Monastery of Misanthropy

Posted on May 2, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Thom Wilson
ThrowiGames
Shadowdark
"Low Levels"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Aethelberd’s Tomb

Posted on April 29, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Scott_M
First Era Adventures
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

Few now recall King Aethelberd’s name, but in his time, he was rightly feared. His ruthless crusade against criminals and sinners took thousands of lives… many by the king’s own hand. The ancient lord’s body now rests somewhere below his ruined keep, his legacy all but forgotten. Rumors, however, tell of a trove of kingly treasure buried within Aethelberd’s tomb, along with his legendary weapon: Angbolt – The Mallet of Justice.

This thirteen page adventure presents a dungeon/tomb with about twenty locations. A ‘standard dungeon’ with a few different situations going on, it is relatively wordy for the degree of content present, coming out to about four keys per page or so for a mix of vermin, undead, and bandits. 

I’m rather fond of the setup of this one, or, perhaps, the framing. There are some ruins on a hill in a wood. And I mean ruins; almost nothing left but a few walls. Once the tomb of majestic figure,eons past and nothing is left of Ozymandius (by Shelley you cetin! God how I love Frisky Dingo.) but two legs. And, now on the road through the wood you come upon a dying man and a ransacked cart. “Tracks in the dirt indicate that three humans in boots led a woman and child off into the woods, along with a heavily-laden mule or pony.” Low bandits, now hold up in the topside walls of the tomb of a lord known for justice, too scared to venture down the stairs.  I find this framing rather poetic. No highborn rebels or a bandit-king with airs and plans, just the meanest and most low of ruffians, picking on a man and his woman/child brutally. Too common to even venture in to the hole in the ground in search of gold, camped in a place of utter ruin, of former majesty that they have no knowledge of. This is all handled rather briefly.

The rest of the adventure is not bad, but it doesn’t come close to that poetry. It is a relatively standard dungeon crawl, perhaps a bit above the usual average, with not a lot to distinguish itself and a few things that could be done better. This is not an Orcs in a Hole problem, but perhaps a sign of a hobby in which every adventure ever written is available immediately to you. How does one stand out in a crowded marketplace? [By each adventure having the unrealistic expectations of being a masterpiece, duh! If the premise of the blog is that common mistakes are repeated time and again then the secret hope is that those eventually get resolved and concentration can be done on more in-depth stuff.]

The bandits are huddled in the upper ruins, little more than a few crumbling walls. They’ve set a slack guard during the day and wall themselves in at night by moving boards. There’s a nice earthiness to this. They see the stairs, and have stuffed the women and child in a cellar room, where they whimper, but are too scared to venture any further. I might emphasize their condition, of both the captives and … beastiality? of the bandits a bit more, but the quick mentions of their fear and how they wall themselves in to the ruins is good. 

The map supporting this is fine for it’s size. The hill, ruins and wood around it are covered fine, and the dungeon proper has a variety of features, caves, water, worked areas, streams, statues, same level stairs. It is clear and has creature notations on it, which I always find very useful when running an adventure to keep the surrounding dungeon context front and center when running an encounter/noise in a room. Good job, and something I wish more adventures did to help me out at the table.

The dungeon entries, proper, are where my hang ups mostly lie. And I have no idea how to describe what I think is wrong about them. They do tend to be a bit long, four paragraphs is not uncommon. There’s an occasional bolded words or ALL CAPS monster reference, which shows some awareness of trying to call the DMs attention to things. But, for all the world, I can’t figure out why the entries are long. Typical problems in other adventures might be backstory embedded in them, or victorian laundry lists of contents, overly describing, trap & door porn or explaining WHY. None of that really seems to be present here, and yet the entries tend to the long side, particularly for what they are. 

I’m looking at an entry for room eight, The False Tomb, which I think is fair representation of the other rooms as well. There’s three paragraphs of general description. The first is the overall room, then one touching on some alcoves and frescoes, then one about the body in the room under a shroud, and its treasure, and the skeletons it triggers, and then one about a bronze chest and its loot. I can’t really fault any one of them for being there. The first paragraph reads “The shrouded body of a long-dead warrior is laid out upon a stone bier. The floor surrounding it is covered with various burial offerings: Ratgnawed baskets, sealed crockeries of seed oil and spoiled wine, moldering furniture and tapestries, graven idols of old gods, etc. (no value). Among the funeral goods stands a squat bronze chest” This is not the most evocative thing ever, but it’s trying and I recognize that. It’s also, I think, not lingering too much on the mundane. I can’t particularly fault the description of the body and chest and their treasures either. 

So the descriptions are not in and of themselves problems. And the formatting is not terrible. It’s certainly not wall of text and there is an occasional bolded word to direct the DM to more information. The closest I think I can come is that there seems to be a disconnect between the length and the … mundanity of the interactivity. There are some traps here that are more than just a pit. (Flaming oil jet!) Rats, centipedes, skeletons, wraiths, shadow, zombie dog. The more special undead have a note or two to bring them to life. And there’s an otyugh in a well, ala Moria. 

I don’t know why, but maybe the absence of more exploratory interactivity, but it feels plain to me. I’m not excited by this. It’s not bad. I just don’t look at it and and can’t wait to run it. Specificity? I’m going to assume this is a me thing.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, which shows you the setup, the maps, and a few dungeon rooms. Good preview. Take a look and see if you can nail the descriptions thing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561573/aethelberd-s-tomb?1892600

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The Quiet Hunger

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Craig Turner
Aspire2Hope
Generic/Universal
Levels: Ghouls as an ememy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Kingdom

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By James Desborough
Portmortem Studios
LotFP
Levels 2-4

A high-concept adventure beneath the bone-white hills of Southern England:. […] The hearthstone tilts forward as the ground beneath it gives way, and the fire collapses inward with a choked sigh. A black seam splits across the floor, racing between boots and table legs, widening in the stretch of a blink. Tankards slide. A bench tips and crashes onto its side. The air fills with a grinding roar as chalk collapses in vast, dry heaves beneath the inn. The far wall lurches downward, its timbers shrieking and daub shattering to powder and horsehair as it tears loose. Cold night air floods briefly in through the widening fracture, carrying the smell of wet earth Elinor cries out as the boards beneath her feet dip and tear apart, and she vanishes into the dark. Outside, horses scream, their hooves beating against nothing […]

This 62 page adventure presents seventeen rooms of pitch blackness in a “lair of the sub-humans” tunnel complex. The designer had an idea and tried to implement it, but has no idea of what an adventure is or how to write one. Thus a confused over-wordy mess that, I think, doesn’t understand the Lamentations game system either. The pretension, in the face of this, is interesting to see.

You’re sitting in a bar. Oh no! The tavern collapses in to the earth. It’s very dark. TOTAL darkness, not even infravision or magical sight works. Subhumans start killing the other survivors who fell in also. Thus starts a little over a dozen rooms of groping about and smelling your way to the mystical ate that gets you back to freedom while you suffer -2 hit, +2 to be hit, blah blah blah. 

This is garbage. It didn’t have to be.

The designer here is a Clever Boy. We know that because he tells us that in page after page of introductory text that amounts to See How Bad Ass I Am? I don’t know, he’s scared of the dark, he obviously met Raggi once somewhere and they are basically the same person and now he wants to suck him off by name dropping and it’s not a Fuck You dungoen its actually just hard the way OSR dungeons should be. “This is Atypical You’re not going to find any of the typical adventure-book fare here.” Uh huh. Listen to the voice saying Follow Me, says Frankie. As it has always been, the person shouting the loudest is generally engaged in flim-flam. 

“Perhaps the best/ worst example of this was The Tomb of Horrors, but the ‘fuck you’ is now used as a condemnatory slur directed at anything with even slightly elevated deadliness or Old School sensibilities.” No asshat, it is not. But you didn’t write this for the OSR, did you? You throw some words down on paper, with painfully little care, in order to slap a price tag on it and make a buck or three from whatever followers you have and test the waters for more from the OSR crowd. Alas, at least from your viewpoint, you will find little purchase here. I suggest one of the more niche circles for your medicine show.

Name calling? Ad hominem attacks? That’s not this blog. Or, rather, it’s reserved for the worst of the worst, the money grab people. Let’s see just why this adventure is garbage.

There is, at a minimum, column long section of text up front defending hard dungeons ala the Fuck You dungeon, and, of course, noting that this is not a Fuck You dungeon. This is wrong. It is a Fuck You dungeon. Further, it’s a Fuck You dungeon that, I suspect, has never actually been much less playtested. The mechanics in this just don’t work. The presentation doesn’t work. That’s how I know this. Perhaps one of the very earliest examples of this, in the text, is what happens when the tavern collapses. You have to make a save or take 2d6 damage. That’s gonna be a 16+. We’re looking at between 5 and 18 HP for a party of mixed classes for levels two to four. And you’re gonna take seven damage. AND THEN YOU NEED TO MAKE ANOTHER 16+ SAVE OR TAKE ANOTHER 2d6! These are not optional. They represent the collapse of the inn into the chasm belowground. That is, on average, fourteen damage, with a fighter, on average, having eighteen hit points at fourth level. And you want me to believe that you have play tested this? Run this? Believe you know how D&D works? No. I loathe mechanics. I loathe an appeal to balance. But I also know that the lack of understanding of low hit points, saves, and turning undead are the absolute tells of fuckwit medicine men. [As in, all medicine men are fuckwits, not an adjective to describe certain medicine men.] The designer does not, in any non-trivial manner, understand the game system that they are writing for. The snake oil is strong with this one. 

How else do we know? The read-aloud. The read aloud here is long. VERY long. Like, a page long in some sections. A column, or a good chunk of one, is not uncommon in most places. James Desborough has never read that text aloud to anyone playing this game. Because if they had then it wouldn’t be that long. James would have seen his players turning on their portable gaming systems, watching tiktoks, going to get a beer, swiping on tinder, or whatever. No one pays attention. We know this. It’s common knowledge. You don’t monologue a villain. The players don’t pay attention. You don’t write long read-aloud, the players get bored. This is not a player issue. This is a designer issue. The WotC study, the article about it read-aloud and attention spans, should be well known by this point. And, as I noted, even if it were not the complete lack of player attention as you spew more and more irrelevant flowery text at them should have been a major hint to the designer. If it has been play tested, of course. Or even run for someone. Does it work for the players? Do you CARE that it works for the players?

How about the DM? Do you even care if it works for the DM? Or is this just a payday for you? You see, gentle reader, the text here is in italics. And in a funky fucking font in italics. No one, ever, in the fucking history of the world has ever said “Oh boy! I hope I get to struggle through a long section of flowery text in a font that is hard to read!” Long sections of italics are hard to read. This is, or should be, common knowledge. Funky fucking fonts can be hard to read. Funky fucking font in fucking long sections of italics are VERY hard to read. It’s a fucking cognitive issue in much the same way that single-column text causes more fatigue than double-column. Not that YOU give a fuck. 

Let us move on to formatting. The text here is in a kind of long conversational paragraph styling. The only straight appeal to formatting is a bolded word like “Smell” or “Taste.” That’s good. It helps direct the DM attention to those needs. You know what else the DM needs? To know how many creatures there are in the room. Room one in this is where the adventure starts, so to speak, the pit the tavern and everyone has fallen in to. There’s some vignette shit where the party hears gurgles and screams as the Bone Tomahawks slit throats and cut hamstrings and the like. And, of course, there’s a fight for the party to take part in. It doesn’t actually say. Ever. Some of the people in the inn survive the fall and there’s a little section for each of them that describes their current state. Related, there’s a brief “event” that is the attack, and in the text of one of them, relating the attack on one of the fallen NPC’s, there is a note that says “If they kill both the attackers …” That’s all you’re fucking getting. Pretty fucking basic, isn’t it? How many enemies are in the room? No? You wanted to write some story game bullshit and slap an OSR label on it? Or, are you just incompetent as a writer after all these years? Or, given up and doing a money grab?

How now brown cow, let us look at immersion. There is little. What there is, though, is designer fiat. Why can you not see in the dark? A Wizard did it. Why is X? A wizard did it. I’ve been writing three reviews a week for, what, fifteen years now? The amount of contempt the designer has for their audience is beyond compare. Yes, fuckwit, we are all playing D&D. We know that if we want to play D&D tonight then take the hook. We know that everything in the fucking game is made up. And we rely on designers to provide the verisimilitude that does not break the fourth wall and does not drag us out of the vibe. You didn’t even fucking try. You just wanted X to happen. I don’t need explanations. Those suck also. A contingency spell goes off that triggers a magic mouth that says a spell trigger word. That’s bullshit also. Explanations suck. But immersion in the game does NOT suck. It’s a major fucking point of RPG play. But you don’t give a fuck about that do you? Cha ching! Given that no one makes any money in RPG’s I must then assume this is and ego boost for your self-described “high concept” pretentious adventure of little imagination.

There’s a reference sheet at the end with some mechanics on it. That’s good. There are also a series of NPCs who you end up with in the tunnels/pit. The descriptions of these are in three parts. A read-aloud (ug) and a paragraph or so of information that is full of background as well as mannerisms. The mannerisms are good, the backgrounds less so, and in most cases could have been eliminated or GREATLY reduced. Then there’s “their condition after falling in.” The mannerisms and condition information should have, also, been included on the reference sheet, in an abbreviated manner. There’s a nod to this, but just in terms of a name and tracking their alive/dead status. A few extra words here, on mannerisms, would have gone a long way. IE: how to use them in play. 

Otherwise, this is just a series of encounters in the dark with little interactivity beyond that. There’s a lot of room in the OSR, from the RAW 1e crowd to those smaller games that lean more towards streamlined mechanics. I don’t see this as fitting anywhere in the spectrum.

This is $13 at DriveThru. There is no level range mentioned until you get in to the meat of the product, that should have appeared on the cover or the marketing page on DriveThru. The preview is six pages, the first six, so you get to see a good deal of the initial pretension. It should have included a page or two of encounters to give the potential buyer an idea of what they are purchasing. That is the purpose of a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561839/kingdom?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Reviews | 2 Comments

Fortress Tomb of the Ice Lich

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By G. Hawkins
Mythmere Games
OSRIC
Levels 9-12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Level 12, Reviews, The Best | 14 Comments

Righteous Bro Cave

Posted on April 20, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Operant Game Lab
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments

A Grinning Ghost’s Grim Tale

Posted on April 18, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By GMaia
Knight of the Lake Games
OSR
Levels 4-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Reviews | 7 Comments

The Rook & The Crook

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Taron Pounds
Land of the Blind
OSR/Vagabond
Levels 6-10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Reviews | 12 Comments

Corpse Husbandry

Posted on April 13, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Shanklimb
Self Published
OSR
Levels 4-6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing here. Move along. Move along. 

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

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City of the Ape-Men

Posted on April 11, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Gabor Lux
EMDT
OSRIC
Levels 5-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do have a few issues though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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