tenfootpole.org

By Shane Ward
3 Toadstools Publishing
Labyrinth Lord
Level 3

A long time ago lived an evil and very eccentric warlord named Gardag. Over the years he built up a cult following, many flocked to him and worshipped. He sent out his cultists to pillage and burn the surronding lands. Eventually he amased a huge stock pile of treasure.

There is no real indication that Gardag was strange, at all.

This twenty page adventure describes a 24 room tomb. It has a simple branching map and only uses about six pages for the room keys, the rest being pregens and hirelings type info. I find the writing bland, padded, and the formatting choices hard to read.

Issue 1: The DM text is all in italics. I know, I know; it makes me seem like a petty little bitch. But it’s hard to read. I don’t like feeling like I have to fight the adventure in order to run it. Adventures with big blocks of italics or cursive or other hard to read fonts drive me nuts.

Issue 2: The writing is flat. “Large paintings depicting various historical scenes from Gardag’s reign.” That’s boring writing. It doesn’t inspire the DM to want to describe the room well. “The room is ornately decorated with murals depicting Gardag on the walls.” There’s always this element in published adventures that the DM running must bring a part of themselves to it in order to breathe life in to the adventure. We’ll accept that as given. But the role of the adventure designer is to make it easier on the DM. Specificity can help cement an idea in to the DM’s head, where their own imagination can take hold and add and expand it. “Murals of Gardags life” is abstracted. “Murals showing Gardag’s atrocities in the looting of the city of Fazool” is specific. It gives the DM something to work with. And that’s really the point of a good adventure. You can create a minimally keyed thing (and/or maximally describe it) that is easy to use, but the value beyond that comes giving the DM that extra little bit of a helping imagery (without getting long winded.) And in a market overflowing with shit I expect that extra bit. Don’t. Settle.

Beyond that, I think the writing is weak overall. It pads out the text using the usual methods. “This room is 40×40/” Yes. In fact that the map shows that. What’s the point of putting it in the text? “If there are any PC’s that can read elvish then they will read that …” This sort of if/then stuff drives me crazy. The writing is in elvish. Stating its in elvish states a fact. “When the party walks in to the room” is a kind of conversation writing style. It pads out the text and makes it harder to find the information you need.

The rooms are pretty standard. Pit trap. Poison gas trap when you remove a painting from the walls. Skeletons, zombies, more moorlocks. Branching map. Treasure is light, except for a room with ten tapestries each worth 1000gp.
It’s hard to use and it’s not very evocative. It doesn’t make you excited to run it. That doesn’t mean explosions and transformers set pieces. That mean good writing that inspires the DM.

Gardag is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $0. The preview shows you the entire adventure. Yeah Shane! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/148044/The-Tomb-Of-Gardag-The-Strange?affiliate_id=1892600

By Seth Kenlon & Klaatu Einzelganger
Mixed Signals
Pathfinder
Levels 1-3

Mrs. Wyverstone has a simple job he needs done. She has a home she wants built. The foundation has already been laid, but her building crew has abandoned the job. She needs a crew to go in and finish the job. She says any able-bodied idiot can do it. So why is she hiring adventurers?

Ug.

This forty page single-column linear adventure details the parties attempts to build a house(!) for an old woman. It is, essentially, just linear event encounters. Single column, a railroad, unorganized, it still manages to not score WORST EVAR by giving the DM some advice. Barely.

Man, where to start? The lady who who owns the tavern is building a house and needs some workers to complete it. She’ll pay you 1000gp, parceled out over the project, to do the job. Inflation seems to have hit Pathfinder pretty hard. I don’t think the size is ever mentioned, but the mason does the walls in one day, by himself, and then does the roof and door in one night, so it must be pretty small. 1000gp for a hovel when you own a tavern is pretty rough! But, enough sillyness!

Encounter one. You hammer in the last few nails to finish the framing. It’s a DC17, with failure meaning it takes five blows to drive the nail. Five hammer dings will summon an angry spirit that attacks. (Seems the build site is on a graveyard …) The spirit isn’t stat’d, instead the DM is given the advice of “use whatever stats are appropriate to the level of the party.” Uh, No. That’s your job, Mr. Designer. I “bought” this adventure because I didn’t have time. It’s your job to provide me the tools I need to run the adventure. Uncool, not stat’ing the thing. Further, the DM is supposed to have a number of undriven nails appropriate to the parties APL. Again, no advice given. YOU DON’T GET TO FUCKING DO THIS. Just stick in a small table telling us how many for what APL. It’s your fucking job as a designer!

Oh, oh, the main villains identity can change! The woman is, of course, and evil witch. Unless the party catches on too fast. Then it’s the mason that’s evil, or … and get this … it’s her husband who’s been gone for six years. Yes, Mr Not-appearing-in-this-adventure and never mentioned before is the bad guy who swoops in at the last moment! Nope. Again, a TERRIBLE design principal. You don’t get to change the ground under the party. You don’t get to run an encounter “until the party is almost defeated.” You set the fucking scene and run it in a neutral manner, with an eye towards fun. The players HAVE to be able be make meaningful decisions and they CAN’T do this with the DM just doing whatever the fuck they want whenever the fuck they want.

The inn’s rates and services are scattered through the adventure. The inn appears at the beginning. And then after day one there’s another little section on the inn and it’s pricing and services. And then at the end of the day two section there’s another little section on additional prices and services. Perfect. Make the DM hunt for information.

At one point the characters fall through the ground in to a little crypt complex. There’s no room/key format, the first couple of rooms are described in one big text block that you have to dig through to figure out what goes with where.

This shitshow does, however, do a few decent things. There’s a flowchart at the beginning to tell you how the adventure works. That’s a good choice for an event based adventure … even if it is unneeded here. It also has a pointer to some free resources, for an inn layout and NPC’s, which is a nice little touch. That’s a good value add. Finally, it offers some advice on the hook. “Building a house may be the least sexy thing your party would choose to do.” No shit. But, it does present some advice to get the party involved, a couple of NPC’s talking about eerie things at the bild site, etc. It’s a nice nod to trying to provide resources for the DM at the table.

I know it’s $0. It’s not worth it. I like the absurdity of the telegraphed villain … because I like shit like that. But the rest of the adventure, man .. .I don’t think I could ever run something like this for people.

This is PWYW at DriveThru, with a suggest price of $0. The preview gives you the entire adventure, since it’s free. Note page 13, which shows the “free text” room descriptions.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/230039/Hammer-Haus

By Joseph A. Mohr
Old School Role Playing
OSRIC
Levels 10-13

The King of Zanzia is greatly concerned about the troubles in his land and he summons the greatest adventurers that he can find to take a perilous journey to see the Oracle at the Temple of Gula to find answers to what ails the land.

This thirty page adventure has about sixteen or so rooms in a two level temple in the mountains, with the actual adventure text taking up about nine pages, once you’re past the “getting-there wandering monsters.” You’re trying to get to an oracle to ask some questions. Linear dungeon, straight-up “challenges” and fights in every room, and muddled text results in something atrocious. (Also, I had to spell atrocious three times to get it right.)

Backstory: four or five pages with the hook mixed in. IE: the worst sort of backstory, forcing you to read it so you can run the adventure. King Dipshit think something is up in his kingdom, shit been going down a lot lately, and wants you to go ask the oracle whats up. It’s a two week journey on horseback through the mountains, and you get a decent wandering monster table, with several of the encounters described. I like wanderers that have more than just a name, but the three or four paragraphs that each get here is a bit much. A couple of sentences, to set a scene and get the DM’s juices going, is really all that’s needed. Otherwise you’re facing the same issues that you have in long encounter descriptions: fighting the text to find the important bits. And for all the bullshit you go through you … a 20 acre plot. That’s what, one step above serf?

The maps are small and hard to read. DON’T USE FUCKING A CURSIVE FONT. Don’t use it in on your map and don’t use it in your adventure text. It’s fucking impossible to read. And the grid lines on the map are in a heavy blue, obfuscating the numbers and just lending the entire thing an air of “oh god, why the fuck am I even trying to read this.” Level one is a big open room while level two is COMPLETELY linear. One room after the other connected by a line. Not. Good.
Roome one of the temple complex. The statue blocking the door asks you “What do you seek?” If you answer knowledge it moves. Any other answer has some stone golems animating to attack you. Oh, and if you answer knowledge then then the statue says “then face my challenge to prove your worth” and the same enemies attack. So nothing you do matters.

Walk around a big room, proving your worth, repeatedly, until you face all of the challenges, and then a door appears, allowing access to level two. Level two is a linear map. You go in a room, right a monster, etc, and then go to the next room to repeat. This is not adventuring.

Why you would want to suffer through this is beyond me.

This is $3.50 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages and all you get to see is backstory. Joy.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/229864/The-Oracle-At-Gula?affiliate_id=1892600

mother fucker, and now my copy/paste isn’t preserving para breaks between google docs and wordpress. Grrr…..

By C.T. McGrew
Paper Brain Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-3

A lonely hill concealing terrible tragedy. Orcs and goblins in a standoff. A monstrous predator.

This twelve page adventure details three interconnecting cave systems featuring an abandoned gnome burrow, an orc outpost, and a goblin lair. There’s some faction play present, and the overall setup has a charming/simple vibe present. The adventure takes a lot of words to describe mundane things in detail, which detracts significantly from its ability to actually BE a charming little adventure.

There’s no real hook, just a throw away line about a poster with rewards for monster heads and to go to a hill a half day away. There’s no read-aloud either, which is a joy after the last few reviews page long monstrosities. There are three cave systems under the hill, all interconnected and all that also have outside entrances. The first was a gnome burrow that was taken over by an owlbear. The second is an orc outpost, with a gnome owlbear survivor tricking them to attack the third caves: the goblins who sent the owlbear to the gnome burrow. Stirge fly out of holes, the owlbear has a rank smell, the goblins caves also have some webbed corridors with a giant black widow or two. (PERFECT! I LUV “real” monsters that are relatable, especially at first level.) You can talk to the orcs, since they have a couple of goals other than “kill everyone they see.” That’s good and can add a depth to the adventure and some interesting situations … which is why the fuck I generally advocate a couple of NPCs in the dungeon. Talk to someone, ally with them, enjoy the roleplaying and the problem solving your new friends can help you with. You can always stab them later.

But, charming though it is, this should really be just a couple of pages, not twelve. It’s not full of appendices and pages of introduction and background, it’s actually just room after room. But .. the rooms are pretty poorly written. It falls in to the common mistake of describing the mundane. The kitchen describes everything you would expect to find in the kitchen. The coat closet describes everything you would find in a coat closet. The bedroom describes a bedroom. And it takes several sentences/a long paragraph to do that. We don’t need that. We all know what a kitchen looks like. The descriptions should instead focus on the “the different”, and in particular, that which is relevant to actual play. The kitchen description, after the long boring normal description, has a second one that has the table smeared with blood and viscera, where the owlbear caught a gnome and ate it. That’s great. The closet has the outfits of a gnome family. It’s good to know there are five and one is a child, but that can be communicated to the DM in a method OTHER than a long drawn-out description of the quantity and length description of each object.

The overall effect is to hide the important information and make the DM hunt for it during play. When if the owlbear at home? I don’t know, let me dig through a bunch of “what happened before” text and then find the “moms at home” data buried at the end …

It doesn’t help, either, that padding words and phrases are used. “Anyone searching will find …” is just padding. It’s an IF/THEN clause. “IF the party searches the room THEN they will find …” That’s all padding. There is a rosewood box hidden under ashes in the fireplace.?-Period. Describe what IS. This is what good editing should deliver for you.

But, just when you want the detail, it doesn’t exist. “A necklace worth 1000gp” is listed as treasure. That’s a lot of cash. Perhaps we could get JUST a bit more description of that? That’s the kind of thing I mean about the focus of the adventine text being on the actual play elements. That should be a famulous necklace that elicits awe and envy in the PLAYERS … all in less than one sentence. That’s the trick to writing an adventure.

This is $1 at DriveThru. Alas, there is no preview.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131298/The-Beleaguered-Burrow?affiliate_id=1892600

By Joel Logan
A Hole in the Ground Terrain & Games
5e
Level 2

Fuck me, man. It’s 95 fucking pages long! Come on, if you’re gonna publish shit at least make it short to reduce the suffering of the fuckwits who end up with it.

This thing is divided up in to eight episodes. Each episode has a couple of sub-parts. The adventure has some nice large mass combats, which I always find satisfying, but that doesn’t keep it from being an UTTER PIECE OF SHIT!

The adventure is episodic with the episode outcomes not being determined by character actions but rather by “when things appear grim.” IE: the adventure is arbitrary; there is no player agency. Your actions do not determine your outcome.

The first episode has you relaxing in a crowded inn. “A well armed and agile skeleton bursts in.” What follows is an endless number of skeletons. The instructions are, literally, to keep pouring them in the inn. Doors, windows, they are coming in. The inn is crowded. The people in the inn have personalities (Great!) and there is a kind of slow desperate retreat upstairs.

This is all pretty good, at least in theory. “Army of the Dead” is a popular trope, but the party almost never faces the full might of the army. Adventures always throw in a couple of skeletons or zombies out in the wilderness. Not this time. The army of the dead is attacking the town and every building in it, and grabbing people and taking them. The entire town, and your puny inn is just one part of it. There’s a shit ton of skeletons that create a desperate vibe and a lot of innocent people, panicking. The people have personalities and that can contribute to the desperate situation inside the inn.

Except the designer fucks up nearly every aspect of it. There’s not just a lot of skeletons, there’s an infinite amount of them. The instructions are to call them off once the situation in the inn gets desperate. Fuck. You. This is a shitty designer attempting to create tension through fiat. That’s not D&D. You set up a situation and let the players handle it. THAT is D&D. The former gives the players no agency, their actions are meaningless. Use your daily or just burn you at-wils, so to speak, it makes no difference.

The personalities of the NPC’s are useless. The blacksmith is gaining a reputation as good and reliable and doesn’t talk much. The Farmer is one of the biggest suppliers of fresh food & meat to the Inn. The waitress is hard worker, one of three bar wenches. And so on and so on. ALl of these have in common a lack of potential energy. The descriptions are generic people descriptions, maybe useful if you were moving to town and talking to the mailman. But that’s not what is going on. It’s a stressful situation in an inn under attack. The personalities need to be oriented toward the action. The farmer tries to save his rutabagas is actionable. The dwarf is lame AND hates the undead. The bar wench freezes or hates the undead. The fucking NPC”s need to have data presented that is relevant to the fucking adventure.

Finally, let’s note that the description tells us that a “well-armed and agile skeleton bursts through the door.” L.A.M.E. Those are conclusions. The read-aloud should present information that lets the players draw conclusions. Describe the weapon. Describe something that makes the players think the skeleton is agile. Give us a nice image of the undead bursting through a door of a cheery inn during a thunderstorm.

And did I mention that this “episode” takes four pages to describe?

This happens over and over again. LONG sections to describe “normal” D&D things. “When things look grim, have the ranger show up to save the party from the wolves and drive them off.” Oh, and the arbitrary shit for the purpose of narrtive? How about:
“For purposes of the game narrative the door can not be opened by any low level spells such as knock or dispel magic. On the other side of the door is a large overwhelming force of the undead.”

Uh, No. It’s the players and their characters journey, not yours.

LONG read-alouds. Longer DM text. Backstory presented through … JOURNAL ENTRIES! Oh joy, just when I thought I was safe.

But some of the scenes are great. Mass combats. A bunch of orphan kids in town after the attack of the army of the dead. There are even some summary sheets for the episodes, which I thought were great. If they were better written you’d be able to skip the massive adventure text.

But NONE of it is worth the downsides. MASSIVE text to wade through for no player agency and a DM-driven “story.”

Fuck. Your. Story.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The last four pages of the preview show you the first episode, the attack on the inn, and show you both the good and the bad.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/219586/The-Halls-of-Runehammer–A-Classic-Dungeon-Crawl-for-5E?affiliate_id=1892600

By Mark Hughey
Darker Age Press
Castles & Crusades
Level 3-5

After awakening in an immense cavern amidst the signs of an unearthly struggle– with little clue what happened– the few scattered survivors piece together that they are behind enemy lines, and will need their wits and their swordarms to return to the surface and report what has happened. But along the way, they find that their battle is a small part of a much grander scheme, one that may embroil all of Melcanth in war!

My life is a living hell.

I know, I know. I say that a lot. But man, this kind of stuff …

This 48 page linear adventure has about a dozen dungeon rooms that lead to a small town with about another dozen encounters. The premise is great, but massive Massive MASSIVE read-aloud and wall of text for the DM makes this a “Must Skip.”

The premise is decent. In all the tropes the good guys rush in at the last minute and battle the bad guy and save the world. There’s usually some *boom* with a ring shaped shockwave that fattens everyone, etc. This adventure starts RIGHT THEN. Awake in a cavern signs of evil lights & summoning. Hordes of dead orc & legionnaire bodies … of which you wear the same tunics. You seem to be the only survivors … and have little to no memory of what happened. Pretty sweet start to a campaign. Except this one seems to start at level three to five … but whatever.

The initial read-aloud is a page long. When you find a survivor, his read-aloud is a column long. And that’s before all of his LONG scripted read-aloud answers to the players questions. Half a column seems like the minimum read-aloud length for this adventure, per room. Even the empty rooms, of which most are, get extensive read-alouds. Players don’t like read-aloud. They don’t pay attention. If they tell you otherwise they are lying to you to be polite. I am 100% certain of this. An article by WOTC, observing organized play games, noted that people stopped paying attention after two or three sentences. There’s some kind of control issues, I think, mixed in with this read-aloud. The survivor, when questioned, has a read-aloud for each answer. This is in contrast to a different style, which might be summarizing what they know in a short list of bullets, or a one or two summary note for the DM per question. But, that would allow the DM to deviate from THE STORY and perhaps interject some of their own personality in to the scene .. and thus it cannot happen.

The DM text most often appears as a long paragraph, wall of text style. Important facts appear mixed in to the text, making them hard to find. There’s a weird description style where the scene is set with things “it looks like the campsite was in the process of being abandoned …” and so on … only to have text like “there are four orcs and their leader sifting through …” Well, fuck man! Do ya think you might have moved that up a bit in the text? That would seem to be the most obvious things the characters are going to see when they have a looksee. There’s no effective use of organization to communicate information, only an almost stream of consciousness like flow of words.

And then there’s the description abstraction. You find some refugees, hiding in their house. They have some information. One family tried to stand up to the orc army looters and died in their yard. That’s the text. That’s not what happened. Old man Johnson and his boy stood up to them and saw his wife Marie and their daughter cut down before their eyes before they were gutted. SHOW, don’t tell. Be specific, without being wordy. One is flavorful and effectively communicates a vibe. The other is abstracted garbage.

There is not really anything special about this adventure. The starting dungeon element is completely linear. The town part is a little better, because of the chance of refugees to spice things up, as well as looter stragglers. But You have to wade through the wall of shit text to get there.

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages and takes FOREVER to load (Did I mention the download is 100meg?) Your reward is the entire perview being the bullshit pages long backstory.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/174847/Shards-of-Memory?affiliate_id=1892600

By Glen Cooper
Dreadful Dungeons
5e
Levels 1-5

Deep in the wilderness, and only a few short hours travel from a remote human settlement; a passing druid tending to the forestry came upon a beautiful glade. In it’s centre a solitary majestic tree topping a lush grassy mound, bearing irresistibly ripe fruit. The druid sat for a moments rest to eat a piece of the fruit, and fell asleep under the shade of its cool leafy canopy.

This is a 22 page adventure that has six pages describing a small nine room complex under an evil tree. It lacks a motivating element and uses a conversation writing style that is heavy on mechanics. An edit, Usul, the likes that even god has never seen, as well as a shift from CONTROL to GUIDANCE for the DM would help make the horror elements stand out more.

Oh, where to start. This was to be a horror adventure, or, at a minimum, a creepy horror elemnt adventure. Most of the hooks are generic throw-away “sent on a mission” or “please help us” nonsense, but the first has a nice little horror theme. You stumble across a deserted camp, it’s overcast and about to storm, and then you hear a scream in the distance. It’s a classic creepy set up. It works well because the text of the hook is short. It’s not full of mechanics or overly wordy, it’s just pure refined theme. The adventure tries to bring the horror in other elements. There’s the big old creepy tree on the hill. Muddy ground, a tangle of roots at your feet and/or hanging down in your face when you get underground. But the impact is lost because the vision is hidden behind a writing style that is … unfocused? unedited? Conversational? Not to the point. And because of that you have to fight the text to get to the creepiness and then its watered down through the effort to uncover it.

This comes from several different sins, almost all a form of padding. The first is drawing conclusions. The read-aloud at one point, in the middle of a paragraph of it, tells us “Centered in the glade is a ghastly sight.” This sentence is a conclusion. You See A Ghastly Sight. This is TELLING the players to be afraid. This is not a good thing. Instead we should be SHOWING the players and, hopefully, we do it in such a manner that they say to themselves “Man, what a ghastly sight! I’m freaked out!” So, sin one, we’re told what to think instead of being shown something for us to draw our own conclusions. To be fair, the text does then describe what we see. Which means that the entire sentence quoted is also redundant. It serves no purpose other than to clog up the text. The read-alouds can get long, also. Our WOTC friends published that famous article noting that no one pays attention after three sentences, and yet we get long sections that take up almost an entire column. Worse, it’s written in a first person style, so there’s a lot of “you push through the roots” and “you see a “ text. I’m NOT a fan of that style of read-aloud, the kind of assumed action dialog.

The DM notes do not fare much better. Long and full of both repetitive elements and overly descriptive mechanics. The “you approach the hill/tree” encounter has four paragraphs. The first two completely duplicate the information on the map, describing where the next room is, textually, and giving dimensions. Almost all of it is unneeded. A pool is described as “… appears to become very swamp-like …” No. It does not “appear.” It is. And swamp-like is more of an overly abstract term. Bog? Peat? Watery with trees sticking out? But, the mechanics are what I really want to focus on. “From either side of the pool or even standing above the mound the entrance door is incredibly well camouflaged.” This is a sentence justifying what is to come in the next one. It’s not really need. “The door is well camouflaged” would do the same thing. But then, you need to be within a maximum of 10 feet and make a DC25 check to find the door, increasing to DC30 with subsequent rolls as disbelief sets in. Thats a lot of words for something very simple. (Plus, its a roll to continue. What happens if we don’t find the door? I guess the adventure is over?) Finally, there’s a lot of if/then statements. IF the adventurers do X THEN this thing happens. Again, that’s just padding begging to be rewritten in a more direct fashion.

[And, as a nitpick, it uses boring words in places. Tall, heavy, long, big … these are all words that should be replaced with more descriptive ones,]

There’s a lot of maps provided, and I especially like the cross-section ones and the way they help communicate the room flow. I wish, though, that more information would have been on them. There’s a column or so o text near the beginning that describes a lot of terrain features, in the rain, in root rooms, etc. Those could have been placed on the map, making them less confusing and easier to find than continually flipping back to the terrain section at the beginning.

I note, also, that the adventure suffers from a “Why do that?” problem. Why go inside the tree? Creepy tree. Creepy setting. Tree clearly evil. Burn/chop it down. Yes, it’s raining. Yes, if you chop it down the evil dudes come out. But, still, seems much safer than going inside. And yet the premise is that the party goes inside. And past a big trapped front door at that. A little more incitement to explore would have been nice to see.

There’s some creepy stuff lurking in this, but its all obfuscated by the over-use of mechanics and padding/ineffective text.

Also, let’s all welcome Glen to the blog. He sent me a note saying how much he was enjoying reading it, and noting he had written this adventure. I repaid his kindness with this review.And here I am claiming that the only meaning to life is our interactions with others. Bah!

This is $2 on dmsguild. The preview shows you some stats and the terrain features … Which makes it seem more like a 4e adventure than a 5e one. Showing the meat of the adventure, so we can get an idea what to expect, would have been better.
http://www.dmsguild.com/product/190617/The-Tree-of-Blight