By Phil Beckwith
P.B. Publishing
5e
Levels 4-5
In ages past, an ancient town was lost and destroyed to a seige of orcs. Only one building survived and to this day, the manor is the only still standing building to be seen for miles around. Some say it is haunted, a few whisper of great treasures within, whilst others whisper that it is the manor itself that lives! No one knows for sure, only that a great evil haunts its halls. Do you dare enter Montarthas Manor?!
This sixteen page adventure presents 24 rooms in a two floor haunted house. If you liked the Dwimmermount chess players then this adventure is for you. Otherwise, it’s just a collection of what not to do in an adventure.
For [reasons] you are entering an abandoned manor home. You know the deal, tired old generic you were hired or you need a place to stay or it feels evil shit. You approach. There are front doors. You try to enter them but you cannot, in any way, open them. Then, as you turn to leave, the doors open with a creeeeaaakkkk. Welcome to this adventure, where the tropes are done childishly and the adventure is a railroad.
You are not adventuring here. You are EXPERIENCING this. Because it’s a railroad. It’s all telegraphed through a series of simplistic vignettes that tell you how to feel and what to think instead of showing you. There is the front door thing, it not opening until you turn your back on it after trying. Because a front door opening on itself with a creak is c00L! No mention of the doors, windows, roof, or anything else. YOU WILL DO AS THE DESIGNER INSTRUCTS YOU!! You want free will? You want to explore? You want some player agency? Fuuuuucccckck you! “A portcullis blocks the way up until the party has explored at least 5 rooms on the Ground Floor (in total)” It’s clear what is meant to happen. There’s no mention of the windows or roof or balconies or alfresco areas as entry points because that’s not how the adventure is meant to be experienced. I can, perhaps, get behind this. If this were some story game and not D&D. Write the fucking thing for a story game if you want to fucking story game. This is a shitty fucking D&D adventure. “Once the heroes enter the basement, the door slams shut and a noxious green gas begins to fill the room” Yes, I am fucking aware that this has happened in many an adventure. And it was bad then and its bad now. There have always been designers doing these shitty things.
And the prose. It is almost purple, and not for lack of trying. I suspect that if it could be it would “The looming black space behind the entryway stares menacingly at you, inviting you into its abode.” Ug, ok, so, second person. Never good. It tells you what to think instead of showing you, with that menacing word. And the room descriptions aren’t even god at all. It’s just barely a description, at all, with nothing evocative about them and sometimes the read-aloud telling you what to feel. It’s fucking weird.
The map is super simplistic. You can go right or left, down a hallway, with rooms hanging off of it. Oh, I guess you can dgo up one set of spiral stairs to the second floor. Where you can go right or left with rooms hanging off the hallway. And the kitchen is on the second floor?
Whatever. I mentioned the chess players. I don’t mean to keep crapping on it, but it was an iconic moment in the OSR. This thing has, I don’t know, eight chess player rooms? Meaning that there’s a hologram in the room that you watch and essentially has no impact on the adventure. There is the (required) ghostly dining room. If you do nothing they do not interact with you, or have anything to do with the adventure, just floating around. If you do then the host screams at you “You should not be here! Leave this place!” and then everyone disappears. Or, perhaps, if that’s too much interactivity for you: “A ghostly apparition is stirring an ectoplasmic load of dirty
clothes. She fades once the party attempts to interact or they enter the room.” This is not horror.
It’s padded out. “But the heroes must defeat it [ed: the monster] one way or another to retrieve the jeweled sword.” Yup, sure is. “This is the tea room. Where the residents drink tea and have refreshments.” Yup, that’s a tea room all right. The read-aloud over reveals details of the rooms. The adventure is DESIGNED to split the party. For “Atmosphere” purposes. I fucking HATE running splot parties. One group is always bored to death. I don’t know, maybe I don’t know how to run a split party.
The main baddie is a hag. You meet her in the last room to stab her. There are attempts to foreshadow, through the ghost vignettes and diaries, but her evil never really comes through. The more relatable evil is a little childs doll that does hit and uns on you when you reach the second floor. No description of it, of course. But it drops from the ceiling, stabs you with a knife and then teleports away … as a bonus action. A little uncool. More like a “take damage” situation. Don’t get me wrong, an evil little possessed doll with a knife and glinting eyes is, BY FAR, the best concept in this adventure. It’s just not handled well and doesn’t really have enough room to breathe. Also, you actually find the doll in room two, inert. If I found a doll like that I’d destroy it. No notes from the designer about that. It’s just a doll laying on a chair. Maybe its not the real doll? But I think the adventure says it is. It’s fucking weird. It doesn’t occur in the plot yet so it doesnt occur in the design yet, of course.
I leave you now with this read-aloud, the last thing in the adventure: “You manage to escape the falling manor, which has been the epitome of true evil. The night hag, Gertrude, has been defeated, the horrifying evil doll was removed from this world, and the undead have been laid to rest. You know not who the hag’s victim was, however, but they did leave you the emerald in their departure. Now, standing before you, are the piles of rubble and decayed remains of the manor; finally resting in peace. The night begins to grow old as the first hints of dawn start to creep over the horizon. Today is going to be a good day, well a better day, you hope”
This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages, with the last page showing you some rooms. If the entire preview were like that then it would be a good preview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/206076/the-haunt?1892600
Thank you, thank you for showing, once again, people are generally a bad judge of what makes a ttrpg adventure. And will throw there money at such rubbish. It demonstrates the resignation amongst creators to just mail it in, because, why not? Just slap a littel dnd logo on it and make some money.
This thing has an adamantine medal and 184 reviews, 87% being 5*?
TBF, it’s been out for more than 7 years.
DMs Guild products from the first 1-2 years of its existence (it’s been around since 2016) had a HUGE advantage of coming to a relatively uncluttered market, getting almost guaranteed sales, and then said sales more often than not becoming self-sustaining.
But yes, it is almost a gold standard of ruinous design trends that started to plague 5e very soon after the launch of DMs Guild.
I’ll go out of a limb and say the main culprit is Adventurers League, 5e’s organized play programme. Due to its slavish devotion to the 4-hour, one-shot, organized play format, it codified the following cancerous outgrowths in 5e adventure writing:
1) 5-room dungeons, and often linear ones at that, because we gotta cram everything into the constraints of the time limit;
2) Rushed plots and rampant railroading, because we need to get it over with quickly;
3) Initially, forced combats and grandiose set-piece battles royal in the vein of 4e;
4) Later, when WotC realized most of their modern audience doesn’t actually know the rules and almost uniformly suffers from ADHD, they started to put it fewer (or intentionally easier) battles in favour of corny and contrived “interactive” role-playing set pieces, mostly coming in the form of – YES! – endless fairs, carnivals, and circuses, and even, I shit you not, cooking competitions.
So there you have it.
Given that, as near as I can tell, Wizards and TSR before them have never seen fit to issue any intelligent advice on how to run a game in any official product since years before most of the people currently playing were born, I doubt Adventurer’s League is the root cause. If anything it sounds like a return to form.
Yeah WTF? AL adventures are literally just a modernized format for tournament modules, which are widely-popular across all editions (especially old school ones).
Apparently OP also never heard of the RPGA, which was AL before AL.
Pish. I think the early proliferation of tournament and tournament-derived adventures is simply that TSR were lazy shites.
You seriously underestimate the effect of the internet. Earlier RPGA/Living Whatever stuff was limited in its circulation (usually shoddily published, limited to convention attendees, etc.).
Adventurer’s League and DMs Guild adventures were/are easy to physically come by, AND they appeared during an Eternal September of newbies jumping on the 5e bandwagon and having absolute no knowledge of how adventures used to be made, or, for that matter, anything D&D-related and older than 2014.
As a result, an entire generation sprang into being whose only frame of reference in adventure design was/is AL slop, endlessly regurgitated.
Thanks for demystifying this, Artem. I was genuinely puzzled.
D&D has become about a storytelling experience in place of gaming challenge, and player self-expression in place of player agency. So the rave reviews of this thing dismays but hardly surprises me.
While products that claim to be made for OSE are 95% trash, there’s still a solid bunch of actual adventure designers writing for it. 5e products are more like 99.99% trash because the corporate hacks have actively taught their fanbase to write this way.
If people want to play a storytelling game with little agency that’s fine. Those people are getting dicked over too, though, because the mechanics and adventures they’re being sold aren’t any good for that either. It’s the tools of one game being bent to the service of another. A lot of people appear to want to pretend to be running a D&D type game, while actually cheating behind the screen to make it into a narrative game, and the players are supposed to pretend not to notice. If they would let go of this conflict between the game they want to run and the game they’re “supposed” to be running and just match the tools to the playstyle they would all be better off.
> A lot of people appear to want to pretend to be running a D&D type game, while actually cheating behind the screen to make it into a narrative game, and the players are supposed to pretend not to notice.
Citation severely needed. Hitchens’s Razor, and all that…
I think it’s not too far of a stretch to believe that modern DMs, perhaps ignorantly, want the game to perfectly fit the preconceived storyline. Modern DMs also fear that players will leave and not come back if the game is not perfect, and in my experience, modern players (especially online players) are excessively picky, wanting to play their own preconceived stories for their own characters and not the DMs game/world, and heaven help you if their character dies. Their characters can’t die, even an heroic death.
Again, citation needed. This is just conjecture and extrapolation – how many groups have you been a part of? A conclusion like that requires at least N=100.
I’m sure there are some (perhaps even many) groups like this, but its hardly a universal phenomenon just because you think it might be.
It’s poor form to make assumptions about game groups based on the module market, for a number of reasons, the least of which being literally zero barrier to entry.
Anonymous, I neither need to nor can give evidence for my own anecdotal observations. When I say “a lot of people”, I mean a lot of people I have played games with, spoken to about running games, heard giving advice to others about running games, plus those last two again except online.
A lot of people dislike anchovies. “Hitchen’s Razor!!! N must >=1,322 or your statement is invalid!!!” Respectfully, get your head out of your arse.
I’ve been playing D&D since 1980. I’ve played together as DM and player character at home tables, conventions, online, and online conventions. I’ve played single 2 to 8 hour games, and full campaigns that lasted 1 to 3 years. I’ve played with hundreds, perhaps a thousand people. That’s experience for you. If you want a geek research study, you can find those elsewhere or do your own, but I think Anonymous should sit up and pay attention.
“citation needed” … yeesh, these are blog comments, not an academic paper; anecdotes and personal experience are plenty legit to make a point here.
Peltast is absolutely correct. Can’t be bothered to compile a bibliography for it, but a brief survey of DM advice youtube videos, and the most popular live-plays show that the presumption that D&D is a story-telling game is at epidemic levels. Despite the fact that what WotC keeps designing is a gridded tactical battle game with a bit of fluff on the side.
Sure, I guess you could use it to play-act in a story game (in which case the tactical battles are basically performances with forgone conclusions rather than actual challenges). But you could play-act a story in Monopoly too.
Another popular form of brain cancer is that 5e is somehow a rules-lite, anything-goes, make-it-up-as-you-go-along game.
Y’all sure love your generalizations.
I hear grognards are all completely impotent. All of them. Not even a wiggle.
I heard a lot of people talk about it, plus Youtube videos, so it’s true. Can’t link though – do your own research. This is a blog.
Does anyone else see the irony of a person insisting on citations who names himself Anonymous?
Anonymous, I can’t speak for the others, but do you have anything at all you would actually like to SAY? Or are you just expressing your disgruntlement that I made a personal observation that didn’t match your own?
Citations-Anonymous demanding an N=100 also makes him feel like the kind of impotent troll who thinks that F.A.T.A.L. is a well-designed system. No threat detected here.
And Peltast, and Kubo, thanks for your contributions. Despite the intention to move away from 4e, the only thing I find that 5e does acceptably is tactical minis battles. And the design choices leave me fighting the system rather than be helped by it both when I tried to run planned stories (yeah, I had the narrator-brain rot for a while too), and when I tried to run actual adventures. That help explain why so few published 5e adventures are actually good.
This author has obviously tapped into a successful market for the current version of D&D. Good for them and good for their audience. I guess they want content like this?
It sounds like dog poo to me. I have never been happier that I gave up on WotC during the 4e era.
As I said, players these days want to express themselves rather than actually play a challenge. I’d otherwise shrug and let them do them, but it’s hard to ignore since the disease has infected the entire adventure-design industry.
My defense against accusations of simply being a nostalgic grognard is that I actually LIKED a lot of changes in 4e. The entire package still sucks at every level of game design though.
Agree with Artem that AL is the big culprit for unwittingly ruining D&D for the reasons he stated. In my experience, AL (and really all other organized play for RPGs) are best at offering a perfectly average (bland) game. Most new players that move to being DMs model their games on this (and not to mention inspiration from Harry Potter and Disney films) and the results are sad. It’s like walking into rooms upon rooms of uninspired amateurish landscape paintings or reading a long book of bad poetry.
Rare, but I agree with literally everyone, and embrace the entire sphere of perspectives. Each one curiously has merit based on speaker and audience. It’s sort of like judging . . . gonzo porn. Is it dumb, smart, or targeted?
The word “childish” is what resonates with this review. It’s a Haunted Funhouse with a bitchy mother-in-law. Okay. Back to a new slant on a traditional cheeseburger. Halloween XXIII.
Someone else cited a kind of Timing Is/Was Everything with the commercial aspect of the author. I agree with that entirely too.
I am starting to wonder if I am the old curmudgeon who resists change, or the man who firmly believes that the (Biblical Expletive) game was designed correctly the first time. Sort of like jazz. And children doing chores.
someone else can back me up but I think literally everyone of these plots…
“endless fairs, carnivals, and circuses, and even, I shit you not, cooking competitions.”
were done in Dungeon Magazine (back when it was in print) so not “OLD” old school, but far from a modern phenomenon.
I haven’t seen any cooking competitions, but definitely fairs, carnivals, and circuses (which are basically synonyms).
It’s a question of scale and frequency.
Look no further than this little nugget, reviewed on this very site: https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=7518
“Your level eight characters get to escort a wagon full of mead barrels to two towns. Escort mission. Of beer. As level eight’s. It’s not magic beer or anything. It’s just mead. Because the two towns haven’t had any for awhile and it will make them happy.”
And I’ve seen a crapton of “cozy fantasy” nonsense like this.
I can think of 2 cheese themed and 1 cheese related adventures alone, off the top of my head…
But Wheel of Evil is fun, and crusty rather than cozy.
Anybody ever run a cheese golem before? That sounds like a thing. Is that a thing?
I wish there were a way to reward some of the musings and pronouncements in these comments (ha! that hardly does such pensées justice) sections, by bestowing an electronic thumbs up, which captured my personal thumbprint for the purpose of verification.
From the soundness of the reflections that are everyday sprinkled on your faces here at tenfoolpote, it is clear that eminent tinkers moonlight here *in disguise*, chanting restful midnight murmurs about the game we love, at the end of a day of braincrushing toil solving world mysteries from their cell.