tenfootpole.org

By James Andrews
Stormforge Productions
LotFP/OSR
Levels 1-3

Deep in a mine is an ancient vessel. Something so ancient, it sunk under the stone like mud. A vessel alien to this world, yet here longer than most of human history. Can the players harvest its strange technological bits before being disintegrated by deadly lasers? Or will they be enslaved by the odd pink aliens which have been unleashed on the world?

This 22 page adventure details a 22 room spaceship buried in a mine. The miners are now undead cyber-zombies, the aliens floating balls of tentacles, and there’s a crazed robot to avoid. But, treasure is abstracted, the rooms all need a second pass for logic and to clean up unneeded text. Still, there’s a good cat and mouse idea here.

The (rather loose) hook has some miners having disappeared and not come back, except for one with tales of a metal demon and hellfire. The actual mines are quite small, just a couple of room, before the spaceship begins. It’s a collection of obvious obstacles, like a laser screen doorway to be crawled between, alien tentacle blobs, abstracted treasure, and a killer robot to be avoided.

The patrol bot is the most interesting part. It roams about the hallways, on a loop. If it catches someone it most likely kills them, then takes them to medbay to convert to a cyber zombie. There are guidelines for hiding form it, how hard is searches, vents on the map to crawl through to avoid it, and how it escalates its searches over time in response to interactions with the party. It’s an interesting aspect of the adventure to put on some pressure AND it supports the DM with the maps, guidelines, etc to help them accomplish it.

The rest of the adventure is uninspiring.

There are annotations missing form the map. The robot does something at points A and B, but they are not on the map. Some of the traps are Bad Traps. While searching the lockers in a room one explodes and you take damage. It’s kind of the same as a rando pit in a corridor … just take damage and move on with the adventure. There’s no interactivity with that.

Each room starts with a DM overview and then some bad read-aloud. The overviews are mostly not needed at ALL . The room titled “4. Medical Room” tells us that “this room is the equivalent of an alien medical bay.” Well, yes, could have guessed that. It’s almost all unneeded text. The read aloud if overblown imagery at times, and leaves out details at others. It’s not really evocative at all. The med bay, for example, have absolutely no mention of creatures, until you get far down in the room description where it say “Creatures: 4 cyber-zombies.” Wouldn’t that be mentioned in the read aloud? What are they doing? Just standing there? Do they attack? Whatever the designer was going for doesn’t really come across.

For those in search of tech, you shall despair. It’s all abstracted in to “bits” worth 1sp each.

It comes off as just a generic, abstracted spaceship. IN fact, the surviving miner even calls it a ship. I managed to run S3 once for three sessions and the party still hadn’t figured out it was a ship. This aint that, and not even a glowing red laser fence can save it.

This is free at DriveThru. There’s no preview (although I guess you don’t need one if its free) and the level isn’t included in the text description, although it is on the cover if you blow it up to look at.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/262967/The-Things-Lost-to-Time

By Kingtycoon Methuselah
Game of the North 
OSR (LotFP?)
Level 4-5?

Nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted on Cormorant Isle!  And yet you find that you must rely on dangerous strangers if you hope to leave the Isle alive.  Who are these tricksters and what is the secret that they will kill to keep hidden?

This 73 page adventure contains about ten adventure locales on an shipwreck island, each with about ten or so locations. Imaginative, this thing is VERY hard to decipher. Fonts, layout, rules, phrasing … I actually had a very real headache after the first two pages. I’m going to count this one as a ‘Failure to Review’ … I just don’t think I got it.

I usually review an electronic copy. This one I had to resort to printing out, which yields something a little easier on the eyes. As I noted, it gives me a headache. The format is three-column. The read-aloud font is a kind of dark magenta or brown, with a grey background, in italics.  There are weird section breaks that are not obvious. You’ll be reading a paragraph and the words will just stop mid-sentence. That’s your clue that the section below is a major new section break and you should continue reading from the top of the next column to finish the paragraph you are in … an invisible section break. Except when there actually IS a formatting error and the paragraph just ends WITHOUT it continuing in another column. “The heretic has “ … clearly is meant to convey something, but it just stops right there. The tables presented look like screenshots, with a font, background, color that over the line on readability. You CAN make it out, but for your eye health you should not.  This 24 pages of the adventure, proper, actually failed to print the first time I tried. There is something STRANGE going on, none of which lends a hand to comprehension … at the table or not.

The game system is … not mentioned? “OSR.” A scale walls test is mentioned as a “d6 scale walls test.” Like, that’s the check, as in game system, or you need to make d6 attempts at a check? Other sections reference Search result 1, search result 2, search result 3, and so on.  I have no idea. Things kind of LOOK like D&D. Each NPC and creature gets their own full page character sheet (with something called “Primary Mode” with a symbol in it?) and a “Phys/Men” trail score … but it also has HP, AC, HD, Mv, Init and so on. I just … I don’t know …

The writing is … abstracted? Obtuse? Both? Your ship needs provisions, there’s an island ahead. Through the spyglass you see a battle taking place on the beach. Three ships are burning. You see the last combatant drowning the second to last under the waves.

Huh? Battle between who? The people on the ship? There’s no detail, in the read-aloud or DM notes, of what the fuck just happened, or enough context to infer. This lack of context to infer what is going on is a major, major issue throughout the adventure.

This is in spite of a summary, which comes at the end of the keyed encounters on page 25 or so, that tells the referee what is going on. I note that reading that summary sheds VERY little light on the goings on.

Did I mention that there’s an Exquisite Corpse label on a Lulu product? My eyebrows are raised.

“But Bryce, you haven’t actually reviewed the adventure yet!” Correct. There’s a witch, riding a giant sword, over a beach throwing fireballs to set ships on fire. There’s an illusion of a bonfire. It’s also a teleporter to other, REAL fires. Uh, there are knights, and places, and some Lashan, and a witch and … I have no fucking clue what is going on in this adventure.

I fail. The weekend is coming. I’m going to try again.

Ok, weekend over. Tuesday now. I’ve been through the adventure three more times and feel that I now grasp it, although I’m not sure enough to run it.

Your ship needs provisions so you land on the island, seeing the end of a battle of knights, one drowning another in the surf. Landing, there’s recruitment attempt by the knight to his cause. His group (they have a camp farther in) is here to find and rescue a woman, kept by another group of knights. There’s a small castle that you and they can rush. (From this point out they serve as a kind of greek chorus, getting killed, etc as you explore the island.) You could, also, join up with the other group of knights or do something else … at least that’s what the text tells us, although its not exactly well supported. Somewhere in this the islands witch shows up and burns down your ship, trapping you. From the castle, ruined and full of bodies, you see a tower. Exploring the tower lets you see four other areas, each with some tie to an element. Getting through those MIGHT get off the island. Along the way is a kind of animalistic dragon with mimcry in a lava cave, some leshen, children in masks (another chous, or a sorts, maybe) the witch, and so on.

It’s got strong allegorical ties then most adventures (ie: >0) and some great language in it. Buried behind text that is THICK to get through. A highlighter won’t work in this one.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $7. The preview is six pages. The last four pages show the first encounter sections. I encourage you to TRY and read page three.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/256600/The-Tricks-of-Treachery-Isle

By Andy Tam
Self Published
5e
Level 4

… The agricultural exports that once brought it wealth and decadence has since all but withered to naught. A group of intrepid adventurers has taken on the task the escort a vital cache of grains to the ailing town, but what seem to be a simple run-of-the-mill escort job takes a sinister turn for the worse. Ultimately embroiling all involved into a spiral of decay and madness…

This 58 page adventure features a cult in a village and about sixty locations in the manor home/dungeon.There are hints of an adventure in this, but it’s written like a linear plot based thing rather than a normal adventure. The benefit of the doubt would seem to indicate a lack of understanding of how to design a non-linear adventure.

Digging around on DMGuild, I was struck that everything there is either A) not an adventure, B) Some AL nonsense, C) Connected to the latest book. I went out of my way to find something relatively independent and came to this. The baddie here is a Warlock, in service to her patron. Nice! Reminds me of the days when druids were baddies. There’s also a civil war going on, with the village in question being majorly impacted. Muddy fields, bodies face down in the dirt, spilled blood, starving and desperate people … that’s pretty cool. I mean, it’s just gonna be used as a throwaway once this adventure is over, but what if it weren’t? Nice campaign regional.

This thing also tries. It’s got an encounter on the way to the village with an old woman trader doing some profiteering, a source of information, who also steals from the party at night. And it tries to add atmosphere, mostly by having a section at the start called “Atmosphere” with some bullet point ideas. And the entire concept of a village, starving during a civil war making civil hands unclean, desperate people, bodies down in the mud, a good ol’ hanging tree ala Witcher 3 (who also tried and failed at wartime) … ah, warms my DM heart. As does a certain brevity in combat encounters; only a few sentences each, on average!

Oh, and then there’s this bit right up near the top of the adventure, one of the few few words …

“Crimson Harvest is a dark fantasy story presented in the form of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure …”

Ok, no, it’s not as bad as those words would imply. But, man, seeing that can cause your heart to shudder.

The hook has the baddies luring the party to town. Lure adventure suck. They are right up there with Challenge/Test adventures. Then the guy who hires you will commit suicide rather than be captured, if you attack him. This is not going well. Really? He kills himself? He’s bought in that deep? And still passes for normal, enough to put one over on the party? Just let the fucking party capture him, who cares? Besides, the hooks are all lame anyway. Hired or assigned a mission or Yet Another Missing Loved One. My next PC is going to home from an extended close-knit family of about 600 relatives, just to mock all these lame ass Loved One hooks.

The read aloud is extensive. Extensive read-aloud should never be included. Can I say that categorically? Are there exceptions? I don’t know. But it’s close enough to the truth to say it categorically. Plus, it waxes poetic and flowery and presumes to tell you your character’s actions and feelings. Find some vials? The read aloud tells you open them and sniff. Uh huh.

And that atmosphere that I mentioned had bullets? It’s mostly generalized and abstracted, giving you little concrete or inspiring to work with.

But that’s all minor nits compared to the major failures, on two key points. First, it fails utterly in some pretty basic design issues. Like it wants to split the party. This is a fucking disaster for DM’s, because it ALWAYS leaves a group of your players bored and disengaged. The only way this works is if have the ability to regroup almost immediately, and that don’t happen here. It also REALLY hates maps. Which is to say it loves them too much, in the wrong way. Clearly someone put some effort in to making battlemaps for everything, nice and colorful and detailed. But the main DM map is a zoomed out version, hard to read. And basic information like “how many villagers attack the party in the tavern?” are left unanswered because the information is not in the text OR on the map, as the adventure indicates it should be. So you can’t run it, by design, unless you use the battle maps which tell you the enemy count and location … and then the information isn’t on the maps? And, if it IS there, and I missed it, then it’s not clear enough. There’s this weird abstraction of detail, like in a tower with a boy. There’s no map, I think, but the locations are numbered like there is one. But they are weird, like #1 is  painting and #2 are the aforementioned glass vials and #3 is a chest, like there’s a map somewhere of a big room with numbers on it. Feel free to stretch your legs and try new things in design, but you should also make sure they work.

The second major issues is the entire adventure. Or, rather, how it designed. It’s clear that the designer is going for a kind of open ended sort of thing, something akin to a sandbox/independent location that the party find themselves in. But I don’t think they know how to do it.

There’s a strong bend to the writing that is linear and plot based. This then this and then this … not quite that but about as close and you can without having scenes. The militia, as cult members, are stationed outside the manor home to keep the party out. There’s a strong element of capturing the party or directing them to certain hidden entrances. If this adventure is The Wicker Man then everyone in the village is right on the edge of clubbing the party over the head. It doesn’t come off as much as a village with a problem but rather a kind of armed camp ready to assault the party, turning the adventure in to a hack fest almost immediately. The maps have a strong linear dungeon bend to them rather than presenting the place as a “normal” manor house. Look, I hate simulationist stuff as much as I hate linear stuff, but this is clearly close to the plot side of the spectrum, too much for its own good.

Getting out of the 5e echo chamber and seeing examples of good adventures would go a long way to helping the designers next effort. Pruning back the prescriptive writing elements and either returning to traditional map/key or putting more work in to the color battle maps actually helping the DM.

This is $3 at DMsguild. There’s no preview. Andy, go create a preview that shows a few encounters so people know what they are buying!

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/263425/Crimson-Harvest

• By Jeremy Reaban
• Self published
• OSR
• Levels 2-4

After 200 years, a bold band of adventurers plunded the first level of the dungeons beneath the ruined tower of Reynaldo Lazendry. What horrors await upon the second level of the insane mage?

This fifteen page adventure describes level two of Jeremy’s dungeon, with 56 rooms and a Frakenstein/revivification theme. It’s inconsistent and, it seems, jeremy’s heart just isn’t in it.

I’m always happy to see large dungeons, even when they arrive in installment plan mode, like this one. Big dungeons, exploratory things, are what the game was designed around and really show off the strengths of D&D. The mechanics of the game, at least up until 1e, work well with what large dungeons have to offer. To that end, the map here is an excellent exploratory map, with loops and moderate complexity that really allows the game to show off how it works. Loops, bypassing, dark corridors that anything could be lurking down … it’s all present here.

The theme here of a Frankenstein lab level, with some Herbery West thrown in, is a good one. It allows for a lot of room for weird effects. Stitch some new abominations together, give some severed body parts life, and fill in a lot with creepy things floating in strange liquids in jars. This is expanded upon with other moments, like couches whose seats can be searched for loose coins. If you accept that every waterfall needs a cave behind it then you must also accept that couches need to have things in the cushions. Life has a logic to it and D&D should play to that logic. Players LUV it when their theories and logic make good.

But, all os not good in Charnel Pit land. For every washroom with buckets full of weird eyes and baby shoggoths with attachment issues there are also fifteen rooms where not much effort was put. The food storage room, two, tell us the door is hard to break through but can be picked … and nothing at all about the room other than that. Normal food? Body parts? Anything evocative at all? No. Still, room four, the morgue, tell us that it is as cold as the food storage room. So … it’s the same temp as every other room in the dungeon, because the food storage room told us nothing. Room seven tells us, exhaustively, how many wigs are present of each color even though it has no bearing on the adventure?

The rooms are focused on history and backstory rather than interactivity. The Torture pits tells us that “Twelve of these pits contain people who Lazendry brought back from the dead using the revivification process but were incomplete or somehow not right as referred to by ancient wizards as liveliest awfulness.” So rather than focus on the occupants ,the sights and the smells and how the party might interact with them, we instead get a brief bit of history, justifying why the creatures are here. They are here because we’re playing D&D tonight. Or, we want to anyway.

Monsters, especially in something inspired by Lovecraft, should be awful. In this they are … present? We get descriptions like “strange pre-human beings not unlike ogres with very large mouths” or “appear to be a misshapen human shaped mass of flesh, often with bones exposed and large gaping maws. They are ferociously hungry, even though they don’t need to eat.” You can see hints in these descriptions of something better, but its abstracted to the point of providing little of concrete value to inspire.

Jeremy has a style that he likes to write in, and I don’t always agree with his choices, but in this adventure he seems to be slipping even from that. It feels more like a first draft, or rough notes, than it does a complete adventure. Still, coming from Jeremy, that makes it better than most.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $.50. The preview shows you the entire adventure, something I wish more designers would do. From it you can tell exactly what you are buying before you buy it. Note page three, the first page of rooms, for some of the writing style issues, and then page four and page ten for some light humor and heavier monster descriptions.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/257586/RL2–The-Charnel-Pits-of-Reynaldo-Lazendry

• By Frank Schmidt
• Adventures in Filbar
• OSR
• Level 1

This eleven page adventure presents nine encounters, in linear order, as the party passes through a mountain pass. Single column. Linear. Read-aloud telling the players what their characters feel. Forced combat. It feels thrown together.

I don’t know what to do. I told myself I was going to find the joy in D&D adventures. Concentrate on the positive, and just mention the negative off hand. And then, this adventure was the very next one I encountered.

So, I like the cover. I used to draw little stick figure army man battle scenes when I was little and have had a fondness for them every since. Man, I used to love those little plastic army men and their playsets. And the name is nice: Murder Hobo Inc. I’ve used the Murder Hobo idea as a kind of crutch for getting the party together. Never having seen each other before, they instantly recognize their bond with one another as fellow murder hobos. Those daring few willing to live life on the edge and with gusto!

And the party has a map of the countryside showing a safe long journey around the mountains to their destination city, and a little mountain pass that’s MUCH shorter with a skull and crossbones on it. What ho! No self respecting player would ignore telegraphing like that! Adventure awaits! It’s charming.

There are several elements to the encounters that also fall in to this charming category. Berry bushes with fruit that heals, for example. Far too often adventures only include bad things. Everything you mess with is dangerous and kills you, so the party learns to not mess with things. Interactivity drives D&D, and learning to NOT interact is not the lesson we want to teach. Likewise there are some hippogriff chicks to capture. With a sale price listed, I’d be much more interested in training them, and would have appreciated some advice in relation to that. Finally, there’s this tree with some bodies hung up in it, swaying. This imagery has always appealed to me as a DM. Scarecrows, warnings, etc, always give a kind of warning, a message to the players. His serves to both set the mood, providing some subtle subconscious atmosphere, as well as providing an explicit warning to the players: dangers ahead, be on guard!

And it would have done that here had it appeared BEFORE the dangerous encounters, instead of after them. 🙁

I can take barbs because of my taxonomy, but it comes from ruined expectations. This adventure is labeled “OSR.” Look, I know that no one can agree what it means, either literally, in the case of the ‘R’ or figuratively in what it espouses. But this isn’t OSR. Some will argue that yes, it is, because it chooses to label itself OSR. And by that it loses all definition and we are admitting that everything is meaningless. ‘I liked it.’ becomes the rule of the day, of life. You can have no expectations. Of anything. And that should be ok.

Agony and Ecstasy. To live free from expectations, and thus also the disappointment that it can bring. A utopian vision that each of us is charged with, to create our own brave new world. Of course, reality that is that we subject ourselves to the petty tyrannies of life all day long, for our filthy lucre, to hand over to someone else in exchange for a car, that arrives without wheels, an engine, and looks strangely like a bag of imitation doritos (empty), for the low low price of $36,400, financed at 7% over 96 months.

The adventure starts by telling us it is linear, literally, it tells us it is linear. The party must walk in the trail and cannot climb the walls or avoid the encounters as presented. The encounters are forced fights, with little more to them (with exceptions) other than “roll for initiative.” One encounter, the DM is encouraged to rearrange the adventure to make the betrayal of the party more effective. The read-aloud tells the players how their characters feel. And it asks for a DC14 medicine check in one place. What then? And streamed on Twich!

What then?

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is two pages. The second page shows an encounter, representative of the typical encounter. The first page, second paragraph of the “DM Background” section. Last sentence. Linear Adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/261388/MHI–0-Hansons-Gap

By Travis Legge

• Self Published
• 5e
• Tier 2

Deep in the jungles of Xen’drik, embedded in the side of a mountain stands the tower of the Mad Mage Xeffon. Though his various servants can be found flowing in and out of the tower on a daily basis, the elusive wizard has not been seen in many years. Some say he no longer lives, while others postulate that he is locked up in his laboratory, tinkering with magics that could alter the face of Eberron!

This eighteen page adventure is in an eight level wizards tower with seventeen rooms. It is the usual drivil that one comes to expect of the D&D marketplace, bereft of value. I guess I deserve it for looking outside the Adept box.

Imagine my surprise in buying an adventure and finding this tasty tidbit: “This is not an adventure. It’s barely a supplement. Really, it is a toolkit which I built to use on my stream and I am sharing now with you.” Then why is it in the adventure section? Why isn’t it in the “fluff supplement” section? Because it won’t sell as well? Because people won’t mistakenly buy it then? Regardless of Bryce puffery, it IS an adventure. Travis, it appears, thinks he needs a plot to have an adventure. Adventure Location is fine, and most times tacking on a fetch quest plot makes the thing worse instead of better.

Anyway …

The map is garbage. I had to blow it up to twice normal size to make it even partially legible. Maps are not art, they are play aids. They can be pretty, but not at the expense of legibility. Screwy number fonts and a greyscale map that’s too tiny to read/use/interpret does not help the DM run the adventure.

The blurb mentions “flowing inside and out of the tower” which implies an outdoor portion, but that’s not there. This is JUST a description of the towers eight floors. The only view in to the area around the tower is the picture of it on the map. There IS no surrounding context. It’s just eight levels of a tower. Not even a description of the outside of the tower. Barely a supplement indeed!

The rooms, proper, are boring and disorganized. A neat barracks room stuffed full of lizard-people. Well-kept rooms with beds made and personal items in footlockers … is that how you picture a kobold lair? I recall making a similar complaint in some official WOTC drow barracks. Either make the kobolds kobold like or put in humans. You dilute the meaning of kobold when they are used as a substitute for human foes. Oh, you were just building an encounter and wanted something of the appropriate hit die? That’s a terrible idea and also explains why this adventure is so generic and bland. There’s almost nothing wizard-like in this tower. It’s all boring blandness. And what there is is described in a manner that makes you fall asleep. Not evocative writing at all. There’s no burning passion behind wanting to run this, based on the writing.

The room organization suffers also. There’s a writing style were you put an overview first and follow up with more detail. There’s another style where you give no thought to how the DM needs the information and just throw all the words you can think of down on the page and expect the DM to read and memorize the entire adventure for immediate recall. You can guess where this one falls …

A very basic example is the first floor. The description goes: “This floor is used as the latrine for every inhabitant of the tower, including the ogres. The sewage covers the entire floor, roughly four feet deep. There is a potpourri odor thanks to a minor illusion on the area, but it barely penetrates the sewage stench. The room is dimly lit due to several dancing lights throughout the area.” Note the first sentence. It explains the floor, providing justification for what follows. It’s not needed, at least not as the first sentence. Far more important are the next three. The floor is flooded, it smells, and there are lights. THAT’S what the party is looking to know right off the bat, and therefore what the DM needs immediately. This is a great example because it’s easily understood and a terrible example because it IS just one sentence.

Transitioning though, to room seven as an example, yields more fruit. Paragraph one: you see light and here’s a bunch of mechanics. Paragraph two, there are are some big rocks in a circle and here’s some mechanics. Paragraph three, there’s three monsters in the room and here’s some mechanics. The DM needs to read three paragraphs in order to present the room to the party the first time. No. A well written room allow the DM to glance down and in half a second relate the room to the party.

There are a heavenly host of other issues. Treasure is abstracted away, destroying yet more wonder to the game. The history of rooms are in their descriptions sometimes, providing nothing but padding.

Just another adventure by someone who doesn’t know how to write an adventure. I always applaud people’s effort to publish, I just wish they took more time to understand how to do it instead of leaving it to the rest of us to pick up the $2 bag.

This is $2 at DMSGuild. The preview is six pages and shows you the first ten or so rooms. That’s a good preview, doing what a preview should do, letting you know in advance of what you are buying. Check out Floor one and room seven for the examples I provided of misorganized text.