By Pitiless as Bronze Productions Self Published OSR Level 1
While on pilgrimage to the winter faire at Saint Lewiston, the outcasts become entangled in the fates of a decaying monastic order and an otherworldly creature that might be their salvation, or the last rusty iron nail in their coffin. Now with inter-player paranoia and inquisitors!
This 36 page adventure is laid out in seven scenes revolving around the discovery of a wounded angel and that discoveries intersection with The Inquisition. An interesting concept that tries to do a sandbox in a scene based format. And wordy for what it is.
THis is based off a hex encounter in the Mythic North hex crawl for Outcast Silver Raiders. That encounter is a dude that has an angel under a tarp in his wagon. It mashes that up with some information about The Inquisition of the Black Bishop also found in the hex crawl. Thus, this adventure is doing what all hex crawl refs do: taking something tha party just stumbled across and riffing on it with something else that the party has stumbled across.
The pretext here is that the party is on the road travelling to someplace else. First, they meet a group of villagers, fellow travellers, who are injured. Turns out they got hit by bandits. Also turns out that they are feeling a village that the Inquisition just hit. We have, here, hints of a couple of upcoming encounters. And, sure enough, the very next encounter is with some bandits attacking a small group of monks. Saving them can give you a leg up when you hit encounter three, the Monastery of Sabriel. They are devoted the the angel Sabriel, who has not graced them with blessings in quite some time. Blah blah blah. Whatever. Next up we meet a cheery peasant on the road with a wagon and a tarp in the back … and an angel under it, in a very weakened state. This is the last normal encounter. From here you get to decide what to do. Take the angel? Help the dude to sell it? Free it? Kill it? The adventure could go several different places, literally. Next up the party meets a scout for the Inquisition, and then in the final encounter the Inquisition proper. They could meet the party on the road, or at the monastery, or in a town, or … you get the idea. Whatever the party decided to do, with the angel, they will then meet the scout and then the main Inquisition group. The DM needs to riff in these two encounters with the choices the party made earlier on what to do.
If we consider the opening scenes the hook, the pretext, then the closing scenes, with the angel and the Inquisition, aer the payoff. And it is here that the adventure shows its cracks. It is trying to represent a kind of natural flow and progression through the use of its scene based formatting. But the manner in which it does this is clumsy. It is, essentially, trying to say that the party should encounter the angel, and encounter the scout and encounter the main force. But, also, it doesn’t know what the party has decided to do prior to this. So while the opening scenes are rather static, you meet this person at this place doing this thing, the final ones must be more free flowing and open to being riffed on. This means the adventure, in the “scenes” must resort to something akin to “if the party is here then the baddies do this thing and if they are doing this then they are doing this” and so on. During this, in spite of the page count” we lose the specificity that brings an adventure life.
I think perhaps that this shows the promise of a more traditional way to write a sandboxy adventure. Viewing a lot of this as hooks, we focus on motivations and goals, quirks and relationships. Toss in a few problems to get the party moving around. We then have a much more open ended adventure with the DM using the resources provided to respond to the party, perhaps with the benefit of a timelines of escalations. The DM responds to the parties actions by the counter actions of the various parties, be they the inquisition or a disgruntled peasant or monks or whatever.
I’m not morally opposed to scene based adventures. They tend to not be my thing, in general, but I recognize that many folks play this way. The issue here is the mixing of the scene based format with what is, inherently, a more open ended set of potentials from the party and reactions from the other NPC’s. Confusing is not the word for it, but the if/thens grow tedious in a world where a more opened ended format would have suited it better.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages, near the end. It doesn’t really give you much of an idea of what you’ll be buying, so, bad preview.
A long time ago, a legendary hunter lived in the forest near a small village. He was ruthless and cruel, and delighted in tracking and killing dangerous foes and monsters. No, you have to find a missing son. Will you dare explore the Halls of the Hell Hunter?
This six page adventure uses about two pages to describe eighteen rooms in a tomb. It relies on abstracted descriptions and a minimalism style. This causes it to come off as a rather generic and unmemorable adventure with little to recommend.
On the plus side, the entries are terse. No hunting for information here …
This is an EASL adventure, so I get to be an asshat here, making assumptions about someone whose english is far far better than any of the other languages I speak. But, also, the adventure borders on being illegible., Looking at the cover, the text on it is in white, with a black outline, on a blue background. It just looks blurry to me. And continuing inside, I’m not sure what it is, the kerning maybe? In any event it, also, looks somewhat blurry to me. Like the letters are bleeding in to each other. And then the map. We’re trying to do some fancy shit there with the grid and so on. But again it comes off small and hard to read. And the key numbers are in a light blue font with a light stroke weight. You’ll be hunting to find them on the map. Legibility is, perhaps, the very first thing on the adventure checklist. In order to run the adventure you have to actually be able to READ the adventure. I guess people think that the font they select is going to look cool. I don’t know. Maybe? But also it has to be readable and in far too many cases I see a font choice result in legibility issues and I seldom if ever think that the unusual font choice is cool, outside of a handout. I’m sure folks will argue that you can have an aesthetically pleasing thing to look at and be legible. And I’m sure that’s a correct statement. Just as I’m sure that if you’re picking a cool font you have deluded yourself in to thinking that its perfectly legible.
On to the background and intro! The setup here is that a legendary hunter lived in a forest near a small village. Hmmm, sound familiar? Yes, the marketing blurb is the intro. It’s repeated, of course, but go read it again. It is abstracted, yes? Exactly like one would expect in a marketing blurb. Except the actual background is just as abstracted. There is ZERO specificity here, even of the piss poor variety found in most adventures. “A mother for the village needs help: her young son has disappeared in the forest, searching for the famous tomb. The party has a mission: find the kid…” That’s your specificity. There is NOTHING here more specific than that in all of the background or intro. Hmmm, no, “legendary hunter” was killed by a green dragon. It’s irrelevant, but, also, I guess it is specific.
Lets hit the room keys, shall we? “The body of a young male human lies on the ground. He has been killed by a stone arrow. A mother will cry.” Well, props, I guess, for putting the pretext in the first room of the dungeon. But, how about: “A room dedicated to Dralena, the goddess of the hunt. The walls are decorated with decrepit tapestries of rural scenes and wild animals (stags, boars, foxes…).” This is not sterling writing. I’m not even sure what style to call it. Minimalistic, I guess.
There’s an almost obsessive lack of detail of detail here. “In the altar, a hidden cache contains a magical hunter’s dagger.” What kind of magic dagger/ What does it do? No idea. And no stats of ANY kind are present AT ALL. Not even Ye Old Skill Check DC 16. “Weakened stalactites can fall from the ceiling, especially if there is noise in the vicinity.”
These are all concepts. Its what you might jot down in the middle of the night, or on the drive to work, to remind you of an idea to expand upon further. But they are not expanded upon. The abstracted idea, the conceptual, barely that, is all that is described.
Specificity is the soul of the narrative. Don’t drone on in detail, but instead carefully select the important bits to be specific about. That’s what brings lifes to an adventure.
This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and shows you the map and some room keys, so, good preview.
The citizens of Arden don’t know it when they get up the morning that the adventure starts, but they are about to have a very, very bad day. One that will push them to their limits, and maybe a bit beyond, even. One that will put them on the path to becoming heroes. If they can rise to the challenge. If they can survive. Are you ready for your first day of school at the Hero Academy? The curriculum is hard and unforgiving, but the rewards…well, the rewards can be sublime. May fortune find you, and smile!
This 41 page funnel adventure details the attack on a village by a group of 400 invaders. It is one of the worst adventures I have ever seen. Rambling, devoid of structure, and with little to do. What can I say, it was in the OSR section.
I am at a loss. I don’t know what to say. I’m not allowed to be a shit. I’m not allowed to fucking hate life and all that lives. Can I rant and rave and cuss and throw a fit? No. I have to be supportive. I have to say things like Falls short of their vision and crap like that. Somehow, we are expected to have a giant steaming pile of shit shoved down our throats and say Thank You Please More! You can’t actually not like anything, you can’t have fucking standards. And thus ut always was and alway will be.
Hermes Trismegistus as an old level one wizard of mine who was 98 and taught in a magic school.And he killed three giant rats over his career with a magic missile in the schools basement hence his name. And he blew out this kids throat once with a magic missile and got no end of shit for killing a kid even though the kids eyes were glowing black and he was JUST about to start unleashing hellfire. You remember all of those long, old, boring, let me tell you about my character stories that you have had to sit through politely until you can find an excuse to be somewhere else, like cleaning out the pig styes? This is that, except in DM “Let me tell you about my home game” form. It drones on and one and it interjects pages of This Is What Happened In My Game, in detail!, at various points in the text. Pages that have little to no use, even as examples, in the game you might be running from this adventure text.
I don’t know how to describe this. 400 dudes attack the town of 200 people. They knock down the two guard towers first thing. At some point some PC gets two arrows fired at them. At another point two attackers show up for the party to fight. Then you can roll up to six times to make forays in to town to save people and gather supplies. These are just Stealth Checks, with no other roleplaying or situations. Oh, Oh, there is this: “Mrs. Miller appears out of the roiling smoke to one of the search parties. She is bloody and crying. Her two youngest children are missing and Mr. Miller died looking for them.” That is the closest, and the ONLY place, in this adventure where there is any specificity to a situation. Seriously. That’s it. The abstracted stealth checks are the adventure. There is NOTHING else. The fucking Miller shit is what the adventure should be. Situations. Difficult decisions. The designer prompting the DM to scenes and situations and greatness.
But not here. Forty pages to get a couple of encounters. Somehow it has both no details and an overabundance of them at the same time, but nothing gameable. It’s as if I write an adventur ein the style of this blog, all stream of consciousness with long rambling sections, little formatting, and what formatting I do throw in I ignore and mix in other shit.
A page of italics r4ead-aloud to start the adventure. A LONG and involved process of character creation, that attaches the players to their characters through a long rich fully developed backstory. It’s a fucking funnel man! A funnel is designed to NOT do that, You make some dudes and GO, you’re not attached. You get attached through their deeds.
“This is very open ended and when this adventure begins, I have no way of knowing
where your players have placed their characters” The entire adventure is like this. “Meanwhile, if any of your characters have situated themselves around Miller’s Pond, they’ll be pursued.” Why would I be around millers pond? There’s nothing special about this place. “If several of the characters started in or near the tavern, their action economy should overwhelm these two, which will give the characters an important win, plus 2 Gambesons, 2 Spears, and 2 daggers for the effort. That’s potentially huge.”
“This…this right here is how heroes are ultimately made. Not born, made.” Jesus h fucking Christ. Fantasy Heartbreaker anyone? You have to suffer through page after page of this smugness. Of this mastabatory fantasy of their home game world. I pulled section after section of text from this to quote, but it’s just too much.
There is no interactivity to speak of. What little there is is abstracted to a die roll. There is no specificity; the miller pond thing is BY FAR the only specific situation in this. It is long, conversational, rambling, overly invested in itself. Bloodymage, at least, didn’t drone on for forty pages. Information is mixed in willy nilly, with little structure to find things. It talks AT the DM instead of supporting them in their game. It’s the difference between Ulysses and an operation manual. I’m not doing a Finnigans Wake thing here, I need details to operate the thing.
I really can’t say enough bad things about this. It does … nothing? But it manages to do it in such a smug Holier Than Thou way. I really cannot stand this. It’s an outline of an outline, that is then abstracted. While still somehow dumping TONS of detail that has absolutely no bearing on anything while telling you how great it is.
By Nikoline Self Published OSR "Low to Mid Levels"
West of Kurhan, south of Makkalet, the burial-mound of Tell-Arn rises like a mountain over the fells. For a thousand years the Hyrkossi interred their kings, chiefs, and hetmen in its depths. But for fifty winters none have dared; the Lion of Tell-Arn slays any brave enough to enter. Now it ranges wider, beyond the tell, and threatens the village of Lambsblood nested in its shadow. The chiefs know why; they know a reckoning has come.
This 44 page adventure uses about twentyish pages to describe a two level burial complex with about fifty rooms in it. There is no “ancient tomb” syndrome here; the place is alive with a riot of things going on and interactivity, while keeping the encounters focused on game play. It is deceptively complex and intricate, ala the best of the original era third party supplements.
Yeah, that’s right. I said it. Thracia. This isn’t Thracia. But man, it may be one of the closest things I’ve seen that gives off a Thracia vibe. It feels intricate and subtle. A weirdly mixed degree of hazards and interactivity. That odd OD&D feeling of not quite ever knowing what is going on, as a player, and yet having a lot laid out in front of you. “Why is there a greek temple here behind this waterfall, in the middle of Laos?”
We’ve got these towns and village sout on the steppe. Vaguely tribal, herdsmen. There’s a larger town/city to the north and south, a few days away, and Lambsblood, the little village you are in. Nearby by is Tell-Arn, a burial place for the kings of old. And, now, stalking about, is The Lion, killing freely. There is a little history section in this (isn’t there always?) but it does a decent job of laying down a framing in a length that is not too onerous. It sets the stage for a three or so dead (ish) warlords of varying ages in the Tell, as well as The Ancients (err, “Middlemen”) and so on. What this results in the faction play kind of thing where the party could use use the inhabitants various quirks to exploit others. Thus we get a little sheet for each level that says things like “? The Victors of Makkalet observe the living, attack the Black Host, ignore the ancient dead, flee wights.” or “Baboons eat centipedes, climb on the statues, flee the roc, lions, and the undead.”
Ok, so, a kind of burial mound with a hole in the side. And, in the grand tradition of decent adventures, there’s something on top. In this case, two rocs. Uh huh. And, sometimes, on the wanderers table, they dive in to the dirt and rip huge chunks out as if they are trying to get inside, leaving new holes open to the sky (at least on the first level.) Man oh man! I love the entire top. Nest, eggs, barren tree, a silver mask hanging in it. Yeah, a silver mask. Vaguely avian. And it causes confusion in the rocs and they mostly leave you alone. Nd fear in the lions inside the complex, and so on. A vaguely “this is a roc” kind of a reaction without going full on overboard with it. It’s great! This kind of situation, with a giant mostly barren mesa top, two big threats on it. Some obvious treasure … this is all great. It tempts you. It dares you. Go ahead fuckwit, push your luck. It’s not an explicit set piece but yet it is expansive enough to BREATHE and allow the party to plot and scheme.
And this place is FULL of high HD creatures. And low hit die creatures. Like, a pesudo-lich, and then also the cultural hero of he tribesmen that doesn’t really know they are dead, and a fucking hydra. And, I don’t know, half a dozen others? Do not go gently dear adventurers! Use that guile and wit and those feet to work around folks and even, perhaps, make alliances.
The formatting is decent, bullets, bolding of “the most important thing in the room” and whitespace to help organize topics. This, combined with the number of elements to most rooms, puts us at four per page. It’s quite he dense work with very little padding, again noting the degree of interactivity that a lot of the rooms have. Multiple things per room.
Looking at this random room, “A doorway of rough stone. Two massive iron skulls are placed in niches either side of the threshold. If wights or the Lion are near, they begin chattering.” Window dressing, but pretty good window dressing. Certainly sets a vibe! I’m not enamored with the if/then, but that’s just knee-jerking since its not really used like an if/then. Still, though … Anyway, continuing on the next room “An articulated skeletal warrior, sat astride a skeletal horse. Raised on a bier. Wields a gold-hooped spear (BITER); both figures are held together with gold wire (50c rider, 100c horse).” Decent little scene. Maybe a little light on the adjectives and mood, but it still does a nice job. Moving to the first bullet: “? If a light is shone within, the shadows of 6 unseen figures are cast on the walls. These are 6 ghosts of faithful companions to a chief killed at Makka.” That’s a pretty freaky effect! Shadows kind of used as shadows … without being the real shadows of something! Anyway, further bullets explain that if you can speak to them in their language they announce they are the protectors of blah blah blah and it becomes a safe rest site that they defend, while another tells us that if you wear the GOLDEN MASK then they kneel to the wearer and can be commanded, in part of the complex anyway. Nifty! It all works together, it all makes sense. There are some logical consequences to the creatures being there. And this adventure does that over and over again. There are reasons for things and you can take advantage of that. It doesn’t drop in fucking backstory to explain why they are there and just say THEY ATTACK! It doesn’t drop in backstory and then let you win them over. No, it concentrates on the Win Them Over without droning on or engaging in padding.
Speaking of, let me drop these here “… a dead tomb-robber lies slumped against it [ed: a wall with doorway], head caved in; its arm is crushed between the south wall” Head caved in! Yeah! Arms stuck under a wall?! Yeah! Or, how about “… a tomb-robber sits cradling his head, rocking back and forth; his stomach has been torn open and his fat-slick guts spill out onto his knees” Game over man! This is a wight about to pop up. Wonderful handling of the undead. Wonderful introduction of real life shit to bring home the situation. These have a visceral feel to them …. Imagine what would happen if the language were pumped up just a bit more?
Lots going on here, secret doors to bust through, things to fuck with, things to talk to, situations to maneuver around and perhaps ake advantage of, secrets to discover and exploit. A nice variety. All supported by a pretty decent map with room for an adventure to breathe in.
So, there are some things wrong also. I mentioned the language could be a bit punchier. And some of the rooms can really drag on a bit. This is the hidden depth of some adventures, but when you take it too far it starts to drag. This, combined with the specifics of the formatting, can do a bit of a wall of text, but in bullet and indent form. I suspect it has something to do with the justification (as in typesetting), but I’m not sure.
It gets a little cumbersome also in the more NPC things. They are described as having who they are, what they know, what they don’t know, what they want, what they dont want, and what they can do. This sounds good, but it works out to be a bit cumbersome as you dig through it. There has to be a better way, perhaps by bolding a few keywords in each section or something. The adventure also leaves out a few things. WHile I was happy to see the treasure for scraping off the bronze, in the above example, with values, there are other parts where things seem to be missed. The entrance to the complex is flanked by two crumbling statues. Which is the last we hear of the statues. It’s obvious the party will investigate them. A couple of more words would have solved that, either in the initial description or in a follow up. IE/: you don’t have to follow up with another section on some throw-away statues, but, also, the initial description should then e enough. “Herdsmen soldier statues” or some such. Just enough for theZDM to further riff on.
Nice consequences at the end. For some of the Middlemen artifacts/magic items: “and make no secret of it, they are sought after, envied, and cursed from Kurhan to the south. Merchant-houses and wizards seek to steal their prize, and wars are fought for a single blade of Middleman steel.” Yupperoo buckeroo! You get a ring of wishes then people gonna want it, even the mostly kind-hearted ones.
I like this. Decent map for play. Good complex with a lot going on without it feeling unnatural. Varied opponent levels, including the Lion-monster, to put some pressures on imaginative and fast play. Great treasure and magic items, varied, that don’t feel like book items but fit in naturally. I really kind of like this and want to run it! All from a first time designer who got inspiration from that Skerples starter adventure. If you grow up with good examples you produce good examples? I don’t know man, but I’ll take this one, for sure.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. A fucking dollar? Absolutely. The preview is thirteen pages, more than enough to get a look at several of the keys. Good preview. I would encourage you check out at least the preview to get an idea of what is going on.
Boozy, smokey, fatalistic, cheap, lonely, bloody, melodramatic, effervescent, nodding off, oneiric, seedy, urban, muddy, Ink-stained, shrouded, fetid, a sour gut, a shadow, a lie behind a lie, and one wrong move from ending up another corpse in another alley on another list at the bottom of a stack of scrolls on the lawman’s desk, fighting for his life against another hangover. Everybody Rots is a fantasy western noir adventure, populated with a city full of life. Maybe too much life. Characters with emotions, behaviors, and motivations that dictate the way the action shakes out. It can be used as a standalone adventure or plugged into an existing campaign.
This fifty page city adventures/setting has a couple of good turns of phrase, but it is so overwhelming up its own ass that its hard to make out what is ging on here. Figuratively and literally, as it turns out since the layout is an abomination and the text a confusing mess of postmodernism.
The email the email, what what the email, the email the email, what what the email. Hard to type with those boxing gloves on, eh? “Dear Bryce, I love you and want to have millions and millions of your babies” Ok, it’s starting off right. “I wrote a 5e adventure on itch” Oh. Ok. joy. “Everybody Rots is a fantasy western noir adventure” oh my god. No! NOOO!!!! “populated with a city full of life. Maybe too much life. Characters with emotions, behaviors, and motivations that dictate the way the action shakes out.” Well, ok, I admit. That sucked me in. That’s the line that got me and got you your “5e western fantasy noir on itch” adventure review.
This is supposed to be a kind of city/town setting, for the party to do things in between adventures. And then also it has a few adventures in it, a kind of overarching plot to keep things together and give some semblance of continuity. But it fails in very nearly every way. It does, however, sometimes deliver on its promise of delivering things that seem real. These are some of the best parts of the book, setting and adventures. Some dealers are moving a drug shipment to a nearby town to expand operations and some druggies find out. They dig a trench across the road, cover it, and then hide out to hit the shipment. And ill get fucking slaughtered, but if the party intercedes for some reason and they survive they swear they are taking the money leaving this shithole of a city. And there’s a 10% chance that they do actually do that. This rings true in such a depressing way and I’m sure many of you can relate. When the adventure is doing things like this its doing a good job. But they are far too infrequent. Not that everyone has to be dripping with this shit, but the motivations for the various people, and they way they interact with others, is far too staid. There is, at times, some throwaway shit that is a chuckle. You find a murder weapon covered in blood in an alley, as a rando event. Or a big thunderclap that makes kids and dogs run around scared. A parrot in a cage squawking DONT MAKE ME DO IT over and over again. There’s nothing more to these, they are just rando things to find/happen.
And that is one of the major problems. It’s just weird for the sake of being weird. The parrot, the murder weapon (how non-specific!) … they just dont do anything. It’s just window dressing. There’s not springboard there. “Stuck in the lord mayors wife” or something. Thats a situation. And the town should have situations not possessions. “A group of 4 or 5 goblins and elves are furiously making out. Pants are at ankles and dresses are pulled above waists. Hands are everywhere and the slurps and moans are burned into your brain” This comes off as trying to be clever and witty instead of being clever and witty. And why do I care?Ohhh! It’s a booby! How risque! There’s nothing to any of this.
And the adventures included, and even the overall plotline, just isn’t there. A little girls cat is missing and you need to go in to a basement to find it. And there are giant rats there! Seriously. Rats in a basement. Yeah, sure, mutant rats. Whatever. It’s rats in the basement. For an 11YO. I just knifed an orphan girl and cut out her kidney to sell for drugs, but, sure, I guess it’s time to go find a little kids cat. In a basement with giant rats. There’s a fucking disconnect here. Help a hooker? Sure. Help the old woman that gives us stale bread? Sure. Even maybe the kid lures marks to an alley for us to roll and then we help her. But THIS?! There’s a disconnect here between the vibe the designer wants to portray and the content that the designer is providing. And I’m not even gonna touch the “giant rats in a basement” trope.
This disconnect runs through it. Arasaka corporation, the drug pushers, don’t come off as Arasaka. The cult of decay faction doesn’t come off like a cult of decay. Even the newly arrived cops are not really copping well. All of the situations and vignettes that would turn this in to good shit isn’t present. In spite of their being reams of information about them … that isn’t really gameable. Theres a focus here on How Clever Am I instead of gameable stuff. Too much randomness for its own sake instead of communicating the vibe through the thighs on the table as appropriate. The city, for all its descriptions and little weirdness, seems lifeless. A sin beyond compare for a town supplement. ABD, it’s a pretty idiosyncratic lace, being on the literal edge of the world (whats that place in Discworld?) You’ll need to fit that in.
And then theres the text. The physical text and layout and font and colors chosen. Ths thing is a fucking nightmare. White text on black background. Weird drippy overlays. Weird font and angles. I don’t see how you can get any mor illegible than this without it actually being illegible. I mean, can you technically read it? Yes, in the same way you can read something that is written backwards. Information retrieval. Headaches from it. It’s just Willlldddd that this was the decision made to aid gameplay. By making it hard to use. Your book can look cool and edgy and still be easy to use and legible. It is one of the worst put together books, for usability, I have ever seen … while still having, I guess, words that you can actually read if you try just a little.
This is $10 at DriveThru. The same pages on itch are NOT indicative of the actual pages.
There’s not enough actual situations. There’s not enough people with real motivations. The main town plot has not enough specificity in building tension. It’s illegible. Which is all too bad cause I like a good town supplement and the promise of a seedy one that more mimicked how real life is was quite intriguing.
By Velociryx Self Published Home Brew 5e Levels 3-5
It starts with an uneasy feeling. A Foreboding. At least one member of the adventuring party feels it. Uneasy sleep. Nightmares. The feeling of being hunted. The eyes of something powerful and predatory ever upon you… That feeling draws the party from the city of Argenia, farther north, and as they draw closer to the village of Brunvaald and its surrounding Hollers, which collectively sit in the shadow of a mountain known only as the Scarberg, that sense of unease grows stronger. Something stalks the folk of this lonely mountain. Something is choking the life out of this isolated town, and it grows stronger by the day. Can you stop it before it becomes too powerful to be contained? Dare you even try?
This 33 page adventure is more conceptual than an outline than an adventure. Wordy and prescriptive the like of which is seldom seen today. The local color, what there is, can’t save it from itself.
Someone was interested in this being reviewed and it was in the OSR category. It turns out that “Other OSR” now means “5e” on DriveThru. Good ol DriveThru, keeping up that garbage fire image. Anyway, someone in the party has a bad dream so you head north to a village. Once there the Mayor tries to kill you or you try and kill the mayor and/or fight a demon in a valley nearby after maybe doing some investigating. It’s all very loosy goosy, but not in a good way.
What it does do in a somewhat interesting way is present a couple of power bases in nearby valleys. Think, if you will, of an inn out in the wilderness. It might be a little fortified or walled and have maybe a stable and smith and some workers about who stay there, since there’s nothing else around. We might also think of a massive ranch, out in the middle of Nowhere Texas, with some hands around. There’s a boss and then there are some loyal workers who could act as toughs or NPCs or something, but, basically, these are little islands exerting some control on some amount of land around them. There are three here. The first is the local wise woman. Breaking trope tradition, she’s not living in a hut out in the woods. People who live alone get killed, historically. (Sorry about you isolated cabin in the woods fantasy!) She’s got almost a little compound. It doubles as a whorehouse. She got some dudes around for muscle. Maybe a few chicks that also also learning how to be wise women. Home for wayward souls, as the adventure puts it. Or, another valley with the rancher Merle. And all his hands.
I should note that I’m praising the concept here, not the implementation. Everything in this adventure is a nightmare.
You know how some DM’s and/or designers will put in a very special NPC that is clearly their player character, who is super powerful and all knowing blah blah blah? The DMs pet NPC? That doesn’t happen here, except the entire ADVENTURE is the Dms pet NPC. There’s a smug self-satisfied nature to this that I just find such a turn off. Not exactly a railroad but something closer to one true wayism? If you Your party needs one cleric or warlock or ranger in it. Otherwise, pick a different adventure. Even though you already bought this one. If you ignore the dreams then the adventure is over. If you X then the adventure is over. If the party is not careful, the adventure tells us a bazillion times, then the party will all die and deservedly so. If you don’t do a good job talking to the refugees on the road then the adventure should be very hard and the mayor should basically just kill the party, the adventure tells us, more than once. Dude says, straight out “As mentioned previously, there is exactly ONE right way to approach this problem.” Talk to the refugees. Talk to the valleys. Work together to bring down the mayor. Then go banish the demon. Otherwise you face the mayors thugs and demon at the same time. Oh, also, the demon is AC16 with 150HP and DR to normal weapons. That’s 50% resistance, right? Is that a challenge for level 5’s? Or threes? It’s been awhile since I 5e’d.
And then there’s the conversational style of this. This is almost all long form paragraph style with little formatting. And little in the way of section headings. And where there are some other information gets mixed in. “This is a fun bit of role play that will give the Ranger an opportunity to shine. His group can pass the other group entirely unseen, or even ambush the Highwaymen under the Ranger’s direction if the Ranger’s player wants to take it in that direction. In any case, it won’t take up a ton of time and it’s a neat way to showcase the Ranger’s unique talents. In fact, if you, as the DM don’t feel that your ranger has been getting enough time in the spotlight, forget rolling and just make sure that one or both of these occur!” Wonderful. The adventure is full of this. I think it would be hard to grab a couple of sentences or a paragraph in this adventure and have it NOT be like that. “Or, as my last group did … “ I. Hate. My. Life.
Finally, the adventure is not an adventure. It’s not even an outline of an adventure, I’d say. It’s more of a concept of an adventure. There are pages of text about those valleys/power bases, but you’re not really going to get much of anything more than what I’ve already said. There is no specificity. Nothing going on in them. No names other than who is in charge. And the mayor doesn’t get much more than “send his dudes to lead the party in to a trap.” Seriously, that’s about all you’re gonna get. His dudes? His house? Power bases? Best buds? Not really.
And yet this is 33 pages. Because of the conversational tone. Because of Mary Sue DM pet nature of the adventure. What A Clever Boy Am I. I’m not a clever boy. I’m a worthless hack. But I’m a worthless hack that can spot this kind of shit from a mile away.
This is $3 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Otherwise you wouldn’t buy it.
The guardian of the Shrine of Ismene has been slain! The cries for vengeance ring out! Will you aid in this noble deed or take the opportunity to pilfer the now unguarded treasures of the shrine?
This seven page adventure presents six rooms in a nerid shrine. While fine from a comprehension standpoint, it is aimless in its design, with nothing really going on … in spite of there being something going on.
Ohs nos! The spring in the middle of town has dried up … like thirty minutes ago! It comes from the little shrine next to it where a nerid lives. She must be pissed at the village! Lets send in some hobos! Inside we find an adventuring party in one of the rooms with a giant snake head and a nerid in another room cradling a dead giant snake, sans head. You can, also, if you want, go find the nerids treasure vault that the adventuring party was also looking for.
I’m not really sure what the point of all of this is. And that’s coming from a pretty hard core exploratory guy who doesn’t really need pretext. EVentually the nerid stops being a whiny little botch and goes and kills the other party. The other party is friendly but standoffish, according to the adventure. Great. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Kill the nerid? Kill the party to avenge a giant snake? I don’t give a fuck about any of this. I guess the other party are bad guys and I’m supposed to see that and help the nerid? And, no, I’m not buying that “open ended movie ending” thing here. This is just something else. A dragon in one room that will leave in an hour to go to another room and kill the balrog that is in that room. Ok. And?
The nerid is a woman with lightly blue skin. Also, she MIGHT have a fish head. It doesn’t SAY she has a fish head in the initial description. “At the edge of the pool is a slightly blue-skinned woman on her knees clutching a 15 f long headless serpent” Ok, so, if she had a fish head you’d think that would go in the initial description, right? But, then, in the follow up it says “The blue-skinned woman is Ismene, the fish-headed Naiad.” Ok, so, I guess she does have a fish head? And, in the same room, the designer felt that telling us how to tread water in a pool in the room was more important than telling us about the omwan in the room, with or without the fish head. The most important things should come first. We don’t put trivia first.
Did I mention the magic item that can teleport water at thirty gallons a second? It’s a waterskin. You fill it from like the ocean, and then when you open up the stopper it will teleport the water you filled it from at a rate of THIRTY gallons a second. Jesus! H! Fucking! Christ! What the fuck man! Isn’t that like one of those “cutting water” things they use in metalwork or something?
The credits say that, in credit the playtesters: “No one yet!” I can believe that.
An aimless dungeon.
This is Pay What You Want at Itch.io, with a suggested price of $1.
Durgam’s Folly sits at the edge of the kingdom, an embattled outpost against the evil creatures of the wild. You travel with a caravan to that distant fortress, transporting mysterious cargo. But as you approach your destination, something is amiss. A local hamlet is in ruins. Strange creatures patrol the land. Has the famed fortress finally been overthrown?
This 32 page adventure uses six pages to describe about fifteen rooms in a golem dungeon under an ogre fort. It most resembles long winded hucksterism making a cash grab through stabbing.
Step right up folks! I have the most amazing wonderful adventure ever to show you! From the hands of Bill Barsh and Mike Mearls, two renown names in the D&D industry! Never again will you see the like of this, the Necromancer dude and Mearls of WotC! This is hours and hours and hours of fun for your entire group! Your friends will laugh and have an excellent time! Your kids will bond with you, though they be teenagers, and you’ll get to have the relationship with them that you always wanted! Yes sir, all thanks to this little adventure here! You know, you watch those old timey western movies and you see the snake oil salesman in town and you wonder, how can anyone fall for that? A golden age! Real medicine that did real things making an appearance! And the notable and famous lending their names to make a buck, though they be past their prime, you can still memberberry it. Welcome to the OSR version of Paizo, where we write for an adventure to be read and make some money. You can search for the meaning behind all of this, though the search itself is more important than the meaning.
Ok, you are level six caravan guards. Your boss is a 4MU and the dudes are mostly 1HD guards. You get treated like shit. At what point does the party NOT have to be caravan guards anymore? At what point can they get a little respect? This is why I so often turn to the knife. Once the DM kills my family 23 times I no longer care. ANyway, after being degraded by the caravan boss you arrive at a village which looks peaceful but in which everyone has been killed. You see ogre tracks and out of the kindness of your heart you track them back, having a couple of monster encounters on the way, to a fort. The top level has ogres in it and you kill them and then go to the dungeon level, which is mostly linear, and kill golems till you’re bored.
I really cannot emphasize enough the overwhelming amount of text in this adventure. That is combined with a lack of any meaningful formatting and a painfully small font. It takes the adventure three LONG paragraphs to explain that there ARE hooks, before it actually gets to the hooks. The caravan boss gets a half column of information and backstory. The other guards gets some also, though less. EVERYTHING here has a backstory. “Two nights ago, a group of ogres led by Grimulak silently crept up on Hansonburg and murdered every last one of its inhabitants. Using his invisibility and polymorph self abilities, Grimulak easily disposed of the guards before leading the ogres into town. Under the Grimulak’s iron-fi sted command, the ogres methodically moved from house to house, killing the inhabitants in their sleep and quickly running down and killing those who tried to escape.” This is not written for a DM to run. This is written for someone to buy and read. It’s that kind of shit everywhere. The ogre you find in the wilderness has a full backstory on why he is where he is and how he got drunk and so on and so forth. A demon, in the dungeon, that you can free gets four fucking paragraphs. Four paras! How much fucking text do you need?
And then, with ALLLLLL that detail and backstory, we get shit like this in the read-aloud “The tension of the journey is shattered by shouts from up ahead. A guard under Uli’s command at the front of the caravan gallops toward you, shouting that Uli has tracked down an ogre responsible for the sacking of Hansonburg.” This generic and lacking in the specificity in bringing things to life. So, both exceptionally long winded AND boring. And the room descriptions follow this same line as well. Lots of text and yet no really evocative environments. There is a pretty good art piece in it showing some decent body horror/borg building, but nothing compared to it in the text to even give the semblance of it. It engages, over and over again, in telling instead of showing.
One of the absolute most interesting of bad choices is how the fort is handled. This is an old fort now full of ogres. Over the course of three or so pages we get like 25 rooms described to us. Short, boring rooms. It’s done in almost a completely different style than the dungeon rooms, below, as if it were a different author. But, anyway … there are no monsters. Not in any room. One room has some human prisoners in it, but thats all. Instead, at the end, we get a page or so that tells us where the ogres are. They hang out in room sixteen. They are also in room seven. A group patrols the courtyard. This is absolutely insane! Why would you do this? Why would you not just put the ogres in the rooms in the key descriptions?! I get that having a separate order of battle is nice. A little section (Ha! Not in this adventure!) that you can easily reference when the infiltration inevitably turns to a raid. Fine. But to put ALLof the monster locations on the first level in what is essentially an appendix at the end of the level description? What possible purpose is there for this?! I’m not fucking making this up. This is the FULL tetx of room seventeen: “STORAGE ROOM This plain stone room looks as if it once held many kegs of ale, judging by the patterns of dust on the floor and walls. Four kegs stand clustered in the southeast corner of the room. This room was used as a storage area. The ogres have gone through most of the supplies that were kept here.” Got it? The text at the end of the level one keyes tells us that there are five ogres there.
Otherwise, you enter rooms and stab things. I guess a couple of times you can free prisoners. yeah.
This is $13 at DriveThru. There is no preview. It’s just $13 for the Frog God/Mearls combo.
What was once a sprawling expanse of magical innovation is now a few scattered buildings covered in muck. Yet, the magic these ancient folk wielded can still be found throughout. It weaves through everything in this forsaken stinking bog. Explorers come from far to sift through the ruins and try to pry open the cold stone doors. Some succeed, cracking open the old tombs to find contraptions, spirits, and long-lost knowledge. Giant reptiles and relentless insect await those who visit, and others lurk out there in the sodden landscape. Beings of power, cruelty, and deception. To come across them is to come across death, or worse. Deep in the swamp stands a cathedral looming over the fetid vestiges. There the Abbot waits.
This 32 page adventure presents seven encounters with “tombs” in a swamp, with a quest giver in one to get you going. It’s not the greatest framing for an adventure, and the descriptions can be cringe at times and generally overstay their welcome by quite a bit.
The Legion of Gold is the Gamma World module I grew up with. I believe that part two is the exploration of the bunkers. A bunch of underground bunkers,maybe four rooms each, that you break in to and explore and find, like eight or ten different things going on. Empty. Travellers, batt-like Obbs. This thing has the same energy as that. While labeled a hex crawl it is really just seven one or two room locations with some shit going on in each. Even with spreads involved, 32 pages seems like a bit much.
There are a couple of empty hexes, two, I believe, to be exact, in the nine hex map. And, along with those, is a table to help fill them with something. “Complications” the adventure calls them. “A dead explorer floats by, covered in leeches.” Well, ok. Nice window dressing, I guess, but not really a complication? More interesting, it has an option to have other explorers around when you visit the locations. “Crawling over Everything” is the heading. 1-4 more explorers are running all over the same place you are, rolled for in each hex! That’s kind of an interesting approach to things. There’s also nothing to them beyond that; I would have enjoyed a simple list of fuckwits and their issues.
Taking a look at what I think is the read-aloud, we get things like “These heavy stone doors have stood open for centuries and are the only thing that indicate this is anything more than a pile of rubble. A foul smell wafts out from the dark passageway ahead.” I’m always down for a good rank wafting smell. But, stood open for centuries and the only thing that indicates are both conclusions. And conclusions should generally be kept out of descriptions. We want a description that leads the PLAYERS to think “wow, that doors stood open for centuries.” This is the very basics of showing instead of telling. You’re telling us that the door has stood open for centuries instead of showing us that the door has stood open for centuries. (Also, shame on all those other explorers. They’ve been digging around here in swarms for centuries and haven’t mined these places for all their loot yet?! Pffft!) In another place we get this “The silence is painful. You have entered the heart of the Monastery. Whatever tales you have heard,
whatever gossip, you will now have to decide for yourself what is true and what is a lie.” Ok, sure man. We don’t use first person. And, as general life advice, listening to The Cure for awhile will help until you transition to a I Feel Love remix.
It suffers, as well, from the generic/agnostic syndrome. “A pouch made of a smooth material containing diamond dust” with no more details. General monster stats that are CLEARLY modeled on B/X, but then also obfuscated further to “unarmored” AC’s. This sort of aggressive genericism does nothing to help an adventure. Specificity is the soul of the narrative. If I’m buying a generic/agnostic thing then I’ve already made the decision to restart … why not help some?
And then there’s a GREAT bunker, err, I mean tomb? It’s got three great big giant stone heads next to each other, along with a great art piece. Along with the requisite strained read-aloud that ends with “The black hole in its neck draws you, calls to you even. With each step closer, the stench of a thousand rotten corpses is exhaled upon you.” I’m still down for the stench and I’m still NOT down for the first person description. However … all three mouths lead to doom. Two teleport you far away, effectively ending a PC’s career, at least for this evening, while the third just kills you. There is no hint. The draws you to it, and seeing another explorer enter a mouth when you enter … these encourage the party to take themselves out. I guess, as a one-shot at level one thats chill? Never get attached to your level one.
There are some great magic items in this though. The same abstraction that hampers many parts of the adventure works in the magic items favour. A magic eight ball like thing. A croc jaw as a sword, a tooth necklace giving you some animal-kin. Nicely done items with a touch of naturalism and mystery about them.
This is a pretty basic adventure. Just seven places to explore framed by the Abboot giving you quests to go find things in them. STrained read-aloud and a need to edit, along with a need to discover the BOLD key, would help comprehension and finding details quite a bit.
This is $5 at DriveThru. No preview. Booo! BOOOO!!!!!!
[…] Twenty years have passed and the boy Dagobert has become a man; cunning, cruel, and simmering with resentment. Gunthigis, re-married, prepares to celebrate the marriage age of his daughter. Dagobert plans to abduct his half-sister during the celebratory feast. To do this he has retained the services of Bleda, a wizard-for-hire. Unbeknownst to Dagobert, Bleda has an agenda all his own – an agenda delivered to him by the silver armband he bears and the vengeful spirit of Carvilius that pours a honeyed poison into his ear each night…
This 47 page adventure has the party assaulting a goth/brigand hill fort. It is rife with politics for the party to navigate, both in the pretext and the conclusions, with the main “adventure” being almost certainly quite the difficult slog. It is a more interesting raid than most.
Okey doke. The time is roughly 55AD in England, I think. Post-roman, Franks and some goths running around, although this could fit in to just about any D&D game. The local manor lord is looking for a husband for his eldest daughter and holds a tourney/fair that everyone is coming to, peasants, freemen, landowners, local neighbor lords and churchmen. He’s looking for someone to marry her off to and everyone is coming to show off. At he end a large man steps forth, declares he is the rightful heir to the manor lord, and a bunch of screaming goths come out of the woods and murder and kill A LOT. Meantime the brigand/heir dude kidnaps the chick and runs off to his hill fort. The party raids it.
And why do they raid it? Well, the local lord can’t appear weak. A frontal assault will weaken him and leave him open to his neighbors raiding him/taking his lands. But he has to do SOMETHING, but, also, he can’t have hired the party, that would be an affront to his honor and strength. So hush hush. Also, he does not mention his abducted daughter. “He does not mention Elke, and if asked, shrugs and states that “he has other daughters.” Ouch! That’s real politics! The neighbor, at the festival, wants the heir killed and the daughter returned to HIM. He’s playing the long game, marrying her and getting a child will give him the manor lords lands in time. Crafty SOB, eh? And the local Bishop? He wants the daughter killed and the heir returned to him. Where he will declare him to be the rightful heir and thus NOT weaken the local lands/bishops power in the area, which would otherwise fall to more decline if chaos erupts and the local manor lord, who he thinks is weak, prevails. You’ve got three separate outcomes the party can pursue.
What I like about this, both in the setup and in the conclusions, is the appeal to a larger environment. The party is getting lands and some social status in all of these scenarios, which puts them squarely in the next part of the D&D campaign, the build a stronghold portion. VERY rarely do you see this in an adventure and yet its present both here and in the previous adventure, ifI recall correctly. And, of course, you make enemies no matter which path you choose, to varying degrees. Thus we have context in the campaign that the DM can leverage going forward. I’m not sure ANY other adventure I’ve seen has put this kind of element in to an adventure in quite a good way. You’ve got a goal to pursue in the raid, not just a vengeance/justice raid. Justice, after all, goes to those that can enforce it.
We move now to the actual raid. The hill fort has about fourteen primary rooms with a lot of sub-rooms attached to that. So, something like “Jail cells might have six or so sub locations and so on. Under the fort is an old barrow with another thirty or so locations. The place is STUFFED. Actually, so is the raid on the fair. We’ve got forty goths and twenty wardogs and like ten level twos and a few others attacking. These are split in three groups so it’s not as bad. But in the fort you will routinely encounter lots of enemies. Five ogres. Thirteen mummies(!) And lots of men. Or, the lake with a thousand snakes in it … There is a little bit of faction play here, with the goths coming from three tribes and some varying loyalty that could be taken advantage of, though not easily and with little initiative to. Following on from the first adventure, the adventure notes levels two’s, but I suspect that, without a larger group of supporters, fours are going to have more options, just from the spells available, such as silence, to make a raid easier. In spite of this, it doesn’t come off as, say, unfair. We’re not doing linear battles with fixed opponents and so on. Stealth and smart play win the day, although, it brings to mind the admonition in certain older adventures that an adventure would be for experience PLAYERS, not experienced characters.
There is some good design here. “A wolf-headed altar here is dedicated to a Celtic death-god. Inside of the wolf’s mouth is the glint of silver” The ever popular (at least with me) tempt the players angle! Who wants to stick their hand in? And, in other places, a good scene or so. The heir, Dagobert is found “Dagobert lies in the light of a fading torch, face ashen. There is a dagger protruding from his chest and he clings to life tenuous” Noice! He can, if th party likes, join them for his revenge “and we’ll sort the rest out later.” And he does! I’m down!
The descriptions in the dungeons are not exactly wonderful. “Empty. Pauper’s graves line the walls, all old bones and rotting funeral-wraps.” or “An ancient gaol; rusted iron cells with wrist-thick bars. Zombified watchdogs lurk amidst the gloom and debris” I’m not exactly MAD at these, but they could use just a bit more to them. But, also, there are situations like this “Four gargoyles squat evilly and scowl at each other, an iron chest between them. Each offers the contents of the chest to anyone who will kill the other three gargoyles. It is a ruse; they will all attack if one is attacked” That just reeks of old school situations, although, again, the descriptions are lackings. Specificity, in things like 3 elf slaves, with not much else to them, could have been done better.
The formatting of the preamble is a bit rough also. Long paragraphs that could use some more formatting to call attention to things and organize the longer text sections better. More specificity int the rumors “Stay away from the forests to the west, across the river. A witch dwells there and
she’ll suck your soul dry if she catches you” would be nice. Mag Maggy or the like. And, the events at the fair come in their own section rather than in the sections of the contests. So, a description of all the contests and then an outcomes section at the every end of them all makes page flipping a requirement.
I have a decent number of reservations here. The raid is not bad, just not great. But the preamble and conclusions are very good, in situations if not in the formatting of them. A little more specificity, a little more … events? Situations? In the dungeon or the events would have really gone a long way here to lifting the whole thing up to the level I think it could achieve. It is absolutely worth checking out though just for how the political/larger game is handled, as inspiration for how to design and integrate your own game.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing, which is great! But you’ll need to dig deep to get the entire sense of it.
“Nicetius [the Bishop] reminds the player characters that Elke [the daughter] is a “loose end” that should be “tied up” to ensure a seamless succession for Dagobert.”
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