tenfootpole.org

By Miles Adams
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-2

An ancient, crumbling crypt overrun with vermin is now home to a band of goblins, but the temple beneath the crypt contains dark secrets.

This fourteen page digest adventure features a two level dungeon with thirteen room in about eight pages.It’s a pretty basic goblin affair. There are hints of better things to come with the designer, based on elements of the room description

It’s a humanoid lair. B2 had humanoid lairs. What’s it doing that B2 doesn’t do? Orcs in a Hole  man. Except this time it’s goblins. A bunch of rooms on the first level with goblins in them and then a couple (four?) on the second level with an old temple and mummy in one. 

The format here is interesting. A room title. A short one sentence italics … overview? “The stench of death. Moans in the darkness.” That don’t do shit … except give a certain vibe to the DM. That’s what vibe the designer is going for in this room. And …. Meh? I mean, ok. I get where you’re going. But, also, why not just make that the rooms vibe? Via the descriptions? 

Then we get the bullets, with some nested bullets under those for more info, like treasure carried by the bulleted monster. With some bolding to draw the attention to a word. A stat block in an offset box and maybe another section with some more information if there’s a random table or something. It’s basic, easy to scan and find information. And, probably, in this case, implemented incorrectly. More on that later. But, it also has some extraneous information, like “The goblins keep the toad well fed so they can pass it by.” Great. Why do I care about that, when running a game? Or, where the fucking doors lead. You mean, the thing the map shows? You almost never need to include exit/door information. And, then, some of the bullets are out of order. Room one’s first bullet is that there is a giant toad in the room. And bullet two is that the muddy floor conceals the toad. We dont do things this way. Obvious things first. First things first. The floor is muddy. It hides a giant toad. That’s the way we order information, the the manner in which the DM is likely to need to use it.

Before we get to my main comments, let’s talk first about randomness in an adventure. I feel like I’ve talked about this sixteen hundred million bajillion times. Randomness in an OSR adventure is not arbitrary. It’s there for a reason purpose. It feels like people say “Oh, OSR has random tables in it. Here’s a random table. Now my adventure is OSR also!” No. In certain situations it makes sense to have some randomness in an adventure. A giant room full of trash that you search could reveal some loot/objects in a rather arbitrary manner. If you have multiple corpses, or graves, or something. Enough tha keying each, individually, could be a pain, then randomness might make sense. But, let’s say there is ONE corpse in the room. And you loot it. What’s the purpose of having a random table to show you what is on the body? The table takes up more space. And, there’s no reason for it. Whatever the body has is what the body has. Put put ni the fucking things you were randomizing. If you’ve got a scene based adventure and write four scenes as potentials on the way to the dungeon, and you roll to see which one the party encounters … why the fuck are you doing this? To waste three encounters worth of content? 

But, mainly, I want to talk a bit about the room descriptions and how I find them uninteresting. This is a common complaint of the OSE format and/or bullets. The usage of these, for organizing, does not remove the need to be evocative in your descriptions. 

The general, “always on” descriptions used for the dungeon rooms are found on a normal page … and not the fucking map, etc, where they should fucking be. And they are not bad. A cool, damp, dank, earthy smell. Ceilings of timber, 8’ tall, falen bricks, handling root, dripping water. Floors of black flagstones, broken and uprooted by mud, roots, and slime. Sconces of coiled serpents. Sagging dark green stone block walls, collapsed by expanding roots. These are not bad at all! But they are lost by being put up front and not someplace the DM can always reference to beef up a description. How often ar eyou going to remember to go back and look at that page, while looking at the page you are running, in order to incorporate it? WHich is why you put the fucking things someplace they will always be seen. OR you put them in the room proper, in your description. Pick one or two and go with that in that room. 

There are rooms here which could not be bad. “Smokey, fetid, crawling with lice”, says a room. With an oil lamp hanging from a ceiling. Lean in to that fucking smoke. Hanging in the air. Hazy, Choking a bit. With debris. The floor crawling with lice. And goblins lurking in it. Instead it comes off a little busy and boring.

Or, The SInking Temple. Which is labeled Dark, Dank, Roots entwined serpent columns sinking in to a muddy mire. And a corpse floating FACE DOWN in it. (Nice!)  But I’d lean in to the ankle deep water, and maybe some slime and debris, leaves, roots in the water. Go harder on the vines and columns. 

So, conceptually, you can ALMOST get to a decent room.But it just never makes it there because of the choices made with te format. 

In the end it’s just another goblin lair with little to distinguish it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/422928/Sepulchre-of-the-Serpents-Servant?1892600

Kormar Publishing
OSE
Level 1

A group of Roachling pilgrims from the chasms below the earth have emerged and are fortifying the abandoned chrysalis of a death gnat. They prepare to wage a profane war of infection against those who refuse to live in squalor. The human village of Peldor has already been ravaged by the emergence of death gnat; it is not equipped to handle the insect threat.

This sixteen page digest adventure uses seven pages to feature a two level dungeon with 21 rooms and a lot of intelligent roaches.  The central conceit is a gimmick, with interactivity being limited to stabbing. 

The roaches got three factions. The mercs, interested in cash, the preachers who want to convert folk and the zealots who want to kill people. As a level one, id you take roachling as your optional language? No? Then I guess you’re not gonna talk to them, are you? So you better get out your stabbers and stab away. Not that there’s any real guidance on talking to them, anyway. So stab away you kooky cats! For, while the roach leaders have personality ,and the lair is full of weirdo window dressing, ain’t none of it meaningful for an adventure.

“Room 5: Refuse Pit. A dumping ground for the Roachlings. Trash and excrement left here may

be used later in construction.” Wunderbar! You’ve both defined what a refuse pit it and then told us what its going to be used for. Neither of which helps us run this adventure. That’s a pretty good example of a low-value room description. “Bedroom: This room is a bedroom. People sleep in here at night. It has a bed.” would be an equivalent description. 

There’s a lot of littl mistakes in the descriptions I could point out. Important things second int he descriptions. Little bits of backstory embedded. None of them is really enough, in a normal adventure, to make me more than a little grumpy. But, here, the minimalism of the text combined with the complete lack of anything interesting (ooo! Roaches that can stand up and weak clothes and can speak their own language!) make them all stand out like a sore thumb. 

It’s just being weird for the sake of being weird. Kormar has done some interesting things in the past; this is a shame to encounter. There’s nothing to this. I don’t know how to write more. There’s nothing here to review. “Oooo, look, the pug is wearing a tutu!” Ok. Now what?

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $2.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/422019/Pilgrimage-of-the-Roaches?1892600

The Secret of the Wood of Dark Bough
Footprints 20
R. N. Bailey
1e
Levels 3-5

… An angry mob rushed to arrest the suspected Ostenheim farmers. Eight men of that community were given a quick trial and found guilty. These men are now held in Alfandi. In five days’ time, they are to be executed for practicing black magic on their neighbors….

This 31 page adventure details a wilderness region, a small wilderness lair, and then a three level bullywug dungeon. It’s a real 1e dungeon, for better or ill, that is magazine formatted. So, you’ll get a kick in the balls trying to run it but it’s the real deal. A classic 1e adventure right out of 81.

ObInsult: Ah yes, the hardcore 1e gang. Where the height of game design and formatting was whatever Gary shit out in 1981. Alas, for us all, it was pretty good design …

So, the village of Bumfuck has had some crops fail. They blame the village of Asshattery and their black magic. They kidnap eight farmers from there and are executing them in a few days time. You learn of this and attempt mediation. In looking at the Bumfuck farms, you find some tracks, follow them in to the woods, find a siren in her lair and learn of a stolen magic cup, go back to town to confront the thief about the crop-withering cup only to learn that bullwugs in the swamp stole it … and set off to go get it back so as to provide an alternate theory and free the villagers. As a B/X five, I’d probably just kill everyone, but, we’re in “realistic” 1e land, so, we murder ourselves with labour (U1, biatches!) for 2000gp in treasure. Along the way we get a handful of farms to investigate, a handful of locations in the woods, a siren lair with a few roms, a swamp with a handful of locations, and a three level bullywug lair. 

There is a casual realism here that I greatly appreciate. The mob and fueding villages is very well done. Petty grievances, some jumping to conclusions about evidence, and so on make civil hands unclean. The villages, proper, are well done, with almost no shops. One has a Drink Hall instead f an inn, and you can all sleep in it for a cp. No private room bullshit here! The creatures, as enemies, and the locations extend this kind of realism. Not just things to stab, but also not a useless backstory and history garbage. 

This thing is TIGHT. I mentioned all of the locations, and, with that page count, you’ve got to expect that there’s a been tight job of writing/editing. You get a page of backstory, or so, but, other than that there’s almost no wasted space. None of this “appears to be” shit or integrated what used to be or motivations in the room descriptions. There are some spare words, you’re not getting a flavourless minimalism, but its realism without simulation and a focus on actual game play. Exactly the fuck the way an adventure should be written.

Interactivity here is … subtle. For the most part you’re following breadcrumbs, talking to folks, and stabbing things. Generally, the monsters know something and thus capturing and questioning works for the trail. There’s a shrine to maybe leave an offering in. Or, an underwater cave to discover and swim through. Mostly, this is going to be the party using all of their 1e abilities to overcome things that are at their level. We’re not talking an environment set up against the party, but rather a more natural, neutral environment, with the associated interactivity. 

Decent NPC’s, with their descriptions focused on play rather than backstory. A great little timeline of local events that take place, and where a roving band of miscreants is at any one time, for the party to perhaps stumble upon. The lack of an order of battle for the bullywugs, in their lair, is a somewhat obvious miss. I guess they get what they deserve then 😉

Right now out 1e friends are masturbating furiously over this. And they will continue to do so in spite of …

This is magazine formatted. Magazine formatting is something I discovered in my Dungeon Magazine odyssey. Basically, you’re getting two column, with some bolding. Overall the formatting options appear (for magazine reasons?) to be quite limited when things appear in that medium. This severely limits the possibilities for bringing clarity and scanability to an adventure … something high up on my list. (And, everyone else’s, since “they are hard to run” is the number one complaint, year after year, about prepublished adventures.) This seems to be a common problem. Or, at least, a refusal to deviate from a house style. That’s a miss. The long form paragraph is not the end all and be all of formatting. It can absolutely work, but, also, it is almost certainly not going to work if you don’t work the entries hard with editing and/or keep the entries short. And, all that 1e realism is NOT contributing to keeping the entries short.

We’ve traded evocative writing for gygaxian naturalism. Both can work, although I find High Gygaxian a little distant. The writing here, especially for the descriptions, can be very hit or miss for that reason. “Steady drips of water fall from the ceiling, a few inches of foamy water cover the floor, and flaky, white mold grows on the walls.” I find the overall effect here to be a bit distancing, or coldly written, but steady drips, format water, and flaky white mold are all hitting exactly what they should be. So, not rock star but also not bad at all. But then we get to “In the center of this cave sits a 3’x3’x3’ flat-topped chest of iron.” This is not exactly the best room description ever written. There’s this steady cadence, both in the descriptions and in the DM text, of 1e descriptive elements. Exact dimensions. And dear god, if I have to read “If there is a ranger or druid in the party then the tracks …” one more time I’m gonna have a head burst. “This cavern has a 15; high ceiling and a strong musty smell” is not going to do it for me. 

Which, again, leads to the primary interactivity in this adventure: fucking up dudes. Because, if you’re playing 1e like it’s 4e, then you’ve got enough information to fuck up the dudes present. 

Thus, it ain’t cutting it for me. I could debate the merits of high 1E for a long time. I believe, though, that if you are in to high 1E then I’ve already told you enough that you’re going to check this out. For everyone else … there are other fish in the sea.

Yo, free at Dragonsfoot. You should absolutely check out their magazine, Footprints, at least once in your life, if only to see how the other half lives.

https://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=FT&fileid=377

By Skeeter Green
Skeeter Green Productions
S&W
Level 1

The Valley Out of Time is a series of ‘zine-sized adventures from SGP. This valley can be placed in any ongoing campaign, and is set in the “Neanderthal Period” of development. Huge monsters – both dinosaurs and otherwise – and devolved humanoids plague the area, and only the hardiest of adventurers will prevail! This series of adventures borrows heavily from classic dinosaur art, books, and movies; if you’ve ever seen a classic Frank Frazetta or Roy Krenkel painting, or read or watched The Land that Time Forgot, The Lost World, Journey to the Center of the Earth, One Million Years B.C., The Flintstones, any stop-motion film from Ray Harryhausen, etc., you’re going to feel right at home.

This twenty page digest adventure has three encounters in it. With a fuck ton of 4HD and *HD combatants. At level one. In long form paragraph form. I wish I had this chutzpah.

Twenty pages. Three encounters. You see a tribe of cavemen. A giant monitor lizard attacks the cavemen. They move camp and a giant snake attacks. Welcome to $5 worth of value, folks!

The caveman thing takes, like four pages or so. See the cavemen. And then get a run down of what they do if you approach. Or attack them. They’re a tribe of cavemen. That’s what the four pages say. And they attack you if you are hostile. There’s a staggering fucking leap of logic. There is NOTHING in those pages that any fuckwit on earth would not do if you said “tribe of cavemen.” No little vignettes. No personalities. No curious kid. Just a fucking tribe of cavemen. In four pages. 

And then a 8HD monitor lizard attacks. Then it’s followed by eight 3 HD raptors. For “Four to six characters of level 1–3 should find the encounters presented herein challenging but manageable.” Uh huh.

And, did I mention, that if you’re injured you get to make a save or get jungle rot. No spell recovery and all rolls at a -1. At level one. And if y ou wear armor you move at 25% movement speed because you are sure to fail one of the eight heat exhaustion rolls you make a day. At level one. 

The cavemen move camp after the lizard/raptor attack. On the way they get attacked by a 8HD snake. Oh, also, the cavemen are 4HD, so, good luck attacking them. 

Three encounters. Not first level. Nothing to them beyond what “cavemen” would most commonly imply. 

But, sure, it takes a lot of fucking words to get there. All laid out quite nicely in long paragraph form. Just read the entire thing. How many cavemen are at the party? Read all of the cavemen pages and then at the very bottom of it you’ll be told. Yeah you! Maybe you wanna give me $5 for this review? It has just as much value as this adventure. But, hey, it pulled in $8k in its kickstarter and has 100% 5 star reviews!

Happy fucking New Year.

This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/391980/The-Valley-Out-of-Time–Welcome-to-the-Valley-SW?1892600

By Harry Menear
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-3

STRANGENESS AND TERROR FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE!  Borgenwold is cursed, they say. Cursed by pride and greed to cower in fear of the past. A fell monstrosity from beyond the grave has risen to devour this town and all who dwell here.  

This 61 page exercise in pretension has a fourteen room dungeon. It shows some promise, in specificity, but lacks interactivity and the designer has their head so far up their Layout Ass that they ruin any hope of usability. It’s as if it were a kickstarter for a one page dungeon with four rooms, and all the stretch goals added things … but not to the dungeon and not actually usable. Just shit like “what color is the mayors hat back in town?” tables.

Some dude in town hires you to go to his moms tomb and bring back some priceless treasures for him. He’ll pay you 500gp per treasure recovered. Why you’re giving this shit to him, instead of just keeping it for yourself, is beyond me. He owes a loanshark and will be gone in a week anyway, if you don’t give the loot to him, so might as well take it. Speaking of the loanshark … he’s set up a big bad wolf … but has no stats. I assume that means he has 2HP and we stab him and take his shit. He’s got no bodyguards mentioned, when the text goes out of its way to mention bodyguards for everyone else. I assume this means the adventure was not playtested but a variety of other groups. Oh, yeah, did I mention the hooks and timeline don’t match up?
Weve not gotten a shipment for a couple of months now …” while the issues have been going on for a few weeks. 

So, look, this is going to be a theme with this review. The adventure is pretty much crap. There is some high points with the specificity involved, which shows a good deal of promise, but just about everything surrounding that is shit. But, you don’t really KNOW it’s crap just by taking a glance at it. 

And let’s talk about that. It looks niiiiicccccce! Ooo, look at that cover! Two page spreads! Nice art! And, hey, check out that fucking layout! Pretty artsy! Fuck me man, let’s put that fucking thing on the coffee table, am I right? (A reproduction of the wenge table in the Japanese embassy.) Oh course, it’s absolute shit.

The same fucking problem we always have with this art house garbage. The morons get a hardon over their layout. Their fancy fonts. Their background images. How they mimic some cutout style and put the tables at odd angles. The tables that take up an entire page. OOooo, look, a faux gothic style of font! Text that runs at an angle! Fucking idiots. I’m am so fucking done with their bullshit. If you don’t want people to run it then just label the fucking thing as a coffee table book and be done with it. Bt, ohhhh, noooo, no one will buy it if you label it like that, right? They want a nice looking book. Who the fuck said it … the secret to success is to pay for art and layout and have a print fucking version. That’s how you make bank. That’s what the fucking idiots buy. But, also, you are abandoning the core feature. It’s like buying a gorgeous new PC case … that’s completely sealed. You’re failing at the primary purpose. The fucking thing is a monstrosity to read. You can’t fucking follow it. It’s like almost every fucking choice was made to look pretty rather than to contribute to usability. And in this case I mean legibility. You’re fucking brain hurts to look at this. You can’t scan it quickly. The fucking main font, the use of the bold font, the off center text. The fucking gothic font. SHadow boxes and background images. It’s a fucking nightmare. Oh, sure, looks pretty. 

And, while I’m on a I Can’t Fucking Stand This roll, let’s talk about the core of the adventure. A fourteen room dungeon. Everything else in this is essentially padding. And, hey, I don’t mind a little local colour. I love it in fact. But the main adventure is the fucking dungeon. Fourteen rooms. Sixty pages. More on the shit-ass dungeon later.

What do you get? How about a table to describe the local hunters? You see, there’s some side shit (which is tangled up in the main quest.) The titular (heheh) beast is an undead manticore, taxidermied. There are some hunters about. You get a table to make up some hunters. EVen though they don’t really play much of a part in the adventure. They are hardly mentioned. ALso, there is not one table but like four. On four separate pages. That you get to roll on to make one up. How’s that for usability?

No? It’s not? But, hey, one table per page lets you so some funky layout shit! I mean, fuck you and actually running the thing. Otherwise we’d put all four tables on one page. Or, JUST DETAIL A FEW OF THEM IN THE FUCKIGN APPENDIX. People don’t understand what random is for. 

There’s some other shit hanging around in this. Some crazy goblins described over seven pages. The sum total osf which is unpretentious is “Small, cramped passages — too small for anyone but children and halflings to move about. Goblin eyes shine like stars in the torchlight.” That’s your goblin lair description. But, hey, we did get to masturbate over all of those freaky deaky goblin tables that take up the rest of the pages, right? 

There’s a hex map. It serves no purpose and is not linked to the text. Therefore it’s not a map. It’s an art piece. 

And the dungeon? It’s trying to use the OSE format but it fucks it up because because it dopesn’t know what is important. The idea is a short little description with bolded words that expanded upon. But this thing is all over the place in what it thinks is important. Thus, you’ll be readying the entire description to relate some bits to the party. This stands in direct opposition to what the OSE format is trying to do, when implemented correctly. Summary first. Or important things first. Or some way for the DM to figure out those things first. And, ultimately, the dungeon is just about stabbing shit. Stab stab stab. Stab stab stab. Almost no interactivity beyond this most basic of type. Enjoy your stabbing of 6HD creatures that are undead and immune to everything but fire and silver and magic. In your level one adventure.

The fucking thing looks like an adventure that someone has sunk money in to, and thus will be good. But it’s all flash.

It’s got some decent specificity. Good even. The lady that runs the tavern does so “with her two knucklehead sons.” Perfect! That communicates a lot! Of a magic hunting horn “The horn vibrates with raw magic; its makes your hand numb and your teeth hurt just holding it, like gripping a live wire.” That’s a magic magic item description! You know you’ve got something! Some commentary on some magic ‘godling’ fish says “If you eat enough of a gods children, you are eventually deemed a worthy addition to the family.” Absolutely! That’s one way of becoming a god/godling! It makes perfect sense and jives with all mythology ever. 

And, check out this terrific description “[…] bodies of villagers, merchants, hunters, guards — brutally, gleefully rent by claw and tooth. Hoisted into the trees, impaled upon pine limbs; a grisly larder. The air is putrid, a wall of sweet death smashing against the nose. Rotten corpse fluids run rivulets down tree bark. Flies swarm and buzz in clouds.” Fuck yeah man! Good description! So the specificity required to have a good description, to write a terse description that conveys overloaded meaning exponentially multiplied in a way that word count would not imply, os absolutely there. When the designer chooses to. In a dungeon room? No way. Hanging ut on its own somewhere, apart from the dungeon. Yup! 

“All the bestial heads mounted on the tomb’s walls animate, roaring, bleating, and wailing as one of the rooms’ animals come to life and another hunt begins.” Absofuckinglutly! Now, but ina room fucking description that matches. Trim yor fucking text. Organize it so that the most important shit is up top, and actually give us some descriptions of the situation, or a way to ferret it out to relate it to the DM. And take a chill pill when it comes to the fucking layout. Jesus, man. Make it fucking legible. The main thing is the fucking dungeon. Agonize over the fucking thing. Beat yourself over the writing. Then, you can pad out the region and town and npc’s and shit. 

(And, note, I’m not EVEN bitching about the disconnect between the hook, town, manticore, and adventure. I don’t fucking care. This is a bridge too far for 99.99% of designers, so I’m not going to beat someone up over it.)

The cottage industry continues. Layout dudes doing layout adventure bought by other layout dudes. But, he is not a ninja.

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. The first six pages. So, one actual page of adventure timeline. IE: worthless for making a purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/410351/The-Beast-of-Borgenwold?1892600

By James Mishler, Jodi Moran-Mishler
James  Mishler Games
Shadowdark
Levels 1-2

Help the Shepherd find his Goats and Daughter who have been kidnapped by the Witch of the Woods. The woods are home to all manner of strange, fearsome, and fey monsters… not to mention the witch!

This twenty page adventure, with a fairy tale vibe, has the party exploring a wood with twelve locations to bring back a dudes daughter and goats and kill the witch responsible. Chill vibes but padded to all fuck and back. And you know what we say at tenfootpole: “Are you a fucking masterpiece? No? Then you better get your shit together if you want me to run it.”

It’s the day after Christmas and Sants brought me some Vegamite and olives stuffed with anchovies, in my stocking. So that’s breakfast. Along with an IPA. And this thing.Later today I’ll be making a suit out of garbage bags, buying thirty bottles of champagne and reading the Wizard of the Crow. So, you know, D&D will definitely NOT be the highlight of the day. Because of this.

We’re pretty close here. It’s got a vibe, brining a good fairy tale thing to the party. Shepherd lives on the edge of a BIG FOREST in a little cottage. His goats have been stolen by the witch of the woods, along with his daughter. You get 5gp per goat returned and 50 for the kid. (Who’s 19.) So close. Dude is a miser and cold-hearted, which is the source of all the troubles for him. I’d change it to 5gp per goat, and another 5gp for the kid. But, whatever. And, the kid is 19? Nahhhh, she’s fucking sixteen. See, dude made a deal with the witch, in exchange for a magic goat hed give her the kid at 16. But he didn’t. Do the witch plotted for three years for revenge? Nah. Make her 16. And keep the rest the same, I guess. Cause the kid hates dad also, and has been taught witchcraft by the witch and is in on ot. IE: some elaborate revenge plot going on here by these two. Fuck if I know man  … I guess they want to turn dad in to a goat and have some “put the amulet around his neck” thing going on. This part makes little sense. I get that you want the main witch to disguise herself as a black goat, very VVitch. But we’re straining here.

Otherwise, chill vibes in this one. A dwarf trapped in a fairy circle, complete with bird nests growing on him. A goat on a hill that won’t come down. A goat on a log in a pond. Giant goats next to a goat giant. A harpy … with the head of a goat. It’s all very fairy tale. 

One page per encounter. And it’s all padded out to fuck and back. 

“The Treasure Tree is a place where, long ago, some dwarves hid a BURIED TREASURE they won from some trolls. They buried it with many runes and curses against it being found and stolen… then they forget about it. Over the centuries the runes and curses came to life, animating the soil around the chest of treasure, creating a TREASURE GUARDIAN. Recently an adventurer found a map to the long-lost treasure for him, the Treasure Guardian overwhelmed him and his bones now grace the form of the guardian – as does the recently deceased body of a goat!d has tried to recover it. “ That was about 80% of the description of this location … and it has nothing gameable in it. History. What was. No description of what we’re looking at. No idea what to do, as a DM. 

It’s not until paragraph three that get one sentence “The chest is half unburied, with the shovel of the adventurer currently stuck in the body of the guardian.” That’s it. That’s your description. There’s another paragraph that has another description of the history of something in a manner that cant be used, also.

This is a classic “read it” adventure. It’s written to be read. You can’t use it during play without some serious time with a highlighter and note taking. The focus of the writing has to be on the DM using it at at the table. It is almost always the case that how the situation happened is not interesting for gameplay, and especially not so at he start of a description. We don’t dig through three paragraphs of useless info when the party enters the room. WWe need the data, now, to related to them. 

This don’t do that.

And I got other adventures to run that do.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. More than enough to see the actual encounters. Good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/419475/The-Witch-the-Shepherd-His-Goats-and-Their-Daughter-A-Shadowdark-Adventure?1892600