By Mark Ahmed, Sean Ahmed, Scot Hoover Axe mental Productions OSRIC Levels 1-4
Hidden below the Black Fen lies the fabled Hoard of Delusion.
This 117 page adventure presents a village, wilderness region, and fifty room four level dungeon. It’s easy to see what it wants to do, but is bogged down with not knowing how to get there. Good ideas marred by poor execution; this needs a full rework to be usable.
This is striving to be like the adventures of Ye Olde Days, the better ones anyway, with a village, a wilderness region, and a multi level dungeon. It’s built around the dungeon, with village and wilderness encounters supporting/proving hints to the dungeon. The village and wilderness have interconnections within thm, and a couple of sub-plotty/other shit going on things going on. There’s even a keep in the village. The idea of a village, wilderness area and dungeon environment supporting each other is great, it’s what adventures of this type SHOULD be doing.
Further, the dungeon environment has some good ideas. New monsters, and classic elements abound. Giant octopus, mimic-like things, a giant eyeball on a ceiling, cracks in the earth that mist flows from, a rope bridge, and brains in jars.
It’s marred, though, by being nigh unusable because of the description style used. And some pretty hairy encounters.
Level 1-4? Great! The area in the ruins, outside of the dungeon has a 5 HD hydra. The first room of the dungeon has a 7HD baddie with a gaze attack. 10HD black pudding? Toss it in there! A 12HD monster? No problem! I get it, OSR, you can run away. But the first room? And the dungeon entrance/ruins outside? This seems more like an issue of scaling.
Further, the treasure is low throughout. It notes that the wilderness areas can be used to gain levels/experience before tacking the dungeon. (You know, the one with a HD hydra outside and 7HD monster in the first room? The one with the gaze attack?) But the loot is low, WAY too low, for anyone to be doing much leveling. Not quite comically low, but it’s hard for me to see a party leveling to three, and two might be difficult if you don’t recover everything available.
The village is described incorrectly, of course, most villages are. The mundanity and backstory of the people, with little assistance on the subplots or a reference on where the party might like to go. Villages are not explored like dungeons. You don’t walk down the street looking in to every shop. You get directions to the General Store and go there. And yet, this is laid out like a typical dungeon.
And then there’s small map issues and other mistakes. No stairs on the map in the first room of the dungeon. Encounters left off of the wilderness maps. Just sloppy stuff.
But, the real issue is the encounter descriptions. As always.
The descriptions can be long. VERY long in cases. Page long rooms. No one can run a fucking page long room well unless the formatting and layout are par excellance. And they ain’t here. It doesn’t matter: village, wilderness, dungeon, the encounters are all done in the same manner and SO. FUCKING. FRUSTRATING. Ignoring, for a moment, the usual tavern descriptions and how everyone on earth feels the need to redescribe it, the rooms are a fucking mess. This room used to be. However frank looted all of the bodies. A paragraph of backstory. Important details mixed in to the backstory descriptions. Conversational, with no knowledge of how to organize a description. The inn has three or four tables and a booth. Great. A wonderful night of D&D was then had. This fucking shit is garbage. This is a bit hyperbolic, but: Does every fucking word of your description contribute to the ACTIVE adventuring environment? No? Then fucking cut it. And then, when writing a description, put the important and obvious shit up at the front of the description.
When the players open the door to a room I’m not taking ten fucking minutes to read the fucking room description to myself before conveying it to them. The fucking phones come out, and rightfully fucking so. I’d be a shitty shitty DM if I did that. But what other choices do you have? Ye Olde Highlighter, going through the adventure highlighting and making margin notes? Seriously? If you have to fucking do that then the adventure was not written well. It’s failing at its core purpose: being useful to the DM as a play aid at the table. Why the fuck is this so hard to grasp? People bitch a blue streak that they don’t use adventures because they are a pain and require prep, note taking and highlighting. They are fuckign right.
What’s all the sadder is that you can tell what this wanted to BE. The village, the wilderness, the dungeon. The interconnectedness. The classic dungeon elements. Iconic rooms that don’t feel like set pieces. But in the end none of that matters, because it’s 117 pages of unusable adventure.
This is $12 at DriveThru. The preview is 80 pages. That’s what I like to see! Take a gander at room one on page 58 of the preview/54 of the book. Good idea. Some useful imagery. One of the better rooms and MIGHT be salvage if all of the other rooms were as good ths this. Maybe.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/302841/Hoard-of-Delusion?1892600
By MalrexThe Merciless MerchantsOSR/1e/2eLevels 4-7 Eerie lights? Strange noises? Ships are sailing blind into the…
By Lance HawvermaleFrog God GamesS&WLevels 3-5 They say the god of nature never forgets. This…
By Brynjar Mar PalssonSelf PublishedShadowdarkLevels 1-3 No amount of coin is worth crossing paths with…
By Christina Mitchell NASA Generic/Universal/Fantasy Levels 7-10? A dark mystery has settled over the city…
By reddJack Self Published EZd6 A complete one-shot adventure for the EZD6 system that sees…
By Ben Gibson Coldlight Press Starfinder Level 3 (ending at level 6) > Why am…
View Comments
Great, hilarious, read... and as usual, spot on. That said, I do think urban environments can be run as crawls. Had enormous fun with the cluster fuck that was Mayfair Games version of City State Of The Invincible Overlord... and when one takes into account crawl mechanics from Vornheim, Last Gasp and Shadel Port, I think we can make a strong case for city aa dungeon. There are multiple methodologies depending upon the campaign (e.g. NPC as dungeon 'room'), but it's all a case of encounter description, ultimately.
Are there any modules that have decent towns?
How about Restenford in L1 The Secret of Bone Hill; Threshold in B10 Night's Dark Terror? Moving to mainly sourcebook materials, the 2E City of Greyhawk Boxed Set is pretty good. If you are willing to try Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay materials, the books on Marienburg and Middenheim are excellent.
Talking new modules with villages/towns that tenfootpole likes, but thanks.
OK, how about Kellerin's Rumble (City of Illanter)? That is more of an outline of how to handle a city adventure. It was a real pity that the City Of Vermilion Kickstarter didn't fund, but it may well be back in expanded form. I'm sure Malrex would be happy to say more.
You're absolutely correct that this is not an adventure you can run on the fly. However, I think a significant number of readers that delve through its 80 page preview will be pleasantly surprised.
Run on the fly is laudable, but not a review standard. If the designer can't be bothered to make something that can be run easily then why should I be bothered to buy and run it, particularly when choosing from among the other options available that COULD be bothered to make it easy for the DM to run?
I'm not saying that it's a particularly good module but, unlike what you directly say "...in the end none of that matters, because it’s 117 pages of unusable adventure," it is certainly usable. The DM would have to sort through much chaff, but there is much to be garnered from this module.
A significant number of people will find it useful [I actually don't] and Axe's preview allows those purchasers to weigh the matter individually. I find this eminently more usable than something like Broodmother, which you creamed all over and which I regret purchasing [based on your recommendation, I may add.]
It is unusable within the framework of Bryce's standards. In that regard, he's being true to his review standards and philosophy. On the other hand, I think you are spot on when you say "A significant number of people will find it useful". yes, they will and that's why everyone reading these reviews has to keep in mind what Bryce wants out of an adventure is not necessarily what others want. For me, there are several of Bryce's Best that I wouldn't touch with a, pardon the pun, ten foot pole. At the other end of that spectrum, there are others that he didn't like that I did.
There is a fair amount of them scattered in the best of:
Penbrookshire, Walstock, Terniel, Slag heap, Marlinko, the Kramer modules and many others have towns and villages.
Reminds of the excellent N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God with its village, temple, wilderness, and dungeon. In N1, the evil cult is what connects the module's components.
N1 and T1 both feature villages that don't suffer from poor execution.
I just finished running Against the Cult of the Reptile God for a second time and I had a blast with it. The players also really enjoyed it.
On first glance the village seems overly described with descriptions for every single building and its inhabitants, but for a village where the players are supposed to talk with the locals to get a picture of what is going on, it does a really good job. The actual descriptions for each farm or house are actually very short and brief, giving a quick impression of its state and only really giving detail about the family member that will be doing the talking with strangers. And usually in one or two sentences you get information how that character reacts to visitors, how he feels about the situation in the village, and what he can tell the players.
I've read the description of the whole village two or three times to familiarize myself with who is who, but after that, running the players through it was a breeze. I never felt so comfortable playing minor NPCs on the fly with no preparation of what I wanted to tell the players before. It really worked brilliantly.
Thanks for taking the time to review this Bryce. Too bad it suffers in the execution.
Some interesting comments above. I agree with Bryce that the entries seem wordy, and that placing the hydra (with shriekers to give the alert) followed by another tough beast isn't a good way to begin a low level dungeon. It would be fine if the hydra could be distracted by a sheep corpse in the former case, or bargaining was possible in the latter encounter. However I do agree there is useful material to be mined.
Melan has reviewed Broken Castle, and intends to do this one as well: they are linked as being attempts to recreate "the Gygaxian campaign" as described in the 1E DMG (see p.91). As he notes, T 1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil is also an example (which I feel loses its focus in the description of the elemental nodes). His blog is available to those wanting something better than my crude summary!
There are reasons why the first encounters are so difficult. You touch on that a bit; Bryce utterly failed to.
It points straight to the heart of Axe's (and a lot of other people's) gaming style/philosophy.
I know many managers who simply do not want employees who can't keep a strictly neat and tidy desktop. Doesn't matter what else that person has to offer. By making this the first priority winnowing point, they may pass over very good candidates for whom a tidy desk is not their style.
But I would disagree that, in this case, the "messy desk" is indicative of an adventure that doesn't provide the meat most DMs prioritize most highly. I think good D&D value is provided here. I'm surprised there was not a single mention of the voluminous art provided throughout the offering; much more than in most RPG products. This wouldn't make up for an unplayable module (which I don't think this is), but it is a delightful distinction to most offerings.This drips with evocative RPG art.
It's weird to have all these posts trying to extol the virtues of a mediocre product. This module is unrunnable as it's written. The walls of useless text makes it a product that is 80% filler with very little creativity that most lay GMs (including myself, and I consider myself both mediocre and lazy) can make up on the fly without doing days worth of homework.
If it's an art book, then market it as such. That's not an adventure. Paizo products knock the socks of most products from an art and production values perspective, which lots of people value.
As with the last review this is a product for a specific scene, one that wants the wall of useless text, as long as it's vaguely medieval mundanity. The same folks that would laud a tenfootpole excoriation of something like UVG or Lorn Song of the Bachelor want to overlook the problems in this shard of OSRIC blandness out of scene loyalty.
"Serious" or "traditional" D&D implies long stone corridors and long texts about former uses because that's like the old days and clumsy mechanics are transform into a proving ground for D&D virtuosity. I don't say this out of malice, everyone likes what their friends produce more then what strangers make.
Unfortunately that scene is pretty much the only one still commenting here.
@Lord Mark: You are not necessarily wrong IMO, but intended malice or not, you do seem angry.
I'm not angry, but let me go on record that Dr. Intombe that death magic spammer is nothing but a conjurer of cheap tricks! Only Lord Mark's vampiric spam offers ancient secrets and power for a low monthly payment.
"Serious” or “traditional” D&D implies long stone corridors and long texts about former uses because that’s like the old days and clumsy mechanics are transform into a proving ground for D&D virtuosity.
Hahahaha! Someone get him the doll. He needs to show us where the "serious/traditional" touched him. Run back to your echo chamber!
This is entirely typical of the sort of gamer so common here - immediately shifting any discussion to child sexual abuse.If it wasn't so tragic it'd be so so creepy. I wonder what the correlation between a fixation on mazes of 10 x10 grey stone rooms into one's middle age and pederasty is?
Booga booga boo! Get back to your Masquerade!
You cut them deep, sir!
/ hat tip
https://youtu.be/azr2ooLlfzQ?t=30
Gus's main problem is not his woke-sickness, which causes him to lash out rabidly at fellow hobbyists for liking 'the wrong DnD' but the bone-deep hypocrisy that underlies it. He has already seperated from the hobby, yet insists on remaining, haranguing and complaining, a wraith twisted by habitual defeat.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this review's main conclusions about this adventure module. I ran an AD&D/OSRIC session at Winter War 45 based on the pre-published manuscript of the Hoard of Delusion. I was able to easily carve out the Tower of Bones section as a single course for my 4-hr session. The dungeon approach/dungeon proper played very well, although a 6-hr session would've been more appropriate. The portion of the module I ran was highly playable and extremely well designed, particularly in the following respect: the dungeon design expertly balanced the agency of a non-linear design with a scope that allowed for both rewarding AND very fast-paced play. For people that really play the game, you'll see and appreciate what I mean. It was the right balance of leveraging the AD&D lexicon with a twist and supplementing it with the completely new that still felt in harmony with the old. I will add, this is probably the best illustrated adventure module I've seen for people that are actually intending to play the adventures they own. The illustrations were a fun and useful enhancement to play. The art was unique in its union of a) high quality, b) spirit of the game, and c) utility like no other module I've seen.
I'll add I don't really consider this an OSR module. They're something in the approach, here, that's so veteran and engrained in playability. It's clear that this product is not replicating an older style, it is a personalized version of that style. For veterans of the Gygaxian style or for those new to it that want it in a current product, Hoard of Delusion would be one of my top recommendations.