tenfootpole.org

By James Thomson
MonkeyGod Enterprises
3e
Levels 3-4

For a thousand years, Yagga-Kong have offered a fabulous reward to anyone who can find their way through the maze. Every generation or so, someone lives to claim it. Will you be the first this century? Then come to the Last Redoubt, where the mountains scrape the dome of the sky and the air makes men bleed from their ears. Come walk the twisted streets of the City of the Damned and brave the depths of the Maze of Screaming Silence.

This is an older, out of print adventure and doesn’t seem available digitally. I don’t normally review out of print products, or older for that matter. It somehow made it on to my list and I stumbled across a copy at Half Price. This isn’t going to be a regular occurrence, although I have promised Kent I would get to The Beholder, eventually.

This one hundred page(!) adventure describes an “evil” town with a few pages devoted to the pretext to going there: the titular maze. It oozes character, revealing in the environment it has created in the way few other products do. The core elements are excellent. It can be evocative in the way few other products can. It also probably has four to five times more text than it should. It wears that onion on its belt because it was the style at the time, but, even given those allowances, it’s hard to get past. It is fairly close to that platonic ideal I have of stumbling on to a classic adventure at the “dead rpg’s” booth at a con.

Evil Iggy, a warlord/raubritter, has a small outpost. Down beneath it is a little town/village that has grown up full of scum and dregs. Every day everyone gathers around the Maze to see who till try it. If you stay in, and survive, you get a bunch of cash. People bet, obviously.

This is a mostly a town adventure with extensive social components. I’m VERY fond of those elements. Town adventures are some of my favorites. Nothing gets the players going like the freewheeling nature of a good town. The Maze is mostly a pretext to get the players in to town and interacting with people. And, of course, to kick off the plotting and scheming that goes with something like “defeat the maze and win a prize.” The whole thing feels like a less mercantile Bartertown/Thunderdome thing. More scummy and knife you in the back than sell your camels.

I find the text, some of it anyway, some of the most evocative I’ve seen. It pulls at every fiber of your being as a DM. You WANT to run the encounters in this thing. At one point there’s a little paragraph that goes something like: “The Oracle presents a fearsome sight, blood pours out of her mouth, eyes and ears, her fingers are torn down to the bone, she laughs and screams “soon!” continuously as she lashes out at all and sundry.” She’s just turned in to a king of zombie, the “kill you and you become a zombie” kind. That kind of strong imagery, or maybe concept, is present over and over again in the adventure. Almost every single encounter/element has that something quite strong on which the DM can hang their work and work with. You WANT to run these and cackle gleefully to yourself on the joy you expect to have. Not the joy of punishing the players, or see their own difficulty, but in the joy of your mind racing with delights and possibilities. It’s a great example of really and truly communicating the vibe of an encounter to the DM. Creepy ways the locals interact with you. Guards that present pidgeon common in a wonderful way. Rumors presented in voice. “Last winter was bad. We had to eal all our dogs.” Yup, thats a bad winter! But anyway, “no there’s no dog fights in the pit … Someone times you can get a pit fight gong between two drunks, but it’s not like betting on dogs.” That’s a fucking rumor. (of the fighting pit and the guy that runs it. I removed that part)

It does a great job of giving advice to the DM via side boxes, and in the main text, aon adding atmosphere. How to communicate the flavor of the locals. Little things to cement the character of the town. It helps the DM communicate the flavor to the players. At one point there’s a ncie page section on various schemes the characters could engage in to acquire the ring the warlord wears. A pretext to drive the action to be sure, but it recognize that, once laid out, its up to the adventure to help the DM understand some of the more common responses and advice them on making them fun.

And the big bad the center of the maze? The beast that everyone fears? It’s a minotaur. Just a minotaur. Not one of those BloodWolf Tainted Exalted Minotaur King things. But it’s referred to as The Beast, not as a minotaur. It’s a great example of making a normal monster from the manual mythic without resorting to bullshit. Fuck yes a 6HD minotaur is a challenge to a party of 3’s and 4’s!

One more thing, at one point the local use their sly humor to get the party to stay in a cursed home. If/when the party survives they are then treated with a newfound respect and deference by the locals. That’s a great touch. Not enough adventures have the locals give the party their due. There are some real mechanical effects in addition to the roleplaying ones. It’s a great technique and one that should be used more.

It is also MIRED in too much text. The hook takes up the first 20 pages (that oracle that eventually goes zombie.) It also involved a dream (ug!) It has almost two pages of read-aloud. If you kill her and the loot the place BEFORE she goes zombie then there’s a little section of advice on how to punish the players by having their characters tortured and killed by the local lord. Being punitive to the players is never good. There’s also a writing style that almost is like a novelization of the adventure. It’s clear someone had a certain set of elements in mind and by god the players and their characters were going to follow that script. “If someone is disrespectful enough to pull back her hood then …”The usual culprits of irrelevant backstory and if/then writing combine with the “novelization” and ham-handed oracle/dream scenes to produce something truly atrocious, and quite out of place compared to the rest of the adventure. “Run this until the players get bored.” Indeed?

The writing is too long throughout the product. For every evocative couple of sentences we also get mountains of text that is not relevant or written a little too clever, irrelevant to the direct play of the characters.

It can also be generic at times. “Before your eyes, and before you can take any action, a man is stabbed to death by another man, who then runs right past your position. There are a few witnesses, but no one does anything about it.” That’s a weird style and uncharacteristic for most of the adventure.

But, still, quite good for the time period in which it was published (2002.) This is that most rare of things: a physical RPG product I’ll be keeping. I’m not sure it can be run well, it’s organized for shit and, like I said, you need a highlighter and a weekend taking notes to get it organized. But what’s inside, at its core, is a magnificent city adventure in hive of scum and villainy. Someone needs to update the writing, editing the fuck out of it and putting in a bit more of a summary for the DM, and publish it anew.

Alas, I can’t tag it The Best. It’s too unwieldy and I’m not selling my standards down the river because it’s a town adventure. But I can recommend that you pick it up if you see a copy.

Read more about it at:
https://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/61969/maze-screaming-silence

By Karl Stjernberg
Self Published
OSR

A spore-filled series of caves where everyone is sad, sad, sad!
Console sad fungoids, argue with a gargoyle, risk getting your skin melted off and replaced by a moist, spongy matter! All that and more, in Spores of the Sad Shroom!

This sixteen page adventure details an eleven room dungeon full of mushrooms. Nice detail, terse writing, great treasure, freaky effects all bring the mushroom vibe. It’s just a tad too “system neutral” and a bit short, otherwise it would be a home run.

This thing brings the detail, that’s for sure. Or, rather, it brings the specificity. I’m a strong believer that being specific in your dungeons really cements a scene in the DM’s head and allows them to expand upon it. That allows the designer to communicate far more than the actual text they write. At one point, if you talk back, this could happen: “An angry mushroom-brute takes one gigantic step out of the wall and cracks its knuckles, loudly. It insults trespassers and gut-punches anyone standing up to it.” That’s a good example of being specific. It really cements the entire scene and communicates the flavor. It does it in just two sentences. It doesn’t drone on with details, or text, or meaningless backstory. It’s an icepick to the brain of an idea. This adventure does that over and over again. It’s one of the more terse written written adventures AND one of the most flavorful. In fact, I’d say this is pretty close to perfect as you can get and still use sentences. There may be other formats, like bullet point phrases or “impression words” (used to such great effect in Hyqueous Vaults) that can also be used, but, for sentences, this one is close to the top.

Looking at just the “what happens if you talk back” table, you get anxiously apologizing mushrooms who explode, wailing in emotional pain mushrooms, kill me and eat me mushrooms, the knuckle-cracking mushroom, an especially emo mushroom, and a NPC henchman mushroom that steps out. That’s a great deal of detail, and doesn’t even cover the table at the rear to help with the inevitable “I eat a mushroom” character action.

At one point there’s a river and the text offer three possibilities on where it goes if the characters want to further explore it. All three are magnificent and you could build a lot of fun around them. “The other evil manta rays are jerks!”

The treasure can be great. From mushroom effects to hollow magic swords, gobets to be repaired, fingernails and eyeballs (ala Vecna) it reveals in the OD&D non-standard vibe that I love so much.

No everything hits on all cylinders though. Most of the rumor table is, in contrast to the rest of the adventure, a little generic on detail. “A great evil was sealed down there.” Uh, yeah. Ok. That’s a good example of NOT being specific to the detriment of imagery and helping the DM.

Further, the adventure is almost systemless, needlessly I think. It doesn’t really provide stats for almost anything, except for a couple of new monsters. “Gargoyle” you get to go look up in your own system. Further, there are areas that could be trapped, or, another adventure, have some mechanic associated with them. In one area you pull a sword out of a mushroom and are sprayed with sticky liquid. That’s the extent of the mechanics. “ you are sprayed with sticky liquid.” I really like lightweight mechanics … but I’m colder on “no mechanics at all.” The original mind flayer and his 1d6? That’s fine. Older D&D versions, clone or not, are close enough that this could have been for Labyrinth Lord and it would not have detracted from it.

It’s also short, at eleven rooms. It feels like you just get in to the swing of things and then its over.

All of that old D&D mushroom art, from Sutherland and his ilk, sure seem to have had a disproportionate impact on the OSR. It strikes me that a higher percentage than normal of mushroom adventures are pretty good. Maybe it’s the permission to be more fantastic and less Tolkein?

This is $6.66 at DriveThru. The last two pages are representative of the product. There’s a bit on mushroom commenting on the party … and the repercussions of giving them lip back, as well as the first three or four rooms. It’s a good preview.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/230641/Spores-of-the-Sad-Shroom??affiliate_id=1892600

By Ron Lundeen
Run Amok Games
Pathfinder
Level 1

Late at night, the storm howls and sheets of rain fall. The High Road is supposed to be safe and well-traveled, but this stormy night there has been no one else on the road and no place to stop for shelter. A gruesome scene on a rain-slicked bridge leads to a nighttime race to grant a restless soul peace.

Gah! Freaky fucking cover!

This 38 page “adventure” has eight scenes. You’re trying to track down a local nobles undead kid and put him to rest, complicated by a troll running around. Linear, padded text, too much read aloud, endlessly droning DM text. Also, at least one good bit of imagery, but, like Paperboy, it’s not worth it, kid.

Scene 1: You stumble on the scene of a battle on a bridge, then skeleton attacks. Scene 2: Meet aristo at an inn. Scene 3: Troll attacks. Scene 4: Aristo pleads with party to take over his mission. Scene 5: Chase after the troll. Scene 6: Party kills undead kid. Scene 7: Fight maggots in graveyard. Scene 8: Put kid to rest/fight undead. This takes forty pages because … well … the designer doesn’t know any better? I can only assume they’ve only seen examples of shittily written adventures.

Three sentences. THREE. FUCKING. SENTENCES. That’s how much read aloud you get to put in a time. You put the fucking information in the adventure in such a way that the DM can communicate it AS the NPC. Or in back & forth questioning/responding to the players.

I don’t know what the fuck else to say. The DM text is padded to fuck and back with endless trivia and go-nowhere statement. Hence the forty pages. “The party might be suspicious of the open gate in to the cemetery, particularly is they realize it detects as magic and requires a Will save for some reason. Therefore, the party might instead decide to enter the cemetery by climbing over the fence or obelisk.” This is after a paragraph listing the climb DC’s for the fence & obelisk. “Once inside the party must locate the kids resting place.” Uh huh. You forgot to say they also need to breathe.

The designer doesn’t know how to write an adventure. The ideas aren’t in and of themselves bad, but he presents them in just about the worst way possible. An aristo hunting his undead son, a vindictive troll … the dead of night in a storm .. it’s a good gimmick. At one point skeletons claw their way out of corpses, bursting them, in order to attack. That’s pretty fucking good right there and EXACTLY the sort of imagery I’m looking for in an adventure.

I like the overall idea but it’s close to incomprehensible here, buried in the text the way it is.

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview doesn’t work. Sucker.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/104119/Teeth-of-the-Storm?affiliate_id=1892600

By Jeffrey Talanian
North Wind Adventurers
AS&SH
Levels 4-6

Until about three years ago, the peculiar town of Port Greely was renowned as a proli c exporter of crustaceans. en the Greely lobstermen severed all ties with outside partners. Subsequent attempts at renegotiation were shunned. More recently, a small group of Fishmongers’ Guild representatives from the City-State of Khromarium has gone missing in Port Greely, and answers have been less than forthcoming. At present, the Guild seeks answers. It wants to know what became of its representatives, and it wishes to re-establish its lucrative partnership with the Port Greely lobstermen. Your party have been contracted to help resolve e Mystery at Port Greely.

This forty page adventure details a corrupt town and the underground temple of fish-men in charge. It’s a typical Talanian AS&SH adventure, which means strained text at the expense of usability. Jeff’s formatting continues to be an issue also. Both contribute to an adventure hard to get in to. It’s a dungeon with thirteen rooms for christs sake, and takes forty pages to do that.

Hate it or hate it, Talanians got a style. I love to tell my wife that it don’t matter what style you got as long as you’ve got one. I’m wrong/a hypocrite. It does matter. Rule number one of adventure writing is that it is technical writing. The thing has to be useful for running a game at the table. You can also use it to start a fire, line a cage, get inspiration from, or read for fun. But, it has to first be useful at the table.

Talanian uses footnotes. That’s a good example of using formatting to help refer DM’s to other useful information. “Where do I find more information about orcs? Oh yeah, the footnote says page 23!” Perfect!
But most of the adventure text does NOT contribute to usability. Parts of the adventure feel more like an Appendix N novelization of an adventure. One of the first locations is a tavern in town and that vibe is present throughout. The arrangement of the text seems more like novel writing than adventure writing.

Some of this also has to do with the formatting choices made. Page twelve has a description of a room that seems to be all over the place. The formatting, leading sentences, bolding, all seem to contribute to an almost random stream of consciousness description of the room. Scanning it to find something would be a nightmare.

The actual text runs from uninspired to strained. Here’s the description for a giant centipede: “multi-legged, segmented arthropod of 21?2-foot length, feared for its painful, venomous bite. It is but rarely encountered during the day.” Well, ok, yes. Factually true. But it doesn’t really do anything to inspire the DM to action. Further, I would argue that the last sentence is both irrelevant (who the fuck cares? Just modify the damn day/night wanderers table) AND a great example of the strained writing style employed. How about this fine example: “If perchance sorcery or some ability is employed to comprehend their conversation, it seems one fish-man bemoans his ineligibility for certain mating rights; meantime, the others berate the lamenter for a pathetic weakling.” Strained AND am example of if/then writing. One room with barrels of lobster takes what seems like miles of strained text to share an uninspiring vision of the room that could have been done better if it were shorter and used less strained text. “Nine massive marble barrels set in to the floor foam & churn with lobsters.” Done. Talanian tells us, via the last sentence, that these are food for the bob & margaret, the high priests. Joy. So what? Does that have a bearing on the adventure?

Speaking of, the text is loaded with used to be’s. Mixed in to the descriptions is a lot of useless history that will never come up. Island 4 is a great example of this, with the text full of a history lesson. This does not contribute to good scanning of the text.

I could bitch about other things also. The ship’s captain, probably important to the adventure, doesn’t get a personality at all. At one point the party is probably captured, in town, only to be freed by some rebel townfolk. What’s the point of this? It smells like plot. In fact, the entire town section seems weak. It’s supposed to be an Innsmouth-like situation, and at one point they chase and hunt the party in town … but there’s almost no guidance on this or things to spice it up and make it fun. That’s the point of someone else writing it beyond the running dm: to provide the running DM some guidance. Otherwise what value are you adding?

Just Another Innsmouth. And not as good as Scenic Dunnsmouth. Move along. Nothing to see.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages and shows you nothing by a couple of paragraphs of the hook.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/187120/The-Mystery-at-Port-Greely?affiliate_id=1892600

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