By Allan Bollinger
Black Dice Games
Cresthaven
Level 1
Something has awakened beneath Black Hollow, and the veil that once separated the world of men from deeper horrors is beginning to thin.
This twenty page adventure uses all twenty pages in a meaningless flaccid jerk off that never pays off in the end. Self-indulgent and purple prose with over explained situations that MEAN NOTHING.
As I was going through this I had this great schtick I was going to use. I was going to quote various parts of te purple prose and then just say something like “I’m going to kill myself” after each section. And then I started to get worried. The page count kept creeping up. I suddenly only had two pages left and the adventure had not started. Ought oh. So, the designer has denied you, gentle reader, of my most excellent purple prose quoting and instead I get to do this.
FUCK YOU!
You know those fucking tick-toks that cut off the ending? All that edging and lead in and no pay off? Making you go watch part two (which is never fucking posted …) Fucking click bait piece of shits. Well guess what the fuck this adventure is?
The adventure ends with instructions for the DM to conduct a survey! What fun!
- “What was your favorite moment from this session, and why?”
- The part where it ended. Also, the moments of column long read-aloud allowed me time to rant about Connections. I appreciated that.
- “Was there anything that felt confusing or frustrating?
- No. It was all pretty transparent. I mean, the whole Mayor Is An Imposter thing didn’t make sense at all, but that didn’t matter, so.
- “Did any part of the story or world-building pique your curiosity?”
- I liked the part where the focus was on me and my character and my interaction with the game world. Oh, wait, there was none of that.
- “On a scale of 1 to 10 …”
- -9. Fuck you. Would rather sit through another six hours of simultaneous gallbladder and kidney stones.
A summary, I guess. Dude steps out of the shadows, is a prick, and tells you his boss wants to hire you. (He’s also a prick.) You maybe investigate a little, go to the village which is mostly abandoned, and only a day away, and question the four or five people left. To no actual end. You then go to the mine entrance and the adventure ends. It’s supposed to be horror themed. Building suspense and the like. It’s pretentious nonsense and fucking clickbait.
THAT COSTS $20!!!!! I don’t like to mention price in reviews. It is what it is and I’ll pay a lot for a short adventure that is good. But, also, I resent the expensive adventures because I know they are gonna suck ass and spending $60/week on garbage kind of annoys me. I don’t have a good reason for this. It just feels wrong? But, also, This is 22 pages long, costs $20 and is not an actual adventure, in spite of what the naysayers will quote about lead in and roleplaying. I know how to do those fucking things. And I also know how to make an actual fucking adventure out of them.
So, you gonna wander around your start village and ask some questions, maybe. Then you gonna go to the village in question and ask some questions. That’s the adventure. I guess there are some fire beetles you could disturb. And a Carrion Screecher Swarm, whatever that is. A little description might be nice. All we get is “As the party nears a ruined spiral-marked stone, a swarm bursts from the dead canopy.” Ok, sure, whatever. Just yell COMBAT and roll the dice, I guess. No creature description. No real encounter. Just getting attacked. Fun.
One of my favorite sections of the adventure is the “PURPOSE IN ADVENTURE STRUCTURE” notes that are pervasive in the text. Long, lengthy sections that tell us what the purpose of the encounter is. Which is inevitably build dread, foreshadow, offer subtle backstory. Over and over again the text takes, what, a quarter of a page each time, to explain what the fuck it is trying to do. Repetitiion is one thing, but fuck man, its repeated like a gazillion times in twenty different ways. I get it. Be creepy. Note, it’s not advice on HOW to be creepy, it just says the purpose is to be creepy. So, you know, worthless. “The Mayor’s House is a roleplaying-heavy location full of tension, contradictions, and concealed information.” Yup, just like every place in this adventure.
Column long read-aloud. Almost a page long in places. Purple prose. “The man is tall and pale, his features sharp as winter frost. His eyes are cloudy like river glass, and his black robes seem to drink in the fading light.” Ok, so, I know, I said write evocatively. There’s the “stick an adjective/adverb in front of each noun/verb” method of fucking that up, and then there’s the simile.metaphor method of fucking that up. There is so much of this that I was going to make it the entire review. “From the moment the characters leave Cresthaven, the sky above them hangs heavy and oppressive, a leaden gray promising no warmth” Jesus H Christ. “Only silence, and the growing sense that whatever lives here no longer remembers how to greet strangers.” I’m gonna kill myself. “The final pages are nothing but spirals. Something broke them. Something reached in and rewrote what they were.” If I had to sit through it then so do you. “A stern but sincere man, Father Harder warns against venturing into forgotten places. He’s begun leaving the chapel door unlocked at night, in case the light must Flee. “ In case the light must flee?
Look, this is just a shit adventure. Or, as the initial observations noted, not an actual adventure at all. To put a cherry on top of it all, there are passages out of place in the text. As if there were a copy/paste error and chunks were just moved to other area. EASL I can forgive, but a final proof read? [Insert standard joke/comment here] I think not. Twenty fucking dollars for this. Twenty fucking dollars. For 22 pages of nothing.
This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and shows you nothing but endless designer puffery.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/529970/echoes-of-black-hollow?1892600
I wonder if I’m still alive and out of surgery yet?
This isn’t the Worst EVAR?
“Contains AI generated content”. These text examples are 100% AI.
I have no idea why Bryce even deigns to touch literal AI slop. I think he really just doesn’t recognize AI writing.
Sometimes it’s just poor writing. But when the product ID tags themselves list AI generated content, he doesn’t have to recognise it in the product, just skip over it – or set a Drivethru RPG search filter against it if possible.
Can we just have a blanket “no” to reviewing AI generated slop? Don’t even consider it, it’s just a sign the guy has no idea how to write.
I would agree to this, except for Anthony Huso has (unfortunately, IMO) started using modified AI-generated art in his work and I still want Bryce to review Castle of the Silver Prince. But I think it would be fine filtering out anything on DTRPG that has the “AI-generated content” tag selected.
Art is one thing, but AI-generated writing is another. An adventure can be worthwhile and have AI-art assets (ref. Slyth Hive, I hope). But we have not seen a worthwhile adventure with AI-generated text.
This is, I think true. But will it always be true? I suspect that the stock art business will no longer have a place for photographers or models, or that commercials and ads with no have no need for actors and the like, if it has not already happened. The quality issue with AI art will eventually be solved, which leaves only the moral one. But, as a designer, are they so special that AI is not coming for them as well? My degree is in Cognitive Sciences and thus I remain somewhat skeptical of the large language models ability to produce … especially given the slop in to train it with. But I am not so certain as to bet the farm against it.
None of which is why I review what others seem to think are obviously AI adventures. I seem to have some hole in my ability to recognize them? I’ve played around with the models and can recognize some writing sometimes, but I guess I’m just gullible? Whatever. I do seem to have a hole there.
Thank you for being so open and honest. I really appreciate that.
It has nothing to do with gullibility and everything to do with experience. Apparently, even a (handsome) supra-genius like yourself can’t detect it without seeing a lot of it.
When their grammar and sentence structure is perfect, and they display a complete mastery of the English language as well as a profoundly-robust vocabulary AND churn out lots of it—BUT all those wonderful words say nothing at all? That’s AI.
The question is if it matters. I don’t believe in the moral issue surrounding AI myself, viewing it simply as a tool, so the bottom line is quality. A great adventure writer might, in time and with prompts, be able to use AI to vastly increase his productivity. A bad adventure writer will use AI because they are also lazy and produce slop. But currently, the use of AI for writing seems to be an indicator of the latter, not the former.
One of your strong points is that you do actually have an almost complete catalogue of new OSR adventures which is insane but that means you have a huge dataset. Probably you should just include them because once you abandon that universality it becomes less useful. I can understand making selective exceptions because of time constraints.
In this case, the indicator that its going to be lazy shit is because it tries to appeal to every single system on the planet.
“I don’t believe in the moral issue surrounding AI myself, viewing it simply as a tool, so the bottom line is quality.”
I agree.
And, I don’t want to conflate AI art with AI writing. Bad AI art sucks. Good AI art doesn’t. It’s that simple.
The products Bryce has been reviewing lately give me the impression that some of these are just cons. They aren’t trying to make a good product, they delegate the whole thing to an LLM and shovel it onto Drivethru, hoping to make a few bucks. Like, this:
“This twenty page adventure uses all twenty pages in a meaningless flaccid jerk off that never pays off in the end. Self-indulgent and purple prose with over explained situations that MEAN NOTHING. ”
That’s why you end up with when somebody doesn’t care if it’s a usable product.
My hope is that it isn’t a lucrative con, because my impression (hope?) is products don’t get a lot of takers unless someone involved with a project is a recognized name, or unless knowledge of its existence spreads by word of mouth. So hopefully it goes away because it isn’t worth it.
“(Hope)” probably isn’t the right word there, I would like honest but unknown designers to have a shot at getting noticed.
I think it’s important to realize that the great filter of good authors vs. bad authors is not bulk, but rather quality. Unknown authors become known by their great works – there are plenty of writers who produced only one or two items of note, whose names we still remember to this day.
All to say, if you worry that a bulk of AI garbage will bury the legitimate authors, don’t. A diamond in the rough remains a diamond, no matter how much rough is around it. They may not get their due credit right away, but they’ll get it eventually. Our place is not to lament the bulk, but rather to spread the word about the gems embedded within whenever we find them.
I wish that was true, but I don’t think it is. Lots of talented people never become known, because there is a massive amount of luck involved in becoming successful, especially in chronically low paying careers like writing and art.
If the period since 2008 has taught us anything, it’s that C-suite class isn’t any smarter than the rest of us, just luckier. Lucky to have the right connections, the right parents, the right schools, the right mentors, and sufficient intergenerational wealth to never be distracted by the stress of struggling to get by. Some truly dense and entirely undeserving people, including some who are functionally illiterate, currently occupy very public positions of power and influence.
Meanwhile, you can have gobs of talent and amazing ideas, but if you don’t have any of those more material advantages, nothing is going to happen for you unless you (a) are noticed and promoted by somebody who *does* have those advantages, or (b) through some accident of fate, find yourself in the public eye during a moment when you are demonstrating your ability.
But does it help when idiots like Bryce don’t even ask for the art packs that illustrate the module?
Oddly enough, it’s now only $10.
Bryce has a nice scam going – people give him money on Patreon to review AI-generated garbage.
You anons and your patreon complaints… I’m starting to feel guilty for reading BL’s reviews for free. I WILL support when my income exceeds -$1. And Bryce, you aren’t supposed to review bad adventures immediately after surgery. It can cause internal bleeding.
I know you’re just a butt-hurt Anon mad about something, but I’m a long-time reader and Patreon.
I support whatever Bryce wants to do, but I *would* like him to learn to better recognize the AI slop and identify it as such; come right out and say, “This is AI slop.” (A tag doesn’t cut it because he’s *never* used *any* of those consistently.)
The only time I’ve complained is when he reviewed 5e stuff “too often,” in my opinion, because by definition it is not OSR; it’s the current school. And, his mission statement is to save me money. I’m only interested in OSR/CAG, so I’m never buying anything from 5e (or Habro), so that doesn’t save me money. (A small handful of 5e adventures a year is okay.)
AI slop is the #1 enemy of the OSR buyer AND content creator right now. It must be called out for what it is.
I looked at the preview, it isn’t even good AI slop. The newer paid AIs are getting harder to detect, but this one definitely had generic free LLM “voice.”
Yes, I’m sure this site is making him rich beyond the dreams of avarice. I’m sure reviewing things like, to pick a random example, an incomprehensible 242 page nightmare that takes him a month to get through, must be an excellent and lucrative use of his time.
Bryce, for God’s sake, just fucking use ChatGPT for a little bit already. Write a good 8-page adventure with it. To start, just type, “I want to write an 8-page D&D adventure.” I’m sure you two will figure it out from there.
In learning to use it, you’ll learn to recognize it.
Agreed. At this point, basic familiarity with ChatGPT is necessary for reviewing written works. The “The Mayor’s House is …” line is obvious ChatGPT slop, and any of that in the body of an adventure should mean no review (except a 1-star “this is AI slop” on DTRPG or wherever). Maybe a separate list page of “AI Slop Adventures You Should Not Buy.”
Thanks Bryce. Have a speedy recovery.
Bullet points! New depths of despair!
Heal fast, Bryce.
Penis