Blackmore

By Eric Garneau
Critical Lit Publishing
OSE
Levels 1-2

Suspended high above the land by magicks unknown, the magnificent Castle Blackmore stands as the sole remaining triumph of a civilization long past. But every Year of the Fox, for but one day, a luminous rainbow bridge appears to connect the lands below to the castle above. What treasures does Castle Blackmore hold?

This is just crap. You don’t need to keep reading this review.

Have I told you about my band, Mic Check? We get up on stage at your local dining pub, crank up the amps, and spend two hours just (badly) tuning our instruments. and saying “Check check.” My band has more merit than this adventure.

It’s got 44 digits pages and has three adventures. It’s inspired by Deep Purple? & Dio? That’s metal from the … 60s? Early 70’s? Ok, so,  this is either boomer or some kind of music dude that also likes D&D. And has, presumably, never actually seen a D&D adventure. And thus we get this thing of a shit-fest. 

The first adventure, the only one I could make it through, is fourteen pages long. It has a “really fun role play encounter” and then a six room temple … in which four of the rooms are on one page. How this thing managed to get to fourteen pages is beyond me. I mean, I know, it’s my fake job to know, I’m just incredulous.

So, you want to make it to the magic castle in the sky. TO get there you have to take a circular tunnel in the side of a mountain. You go through it to find a room with a wizard in it. He tells you that to get to the castle you need to open a frozen door and that he’s forgotten all of his fire magic. Great. You thaw the door, go through the passage to see a temple. All of that takes four pages. We’ll get back to that. The temple is one one big room, four smaller rooms hanging off of it and a basement. The basement has 2d4 sahuagin in it. That you have to fight to continue on. Those are what … 2HD? Yeah, levels 1-2. Right.You get a ring off of one of them, stick it in the alter up to and you’re done … you summon the rainbow bridge to the sky castle. Fourteen fucking pages.

That initial four pages of text? That’s just paragraph after paragraph of “and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens” sprinkled in with a lot of “and as a DM you could do this or as a DM you could do this or as a DM you could also throw this at the players.”

 And long fucking italics that is hard to read. 

 An din the adventure advice like “play up their grotesque description” … without any description for the DM to play up. 

And commentary in the text like “but where is that object?”  addressed to … theDM? The players? 

And other commentary in the descriptions like “they are possibly remnants of the temples earlier inhabitants or perhaps among its meanest primal antagonists” This is in reference to the sahuagin. Who the fuck cares about that? 

This is just nonsense. There’s little semblance or organization at all. Just a whole lot of words that are padding. No help to the DM in running it, either in the descriptions or the formatting or anything else. Your interactivity is putting a ring the sahuagin have in to the alter in the main room. And, I guess, thawing an obviously frozen door? 

Yeah, I’m not explaining why anything is bad this morning. I’m not explaining what to do better. I really don’t give shit, after reading this. If you’re going to make no effort at all then why should I?

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. Go ahead and summer through the last couple. It’s representative.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/419845/Blackmore-A-Rock–Roll-Adventure-Module?1892600