The Siege of Bonemoore Keep

By Mihailo Tesic
Purple Duck Games
DCC
Level 0

The Thrallmaster’s hordes come… are you ready for the Siege of Bonemoore? The call to arms does not always come to warriors, and fate has found your humble party in Bonemoore Keep when the ghastly armies of the Thrallmaster attack. Faced with demonic fury without and mysterious sorcery within the Keep, will you survive to carry the day and start a career in intrepid Dungeon Crawling?

This 72 page funnel adventure features a “siege” of a keep … and extensive dungeoncrawl under it. It is absolutely on eo the wordiest adventures I’ve ever seen, making it ludicrous to think about running it.

The opening read aloud is two pages long. In italics. At work, my office is completely barren but for two things: a monitor and an eighteen inch tall statue of Don Quixote. This is what my life is. It’s 2022 and people still pump out a two page read-aloud. And then put it down in italics. Because this is the way the world operates. Anyone can do anything at any time. And isn’t that great? But, also, SHOULD you do it? Given a world of complete freedom the question becomes not CAN you do it, but what do you choose to do, and how. And this dude chose to write two pages of intro text for read-aloud that is in italics. Because I am a hypocrite, let me say that it ends with someone yelling the obligatory “were all gonna die” and the guard sergeant hitting in the jaw … the dudes teeth flying out of his mouth all in to the mud … and these sergeant picks them up and gives them to you “Here, might bring you some luck. They were lucky enough to get out of his stupid mouth!” Ho ho! That’s great! That’s fucking specificity! 

Ok, so, the keep is being sieged by The Thrallmaster and his army of mountain men, cannibals and flesh puppets. You’re the local peasants who are taking refuge inside. 

Oh, wait, hang on. I forgot. Before the adventure starts there is a “rewards” section, among others. That section takes one and a half pages to tell the DM that, sometimes, the adventure will give a party member a +1 stat bump. One and a half pages. To tell us that someone will sometimes get a +1, permanently. One and a half pages. 

Ok now, time to start the adventure! Back to another three long paragraphs of r read aloud! In italics. *groan* Flame golems show up. You fight them and put out some fires, I guess. Then some cannibal ghoul dudes try to climb the walls and you kill them. Then some dudes show up with a battering ram and you get to put the oil on them.  The golem/fire thing takes seven pages. The ghouls on the wall thing takes four pages to describe. The battering ram only takes four paragraphs, so, you know. You only have to kill 11 ghouls, out of twenty, in that encounter though. So, you know, a quick and easy one.

We transition now to another page of read-aloud. The keeps command has disappeared inside! Ohs Nos! Go save him/find him/etc! The entrance room is two pages long. The dungeon room with cells is like six pages long. To be fair, the Bailey room is only half a page. 

This is the norm here. Two pages for an encounter.  I’m not fucking doing that. I don’t give a fuck how good your adventure is, I’m not digging through two fucking pages of text to run a fucking room. And, to be clear, these are not complex rooms with lots of things to investigate and look at. These are, almost exclusively, rooms with a combat in them and nothing else, or else, some other “single encounter” type of room. This is fucking onsense. Two fucking pages for a fight? No. Absolutly not. You figure the fuck out how to write it down shorter. Or, you figure the fuck out how to write it down in a such a way that it is easy to refer to during the game, with bullets, or bolding or whitespace or some such. I am absolutely the fuck not pausing my game to five fucking minutes, or more, while I dig through two pages of your text in order to figure out how to run th encounter in this room. Are you shitting me? I would be the worst DM in the history of the universe if I did that. We do NOT pause the fucking game. We interact with the fucking players. That’s the entire point of the fuckinggame, the interaction between the players and DM. It is not “the DM spends five minute intervals reading the book while the players dick around on their phones.” Fucking to pages of read-aloud. Fucking two pages for a combat encounter. As if.

So, the siege turns in to a dungeoncrawl, with no siege elements anymore, and this is the main loop of the adventure.

I have absolutely no patience for this kind of shit anymore. There are literally a bajillion million adventures available. And yet, my standard for not calling something shit is rather low: do no make the DMs life a living hell if they want to run it. It doesn’t have to be fucking good. It just has to not make the DMs life a living hell. And yet most adventures can’t even reach that simple baseline. I have high standards. *pffft* I have low fucking standards, it’s just redonkulous that adventures can’t even to get to that level. 

This is $8 at DriveThru. The only preview is that bull “quick” one that shows you nothing, so, you know, Fuck Off.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/316655/The-Siege-of-Bonemoore-Keep?1892600