The Corrupted Jungle

By Peter Rudin-Byrgess
Self-published
Zweihander / ROlemaster

The action starts with the wrecking of the Wight’s Shadow. With the characters washed up on the beach they have many adventures before them and will face many horrors in a strange land of jungle, witchcraft and mutated monsters. … The adventure should cumulate in a confrontation with a Defiler who has returned to her homeland to exact her revenge and destroy her own people who drove her away centuries before.

This fifteen page adventure gives a general overview of three or four locations on an island you’re shipwrecked on. “Abstracted outline with weirdly specific mechanic details” would be how I’d describe it. 

Let’s say I write an adventure. Your ship runs aground on an island, and the crew turn to zombies to attack you. There’s four locations on the island. One is a ruined city full of religious cultists who are friendly but really want you to, voluntarily, sacrifice yourself in the volcano. There’s another set of ruins with some carnivorous apes in it. There’s a third set with an evil necromancer, who is going to wipe out the cultist village. 

That’s it. That’s the adventure content. That’s what you’re getting here, except in 15 pages. There is barely anything more specific than what I write above. Is that an adventure? It’s more of a setup, and certainly could be used like a sandbox, I suppose. But it’s just an outline. Or, even less than outline. 

The rest of the pages are taken up with wall of text descriptions of what happens in each area. The necromancers history takes nearly a column. There’s a bunch of trivia for the carnivorous apes. There’s a detailed description of how the cult leads (willing) sacrifices up to the volcano to sacrifice them … and the skill checks needed to escape. It’s all one great big giant block of text. There MIGHT be paragraph breaks, but everything is left justified so you can’t tell where a paragraph starts, just where the last one ends, I guess? It’s just a continual list of what is, essentially, if/then statements. If the party defeats x then Y. if the apes spot the characters then Z. If you defeat D then J. All back to back in that weird left-justified format.

There no main map, just a text description. You see some paths going in to the jungle, some pyramids and ziggurats over the trees. From this the DM is left to figure out which one is the “Jungle Settlement”, the “Pyramid Settlement” and the “Ziggurat”.  I find this lack of even the most basic cross-referencing maddenning. If you say that there are jungle paths and then the next section is Jungle Settlement, how am I to figure out that A leads to B? Call it Jungle Paths or something else obvious. Or, better fucking yet, use a fucking kay & fucking map! That’s what they exist the fuck to do! 

I can’t fucking stand it when I have to fight the text. When people leave shit out like a map and key. When they seem to be purposefully obtuse. The fucking left-justified wall of text shit. There is no way in hell this was ever given to anyone to look at before publication. … I find it impossible to believe that even the most kind of reviewers would overlook this shit.

This is, inexplicably, $3 on DriveThru. The preview is six pages. The shipwreck is on page four while the cult settlement is on page six. Both to a fine job of exemplifying the “content” you’ll be getting. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/270035/The-Corrupted-Jungle–Adventure-Compilation-for-ZweihanderRPG?1892600