By Mike Mearls
Frog God Games
S&W
Levels 4-6
Durgam’s Folly sits at the edge of the kingdom, an embattled outpost against the evil creatures of the wild. You travel with a caravan to that distant fortress, transporting mysterious cargo. But as you approach your destination, something is amiss. A local hamlet is in ruins. Strange creatures patrol the land. Has the famed fortress finally been overthrown?
This 32 page adventure uses six pages to describe about fifteen rooms in a golem dungeon under an ogre fort. It most resembles long winded hucksterism making a cash grab through stabbing.
Step right up folks! I have the most amazing wonderful adventure ever to show you! From the hands of Bill Barsh and Mike Mearls, two renown names in the D&D industry! Never again will you see the like of this, the Necromancer dude and Mearls of WotC! This is hours and hours and hours of fun for your entire group! Your friends will laugh and have an excellent time! Your kids will bond with you, though they be teenagers, and you’ll get to have the relationship with them that you always wanted! Yes sir, all thanks to this little adventure here! You know, you watch those old timey western movies and you see the snake oil salesman in town and you wonder, how can anyone fall for that? A golden age! Real medicine that did real things making an appearance! And the notable and famous lending their names to make a buck, though they be past their prime, you can still memberberry it. Welcome to the OSR version of Paizo, where we write for an adventure to be read and make some money. You can search for the meaning behind all of this, though the search itself is more important than the meaning.
Ok, you are level six caravan guards. Your boss is a 4MU and the dudes are mostly 1HD guards. You get treated like shit. At what point does the party NOT have to be caravan guards anymore? At what point can they get a little respect? This is why I so often turn to the knife. Once the DM kills my family 23 times I no longer care. ANyway, after being degraded by the caravan boss you arrive at a village which looks peaceful but in which everyone has been killed. You see ogre tracks and out of the kindness of your heart you track them back, having a couple of monster encounters on the way, to a fort. The top level has ogres in it and you kill them and then go to the dungeon level, which is mostly linear, and kill golems till you’re bored.
I really cannot emphasize enough the overwhelming amount of text in this adventure. That is combined with a lack of any meaningful formatting and a painfully small font. It takes the adventure three LONG paragraphs to explain that there ARE hooks, before it actually gets to the hooks. The caravan boss gets a half column of information and backstory. The other guards gets some also, though less. EVERYTHING here has a backstory. “Two nights ago, a group of ogres led by Grimulak silently crept up on Hansonburg and murdered every last one of its inhabitants. Using his invisibility and polymorph self abilities, Grimulak easily disposed of the guards before leading the ogres into town. Under the Grimulak’s iron-fi sted command, the ogres methodically moved from house to house, killing the inhabitants in their sleep and quickly running down and killing those who tried to escape.” This is not written for a DM to run. This is written for someone to buy and read. It’s that kind of shit everywhere. The ogre you find in the wilderness has a full backstory on why he is where he is and how he got drunk and so on and so forth. A demon, in the dungeon, that you can free gets four fucking paragraphs. Four paras! How much fucking text do you need?
And then, with ALLLLLL that detail and backstory, we get shit like this in the read-aloud “The tension of the journey is shattered by shouts from up ahead. A guard under Uli’s command at the front of the caravan gallops toward you, shouting that Uli has tracked down an ogre responsible for the sacking of Hansonburg.” This generic and lacking in the specificity in bringing things to life. So, both exceptionally long winded AND boring. And the room descriptions follow this same line as well. Lots of text and yet no really evocative environments. There is a pretty good art piece in it showing some decent body horror/borg building, but nothing compared to it in the text to even give the semblance of it. It engages, over and over again, in telling instead of showing.
One of the absolute most interesting of bad choices is how the fort is handled. This is an old fort now full of ogres. Over the course of three or so pages we get like 25 rooms described to us. Short, boring rooms. It’s done in almost a completely different style than the dungeon rooms, below, as if it were a different author. But, anyway … there are no monsters. Not in any room. One room has some human prisoners in it, but thats all. Instead, at the end, we get a page or so that tells us where the ogres are. They hang out in room sixteen. They are also in room seven. A group patrols the courtyard. This is absolutely insane! Why would you do this? Why would you not just put the ogres in the rooms in the key descriptions?! I get that having a separate order of battle is nice. A little section (Ha! Not in this adventure!) that you can easily reference when the infiltration inevitably turns to a raid. Fine. But to put ALLof the monster locations on the first level in what is essentially an appendix at the end of the level description? What possible purpose is there for this?! I’m not fucking making this up. This is the FULL tetx of room seventeen: “STORAGE ROOM This plain stone room looks as if it once held many kegs of ale, judging by the patterns of dust on the floor and walls. Four kegs stand clustered in the southeast corner of the room. This room was used as a storage area. The ogres have gone through most of the supplies that were kept here.” Got it? The text at the end of the level one keyes tells us that there are five ogres there.
Otherwise, you enter rooms and stab things. I guess a couple of times you can free prisoners. yeah.
This is $13 at DriveThru. There is no preview. It’s just $13 for the Frog God/Mearls combo.
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FGG has gone downhill as of late. They are regressing into 2E days of literal novel length descriptions for rooms and areas instead of shorter, simpler, details. Tegel Manor reads like a stephen king novel 5x the size of the original which was simple and easy to run.
I have a feeling folks are getting paid on Word Count alone so the sheer amount of sentences that go on for FUCKING EVER is what matters.
Sad.
Seems like Bryce has been crapping on FGG's stuff for a while now, Finch's work in particular. When was the last time one of their adventures got a positive review from him? Not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don't know.
From a cursory search of the blog, the closest I can find are The Lighthouse of Anan Marath or Horror Out of Hagsjaw from 2020 (and even then, only a "no regerts" tag), and neither are authored by Finch. Quantity over quality, I guess?
Shit, just realized this isn't done by Finch, but rather Mearls. Point stands though.
This is not regression from the Froggies; this is actually a very old module from the Necromancer games days. It's one of those 3e but like 1e things.
The Necromancer games were recommended to me when I first got into the OSR and I bought a few. There's some in them, stuff like The Lost City of Barakus, the Tomb of Abysthor and such. But they are all padded out with bad layout and small print. That was the style apparently of the 3e stuff back in the day.
I'm surprised this review does not talk about the animated clockworks that are possessed by Orcus, or something like that, been a long time since I read it. It's one of those adventures where you think it's just a bunch of monsters in a fort but there's more to it. It's not bad but it is not one of those to print out and just run.
Bryce didn't get this far. Tl;dr. The MUCHO TEXTO broke him.
Agreed: A buy and read.
I can't tell if Batman is left-handed, or if he merely switched hands to molest Robin briefly. Am I missing the scabbard somehow within the illustration?
Holy - moly …… station ? man
Nice over catch
Nice COVER catch
I'm currently writing a rather huge hexcrawl (150..ish pages). Even so, I didn't feel the need to write more than half a page of adventure background. The page you screenshoted in the review is crazy levels of buy to read.
Oof
Hey, I vaguely remember this one!
This is actually old AF, and not in a good way. The first version of this came out during in 2001, the very early days of the d20 glut.
As a result, it features very dated 2e tropes (DMPCs, plot crammed down your throat, MUCHO TEXTO), combined with the very dated tropes of the nascent 3e (overemphasis on combat, also MUCHO TEXTO).
I dunno how the S&W is different, probably not by much. Mike Mearls was a nobody back then, and he worked like crazy to claw his way into the industry, a strategy that was, by and large, successful. Good for him. But this was a pedestrian work 24 years ago, and is so now. Obvious cash grab is obvious.
"A guard under Uli’s command at the front of the caravan gallops toward you, shouting that Uli has tracked down an ogre responsible for the sacking of Hansonburg.”
This is bad even on substance. Leave some oversized footprints around Hansonburg, to let a player draw the obvious conclusion, or just to roll tracking if they insist on doing so. Instead the author removed game play from the players' hands in the name of advancing his preferred plot.
3-clue-rule should have been in play, yeah. Stuff like this reminds me of the crap I pulled when I first started DMing... at age 10.
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious let’s go visit Theodocious…
Tier 1. Local Heroes (Levels 1-4)
Tier 2. Heroes of the Realm (Levels 5-10)
Tier 3. Masters of the Realm (Levels 11-16)
Tier 4. Masters of the World (Levels 17-20
But that’s just a guideline
Levels 4-6
Caravan guards? Really.
Step 1 iMPALE The 4th Level asshat
Sacrifice the Level 1 guards to Orcus
Step 2 cast raise dead on the guards men-zombies to carry the new battle standard (impale MU) before you
Any questions?
Step 3: Cast magic mouth upon the zombies.
They now chant::
“What is best in life, Conan.”
Bryce obliviously blundering into reviewing a cheapo re-release of a 2002 Necromancer Games adventure but somehow managing to write an absolute banger of a review is the TRV drunken master style. Well done.
Yes, this adventure is rooted in the design paradigm of its time in a really bad way. Necromancer Games laid the foundations for a lot of things we take for granted in old-school gaming, but they had to work with what they got, so their releases were either great adventures suffering from bloated presentation, or general crap that seemed to fit into their "Third edition rules, first edition feel" slogan at first glance, but really didn't succeed at it at all. This is a true example of "Third edition rules, third edition feel" - bad railroading leading to bland, mechanical dungeon hacking; a truly joyless adventure. Why you would pull it out of the drawer instead of making something like Rappan Athuk or Tomb of Abysthor from scratch is a good question.
Durgam's Folly is also a glance into the life an times of one Mike Mearls: from a hilariously wrong review of Keep on the Borderlands ( https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/classic/rev_1250.phtml ) to mercenary work like this, to fucking up D&D with a terrible design philosophy, to a growing understanding of old-school gaming, to unfucking D&D a little bit, to soft-cancellation, and eventually to a return from digital exile. A man of twists and turns for sure (newer translations would call him "a complicated man").
Just want Melan to know that I got a kick out of that Fagles v. Wilson joke. Golf clap.
> a hilariously wrong review of Keep on the Borderlands
Holy hell, how is that even a review? I'd say it sounds like drunken hobo ramblings, but even the drunkards have a message of some kind in what they say (usually "tha guverment is tryna steal mah teeth!", but still... makes more sense than this drivel).
“tha guverment is tryna steal mah teeth!”
ROFL
But he’s not wrong about B2’s faults.
The probelm is not seeing its virtues.
He doesn't have any points to make about B2's faults. He just expresses incredulity over what the module is.
It's all "Look, everyone is living close together - WTF? The NPCs have no names - WTF? The crazy hermit is 4th level - WTF? This thing is a disaster! Zero points for good taste! I sentence Gygax to the electric chair!"
It's the amirite gambit. "Those silly old games are sure outdated, amirite?" Audience claps, laugh track, etc.
And, thereby, demonstrating that he has never run nor played B2.
I can honestly say that I've run B2 dozens of times. It's been played now for 46 years and will be played for another 46, long after The Siege of Durgam's Folly was forgotten - if it was ever remembered at all.
I have run B2 five times that I can recall. Some of us have had the thing so long it still reeks of cigarettes.
It is the Back in Black of D&D: it can be played in any venue from arena to coffeehouse. I have heard the "base ecology" arguments about creature crowding for thirty years. Eff that, twice. Who cares? It's fun. A beer can drifting down a stream for five miles on Piney Run doesn't make much sense either. But it's cool. Not everything in life works within its own internal logic.
The module is immortal, far above our poor power to add or detract.
@HuckSawyer
" I have heard the “base ecology” arguments about creature crowding for thirty years ... Not everything in life works within its own internal logic."
You gotta love it when people complain about unrealism seeping into their fantasy game about giant flying magical fire-breathing lizards. Oh won't somebody please think of the verisimilitude!
"Oh won’t somebody please think of the verisimilitude!"
A world with versimilitude allows clever players to infer, to act as though it were real, to anticipate. It is a living breathing game that transcends the rules written on the page, with seemingly infinite depth. A world without versimilitude is static and the players can only refer to rules or react. They cannot predict its movement. But to a hylic, a real world is as incomprehensible as a fake world. They can only respond to either passively, like beasts of burden.
@Polybius
It was sarcasm, my dude.
Not a lot of verisimilitude in a game with blink dogs and talking trees.
Less math and more elf game, please.
@DP
You don't seem to understand. My initial comment was in response to your sarcasm w.r.t to versimilitude in elf-games. I am advocating that versimilitude serves a vital function even in games with fantastic elements, but that on self-evident idiots like yourself, this function is wasted.
@Gnarly Bones
Even a fantastic milieu must have some basic rules, consistency and underlying organization that allows players to make basic inferrences about the surrounding environment. Owlbears and blink dogs exist, level 20 town guards and peddlers selling +5 holy avengers for 1 sp are out.
What is the common complaint about OSR design? You fight a god at level 2? You are a caravan guard at level 8? Those are complaints of versimilitude.
And those are both invalid complaints. Funhouse dungeons have always existed, will always exist, and people will still be playing them (and, I know you will be shocked and awed to discover) and enjoying them after you and I gone.
Selling baby dragons in any decent-sized marketplace is BtB play. Any appeal to the golden calf of verisimilitude falls flat in the fave of blink dogs and talking trees.
I can still recall the first time I went through Tamoachan as a player and we encountered the nereid. One of the other players (whose PC dove into the heaving waters to embrace his "beloved") said something to the effect of, "This tomb has been sealed for centuries, what did these monsters eat?"
To which the teenage DM, wise beyond his years, answered, "Adventurers."
@ Polybius
"I am advocating that versimilitude serves a vital function even in games with fantastic elements, but that on self-evident idiots like yourself, this function is wasted."
That jab was pretty un-fucking called for, dickhead.
No shit verisimilitude matters - that's not even what we are talking about. Did I say anywhere "verisimilitude is not important"? No, I didn't.
Perhaps I didn't "understand you" because your stilted, rambling, off-topic nonsense is irrelevant to anything being said.
I’ve run and played B2 multiple times. Had some fun with it, but it doesn’t hold up IMHO. Humanoid fortresses just aren’t my thing. 1) Guard room 2) Storage rooms 3) Guard room two 4) Common room 5) Chief’s room 6) Secret treasure room. Copy and paste.
And before I’m accused of thinking it can’t be good because it’s old: I love both B1 and the Tower of Zenopus from the Holmes book. Both are much more imaginative, interactive, varied, strange dungeon settings than the featureless monster barracks of the Caves of Chaos.
This is an odd choice for FGG to re-release. It was one of the weaker entries in their catalogue, and never had much of an old-school feel. Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia, on other hand…
Content aside, Necromancer/Frog God Games haven’t changed their house layout style in 20 years. When combined with text bloat, it’s godawful trying to read and parse their books.