Emelda’s Song

Posted on July 9, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Scott Malthouse
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 2-4

The market town of Lankshorn is abuzz with excitement after the cruel Lord Malbleat announces a festival honouring his sorcerous ancestor. Only when the young singer Emelda—famed for her beautiful voice—is reported missing do things take a sinister turn.

This 44 page adventure uses the vast majority of its pages to describe a small fair, manor party, and some underground crypts with around a dozen rooms. OSE style guide gets a little long in this digest, with the investigation half being well supported(?) and the dungeon being a hack.

I don’t know about this. There are multiple things wrong here but they are wrong in such interesting ways. Or, perhaps I mean to say wrong in complex ways? It’s just fucking weird, the kabuki around the actual adventure.

No where in this, I think, will you find a summary of the actual adventure. How the thing works and an expected arc for the party. I’m a fan of Not over-explaining, but, also, that only works for short adventures, and a 44 page booklet is not short. The titular chickula has gone missing and you should find her. You are pointed toward an inn where she frequented. In town there’s a fair going on, with fairgrounds. Associated with this fair is a party at the local manor, exclusive for the nobility and such. Underneath the manor is a crypt where the lord is using a chick to bring a dead relative back to life as the climax to the fair. As one does.  So, you gonna poke around the town a bit and then find an entrance to the crypts in the fair/town or bluff/sneak in to the party and eventually find your way down via the GAPING STAIRWAY MAW in the main salon. I found this rather amusing: “Crypts Entrance – Ancient limestone archway (set incongruously in the northern wall). Arcane symbols and sigils (carved in blocks)”  Whats that? Oh, that is our hosts brain collection. He keeps his 36 ex-wives brains in jars to admire here in the salon. I do love a farce like this, where the folk ignore the outrageous, having normalized it as commonplace. 

The adventure is, essentially, in two parts. First you gonna poke around town, getting up in peoples business and sticking your noses where it don’t belong. Ask around the town, ask around the fair, maybe infiltrate the party. This part is rather well supported. Sections on party guests and their manners and conversations, the town, rumors.  It’s a relatively simple A leads to B leads to C sort of thing where asking at the inn gets you a clerics name, which followed up on gets you someone else’s name, which leads to a party invitation… and there are several examples of that, different paths that the party might follow, with, if I recall correctly, like four different entrances to the crypts, paths that the party could take to discover them. 

Inside the crypts you’ve got some household guards, a few skeletons, an intelligent spider, and a decent number of captured/coerced people. And a distinct lack of anything but stabbing. Yeah, sure, you can talk to a prisoner and they’ll tell you something. Or you can loot a room. But puzzles and specials and interactivity beyond the stab is quite rare here … and every stating its rare is a stretch. 

This puts this adventure in a weird category. It’s a raid. In my experience, all raids start with a wacky PC plan to infiltrate and then turn in to a slugfest when the party gets busted. What is perhaps unusual here is the investigation beforehand. That is not something we generally see in a raid.

So, given that over HALF the pages are the investigation, we would expect that portion to be pretty good. I don’t think it is. Oh, sure, pretty formatting and nice layout. The Gnomes do that well. But in this case there’s a distinct lack of content especially for something taking up over half the pages. I mean, sure, there are places to go and people to talk to and juggling and fire eating to watch, but it lays the window dressing on REALLY heavy and it seems that the adventuring content is pretty light. From this, I can only intimate that the first part is supposed to be a slow and relaxed affair. We take our time. We enjoy the view of the meat on a stick vendors. But I ain’t no senator’s son. I really do not give a shit at all about most of the content in this section. I like the Gnomes formatting and descriptive style, when used correctly, but here its overkill. We get these lush room descriptions for no purpose. And none of that Journey is the Destination crap. I got an adventure to run. The descriptions get long. It smacks, in areas, of throwing things in as boilerplate. “The style guide says we need to note how many pimples each NPC has on their nose, so I don’t care if they don’t have a nose, you need to say they have no pimples on their nose.” Hyperbolic of me, to be sure, but the point I’m making is that hte mundanity of the adventure is taken too far. 

I note this is to a degree in which, three times through the adventure, I’m still not sure I could adequately describe to you the various entrances to the dungeon and how the adventure interconnects to each other. Farmer A knows B which leads to F, that sort of thing. There is no overview, it’s all buried in what feels like descriptive text thrown in because a style guide says to. I’m not saying that’s the case, but it feels like it is. The other explanation is an overindulgence in trivia to the detriment of the adventure, which is the greater sin. 

The dungeon is no better. While I’m a fan of the OSE style, in this case I think its not used very well. I’m thinking specifically of a room with an insect swarm in it in which the swarm is treated almost as an afterthought. This is the initial room description, although I’m not sure my point comes across well with it alone; “Sandstone blocks (walls, floor, ceiling 10′). Dimly lit (large lantern suspended from ceiling). Moss-covered walls (dripping moisture). Humid (nearly suffocating). High-pitched buzzing (whizzing clouds of insects).” And then, near the end of the colum, a colum of insect swarm stat blocks/notes. I’m not sure that giant clouds of insects, large enough to kill you, deserves to be last in the description, even in a dimly lit room. The corpse, the workbench, the vials, everything gets spoken to, except the swarm, which just gets essentially a stat block, at the end. Things are out of order. Correct things are not emphasized. And while I like the OSE style I do recognize that it also takes skill to use and its achilles heel IS just that. It requires that the correct things be emphasized, and in the correct order. The Bolded KeyWord (A couple of more words) isn’t magic. You still have to do the work to put the right things there. 

An investigation that is quite loosey goosy and a town/festival/manor that overindulges in the mundane and its format to the detriment of the actual play. Combined with a raid. This makes this adventure akin to the old investigation that leads to a five room dungeon with cackling villain at the end. It’s not terrible, but its leaning enough that way, or not enough to the good side, that it falls in to the Colored Lights May Hypnotize category.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is sixteen pages. But most of it is useless. A couple of pages of DM background, a page of hooks, a page of players background/common knowledge … a situation overview that is quite poor … the preview needed some room descriptions. That would not, in this case, have led me to a better purchasing decision, but the OSE style is a little jarring and a page showing a typical room would have been in order. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527293/emelda-s-song?1892600

Posted in Colored Lights May Hypnotize, Reviews | 4 Comments

Mudbones

Posted on July 7, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Scott Craig
Cutter Mountain Simulations
OSE/Shadowdark
Levels 1-4

Amid the blood and flame at the end of empire, the god of this temple was slain. An ancient enemy summoned a flood of soil and stone, and the temple and its holy fount and sacred valley were buried in hardened mud and ooze. Yet with the passing of centuries a forest has sprung up, and wheat has taken seed, and a new people have made a home in the rich floodplain that was once a valley. Ever have the thoughts of men and near-men animated gods both new and old, and thus a fragment of the dead god stirs with the desires of these new people. But the curse lingers still, and a curdled malevolence skulks within the depths of the buried temple…

This six page adventure uses two pages to describe two dungeon levels with about 36 rooms. It covers a lot in the few pages it allows itself, and turns out a better product than the vast majority of adventures. Wisely using some recurring themes, it lacks only that last little joi divie needed to really hit high marks. A great filler for your map.

Hmmm, something sounds familiar here. Six page adventure. Two pages of maps keys. A page for the mp. A page for monster reference and other important dungeon tips. An overview page … all of this sounds familiar. So, clearly, the designer is a genius! But, also, it looks like this is coming from a patreon in which these come out every month, a couple of months in arears to allow for the patreons to get them. 

This is a solid little adventure. You’ve got an old temple, buried under mud and grime, and an entrance to it that has opened up right smack dab in the middle of a ransacked bandit encampment. Inside we have terrified bandits, crazed bandits, some mud monsters, a few undead, and a couple of golems, inactive, just yearning to be active again and restore the temple. (in a good way. Hmmm, can you be agnostic in D&D? Or an atheist? I mean, there’s a fucking god right next to you and miracles everywhere. It’s probably normalized. ‘Pffft. Zeus? One aspect? Just some dude with a lighting bolt implant. I’d believe if I were shown some REAL power …’)

The adventure is pretty tight with a decent amount going on for such a smallish dungeon. It does fit in two levels of about eighteen rooms each. And it does so on a moderately interesting map, attributed to the designer. It’s got a large central dome like area with a circular area/arc around it and then a set of passages hanging off of one side, with the second level being of the same general shape of a square attached to a circle. A decent number of stairs ,secret doors, curtains, and elevation-without-changing-levels makes it on to the map. I mean, dude is putting two map levels on one page, there’s only so large you can go and still remain legible. And, speaking of that, it kind of reminds me of those tower/fortress maps from MERP, but legible. Well, except, some of the secret door icons (and a few others) are a bit rough to make out. Not impossible, but not quite as glanceable as I would prefer. A little work on the icon set would be in order. 

The reference page has a monster stat list as well as the “always on” dungeon descriptions. It also has a small section on activating the golems, cleansing the temple, consequences after the adventure and other general adventure reference works. They are ok, but, things like the consequences are a little rough. Mostly just “how much does a restored temple reappear to be worshipped” its all pretty obvious stuff and without color. The general thrust of this page is good, an overview of how things work in the dungeon. But when it tries to wander in to the territory of “color” then it falls down. 

But, the good first. The various locales are solid. “The bandit camp is easy to find, a cluster of rough shacks ringed by a thorny enclosure. The camp is deserted, and has been thoroughly ransacked. No one is here, living or dead. A gaping hole lies in a clearing between two huts; dirt and cracked stone blocks are heaped beside it. Steps have been crudely hacked into the clay tunnel, descending into the darkness…” And, there’s no more of the bandit camp. That’s what you get. And, I think, its nearly enough. No need to drone on about the entrance. Crudely hacked steps, gaping hole, thorny enclosures. It using its word budget to maximum effect. It’s not quite where I would prefer to see it, its still not giving off mythic underworld entrance vibes. But, its also clearly a description that has been worked and I think it shows and pays off in the way it springs to the mind, which is what a decent description should do.

Inside is the domain of the tersely written description. “2. Scriptorium. 2 CRAZED BANDITS looting. Smashed desks, trampled lead tablets, CHEST w/ 2 TORCHES. Bandit corpse leans against a mound of rubble against the north wall.” A nice little vignette, eh? There’s some action going on. The room has a name to frame the description that follows. The use of ALLCAPS and bolding is used to highlight. Lead tablets. Smashed desks. We’re hitting all of the adjective and adverb marks. Looking a “empty” room, we get something like “5. Hall. Cracked plastered walls; a mural of storm-tossed seas.” Cracked player. Storm-tossed seas. Look, I’m not saying these are rock star level descriptions, but  I am saying that they are way Way WAY better than the VAST majority of adventures that get published. Someone thought the fuck about this thing and tried to both fulfill their vision (of six pages) while maximizing what they could do in that budget. And as a result they hit a good number of design principals hard. Situations. Things to explore. Scan ability. Evocativeness. “Ragged hole has been punched through south wall.” Fuck yeah it’s ragged man!

However … I appreciate the devotion to six pages. But, like all gimmicks, it limits the ability to deliver. The best one page dungeon ever written, or to be written, will never be the best adventure in the world. It can accomplish other goals than being the best adventure ever, but the artificial constraints imposed limit what it can do.

The bandits, crazed and terrified, get short shrift. They could use a few names and descriptions, a couple of words each. This would really bring them alive. Likewise, “A GHAST lurks in the shadows. He wears a MODIUS HEADDRESS of ebon and gold” is not wonderful. I appreciate the headdress, but a description of what lurks in the shadows is better telling me. What’s that? Show don’t Tell? Hmmm … This is a pretty consistent problem throughout. It needs just a few more words for each of the creatures. And for other things. I’m thinking specifically about magic items. ” BALANCE SCALE OF CONVINCING VERACITY”. Come on. This has got to be the result of a name generator. I’m all for generators to help inspire creativity. To get things kicked off. But you gotta work the thing and massage it in to something better. 

Two more points. Sound/light/monsters on the map. That doesn’t happen. It should. Just put one of your icons on it to help us figure out who’s making noise or who reacts from the next room. It helps me immensely when running a game to know who’s nearby and/or what the party can see/hear in terms of light/sound bleed. And, then there’s the mud. Or lack thereof. This place is supposed to have been swamped in mud and ooze. But it doesn’t really come off that way at all. In fact, the “always on” descriptions on the monster reference page tells us that “Walls are of white marble panels, and floors are of glazed blue and sea-green tiles in all Temple Level areas” That’s pretty much the opposite of “ended in mud and ooze.” And then there’s mud monsters. That don’t smear walls and leave tracks evidentially. If this theme were carried out consistently throughout then I think the adventure would have been stronger.

I mentioned, earlier, the constraints of a six page adventure and its content with just a few more words to really bring a few more things to life. But there was a word budget available. The first page is fluff. A short section on OSR vs Shadowdark stats. And the rest a “how to parse this adventure” and “join my patreon” section and so on. Almost nothing on that first page is worth spending the word budget on. Reclaiming it gives you more room. But, wait, thats then five pages of adventure text! The designer wants four, to fit on a DM screen. Moving some of the reference material to the first text page, like adventure consequences, is not going to be the end of the world. It’s less “i need this right now at the table” than the rets of the adventure. Further, the first page of dungeon keys has some bullshit hook shit that is … a fifth of a page?  No need for that nonsense. Just pick one of the three and put it on the first page or leave it out altogether. And, the wanderer table … that sounds like reference material to me! Page four you go! “Catacomb Level, Areas 19-26” isn’t really needed, as a page header, since the numbers are on the page. 

The adventure is focused, but, the reliance on the six pages gimmick means it has to be HYPER focused. My critiques aside, this is a decent adventure. The fuckwits on the internet will say its because its terse and easy to scan. That certainly helps. And those ARE easy things to do for any beginner to improve their adventure. But, the interactivity of an adventure is what is going to make it a fun place to adventure in. The situations and possibilities enabled by the designer. And that’s certainly evident here. Rock star? No. but if you used this as a random place the party stumbles across, or a hex locale, or something like that then you’re going to be more than satisfied with it. It is a great journeyman effort. 

This is $5 at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/526870/mudbones-compatible-with-shadowdark?1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 2 Comments

The Lover’s Folly

Posted on July 5, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Daniel Collins
mxplusb
OSE
Level 1

Aeranor is a land of scattered small communities trying to carve a stable life for themselves. Petty Lords squabble over land as neither the crown or the head they sit upon last long for any King. Darkness festers in the deep wilderness. Evil stirs in the dark dungeons below. Rumors of silver and glory stir about. The adventurers are a few of the many who have grown tired of the simple life. They yearn for more than what their father did before them. Barrow elves, witches, dragons, and more await the adventures in the wilderness of Aeranor. Oaths will be tested, the Gods will send forth Omens, but it is up to the party to forge their own destiny. 

This 64 page adventure describes about thirteen mini-locations in a small region. It wants to build intrigue. It wants to be a teaching adventure for DMs. It is dull, unimaginative, and needs to learn how to write an adventure before telling others how to write an adventure.

I am fond of a few things in adventure. Town adventures. Barrows. Gonzo. Generation ships. I try to disclose these at the start of a review. I also have an unnatural hated for at least one thing: the teaching adventure. Specifically, the ones that try to teach the DM. Specifically, the ones that try to teach the DM how to write an adventure. I loathe them. I think this comes from all of the reviews I’ve done, and seeing people follow all of the bad advice. Time and time again a magazine, or published product, has had an article about How To Write An Adventure and its almost always full of shitty ass advice. And then I get to see the fallout from that, as others write to those standards or learns to write an adventure from the looking at the adventures that were written to those standards. I fucking LOATHE it. Hence my descent in to hookers and blow. “For this, we need to make a table. When you make your own, you want enough to be able to run an interesting encounter without having to think about too much during play. Give each a little prompt instead of just the monster.” You learn, instead, the way everyone else has fucking learned: by looking at good adventures that speak to you. Having to be told how to create a wandering monster table is wiiiilllldd. And in a conversational tone as well, no less. This then is the doom of man.

To its credit this product is trying to weave a larger narrative. It’s trying to tie the thirteen populated hexes in to a larger narrative about a stay-at-home-lord, a newly married couple set to inherit the crown and blah blah blah. That’s the right thing to do. You’ve got all of these hexes and you make a handful of them related to the “plot” and the others complications or just things to do. Correct. It also doesn’t really takes sides, allowing the party to do what they will, although it seems that one of the choices it played out more. I’m generally ok with this. We don’t force things down the parties throat, but also, we support the options the most that are the most likely to be taken. 

Hey, did I mention that the Table of Contents has no page numbers? No, it’s not hyperlinked either. Good luck locating any information on those thirteen adventure sites that you need during play! Obviously, there were no instructions to put in page numbers. 

And what kind of adventure can we look forward to? Well, “Lord Eowald has posted a notice asking for any men-at-arms to take care of this elusive “Barrow Elf” who lives near the river to the East. There is a total reward of 50 sp for its head.” Wunderbar! It’s one of THOSE adventures.

The first adventure ,with the Barrow Elf, is generally typical of everything you’ll find in here. It’s got a small Dyson map of ten or so rooms. (Quoting some Sly Flourish advice mahed up with the designers own: “dont worry about finding the perfect map, just grab the first one that looks good enough.” and “go find a free Dyson map.” Both oof which i might take … if I were using this in my home game. And neither of which is good advice for something that you are going to publish and charge fucking money for.

Anyway, on to the rooms. I’m going to do something here I don’t usually do. Yes, I quote room text frequently. But this time I thought I would just include the first six rooms wholesale, so you can get a good look at the context in which the critique is going to happen:

1. 3 Corpses of unlucky victims (Zombies) are scattered on the stairs. They stir if anyone walks past.
2. Still, putrid smelling water. The water will rot away any flesh.
3. Empty, and eerily clean.
4. Zombies shambling around the room where they once rested eternally. Each stone coffin holds 1 keepsake and 1d4 silver pieces.
5. Empty
6. Ulsylmor’s wondrous lyre lay discarded in a stone coffin along with a set of silver plates (25 hacksilver worth). 1 XP

How’s that? You loving your fucking life? Maybe a little less effort in to the bullshit advice part of the booklet and more effort, A FUCKING LOT more effort, on the actual adventure, eh? Unlucky is padding. Once rested eternally is padding. These are backstories that don’t impact he actual play. The designer has confused “backstory” with “useful to play. You could have made them do something. You could have given then a word or two of evocative description. Nope. Backstory. And those rooms, proper! The majesty of them! The lack of evocative description! The lack of interactivity! Look, ok, I’m not morally opposed to room twos still putrid water that rots away flesh. I think it could use a little more. You had, obviously from the comparison to the lines above and below it, a few more words you could have thrown in there, but, not a bad thing. The rest though? Low effort descriptions of low effort room concepts. Shit. And I’m not cherry picking here. Most of the adventure locale keys in this resemble those above. Which kind of makes you wonder what the designer was thinking, devoting, generously, thirty pages to keys and thirty four to padding outside of the adventure. 

The general store, in the starting town: “Talbrak’s Goods: Talbrak’s is the one stop shop for anyone traveling looking to restock supplies.” A boring town, with a sentence per, and nothing unusual or fun or intriguing going on. The local roc lair: “While they do mate for life, the father went off to the mountains to the East to protect his family from another aerial intruder – a dragon!” Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Film has been a fixture for a long time now. It’s systemic, it’s everywhere.

Hey, that barrow elf? It’s a wight. That’s the first thing you’re gonna fight. A fucking fight. It’s explicit. Well, there’s those four zombies, but the only other thing is the wight in the tomb. 3HD: THAC0 of 17. Energy Drain. Hit by magic and silver only. That kind of wight. I’m not sure if that’s a TPK at level one or not. Hmmmm … And you start, right after the garbage Session 0 advice crap, in media res, right on the journey to his mound. 

This is hard because I generally separate the creator from their work. In this case those, because its to be a learning adventure, they seem inherently linked to me. The advice within is simplistic and the adventure itself not good in the most basic ways, except for the overarching concept behind it. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is nineteen pages and you get to see the first couple of adventuring locales as well as some of the “teaching.” So, good preview anyway.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524071/adventure-kit-1-the-lover-s-folly?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

Hyena Child

Posted on July 2, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Markus Schauta
Gazer Press
S&W/LotFP
Levels 1-4

In the 17th century, Alexandria is a city that has endured beyond the promises of its once great future. The inhabitants of the Egyptian port live in ancient ruins and dilapidated villas. The few rich and powerful celebrate in an arrogant grandeur of sad luxury, knowing full well that their days of splendor are numbered. For grave robbers and body snatchers, the port city is a beacon, a promise—for in its bowels, endless tunnels twist and hold long-forgotten treasures. Some fortune-seekers have struck it rich, while others have dug too deep, to where the past lives and antediluvian horrors lurk.

This delightful booklet uses 204 pages describe five adventures and an eight level dungeon in Alexandria in 1632. It is PACKED with things to spur adventure at the table, is easy to use, and contains many situations for your party to get mixed up in, both in and out of the dungeon. 

Warning: Bryce likes a good city.

I was a bit apprehensive in cracking this open. Two hundred pages. $25 dollars. This tends to not be a good sign. And then I hit this paragraph starting on the first column of the first page: “The players may start toying with the idea of involving their PCs in the mummy trade, with the aim of shipping a cargo hold of the dried-up corpses to Europe. This is perfectly fine. However, getting involved in the mummy trade also puts the PCs at odds with powerful Alexandrian merchants and smugglers, who won‘t just stand idly by while the PCs attempt to move in on their profits. Furthermore, the governor won‘t want to miss out on his share of the lucrative business either.” This is a designer with his head in the right place! Clearly he has dealt with players before, and their mad scheming! And, just as clearly, he knows how to deal with them: if there’s a buck to me made then someone else is already making it and they are not going to just let the party sidle in on their profits! 

The setting here is absolutely wonderful. It’s clearly a LotFP type setting, with Alexandria in the 1630’s. Mysticism. Ancient horrors. And science mixed in with the a great mix of peoples from all over the world all hitting the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria. You really get a strong vibe off this. Seedy, wonder, magic, ancient history, spies, agents, factions, opulence and decadence and grit and grime. This is EXACTLY the kind of city I love in a D&D game. 

The city is a small part of this booklet, about thirty pages. Itis also the setting for the adventures and the dungeon and a home base. Each of the about thirty locations is clearly oriented at driving play. Sure, you’re going to have adventures, and in between you’ll interact with the places in the city and each of them has something for the DM to use to directly drive some fun play. The focus here, the ability and understanding of what is needed in this environment, is wonderful. Even something as base as some old pillars near the sea. There’s a hermit there. The locals venerate him as a saint. It is said that his feces can break a curse. And, in fact, it can, four in six. Curse breaking? Of course you need curse breaking in an adventure in Egypt! And this is a perfect way to do it! Old beggar woman? Down on her luck? She’s got fleas! And you might also if you help her (a lot of fleas in this adventure …) But, also, helping her might get you a very trusted retainer who knows a bit of the healing arts. Everything, every single site, has something to play off of for the party. That IS the purpose of a description in a city/town/village. I don’t care what fucking color their cloak is. I want things to drive play, even between-crawls play, and this does it, spicing things up. It’s perfect. Maybe a sentence or two long in places, but not in any way droning on.

The focus here, on gameable content, is remarkable. The appendix is only thirty pages. And even that is composed of Factions, Day & Night encounters in the city, rumors and the like. Only a VERY small portion of the entire volume could be considered padding. And I hesitate to even use that word. The number of words, pages, etc and their absolute focus on contributing to actual games at the table is truly one of the more remarkable efforts I’ve seen. Virtually nothing here is not directly related to a game at the table.

This, also, is one of the earliest passages of text in the volume. “When finally the day is done, the mumia smokers wake from their restless dreams. It is the time of pleasure boys and whores, of the discreet and the drunkards, of thieves and astrologers. Everything punishable by law and God, all that decency does not wish to see; all of that emerges in the pale light of the moon. It is then that the grave robbers and body snatchers shoulder their shovels to plough the cemeteries in search of treasures long consigned to oblivion in dilapidated tunnels; digging ever deeper, to where the past yet lives and antediluvian horrors lurk.” The tone is sets for the city is great. You immediately know the vibe, how to run it. Your mind starts running wild. All of what you do from then on is going to be colored by those words, dripping in evocative flavour. And the adventure does this with its text over and over again. That paragraph is somewhat general, but the others are far more specific, depending on their context, and virtually all of them lend to that same effect. 

So, the adventures. Or, let’s start with  home base. There are a few notes in the beginning about how the party can start in one of four locations in the city. The merchants have excellent palace contacts. The monks have some healing available for the party, and so on, depending on where you might call home to start. Then we move on to the adventures, most of which have some connection to the dungeon, or a specific level of the dungeon. (Except for level eight, a hidden level opened only by discovering things through play.) Let’s see, we’ve got a kind of Stargazer tower adventure. Garden full of sleep flowers and some murderous baboons. And then a tower that is little more alive than Stargazer, with a murderous frankenstein monster in it … that may ignore the party completely as it REALLY wants out of the tower. Where it will begin to kill townfolk, stalking the streets at night and so on. Oops. Actions have consequences I guess. Which, come to think of it, could be the byline of this adventure. We’ve got a dinner party full of intrigue in a manor, the titular hyena child involving a cult and so on. And then there’s the Mummy Raid. The swedes are in town and need a fuck ton of mummies. You can make mummia from it and they need/want it to give to their soldiers to meth them up in their wars in the north of Europe. They know where some is, on level three of the catacombs. You need to take this legless asshat of a wizard down to level three, find the mummies, and then he’ll teleport them all to the cargo hold of a ship. Bypassing the “official” unofficial trade, and pissing people off. Also, another group is after the mummies as well. Complications abound! As do consequences. The adventures here, more than most, offer consequences, both positive and negative. We’ve seen this in many LotFP adventures where the world ends or a plight spreads because of theparty fucking around with things. But the actions and fallout/consequences here are more timely, impacting the current and future play sessions. Most adventures are just standalone and don’t mention consequences to assist the DM with. Good adventures will offer some words of advice on the subject. But this product really does integrate those consequences, positive and negative, in to the play sessions. This brings the Alexandria alive in a magnificent way. 

I’m not even touched on formatting or the dungeon rooms proper yet. Formatting is clean and clear. Easy to follow, easy to scan during play, which is critical. It’s a summary section of immediate things to notice with some bolded words that are then followed up in their own sections with more detail. 

Who wants to crawl through the statues mouth?!!?1 You do? The obvious happens. Some of the rooms are right out of … I don’t know. I’m thinking of a room with a table with a coil of rope and grapple on it. Pulling the rope fires a blunderbuss under the table. Ouchies! It’s so much more VISCEREAL than your bog standard trap, and so much more relatable. I know it sounds dumb, but, I’m going to relate one of my favorite rooms. It’s trivial, it’s simple, it’s dumb, and I love it. You’re in a dingy room. There’s one exit. There’s a rotting dog carcass in front of the exit you need. The dogs mangy buddy is right next to it, growling, protecting the body. You gonna kill a poor old staving loyal stray dog? Heartless monster! I hope there’s a dog lover in your group! It’s so … real. It’s not contrived fantasy nonsense. It feels imagined and then put in to a D&D game, rather than the the way around. I fucking love it. 

There is so much more that I could talk about with this. What it does and pitfalls it avoids. It is solid. Dense. Breezy. Exciting. It is everything I want in a D&D adventure.

This is $25 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, and mostly shows you nine of the city locations. That should be enough to convince you. Yes, it’s $25 for a PDF, but, spend your money on something good instead of slogging through shit the way I do.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/525423/hyena-child?1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 12 Comments

Three Witches

Posted on June 30, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Michael Robinson
Rutibex
"OSR"/5e
Levels 3-5

Greetings Adventurers! Embark on an exciting hex crawl adventure in the new module – Three Witches! Explore a diverse and dangerous realm, where three rival witches vie for power and influence. Unravel the agendas of the Desert, Forest, and Mountain witches. Will you ally with one to defeat the others? Can you resist their corrupting influence? The fate of the realm lies in your hands!

This 145 page adventure uses 35 pages to describe twenty hexes and about thirty rooms over three dungeons. A bland outline, I’m not even sure there’s a pretense that this is OSR.

Hey man, I’m reviewing a longer work! Know you all want this! Let’s see … “For OSR and 5e!” Usually that means its a 5e adventure with maybe a page of stat conversions for OSR systems. This doesn’t even do that. It is clearly a 5e adventure, even though the cover and marketing indicates that its compatible with OSR. Sure, in the same way that a Funyun is compatible as a hammer. I could take all of the stats in that Star Frontiers adventure and do my best, on my own, to convert it all over to B/X. But, then, is that worth marketing? So, fuck you Rutibex. After this one I’m moving on with my fucking life, such that it is. Fucking garbage.

Most of this product is the witch class, with the usual long ass spell descriptions taking up most of the page count. That’s about 35 pages for the hex crawl and dungeons and about 110 pages for the witch class, spells, and a couple of new monsters. Joy. Love this. A 140 page adventure with a hexcrawl and three dungeons and five pages of bullshit tackon? Super cool. But the other way around? No thank you. 

There’s no lead in here. I gather that there is a region and that there are three witches here all crying for power. We know nothing about the region, or town, or people, or even the witches and their vying for power. We just get a wandering monster table for each terrain type. Here we go! “A fairy ring. Entering it could transport the players to a fey realm or cause other magical effects.”No? How about: “A cursed statue in a small pond, with a puzzle that, if solved, breaks the curse and grants a reward.” These are typical. No detail at all. I get it, wanderer. Short. Terse. But, man, you write the fucking encounter. Put the fucking thing down on the fucking page! 

This is, of course, a pretty blatant symbol of whats to come. Let’s look at those hex descriptions, shall we? “A barren and scorching desert, where only the hardiest creatures survive. A large sandstorm obscures the horizon, making navigation difficult. The players may encounter a band of nomadic raiders, a hidden oasis, or a mysterious ruin.” Again, this is a fairly typical hex. A little one liner that is super generic about the terrain and then “you might encounter/see A, b, or C.” This is not creativity. This is not, IMO, a hex crawl. This is just a bunch of crap thrown down on page that requires a DM to do a metric FUCK ton of work to turn it in to an adventure. That’s not my fucking job. That’s not why I bought this fucking adventure. I wasn’t hoping for “frozen tundra. Maybe there is something here for the party to interact with?” Thats the fuck the job of of the fucking designer. I swear to fucking god. How can someone think that this is an adventure, or adding value, or making a DMs life easier? Or even inspiring to run? There’s nothing specific about anything in that fucking hex crawl.

Let us move on to the rooms in the dungeons. “”As you step into the cavern, your footsteps echo ominously through the dimly lit corridor” Second person read-aloud and purple. And the, how about this: “This corridor serves as the foreboding entrance to the Cavern of Bones, setting the tone for the grim discoveries that lie ahead” That’s the DM text, describing what the room is. You know what would be better? Designing a room in which you show us that this is a foreboding entrance rather than telling the DM that this is a foreboding entrance. It’s absurd to put in a line of text that tells us that room one, the entrance, is the entrance. In another place you come upon a pit trap with some bones at the bottom. The DM text tells us “it’s rumored that the bones within the pit belong to thieves and adventurers who sought to plunder the cavern’s secrets, only to meet their demise at the very threshold” This is clearly not written for a DM or for a player. It’s written to be read. And an adventure to read ranks just above “shameless money grab” at the bottom of the list of adventure sins.. In another room, the Guardian Chamber, the read-aloud tells the players “As you step into the circular expanse of the Guardian Chamber your torchlight flickers “ Now how the fuck are they supposed to know that its The Guardian Chamber?! 

This is absurd, and not in a good way. Page long rooms are the norm. Overwrought read-aloud in the second person. DM text telling us background and … I don’t even know what, information that no one can possibly know or care about? 

The hex crawl is abstracted encounters. The dungeon encounters are torturous to wade through. Bad read-aloud. Bad DM text. Standard challenges. And there’s not even a pretense of this being OSR. Nope.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages. OIt shows you the hexes and the first part of the firs dungeon. More than enough to see what you’re in for, so, good preview at least.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524814/three-witches?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 51 Comments

Love Songs of the Death Goddess

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jesse Burneko
Bloodthorn Press
Black Sword Hack

A mercenary company storms into an ancient library and demands access to a forbidden tome. When they are refused they begin to set fire to the collection of books and scrolls. What could be so valuable it’s worth destroying a thousand years of knowledge?

This 48 page adventure provides a loose framework through six-ish scene/locations as the party searchs, for some reason, for a chick that has sailed in to the land of the dead cause she’s in love with the death goddess. It is a pointless adventure, both in motivation and in the loose framework that seems to pass for an adventure locale. 

You read the intro. You’re in a library when some dudes barge in, want a forbidden tome, are denied, and then set fire to place to apply some pressure. For some reason you get involved. I mean, sure, arson and all that. But, you get involved BEYOND that. An abbot hired them, so for some reason you meddle and go there. Before reaching the monastery the nearby village warns you off with some spears. You win their trust and they say the monks are now kidnapping their kids. Getting to the monastery, they are now some vampire/zombie hybrid, sleeping underground during the day and eating children at night. The abbot fell in love with the death goddess and sacrificed everyone to see her, but made a mistake and now they are all undead. Also, he has one half of the time of which the other half resided in that library. Following up, for some reason, now that you have both parts, leads you to a village of squatters and an abandoned temple of the god. Inside the avatar statue is sad, the high priestess, who wrote the tome, left the god to pursue her love of the death goddess. You win him over, or take his heart, and go to a lighthouse to replace the beacon with his heart. This calls back the ship of the high priestess from the lands of the dead, where she was searching for the death goddess to give her the present of a magic scythe she made. End of adventure.

I cannot tell you how much I loathe this. It is completely open ended, in a bad way. It has few details of any location, giving just a rough layout of the locales, sand room/key. “Frank lives here. Here’s his backstory. He is sad about chick leaving.” Would that it just took that amount of text. Oh no the text must drone on. In a very general way. 

It’s presented in long-form paragraph. Just a whole lot of words with no organization at all in a format that speaks to Wall of Text issues. I know what it’s trying to do, it’s trying to present situations for the party to interact with. “Here’s what’s going on at this location and here is the chief NPC at the locale and what’s going on with them.” But it’s so muddled and so loose. It really is little more than “The avatar is sad that she left and pines for her.” along with “the squatters in the village don’t want the party to enter the temple and they are led by kind-hearter Bob.” 

I was really, REALLY hoping for more with those zombie/vampire monks. Sleeping in the catacombs during the day, kidnapping and eating children at night. Ravenous for tender flesh. That’s a fucking GREAT concept. But, no, we get very little more than that. A textual description of the layout of the map and a very loose “they don’t use their cells anymore.” sort of thing. Even the whole “set fire to the library” thing is pretty good, but there is not much more than that. No exciting library action. Sure, the dudes who set fire are there and you cankill them, but no running through the library, or falling bookcases, or smoke visibility/damage or anything like that. It’s all VERY loosely defined situations and the DM is just told to run with it and see where it goes. 

And then there’s other weirdness here. The forbidden section librarian dude is like a yuan-ti, for no reason. And then the major section headings are in one of those fucked up gothic fonts that s barely legible. And we all know what I think about the adventure making is difficult, on purpose, to locate information. What little information there is.

It’s just a mess, dumping text at you. I suppose you could read and memorize the entire thing and make copious notes about how the parts are interconnected. Highlight and underline and so on. But why would you bother? I mean, why would the party even bother to get involved here? Because they are really in to the chief librarian? It’s suggested that the party have a preexisting relationship with the library, but, even then, I’m not sure why you would pursue things beyond the initial arson event. Nothing here makes much sense at all.

This is $10 at DriveThru. No preview. Sucker. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524848/love-songs-of-the-death-goddess?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 16 Comments

The Graveyard of Sorrows

Posted on June 25, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Martin Cubas
Weird Adventures
Castles 7 Crusades
Levels 5-7

An undead family on the path of revenge. A haunted cemetery. And creeping horrors at every turn. Prepare for a hell of a family reunion.

This 75 page adventure uses about 33 pages describe about fourteen ‘areas’ in a graveyard. Long room descriptions will add to the tedium of Just Stabbing Dudes as you battle through hordes of meaningless undead. 

You’re walking down a path when a villager runs up to you. “Oh please sirs! An undead just came out of the graveyard! We killed it but the militia is scared to go in! Please help us!” You mosey over to see a ten foot high wall surrounding a HUGE graveyard and a barricaded front gate with militia around it … and a dead dude. A first level cleric runs up and dumps a pile of holy and undead-killing weapons at your feet. In you go! Based on that, how the fuck do YOU think this adventure is going to go?

Ok, its full of fucking undead, so lets get the turning thing out of the way. Castles & Crusades is a Wisdom check vs the undead HD. Beating it by two means a turn and if you’re five levels higher you destroy the undead. The undead here range from 3HD to about five or six HD, on average, so lets call it a 50/50 chance to turn 1d12 undead each turn. The graveyard has three zones in it. The first zone has 42 undead roaming around the graveyard proper, ready to burst out and fuck you up, with another 27 in their crypt locations (three or four rooms in zone one, if I recall correctly.) So, seventy undead of around 5HD on average, vs your levels 5-7 party. Just in zone one of three. I guess just stuffing your adventure with high level “average” undead is one way to handle the clerics turning. Everyone surrounds the cleric and parry’s so the cleric can, on average, turn 6 undead a turn? That’s exciting D&D play. 

Not to worry though. The entire graveyard is covered in a heavy mist. You can’t see more than 5’ in front of you .Yes. FIVE FEET. Was it playtested at all? Obviously not.

Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. .Dad is the feudal lord in charge. He’s got some kids. They are evil little brats who eventually make a pact with the devil and become TRULY evil little shits. They grow up and one of the chicks sacrifices a peasant girl. The peasants hang all of the kids while dad is away. Except for the eldest son. Dad pardons the peasants and disappears. The son comes back as an evil undead, raises his sisters (I assume there are incestous undertones here, while not explicitly mentioned. One brother, a bunch of sisters, and he does care for them a bit too much.) Now he’s going to turn the entire graveyard in to undead and kill everyone in town as revenge for killing his sisters. A bunch of bullshit to justify “there’s a graveyard with a bunch of high level indeed in it.” 

Let’s see, mist with 5’ visibility, a 10’ high wall that I guess is adequate for keeping out several hundred 5HD undead, a level one cleric with a literally shit ton of undead killing magic items he dumps on you … what am I missing?

Rooms average a page to a page and half in length, each.  Here’s some read-aloud for you to mad-lib your own review of: “Before you rises an ancient turret with cracked, darkened walls. Several skeletal figures stand motionless near the entrance, their clothing rotted to rags by time. Although they do not move immediately, a sense of vigilance hangs in the air—as if they are waiting for the right moment to strike. Above the doorway, an elaborate inscription reads “Frida Stranholt.” A carved relief on the wall depicts a short, slender woman wielding a bow and arrow.” How many cinema sins can you count? Purple prose? Absolutely. Second person text? Absolutely. Overreveal? Absolutely. 

After that read-aloud for the outside of the crypt, we get read-aloud for the inside of the crypt. Then we get Castle Keepers Notes.” In this case: “A group of Skeletal Wretches has been stationed outside this tower to prevent entry. The interior holds a far greater threat. The Fountain Room is a trap Frida uses to eliminate intruders by sealing the exits and releasing deadly poison gas” Ok so, this is all padding. It adds NOTHING. You’ve already told us twice about the guards outside. I don’t need her motivation. Her motivation is that shes a dick. Further, she’s been alive for, what, three days now? And she’s building traps to eliminate intruders like it’s Tomb of Horrors?

So, anyway. Overwrought text. Way Way WAY too much text. Padded. Purple. Over-reveal. No real interactivity except for stabbing undead. Yeah yeah, you can talk to a couple. YAWN. All it leads to it more stabbing. Of them. Of them helping you stab. Etc. 

I KNOW people play D&D like this. I’ve sat in the games. Home games. Con games. I’ve had a miserable fucking time. And I’m not talking 3e/4e/5e era stuff. 1e/2e games that play like this. I try to understand others stances on things, but I just really can’t understand this style of play at all. I’d like to say born from cRPG world, but I’m absolutely certain that this existed in the early 80’s. 

But, even beyond it being a hack adventure, you could be in to that … I mean, is it a GOOD hack adventure? No, obviously. The presentation sucks donkey balls. It uses way too much text to cover basic details. Its prose is purple. It obfuscates the information you need to know to run the hack. And, most of all, surrounding the cleric in boredom while everyone waits for the cleric to roll this rounds Turn is not a very exciting way to play D&D. 5’ fucking foot visibility the entire adventure, indeed. Pffft.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. You get to see the start, with the dumping of the magic items, as well as an overview of the roaming underneath in each zone. But you DO NOT get to see a typical room. Which means this is a bad preview indeed. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/522646/the-graveyard-of-sorrows-castles-crusades-edition?1892600

Todays Question: Was Charles Ingalls a l0ser, moving his family around a lot, or did he just enter farming at the wrong time, during the great locust plagues and was never able to recover?

Posted in Reviews | 11 Comments

Skull Mountain – The Zherovain Highlands

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Paul Wolfe
Mystic Bull Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

The evil sorceress Evia Alyn lies dead. Those who know of her dark legacy have begun to gather in REDSTOWE VILLAGE, perched on the edge of the ZHEROVAIN HIGHLANDS. All seek the same prize: SKULL MOUNTAIN, her fabled fortress deep in the RAVENYR MOUNTAINS. For generations, she held the WESTERN SLOPES in her iron grip. Now, tales of POWERFUL ARTIFACTS left within her fortress draw a strange parade to these windswept plains: WIZARDS bent and twisted with their ambition, THIEVES with sharp eyes and sharper blades, PRIESTS mumbling and sacrificing to varied gods and WARRIORS dreaming of glory.

This 68 page adventure presents a hex crawl in a small region, along with about eight sites to explore/delve. It’s a full work with some decent puzzles and a fully realized environment to adventure in. For some definition of “fully realized” … meaning it tends to the minimalistic side of things. 

This is the first part of a larger campaign that is eventually, according to designers notes, end up in the Skull Mountain ten level dungeon of the witch queen. But, first, you’re level ones and need to FIND skull mountain. So you hit the local town looking for rumors and begin to explore sites related to her. That’s this adventure, a hex crawl and some adventuring sites related to the witch queen. It has everything you’d want for something like this, but, just perhaps not to the extent you might want it. Conceptually, think of the support system (not the adventuring sites) as being on paragraph and then a twenty entry random table to support it. It’s easy to think of as adventuring regions. The Pine Forests get a short description and then a wanderer table to support it. Or the town gets a paragraph and then a twenty entry table to support it. That’s not quite true, but it gets you in to the correct frame of mind for the review.

The town, which adventurers are flooding in to, has an inn that gets a VERY basic description, as does the town. We’re told that there are market days and sometimes the steep nomads show up, or the Bone Charmers (although, no description of either entity) and then a little events table to help support play. This can range from a monster attack to a heavy fog to an actual market day, and so on. Including a bad batch of ale at the inn, save vs poison or be at -4 CON for a few days. Just a few little things to spice up the town and keep it a bit dynamic. There’s a brief section on the town growing and money flooding i, which is a great touch, although a little short. And, there’s not much, at all, of the other adventuring parties flooding in, or trouble caused by them. This is going to be a theme. The adventure touches on little aspects but then doesn’t really provide much at all about them. I’m not asking for an appendix here, but a couple of sentences more would have been in each of the various areas. There is a relatively decent little rumors table. The Silver Queen’s fortress lies at confluence of the Rhoest and the Whisper rivers.” or “ Restless dead roam battlefields found across the steppe, crags, and thickets.” This is a good way to get the party going to locales, so they are relevant and help drive the adventure forward, although perhaps I could use some in-voice for them.

Magic items are great. The Salt Lords Sceptre. Staff, +1. Carved from a single crystal of salt with the head of a bull. Casts hold person(!) once day. On one subject. Nice little items, mostly book with a little more and a decent little few word description like that. Really nice sweet spot in describing magic items and giving them just a little uniqueness so not everything is just a generic +1.

The locations vary in size, but range from a few rooms to, of, say, twelve to sixteen. They are interesting environments, interlinked with objectives to unlock each other and greater mysteries. The first is quite mirror-forward, as they say. (I had a condo once owned by the Saran Wrap heir that was very mirror forward … or was it the Reynolds Wrap heir?) So, we’re looking at frescoes, grabbing mirrors, putting mirrors up. Looking at reflection, and using magic light from mirrors to do things in the dungeon. Things are not really being telegraphed, at least not in an obvious way, but you can figure things out if you pay attention and do some things that should be obvious. 

The room descriptions though, are pretty minimal. We’re looking at mostly fact based descriptions, and terse ones at that. “Mirror Hall. Mirrors (3’x5′) east wall. Worn tapestry west wall. Tarnished censers hang from chains (center)” So, a room title which is good. Then we get an indented and bolded bullet for Cracked Mirrors, Tapestry, and Censor. “Tapestry. Queen gazes over shoulder in hand mirror at supplicants. Hides pristine mirror (3’x5′). See area 4.” A nice little bit of cross-reference there. I would have liked a few more words here, not many, but some adjectives and adverbs. Gazes sternly or something other than “worn” for the tapestry, a couple of more words per items to cement them a little better. The facts and just the facts. 

This makes the entire adventure read more like a framework, and while, yes, all adventures are frameworks, some are more so than others. I wanted just a bit more in town. The other parties, a little more intrigue. Just a little more for the various rooms to bring them to life. And, perhaps most of all, a little more in a summary of how the adventure should work. You are clearly finding things at one site for another and aligning things between sites and so on. That’s all great, but the adventure is just too “long” for a DM to really put that together all by their lonesomes. And, besides, you know the deal, if the DM has to do it then the adventure designer should be helping out. 

I’m not angry at this. It’s well constructed in parts and clearly thought has gone in to it. I can’t see myself ever running it. But, buying it, putting some effort in to prep, and then running it could be an option for folks that tend to the minimalism side of things. Well, no, I consider myself a minimalist, but this goes a bit far even for me, without ever actually reaching those Vampire Queen levels that I find so annoying. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is one page, a hex page in the region. So, poor preview. It needed to show a few dungeon entries so a DM can know what to expect.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524703/witch-lords-of-skull-mountain-the-zherovain-highlands-old-school-essentials-edition?1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 4 Comments

The Snake Temple Ruins

Posted on June 21, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Olly Tyler
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-2

The local town of Penderham has been beset by raids for a year by a bandit gang that they cannot track down. The bandits are led by a battle hardened and wily orc called Nurgal who has assembled a group of orcs, goblins and two harpies. Before terrorising the local trade routes and villagers his band found themselves a perfect hidden and fortified base inside the dungeon of an ancient ruined temple.

This 37 page adventure uses about seventeen pages to describe about 32 rooms in a two level dungeon complex. It has some interesting room concepts but the length of eac room combined with an incoherence in the writing makes this one of the more opaque offerings I’ve seen. 

I’m not sure which way to go at the start with this review. The adventure borders on being incoherent. But, also, it has some decently interesting room concepts at times. Room concepts that can hang with some of the best designers if they were done right. This is a non-trivial accomplishment. It’s hard to say just how many adventures I’ve seen where Stabbin is the only interactivity. Or, perhaps, some simplistic traps. But there’s something else going on here. I’m not sure if it’s AI or if it’s just an EASL issue. 

Ok, on to the good stuff. There are a few really interesting room concepts here. They combine a kind of mashup (future symbolism …) of ideas that are familiar yet new. In one room we’ve got one entrance and a waterfall in a corner … and a snake inlay wall design  on the far wall … with jeweled eyes. Fucking withthe eyes causes the entrance to close and the room to being to fill with water … there is a rusty iron ring in the silted over pool under the waterfall. Pull it up to unstopper the place and open the secret door that is behind the waterwall. Rusty iron ring, under the silt. Secret door behind the waterfall, snake inlay with jewel eyes … this is all just classic stuff. Classic in its components, anyway. That’s a good OSR room. Other rooms have nude bodies on slabs covered in point delicate crystals (open wounds? Breathing in the dust? Oops …) A multi-level moonlit harpy room. Nice rooms. Nice room concepts. Good interactivity in them. 

But man, this things rough. Those nice concepts are hidden behind some really rough stuff. That waterfall room, that fill up? The door that shuts? It’s a portcullis. How does a room fill with water if its a portcullis? Does the LLM not know that or was this an EASL issue? That same room, the map. It’s a normal dungeon room, somewhat smallish, square, with a waterfall in the corner. The hallways near there have some water features. The map water gives the indication that the waterfall is a leak, something that should not be there, with the soggy hallways and nearby rooms now having damp floors and ankle high water in places in the rooms. But the secret door behind the waterfall, the whole door trap, the iron ring to unplug the room … this implies that dungeon is built that way. 

Something stinks here. There’s a room near the entrance. It has a door to a small 10×10 cupboard. It has old sacks and cloaks hanging on hooks and laying onthe on the floor. Got it? Oh, right, also, there’s a skeleton in it that attacks you when you open the door. Got it? Inside it is a secret door. It leads to a FORGE … with NO. OTHER. ENTRANCES. . Like a real forge, 50×60, columns down the center, coal and wood to stock the forge, sheets and rods of steel. AND MULTIPLE HUMANOID SMITHS WORKING. Everything gets dragged through that cupboard? No signs of it in the cupboard? A fucking skeleton attacking when you approach it?! Come on now. No way a real person wrote this. Or,maybe they did. That 10×10 room with ancient red dragon in it was a thing at one point in time. 

There’s more than a little to not like here. The read-aloud is in second person form, with all of you see and you feel shit in it. Things “appear to be” all over the place, “You enter what looks like a wood paneled armory.”. The read-aloud over-reveals the room contents destroying the back and forth between players and DM. The room contents read like Victorian laundry lists of objects found in the rooms. This makes room descriptions long in places, with a column or even a page not being unusual. The RA tells us that there are lumpy sacks on the floor, but not what they contain.

Did I mention the healing font? It never runs out. Well, it does, but refills once a month. Sounds like a business opportunity to me! Gotta get that side hustle on! 

I’ve mentioned incoherent a couple of times now. It’s not really in relation to things like that waterfall room which just don’t make sense. It’s incoherent in that the organizational structure of the paragraphs seem out of order. It’s like you write a five paragraph essay, in the classic style, and then Put a detail paragraph first and second and then the conclusion paragraph, then the last detail paragraph and then the introductory paragraph, if that kind of makes sense. The details and the summaries just seem to to appear in the text without any sense of where they should be. This is most notable in the town sections, which also serve as the backstory and hook, in which the information the party finds out, and from who and where, just appears kind of willy nilly interspersed with summaries. You find out information from various NPC’s and then the adventure tells us we can go to those NPCs to get the story of what’s going on … but those are only real NPC’s and we just read about the details of what is going on … which was still confusing as hell. It tells us that there are raids happening. There’s a survivor reporting goblins and orcs. There is evidence of that. And yet the adventure then acts like who is raiding is a mystery. What?! 

I’m not sure what is going on here. I know, with the ai art in the piece, folks are going to lean that direction for the letter drops, the weird incoherence order of the information and the disconnect in logic in rooms. In my naivete I am not as quick to jump to that conclusion. Either way, the work is a confusing mess, difficult to dig through, with the high points not being high enough to justify looking at this.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. The preview is fifteen pages (beyond being PWYW) and shows you the entire intro and about ten dungeon rooms, so, good preview, AI overlords!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524972/the-snake-temple-ruins?1892600

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Perilous Path of the Cursed Camel

Posted on June 18, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
by Joseph R Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
OSE, Cairn, Shadowdark
Levels 2-3

What do you say when a bizarre camel appears and says you’re doomed to have your soul eaten by witches… unless you can steal as many ancient Relics as possible from all over the world in the next few hours? Hopefully, you say: Let’s go!

This 25 page adventure features thirteen situations using a “teleport you to the next situation” gimmick. There’s a real-time element to this that, while core to the gimmick, I think really detracts from the overall adventure, as presented via the text. 

Bad day! The Evil Witches have randomly selected you to eat your souls! Or so says the weird camel that just showed up and told you that. You start doing the Sliders thing and every thirty minutes (of real time) jumping to a new reality, being dragged toward them. Rough one man! But, hey, if you can find some relics on the way then you can give them to the witches and they won’t eat YOUR soul! Good thing there are some relics that just happen to be hidden in every reality/situation you slide in to!

The parts that Lewis does well continue to be the parts that are done well. Formatting is top notch. Magic items are great and the evocative nature of things works well. There is a little callback to things that you recognize. Here’s the treasure list for the main encounter at the end, with the witches ” Under a rock in a dark corner is a dirty little cigar box. Relics: coffin nail (stab any creature to kill it instantly), piece of straw (place on a creature’s back to break their spine), copper penny (give to someone to learn everything they know), gray stone (throw to instantly kill the two nearest birds), severed green thumb (bury to grow a vast forest).” Folklorish indeed! I’m a big fan of these and how they are handled without droning on about mechanics and so on. These are the things that Twelve in One Blow are made of.

The environments that you slide in are the trope ones. The snowy one. The sea one. The Maze. The inside of a dragon haven been swallowed, it seems. But, also, Lewis does not lean in to the trope in a hard way. So, yes, it’s a snowy place. But there is a small hut with a hunters family. Mom and dad are suffering from the plague. Little Timmy is gonna need to be adopted. Perhaps by you? Lewis has a knack for bringing interesting elements to situations. In the Fey realm, a group of dungeoneers are looting. Not your usual fey encounters. And fey goblins lurk under the water ready to drown you. Noice! In the desert, a caravan is being attacked by giant scorpions with a mighty sandstorm on the horizon. Pretty topy. Oh, also, the caravan is full of vampires. Yikes! He takes the trope as a setting but then adds a twist or some such to it to make it much more than the trope; the trope is just the setting to navigate while working the other issues. He’s very good at it and they all stand out well 

Each site gets a page. And now we begin to see some cracks forming in this adventure. The giant scorpion/sandstorm thing is a lot. And then we toss in vampires. In thirty minutes of real time. Also, you’re looking for those relics, yeah? This can lead, I suspect in play, to a kind of madcap situation in which There’s this giant battle with scorpions, vampires about, severely injured and bleeding people crawling across the sand in desperation … and then the party shows up and starts madly searching the caravan. Or tossing the cabin of the hunter/plague couple while a mastodon trundles by and some snow raptors descend the place in to chaos. No time for all that! Let’s yoink everything out of that cabin to search it! As lLewis points out, you can’t really combat in 30 minutes very well (and he suggests not to, until the witch show down at the end.) The page count also constrains things a bit. You need a page, but also you’ve got multiple things going on. Certain things, such as the dungeon party. Each of the five get a two words description (beautiful, maniac) and then the party goal of robbing the PC’s, noting not necessarily killing them. 

I think the way this works is as a madcap sort of thing .You hit the first couple, discover you can’t really ‘explore’ before sliding away, and then begin to increasingly ignore the plight of others while you rip things apart looking for “relics.” (Which is a stand in for magic items like the ones I quoted.) With this in mind, I suspect it works well as that. Which probably works for Cairn and maybe Shadowdark? I am not as sure in an OSE/OSR context, giving the pacing one expects from fragility of body.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is twelve pages and does a good job of showing you what to expect, as always from Lewis.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/523835/perilous-pat?1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 3 Comments