(5e) Sinner’s Manor

By James Eck
Mind Weave
5e
Level 1

*sigh*

This nineteen page adventure details a four level manor with about twenty five rooms in about five pages. It’s just combat encounters in a non-keyed long paragraph descriptive format. Combined, of course, with counter-productive skill checks. A few interesting details show some potential, but this is just Yet Another Garbage Product.

And I’m the asshole. I’m the jerk faced jerk because I protest the torrent of shit and vomit that erupts like a firehose in to my face. How bad is this adventure? It’s got three stars on DriveThru, THAT’S how bad. 

So, old manor house in a town. Abandoned for multiple centuries. Rumored to be haunted. Over the years people have gone in to never come out. Still standing intact. Some dude in the town is obsessed with it and wants you to investigate it out so he can move in. Inside are the seven deadly sins. You go from room to room, finding one and then fighting it. That’s the entirety of the adventure. A straight up hack right out of the worst that 4e ever produced. Maybe worse; those had terrain.

I’m pretty sure that 5e still pays lip service to the three pillars concepts. Combat, roleplaying, and exploration. This is just combat. Nothing more. Any joy or wonder that D&D has is entirely non existent in this adventure. There’s nothing to explore, nothing to interact with. It’s just rooms with combat.

Oh, I’m sure it THINKS its exploration. But there’s nothing truly to discover or interact with except the monsters. 

And the format, oh my. The section headings in the text are by floor, and then by room. So, First Floor and then a subheading Kitchen. Of course, the map is numbered and doesn’t have the room names. This means the room numbers are put in to the text of the paragraph and you have to look there. Further, those subheadings? There’s not one per room. The Serving Room, not described, is mentioned in the Kitchen subheading but not elsewhere. This is not an isolated event, most rooms don’t have any description at all and are just mentioned in passing.

Why are they mentioned in passing? Why, to pad out the text by describing the doors on the map. The north door is open and leads to the Kitchen, for example. You know, THE THINGS A FUCKING MAP TELLS YOU. 

A house, with windows, yes? That you can look in? The text makes a point of telling us repeatedly that kids throw rocks at the glass. Well, no windows on the map, or even a hint of them in the descriptions. There’s absolutely no thought at all that has gone in to thie as a real environment. Mostly.

There IS a decent idea or two. A fireplace has ashed out on to the floor and there are ashy bootprints across a rug, as if someone was pacing. Oh course, you see the someone probably before you see the bootprints, and they attack you immediately, so the impact is lost, but the idea for a creepy descriptive thing is a good one. Broken glass from windows on the stairs. Again, a pretty good detail. 

These little bits show some promise, but they are VERY few and VERY far between and do very little to redeem the lack of interactivity and terrible format.

And you don’t even get real treasure. You’re told to put in a CR2 hoard. THAT’S THE FUCKING JOB OF THE DESIGNER! That’s is LITERALLY why we’re paying you. (Or, well, turning to a pre-written adventure in the case of a $0 or PWYW adventure …)

Oh! Oh! I almost forgot! Skill checks! It’s full of useless skill checks! In fact, the skill checks run COUNTER to the adventure. In general you make a skill check in this to determine how some rando body you find died. And the details are creepy. But if you don’t make the skill check then you don’t get the creepy. Is that the point? To NOT creep out the players?  No, of course not, you want them shitting themselves with fear. But you hide that behind a skill check. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.You get all nineteen pages in the preview, so it’s a good preview. Page four of the preview (page two of the text) shows you the long-form descriptive stye that is indicative of the writing in this adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/292525/Sinners-Manor?1892600