By Paul Carden, Mitchell Woods
Ethereal Games
S&W
Level ??
The Delverne Windmill — An adventure about a missing windmill and a monstrous wyrm
The Hermitage of the Seven Stars — An adventure about an errie chapel in an alternate universe where everything goes wrong – to the adventurers
The Wizards Scroll is a zine with a little over a hundred pages in it. Inside are the usual zine articles about ziney things. Tables, locales, levels caps, blah blah blah. And two adventures. We do adventures here.
The Delverne Windmill is about a twelve page adventure, in the usual digest format. It advertises itself as a short investigation and crawl. Let us look deeply within ourselves and ask What Do Those Words Mean To Me? The correct answer, of course, is that old Brycy Bryce wouldn’t mention it if it weren’t a problem. This sort of disconnect about expectations, a continual theme, is prevalent in several areas in this adventure. The village has some maps. As well as an inn. As well as the hole in the ground where the missing windmill was. But, actually, are they maps? I guess, technically, they fulfill that purpose, at least one anyway, has a scale on it. But the others? These are art pieces. You don’t need a map. There is nothing about the location of A relative to B in the village that requires a map. Or the inn, where nothing really happens. Or the hole in the ground where the windmill used to be. Nothing happens. So why provide a map?
And, just what is an investigation? That is the first part of the adventure. The investigation. But there isn’t one. I mean, the windmill is gone and there’s a hole in the ground. The investigation, in this context, is talking to some people in the inn, if you want to. Yup. Heard a noise. Saw some blue lights. And a dude that thinks its a hoax. Is that an investigation? That sounds like a rumor table strung out to a few pages. There is no conspiracy. There is nothing to discover, nothing to help you. Just, a hole in the ground with some blue mist in it. Gotcha.
On to the hole in the ground! The crawl has four rooms. In a line. Your entrance room. The ghoul lair. The Blue crystal room. And then the dragons lair. (No Daphne) The ghoul lair has a some ghouls. Kind of. They aren’t undead so I guess you can’t turn them? But they paralyze? Whatever. You kill some and then keep having wandering encounters with them until you make the forty foot trek in to the blue crystal room. The adventure ends when you pull the millstone from the dragons mouth, where it is stuck. Or kill it, I guess. Then it crawls down a hole and goes away. You get 200gp. Good job.
Theres no real investigation. There’s no real crawl. There are no really evocative descriptions. Interactivity? I guess? You can pull the stone out of the dragons mouth only for it to immediately slink away? So, yes? “? unique interactivity” means less when there are three rooms. Anyway, twelve pages to do this? This is like a one page adventure.
The Hermitage of the Seven Stars is a bit different though. This has seventeen rooms in a kind of palace. You start on the second floor and, having been transported to the SOMEPLACE ELSE where it resides, you can throw yourself down to the roofs, domes, etc, of the first by nature of the lower gravity. Also, you can die out there so don’t fuck around too much.
Thinking about this and it implies. There is a consideration of the environment. You are on the second floor. You can get to the roofs, etc of the first by going outside. It does have lower gravity and you can bounce away. And there is that whole oxygen situation to deal with after awhile when you are outside/far enough away. Is it a trap? Is it a puzzle? It’s an environmental condition? You can take advantage of it? It’s entirely more integrated in to the entire adventure than a simple effect is. And a lot of this adventure is written that way. These integrated puzzles/traps/situations.
The setup is very terse handled. You’re in a chapel in the woods for whatever pretext theDM has. There’s a giant bell and if two people ring it then everyone in the chapel get transported to the palace/”dungeon.” It’s the home/waste hope of a sect and is rumored to have all of the future knowledge of the world in it, and thusly and oracle for the party to explore to get that answer that they’ve always wanted about the words for that wand/person/etc.
The appeal to this one, as I mentioned earlier, is the kind of integrated room things. Room two has a statue in a kind of giant bell jar filled with reddish liquid that bubbles some when a living person gets close to it. And the statue has pearl eyes. You all know how much I like something obvious going on that tempts the party to fuck around. Breaking the glass releases the sonic creature inside. And, also, you can remove the statues hand to find a compartment with a potion bottle inside. Three things, in one small vignette. Another room, a kind of tower, exists in a kind of ethereal state that you can’t interact with … until you find things deeper inside the dungeon to help you. Another room has a furnace, a foundry, with the furnace filled with a kind of translucent jelly. When free it makes a beeline for a magic-user to attack, and, otherwise, crawls outside and throws itself down a pit. We need to imagine Sisyphus happy, I guess. It’s doing a really good on the rooms without them appearing to be obvious puzzle/set piece rooms.
The descriptions are not top notch at all and could be pumped up quite a bit to make them more evocative. A hard edit to reduce word count and add some bolding (non is really present) and other formatting to call attention to things and enable better scanning would be in order also. Creatures such as “irradiated monk” and “Amoebal warrior” don’t really get a decent description either. And I do love a terse but evocative monster description. I want the party feeling something when they show up and appreciate a little nudge from the designer in that direction so I’m not just left out in the open to come up with something totally on my own … that’s what I think I’m paying for anyway.
I’m inclined to No Regert this one based on the rooms and situations in that second adventure alone. The adventuring challenges are interesting and in places deep. Just know that you have more than little work to do to bring the place to life fully, all on your own.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is eleven pages of the zine, but, as Pay What You Want, you can see the entire thing and judge.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499639/the-wizard-s-scroll-ii?1892600
So it’s a no regerts for a couple of situations that could just as well be pulled and dropped into our own adventures over the adventures themselves being good?
That’s every adventure, Asshat.
Ah, was under the impression that it was given to generally solid adventures with glaring annoyances.
The review suggests the second adventure is pretty ok, with some quite strong parts, and it mostly loses marks just for the lack of evocative writing
Question — What’s the difference between a “locale” and an “adventure,” anyway?
I think “adventure” implies some kind of progression to a goal(s), whereas a “locale” is just a place where stuff is going on to be leveraged and interacted with at the players’ whim.
Steading of the Hill Giant Chief would probably be considered a locale (if run standalone), but it’s also part of the larger Against the Giants adventure with a goal of stopping the giants’ war and their drow controllers.
If the locale has treasure and the edition is 0e-2e, no difference there be
This. G1 is definitely an adventure. Something like the B/X gazetteers may be more like locales.
G1 is what Gus L calls a “Gygaxian Fortress” – a static locale to be raided/infiltrated by the party, where players determine their approach from a blank slate, and the only development to be had is in the reactions of the defenders. The focus is all on the organization/roster of the location, rather than its overall plot relevance.
“Adventure” implies some sort of plot, development, and a narrative arc of some kind. The only “development” of G1 is that you are pointed to the location of G2; the only “plot” is that the giants inside must die. I don’t know if that qualifies it as an “adventure”, per se.
I guess ultimately it’s semantics, and doesn’t really matter at all anyway. It would be good to scrounge up an official definition though, for curiosity sake.
Au contraire – the purpose of the adventure is to stop the giant raids, and over the course of the adventure the party explores the dungeon, discovering factions, the Weird and challenging high-level play- all in 8 pages (with iconic art as well, including the hidden Hawaiian Punch Man).
G1 is really the Platonic model of a D&D adventure.
I don’t know about “platonic model”, but I am coming around to seeing your way of thinking.
The sticking point for me is that those plot beads you’ve pointed out (exploration, factions, stopping the giants) are only really plot beads if you play through all of Against the Giants. Otherwise the other giants visiting the steading are just another stronger enemy, and not the emissary of a whole faction, and “stop the giant raids” amounts to “kill everyone in this non-flammable building” – not exactly a fit for feature-length film, you know? Exploration is virtually non-existent compared to something like Barrier Peaks – you can explore the situation, sure, but the environs of Steading are not particularly mysterious and enticing (if you weren’t shoehorned into killing giants, you’d probably not even bother to take your party there). When put it into Against the Giants, Steading becomes the first link in a chain of exotic locations and sustained narrative – on it’s own, it’s just a really big longhouse in which you kill everyone then leave forever.
To me, that sounds more like a locale than an adventure, but I won’t begrudge someone who thinks otherwise.
A locale full of monsters and treasure is definitely an “adventure,” in the meaning of that term relevant to Dungeons and Dragons.
I’d say that an adventure has a motivating reason for the characters being there (other than wandering in at random); a locale is simply a bunch of NPCs and items waiting for someone to interact with them.
G1 is an adventure because the hill giants are attacking outwards, giving the players a reason to engage and investigate.
A clearing in a forest with an elf encampment is a locale, even if there’s some note to the effect that they are xenophobic and will attack any party with humans in it which happens by. If the party is made of elves then the ancient elf leader may ask them to go on some quest – which is an adventure.
That’s how I see it.
Thanks for reviewing Hermitage. As you perceived I didn’t really know what I was doing editing it, I was more or less just trying to pare it down to <10 pages quickly, by any means necessary. I do naturally tend towards plain, matter-of-fact descriptions when designing dungeons and DMing, but I also wish I'd provided more detail on the situation. I realized in playtesting that I had to fill in a lot of the background narrative on the fly.