tenfootpole.org

By Ben Laurence
Through Ultan’s Door
OSR

Go through Ultan’s door in this inaugural issue into the Ruins of the Inquisitor’s Theater, a 30 room dungeon replete with oneiric puddings, delicate shadow puppets, giggling white swine, and much more. This 36 page zine contains everything you need to launch a D&D campaign in the Zyan, flying city of the dreamlands.

This forty page “zine” contains a thirty page dungeon and the supporting monsters, spells, etc. Lush, rich prose, the ruins of a decadent empire, and heavy opium clouds bring the OD&D HARD. Digest format is as digest format does. It’s good. I’m also predisposed to this kind of shit.

I didn’t think people still used opium in the US. This adventure proves me wrongs. Yes, that’s a compliment. It’s important, I think, that I communicate the vibe of this adventure. There’s this thing that some of the Psychedelic Fantasy adventures fell in to, and some of the Calithena/Bowman Darkness Beneath adventure briefly hit upon. It’s also present in in some of the pointcrawl work of Slumbering Ursine and those world weary decadent elves of that setting. From the Vats, Operation Unfathomable, Blue Medusa and some other Patrick shit, the city from ASE1, a touch of Tekumel, and Lapis Observatory. There’s this lush, sometimes lurid, velvety decadance … sometimes in the writing, sometimes in the environment, sometimes in the imagination behind the encounters. There’s this intro to a Frankie Goes to Hollywood mix, cribbed from Nietzsche I think, that gives me a certain feeling when I listen to it and this adventure reminds me of that feeling.

A part of this is the OD&D thing it’s got going. By that I mean, in part, the monsters are new. You don’t know what a new monsters will do. It’s powers are unknown. That creates apprehension in the players and that’s usually a great thing for an adventure to do. Not only are the monsters new, the descriptions focus entirely on the actual play of the creatures. Descriptions are: Sinuous white swine, with children’s hands, and mischievous human eyes, or Each is a tangle of raven’s wings with no body or head, flitting erratically like a quick moving bat. In the center of the conjoined wings is a single staring eye that gives baleful glares like cutting knives or worse. That’s what the characters encounter so that’s what the description says. The only addition to that description is their spoor (hints to come) and the monster stats. No bullshit history or crap to clog up the adventure … just pure impact for the players. Fucking. Perfect.

There’s another part of the OD&D vibe that tends to concentrate on the non-standard encounter. I’m not saying it well, but there tends to be this de rigeur way of writing encounters. It almost seems like there’s this hidden formula that people follow to create a boring encounter thats the same as every other boring encounter. Tolkien genericism. I’m not bitching about orcs, I’m bitching that they always appear the same way, as do pit traps, etc. There’s this emphasis on mechanics, as if they come first “a 100’ pit trap”, and then the rest follows. When I talk about OD&D encounters/imagination I’m then I’m talking about that being flipped There’s some weird ass scene imagined … that’s the focus, and then some mechanics are are lightly bolted on. There’s this room, smelling of decay, with a straw floor, and a balcony up above, and three bodies hanging from it with hoods over their heads … and a bear trap in straw under each body. Balcony with hanging bodies and bear trap … just a little twist that keeps it fresh. And this adventure does that over and over again.

The descriptions are lush and rich with great imagery. A door of cerulean blue and gold leaf glittering in the candlelight. Or, to directly quote: “The statue at the end of the room is made of basalt. It depicts a robed figure, with a long beaked mask. She pulls apart her robes, and dozens of small- er beaked masks peer forth form the darkness beneath, pressing out. Lapis Lazuli borders her robes, and the eyes of the masks sparkle with polished carnelians and peridots.” That’s a pretty cool thing that I’m DYING to run! Which is exactly what I’m looking for. I want to be excited. Ben jabbed an idea in to my head and I can fill in the rest effortlessly because of his ability to communicate the seed to me, the DM. WHich I can them have a much better chance of doing the same for my players … and communicate my enthusiasm to them. Nd, as an aside, much of the treasure is great also. A necklace of bismuth stones strung on a chain of platinum, each stone a miniature rainbow labyrinth. Fuck Yeah I want that thing man! If you have treasure that the players want to keep, wear, and use, instead of just abstracting away in to gp, then you’ve done a good job and this is a good job.

Twenty-ish rooms means the map isn’t too large, but it’s good enough, and it appears that the next “issue” will be the next level of the dungeon. My only major complaint is that the room numbering is not as trivially legible as I would prefer.

Ben’s got an overview of the game world this comes from, a kind of Dreamlands-ish thing, on his blog. That should give you an idea of what you are getting yourself in to. These days Dreamlands makes me think “arbitrary”, but that’s not the case here. This is a concrete, real adventure.
http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2017/09/two-years-through-ultans-door-zyan.html

Another great example of a “going to a freaky place” adventure … with the door signaling that the rules are all wrong and every perversion is justified in the mythic underworld … communicated via the door transition.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is ok. Showing some of the rooms, or wandering table, would have been better. The general fluff stuff is ok, amd gives you a view in to the writing style, but the actual rooms and wanders give you and better view in to the FOCUS that the actual rooms give, and encounter types. As is, what’s previewed seems to imply a longer writing style than is actually encountered and not as much of the OD&D style. It’s more setting than adventure in the preview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/254659/Through-Ultans-Door-Issue-1?affiliate_id=1892600

It is, of course, Frankie, and Frankie only …

By David Flor
By Darklight Interactive
5e
Level 6

…Throughout the years, the village has had its share of disappearances; most of them had been blamed on the harsh environment of the surrounding forest and the natural dangers of the world we live in, but recent evidence leads to the doorstep of the Seyvoth estate. And when the two young daughters of a prominent noble go missing and the village sends out search parties to the surrounding area, two separate search parties passed through the iron gate at the entrance to the estate and have yet to return….

This 44 page adventure describes a an evil/vampire manor with about eighteen rooms. Realizing the promise of the 4e adventure… but written in 5e, this thing is essentially eighteen set pieces strung together. It attempts to marry the more open ended styles of play with the rich room encounters that were a hallmark of the 4e style. If you can accept that, and its implications, then the amount of odiousness it engages in is minimal. Maybe. I can’t decide if its arbitrary. Or, rather, if the arbitrariness it engages in is any different than normal D&D arbitrariness.

There’s a tournament component of this that is … strange. The party is given four hours to complete the mission to find the girls in the manor. You can keep playing, but after that they turn in to a werewolf and vampire. There’s also a scoring system. Fifty points for this and ten points for this other thing. And if you die you start back at the front doors with scoring penalty. It just comes out of nowhere, with no explanation. “If you die you start back at the front door with a scoring penalty.” Huh? Like I said, out of nowhere. It’s more than a little disconcerting, as if you’ve missed something. If I digress here, to talk about this adventure as a tournament adventure, I’d say it’s one of the best. Most tourney adventures tend to be rather linear, in fact, the most linear. This isn’t that. It’s a real deal “explore the house as you will” adventure, up to and including reasons to revists certain areas. And it’s completely usable as a non-tournament adventure also. David has done a good job at duel use.

It can be a more traditional “explore” adventure and a tournament adventure because, more than almost any other adventure I’ve seen, this thing is CONSTRUCTED. Getting to the secret room requires you place a necklace on a statue. But first it has to be “blessed” by the ghost it belonged to. And you have to find it first. And if you give the WRONG thing to the ghost lady, like the jewelry of the maid her husband has been fooling around with, well .. you can imagine. And that’s but one of the interconnected things. A ghost girl wants her dolly. There are a lot of dolls around the house … and she’s not going to be happy if you give her the wrong one. But there are pictures, etc around the house that provide clues. And there’s a ghost composer who’s like his sheet music back … getting him all of it distracts some of the ghosts as he plays, providing some assistance later on. This doesn’t FEEL like a fetch quest. It feels more like “Oh! This is related to that other thing we saw!” That’s the sort of discovery that always good for a D&D adventure.

The rooms, proper, are RICH. They are LONG, with multiple elements in each room. We’re talking at least a page per room. It manages to put multiple elements in the room, some of which have no relation to each other, and make each room a place where the players can explore quite a bit. I note that this can be difficult to achieve and still be scannable … but this adventure manages to mainly accomplish that. It starts with bullets that give an overview, and then sections that are, essentially, tied to each bullet. These have good use of bolding and whitespace to make finding those sections easier. The individual sections DO get a bit long, but I think it’s manageable. The Graveyard, for example, has a cliff edge, graves, a fountain, sarcophagi, a gazebo (with ghost), and statues. Then there’s a long multi-paragraph section on the main event, the ghost, and another long section on “Encounter” which means potential combat with some of the previous room elements. THEN column long stat blocks. It’s a lot, but manageable. The formatting, as well as the emphasis on playable content, rather than mentioning trivia. Keeps it on track. The long text in the individual elements is related to the EXPANSIVE hand holding. Lots of text on opening doors, disarming traps, and so on. Almost a defined template/schema that is being followed, that is closer to the SPI end of the spectrum than I can comfortable with,

There is definitely some abstracted D&D here, from the 3e/4e era, that shows and stands out as being crappy. There’s an emphasis on skill checks to discover things. If you have a DC13 per check you can see that the statues arm is hinged at the elbow. This is SUBSTANTIALLY different than telling the party that the elbow is hinged in response to them saying they are examining the statue, or looking closely, or something. That’s shitty D&D. I know people like skill checks these dys to tie your shoes, but they are overused. Unless it’s really hard/hidden, and even then, if they ask you should be telling them. The answer is not in the build on your character sheet. The adventure relies on this shit over and over again. It’s easy enough to ignore and play the right way. (That’s right, I said THE RIGHT WAY.)

It can also be arbitrary at times. All D&D is arbitrary, to a certain extent. It’s a part of the game. You don’t know what’s behind the door. There are parts of this though that seem a little more than that. If you give the ghost the wrong thing she freaks the fuck out. She doesn’t actually tell you that she’s looking for a necklace … and I’m not real sure that the maid/infidelity thing is related very strongly. This allows the party to engage in what they think is the right thing, but are then punished for. It’s important to not set up a situation in which the party just never tries because it’s not worth it, based on past experiences. Sometimes warnings about what will happen this is done with foreshadowing, or warnings from others. A pile of dead bodies holding shitty jewelry, around the ghost, for example. From that we can learn of the horrible consequences. There’s another part, in this same thread, where another ghost tries to trick the party in to taking the wrong necklace, it pretends to look like the ghost in question. (In a mirror, ghostly pointing. Really well done.) But at this point it’s hard to tell that you are doing the wrong thing. In fact, you’re being told it IS the right thing … and it’s not clear to me that there are cues you are on the wrong path to success. Wizards and Clerics have “are we doing the right thing” spells, but without a strong history of the party using them that’s not really the way a lot of modern D&D is played. (Shame!)

You know, there’s also not an actual map. Oh, there are lots of tactical battle maps, one for each room in fact, in order to solve the “I see a map! That means combat!” metagaming from the party. But there’s not an overall map. That’s bullshit, and by far the most impactful issue when trying to play this.

There’s also this weird emphasis on handing out cards that represent treasure. Everything together (that long text, remember?) gives this a very boardgamey vibe. There’s a clear lineage to 4e … but lets say 4e done right … but written for 5e.

I’m a fan of this. I’m surprised myself to say this. I think it’s an interesting approach to writing an adventure. I find it interesting for that reason alone, but I also think you can actually run it easily. Is it The Best? Sure, why not, if we’re grading on the 5e curve.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There’s no preview? Really? That’s kind of toolish.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/253742/A-Night-in-Seyvoth-Manor-DnD-5E?affiliate_id=1892600

Nickolas Z Brown
Five Cataclysms
OSR
Levels 1-4

On the edge of a swamp beneath an old forest lay an even older fort, constructed for some ancient and unknowable purpose. The shadows are stronger here, and the scent of madness lingers in the air. The fort may seem mundane at first glance, but you will learn soon enough that something is not quite right…

This 27 page funhouse dungeon has eighty rooms. Imaginative, terse and well organized it brings the OD&D vibe with unique monsters and a metric fuckton of shit to get in to trouble with. Your enjoyment of this is going to be directly related to your view of funhouses. I like funhouses, they are just not the easiest to use sometimes.

This thing knows what it is doing. Funhouses are not set piece dungeons, even though they have lots (and LOTS) of little self-contained rooms. They are not challenge dungeons where some higher power is testing the mettle of the party. They are not riddle dungeons or trap dungeons. They are a curious mix of things that make sense and not. Most of all, I think they are tend to be Push Your Luck dungeons, or Temptation dungeons.

There is a certain type of … Gleeful D&D. In this style everyone is grinning and everyone is on on the secret. Imagine a room empty but for a skeleton on a throne .. and it’s holding a big fat ruby in its hands. Fuck it, maybe you even have to put your hand in a mouth of something to reach it. The DM knows that the room is a set up. The players all know that the room is a setup. The DM knows that the players know … and the players know this also. And everyone is sitting around grinning at each other. “Well, You wanna stick your hand in and grab it?” says the DM. “Looks like it might give you enough XP to … Level.” This isn’t really adversarial D&D, but really everyone kind of knows what’s gonna go down. That mouth is gonna close and that skeleton WILL be animating. Push your luck, take a chance, there’s not really hidden information. That’s a good dungeon room. And a good funhouse dungeon is stuffed full of them. And this is a good funhouse.

There’s an art to writing them to get them right. Imaginative situations, clear setups and consequences pretty clearly implied. These are done right. They are mostly pretty simple. Open a door, set a gold statues with ruby eyes floating towards you. Oh course, it’s got a floating clear ooze surrounding it that’s initially hard to see … but, of course, everyone knows SOMETHING is up with it. It’s just a matter of what. This dungeon executes over and over again. Big big fan.

OD&D style has a strong element of the new and interesting for monsters and treasure, and this is most definitely OD&D. No orcs but lots of new monsters with new gimmicks. I love that because the players have to figure out new things to do to defeat them. They instill apprehension, if not outright fear, in the party. And those fuckers always need a bit of fear to keep them in line. OD&D thrives on the non-traditional. It’s the anti-Tolkein. Or. maybe, thrives closer to Bill & Berts issues with sunlight. Talk to the monsters, and get the KICK ASS magic item when you get them turned to stone.

The map is nice and large. Eighty rooms in 27 pages means a terse writing style. There’s enough text to get the DM going and it’s organized well, with bolding and paragraph breaks and general text leading to more specific. It’s RIGHT on the (wrong) side of providing GREAT room descriptions. So close to being really magnificent … but still very good and NOT falling in to the verbosity trap. The monsters, in particular, have great descriptions that take a heartbeat longer than “perfect 10” to get the DM’s imagination going. Exploding Ethereal Skull. A lizard of scrap metal that reeks of machine oil. Bloated firebats are “A fat winged creature that has gorged itself on fire oil and transformed into a flying orange blob.” Imagine it barely able to fly, dripping big flaming globs of oil. That’s where my imagination went.

It’s even got a GREAT hook, with villagers getting their shadows ripped from their bodies by some pale creature with a description straight out of a nightmare. It’s fucking WONDERFUL.

It could be better. The descriptions are about a heartbeat behind perfect. Some of the rooms are not perfectly organized. Room two is an example, with statues being missed in the initial description … and then the “a,b,c” elements of room not standing out as well as they could in the text. A lot of the mundane treasure is “a pile of 1200gp and 80 gems worth 800 gp” … not the soul of evocativeness. It also lacks a certain … theming? Both players and DM need theming to put certain logic to use (for differing purposes) in the dungeon. There’s a lack of a cohesive story in a funhouse dungeon. Now, I’m talking 5e story, but more a many Gates of the Gann story. An element of the entire dungeon kind of working together. That is, I think, what separate this from, say, The Upper Caves of the Darkness Beneath. (Well, that element and a few other things.)

This thing is fun. It can work as a one-shot, for beer & pretzels, or at a con. It can also ABSOLUTELY work in a normal campaign. There’s not a lot of “modern” puzzles, etc that break immersion. Yeah, not everything makes sense to be in a dungeon .. but it’s not some fucked up mish-mash of an elevator puzzle either.

This is $5 at DriveThru. You get to see the map (yeah!) the wander monster table/descriptions (yeah!) and the first page of rooms (yeah!) It does whata preview needs to do.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/248347/The-Sunken-Fort?affiliate_id=1892600

By Malrex
Merciless Merchants
Gold & Glory
Level 3-5

Congratulations!! Someone in your party won/found/bequeathed a deed to a warehouse inside the protective walls of Illanter, City of Broken Swords. Another bonus, while visiting said warehouse, you are invited to the mysterious Kellerin’s Rumble, an annual gambling event. Your group is the talk of the town! Gossip and rumors are flying around the city about the event….and YOU. Let the games begin!

This 27 page adventure describes a warehouse, sewers, and manor located in a small city. It’s centered around the manor, an invitation to gamble there, and several side quests. It’s organized well, is easy to scan, and has A LOT going on in it. It feels like a lot of the encounters can lead to other things … leaving everything feeling full of potential and hooks and things to follow up on. It ain’t gonna change your life, but it is certainly a very high level of quality with lots of potential for fun … and that’s what I’m usually looking for. I wish every adventure were at least this good. Also: I REALLY like city adventures and this is that, so, I’m predisposed to gush.

You get the deed to the warehouse, and the sewers have several connections, with short city-life events/NPC’s thrown in to add some color. Several potential hooks pop up, all meant to get you in to the manor and poking around. I get the overall feeling that a lot of of the encounters lead to something else. There’s a leper in the sewers being eaten by a blob which can turn in to an NPC. There’s a ship captain being dunked in the water by his crew because he owes them money. Who ya gonna side with? The main manor dude wears a ring that looks like a ring someone may have contacted the party over …

You know, there was this Nike “Just Do It” commercial once. It showed various scenes, over and over, in quick cuts, of people getting ready to do things. Runners on the line rearing up right before the gun went off. Swimmers getting in to their positions moments before they dove in. Things like that. Moments captured right before the action started … but never showing the action. That’s what this feels like. So many of the encounters feel like “Oh man! It’s about to go down!” But in a “set piece” kind of way. Friends or foes to make, no right or wrong choices, just situations that pop up in front of the party. Inciting action … over and over again. It makes the thing feel packed and ALIVE. Which is exactly the fuck how a city is supposed to feel.

For each location you get a short little description, a couple of sentences, and then a few bullets pointing out obvious stuff. It’s a great format to use, easy to scan. The descriptions generally tend to be punchy … not teeming with evocativeness but certainly a cut above and not bad. The bullets concentrate on important things. Treasure, traps, potentials for getting in to trouble, etc. It’s not trivia. It’s things that are important to the players. LUV.

There’s rando NPC tables for the town, there’s a NPC summary sheet for the other gamblers at the party. The maps are interesting. There are important things mentioned, like ow often guard patrols pass a certain point in the manor home. RELEVANT. There’s this little section on a wish that doesn’t allow you to talk about what’s going on inside the house once you leave. Even that’s handled well, with various methods to circumvent it that are NOT another wish.

I could mention a few negative things. Primarily, I feel like this thing is missing maybe two more paragraphs of text. One an overview of the adventure proper. What’s missing is “the party gets a deed to a warehouse to get tem in to the city and invested, and there’s fun stuff inside to make the first visit a good time, The sewers connect points A&B and are natural. The main adventure point is the manor house gambling, which A, B, and C tie in to.”

The second is something more about ‘the house at rest.” Windows & roof fun, more guard paths, a little more on sound travel, and roleplaying “ought oh were caught!” bluffs. There’s a bit of this, but feels a more ad-hoc and it needs some more concrete overview.

I saw this was an example product of what you get when you Patreon Malrex. “Ug, here comes the shit …” I thought. Oh, how wrong I was! Also, man, a fuck ton of lepers in this city! Didn’t I review another one like that at some point?

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a current suggested price of $5. The level is on the cover but not in the product description (Naughty!) The oreview is eight pages. You can see a rando NPC table, with short NPC descriptions, and the entirety of the warehouse and sewer descriptions. There’s also the additional hook stuff before the warehouse and the lack of the overview can be seen.Note warehouse rooms two and eleven!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/250834/City-of-Illanter-Kellerins-Rumble?affiliate_id=1892600