By Tarcisio Lucas TLHP Games OSR Levels 1-4 (Seriously?)
High hopes dashed again. I know, I know. I’m a dreamer.
An ancient Zigurat hidden in the midst of a distant Swamp. A lost civilization of lizardmen, long gone. A mystical amulet with arcane powers. A mysterious stranger in a Tavern.
A 43 page dungeon with six rooms taking up six pages. With garbage room descriptions. This is what my life has become.
It’s hard, really, to describe just how bad some of these adventures are. And yet, this is the task before me.
The format here is digest, I think? Or maybe full page. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, I guess. Each page is, essentially, a full color illustration. In full dazzling colours. And on each a bright yellow scroll with the next of the adventure. This combination, alone, makes the test hard to read,. The eye is distracted by the BLAZING gaudy colours. No bolding. No real effort at formatting or organization beyond this. The monsters and hazards are just mixed up in this text with no effort to call them out. It is the definition of cognitively difficult to absorb.
I believe that the purpose of an adventure is to assist the DM in running it. It is therefore the job of the designer to help bring the adventure to life, to provide the DM with a little snippet that helps them run the thing, bringing it to life in the DMs head so they can riff off of it and run t he encounter well. To do this, this adventure provides, at times, a little footnote like thing here and there. Footnotes like “For the GM: How does the figure behave? Does he speak softly? Hastily?
Does he have a distant lands accent? Is he wearing an exotic perfume? Does
he have a vulgar vocabulary?” I fucking HATE this. This is the EXACT opposite of what an adventure should be doing. This is the kind of shit you are supposed to build in to your descriptions. This is the exact sort of thing that SHOULD be provided so the DM can get a mental image and then riff on it. What he fuck is the purpose of this? Why not just say “figure out an encounter and present it ot the players. Maybe the goal is to introduce them to the adventure?” What the fuck man? Why bother even writing at all if yo’re not going to say anything concrete about something?
Oh, oh, and the traps and hazards? “Consider the most logical narrative consequences as a result of the PCs actions. Assume 1d6 damage as the standard consequence for something
going wrong.” That’s fucking wonderful. It says NOTHING. The individual encounters have NO detail about hazards. Just that little snippet. Look, I’m not the most mechanically minded DM. I love it when things are more free form. But, seriously, if you can’t describe an encounter, mechanically, in any way other than this then you’re not doing ANYTHING to assist the DM in running the adventure.
Oh, oh, how about this for one of those SIX FUCKING ROOMS that the dungeon consists of? “ they discover a hidden alcove housing a dusty tome, its pages filled with cryptic prophecies and riddles that may hold the key to the ziggurat’s mysteries.” That’s it. That’s the description of the book that holds the dungeons secrets . I’m supposed to run this fucking thing with THAT as a description? Go fuck yourself.
This is nothing. It’s a collection of ideas. I’m pretty sure it’s quite low on enemies. Maybe a giant snake in the temple and that’s it? Otherwise it’s all just “heres a list of monsters they encounter in the swamp on the way.” Those six rooms take four pages to describe. Four pages. “The air is
thick with an otherworldly stillness, broken only by soft echoes that seem to emanate from the very walls. Intricate murals depicting ancient rituals and sacrifices adorn the chamber, their faded colors hinting at a time long past.” Thats a little purpose, but it does get an image across. Mostly ineffectually, for the amount of text.
Fucking christ. I get that people want to play with format and shit. That’s fine. But you’ve lost track of the goal. If you need 43 pages to describe six rooms then you’ve failed. Completely. And, to have NOTHING concrete in the rooms at all? To force the DM through permutations to go find encounters and the like? Go find a page with some stats on it, somewhere. Fuck off man.
This is $6.50 at DriveThru. The preview is thirteen pages. Go click on it and enjoy the formatting and full colour illustrations. They looks like blacklight paintings.
AI art, and probably AI text. This is our life now.
Wonder if the AI product would be any better if it was asked to create a 43 room dungeon in 6 pages instead of a 6 room dungeon on 43 pages.
“An OSR adventure” was already on the cover, so this one’s on you.
Adventure Module casts Color Spray…
Bryce saves!
i’m impressed you were even able to read the text in this, i’m not sure i would be able to
the layout in the preview is insane
Brazil only does shit when it concerns OSR. Pease stop giving them visibility for this kind of crap.
Is the entire Brazilian OSR one single group of friends? Because everything out of Brazil seems exactly the same and all of it is absolutely fucking terrible.
Actually, they hate each other, mostly.
There’s a couple of groups that shill for one another, it’s easy to identify when this happens.
In the end is one crap designer hating another crap designer. It’s the way on every third world environment, in order to keep the status quo.
Actually they have a wonderful group shaping a retroclone named Caves&Hexes.
But they think OSR is dead overthere and are dismembering the OSR to a movement named oil fantasy.
C&H is a B/X (OSE) retroclone with nothing new and oil fantasy is a ” The Forge” filled bullshit. No thanks.
Are all these “new” rulesets just variations on variations on a theme? Seems like we’ve moved beyond simply retrocloning to retrocloning the retroclones and/or making a few tweaks here and there and proclaiming it to be a new ruleset. Just another in a long line of niche games that only a handful of people will ever play or care about.
TLHP Games go read and run Castle Xyntillan, Vault of the Drow, Dark Tower, Stonehell Dungeon or Tomb of the Twice-Crowned King etc to learn what makes an excellent adventure module ….
Wavestone keep contest.
I think it’s time for such products to identify and classify as avant-garde or experimental dnd. You can experiment all you want, but at least the buyers know to expect heavy style/design experimentation that is probably crap.
That would be nice. We’ve experimented with design for this module in order to facilitate…
At least then we’ d know if they’d actually sat down and thought about why to use X system or Y choice to suit this style or play or scenario.
Its called NuSR.
These clowns cannot experiment either because they don’t understand what they are experimenting with.
Shame and disgrace! I started my so-called career as an adventure writer with a vs. lizardmen module*, and this effort by my teenage self looks better thought-out than this garbage.
Speaking on which… any plans of a “lizardmen in a swamp” contest?
*Reviewed rather favourably on this very site: https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=600
Oh, good gracious! What is the point of this? Why is every single page a full-page illustration that only the *DM* will ever see?
LOL at the AI-generated paper scroll used on every page that scrolls in 3 directions
This is the worst I’ve seen, ever. It it so far removed from D&D as to be something completely foreign.
Why AI your hobby? It makes no sense.
Someone really fucked up their AI prompts and didn’t even understand the problem. It’s not an adventure, it’s a text ABOUT the adventure which makes it very funny 😀