Fangs in the Dark

By Ben Thompson
99c Adventures
B/x ... but really 5e.
Level 1

Look ma! An old school cover!

A daring escape from the clutches of Gnoll marauders liberates you from a life of brutal servitude, yet your struggle for survival continues…  for now you find yourself alone and unarmed, beset by unseen horrors that lie in wait at every turn, with only your wits, your courage, and your strength to sustain you.

This 64 page adventure is shit. Everything about it. Read-aloud, DM text, linear, design. All shit. 

First, it’s not a fucking PSR adventure. Putting “OSR” on the cover and including stats for B/X does not make your adventure an OSR adventure. The fucking game works differently, betweem PSR and 5e. Shit you can get away with in 5e,, like forced combat after forced combat, just does not fucking work in OSR. This is one of the reasons why linearity and plot tend to fail in OSR adventures. One of the first “scenes” is with two gnolls and two hyenas. That’s bad enough for a first fucking level party. But, then, the party has no weapons and no armor. What the fuck happened in playtesting? Oh, right, you didn’t do that.So, this is a 5e fucking adventure with the OSR label slapped on in the most shameless way in order to increase sales, I guess. Fucking bullshit money grab. I say it again. Write something because you love the game, not because you want some fucking money. 

The opening read-aloud is a page long. Read-aloud in this is routinely long. DM text is even longer, with the most basic of encounters running a page in length. Seriously. A fucking SPIDER is a page long. A NORMAL spider, not a giant one. ONE spider. A page long. It’s fucking nuts. 

“Force them to run: Some of you contemplate standing and fighting for a moment, but the overwhelming enemy response breaks your resolve and you decide to escape rather than perish.” It’s just a railroad. Moving from one scene to another. Except, during an overland journey. Then it turns random. Why? WHy then? This is certainly not the greatest of all sins that can be committed, but, if you’re writing a 5e adventure, a 5e scene adventure that is essentially a railroad, but switch to randomness then? Because you don’t understand the purpose of randomness. Just take one or three and flesh them out (to the appropriate degree) and stick them in, for a better experience. If you’re committed to a railroad plot then do a railroad plot.

It ends in the ruins of a castle. Where you meet a dragon. WHo sends you on a fetch quest under it to get a gem stolen by rats. Wererats, of course. At level one. Coming back you get to [pick an item each from its hoard. Very dragon like.

Overwritten to a point of extremes. A railroad from start to finish. This then is D&D.A suck ass review of a suck ass adventure. Is this really the vision you had when you set out to write?

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. Enjoy the opening read-aloud mess, along with the railroad of an escape and combats.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/441326/LC1-Fangs-in-the-Dark?1892600