By Mihailo Tesic Purple Duck Games DCC Level 0
The Thrallmaster’s hordes come… are you ready for the Siege of Bonemoore? The call to arms does not always come to warriors, and fate has found your humble party in Bonemoore Keep when the ghastly armies of the Thrallmaster attack. Faced with demonic fury without and mysterious sorcery within the Keep, will you survive to carry the day and start a career in intrepid Dungeon Crawling?
This 72 page funnel adventure features a “siege” of a keep … and extensive dungeoncrawl under it. It is absolutely on eo the wordiest adventures I’ve ever seen, making it ludicrous to think about running it.
The opening read aloud is two pages long. In italics. At work, my office is completely barren but for two things: a monitor and an eighteen inch tall statue of Don Quixote. This is what my life is. It’s 2022 and people still pump out a two page read-aloud. And then put it down in italics. Because this is the way the world operates. Anyone can do anything at any time. And isn’t that great? But, also, SHOULD you do it? Given a world of complete freedom the question becomes not CAN you do it, but what do you choose to do, and how. And this dude chose to write two pages of intro text for read-aloud that is in italics. Because I am a hypocrite, let me say that it ends with someone yelling the obligatory “were all gonna die” and the guard sergeant hitting in the jaw … the dudes teeth flying out of his mouth all in to the mud … and these sergeant picks them up and gives them to you “Here, might bring you some luck. They were lucky enough to get out of his stupid mouth!” Ho ho! That’s great! That’s fucking specificity!
Ok, so, the keep is being sieged by The Thrallmaster and his army of mountain men, cannibals and flesh puppets. You’re the local peasants who are taking refuge inside.
Oh, wait, hang on. I forgot. Before the adventure starts there is a “rewards” section, among others. That section takes one and a half pages to tell the DM that, sometimes, the adventure will give a party member a +1 stat bump. One and a half pages. To tell us that someone will sometimes get a +1, permanently. One and a half pages.
Ok now, time to start the adventure! Back to another three long paragraphs of r read aloud! In italics. *groan* Flame golems show up. You fight them and put out some fires, I guess. Then some cannibal ghoul dudes try to climb the walls and you kill them. Then some dudes show up with a battering ram and you get to put the oil on them. The golem/fire thing takes seven pages. The ghouls on the wall thing takes four pages to describe. The battering ram only takes four paragraphs, so, you know. You only have to kill 11 ghouls, out of twenty, in that encounter though. So, you know, a quick and easy one.
We transition now to another page of read-aloud. The keeps command has disappeared inside! Ohs Nos! Go save him/find him/etc! The entrance room is two pages long. The dungeon room with cells is like six pages long. To be fair, the Bailey room is only half a page.
This is the norm here. Two pages for an encounter. I’m not fucking doing that. I don’t give a fuck how good your adventure is, I’m not digging through two fucking pages of text to run a fucking room. And, to be clear, these are not complex rooms with lots of things to investigate and look at. These are, almost exclusively, rooms with a combat in them and nothing else, or else, some other “single encounter” type of room. This is fucking onsense. Two fucking pages for a fight? No. Absolutly not. You figure the fuck out how to write it down shorter. Or, you figure the fuck out how to write it down in a such a way that it is easy to refer to during the game, with bullets, or bolding or whitespace or some such. I am absolutely the fuck not pausing my game to five fucking minutes, or more, while I dig through two pages of your text in order to figure out how to run th encounter in this room. Are you shitting me? I would be the worst DM in the history of the universe if I did that. We do NOT pause the fucking game. We interact with the fucking players. That’s the entire point of the fuckinggame, the interaction between the players and DM. It is not “the DM spends five minute intervals reading the book while the players dick around on their phones.” Fucking to pages of read-aloud. Fucking two pages for a combat encounter. As if.
So, the siege turns in to a dungeoncrawl, with no siege elements anymore, and this is the main loop of the adventure.
I have absolutely no patience for this kind of shit anymore. There are literally a bajillion million adventures available. And yet, my standard for not calling something shit is rather low: do no make the DMs life a living hell if they want to run it. It doesn’t have to be fucking good. It just has to not make the DMs life a living hell. And yet most adventures can’t even reach that simple baseline. I have high standards. *pffft* I have low fucking standards, it’s just redonkulous that adventures can’t even to get to that level.
This is $8 at DriveThru. The only preview is that bull “quick” one that shows you nothing, so, you know, Fuck Off.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/316655/The-Siege-of-Bonemoore-Keep?1892600
As single-session introductory adventures, Zero Level Funnels can only be 32 pages max (and 16 pages or less is better). Bonemoore Keep? Is he channeling Rappan Athuk?
Wordiness might also a be a byproduct of English As 2nd Language
Or college education
Guilty of both!
I just want to thank Bryce for this review so that we are not boned more (Ha!) for buying this.
Yeah, that statue. This style comes from deeply held and thoroughly internalised ideas about how game writing is “supposed to” look like, and like other successful mental programming, takes an effort to unlearn. It is just that people don’t make the effort, even though it is not rocket science.
Because the adventure is total shit, I’m going to comment on the rules system. I do believe that *OSR is a mindset, not a rules set*, but I also adhere to the “rulings not rules” side of the OSR.
For OSR play, I dislike DCC for the same reason I dislike D20 or 5e.
I’ll let Arnold Kemp (who references Matt Finch) to explain my opinion:
https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/02/osr-style-challenges-rulings-not-rules.html
A brief excerpt:
>If you want OSR-style gameplay, you need to encourage/allow it at all levels.
>System Level
>Like Mr. Finch says, this is about getting players to stop thinking with their character
>sheets. (This is why skill lists are potentially so poisonous–players thinking about
>solutions sometimes start and end by looking at their skill list as if it were a list of
>permissions.)
>(1) And to do that, you need an incomplete system. You need to have room for
>rulings, and that means that there have to be gaps between the rules.
I have long said that NWP limit what PCs can do.
PLAYER: “My fighter leaps on his warhorse and chases after the necromancer.”
DM; “Do you have horseriding as a skill?”
PLAYER: “It’s a medieval world! Horses are the only means of transport!”
DM: “Do you have horseriding as a skill?”
PLAYER: “… fine, I run after him …”
DM: “OK, what’s your Sprint skill?”
PLAYER: …
Yep. This is it. This is what I hate.
Or, “Let’s all sit around throwing a d20 back and forth for a couple hours.”
I’ve only played a few games of it so I might have just had a bad experience. Maybe DCC’s a great as its fans say. I’ve never looked at the rules.
But, I went to buy the core book and saw it was 480 pages, so I nope’d out right there. It might be great, but it’s just not for me.
it is obvious that you haven’t looked at the rules. you might have not liked them anyway but not for those reasons.
out of those 480 pages i think that spells take about half due to the unique, table-oriented, spell system and that is probably the most not-OSR thing about the DCC.
OSR is mostly about resource management and DCC is about gambling.
this is literally what dcc does
i mean ruling not rules, gaps in rules, no skills, treating low level play as high level play and all that. it can be argued that dcc is not osr but who cares it is fun system that does well what it says on the lid.
>but who cares
People who like OSR and get tired of shills pretending DCC is the best version of D&D ever printed? lol
so no one consequential, you want to say?
A siege against overwhelming odds, when a lot of folk are going to die, seems like a great idea for a DCC level 0 funnel. Is there the core of a good adventure here?
Flame golems, wall-climbing ghouls and battering rams all sound pretty exciting to me, although Bryce seems to have given up on describing the dungeon-crawl element.
Maybe I should just write my own version of this adventure.
Yeah, the OSR could use a lot more funnel adventures that are more than a dungeon crawl. It’s too bad this isn’t it. Maybe with a super heavy editing pass to trim it down to 8 pages?
It does all sound fun- even the ghouls makes sense, it’ terrifying because if they get over the wall, you’re fucked. But while they are climbing they are vulnerable and if you have a couple of pc’s left each (funnel) then picking off 11 with some good rolling or a cockamamey plan seems doable. The tension being do you stay and try to stop them like good soldiers or run the hell away as soon as they start getting near the top and damn the consequences?
Sounds like fun ideas- DCC is usually good at fun environments/scenarios. But some dude tried to novelise it.
Curious about the dungeon part also.
Setting aside the adventure itself, you’ve got to think about your title. I’ve had groups that were otherwise fine, but the session would have been over the minute I said or they saw the words “Bone-More Keep.”
The Queen of Spades visits Bone-More Keep
I’ve played a one shot with Mihailo in an online con. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the man. One of the best OSR GMs i’ve played with (or rather one of the best GMs, period), easily. Great at improv, descriptions that oozed atmosphere, player agency to the max, solid pacing. Maybe the style of writing is too verbose for Bryce, i get it. But if Mihailo can run a game like the one I was in, there’s zero chance he will have written a bad adventure. Plus, I like the theme, so I’ll definitely be checking it out.
I’ll only note that the ability to run one’s own materials does not equate to writing materials for others to run.
This has become the CinemaSins of rpg review sites, jeez