tenfootpole.org

By Jason Youngdale
Youngdale Productions
DCC/OSR
Levels 1-2

Long ago, beneath the fertile valleys south of Castle Dragonwater, a minor baron swore fealty to the Starved King, a demonic entity of hunger. In exchange, the baron’s land flourished with endless crops and fattened livestock. When the baron died, his descendants sealed the King’s shrine in terror—but the hunger below never ended. Now, farmers near Horndale report crops rotting overnight and livestock turning feral. Strange lights flicker in the old Granary Hill Mound, and the smell of roasted meat fills the night air. The locals beg the adventurers to descend into the forgotten vault and end the demonic banquet once and for all.

This twenty page adventure uses about four pages to describe twelve boring rooms of boringness using single-column formatting. Here are words that should be a contradiction: it’s a boring DCC adventure.

The turn of the millennia was an exciting time in RPG’s.the 3.0 explosion, indie RPG’s everywhere. I remember Polaris. Or, rather Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North. Conflict can be ended by someone saying “Thou are but a warrior …” Yeah, that’s tragedy all right. Your force of arms can do nothing here to resolve things. Noice! You know ol Brycy Bryce loves some human relatability and complexity in his game. Not to punish the party for wrong choices but to muddle the affairs of the way the word REALLY works in to an RPG and still have it be fun. Let us imaging, though, after saying this the party then stabs the NPC. And then they go all Lancelot-at-the-wedding and stab the king, queen, prince, half-brother, wedding guests, and everyone else in a ten mile radius. Ha! Damn skippy I’m a warrior biatch! I’m not sure that one is playing Polaris then, even though you might be using the Polaris rules. Blah blah blah its art is the creator calls it art blah blah blah. Whatever. It’s lost the point of Polaris. 

And thusly this adventure and DCC. Let us imagine a DCC adventure with three 30×30 rooms in a row. No doors. 4 orcs in each room. Each room is otherwise empty. Is this DCC? It’s stat’d for DCC. Does that make it DCC? Sure. But it has lost the point of what a DCC game is. What is it, Mighty Deeds or something, where you can describe using what’s in the room to do cool shit? That’s the point of DCC. It makes cool shit happen. The halfling, the thief, the mage, the fighter, they are all built around making cool shit happen ORGANICALLY. The person has an ability, but the environment and set up is there for the party to riff on. The designer takes us to the McDonalds PlayPlace and the fighter drowns someone in the ball pit. Except. What if there is no ball pit? Or slide. Or anything else. It’s just an empty room. I’ve played in DCC games like this at cons and the difference is marked. 

Examining this adventure, room 1 save or vomit. Room 2 save or eat dirt. Room 3 is a ghost kitchen with nothing to use to fight in. Room 4 has a banquet table to fight in. Room 5, finally, is larder is hanging hooks to fight in. Room 6, pantry of jars to fight in. Room 7 had a bed to fight in. Rooms 8 and 9 have nothing but saves. You get it. There’s is little to build on here. What the fuck am I supposed to Might Deed in a ghost kitchen in which nothing is real? The banquet table isnt fucking stupendious but at least it has a table, and the same goes for the larder, at least there are hooks with shit hanging on them. Not exactly a complex environment but at least its SOMETHING. 

And the save rooms. Ug. Save or vomit. Save or eat some dirt. These have no meaningful impact on the game. It’s window dressing. Just a reason to roll dice. It’s fucking lame. 

The locals are starving, crops withering, livestock fading away. “The locals beg the adventurers to descend into the forgotten vault and end the demonic …” WHat about them? DId they try and fail? No? We don’t care about them? Because we don’t care about the adventure? It’s just a flimsy pretext for a VERY lightly themed “hunger” dungeon? Yeah, I know, because it comes off like that. There’s no immersion here. All these pages. Nothing.

“Giant rats could also be in this room, waiting to attack any intruders.” Wonderful. “Four ghouls here jerk their heads sharply as you approach.” Great, embedded tenses in the summaries. “This appears to be a” Padded out wording. It’s only four fucking pages rooms and it’s still padded out. 

Nothing to see. Move along. Move along.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is the first three pages and shows you nothing but the credit and table of contents. You can’t make a purchasing decision based on that, so it fails at being a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555500/the-banquet-of-the-starved-king?1892600

By Taron Pounds, Lawrence Schick
Landof the Blind
OSR
Levels 5-10

Three relics have been stolen from their owners, and worries have spread about the power one person would have with all three in their possession. Word of a substantial reward for their return spread, with a poem as the only clue. 

This 36 page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe the eighteen rooms of White Plume Mountain. A homage/updated version with the serial numbers scrubbed off, it is trying hard on the ease of use front but loses the charm of White Plume by under-describing. 

I’m down with the overall goal here. Updating some of the classics to improve upon them seems like a fine idea. I mean, I still have several Dungeon adventures on my ToDo list to overhaul and update for when watching paint drying becomes too exciting for me. As an experiment to understand layout and formatting and what’s important I think it’s an interesting idea. It also gets some eyes on older adventures, many of which forged new conceptual ground. And then also I suspect time would be better spent on new adventures, but, who am I to tell someone how to spend their few remaining precious moments of life? There’s another aspect to this as well: the system-neutral thing. It’s not really system-neutral, it’s aimed at D&D-like systems, with stat blocks to prove it. I’ve never really found a problem using adventures for other systems in whatever I’m running (which is generally B/X based with a heavy bend to oD&D) however I suspect there is a certain market limitation, or advantage, to saying “Works with Mork Borg!” in any event, I think this is the proper way to do it; stat it for a B/X as the foundation of most systems follows, and then note what it can be used/adapted for. Perhaps a little disingenuous in the marketing, but, meh, at least you planted a stake in the ground. 

It’s pretty obvious what they doing with the formatting. Bolding, bullets, icons, headers and so on. There’s a little intro section, a few sentences or so with some bolded words and then some bullets to follow up on those. The icons are probably overkill, meant to tell you “this is a trap” or “this is a monster.” All in all, I think there’s too much here. The pages end up busy and your eyes tend to glaze over a bit. This is a not uncommon problem in some adventures. Folks recognize that formatting and layout can bring clarity but they they take it too far and it can contribute to obfuscation. If everything is important then nothing is, or something similar to that saying. I’m going to list the lighting condition, door, stone texture, etc in every room, would be a similar problem. No. You have to craft these things carefully. Adventure design, or, room formatting and layout, is not a one size fits all issue. You can have go to techniques but you have to use them carefully to highlight certain aspects to bring clarity. When something becomes rote and is generically applied then it can lead to problems. 

But the major problem here is that this comes off more than a little soulless. There was a charm in White Plume that came through and this doesn’t feel like it has that. This feels like a bunch of rooms with challenges in it and little else whereas White Plume had just a little bit more going on to ground the rooms and encounters. S2 has a rather mangy and bedraggles sphinx squatting in the water. This, however has “a sphynx stands on the other side” [of the forcefield.] This has six globes of silver dangling from the ceiling, with bullets for their contents. S2 had silvered glass globes dangling from the ceiling on unbreakable wires, that a good crack would shatter, dumping their contents in to the muck below. It’s a much fuller picture and paints a much more evocative scene than just a mostly fact-based list of the challenges in the room. And this is not cherry picking, it happens over and over again. I ofton encourage folks to think about the room, devoid of mechanics, and create it, then adding mechanics, instead of the mechanics leading the charge. This is how we get the slim strands they hang from and the good crack and the dumping the contents in to the muck. Further, we can see a word choice in S2, spartan but present, that brings this room to life, and that just isn’t present in this adventure respin. While we do get the “silvered” globes, it feels like an extra adjective was just thrown in for the sake of having one rather than painting a complete and evocative picture of the room.

I do like the cover, but that art style is one I find personally appealing. And an attempt is made at the wanderers, with the gargoyles flying a corpse somewhere, for example. It lists factions, but, these are not really factions with a factions game and things they want, it’s just a list of major monsters. I not, also, there is a disconnect between the text and the supplementary pointcrawl map. (The adventure has a “real” map also.” The pointcrawl map point out rooms with the mucky water in them, but it disagrees with the text on rooms 13/14. No so great when the reference material is off. 

So, it’s White Plume, explicitly, with updated text and layout and the serial numbers filed off. But the updated text has removed the specificity that brought White Plume to life. Thus, it is just the wacko room challenges boiled down to mostly mechanics. And that’s not the vibe I’m looking for in an adventure. 

This is $5 at Drivethru. The preview is the whole thing. Yah! Great preview. I might suggest checking out page ten of the preview/page six of the product. That is the Globe room. I think it encapsulates the formatting/layout and the derth of specificity in the descriptions.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561058/ghost-crest-peak?1892600

By The Crafty DM
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-3

Arriving with little coin and no reputation, the player characters must earn their place through action, not titles. The town is wary, its people practical, and its problems real. Strange signs gather along the docks, the nearby wilds grow unstable, and something stirs beneath the waterline. Through investigation, negotiation, and hard-earned victories, the party builds trust with the townsfolk while uncovering the first threads of a larger danger.

This 39 page adventure presents three mostly scripted fights mini-quests in a small fishing town. They follow a pretty rigid outline with some kabuki of interactivity that amount to monologue, fight, monologue. It seems to have some U-series overtones. 

We’re not starting out strong with this one. The pretext here is that the party is new to town and they have to do a bunch of mini-quests to gain the town’s trust. Then, in another module in the series the town will trust them enough to give them an actual task.This strikes me as aking to the asshole quest-giver tropes who treats the party like shit and still expects them to run errands. The implicit assumption is that you can treat the PC’s like shit and that they have no free will. Yes, we all want to play D&D tonight but how many hoops do we need to jump through before they just go somewhere else to seek their fortune? The party has free will. This is followed up with bythe designer with a comments “Not all of these quests are presented with full detail in this module. This is intentional, allowing you to tailor certain tasks to the personalities, abilities, and backstories of your players.” I see this sometimes in adventures. This is inevitably NOT a sealed off passage for the DM to expand upon. It is instead getting ahead of criticism by saying the flaws exist on purpose. The whole It;s Up To The DM To Bring Life To The Game thing. Which, while true, ignores the central tenant of adventure writing for others: you’re supposed to be helping the DM out. Leaving a sealed off passage is great. Flaws in execution are not.

You’re in town, arriving in a bar in the opening read-aloud. What follows is a series of mini-quests that all follow the same outline. Some comes up to you to ask you to do something. You talk to them. You go to a location and maybe roll some dice in a performative way to “investigate.” You get in a fight. You talk to the person who gave you the quest. I know, this sounds kind of like the platonic outline of a quest, but, the difference is that this is three scenes. Someone runs to get you. You talk to a fisherman and look at a body and talk to an old lady. You might roll some dice to look at a body. You go back to the docks at night (I hope …) and get in a fight. You talk to more people the next morning and are told you did a good job. You talk to someone about a druid. You go looking and fight some woodland beasts in three waves. You talk to the druid and do the performative thing. It’s all a really simple pattern here. 

There is nothing really to fail, except I guess the combat. If you don’t do the thing you are railroaded in to then you’re instructed to modify the end monologue but to keep the arc going. On the docs, the Sea Devils you fight are looking for the body you examined, and that get stolen no matter what you do. I guess if you have it strapped to your chest and chained to you it still gets stolen? 

It’s just so … obvious? Low effort? Read a bunch of text. Lots of read-aloud and lots of italics. Everything just follows along the “plot” without any deviation, no matter your actions. Your actions and die rolls don’t really matter. What’s the point of this? 

It’s just a railroad of an adventure with a VERY simple outline of a pattern that repeats. I mean, again, I get it. We;re playing D&D tonight. But the meaninglessness of it all. Rolling dice for no reason. No pretext of choice at all. Yes, the DM can fill in and bring it to life. But you have to give them something to work with.

A haunted house on a hill. Sea Devils Lizardmen, The house in this is red herring, not even really covered. The lizardmen are friendly. But it’s the same elements as the U series. It’s fine, I guess. You get to reimagine and respin the classics. Well, if done right. And this isn’t done right. Perhaps the platonic example of a low-effort adventure that one might throw together on the back of a napkin in three minutes before the game starts?

There is no price of trust in the adventure. And I’m not sure I’d come back for anothe rgame if this were the campaign kickoff.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. There is an annoying youtube promo. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563326/sinister-secrets-the-price-of-trust?1892600

By Nicole Mattos, Icaro Agostino, Davide Tramma
Angry Golem Games
OSE
Levels 2-4

After being denied recognition as the supreme lord, Severo cursed the region, bringing a devastating drought to the Village of Rangdum. In desperation, a Council of Elders performed a forbidden ritual, sacrificing a young woman who became a Rusalka, bound to preserve the lake through a hidden artifact deep beneath its waters. After being denied recognition as the supreme lord, Severo cursed the region, bringing a devastating drought to the Village of Rangdum. In desperation, a Council of Elders performed a forbidden ritual, sacrificing a young woman who became a Rusalka, bound to preserve the lake through a hidden artifact deep beneath its waters.

This fifteen page document is the outline of an adventure, in which most of what’s presented doesn’t make much sense given two seconds of thought about it. It’s just the usual low effort crap that gets churned out. 

Ohs Nos! People are disappearing down by the lake! There’s singing coming from the lake. Nobody knows whats going on! People are moving out! The village is dying! Blah Blah Blah. No one mentions that the villagers sacrificed a young woman awhile back. To the lake. To keep the lake fruitful. 

There are some timeline issues here. It’s not really apparent how long ago the sacrifice took place. It’s implied, and stated in one place I think, that the Council of Elders are the only ones who remember. But, also, how long as chickcula been doing this? Since day one? Did it start suddenly? Did the lake go from Dying to Healthy But You Never Approach It Or She Kills You in like two hours? None of the backstory makes any sense, which is gonna make an investigation pretty difficult to conduct. Oh, also, the lake is, I think, called “Cursed Lake.” Anyone? Anyone? No? No ideas? Ok, gee, I don’t know then, why people are disappearing in to the lake called Cursed Lake, that you hear singing from, that the elders know they sacrificed a young virgin to for prosperity. 

Not that it hatters, there’s not really anything to investigate. The Council of Elders are not mentioned in any detail, even by name, and  have no personality other than NEVER talk about the sacrifice. No one in the village has a name or personality. There’s a short six entry rumor table of abstracted information but that’s it. There’s one dude, in a cabin, a level five magic user who shoots lightning bolts at you and then sleeps the entire party and captures them. He’s the only one with a name, or any information. He’s also extremely paranoid, so, you know, good luck with that. 

Besides the MU cabin there’s also an abandoned tower i the wilderness. It gets no map, just a text description like “On the first floor of the Tower there is a guard room, along with a small fireplace and a spiral staircase.” and so on. PUT IN A FUCKING MAP!!! Jesus Christ, the effort is minimal. Just stop phoning it in and do it. 

Not that I would suggest wandering too much. The table has things like 1d6 wraiths on it. Civilization this is not. If they don’t get you then the bears will. This is a rough table to put right outside a town that you NEED the party to push through to explore. Oh, fuck, did I mention that the hook table is a 1d4 table? Fucking people who don’t understand the point of a table in an adventure. I guess its just de rigueur these days to slap a table in for this, nit that it matters, it just irks me. 

It’s an EASL adventure, I’m pretty sure, and that’s ok. There’s an awkward turn of phrase here and there like “The sight of the Village is devastating.” There’s no real expansion on WHY the sight of the village is devastating, just it looks a little abandoned. I am going to say this is NOT an EASL issue, but rather a general adventure writing issue, not providing any descriptions that are concrete, specific, etc.

At some point, I think maybe in the Lake entry, there are notes on how to kill the monster. Like a stab its shadow with cold iron sort of thing. We are told we can learn this trick from the council of elders or the MU. But, would it not be better to put that information in the entry of the place we learn it from? 

The adventure is rife with these sorts of basic disorganization issues. With missing descriptions. With a lack of specificity that would tie things together and bring it alive. This is just a hand wave of text balh blah blah monster in the lake blah blah blah. It’s just an idea of an adventure, some napkin notes that don’t really introduce anything interesting to the “lake sacrifice” genre. I think I’m done with the Angry Golem for awhile, especially since their liner notes say that their adventure have been well received. These designers to write this. Pffft.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The review is eight pages and doesn’t really show you anything of note. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563628/fortnightly-adventures-7-the-singing-lake-ose?1892600

By Martin Cubas
Weird Adventures by Martin A. Cubas
Castles & Crusades
Levels 2-3

They can’t see you. They don’t need to. A colony of blind, grotesque predators has infested an abandoned temple deep inside a canyon. They hunt by sound. They move in packs. And they’re starving.

This thirty page adventure uses about fourteen pages to describe seven rooms. Obviously long-winded and padded out, you kill a few monsters. Also, it’s not dark.

Oh lop-sided page count, where have you been? I’ve missed you. Look, I get it, PDF pages are “free”; you’re not paying to print them. Why not put in a bunch of appendices, and lead in, and backstory, and everything else? It’s free! Academically, I agree. But, in practice, what I see time and time again is a poor adventure with a low “core” page count with a whole lot of extra information. While a bit hyperbolic, one must ask oneself, is the designer interested in writing an adventure or ar they interested in world building and the adventure is just a pretext for that? Again, I don’t care if you world build. I don’t care if the page count ration is one adventure page per one hundred pages of backstory. But if you’re selling me an adventure then it had better be a ROCK. FUCKING. SOLID. Adventure. And it almost never is. The designer is distracted by the fluff. They spend their effort there instead of in the core adventure text. What pops out the other end is just another crappy adventure surrounded by a bunch of backstory and appendices. Who would like to guess if this is in the one in a thousand adventure in which there is a lot of fluff and a solid adventure? We all know the fucking answer already. You have to AGONIZE over the adventure text. It should be the best possible, that you are capable of (… ) and more. 

Ok, so, we’ve got some eyeless creatures in a cave. There’s a long backstory here about bandits, a holy order, orcs, and so on but all that really matters is that there are eyeless creatures in a cave. They hunt by sound. This whole “shrieks in the dark” thing doesn’t really matter. They can use a sonic attack, but the party is never limited on light. So, you’re just stabbing some monsters in a cave. The central conceit, of these creatures who can hunt without sight, is never capitalized on. We get long monster ecologies (in fucking italics …) who nothing about them putting out lights, etc. So, you’re fighting 5HD orcs in a cave that have a sonic attack. 

Room descriptions average a couple of pages each. There’s no need for that. Nothing that interesting is going on. “The disc was collected by the Shrieklings along with other debris from the caverns and has no special significance to them.” Great. You want me to etll you about the pile of shit I collected this morning? It has no bearing on anything, so why not? Backstory, meaningless trivia. Overexplained things. “The Shrieklings’ thick, mucus-coated skin produces a scent that naturally repels the barracuda, allowing them to swim and hunt freely.” Explanations on ecology. Great. That’s not coming up during play, so it’s a great thing it’s in there clogging up the descriptions (as my aforementioned shit this morning may have the toilet?)  These are simple rooms with simple interactivity that are just padded out in what amounts to a wall of text. Bullet point up the main issues, but if the bullet is half a page then what’s the point? Sixty some words to describe “+4 to move silently when within 15’ of the waterfall.” 

The designer notes that this is inspired by the a Dungeon Design Framework. Monsters have patterns and routines, etc. There are a couple of charts to help with the monsters wandering patrol paths. I’m not saying they are wrong, but they are poorly done, not noting the creatures locations. Just dots and blips that you must then interpret and expand on. Hooks are all “you are hired to “ nonsense. And, in particular, the claim that “Inside, you’ll find tightly written areas built around meaningful encounters, and systems that keep the dungeon active between player actions.” would not be true. Tightly written. Meaningful encounters. I think not.

This is likely the last Cubas review, joining Mohr, Filbar, Elven Tower and the rest.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. Meaning nine pages of background/fluff/intro and one that starts to show the first room. (There’s another full page of room one info.) Take a look at that Gannt chart like thing. The blue and reds could be handled much better to show current location, not moves. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563481/c-c-shrieks-in-the-dark-c-c-edition?1892600

By Dougal Cochrane
Self Published
Dolmenwood
Level 2

South of Fog Lake, where the Cave Path plunges into the Ballow-Clefts, the horizon narrows to a ravine of glistening wet stone, steeped in shadow. Pale yellow celandine flowers bloom ankle-high in the gloom, their petals never fully opening except at noon when the sun shines in. Narrow clefts riddle the rock, most shallow and choked with roots. From one fissure seeps the earthy scent of moss and the sickly odour of mildew. The cavern leads down into the Grotto of Grundlow Greenteeth.

This 22 page adventure uses about nine pages to describe twelve rooms in an underground troll den/garden. It’s wordy, cutsy, and has both too much going on and not enough at the same time. 

Can you be nicely formatted and STILL have wall of text issues? Why, yes, I think, now, that you can, after reading this. Is it wall of text, actually? I’m not so sure. It is certain A LOT of text. Because A LOT is going on. And the text, while not in traditional straight paragraph wall of text format, does repeat certain patterns that obfuscates. 

But first, our setup. There’s a two-headed troll in a cave, with a grumpy head and a romantic head. He eats moss. He’s got a mossling cook enslaved. Mossling hates grumpy head and is in love with romantic head. Mossling grows herbs and puts grumpy head to sleep. Thus the Bog Red Button. Don’t wake the grumpy troll head … that you generally don’t know exists. Then, there’s a dude with a body switching thing. He’s trying to dig up a gate in the troll cave. He’s made several people switch bodies and minds. And a gang of skeleton thieves (as in, they are skeletons who are thieves.) is trying to knock off a prospector for his emeralds … and the prospector and his donkey have both been mind-switched. And, there’s a slumbering demon who does NOT give eternal youth when awakened. All that shit, and more, is in twelve rooms. 

There’s A LOT going on in here. Rooms can range from a column to a page. And this is where things start to get rough. Rooms start with a little description in an offset box that is easy to locate. Let’s say, something like this: “Dark, earthen tunnel (wet stone floor) tangled with thick tree roots (beaded with dripping water). Several wooden buckets (half-filled) sit beneath the largest roots, placed to catch water. A skull is wedged in a crevice halfway along the tunnel.” So, king od a mashup from OSE style to paragraph style. I’m not sure it works. If this had been a paragraph, without parens, or terse OSE, I think it would have gone better. The sentences with lots of parens distracts. I mean, not a bad description by any means, I’m nitpicking here. Certainly better and more evocative than the vast majority of adventures.

And then we move on to the details of the contents of the rooms. And this is, I think, where things start to get rough in terms or formatting. There is a bolded heading and bullets with more details on what to see and do. Maybe a couple of words of description or explanation or mechanics or whatever. And they are nested, so, looking at one thing that has more subparts SHOULD be fine. 

I think the issue here is sheer quantity and the use of the bold/bullet/indent format on, essentially, everything. Let us assume I have a bookshelf with 24 books on it. Each book gets a bolded heading/bullet, a sentence or two, and then I move on to the next. A few get a few indents and a mechanic or two. Everything is relatively mundane. Book eleven kills you when you open it. Meh, bad example. You REALLY need to know book eleven is there and it is the only book that does something meaningful, most of the rest is trivia, or else meaningless more or less to the adventure. Should book eleven be in the exact same format as everything else? Should it be highlighted? I’m not sure of my example, here, but I know the principle involved: when everything is special nothing is. I’m looking at a page of, I don’t know, a couple of major headings with read-aloud, major bolded headings, several subheadings, bolding at the start of major sections and in the paragraph text. It’s too much. EVERYTHING is calling for attention. You know how garbage adventures tell you what ‘AC” means and what “read-aloud” looks like? This may be the first adventure in which I think I actually have failed to understand the formatting involved. Everything is calling for your attention. What should I pay attention to? I’m not willing to say this format doesn’t work for complicated rooms, but I am willing to say that it doesn’t work HERE, on THESE rooms. 

I don’t know what to say about interactivity. Don’t wakey wakey the grumpy troll head. Feed people sleeping herbs. Maybe do a deal with the skeleton dudes or the wizzo doing the body/mind swaps. I think it’s hard to dig through here and figure out what’s going on. I’m thinking of a room with a kind of west garbage pit in it. I’m thinking like the Trash Compactor scene from Star Wars. There’s a description. There’s a columns of bullets and bolding and sentences. And then there’s this note that a major NPC (mind swapped in to a donkey) is “braying piteously and thrashing to stay afloat in the muck.” Well fuck me man. That’s obviously the reason the room exists. Don’t you think maybe I should know about it sooner, and the party should as well? Why go through all this trouble of description and mechanics of staying afloat and then bury the lead? Most rooms are like this; something important is in there and it’s almost certainly NOT getting called to your attention in any meaningful way. 

There’s a lot going on here in a short amount of space over a short amount of time. And, yet, it’s not written to run as a kind of madcap adventure, as that would imply. There’s not enough room for everything going on and there’s both too much going on in the room descriptions while, at heart, not an extreme level of interactivity. It LOOKS like there is, due to all the herbal concoctions and hooks and ind swaps and so on. But I don’t think any of it really means much at all. I’m not going to commit fully to that opinion, this thing is a bear to dig through and that may be impacting my judgement. But, also, I’m pretty sure I’m right. Just fucking walk around and stab everybody and everything is solved and you’re much safer in the end. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Boo! Hiis! We need a preview to make an informed purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563700/troubled-troll-grotto?1892600

By Pat_Sagor
Pat_Co Productions
Nimble/OSR
Level 3

In the heart of a volcanic wasteland, the Tower rises amid fire and ash, a slender edifice of stone. Its citizens never leave the Tower, and keep their mysterious traditions out of sight from the outside world. But they have gained immense wealth trading wondrous artifacts extracted from the depths below the Tower… Outside the Tower, Baron Hugues DeMort’s massive army has been laying siege for over a month. Unable to breach its impervious gates, frustrated and desperate, he has devised a plan to infiltrate the Tower, and he just heard of a group of adventurers that are brave, capable, and … expendable. The perfect team to send on a probably suicidal mission!

Greetins Green Level adventurers! Friend baron has a new, fun, and exciting adventure for you! This fifty page adventure describes about twelve scenes inside a gigantic tower/city that is under siege. The party travels through a rigid caste-based society that really be in a 70’s social commentary scifi movie instead. Follow the script, stab the bosses and then … win?

Ok, so, Baron von Evil is laying siege to the massive tower city and sends the party in through some lower cave/tunnels to get to the city gates and blow them up with the bombs he’s devised for you to carry. You get in and find a massively caste-based society. The tower/city has four levels. The lowest, black are the workers, then the level above has the red managers, then the golden enforcers and judges above that, and then the white intelligentsia above that. We’ll let you decide if Black=Worst and White=Best has any meaning here. Anyway, it’s right out of a scifi movie and, in fact, this probably should have been a Gamma World adventure but, then, of course, it wouldn’t sell any copies at all. Ok, so, anyway, you’re in this city on the lowest levels. You gotta get ahold of some levitation bands to Ascend through the central shaft. Along the way you meet rebels, learns about the rape of an 8 year old by a cop, and find out that hte whites are not white, they are all really just one lich in charge of everything. 

The designer kind of knows they’ve written a railroad and has some words on advice on how to make it not a railroad and more interactive. There are some very basic maps of the city regions, but, ultimately, the adventure comes down to the twelve or so scenes/events that make up the plot here. You’re in the tunnels and then watch some cops kill a couple of citizens just minding their own business. You watch an Ascension, where citizens are promoted to the next color up. You meet a rebel and then get arrested by the ol “four more show up every turn” trick. Youre in the middle of the Barons army invading the tower, you boss fight Golden Centurion Marigold 1 (that’s one of the tower peoples names. Like I said, SciFi) who covered up the rape of the little girl. Let’s see, one of the lich’s victims telepathics you, and then you fight the lich. Let’s see … have I bitched about rape yet? Of a child? Why are people putting this shit in their adventures? This is supposed to be fun. You know what’s not fun? Child rape. People just seem to toss that shit around the way they toss around Hitler when arguing. Maybe give it a rest and find something else for the cops to cover up? Maybe Soylent Green is people. That’s fun. Can you  imagine? People love it. They riot over it. And it’s actually people. And, notably, not child rape. (and murder! Don’t forget the murder after the child rape.) 

The adventure gives you a list of NPC’s, a list of scenes, and a list of locations. There’s a decent number of summaries and background information as well, but, really, it is the people, places, and events that drives this.

Well, I say people drive it, but it tends to be more of a “Guest Star of the Week” kind of the thing. You get an NPC in a scene or situation and then you’ll be lucky if they continue to show up. Thus there is a relatively large number of named NPC’s, each with decently long NPC descriptions. Those descriptions are fairly well done but at some point you’ve got to ask yourself why we have so many people. You can’t possibly form a bond with any of them, not in the amount of time they are showing up. There is supposed to be this underlying theme pr regression, rebelling against order, blind adherence to order and the neutral observers to it all that is handicapped (Let’s see the judiciary enforce their decisions when enforcement power belongs to the people they are ruling against.) And then, of course, ultimately the entire system comes from corruption at the very top, the farce of the liches leadership. 

We’ve all seen a lot of liches. Party liches, grim liches. We’ve got a master manipulator here, that shows up a couple of times in public ceremonies impersonating a “white,” Possessing, really. And he has some tells. He raises his hands to his face and says “Actually …” a lot. There’s a fun little gimmick to get the party wondering, This is just slightly farcical and one of the better parts of the adventure.

Looks, it is essentially a railroaded scenebased adventure. The designer tries to help it not be that with some locations and a tad bit of free will, but that’s what it is. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is, I suspect, how the vast majority of people play D&D, some derivations of scene based with a lot of hand-waving. Not my favorite type, but I get it. If you’re gonna have scenes then lean in and write a scene based adventure. If you want your location based adventure to have events then dump those in. This adventure never fully commit to either and is the worse for it. Devo says you need to Sartre this baby up! This needed to be all events/scenes or a location based adventure with “secrets” to discover and a few events thrown in. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggest price of $1. The preview is eleven pages and gives you a good cross-section of different aspects of the adventure. Good preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563227/the-tower-for-nimble?1892600

By Thom Wilson
ThrowiGames
Shadowdark
"Low Levels"

Be it known that the evil wizard Kuzax, having performed cruel and twisted experiments on the living and dead, is wanted for crimes against humanity. A bounty of 100 gold coins is offered to any who can capture and produce the wizard, dead or alive, to the captain of the guard of Draxmoor. Kuzax was last seen heading toward the abandoned mountain monastery in the north.

This forty page adventure uses about 25 pages to describe a vertical monastery full of abominations with about forty rooms. The vertical map from Logos is good, but poorly utilized, and while the beginning  has an good idea or three it quickly turns to dungeon-crawling “what abomination are we stabbin in the room THIS time.” 

I liked the marketing blurb on this one and I seem to recall not hating Throwi, which is why we’re reviewing a Shadowdark today.

I like the bounty thing in the marketing blurb. Good ol Emirikrol, bout time someone brought his head in. If the authorities can be after the party then they can be after Kuzax also and, stands to reason, that if you’re desperate enough to go in a hole in the ground to find gold then making the leap to amateur bounty-hunter, for the plebiscite, shouldn’t be that hard. Image the local quest board had no rats in the basement or lost puppies and instead only People We Want You To Kill/(ok, sure, you can bring them in alive.) Harvest is looking a little poor. Ma needs medicine after the baby, let’s go see who to kill. Anyway, nice to see a bounty play out.

So, for some reason you are approaching a monastery, long abandoned, and, yet, somehow not looted. I don’t know why. But, also, there’s this cliff that you’re at the bottom of. There’s a waterfall and some buildings running up both side of the waterfall, connected by a bridge in the middle.  There’s a ladder, little more than hammered pegs in the wall, that gets you from the ground up in to room one. It says several hundred feet of pegs to get to the buildings, but, whatever I guess. Anyway, at the base you see a young hireling! He’s “nearly out of food, water, and patience.” Wunderbar! He’s got the official bounty notice for capture of the wizard and his employers went up in to the monastery a few days ago with no word since. That’s fun! A hireling watching the horses who is fed up. Whens the last time an adventure gave a nod to what actually happens in D&D play? So far we’re doing pretty good here in the framing and intro.

Climbing up we reach a small clearing with the monastery building door about fifteen feet away. Or, as the room one entry tells us: “Short platform. Fifteen feet of level ground between stairs and front door. Grisly remains. Young adventurer, missing a leg, crawled away from door, leaving a bloody trail behind. Spiked door. Covered in dozens of iron spikes, door ajar. Something hidden keeps it open. Reeking stench. Awful odor emanates from within monastery.” Well that’s a fine how to do! Nice missing leg, bloody trail from crawling. A bullet (there are three, describing the adventurers body, the spiked door, and the smell) tells us that the door is held propper open with the adventurers missing leg. Ouch! But, also, good thing! You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.

The map here is the Dyson “waterfall” map, two vertical sacks of buildings, one on either side of the waterfall. I think this is the third adventure I’ve reviewed that uses it. It can be small and a little cramped but i like it. Round stairs going up and down, bridges, windows and balconies overlooking the waterfall and a little room for some cramped non-standard room layouts. One of the better Logos small maps even if it is, essentially, linear. The waterfall and the bridge over it, balconies and so on isn’t really taken advantage of well. Only one crossing, a note explicitly saying we can’t jump or fly over. There is a room that is “slick with spray” from open windows … and, somehow, you can slip and go over the edge? I guess I might call that a doorway instead of a window. Yeah, you get attacked on the bridge between the two sides. 

There’s some editing mistakes that come from  confusion, I think. The very first room tells us that “Stairs. Circular and narrow, lead downward..” Uh. No? Those stairs lead up since we are on the lowest level. Or else I REALLY misunderstood the map. That I’ve seen multiple times in multiple reviews. Anyway, there’s a slip up or three like that in this adventure but none of it is impossible to overcome after an initial read-through; they stick out. We might ask for a partial refund from the editor attached? 

Formatting is fine. There’s an initial description paragraph that does a decent jon delaying an environment and then some bolding to call out some bulleted information. The bolding is not too bold though and doesn’t really help much, it needed a better stroke weight. And the bolded words don’t really lead to you to the bullets, you have to find the bullet related to the bolding since the bullets don’t have a title/intro/reference back to the bolding except in the free test description. 

The interactivity is a little one note. You enter a room. It is old and abandoned. There are bones, a mess, and sometimes an abomination, from the wizards experiments (which, ultimately, killed him.) You’ll find a grisly lair, a messed up room, or some dead monks. There is the usual religious puzzle or two, say the magic word in front of the temple statue and get a magic spear. 

I’m left, much like my last review, in being a little non-plussed here. It starts off well with the framing and dead adventurer but becomes a little staid, even with the abominations. Good use of unique monsters, although I don’t think the weight of them settles in. There’s little inherently wrong here, and it’s nice to see a vertical map, something different than the usual “flat”, even if we’ve seen it before multiple times. It just feels more like a rote “enter room, look around, sometimes stab” kind of journey, which is not helped by the mostly linear nature of the map. This would be a fine drop in but I can’t see it being a cornerstone. The effort feels phoned in, although the phone call was very clear.

This is $5 at DriveThru. Alas, no preview. 🙁 Give us a preview. Pretty please?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561983/monastery-of-misanthropy-ea2?1892600

By Craig Turner
Aspire2Hope
Generic/Universal
Levels: Ghouls as an ememy

In Faynford at the Staple, tension simmers beneath the smell of hearth smoke and fresh bread. Old fears stir as food grows scarce, livestock go missing, and whispers spread—of sickness, of shadows, of the dead no longer resting easy. Beyond the river bends and chalk downs, the Hundred is holding its breath. The boundaries between custom and survival, welcome and warning, are wearing thin. Something hungers in the dark, and the quiet strength of this land may not be enough to hold it back. Your road has led here. Whether by duty, kinship, or necessity, you have arrived on the edge of a story that will not wait. Will you uncover the truth before Faynford at the  Staple falls to fear—and to what walks in its shadow?

This twenty page horror-ish adventure describes a bucolic village, and the refugee situation that is unfolding as they absorb villages who have been displaced by war. It is quite long-winded and verbose for what is essentially an outline of an adventure. The outline part is ok, but the long-windedness results in confusion of the overall situation. Too much time on vibes and not enough time on specifics. 

I’m a sucker for Harn-like settings for adventures. Call something A Hundred and I’m drooling, for some reason. I guess it was 100 Bushels of Rye. Whatever. We’re here today because of that. And, then, we mix in, from the marketing blurb, what appears to be a horror element. I think horror translates well because of the emphasis on situations that it fosters. I can restart a monster, but the vibes and plot and horror elements are for the designer. I love my classic exploratory dungeons, but the journey to and from the dungeon, and shit going on in town, has always been a part of D&D and these little situations are great for dropping in to spice up the “downtime.” 

So, we got this village. Humans, halflings. The halflings were refugees about fifty years ago and have settled in. More war has caused an influx of new refugees. The locals kind of recognize kinship to them, accents, mannerisms, far less alien than the halflings were. Then a lamb goes missing. And a couple of people die from a new disease, ashskin. Things are tense. The local sheriff wants to relocate the refugees a little farther down the valley. This is the pretext for the adventure. It turns out that a local seedy patriarch is an agent for a foreign power and ashskin? That’s people turning in to ghouls. Did you recognize it by the name ashskin? I didn’t at first. And I love that kind of shit .Where you describe something to peoples faces and they don’t get it. They drop some gnawed bones and bodies here and there, and once you get to the graveyard and find out the graves were dug out from the INSIDE, well, the undead is up, so to speak. 

The adventure wants to outline a situation. It’s trying to present a map with various locations on it and then explaining what is going on at those locales. It provides some NPC overviews with mannerisms and goals, for the DM to drop in to the game and use as the party comes across them or seeks them out. It flirts with doing the right thing. And then it fucks everything up.

The NPC descriptions fit, maybe, two to three to a column. There’s a bullet for Appearance, Personality, Goal/Motivation, Quick, Disposition, and What they know. Maybe somewhere from three words to a dozen or so, and then the person ends with a little quote. This is all too much. It’s on the right track, a quick, a goal, what they know, but then it muddies it up with too much information that one needs to dig through. And this is going to be a theme here.

The locales, a half dozen or so, stretch on for a column or page, and then have their NPC’s, in the same format as above. It starts with a setting prompt, in bullet form: Light, Sights, Sounds, Smells. This is too much. Shortening this to  a sentence or two, including all of them in it, to give a little vibe would have been better. There’s a brief couple of paragraph description of the locations “the fields are well tended, it’s maintained through diligence.” Again, too much. The diligence comment it meta, and the whole location description is hard to sort through, I suspect, during play.  Terse. Hit. Get out. We want a quick vibe if its not super-important to the location to have details. Then we have a section called Plot. I’m looking at seven paragraphs, one or two just a sentence, like “Corwin is dead” or “Pip knows what that means, even if he struggles to say it properly.”  The plot section, what is happening, the meat of the location, what the party can find out and do and so on, is all muddled by this. This is NOT the time to get flowery with your language and clever with your descriptions. And yet it does, over and over again. This is a nightmare to dig through. This would have been the PERFECT time for all of those bullets. 

The overall plot, what leads to what and who’s doing what, is confused because of all of this. Cognitively it’s a problem. After a couple of times through this I’m still not sure I can explain the hows and wherefore and whats connected. I THINK 

The elements it wants to emphasize, the contention between the refugees, the more established refugees from fifty years ago and so on, these are not well handled at all. There’s little to bring these to life. The tension that should be going on isn’t added to by specifics. We’re not looking for everything spelled out and scripted, but vignettes, specificity, to drop in to make that tension come alive. Even the spying, it’s not really brought home. 

This was a good idea. Blaming The Others should be relatable to the players. The mixing in of the ghouls and people turning. Great potential there. But this would need a lot of effort to bring to the table. It knows to outline a situation, and it knows the major elements to hit, it just fails in doing that in a way that can be run or in bringing it truly to life.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages, not quite enough to get a good vibe check on it. Only the last page really gives you an idea of what to start to expect in terms of writing and presentation. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/562279/the-quiet-hunger?1892600