by Rick Maffei
Expeditious Retreat Press
1e
Levels 2-3
Bandit and humanoid raids have increased on Ashen Ridge rendering the trade route increasingly more dangerous. Spurred by a recent, brutal attack by humanoids that claimed an ingot caravan, guards and all, the elders of the towns below the ridge have put aside their differences and agreed to reclaim and permanently re-staff the fallen watchtowers. Engineers and guardsmen stand ready to attend the towers, but first they must be scoured of any threats and wildlife. The towns have put out a call for brave adventurers willing to seek out the towers, assess their condition, and cleanse them of hostile humanoids and beasts if necessary! Will you hear the call?
This twelve page adventure presents four-ish adventuring areas of a ten or so entries each, for you to stab your way through. Lots of backstory in each entry turn the caves of chaos in to rather long-winded examples of what it should be.
There are some old watchtowers along a ridgeline and the local towns hire you clean them out so they can be garrisoned. For hitting up three watchtoweres, which they KNOW have bandits and humanoids in them, you’re gonna get the princely sum of 500gp. Fucking live it up boys! 500gp! Speaking of, monetary treasure is WAY on the light side, but a gem of seeing, pearl of wisdom, +1 manual (bodily health, iirc?) and a tooth of Dal-Vahr-Nahr reside within. Along with a necklace of adaption, esp, and a decent amount of other magic. But, yeah, just in cash and jewels you’re gonna be hurting a little at this level range. Oh, while I’m on the plot, there’s some subplot that involves L6 fighter, and his L1 cronies (six of them?) hitting you at the end when you’re wore out. You see, he’s a member of the town council and has been getting kickbacks from the goblins in tower two. Having been outvoted in the Hire Adventures vote he hits you at the end to keep you quiet. Not that there’s much to give it away anyway. Basically it’s just a pretext to hit you on the way out. I don’t really get this. There’s three different watchtowers and a little fairy grover to deal with. Which one does he hit you after? The second I guess. And takes up A LOT of words. I mean, A LOT. It doesn’t really add anything to the adventure before or during it, and afterwards it’s just stabbing Lareth. But, sure, whatever.
And I feel like this adventure does this kind of thing A LOT. B2 and the caves are note exactly a masterpiece, but they are terse to a very great degree. This thing could be as well if the designer could keep the backstory out of the room descriptions. “In a rear corner of this cell, behind a loose wall stone, is a brilliant yellow topaz (worth 500 gp). A bandit imprisoned here stashed the stone for future times and later escaped while being moved upstairs for questioning, only to be slain by an irritable owlbear in the woods some miles distant while making his way back to his hideout. Neither the tower’s original inhabitants nor current residents know about the gem.” So, I’m not opposed to an occasional aside or two in an adventure. But, also, I prefer them when they add to the overall adventure trajectory. Here, everything after the 500gp portion is just backstory. WHY is the jewel here? Well, let me tell you why … When we look at this entry we can see that far and away the text bloat here, in relation to the content, is way out of proportion. And it’s this way with EVERYTHING in this adventure. Why use one sentence when five more are possible? The town council of, like, seven or nine people (a select group from a larger council of forty or so, the text tells us …) is described in detail. Because they will hire the party. It’s fucking insane. There’s no real reason for them to have multiple paragraphs each,or the backstories they do. It’s great that you grew up in Virginia. It’s great that the hogs got the fever. It’s great that you moved to SanFrancisco and prospered in dry goods. But, man, I need to know what I need to know NOW to run the fucking adventure at the table, not the adventure twenty years ago before I had eight kids. We’ve got a small font and a lot of words. Not a good combination.
This is an assault mission. You are stabbing things in the three towers, one with bandits, one with goblinoids, and one with a yellow musk, ending with a fairy kill in their grove. Mostly everyone just sits in their individual rooms to die. Notes about bandits reacting to the noise in room one are found in room two, where the bandits are, instead of where the noise/reaction is needed. I guess you can stab things as an adventure. I’m not the biggest fan of just stabbing, but a good ol assault with a sneak up and plan and infiltrate thing can be a great one. I don’t think this is that though. The towers just have, like three or four rooms each, usually. That’s rough. I guess the bandits hiding on the second floor, with no way to reach them, can be interesting. I suppose the town council would be shitty at me for undermining a wall and collapsing the thing on them. Mostly, a gem of seeing, painted back and used as a paperweight, is what the interactivity here is going to be. Do your tactical assault, 1e style.
This is just way too long for what it is. I get that, perhaps, you need a page count to publish something, physically. And maybe twelve is the magic number here, hence the smaller font. But cutting back on the text bloat and padding and working a bit more on some interesting descriptions of rooms, magic items, or jewelry would have been nice. Not to mention, perhaps, a bit more involvement in the tower portions. A slightly more complex environment for our fours and fives to take on. Basement tunnel in. Trees too close. I don’t know. Some pretext to get inside and bluff? Nothing certainly precludes this, although the adventures lean is certainly to the “they attack!” side of things.
I guess the publishing spectrum runs the gamut. Some will suggest changes and some will copy edit?
This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, which shows you all of the intro, tower one, and part of two. I really like the inclusion of the areas around the tower, which you can see here in the preview of one and two.
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Eight kids? I would have killed myself three times already. Maybe you have had/still have four wives. So you're deaf. I feel your pain.
I like this adventure. Will I earn $7.44, pay my Uncle Sam taxes, and convey $6 for it? Not sure yet.
But: this is a pretty good starter-adventure for a new DM, a new set of players, or even a fossil posse who has been away from the game since, say, 1988. For hard-core DM purists, this is an old cheeseburger, something you've seen a million times. In fairness to the building blocks of initial adventures such as Ruined Castles, Burning Homesteads, Kidnappings, Wilderland Cartography, Brooding Evil Towers and Marauding Bands of Something, the Disappearing Merchant Caravan is right in the sampler with Robustos, Torpedos, Cheroots and that stupid Cohiba with the wild tale of smuggled Cuban seed in an Ambassador's pouch.
We are going to butcher and boil the presentation for our gaming/PC audience anyway. A ten-year old new gamer may have never discovered a rotting deer corpse in the woods, but they can get a whiff of soaking broccoli and pick up the scent of nastiness.
(I read the Preview) I think the bones are here as a building block within a starter set. More Angus Young than Joe Pass. Truffle oil shouldn't be on cheeseburgers anyway.
So…a mid adventure got a mid review? Seems like the system is working as intended. Not everything needs a gold star from teacher for the sake of fee fees.
The down ranking also seems to be much more focused on presentation than the building blocks contained within the adventure. I mean, yeah, it’s possible to wrap a cheeseburger in 10 layers of paper. You can still eat it. Some people may like it. But the unwrapping experience ain’t great bucko. Don’t try to make it about truffle oil.
(Avoiding shoveling more snow)
This one seems viable to me if I place myself in the boots of a DM or gamer who may have never scrabbled-through a Caves of Chaos (Keep & Kill), Saltmarsh (Haunted House), Bone Hill (Ruins with fantastic illustrations, I mean jesus, Farrah Fawcett on the cover?), Tomb of Horrors (Brooding Evil) and and and . . . pick your vampire.
Authors, composers, whathaveyou don't generally create something to sell to other creators. There is no market there. They are selling Compton Rap to soft white suburban kids like my children.
In the vein of (potential) widespread appeal, this work doesn't seem to be too bad an anchor-point for new chips in the game. For purists or guys who have actually slept in the woods alone with a zippo, KBAR and hammock, it seems mundane. I can see that side of it, too.
Hopefully there are newer dogs out there who haven't tried as many cheeseburgers.
I'll agree with anon to be honest, at least partially. We may not write for creators, but at the very least we write for very experienced crowd. When I created for 5e I felt the need to include beginner information in the document. Chances were the customer was a first time DM, or new generally.
In my OSR documents i dont feel the same need. Ans this comes from personal experience from what i read online. I would guess the majority of OSR crowd has DMed/played/read/at least knows the concept of B2. So if you write a similar adventure, you should have in mind you'll be compared to it.
I think that's fair to say. There is a quandary: A majority of the OSR audience are seasoned gamers who, even if they weren't introduced to the game through B2, they've certainly played it. They came to the OSR (or, perhaps, the OSR came to them) as a legal version of the out-of-print game they continued to play uninterrupted for decades.
There is, however, a minority of gamers who came to the OSR organically either being being introduced to gaming through the system, or who came to it after its creation after trying other systems.
I, for one, don't really see a need to *ever* try to recreate B2. First, the original is legendary for a reason and easy to obtain, second, cloning it has been done, and done ... and done. I find it hard to believe there's *that* much of a need for a "What is a Role Playing Game" paragraph in any OSR product.
So the adventure is only good if you’ve never played a good adventure? Not sure it works like that.
>authors don’t create for others creators
When your audience is old school DMs, you are almost exclusively creating to appeal to other creators.
Apologies if I misunderstood your points, which are hazy.
Replying to HuckSawyer
I completely agree with that perspective: if your (paying) audience is/are experienced gamers, you need to build on established concepts and norms. The goal then is to innovate or imagine something entirely novel to a wizened crowd. An onion-fudge sundae. I can appreciate that directive.
I'm a common whore. I do it for money. So I try to appreciate (incorporate?) that something the older dogs take as common may be entirely new for a broader audience, at least for a little while. In that vein, I think the . . . jesus I forgot the name of the module . . . succeeds as a foundation for a new potential audience, the guys that never named the Hermit (Argyle) and Ogre (GrouchyShitFace) in B2.
Admittedly I don't know how those people would find this module, but then I thought Taylor Swift was a ladyboy until about a year ago. I completely agree with your perspective as well.
I don’t think the goal is to create something entirely novel, but to create something good and fun, with solid interactivity, usability, and depth. Unfortunately, most adventures contain none of the above.