The Wizards Scroll 2

By Paul Carden, Mitchell Woods
Ethereal Games
S&W
Level ??

The Delverne Windmill — An adventure about a missing windmill and a monstrous wyrm

The Hermitage of the Seven Stars — An adventure about an errie chapel in an alternate universe where everything goes wrong – to the adventurers

The Wizards Scroll is a zine with a little over a hundred pages in it. Inside are the usual zine articles about ziney things. Tables, locales, levels caps, blah blah blah. And two adventures. We do adventures here.

The Delverne Windmill is about a twelve page adventure, in the usual digest format. It advertises itself as a short investigation and crawl. Let us look deeply within ourselves and ask What Do Those Words Mean To Me? The correct answer, of course, is that old Brycy Bryce wouldn’t mention it if it weren’t a problem.  This sort of disconnect about expectations, a continual theme, is prevalent in several areas in this adventure. The village has some maps. As well as an inn. As well as the hole in the ground where the missing windmill was. But, actually, are they maps? I guess, technically, they fulfill that purpose, at least one anyway, has a scale on it. But the others? These are art pieces. You don’t need a map. There is nothing about the location of A relative to B in the village that requires a map. Or the inn, where nothing really happens. Or the hole in the ground where the windmill used to be. Nothing happens. So why provide a map? 

And, just what is an investigation? That is the first part of the adventure. The investigation. But there isn’t one. I mean, the windmill is gone and there’s a hole in the ground. The investigation, in this context, is talking to some people in the inn, if you want to.  Yup. Heard a noise. Saw some blue lights. And a dude that thinks its a hoax. Is that an investigation? That sounds like a rumor table strung out to a few pages. There is no conspiracy. There is nothing to discover, nothing to help you. Just, a hole in the ground with some blue mist in it. Gotcha.

On to the hole in the ground! The crawl has four rooms. In a line. Your entrance room. The ghoul lair. The Blue crystal room. And then the dragons lair. (No Daphne) The ghoul lair has a some ghouls. Kind of. They aren’t undead so I guess you can’t turn them? But they paralyze? Whatever. You kill some and then keep having wandering encounters with them until you make the forty foot trek in to the blue crystal room. The adventure ends when you pull the millstone from the dragons mouth, where it is stuck. Or kill it, I guess. Then it crawls down a hole and goes away. You get 200gp. Good job.

Theres no real investigation. There’s no real crawl. There are no really evocative descriptions. Interactivity? I guess? You can pull the stone out of the dragons mouth only for it to immediately slink away? So, yes? “? unique interactivity” means less when there are three rooms. Anyway, twelve pages to do this? This is like a one page adventure. 

The Hermitage of the Seven Stars is a bit different though. This has seventeen rooms in a kind of palace. You start on the second floor and, having been transported to the SOMEPLACE ELSE where it resides, you can throw yourself down to the roofs, domes, etc, of the first by nature of the lower gravity. Also, you can die out there so don’t fuck around too much. 

Thinking about this and it implies. There is a consideration of the environment. You are on the second floor. You can get to the roofs, etc of the first by going outside. It does have lower gravity and you can bounce away. And there is that whole oxygen situation to deal with after awhile when you are outside/far enough away. Is it a trap? Is it a puzzle? It’s an environmental condition? You can take advantage of it? It’s entirely more integrated in to the entire adventure than a simple effect is. And a lot of this adventure is written that way. These integrated puzzles/traps/situations. 

The setup is very terse handled. You’re in a chapel in the woods for whatever pretext theDM has. There’s a giant bell and if two people ring it then everyone in the chapel get transported to the palace/”dungeon.” It’s the home/waste hope of a sect and is rumored to have all of the future knowledge of the world in it, and thusly and oracle for the party to explore to get that answer that they’ve always wanted about the words for that wand/person/etc.

The appeal to this one, as I mentioned earlier, is the kind of integrated room things. Room two has a statue in a kind of giant bell jar filled with reddish liquid that bubbles some when a living person gets close to it. And the statue has pearl eyes. You all know how much I like something obvious going on that tempts the party to fuck around. Breaking the glass releases the sonic creature inside. And, also, you can remove the statues hand to find a compartment with a potion bottle inside. Three things, in one small vignette. Another room, a kind of tower, exists in a kind of ethereal state that you can’t interact with … until you find things deeper inside the dungeon to help you. Another room has a furnace, a foundry, with the furnace filled with a kind of translucent jelly. When free it makes a beeline for a magic-user to attack, and, otherwise, crawls outside and throws itself down a pit. We need to imagine Sisyphus happy, I guess. It’s doing a really good on the rooms without them appearing to be obvious puzzle/set piece rooms. 

The descriptions are not top notch at all and could be pumped up quite a bit to make them more evocative. A hard edit to reduce word count and add some bolding (non is really present) and other formatting to call attention to things and enable better scanning would be in order also. Creatures such as “irradiated monk” and “Amoebal warrior” don’t really get a decent description either. And I do love a terse but evocative monster description. I want the party feeling something when they show up and appreciate a little nudge from the designer in that direction so I’m not just left out in the open to come up with something totally on my own … that’s what I think I’m paying for anyway.

I’m inclined to No Regert this one based on the rooms and situations in that second adventure alone. The adventuring challenges are interesting and in places deep. Just know that you have more than little work to do to bring the place to life fully, all on your own.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is eleven pages of the zine, but, as Pay What You Want, you can see the entire thing and judge.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499639/the-wizard-s-scroll-ii?1892600