
By Mike Mearls
Frog God Games
S&W
Levels 4-6
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.