By Thomas Denmark Night owl Publishing Labyrinth Lord Levels 4-7
The frozen lands are dominated by Blurut of the Crepuscular Claw and he has laid plans to expand his reign and dominate the realms. Can the adventurers infiltrate his lair and thwart Blurut’s plans before he unleashes his final assault?
This 24 page adventure uses six single-column pages to describe a sixteen room linear set of caves at the bottom of a rift. Stefan says: This adventure has it all! Single column, low content to page count ration, linear, & disorganized and long writing.
This is a stunt dungeon. There’s this twitter bit, evidently, that creates rando dungeons. The designer took that and then augmented it in to a dungeon. I have no idea what kind of job the twitter bot does. I’m a big fan of “using inspiration” to create something. I find that “anything is possible!” generally results in a THX mindlock for me. Give me just a little bit to start from and I can create connections and expand content seemingly at ease and on demand. I’ve experimented with this a bit in the past and thus was interested to see how someone else does it.
Meh.
Long introduction describes a slightly generic northlands. Long appendices detailing monster stats and a couple of ideas for adding to the dungeon. Single column throughout in a decent font size, hence the high page count and low content count.
The actual dungeon is linear. There’s a connecting passage from room two to room sixteen, the last room, but it’s filled with rubble and you can’t dig it out, it keeps collapsing. So why is it there? I don’t know. This is a cave system map, fully linear with just a couple of off shoots. There’s little extra detail, elevation changes, of anything else in it. It is, essentially, a linear set of dungeon rooms with some yeti’s and ice. I would have wished for some elevation stuff, but, maybe that’s a feature of the bot? Oh, no, I just looked it up. It creates a name, that’s it. Hmmm. I now regret my choices.
The rooms are full of history text that add nothing to the adventure. “This room was once a …” “This room was as far as they … “
Combine this with the conversations style and if/then’s. “After the fight, if you dig through the rubble …”
Combine this with boring word choices and abstracted descriptions. “There is a large block …” “Mysterious runes are carved …”
Combine this with a lot of “it seems to be …”
And then add A LOT of text for the most of encounters, like some wolverines attacking. Or a room with a ghost.
There’s just not much going on here. The design is linear. The rooms not very interesting. The rooms not described very interestingly. What there is is either abstracted generalisms or LONG abstracted conversational writing. It doesn’t feel like much of an effort was made at all. Maybe there was. But it doesn’t feel like it.
There is no hope. The bread and circuses are over. All that’s left is the mundanity.
This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages and shows you nothing of the dungeon, so it’s a bad preview.
$3.00 for a randomly-generates dungeon? To think of the dozens of dollars I could have made instead of offering my modules free at DF.
The title alone is worth $1.50.
The best thing about it would appear to be the cover and the TPK module numbering convention.
As a creature of the night and well aware of the limitations that being a “nocturnal claw” presents I can’t say I’m too worried about this “Crepuscular Claw” fellow … just from a time management perspective it’s really got to limit “claw time”, though perhaps he’s an ocelot – they are well known to be crepuscular.
Lighting related claw quandary though – it sounds like a sort of lazy 5E description style migrating to Lab Lord. I have this suspicion that there’s a species of designer that sees vague pedestrian word choice as a sort of house style. Much in the same way that a classic design might slip into Gygaxian purple prose – “eldritch sigils writhe across the basalt above the profane mark of Kas” this design school feels ” carved mysterious runes” are both evocative and sort of comforting. Clearly this author has better words – that Crepuscular rise it’s head again (and likely returns to napping as it’s unlikely to be dusk or dawn) – but finds the mundane correct for keying adventures.
How did this happen? One of the joys of early D&D books is the batshit autodidact vocabulary in them, it’s sad to see that die – alone – in a “100′ x 100′ carved stone chamber that was once the nursery of the lost dwarven mine, formerly bright with murals and filled with toys and giant beer stein cradle, including the one that Brewbreath Hammerface Thane King of the renowned Hammer Clan tumbled from to take the first steps on his lifelong struggle against [color + weapon] Goblin Clan in the ancient year of the [prophectic and umemorable name], but which is now empty, perhaps power-washed or sandblasted free of noteworthy objects or decoration, certainly so empty that no trace of anything remains which adventurers might interact with on the way to their next encounter.”
Brilliant!
*golf clap*
“I have this suspicion that there’s a species of designer that sees vague pedestrian word choice as a sort of house style.”
I can’t bow low enough.
All your module are belong to us.