The Harrowing
By Monte Cook
D&D
Level 15
While wandering in the forest you see some dead birds. Following them leads to a cave complex, and then a gate to the demonweb. This is quite a long adventure, taking up 44 of this issues 120 pages. It is, essentially, one long hack-fest. Enter room. Fight monster. Go to next room. The maps for the two areas (the caves and demonweb) have some interesting features, with ceiling and floor entrances and exits, but probably not enough to recommend them. Fight some drow. Fight some Slaad. Fight some drow who are fighting some slaad. A special prize for Monte: I believe this is the first example, in Dungeon anyway, of the shitty linear 3e adventure. Some people really like this one. You should not play D&D with those people.
Demonclaw
By Peter R. Hopkins
D&D
Level 5
This may be the dictionary definition of Wall of Text. It goes on and on, paragraph after paragraph, with little to save the poor DM from misery. It features such classics as:
“2. Closets. These rooms are identical. Each has several hooks affixed to interior walls. Just inside the doorway sits a low shelf designed to hold boots and shoes. An everburning torch is mounted to the wall opposite the door. Both chambers are empty.”
Which is a fine description of a boring closet. It adds nothing and nor do many of the room descriptions. Fourteen rooms of a wizard’s tower. It provides stats for a dead body on the floor, that will not come back to life in any way during this boring snoozefest. There’s nothing in this wizard’s tower that feels remotely wizard like. 🙁
The Dying of the Light
By Chris Doyle
D&D
Level 10
Nice flavor to the complication/premise in this. Seven vampires live in a castle. You have from Sunup to Sundown to kill them all. At Sundown they awake and exact their revenge, for the parties raid, on the small town nearby. The parties hook arrives by a winged cat with an arrow in its ass … a nice addition. It’s got good general DM advice, a nice order of battle for how the castle reacts to incursions as well as nice overview sections to get oriented to things. A good map supports the adventure, giving the party non-linear opportunities. Good “classics” like the well having a trap door at the bottom, and so on. Also, winged owlbears and a giant undead dinosaur in the lake in front of the castle. This is a great example of an otherwise good adventure being ruined by form. The ideas are wonderful, but marred by the slavish devotion to rigor in description. Boring read-aloud unrelated to the interesting things in the room. Wordy DM text. Full creature stats and longish references to where in the DMG to find data … repeated. I like this adventure a lot, but it needs a good photocopy and highlight, or a strong rewrite to focus the DM on the important stuff. Fun.
Dungeon of the Fire Opal
By Jonathan Tweet
D&D
Level 10
Tweet is probably an ok DM. He’s not a good writer. This is the 3e example dungeon, which is also the 1e example dungeon. You know, the one with the scroll in the water skeleton and the platform secret door? Tweet is prolific with advice in this. Some advice is good. It’s general theme might be “don’t let the rules constrain you.” Being generous with clues, how to let the party find the choke point secret door, warning that a dangerous encounter is up ahead, and so on. He also gives this sort of advice in some of the rooms, and it’s here that things go a bit south; it gets tedious. It turns it into almost a n00b dungeon, for a DM that’s never played D&D before. In that respect it MIGHT be fine, but it also falls in the old trap of tedious text. Some of the rooms are QUITE long while most contain boring read-aloud and more boring DM text, especially of the “what this room used to be that now no longer has relation to the adventure” kind of description. Trivia not useful for the DM running the adventure. It’s also pretty boring. “Once this room was a well stocked larder …” Ok hooks and a pretext of rumors are appreciated, but in the end it’s just a boring dungeon with not much interesting going on.
Armistice
By Peter Vinogradov
D&D
Level 7
More of a sandbox adventure. A valley is presented along with the various enemy commanders who make up the small companies present. They are at war with each other. There are a couple of (generic) villages in the valley, non-aligned. There are some werewolves running amok, freed by a rogue commander on one side. The party comes into this mess after being hired, outside the valley, but the two lords the troops report to. They have made peace and need someone to go tell their troops. Thus the adventure involves wandering the valley to find the various troops/commanders and convincing them the war is over. And dealing with the werewolf threat making things harder. It’s got some good high-level window dressing, like the daughter of one lord being married to another to seal the peace, and women talking about looking forward to their husbands return, and so on. After a read-through to get an overview then most of the adventure boils down to just the DM’s map and a couple of reference pages, kindly provided for the DM. The adventure could have used a few more … specifics? Ideas? about werewolf tactics/flavor and maybe even soldier flavor. That would have pushed this one over the top into Strong Recommend territory. Decent premise, good reference material, some bits of flavor. An ok adventure setup that will unfold as the party wills.
A special prize for Monte: I believe this is the first example, in Dungeon anyway, of the shitty linear 3e adventure. Some people really like this one. You should not play D&D with those people.
You really need to work on stating your opinions more directly.
😉
I know the shit about “this room used to be blugh” drives you bats, but it wouldn’t be so bad if there was stuff where the players could say, for example, “Oh, a larder! Ah, salt! Now we can fight those damn slug men down on Level Three!” but apparently that’s too much to ask.
Absolutely, that should be fine. If the name of the room was “Well stocked Larder” then the DM can say “Yup, it’s got salt.” You don’t need to TELL the DM what’s in a well stocked larder, any more than you need to, say, describe a normal bedroom.
(You might mention the salt in the DM text, speifically, if there ARE slugs in the lower level and you intend that. But you dont NEED to. Players see slugs, remember larder, ask DM is there’s salt, they say yes.)
Real world Larders (even well stocked) can have different ingredients because of climate and storage possibilities. If the adventure was built around using salted herring as throwing daggers to kill the slug men, that would lead to slight problems since players would have had to have lived in Norway to figure it out. A little extra detail to get all the players and other DMs on the same page is quite helpful.
That is different from great amounts of back story that has no impact on the current play. If 500 years ago the adventure location was exciting, I would prefer the adventure to be set back then instead of having hints of awesome buried under a boring slog.
Hmmmm, now I’m thinking about statting up Slug Men.