tenfootpole.org

By Jonathan Hicks
Farsight Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level: Who the fuck knows?

When a dog comes running to the players looking for attention, what dangers will they be led to?

This six page adventure has one encounter, with five ghouls. My life is a living hell.

I’m interested, lately, in lower page count adventures. In contrast to the overwritten stuff that seems to dominate the market these days I was thinking about the opposite end of the spectrum. What was G1, like, eight pages or something? And it’s one of the best things written. [And, yes Kent, it violates several of the things I judge on and could be written better.] I’ve been a little intrigued lately by the idea of a lower page count adventure with a higher density of rooms. Alongside that is some thinking about pricing and inflation, again influenced by G1. If you got something really good in six pages, or adequate, what’s a fair price for that? Ain’t nobody gonna make any money doing this shit, so it’s a kind of academic question at this point, but interesting nonetheless. Finally, just how hard is it to make an adventure for publication? How much effort is it to get something short, dense, and at least adequate in a form that other people can use?

With this in mind I selected the Dog That Would Not Bark for a review. Six pages fits the model of what I’m looking for! And $1! Alas, it’s actually a six page Sidetrek featuring one encounter. The blurb says it’s an “adventure.” It’s not an adventure, it’s an encounter. The blurb has no level listed. Five ghouls … what is that, level 2 or 3?

An agitated dog runs up barking, making no sound. He wants you to follow him to a ruin nearby. Inside are five ghouls about to eat two little kids. ADVENTURE! Wonder! VALUE! Population: you.

Six pages for this shit. Oh! Oh! “If the party did well then you can put a magic item in the treasure by rolling on the table in the core book.” This is how you write an adventure?

Yeah, the soundless bark is interesting. As is the ghouls about to eat the kids. And the kids say the dog is actually their uncle turned in to a dog by a wizard.  But come on man, six pages? Seriously? There are dungeon with fifty or sixty rooms that come in six pages. That pack this much adventure in to a decent percentage of their rooms.

What a world. What a world. Time to try and find another example to support my thesis and ignore this ever existed. Sometimes science is about conviction.

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is but two page long. If it were longer you’d know how much “value” you were getting and not buy it. The second page is representative of the adventure. Lots of whitespace with a couple sentences of text.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/269108/The-Dog-That-Would-Not-Bark?affiliate_id=1892600

By Peter Lattimore
Garblag Games
OSR/Warhammer

High on a mountain side where the pass skirts the flank of a massive peak sit two towers standing proud against the sky. Between them a thick wall and portcullis bar the path of anyone seeking to sneak from one land to another, for whatever purpose. The walls of this structure have witnessed many things: diplomatic envoys hell-bent on trade deals, generals on horseback with declarations of war, displaced peasantfolk hammering on it’s gates with malnourished hands.

This ten page “locale” is not an adventure. It describes a location, barely. Two towers with a wall running between them, closing off a mountain pass between two countries. It is devoid of any but the most basic location information.

Not an adventure. It is basically a map and then some text describing the map in a VERY basic way. Like, the map shows murder holes and the text says “there are murder holes on the wall”, or the map has two rooms on a floor labeled “bunkrooms” and the text of the product says “there are two bunkrooms on this floor.” IE: the text almost always adds nothing to the map and, while it doesn’t describe room dimensions, it does essentially the same thing with everything on the map EXCEPT room dimensions.

There are no NPC’s. There’s no garrison commander, or drunk soldiers, or anything like that. When it mentions people, and it seldom does, it mentions them in the most generic way possible. “The commander might …”

And it’s full of “might.” It contains useful advice like “you can change the walls from stone to something else to fit your campaign better” or “defenders are most likely to be seen on the walls”, or, in a hook “we’ll leave the blackmail option up to you.” So, basically, this product is a one page map expanded to ten pages with almost nothing else.

And even the map suffers. The two towers are called Falcon and Eerie, but the maps generally don’t note which tower is which.

I bought this on DriveThru and was gonna print it out, but it says i can’t reproduce it in ANY way unless I contact the designer, and I can’t find contact information for them. Yes, I’m being an ass.

There’s nothing here. I’d say it’s not even a location, but rather just a map.

This is available on DriveThru for $2. There’s no preview, otherwise you might know beforehand what you’re buying.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267577/Adventure-Location-003–The-Mountain-Tollkeep?affiliate_id=1892600

By Charley Phipps, Thom Wilson, Mike Badolato
ThrowiGames & NTRPGCon
B/X
Levels 2-4

This 28 page adventure details the Daves of the Unknown dungeon from B2/Keep on the Borderlands, that was initially left blank for the DM to populate. It has about 44 encounters in the main Caves of the Unknown area, and expands the Lizardman mound and a couple of wilderness areas. This adventure provides an answer to the question: can you be both minimally keyed and wordy?

I picked this up at NTRPGcon. After writing this review I discovered that it appears to be physical copies only … and those copies are hard to come by. Oops. Sorry, I don’t usually do that. It looks like BadMike sells them in this storefront. Uh, I mean … SUCK IT FOOLS! I HAVE SOMETHING YOU CANT HAVE! Bwahahahahaha! Until I sell of my collection again. But first I have to rebuy it. Anyway …

Three authors and three separate sections: Charley with the Caves, Thom with the additional Lizardman mount and Mike with the three supplemental “one room” caves.

The second two are easy: they are too long. Column long rooms in the lizard mound and page and column long descriptions of a grizzly bear cave are too much for me, given the basic nature of the encounters.

The Caves of Unknown have more meat to them. And thus more sins. The writing style in all three is quite loosy goosy. Almost stream of consciousness. There’s a lot of padding, and I note in particular the Quantum nature of it. “IF the characters search the [x] then they find …” Or a room “appears to have once been …” This is not effective or efficient writing of descriptions. Ray goes over this in his Writing with Style booklet for RPG writers.

The padding is strong with this one and the loose style does not help scannability. The dungeon is pretty close to Vanilla and minimally keyed, which makes the “four to six rooms per page” stand out, even with the larger font size. There’s a snake under the rocks near the secret door. Further, there’s context involved in the descriptions which often clogs things up. We learn that the lost Thouls get their water from the room with the harpy, sneaking by her while shes asleep. Of course, they attack immediately, so this is a just an appeal to ecology. And explaining of WHY something is. The Thouls must have a water source! The bugbears are working for someone!  And so on. D&D seldom needs a WHY.

Otherwise, it’s pretty vanilla. Skeletons wear amulets to make them harder to turn. [Not one of Gygax’s great moments, and certainly not something to emulate.] Ghouls jump out of sarcophaguses when opened. Treasure is generic book items … and I’m sure B/X got its kiddie reputation based on the preponderance (exclusive) use of book monsters and magic items. They’re generic at this point.

And yet, there are hilights. A burned body on the floor … except for his robe, one of fire resistance. The naked woman in the forest ISNT a nymph, but a werewolf, looking not to kill but to infect others to grow a pack. A decent map, with underground river and several different encounter areas/themes … even if 85% of the dungeon does lie behind an easily missed secret door. Seriously … do no clues at all for that door? That seems a bit rough. I mean, the tossing a 44 room dungeon after room five seems a bit much.

It’s just another dungeon. And that can be ok, but it should be easier to use. Also, I’m not sure I like inline stat blocks combined with fat fonts. Putting them at the end of the room would have made scanning the room easier, I think?

Anyway, how would you, the reader, know? You’re not gonna see a copy of this. 🙂

By Carl Niblaeus
Stockholm Kartel
LotFP
"Low Levels"

Something stirs within a mountain on a forgotten planet somewhere in the Cosmos. Legends talk of a God living in the mountain, a God that has recently woken up again. Some of the inhabitants of the abandoned planet instead whisper of a mad wizard who has returned to the area. And among the elders there are still some who remember the disappearances and abductions many, many years ago. In the dark woods on the mountain there is a strange clearing surrounded by ancient statues, that only bold adventurers dare investigate. What will they find?

This twenty page adventure describes a kind of wizard lab/tower with about fifteen rooms. Nice ideas and an interactive emphasis can’t save us from column long rooms. Even if there is an attempt to provide an overview.

So, wizard tower. Wizard is home and about to Call the Stars (Mummy reference!  That right bitches, I played VtM when it came out! And was Prince of Indy in the LARP. So I’m REAL royalty! FU PoN! 🙂 /Complete the Ritualistic Ritual of Ritualism. Also running around inside are some helpers, some abominations, some dum dum homunculus clones,and some space pirates. Yup. Space Pirates.

And OMG I luv Luv LUV them so much! No-gooders, stopping at nothing in their hunt for treasure. On the lam from the Galactic League. Led by Tunguska Slim, wearing a tooth necklace and singing blues tunes with a raw growling voice. Their spaceship is parked in the woods nearby. Uh … I’m supposed to point out, in this part, how I like gonzo, right? That’s really just a one-off though, the rest of the adventure is devoid of the gonzo.

But it IS full of wizard labbyiness. There’s a metric Fuck Tun of shit to mess with in this. Helmets, thrones, chairs, crystals … sit down, fuck with some crystals, push some buttons. The third leg of Bryce’s Good Adventure stool is interactivity. I think it’s one of the few things, outside of the DM, that can make an adventure fun. You can’t MAKE a party have fun. And the DM contributes mostly to the fun (along with the group. IE: people are important) but an interactive adventure trumps a non-interactive one. Do you want to walk down the street and look in the windows or do you want to go in, try on the clothes, play with the toys, and get free perfume samples? If usability for the DM is one leg, and evocativeness the other, then those two tend to have more of an impact on the DM. Interactivity though leans more towards the players than the first two. And a fucking mind-swap helmet brings the interactivity!

It has a summary sheet that goes along with the map. It’s one page, lists all of the room numbers, and then bullet points the interesting things about the room. A kind of cheat sheet for the DM when running the adventure. It’s a good idea, but I don’t think it’s implemented well. The bulleted summary comes off a a bit generic, losing the flavor of the rooms in favor of the facts and I would prefer to have both. “Room1: Five statues around a large sphere. Pressing bronze disks on sphere reveals entrance to below.” Ok, sure. But a few more adjectives and adverbs would have helped. And what about that formerly manicured walkway? The bullets lose the flavor of the room. Yes, there’s only so much page real estate, but I think that’s a solvable problem. The margins are wide. The bullet form is slavishly followed. Column break space is large. Individual lines in a half point smaller font. Headers/footers. There are a lot of ways to fit more on a page.  

This is important, I think, because the main text is a mess. It’s long and hard to dig through. Long is necessarily always a problem, but hard to dig through is. Formatting, layout, word choice, whitespace can all make long things easier to dig through and find the important bits. But … why have a preponderance of unimportant bits? Sure, some are nice, but not to the extent they get in the way. And man, this is a textbook case of “could be easily fixed.” One room starts with “This 40’ circular chamber is the room where interested guests to the laboratory were greeted.” Guess which room that is? Yes, it’s the reception room. I left out the first part “1: Reception Room” And we know it’s 40’ from the map. The first thing the DM sees is garbage text. That’s not conducive to running it at the table. [And, a note for those who like to see room dimensions in room text. A: I don’t care. B: You get to like what you like C: You’re arguments carry more weight if you can make a case for them better than ‘i like it.’ And remember, you’re fighting against Core Principal One – Make it easy to find shit]

Likewise the text is full of notes like “If the PC’s look behind the curtains …” or “if the PC’s search the boxes in the room …” These are not quantum events. They don’t exist when the PCs do things. Less snarkily, those are filler phrases that do nothing. “Behind the curtain are …” or “The boxes contain …” is better writing. Ray(?) has an entire book on this shit. What’s that called? I gave it a recommendation. Oh, Writing With Style by Ray Vallesse. Someone needs to buy Carl a copy. (https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=4366) “Six armchairs, once beautiful, now ragged and decayed.” You mean 6 ragged & decayed armchairs? I think we can infer the once beautiful part based on context.

A major, major edit, both by a good editor and by Carl proper, would clean this up enough to at least hit No Regerts. But not in its current form.

Also, did I miss the Aldebaran thing? Lovecraft? Howard? I know it pops up all the time in shit like it has some meaning I missed.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggest price of $2. The preview is meh. It does show you the map summary thing. It’s a good idea. It also shows the rumor table, which seem ok to me. The beginning of room one is on the last page. That starts to give you an idea of the writing, in an imperfect way.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/265258/Through-the-Gate-of-Flesh?affiliate_id=1892600

Citadel of the Dark Trolls
Lee Barber

This is level 9 of the community Fight On Megadungeon The Darkness Beneath. It has nine locales in a large cavern system, with each of them expanded upon in to a number of keyed entries. Deep in its own mythology, it rivals the Ghoul Kingdom. And has no idea how to organize itself for play at the table. Ultimately, a disappointment.

Some of the upper levels of Darkness Beneath rank among my best of all time, including what I think of as THE best of all time, Level one. It’s simple, terse, non-standard and creates child-like wonder. I would argue that the Citadel of the Dark Trolls is has the most expectations of all the levels presented. That “dungeon map” that rides along with every Darkness Beneath level has had it staring us in the face for many years. Yeah, it’s not the LAST level, the Tomb of the Dark Lord remains there as desert, but Citadel has the kick ass name and the teaser right from level one, with the great doors on the underground highway. Lee has written something that lives up to the expectations set. It’s deep and rich and full of that hinted at mystery and mythology that Kingdom of the Ghouls (Baur) also did so well. You get a real sense for the place, and it’s not generic AT ALL. I have an issue with expectations and you can see that in many of my reviews. It’s not my most charming quality. But this dungeon met my expectations. It FEELS like the Citadel of the Dark Trolls.

The caverns have about nine major locales. These are large open areas and  the like, on a grand scale ala Descent in to the Depths of the Earth. Not really a hex crawl, but there’s a sense of large space/distance here. It’s a nod to the ecology and the “kingdom” of the dark trolls. Each locale is expanded upon, some more than others. There are fully keyed out locations, like the citadel proper, and then other locations that get more than a nod, like the troll “farmlands.” The hand-waving gets a little deep at the some places, like the farmlands/supporting “countryside” but it’s at a level that is about appropriate for something like this. It’s enough to give the DM something to work with, as a sideline if the party should flee there, for example, but I think also recognizes that this is not a 90 page supplement but rather one article/dungeon in a magazine with about 20 other articles in it also.

I’m going to concentrate on three points to the review, two minor and one major. First, I quibble with the overview map & key. Oh, did I say key? I mean, it doesn’t actually have a key. The “big map” has a hex-like map of nine locations, each with a number and a little embedded “#1 is the gatehouse” chart on the map. And then the main text has GATEHOUSE instead of “#1- Gatehouse.”I’ve seen a couple of adventures do this lately and I’m not sure where it’s coming from. (Since this was written a few years, I guess from this?) There’s this reliance on textual headers to convey location information. I don’t get it. How does that make it clearer? Maybe if magazine page numbers were on the chart also or something. But forcing me to fig through the text to find a one line offset entry for “GATEHOUSE” is not the way to earn “I am the friend to the DM” points.

Secondly, the linkages to the other levels seems a bit light. As an example, the gatehouse notes that the guards will let you through with a legitimate reason. Three are listed: legitimate bounty, an identifying item/pass, or you want to fight in the pit games. I know, all too well, how hard it is to link up a deeper level to an earlier one when you’re writing it at different times, and yet that’s the challenge to overcome.

Both of those are symptoms of a larger problem, the need to think about how the adventure will be run and orienting the writing and layout towards that. For example, on of the rooms at the gatehouse tells us what happens if people fly over the gatehouse. It’s the room with the giant ballista in it. Ok, that makes sense, in a way. But … isn’t it more likely that the party will just fly over the gatehouse and the DM will be left digging through the adventure looking at keys, ALL of the keys, to see what happens then? Why would you not put this information “up front” outside of the keys? That’s where the information is likely to be needed. Buried in room 23 of 76 would wouldn’t have a note about what happens if the party doesn’t visit the dungeon, would you?

But, the major issue is that I like to think this level is incomprehensible. Each and every room is so THICK and DENSE that you can’t make out what is going on and how it relates to the issue/room at hand. Rooms are a third of a column, or a column. Paragraph breaks are few and far between. I’m looking at room 2 of the gatehouse right now. It’s about half a column of text without bolding or paragraph breaks. There are long digressions in the rooms of things like:

“Skaemir was returned to the Citadel by posturing goblins, his lacerated flesh sliding from exposed bone. To chastise the troll nobles, Gorangol kept the Prince’s equipment, ate his Blood Thump, and demanded that a week-long party for her wild goblins be held at Dagendreng Hold, free of charge. While recovering, the angry Prince learned that the Shamans blamed an outbreak of disease on his combined failures to uphold prophecy.”

Uh, ok. I guess so. Is the middle of a room description the best place to put that fluff?

And fluff it is. Fluff after fluff after fluff. That section comes from a column and a half that describes fighting styles and other information. WITH ONE PARAGRAPH BREAK.That’s what this level is. It’s a fluff regional setting book. I don’t review those. Since fluff is solely inspiration, and I think that’s totally subjective (or, maybe, I don’t know how to review subjective shit) I don’t review fluff. I like it, and don’t mean fluff in a derogatory term, but it’s not an adventure.

This is 27 pages of fluff masquerading as an adventure. Ye Olde Pushbacke &| guidance seems to have been missing.

It’s fucking cool, but I’m currently running a game, not reading the background guide for a Tv series writer.

This is $8 on Lulu.