By Ben Thompson 99c Adventures OSR Level 4
The tiny village of Ostlund has long been home to a beautiful park, but, beginning around a year ago, the once-serene garden has become a very different – and much more sinister – place around sundown. A mysterious dark curse now sees the village haunted by all manner of evil creatures that wreak havoc on the town and its people, causing destruction and mischief that is becoming increasingly more violent and frightening for the people living here. Ostlund has managed to cope with this situation, for now, but with crops beginning to die, villagers going missing, and structures mysteriously catching fire at night, the people now seek help to free them from their torment. You must venture to Ostlund before the night of the Summer Solstice. You will have just one night to wander the haunted park and cleanse it of the curse. Succeed, and you will become the greatest heroes this small hamlet has ever seen. Fail, and you doom these people to continue their cycle of misery for another grim year.
This 64 page adventure uses ten pages to describe fourteen areas in a small park that is about 300 feet on a side. No plants here, just endless read-aloud, too much DM text, and an obvious 5e adventure restated for the OSR to increase sales. 99c Adventures are now off the table.
We start with a one page read-aloud; a letter to the party from a village pleading for help. Evil things in the park, crops failing, blah blah blah. Off you go. On the way you have a one and a half page encounter with a troll at a bridge. Nothing really special here; fight him or pay him off. There’s a night in the river underneath that you can recruit. Sir Eric. A kind of Gilderoy Lockhart type dude with a fawning fan club of women in the village you are going to. That’s fun. That’s ALL that is fun in this adventure.
A page and a half troll bridge encounter. What the fuck were you thinking man? With all that read-aloud? IN ITALICS so my fucking eyes would pop out of my head? And then ALL of that DMs text. For a fucking troll on a bridge. Why’d you do that? And none of it is interesting. None of it. It’s just troll bridge shit,all of it generic and nothing special or fun or unusual about it. It amazes me, the ability of people to pad shit encounters out with more shit.
Ok, then you get to town. There’s nothing fun in town, really. There are three Vampire Spawn, which are not vampires, but, close enough I guess. They don’t really do anything unless you hit on one of them (Hello Ladies!) And there’s the knights fanclub. I guess that’s fun. There are some druids you can talk to who will teach yo a spell to talk to the lake guarding in the park. Otherwise, it’s just generic shit and a few programmed combat/challenge encounters.
Off to the park you go! There’s a giant statue head in the park. It’s the source of evil. How you know this I know not. You need to collect an incantation n the park and get the fabulous SUN SWORD, err, I mean Sunstone. The lake guardian thing can tell you to go get both. Otherwise , I don’t really know how you are figuring this one out. “You feel like there might be more to do” , I believe the encounters say. Yeah. That’s always a great sign. Telling the party outright they have more to do. Which, of course, means more of the DM running “INITIATIVE!” as monsters attack. There’s no real option to do anything but stab everything in the park. So, get stabbing boyo!
I really can’t get over this. Vampire Spawn in the broad daylight. Sixty four pages for just over a dozen encounters. Almost all just straight up combat encounters. It’s fucking absurd. Ridiculous amounts of read-aloud. Ridiculous amounts of DM text. Why would you attach your name to this?
This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. Enjoy that intro read-aloud and the start of the troll encounter. Perfect preview, since you know nothing but pain is coming for you.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/464634/LC3-Garden-of-Terror?1892600
Reminds me to actually run Garden of Ynn though.
I stopped reading at medieval surfer dude, that’s like totally lame!
That preview is pure pain. It’s at least half read-aloud.
Some of this I just can’t understand. Anyone can imitate (or at least make an attempt), so why don’t the authors learn by just reading another better adventure and imitating that? It’s not like Black Wyrm of Brandonsford is more than a few dollars… I won’t pretend that it’s easy to replicate the secret sauce behind that success without some deeper understanding of why it works, but attempting to copy it on a superficial level at least overcomes so many basic adventure-formatting flaws. Instead, this imitates the worst excesses of “GM as movie director” mentality and suffers all the more for it.
As a rule, I generally avoid anything that claims to be OSR but has a suggested level range of a single level (such as “for level 4 characters”, in this case), as it betrays an obvious ignorance of how XP advancement worked in pre-3rd edition games, and usually means they’re taking modern assumptions and trying to backport them to older rulesets, without understanding the differences in how those rules worked.
(the exception being “for 1st level characters”, which would fine for adventures aimed at starting characters)
The single level range makes sense in OSR modules. Even Gygax says you ought not be levelling up more than once on an adventure; he made a codified rule that if you were to advance two levels during an adventure, you should instead bring the character to the very brink of levelling up so that they would advance in the next adventure.
A single level range does not work for OSR because the classes do not share a unified XP table. It takes thieves 1250 xp to get to level 2 and 2500 xp to get to level 3. Magic-users need 2500 xp to get to level 2, therefore you’re likely to have a party with a mix of levels even if everyone gets the same amount of XP.
A level range is the standard for a reason because not everyone is assumed to have the exact same amount of xp. Xp bonuses from high ability scores alone are going to create variation, to say nothing of downtime, spare characters, henchmen etc.
Newcomer OSR morons with newcomer OSR moron takes.
Pretty sure it’s assumed to be the average of the party levels, which is merely a metric used at the onset of the module’s run to determine the difficulty/balance of things ahead. One level 3, three level 4s, and one level 5 character could all fit into “an adventure for Level 4 characters”, even without a range indicated on the cover. If your party is not averaging the level on the cover, then the adventure won’t fit. It’s not exactly rocket science, nor is it especially game breaking if the party doesn’t fit the *exact* level confines.
If you say “fit for characters level 4-6”, and your party is four level 6 characters and a level 7 character, does that mean there’s no game today? No, it’s a middle-road suggested level, just as a static single level indicator would be. Likewise, a run with 5 level 4s and one level 3 is going to be very different than the prior party. So you put a nice middle ground number (“Level 4”), and expect that a group of adults are not so helpless as to be completely stymied because “oh no, Jim is only a Level 3, can we even play this thing?”.
…or you can just be a pedantic dick about it. I’m sure that will win you all the friends.
I don’t want to be your friend because I don’t want to be friends with people with dumb takes that keep defending those dumb takes even when it has been demonstrated that those takes are dumb.
The old adventures would often specify not only a level range, but also a total amount of levels so it can be adjusted for the number of players. This indicates a bandwith because, surprise surprise, it is a bandwith when you play it also.
If it was extremely laborious to write ‘4-6 characters of levels 5-7’ instead of ‘characters of level 3’ then the point would be defensible but it is not so it is not. Stop weighing in on on topics that you do not understand. There is enough stupidity on the internet without you adding your worthless two cents to the pile.
Dude, if you can’t figure out what levels to use without the module telling you +1/-1 of what your character ought to be, that’s on you. Can you add or subtract 1 from a number? Cool, you’ve got your range. Sorry it was so laborious for you, apparently.
A singular listed level instead of a range is not the end of the world; people shouldn’t be shitting their pants over it.
No pant-befouling necessary.
But it is an obvious sign that a Seller is trying to market a product written for some other system as OSE to latch on to the New Hotness.
I repeat:
“If it was extremely laborious to write ‘4-6 characters of levels 5-7’ instead of ‘characters of level 3’ then the point would be defensible but it is not so it is not. Stop weighing in on on topics that you do not understand. There is enough stupidity on the internet without you adding your worthless two cents to the pile.”
Note use of the If clause. Your reply makes no sense because didn’t read what was said because you were still assmad for being unmasked as a FOE. Good.
A level range can be greater (10-14) or narrow (7-9), depending on the presence of certain spells, number of players etc. So just giving a single level would indeed be a loss of information and it would not be automatic. I understand that for drug-addled, pattern-recognition deficient morons who play ruleslites this is not a problem, but the rest of us would like to play dnd like a normal person.
Simply because people are stating something does not need you need to chime in. Know what you are talking about before you do so.
No; it’s always a range. First, the classes do not advance evenly, the thieves and fighters will advance long before the elves, for example. The defined ranges are typically 1-3, 2-4 (quite rare), 3-5, 4-7, 7-9, and then 8-11 with the oddball 11+.
Gnarly Bones said
“But it is an obvious sign that a Seller is trying to market a product written for some other system as OSE to latch on to the New Hotness.”
This….right…here. Too many of these jamokes are trying to take the easy and lazy way out by creating an adventure for one system, let’s say 5e as an example, and then slapping an “OSR” tag on it as if that proclaims magically that the adventure is now old school compatible. Or they say compatible with OSE, or compatible with old school rulesets. And you can easily tell that it’s a sloppy conversion because the adventure still includes things like DC checks or, in this case, a single-level PC suggestion.
They should just convert them to Pathfinder (either edition) since at least those games share the same design sensibilities. There’s also a plethora of “high fantasy crunchy spam roll” RPGs they could use.
But they always pick OSR for some reason…
“I bought these adventure and review them so you don’t have to.”
Thank you, sir!