Signed in Ale, Sealed in Wax

By Michael J. Bojdys
GrantWerk
OSE
Level 1

You wake in a locked cellar, heads pounding, contract signed in spilled ale. A dagger’s gone missing. A debt must be paid. And something in the dark wants more than gold.

This 32 page adventure uses three pages to describe six rooms in an underground smugglers den. I guess it’s inoffensive. There’s a compliment for you. How does “meh. whatever” sound as a puff quote to list on the back cover?

I can’t stand what my life has become. Someone, somewhere, thought this was a good idea. An adventure that uses three pages out of 32. Or, perhaps, if we are generous with the page count, seven pages out of 32? But, certainly, only six rooms and only three pages to describe those six rooms. Pre gens, house rules, appendices, backstory, game world, all thrown in. I do this page count to room key comparison for one specific reason: to show what a farce these types of adventures are. It’s hard to argue that this ratio is inherently wrong, (or that anything is or is not wrong or right) but it’s certainly clear that MANY an adventure would have benefited by a much strong focus on the ACTUAL adventure and less docs on the supporting material. When these page counts get to fucking lopsided its clear that the designer doesn’t know wat they are doing and didn’t really want to write an adventure; they wanted to write their house rules and setting. 

But on to this particular set of trouble. So, yeah, you wake up in the dungeon. I guess you signed a contract drunk in a bar last night and agreed to go get a dagger in this smugglers lair. While I’m not a fan of these sorts of forced scenarios in which you have no agency, they are slightly less odious when they are very first adventure for a campaign. Setting up things to come, don’t you know. I still fucking hate them and wish different paths were chosen for the framing. Forcing the players in to, say, a desert island with limited water heat stroke rules for wearing armor feels more abusive to me then the agreed lie that this is what we are doing tonight to play D&D and outfitting out party for an expedition to the very same locale with the same issues. But, whatever, minor issue.

Ok, the dungeon has a zombie in it. Got it? That’s the only keyed encounter with a creature. It also has a ghost that wanders around and attacks you. Every turn there is a 50% chance that the ghost moves one room closer to the party from its random starting location. 2HD so we’re looking at a 9 to turn it. And you’re gonna need a magic weapon to hurt it. And there’s one magic weapon in the adventure, the +1 Dagger you were sent to get. I wonder if this adventure was playtested?

The background information for the DM is a mess. It’s a combination of intro for the players and their characters and a lot of backstory that is irrelevant to the game at the table. So you need to dig out things to tell the party from the larger info dump of useless trivia. Not the strongest start.

Rooms are … ok? Not ok? I mean, I’m gonna bitch. They aren’t done right. But, you can run them. Basically, each room is going to take up about a column. You’ll get quite the short description of the room before it moves on to a longer section telling us information that the map tells us: where the exist go. I’m glad to see that this important duplicative information takes up more column space than the room description. Then, running on from the exist information we will get some follow up on things in the room the party might examine, the contents of a chest or something. This is likely to take up half the column. You can follow it well, except for the contents kind of running on from the exits. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. 

The descriptions are fine. Not awfully inspiring but more than just facts. The designer has clearly tried to spice them up with adjectives and adverbs, and sometimes this runs in to being purple. “The air hangs cold.” Uh huh. I get what the designer is trying to do, and their heart is in the right place, there are just better ways. Like showing instead of telling. You can see your breathe. There’s a stillness. … Oh, wow, the air hangs cold, eek!

There’s not much in the way of interactivity. Search for a secret door. Stab the zombie and ghost. Jump over some sewage. It’s six fucking rooms. 

I’m annoyed that it took 32 pages to present these six rooms. This is just a throw away adventure attached to the rest of the campaign content, sold as an adventure. That annoys me. The actual adventure is nothing special. Id’ say it’s a typical six room lair, which means no room for anything to happen. It is written just slightly better than most of those, but that’s still the bottom of the adventure heap. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you the confused intro and the ghost. No rooms. Then again, if it showed you a room page then you’d see half the actual adventure … poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527981/signed-in-ale-sealed-in-wax?1892600