tenfootpole.org

By Marco Giulio Fossati
Hellwinter Forge of Wonder
OSE
Levels 6-8

The Antrum was a temple dedicated to the chaotic god Chryzothuul, but the priests dwelling there abandoned it some years ago after a plague decimated them. The Antrum lies in a small valley amidst the Rolling Red, rugged plains and hills covered with sanguine-red grass.

In the last months, rangers and lonely travellers spotted an undead presence near the Antrum. So, the local authorities decided to send a group of adventurers there to investigate. Who or what is behind those undead?

This twenty page adventure presents an old temple dungeon with about seventeen rooms in about five pages. It is boring. Boring in interactivity. Boring in descriptions. Low effort does not begin to describe it.

Right about now I should be waxing philosophically about the measure of a man and so on. It’s traditionally, when I see a poorly designed product, to speculate why as you describe the hows, I think. But not this time. I HATE this adventure. It represents everything I loathe. It is low effort. No one seemingly cared about it during its creation. Instead a coat of paint was slapped on and it was called done. Be it to satisfy some deadline or some other reason, instead it received nothing. 

Let us begin with the original sin: the level. Levels 6-8. And the hook? “The characters are the adventurers sent to investigate the undead presence of the Antrum, and they have been hired by a reasonable law force in the area, such as a military commander, a local reeve, or the council of a nearby town” Yes. my level eight got hired by the village reeve. That’s exactly what happened. I’m currently engaged in a bloodbath in the village ala Kid Marvelman and the village Reeve walks up to me and hires me. Great. But, sure, whatever, yes, I do want to play D&D tonight. The adventure, proper? It’s full of undead. “You gotta bring a cleric!” says the designers note to the DM. Actually, no, you should NOT bring a cleric. And why is that? Room one: eight skeletons. FOr your level six through eight cleric. Or how about some zombies? Shadows? You’re just gonna blast right through each and every undead in the adventure. I don’t think there ARE any undead present that are not an automatic turn. Did you actually even ever run this for ANYONE? Now, I know that D&D-mine’s favorite hobby is changing the Turn Undead rules, but, still … I think I understand the OSE rules. It’s like an auto-turn. And most of the time it’s an auto-destory. There are new undead in the appendix, created just for the final boss fight, and they get auto-nuked also. The custom monster you created for the boss fight is an auto-nuke. And they are ALL like that. The designer made it and the editor looked at it. Or said they did. The same person did the layout, which presumably means the C00l color scheme. Maybe, instead, do the work of an editor?

But, hang on. Let’s change the levels. Let’s say its, I don’t know, level four or so?

Reven now, in the magnificence of the descriptions! “Two stairs, both going down a few steps. At the end of each stair, there’s a closed door. A small alcove lies in the south wall.” Behold now the modern wonder of the full power of this designers evocative text! “There are still some old chests in this storeroom abandoned long ago.” That’s the fucking room description. I didn’t cherry pick one sentence from it. Are you not inspired?!?! You know, you really should be. After all a good DM could … spend their money and time on something worthwhile? 

Shitting fucking descriptions. Nothing evocative about them AT ALL. And, then, that kind of writing style that I just abhor. “There are still some … “ This kind of passive voice description. Just tell us about the storeroom and the chests. The absolute best bits of this are when the designer IS getting specific. When they mention the consistent low haze of the plains on your overland journey or the pulsating shapeless blob sitting on an altar. But those may be the ONLY examples of decent text in this. There is little specificity. It’s abstraction. Our rumors read “The Antrum still contains a sacred relic of Chryzothuul. (true)” No, it does not contain a sacred relic. It contains the head of saint whatever, missing its blue tongue, or some shit like that. Specificity, not abstraction. Abstraction is boring. We’re paying for specificity. 

How about mechanics? It takes a day to get to the temple through the grasslands. You have a 2 in 6 chance each day of getting lost.. If you get lost three days in a row then you automatically find it on the fourth day. You can find some laser gemstones. They shoot out a 2d6 laser beam, continually. Well, that’s fun, anyway!

The overall effect is one of low effort. Clearly not play tested. The writing is abstracted and not evocative in the least. Boring stabbing encounters sprinkled with a few simplistic traps and not enough treasure to warrant a walk through the plains for my level eight. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is the first seven pages, which doesn’t show you any encounters. Not a very good preview of what you would be purchasing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499189/the-antrum-of-chryzothuul?1892600

By Jacob Densford
Illuminated Snail Press
Knave 2e

Only one of the foul creatures remains—abominations forged by the meddling hands of wizards. After generations of slaughtering us, we’ve finally driven them back to the brink. Let the final hunt commence: the hunt for the last Owl Bear.

This sixteen page adventure has seven hexes to explore as you slaughter the last living owl bear. You’ll need all of your wits to survive the monotonous boredom of hexes with nothing/close to nothing to do in them. 

Sixteen fucking pages my ass. I’ve been noticing a lot of Knave adventures pop on DriveThru all at once. Looks like there was a contest and this thing was the third place winner. Which seems to mean the public voted on it being the third place winner, so you know, the unwashed masses and all that jazz. 

Ok, so, there’s one owlbear left. You’ve just arrived incountry at some white colonizer camp in the jungle. There are two hunting parties going out tomorrow. You want to join the big game hunter and her quisling local businessman sponsor or you want to join the white savior environmentalist and his smiling caricature of a local? Or maybe go your own way?

But first, the news. You wander around those seven hexes, notably NOT going south. IE: you start on a hex border at the six o clock position with nothing else shown on the map but the rest of the surrounding dial from the centerpoint of the hands. And from there you wander from hex to hex with little initial direction in finding the owlbear. Eventually you’ll find something. A village of locals who have all been grisly slaughtered by the owlbear with some ghosts playing a flute.. Or a bunch of monkeys in a tree banging on a drum. Or a wizards hut with nothing to do in it. 

I really really can’t emphasize enough how shitty the encounters are. There is this thing that designers sometimes do where they are SO resistant to actually putting anything concrete down on paper. Maybe, if you squint really hard, you can get what they are going for. But, the wizard hut. It takes a fucking page, like all of the encounters do. And it’s nothing. It’s a dude living in a hut. He’s not fucking histile. He doesn’t really even have anything. You CAN get a spell component from him, for some project later, but it’s just so empty. He’s got no real personality other than “likes flowers.” The entire thing is pointless. I get it, you want a place to get the spell component. So, put some interactivity there. Likewise the monkeys in the trees. They’ve got a drum they bang on. That’s it. I guess you are motivated to get the drum because you se ethe monkeys have it? And I truly am guessing; I don’t see any reason to do anything here other than yawn. You’ve got to lead the party on, give them something to follow up on, give them SOME kind of bone to get them going an interested. We’re not talking spoon feeding them, but, something. ANYTHING to get the going. “Monkeys in the trees” ain’t it. 

You know what else isn’t it? If you pick up the drum then you hear in your head “Rebuild my shrine and I will reward you!” Likewise if you pick up the ghosts flute or the other thing. LIterally a voice in your fucking head. This is not roleplaying. There is no subtly here. Telling someone directly what to do is not embracing the joy of player discovery. But, in the rumours, there is no specificity. “The local gods are feuding with each  other, with dangerous repercussions  for mortals—take shelter in bad  weather” Well that’s exciting. DO the local gods have names? Is there a story to go with this? No? There’s just senseless abstraction of a rumour? Got it. I am not amused.

And now to the part of the review that the fuckwits will feel the need to comment on. You know what’s a decent novel? Things Fall Apart. Not my favorite, but pretty decent. You know what’s not Things Fall Apart? A sixteen page adventure. I have no fucking idea why someone decided that a sixteen page adventure, with a contest deadline attached, was the correct medium to comment about white colonization. We  get white colonizers. We get the enviro dude with a white saviour complex. We get lots of references to white colonizers. We get a note about portraying the locals with empathy … even though we don’t get any information about them except they are all friendly. It’s fucking nuts. But, sure, dump in the smiling native caricature and the evil quisling businessman caricature. Or, the infantilized natives who can’t solve their own problems. And don’t forget to slaughter the smiling natives family so we can know for sure he’s just there as a trope. Got it. Ham fucking handed. And let’s be clear, I’m not bitching about your white colonizer shit. I’m bitching that its done is a hack fucking way.

But, also, I’m a hypocrite and can get over that. Well, I could get over that that. I mean IF THE FUCKING ADVENTURE WAS ANY GOOD. The smiling native guide has a village. If you go there everyone is slaughtered bloodily by the owlbear. There are some ghosts playing a flut. If you bury the villagers bodies then the spirits go to rest. IT TAKES A FUCKING PAGE FOR THIS. An entire page. Is there detail? None to speak of. Evocative descriptions? Not really, not to justify a page. Big fonts, a lot of white space and A LOT of extraneous padding. “IF the party picks up the flute THEN [fuckwit local god] speaks directly in to their mind: Build me a shrine and I will reward you.” Fuck off with that shit man. There’;s nothing to this village, or any of the encounters. There’s no content. There’s an ABSTRACTION of content. “You could, maybe” put in some ghosts of the villagers or something, I guess.” This is the equivalent of what is going on here. The specificity that brings an adventure life is just nt present at all. 

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages, a mix of intro and hexes. That’s enough to know what you’re getting. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/498863/hunt-for-the-last-owl-bear?1892600

By Roberto Marcarini
Old School Fox
OSE
Levels 2-3

The wedding of Baron Duncan was meant to be a day of celebration and joy for all his subjects, as well as for you, brave heroes, called to witness the event. During the ceremony, however, just before the fateful ‘Yes, I do,’ Xanaxarius, the bandit-sorcerer known throughout the surrounding lands, broke in with his horde of followers. You remember very little of what happened next: the cries of the almost newlyweds, the dark and arcane words of Xanaxarius, and the red flash that engulfed you and the other guests…

This forty page adventure uses about seventeen pages to describe about thirteen locations in a magic land inside of a red crystal. It’s got a conversational style, full of backstory and explanations, that are inappropriate for room descriptions, as well as a lack of specificity to bring places alive or situations to develop for interactivity. And thusly …

I don’t even know where to start with this. Room one I guess. “Among all the guards and heroes who came to the rescue of the two newlyweds, the characters were among the luckiest and appeared on the cliff that rises to the north of the magical river, which flows through the dreamlike crystal landscape” It continues. For almost half a page. That has told us almost nothing. I guess it says you can see a river? So, mabe a vista landscape descriptions, orienting the party? But, also, all that shit is on the map. And you know how I love a description that repeats obvious shit from a map. Otherwise, this is some kind of commentary. A very conversational tone in writing a room description. Unfocused, repeating information for, like, the nine hundredth time, about the red landscape and sky. And this thing is just FULL of that shit. Asides and commentary, explanations and backstory. Repeated information. There is actually very very little information present that could be of use to the DM running the game. 

Evocative text? I think not. “An old staircase carved into the rock of the cliff that descends to its base about forty feet below.” Yeah! I’m inspired! The next three sentences about the staircase do little more. How about “ A small grove nestled between the cliff and the nearby river.” How’s that? Cool? There is just SOOOOO much text here. The page count to encounter count would imply that, for sure. And yet there is almost nothing present that you could turn in to a game. The gnome couple, on the cliff, don’t really have a personality to interact with. Or a purpose other than telling the party to go south, I guess. The Crimson Toad! “As large as a medium-sized dog.” That’s your description. Great. Oh, wait, it does say, buried deep in the text, that maybe the party learned how to bypass the toad from information in room one. But, that’s in room four, not in room one. Room one doesn’t mention ANYTHING about this. Uh … we put the information where  we need it to use, not in a different room.

And yet the adventure goes on and on and on. The creatures and challenges here are expanded upon at great length. And yet they say very little about them. Nothing really evocative. Nothing really in the way of interacting interactivity. Sure, you can stab something. Yeah?

One of my favorites are some old rotting bags that say they “have become the home to some parasites and other horrid creatures.’ That’s your description. But that’s not a description. That’s some kind of meta overview. Why put this in? Why not just describe some giant grubs or water bugs or ticks of unusual size or something? Why the choice to NOT give a description but instead focus on the abstraction of the encounter? There’s no specificity here. And, in the end, you get attacked by four cockroaches. Yes describe the horrid parasites! But, no, that was not the choice chosen for me. We all need a savior to come our way.

There;s nothing really here. It wants to be a fairy tale land covered in a red tint glow from the crystal you’re trapped inside of. It comes off, though, as meta abstractions of encounters without real descriptions or interesting interactivity. A shadow of a shadow. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see the first few encounters which should be enough to give you a feel for the writing style.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/498723/prisoners-of-the-crimson-crystal-eng-ita-version?1892600

By muv, Billman
Novis Ludis
OSE
Levels ?

The Lord and Lady Talbot are the last of their line, wealthy owners of a remote but productive silver mine. Over the past decade or so, things have changed. The Talbots have become reclusive, packs of wolves howl throughout the nights, and people have vanished without a trace.

This 25 page adventure has three encounters. With werewolves, mummies, Franenstein’s monster (fuck you!) and a vampire. And igor? A new low in 4e conversions. Or, someone’s home play style with OSE resembles the worst that 4e had to offer.

I went to see My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult once at Talbot street in Indy. So, now, yo uget a Talbot adventure.

I am disappointed. Shocking, I know. But this had a decent start! The party is in a village, a mining village, when an earthquake hits. Miners are trapped! Off to the rescue! See, now that’s something I can get behind. A great big communal rescue job. The party as a part of a bucket brigade or making a human chain to reach someone in a flood/river. This is how people act. It’s relatable. When the party, the players, can react to situations like this, situations that are real, that have that flavour of reality to them, then it sticks much more with them. The players get  motivated, and that is SOOOO much more better than the characters being motivated or resignation to the monday night hook.  So, the premise, generally, is that some miners get trapped by an earthquake.

But, also, generally is all you’re getting here. There’s no real information about the cave in, etc. To quote the adventure “Early the next morning, a small tremor rocks the village. Miners pour from the silver mine calling for help; a cave-in has trapped and possibly killed miners!” That’s it. The adventure then transitions in to encounter one. Oh, I did mention that there are only three encounters, right? In 25 pages? Oh, but it gets worse! More on that in a minute. I was looking forward to some greedy mine owners, foremen, a company store, wildflowers, crying kids, lunch pails and the whole lot. Nope. Just that little bit I copied above. 

There are mountains and mountains and mountains of text in this. Backstory, almost all of it. I think we’re told three time that “Lord Talbot’s mind shattered and he became obsessed with disturbing uses of alchemy.” At least three times. To get us to those three announcers, each of which  takes about a page to describe. In the mine you get attacked by werewolves. At the lords castle you get attacked at the gates by mummies. In the great hall you get attacked by Frankensteins Monster and a vampire. Yes, I have accidentally reviewed a halloween adventure, I guess. I try to avoid those for exactly these reasons. Anyway, there’s no castle details and no treasure in this adventure. No silver in spite of it being a silver mine. No treasure in the castle. Or magic items. Must be something inside, says El Senor Ant. Clearly no one has ever leveled in OSE before. Strange, but the adventure is FOR OSE, yes? Hmmm … Three encounters. A page for each. A map for each encounter that has multiple areas on it … I know what that means!

4e.  Look, I’m not gonna hate on 4e. I mean, sure, it’s a disgusting pile of shit, but, if you want to enjoy your tactical minis combat then you should be able to enjoy it without me dumping on it. It’s just not my cup of tea, because I don’t like a giant turd floating in my cup. To each his own, though. 

This is clearly a 4e conversion. I’m not sure how anything could be more clear. The maps here are of an area. So, encounter one is a map with like ten locations on it, each with one sentence like “two werewolves start here” and shit like that. Nothing evocative at all. Just minis combat notes. Mechanics. And the same with encounters two and three; large area maps for you to tactically move on. “Blacksmith – this shop is functional and appears to be in occasional use (Lord Talbot sometimes uses it in his work)” Just notes about the extensive bestiary. No one cares about treasure. No one cares about descriptions. No one cares about roleplaying or situations. Just tactical minis combat. 

Oh, hey, did I mention tha the opening read aloud mixes third person and second person narrative, in amazing levels of abstracted text? No? Oh,ok.

We do not do that here. A shitty shitty 4e adventure pretending to be OSE. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $4. The preview lets you see encounter one. Not that I’ve seen the entire thing the 4e nature is obvious.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/498351/dark-clouds-over-castle-talbot-ose?1892600

By directsun
Self Published
Knave2
Level 2

The viscount’s son has been kidnapped. The worst is feared when a ransom paid does not return the son. But could the truth be far darker – or wilder – than anyone suspects? See what actually happens! The win, smoke and forbidden potions flow freely in a reckless spree of medieval excess. It’s a whirlwind of power, pleasure, and peril. WIll they survive the highs, or lose their souls to drug-crazed abandon!

This sixteen page adventure details about eighteen rooms in six pages inside of a cave complex that is an old cult site full of horny ghosts and hand abominations. It wants to be a frat party with monsters in the basement and a portal to elsewhere. It’s not that at all.

Ok, dudes son was kidnapped and not returned when the ransom was paid. Some drunks bought a bunch of booze at a rural bar with the ransom gems. You’re sent in to get the son back. It’s obvious, I think, that the son is behind everything, just from that summary. You track them back to a small cave system that once housed a drunken cult. Inside are the drunk and drugged up youths and a bunch of friendly spirits that are going to eat their souls.  You have to destroy the body of the high priest spirit, which you get at by going to a demiplane like place inside the mouth and over the tongue of a giant head that talks to you. Fun! 

The magic items here are pretty decent. A jar of pupae that when ate turn you in to a horsefly for a turn. A small silver gorilla status that, when shaken, hoots more and more until an irritated angry gorilla pops out. Now THATS how you write a figurine of wondrous power! The most abusable is a jade frog that turns you in to a bullfrog when you kiss it. I’m not a big fan of mechanics but that one may need some limits, although seeing Ra turn in to a bullfrog would be cute.

There’s also an encounter or two that is decent. “Shelves full of tomes and trinkets cover the east and west walls. A massive openmouthed head fills the north, saturating all in oppressive red light.” And then the tongue A thick, curvy tongue drapes limply over her chin, resting on a dark altar” There’s more. The head is alive and speaks and tells you you would be much more comfortable inside of the mouth. Walk right up on the tongue! You can see inside … a mystical realm/room awaits! That’s a nice little vignette. There’s a great piece of artwork also, of ono the monsters, a combination of many many arms and hands. It gives very creepy vibes. 

Alas, our time with the positive has come to an end …

I hate it when I have to validate the views of the prols. This is using a bullet point type format slightly reminiscent of other bullet/bolded formats. And it’s bad. It’s not bad because of the bullet format; the starting with a couple of short sentences and then expanded upon on certain things with section headings with bullets. It’s bad because it’s not very evocative at all and the choices for both language and subject, on what to expand upon are not well made. If we assume the platonic form of a format that is not going to save an adventure that implements it badly. And, in this, it’s done poorly. The initial text tends to the purple side of the spectrum. “Sounds of snores harmonize with the gentle undulations of a colossal humanoid—their over-sized limbs draped languidly over a Barrel.” I’m afraid this is a critical case of thesaurus syndrome. We must imagine a scene and then try to describe it, not just pick out words from the dictionary. And then we tend to get bullets that expand on mechanics or some slavish minutia. The major heading of Ratbird Nest then tells us, in the first indented bullet, that “?Grape-sized, veiny eggs. Silhouettes are visible throughbtranslucent shells.” and then we get another level of indentation and bullets with “? Ratbird eggs (12).” We’re engaged in post-modernism at this point, with bullets, bolding and indents just for the sake of having them, as Moe would say.

In another example we have a back entrance to the place: “On the south side of the rocky hill is a three-foot-diameter dug-out hole that tunnels through the earth. HOLE ?Handprints in the loose earth. ? Made by Pluckerfiends (p. 14). ?Speed is halved. Checks at -5. ?Leads to Escape Hole (p. 8).” You’re gonna have to imagine the indentations rather than the run on Im using. But, also, We see backstory/explanatios and this need to tell us what the map already tells us. Certainly not the worse sin, in this example, but we see this over and over again.

And this comes to the detriment of actual content. It is, for the most part, lacking. The room descriptions are not the greatest, while they are terse. They come off as boring and the expanded bullet sections to little to augment them. Combine this with an interactivity that is also somewhat lacking: doing rugs and stabbing things. The map annoys me, having page numbers on it instead of keys, but in the grand scheme of things I’ll live.

You, however, will not live. Those pluckerfiends? Remember the level range here, 2? 14 HP each, attacking at level 3. Every time you’re hit you need to make a save or your soul is plucked from your body and replaced. The last room, with the ghost last boss? That’s got twelve of them in it. You not making it there though; there;s more than enough on the wanderer table or other rooms, in threes and fours, to fuck you up before then. CHA save my ass. I THINK I know how a CHA save should work in Knave2 … maybe I’m wrong?

The formatting and bullets make this an outline, but not a great one. Things just don’t click, from an interactivity standpoint. Great magic items, ut the drug/alcoholCHA save stuff is a bit heavy handed, I think, for level 2. All for a transparent hook that is expanded enough for me and a cult ending that doesn’t have enough lead in for me.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $7.50. The preview is everything, as a PWYW should be.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/497712/with-the-cult-of-crimson-revelers?1892600

By Ramsay McGregor
FantasyBound
D&D
Levels 2-3

The church in the village of Endmarsh have asked the adventurers to investigate dancing lights that flicker across the horizon of the sea. This phenomenon started at the same time as when fishermen had begun mysteriously disappearing, and the folk of Endmarsh started experiencing haunting dreams and whispering voices at night. The Graenician priests of the Endmarsh church will pay a handsome sum of 230 gold crowns to investigate and if possible, remove this supernatural incursion.

This six page adventure uses four pages to describe … six encounters? Long overwrought read-aloud, wall of text DM notes, plot, backstory, it’s got it all. The concept here should be, like, a quarter page in a larger dungeon.

Oh no! Lights on the horizon of the ocean! Missing fishermen! Strange dreams! Better have the church spend a bunch on some adventurers so they can take a rowboat out to investigate! Once out to see you hear some voices. You land on an island and see a puka chained to a cart. You go down some stairs in to a ruin and maybe fight some zombies. You go in to another room and maybe fight a revenant. And, a 50% chance, you might a 5hd witch. Then there’s three more boring rooms, one of which has a magic gate you can step through. Your weekly evening of torment is now over.

The read-alouds are long. People get bored listening to long read-aloud. Don’t put in long read-alouds. You get three, maybe four sentences tops. The first real adventure page of this is taken up by almost a column or so of read-aloud. The read-aloud is in italics. Don’t do that. Italics, or any weird ass font, is hard on the eyes. You lose your place. It’s a cognitive burden. You can use italics to highlight a word or two, but if you want to offset a decent chunk of text, like read-aloud, then use another method. Shade it. Use white space. Th read-aloud over reveals information. A core feature of an RPG is the back and forth between the players and the DM. How they ask questions and interact with the game world and then the DM responds to that. If your read-aloud over reveals information then you are working against that model. When you tell us, in the read-aloud, what the etching on the inside of the cauldon says then you prevent the players from walking over to the cauldon, the DM describing it. The players examining the cauldron and the DM describing it, and so on. Don’t over reveal in your read-aloud. The read-aloud is very second person focused. “You feel …” or “You find yourself …” This is a symptom of poor writing. The designer is trying to tell the party hat to think. Instead, a better practice is to describe what is going on in way that makes the party think “oh, i feel sad/angry/whatever.” Besides, it seldom takes in to account the fact that the party is invisible, dig through the top of the room with shovels, or some other, now destroyed, implicit assumption that the designer has made. 

The text of the adventure is overwrought. “You feel the sudden pressure of the ocean against this unnatural island as you continue downwards until at last, after a minute, you feel yourself touch the base of this underground ruin” You don’t need this. This focus on feeling. Calling it an unnatural island. Until at last. This is all text that tends to the purple side of prose. Again, we’re trying to make the players think “man, this island is unnatural!” not TELL them that the island is unnatural. You know, showing instead of telling. 

There’s also this tendency to dump in awkward wording. At the end of the zombie room encounter the text tells us “The witch has since placed a terrible spell on the bodies.” This is referring to, I’m 90% sure, the fact that the bodies are now zombies. And, yet, its … trivia? Padding? Or when the party arrives on the beach of the island the text eventually gets around to telling us “There is nothing of value on the coast besides a silver bracelet worth 60 silver crowns.” This is an awkward way of saying there’s a bracelet on the beach. It would have been far, far better to say its sticking out of the sand, or catching a glint of sun or something instead of saying There is nothing on the coast except.” And, then, the famous if/then statements appear. “IF the adventurers open the party.” Which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be IF the party opens the chest, but whatever. Samesies. No if/then statements in adventures. That’s padding. “If they do, the GM will read or show them the following …” 

There’s no real interactivity. The last room has a teleport gate with a book in a different room telling you how to operate it. You might fight some zombies or a revenant. The main baddie, the witch/necromancer, only has a 50% chance of actually showing up in the adventure. That might be fine for longer term play, I guess? But, also, I’m not sure anything takes place here. Talk to the pooka, I guess. Free some air spirits. I don’t know. “ 

There’s not really anything here of any interest.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. There’s no preview but it’s Pay What you Want, so, there/s that.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/496605/moss-stone-steel-the-whispering-lights?1892600