By Crumbling Keep
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-3
Your mother used to sing you a song when you were young about circling birds, but it would always end with her tears. Now you find yourself in a forest of crawling dead things and strange happenings, and the events of the song are coming true! What does it all mean? And what is the creature that stares at you with your own eyes?
This fifteen page adventure has five populated hexes, one with a small five room keep. It’s got one of those bullshit narrative game framing devices. Otherwise it’s just fiveish simplistic hexes in a font/layout optimized for your phone.
Time marches on. We’ve seen responses to various trends in D&D adventures over the years, such as the inclusion of VTT maps, hyperlinks and so on. This time we’ve got an adventure ‘optimized for mobile.’ In practice that means a GIANT FONT on a small screen size and some hyperlinks in the adventure to make moving around it easier. I can’t imagine ever using this, but, it exists so someone somewhere must need it. But is it GOOD?
No.
Let’s looks at the opening page: “Dim light filters in from a sun that struggles to rise over the horizon. It’s early, perhaps earlier than you’d like, but sleeping was not easy last night. It’s eerily silent as you all mill about, gathering your supplies to get back on the road, and a low mist gathers around your legs, obscuring the ground. Suddenly, a large group of crows rises out of the woods, their caws rising in an insane chorus as they fly in a circle before heading northwest. Ask: Which PC’s mother used to sing them a song about circling birds?” Yup. It’s one of those. A narrative bullshit thing. The followup question is “Why did you think she would cry after singing the song?” So, even better, it’s got some trauma dumping shit attached to it. This is not fun and is inappropriate to put in to a game. The trauma shit. I think the narrative shit, explicit as it is here, is lame as fuck and tends to not fall in to my definition of what a ‘game’ is. It’s a fucking activity. But, if we are going to go down that path then FORCING your players in to some kind of trauma dump is bullshit. Yeah, I think the trigger warning shit is general nonsense. “Someone dies.” or “There are snakes.” But, also, if you’re gonna put crap like this in your game then, yes, you get to trigger warning it. And, further, if you feel the need to trigger warning something then you probably shouldn’t put the fucking thing in your game. This is all edgelord bullshit. You write a couple of decent adventure that I would consider Best, then I’ll ease up on my diatribes and consider that you might be able to stick something edgier in. But, again, we’re all here for fun, not for trauma bonding in a group circle where we work out our feelings. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. EXCEPT WHEN IT HAPPENS IN THE FUCKING D&D GAME. “Sketch the symbol your mother had tattooed on her wrist that she never explained.” Go fuck yourself. I’d walk the fuck out of this nonsense and demand a refund if I stumbled upon this at a con..
The style is OSE. “Birds flying over head (squawking ominously), Bones litter the ground (animal and human, clean and unmarred), Stone Altar (northern end of the field, ancient, crumbling” It’s fine. OSE Style is easy to do. You still have to write a decent description. These are ok. Nothing special, but also not terrible. Meh.
There is, though, a lack of understanding of what a D&D game that infects the encounter keys. Let’s look at one of the encounters: “Pained Man (half embedded/phased into the rock wall, there’s no way he should be alive, can only wail, has lost his faculties)” You getting nothing more than that. Seriously, that’s it. Has the designer never played D&D before? This is clearly an element one wishes to focus on in the room. The party WILL be investigating. And, yet, nothing more. It’s just fucking window dressing. Similarly, there’s a chasm in another area. Down below are a lot of bodies. Absolutely nothing to do in the text mentions that again. The party WILL be fucking going down there. They WILL be searching. If you didn’t want them to then don’t fucking thell them that there is shit down there to do and look at . You put something there, so you need to help us run the inevitable situation where the party goes down to investigate it.
Oh, I didn’t describe the adventure. You start with that rad-aloud from above, do the trauma dump thing, and then, for some reason, wander around in the woods. I guess cause those birds circling and your mom? Whatever. You wander hexes until you maybe stumble in to one with an encounter in it (five of them) and hope you don’t wander off the edge of the map. IE: I’m sure it was playtested as a railroad rather than a hex crawl. Eventually you find a cave with some abomination in it that looks like your twin. Whatever. No explanation. Just a mystery.
Garbage adventure with nothing special going on except some pretension. If you’re gonna do some pretension in your adventure then fucking disclose it so we can avoid it.
This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages. You get to see the start with the narrative nonsense.
I can only imagine the answers my players would give if I tried to pull this. ” she cries because my father manhood was smaller than my wee baby one” or ” She cries because the local inn Bell of the Taco removed Mexican Pizza from the menu” or she cries because ” She couldnt get tickets to the Creed tour”
And that tattoo, you better believe it would be what ever the Jugalo symbol is.
Sounds like some Trophy Gold kinda story gaming influence. The guy on Fear of a Black Dragon podcast popularises that kind of play. Which is fine, I’m there for adventure reviews, I just play D&D and not a story game.
Did a person request a review of this? Is that person your enemy?
I wish storygamers would fuck off, there is no and was never a meaningful link between storygame and OSR play. Just desperate coattail grabbing after storygames failed to become mainstream successful after 15+ years of every opportunity to do so
Anon, using this little doll, would please show the courtroom where exactly the storygamers touched you?
Can you show me what part of your smooth autistic brain thought that was funny DP?
At least I can remember my own name, anonymous, and storygames don’t keep me up at night in a cold sweat like a little bitch.
To the anonymous user who writes from the comfort of non-attribution so they don’t have to face consequences for all the things that fall from their head onto the webpages of others: On further reflection, this was a rather knee-jerk and angered response on my part. For that, I apologize. Allow me to iterate my point in a finer, less hostile fashion.
I’d like to share a story.
I went to the book store the other day, and there were a load of books in the Romance section that were most certainly not my cup of tea. Too trite, too saccharine, and in my opinion most are poorly written cash-grabs by less skilled authors preying on loneliness and longing. Though it irked me to see such offerings in my local bookstore, I was far from being in a position to dictate what they could or could not sell there. So rather than hanging around the Romance section criticizing fellow browsers for their interest in such things, I instead went to a section of the bookstore I usually enjoy, over in the non-fiction section. There I found books more to my liking, and I bought some based on a bit of light research into what may better suit my taste. I was able to do this because I am an adult, one who is capable of discerning and differentiating what I’d enjoy versus what I wouldn’t. This was not an especially difficult skill to acquire; most of us develop the ability to discern such tastes during the formative years of childhood, and as such, are able to steer ourselves away from what doesn’t suit us and towards that which does.
In short, I hope that one day you will grow into the sort of person capable of making comparable choices in your own life, rather than being some creeper frowning in the wrong section shouting at passersby because they hate Romance books. Nobody likes those people, and they are always a deeply unhappy sort.
The storygamer/OSR artistic beef is an old score at this point, DP, there’s no need to blow up over it.
Fucking hell DP! The point is garbage like this adventure ADVERTISE themselves as OSR when they’re actually storygame! I don’t care if storygames exist as long as they don’t CLAIM TO BE SOMETHING ELSE
@ Quentin: I wasn’t the one who blew up – I believe the very first thing from anon’s post was “I wish storygamers would fuck off”; pretty damn hostile.
Then I made a joke about anon blowing up and how they’re making a bigger deal about it than need be.
Then anon made it personal when they called me autistic as a slur (which I’m not, for the record, though my wife and several of my friends are), so I lost my cool (and then came back when I calmed down to post more civilly, because these comments have no EDIT function to retract what gets said).
So yeah, that’s how it plays out. Push me, and I push back. I won’t apologize for it, but I will apologize if I retaliate harder than I should.
@ Anonymous – pick a username, and then calm the fuck down. The thing is labeled as being useable with Old School Essentials, and while it’s suitability for gaming purposes is suspect, nonetheless it is still statted for OSE. A tag is not an advertisement, and they aren’t curated. If people buy something based solely on a tag (which again, is not an advertisement), they deserve what they get. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Steam, etsy, ebay, Amazon, and every other modern shopping experience in the 21st century works this way. It’s why Bryce even has a blog to begin with; to separate the wheat from the chaff like this. Don’t give yourself an aneurism just because reality doesn’t align with your ideals – it’s not worth it.
*sigh* DP has multiple times demonstrated himself to be a troll who doesn’t engage in good faith. He commonly resorts to mockery and moral superiority rather than actually consider points that might contradict his view. Best not to feed.
And yet here you are, engaging.
I usually engage in good faith – I’ve had many discussions on here, asked lots of questions, even changed my mind when presented with appropriate evidence by people who know what they’re talking about. Me sticking to my original intent is not me “engaging in bad faith”; it’s you being unconvincing.
Mockery? Hardly. I make a joke now and again, but it’s far from “haha, you’re a neckbeard incel, go back to mamma’s basement!” or whatever shit you seem to think I’m saying to you. In fact, whenever I see guys using “fag” or “retard” or “autist” as slurs, and I immediately jump to shut that shit down.
Moral superiority? In here? What does that even mean? You make it sound like I’m chastising people for having premarital sex or getting abortions. When have I ever brought up morality?
I consider all the points put to me – please know that “consider” does not equate to “immediately agree with”. Sorry if it bothers you that there are people out there who don’t immediately believe you correct just because you believe it. If you want that shit, hit up one of many echo chambers on the internet – I don’t go in for it. Doesn’t make a me a troll.
A troll is someone who posts under a name like “Another Anonymous Asshat” – THAT’S a troll move, buddy.
Bryce
How do you pick ‘em?
a) you randomly pick things on dtrpg and a large portion of them suck
b) you pick things that might be good – filtering out obvious garbage – and yet a large portion of them suck
c) you pick a spread of products expecting them to be a representative range of qualities (“ill pick A because ive heard good things, B looks like hot garbgar, and C screams 2025 mid”). And they skew towards sucking more than youd calculated.
NB: above is not in anyway a criticism of your decisions and efforts.
Im trying to gauge the real size of the iceberg.
I usually log on to DT. once a week and set the filter to Adventures/OSR. I then scroll back through the list until I reach the last weeks titles. I open up each new one and generally eliminate designers I have sworn off, Mork Borg, Shadowdark (sorry!) and a few others. This leaves me with 2-3 a week that I add to my Wishlist. Then I go look at my wishlist and grab three things that look interesting and that are, generally, NOT 300 pages long. (I usually have one longer title on my desktop that I work through while working through the regular weekly set. So, I guess mostly B, but I do give unknown designers (or ones I’ve forgotten about) the benefit of the doubt and add them. Every couple of months I take a look at the Classic D&D section or the Generic section.
DT categories are down for me right now, but I’ll give an example when they come back
Today I see: 2 Shadowdark, a Shadowdark by Elven Tower, 2 kiddie monster adventures, a cairn, a Rutibex, eight kiddy monster adventures, two that look like genuine OSR adventures, a scifi, a set of tables, and then I reached Nerenka, which I have already seen. That makes for two possible adventures out of eighteen new releases in the OSR/Adventures section in the last week.
Damn, I just checked and a few weeks ago Rutibex released 1260 pages long premium sci-fi ai slop. I’m really interested what kind of audience does he want to attract.
Do you forego Shadowdark because its not D&D, or because what youve seen is crap?
My angle – i like the shadowdark rules, mostly.
But the 3rd party stuff is slop, mostly.
I think you answered your own question. He reviewed quite some and said he’ll stop, since apparently all examples seemed to be low effort slops.
@AB Andy
Considering most of what he reviews lately is trending towards low effort slop (and often seemingly AI generated at that), why should Shadowdark be exempt? Judging by all the comments, it seems as though there’s an actual desire for more SD reviews, especially if Bryce can only find only a couple “genuine OSR” modules worth reviewing these days.
Personally I’d like to see Bryce tackle more modern systems (I’m especially keen to see what he thinks of any new 5.5e stuff or something like CR’s Daggerheart; I suspect he’d rip it apart). I know he traditionally skews towards OSR reviews, but there’s nothing indicating that tenfootpole.org only covers OSR stuff. He’s certainly covered enough non-OSR work in the past, and by his own admission above, the OSR pickings are slim these days.
@DP As SD gained popularity a lot of people smelled money and produced quick and dirty. I think Bryce just waits for it to calm down (which I think it had) before trying it again.
Daggerheart, does it have any published modules? From what I understand, it is a narrative focused game. One that suits the CR team and the style they play. I agree with you, that all styles of play should be respected, but as you say, Bryce will probably hate the system.
I honestly would like to see some reputable Mork Borg. He did MB in the past, but it was bad. From my experience though, there are some quite good adventures out there. I played Death Zigurat recently (OSE stated) and it was good. Perhaps there are more gems now that the hype has died.
@AB
Ah, you’re right about Daggerheart, looks like there’s nothing for it yet. Honestly I just kind of wanted to see Bryce rip in to Critical Role stuff (I don’t enjoy them very much, would have been nice to see them put under a critical lens).
Mork Borg stuff would be good to review, but it’s all “Artpunk” (because it looks cool and has an actual art budget) so apparently that means it’s unredeemable and totally worthless garbage that can never be used for fun, per too many definitions.
Shame, I do enjoy Shadowdark quite a lot. Then again, thanks to your Best list, I have adventures to run for the next lifetime, so thanks for that 🙂
Kelsey Dionne Shadowdark is often good. But she doesn’t seem to be so much on the adventure side of it anymore.
She has a couple of zines with hexcrawl / dungeon / adventure stuff that Bruce could review. And there are a few, very short adventures, mostly free.
Yeah, while I’ve been rather disappointed with 3rd party Shadowdark content, I think the stuff that Kelsey produces herself is worth a review.
Bryce has already reviewed four of Kelsey’s own modules – all four got The Best! You can find them using the Search Archives.