tenfootpole.org

By Ben Gibson 
Coldlight Press
5e/Pathfinder/OSE
Levels 4-6

What’s going on in Morpheus’ villa? We’ve not heard anything from them for weeks, outside of the weeping, and the screams, and deep below, some kind of roaring…

This ten page adventure uses a couple of pages to describe a two level villa with about forty rooms in it. Overly terse, it leans hard toward the Vampire Queen style of writing, or perhaps Tegal, than a modern take.

I think I’m missing something here. This is in the OSR section on DriveThru. It’s listed for Pathfinder, 5e, OSE. The cover says “Written for 5e” on it. There’s one set of stat blocks on the back page that seems an awful lot like 5e. Is the assertion here that 5e/Pathfinder/OSE are enough alike that you can just run with it? I don’t  know. I guess? Something feels wrong here. 

This is a two level “villa crawl.” Some dude hasn’t been heard from and you go in to find him/loot the place/whatever. Blah blah blah, there’s monsters that drain your mental stats to represent ”draining emotions.”  The mechanics are simple, you recover a point a day once the big monster is dead and if you reach zero you turn in a monster. Thusly you’ve got former residents and servants now drained of emotions and monsterized and of course the usual assortment of cultists and others looking to cash in one way or another.

Before I hit the encounters let’s talk map. It fucking SUUUUUUCKs. It’s hand drawn on … beige graph paper? The pencil weight vs the weight of the graph paper lines is too similar. You can’t tell where a wall is and where a door is. Level two, the underground, is better, but level one is all “classic gygax” map with thin walls and everything on top of each other. It’s gotta be legible man, that’s always rule number one. Handdrawn can work, but there’s gotta be enough contract that you can tell what is going on. 

The encounter writing style here is terse. VERY terse. Like, twenty entries to a page terse. “Outer Patio – Both doors wedged shut. Gives a numb feeling, cold.” It just feels odd to me. Like, it’s a ten page adventure and two and a half are devoted to the room keys. That’s just odd. It FEELS like there is some artificial constraint going on here here. Like “facing pages” or something else that Gibson is trying to do that is just NOT translating AT ALL. In another place we get the room description of “Smells of rot, corpse of a slave who trapped both doors

in here wearing a lucky band (one-use, reroll failed mental save)” That’s the entirety of the entry, so I’m not quoting things out of context. (And, I don’t see anything in the intro/other keys which this could play off of.) The corpse could use an extra word. The traps two more words. It’s just sparse to the point of almost being barren. “Passing between these glyph-etched columns drains all emotion during the walk (mental damage).” I get it. I get what he’s going for. Kind of. I’d prefer this just be a little longer with a few more adjectives. I think I can make a case, also, for it being ambiguous in its effect. There ARE rules for draining emotion present in the intro. “Several traps, effects, and spells inflict mental damage, dealing 1 point of damage to a random stat (1d3 for INT, WIS, or CHA) “ So, if we take that, then … the door traps are, what, these magic emotional traps? I didn’t really get that vibe from the servant body thing. And, for the glyph pillars I’m kind of stuck on the word “all”, as in “all emotion.” Does it mean all? As in this is a death trap? Maybe I’ll chill with that at level six. Or, is it referring to one point?

And then there’s the Big Bad, The Below. The stat block is just a stat block. There’s no real description anywhere, just a reference to a spirit of earth and darkness in the intro. 

I don’t want to read too much in to the intent, but it FEELS like this is an experiment to write for 5e/Pathfinder/OSE in a way that makes an adventure possible for all three. And then combine that with this kind of very terse style. Theoretically I think both of these are possible. Nothing REQUIRES a mile long state block for Pathfinder. And it’s all D&D based, after all, so with a little work I think you could do the ruleset thing. Similarly, I think you can get away with those very terse descriptions. I mean, fuck me, Stonehell is the king of this shit, but it leveraged a few pages of context for it’s terse keys. I’m also chill with some abstracted away mechanics, which saves TONS of space. “Poison needle trap-1d6” works for me. But it has to be done in a way that keeps that the enables the evocative. You have to WORK those keys, hard (and possible the layout) to stuff in enough vibe to not have this be a half step more than Vampire Queen. A few more descriptive words. Building a vibe in key after key that kind of leverage each other to create something greater than the individual entries. 

If that was going to happen here, if that was the intent, then the keys needed more work. I get that a kind of “basic outline” is a different kind of structure, but I just don’t see that as being as successful in running a game.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and shows the level one map and keys and intro. Good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/567820/house-of-the-lost-shepherd?1892600

By Marco G. Fossati
Self Published
Dragonbane/OSR
I think this is a BRP system

… hear the tale of Ardana, a mage who defied the Dragon Emperor and vanished with her dark grimoire, The Heart of Ardana. Her ruined tower still stands, touched by strange demonic magic.

This eight page adventure features an old wizards tower and uses four pages to describe eleven rooms on like five floors. Long read-aloud, over-reveals, abstracted treasure. It’s really hard for to describe how “lackof adventure” this is. 

So I’m out with friends and the chick next to me is like “Hey Bryce, where are some places to go to meet people. I want a summer fling.” So I turn to some stranger next to me sitting alone at the next table and am like Hey man, where are some fun places to go in Indy, Chickula is looking to meet men. And he’s like “I’m gay.” Dude, not you, I’m like 30 years older than her, maybe you, as a young fella, know of a place where the the young women might go other than a fucking D&D convention?!  “So he replies: “I know of three jazz clubs …” Dude has missed the point. Oblivious to it all. 

Ok man, let’s GET! IT! On! We are Dragonbaning and I couldn’t be more excited this morning. “At the first light of dawn, in the settlement of Outskirt, the player characters came across a ballad sung by a highly skilled female Bard, named Tymolana.” Oh Jesus h fucking Christ. Fortunately, that’s all there is to this. Except the ballad itself. What do they call that? At the cons? Filcing? Felching? Whatever. It then jumps to “The ancient tower, called The Tower of The Standing Stones, lies at the foot of a hill. The player characters will face a hard journey which lasts at least a full day.” So, you get the “highly filled female bard” sentence, the ballad, and then the whole “it’s a hard journey” sentences. I absolutely thought, given that bard line, we were gonna at least mary sue the chick or at least spend an hour having to deal with some read-aloud, but, no. It just tosses in that “it was a rough journey” thing and you’re at the fucking tower. I don’t understand why any of this is in the adventure. The bard has nothing to do with it. The ballad doesn’t matter. The journey clearly doesn’t matter. And the adventure is like this, time and again. This weirdly specific attention to detail and then, quick, abstract everything!

“A weathered stone tower at the foot of a low hill. Its crown has crumbled and the masonry is cracked and flaking; the whole place looks worn-out. A short run of broad stone steps climbs the slope to a heavy, skewed door. Faint chisel-marks and moss stains can be seen on the lower steps and around the lintel. Windows and fissures reveal that it is a 3-story tower. On the top, some standing stones point to the sky. From time to time, some crackles of purple energy strangely illuminate the surroundings.” Over-reveals in the read-aloud. A read-aloud that is too long. Three stories?! Let’s climb to the top! Windows? We’re in! Never use the front door, kids, when doing & B&E. Does the adventure handle any of this? No, of course not

“A narrow stone corridor with damp, flaking walls. Faded paintings of skeletons line the west wall. One skeleton has an oversized skull with purple eye sockets” Where do YOU think the secret door is? Jesus. Ok, so, when you write a description like this you start at the abstracted layer. There are faded paintings on the walls. As the party asks then you tell them it’s of skeletons and the whole purple eye thing. That’s it. That’s the core fucking mechanic of D&D. The DM describes something and the party responds. Why not just fucking say there’s a secret door behind the purple eyes? Fuck me man. Don’t do this. Please. Don’t write descriptions that over-reveal. Keep the game alive. Keep the core mechanic alive. 

“Treasures: Among the crates and the sacks, the player characters can find treasures equivalent to one treasure card.” I don’t know about you, but I like to show off my treasure cards to the young ladies at the bar. They love that treasure card flash! So, I assume this is some Dragonbane shit, but, still, “treasure card?” The party wants the fabled rose of Amun-Sur or the cape of Verde Tacana, not “a treasure card.” Good treasure makes the party want to keep it and wear it, even if it’s non-magical, instead of melting it down immediately to purchase twelve more torchbearers. Why abstract this? It’s like buying an adventure and opening it to read “Have an adventure” and nothing else. That’s it. That’s a major part of the whole fucking experience. 

And this extends. That fucking ballad, which is like eight short lines long, mentions The hEart f Ardana or some shit like that. A spellbook. You ready for it, the reveal, the object of infinite desire, the thing to which launched a thousand ships, The grimoire called The Heart of Ardana: “Grimoire: The grimoire is the Heart ofArdana. The grimoire is trapped (see below).” That’s it. Nothing else. No more description. Not in the text. Not in an appendix (there are none.) No mention of it or its contents. Shall I compare thee to a Summers Day? “Vecna: Seldom is the name of Vecna spoken except in hushed voice, and never within hearing of strangers, for legends say that the phantom of this once supreme lich still roams the Material Plane. It is certain that when Vecna finally met his doom, one eye and one hand survived. The Eye of Vecna is said to glow in the same manner as that of a feral creature.”

Instead we get backstory. “The demon was conjured by Ardana during the siege as her last defense, but the ritual was interrupted before it was fulfilled. It has been in that state since there and looks to be freed. In order to do so, the ritual lines must be canceled” I DON’T CARE. This nonsense adds nothing to the adventure. And it’s EVERYWHERE. 

This is absolutely one of the most boring adventures I’ve ever seen of everything that actually qualifies as an adventure. And it’s not because there is, like, five bandits in the tower. It’s because of the writing, the mechanics of handling things “Place hands of altar and make a wil save”. It’s weirdly abstracted method of not tellin you ANYTHING about anything to want to know about but still making sure that the room entries are a column long. And that each one has a section about every exit in the room. Except for the ones that DO NOT have a sections about every exit in the room. 

This is boring and inconsistent. 

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

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/567777/the-tower-of-the-standing-stones?1892600

Also, hey, a question for all the eurotrash: I assume each country in europe has a dominant game, aka that Das Schwarze Auge shit. But Italy seems to be the only country in which we get adventures out of. They just crank them out. Something weird in the Italian water, D&D-heavy, or something else going on? Why don’t I see frenchy adventures?

By Phil Martin
Self Published
Knave
Level 2

Come for the frogs.  Leave when it all goes to hell. The small hamlet of Roudenbush moulders on the edge of the Great Cheerless Swamp. Built at a crossroads, the town sustains itself on a mix of merchant caravans stopping for provisions, those that seek treasure in the swamp, and the bounty of the swamp itself. Wooden, thatched-roofed residences and stone municipal buildings make up the town. Two weeks ago, a tide of giant frogs breached the town’s outer wall, causing chaos in the streets until they retreated back into the swamp.

This thirteen page adventure uses three pages to describe seven overland locations and a five floor wizard tower. Napkin notes for an adventure, it exemplifies the IF rather than a THEN. 

My brief foray in to products recommended that live in Itch has ended as I am, and no one else, is completely shocked. I find it FASCINATING in what both people seem to be willing to pay for nothing and in what people are willing to publish. For Money.So, some giant frogs showed in a a town int he swamps and rampaged through. I guess you’re going to do something about it for some reason. There’s some abandoned wizards tower in the swamp with a magnifying glass turning frogs giant. That location is called Frogtown. There’s also a wandering knight called Sir Robin Hell. Get it? 

I’m in a foul fucking mood this morning. This thing isn’t help that any.  I’m not going to waste a lot of time on it. Fourteen pages and it manages to put in just a few with encounters in it. This is nothing more than napkin notes. It’s not an adventure. It’s possibilities, rather than specificity. 

What do we mean by this? There is some rather common tendency to be seemingly afraid of outcomes. It is as if the designer is terrified of actually stating something concrete may happen. In this sense it is more like a hex crawl but without the scope of a traditional hex crawl. You come across a village of 100 gnomes living in a mesa. “The hive-mind seeks the return of myconids that have gone missing, believed taken by the lizard folk as food / offerings. Will exchange fly agaric mushrooms from their grove for myconids that are found and returned “ I’m paraphrasing the set up but the outcome is from the adventure. This is classic “giant hex crawl.” But it’s not “overland journey to the adventure site.” In the starting village there are a couple of NPC’s. The are not specific to the adventure, just a list of NPC’s for the most part. One of them is a guy you can hire, Buckingham Craddlethatch. The second floor of the five floor “end site” tower in the swamp reads, in its entirety “Ruined arcane library and alchemical lab. Most of the tomes are mildewed and illegible, but an intact Chaos Spellbook can be found among them. If Buckingham Cragglethatch is with the party, he finds a book bound in human skin. Perusing it, he will suddenly announce that he must leave immediately. “ 

Those two encounters are representative of most of what is going on in this. They are possibilities. They are the “collapsed stairwell to another level of the dungeon that the dm COULD expand upon if they were so inclined.” In a traditional hexcrawl adventure these are the core of the adventure. It’s a wide open area that the party brings themselves to in order to exploit. Contract this to the standard “overland adventure” portion of adventures where to travel to get to an adventuring site. These are instead dangers and Lair, with associated lair treasures. And then contrast these two types of things to the keys found in most adventures. Obstacles and encounters to overcome. Those three encounter types serve much different purposes, influenced by the scope of the adventure and environment. 

The muddling of the streams here results in adventure that is nothing but napkin notes for a small adventure.

No more itch for awhile.

It’s Name Your Price at itch, with a suggested price of $5.

https://daseinphil.itch.io/hell-comes-to-frogtown

By Brendan Barnett
Self Published
Generic/Universal
"Lower Levels"

If legends of the Golden Gargoyle are true it could mean infinite wealth for any who possess it. Trouble is, nobody has a clue where to find it.  That is, until a goblin falls out of the sky with a pouch of gold dust and a map to a hidden cave, high in the mountains. What you can make out amongst the blood splatters is very promising.

This forty page adventure uses sixteen pages to describe eight rooms in a low-conflict cave full of goblins. It’s meh, mostly because it uses forty pages to describe eight rooms in a low-conlift cave full of goblins. 

Great looking little pdf. And I assume print book? Nice cover. Pretty little isometric map inside that is itself an art piece, like you might see as a two page special insert in Dragon or Mad Magazine. Nice illustrations and a layout style that looks pretty with its use of word color and boxes and highlights and so forth. And not garish, in spite of its use of pinks and purples. Nice accomplishment there!

Did you want to buy a coffee table book? Cause this is an awfully nice looking coffee table book.

It’s just real hard to take this seriously as an actual adventure given the page count to encounter ratio. Forty pages. Eight rooms. In spreads, of course. What is it that the designer wanted to do? DId they want to write an adventure or did they want to make a great looking book? Room one. This is all of the text on the first page of room one: A large rectangular chamber. In the centre a stone gargoyle statue sits atop a tall pillar with the word ‘umop’ roughly carved into it. The word ‘uado’ is scratched above each of two sealed stone doors to the north and west. The ceiling (30′ up) is covered in spikes. The floor is littered with broken bones. Searching the floor yields 10gp in assorted coins and a silver ring (40gp). It bears the image of a human figure immersed in a river.” There’s some line breaks in there. The second page has open and down in normal and reverse print. Yeah, the words are mirrors and one opens the doors while the other does an anti-gravity. Two fucking pages. Two fucking pages for this. And this is the norm for the adventure. Simple rooms, spread out over two pages.

We can, I suppose, ignore this. We can simply accept that the designer decided two pages per room. What we get, then, is eight (or nine, for an A/B room) are some relatively simplistic rooms. The interactivity here is basic. I’m pretty sure there’s one ‘fight’, with Vampire Kinght[sic] Armour. Nobody present really cares that you are nosing around in the caves. I can’t help but think that this could have been much better i it were larger. The goblins, cultists, bats, tomb, all with zones in the dungeon, expanding the thing to something with more going on and room for the adventure to breathe. 

The language used, for the room descriptions. Is rather plain. A large rectangular room. THis is not the height of language use to evoke imagery. The exception is the isometric map. It’s a pretty great art piece, harkening back to all of those Bat Cave and Hall of Justice isometric pieces from comics, or, the Starship Warden piece I have hanging on my call. Very evocative, but not exactly something you can run from. (There is a more traditional map as well, to run from, the isometric piece not being the most clear on room connections.) 

I can’t say it’s true or not, but it certainly FEELS like the isometric map was the starting point of this adventure. As if it were created and then the rooms followed on. Like the adventure, proper, was secondary to this and/or inspired by the art piece. That doesn’t have to be bad, but in this case the adventure just doesn’t feel worked enough. 

It remains interesting to me the many ways that the various subcultures produce bad adventures. Starting from bland, or assembly line, or wordy, or mini combats, or rote, or art, or layout, or, or, or.

https://pocket-sized-perils.itch.io/grotto-of

This is $5, Aussie, at Itch.io

By John Webb
Self Published
OSR/5E
Level 2

[…] Years later, a band of opportunistic brigands took shelter in the manor ruins. In the depths below, their leader, Halren Pike, discovered the dagger and fell under its influence. Compelled by its will, he now seeks out elves and half-elves, testing their blood in search of a surviving bastard heir to House Thalanor. Though the bandits themselves are not uniformly cruel, their leader’s fixation has led to kidnappings, imprisonment, and worse. Some captives are released after being “tested.” Others are not so fortunate.

This twenty page adventure uses about seven pages to present sixteen rooms, six above and the rest below, in the ruins of a manor occupied by bandits. It’s a tactical deathtrap as your small band charges in to a mesatop fortress with a lot of lookouts and bandits present. It’s a raid, with nothing going on beside that. 

I dunno know. Either the designer asked for a review or it was in the OSR category trying to Puffery its way in to a few more sales. Ok, so, a long time ago there was an elf noble house that was mean to its subjects. People rise up and the lord kill himself and his family when things go south. His god is pissed at that. (So, you can be a despot and have a chill god but killing yourself and family so you won’t be taken is just a step too far.) Bandits move in a long time later. Their leader finds a dagger, cursed, that makes him test elves and half-elves by cutting them to see if they are the heirs to the elf noble house. This entire nonsense of stuff I find lame, with despotic elf nobles and the like. Man, just make them human. The whole “Demihumans are humans with pointy ears” thing is kind of lame. Where’s Jorune when you need it?  

Back to this, the designer tells us, up front: “With a mere sixteen rooms, this adventure’s complexity lies not in a vast sprawl, but more so in the behavior of its inhabitants and the unpredictability of its emergent narrative. Will the party fight, bluff, negotiate, or sneak their way into the lower level? Will they seek a peaceful resolution, or simply kill all in their path? Will they rescue prisoners at the expense of time and stealth, or leave them to an unjust fate? These are the questions that must be answered, Gamemaster, over the course of play. Alas, I cannot prescribe them nor would I, even if I were so capable! “  Just to be clear, none of that really exists in any practical manner.  I mean, yes, there are prisoners to rescue, but they are not really troublesome other than wanting to leave, just like all prisoners freed are. Nothing mentioned in that section is anything other than the normal course of play. Nothing special is going on. In fact, there’s a lot less special in this adventure than in most adventures. I don’t know. I guess if you play Napoleonic Miniatures and someone introduces a dungeon it might be remarkable, so, if you play D&D in hardcore 4e tactics mode then “Look! You can roleplay also!” might be interesting? 

“Wood Door: AC 13, 18 Hit Points, and immunity to Poison and Psychic damage.” Oh, how I have missed this nonsense. There’s nothing funnier than then when pay-per-word padding becomes the de rigueur standard because people grow up with it. But doctor… I am Pagliacci!. And, of course, married to that are explicit illumination notes in each room. This is so dumb. I’m not sure who these things are being written for that this kind of garbage has to be included. Well, no, I guess I stated it above. It’s written for someone paying by the word. But the designer writing THIS adventure doesn’t know that. They think that’s how you write an adventure. The sins of PF Changs Pad Thai run deep. That’s not real Pad Thai, but you don’t know that. Once you have the real thing you’ll never be fooled again. 

This is a frontal assault. There are nineteen bandits present, but six start not-at-home and return 10-40 minutes after the party starts fucking shit up. There’s not a super good description of the outside ruins environs, but from the map it looks like a cliff face with a landing on it ten or twenty feet up with fortress ruins on it. There’s a broad stair case up running parallel to the cliff face that then turns 90 degrees to run perpendicular to in to it. There are the remains of three watchtowers on the cliff “landing” ruins. There’s a bandit in the towers watching the approaches. There’s guard dogs sniffing shit out. The bandits have planted shriekers on the “unused” cliff edges as an alarm bell. There’s also a patrolling bandit, watching specifically the approach of the stairs, walking along the cliffside it is on looking for intruders. I’m afraid this is a tough nut to crack, even for my “burn it down and reroute the river method of murder-hoboing. There is a 10% chance a guard is asleep. Yeah? And, there is a secret door in. Right in playing view of all of the guards, on the stair landing where it turns 90 degrees. You gonna have to search for it and then make a history check at DC14 to recall the password. I don’t see how you do this under the guards’ noses. This all seems a bit much at level two. Well, for anything other than a pitched battle. Which is fine, but, it looks like a death trap to me with that approach. You could silence the shriekers … if you knew about them? And had access to level two spells? The secret door doesn’t seem reasonable. I guess that leaves bluffing your way to the top? I don’t know man. This feels like a hack … with the odds stacked against the party.

Inside it’s more of a hack, although not quite in the same “its a trap!” set up. There IS a curse you can break. You need to make an offering to a goddess of the correct type. Then commune with here. Then make a DC14 check. Then you’ll get a scroll that of remove curse. Then you gotta figure out that there IS a curse on the bandit leader and use the scroll. Yeah! Now they are just a normal group of bandits instead of a group of bandits that also “test” elves and half-elves by cutting them. Uh. Ok? Or, just stab the bandits? Oh no! The bloodthirsty demon has acne! Good thing you have him some zit creme, now he can get on with his reign of terror AND look good for his portraits! 

None of this shit makes much sense, and, it’s just a hack. I have no idea why it is in the OSR section of DriveThru. Usually that means Shadowdark, but not this one. I mean, it’s basically just a 4e adventure. And you KNOW that’s not a compliment. More minis combat min-maxing then RPG.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview gets you eight real pages, including some keys. Good preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/564113/the-ruins-of-manor-thalanor?1892600

By Operant Game Lab
Self Published
OSR/Rovers & Riches
Level ??

Even the most ignorant children know the realm is divided by a massive, transparent wall. Everything outside the wall is “normal.” Everything that lies inside is “wrong.” The “wrong” lands are called Zu. Today, we take a field trip into strangest Zu…

This 35 page decently-sized hexcrawl adventure presents a bunch of hexes in Zu, a weirdo land full of bizarre things going on in a fantasy/post-apoc/PoMo mashup. The hexes can be interesting and are certainly creative, but they lack tension.

Let’s call this a farcical Rifts setting. A giant glass wall separates the Normal lands from the Weirdo place beyond the wall, which everyone calls Zu. There’s a break in the wall at Happy Town, to let you in. Tonally, a giant mecha made of junk is on the wanderers table and is described as “It powered by a dozen subjects running on human treadwheels. Six troopers (p. 24) with scoped rifles float from balloons lashed to the giant’s shoulders, poised to rain down leaden death.” 

This thing has a niche audience and it’s not me. And I mean this in two regards. First, the setting. It might be closest to that 4e D&D version of Gamma World, the Paranoia Zap of gamma worlds. Those things like Troika and Mork Borg come to mind as well.There is a strong element of absurdity here, maybe even Theater of the Absurd if I get a little meta. There’s an old school with a janitor in it and a teddy bear that needs stories read to it. Or, a water slide aqueduct trickling water to an empty pool where cleric chicks covered in sponge suits dole out the water to bedraggled people standing in line ala Fury Road. Happy Town itself is ruled by a little twilight zone Anthony with a wand of transmutation who turns people in to stuff if she doesn’t get her way, so the people there only make candy and cakes and force smiles here in Peaksville. Tonally, you’re going to have to be ok with this kind of content being your game if you want to use this, and I suspect the more niche sides of the OSR are where this is aimed. You not gonna be happy with this if you don’t like zaniness.

I’m struggling to find a way to frame this second point. There is, in my mind, a difference in game play in certain systems. D&D, of the classic OSR style, leans more towards a game. You are typing to stay alive and level. There’s an inherent tension in that, and staying alive and leveling is ‘winning’ at D&D. It lends itself to campaign play well since there is continuity, your character. This is one of the reasons that ‘museum adventures’ are so frustrating to me; you are actively discouraged to interact, which works against what you are playing. Other RPGs fall more in to an Activity. Baron Muchausen is the classic example. Your enjoyment comes from something different. And that, I think, is where this adventure lies.

The hexes in this have two general types of encounters. First there are some filler hexes, making up about half of the hexes. Short, with only two-three sentences, they provide some flavor. A hex full of wines, walking through them wakes them up, and they feel the party members and pat them on the back before opening up to allow them to pass. Freaky? Absolutely. But nothing else going on.

The second type of hex, representing the other half of the hexes, take about a page or so each. There is more text and whats happening is more involved. But, i would assert, to the same end. There’s nothing really TO DO. Oh, you can get involved, but why? Touching things and getting involved brings trouble. And there’s not really anything to exploit, as one might in a traditional hex crawl game. If you were just trying to interact to have a good time then you’re chill, yeah, freaky things will happen. But no one is going out out their way to gack you (other than perhaps the wanderers) and there’s not really treasure to loot to exploit, at least in a traditional sense. Some of the hooks DO send you on the hunt for something. Happy Town wants you to go get a candle. Ok, so, I guess we can explore and look for that. SOme hexes ARE mentioned in other hexes, but they are not really interconnected, either explicitly or, I would assert, implicitly, in that you can, say, break the dam in hex X to flood the orc caves in hex Y, or some other wacky scheme that the party were to come up with. You enter a hex, have a wacky encounter, and move on to repeat.

For the more Activity-based RPG”s this is going to be a great adventure. I think it serves everything they need to get in to wacky situations. But for a more campaign/game based game I’m not sure its overly useful. (Not that you can’t campaign Mork Borg or Troika or DCC, but I don’t think it works out that way in practice.) 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. PWYW and then preview is the entire thing, so good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/483434/field-trip-to-zu?1892600