By John Josten Board Enterprises OSR? Ha! That's a joke! It's actually Legend Quest Level ?
A new legend is making its way around the city. Some failed adventurers are claiming that they have seen an emerald that is the size of a halfling’s chest. Not just some raw rock, but a cut, jewelry grade emerald. A gem destined to be the stuff of legends. And the guy who saw it is willing to show anyone interested the way, as long as they agree to try and save his buddy who got left behind. Seems like good pay! Millions in gem wealth just to rescue somebody. No adventurer is going to turn that down! But it’s time to move. You can’t wait for some other party to get there first. Of course, it will be dangerous, but the pay day on this one is more than you have ever received before.
I hate life. Seriously. I was doing great. I was! The trauma of the best left behind I was excited to be exploring new worlds. I was even gonna snag an Echoes to review! But, then, it came. And I realized, you can never really escape from the trauma of your past. You can, perhaps, learn to control it. Manage it. Lessen it to a degree. But it’s still there. My Dungeon Magazine reviews. The insanity of the adventure design and writing that ent in to them. I had left it behind. And then THIS thing showed up via a request …
This 62 page adventure uses thirtish pages to describe thirty four rooms in a doll house. It is a prime example of why the early 90’s sucked for D&D. It is long winded and pretentious to a degree I don’t think I’ve experienced since my Dungeon reviews. Which makes sense since this is from 1994.
I have no real idea what this is meant to be. There’s a separate, seventeen page booklet for the players, to get them familiar with the game world. Which is just a D&D world reskinned with different names. And then then entire thing is laid out like its a newsletter? Here’s some places in the world. Here’s an article on why Shadowrun sucks. Here’s one on Aliens in fantasy worlds. I just do NOT get this at all. Most of this is NOT an adventure, but some zine type thing, even though the title and DriveThru entry seems to indicate that it’s primarily an adventure. Seventeen pages to get the players ready tof the game world … as if I need to continue this review …
This is, I’m going to bet, an exact replica of the adventure from 1994. Not an update. And you know this because of how terrible it is. Basically, some drow somewhere make a dollhouse for a kid. Kid grows up and put it on a table outside the dungeon entrance and if you touch the key on the table you get transported in to the dollhouse. This all takes multiple pages to explain, since it must go in to minute detail on how this works and how the players can’t destroy the dollhouse, fuck with the magic key that transports them inside, etc. God forbid they be allowed to colour outside the lines.
We are told, of course, that “The first thing the game master must do is to make sure that every player has a character.” I am amazed and delighted. My every whim catered to. Well, it didn’t tell me when to breathe, so … you know, I almost died.
Read-aloud is in italics. Which is hard to read in extended lengths. It can, frequently and not unusually, take three or four PARAGRAPHS to contain the read-aloud for a single room. A normal-ish room. It’s fucking nuts. It goes on and on and on. With nothing in particular.
DM text can be just as bad. The first room is 1.5 pages long. A column is not unusual and typical. It takes a column for a hallway with some animated suits of armour in it. A spider in a kitchen takes a column.
“This room contains a spider hanging near the ceiling. The spider is hidden from view by the webs. While large (about 2” plus legs), this is a normal spider. It was not shrunk upon entering the house and appears to be about 30” in diameter plus legs. Milendez is highly entertained by this spider and makes sure it gets enough to eat.
The spider is a poisonous web spinner. It has filled this room with webs but has not spun outside of here. It can move normally within its webs, but humanoids will be forced to chop their way through the webs. The webs will burn slowly (one cubic foot per turn) if exposed to an open flame but will not remain lit if the flame is removed. The webs can be cut, but each strand will take six points of slashing damage or twelve points of bludgeoning. The spider will dart out, bite, and dart back to cover. Anyone attempting to follow the spider (through the webs) must succeed in a Strength task or be caught in the webs. The spider will withdraw to the far corner if the party begins to cause severe damage to the web’s structure. It will continue to attack from here, but it will also be trying to hide. [stats]
The seemingly best maneuver here would be to use something to burn the webs from a distance, perhaps a torch tied to a long pole. Throwing oil might help clear a good sized space, but not enough to avoid the spider’s speedy attacks. Even if all the webs can be burned out while the spider is in the room, the spider is unlikely to take additional damage from being in her own burning webs. If there is any opportunity for her to avoid being burned along with her
own webs, she will use it. A fireball should clear the webs, but therefore would only do normal damage to her.”
Jesus Fuck man, seriously?
The final insult is the treasure table. For each item found it lists the value class , it’s grade, its cost for scrap, resale, cost at the source and cost in the city. For every bit of treasure. I hate mu fucking life.
All of this for a fucking dollhouse. That isn’t even that great! A few toy soldier encounters and the like. Nothing really too out there or overly fun. Nothing to play people against each other. Nothing really dynamic. No updates AT ALL, I’m guessing, over the original 1994 adventure.
Life is pain and trauma lives forever.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see that Shadowrun article. Joy.
The horror.
The horror.
Dungeon Age! Kelsey Dionne!
Dungeon has the long form witches one
Amd dwarves megadungeon from barrow guy
HOPE EXISITS BALANCE IT OUT MA GUY
I love how if it sucks you say it if the unknowns get to you with bad space it the established maybe goods
Like Gabor! He will ease your pain
Hungarian anus
Sub-literate to an extreme degree…Troika fan maybe? Must remember to investigate further.
Kent is that you?
omfg. you just reminded me that YDIS exists. have to go see if anything is going on over there.
thanks, bruh.
I do enjoy adventure s that transport the PCs to odd little pocket universes, and a “Honey I Shrunk the Murder-hobos” is a fun bit (hard on treasure though when 1 GP weighs the equivalent of an elephant). Still I hated those 90’s adventures as well – at some point one has to draw a line between describing, simulating and controlling everything via the key and acknowledging that this is a game. About wizards and dragons and other fantastical nonsense. This sounds like 1/2 the problem: 90’s naval gazing with the other half being a perverse need to keep everything justified within the oddly exacting limits of boring fantasy – that booklet damn. I’m gonna say the spider kitchen should be more like:
“DOLL HOUSE KITCHEN (DARK, **COLOSSAL SPIDER**, WEBS) A **COLOSSAL SPIDER** lurks in the cable thick webs that choke this room. The beast is a simple animal but will dart down from ambush, bite and retreat to its webs near the ceiling 20’ above while it’s poison works. The webs require magical flame to burn, limit movement to 10’ per round, and impede AC and Attack by 2. Beneath the gummy strands the room contains the limited and unnaturally proportioned equipment and utensils of a rich child’s conception of a kitchen whittled, folded and painted from trash: club sized wooden spoons painted silver, a jagged edged knife of snipped foil, rickety pasteboard counters, matchstick legged chairs, and a single cauldron sized to cook for an army and cast of 6” thick tin that hangs in a flu-less fireplace of painted brick.”
Dungeon Mag flashbacks for sure, but I still have fondness for the Elephant Graveyard (you died of malaria) adventure and the Spelljammer space dragon sargasso one.
Fascinating. You should consider starting a blog where you can post these rewritings. The memetic primers are nonsense. Perhaps we can paint tiny pictures next to each entry to ‘improve recall.’
“The beast is a simple animal but will dart down from ambush, bite and retreat to its webs near the ceiling 20’ above while it’s poison works.”
Spiders are neither animals, nor beasts. The caveat while it’s poison works is superfluous.
>The creature surprises on a 1-3 and will swoop down, bite and retreat to the ceiling 20′ in a single round if it wins initiative.
“Beneath the gummy strands the room contains the limited and unnaturally proportioned equipment and utensils of a rich child’s conception of a kitchen whittled, folded and painted from trash: club sized wooden spoons painted silver, a jagged edged knife of snipped foil, rickety pasteboard counters, matchstick legged chairs, and a single cauldron sized to cook for an army and cast of 6” thick tin that hangs in a flu-less fireplace of painted brick.”
Run on sentence, flowery, too many adjectives. We are using memetic primers like Spider and Dark because we can’t expect the reader to remember the contents of an important room that but we expect them to quickly absorb entire paragraphs of flowery language during play?
“Beneath the gummy strands the room contains the unnaturally proportioned utensils of a rich child’s conception of a kitchen; club sized wooden spoons painted silver, a jagged-edged knife of snipped foil, rickety pasteboard counters and matchstick-legged chairs. A large 6” thick tin cauldron hangs in a flu-less fireplace of painted brick.”
And then you hide the treasure somewhere properly, like under a loose brick in the hearth.
Animal: “any of a group of multicellular eukaryotic organisms”
They are in fact animals.
In his inexplicable hatred for Gus L., the Prince tends to forget his biology, his manners, and his cool.
To post publically is to invite feedback. If one is ill-equipped to handle feedback one should not post in a public forum.
What law of biology applies to a giant spider that creates webs that no normal flame can touch? It can charitably be called an animal, its no shakespeare.
High intelligence allows you to discern that his posts are rubbish. Low wisdom compels you to constantly point it out publicly.
oooh, shades of Gygax. was it in the DMG or DDG where he pointed out that he had the Intelligence to realize that smoking tobacco was bad for his health but he didn’t have the Wisdom to quit?
You didn’t say you were only talking about “giant spiders” in a fantasy game, you said “spiders are neither animals, or beasts.”
You are simply wrong. Spiders are classified as Animalia. There’s nothing charitable about it.
That’s too much even for me. Put some faith in the GM to think critically and run the encounter. Put some faith in the players to paint a picture in their heads with only a few memorable details. Over-explanation always strikes me as a lack of trust, and an onanistic love of one’s own prose. Of course, I’m guilty of that, too.
It’s a fairly complex encounter: spider with distinct tactics, webs with mechanical effects, and room description for a weird space. Still I am sure my version could use and edit, but I wrote it on my phone in a minute or two and I’m not charging anyone for it. Plus, however much one might hate anything that wasn’t randomly generated from the back of the DMG … it’s still shorter and more useful then the original. Design is an process.
That said, the soulless formalism that 10ft pole’s nostalgic post-OSR orchole praise is as bad as 90’s Dungeon mag obsessive detail.
“DOLL HOUSE KITCHEN: Giant Spider.”
— Not a key worth reading. A computer could write it – in 1985.
I don’t know that I always or even frequently succeed, but I think a key needs some details the referee can latch onto, and that bare mechanics, not description, should come from rule books – even if that means simplifying the mechanics of a space. Challenge and wonder are in tension in dungeon keying – the more lines to mechanically define challenge … the more that imagery and language need to retreat. The 90’s prove you can’t maximize both (or either really).
To me the thing that makes the idea of being a shrunken dungeon bastard exploring a dollhouse interesting is precisely the way the space is a poor simulacra of a mundane space. Expressing the disorientation implicit in that idea is hard, and as a referee I’d want concrete examples to hand out — the walls aren’t oak, but far thicker sheets of spongey balsa wood or cardboard. The doll house doesn’t follow the architectural necessities of a full size building, but presents new challenges because of this.
That’s how I’d want to make a space like this interesting rather then cooking it down to a minimum that some theoretical player or referee capable of catching these odd nuances of a fantasy space would want. The snarling claim that DMing is an art and if an adventure fails it’s the DMs fault for lacking all the showman’s tricks of a Hickman XDM or innate genius of John Wick is bullshit. Published adventures can’t demand a genius to referee them, and should give the referee tools — including phrases, description and one off mechanics — that bring the unique nature of the particular location to the fore. Sometimes that takes more than a line and a reference to the Monster Manual or DMG.
Now, I’m sure the resident YDIS and 4chan trolls will have their day with this comment, they always do, but I’m not writing for them. Never have. Presumably some poor bastard might stumble onto this rotting corpse of a once functional review community and see this. That’s who I am writing this is for – there are ways to still be creative while producing content for old editions of D&D.
“DOLL HOUSE KITCHEN: Giant Spider.”
Bit of a straw man. I REALLY don’t think anyone is suggesting that this is the solution for excessive verbiage. You are excluding a vast middle ground.
To me, the key to an evocative description is that you give a small number of details that really pop. You just need to set the scene. Too many details quickly overwhelms the reader/listener, and nothing sticks.
As for your proffered revision of the spider’s tactics, I’m much more in agreement. That part is fairly concise.
Ultra minimalism and slavish commitment to the limitations of a revisionist view of Gygax’s tone and setting are what I usually see lauded in these comments. If that’s not your style, my mistake.
I’d place my quick revision and general style in that middle ground you mention compared to the excesses of late TSR design.
How middle? I don’t know and I don’t really have a great desire to defend its specific phrases.
In general I think one or two sentences is about right for actual room description. Three to five details for more important rooms with an extra sentence or two if an object is interactive. My personal style is to place non immediately obvious details and complex/mechanically modeled aspect of a room in bolded sub paragraphs. Here that would be the spider, the webs, and possibly the shoddy oversized toy fixtures.
Also I might move some of the ideas around construction and the overall dollhouse aspect to more general level regional/level description, especially if hacking through cardboard and balsa walls was common enough in a play test to need either rules or a mention. Can a plate armored fighter Kool Aid Man through a dollhouse wall?
At the same time, when you want a space to be easier to visualize you need more detail if it’s not a cliched space. I bet we all get a pretty distinct impression to “dungeon corridor” which means that if my dungeon isn’t a rough cut masonry ruin with iron bound oak doors I need to offer extra info to counteract that impression as well as actually describe it.
Your posts are too long, by paragraphs. They are cluttered with irrelevant adjectives, observations and redundant references, like a senile old woman. It is embarrassing that I, a non-native speaker, have to explain this to you in your own stolen tongue. Put up a poll if you do not believe me.
Your framing is very weak. The review community in the real OSR is vibrant, proactive and engages in frequent contests and actually plays, yours is not. Bones of Contention produces no valuable insights and does nothing. It is not even dead, it was never alive. 8 people with an output lower then any one of us Three. Why? Because fundamentally you do not review anything. You attempt historical revisionism.
Since you cannot honestly examine what the hobby was, or what moved the OSR, your insights are always skewed. This is separate from any personal problems you have. You are always trying to justify a narrative that you fundamentally know is false. This causes the flouncing, the pretension, the flourishes of intellectual bravado that are ultimately mediocre.
You can pretend you do not respond anonymously to provocations but again, who are you fooling? There are too many tells. When someone observes your rules of engagement and holds you to them, you simply cannot handle it. You keep showing up here, and pretending that you want to engage in the ‘discourse’ whatever that means, but you are actively waging war against people here, trying to get them cancelled, and saving no attempt to marginalize people that actually like D&D. Gabor. Campbell. And so on.
Yes Gus Zakfriend. You do not write for anyone here. You write for yourself.
I can speak only for myself, but I find this kind of endless personal-attack grousing so tiresome.
Get a room. Both of you.
All I read in Gus’ comment was ways he thinks the rooms could be written. Why do you attack him so personally, I really don’t understand.
No one else here gives a fuck what those two are gnashing about. But I do wish they’d go hash it out elsewhere.
This conceit has been done before, “Chadranther’s Bane” from Dungeon #18. PCs are shrunk by a MacGuffin and have to navigate a hostile world a la The Incredible Shrinking Man (complete with a dragon-sized cat IIRC). Wordy like all Dungeon magazines, but I ran it in the early 90s and the party had a good time with it.
I was thinking of that one honestly, as you say it’s totally 90’s if I remember right. Great cover painting on that issue – from the adventure – and I think it solved the treasure issue with 5k + value gems that were still elephant sized to mini-PCs but worth it? Too many gnomes for my taste I remember, but I was on a Darksun kick back then. Now I realize the garden + gnomes thing is a pun I must respect
I have no real qualms at all about a miniaturized party navigating a dollhouse. That’s not a bad idea at all. It’s actually a time-honored trope that goes back to Kuntz’s The Bottle City (1974). It seems that the author adhered a little *too closely* to the 2E word bloat, LARP-lite traditions.
I might actually haul out Chadranther’s Bane for a one-off now that I’m thinking about it.
If I remember Bottle City had the shrink thing, but not in a way that really impacted play? More a portal adventure then a tiny world? I like portal stuff, especially for mid and higher level as they somewhat explicably restrict PC resources while offering easy alternative setting access.
Tiny world is a theme worth exploring, and Chandrathers is a good place to start. Are there any good Mausritter adventures to steal from?
Wasn’t this done in Johnathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726) first? (Wouldn’t surprise me that the same thing happened in the 1621 “History of Tom Thumb”, but I don’t recall a doll house in it). No innovation here. Just using the classic books for a theme. I wasn’t (and am still not) a fan of this popular shrinking trope in c. 1990s adventures, but acknowledge that it could be interesting to play in a non-serious beer & pretzels style game. (I’d play the Wavestone Keep wine bottle adventure before looking at this one).
Was Gulliver’s Travels an RPG? Don’t be dumb. I think it’s actually a pretty cool and fun concept, although it’s clearly a one-time gimmick. A DM should choose one best shot at shrinking the PCs for a session.
You know, I forgot about the Wavestone Keep wine bottle scenario!
Feel free to create the Gulliver’s Travels RPG. And don’t complain that it’s been done before.
In fact, I guess it has actually been done before. LOL. A game called Gulliver’s Trading Company – I’m guessing in 2013? Totally original.
We must innovate. It is the rallying-cry of the would-be luminary. But innovate towards what? From where? This is not considered.
There is a pre-occupation with form in these circles. Bullet points, layout, headers. This is the most trivial, most peripheral thing to innovate on. It is a quick win, nothing more. Nothing revolutionary can grow from this path. Adventures are ultimately interacted with by players, and these players interact with its substance.
How can we improve upon the substance? By stretching the game to its limits, by breaking it down to its essence.
The low level epoch has run its course. Let us game in the 14+ band. Let us duel with demon princes and traverse infinity. Dream House of the Nether Prince is only a doorway.
I’m going to take this comment at face value and not as sarcasm, in which case I say, “fuck yeah!!” Although, I’d be happy with level 7+ gaming at this point. Jesus Christ on a Cracker, what a pathetic excuse for a movement the OSR has become. Between the fixation on low level only gaming and the plethora of complete a-hole publishers, it’s definitely time to leave the OSR behind and start something new.
I think it’s fair to say that that adventures for Levels 1-3 have run their course. There’s just a massive glut. Can you imagine anyone asking on a forum, “Can you suggest a low-level starting module?” and the thread explodes into 27 pages just listing new products pumped out in the last 10 years.
High-level modules are tough to write. Baby steps. I’m happy to look at adventures for player character levels 3-5 and 5-7. Bring ’em on!
15 years or so into the OSR and we still have minimal decent adventures past level 5. That’s an abject failure. There’s really no excuse for needing baby steps at this point, but I hear you.
Hey, at least we have 117 or so different OSR rule sets to play with!! *sarcasm*
Once upon a time at DF, way back in 2009, I noted that the Old School Renaissance had weirdly drifted from using the existing, but out-of-print, gaming rules, to legally publish new 1E, 2E and B/X gaming materials, into an infinite barrage of 1E, 2E and B/X house-rule Rule sets instead.
People laughed. Oh, how they laughed.
I do hate being right all the time.
I’ll be your designated contrarian today.
Actually, that’s overstating it. But I’m going to propose a different perspective here.
Published D&D modules have almost NEVER done high-level adventuring well, and that goes back to the early days of TSR. The few exceptions are noteworthy as such. And there are good reasons for this.
The mechanics of D&D break down at high levels for dungeon crawls. To keep challenges from becoming trivial, you either have to arbitrarily nerf many high-level options, or you have to go HAM on the lethality dial. The former approach is boring, and the latter approach does not lend itself to reaching high levels in the first place.
The key phrase of that last paragraph is “for dungeon crawls.” Pretty much every version of the old TSR rulesets hinted strongly at domain-level play from high-level characters. Heck, past ninth level, it basically assumes you have some kind of stronghold/guild/tower/hippie commune and a small army of followers.
When we hear stories of how the game was played in the formative years, it’s clear that it was clearly the goal for campaigns to evolve in the direction of strategic regional play, and they did. You can see the wargame roots in this kind of role-playing. But these were rarely reflected in published products.
Why is this? Part of it is probably because dungeon crawling was just much more popular. Another reason is probably because play at this level was very customized to each group of players, more likely to become freeform and hard to codify.
I think the closest that TSR ever came to writing these kinds of adventures can be found in the Companion Set. CM1, Test of the Warlords, is an excellent springboard for this kind of play. Later Companion adventures were a bit less open-ended, although it’s clear they are meant to be run in this kind of situation. Check out Earthshaker!, CM4, for a great example of this. Even CM2 and CM3 have domain-level scope.
My point is that maybe high-level D&D adventures shouldn’t be structured like dungeon crawls. At least not very often. I almost never hear people talking about the Companion Set, but I always thought it did something different, and did it well. It had mass combat, which is a strange omission from 1e if you think about it.
This is an interesting topic, and probably deserves a blog post. One type of high level adventure that includes a dungeon is the raid on enemy HQ as illustrated by D3 Vault of the Drow, The City of the Aboleth in Night Below, WGR6 City of Skulls. Your characters may be mighty, but they can’t handle an entire enemy army, so deception, speed and stealth is required until you reach the target. And as soon as you have lost the element of surprise, any intelligent enemy will reorganise, reinforce, and possibly counterattack.
Sheer brute force might pose a considerable challenge e.g. G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King. (And what if the referee decides the giants are going to grapple? Or the large number of trolls when you haven’t memorised much fire magic?)
Sometimes “nerfing” is justified. If you just let possibly hostile high level foes wander into a throne room unprotected by magic, I can only assume you are a republican. Or if a high level wizard does not limit access via passwall or make some effort to shield against scrying, they are probably a few spells short of a grimoire. So in dungeons such as S1 Tomb of Horrors, Return to the Tomb of Horrors, Mud Sorcerer’s Tomb (Dungeon #37) a discussion of the extent to which spells work is essential: if you are not using divination and transmutation/teleporting magic, you are playing like pilchards.
However it has to be admitted much of the published high level material isn’t good. There are interesting ideas in WGA4 Vecna Lives, but very strange ideas about effective high level fighting. Then there is the problem of using the exact same adventure as per low levels, except the village drunk is implausibly now a 10th level fighter. And the climaxes to various Pathfinder campaigns should not be discussed in polite society.
Onto the CM modules. I have zero play experience here, so take this with a pinch of salt. CM6 Where Chaos Reigns has good ideas but needs more pages to do them justice; CM1 may well be the best. But how convincing do you find the mechanics for mass battles involving armies and high level characters? With an invisible flying fireball throwing magic-user “bomber command” available, new tactics are needed. You could imagine that the remains of an army who foolishly assaulted one of the archmage heavy countries in Mystara could fit into a backpack.
Facts: less than a handful of adventure designers who can design a high level adventure. You need to be very creative and innovative- the original kingdom of ghouls, drow series etc. have certain qualities in common. People should heed in understanding those elements (and no, dungeons stacked with save or die traps and 1000 beholders don’t qualify).
Respectfully, that’s not really an answer. Plenty of writers try and fail at LOW level adventures. The point is that they try. Just like low level adventures, you can’t write good higher level ones unless you try, and learn to get better based on feedback.
High level adventures should not be judged on the same criteria of success as low level adventures. People seem to think that they have to be a challenge to all groups, anywhere and anytime. I don’t think this is the right criteria, and ultimately not always possible considering the variety of options high level players have up their sleeves. Possession of a single magic item or a particular spell can change how a party fares in any adventure at high levels. It’s not possible to counter this without gimping players in some form. The right criteria is merely that ‘it’s going to be fun to play’, even if one party finds it a challenge but the next party finds it easy. Players at high levels have earned the right from time to time to romp through an adventure, smashing the challenges thrown at them.
Well said.
https://www.thebluebard.com/post/high-level-play
Thanks for the link! Very interesting!
Here’s part II in case someone didn’t realize it existed.
https://www.thebluebard.com/post/high-level-play-part-2-mechanics
So . . . you didn’t like it?
In all honesty, sounds like a pretentious railroad with way too many fiddly bits. This is the sort of thing that wanker DMs love because they can write the story for the players (I’ve been in a few sessions like that, but never for long, because I walk out). Contradicts everything I love about emergent game play and co-world-creation.