By James Introcaso, Sean Van Damme, Jeff Stevens Self Published Zweihander Basic Tier
Anthla Tremal leads the Cult of Slugidor, the ancient deity of oozes. She brought the cult to the caves five days ago after learning Orthive’s tower was destroyed when the now-deceased wizard tried to summon Slugidor. The cult found the basement of Orthive’s tower connected to the caves and captured and questioned Orthive’s ghost. According to Orthive, the cult needs a “worthy sacrifice” to offer the demon lord. Anthla sends the minor oozes created in the slime to terrorize the people of Norwal, hoping heroes track the monsters back to Slime Cave…12p 6r
This twelve page study in depression describes a cave complex with six rooms and a few slime monsters in it. What do you actually expect to get from a review from a low effort adventure? Joy? Meaning? What even does happiness mean?
So far everything written for Zweihander is crap, right? Or did I miss something?
I guess Zweihander remains the hotness in the mainstream OSR world, with the market continuing to be spammed with adventures. This one was a 5e adventure converted to Zweihander. So, you know, one of the worst things in the world: a conversion. The grim & perilous world of Zweihander is about to meet its greatest foe: the magical ren faire of 5e! Yeah, so, tonally, this thing has issues. It’s the gump drop fairy world of 5e, with candy colored art, rather than the grimdark of Zweihander. Conversion, conversion, conversion. Yes, you can use any system, but, certain systems have certain vibes and a raw conversion, in my experience, seldom manages to convey the vibe of the game. All they are doing is slapping some new stats on monsters, converting skill checks if you’re very lucky, and that’s usually it. Low effort conversion to take advantage of the hotness. LAME
So, a village of 200 people supports a tourist industry to the local ruined tower and caves full of slime. 200 people. Tourist industry. With a spa. And a gift shop. And an inn that serves extra oozy eggs and slime pea soup. Ok, so, I have to admit, I like the food, and the slime spa treatment iea, but only in a farcical “lets push this fucking thing to its fucking limits.” But, this plays with the suspension of disbelief. As does the hook of all of the local militia having being killed by slime oh please might you do something? I’ll maybe give you a magic shield, and, if you bargain more, I’ll throw in a slime bath treatment at the spa. Seriously? This is the grim dark that Zweihander promised me? I’ll all for farce in a game, but there has to be some core of realism. The world the players are in MUST be the straight man. It must SEEM normal, until the party shows up and starts to fuck things up.
So, there’s a cult, because mental illness, anti-science (alchemists) and cult religions are the three acceptable bad guys these days. Not that I have a problem with that, but, its fucking over-used. Everything is a fucking cult these days. Come up with a decent fucking spin on a cult maybe? Remember the throwaway cult in Hoard of Tiamat, and the Hack & Slash remix of chapter 2? THATS a fucking cult. This is just a fucking low effort throwaway. Anyway, the cult is in the caves, blah blah blah, they need to lure heroes to cave to sacrifice them to summon their slime god. Lure. Heroes. Yes, another fucking low effort idea. I can’t come up with any reason why they are in the caves and/or pretext for things so I’m just going to say that they want to lure heroes in and sacrifice them. Jesus. How about a skill gauntlet while you’re at it, just to “test” them? No? That would be effort? Ok. So, cult luring heroes to the cave.
You have to track the oozes that raid the town. I have no idea why you have to do this. It seems obvious that the ruined tower, and slime cave underneath, are the place to go. But, anyway, you track the oozes. If you make your roll you track them to the slime cave. If you fail your roll you track them to the slime cave and get attacked by four of them. So as to encourage mix/max’ing of characters. Inside the cave are six rooms.
Let’s see … “get attacked by an ooze” seems to the major theme here, surprisingly. After fighting oozes in cave one, cultists come rushing out, (their names are in room two, obviously) to pretend to be adventurers and lead the party to the finale trap room. Oh, and a “shimmering ooze” attacks the party, I guess maybe when they cross a slime river? It’s just a one sentence thing. Which, I can appreciate form a terseness standpoint but has absolutely no flavour at all.
Another room has an ochre jelly in it, standing behind a slime river and in front of a chest. The chest is trapped, setting it off pushes you in to the ochre jelly. Why you left an ochre jelly in the room is beyond me, as is why the thing didn’t attack you before you opened the chest.
Oh, there’s a ghost. The cult trapped a ghost in a giant alien-like pod transparent bell jar. He’s a scared ghost though, and doesn’t fight ot help you. Except by prodiving monologue to explain everything that is going on in the adventure. Because that’s the only way to convey information, beyond a journal/diary, in a shitty adventure.
I guess, the only good part of the adventure is that if the party fails then the cutists summon their slime god and it devours the entire world. So, you know, time to switch games. THAT’S a good thing!
Low effort ideas. Low effort interactivity. Conversion job. Nothing to see here, move along!
This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages. Good enough to make a purchasing decision. That, to be clear, should be “NEVER.”
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/368404/Slime-Cave-of-Norwal–ZWEIHANDER?1892600
Apparently, this module answers the question raised by the title of your last review: What Nightmares May Come? This, of course. This trash.
[oh, wait…I missed a review in between this one and WNMC? Ah, well. I am a cretin who laughs at his own wit. What else is new?]
“NEVER.” It seems to me there’s a label to this effect.
Eff all of that. My PC lets the slime god summoning happen, flips the town the bird, and then gates to a world with good adventures.
Mental illness, anti-science, and cults? Just take off the mask (literally and figuratively), woketards. Why not make the cause of everything bad stem from orange man or voter suppression or an insurrection? The left can’t meme, but surely they can write a halfway decent adventure!
lol awesome self-report.
I’ve always thought it’s a knock on from Hollywood complete inability to create proper villains due to not wanting to Offend China and Russia. I mean how much has the US bombed the fuck out of the Middle East and waved dicks at China this decade. But every film has some weird fella with Daddy or abandonment issues as the villain . Take a shot at China they might respect ya for it.
The reason they are so dreaded by our Weinstinian betters is that they represent a huge market and actually don’t tolerate or respect anyone messing with them at all.
Snowflake Venger’s Political Correctness has gone too far!
I love how the left tries to reclaim the word “snowflake”. Lol
Venge, you blew it on 1/6 by not showing up for your god-emperor, and you got upstaged by some doofus from Arizona. You could have been that doofus, acting as the MAGA chaplain.
You could have been a contender, but for your lack of sack.
I’m semi-retired. But you could still become a domestic terrorist, just join BLM or Antifa… why not both?
So, there I am, in the South Pacific. I’ve been here for a couple of weeks. Alcohol, drugs, hot woman half my age, freaky shit going down. Up at 11am sitting on the veranda watching the waves roll in. Pretty much the best life possible. Then my special phone goes off. The one my kids have been instructed to call only if the condo burns down or they die or some shit. “Uh … Dad … ”
I am NOT the fuck pleased.
Handsome Venger got a little off track
Took a year off of college
And he never went back
Now he smokes too much
He’s got a permanent hack
Deals dope out of Denny’s
Keeps a table in the back
He always listens to the ground
Always listens to the ground
So I say
I say welcome, welcome to the bantown
And just in case your Junior High school edge lord mother fucking ass is thinking he can circumvent this ban, I suggest you not push your fucking luck. I’m doing this fucking shit on a sat phone when I should be fucking this woman while shitfaced. I am seriously NOT the fuck pleased right now and if I have to revisit this shit I’m going to go the fuck off.
Sorry I fed the troll, lad. I let my wish to see him have another messy meltdown supersede my responsibility to you as congenial host and consumer advocate.
The catalogue of adventures for Zweihander has been universally dissapointing. I don’t know what causes it. I remember it being hard to create new content for as there are a lot of hard-coded procedures to follow when you are creating monsters but other then that, its essentially WHFRPG/RuneQuest and we know that has at least 3 good adventures.
> its essentially WHFRPG
That’s awfully polite of you, but that right there is your answer. Who wants to write or be associated with a system that has been ripped off through a loophole in copyright? And especially so when that “author” goes around hassling file sharing communities who want nothing to do with his “work” and never share it.
It’s not just the adventures, ZH is a mess of a rule system with endless Contradictions and most complex initiative system ever devised for an RPG whose own author states you should. ZH a bag o’shite
Now come on. Those file sharing communities didn’t share his stuff because he actually had the legal nous to attack them.
Considering many of the people who read this blog are budding creators themselves who believe that people should be paid fair compensation for their work. I think painting said communities as harmless is a stretch insulting.
When ZH came out there was no decent WHFRPG that was not about cards or sharing cooties or whatever in circulation so it made sense at the time. The OSR is rife with retroclones, so an imitation of WHFRPG is hardly an egregious crime. I think Fox’s shenanigans might be a greater cause for trepidation, but you’d think there would be at least a few Warhammer Fantasy fans in its fanbase alongside the traditionally half-witted Eat-the-Rich howler-monkeys.
R.e. file sharing, the link between piracy and loss of income is tenuous. As anon mentions, Pirates tend to buy more then the average consumer and occasional piracy can serve to boost obscure works. I’m not convinced 1 pirated copy translates into 1 missed sale but I might be wrong. That being said, Fox hassles because his stuff got shared.
With the Enemy Within Campaign (up to Power Behind the Throne) and Pavis and Big Rubble written for respectively WFRP and Runequest, the question of whether those systems have any good adventures is on the same level as asking whether Brazil has produced any good footballers. A number of fan competitions were run for WFRP 2e, and some entries were very good: I would recommend any of “The Bigger They Are”, “The Eye of the Tiger” or “The Nine Virtues of Magnus the Pious” as starter adventures. And there are Lamentations adventures which read much like WFRP ones e.g. Forgive Us.
So yes, perhaps a read of the classics might help aspiring Zweihander writers.
I think what causes it is that every adventure they write has to pass a censorship officer to ensure it does not contain anything that might cause offense to anyone.
Are you sure about that? Some content in “A Bright Future Ahead of Her” is not suitable for my table (and is marked with a mature warning); the background in “Escape the Noose” is brutal.
I always defer to CDPR, labor withstanding game industry treatment of workers, core non american ideology matters. Pirates are wales for a reason
Also Venger, I would never say a word. You are passionate and make game things with love.
I will say from a place of good will please dont bring recent bat plague into it, people I love died
Bash left right center woke christian whatever but I got to tell you that.
Its ironic that mask off became a twitter thing before this all happened, I hate the term now
The world is cruel
Heck I even hated it before
loathe?
Fills with existential sadness
lets go with that
That font and the halo effect around it are a bigger red flag then bragging about one’s NFT portfolio. I’m not especially concerned about cover design, but that somehow manages to hit all the wrong notes – both passionless and clumsy.
Stylistically, the cover definitely fails to conjure much of the Warhammer FRPG spirit.
5 Flurks and counting Gustav.
I certainly haven’t read the adventure, and certainly take your words on its quality, but the “village of 200 people supporting a slime-based tourist industry” is a great setting hook. You can do a lot with that premise.
Lol Bryce get it
Sounds like Ian Flemmings crib