Troubled Troll Grotto

By Dougal Cochrane
Self Published
Dolmenwood
Level 2

South of Fog Lake, where the Cave Path plunges into the Ballow-Clefts, the horizon narrows to a ravine of glistening wet stone, steeped in shadow. Pale yellow celandine flowers bloom ankle-high in the gloom, their petals never fully opening except at noon when the sun shines in. Narrow clefts riddle the rock, most shallow and choked with roots. From one fissure seeps the earthy scent of moss and the sickly odour of mildew. The cavern leads down into the Grotto of Grundlow Greenteeth.

This 22 page adventure uses about nine pages to describe twelve rooms in an underground troll den/garden. It’s wordy, cutsy, and has both too much going on and not enough at the same time. 

Can you be nicely formatted and STILL have wall of text issues? Why, yes, I think, now, that you can, after reading this. Is it wall of text, actually? I’m not so sure. It is certain A LOT of text. Because A LOT is going on. And the text, while not in traditional straight paragraph wall of text format, does repeat certain patterns that obfuscates. 

But first, our setup. There’s a two-headed troll in a cave, with a grumpy head and a romantic head. He eats moss. He’s got a mossling cook enslaved. Mossling hates grumpy head and is in love with romantic head. Mossling grows herbs and puts grumpy head to sleep. Thus the Bog Red Button. Don’t wake the grumpy troll head … that you generally don’t know exists. Then, there’s a dude with a body switching thing. He’s trying to dig up a gate in the troll cave. He’s made several people switch bodies and minds. And a gang of skeleton thieves (as in, they are skeletons who are thieves.) is trying to knock off a prospector for his emeralds … and the prospector and his donkey have both been mind-switched. And, there’s a slumbering demon who does NOT give eternal youth when awakened. All that shit, and more, is in twelve rooms. 

There’s A LOT going on in here. Rooms can range from a column to a page. And this is where things start to get rough. Rooms start with a little description in an offset box that is easy to locate. Let’s say, something like this: “Dark, earthen tunnel (wet stone floor) tangled with thick tree roots (beaded with dripping water). Several wooden buckets (half-filled) sit beneath the largest roots, placed to catch water. A skull is wedged in a crevice halfway along the tunnel.” So, king od a mashup from OSE style to paragraph style. I’m not sure it works. If this had been a paragraph, without parens, or terse OSE, I think it would have gone better. The sentences with lots of parens distracts. I mean, not a bad description by any means, I’m nitpicking here. Certainly better and more evocative than the vast majority of adventures.

And then we move on to the details of the contents of the rooms. And this is, I think, where things start to get rough in terms or formatting. There is a bolded heading and bullets with more details on what to see and do. Maybe a couple of words of description or explanation or mechanics or whatever. And they are nested, so, looking at one thing that has more subparts SHOULD be fine. 

I think the issue here is sheer quantity and the use of the bold/bullet/indent format on, essentially, everything. Let us assume I have a bookshelf with 24 books on it. Each book gets a bolded heading/bullet, a sentence or two, and then I move on to the next. A few get a few indents and a mechanic or two. Everything is relatively mundane. Book eleven kills you when you open it. Meh, bad example. You REALLY need to know book eleven is there and it is the only book that does something meaningful, most of the rest is trivia, or else meaningless more or less to the adventure. Should book eleven be in the exact same format as everything else? Should it be highlighted? I’m not sure of my example, here, but I know the principle involved: when everything is special nothing is. I’m looking at a page of, I don’t know, a couple of major headings with read-aloud, major bolded headings, several subheadings, bolding at the start of major sections and in the paragraph text. It’s too much. EVERYTHING is calling for attention. You know how garbage adventures tell you what ‘AC” means and what “read-aloud” looks like? This may be the first adventure in which I think I actually have failed to understand the formatting involved. Everything is calling for your attention. What should I pay attention to? I’m not willing to say this format doesn’t work for complicated rooms, but I am willing to say that it doesn’t work HERE, on THESE rooms. 

I don’t know what to say about interactivity. Don’t wakey wakey the grumpy troll head. Feed people sleeping herbs. Maybe do a deal with the skeleton dudes or the wizzo doing the body/mind swaps. I think it’s hard to dig through here and figure out what’s going on. I’m thinking of a room with a kind of west garbage pit in it. I’m thinking like the Trash Compactor scene from Star Wars. There’s a description. There’s a columns of bullets and bolding and sentences. And then there’s this note that a major NPC (mind swapped in to a donkey) is “braying piteously and thrashing to stay afloat in the muck.” Well fuck me man. That’s obviously the reason the room exists. Don’t you think maybe I should know about it sooner, and the party should as well? Why go through all this trouble of description and mechanics of staying afloat and then bury the lead? Most rooms are like this; something important is in there and it’s almost certainly NOT getting called to your attention in any meaningful way. 

There’s a lot going on here in a short amount of space over a short amount of time. And, yet, it’s not written to run as a kind of madcap adventure, as that would imply. There’s not enough room for everything going on and there’s both too much going on in the room descriptions while, at heart, not an extreme level of interactivity. It LOOKS like there is, due to all the herbal concoctions and hooks and ind swaps and so on. But I don’t think any of it really means much at all. I’m not going to commit fully to that opinion, this thing is a bear to dig through and that may be impacting my judgement. But, also, I’m pretty sure I’m right. Just fucking walk around and stab everybody and everything is solved and you’re much safer in the end. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Boo! Hiis! We need a preview to make an informed purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563700/troubled-troll-grotto?1892600