tenfootpole.org

By Marcelo P Augusto
Giallo Games
OSR
Levels 1-2

Something evil and cruel has been terrorizing the peaceful villagers of Woodsmen Village. Who will be the brave adventurers to discover the source of this evil and restore peace to the land?

Thi 24 page adventure features a cave with twelve rooms. It is 2023 and OSR adventures continue to be terrible. Including this one.

Ok, I Just typed up a long paragraph that I decided was a harsh personal attack on the designer. So I deleted it. Instead, I poured myself a drink (9:23! I’m doing better!) and am going to write the normal boring ass review of a normal dreadful adventure. But, man, I fucking went there. Cause this dude doesn’t deserve that. It’s not a rip off adventure. It’s just a dude doing his best. Like, you’re having open heart surgery by a dude that saw a cartoon yesterday that had a beating heart in it and now, today, you’re going under the knife.

The dungeon starts on page fifteen. Up until then we get a village description, or, rather, the village backstory description, as well as a couple of pages on the surrounding wilderness. Everything in this describes, pretty much, this wandering priest who used to be around, who stank a lot. Now there’s sheep heads and slaughtered animals showing up. Best go track him down. 

The village, proper, doesn’t really get much of a description. Nor does it really need one. It starts off with a paragraph describing an idyllic little place. And then it goes on and on and on and on, with backstory mostly and a little “pleasant farmers doing pleasant farmer shit.” Absolutely nothing, beyond that first paragraph, is needed to run this village. We all know what a kitchen looks like. Then there’s what feels like six hundred pages of back story that is kind of disguised as rumours that you can hear. There IS a rumour table, but it’s kind of meaningless. “Ocs in the mountains!” kind of shit. The actual adventure backstory has all of the information that you want to tell the players, integrated in to the adventure. You’re not going to be able to do that, of course, since there’s no way to slog though it all except in real time. It’s all mostly about the stinky priest that used to come around. And a little about the traveling heroes that saved their village once. WHich is why, I guess, everyone is afraid of you when you come in to town. Because wandering heroes saved them once and they still venerate tem and remember them and now they are afraid of all wandering heroes. I’d love it if this shit made sense, but it don’t. 

Ok, so, there’s a wilderness map. It has place son it from the rumour table, like that pass with orcs, and where the last sheep head was found and shit like that. They get no descriptions. While the locations are keyed, on the map, there are no descriptions of any of the locales. There’s a short wandering monster table, in case you want to meet “deer” or “1d6 wolves.” Have fun. You need to wander in to the swamp, where you will find tracks that lead to a small mound with a cave entrance in it. 

Great! You’re at the cave. Enjoy such room titles as Tunnel 1 and Cave 2 and Citrine Cave 3. You’ll find a map with about twelve rooms on it. And no grid. Why no grid? Why was that the decision you made?  Have ya played D&D before? You know we need a map grid, right? I mean, yes, you did put on a, like a line that says 1” equals ten feet … but that don’t cut it.

You can then enjoy many confused and overly long descriptions that repeat things form the map and need better evocative writing. You will find a +1 dagger, a cursed necklace, and, I don’t know, 100gp in treasure. Again, have you played D&D before? You know that gold equals XP? No? 

Oh, after all that lead up to the stinky priest, in this stinky cave, it turns out that the priest is long dead. All of that foreshadowing is worthless. It’s actually a stinky troll in the last room. A troll. At level one. You have fucking fun with that, yeah?

There are a couple of decent encounter ideas in this. A spider crab thing lurking under the water outside of the cave entrance in the swamp. Always a fun encounter! Some quicksand in an otherwise flooded cave … that’s a nice little combo that can bring some life to an otherwise staid encounter type. 

Otherwise it’s nothing but repetition, boring words, and abstraction. Houses in town are decorated with various allegories like pumpkins and candles in the windows. Fucking great. DESCRIBE it. Make us FEEL it. Don’t fucking abstract a key component of the adventure.

This is just junk. A step backwards in OSR design, in many ways, from the slightly better terrible offerings generally showing up these days. 

This is $2.50 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, the first six, so you get about two pages of actual text … and I’m being generous in that. Just imagine that everything int he adventure is like that and you’ll get an idea of it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/452728/Into-the-Caves-of-the-Pestilent-Abomination-An-OSR-adventure?1892600

By Laszlo Feher
First Hungarian d20 Society
OSR
Levels 3-6

A cornucopia of four short, open-ended adventure outlines leading to lands of pure imagination, this collection should astound and entertain any company of players interested in exotic locales, strange individuals, and a generous helping of satire. Herein, you will journey to a tropical island to answer the eternal question, “What is Art?” (or die trying); confront a reclusive artist with a peculiar scheme to enlarge his audience; find the fabled graveyard of the elephants and partake of the fruits of the Tree of Forever Return; and judge a pie-baking contest in a rural backwater where nothing could possibly go wrong… or could it? Some assembly required!

This 44 page booklet has four adventures in it: an island, a jungle trek, a frog-pond and a village pie baking contest. Leaning farcical, the descriptions could be better even if its creative heart is in the right place. 

This is a compilation of four adventures, with the common theme being “Farce.” In the first you are whisked away to a remote island by an efreeti, who wants you to create/find art so he can present it to the sultan of the city of Brass. In the second you face a toadman noble with a penchant for poetry who is turning others in to frog-men also. In the third you trek through a jungle in search of the elephant graveyard. In the fourth you end up as judges in a pie baking contest in a small village … with a lot of oozes present and infiltrating. 

Among the ten thousand nations of the OSR empire there lies a portion that are devoted to farce. I loathe these. I don’t do joke adventures. The black comedy of a (slightly) serious Paranoia/Brazil is fine. We can have a bunch of farcical things and people running around an adventure., That’s ok also. But, straight on comedy? Nope. And, if the adventure proper turns in to farce, then, I’m out as well. I prefer a light hearted D&D that is still, I don’t know, realistic? That’s not the right word. We’re allowed to have fun, but this isn’t a three stooges movie. But that’s not the vibe we’ve got going on in this compilation. We’re more than a little over the line here in to comedy, or, perhaps, so much farce that its comedic. The first adventure, for example, has the party finding/creating/passing off things as art to the efreet critic/collector. I’m not too harsh on the concept. I think it would be great as an individual encounter in a different adventure. But when the entire adventure is about this concept then we’ve gone a bit too far over the line. Now everything and everyone in the adventure shares this farcical outlook and every encounter bends this direction. I’m not going to go down the path of “D&D is serious!”  … because those people are fuckwits. Errr, I mean, you should all have fun the way you want to have fun.  

There are many ways to write a good encounter. My favorite is, perhaps, the ones with a certain slyness to them. They are giving you a little wink in way that lets you read more in to the situation than is actually written. And that’s certainly the case here. This is somewhat related to the encounters being situations instead of static things. It allows the DM to build upon an encounter, bringing more to it than the actual words on the page. 

But, also, the actual DESCRIPTIONS of the places here are not altogether that strong. Each of these adventures tends to have places described instead of rooms. A village, for example is described as “Houses crudely hewn from red volcanic rock are living quarters for …”There is more here, describing what’s going on in the village of pirates, but the actual village description, what it looks like, is just what you’re being given. The House of Embers, where the efreeti lives in the first adventure, is given “structure resembles a M?ori longhouse, keeps glowing and smouldering without end” or a “big two-masted pirate sloop.” I’m pulling descriptions from the first adventure, because I’m lazy as fuck today, but the other adventure descriptions are much the same. For while you get a decent little situation description, if a little farcical, you don’t get much of a physical description. 

I think that doing a little more work on the physical descriptions and vibe, and pruning back a bit of the situation descriptions (which by far make up the bulk of each location description) would go a long way with this one. There’s nothing to be done about the farce: either you’re in to it or you’re not. 

This is $6.50 at DriveThru. The fourteen page preview will show you the first adventure. All four, I would assert, are in the same style. You can see that the thing was constructed well and inspired, just a bit off in tone and in practice.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/390271/Weird-Fates-vol-01?1892600

By Zzarchov Kowolski
Self Published
OSR/NGR
Levels 1-2

There is a vast steppe. Peasants who try to settle on it disappear. The cossacks have lost a patrol on it and want you to find out what happened … and if its the same thing thats happening to the peasants then that’s ok too. 

This eighteen page adventure is one wandering monster table for the steppe and a small earth dungeon right out of that shaman scene in 13th warrior. It’s ok I guess. A little cumbersome with the wanderer table. But, also, it’s a wanderer table and a small three-ish room dungeon. Meh. 

Oh, and sorry, it looks like you can’t own this one. I mean, it’s not available digitally and you have to catch ZZarchov in person when he’s got his table set up in order to buy a physical copy. Oops. I don’t usually buy and review things you can’t have. But, I bought a bunch of shit from him at GenCon and didn’t realize this was the case for this one. So. Uh … now you know if you should buy it on eBay or not I guess?

Anyway, so, overcrowded cities. Over time, local despot sends peasants out to the vast steppe to settle it. They all disappear. ALL of them. He sends out some cossacks to protect them. They don’t give a shit about the peasants. Then one of their patrols disappear and they want you to scout to find out what happened. You then wander around the steppe, getting lost etc. Do no discount that statement, that  IS the actual bulk of the adventure, rolling on that table. Eventually maybe you cast a spell to see astral threads, or triangulate the locations of the trees and shrubs that are attacking you, or track back the wildmen attacks you have been undergoing. You find a hill with a tree stump on it with one live branch. There’s a hole you can crawl in to, all 13th warrior shaman room. Inside you kill the tree elemental that hates mankind. Roots of Bitterness, get it? Yeah. 

I admire the tree elemental. It’s hubris, I mean. No opposable thumb. Stationary. Living under a hill. Sure, it’s got some wildmen cultists to worship it and do its bidding. A dozen or so, I’d guess. But, also, hey, I got 14 billion opposable thumbs with shovels and torches. But, whatever, tilt that windmill man! 

The bulk of the adventure is wandering around the steppe until you get tired of it, figure out shit is coming from the hill with the stump, and find a way to get there. You literally just get attacked by trees and wildmen until you figure out some way to discern the intelligence behind it. A detect magic, triangulation or tracking are suggested. You roll a d8, a d6 and d4 for each wanderer encounter, with the individual rolls meaning  something. As does the sum of the rolls. As does dubs, trips, and straights. Enjoy those table lookups! I guess it’s the main part of the adventure, so, I should give it a pass. But I’m not going to. I really don’t like procedural generation at the table, at least to this extent. 

The ol cossacks have that ZZarchov charm. You get their nature, as well as the nature of the peasants leaving the city and so on. And after that it kind of breaks down. There’s only so much you can do with procedural generation, to convey the charms of a designer. And the old dungeon at the end comes across as just another dig out hole in the ground. The charm, so prevalent in ZZarchov adventures, is not to be found. And I’m not a big fan of the” wander around until something happens” school of design. Bored players are not a good thing.

So, do you need this one? No. Which is kind of a good thing since you can’t have it. 🙂 It’s not his best work, which means its better than most of the dreck being published today.

By Gustavo Tertoleone
Black Dog
OSE
Level ... 4?

a secluded village in the mountains holds the entrance to an old complex of rooms where secrets from the holy church lie dormant. Getting in there can be a difficult task, but the occurrences in the village above it can turn the task deadly impossible.

This 52 page adventure, with no level range provided, describes a dungeon with thirteen rooms. More LotFP than OSE, it is STUFFED full of treasure. Some decent Indiana Jones puzzles and a smattering of monsters lie in WAYYYYYYYYY too much text. Another skip.

Ok, so, you got this village. 44 normal villagers live in it. They have a church with a dome. Inside the dome is art work a thousand gp. Oh, and the dome is covered in gold worth 100,000gp. 100k. Fortunately, for the party, the villagers are mostly infected with astral larvae, so, go ahead and kill them all and take all that gold. I guess the villagers are there to keep the party from just doing whatever they want, but, really, only 44 humans? I mean, parties routinely slaughter kobolds more than that in number. Once you get in to the church catacombs you’ll find them STUFFED with artifacts. And I mean STUFFED. Dozens of unique items. THis thing goes above and beyond in being a monty haul … a word I have not seen used in quite some time.

The village is supposed to be a part of the adventure, but, other than the priest name and “44 villagers” we are getting no information at all, except a How Is This Villager Crazy table. They hunt the party if they think they know the villagers are infected or they see the party trying to dig out the catacombs, which take six days, so, you can expect a villager hunt. There are also some mushrooms growing on cow dung that can give the party ESP powers, to help track down the larvae infested villagers, I guess. It’s a nice touch and would add a lot … IF more were done to bring this villager to life. Like, a name or two maybe? As is there’s nothing. N O T H I N G.

And that’s a problem. 53 digest pages for thirteen rooms. And how can this be? Not because of the Kwisatz Haderach, that’s for sure. No, it is room descriptions that take two pages. And page after page of artifact descriptions. It’s the usual culprits. A LOT of backstory for things in rooms. We get the full history of the bat-man thing that lives in room one. That contributes nothing to the adventure. And this happens time and again, with room entries, in simple paragraph format, going on and on with backstory that does not contribute to play at the table. This combines to create the usual mess that you have to fucking dig through to find information. And, that includes trying to figure out which rooms have creatures in them. You have to really dig to figure out if there’s something in the room thats going to eat the party. No Bueno. “A long time ago, a bat, attracted by the smell …”

Read-aloud, while sometimes good, can tend to be long. And it’s in italics. And it’s in some weird fucking flourish fucking font. WHich means you get to struggle through the fucking shit. It’s hard as fuck to read. Don’t fucking do that! Try to keep the read-aloud short AND DON”T USE FUCKING WEIRD FONTS! I don’t really give a flying fuck if this is a coffee table book. I’m trying to use it at the fucking table and I can’t do that if I’m struggling to read the fucking text that I’m supposed to be fucking using. 

And, while a minor point, there is a fundamental lack of understanding about randomness. The old wound. “Roll to find what artifact the party finds and if its magical.” That’s not how we do things. That’s not the point of randomness. You, designer, roll, on your own. Then place it in the text. I note that this would ALSO cut down on the amount of fucking pages and text to dig through. If you want to make a cess pit with ALL of the treasure in it, and roll to find which treasure, over time, as the party searches, that’s fine. But, in that case, the treasure actually exists. You’re just rolling to find the order (and how many wanderers show up in the mean time …) But NOT to figure out if a room HAS a treasure. 

So, long, long LONG entries. Hard to read-read-aloud (which, generally, is not bad in being evocative in this adventure) and a lack of any form of formatting at all to make things easier on the DM. Padded to all fuck and back with a conversational style. Some decent vibes here, with Indiana Jones style puzzles (not traps) and a nice monster selection. 

Also, fucking christ, entities form outer space in an adventure? Europe in an area between SPain and France? The Church? This seems like a Lamentations adventure. Especially since A Fungus From Outer Space is now the most overused trope in fantasy gaming thanks to LotFP.

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. You get to see a bunch of blank pages and table of contents. Shitty preview that gives you no idea, as a DM, of what to expect. And, of course, no fucking level range anywhere.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/446202/The-Cosmic-Gate?1892600

By Brian Binh
Pufferfish
B/X
Levels 4-6

Vahden is a sleepy, little sheep-ranching village in a valley on a market road. A wizard’s tower overlooks the valley, but the reclusive wizard, Chageth, hasn’t been seen in years. In recent nights, livestock and travelers have been found burned to death. Witnesses have seen a “huge, horned hunter driving a pack of fiery hounds” across the valley at night.

This sixteen page adventures features a small tower/fort with dungeon with about thirteen rooms. The descriptions are both dull and confusing, especially for a site of this size. A case of trying too hard, perhaps?

We;ve got a small tower thing on a hill with about six rooms in it. There are two separate dungeon areas connected, one with three rooms and another with about six more. There’s a nice side-profile map, and, for a small hill fort/tower thing, it’s got some interesting features that let it be more than just a simple ten room flat dungeon map. I can’t tell you how over I am of simple flat ten room dungeon maps.

The tower is infested with undead fire blobs, and has an ogre wizard inside that is a kind of shaman undead hunter that is trying to get rid of them. There are a few encounters with the blobs till you reach the main dungeon levels, where the undead pick up dramatically. You get both the undead former wizard owner and the barrow mummy thing that the fort was built over. So, stabbing undead, maybe talking to to ogre, and fucking with a machine inside (thats making undead flaming blob things) is the interactivity here. That’s kind of low, even for an adventure of this size.

The major malfunction here is in two parts: the descriptions and the … formatting? Layout? The descriptions are essentially non-existent. The False Crypt room gets “The Malevolence (viscous, vicious, grey goo): This mass of hate puppets an empty Sarcophagus and three skeletal warriors in its sticky strands of viscous ooze.” While this is not the worst description, I want you to notice the lack of scene setting. There’s nothing at all about the crypt. AT ALL. And this is par for the course here. While there’s a kind of hybrid OSE format going on (bolded keywords), the choices for what to describe aren’t done real well and there’s no real overview of the room. Further, that description would probably work better if it started off like “Viscous vicious grey goo (the Malevolence …” Starting with what you see and noting the creature in bold in parens instead. And, ug, don’t get me started on the creature names. The Malevolence. Dark Thoughts. Raging Dreams. Foul Hopes. I’m not hating too much on the names, but, rather, how they are used in the adventure. While going through the text you can’t tell whats flavour text and whats a creature name and whats something that is expanded on further. Is foul hopes a creature? A vibe? Something else? And the formatting, with the bolding choices and sidebars, while it is trying to be helpful, just gets in the way, making it harder to slog through and find things instead of making it easier, cognitively, on the DM. 

I really, really, hate the lack of descriptions in this one. And when there are descriptions we get things like “Barrels (many shattered) Pool of ooze (grey seething, knee deep)” That’s not enough. The formatting might work if the vibe were set better with the word choices, but, also, why not just describe the room? Give it an actual description that sets the mood. 

So, does it make me angry and feel ripped off? No. It makes me sad. Just another lost dream of a dreamer. The designer made an effort, clearly. They tried, but went a little overboard on the formatting and needed to focus more on the room and creatures, giving them a vibe, and then working a little more on the interactivity. Thirteen rooms in sixteen pages. ?

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is BROOOOOOKKKEEEENNNNNNN!!!!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/450912/Lair-of-the-Wild-Hunt?1892600

By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 3-5

King Nothrim’Ston and his kin founded the dwarven mine of Drothumstone some 400 years ago.  The hope was to build a new citadel and companion city to Zolotoheim.  Trusted by his friend and fellow adventurer, Tasadantilis, Nothrim’Ston was given one of the keys to Tasadantilis’ exradimensional space: the looped scepter. But Nothrim’Ston succumbed to an insidious mental illness that affects many dwarves.  Pushing his clan harder and harder, the dwaves recklessly pursued the gem deposits and veins of ore in the mountain.  It all ended in a single day as they stumbled upon something that had been better off buried…

This 121 page region has a “main” dungeon as well as a dozen or so sites spread out over a mountain hex map. It feels disconnected from itself, both in the hexcrawl and in the dungeons. A heavy dose of trivia and lack of exploration elements don’t help any either.

Blah blah blah, ancient dwarf mine. Go find it and loot it. The hex map for the mountain region has a road on the left side that leads to several adventuring sites. The actual mine is on the right side, with several other adventuring sites scattered throughout the map. No quite haphazard and probably things that the party will stumble upon, more or less. IE: a giant lake is in the middle of the map and a couple of sites are around the shore, where they might be seen while skirting the lake. Not a bad way to handle things. There are a few sites out in the nowhere, but, whatever I guess. The actual dungeon maps tend to be rather simplistic. A star pattern and so on. Not a lot of map terrain and, in some of them, hard to make out features. The joy of digest format, I assume. 

The actual mine in question doesn’t start until page 82. That doesn’t have to be bad, if you’re doing a kind of sandboxy region, which this thing is trying to do. The wanderer table feels a bit short for that, with most of the entires being a simple attack description with a little variety in how they attak. They erupt from the earth and attack. They come out of a cave mouth and attack. Better than a bare table, I guess. The other sites are … weird. There’s a variety of them, mostly ruins, cabins and an occasional outpost with a couple of other mines and lairs. I’m struck by the … mundanity? of it all.  Here’s a boring outpost/ It’s keyed. Which are boring. Why is this done this way? Yes, hobos are gonna hobo, they could fuck up anything. But if we don’t expect them to then we provide a minimal description rather than doing a full key. This cabin has three rooms. Let me fully key it! And have nothing interesting to say about the cabin to interact with or move the game forward! 

The room descriptions are in OSE style, which some folk won’t like. But, like all styles, it depends on the designer. And the room descriptions here are … you guessed it … boring! How you can make a majestic throne room boring in its description is beyond me. The bolded words. The extra descriptive words. All boring. A mundanity that you are continually fighting against. A full page NPC description for no real reason. Why?

And those descriptions? Disconnected. I’m not talking about the paragraph after paragraph of free text descriptions for general location information, which is bad enough. No, the rooms. We’ll get a description of a room, OSE style, and then at the end of it we’ll be told that this is the lair of a filth monster covered in filth. It’s like the monster and the room are disconnected. What if you just wrote up a bunch of room descriptions, without monsters, and then rolled on a monster table for each room and put that monster in the room, without thought to the room description? That’s what this feels like. Are cockatrice neat? No? You wouldn’t know it from this dungeon. And true interactivity is poor. Stab shit. Find a secret drawer in a desk or a tunnel under a statue. Which are great, but, also, that sort of interactivity can’t be all you have in something. There’s no real sense of exploration or wonder in this.There’s so much trivia in the descriptions, things explained and detailed for no reason. Who cares that the left kitchen cabinet has clove and nutmeg in it if it doesn’t contribute to the adventure?

A quick google shows that this was written in June and published in July. That’s not enough time to really playtest it, I think, and really not enough time to edit this, I think, for 121 pages of content. And by edit I mean “agonize over every encounter and description, hate yourself, throw it down six times only to pick it up later and work on it.”

Look, this isn’t the worst thing ever written. Not by close. It looks like dude tried and was excited about it. But that’s not good enough. You are competing with every adventure ever written for every game system, ever, since 1970. Fifty some years of content. Why should I pick a mundane adventure? Why should I ever run something other than the best ever produced? Something interesting to play, easy to run, and evocative. I am ALL for supporting the new over the old, hence the emphasis on new adventures oh this blog. But not to the extent that it makes my life hard and is less fun/easy to run. If you are not producing the best work of your life then are you publishing it? 

This is $6 at DriveThru. No preview … suckers! 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/446984/The-Lost-Mines-of-Drothumstone?1892600