The Attack on Arden

By Velociyrx
Self Published
5e?
Level 0

The citizens of Arden don’t know it when they get up the morning that the adventure starts, but they are about to have a very, very bad day.  One that will push them to their limits, and maybe a bit beyond, even. One that will put them on the path to becoming heroes.  If they can rise to the challenge.  If they can survive. Are you ready for your first day of school at the Hero Academy?  The curriculum is hard and unforgiving, but the rewards…well, the rewards can be sublime. May fortune find you, and smile!

This 41 page funnel adventure details the attack on a village by a group of 400 invaders. It is one of the worst adventures I have ever seen. Rambling, devoid of structure, and with little to do. What can I say, it was in the OSR section.

I am at a loss. I don’t know what to say. I’m not allowed to be a shit. I’m not allowed to fucking hate life and all that lives. Can I rant and rave and cuss and throw a fit? No. I have to be supportive. I have to say things like Falls short of their vision and crap like that. Somehow, we are expected to have a giant steaming pile of shit shoved down our throats and say Thank You Please More! You can’t actually not like anything, you can’t have fucking standards. And thus ut always was and alway will be. 

Hermes Trismegistus as an old level one wizard of mine who was 98 and taught in a magic school.And  he killed three giant rats over his career with a magic missile in the schools basement  hence his name. And he blew out this kids throat once with a magic missile and got no end of shit for killing a kid even though the kids eyes were glowing black and he was JUST about to start unleashing hellfire. You remember all of those long, old, boring, let me tell you about my character stories that you have had to sit through politely until you can find an excuse to be somewhere else, like cleaning out the pig styes? This is that, except in DM “Let me tell you about my home game” form. It drones on and one and it interjects pages of This Is What Happened In My Game, in detail!, at various points in the text. Pages that have little to no use, even as examples, in the game you might be running from this adventure text. 

I don’t know how to describe this. 400 dudes attack the town of 200 people. They knock down the two guard towers first thing. At some point some PC gets two arrows fired at them. At another point two attackers show up for the party to fight. Then you can roll up to six times to make forays in to town to save people and gather supplies. These are just Stealth Checks, with no other roleplaying or situations. Oh, Oh, there is this: “Mrs. Miller appears out of the roiling smoke to one of the search parties. She is bloody and crying. Her two youngest children are missing and Mr. Miller died looking for them.” That is the closest, and the ONLY place, in this adventure where there is any specificity to a situation. Seriously. That’s it. The abstracted stealth checks are the adventure. There is NOTHING else. The fucking Miller shit is what the adventure should be. Situations. Difficult decisions. The designer prompting the DM to scenes and situations and greatness. 

But not here. Forty pages to get a couple of encounters. Somehow it has both no details and an overabundance of them at the same time, but nothing gameable. It’s as if I write an adventur ein the style of this blog, all stream of consciousness with long rambling sections, little formatting, and what formatting I do throw in I ignore and mix in other shit. 

A page of italics r4ead-aloud to start the adventure. A LONG and involved process of character creation, that attaches the players to their characters through a long rich fully developed backstory. It’s a fucking funnel man! A funnel is designed to NOT do that, You make some dudes and GO, you’re not attached. You get attached through their deeds. 

“This is very open ended and when this adventure begins, I have no way of knowing

where your players have placed their characters” The entire adventure is like this. “Meanwhile, if any of your characters have situated themselves around Miller’s Pond, they’ll be pursued.” Why would I be around millers pond? There’s nothing special about this place.  “If several of the characters started in or near the tavern, their action economy should overwhelm these two, which will give the characters an important win, plus 2 Gambesons, 2 Spears, and 2 daggers for the effort. That’s potentially huge.”

“This…this right here is how heroes are ultimately made. Not born, made.” Jesus h fucking Christ. Fantasy Heartbreaker anyone? You have to suffer through page after page of this smugness. Of this mastabatory fantasy of their home game world. I pulled section after section of text from this to quote, but it’s just too much.

There is no interactivity to speak of. What little there is is abstracted to a die roll. There is no specificity; the miller pond thing is BY FAR the only specific situation in this. It is long, conversational, rambling, overly invested in itself. Bloodymage, at least, didn’t drone on for forty pages. Information is mixed in willy nilly, with little structure to find things. It talks AT the DM instead of supporting them in their game. It’s the difference between Ulysses and an operation manual. I’m not doing a Finnigans Wake thing here, I need details to operate the thing. 

I really can’t say enough bad things about this. It does … nothing? But it manages to do it in such a smug Holier Than Thou way. I really cannot stand this. It’s an outline of an outline, that is then abstracted. While still somehow dumping TONS of detail that has absolutely no bearing on anything while telling you how great it is. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/511510/a1-the-attack-on-arden?1892600