Killing Grounds

By Eduardo Raffo Carozzi
Breeding Calamities
Generic/Universal

Year after year, the monks meditate and pray with the desire to get closer to enlightenment. They boast of having abandoned the desires of this material world, of being one with the Universe, however, no one is beyond temptation and many times the most devout are the first to be corrupted.

This thirty page outline is trying to convey the hunt for a demonic beast in a small village and with their growing anxiety and panic. It’s way too wordy for what it is with not nearly enough gameable assistance. Great NPC’s though.

On the first page the adventure tells us “This is just the sketch of the adventure …” Well, fuck me man. I guess if I knew that going in to this I MIGHT have still purchased it. I do have an academic interest in adventure sketches; enough information to get the thing going but far fewer pages than a traditional adventure. But, also, I thought I was buying an adventure. I’m not buying an adventure though, as I learned. That makes me sad. It makes me feel like I’ve been cheated. I did NOT want the clearcoat. I feel like going on a diatribe about this. I will save everyone the explicit insight and just say that the buyer should know what they are getting.

Ok, so, a monk is sick. The party comes up to the monastery to help and the dude implodes. Or escapes to the village and implodes. Either way, a monster now stalks the village at night killing people a night.The party gotta stop it. Errr…. Should stop it? Could stop it? 

There are two good parts to the adventure. The designer knows they are the good parts. They ARE what the adventure is. The core of it. The first is the list of village NPC’s. It’s a good list. An entry or so takes a full page. Others take columns. Others are a paragraph or two. So, yes, the writing is WAYYYYYYY too long. (In a small fucking font that looks like wall of fucking text. Jesus man, give a dude a break!) And the adventure is in DESPERATE need to a summary sheet for the NPC’s. The name, occupation, age, relationships, secrets. Somehting like that, so I can look at one page (NOT IN A SMALL FUCKING FONT!) and work them in the on-fly social interactions in the village as the game progresses. But man oh man oh man, the NPC’s are good. The dollmaker digs up a body every couple of years and has a basement full of zombies that he makes. He’s going to be a strong ally of the party in their hunt for The Beast. No, seriously. He is. He’s devoted to the village. The Reeve is cooking the books and has been sleeping with the local milkmaid. If she dies then he goes fucking nuts, in a small way, rounding up all of the young men and going on a vengeance hunt for the Beath, making a lot of mistakes in his hubris/anger. That’s fucking good. That’s real life. And the hits just keep coming and coming. Including a farmer with good yields, five kids, a young and beautiful wife who cooks well. “He is living his best life” the text tells us. Oh man, the ways I could use that! The NPCs work with the adventure their shit makes sense IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ADVENTURE. It’s not just random trivia, it’s things that can help enrich the adventure. 

The other nice part is a small, three event, section. There’s a mechanic called VIllage Hive Mind, or some such, which basically tracks the mood in the village. As people die their IMP score is subtracted from a starting total. More important, liked NPCs subtract more. When it reaches a certain level then people start a mass exodus from town. When it gets still lower then some people start to think they should worship the Beast,leading to a confrontation and death in the town square. The third and last event is The Rapture, where they kind of go buts. They start self sacrificing themselves to The Best, or “the people begin to voluntary surrender themselves to the Beast, worshiping it like some kind of god and letting the monster absorb them as it evolves into its Abyssal Phase.” Sweet! I fucking love it! Again, mirroring a kind of dark human nature in extreme pressure trope. Alas, these event section are quite short, just a couple of sentences each. 

That is, essentially, the adventure. There are no real maps of the monastery. Or the village. Or any events to speak of. No kills. And while there’s quite the focus on the ecology of the monster there is not a whole lot on how to use it during play. 

The designer recognizes, correctly, that the adventure they are building is a kind of paranoid monster hunt where the creature also stalks the villagers. That is a social adventure and the designer knows that. The NPCs would be the heart of that, the designer recognizes that and a substantial focus, via page count, is there. The second support, though, would be the events. And while there is that very basic outline, that could use a great deal of supplementing. More kills. More vignettes and so on. Somehting for the DM to riff more on. SHort, just a couple of sentences each, but there for the DM to sprinkle in. Do you need maps? Well, no, not really. Not very good ones anyway, like an exploratory map. But, also, having a map of the monastery and village, just a rough one, not really keyed much, would have helped a lot also. 

It’s very hard for me to get over the small font and extreme number of words that is taken to describe almost everything. Those three events, of just a couple of sentences each, that’s about the right size for what it is. You could get away with a few more sentences there, maybe. But, other than that, almost every entry in this just drones on and on and on, with the smaller font making it even harder to scan the text for the important details. The large page count here is almost entirely wasted. Yeah, there’s a hunt wandering monsters in the wilderness so you can craft minigame. And that’s ok also. But the main monster text focuses on the wrong things about the monster. Ponderous, I guess. The text is ponderous. The phrasings and vocabulary choices are off just a bit, which may be an EASL issue,  but that’s not really a problem. The ponderousness of the verbosity. That’s the issue.

Reference sheet for NPC’s. More events/kills/etc. A couple of throw-away maps. Bonus points if they have some features that enable some interesting play. Cut the word count drastically and pump up the font. 

I leave it as am exercise for the reader if generic/universal is appropriate or if you just stat shit for D&D and be donet with it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. No preview, but, with PWYW you can look at the entire thing. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/445024/killing-grounds?1892600

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Tangled

By Josh Domanski & Reilly Qyote
Afterthought Committee
OSE
Level 0

Like viscera from a corpse, a carnivorous tangle of vines and bramble has spilled forth from an ancient fortress, swallowing up the countryside. Today, it reaches the outskirts of Peatstead. Your home. With promises of gold and glory swirling through your head, you’ll accompany a small army of commoners to put an end to its deadly expansion and emerge as heroes. Discover ancient treasures, avoid devastating traps, and encounter the wrath of nature itself in… Tangled

This 24 page adventure uses ten pages to describe ten rooms in a plant themed dungeon. The read-aloud leans purple and the encounters rather simplistic in this “Enjoy The Dm Backstory” adventure. A couple of nice ideas to steal, though.

It’s a funnel! The local plant life is out of control and the villagers go out to deal with in, in the local dungeon/cave place. Where the old druid lived. So this is going to be a standard “plant at the middle of everything will tendrils everywhere” adventure. This one is done in the art style, with certain exceptions, of an 8-bit dungeon crawler. An appeal to nostalgia using a familiar trade dress that is not T$R? I generally stopped reviewing DCC adventures because of their linear nature. They do it well, but I don’t need to go out of my way to find that. And this, also, has a map that is mostly linear. There are a frustrating number of “cracks in the roof letting in a beam of light” that the party CANT exploit. Such is the nature of a linear adventure.

Our read-aloud, which can in places push the limits of what I’m willing to put with, is all in some cutsy font. No doubt authentic to the 8-bit genre being emulated. I continue to find it puzzling why people think illegibility is a good idea. I’ve got enough problems in my life and struggling to read your text should not be one of them. Unless … this isn’t an art book is it? Not an adventure at all but a piece of art masquerading as an adventure? Cause you know, if that’s the case then I’m going to go all full Bryce on you. Which is not to say you can’t make your adventure look pretty. But not at the fucking expense of being a fucking adventure. Oh, also, the read-aloud over-reveals what is in the room. It gives too much detail in places, which means it destroys the back and forth between player and DM that is at the heart of all RPGs. For example, in one of the rooms, there are some woodland creatures. “Some of them sleep while others have long since died in a peaceful huddle around a gnarled effigy” That is something for the party to discover, not for the text to prematurely reveal. The tension of discovery has been ruined, as is the horror of it all.

As that text betrays, the wording here runs to the purple side of the spectrum. It feels disconnected. In the past I’ve made an analogy to the bible used to write scripts. Its not the end goal but something used to send a signal to someone else who is doing the writing. And that’s not the right place to be in adventure text. “The smell of rotting wood and mildew sweeps up from the floor.” Sweeps up from the floor? Really? I’m all for a thesaurus, but we can play “stick in a word randomly.” Or how about “Inside is a pitch-black chamber of incomprehensible shape or size” Ok, we’ll ignore te pitchblack and vision aspect of this. Incomprehensible size and shape? Really? One of favorites from the adventure is “The river crashes against the rock with an uproar, as though fleeing from danger.” You gotta be fucking kidding me man. See, maybe if I was trying to tell the set designer what to show me, maybe thats chill. But that’s not the same as telling the DM something for them to riff on and inspire them, or to the players in read-aloud. That is all groan worthy.  Which is too bad because there is at least one major disconnect between the language and the art. There’s a terrific back cover piece which communicates a scene in the adventure VERY well. And yet the text used to describe it comes nowhere close. The text needed a lot more work here.

And, we won’t even mention all of the DM backstory that pads the DM text out. With all of that removed then theres remarkably little text to the adventure. It’s all pretty much your standard fare in terms of interactivity. 

But not all of it. 

There are some really great things on here also. The magic items are TOP. SHELF. We’ve got a ring that keeps you from getting surprised. And makes you very paranoid. Excellent! That is EXACTLY what being hyper-aware means! A wonderful example of not imagination first. If we assumed there was no surprise mechanic in the game, and you wanted to give someone the power to not be surprised, to make them hyper-aware, then what else would happen? The’d be hyper fucking aware. Which is paranoid. NOW you can turn to the mechanics. And then there’s this lamp that dispels illusions inside its glow. POWERED BY YOUR OWN BLOOOOODDDDDD! Fucking rocking man! “I was a thousand times more evil than thou!” Power has consequences.

And, then, in the rooms also. There’s a dude, asleep, with an apple tree growing out of his back. Uh. Ok. Hey, trees got some apples on it. Wanna eat? An apple tree comes out your mouth and stomach. Oopsies! It’s fanciful and imaginative. Which is what an adventure should be. I know some of you are going to grouse at the more folkloreish aspect of it (and, I do love me some folklore in an adventure …) but you also have to recognize that its a thousand times better than the deriguour that can pass for room encounters in many adventures. To it’s credit, we’ve got pitcher plant mimics as pits, rope bridges, an underground river to swept up in and a nice little room that you have to feel around and groped in, along with tiny mushrooms. That are bleeding. Pretty nice things. 

The trappings here, though, are just not enough to really recommend the adventure. Yeah, it’s a funnel. But the text really needs to be better and the encounters, the ones that are not straightforward, are just not enough in concept, by themselves, to support the adventure. I will note, though, a great little “follow ups” section that recommends other plant based adventures. And, they are pretty decent ones. Hole in the Oak. Hideous Daylight and so on. AT least the ones I’m familiar with are pretty damn good. That’s a nice little tough for someone that wants to continue the plant theme.

This is $10 at DriveThru. No preview, so I guess the potential buyer can go fuck themselves.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/493879/tangled?1892600

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Madness of the Azure Queen

By Realm Diver
Self Published
BECMI
Levels 4-6

You opened the chest? You shouldn’t have opened the chest! You are magically transported to a ruined temple surrounded by vast desert. A dragon, driven mad by the slaying of her mate and brood, lies between you and a wish-granting treasure that could mean your salvation, or spell your doom…

This 24 page adventure uses about thirteen pages to describe a dungeon with about 35 rooms. It’s got a rather complex situation going on in it that seems inconsistent with its size and difficulty. I’m not a fan of the long-winded and writing to be slogged though, but, also, there’s something going on here. Just not enough for me to to deal with it.

I’m having a hard time with this one. I think I can tell that there is something going on here, but I’m so off-put by the presentation and writing that I want to throw up a little in my mouth. WHich does seem overly harsh. But, there it is. Anyway, I said there was a lot going on …

We’re going to ignore the premise. You find a treasure chest and open it and find a jewel buried in some sand and if you touch it then the sand swirls around you and you’re all transported to this place in the desert. There’s an abandoned campsite and a mesa with a couple of giant statues standing in front of a crack in the mesa wall. So, right, we’re ignoring that. Yes, treasure chest adventure, living room, blah blah blah, hook. Let’s instead focus on some on the weirdly high number of things going on here for a dungeon with 35 rooms. We’ve got the lizardmen-like tribe in this temple complex. Then we’ve got the EHP lizardman shaman, who is raising humanoids from the dead with her magic staff. We’ve got the former leader of the tribe, under house arrest and looking to regain power, pretty please Mr adventurer. Let’s see, we’ve got a thief raiding the temple. We’ve got the undead former high priest of the temple who really thinks the lesser evil here is getting the party to cleanse the temple of most of those folks. ANOTHER undead dude seems to be full of ennui. The Azure Guard, the undead dudes raised by the EHP, are bopping about. And then there’s the crazy dragon whose mate and hatchlings are dead, in the final room. Azure? Yup. Worshiped by the lizardman dudes? Yup. Stuck in that room? Yup.

While there is  bit of an order of battle for the evil lizardman faction, and the house-arrest queen has some deets, mostly the people with plans are just sitting in their rooms waiting. Including the dragon. This is kind of disappointing. In addition to everyone listed there are also a few other things going here, ghosts to talk to and so on, almost all of which give you some kind of clue as to SOMETHING in the adventure. What’s a little off putting here, though, is the relative size of the adventure. It’s only 35 rooms, and in a typical dungeon room format. And that’s A LOT of intrigue for 35 rooms. The tightness of space isn’t going to allow for a lot of room to sneak about, infiltrate and so on, I think. There IS a secondary entrance to the tomb, that takes you to quite a few of the lizardman people to interact with, so, maybe thats the “correct” way to play? It’s just hard. There are a lot of high HD enemies here and we’re playing BASIC. Like a bunch of 3HD lizardmen riding 5HD firebreathing (3d6) firedrakes. It’s just rough, in such a compressed area. I guess your going to have to really sneak about. 

Up until now, in the review, you might be thinking this is a relatively decent adventure. And it might actually be one. And then I touch on the writing. I hate it. It’s got a format its using and its own style and I fucking hate both of them. It’s probably just me. But I don’t know that I care; it was also my money. We’re going to ignore that the read-aoud is in some fucked up font that you can’t actually read. There’s only, like, two sections of read-aloud in the adventure anyway. Still, I hate it.

I’ve taken another long break. I still hate it and I still don’t really know. The writing style is not particularly evocative, at all. And I don’t think it’s trying to be, at all. I guess, it’s fact based? And I don’t like that? A typical description might read: “This room has a 5’ pit in it to house giant oil beetles the Sandscales farm for their oil and meat. The beetles are fed on whatever dead or rotting matter the Sandscales accumulate, and are quite content to stay in the pit. They will certainly see anything that enters the pit as fair game to eat, however. There is a 40% chance there is a Sandscale male in here on the raised floor, dumping slop into the pit.” That room description isn’t really saying anything. There’s a lot of explaining why things are the way they are, but it’s not really anything other tan a 5’ pit with beetles in it and maybe a lizardman. But it’s long, isn’t it? And that’s pretty typical. A lot of the rooms, most, I’d guess, run to half a column of text. It’s got this bullet point style and I think the first one is usually a general overview of the room with the rest following up on that. But, also, this means a lot of the rooms are four or more paragraphs. And padded out, wordy, verbose, mostly for no reason at all. It if could take a sentence then it takes three. I feel, continually, like I’m fighting the text to get something out of it. “Prison Cells: Whatever these rooms used to be, the Sandscales have repurposed them as a prison” Yup, that’s why the room name is Prison Cells.That first sentence does nothing but repeat that this is a prison. That’s the purpose of the room title, to frame what’s to come. And then you frame it again. I think we all know by now that I’m not looking for an ultra minimal room description, but, also, I fucking HATE the padded out shit. This isn’t an ethnographic exploration of the lizardman takeover of a desert temple. We’re playing fucking D&D tonight and I’m not using a highlighter to do the work that the editor should have done. Oh, wait, no editor. Not that the fucking copyeditor shit that passes for editing would have helped anyway. Man, I AM grumpy this morning. “This room has the appearance of a barracks.” No. Never. It IS a barracks or is not. That goes for the DM text and that goes for players text. You’re just padding the fucking thing out. 

There’s a 9HD undead philosopher in this. He summons four 1 HD blobs to defend himself. “He will not defend himself, but will cackle madly and disappear if destroyed.” A commentary on the futility of modernism since the death of God? I didn’t expect to see that in a BECMI adventure. 

I don’t like this. I accept that there could be an adventure in here. I think it needs a larger map and a reworking of the various areas in to something that might be more supportive of faction play. In terms of design, that’s the flaw here. But, also, this thing needs a complete reworking of the text. There is no evocative writing to cement the room for a DM to effectively riff from. And they are padded out to hell and back, making digging though the text a chore. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages and shows you mostly padding. The last two pages describe the outside of the temple complex and part f the first two rooms. Those last two are what you can expect from the text, especially that last one.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/494473/madness-of-the-azure-queen-becmi?1892600

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Raiders of the Forlorn God

By Andrea Tupac Mollica
Hellwinter Forge of Wonders
OSE
Levels 4-6

The wizard Azarhorn has hired you to escort him to the Cenotaph of the Forlorn God, where a fabulous treasure awaits you. You heard something about the sinister fame surrounding the place, but the wizard promised you a good reward and all the riches you can plunder: enough to dismiss all doubts and fears. You just arrived at the village of Greyven, nothing more than a bunch of stone houses a few miles away from your final destination. You have the time to supply; then you’ll have to leave for the Cenotaph and the perils awaiting you inside.

This forty page adventure uses about sixteen pages to describe about seventeen rooms in a dungeon/prison. Rooms are one trick challenge rooms, with generic tropes done generically and an uninspiring, but short, writing style. At least there’s that.

First, the good. The rooms descriptions are relatively terse. There is a decent amount of DM text for each room, but, also, for something like this I think it could be considered terse. We’re no longer in the days of just noting pit traps on the map, so a short paragraph about one seems to be the standard.  And, the paragraphs are focused on the effects of the rooms in a kind of bullet point style, once major thing per point, so, it doesn’t seem like the text, either DM text or room read aloud, is too burdensome. This, alone, means that I don’t hate this adventure. Also, the adventure starts with you passing through a little village and there’s a body hanging from a gallows in the middle of the village square. Groovy! That’s a fun bit of description! It’s got some game effect, cutting off it’s pinkies to use to open doors per some folklore, bt, still, it’s a nice touch anyway. That’s exactly the kind of thing you might put in to set the mood for a disaster to follow or some such. There’s one more nice little bit, and it’s in the village also. The villagers have a rumor/legend about The Hill Horror that wander the hills. That’s what they call it, The Hill Horror. That’s the way legends and rumors work! Name the thing. The troll under the bridge should be Ol Man Hickory. The bandits should be Fat Mamma Cass’ Boys. I love it! Oh, one more bit of finery in this adventure: at one point in the wilderness the party gets a better die roll if they have a ranger “or a stray dog is with them.” That’s some OSR D&D playing right there! Got a dog? It’s gonna help you out. A free-wheeling kind of play, in which mechanics are not tied, via the books, to every little thing but circumstances make a difference. Make the case why you don’t need to roll the dice! Get a dog. Have a DM that thinks about what is going on rather than just looking up rules!

Which is not at all to say that I think this is a good adventure. It is, at most, an adventure that does not offend too much. I did find myself giving withering sigh after withering sigh, Sideshow Bob style.

First, we’ve got an escort mission. You’re escorting Mr Wizzo in to the dungeon. How fun. Then, of course, Mr Wizzo doesn’t help you at all during the adventure. What fun. “He considers it a test to see if he chose the right people to escort him in to the dungeon.” What fun. And then in the last room of the dungeon he turns on you to kill you. What fun. Never say that one coming. You know why adventurers don’t have families and loved ones? Because the shitty DM trauma is real. Anyway, go ahead, take your time, explore the dungeon. But …”After one month, all the Forlorn God dungeon’s perils reset, and all the creatures revive with full HP” What fun. I just can’t fucking stand of that shit. Why are we even playing D&D? It’s all fucking bad. It takes the agency out of the players hands. Just watch a fucking movie or roll one die as a party and have the DM narrate what happens for the next four hours. loathe Loathe LOATHE.

The map is an uninteresting affair, with no real thought behind it. The read-aloud can be column length in some places, and terse in others. But t also is in an annoying fucking font that is hard to read. It’s beyond me why people still do this. DId no one tell you this? That, as the DM, it was hard to read the fucking font? No? Because you didn’t give it to someone to run? 

And the room descriptions. Ug. Some of them are short and terse. “NARROW AND UNEVEN STEPS DESCEND INTO THE DARK BELLY OF THE HILL, FROM WHICH A FETID AND STALE AIR EXUDES.” I’m down for some fetid and stale air exuding from the dungeon. But when we also get shit like “THIS COLD ROOM IS BARE EXCEPT FOR THE REALISTIC STATUES OF six war mastiffs. AN UNKNOWN HAND PORTRAYED THE BEASTS IN VARIOUS POSITIONS.” An unknown hand? Really? It’s all in that weird narrator style, or stage direction style, maybe. “A ghostly figure COVERED IN A RAGGED BLACK ROBE SITS IN FRONT OF A TABLE WITH eleven mouse skulls. WITH A BOOMING, EERIE VOICE, THE FIGURE INTRODUCES ITSELF  AS THE Skullmaster AND INVITES THE CHARACTERS TO CHALLENGE IT TO A GAME OF INTELLIGENCE AND STRATEGY” What the fuck is that about? Abstracted? Generalized? I have no words to even describe that writing style and its blunder. 

Interactivity is simplistic. Basically, in each room you face a challenge. Maybe a pit trap or something. And you have to collect all of the keys and use them to open various doors, etc. In most rooms you have to be quiet or The Jailer shows up. It’s not clear to me how he gets from level one of the dungeon to level two, since the entrance is under a lake you have to drain. But, anyway, he shows up if you’re not quiet. We get “challenges” like “, the doors magically close, and all the lights, including the magical ones, snuff out” and then the ink demon attacks. Of course. Fucking doors slamming and your lights going out. Lame lame lame lame lame lame lame lame lame lame lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame  lame lame lame. Backstory that doesn’t make a difference in the adventure. The Jailer was the former blah blah blah” but, of course, doesn’t mean anything since he can’t remember anything and even if he did it wouldn’t impact the adventure you’re on. 

Uninteresting rooms. Generic tropes done generically. Plot points worthy of the worst 5e dreck. That all detracts from the better parts of the adventure, which are few and far between. And yet I don’t hate this. At least the rooms are short. I’d drink myself to oblivious if I had to run this, but I could run it.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There’s no real preview. There is a sample of one dungeon page but you can’t really read it. Sadz 🙁

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/494628/raiders-of-the-forlorn-god?1892600

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Fight On #15 – Caverns of Slime

Level 13 - The Caverns of Slime
By Alex Schroeder, Lior Wehrli, Chris Roberts
Level 8+

The waterfall from the mushroom forest above passes through this area of powerful myconial
magic. The fungi undulate to a silent music, while phosphorous lights and dancing glow-bugs illuminate dancing shrooms and glistening towers of fungal growth on the steep walls.


This 23 page adventure details level thirteen of The Darkness Beneath and it’s … eleven major areas? It is a magnificent framework in which to die, and is perhaps most similar in play style to D3. A glorious jumble that is all I ever want in my life to be happy.


There’s an overview of the level up front which thankfully details what a typical jaunt in to the Caverns of Slime might look like. Briefly, you descent the Fungal Fall and travel through the Shroom Lords lands to the Spider City. From their you gain river travel on the River Styx, visiting the Bone Crusher and its roaming ghouls and two Panzerships. Perhaps diverting to the Prison of Dis and past the Shark Den (having orcs riding flying sharks …) you can hit up the wizard Gar at his titular Vats of Gar, who can maybe get you out of this place. But you’ll need to get past the Bubbling Stench to the Damn of Ix to disable its blocking power. Past the Eternal Swamp is the passage to the Ooze Lord (feature a 99 foot tall statue …) and, therein, the black door to the last level. You follow all of that? Essentially we have the party stuck on the level and eventually learning what they need to do to get off of it. They travel around to various areas learning things and making friends and enemies until the epic assault, via Ajax, on Mongo.


Essentially, each of those places I mentioned is a little … encounter area? A little place to have an adventure? A little town with shit going down in it? I’m not sure how to describe it. You end up at place X. You poke around, find some shit out, pick up some things or people. Get in to a greater situation going on there and somehow navigate it to end up getting what you want. I’m not sure I would characterize this as a fetch quest or gathering the six parts to the Key of Time. It’s a great big place that you can wander around in a non-linear fashion (although linearly makes sense) and do shit, eventually with the goal of escaping. I don’t know. Nothing I’m describing here is helping, is it?


The Spider City opens wilth a little red-aloud, and then covers some themes for this area for the DM to work with: Darkness, spiders, silver lights, ropes, webs, living on the ceiling. Some bullet points on more theme-like things, like occasional ropes reaching down to the cave floor or the floor being covered with broken bones and husks. Then some typical spider names, a little overview of the area, and a longer section covering events that can happen in the city. This takes up a page and is weird as all fuck. And this is a friendly area.


Everything here is familiar yet bizarre. Like that first level of Darkness Beneath but amped up. Crocodiles, Spiders, Orcs, but amped up and twisted. You could, i suspect, run an entire campaign on this level, or something close to it? That’s no doubt hyperbole, but it feels like it. The bandersnatch fits in well here, and the rolling ceiling fireball maybe just a little too mundane.


An open ended adventuring area with greater goals than looting the dungeon? If each of these was a separate kingdom, above ground, and the party needed to achieve some goal, using them as resources, that might cover this place? But it’s far far weirder. Without, I think, going in to gonzo territory. Whatever that is. I’m gonna sleep with this one under my pillow, even though you’re gonna have to bring every ounce of DMing chops to it. It could, not doubt, be organized and described better. And I don’t give a fuck. It’s magnificent.

The Catacombs under Old Samora
By Phillip H.
Levels 1-3

Generations ago, they were home to a small circle of acolytes that worshipped the powers
of the underworld, Hades foremost among them. Affluent citizens had their dead interred here and the priests performed burial rites and tended graves. With the decline of the city, the place was eventually abandoned and largely forgotten


This ten page adventure details about 45 rooms in some old catacombs/funerary complex. A solid contender and something I’d be happy to run as a drop in.


Ah, Ye Olde Levels 1-3. That’s a rough market. Everyone and their brother has dumped an adventure out for that level. Your adventure competes with past classics, current classics, and things released that the fuckwits don’t yet recognize as classics. This is a tight adventure/dungeon. And I’m reviewing it right after an issue of Ultan …


Catacombs under a slum section of a city, an old mausoleum entrance. Not exactly a secret but not well known either. Inside are graves, prep rooms, some places for the (now gone) priests to maintain the place. And, of course, an evil priest who likes to stretch his legs and visit the place when he needs a short break from his studying about sacrificing babies. Oh, and the drug addicts. That is one of my favorite parts of this. I mean lots of it are pretty good, but that drug-addicts are rock star. It’s a slum/tunnel/sewer hole/mausoleum. OF COURSE there are drug addicts hanging out in it. Or, as they are called, the sewer-folk “These squalid, drug-addicted humans live in a near-animalistic state in the sewers below the city” I love this kind of shit. There’s something so real about it. It grounds you. It gets you out of that bullshit fantasy orc stabbing mindset. What’s real, what’s a threat, what’s not a threat? If you went wandering around If you’re out doing some urban exploring, entering those holes in Pogues Run, what find you run across? Some kids. A large group of them? Are they dangerous? How about some homeless? Just homeless? Drug addicts? Desperate and looking for an easy score? Are you an easy score? Wanna posture some? Does that make things worse? WHat else is down there? This is great.


And, it does that thing that certain adventures do where you get fucked up coming OUT of the dungeon. Maybe some thugs out to score something easy. Hope one of those sewer-people didn’t tip them off. Or, the law, looking for a cut and kickback tax. This is all so great!
Oh, and did we mention that the sewer people are afraid? Some of them go missing … yup, it’s ghouls! Yeah ghouls! As serial killers/conpiracy/urban folktales! And the place has HORDES in it. There are some places where there are A LOT of ghouls, or a ALOT of jerlamaine/rat type people in their lair. And, of course, we all know that the lair is where the loot is. As is the tomb of the elf dude that is dangerously trapped. No pain no magic armor you murder hobo wannabes!


Writing is a little on the mundane side. Not bad, just not good. “Enormous empty washing basin cut from grey marble. Bas-reliefs on the basin walls depict a paradisiacal afterlife. A cracked painting of the night sky on the domed ceiling.” There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. It doesn’t overstay and it doesn’t pad shit out. It a decent solid workmanlike description, which makes it better than 90% of the shit being published. I’m just always hoping for a little more. The designer does, though, do a pretty good job of noting specific details. And, of course, specificity is the soul of narrative. In a room with a well “Claw marks in the hard earthen shaft were made by creatures climbing up and down” GREAT detail! SHould scare the fuck out of the party. Provides a hint. That’s all good D&D. In another place there’s a door with a raven carved in it. Fuck around and the raven comes to life to attack you. And when/if it dies it leaves a jewel. The overloaded context here is WONDERFUL.


The map is good. Decent detail, same level stairs, statues and so on. The locked/secret/concealed doors do get quite a bit hard to read, but, otherwise, the map is a good one. Hand drawn, which has its own charm and I kind of prefer. Except you do have to take care that things are legible. Like those fucking door codes, which are NOT.


Overall, a good little dungeon. Solid. It’s not winning an award, but it’s a good example of what you do. Platonic, even. It’s only ten pages long. And it does much much more with those ten pages than adventures four or five times its length.


Fight On! #15 is $5 at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/489776/fight-on-15-spring-2024-pdf-version?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

Beneath the Moss Courts

By Gus L
Through Ultan's Door
OSR
Levels 2-3?

[…] It expands one of the hidden locations of the sewer point crawl into an entire pirate-themed siege adventure that also reaches up into the law offices of Zyan Above. Receive your first glimpse of the city of Zyan! Defeat your enemies at trial with the testimony of cats! Loot the wreck of the Verdant Purveyor, rich with blood-stained pirate booty! Or, more likely, end up imprisoned in its water-choked hold!

This 46 page supplement presents a corrupt solicitor/office as well as his thug/pirate buddies who live in the sewers unearth on a grounded ship. Ultan and Gus primes you for expectations, and those are met. Evocative, interesting, twisted yet relatable. And, deserving of a little more work to make it fully usable.

Each piece of Zyan that comes to light is wonderful. It’s bizarre and yet fully relatable. Wonderfully byzantine and, piece after piece, consistent with what has come before in style and tone. This chapter comes in from Gus L and fits easily within what has come before. This alone, should be a remarkable feat.

What we have here is a little mini-adventure setting that revolves around the party getting in to legal trouble. Probably. There is no ham handed plot here. Or, plot of any type. Instead we get a small introduction to the legal system in Zyan. This then dovetails in to the office and personage of a certain Fee Inquisitor & Lawgiver, Millbrath Osban. This then leads us to a grate outside his window in to which the party can descend in to the sewers (Beneath the Moss Courts!) and travel a bit before coming across a pirate base. This is run by an associate of Millbrath, who uses his gang of thugs to make witnesses disappear and so on. Thusly we have an opportunity for adventure. The party could be in legal trouble and come to know Osban through tha mechanism. Hiring him to help them, or, better, having opposing counsel that is running in to trouble with the legendary Osban and his legal ‘skills.’ The party in legal trouble is always a great side adventure, eh? The offices and base nearby make perfect sense in this context and any DM could easily use the resources here to guide the party though an adventure. Other uses for this should be obvious. For the supplement is giving you resources to use to create and/or have an adventure around. The legal system, a corrupt solicitor, and his mob organization associates. Parceled out over week or diving in to it, you’ve got what you need.

This falls in to weird category. It’s not really a site based adventure. It does present multiple sites but its clear that this is meant to be taken advantage of to supplement a certain thing that can happen in a game. I don’t know, as if you needed to raise a daid dude and there was an article about how it works in the city along with a church and a couple of other places, so you could spin that task in to an adventure in any of a few ways. This straddles the line between a supplement and an adventure. And, because it’s city based, I love every minute of it.

Everything about the place is great. Wonderful monster description, a great vibe to the language that successfully communicate the tone of the place and the people. The writing is used to great effect to add to the tone. This end is, mostly a pirate base. Infiltrate or assault, based on your levels. Or, infiltrate until the inevitable discovery occurs? There’s an order of battle, watches are mentioned well, using the slaves and their reactions to an infiltration/assault are well covered without droning on. Gus knows what the point of the descriptions here are, to facilitate play, and covers the important things you need to do that and minimizes or leaves out the rest. God, so many people could learn from that. Anyway, the interactivity here is centered mostly around skullduggery, the social and sneaking parts of the game. A little exploration, related to infiltration perhaps, and a few traps around treasures and so on, but, mostly, navigating the complexities of getting what you want to happen to happen, through talking, stealth, and some well placed stabbin.

There are a couple of points that I wish were handled better.

It feels like there is a map missing. While there is a decent little map of the “law offices” (nothing so mundane in Zyan, I’m paraphrasing here …) and of the “pirate ship”, there is, it feels like, a missing map of the envions around the ship. A little build up around the “bay” where the ship is and then, perhaps, the little “settlement” around the ship as well. These are keyed, in the text, but there doesn’t appear to be a corresponding map. This is not an impossible situation, I suspect you can run it a bit linearly, but I do like the stripper to tell me she loves me even if it’s not true. I note that there are various lookout posts that the text focuses on, that being a trigger in to the “pirate” order of battle. And, yet, spatially, these are a bit offputting, being relegated, it would seem, to just the encounter area they are noted in. That whole “vista overlook” thing that I like to harp on sometimes. It becomes a bit cumbersome without a map.

Then there’s the text, proper. It can get a bit long in places. Information is dense and embedded well. Taken as a whole the thing reeks of flavour, but, it also comes off as having dense entries. And it’s not always obvious to me that those dense entries were handled in the best way and that rehoming certain pieces of information other sections/entries would not have been smoother. The goal, of course, is to supportive during play and that’s a spectrum. But I think what I’m saying is that the density of the entries, and sometimes the nature of the information in the entries, seems like it should be elsewhere in the text. An overview, a different section. A sidebar. Something/where. 

It comes across, again, as a kind of … I don’t know. It’s not an exploratory adventure. It’s not a plot adventure. It’s not a regional setting. Or, maybe it is? I’m trying to get across the nature of the text, supporting play but not directing it, even in the way that an exploratory dungeon would. 

Anyway, I love it. It’s great. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. I don’t see a preview here … bad Ben! Bad! No cookie for you! Console yourself with a Best.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/364637/beneath-the-moss-courts?1892600

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 2 Comments

A Sample Dungeon

Billman
Novis Ludis
OSE
Levels 2-3

The monks who used to live in the Monastery of the Unknown Path followed the teachings of Vyncis, a charismatic philosopher-cleric of Fharlanghn who founded the monastery centuries ago. Vyncis was a devout, somewhat militant and disciplined acolyte with a unique philosophy of how to honor their god. Essentially, Vyncisian monks were devotees of Fharlanghn who actively and persistently tested the skills needed to truly follow unknown and potentially dangerous paths, as directed by their deity

This fifteen page adventure uses seven pages to describe about forty rooms on two pages of the 1e DMG sample dungeon. It does not live up to the gygax sample rooms, padding boring room entries. The lessons of the sample rooms are lost here.

Yes, this is Yet Another attempt at the sample dungeon in the 1e DMG. It does appear to have a significant hold over gamers. Or, at least, gamers of a certain age. I guess ol Skull Mountain had quite a bit less impact on folks; sorry Domed City, no one loves you! Anyway, this is yet another attempt at the Sample Dungeon. It uses a fucked up format.

Basically you get a little room description (more on that later) and then some section headings. Monster. Treasure. Trick/Trap. Two monsters in the room? Then you get two Monster headings. The problem with this, at least how its implemented here, is the severe disconnect between the room description and the other sections. The description might just be of, say, idk, a throne room. And maybe a relatively long description, at that. And then the monster section tells us that there are 123 guards in platemail and a 33rd level fighter on the throne. And then maybe the trap section tells us that there is a giant chasm across the middle of the room. There’s no integration of the room description and the other objects in the room. I like to talk sometimes about the most important things appearing first in a room description. If the door to the room has some special quality, like it it made of obvious gold or is an obvious trap, then that should come first in the room description, not last. It’s the first thing you are going to need when running the room. Likewise if the small room has an ancient red dragon in it then you probably want to say that up front in the room description. It’s the first thing that the party is going to notice/see when they open the door. When you dump this important shit, like a monster or an obvious treasure, down low in the description then you’re making the DM work A LOT hard. “Oh, yeah, uh, I know you said you entered the room, but, also, there’s a ancient red dragon in the room …” Or, you have to read the ENTIRE room description before integrating the entire thing in to your head and then rephrasing it to describe to the party. No. What a good description doe is integrate things so that the DM can run the room, with an initial description, almost immediately. Then, as the party is mulling things over the DM can read further in to the room description. There is no way in fucking hell I am running a game in which I have to take a minute or two to read a room description and pause the game while doing so before the party gets a chance to act. This is NOT a trivial amount of time, to read and grok and rephrase an entire room description, put together in your head. It’s fucking boring while the DM does it. It’s part of a boring game.

And the room descriptions here are not real solid. Let us look at this gem: “Approaching the door is enough to hear a haunting, moaning sound that rises and falls in an irregular way. The goblins forbade the bandits from entering this room because they feared the moaning sound was a ghost, and the goblins did not want the ghost disturbed.” That’s great. It tells us almost the fuck nothing about the room. It’s long, full of backstory, it’s awkwardly worded and padded out. And all it tell us, in terms of gameable content, is that there is a moaning sound coming from the door. What are you doing man? What value does this add?  “the hobgoblin corpse was part of Lurantu’s gang (see areas 35-38) who went off exploring on his own, got mortally wounded by the ghouls, and managed to escape here before dying of his wounds.” NO ONE CARES ABOUT THIS!!!!! It doesn’t add anything at all to the game! And the room descriptions are full of this shit. It distracts. It’s a waste. The designer focused on this instead of a real, gameable, room description. And when were not getting backstory then were getting something like “The tomb of a former abbot of the monastery is in the small 10×10 room down a tight, 5’ wide hallway” That’s your room description. That’s it. Exciting for the tomb of the former abbott, eh? And, then, sometimes, the cross-references are off. In one room you can turn things white colored, bleaching them out. And the cross-reference tells us this could be useful for room 29. Except, the way to get in to room 29 is in the description for room 28. This is pretty obvious stuff. This is why we have external editors or playtesters who are not the designer. The designer knows what is going on because they created it. The rest of us have to rely on what the designer typed up to help us understand it. There’s not really an evocative description in the entire thing. 

Finally, a note about the room design. There is, I think, a notable difference between the gygax rooms and the rest of the rooms. There is a tendency, in dungeons, to put one thing in each room. This is the thing that this room holds. We can contrast this with rooms that have multiple things going on in them, a far far more interesting way to develop and present a room for play. And we can see a couple of examples of this in the first couple of rooms that gygax presents here. In room one we have those spiderwebs in it. And the spiders in the webs. And then tha bags in the room. And the yellow mold on the bags. The treasure, and then a stuck secret door that has swelled. Multiple elements in the room. Lots ot explore and discover, all in one room, without it feeling like it is empty room. And the descriptions for the rooms, presented by gygax in the sample dungeon, follow on to this. Multiple things in the room, and yet the rooms feeling natural. As opposed to most of the rest of the dungeon presented here, or in most products.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $1. There’s no preview, but, it’s PWYW, so, you know … I might also note that there is no level description present on the cover or marketing  …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/493535/a-sample-dungeon?1892600

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Slug House

By Daniel Herz
Stromberg Press
B/X
Levels 1-3

“Thou shalt drink one too many potions my dear” she said “any find thyself crawling around like an overgrown earthworm.” The brazen cheek! I will begin my experiments again, and make myself the very subject! A beautiful mansion was once occupied by Uzul Balashi, a powerful wizard who mysteriously disappeared many years ago. His house is said to be full of treasure and magic items, but also dangerous traps and monsters
This 66 page adventure presents a wizards home in a city with three levels; two up and one down, with about eighty rooms. Parts of this match, exactly, what I am looking for in an adventure. It is, I think, difficult to keep that up through every room, and that shows in this adventure. More refinement in the text, from editing to layout, would also help. But, hey, I wouldn’t be mad running this.
So, Frank the wizzo has a house in town. A kind of U shaped building, with the fourth side being a courtyard open to the street, with gate. He’s got some human guards working for him. They stay in one of the courtyard wings, a leg of the U. Then Frank goes missing. The guards hag around, now little more than thugs. Some halfings start serving food, and the courtyard now becomes something like a hang out, the stoop everyone sits on and drinks booze and eats and whores and games. This section, the first dozen or so keys, is really REALLY well done. No body really cares if you hang out. You can gamble with the dudes. They are kind of bandits? More lazy unemployed men with swords. There are some hookers about that they keep around. It’s got this very “collapse of society” thing going on that I’m real in to. Nothing is pushed too far. Sure, you can brawl in the courtyard, no one really cares, except when weapons come out. I guess you’re kind of hanging out with all of the mean ass bullies in school, or something. Maybe some fights, maybe some drugs, you can hang around, some chicks, but no one is just stabbing anyone who wanders in. The vibe here is perfect. Those first dozen or so rooms, all contributing the scene, really do well this kind of grey area between banditry and not. Both from the guards pov AND from the pov of the party, who will perhaps just start killing them. This section can hold up and go toe to toe with some of the best content written. It’s not perfect, but the overall situation here is exactly what I mean when I say I’m looking for situations and not encounters. And did I mention the balconies and open areas on the maps? Nicely done.
The inside of the home drops off somewhat from this high praise. We get a pretty decent wizard home. There are plenty of mundane rooms and rooms with just a little bit more going on in them. The interactivity can feel a little slow in places, creatures are few and far between, it feels like, in places. There are some decent secret doors and so on to find, turning levers and the like is always fun. I’m fond on the “tax writeoff” skeleton accountant. The slug wanders around, and the party can free a shadow which can show up on the wanderer table if the uncover The Black Mirror. We’re not going to win any interactivity awards, but its also a cut above your typical fare. Monsters pound on doors. That shadow you free creeping around. The designer is taking the “normal” interactivity, or the usual stuff, and doing about as much as you can with it. Give a hint to some magic items existing and then hide things around the house. The shelf full of vials and potions that do things. Extending to the monsters, there’s are quite large butterflies in the garden. And when they gently land on you .. they stick in a needle and start sucking stirge style! Very nicely done. And, while the monster descriptions are generally present but not earth shattering, the art that goes with the adventure is a cut above and turns “hound with a skull face” in to something much much better in the art.
The writing here can tend to the long side in places. Or, perhaps, it feels long. The descriptions are trying to bring an evocative flair to things but don’t succeed perhaps as much as they think they do, those monster descriptions being a good example of that. It feels like more than a token effort was made, but they still were not really successful in the way, perhaps, the designer wanted them to be. And, magic items get a decent description in the appendix that doesn’t overstay its welcome. We get descriptions like ”A mouldy billiard table sits stoically in a seething sea of crawling centipedes. A constant sickening sound of thousands of moist vermin writhing. Atop the table remain a few forlorn billiard balls.” Stoically and forlorn are a bit much here, but moist vermin writhing is great! The constant sickening sound is better example, we know whats meant but it still doesn’t come through great. A more typical description for an emptyish room might be “Grimy sinks and a table covered in old mouldy cloths. A small cupboard contains a bucket of wood ash, soapwort, vinegar and a small vial of universal solvent (see appendix II).” I get, again, whats being tried for. Grimy. Old cloth. But it feels a little rote. As if we need to stick in an adjective from a thesaurus.
The formatting can, at times, be weird. Treasure, monsters, and Exits will, at times, be called out in separate headings in a room. I’m not sure this is really working the way the designer wants it to. The creatures, in particular, don’t feel integrated in to the room. The Exits section is less jarring, contains perhaps sounds from them or How The Secret Door Opens. The secrets, in particular, avoid the traps and door porn syndrome and give enough information to add some spice. He’s done a nice job with this section, including it when appropriate and using it to add variety.
In the world of haunted mansions we can point to Tegal, Xyntillian, Shadowbrook. Maybe Amber. This feels a little more grounded than those. A little less fanciful. It’s still present, but not pushed in flavour. Or, at least, that’s the way it feels. There is a giant garden. A giant slug, a shadow running around, and a body laid out on a slab in the basement. Teleporters and magic bells abound. But it FEELS a little more grounded.
I’m not mad at this. I wish the writing were a little tighter. And I wish the writing hit more, in terms of being evocative. And while there are a decent number of situations and things to fuck with, nothing, I think, every quite reaches the heights of the initial bandit/courtyard thing. The imp running around. The slug. The shadow. None of it really hits the way the opening does. But, Also, I’m gonna stick this in my starting city in Dungeonland. This is a good adventure.
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. You’re going to get to see the first ten rooms, which should get you fine examples of the formatting and how it is used, as well as the writing style. As a bonus, you also get to see part of that opening section I like so much, although you miss their intro, which adds a lot.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/491255/slug-house?1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 3 Comments

Through Ultan’s Door #3

By Ben Laurence
Through Ultan's Door
OSR/1e
Levels 1-4

The Apartments of the Guildless, a dynamic pointcrawl through abandoned chambers, ruined temples, arcades and sunken courtyards, where the outcasts of Zyan are hunted by stuttering puppet automata. Visit the convent of the crawling nuns! Hear haunting flutes amidst trembling fungal woods! And much more!

This double issue (two 32 page digest zines) is a … description of a home base and a small  region around it? Ben’s shit is very good. I joined his Patreon because I like good shit. 

I read some book. It was talking about the cultural heroes in certain societies. It made the point that in order to be a cultural hero you had to 1) be recognized as a part of that society and 2) exhibit traits outside of that society. So, if a Japanese Salaryman represents Japan, then you can’t be a Japanese hero by being a very good Salaryman. You have to be a weirdo artist or something, defying the expectations and conventions that the Salaryman represents. 

I take note of this today because of Through Ultan’s Door. We are awash in trade dress. In the 5e DMsGuild templates, for covers. In art styles that all look the same, the generic heroic fantasy of today. 

Then you stumble across the covers for Through Ultans Door. Clearly, something else is going on here. Someone has a clear and strong artistic vision in the art direction, which is consistent with the gaming environment presented. You are about to hit something different, the cover tells us. The art absolutely sets the vibe and contributes to it, which is exactly what the art SHOULD do. Yeah, I know, I never talk about art. Because it seldom accomplishes that. But it certainly the fuck does here. 

So, I don’t know the fuck how to review this double issue. I’m not sure it’s an adventure, and all I really know how to do is review adventures. I’m terribly excited by this … setting(?), so much so I joined Bens Patreon. The first two issues clearly had site based adventures in them. This one is a little different. It feels like this is the start of a larger world coming in focus, but a game world, meant to play, not a gazeteer. Let us imagine you are publishing a megadungeon and you release a few levels of it. Then you decide that you should also release a home base, a town to venture forth from, as well, perhaps, as the environs nearby that the party might end up in  or travel through. That seems entirely appropriate, yes? So if we view Ultans Door as episodic entries in a dungeon, or, in the context of a larger, completed, work, then a home base and the environes for travel seem like something that should be present. Indeed, my own standards indicate that I enjoy a little ‘wilderness’ journey to get to the dungeon. Thus the setting in which we find ourselves in this double issue of number three.

The volumes cover a system of movement through the undercity and searching for secrets, etc, on the way. And what secrets they are! The hidden pirate lair. The witch/hag lair, and the sewer dragons lair. Shades of wandering in to that lich room in D2. 

It then transitions, in the second volume, in to a description of a kind of home base, of sorts. A leper colony, full of folks suffering from the weirdo diseases. More like a prison, with trustees and perhaps chanelling that scene in Ridick in the prison (complete with elevator). You have the trustees, the gang of invalids who kind of look out for each other, and then, descending sometimes, the guild of healers, weird beyond pale in their own right. We;ve given mostly the social setting present, with the mundanity of buying and selling not present. This is a place to rest and perhaps get sucked in to intrigue, without gearing up again. 

Following that is a kind of regional setting. The locations detailed in issues one and two are noted, as well as a few others that really fall in to less of the site-based-adventure category and more of the “fucked up place to visit” category, perhaps with some motivation to do some stabbing or leverage their own intrigues. 

The opium induced environment is strongly visioned, as they have been in all of the issues so far, with excellent descriptions of creatures, weird environments that successfully channel, more than anything else, the AMR Barker and Dreamlands-ish visions that we all hope for when we dig in to one of their vaguely dreamlike adventures/settings. Ben really does an excellent job with the descriptions and in communicating a vision; the vibe is ridiculously strong here. Things perhaps get a little longer in the text here than is immediately comfortable, and could perhaps use just a tad more formatting to help draw attention, but the overall effect is magnificent.

The toad people : “Their pale clammy hide is speckled with pus-dripping carbuncles. Fleshy sacks hang to either side of pot-bellied stomachs, topped by heads like misshapen toads. They wear jewelry fashioned from sewer trash and ill-fitting stained clothing ripped from water-logged corpses … with excellent manners.”

Given the episodic nature of my reviews, and the episodic nature of Ultans door, and in particular this double issue, its hard for to review this. And, I don’t think I have, I have just described it. As a standalone product its hard to recommend. But, seen as the first chapter to a larger dungeon, the base and environs, it fits in perfectly well. I’m excited to see more.

This is $10 at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/364621/through-ultan-s-door-3-double-issue?1892600

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Through Ultan’s Door #2

By Ben Laurence
Through Ultan's Door
OSR/1e
Levels 2-3

in the porcelain abattoirs of Zyan Above, the sacred butchers, supernal exsanguinators, and exalted flayers of the Fleischguild labor tirelessly at their exacting arts, offering sacrifices to appease the insatiable hunger of the Unrelenting Archons. Their holiest guild sites in the undercity are marked by ornate chum spouts that stream effluvia from their gristly rites. On the Great Sewer River, these spouts adorn the entrance to the catacombs interring Master Carvers along with their child prodigies. All praise be to Malprion, aspect of Vulgatis, Archon of unseemly and fecund growth!

This 41 digest page adventure details the catacombs of the guild of butchers, under a decadent city. It has about 31 rooms, pretty tightly packed, with a rich and evocative descriptive style in rooms that each contain a variety of interactivity, without it feeling like set pieces. Delightfully baroque and pushes the edges of what a pure text format can deliver. 

Like all reviews I do of good adventures, I don’t know where to start. I guess the descriptions, since that’s the first thing I noticed. Very near the beginning of the adventure there’s a section on factions. In it there are some descriptions of the people that make up those factions, the cultists and/or guild members. “They wear serene copper masks and purple robes. They come reluctant and skittish” Seren copper masks. Reluctant and skittish. Not just “guild members” or “religious cult”, but, rather, a decent description for the DM to riff on and that easily communicates the vibe. It’s not a lot of words, but it does SO much to bring these people to life. Not just generic people on the wanderers table, but those serene masks and purple robes. That’s a good fucking monster description. Or, there’s also this group “the tanned skin of their face is spread like a hideous mask before their flayed skull, stretched on fish hooks across the frame of a headdress, hanging taut and expressionless before the exposed flesh of their head.” Well now, there’s something you don’t see every day. These are fucking terrifying. Or, our undead/spirits who congregate in huddles mass groups and “Each clutches their pitiful remains assembled from the chum spout: an ear, a rotten liver, a scalp. In muttered and distracted whispers, they jealously plead for proper burial.” That’s a fucking monster, man. Not “2d4 zombies” or some shit like that. No, these things have character! I wish a lot more adventures did this to their creatures, at least in some small way. Opponents should be terrifying. The PLAYERS should shit themselves. Those descriptions would give me pause, as a player. 

And the room descriptions continue this trend. A very basic description would be “Two raised basins flank the passageway to the north. The south end of this room is taken up with eight small sarcophagi flanking a dais with the statue of a woman” This is quite the tersely worded description, and pretty good for an initial first impression of the room by the players. What follows then is about a page and half of additional description. The basins. The statue. The sarcophagi. All of the things noticed in the initial room description. The initial one doesn’t overdescribe, it just lays things out, for the players to investigate further, the way an exploration adventure should proceed. And, before ALL of those extra descriptions is a little note that states you could meet a monster here. The most important thing, the initial description, is first. Then the monster note, since it could appear after the party arrive. THEN we get the individual descriptions of the things. “The marble statue of a middle-aged woman sits facing the sarcophagi with her face in her hands, shoulders heavy with grief, robes painted with rich designs, bar and skin and hair unpainted alabaster.” It’s a good description. And then, of course, we get some DM notes as well. And, again, in the descriptions for the treasures we get things like “A bronze thimble carved with vines bearing tiny amethyst grapes (50gp), and a silver sewing egg with needles and a spool of purple thread nestled within (75gp).” The entire thing, monsters, rooms, treasures, they are all rich and lusciously described.  It’s a good job. It pushes the bare text, with occasional bullets, formatting to its absolute limits, but a clear vision and understanding of the sectioning of the room description wins the day. They can tend long but are manageable. 

And those descriptions tend to be long because of the interactivity in the various rooms. They are not one trick ponies, with just one thing going on, but are rich and full of things to do. That room I described has a creature that might appear. The two basins that can be interacted with. The statue (just a statue) and then eight sarcophagi to explore and fuck with. And loot. And, on top of all of that, fucking with shit in here might bring other creatures down on you. Both in the near term, for those flayed dudes, and in the longer term with the guild posting guards and such. For a tomb, this place feels alive and lived in. (And, to be fair, I guess it is, since the guild still actively kind of uses it/maintains it) The entire thing has this vibe of effortless design. At a glance, this just looks like a zine, like any of the other hundreds that come out. But it’s not like those, it really does have some design behind it. From the minor game mechanic changes that spur gameplay, like the wandering monster warning signs, to the design of the map, both evocative and putting an interesting part of the complex in a , shall we say, less frequented area. And, also, we all know, that the lair is where the loot is, right? Everything else is just winnowing the parties resources. The deep play of the rooms … and it all comes in pretty much seamlessly. It’s not bragging, or calling out the design choices, they are all integrated in. 

I’m down with this. For any complex under a jaded and teeming city full of miscreants, the undercity of Old London, teeming with life above and a hundred thousand delights and torments there and below. Thus thing successfully communicates that vibe. Rich language, great traps, encounters, roleplaying possabilities. Problems with no immediately visible solutions but what the party devises. 

GREAT adventure. And shame on me for taking so long to get to it. Sometimes things drop off my radar.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The ten page preview is MORE than enough to get an idea of what is going on. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/279520/through-ultan-s-door-issue-2?1892600

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