By Olly Tyler
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-2
The local town of Penderham has been beset by raids for a year by a bandit gang that they cannot track down. The bandits are led by a battle hardened and wily orc called Nurgal who has assembled a group of orcs, goblins and two harpies. Before terrorising the local trade routes and villagers his band found themselves a perfect hidden and fortified base inside the dungeon of an ancient ruined temple.
This 37 page adventure uses about seventeen pages to describe about 32 rooms in a two level dungeon complex. It has some interesting room concepts but the length of eac room combined with an incoherence in the writing makes this one of the more opaque offerings I’ve seen.
I’m not sure which way to go at the start with this review. The adventure borders on being incoherent. But, also, it has some decently interesting room concepts at times. Room concepts that can hang with some of the best designers if they were done right. This is a non-trivial accomplishment. It’s hard to say just how many adventures I’ve seen where Stabbin is the only interactivity. Or, perhaps, some simplistic traps. But there’s something else going on here. I’m not sure if it’s AI or if it’s just an EASL issue.
Ok, on to the good stuff. There are a few really interesting room concepts here. They combine a kind of mashup (future symbolism …) of ideas that are familiar yet new. In one room we’ve got one entrance and a waterfall in a corner … and a snake inlay wall design on the far wall … with jeweled eyes. Fucking withthe eyes causes the entrance to close and the room to being to fill with water … there is a rusty iron ring in the silted over pool under the waterfall. Pull it up to unstopper the place and open the secret door that is behind the waterwall. Rusty iron ring, under the silt. Secret door behind the waterfall, snake inlay with jewel eyes … this is all just classic stuff. Classic in its components, anyway. That’s a good OSR room. Other rooms have nude bodies on slabs covered in point delicate crystals (open wounds? Breathing in the dust? Oops …) A multi-level moonlit harpy room. Nice rooms. Nice room concepts. Good interactivity in them.
But man, this things rough. Those nice concepts are hidden behind some really rough stuff. That waterfall room, that fill up? The door that shuts? It’s a portcullis. How does a room fill with water if its a portcullis? Does the LLM not know that or was this an EASL issue? That same room, the map. It’s a normal dungeon room, somewhat smallish, square, with a waterfall in the corner. The hallways near there have some water features. The map water gives the indication that the waterfall is a leak, something that should not be there, with the soggy hallways and nearby rooms now having damp floors and ankle high water in places in the rooms. But the secret door behind the waterfall, the whole door trap, the iron ring to unplug the room … this implies that dungeon is built that way.
Something stinks here. There’s a room near the entrance. It has a door to a small 10×10 cupboard. It has old sacks and cloaks hanging on hooks and laying onthe on the floor. Got it? Oh, right, also, there’s a skeleton in it that attacks you when you open the door. Got it? Inside it is a secret door. It leads to a FORGE … with NO. OTHER. ENTRANCES. . Like a real forge, 50×60, columns down the center, coal and wood to stock the forge, sheets and rods of steel. AND MULTIPLE HUMANOID SMITHS WORKING. Everything gets dragged through that cupboard? No signs of it in the cupboard? A fucking skeleton attacking when you approach it?! Come on now. No way a real person wrote this. Or,maybe they did. That 10×10 room with ancient red dragon in it was a thing at one point in time.
There’s more than a little to not like here. The read-aloud is in second person form, with all of you see and you feel shit in it. Things “appear to be” all over the place, “You enter what looks like a wood paneled armory.”. The read-aloud over-reveals the room contents destroying the back and forth between players and DM. The room contents read like Victorian laundry lists of objects found in the rooms. This makes room descriptions long in places, with a column or even a page not being unusual. The RA tells us that there are lumpy sacks on the floor, but not what they contain.
Did I mention the healing font? It never runs out. Well, it does, but refills once a month. Sounds like a business opportunity to me! Gotta get that side hustle on!
I’ve mentioned incoherent a couple of times now. It’s not really in relation to things like that waterfall room which just don’t make sense. It’s incoherent in that the organizational structure of the paragraphs seem out of order. It’s like you write a five paragraph essay, in the classic style, and then Put a detail paragraph first and second and then the conclusion paragraph, then the last detail paragraph and then the introductory paragraph, if that kind of makes sense. The details and the summaries just seem to to appear in the text without any sense of where they should be. This is most notable in the town sections, which also serve as the backstory and hook, in which the information the party finds out, and from who and where, just appears kind of willy nilly interspersed with summaries. You find out information from various NPC’s and then the adventure tells us we can go to those NPCs to get the story of what’s going on … but those are only real NPC’s and we just read about the details of what is going on … which was still confusing as hell. It tells us that there are raids happening. There’s a survivor reporting goblins and orcs. There is evidence of that. And yet the adventure then acts like who is raiding is a mystery. What?!
I’m not sure what is going on here. I know, with the ai art in the piece, folks are going to lean that direction for the letter drops, the weird incoherence order of the information and the disconnect in logic in rooms. In my naivete I am not as quick to jump to that conclusion. Either way, the work is a confusing mess, difficult to dig through, with the high points not being high enough to justify looking at this.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. The preview is fifteen pages (beyond being PWYW) and shows you the entire intro and about ten dungeon rooms, so, good preview, AI overlords!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524972/the-snake-temple-ruins?1892600
It doesn’t read like an LLM. People wildly overestimate LLMs, or like you say they leap to conclusions based on machine-generated illustrations.
Here’s a randomly-selected room (L1-21):
“The well is deep and dangerous to enter. Any coins dropped in will be lost. There is a pitcher for water nearby. The rope could be cut off and used ( 60ft rope ).
The secret door to the altar room ( L1-22) is 3 feet square and low down. There is a sword point sticking out of the wall thrust from the other side. This is the end of the dead adventurer’s sword from the altar room which got stuck and snapped off trying to open the trapped secret one way door from the inside. The broken sword tip has jammed the secret door and needs to be hammered back in and a STR test is needed to force the door open.”
First that is not typical LLM language, unless the author rewrote it in their own words. Second an LLM struggles to remember enough different things at once to credibly have written about a sword point in one room, from a dead adventurer in another (he’s present in L1-22 with his broken sword), jamming a secret door between the two, acting as a clue to both the secret door AND the trap, AND you have to hammer the blockage in AND make a Strength check to open the door. That is way too much sauce on one ingredient for a machine, involving relationships it can’t understand or extrapolate from.
The author could have used LLM prompts to riff on for their own writing, no way to ever know, but this is all on them, the good and the bad.
I don’t think it’s LLM. People use AI to create art because stock art is expensive and usually crap or has a weird license and have no ability to create their own. But pretty much anyone can write, and if you are making an adventure in the first place, you probably are an aspiring writer. If he were after money, he’s probably be cranking them out or making 100 lists you find on DTRPG products.
Also don’t think it’s a EASL thing since the author’s name is Olly Tyler. Maybe he’s Welsh, but I think even that speak English these days.
My guess is that a lot of the things are from self-editing passes. When you go over your work you want to elaborate on something and it doesn’t always match the original. Or you move things around so they are out of order.