By Greg Ferris Talaraska Generic/Universal Level ... 3?
The hills making up the Archian border with Caledos are pocked with dozens of abandoned mines. These leave a lasting reminder of the rush for silver in the years prior to the rise of the Graun Empire. Without drawing much attention from local officials, a nebulous consortium of investors has been purchasing old dig sites throughout the region. The mine at Mt. Morris was one such purchase. About 12 months ago, a group of ten men reopened the dig, which locals were sure was folly. After spending a couple of weeks repairing the base camp, the team resumed the dig. None but the foreman had any previous mining experience. Most of the “miners” were farmhands or former members of the stevedores’ guild. None were strangers to hard work, but they were a motley crew to be certain. However, the strangers who came and offered them the job assured them that they would be paid handsomely. The past year had been difficult. The team had failed to find any substantial amount of ore and they often assumed that their work would soon come to an end. Despite this, the paymaster and his retinue of guards would appear every month and the dig continued.
This nine page adventure presents eleven rooms in an old mining camp & camp that has been “overrun” with undead. It’s pretty basic, with not much going on.
I’m not super sure how this made it on my list. It must have either been in the OSR section on DriveThru or a request? I don’t think I see a request, so it must have been in the OSR section at DriveThru at one time, even though it’s labeled Generic/Universal. The marketing blurb advertises it as a flesh out adventure hook, but the adventure, proper, lists itself as an adventure. I don’t know, some way of framing it not having stats? I don’t think that matters. In any event, it has more life to it than the vast majority of adventures and even manages to present more rooms than the number of pages in the adventure. How far have we fallen to have that be some standard of success? What’s a spud to do? Anyway, ignoring most of the intro there’s a small adventure hidden in here that is relatively inoffensive. There’s not much interesting about it either, but, hey, it’s 2026 and I’m in a morose mood because somehow an uninteresting adventure with eleven rooms in nine pages somehow is better than most if the garbage I review. So, no stats and no treasure, just some “place treasure appropriate to your system” notes here and there.
There are some pretext reasons here for exploring, nothing very interesting. Hired to do blah blah blah, or local priest has visions blah blah blah. Getting to the site you find four outbuildings and then seven rooms in the mine. There are bodies about, partially eaten. A stable has horse bodies, and one stall padlocked with a living horse in it and extra water that has run out. One of the buildings has a survivor barricaded inside of it with a confusing story that doesn’t make sense. The idea is that the party will use the stable clue, as well as another clue in the bunkhouse, to understand that the dude knows more than he is saying and that they’ll press him for details. The details are not altogether interesting given the small size and stand along nature of the adventure combined with the generic/unival vibe. He was hired to run a mining crew, looking for a diary in a buried complex. He did some research on his own and found out that the dude was a necromancer and used animated bodies as guards. When the miners found a wall he gave his horse some water and locked himself in, fearing the worst. The miners break in, undead get out, the worst happens, everyone dies but him and his horse. It’s an interesting way to present a clue, without having to resort to a diary or monologue. And by interesting” I mean “correct.” We get to see the results of actions taken in the past that help explain the now, rather than listen to a droning monologue. The players gets to use their brains to put things together. Or not.
The rooms inside the mine are uneventful. Generic alter room. Generic crypt. “There are 8 sarcophagi in this room. Four of these are open and empty. The remaining four are closed and hold inanimate skeletons. There is a small stone altar along the western wall. Beside it rests an open chest filled with gold and any treasures that would be appropriate for your game. “ Nothing really evocative about them, inside the mine or out. Nothing really stands out. A few ghouls/ghasts. Entries are padded out with things like “As the party moves in this direction, they are assailed by [an odor.]” There’s like five pages of intro to go with the four pages of room keys. There’s just nothing to this. “First, do no harm”, the slogan goes. And, for the most part, that was accomplished here. Sure, some padding, a decent amount of it. But, also, the rooms are still relatively terse and easy to scan. There’s still no way I would run this, there’s just nothing to it, but it IS still better than most adventures because it IS doing no harm.
By Kirk Kahoe Crimson River Games LLC Generic/Universal Levels: Any
Warning! This is as close as you can get to being a Heartbreaker without actua;;y being a Heartbreaker.
An eternal horror haunts the woods, reaping an endless harvest of woe from those foolish or desperate enough to travel through them. Tired and injured, the party will have to not only face an endless onslaught from the horror but fatigue and madness as well, for there is no sleep in the Old Man’s realm other than the sleep of death.
This 169 page adventure is an overwritten railroad in which the best solution is leaving the table to have explosive bloody diarrhea in your hosts bathroom and then going home. Ok, that was mean. It’s a 169 pages of railroaded atmosphere in which you have no choices to make as a player and the DM must wade through an excruciating amount of text to run even the simplest encounters.
Page twenty of the intro text tells the DM that they should Describe, not define and then follows this statement up with “A shambling and decaying humanoid creature that stinks of ammonia is scary. Labeling this creature “Zombie” and adding specific statistics is a game mechanism. It is thus no longer a scary monster but a set of numbers to crunch and probabilities to consider.” This is 100% correct. Not only does it follow the show and don’t tell mantra, but it adds that air of mystery that RPGs thrive on. I’m a big big fan of this attitude and it bolstered my spirits seeing it.
Oh! Oh! I forgot! You can get Hep! That’s right! Hep! That’s BAD AZZ! “So, what did I get? Another plague? Yellow squirting zombie fever or something?” “No, you got Hep.” Fucking christ ma! That’s great! I love it! Next time you roll through a village you find out 15% of them are dead from cholera. That’s nicely visceral and I do love a reaction from the players. Which, I might note, is exactly what the adventure is trying to do with its horror.
Great, I’ve said something nice, even if I did include the backhanded “page twenty” reference.
There’s a dude who is the only worshipper of a god and he’s constructed this obtuse parallel reality death trap in a forest to select sacrifices worthy of his god. As the adventure tells us “Due to the depth of role-playing required to deliver the Old Man and the complexity of fatigue’s impact on gameplay …” It’s a test/challenge dungeon. That’s it. 169 pages of test/challenge dungeon. You know how those things work. It’s an alternate reality blah blah blah, you can’t leave, blah blah blah, he controls everything blah blah blah. “In the event (which happens often) that the Old Man (or his copies) are somehow killed in any of the encounters before the final encounter at his hovel, he is instead fully healed and moved to the subsequent encounter.” Cause hes wearing this fucking ring that brings him back. Worry not, DM afraid the railroad will stop, “In all cases, the presence of the ring should not be noted due to the grime and darkness until the last encounter.” Ain’t nothing like having no choices that really brings home the immersion. Time and again we see this. This reliance on a test/challenge environment as a pretext for all of the setup the baddie has done. Time and again we see these mechanical contrivances, like the ring, used as an excuse to justify an effect. Time and again we see these railroads as an attempt to tell a story and get an effect. You can’t fucking do it that way. One of the keys to a roleplaying game is the ability to make choices. Once you take that away you might as well be watching a movie with a predetermined outcome. Sure, I can roll a die. Will the DM let me die or force me to suffer through the entirety of their story? Players check out when they can’t do anything. When they can’t make a decision. Sure, there’s a time and a place for “the RPG adventure as an Activity” instead of “the RPG adventure as a Game”, but, Baron Munchhausen did this a long long time ago.
In spite of the adventures words implying it’s a show don’t tell piece, it relies on mechanics and read-aloud to bring the horror, telling instead of showing. A fatigue mechanic. Mountains and mountains and mountains of read-aloud. No one wants to listen to your half page read-aloud man. You don’t set a mood by using a lot of read-aloud. Yes, the writing should be evocative, but it should not be lengthy. You get a few sentences, three or four, and that’s it. You need to really work those sentences to bring the effect, the impact you are going for. Yes, it is not easy. It is, I think, the hardest part of adventure writing. More is not better. Player attention drifts. You make it harder on the DM to focus. You can’t use mechanics to fill in either. Sanity, in CoC, is just another pull of hit points, campaign hit points, as to say. It is up to the designer to put something together that FEELS like fatigue without relying on mechanics to accomplish that.
So, yeah, railroad. The adventure starts at a little trade town. Caravans leaving, to go over the pass. Wanna join? SURE you don’t want to join? Ok, so, no, you decide to wait at the trade town over the winter? Ok, then bandits keep attacking. Eventually you see over a 100 bandits about to attack and the entire town, whats left, flee in to the hill. Along the caravan route. Heh. So, yeah, you’re going on the adventure. Then you’re in the alternate reality shit where the dude controls everything and you’ve got exactly one path to go on. Just follow it and make skill check after skill check as: there’s a rock fall. There’s a bridge collapse. The wagon is stuck. Blah blah blah. I don’t know, there’s about fifty locations, between the overland and like a manor and such.
There is an EXTENSIVE amount of information presented for each area. There’s a section for environment, then a section for topography. Then a boxed text section for the read-aloud, then a section for monsters/traps, then a section for encounter mechanics, then a section for notes, and a section for treasure, and a section for game master notes. There is EXTENSIVE repetition, which is great because with so much information, a long paragraph or more for each section, the area is then spread across multiple pages. There is NO WAY a DM can keep this shit together for a meaningful encounter. And this stuff is present for almost every area. Time and again, DO NOT use such a rigid format. Leave shit out if you don’t need it. Do NOT do shit like tell us the door, walls, light, smell, taste for each and every room. The purpose of formatting is to help bring clarity and help a DM when they scan the adventure looking for pertinent information. Used in mechanical fashion though, as it is here, is instead obfuscates and works against the goals it is trying to achieve.
It’s just weird, the way things come together in this. In one read-aloud section it says “They have knowledge of the mountains and what supplies are needed, and they can provide basic information about the mountain road. This sound slike DM notes, not read-aloud. And that’s not an isolated example, I’m not cherry picking. In another section there is a Treasure heading that reads “Treasure – Supplies from the abandoned wagons (See Treasure section).” Isn’t THIS the treasure section? (Turns out, no. It’s _A_ treasure section. FLipping to an appendix we can find a Treasure appendix with a listing for “Wagon Contents” which is full of mundane supplies.)
It’s just crammed with so much extraneous and repetitive information. And then the encounters are so humdrum. Oh, make a skill check! Ok, get a fatigue. Yawn. The final battle with th dude is anticlimactic as fuck. He attacks, eventually you drive him off. You find him in his hut and kill him there. End. Given this is 170 pages long and like almost fifty railroad encounters I would have expected just a little more in the way of flavour than a couple of sentences saying “he attacks you.” The horror element here just doesn’t work, hardly anywhere in the adventure. Mechanics and read-aloud doesn’t do it. The Hep C cant save an overwritten adventure in which the horror element is reduced to mechanics.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first seventeen pages. Which doesn’t show any of the encounters because there’s a LONG intro and background info and so on and so on and so on. A preview needs to show some of the encounters so a buyer can make an informed decision about the purchase. That’s the purpose of the preview.
The Delta has long been a dangerous place. Most citizens tend not to stray too far from the port city of Mirkell. When times were not so tough, barges, caravans and other travelers braving the wilds of the province would be well staffed with armed guards. However, as coin purses lightened, the extra expense couldn’t always be justified. Opportunists, both men and monsters, take every chance for an easy payday, or an easy meal.
This 120 page adventure presents a small region with about ten adventuring sites (taking about forty pages), a couple of towns, and a few other locations. I love the premise and setup of the region but the core dungeon locations are beset with clumsy writing and lacks a certain life to the encounters.
Ok, look, I’ll get to the review, but I need a moment to diatribe first. In this we’ve got a new king, a Good Guy” “He established a parliament, limiting his own powers, and fully recognized the citizens of the Delta as members of the kingdom.” Kings don’t do this. Well, they do, but only when their barons have quite strong armies and are not pleased with the king. That’s just not what the job of king entails, giving away your absolute rights derived from god. But, then, also “Recently talks of secession have been heard in the Delta. King Nicolai will not abide such murmurings.” Well king dipshit, what the fuck does your parliment have to say about that? After all, you ceded rights to them. We’re gonna ignore this little bit of contradictory realpolitik for the rest of the review; it’s really the only truly dumb ass thing the adventure says. Not being internally consistent breaks immersion. Pick a direction and go, for real reasons that are relatable, not this scattershot shit. But, again, not a big deal, which is why I’m leading off with it and ranting about it ?
The really strong point to this adventure is the factions and their timelines. You’ve got loyalists and successionists, anti-humans, researchers, nihilist death cult, and the Old Guard Rich & Powerful. Oh, look, the Teamsters (The Delta works best when we say Union Yes!) want more money and better conditions. Oh, look, the old boys club isn’t happy about changes to the status quo. Oh, and some agtators who think the Delta would be better without a remote king. And the kings men who disagree. Oh, and now there’s a death cult type thing mixing in with crowds and throwing firebombs, literally and metaphorically. This amps up feelings on all sides. And mixed in to this we’ve got some rc town assholes and dedicated researchers and the usual array of bandits. There’s a rough timeline of events that can kind of help set the tone during the game, such as “A police force, only answering to the Noble Stewards, is established in Mirkell. The Secessionists have a protest outside of Town Hall in Mirkell. The Cult of Saint Hideo will begin attacking and burning barges on the river. The Segregationists will begin importing mass amounts of arms and armor.” This isn’t a set of specific events but it does outline the general situation and the vibe. I SUSPECT thats enough. Just reading that I can think of a lot of things I can drop in to a game as little side things, and that’s generally what I’m looking for from a designer: enough to get ME going to create and drop in things. We can see crackdowns, brutality both accidental and intentional, accidents that are real and imagined. What do you do when a crate of bows spills out of a wagon? “Uh, it’s for fishing” says the fisherman hailing it. It’s a great little set up thing and a good way to use a death cult. “Yeah, there were death cult agitators in the crowd.” “Yeah, that’s what you WOULD say! Death cult! As if!” I love it when the party explores “Big Als Fireworks & Open Barrel of Gasoline Emporium.”
There are other tidbits here and there that are great as well. There’s a rival adventuring party that shows up form time to time in the wanderers table and in other places. “They are always kind and helpful unless given reason not to be. They travel with their mule, Bee,and little treasure (hoard type D).” Their mule, Bee. That’s a nice touch. Good grounding. And good job sprinkling them in to places to give the world that lived in feel. Good design. And, here’s a magic item “The Golden Eel Mouthpiece An exquisite, hollow golden eel. When held in the mouth, the wielder can breath underwater and swim twice as fast as usual. However, these effects only work in saltwater.” That feels real, yeah? The description, proper, is quite short but great, and while it mentions an effect it doesn’t belabour mechanics. Great magic item!
There are a few things that seem out of place, before I get to my major issue.
There are these graves of saints scattered around. Maybe twenty of them? Basically if you show up and do something for them then you get a magic item or boon or something. It feels a little … I don’t know, video-gamey? In that they are all basically the same mechanic? Or slight variations on the same mechanic? It’s like you’re touching all the totems on the map in Far Cry 19. And, then, one of them has a very specific morality test they ask you. “A poor beggar child is caught stealing bread. He is arrested by the town guard and hung for his crimes. Who committed wrong here? The child? The guard? The hangman?” Bonus test: this is a saint of the god Zakon, who believes that “cultural tradition and legal authority are inherently holy.” Make a guess. Did you guess? I SAID FUCKING GUESS! The child and guard are wrong but the hangman acted justly. I guess there’s room for interpretation in the holy tenets, even among the sainted of Zakon.
All of the intro and supporting information (and there is a lot of it, given that only about forty pages are dungeon) in this is either easily ignored or pretty decent. I wish, perhaps, it were trimmed back. A LOT. But, it is what it is and it’s generally inoffensive when its not great.
The dungeons, though, are something else. Maybe, I don’t know, about twenty rooms in each of the ten dungeon locations? There’s something weird going on with the entries, but, also, it’s hard to point to what exactly. Here’s an example “Bloody Hall The scrabble on the floor here
makes quiet movement nearly impossible. The stalactites here are smaller and are not dripping.
There is a bloody Drag mark here, leading to Room 4. There is also a Pile of stones along the northern wall.” (Bold has more information) So, this should be pretty chill. Bloody drag marks. The text above is the “at a glance’ information, so, not exactly read-aloud. It’s just … blah. “There is a …” repeated multiple times. The tites are smaller and not dripping. “Here makes quiet movement …” I don’t know. Here is a blah Here is a blah Here is a blah. Here is not a blah. The core here, though, I think you can recognize from what I’ve pasted in, is not bad. Hard to be quite, tites, and bloody tracks. Somehow, though, the language, and the follow up language, diminishes the interactivity in te room. Or the evocative nature? It’s weird. I’m not sure I see this too often.” It’s like having a decent idea and putting it down on paper in the most uninspiring manner possible while the concept still comes through. It’s not padded out in a meaningless way, maybe just in an … ignorant way? As in the designer didn’t know a better way to phrase what the room looked like in a more dynamic manner? And room after room is like this. The neato things going on are just so … BLEH. The follow on, for the bolded words, are fine, and the formatting is fine. It’s just all so, I don’t know, both padded out with pad phrasing and then, uninspiring? The formatting is fine. The interactivity is varied. I just have NO desire.
The dungeons, and the adventure might be fine but I’d rather run something else. It’s all just cumbersome. The NPC’s are listed in the back of the book, and are relatively terse, but there’s no way I’m flipping back there to run them. The dungeon are ok, but lack enthusiasm. Even something like the stricture of the regions and adventures. There are hooks for the ten adventures, or, perhaps, ways to get involved. I’d just list them all up front, rather than right in front of the adventure, as shit going non in town or the village or something. Everything all at once, or tied to the timeline. Cut a shit load of text and instead focus on putting the NPC’s together with the timeline together with the hooks, to make the entire regional flow together better as a cohesive flow.
This is, I think, the designers first real adventure/publication. And, given that, it shows. The rooms are not overly written, while the regions is perhaps a little excessively written. The rooms ARE padded out with simple language padding while the regional data has some decent specificity here and there. A strong focus on specificity in the region, trimming a lot of the boilerplate fantasy stuff, and reworking the rooms in the dungeons to eliminate padded out phrasing and bring in more adjective and specificity would make this pretty decent.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $7.77. The preview is 25 pages and mostly fluff. Page 19/14 has the factions and their timeline, which is the best of the more interesting possibilities with this. It should really have had a few dungeon pages as well.
When the One God’s faith washed over the world, the Old Gods of the forest fought back. They fought back with fire, with blood and with ice, and with every season. And they lost. Last night, the cathedral built on the site of their defeat burned, unearthing forgotten stairs… A journey begins, from that unholy crypt through a hellish fairy realm, to the deadly, blasphemous truth.
This 80 page adventure presents a recurring abbey location for your game world that turns in to a complex dungeoncrawl with campaign ramifications. It is deep, full of interactivity, and maddening in its presentation. This will require study and is worth it.
SPOILERS. Have I ever done that before? If you think you might play in this then maybe bail out now and try and get your DM to use this. I don’t think that’s my audience, but, hey.
To give you an overall vibe here, there’s a little designers note at the beginning that finishes up with “This was done for three reasons: its obvious, hegemonic role in sanctioned and unsanctioned syncresis; the fact that it is also a formidable folklore machine; and because it is, as a white-label concept, familiar enough (at least through parody) that most referees can adapt it. Other themes include how beliefs inform communities and societies, how crises of faith impact these groups, and how individual interests impact beliefs.” And then it goes on to actually finish up with “Above all else, this adventure is about solving problems, casting spells, talking to and bashing the skulls of freaky little guys of all sizes, genders, and numinosity.” Fuck yeah man! A designer that knows what D&D is. Let’s raid that keep on the borderlands! And it accomplishes that first goal, the complexities of the themes, while still keeping true to stabbin and lootin. Further, the adventure is noted as being suitable for your level eight party OR a level zero funnel. I’m not so sure completely about the funnel concept, given a few of the encounters and the wanderers/events table, but I think that also gives you an indication of the vibe here. You can explore and accomplish things without necessarily having to turn to high level magics or stabbing everything in sight. Maybe. 1d6 boars that can spit firewalls from both ends is a rough encounter for wanderers. But the overall exploration vibe is there, as well as, perhaps, a real world vibe. In our day to day lives you don’t get randomly attacked on the way to the grocery and maybe make polite conversation along the way.
The first twenty pages of this presents a small abbey. The intent here is that the abbey be a part of your game world and exist until the party reaches a level in which you want to run the core of the adventure. It’s a rural site, the home base of the highest honored paladins of the main religion, The One God. That’s unusual, and people acknowledge it, including the other holy orders who are not always pleased that they play second fiddle to this little abbey in the role of the honored. And yet the abbey is grounded and down to earth, a rural place, not teeming with super-powered clerics and paladins. Grab a heal, a cure disease, maybe a raise dead for the recently departed. It’s a resource for the party to take advantage of. When you’re ready, the church burns one night, which kicks off the adventure/dungeon portion of this thing. Again, as notes by the designer, this is targeted right at the beginning of domain play, with the events then transpiring kicking the world, almost certainly in to a kind of religious schism for which to spice up the domain play elements the party should just be getting in to. Broodmother Skyfortress indeed! Excellent use of the right kind of thing at the right kind of time in a campaign to leverage.
Here’s your spoiler. The One God is a foreign god, who showed up long ago to become the dominant religion. At some point the religion reaches this neck of the woods and comes in to conflict with the two primary deities here, the autumn/spring equinox gods. They did the Persophne thing a while ago and did a merge/dual citizenships thing. They lay a trap, which involves perpetual suffering for one of them, and depose the one god, with the remaining solstice god taking his place, imitating him and stealing his worshipers faith/power. And that was done at the site of this little abbey, and no one remembers it except as the site of a battle where the One God defeated the solstice gods/fey (who had a strong fey/pagan/old world influence.) The discovery that the one god is the solstice god, and perhaps the freeing of the original one god, is going to cause the religious schism of the primary religion in the game world and a whole thirty years war thing with people splitting in their allegiances. The adventure isn’t taking sides, and the One God thing, and rites, play on the complexity of catholicism and its rites and rituals, but it’s not rooted in any real world religion beyond that comparison. Once the church burns down you get access to the first dungeon, which leads to the second. The first is the place where the two solstice gods transferred power back and forth twice a year, with some rituals involved. This has some stronger State Church theming with the rituals clearly being all Wicker Man and their obviousness to more pagan religions in a dungeon with the trappings of an established church with hierarchy. The second dungeon is in the fey realm of the suffering god, a kind of fiery portion of the fey realm, with the theming being more fey-like.
The first twenty pages support the abbey as a location in your lower level campaign world. A brief overview of the immediate environs around the place, some description of the abbey compound buildings and church (Loot!) and more importantly the people there. The monks, the paladins, some lay people who work there and eventually some stone mason who show up a few months before the fire. These NPC’s are relatively terse written with some little details that help them fit in to a game. Emphasis on fit in to the game. Trivia is avoided and instead the emphasis is on detail that could help add color to the game. One chick, who has emotional blowup, has this “This time, her father got engaged to her childhood friend, two months after her mother’s passing” or “She’s likely to fall in love with the next stranger who shows her kindness.” Or, for one of the principal monks, in full “Father Batty- Second in the Order, the prevost is formally in charge of the cathedral, as the bishop’s proxy. Hawk-like features and slick platinum hair, he moves quickly and wastes no words. He plans to become a bishop, and will do whatever is needed to nip any budding scandal.” I think we can see how his little details would play in to both the lower-level interactions before the fire and then, once the fire happens, the ensuing potential for schism. The church descriptions might be a little long, but their heart is in the right place and the NPC’s descriptions are all quite solid. The events table, along with some rumor tables, are nice little petty dramas and things that help the abbey come alive. A wedding! Or “ Frau Gavarn may be seen, sneaking a bowl of hot soup to Brother Lefftish. “ Someones drunken brother shows up and may punch someone. IThey are great!
One night the main church burns down in a mystical/weird way, revealing a set of stairs uncovered leading down. The head abbot organizes an expedition down. The Paladins, inexperienced, will investigate, says the abbot. They let the party take charge, recognizing their greater experience, and a few stonemasons and monks join. And maybe some ley/etc based on past events with the party. The lovestruck and wannabe adventurers impressed by the party sort of thing, sneaking in.
The first dungeon is thirteen complex rooms. This is the site where two gods performed a ritual to swap power twice a year. In addition to that you’ve got some stuff mixed in, the consequences of the plan that deposed the One God. Once you’re in then you’re in, a stone mason forgets his tools and tries to exit only to be burned to ash when crossing that weird symbol on the threshold. There’s a ritual to perform. One of the room has a depression in the earth floor, which is itself unusual here, this is a stone place. There’s a cold iron dagger. A humanoid has to lay in the shape and spill blood from the dagger. Then hundreds of stems sprout from their body, growing in to daffodils and their body vanishes. Fat angry flies swam out and then swarm down the mouth of an effigy also in the room. The effigy then gives silent birth to the reincarnated person. This is, of course, the Vernal Equinox room. How’s that for a themed ritual? Recall, these rituals are being performed by gods, and fit in quite niocely to that fucked up kind of immortal power thing.. One of the rooms has The Night Sky (literally) trapped in it which can, in its own fucked up way, provide some assistance by answering questions. Another strong impression was made by the Autumnal Equinox room, where a loved one (“They look like deceased loved ones: lost PCs, beloved NPCs, parents, lovers, friends, pets… “) rises from a sacrilegious to embrace a party member lovingly and then vanish. “4 kind specters”, notes the stat block. The embrace causes an energy drain. And gives a boon. There are a few real traps here, like a save or get turned in to wood trap, that careful play could avoid, and this also hints at the higher level/experience play required in some places. Utility spells, auguries and the like are gonna come in handier than lightning bolts. Or a funnel of level zeros. 🙂 There are also some “well what did you think was gonna happen dumbass?” things. Walk through a wall of fire and get burnt. Walk through the other direction, the right way, and don’t get burnt. This is a puzzle dungeon.
You will eventually make it to a fey portal, the realm of the Huntsman. We transition then from mostly puzzles to mostly NPC”s in fucked up situations and a complex web of hatreds and goals to be negotiated amongst the ten locations, mixed in with a little fey absurdity. (There’s a Castle Amber like “you can also go visit the rest of this realm” type thing going on also, a page of locations and some notes for running them, for a party who insists on coloring outside the lines.) Encounters here, particularly the potential for wanderers, are going to involve more combat, potentially, and this is where my skepticism of a funnel come in. “Red hands, hanging from a tree, 1d4 drop on those approaching, stats as wraith” or “1d2 Torchbears, flaming, ignivorous bears (stats as owl bear).” Noice! Good retheming to whole fire motif of this area. While the first dungeon may contain some implications of uncomfortable truths, when thought about, this second dungeon is where we can free things will results in godly manifestations in the real world. It’s one thing to kind of guess your religion is a lie, it’s another to then have several new/old gods reborn/freed and KNOW things were a lie.
Theming throughout is spot the fuck on. From the mundanity of the abbey and its petty dramas, organized towards actual play, to the first more Organized Religion dungeon to the second more Fey World/horrors of paganism dungeon, it hits over and over again. Both in the overall theming and in the little things going on. “Now and then, a rumble: bits of high masonry falling” Yup, that’s what happens after a cathedral burns down. Blind Satyrs, drinking, hiding from an avatar, with a 10,000 step stairway leading down to the base and the rest of this corner of the fey realm, if you want to.
Descriptions rock. “A lumped corpse, mummified inside a hoarfrost-coated armour; angry flames erupt from her chest cavity, pierced by a blackened spear “ That’s Saint Larme. There’s a sword, frostburnt black at its feet. Cursed, but, the Witch can turn back in a holy avenger. The witch is a mega-cunt, though, in the worst possible ways. Classic “friendly” hag. The entirety of the dungeons are sprinkled with little sayings that the Paladins might drop in. “We CANNOT leave her thus! We must carry her hallowed remains back, and Any give her an honourable grave! “ Uh huh. Immersion here is VERY strong. We’ve got a drider type thing in place with this “A pair of eyes that shine with hunger, above mandible-arrayed lips. Four more eyes that betray pain: she’s been pregnant for decades. Things crawl inside her gravid belly; it swells; bulbous— it rivals her arachnean abdomen in size. “Ey can feel dem, yoo kno? Mey tsildren, hatsing. Devooring eats other. Breeding. Starteen, all over egein.” “ Ewwww! Cool as fuck.
Treasure is strong, both in the mundane quantity and descriptions and in the relics/magical. Overall value is applicable to the adventure if you can loot bulky things. There are boons in places like “Deliver a Truth: let the player read a random page of this book for a number of seconds equal to half their WIS score.”
The adventure is rewarding, figuratively and literally, and complex. And therein lies my primary grievance.
The meme of “running it without reading it first” is just that, a meme. The goal is something easy to run and the designers work to make that so. This adventure, while it’s going to get a Best, is complex to the point that it is going to take some study and thought. And by “some” I mean “a lot.”
You have the personalities of the hangers on. This is NOT an escort mission, in any way, but those folks are there and have some reactions to things, yes? The first dungeon has a non-trivial ritual and The Consequences of the Depose and a lot of effects, including holy days, urns, effigies, and runes on the floor, all to understand, as a DM, and navigate for the players who are going to try and do player shit. There is a complex set of relationships in the fey realm, none of which are going to be really straight forward in their solutions and/or navigation. I’m not really bitching about this. The environment is deep and complex and I wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s what gives it the soul it has and makes it rewarding. It’s just not presented in the most comprehensible manner. Or, maybe, in a manner that lends itself to easy comprehension to the degree needed to it easily.
There are summaries, but I found them a lacking and not really covering the overall situation. After three read-throughs I’m sure I don’t fully understand the first dungeon, it’s relationship to the second, and how to navigate the entire thing. There are sub-systems here, like the NPC’s and the floor wards and a tangled flaming wood path, that you need to keep in mind that are critical to the adventure. Maybe there’s a little too much exposition on these topics, or an emphasis on the mechanics? I’m not sure. The Hexagrams of Anniliation, the floor wards, take up a column and while I get the gist “wrong way bad, right way good”, there’s a lot going on here. As with some immovable rod locked doors and the 8 spectral votive bowls, attuned to holy days, which control a Planar Shield which gimps the usual spells but you can maybe do something about?
This is not helped by the chosen format, especially in the first dungeon. A mini-map, taking center stage, with little arrows pointing towards things that leads to explanatory paragraphs comprise the descriptive/layout style. There’s a hyperlink thing going on that mixes in a blue font that will take to that detail, but I think maybe that distracts and I suspect isn’t needed most of the time. I found myself wishing for a traditional layout, or, perhaps, wonder if a more traditional layout wouldn’t have made comprehension easier.
Still, absolutely richly rewarding. Excellent job on theming and in creating an environment to explore and overcome through intelligence, wits, roleplaying, and dumping in a fucking fireball on those fucking blue babboons. (The witch ain’t gonna like that! And she’s a central figure …) Great tie in to domain play. No right or wrong or morally grey, just a place, with consequences, depending on actions you take. It rewards a thoughtful party both in avoiding death and in gaining great loot/relics. And you are gonna have to study it to get there.
This is $10 at DriveThru. Fucking thing is a steal at $10. There’s a preview, which is currently broken. (Seems like it might be a DriveThru thing, I’m getting XML back.) And there are some thumbnail pages on the blurb page. There’s also a fourteen page “toolkit” included with time trackers, npc’s, and other shit on it to help you run it. I’ll dump in a page from the first dungeon to help you understand the layout issue I’m having trouble with.
Hexagnome is running three for three. I’m going on vacation soon so I’m written out until Mid-August and rescheduled things so this review is dumping sooner than that.
In the delta city of Portic, the heralds walk the bridges and call for the brave to save the settlement from the pernicious Thieve’s Guild. Papyri offering rewards in the thousands of gold pieces are handed out to the armed, the weaselly, and the wise. Advertising had its effect and dozens of applicants turned up at the Lighthouse. Even after describing the undead infested island, and the underground trap maze expected to confront them, four groups of adventurers drew lots to select which night they enter. The party is assembled, with retainers in tow, as the sun sinks west on the third day. No one has yet emerged from the Odd’s Sink (the Island of the Death). Straps are tightened, supplies checked, and holy symbols kissed as the guards move the barricade on the pontoon bridge.
This 26 page adventure uses about sixteen pages to present forty rooms in two tomb/undead themed dungeons. It is … obscure? In a good way. Full of tomb encounters that are familiar and yet not boring old vanilla tomb encounters. This feels like a lived-in world. That needs an editor in charge of formatting and layout.
You’ve read the marketing blurb, above, and it sounds a little early days to me. Like, 1972 early days. But, let’s back up a minutes and cover what has lead to that marketing blurb, above. We’ve got an old city. The nobility want to revolt cause they don’t like the current .gov. Revolts cost money. They get a loan from the local Guild Bank. This is a legitimate front for the thieves guild, which the current .gov kind of telerates. Revolution successful, there’s a new .gov in charge. Oh, the nobles have a VERY large sum to pay back to the Guild bank. And don’t want to. And the new .gov HATES thieves. Thus starts a pogrom against the thieves and the guild bank, which has an air of neighborhood watch death squads to it, an/or citizen checkpoints/militias. The last of the guild has been tracked to the Isle of the Dead, a funerary isle for the city. Chill during the day for burials, at night the undead walk about and giant beam of blue light shoots up into the sky. And the last of the guild was seen descending in to a tomb tha the light shoots up from. NOW you can go to the lighthouse and apply to root out the last of the guild … and you’re third in line to do so after drawing lots. Needless to say, your turns pops.
There are two dungeons to explore, each with about twenty or so rooms with a “tomb” or catacombs theme to both of them. Supplementing this is a small handful of other encounters nearby. A ship anchored offshore that could be aligned with the guild. Another, with a letter of marque, bringing in smugglers and pirates. Not exactly an adventure locale but more support for play AFTER the tombs are entered and the party returns out again, either successful or taking a break before they reenter. IE: things to support downtime, and such. This is further supplemented by eight or so “events.” Each takes up about a quarter of a page and details some things that could happen to complicate things. If the party returns out of the dungeon then maybe they get approached by someone and a conversation is had and an alternative entrance is offered, or bribes, or so on.
I’m hoping, from all of that, you take away of a kind of context tha the designer has provided for the adventure. A context that all directly relates to things going in the adventure that a DM can use to add interesting things going on in the real world, to riff on and further enhance play. Specifics. It gives the world a kind of lived-in feel. The dungeon encounters, also, have a kind of lived-in feel to them, but its done in a different way. One room is kind of partially flooded. Below the water, is a grate that shifts if any step on it. (That, alone, is pretty nifty room feature. The use of a shifting grate implies things that a static grate does not.) “The Red Tree brigade, who entered the vaults first, are still here. They move through the water, their mail and robes torn, the wizened and twisted shapes no longer alive. They thrash through the water toward the warm meat of the party. – Red Tree Brigade Ghoul (3) “ The flooded room. The grate in the floor. The SHIFTING grate, and then the former party. It’s layered, and feels real to me. And the adventure does this over and over again. I think tomb dungeons can usually feel boring. But this has more of an undercity vibe, with tombs, vibe thing going on. Not completely, but there’s enough that it does bring a freshness to it. Ye Olde Slamming Locke Door is present as a trap room in this, but the room fills with smoke, a real life hazard that is quite seldom used. And this in spite of the twenty-ish room size of each of the dungeons.
And this thing is a PAIN. I mentioned “obscure”, yes?
It’s like, all over the place. Sometimes we get a “you” in the descriptions. “A set of creatures clunks toward you, heavily decayed, skull domes showing. …” Sometimes there’s a random monster stats in a room that IN NO WAY mentions a creature. The rooms are inconsistently written, not clear in many places, or similar features described different ways, in the same room, making you wonder if you’re missing something. The text is … obdurate. Lengthy, maybe with a touch of self-indulgence, but not falling in to any clearly recognizable sin, like backstory, trap and door porn, or explaining why. Maybe a little of the if/then style. It’s just hard to dig through it all. Hard, but not unrewarding.
I am waffling, back and forth, on the Tarichan adventures. Best. No Regerts. I’m going to Best this one, I think. But, also, you know what I really wish? That Daley keep writing. Keep working on his products. And every day go back and edit the manuscript to this adventure for ten minutes or so. Every day. Not with the intent to publish it again but just to rework it and try to clean it up. Call it a daley trip to the adventure formatting and writing gym. Just to kind of get in the practice of seeing what’s possible, without any pressure to produce.
Anyway, good little necropolis adventure. and, frankly, I think Daley is about at the point in which he’s on an auto-buy list.
This is $3.50 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, more than enough to get a sense of the piece.
By B. Wraven Wright 2Die10 Games Dolmenwood Levels 4-5
Four months ago, Father Wolfgang and several other members of the Church of St Pastery’ clergy were having strange dreams that all had one thing in common: a call of pilgrimage from The One True God. Father Dobey, Vicar of Lankshorn, initially had these strange dreams also but they faded in frequency and severity for him while the opposite was happening to Father Wolfgang and the others. Having been compelled into blind pilgrimage towards the direction of Hags Addle, Father Wolfgang and those afflicted with these dreams were confronted by Father Dobey, who declared these dreams as heresy. In doing so, the pilgrims openly questioned his piousness as well as his status of Vicar of Lankshorn. Father Dobey, eager to avoid conflict, decided to let the pilgrims go on the condition that they return in one month’s time. The pilgrims agreed and took their leave with the vicar’s blessing. One month has come and gone, with Father Dobey wanting to know what happened to the pilgrims for a host of reasons…
This seventeen page adventure uses about five pages to describe 27 rooms in a small dungeon. Hack till you drop and do little else as you explore the monotony of uninspiring rooms.
I was quite disappointed with this one. Dolmenwood has been hitting at a decent rate, but, I guess, as a sign of its success, “more is coming out now.” I would hope you can understand the euphemism. The map, also, looks promising. It’s a larger Dyson affair with forty or so rooms on it, only about thirty of which are keyed in the his adventure. Some columns, stairs, curtains, an overhead passage and murder holes. Almost none of which is taken advantage of in te text. ?
The local clergy been having God dreams. The vicars gives them permission to go on a pilgrimage to their dreamed of site. They don’t come back so in you go to find them.
“The One True God who weeps in the temple underneath the dolmen” is pretty strong flavour. There is no preamble to the adventure, no investigation, so there’s no build up to this before you get to the dungeon. Once in the dungeon the theming, of The One True God, and the weeping, is essentially not present either. You will find a weeping statue face (with decent art piece to accompany it) but that’s it. What you WILL find are a bunch of clergy/clerics. They are all scaly bipedal wolfmen.
Why are they scaly wolfmen? No clue. You just show up and there are these empty, or mostly empty rooms and more than a few of them have these scaly wolf men in them that are doing clericy shit. And they attack you. In fact, everything and everyone attacks you in this. Monsters attack you and in a couple of rooms there’s a false floor that breaks away in to pit things. That’s it. That’s your interactivity.
I cannot emphasize that enough. “You see 4 beings standing, frantically “reading” scrolls out loud in a hissing, barking language.” Thats your room. Oh, also, in the description for BEINGS, “Four LUPINE CLERGY stop praying and attack on sight.” Mystery. Wonder. Exploration. Not present. Just stabbing things that attack, which are the scaly wolfmen clergy and some black blobs that are in a few rooms. More than a little one-note. Oh, and the “break through the false floor” pits, Order of battle, for our clergy? Nope. They just sit in their rooms and get stabbed. Stab stab stab. Stab stab stab. Stab stab for the fun of it, stab stab for the fun of it, stab atb for the fun of it stab stab for the fun of it!
There’s little to no treasure present. The last room of the dungeon has Lareth in it. There is not hint, anywhere, that Lareth is about. “As you get close enough to the tapestry to make out the material it’s made of, you see that the ground starting in front of you winding all the way around the room to the pillars on the other side, is freshly turned earth that has a strong sickly-sweet smell of vinegar.” That’s Lareth for you, all vinegar-smelling! So, an earth wyrm pops out of the dirt and then attacks. LARETH WAS BEHIND EVERYTHING THE ENTIRE TIME!!! Oh, Lareth, such a card. No hint. No build up. Nothing that means anything. Just stab some scaly bipedal wolf clerics and then in the last room a wyrm pops up from the ground and you kill it.
Formatting is ok. Headers, color changing, underlines, bolding. You can find things well enough. It also notes the door, light conditions, and exits in the rooms. I am not amused by anything done by rote. I think, that, unless told otherwise, we can assume darkness, or light, depending on the mood of the individual dungeon. Note what’s different,
I don’t know, man. It’s just a VERY basic and simplistic dungeon. It;s padded out, with doors, and light and exits. It’s got some formatting to make it scan nicer. But the core of what’s going on it is quite simplistic. The One True God is not played up. The wolf dudes get nothing. The Lareth behind the curtain is not hinted at. There’s no build up. There’s no really e octave room descriptions, just a bunch of They Attack!s. There’s no insidious presence in town. There’s nothing really to EXPLORE ot interact with in the dungeon, proper. Even the scaly wolf dudes just sit around waiting to die with no order of battle.
This is different than, say, a raid. In that case you know what you are doing and the various encounters and environments are engineered by the designer to support the raid. This is just … basic and static?
This is $1 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Sucker.
As above, so below. Above, Tell Arn is abandoned, the Hyrkossi kings ashamed of what is buried there. Below, stranger kings hold greater shames, and greater terrors are locked away. The mistakes of lost civilisations repeat on one another in the dark, holding a delicate, unruly balance. Tip the scales, break the seal, and let the Lions drink deep.
This 81 page adventure presents two more levels of Tell Arn with about a hundred numbered major rooms and probably as many sub-a/sub-b rooms. Complex maps. Great writing. Interesting environments to adventure in. An adventure that can stand toe to toe with Dark Tower/Thracia/Hyqueous/Xyntillian/The Bowman Levels. Buy the hard copy now.
One of the two level mapsThe Upper right corner
I think, perhaps, I’d like to examine this adventure through one small portion of a zone, in the northeast of the map. The map, alone, should be enough to get you excited. Water, tunnels, above and below, weird shapes, and a complexity that naturally lends itself to exploration. It FEELS like a ruined city, yes? Looking at the small area in the upper right, a kind of cavern. IN the middle is a pit. There’s this long corridor off to 39a, and a broken set of stairs clinging to a wall leading up to 28a. Rough caves to 29, with secrets in that room, multiple secret doors! Pools in 31, with more secrets, but the entrance to the 31 hallway from 28 is a ledge up on the wall. Rooms. Caverns. Pits. Ledges. Stairs. Exits. Secrets. An almost bewildering number and type of environments. Fucking great map! A place for an adventure!
The rooms start with a kind of vibe overview. Room 28 is “Lower Hydra Nest”. How much more classic can you get than a hydra in a ruined city? It makes my mouth water just thinking about the deliciousness of the encounter! Then the entry reads “Sickly stench; grease and putrescence. A ledge (40’ up) to the south (to 31). Water and blood drips from above” It’s kind of orienting the DM to the room. Room 29, the Putrescent Larder reads “The detritus thickens; half-rotted carcasses in great mounds. Sweet stench of death. Lit by guttering blue corpse-fires, burning at random. Sucking steps.” Got it. Ewww! Or, maybe room 21, the Upper Gallery “Reprieve from the miasma. Crashing water. Blue light through fine mist. Hollow on the north wall leads to 29. “ Crashing water, sweeter air, a blue light in a fine mist. GUTTERING. Or SUCKING STEPS. These descriptions feel imagined. They feel like someone called up a mental image in their head, lived the room, and then were able to get that down on paper, and down on paper in such a way that you, the DM reading it, can pick it up and run with it just as the designer imagined in their head. That IS the goal of good writing. A sucking step. Anyone in the mud, bog, fen, swampy environments knows what that is like. It’s a perfect description for that kind of thing. You KNOW what it is. The descriptions here range from good to excellent, across the board.
But wait, there’s more! This is not the end of things.We expand, when entering from room 17, the trail narrows, the stone crumbling, there’s a 30’ ledge to the floor below, with pitted walls. Pitted. The room? A ruined amphitheatre, buried in filth. Corroded pillars break the surface. They are gnawed and scored with deep claw marks. Detritus is 10 deep, bone, plasma, cave-slime, guano. I fucking love that amphitheater description.
Heyt man, how about that pit? Let’s look at that bullet “In the centre of the amphitheatre, a sunken pit (40’ across, 20’ deep). The floor is thick with golden slime. Inspection reveals twisting movement below. A colossal gold-faced bust (3000c/300lb) rests against the west edge. Bringing fire nearby alerts the hydra: 4d6 HYDRA SPAWN surge into 28 to defend it. “ Golden slime. Twisting below. Jesus fucking christ! I’m not going near that thing! I see your colossal gold-faced bust, but the hand AND eye had better be clearly visible to get me to go there! Great fucking environment. And remember, we’ve still got “A broken set of stairs winding 20’ up the wall. At the top, a dark hollow “ and other things in here. Depth. Multiple things going on. Multiple things to look at, explore, interact with.
Expanding this hydra room even more, there are mechanics to help the DM out. That 10’ deep filth? “The filth halves all movement in 28/29 “ Wanna dig through it? There’s a short table for that. Oh, hey, remember that pit with the golden slime and twisting movement? How about this as fucking follow up to that description: “If the slime-floor is broken (like the skin of a water-bed), it reveals a knotted, fused mass of hydra-flesh. A thousand blind eyes swivel into life. 1d10x10 HYDRA SPAWN burst out after 1 turn. “ Like the skin of a water bed. A thr\ousand blind eyes SWIVEL into life. A knotted and fused mass of hydra flesh. Fucking a man, this is a fucking adventure right here!
We saw that colossal gold-faced bust, as treasure. Digging about in the filth could get you “Seventh Binding. (300c). A scabbard faced with moulded silver plates depicting the slaughter of seven giants. Inside, it is choked with black blood. “Nice little description. CHoked with black blood is a good touch also. No blade kept within will dull or rust. That’s a decent effect without relying on mechanics. And, then also “7 charges. The bearer can negate a mundane attack dealing ?8hp. The wound scars over, one of the seven giants rots to bones, and the scabbard fills with the blood that would have been spilled. “ Ewwww! Noice! Love it! Magic item that FEELS like a magic item.
Hey, how about another room? How about that upper gallery, with the blue mist? “Softly phosphorescent lichen coats the walls. It is thicker to the south, growing elaborate tendrils, swaying. On close inspection, see the form of a halfling, splayed out and subsumed by the algae. Its skull is stripped bare; a jewelled holy symbol (200c) of a sapphire rose embedded in the socket. “ Uh. Ok. And also “A stream of water cascades from above into a shallow pool. The pool is white with foam. It breaks off into a stream running down to 30. The water is bright blue and bitter. Small blind fish swim within. “ And then each of those two things, which are major bullets, have a minor bullet like “If bathed in, the water (highly alkaline) causes 1hp damage, drinking it 1d6hp. It cleans anything washed in it to a mirror sheen.”
Formatting wise, we’re seeing a vibe overview that’s highly evocative. Then a few major bullets with details on things from the overview. Then a sub-bullet or two with mechanical-like impacts from those bullets. Bolding and italics are used to effect to draw the eye to certain words, but not overused. Evocative treasure with good descriptions, terse but much more interesting than a Sword, +1.
These rooms hit, over and over again. There are zones in this places, “themed” areas, if you will. There are a couple of major factions running around with wants and needs and goals, as well as theming around hunger, in particular, with a ravenous hydra and ghouls. The amount of repetition of rooms is close to zero, nothing really feels like it’s just thrown in, or padding out the adventure. Room after room and description after description feels intentional, as if absolutely everything in the is adding to the adventure, building it up with intention.
Dense. Complex. Thrilling. Full of awe and wonder and horror the way an exploration adventure should be. You are a FOOL if you don’t check this out. For all the crap being published, today and every year, there is always someone out there with a singular vision who drives it to completion. This is the OSR.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. That’s absurd. This thing is great and you need a physical copy. The preview is twenty pages. You get to see a great map and lots of dungeon entries. Great preview.
Ten years ago, the new rector went insane and burned down the town chapel, killing his fellow priests. No one knows why he did it, but superstitious townsfolk just wanted the whole sad affair to go away, so they turned a blind eye. The scene of this terrible crime was abandoned, yet evil abides. Locals believe the site remains cursed, haunted by ghosts of the murdered priests. Now, after mysterious events have befallen the town in recent weeks, many look to the ruined chapel as the source of their ill fortune. Somewhere below the ruins, the fate of the temple’s holy relic may hold the answer to this disturbing mystery.
This 21 page adventure presents a burned out chapel and undercroft with about fifty locations. There are a couple of interesting subplots going on, with evocative descriptions, decent interactivity, and it being well formatted. A fine adventure. How often do I get to say that?
You know that bag of potatoes in your pantry? The one that’s been for awhile? You know how it’s begun to rot and stink up the place? Clean up your fucking churchs when they burn down!
I don’t know where to start. I want to talk about a couple of points, but I think I should cover the heart of the adventure first. There is a little background and a few hooks that kind of paint a scene of the surrounding town, but it’s VERY minimal. This is, essentially, just a site to adventure in with almost not surrounding info. And that’s fine. This works well as a site-based adventure that you can drop in almost anywhere and there IS just enough to hook it in a little deeper. The reeves teen boy is missing and someone you find in the dungeon could be the kid. And, really, not much more than this and the local legend in the marketing blurb.
The language use here is pretty decent. “Rusted iron gates screech open onto a flagstone courtyard, its edges overtaken with dirt and weeds. The stones are broken and shifted; tall weeds clump in the cracks.” Overtaken, edges, shifted, rusted. The words chosen are good. In another place there is this as a description “Dusty paths encircle scores of old gravestones squatting among the dry, rustling grass.” That could, I think, almost be the platonic ideal of a decent room description. It’s terse, evocative. It uses its word count wisely. It’s the kind of description that makes me think someone who was VERY adept with their vocab imagined a scene and then wrote it down, rather than working the other way around. “Hmmm, graveyard, what words can I use?” There’s a kind of ease that comes from the descriptions, as if they were effortlessly written. The words click together well to build on each other. That’s evocative writing. It does slip in a purple word now and again, like that “rusted iron gates SCREECH open upon” … that’s not read-aloud or second person, it’s trying to use an adverb. I applaud the attempt and I think adverb usage can REALLY work well, but it’s either a smash hit or a failure in my experience in a description. Still, there’s not much of it.
Formatting is good also. This is a standard paragraph style, with certain words bolded to cal attention to them, like creatures or other things that the party might notice, a glint ,a marble font, etc. Each paragraph might have two or three sentences with a room averaging one to two paragraphs. And, those paragraphs are well written. They are not padded out. The important stuff comes up front. One room, I’m thinking of, stretches to a column of text, quite unusual for this adventure. But, it’s quite manageable. It builds. It’s easy to locate information. One paragraph might have the “marble font” bolded and then the very next describes the font encounter information. I don’t know, maybe it’s an accident, but I doubt it. It is, for lack of a better phrase, subtly formatted and organized.
The maps,supporting play, range from great to good. The outside map, of the ruined chapel and grounds, is really nice. Almost an overlay on top of an art piece that doesn’t loose it ability to be clear. The undercroft map is clear as well, although it has a kind of symmetrical vibe to it that I almost always have a visceral response to. It’s NOT wholly symmetrical, but, also, when a map tends to the symmetrical I do enjoy seeing a secret placed on the map that rewards players who pay attention. A fully mapped dungeon, the known areas, would reveal one curious space unaccounted for, leading to a major treasure. Monsters are noted on the map, which is great for helping a DM react to noisy characters. There is a third level, some rat tunnels, that is a neato little extra, simple but nice to have also. Exit locations, and where they lead to, are noted as well, with … six entry/exits to the undercroft. Sweet!
There is some interesting interactivity as well. I’m going to note one of them, as an example. Up top, in the grounds, is a cemetery. At one point you can find four broken in to tombs of knights, with their heraldry, names, etc. Down below you can meet four skeleton knights, and by paying attention and drawing some inferences, they are the same dudes. Calling out to them with their names, etc, can let anyone kind of “turn” them, with a chance. This is the old trope of “i know the real you is really in there!” Finally, if you do the right thing and return their bones to their crypts then a golden trumpet appears midair. A nice kind of symbolism there with the knights and a church. And it turns out to be a horn of valhalla, allowing you to summon them 1d4 4hd knights. It all works together, and builds upon itself. OF COURSE that will happen, right? It what you WANT to happen, as a D&D player. Another example is an skull icon that cn talk (oh, Mort, you cast a long shadow) and if you say a prayer, give alms, etc, then you are rewarded. Again, a kind of free-flowing interactive play, not necessarily tied to casting the right spell but just doing what SHOULD be done. And then the skull responds “Your gesture comforts my eternal soul; Brother Denton has something for you” … so keep an eye open for his ossuary. In the main ruined church. “The cavernous interior space once soared to (60’h) down the center line. Huge rubble piles obscure sightlines deeper into the hall unless someone mounts one of the heaps” And some notes on the “valleys” between the rubble and on climbing them. A pretty good environment.
There’s a place or two that I would have liked an extra word or two. “Scattered on the basin’s bottom are the bones of two missing townsfolk.” That could have used a couple of words more, a missing teen couple dating or some such. Nothing wrong here, but just a yearning for more specificity, given the quality of the rest of the adventure it seems out of place.
Lastly, I want to talk a little bit about the setup. This site is a fine stand-alone adventuring site and doesn’t need more, a surrounding town or some such. But, it’s teased a little, and, again, that makes me want more. “Livestock and stores have gone missing; shadowy, hooded figures are said to roam the fields at night; ghostly lights were seen (from a distance) in the chapel ruins, etc. Worse still, quite a few locals and itinerant laborers have gone missing over the last few weeks.” This is pretty much a platonic setup for a small village getting creeped out. Bad omens and strange happenings. Throw in some sour milk and a lame calf and you’ve got the motherload. This nothing more to this, in the adventure, than what I pasted in and, sure, I’d like to see some specificity here, but, it does make me wonder. I’ve not really been impressed by those “101 subplots for game!” type products, the content never turns out to be what I want. (Well, other than Pembrocktonshire and Petty Gods.) A giant compendium of quick hits for a game, with specificity. Full of lame calves, sour milk, disappearing teens, sudden appearance of hoof and mouth, hank the drunk saw a weird shadow stumbling home. Perfect little quick hits, with specificity, for a DM to tosses in to their games to help bring the context around these site adventures to life.
Anyway, enough rambling. This adventure reminds me of the nostalgia of the original adventures. Not what they actually were, but what you remember them to be, the same as the old sledding hill being flour feet tall when you remember it being humongous. This adventure lives up to the memories of the old ones, meaning it exceeds them.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages and you get to see themain maps and several encounters. Great preview.
Bugbears are attacking the dwarfs on their way up the mountain to make offerings to their god. A group of elf scholars came to the region to study the presence of bugbears in such remote region and they are stopping the dwarfs in their attacks against the bugbears. Furious with the lack of offerings and prayers. The dwarven god is eminent to turn away from the region and allowing monsters to roam free. The PC’s can seek the god absolution on the dwarfs instead or even make them leave the region and help the bugbears in taking the region and put their gods in power of Altuvia.
(This is a PDF but there is an Obsidian markup file. Again, I tried to install obsidian and get it going to view it the way it was meant to be viewed, got it installed, but again couldn’t figure out how to view/work with the markup file)
This sixty page adventure describes … I don’t really know what it describes. A political situation? A couple of dungeons surrounding a political situation? It’s all just general ideas, with few specifics, and almost certainly worth no time. And yet, I find the premise intriguing in a weirdly real-life cynical way.
The marketing blurb is essentially correct. Some dwarves were driven above ground by oozes attacking their mines. They have no ore. They are trying to get ore from their cousins but the elf lands are in the way and “Now the dwarfs wait for the complicated and unhurried elf politics allows the ore transport.” Noice! And, now, some bugbears have moved in to the region. Their attacks are preventing the dwarves from getting to their temple to honor their goddess. This WILL eventually cause her to abandon them and then the bugbear god will move in to set up shop, which is the EXPLICIT plan of the bugbears. IE: preventing the dwarves from worshipping their goddess so she’ll abandon them and their dude can take up the mantle of the region. But, now, also, with the bugbears showing up, some elf researchers have shown up and have a manor home in the wilderness where they’ve set up base. They want to study the bugbear migrations, which they find unusual, and are preventing the dwarves from attacking the bugbears. If we think of the eves as having superior technology/gods/magic/armies, then the position of the dwarves becomes quite interesting. Piss off the local elves and maybe influence the larger political “ore from our cousins” thing? Are there local dwarves acting as guides to the elves, or, maybe, nearby halflings that trade with the dwarves but also sell their services to the elves? The analog of an asymmetric power relationship, and the consequences to all parties, it quite interesting. The elves WILL, through their good natured scholastic meddling, cause the dwarves to be wiped out and the bugbears to take over the region. Do they care? Will they be wiped out also? This is all fucking magnificent. The comparisons to real life are obvious.
And almost nothing of substance is in the adventure. Some of what I described is present in the adventure. Some of it is shit I inferred, like dwarf collaborators or halflings, or other linkages. But, also, beyond a simple overview, essentially matching in context and length what I described, there is nothing of any of this present in the adventure. The individuals, the timeline, everything else, none of it really is related to the overall situation described. Yes, the bugbears want to kill and maybe an elf , described, wants to study shit. But these kind of grand machinations, or even minor machinations, are just not present in the adventure. At best you’ll get an NPC description who has a quest like “I want some elven wine.”
For it being sixty pages there is remarkably little specific to point to. The dwarf mines have a map, but no key, just instructions to roll on random tables. But, even then, I’m not sure I can make heads or tails of the map. Are the rectangles rooms? Or are those just hallways that meet up? What are the grey lines? And then the map of a ruined manor is not keyed, with just things like “Bedroom 1 : The room to the left of the corridor” Creature amounts and mundane treasures, including potions and scrolls are just not present, explicitly so, fitting in to some “for use with any system” statement. I can’t fathom ever doing this in an adventure.
This is SO open ended, SO non-specific that it amounts to just the overall situation description, some NPC descriptions that don’t tie in very well, and site descriptions that are almost as vague and non-specific as you can possibly have and still call it a site description. You’re going to have to wing, and add to and expand everything. I get it, we do some of that when running a game. But there is SO little direction here, so little that is specific, that this amounts to very little more than napkin notes and ideas of what could be going on in various places with various people. In sixty pages. I think I’m done with Kobold King.
Strange phenomena plague the land: saltwater rain, shared dreams of a tide covering the land, shallow puddles reflecting deep, strange oceans. Some people have even fallen into puddles and disappeared entirely. The epicenter of the phenomena has been traced to the mausoleum of an eccentric who believed the whole land was once under the sea. Whether to stop this, explore it, or just to loot the tomb, the players have arrived to the mausoleum.
This eleven page adventure uses two-ish pages t describe about five-ish rooms in a mausoleum being invaded by an aquatic entity. There are hints here of sophisticated play, and maddeningly abstracted text that somehow is also wall of text. The theming never comes through well and it’s hampered by it use of a 5e style guide.
What can i say, I found the title appealing. Alas, there are no hills or screams, much less SCREAMS.
Some dude really thinks the world was underwater at some point. He has a massive tomb built, is buried in it, and then his belief in that idea is so strong that a water-plane entity uses the belief to try to force its way through to our plane.
There’s an interesting concept in this adventure in the way it handles illusion. Basically, the tomb is full of illusions, or, maybe, altered realities, but the adventure uses the word illusions. Before the first room you make a choice, after talking to the dudes friendly spirit, as to if you believe his theory or not. If you do believe then you treat the illusions as real and the non-illusions as illusions. If you do not believe then the illusions are illusions to you and the real dungeon is real. Like one of those scifi episodes where half the cast is out of phase or some such. Some of the sections of the dungeon are filled with water, and there are shafts, so if you believe then you can swim up a shaft, and things like that. (And need water breathing!) The concept is haltingly implemented and not leaned heavily into, but the idea is an intriguing one.
There’s one or two spots where the some interesting things come in to play. The standard “clear the rubble away” thing in one room has the note “Clearing it without precautions causee another collapse.” Excellent cause and effect there and a lack of punishment for players who are not on autopilot. In another section, where you meet the dudes spirit at the start “How to summon Sutton’s spirit is up to the PCs. As a rule of thumb, spending a resource such as a spell slot should work. Actions such as meditating on the bench or lighting the statue’s pipe reveal that the spirit wants to manifest but is struggling to.” Again, pretty decent old school sensibilities. Nothing prescribed but some direction to the DM to have some latitude in their judgements. This is akin to something like the Bless spell being a good catch-all for solving many problems. Rulings, not rules, yes? I suspect, from this, that the dude is a decent DM.
But author …
There are a few quibbles here before the major issues. We’re told that people are missing, strange things going on, etc, and “The epicenter of these phenomena has been traced to Lubber’s Rest” with nothing more beyond that. In spite of the intro background, which is non-trivial, this is essentially just a site in the middle of nowhere for you to explore, even though “the PCs arrived to Lubber’s Rest with hopes of stopping these events and finding the missing people.” So, the framing to support the intro is just not present. At all. Which would be fine if the intro didn’t imply that it SHOULD be there. We’re just looking at a site.
But, more than that, there are some issues with the presentation and abstraction. The “5e template” was used here. This means sections of italics that are longer than they should be. This means long paragraphs of text with little in the way of formatting to help you scan the adventure. You’re digging through A LOT of text in this, with little to separate things and help you locate information. It is, I think, an issue with Wall of Text, even though there are line breaks and some bullets, there’s not section headings or bolding to help a DM figure out where to look for what. And that’s a major problem.
Second is a frustrating amount of abstraction and things simply left out. You will run in to weird symbols that are being used to help summon the aquatic planer entity … but no mention of destroying them. And this is theme, the lack of even minimal guidance for things you WNT to fuck with. When you combine this with the amount of text used to describe and denote other, trivial things, it makes you wonder why the emphasis was placed where it was.
Eleven of the rooms are simply abstracted away. Roll on a table to add a couple of features and then roll on a table for an encounter. An encounter like “Aggressive illusory creature swims in. (Submerged rooms only)” Uh. Ok. And, yet, here’s room nineteen “Contains a heap of rocks, with 4d8 embedded raw rubies. Dumped here by thralls.” This is aggressively terse. Was there not enough room in the adventure for the other rooms, given the terseness of this one? And no value for the rubies?
And, further, note the lack of evocative text. Nothing about a tomb or aquatic/semi-aquatic environment comes through here at all. And this is par for the course in the adventure. There’s a hefty intro. There’s a hefty appendix. But the actual rooms are terse without actually giving much of an impression at all.
What’s a DM to do? There’s little favour here. And I can roll on a table out of a book.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. The preview is ten of the eleven pages, so, a decent preview. You can see both the wall of text in the rooms at the beginning as well as the overly terse ones at the end, and the lack of specificity and lack of formatting to help locate information.
The link to the product in this review is probably an affiliate link. If you follow the link and buy the product, I make some money. Just thought you should know.
