By Taron Pounds
Land of the Blind
OSR/Vagabond
Levels 6-10
An explosion rocks a nearby mountain range. Once the dust clears, two twisted and screaming towers remain: one black and one white. Ominous seals appear on the moon and stars. A wicked smile spreads across the eye-spotted black tower’s upper story, capped by a witch hat-like roof. Its upper and lower floors appear to be separated, with arcs of blue lightning emanating from its center. The white tower is a bastille of pale stone, with an otherworldly blue fire burning at its top. Windows of stained glass bend without breaking along the white tower’s exterior, and eyes of madness follow those who approach the black. A flock of winged serpents fly around these profanities of architecture. No one knows where these towers came from, and what has corrupted the celestial bodies. It is up to the heroes to uncover the mystery to stop a cataclysm that has been unfolding for centuries in secret.
This 44 page dungeon presents two towers with about nineteen rooms between them. It’s a funhouse dungeon in which the world ends. That’s fun! Also, you don’t actually need to do anything here but go to the top floor and pull a lever. That’s fun! I don’t see a reason to go inside.
The gods have trapped one of their own in a magic prison. Dude wants out and finally is about to break free, thanks to his two followers, each of whom built a tower. You don’t know any of this. You’ve just got some generic rando hooks that come down to “you see these two weird towers.” I hope you go inside, because if you don’t then the world ends. That’s rough. Anyway, you go inside and find a funhouse dungeon, the two towers connected to each other with some magic pathways and normal stairs and so on. Turns out that if “the steamworks” is functioning inside the tower, and someone has had their soul aged in the aging room, then if you pull the level at the top of one of the towers then the trapped god will go back to jail. There’s a friendly phoenix, powering the steamworks through a portal to the elemental plane of water, that will tell you all of this who is at the top of the other tower. Anyway, so, the steamworks already works. And someone has already given their soul to the aging room. So, just pull the level in the other tower.
To get there you will need to … ignore everything. Basically. Whatever is in the room, just ignore it and go up the stairs or through a door. Yeah! You’ve overcome that challenge. I’m not sure anything really attacks you in this unless you go fucking with shit. Oh, wait, hang on, there’s a death knight. “Motionless at first, but disappears if vision on him breaks and he then stalks the party.” I don’t know what the whole “disappears and then stalks” thing is about. I guess that’s for the DM to handle. So, I guess you gotta fight him? I THINK that’s the only required combat. Also, “required” is a loose word; I think you can make your way through the tower without having to go in to the throne room where he sits.
Let’s double check my theory. Room one, walk backwards down a mirror hall. No consequences for not doing that. Room two, touch nothing and go up the stairs. No consequences for not doing that. Room three, go up the stairs and don’t touch the floating books. Room four, ignore the tree and go through one of the doors. Room five ignore everything. Room six, go through a door. Room seven, go up the stairs. Room eight, go up the stairs. Room nine, go up the stairs. Room ten, meet the phoenix. That’s one full tower and half the rooms. Congrats. The second tower, to my recollection, is more of the same.
But, hey, you can still make the world end. Every time you use a spell or a magic item or go through a magic portal in the tower then the DM rolls a die. The third time they roll a one the dude breaks free and immediately destroys the universe. You get a warning though, you hear an owl screeching, which, obviously, means the universe is going to end if you cast another spell. This mechanic also ties in to a fun “weird things happen!” table, with entries like “Unluckiest PC must save or their limbs become accordions for 1 Minute.” or some blobs teleport in, loudly fart, and then teleport out again. Fun! … Humor, gentle readers, is highly subjective and doesn’t translate well.
We lead off with three paragraphs of italics read-aloud. We get read-aloud like “This room appears to have been built to keep a phoenix in a consecrated prison.” Appears to be. And how the fuck do we know it’s a prison? Or that it’s consecrated? It’s just garbage. In one room you find some masks. “Each is Cursed and Sentient, but only speaks while worn.” We’re referred to a table telling us what they do. “The wearer fails Checks against surprise.” Dazzling. Sublime. You didn’t even bother to give the mask a name or a personality or anything else.
I’m not a fan of the zany funhouse, but this isn’t that. I’m also not a fan of the museum trip, and this is more in that vein. Just don’t touch anything and look at the scenery and you’ll be fine. But, also, the whole “lets nerf the party” and “oops! The world ended! Guess you didn’t figure out that was going on!” is VERY time. You need to communicate that the party is racing against time or else it’s not a race against time. It just ends up being the wandering damage table and rocks fall, everyone dies. Weird that’s not fun. And if you need to nerf the party then you wrote the adventure for the wrong level range.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you nothing of import. Poor preview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561060/the-rook-the-crook?1892600
>”Levels 6-10″
Oh?
>”And if you need to nerf the party then you wrote the adventure for the wrong level range.”
Dang it. 🙁
I read good advice somewhere once—very likely here—not to punish players for doing the “OSR thing.”
At the same time, that old saying, “Don’t touch anything until you’re at least level 3,” is good advice to warn against bad adventures.
It sounds like the author needed to add at least one necessity for advancement (NOT a “skill check”). Sometimes called a “plot coupon.” For example, a red key to a locked red door.
He already had the setup for one, too. The machine needs a soul to work. There’s a (presumably Evil) death knight, so we don’t have to look far for a probable candidate.
Cool looking cover. Too bad there’s no worthwhile preview (e.g., a page showing map and map key, including encounters).
Thanks for the review!
The opening paragraph for this one is clearly AI generated:
‘A wicked smile spreads across the eye-spotted black tower’s upper story, capped by a witch hat-like roof. Its upper and lower floors appear to be separated, with arcs of blue lightning emanating from its center.
The white tower is a bastille of pale stone, with an otherworldly blue fire burning at its top. Windows of stained glass bend without breaking along the white tower’s exterior, and eyes of madness follow those who approach the black. A flock of winged serpents fly around these profanities of architecture.’
It’s written from a ‘naive’ perspective, as if you asked a person (or an AI) to describe an image without any context, rather than an author (who presumably knows whether the black tower has separated or only ‘appears to have’). If you look for it, you’ll find this in a lot of slop-posting online.
Wouldn’t have cared, but they have a ‘Human Made’ logo in the preview and a spiel about their commitment to human art. 30 seconds searching found another adventure of theirs which has the most obviously AI-generated map of all time (this one – https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555727/wet-dreams), also “””Human Made””””. Reported both to DriveThru.
I agree about the text but I’m much less sure about that map. I can see what you mean about the style but the credited cartographers are pretty well known artists. The map initially looks like nonsense but if you look closely it does all tie together in a way that I think AI slop struggles to achieve.
I can see it’s credited to Skullfungus, who, to be fair, I hadn’t heard of before, but even compared to some other examples of their work it seems . . . loose?
Like, area 12 says it has ‘Bottles piled on a workbench’, which is not what’s depicted in the art (looks like a bench covered in melting wax, or coral?), and area 8’s one defining feature is ‘the spillway’, which isn’t depicted on the map at all (and if it’s meant to be above it, doesn’t seem to line up with all the areas which look to be directly above it (9-13) – and shouldn’t it also be much further away, if it’s at the bottom of a whirlpool presumably off the coast of the island?
The description of the tower at 4, too, doesn’t seem to make sense – it’s supposed to be half-sunken into the ground, with a door in the beacon leading down, but the map depicts it as being in the middle of a big hole without any means to reach the beacon . . . and where, physically, is the pool in 17? You go into the whirlpool, go to the bottom of the ocean, get sucked into 8, go down through the grate to 16, then down the ramp, come out into an ‘iridescent pool’ . . . where? Under the sea? And actually, if the spillway/whirlpool is above 8, why doesn’t the ocean just continually gush through into 17?
Sorry, got carried away – I really wanted to do my due diligence, but the more I read of that the less sense it made. I’ll more than admit I’m wrong if it is just a stylistic thing by Skullfungus – genuinely – but it almost feels as if the superficial ‘togetherness’ of it (stairs to the right places etc.) conceals a much deeper nonsense, which still reads very AI to me.
Sorry, clicked the wrong button and replied as a separate post, below.
I wonder which one of you AI witchhunters will be the first to be sued for libel?
Taron is extremely anti-AI, there’s no way he would use it for any part of these. He’s just extremely tradbrain and has spent years in the 5e ecosystem where this kind of writing is seen as good, actually.
I don’t know, it’s weird – the cover is obviously hand drawn (and very nice), there’s a nice bit of photobashed art of the lighthouse, the map of the ship is perfectly fine, the writing seems alright (technically), it’s just *this map*.
I did have a quick look round their catalogue and saw Vagabond etc., none of which seems to have anything untoward in. But then, you’d think that level of professionalism (Vagabond is Mithral I think?) would mean, if these were all human mistakes, they’d get caught earlier. Just from another quick once-over:
– The rooms below the lighthouse are supposed to be its base, but they aren’t rounded like the top is (or like is depicted in the photo art)? The perspective between them and the top is a bit jarring too.
– The ladders beneath it seem . . . off. The rock is floating off the ground (the trap door is supposed to be under it), but the ladders look just long enough to reach up the height of the rock itself, not whatever additional height it has off the ground. Plus, the middle ladder is drawn the smallest despite being closest to the viewer, and the left ladder is shorter than the others despite them all (theoretically) being the same height/length.
– In the cave in 17, the back wall curves around normally until it passes behind the mast of the ship, then it seems to follow the contours of the grate room and the corridor above it, which doesn’t make any sense as they’re in the foreground. That sort of ‘echoing’ of close but unrelated elements is another common AI tell.
Like I said, I don’t know how it happened – it would be weird to make all this other obviously human art but then use an AI for literally the most important thing in the adventure – but the strange details are difficult to explain away when there are so many of them.
I’ll leave it there – I don’t want this to be a witch hunt, especially if I’m wrong. I’ve reported it, I’ve said why, and I’ll stand by whatever decision DriveThru wants to make with it.
What probably happened is either miscommunication or the map author just didn’t read properly. I have had artists who don’t read the brief before. Shit happens.
So the author of the adventure doesn’t usually also draw a map? Even a half-assed map, just so they can visualize where each location is relative to the others, and which is then passed on to a graphic artist or cartographer to be made pretty?
I’m asking in all honesty. I often start with a map and then imagine what the rooms contain and how they serve their residents when I start designing an adventure. Granted, this is just for my own use at the table (which is really just Owlbear Rodeo and Discord since Covid).
I do think those are valid criticisms but I’d put them all down to human sloppiness rather than AI slop. It’s really consistent in style with the work SF has been doing for years, just perhaps with a bit less care taken.
Love your work btw. The professionalism is incredible. I’m currently tempted to send my open table game back in time via the Sision Tower to Kurhan of the Spear. Or possibly making Kurhan a neighbouring region to Khosura.
As mentioned above, it’s strange. I’m definitely not a professional, firmly an enthusiastic amateur, and I’ve made so many mistakes in making maps and making keys which map to them (mixing up East and West is basically a hobby at this point), but the ones here feel different in a way which is difficult to articulate. I don’t think you could run it without basically remapping and rekeying it, but given that the author is clearly successful and has other products which don’t have that problem I’m not sure how it happened.
Anyway, positivity – thank you, I’d be curious to hear how an open table/West Marches game turns out, it’s something I’ve tried to keep in mind but haven’t been able to test. If you don’t go down the time-travel route, I’m actually putting out an introductory adventure soon which has the party following a caravan to Kurhan, explaining why they’re there and letting them get an idea of the setting/factions etc. before being let loose. It’s launching alongside the print versions of Lions, so either end of this week or early next depending on how fast Royal Mail gets the (hopefully final) proofs to me.