Men!

This sixty page adventure is an Isle of Dread, but with ape-men in the lost city. A complex environment with large groups to challenge the parties looting efforts, it does a hex crawl with some locations being mini-dungeons. Bring those cargo ships to haul away the loot and avoid the pirates while dodging the secret masters manipulation of the apes. The logistics game is the only thing missing. 

We’ve got the ol Dread here, a jungle island with some dinos and ‘big fucking snakes’, the former seat of an empire that prospered from the spice farmingo n the island. Their former slaves, the ape-men are now all that’s left, along with a smaller island off the coast that has a pirate town on it that can serve as a home base. You hex crawl the island looking for spice, pirate-loot, and the wonders of the fallen empire. Don’t worry, in spite of dinos and ape-men there are also a handful of giant frogs, frog-lizards and frogodiles. 

The hex encounters, about twenty, range from the very small “R. The weird rock: A large stone with a spongy, greasy surface stands here with nuggets of a rare ore embedded in it (2500 gp).” to more involved paragraphs to handful (sixish) of mini-dungeons. These range from the “wildlife wants to eat you”, with flying manta rays and dinos and snakes and spiders, to monoliths and locales from the old empire, usually with some mythical bend to them. (Meditation on the holy ruins on the highest peak gives you a +1 to two stats … if you can make it to the top.) 

Running throughout we’ve got LARGE groups of ape-men running around, like, in groups of five to forty. And then in their bases near the lost city, proper, groups of forty to seventy. Ouch! I love a large group of enemies to challenge high level parties in an open environment like this where the party can plan and plot, and flee in a crazed terror through the jungle when the masses appear. 

The apes are divided in to three factions, buying for power. They hate each other, but, also, they hate all humans more. Like, ravenously hate them. They are taking instructions from their GODDESS, a talking statues. We’ve all seen Oz, so we know what’s up, Turns out that there are tunnels full of spider people who are the secret masters, subtly working the apes against each other to keep their numbers low. But, also, they are gonna make sure that nosey adventurers get fucked up hard. Once technologically advanced, their crashed spaceship is on the island also. Don’t worry, it doesn’t really go gonzo at all. The whole place is nice and sandboxy.

I do have a few issues though.

I can’t make much sense of the elevation contour lines on the map. I think the text says something like the island rises to 1200 feet high, and the map says that contour lines represent 1200’ feet. I assume there’s a typo in there somewhere, but, also, I’ve had a REAL hard time making sense of the contour lines on the map. There IS a separate map that just shows the contours, and it helps a lot, but that’s alot of referencing back and forth when trying to relay information to the party. 

The hex crawl instructions are decent, and none of those fucking environment/humidty rules that I hate dealing with in crawls. “You can’t wear platemail!” Fuckoff. You’ll have to kiss me first. My major issue is, with most hex crawls and this one, the lack of mentioning how far you can see/landmarks when getting high up. It makes sense to climb a tree, or a plateau, to see what’s around (See also: the Fallout Red Glow At Night) and a sentence about that would have been nice. 

Given that there is a high likelihood of this being a treasure extraction game, the pirate town could have used a little more as well. It’s covered in several pages and there are several factions there as well. A little more on off-loading the goods and/or a pirate ship/response to the party brining in loot would have been nice. A sample raiding ship or two, perhaps? There is enough, generally, to understand that there SHOULD be complications but a sentence or two, maybe a paragraph, on potential extraction play would have slotted in quite nicely for this one.I might quibble as well with their being simple ruins that are unlooted in a town full of destitutes, or bordellos opening at sundown in a lawless place, but those are just quibbles. It’s also full of good human nature type things like “Linquar’s beggars are downtrodden wretches begging for scraps. At night, more aggressive begging also takes place if the beggars outnumber the opposing party 2:1”

This is a better jungle crawl than Dread. Where Dread was a little sparse this contains the makings of a nice long game, with factions and complications, as well as a base, to help support that longer arc of a game. There are real rewards for dealing with a group of forty flying dinos, or making it through the ape-city, or climbing the highest peak. Intelligent play, by following ruined roads that see from up high, will help direct the party to most places. Three is a place to recruit and offload loot. The apes are presented as SO hateful, though, that it doesn’t leave much room at room for factions, other than, perhaps, subtly working them against each other. 

This is $6.40 at DriveThru. The preview is the first thirteen pages, which shows the island map and some of the town and general instructions. That’s probably enough, although, as always a page of the island encounters or lost city encounters would have been nice as well.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/559570/city-of-the-ape-men?1892600

By Patrice Crespy
Kabuki Kaiser
OSR
Levels 1-4

It was bound to happen. Too many relics. Too many books. Too much past stacked in one place, the Monument Valley of scrolls and mouldy tomes. The Lucubrarium of Unobsolescence has gone wrong. In Bec–de–Corbin nearby, folk forget their names mid–sentence. Chalk–pale, traits blurred by scratches and hollow wrinkles, eyes sunk. Static. Howls in the night. The militia still stands at the keep and demands tolls, then forgets what it’s doing. The rain just won’t stop. Thugs move in, bold as daylight. And when night comes, the lights go out.

This 44 page digest adventure uses seven or eight pages to describe about forty locations in a town and in a two level library/abbey. You can tell what it is trying to do, but in spite of some great specificity it mostly fails to create the environment it is going for.

There’s this library place, including relics, with a small town around it. Some kind of memory eater/void monster shows up and people start forgetting their names. Some of them no longer have faces. Others are worse, their heads a ragged black blob and howling continually. You show up in town, make it to the library/abbey, and … do whatever. Loot the place for relics I guess. 

Kabuki has some decent ideas and can conjure up some great imagery. The whole “forget your own name” is a nice touch. The ragged face monsters and howling and so on are quite appealing to me, personally (ever since The Void supplement for 3.0, I was captivated by it. Who doesn’t love Munch? At one point one of the random atmosphere tables has “A white noble dress fit for a young lady, nailed to a wall, torn. THAT’S NOT ME, written across the chest in coal.” Well now, that’s a statement, isn’t it? There are little bits and pieces of shit like this scattered throughout that are just great imagery. 

Let us transition somewhat to the following entry. This particular location is a part of the “in town” section. “Falkenrot Manor Earl Falkenrot’s a ghoul — kept secret for ages by his family. When the Faceless came, they wandered off and left him here, locked down in the cellar. Half– Faced, black pits for eyes, ravenous.” Nice concept. Decent ghoul description. Mostly backstory. As a concept for something it’s great. As an actual place, meant to adventure in, it’s pretty lousy. And there is A LOT of this.

The town map is irrelevant, just a kind of conceptual thing with some numbers on buildings. The descriptions are short and=, again, just concepts. “Watchtower Deserted. An alarm fire atop has been spent. Did anyone see it?” Well I don’t know, did they? Are there consequences one way or another to that? 

That bit at the end, it’s some kind of hipster pretension. And THAT absolutely IS prevalent everywhere. The whole “let’s put in a meaningless question under the pretext of giving the DM possibilities!”  There’s a forest wolf encounter. The wolves are hungry and want to steal food and run off, mostly. That’s great! Except we also get “No food, they come in.’ This is supposed to, I think, convey a sense of menace. It does not. Nearby this, in a description meant to be atmospheric, about the journey to the town, it ends with something meant to convey the inclusion of the party in the description. “Chatter about the heist, maps, treasure. Or dead silence. Up to the table.” Why, yes, it is up to the table. But also, what’s with the sentence “Up tp the table?” Ol Craig used a cut down sentence, with dropped words and fragments, in order to save space. Space clearly isn’t an issue here given the ‘luxurious’ room given to simple tables. A couple of pages for “Which of the six howlers show up” could be compressed to maybe six short sentences. Or, the text implies that only three howlers exist, so, perhaps not having a table at all? This sort of needless randomness drives me crazy; an adventure is almost always better when the locales are themed around the specifics of a creature rather than just giving a random determination, for these sorts of encounters. 

And how about those dungeon rooms? “Portcullis: Disjointed and stuck shut. S7 STR with up to 4 characters adding their STR to lift/bend. One attempt only.” Great! That’s how we get those thirtyish rooms down into the quite small page count devoted to locations, with the bulk of the text being other tables. The interactivity here boils down to finding, say, the wormacide that helps you fight the giant bookworms, or being confident in answering a forgetful sphinx’s riddles. 

Not Kabuki’s best work. It feels like it needs another couple of polishes to make everything come together and work as a cohesive whole. Better integration of the various major enemy groups, and a more solid effort in brining out the … joylessness? Melancholy? The forgetful nature of things.

This is $5 at DriveThru.The preview really shows off the worse parts of the adventures, the sparse table nature. Things change, the text style and descriptive style, deeper in and that, being the bulk of the adventure, is where the preview should have focused. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/556896/the-faceless-howl?1892600

By Daniel Hicks
Self Published
ACKS
Levels 4-6

Warning! Barrier Peaks is my all time nostalgia favorite. 

A spaceship was transferring dangerous exotic lifeforms for sale at another point. A defective containment unit released one avid Hund, which quickly killed those present and set about freeing its kin. The acid hounds killed or fatally wounded every passenger and member of the ship’s crew in short order. Unfortunately, this occurred while the pilot was making manual course corrections in the outskirts of this solar system and with the autopilot disabled the ship drifted off course for weeks. More recently, she ship has crash-landed, and

presents a hazard if approached.

This five page adventure uses about two pages to present about thirteen rooms in a crashed flying saucer. Basic descriptions, simple map, not much beyond the most basic of encounter structures. And, of course, too small for its theme. But, hey, it’s got more rooms than pages, so there’s that!

A classic flying saucer has crash landed, so imagine a circle layout, about a dozen rooms along the edge and one or to interior, with a circle hallway in between. It crashed because some Acid Hounds got loose. You’ll find all seven of those 3 HD dudes in the first room you encounter after entering through the hole in the side, the cargo hold. At some point you’ll also face a nanite cloud in one of the rooms. This is the extent of your actual challenges. Otherwise you find the door bracelets and collect the blasters and auto-heal patches. IE: the usual. There are more than a few missed opportunities here, like “The ship’s main reactor (‘captive-star’), centrally

located, has burned out, and cannot be restarted without the aid of a similar vessel.” You can self-destruct the ship from here, and you can loot some platinum wiring. But, no word on what looting the captive-star is/does. Sad. No green slime in the shower. No malfunctioning auto-doc. There’s just nothing involved at all going on in this. I mean, even combat, after that first room, except for the nanite swarm. You gotta have some shit to fuck around with in an adventure. Grave tubes. The jungle level. Wait, I’m describing Barrier Peaks….

These small page count adventures have a real problem with matching their theming to their size. The Lost City of Infintium! Two pages. The Endless Maze of Nilhelm. Four pages. If you’re going to theme your adventure to something that really needs more pages and has endless possibilities then you really need to make it more than the five pages, for example, that this one is. 

Descriptions here are sparse. “Shower’ A small area for changing clothes sits outside the two shower stalls. Two dials are in each shower: one to turn it one and off, one for water temperature (a range from freezing to brisk).” There are also some general notes in the beginning about lighting and doors, but no real evocative descriptions are present, even for the Acid Hounds.”Acid hounds have pale green skin and a tripartite jaw.” Ok. Drooling acid? Foaming at the mouth? Mangy fur? Allof the descriptions are very businesslike with little to inspire here.

The map, here, is not great. It’s black on white. The room numbers are in a light blue that doesn’t stand out real great. But also there are other notations on the map. B, P, b, c, 3C, C. These are quite dense, nothing which kind of bracelet gets you through a door, a sub-ro number and the location of bodies. Yes, you can figure it out. No, it is not the most cognitively easy thing you’ll ever look at. If you can light blue the font then the door codes could be in a different color, and if you can put symbols on the map then you can put body outlines on the map, all of which is easier to look at tell what is going on at a glance. 

There’s not really much here of interest, if anything.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558966/chipped-saucer?1892600

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One room takes three pages to describe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By The Danger Forge
Self Published
OSE
Levels 6-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man, fuck this fucking shit! 

Worthless fucking garbage. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Dougal Cochrane
Self Published
DOlmenwood
Levels ... 2-3?

No Funkadelics appear in this adventure.

[…] Lately, the witch owls are squabbling about whether to move on to new hunting grounds, or remain to continue preying on travellers. The owls comprise two factions, led by witch owls named Horned Hextus and Nightshade.

This eleven page adventure uses 3.5 pages to present seven locations in and around a small forest temple. It is too small for the gameplay it wants to encourage (intrigue) so instead we;re just gonna have one titanic battle. The formatting is BADLY confusing. 

I like the art style in this. All of it, I think. Nicely evocative. So, remember, I said something nice.

I hate this. Do I hate it? Maybe not hate. It’s disappointing to see something fail so hard at what it’s trying to do. Like, so hard that I hate the failure. And the environment that surrounds it to generate it.

There’s this temple in the woods. The chick priestess there makes swords for people. And has no guards so a group of six Witch Owls move in and take over and start eating her memory. And they ambush people coming to the temple and eat their memories and use their shadows as guards. And they have two factions who disagree on what to do, one group wanting to stay and one group wanting to leave. 

No level range to be found anywhere, on the cover, in the adventure, in the description. 2-3, I’d guess, based on everyone inside having 2HD. The hooks are the same lame-o getting hired/go find quest-gover nonsense that every adventure has. 

I don’t really know where to begin with this. It’s small. Seven rooms and only four of them are interior as in inside the temple. Of those four, which are right on top of each other (there’s no fucking scale on the fucking map! Which means its a fucking art piece and not a fucking map.) The two factions are right next to each other. Three owls and some shadows in one room and three owls and some shadows in the next room. Literally right on top of each other. How do you do faction play like that? “Frank is next door, go stab him. And by ext next door I mean you can see him, 20’ away, right there. Go stab him,” “HEY! I CAN HEAR YOU ASSHOLE! I” STANDING RIGHT HERE!” All six owls, both factions, in two rooms. Why have factions? Why give the owls motivations and wants and pretend that you can appeal to them? Why not just stuff all six in one room? The map/environment is so close in that it doesn’t make sense. At all. If you want some owl intrigue then you need a larger map. You need to put different owls in different places. Divide up all six, give them some shaky allegiances. Put in some dangerous areas not related to the owls. THEN you can play factions and seek things out for one owl and appeal to a different ones sensibilities and so on. It’s clear, with the whole faction thing and the different owls wanting different things, that this is the concept that the designer wanted. And, yet, we got all six owls in two rooms like, I don’t know, twenty feet apart from each other? With no order of battle? The concept, as implemented, is a failure.

And then there’s the writing and formatting. “A strange river of weird aspect” is how room one, a river starts. What does strange mean? It has a waxed moustache, all Poirot style? What does weird aspect mean? Those are conclusions. A well written description will cause the players to think “hmmm, that strange”, but you don’t use those words to describe things because they don’t actually describe anything. I’m down with twisting the english language, stealing words, making up words, using words out of their normal usage, anything, really, to get across a meaning, a vibe of the location in question. But you can’t use weird or strange; those don’t actually describe anything.

As for formatting … something weird is going on. I’m going to copy in a section of the main room description of one of the rooms. I’m not cherry picking they are all have the same issue. But, also, I’m not sure if what I want to talk about it going to come through in this copy/paste: “A stone portico (cracked slabs, spotted with purple guano) holds a promenade of statuary columns (heavily eroded almost smooth, stag and deer headed shapes) leading to carved steps and columns supporting a wide doorway.” The bolding here, I don’t know, it seems, noun-like? Are we just bolding nouns? Features? They are not followed up on elsewhere. And then the mini-description in the parens. I think we can all see what the INTENT was with this. To provide a little more description of those features. But I don’t think this works AT ALL. I think it’s a confusing mess. Either I’m having a stroke (I AM out of velo 9’s. And gin. And coke. And coffee.) or this is a just a muddled mess of a description with the parens, bolding and so on. It’s too much, I think, competing for our attention, including the word usage. It reminds me for al the world of those adventures that try to use color-shaded boxes to color code every section and paragraph of an adventure and in the end their attempts to bring clarity just result in a big ugly confusing mess that you want to burn instead of reading. And its STILL hard to find out which rooms have monsters in them!

There were supposed to be factions. But the place is too small for that. There’s no real interactivity here, once you rid yourself of any possibility of factions. Just long room descriptions with things overly described for no reason. 

Someone had an idea. This parliament of owls thing, with factions and birds nests and how that works with deer people and witch owls and so on. I would assert, though, that in spite of all of the additional words, it never got beyond, as a concept or in implementation, what I just typed up there to describe it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. Good eight page preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558919/parliament-of-owls?src=newest_recent?1892600

By Andreas Wille
Medora Games
OSR
Levels 1-2

A village deep within the steaming marshlands is experiencing strange phenomena. More and more villagers rise from their beds at night in a mindless stupor, wandering out into the bog never to be seen again. The desperate villagers have promised a great reward to anyone who can find their loved ones and stop whatever dark magick stole them away.

This eight page adventure uses three pages to present six rooms inside of a small dugout/ruined basement. It is trying to do the right things, generally, but confuses form over function, resulting in a muddled mess of rooms in which you generally just stab things.

My complaints here seem familiar to me. Which must mean that I have reviewed this publisher/designer before and then picked something else out to give them another chance and see if the issues I had were a trend or a fluke. And then forgot what I was doing when I rolled back around a couple of weeks later and ended up thinking “wow, this seems familiar.”

Only three of the five pages are actually used for the adventure. Meaning that all of that effort from the other five pages could have reasonably been put in the actual dungeon instead of the support material for the dungeon. THE ADVENTURE IS THE MAIN THING. Spend your fucking effort on the actual adventure. THEN, after you have created a masterpiece, you can add in some support material. 

At the start of each room is a little sentence of two in italics. Is it read-aloud? Is it a room summary? Fuck if I know. Sometimes it seems like read-aloud and sometimes it reads like a room summary for the DM. “You spy a ruined tower behind a curtain of willow leaves, naught

more than a collection of crumbling stone walls.” That seems like read-aloud, right? I mean, it’s in italics and thats shity and it’s in second person and that’s shitty and it’s got that folksy shit and that’s shitty. But, it seems like read-aloud? But then in other places it seems more like a DM room summary? “Behind the gate, a long rectangular room holds a pool of thick,

oozing mud in the middle.” If the room had people screaming in it, or was brightly lit with a broadway show going on, or had an obvious huge ancient red dragon in it then that little summary section would not tell you. But it seems like in read-aloud it should? So … I’m confused. What the fuck is the point of the the italics text that kicks off every encounter/location? I don’t get it. Not read-aloud. Not a DM summary. I don’t know, REALLY bad read aloud?

Because, again, there can be a shit load going on in the room that the read-aloud/summary text just does NOT cover. The description up there is just fucking weird.

After that comes a lit of bullets. Yes, this is the “we use bullets for everything” kind of adventure formatting. That’s not necessarily a good thing and does NOT always lead to better idea presentation. Anything, used too much, becomes cover. If everything is a bullet then nothing is, right? And therefore nothing is emphasized for presentation to the DM? The same with the bolding that occurs INSIDE each bullet. It’s not that all information needs to be bulleted and each noun or whatever in each bullet needs bolded. The use of formatting is for emphasizing and highlighting, calling out to the DM certain things that are important or that they may need to find quickly or something like that. “Hey, this thing here is more important than some of the rest so pay attention to it. “ And you can’t do that if you use the techniques for EVERYTHING. 

The random tables here are weird. Here’s a six entry random table on alternate names for swamp. Fen, mire, bog, etc. Why do that? Why not just present the data if you want to do that? There are, I don’t know, half a dozen of these sorts of tables taking up space. A waste of space, IMO, And in other places, like the wandering table, the entries are doing something. Yeah! But it’s so mundane that they might as well not be. “Crocodiles, laying in wait,” Ok … “Carcass crawler, digesting its last meal.” Sure. There’s no specificity there. A body half sticking out if its mouth? Ok, I’m down with that. “Laying in wait.” B O R I N G. What put it in at all?Bt, then, in a work of genius, on the map page there’s a little three-entry table for “who is held prisoner. “ Things like “pox-riddled peasant sobbing quietly.” ey! Great! War veteran missing limbs. Great! Thief trying to pick the lock. Great! Each has specificity. And that makes them worth putting in. Likewise the “random gore” table on the same page is great. It’s like those two tables were done by someone else because they are the only two that really stand out as interesting and actually adding value to the adventure. 

“Once a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.” That’s one o the bulleted items in the DM text. Background. Telling us what once was. And the adventure is full of this. The entries are full of nonsense. “How to make an entry seem long but not actually add any value” Window dressing effects. “It glows blue” Backstory. “Once a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.” Shit like that. But, ultimately, all you do in the rooms is stab something. As one would expect, I guess, in a six room adventure. “I remember a time in America when an eight page adventure contained the Steading of the Hill Giant chief, with two dungeon levels and a gazillion rooms that made sense together!”  Nostalgia is a terrible thing. We remember Steading, one of the best adventures ever from many standpoints, but forget the hundreds of shitpiles that existed also. There have always been shitty adventures and this is just the latest version of them.

I did, however, find this HILARIOUS. “Thelich cast a ritual to reach out into weak-willed minds nearby.” Yeah yeah, there’s a lich, a weak one, and it’s summoning weak willed people to its lair to like suck the life out of them. (Hey baby …) But, then, also in the hooks section: “A random party member begins hearing the lich’s call and is driven towards its lair.” BURN! Your character is weak-willed!  Suck it Galdalf! 

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. There’s no pREEEEEVIIIEEEEWWWWW! You gotta put in a preview man, so we can tell if we want to buy it or not. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555050/the-lair-of-the-bog-lich?1892600

By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-6

For over a thousand generations, the sorcerer kings of Varkooth held the valley between the Schelus Mountains and the Gray Hills in an iron fist, until the War of the Heavens saw their mighty fortress sink into the very earth. Now, nearly 1,600 years later, that fortress has once more been discovered. Can a group of adventurers stop the evil contained within from spreading once more?

This 103 page adventure uses about forty pages to describe an overland journey and five levels of a dungeon with about a hundred rooms. It is essentially a minimalistic hack expanded to a hundred pages with meaningless trivia and padding. More so than usual.

Characters opening the door should make a Wisdom Attribute check. If they fail then a butterfly flaps its wings in China.

Two weeks away is a dungeon that some archeologists have found, a fabled site. They encountered some trouble and thus the party is hired to come clean the place out for them. You travel overland for two weeks entering many mundane towns and villages (the first forty or so pages), and then explore the five level dungeon where you stab things (the last forty or so pages.) 

I found a few things interesting here. On the journey you may encounter some rangers. They are framed as, perhaps, game wardens who fine or arrest the party if they have been hunting in the area. That’s kind of an interesting framing for rangers. A little out of place given the monsters running around. Maybe they have better things to do given what’s going on? No? You’re gonna write me a ticket anyway? Sure. But, still, nice low fantasy idea. It also puts the monsters on the map with brief notations, great for a DM judging reactions from the next room, and in one place explicitly tells us that the party can hear chanting from behind a closed door. Again, related to the monsters on the map, the dungeon room does not exist in a vacuum, and helping the DM describe what the party senses up ahead is a great then in an appropriate environment.

I feel like this adventure is a textbook example of how to expand an entry without adding any value to it. The result ends up being overly long and obfuscates any meaningful data in the description. We can start right off with a wandering monster table. Here’s the entry for Raiders: “Raiders: Regardless of which kingdom one may find themselves in, there are always those that wish to cause strife. In the Border Lands, raiders are usually from the Kingdom of Beiria, though they make sure to wear no livery.” We have started with “Raiders” and then went on to define what a raider is, “Regardless of which kingdom one may find themselves in, there are always those that wish to cause strife” Yup, that’s what the word raider can mean. Noting the cross-border issue and lack of livery is good, but it would be even better if this were meaningful to the adventure. It is not. There are no cross-border tensions in this. Or, how about a wild boar? “Wild boars are a frequent site in the forests and fields of the Border Lands and the Glaustian Empire. They are frequently hunted by villagers and farmers, though they can prove to be dangerous prey. Wild boars tend to be aggressive and territorial, being encountered in groups of 3d4.” So, 4d4 aggressive and territorial wild boars, with a lead in telling us what a wild boar is. 

It also engages in explaining the mundane. You pass through a non-trivial number of towns and villages on your way to the dungeon, with each being described over several pages. Each. You want to know what a Fishmongers market looks like? It’s in here. It has no relation to the adventure, other than being a place  in the town, but it’s here. No? How about spending a decent sized paragraph describing what an outlying farm is and how they sell their excess on market days and how they pay their taxes? Again, this is just some rando shit in a town along the way. I did mention “text book example” didn’t I? Of adding words but no value? These things are common in this adventure. 

And then there’s the trivia. Imagine if you constructed a room via the DMG1e tables. You rolled for monsters and put in 2d4 kobolds. Then you rolled for furnishings and you got a Stone Throne. So you put this in: “Stone Throne: Dwarven characters will immediately recognize that this throne is of dwarven construction, however, a successful intelligence attribute check, a detect construction tricks check, or a lore check will inform the characters that there is no known connection between Varkooth and the dwarven clans of the region. This begs the question of where the throne came from. It is obviously thousands of years old and will need much further research.”

And this is where my comments about butterfly wings come in. Over and over and over again. “Failure causes the left arm of the statue to break off, in a similar fashion to the right.” Ok. And? Nothing. You come across a bloody altar: “As to the location of the altar’s victim, there is no sign.”  over and over and over again there’s a feature of the room that gets a decent description, as if it should be meaningful and important to play, but it is not. It’s just describing a rock that is in the room. 

And then there are missed opportunities. The adventure ALMOST gets there in some place. “A detect construction tricks check can determine that the room is not safe but will likely hold for some time longer. The stonework of the circular stairs should give anyone pause, as there are several stairs that have crumbled away to gravel. A successful detect construction tricks check can determine that the stairs are sturdy enough for descent at a half movement rate, however” And if I don’t half move? And time and again there are places and things that SHOULD have an impact that get no explanation or description of effects at all. I’d waste most of my characters lifetime restoring and making offerings at altars in this without effect. There are intriguing possibilities that are just ignored while shit like that stone throne, which does nothing, get a description. 

There is little in the way of an OOB. I mentioned monsters on the map, which is good, but nothing beyond that. People stand in their rooms to die. Eve the drow that show up don’t do anything but stand there. “The bugbears have a 2-in-6 chance of hearing the characters coming down the hall, unless the characters are successfully moving silently” Yeah, that’s what move silently does. In one instance there are kobolds that may react: “however, they may be drawn to the sound of fighting above them.” That comes from some kobolds at the bottom of a stair. They would be reacting to the room above them, so to find this and employ it in the adventure you have to actually look at a room on a different dungeon level. How the fuck m I supposed to to that during play? Treasure in rooms that the monster visit, but that they have not looted? Sure! Why not!

There is, actually, very little to set this apart from a hack like B2. Minimal room descriptions expanded upon to column length with little actually adding to the adventure. Is B2 bad? Meh. But I can tell you that B2 expanded to a column per room would be bad if the added text didn’t add anything.

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages, which shows you absolutely nothing of the adventure. The preview is meant to help us determine if we want to buy it, so it should show what the encounters, etc are like.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/554271/the-sunken-fortress-of-varkooth-ose-edition?1892600

By Nicole Mattos, Icaro Agostino
Angry Golem Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

In ancient times, the region was crossed by famous trade routes, and many nomadic groups passed through on their way to distant destinations. Today, the area lies mostly deserted, though it still bears traces of the once-great Anhurak. Among the sunken ruins, a few half-buried houses remain visible. At the center of the settlement rises the Hollow Tower, once home to the fabled Star Devourer.

This sixteen page adventure uses two pages to describe thirteen rooms in a tower with a one room tomb nearby. Overpowered opponents and lots of backstory detract from simple, plain rooms, also full of backstory. Worst of all, for a book telling you how to devour stars, there is no instruction on how to devour stars. 

Ok, so, there’s also a small number of hexes. The giant ant hex is a page long, with ¾ of it being backstory and explanations.  It ends with “When reaching the lair, roll 4d6 to determine how many Giant Ants are there. If the PCs find a way to explore the lair, it’s possible to find 1d10 × 1,000gp of gold nuggets, mined by the ants” That’s what you get. That’s what you get for a page. 

And that’s the story of this adventure. There are TONS of backstory and padding. The first real page of the adventure is number six, with backstory, with the tome up till then full of forwards and title pages and the like. I get it, PDF pages are free. But the actual adventure has to the focus on the writing. All of this trade dress, the seemingly deriguour of putting together an adventure, simply distracts the designer. You odn’t need it. Any of it. Put the effort in to the actual adventure.

Another hex has a simple one room tomb of The Star Devourer. Open the casket inside and you meet the 6HD AC2 dude. “He will speak to the party, pleading his case and complaining of the injustice he suffered.” I’m not sure why he is pleading. He’s already been freed by the time you speak to him. But, whatever. He sets about destroying your level ones. 

The main focus here is a small tower in a ruined city. We’re looking at four floors with about thirteen rooms. Exciting rooms such as “Kitchen: Where the servants plotted the coup. Contains three wall counters, a large central table, and flour sacks. 1d6 x 50 gp wine bottles are on the counters. The first time a bottle is taken, a Yellow Mold releases a spore cloud.” The coup being the plot to trap the dude in the tomb. Backstory. A very plain description. “ervants’ Quarters: Dusty, abandoned, and filled with simple beds.” Look, these sorts of rooms can work. Empty rooms serve a purpose in an adventure. And, certainly, an empty room doesn’t need to have the most evocative description ever written. But when the ENTIRE adventure is like that I have to wonder, where did things go wrong? What led someone to think that two pages of rooms in a sixteen page adventure was a great idea? 

We’re told in one place there are ghostly sightings in the garden. There are no ghostly sightings in the garden. There’s a room with three doors. “Right door” leads to a cold, frozen, empty region.” Huh? There’s a fucking stone golem in the tower. Level one?! Sure, sometimes a monster is actually a trap or a special, but this isn’t that. This is just a small tower with a stone golem in it. How do you do this?

The dude, the dude in the tomb, the central point of the adventure, The Star Devourer. Yup, he ate all the stars. Hope your game doesn’t have any. But, more to the point, room one has a book in it called “How to eat the stars”, detailing how to eat the stars. That’s it. Nothing more. Well, how do I eat the stars and what happens when I do? Yes, I realize we’re told the book is incomplete, but, what if I follow the instructions anyway? 

There’s no real adventure here, not really. There are some things to stab. There are some keys to find and doors to open. But it’s all in this extremely minimalistic style that provides absolutely no specificity at all. And, of course, all surrounded by lots of backstory.

I gave this one a shot because of the whole Star Devourer thing. I was wrong.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first seven pages, which means you get to see all of the boilerplate shit and a page of backstory. Bad preview; it needs to show us what we’ll actually be playing so we can make an informed purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540864/fortnightly-adventures-0-the-hollow-tower-ose?1892600

By Andreas Wille
Medora Games
OSR
Levels 2-3

Endless is the punishment of those that dare challenge divinity… Deep within an endless steppe, a weathered mausoleum stands alone. Its ancient walls, once adorned with beautiful carvings, are naught more than blank stone, marked by time. It would be entirely unremarkable, were it not for the incessant howling spewing from its darkened depths.

This eight page adventure uses four pages to describe seven rooms in an old tomb complex. I can get behind the concepts of a couple of the encounters, but the text is abstracted, the tomb small, and the treasure pretty much nonexistent. 

Endless punishment for those that dare challenge divinity?!?!  Qui audet adipiscitur!

This is a small tomb that always has a howling sound coming from it. It’s got a couple of things inside of it that are almost quite good. We’ve got some undead trapped in a room, screaming, their hands reduced to bloody stumps from clawing at the walls to get out. In another, undead beg to be released from their curse, holding armsfulls of charms and amulets and stuff draped from their hands. Very nice specificity there. That’s a great example of brief specificity that can really ground an encounter and make it come alive. IN another place you’ve got these two desert nomads trapped in a room, jailed there, so to speak, by the local nomads while they try and figure out what to do with them. One “Kidnapped multiple infants and left them to die in his anger about his own lack of children.” and will backstab the party if they find any significant treasure, while the second killed her brother in cold blood and “Stands by what she did, will help in a fight but is headstrong and does not like being challenged.” Again, great specificity that really gives the DM something to run with while playing them. If the entire adventure was like this then I’d be in a much different mood this morning. There’s also this little wandering table for an encounter in the desert leading to the tomb. The people encounters on there are integrated in to the rumor table, so, if you give the nomad, who is asking for water, some then he will give you a rumor. That’s a nice touch.

But, alas, it is not.

The tomb is quite small, with its seven rooms. These small adventures don’t really have room to breathe, so encounters like those two nomads are not really going to have much room to play out. There are these limitations that come with these short dungeons and they don’t mesh really well with the more dynamic and potential energy that something like the nomads could bring. And, of course, there’s not much exploration complexity here with only seven rooms. You’re looking at a simple star design, with a central room and six rooms hanging directly off of it. The central room has a puzzle that opens the last door, to the core heretic, so there is at least some not stabbing here. 

There’s a disconnect here between the dungeon environment and what’s actually going on inside. The setup is that the tomb “howls”, but you don’t really get any howling until you open the final door. Those undead clawing at the doors? Nope. The nomads locked in their room? Nope. This should be a noisy place but you’d never know it from the text. I really don’t like a “oh, yeah, you hear a lot of yelling” that only happens once you open a door and the DM gets to the text they need to read. This kind of light/noise/monster reactions are a sort point for me, in review after review. A room is not stand along thing, it exists in an environment and the DM needs help understanding that environment without making a lot of map and margin notes themselves. 

Each room leads off with a short one to two line sentence (in italics. UG! Tis the old wound ..) that is … I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s read-aloud or a summary or what. “The mausoleum’s ancient stonework is slowly succumbing to the elements. Spine-tingling howls echo from the decaying doorway.” This is not the most evocative description ever. “An angelic statue sits behind a stone sarcophagus that emits the constant, ear-piercing howl that gives the tomb its name.” Nor this. “Four statues of ancient gods adorn this long, dry chamber. Their judging gaze falls upon an elaborately carved door at the far end.” It just seems abstracted to me. A summary of the room, not a brief description. Maybe the lack of adjectives or adverbs to liven them up? The entrance is super bring, that “slowly succumbing to the elements.” It has a bend of fiction writing to it, rather than adventure writing, a common ailment with designers. I know evocative writing is hard, but this is something else. Like people are afraid to actually write a description of the room that means something. 

And the details of the room fall in to this same problem. Ancient gods? Which ones? How do I know they are ancient gods? Gods of what? It’s like someone write “there’s a temple to a god here,” Uh. Ok. That could mean anything, and it’s little better than ‘you enter a room.” 

Trease is light. VERY light. This is, I think, a symptom of “OSR.” It can mean just about anything these days, from treasure light to gold=xp or something similar. “Each deserter holds d4 religious paraphernalia such as charms and rosaries worth 5gp each.” We all know the real treasure is in the lairs, but this IS he lair. The final room does get you some magic plate and sword, but up till then it’s mostly drinking money. 

It’s constrained by its size and the descriptions tend to be abstracted. Good bulleting to help the DM run it, but the lack of specificity is jarring. And, space is wasted on explanations. Spending a third of a page on the heretics backstory buys us nothing. Wasting space on a shrubbery table doesn’t help us. This needs to be trimmed and the extra space focused in. The end result of this is a rather bland adventure.

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. No preview. Boo! Show us an encounter so we can make an informed purchasing decision. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555055/the-howling-tomb?1892600

By Scott_M
First Era Adventures
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

In a lonely glade stands the abandoned tower of a once-legendary wizard. They say he kept great wealth and magical wonders hidden inside, but he vanished long ago and with him went the secret location of his treasure. Is there something to these rumors, or is the tower merely the sad legacy of a dead wizard?

This nineteen page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe about 35 locations in a small wizards tower and the dungeon underneath. Hidden depth without extreme obtuseness, it follows up on classic hiding place and delivers on both Ruins vibe and Magical Wonder vibe. 

I’m gonna botch some, right up front, and then tell you about the things this does right, which is quite a bit. This needed a very hard pass in editing to trim the text. It’s not really engaging in any of the classic bloated text issues, it just needs a real hard pass to get the focus tightened up and perhaps just a tad more in the way of formatting to help focus the DM in on the important bits. I think the text is probably just a tad too conversational, which combines a bit with a need to work on the evocative writing.  The evocative bit gets a pass, it’s hard, I know, but it also needs to be there. Here is “Kitchen”, for example: “Between a pair of open windows on the NE wall stands a battered iron stove with a toppled pipe. Next to it is an empty coal box. A pile of debris and smashed furniture clutters the SE corner. More kobold tracks enter and exit the room. [Para Break] The debris includes the remains of pantry shelves, a butcher’s block, and a shattered porcelain basin. Concealed under the pile is a trapdoor in the floor which opens into an enclosed stairway down to the cellar (T12).” Focusing just on the writing, this isn’t terrible but the sentence structure is a bit passive in places. “Between a pair” , and almost certainly irrelevant. It needs a few more adjectives tossed in and a bit of the padding tossed out. It’s decent, but I always want to see magnificence. \

There’s also this mania present, that is seen from time to time with certain designers, with dimensions. “Throughout this adventure, measurements are described in terms of feet (‘) and inches (“); dimensions in terms of length (l), width (w), height (h), depth (d), diameter (dm), and radius (r); and cardinal directions in terms of North (N), South (S), East (E), and West (W). Map grid scale = (5’sq) in the tower and (10’sq) in the dungeon.” Dude has some unresolved trauma, obviously, the same way I do with Castle Greyhawk. 

Ok, done bitching I guess. 

The vibe here is really old abandoned wizards tower. Like, three stories high. Walls crumbling, Holes in the roof. Getting close to “mostly ruins.” And those tower levels really bring that vibe. Vines growing about. Weakened floors if you cross over the middle of them, treacherous stairways. Dust. A giant spider lurking. A couple of centipedes. It has that classic ruined gatehouse vibe going on, with debris and vermin. And then, if you pay the fuck attention, it transforms. You might gain entrance to the dungeon level. Which is a full on Colored Mists.archways/magical effects everywhere place, complete with illusory wizard welcoming you. Congrats, you made it to the ACTUAL adventure! All of that hard work and cleverness up top in the ruins paid off and now you can really dig in to the twenty rooms in the dungeon. 

I’m really up on the classic elements, especially up top. Holes in the walls and roof, vines up the side of the tower for alternate entry points. The center of the floor being weak so you better walk along the edges. A chimney, with giant centipede up it if you go poking around for treasure (which there is.) Old moldy ragged falling apart carpet, waterlogged. With a key hidden under it. And the vines up the side? Poisin fucking ivy.  Whens the last fucking time you saw poison ivy in an adventure?! I fucking love it. You are embedded in the mundane rather than exoticism, at least in the tower ruin. The whole of the encounters, the challenges, work to create this awesomeness of a grounded vibe.

Are you paying the fuck attention? Cause upstairs, in all the dust, is one spot in the floor WITHOUT dust, that contains an invisible cabinet. Downstairs, in the kitchen, that pile of debris? Did you move it? Cause there’s a trapdoor under it to the basement. And if you find the trapdoor, and the invisible cabinet, and some other shit, then, in the basement, you can find the entrance to the dungeon.

And we have a full on wizard illusion in the entryway that is all “Welcome Adventurers!” He’s hidden his great treasures here … and it’s a puzzle/challenge dungeon. Not my favorite genre. But, as there things go, not terribly done. 

“Surrounding the central column but concealed by dust and found only by sweeping the area clear, is a pattern of 16 wedge-shaped stones (10’dm).“ You did sweep the dust in the room, right? To find the concealed holes on the floor? No? This isn’t Knutz bad, as far as the hidden depth shit goes, but it’s also very clearly for people paying attention. The puzzle rooms can get long, think a page or so, and there are decent number of them in the twenty. There are clues in the dungeon in one place that lead to solutions elsewhere. Obtuse clues. “Anyone viewing the tapestry for more than 1 round sees the scene animate: The wizard and his mount race alongside two more horses that enter the frame (3 horses total). This is a clue to the button code in D7 (Summer = #3).” 

But the magical effects here are wondrous also. In that same room, a gallery, there’s a picture of a knight and green dragon battle “The viewer sees the figures animate in battle, but when the dragon rears back and unleashes its breath weapon, an actual cloud of chlorine gas fills a (20’dm) area in front of the painting. Anyone in the area must save vs. Breath or die. If all affected creatures make successful saves, the cloud transforms into a shower of 500 gp instead.” That’s fun! It FEELS like magic. The puzzles are tough. The place is deadly. But it doesn’t feel unfair or gimpy, just unusual in 2026. . 

I’m going to leave you with this room description. You tell me what’s interesting.”Smashed furniture, dirt, and leaves pile up against the walls. Between the open windows on the SE wall stands a mildewed stone fireplace, long cold. The floor is filthy, though a moldy, rotten rug covers the middle. Pieces of a wooden chandelier dangle limply from the rafters.” I’ll wait, lah lah lah. Tradoor under the debris. Centipedes up the chimney, along with a treasure. Key under the rug. That’s a decent amount of interactivity in one room.

Classic ruins, classic dungeon. Decent enough room descriptions with great interactivity. Hard as fuck, from a “are you paying attention to findthe hidden shit” standpoint. Could use tightened up, a lot, and maybe a few more adjectives sprinkled in. 

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages and shows you the upper rooms and several dungeon rooms. More than enough to get a chance two see the two vibes, the hidden depth, and what the puzzles can be like in the dungeon. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/553734/bergummo-s-tower?1892600

By Jason Youngdale
Youngdale Productions
OSE
Level 1

In the heart of the Wyrwood (the forest that surrounds Caladorei), veiled in mist and myth, stands the Whispering Tower, a slender spire of obsidian stone said to house the secrets of the vanished Archmage Elyrium. The tower is not defended by monsters but by his love of riddles, clever traps, and illusions. The adventurers must navigate its winding stairways, decipher cryptic puzzles, and avoid ancient snares to uncover a long-lost magical artifact: the Mirror of Untold Memory. None that have ventured there have yet to return!

This 26 page single column adventure uses about eight pages to describe fourteen linear rooms in a wizard tower. It’s a one-dimensional puzzle dungeon where you answer riddles out loud. 

I didn’t know this weeks theme was puzzle dungeons, but I think this is the second in a row now. I think I hate them? In general? I suspect, though, that I hate one-dimensional dungeons. All fighting. All social. All puzzles. I’m sure I do have somewhat of a bias towards the classic exploratory dungeon. You know, a little social, a little combat, a few puzzles and traps, things to discover, and explore. I can accept a plot adventure, they don’t need to be one-dimensional. It’s these sorts of blunt instruments that I loathe.

I knew the job was dangerous when I took it and read “The tower is not defended by monsters but by his love of riddles, clever traps, and illusions.” This then was the first sign I was in for it. And then, in the intro, I got “Success is measured by cleverness and character growth, not treasure alone.” Yeah, how much fucking XP is cleverness and character growth worth? Cleverness happens in order to get the XP with low risk and character development, not growth, is a side effect. 

How about a table of a dozen hooks? Hooks such as: “Scholarly Commission: A reclusive gnome sage hires the party to retrieve the Mirror of Untold Memory from Elyrium’s tower. Lost Kin: A local villager’s child has gone missing, last seen wandering toward the tower. Dream Calling: One or more adventurers began having dreams of whispered riddles and a spiraling multi-colored tower.” These must be the most hackneyed hooks possible. “You have a dream!” or you’ve been hired! More is not better. The sushi buffet is not good. 

Inside is the usual assortment of mistakes. “A huge iron door with no handle or keyhole seems to be the front door of the Tower.” Is it the fucking front door or not? Is there another door? No? Then that’s the front fucking door. These kinds of mistakes are all over the place.

Hows about that interactivity though? “A well-worn plaque on the door reads: “I am not alive, but I grow; I do not breathe, but I need air. What am I?” Answer: Fire” Thrilling! Adventurous! A place of wonder and delight! 

No? You need more? How about confusion! “Dusty tomes float midair, circling a pedestal with a glowing closed book on top of it. Puzzle: To reach the real book (a purple one), players must read verses in a particular order (clues hidden in nearby inscriptions) that spell out “TRUTH”.” That’s the room. It’s a fucking synopsys for a room, not a room itself. But, that’s what you’re getting here. Just a brief overview, abstracted, Nothing specific. Take your “1001 room ideas” booklet and just turn it in to a dungeon! 

Still not enough? “A circular room with twelve stone columns, each marked with a symbol of a zodiac. The floor is made up of mosaics also depicting the zodiac signs (12 in all). Players must determine which symbol is missing on the columns that is on the floor (it’s “Virgo” — which is on a floor mosaic among the other zodiac mosaics on the floor).” Twelve symbols in the zodiac. Twelve columns each with a zodiac symbol. Twelve pictures on the floor of the zodiac. Which one is missing? Uh … none? Twelve and Twelve? I guess one repeats twice somewhere, on two different columns? I’m not even sure I could name all twelve zodiac symbols, good thing the adventure is helping out there!

Still not enough? You want more pretension?! Well, ok! “Each character must look into the mirror and speak aloud a personal revelation. They must reveal a deep dark secret to the party. Those who accept their truth may take the mirror; those who reject it are teleported outside the tower, taking 1d4 Psychic damage.” What the fuck does it mean to reject the personal revelation you just spoke out loud to everyone? You voluntarily spoke it, I think that means you accept it? I don’t understand the fail condition at all. I don’t even see how lying fails this room. 

You want some of that sweet sweet treasure? “Scrolls of Elyrium: 1d4 rare spells or ancient arcane theories. These can be in Elyrium’s Study.” This is lame.

Everything here is just so absurdly low effort. Not even bothering to come up with some spells? Not listing the zodiacs? There’s no specificity. The riddle rooms are inane, just read a plaque and answer a riddle? Really? 

This is what D&D is. A game of telephone, played from the early 70’s till now. Fifty years of people subtly changing the message, in purpose or by accident or ignorance, until the original intent is lost. Look man, I can accept the storyteller garbage, at least as an activity if not a game. It’s not for me but I can see some Baron Muchhousen shit. But this shit? No. 

There is something wonderful about free will and the lack of barriers. You get to do it. YOU. No one is there to stop you. The myth of the rugged individuality that is our soul. But, I believe the existential assertion also says that you must KNOW you are without meaning. You are condemned to be free, and you know it. This is what it looks like when you are condemned to be free and don’t know it. Sure, you CAN just off the cliff when faced with the boulder, but maybe also prepare a little and figure out what an adventure SHOULD look like and what makes up a good one before flinging your own shit out there.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. You get to see a part of the first room. Shitty preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555314/the-whispering-tower-of-elyrium?1892600

Bugbear Brothers
Self Published
OSR
Level ..?

AN ANCIENT OATH. A POISONED TREASURE. A DUNGEON THAT REMEMBERS. Built by Celtic druids to defy Caesar, repurposed by the Knights Templar, and sealed for centuries, The Green Dungeon has been opened once more. A newly translated relic points to a hoard steeped in vengeance—and adventurers are already dying to claim it. Within lie three distinct entrances, each guarded by lethal riddles and unforgiving logic. Prime-numbered death traps. Sentient arcane platforms that punish imbalance. A druidic study where failure means immolation—and rebirth. Every challenge rewards observation, deduction, and restraint. Brute force alone will get you killed. At the dungeon’s heart waits a cenotaph bound by oath and silence, a descending shaft into stranger horrors, and a hoard that does not forgive greed. Take too much, and the dungeon will take everything.

This is an eighteen page dungeon of seven rooms (five, really) is a sloppy moneygrab of a “puzzle” dungeon. No one cares. 

You know, I know I’ve got this informal list in my head of publishers and designers that just churn shit out and do not give a shit about it. I’m sure, also, that I forget them from time to time as they disappear, and thus if they reappear I’m likely to get suckered in again. What strikes me is that in the avalanche of crap these folks do not stand out. I should keep a list or something on the website, a Hall of Infamy or some such. 

Let us start by looking ta the cover for this adventure. Can you read the text at the bottom of the cover? The blurb? Green on green in a fun font? Isn’t the purpose of the cover to draw you in and make you want to buy it? No one cared to look at it and think that, hey, maybe that’s not a good idea? Of course not. 

This adventure is in the OSR category on DriveThru. “OSR” it says. The blurb also says “The Green Dungeon is a lethal, puzzle-forward fantasy adventure designed for 5th edition play”. Hmmm, copy/paste mistake? No, not at all. It’s a full on 5e adventure. Skill checks. 5e stat blocks. There has been absolutely no effort made AT ALL to make this an OSR adventure. They just took a 5e adventure and slapped it in the OSR category. A few more bucks to make, I guess. I’m sure there’s an apology in the future that says there was a mistake made and it should not be in the OSR category. Baby, I don’t know how that lipstick got on my collar, it must be a conspiracy! And no one will care. There is no cosmic karma. There is no god. Gygax will not come down and smite you with his ring. Hubris! Chutzpah! But THIS snake oil actually works! Oh, yeah, the adventure was not available when I purchased it. There was a PDF available for download. It was actually, once downloaded, just the cover. Nothing more, the same photo from the listing. Joy. No one cares. And why should they? The demon-haunted world was Sagen, not Nietzsche.  Level?! Pfft,

Ok, so, puzzle dungeon. Some kind of archaeologists find some shit and there are three entrances, each four miles apart. Oh, yeah, this is some kind of druid/romans/templar shit, but whatever. Four miles apart. All three entrances lead to the same chamber, so, you’re actually doing whatever door you come in and the five or so rooms after that. Also, no mention of that four mile slog under the ground. Why are they four miles apart? It doesn’t matter to the adventure. No one cares. 

Inside of each room you face a puzzle. There will be a carving with words on it. Sometimes it’s a riddle you have to solve and say the word outloud. Sometimes it’s just a clue. There is no differentiation. Did you say the wrong word and you’re supposed to say a different word? Or is it just a clue to what you’re supposed to do? Anyway, figure out the clue and do it exactly right or save vs death/die/whatever. Hey man, you know, from memory, “five book spines

bear a faint pentagram symbol. Their titles are Buer, Basilisk, Dragon, Sanzuwu, and Wyvern. Each book’s pages are blank.” Also “The middle shelf is carved with the numbers 5, 2, 4, 3, and 8, spaced as if to hold a single book above each.” Go! You did arrange the book by number of legs, correct? That you knew by heart? No? “Each creature must make a DC 17

Dexterity saving throw. On a success, the character drops to 0 hit points and begins making death saving throws. On a failure, they are reduced to ash.” *sigh* Each room is like this. Hallway gauntlet, with a bunch of comping mouths of metal. The plaque reads “I am indivisible except by one, within a decade, my timer runs, at first I rise, and hten I fall, only to rise again. My sequence speaks, heed its call and soon you will know when.” Guess exactly right or make a DC 20 death save. Or die. Every room. This is just absurd.

There’s no attempt to be evocative, or format things clearly, or even describe the puzzles clearly.  Just some bizarre thing for the players to figure out, and then roll vs death. “The panes only respond to living weight—they ignore objects, inorganic matter, or summoned force.” So, don’t think you’ll be clever. You will solve this the way the designer wanted you to and/or die. 

When you get to the treasure room at the end, if you take more than half then you die if you don’t make a DC20 check. No warning. So, know.

.Hang on, I’m gonna add that list to my ToDo list.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. It shows you six pages of little cutouts you can make for the game. It’s almost like something is being hidden … or that they didn’t care.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/553689/the-green-dungeon?1892600

By Joseph R Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
OSE, etc
Levels 3-5

In the Garden of Amuul, the fey raised a palace for their human guests. But the humans betrayed them, so the fey swiftly slayed them. Now Amuul is a Wasteland, where the dead cannot rest. Twin necromancers, a sister and brother, found the jade palace, and then turned on each other. They raised undead armies and decadent courts, and turned the palace into two warring forts And in the Fey Realm, the Twilight Empress watches and rages, sending her goblins and elves to pay the intruders bloody wages. But all the while, the palace groans with cruel weapons and bright treasures, mythical creatures, and strange magics beyond measure. So will it be wealth, justice, glory, or bliss that entices you to enter the Lovely Jade Necropolis…?

This 81 page adventure uses about sixty page to describe one hundred locations in and around a complex full of undead and fey. Lewis always does at least a fine job, and that’s present here also. It does seem to lack a bit in the joy category though, as in a sly wink and wry grin. It is better than the vast vast majority of the dreck produced today and easy to run.

Lewis is a good designer and a good writer. There’s some balance between specificity and abstractions that needs to be obtained in order to provide effective encounter text. In the very best you can kind of detect a bit of glee in the designer as they were writing it. I’m not entirely certain that this Dungeon Age is quite up to the standards of most of the others. 

The set up here is a cave/camor thing that was built by the fey queen for her prince lover, then they betray her and the fey, there’s a big slaughter. Now, long later, two necromancers move in and start animating bodies, and then turn on each other. So we’ve got a fey queen section, and a section for a necromancer interested in having a good time and a necromancer interested in killing just about everyone. This is mostly backstory though. It explains the “please go kill my sister/the other necromancer” deal one of them is willing to make, and the bored/jaded/disgusted elves wandering around who just want to go back to the fairy realm instead of carrying out the gruesome work of their mistress. Otherwise … meh, it’s a framing for some conversations and a different way of saying Die Petty Human Scum/Adventurer.

Our zombie friends bring a bit of joy to the environs, retaining a bit of their old selves and acting, perhaps, more like a charmed undead person than a mindless undead ravenous thing “Under rare circumstances, a zombie may be able to bend the meaning of their commands to act more freely: “I’m looking for supplies! Just not very quickly…””

I am not exactly thrilled about the treasure here. The magic contains that Lewis charm of effects over mechanics, but the mundane loot is handled by a loot table. I love it in The World of Gamma, but here “ivory flute” or Glass lens” have no monetary values mentioned. Nor does “Walls, floors, and ceilings are solid green jade covered in elegant carvings of forest plants and animals.” What was that adventure I just reviewed that had the villagers stealing the old abbeys walls for their own uses? I guess I’m supposed to not be a murder-hobo and just IGNORE walls and doors made of solid jade. What do you think that does to the local jade economy? Don’t I recall some system or article about inflation and devaluation beaue of the party when they flood a town? Anyway, Gold=XP and that’s all abstracted away here with no treasure values. Boo, Hiss. And “silver chalice” and “ivory flute” are not exactly winning me over either in the description department.

Writing of the encounter descriptions remains relatively solid “Two massive dead trees flank the broken road, their fragile branches interlaced overhead. Tiny white slivers dot the trunks, and tiny black nodules pepper the ground” Thats a decent rooms one, Elsewhere “Giant dragonfly wings glitter in the ceiling, high above a long table laden with sumptuous dishes. A well-dressed couple and a dozen soldiers linger by the buffet.” Glitterring, sumptuous, well-dressed, linger. All great word choices that communicate a lot without being purple. I’m not sure, though, that I ever got the complete picture, room after room. I’m not sure why. The descriptions are there, in each room, but it never clicked in to a unified whole for me.

And, at times, that balance between specificity and abstraction seems off to me. Those two well-dressed people lingering at the banquet table? “COUPLE. “Master Dulcim” and “Mistress Vina” (spice sellers from Kalahar). Silken robes, sparkling veils. Lured here by dreams of opulence. Want to escape. Fear the undead. Unaware of the fey. Suspect “poison (so no one is eating). Also, the soldiers are undead zombies. Pretty much everyone you meet who was lured in are “Lured here by dreams of opulence. Want to escape. Fear the undead.” This just seems off, there’s little personality here, none I would say. The grounding, the think to hang your hat on, is missing. And that’s a little too common here.

I do like the general set up here. Some fey loathe their existence and just want to go home. Some are still greatly embittered by their experiences with the humans. One old goblins living in a hut that is precariously balanced on a silt is slowly dying from a col iron splinter in gut form a hundred years ago. Embittered, he will try to collapse his beloved house down on the party if need be. Elves tasked by their still-enraged queen to torment and torture the undead with salt knives, not to their noble callings of grace. Pixies as thumb sized mindless eaters of bones. The bored, jaded, disgusted undead zombies. The totality here is great, “ZOMBIES in gray tunics drag an old corpse toward #19 for Lord Marfest to animate” but that wandering example could use one more word. Chatty zombies. Jaded zombies. Upbeat zombies. The final bit of framing for the encounter is often missing, as with the two spice-merchants agave. And maybe that’s the theme running throughout; there’s one more bit that seems to be missing to add life to it. The NP’s, the ire between the the parties and their machinations, even the room … themes/layouts/interactivity? There just seems to be one bit more missing that would really send it. Maybe it seems, passive? In an expansive sense of that word?

It’s not bad. It’s certainly better than the vast majority of stuff I review. But I think you can see what this almost is and really WANT it to be that.

This is $12 at DriveThru. Lewis comes through on the preview. Forty pages; more than enough to get a sense of the work and see a great many parts of it. Great preview!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540137/lovely-jade-necropolis?1892600

“When a PC spends a turn chanting this word, there is a 2/6 chance that each nearby fey will be stunned for one turn.” OMG! You have to chant a word for ten minutes and then there’s a 33% chance the fey will be stunned for ten minutes?! Oh Dungeon Turn, you are the gift that keeps on giving long after the thrill of living is gone.

By Stephen Smith
Mister Smith Design
OSE
Levels 2-4

Exaggerated tales of the mammoth ship have spread like wildfire. But now, the truth is undeniable. The wreckage looms—larger than any ship has the right to be. A virtual leviathan of wood and steel, even in its half submerged condition. Its origin is a mystery—but no matter where it came from, it’s here now and ripe for picking. A colossal siren’s call for those brave or foolish enough to salvage its secrets—before it is lost to the waves forever.

This forty page adventure details a shipwreck and its environs, with about sixty locations in all. Layout and formatting are admirable, and as a standard dungeon it would be ok. It tries the faction thing but that doesn’t come off well, nor does the fantastical nature, from the use of plain language?

This thing start out great. IN the local seafaring bar there’s an old cristy dude telling others of the shipwreck he just saw. A HUGE ship, at least three times the size of a normal large ship, washed up and broken on a nearby atoll. A CURSED stol I tell ye’s! This is about a column of read-aloud, in italics, but it’s also fantastic. It reeks of crusty sea dude and bar folk. There are some nice in voice rumors to go with this. This is the old The Wizard is Dead We Better Get To The Tower First To Loot It thing. There’s a nice little bit about getting to the wreck, handled in about five bullet points. Perfect to spur a DM on with ideas for running this portion. It’s augmented by a decent little NPC description for four or so of the townies that you might majorly interact with to guide you, buy a bat, etc. “Speaks in a low rasp, never removes his salt-crusted

oilskin coat. Grizzled loudmouth cuss when drunk. Claims salvage rights (unjustified).” Just enough there to get things going for the DM, and thus the party. The old salt who claims salvage right, the young dude obsessed with the wreck, the widow in possession of a boat to rent who bargains shrewdly. The town doesn’t go on and on, in fact there’s nothing to it except that read-aloud, the NPC decisions, rumors, and five little bullet points with some ideas for the DM to run this section. Fucking focused man!

We move on to the atoll, with five locations and again a few general notes in bullet form for getting aboard the ship and the island. Perfect. There’s also a small section of sea caves on the atoll, with another ten or so locations, and then the GIANT ship, broken up, also, with about forty more. The caves and ship do NOT get these little notes, to the detriment of these sections, although there is a good little “what you see”section, bodies hanging from yardarms and the like. 

The descriopns of the rooms are inconsistent. In one play we get “The chamber is dim and musty, with several old stacked crates and barrels. Faded scrawlings mark the containers. A mob of aged, pus-swollen cadavers are scattered around the area—along with one body that looks freshly torn apart (the curious pirate).” Nice summary, pus-swollen cadavers is always a good sign in a room description. Nicely evocative. And then in another place “Broken shelves held the shattered jars and bottles now decorating the floor. An alembic, soggy parchment, and other alchemical tools rest on a wooden desk.”  A little more facts based and less interesting in the word choice. Some of the descriptions mention who is in the room and some do not, just listing below the description something like “5 pirates.” This is maddening, the inconsistent nature. Some are terse and easy to follow and some go to great lengths to describe the trivia of the room. There is, after the text description, a nice little bullet point list of special/interesting things/facts/DM notes, which provides a nice summary for the DM. 

And then, the factions. This was a pirate ship, magic thing happened, ship got big. So we’re dealing with things on a larger than normal scale, 2-3 times or so, but that never really comes across in the text. The ship has a few monsters in it, and the helmsman is hiding out in it in fear of being hung by the crew because of the accident. But, more importantly, there gnoll pirates are now in charge and have the human pirates locked away below decks. A group of pirates were also taken away during a raid by deep ones (being now hidden away in the sea caves), except these are good guy deep ones, who are trying to save the pirates and atone for the sins of their relatives. Except they are alien minded deep ones, the pirates are scared and the caves are dangerous. 

And NONE of this really comes through in the text. Oh, you get essentially what I just told you in not many more words than I just used. But the encounter descriptions, the set ups, the guiding text, it’s just not present anywhere. And, there is NOTHING here that makes anyone seem like a pirate. Or even a seafarer, other than like two of the townfolk. They don’t act like them, they are not described like them. There’s just nothing in the way of specificity in looks or actions that there. “Pirate”. Great. It’s just maddening. The ship is complex, with hatches and the like, but that is downplayed as well. 

I like the set up here. The townfolks are great, the consequences are fucking great. Rescue the pirates? They tear up the town in celebration. “Tension is in the air. Stalls stand half-empty. Merchants are wary. A woman sobs quietly beside an overturned cart. Blood darkens the cobblestones. “They are out of control, some- thing needs to be done!” There are five or so of these and they provide excellent springboards for some consequences. The core of this, though, feels weak. Maybe because it really is just looting? But, then, why play up the factions if they don’t really exist, or do anything, if I can even call “this is a faction” playing up a faction. Didn’t need a lot here, but those five bullets for the town and atoll really worked wonders, The caves, ship, and factions could have used those also. Maybe that, instead of the pages dedicated to nine mens morris?

This is $6 at DriveThru. The review is fifteen pages. You can see from it how one might get excited. But then the ship, which is where the preview lets off, is where things are going downhill fast. Hinted at, I think, by the sea caves

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/541667/the-wake-of-the-brawny-witch?1892600