By Michael Robinson
Rutibex
"OSR"/5e
Levels 3-5
Greetings Adventurers! Embark on an exciting hex crawl adventure in the new module – Three Witches! Explore a diverse and dangerous realm, where three rival witches vie for power and influence. Unravel the agendas of the Desert, Forest, and Mountain witches. Will you ally with one to defeat the others? Can you resist their corrupting influence? The fate of the realm lies in your hands!
This 145 page adventure uses 35 pages to describe twenty hexes and about thirty rooms over three dungeons. A bland outline, I’m not even sure there’s a pretense that this is OSR.
Hey man, I’m reviewing a longer work! Know you all want this! Let’s see … “For OSR and 5e!” Usually that means its a 5e adventure with maybe a page of stat conversions for OSR systems. This doesn’t even do that. It is clearly a 5e adventure, even though the cover and marketing indicates that its compatible with OSR. Sure, in the same way that a Funyun is compatible as a hammer. I could take all of the stats in that Star Frontiers adventure and do my best, on my own, to convert it all over to B/X. But, then, is that worth marketing? So, fuck you Rutibex. After this one I’m moving on with my fucking life, such that it is. Fucking garbage.
Most of this product is the witch class, with the usual long ass spell descriptions taking up most of the page count. That’s about 35 pages for the hex crawl and dungeons and about 110 pages for the witch class, spells, and a couple of new monsters. Joy. Love this. A 140 page adventure with a hexcrawl and three dungeons and five pages of bullshit tackon? Super cool. But the other way around? No thank you.
There’s no lead in here. I gather that there is a region and that there are three witches here all crying for power. We know nothing about the region, or town, or people, or even the witches and their vying for power. We just get a wandering monster table for each terrain type. Here we go! “A fairy ring. Entering it could transport the players to a fey realm or cause other magical effects.”No? How about: “A cursed statue in a small pond, with a puzzle that, if solved, breaks the curse and grants a reward.” These are typical. No detail at all. I get it, wanderer. Short. Terse. But, man, you write the fucking encounter. Put the fucking thing down on the fucking page!
This is, of course, a pretty blatant symbol of whats to come. Let’s look at those hex descriptions, shall we? “A barren and scorching desert, where only the hardiest creatures survive. A large sandstorm obscures the horizon, making navigation difficult. The players may encounter a band of nomadic raiders, a hidden oasis, or a mysterious ruin.” Again, this is a fairly typical hex. A little one liner that is super generic about the terrain and then “you might encounter/see A, b, or C.” This is not creativity. This is not, IMO, a hex crawl. This is just a bunch of crap thrown down on page that requires a DM to do a metric FUCK ton of work to turn it in to an adventure. That’s not my fucking job. That’s not why I bought this fucking adventure. I wasn’t hoping for “frozen tundra. Maybe there is something here for the party to interact with?” Thats the fuck the job of of the fucking designer. I swear to fucking god. How can someone think that this is an adventure, or adding value, or making a DMs life easier? Or even inspiring to run? There’s nothing specific about anything in that fucking hex crawl.
Let us move on to the rooms in the dungeons. “”As you step into the cavern, your footsteps echo ominously through the dimly lit corridor” Second person read-aloud and purple. And the, how about this: “This corridor serves as the foreboding entrance to the Cavern of Bones, setting the tone for the grim discoveries that lie ahead” That’s the DM text, describing what the room is. You know what would be better? Designing a room in which you show us that this is a foreboding entrance rather than telling the DM that this is a foreboding entrance. It’s absurd to put in a line of text that tells us that room one, the entrance, is the entrance. In another place you come upon a pit trap with some bones at the bottom. The DM text tells us “it’s rumored that the bones within the pit belong to thieves and adventurers who sought to plunder the cavern’s secrets, only to meet their demise at the very threshold” This is clearly not written for a DM or for a player. It’s written to be read. And an adventure to read ranks just above “shameless money grab” at the bottom of the list of adventure sins.. In another room, the Guardian Chamber, the read-aloud tells the players “As you step into the circular expanse of the Guardian Chamber your torchlight flickers “ Now how the fuck are they supposed to know that its The Guardian Chamber?!
This is absurd, and not in a good way. Page long rooms are the norm. Overwrought read-aloud in the second person. DM text telling us background and … I don’t even know what, information that no one can possibly know or care about?
The hex crawl is abstracted encounters. The dungeon encounters are torturous to wade through. Bad read-aloud. Bad DM text. Standard challenges. And there’s not even a pretense of this being OSR. Nope.
This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages. OIt shows you the hexes and the first part of the firs dungeon. More than enough to see what you’re in for, so, good preview at least.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524814/three-witches?1892600
The machine-generated cover illustration should have been a red flag. If an adventure has actual art it means the publisher spent money on it or the adventure was itself made by an artist. If an adventure has no art you know at the very least that it’s not a cynical cash-grab.
The blatantly AI-generated cover image should have been the indicator of the AI generated text. My dude asked for suggestions to chatGPT and copy pasted those as an “adventure”.
Also, the fact that the product description says it “Contains AI-Generated Content” might have been a clue that it contained AI generated content.
Also, the author has put out 37 titles since May of this year. I looked at 8 of them; the total pagecount for those 8 modules was 1542 pages. One of them was 459 pages by itself.
So either they are all entirely AI generated, or Malrex really needs to step up his game and get modules out quicker.
I don’t know – art is distinctly separate from text. Anyone can write text; few people can make passable art. My baseline assumption when I see AI art is “that guy didn’t want to pay an artist, but also didn’t want his adventure to look like a Word doc”, which I can forgive for hobbyist/free work, but not for something that cost money.
The better indicator of AI text is churn, as Beoric states. If this is indeed the author’s 37th title in 2 months, that’s a HUGE red flag. Even a cocaine-fueled Stephen King would struggle to reach that output.
Just recently under ‘The Snake Temple Ruins’ I said that that people are too quick to accuse adventures of being LLM text and tend to overestimate machine writing. But looking at the preview for this one it is absolutely written by a machine with minimal editing.
I used AI when the craze started. Privately, for fun. I kept reading articles about how it can write adventures on its own with prompts, and I thought I’d test it out of curiosity. That’s exactly the way it replies. With maybe, perhaps, could be. This designer copy pasted the answers and sells them for 4 dollars.
I am not against ai. It’s a good tool and it’s here to stay. There are ways (dnd or not) that it can be helpful. But copy pasting like that is the worse way to do it.
This content is 100% AI slop, and any editing sone to it is minimal. Rutibex is a blight churning out endless amounts of AI slop onto Drivethrurpg, and does not deny it when accused of doing so.
Just take a look at their products. This time the accusations are real and apt.
Short of altered statblocks, rebalanced treasure amounts, and the absence/presence of terms like “CR” and “DC”, what exactly differentiates a 5e adventure from an OSR adventure? And please don’t say “open world agency” and “problems solved off the character sheet”, because that stuff is purely authorial choice, and not at all system inherent.
Someone really should publish some kind of conversion manual, considering the number of times it gets brought up.
OSR is a style, not just a set of systems, and plenty of people have already published style guides on it. But even when doing a 1:1 conversion from one system to another, you have to understand the game you’re converting to and play-balance it so all the gameplay loops work as intended and nothing breaks, either as the writer or the DM. If you give someone a conversion manual but they’re never played the game they’re converting to, they’ll still mess it up.
Yeah I get what you’re saying, but you’re not quite picking up what I’m putting down.
When Bryce says “this says it’s an OSR adventure but it’s clearly a 5e conversion”, what does that mean exactly, beyond adjusting some numbers? That is to say, what are these so-called “gameplay loops” that are apparently only capable of existing in OSR and not in 5e? Because I can’t name a single thing you can *only* do in an OSR game that you *can’t do* in 5e, and vice-versa.
The only issue I can identify between the two is the imbalance of direct numerical conversion (monster hit points and issues with gold-for-XP, mostly). And if it is the case that numbers are the only difference between the two, than simple conversion metrics would fix that, no? Literally a conversion manual (a 5e creature with AC 15 and 100hp = a B/X creature with AC 11 and 50hp”, or whatever). “Half all the hit points”, “Multiply GP values by 1o”, and so forth.
Assuming numbers are converted, what other factor could possibly distinguish a 5e adventure from an OSR one, that isn’t just an author’s personal bad practice choice to railroad or what have you?
I suggest a new category “ AI Slop” and a blacklist of AI authors.
If only for your own good – this is the third thing youve reviewed by this shitepeddler.
Should a no-AI policy be instigated? I’m not against the judicious use of AI for spell checking, minor art generation, etc, but wholesale adventure writing that results in slop will surely result in Bryce expiring of apoplectic rage and dismay.