tenfootpole.org

By James A Youhas
Just One More Fix LLC
OSR
Level ?

The Hasting’s Party is a celebration of triumph against the elements and of survival in one of the most inhospitable places for mankind to live. It is a moment to remember the community and sacrifice it takes to survive in a harsh world, but is there something more sinister beneath the surface?

This 22 page sandbox adventure “details” a small winter mountain village and the feast they have every month .. as well as the cave of a witch. The basic architecture of the adventure is good, but it fails on almost all of the details.

First, let’s cover what I mean by it has a good basic architecture. I’m stating this in relation to a sandbox adventure … which I wish more adventures of this type would choose to be. More than a specific plot, and specific encounters, it is presenting a situation that the party finds itself in. Iedally the adventure then provides the DM the resources they need to handle the situation in response to the parties interactions with its various elements. In support of this there might be a little background information on whats going on, the location/village, etc, the people in it and what they think/generally react, an event timetable, the lair of the bad guy, and then some support tables, like what are the names of the people for that random house you just busted in on, and so on. You’re giving the DM the tools they need to react and go with the flow, riffing off of what the party does. This adventure understands that basic format required of a sandbox adventure and lays out the parts of it well. There’s a short little background, describing whats going on, and a little section on themes that I found nice. Essentially, four bullet points with instructions to “pull the adventure back to these elements/insert these elements in situations.” Hey, that’s great! Being so important to the adventure, I would have located those themes on the DM reference sheet included, so they were always at hand, but, hey, how many times do you see an adventure explicitly tell you “try to make your riffing related to one of these elements” in an adventure? Never? Once? Yeah, I’ll take it.

It is unfortunate the, that the specifics of most of the sections are not handled well by the adventure.

Let’s start with the village. It’s a fucking die drop. Do the die drop to make the village map and then use the map to help define the relationships between the various families in the village. Why do this? This is a finite location. It’s not like you’re making an “empty house generator” or planetary design generator. It’s one specific location, whats the purpose of a die drop table? Extra work for me? No thank you. If you insist, because of “replayability” then stick the same thing in the appendix and give me the specifics of a situation in the adventure. The singular can be concrete, it doesn’t need a random generator. 

The witches cave is a one pager art piece, with nice detail, and a two or three sentences describing each room. Most of which, skinning, butchery, rendering, are pretty gruesome. And, beyond that, pretty boring. There’s not really much to investigate. A random table determines if there’s someone in the room, an escaped child or a monster. And there’s no real treasure to speak of. AT ALL. I mean, NOTHING. The The family relationships are likewise empty (because of that die drop shit) and the wandering in the wilderness and exposure are generic and flavourless. It’s just all lacking the details to bring it to life. There’s a little time-table table (ug, because of the die drop) but it’s really just “how many days until the next feast!” There’s no real events in the village, or things to do or things that happen, or drama, except for It’s Feast Day! And once that happens then its pretty obviously killing time. 

As a result we get a very flavourful set up, with a mountain spirit, a pact, an interesting, if familiar, thing going on … and then almost nothing specific to support it with. At best, you get “this family is suspicious and this one is not.” and little else. Hooks are generic and forgettable “looking for someone” stuff, although, there’s nothing wrong with a “you come across a mountain village in your travels” inserted in to an ongoing campaign. 

There is, obviously, a lack of level ranges given by the adventure, . There are a lot of 3HD monsters though, A LOT, so, maybe 6-7, given that the main baddie is a 10d12 HP monster?

You know, there is something else I like. It has a consequences section. Again, mostly abstracted and of little use, but there is one part. The witch is a spirit of winter, and will be reborn with the next winter. That’s nice, but better, the characters will, anytime they are in the winter wilderness, get a shiver up their spine. “The quiet moments of a cold and frozen death are where [the witch] lives” Nice!

So, decent gameplan but poorly executed.

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Naughty Naughty! Put us in a preview and a level range, so we can figure out if we want to buy it?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/311280/The-Hastings-Party?1892600

By “Weird Dave” Coulson
Cut to the Chase games
DCC
Level 3

Far to the south, on the borders of the Great Jungle, brave caravans of merchants, traders, and settlers have begun to colonize the frontier. For several years now they’ve cut into the harsh wilderness, but stand on the brink of destruction from unknown, terrible forces. Just as rumors of a lost temple have surfaced, those same forces seem to be on the move.

This 34 page adventure describes a seventeen page temple in the jungle. Long read-aloud, longer DM text and boring environments make this the usual sort of thing to be avoided. Oh, also, versions exist for 5e, pathfinder, DCC, S&W, and SnW, whatever that is. So, you know, it HAS to be good!

You go to this frontier trading post in Darkest Africa, err, I mean a jungle place, and get hired by one of three companies making the same offer: go talk to to some friendly dark-skinned natives, orcs in this case, and find some lost temple. You walk through the jungle for twenty ot so days, having some boring rando encounters, have a fest day celebration with the friendly native orcs, and go to the temple where you get bored before it collapses. 

There’s only about ten pages of content in this, and that includes the friendly orc tribe stuff, the rest being appendices and the long, and boring, lead in and wandering monsters. All three groups that can hire you are essentially the same, with just some window dressing changes: dwarves, or humans, or … Then you get the walk through the jungle with your half-native guide. The guide is, at least, handled well. He’s got a little personality and he’s got some things he can relate to you if you talk to him on the journey, and they are easy to find and scan quickly.

This is in contract to most of the other writing in the adventure which is the usual terrible stuff, with a sentence or two of description being a brief highlight here or there. DM text is LONG. I mean, a column or more of DM text for rooms. The usual stuff, relating history and past purposes of the room, a conversational style, explaining why, all things that get in the way of finding the information the DM needs.

Not that you actually need much. I am not kidding when I saw that just about every encounter ends with words “They attack” and/or “They attack immediately”, or some derivation thereof. And the one that don’t end that way STILL have creatures that attack immediately. This is little more than a hack of an adventure. Go in a room, trigger the Doom monsters teleporting in, and then kill them. Except, of course, this is DCC so fighters have Epic Deeds. Except the rooms are generally boring with few features for the fighter to riff off of. LAME! These are the risks of a conversion adventure. 

Read aloud is, of course, long, because why would it be otherwise. There is an occasional bright spot in the writing of the Read Aloud. If those sections were isolated and the rest of the RA ignored then the RA would be much better. It over describes, ofton, telling the players immediately what they see instead of leaving details for the players to follow up with. The walls should be described as having murals, leaving the party to follow up by asking what the murals are. Otherwise you kill the interactivity, the back and forth between the DM and the player, and there is no greater sin in an RPG. 

Let’s see, in the friendly orc village they have a feast and go through the motions of some ceremonies. If the party doesn’t follow suit then they roll or get a faux pas point. Also, they get to roll some completely random faux pas checks during the evening. Fail three times, as a group, in total, and you get kicked out of the village without finding the next clue to the temple. There’s no guidance on where the take the adventure from here. Bad. Failed checks can cause complications, but they should not gate an adventure. Gating is generally bad in a published adventure. Make like tougher. Give the party boons for making rolls, but “No more adventure” is not the right way to go.

The read-aloud can be good at times. Here’s the description of a well: “A muted muttering

punctuated by an occasional scream drifts lazily up from the depths of the well, which appears to hold only inky blackness to an unknown depth.” That’s pretty good. I can take exception with over-sharing that comes before and after this, but the evocative part is down tight. 

The interactivity in this needs to be stronger. Much stronger. More than just They Attack for creatures. Things the party does causing attacks, pushing your luck, and other mechanisms. The text needs to be GREATLY shortened, both the read-aloud and ESPECIALLY the DM text. The hooks/job offers in the beginning are nigh unrunnable because of length. 

This isn’t as bad as I thought it was going be, having seen the systems it was available for, but that’s mostly because of the creative writing elements. The rest of this is just a hack, and I’ll go play Gloomhaven if I want to play tactical mini’s combat.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview doesn’t work. 🙁

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/200454/TG1-Lost-Temple-of-Ibholtheg-DCC

By Tony A Thompson
Outpost Owlbear
Swords & Wizardy
Levels 2-3

The small village of Lupo Grace is is in the northern wilderness of the Mosswater region near the Bloodberry Forest. The occupants of Lupo Grace are foresters and hunters who sell their products to other larger towns across the region. Recently the village has not sent any representatives to the various markets though to peddle their products. You and your group are sent to check on the welfare of the village and its occupants.

This five page “adventure” has two combats, unrelated to each other. 

Because I’m an idiot, that’s why. Because I believe. I have hope. I know that good things can come in small packages. I know that we have a wealth of good adventures today compared to the early days of the hobby. I know they exist and I want to believe that every single adventure I review is one of them. Seriously. My crushed expectations? Not fake. How else could I keep this up if it were any other feeling? 

You’re going to a village to see why they’ve not traded in awhile. You see a wagon, hit by bandits. Driver obviously dead. Four bandits interrogating a woman. They tell you to back off. She runs behind the wagon, the bandits engage you. Then she runs out and stabs someone in the party, laughs maniacally, turns invisible, and runs away. This initial encounter is totally unrelated to anything else in the “adventure.” Just some bandits, who have evidently set up an ambush, and their leader can somehow turn invisible. The wagon has a locked box with some documents in it related to the village. The adventure says they may help once you get to the village, but that it literally all it says about them and they are never mentioned again.

The village has an absence of men and teen boys. They are all working out in the woods, cutting lumber, you’re told. You are encouraged to stay the night and go the next morning to see them, if you want to. It’s assumed you do; there’s no advice otherwise. Someone screams while you’re in the tavern. Outside two werewolves and five villagers threaten a boy, and they attack you. This is the end of the adventure. Turns out some werewolves moved in nearby and they are threatening the villagers if they don’t cooperate. That’s not covered though.

Werewolves are 4HD? Hit only by silver and magic? With five charmed villager allies? For a part of level 2’s? Uh huh. 

What’s the point of this? 

Why stop at what is essentially just an opening encounter? It’s just a hook. There’s nothing more. There could have been some bandit shit, aligned villagers, scared, rebel villagers, the werewolves in the forest. A mini-dungeon. Real lumberjacks. Maybe some a witch, I don’t know. But instead, it’s just two unrelated combat encounters. 

You’ve got a lot of choices with your D&D. Why would you ever take a chance with anything someone has not reviewed, when things like this lurk around every corner, ready to surprise you? Well, I guess, it’s not a surprise anymore. It’s expected.

This is Free at DriveThru. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/307867/The-Secret-of-Lupo-Grace?1892600

By Metal Turtle Games
Self-published
Generic
Level ... 2?

What would happen if inhabitants of the stars visited a fantasy world ?

This 24 page digest-sized adventure has a few pointcrawl locations in the wilderness and a four-level pointcrawl dungeon with about 24 rooms. It’s fairly plain, in spite of it’s gonzo nature, with little in the way of evocative descriptions. Interactivity is lightly implied, but in the abstract. There’s just not much to this, in spite of the length. Also, it’s more “weird cultist” than alien, but absolutely has tech and aliens in it.

Villagers hear sounds in the woods and see weird figures in the fog and call in the party. There are four pointcrawl locations, once of which is the four level cultist dungeon, and another location which isn’t on the pointcrawl map. Basically, an alien shuttle has crashed and some cultists, in the dungeon, have captured a few of them. The village, Cowshire, has five locations, each with a single sentence description. “Market: a regular market with a huge choice of beef street food.” Cowshire, The Laughing Cow tavern, a wide variety of beef-based street food? I can get in to that. It’s the consistency of the theming that inspires the DM to push things in their own game and dig in to it. I might wish for some off the wall examples, especially in a gonzo/alien adventure, but, the designer is certainly on the right track with theming, at least in the village. 

There’s a vampire hunter in the tavern. He’s convinced he saw vampires the night the sounds were in the woods. He tries to convince the party to buy garlic to protect themselves. That’s the extent of his description. Maybe a a bit lack lacking again, but the core of a good encounter is there and I’ll take that over too little or too much. Further, it ties in to the first couple of encounters in the dungeon proper.

The wilderness pointcrawl is really just three locations, and maybe a fourth, the shuttle. The shuttle isn’t on the map but the crash can be seen from another location. What’s weird here is that the descriptions seem out of order. I’ve seen this in a couple of other products, only a handful though, and it’s weird everytime I see it. What if you put the main encounter first, the dungeon with its four levels and its twenty rooms, and then listed the other wilderness encounters, each of which took, like, half a page? That’s what this does, putting the main dungeon first after the village and then following up with the minor locations. And then the shuttle appears BEFORE the location where you can see the shuttle. It’s out of order, and weird. I don’t know if this is just convention, staring me in the face, or of there are actual usability issues in this. But it’s weird, in any event.

There’s no stats, and no real treasure to speak of. Well, there is, but it’s mostly text descriptions. “These are very valuable books” and things like that. A blaster pistol. An alien multitool without a description beyond “useful to the party.” And a giant statue worth 1,000,000,000gp if you can get it out of the dungeon. And eyes worth 5000gp each. And that’s not on the lowest level. It’s weird. Stats are “as bandits (b44)” I assume that’s the basic book? Which one? I don’t know. And that’s the GOOD stats. There are a couple of new creatures that don’t even get that treatment. It’s listed as 1e/Basic, etc, but there’s not really anything here to tie it to any system other than that confusing “B44” thing. 

Encounter descriptions are very basic setups with not much more. There tends to be something interesting going on in most rooms, but the descriptive manner is somehow a major turn off. I can’t quite put my finger on it. The second room has a group of vampires living in it, not evil, they steal cows to drink their blood and will talk to the party. Another rooms description though is ”In the middle of the room, there’s an area of the ground with a lighter tone. This part of the ground is actually a trapdoor covered in stone, hiding a pit full of deadly spikes (save against breath or die).” it’s very basic. Very matter of fact. Mechanically based, with little attention paid to the descriptive or evocative elements of an encounter. Thus there’s a nugget of goodness in many rooms, but not much to inspire the DM to run it well. “This old library has miraculously survived many catastrophes and the passage of time, at least for the shelves and a few books.” Well, ok. At least it’s not overwritten? But those descriptions could be massaged in to something more evocative, I guess is my criticism. “This room is full of tentacles, some passing by, others looking for an unknowing prey to catch and strangle.” Ok…. well … what does that mean? I mean, nice, I guess, but … I’m just, I’m not sure what to do with it. I guess i could do anything with it, is my point, and I think a good description needs just a little more grounding. “12 orcs” is too open-ended as a description. “Rowdily dicing”, when added on, gies me something to work with. The descriptions in this seem closer to the “12 orcs” side of the house. Not exactly minimal, or maybe they are? But not concrete in the way I’m looking for in an adventure. Something to wrap my mind around during play, to kickstart the imagination and then take it and riff off of it for the current circumstances.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see the entirety of the village of Cowshire, and the first nine rooms of the dungeon. This should be more than enough to give you an idea if the style is something you’ll be in to.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/311571/Incursion-from-Outer-Space?1892600

By Dirk Detweiler Leichty
Games Omnivorous
OSR

Young king Agenor, for peace and wealth, sold his soul to the Green Sun – and such has been delivered for sixty-six years. Now old and fearing the far hells, the king has turned his worship to the BEAST, purchasing extended life with gruesome sacrifices. The BEAST, still hungry, and seeing the beauty of the king’s daughter Europa, became infatuated, saying “bring me her bones, which I will devout, and she will be my wife,” and promised in return that the king would never die. But the princess could not be found …

This 56 pag digest-sized art-punk thing is probably not an adventure, but rather a genre-neutral city setting with a meta-plot going on that the party can experience while going about their normal fucked-live schemes being schemed. Or, maybe, you can play it like a indie-rpg thing, with this being the adventure/ Who knows. Well, i do. It’s not a fucking adventure. It’s a fucking setting. Which is ok, I like settings, especially city-settings. But not when I think I’m buying an adventure.

This is system-neutral. There are not really stats and things are described in such a way that the city could be used in just about any setting. As long as you can have an Monaco-like city with a king and are ok with a couple of mythical elements, like a devil and maybe an elemental spirit, then you can use this in anything from modern-day New York (a super power CEO? The Mayor?) to sci-fi principalities to CoC to fantasy. The fantastic elements are not really forward and a lot is open to interpretation. A religious sect, collecting tithes aggressively? Ok; pretty genre-neutral. A coven? Ok, could be real could be fake. There ARE fantastic elements, the king has sold his soul at least twice to two different beings and  some nature spirits make minor appearances, as well an esoteric wishing well or two. But it’s not in your face. The veil has not yet been torn aside and the world, as you know it, is still how you know yet … until you start to probe the surface …

There are ten random-ish things that can happen, each a page, and each with some variation. These are controlled by a die drop astrology chart that handles seasons and phases of the moon and constellations in the sky, etc. Yes, seasons. With encouragement to keep track of days so seasons can change, and guidelines on the party being able to perform four “actions” per day. You can see how this could play out in both an indie-rpg like game and also as a backdrop setting for a larger RPG games. It’s a die drop table for rando stuff with the word “ASTROLOGY” plastered above the top. 

There are twenty locations on the “map.” And by “map” I mean “typical art-punk art piece that calls itself a fucking map BUT DOESN”T HAVE FUCKING KEYS ON IT. Instead it has little pictures of buildings. You get to flip through the little book until you find the little picture. Or, search the map for the little picture of the place you want. Fuuuuuuuuucccccck You! Someone made the decision to not dirty the map with a key. WRONG. FUCKING. DECiSION. And, this is where art punk gets its bad rap from.

The adventuring environment, though, is a good one. King Asshat sold his soul to someone. Then he sold it again to #2 “the blue eyed prince”, in exchange for his daughter. Who has run away and is in hiding in the city. He, his family, and his guards look for her, along with a lot of other people. There are cults to the two entities, weirdo other things, the princess showing up as a jockey at the horseraces, and other things. There’s a FUCK TON going on.

In what way, you might ask? One of the first tables in the book is “A place to stay”, describing your lodging, rent due at the start of each month. Your landlord: 1) More like slumlord. 2) Over-nurturing aunt. 3) Debauched partied. 4) Spuy for the king 5) Devout christian. 6) Royal guard sergeant.   That sets the tone for the book Things you can work. Three words, each, and yet NPC’s so packed with flavor. This is what every NPC in every game should be described like, something you can hang your fucking hat on. Who the fuck cares how much rent it, or that fish soup is the special, or frank moved to town 26 years ago. “Over-nurturing aunt” … that’s something I can fucking work with at the table! Something I can play with, and build upon. That’s what a fucking NPC description should be!

And a lot of the encounters, locations, and the random building generator is like that. It gives you, in a quick brief hit, something to build on. Not specifics, not detail. No, eait, yes, detail and specifics, but not overly explained. Instead something evocative and short that you can riff on. Something that you can integrate in the ongoing situation easily. A principal or idea, but one terse and full of flavour .Really well done. 

So, not an adventure. And maybe not even a city setting. More like a meta-plot for a city, with some key figures and locations to spice up your own city. And it’s FUCKING GREAT as that. But, not an adventure. This could be an interesting type of product, meta-things to weave in to your existing campaign, city, location, etc. No rating, because it’s not an adventure, but it is something I’ll keep and weave in to my home campaign city, immediately.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages. Page “3” of the text has that landlord chart and a brief overview, but the rest of it is the astro-chart stuff. A pretty piss poor preview. I’d have liked to have seen a page with the NPC/wanderer encounter and/or a location encounter so people could know what to expect. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/303426/Bring-me-her-bones?1892600

By Nick LS Whelan
Self-published
OSR
Level ?

Send your players to visit the cordial society of the Gentledogs. Presently they’re beset by a moral quandry: trying to live up to their own values while pressed on one side by imperialist forces from the Underdark, and on the other by a treasonous wizard attempting to engineer a fascist coup

This eight page adventure features a fourteen page dungeon described on one page. It’s full of intelligent dogs. Pugmire, then, I guess? But it implies it is not? And the dogs have guns? Anyway, it’s all Stonehell style, with a few intro pages and then a half page map with a page of keys. The key descriptions are pretty ok, focusing on what they need to. But I have to ask: why? And to what end? It feels hollow.

These little dungeons are always hard to review. Both from a size and a page count aspect, but, not this one I think. 

So … Pugmire, I guess? Pugmire is OSR now? I mean, the dungeon has a backstory, it’s full of intelligent dogs, they have rifles and pistols in a kind of 19th century England landed gentry kind of way. There’s no level range mentioned anywhere on the cover, description or product … It’s clearly D&D-ish with morale .. .but something else called the Hatespark? The backstory implies that the dogs were created by a wizard though just to guard the dungeon. So … I have no fucking clue what is going on here. Lets’ make them Mushroom-people with swords and bows and take care of the entire thing.

The backstory is a bit humorous. To quote: A couple hundred years ago a wizard who could feasibly be described as “good” defeated one who was “bad,” but could not kill her. This is the kind of DM writing I can get in to. It’s Just a few little enhancements to the verbange and punctuation and you bring so much more to an otherwise generic backstory. This is great, and it’s a good example fo what I mean by focusing the power of your writing and brining detail and specificity and colour without adding a lot of words. 

And then there’s the  hook-ish/intro to the dungeon. There’s a tunnel in the sewers. It’s long. No one knows where it goes. It takes two days to traverse it to get to the dungeon. Smarter than your average sewer adventure; the sewer is just the front door.

Five and a half pages in to an eight page adventure and we get a small fourteen room map on half a page. A couple of loops. A crevice running through a couple of rooms. It’s serviceable, not stellar.

And then the room keys start, all on one page … with room for art at the bottom. I’m going to bitch a bit about things left unsaid in this adventure, and I feel like there was some internal constraint that the room keys only take a page. Which is too bad; the problem with all one page room keys is that they are limited by their format. Basically the judgement comes down to “Is it good … FOR A ONE PAGE DUNGEON? The “for a one page dungeon” has to be added on to every statement. Why do that? The one-pagers are, essentially, performance art. Why constrain yourself if you don’t have to? (Says the six page dungeon man.) 

The room keys are pretty good though, at lest when it comes to conveying evocative flavour through terseness. The first room is “1. Metal hatch opened by a wheel. Pipes to the left and right expel sewage into the tunnel.” I can visualize that. I can run that. It’s at least three details: hatch, pipes, sewage, all in one line of text that takes us less than the full width of the page. Or maybe “Chugging water pump pulls water up from underground streams. Bedroll in the corner, dirty plates stacked beside it.” Short, terse. These could both be better, but they ARE a great example of how a terse room description can be both scanned quickly and be evocative at the the same time. It’s not really mundane detail. It’s not really trivia, or useless backstory. It’s focused on the meaningful parts of the room and at least an ok description of them. (Ok, of course, being a high compliment from me.)

Treasure and creatures, though, suffer from this format. They tend to be more abstracted. Treasure are described, such as “L: White lace hemmed with gold is draped along the walls. These curtains are delicate, religiously significant, and valuable.” That’s your treasure. For a generic adventure I’d say that’s pretty well, and given the dog-stuff and rifles, I guess not assuming a system is a good thing. It’s also feels abstracted to me, with the conclusions of the curtains rather than a description of the curtains, and I never like that. In addition the creatures are somewhat lacking in motivation. You get a half page or so write up on the races, but the specific creatures lack motivations. They feel like they wait in their rooms, behind a glass wall, for the party to look at. There doesn’t feel like there’s any tension. There’s one “baddie” of note, at the very end, but even he comes off like not having any tension. This could have been a dungeon that was a political boiling pot, ready to explode. Parts of the intro imply as much. But then, the rooms don’t do anything to help that along. Eight dogs discussion philosophy. Ok.  It reminds me of that chess room in Dwimmermount, where nothing happens.

The whole thing needs a good SHOVE. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $2. The entire thing is in the preview, all eight pages, which is GREAT. You might check out the room keys and jusge the writing for yourself. I think it’s tending toward the good side of the evocative spectrum, which, I also think is perhaps the hardest part of writing adventure keys.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/276120/The-Dachshund-Dungeon.?1892600