tenfootpole.org

By Sean Ferrell
Hangry Dwarf Press
OSE/5e
Level 6. Ha! 

There used to be a wizards tower here, but an earthquake changed that. The tower fell, and no one ever heard from the old wizard again. Some say he was responsible for the quake. Some say he left powerful magic behind. Some say he was conducting terrible experiments. Some say all of the rumors are true.

This ten page adventure uses five pages to describe about 21 rooms in a funhouse dungeon. It smacks of just throwing shit in for the fuck of it all. I find the lack of pretext disturbing. I do not like it Sam-I-Am. 

I like pretext. I like a suspension of disbelief. We could all just sit around the table and have the DM roll on the wilderness tables until we go back to “safe place” to heal and repeat until we get enough loot from the random rolls that we can level. Or, we can just do the same thing in randomly generated after randomly generated map. I like a decent pretext. I like the suspension of disbelief that comes from making things work together, to bring them together to something larger than the sum of their parts. To discover the gatehouse at Stonehell and the clues it provides as well as the framing of what’s to come. 

There’s a room here that has the read-aloud “An empty room that is covered by burn marks. “. Another just has a pedestal in it with a gargoyle statue on it. The challenges here are not that of a dungeon at the base of a wizards tower. The challenges here are just a bunch of shit that was thrown together. Random, in the poorer sense of the word, in that there is no rhyme or reason as to why they are there. I guess this is the “A Wizard did it!” nonsense. I wanna get in to the mood. Discover something. Put something together. Say Oh yeah, that makes sense! Yeah yeah, I like Dungeon of the Bear. Fuck off.

The room titles here are pure funhouse. “Dont be Shelf-ish” or “What a Boar” This is all solidly in the realm of funhouse, even if the lack of pretext room encounters lead you in the same direction. But what stands out here are the encounters themselves. An empty room with scorched walls. Obviously a challenge room. A room with a pedestal on it with a gargoyle statue on it – obviously a challenge room. A room with a sign on the door that says “Remember to bring the right tool for the right job” – obviously a challenge room. And, I can, in some circumstances, get behind a funhouse dungeon. Some of them fit and work together. White Plume or Inverness, or even Bear. But, then there are things like this, that jut seem to be a bunch of stuff in a bunch of rooms that are all disconnected to each other. 

The usual nonsense about conversions apply here. It says you can do this in 5e or OSR. Which means it’s a 5e adventure and stated for 5e and, more importantly, TREASURED for 5e. You might be going home with less than a thousand gp for this one and no Blackrazor to show for it. 

But, back to the dungeon. When the read-alouds are not being inanely terse they are instead being overly descriptive. “Six statues made of wax—all amazingly rendered to look like actual people—stand about the room.” Well now, you’ve just destroyed a crucial part of the game. The back and forth between DM and player. No one gets to ask questions about those statues now, not what they are made of anyway. You told us in the read-aloud. You want to the read-aloud to help contribute to the interactivity between player and DM that is the core process of the game. The players ask, the DM answers and the players ask more based on that answer. If I tell them everything in the opening text crawl then that critical element is greatly diminished. 

Oh no! Burning oil got lit! Oh no! The gargoyle came to life and attacks you if the party has a MU in it! Oh, also, it comes to life and attacks you if the party doesn’t have a MU in it. Oh no! Take 1d6 slashing damage from the trap in the hallway! Oh No! Ok, I’m bored of that now. This is not a level six adventure. 5e? I don’t know. Or care. There is the BARE  minimum at the end of the adventure related to scaling. Look, just fucking design the fucking thing for 5e or OSR. Fuck me, it’s 2024, you can publish both versions … I mean, you know the differences between the two systems, right? What, at the core, makes them tik? Like … gold for XP in a certain family of games? 

No, tentacle worms will not save this. No, the racoon pig will not save this. It’s just a series of random rooms poorly balanced and badly described.

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview shows you four rooms, so, good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/501913/the-wizard-remains-5e-knave-2e-osr?1892600

You gonna be my teenage dream tonight, baby?

James Crane
Crumbling Keep
OSE
Levels ... ? Fuck off and buy it l0ser

In the middle of a deep and dark forest along a babbling stream, the PCs come upon a wide and long field. It is extremely overgrown and has become a mix of bolted plants and dead, dry, and decaying foliage. Despite this, there is somehow a completely clear, straight path through it, untouched by the growth on either side. At the end of it is a tall and warped house standing by a single tree. Each PC catches a different scent in the air that reminds them of a specific memory of their childhood …

This 42 page adventure presents eleven rooms inside of a ‘whimsical’ poi crawl house. Aimless, the writing is unfocused and it comes off as something between a museum tour and a funhouse. You simply wander about and interact with strange stuff for no other reason than to do so.

Ok, encounter one. You’re walking towards this house and you see a bird. If you feed the bird then it changes in to a small, wicked-looking six-legged three-eyed winged goat. If you attack it then the goat explodes in powder and you sneeze for a minute if you fail your save. This takes a page and a half to communicate, along with the four one sentence rumors he’s got. So, monster description? Pretty interesting! There’s something you don’t see every day! I might be more specific than “wicked” in a description … wiry brustle fur, sharp fangs and blood red eyes or some such. But, hey, three eyes and six legs with wings has got it going on! The core of the encounter though? This kind of attitude in the encounter design … where an attack causes it to party explore with no real effects. This is meaningless. It is a thing that happens. It has no real impact. It is mostly disconnected. It is meaningless. This is the normal manner for this adventure. You encounter a room and something could happen in the room, if you interact with it. But there’s no purpose to it. To any of it. As if each room were a carnival game you could play … but without reward or context or anything to tie them together in to something more than the sum of the parts. “When it sees any PC, it’ll instantly start taunting them, pausing to squawk and laugh at its own jokes. It can’t be bothered to follow the adventurers, however; that’s too much work.’ This is the Jerk Bird, a parrot nesting on top of a chimney. There’s nothing to this. You might as well say that the door is red and unlocked. This is a museum tour, where nothing matters. A funhouse where all of the encounters are bizarre and disconnected. (Yes, if you befriend the cat then it will chase off the sprites in the attack.)

“Arriving at the house, the PCs see a strange sight: the structure appears to be …” This then is the opening line of the first real room. Note the padding. Note how it doesn’t say ANYTHING. You can literally delete everything here and not impact the adventure in any way at all. And encounter after encounter does this, is like this. Near he start you face two outside doors, two ways in, side by side. A board head trophy in between asks you to sing it a song and if you do so then it tells you that the safe way to the left. My left or your left? Whatever … the point is that the OTHER door describes the kitchen that it leads to … and then we get a description of the kitchen in the kitchen. The organization is MADNESS. There’s no map, each room tells you which room you can go to next … but … can you go back? The sitting room has no exits listed. These are the absolute basics of adventure design and yet they do not exist at all here. 

What level is this for? JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP AND BUY IT. The inanity of this shit. The second half is just a bunch of random encounters, disconnected from the adventure proper, as if we just tossed in another supplement called “Interesting encounters” to the rear of the adventure. 

I don’t understand this. I don’t understand this. I don’t understand this. There is a chair in this room that you can sit in. There is a mouse in this room that curses at you. What is the point of encounters like that? TO be clear, these are not from the adventure, but they represent the vibe of the encounters in the adventure. It’s Isle of the Unknown all over again. 

This is $14 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Because FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499909/a-strange-house?1892600

By Elln the Witch
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-3

The Abyssea Cave is known to be an isolated cavern near the sea, seemingly devoid of activity. Its remote location, far from major cities, means it rarely sees visitors. However, significant events transpired here before the adventure begins: a boat en route to these lands was invaded by a group of half-man, half-fish monsters known as the “Werish.” During the invasion, they plundered the ship’s treasures and kidnapped two individuals as part of a deal made with a cultist leader. Following these events, the Werish found a secure location to establish their base—the Abyssea Cave. In the aftermath, rumors began to circulate in the nearest village about the missing boat that typically brought new arrivals to the land. Locals whispered that what was once a cave where herbalists gathered plants was now overrun with monsters.

This thirteen page adventure uses two pages to describe eight rooms. It uses a conversational tone to describe things on the map. Straightforward rooms with little description in which you stab things.

First, yes, I can be bad, my keyboard dropping letters and me not catching it. But, yes, the designers name is Elln the Witch. So I didn’t fuck that up.

This is nothing good about this adventure. Well, no, that’s not true. There’s this amulet that give you like a +4 to your fire saves. But, also, you are always drenched in water, like you just came out of a pool. That’s sweet. That’s the kind of fun D&D that I like to see in adventures now and then. But, otherwise, there is nothing good here. It’s not BAD bad. It’s clear that the designer is literate and had an idea, they just don’t know how to write an adventure. At all. This is not a backhanded compliment, there are plenty of adventures in which the designer is not literate or does things like use color coding like it’s the skittles rainbow or something. This adventure is not those adventures.

The adventure starts with you being hired to go to a remote cave by a herbalist to collect a couple of herbs with “good healing properties.” I’m not a fan of these sorts of “you get hired” hooks. A pretext is a pretext, after all, but, also, I tend to find it an omen. It means a certain way of looking at an adventure. And, for better or worse, OSR means not only a retro toolset but a mindset and vibe as well. The Hero to Superhero worldsaver arc is not just 180 degrees, it’s a different reality. A Boot Hill adventure sets in the 94th century should probably disclose that. This is a VERY simple adventure with a small plot hook where you are hired and a distinctly lack of treasure … and we know that no treasure means no XP. Which means the designer has left out a very serious thing … which would make me think that the designer isn’t in to the OSR thing at all. 

We should talk, also, about the conversational style of the text used. “The first thing they notice …” or “If the players walk in to this room …” This sort of writing style is  the only one used in the adventure. And while I can forgive the occasional Player/Character thing, I think it does show a certain sloppiness in the writing. A sloppiness ground home, again and again by this conversation padding in the adventure. IF the players walk in to the room THEN they see …  that is all padding. I don’t know, maybe, 30%, realistically, is padding in this adventure? And the rets if not exactly rocket science. You walk down a 10×20 corridor and need to search it to find the weird thing sticking out in int. Or you try to sneak by monsters … who are alert and you only have 5’ on either side of them to make your way around. Elln, I’m not sure that’s a sneaking situation. This begins at the beginning with “Just upon entering, they can see that this cave might be empty because the entrance was blocked by stones and covered with webs. They notice three passages at the entrance of the cave” Well, even if we remove the padding (and map description), we place the covered by stone and webs things first. And, if the entrance is blocked off, how did the hostages (there are hostages in this) get in to the caves? It’s a jumble of text, with little thought as to how the text will actually be used at the table or what it implies. 

There are no real evocative descriptions, or many descriptions at all for that matter. The interactivity here is stabbing monsters, with a bit of Free The Hostages. Otherwise this is just a half page adventure padded out to thirteen pages. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is two pages. It shows you nothing of the adventure encounters … the purpose of the preview is to help the buyer make a determination if they want to buy the adventure … and thus you need to show them something of what to expect, not the intro pages.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/500516/adventuring-in-the-misfortune-lands-abyssea-cave-a-low-level-osr-adventure?1892600

By J. Lasarde
Broken Rat Games
S&W
Level 3

A mile from the village of Breckdell is a solid oak door built into the side of a steep hill. Rumours claim that the door once led to a chapel of an evil cult that terrorised the area many years ago. Not much has been heard of this cult of the rotted claw and locals presumed they had left or be slain, and as the years passed memory of the cults activities were forgotten by most. In recent weeks hunters have claimed that they have seen the door in the hill open, and an eerie light emanating from within. Fear that the cult may have returned the village wants to hire some hardy adventures to investigate and put an end to whatever evil lies within the Chapel of the Rotted Claw.

This 22 page adventure uses about eleven pages to present about thirteen rooms in a small cult dungeon with undead. It’s going for a slow creepy vibe in the catacombs, which it does a decent job working towards. The somewhat evocative writing is organized poorly and, in the end, there is not much special about a dungeon that abstracts insteads of using specifics.

Really/ A mile from the village is a hill with a door in it? I can see it from the front window of my hovel? And the cultists within are stealing babies? Really? Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking and if they have ever lived in the real world. I guess you get to do whatever you want to in your fantasy world, but the more I have to suspend disbelief the less engaged I am. Things should be relatable. People should react the way people react … perhaps with a bit of hyperrealism and such, but it should be relatable if in a What You Would Like To Do if not a Really What You Would Do manner.

We’ve got a lot of effects attached to this adventure. Things like clerics and paladins losing a point of wisdom, temporarily, every two hours. Or the offensive impact of magic-user spells increased, at the expense of a temporary loss of a hit point. I note that the impact of that offensive increase is not mentioned. 

This is a general trend in the adventure/ Things are not expanded upon, in even the most basic way. What IS the impact of that offensive increase? No advice. In another room the description goes in to great detail on the trap/puzzle that is in the room and how you make a chest appear. That chest is never mentioned again. Yes, you survived the no-save crushing lowering ceiling trap by solving the puzzle and made the chest appear … but there is absolutely NOTHING mentioned about the chest other than “a chest appears.” Or, even, perhaps, we can extend this to the marketing for the description … in which no level range is listed. It’s as if no one actually played this. It’s abstracted content. And abstracted content is NOT good content. Specificity os the soul of the narrative. Not length. Specificity. “There are symbols, linked to an ancient cult.” Wonderful. I am inspired. 

The descriptions are a maddening mix of relatively decent evocative test and padding. “This door seems to be unlocked. ‘Uh. ok. Is it or isn’t it? What does seems to be unlocked even mean? The adventure is rife with this, padding, seems, appears to be. Backstory. But. then, it will hit you with something like “Stepping down the stairs leads into a large stone room, thick marble columns reach up to the ceiling, at the top weird sculptures peer down at the PCs. The area is musty smelling, and dust, mold and strange stains cover Everything.” Thats actually not that bad. Good impressions of the room and a nice inclusion of small, dust, mold, stains. This is what a decent description should be doing. It’s sets the mood while telling the party what they can, at first glance, explore.

And then, of course, it all gets fucked up. It just dumps in monsters generally at the end, even if they are gonna gak you in the face in the middle of the text. Imagine a corridor. There’s a full description of the corridor. What you find at the end of it, etc. And, the, at the end of the description, it says something like If you step foot in the corridor then twelve monkeys appears with switchblades to attack you. Well, maybe that goes somewhere else in the text other than tacked on at the end? And it doesn’t help that this thing has some mania with describing room exits. In detail. “The exit to the east goes down a short set of stairs and ends at a door.” Yes, that is indeed what the map shows. Thanks for not adding anything to it. 

And then there’s formatting. Let’s us imagine paragraph breaks, in the text, to help organize things. But let us now do anything with the line spacing or an initial start of paragraph indent. It’s just … a left of page alignment? This is the anti-method of making things more scannable.

There’s nothing special here. The adventure is kind of slow burn. There are undead under water in corridors. There’s a temple flood/escape thing at the end, which it intimates a story for by noting that undead don’t have to breathe, setting up a madcap escape. Bt, other than that we’ve just got some standard traps and standard encounters, poorly formatted and described. Abstracted content rather than the specific content that would bring the adventure to life. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. There is no preview. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499960/chapel-of-the-rotten-claw?1892600

By Hilander
Self Published
OSE
Level …? I guess we don’t use levels anymore? The Big Bad is 10HD.

The folk of Almsville enjoyed a quiet existence far from the worries of city life and foreign wars, but recently a strange spirit has been seen in town, a weeping woman beckoning strong folk into the Harwood, pleading with them to free her from her curse. Just last week the mayor’s son, young Constance, disappeared, stealing away in the night with a sword and shield taken from his father’s wall. The town fears the worst, and Sister Verity senses unease amongst the local spirits. She has sent word to the City, pleading for help.

This twenty page adventure presents a hex crawl with about fifty hexes and twenty-ish encounters. It can turn a phrase now and then, but it’s simplistic in its implementation, mixing plot with what should be hex situations … and not doing either.

Let us assume I have a hex crawl adventure. It’s a thousand hexes. Your starting hex is along a border. I develop a page of backstory that within it contains a plot. The essence of the plot is that the prince has gone missing while searching for a monster. I populate the hexes at some density of encounters. Then I stick the prince in the hex next to the starting hex and the monster in the hex next to the prince. The other hexes don’t really have anything special in them, no help to defeat the monster or things to save the prince or anything like that. It really is as straightforward as I just described. Yeah, the other hexes have some stuff in them, but, also, it’s not really SITUATIONS. Yeah, there are monsters and treasures and weird shit. Some of them are just scattered randomly in the hexes without roads or trails leading to them and not really “in the way of” something you can see from a distance. I think we could all say that this is a poorly designed hex crawl. It meets the definition that it has hexes that you can explore, but there’s no real reason to and a decent number of them are VERY unlikely for you to stumble across in pursuit of other hexes. And, no real situations. Not really things for the DM to riff on and explode and for the players to exploit in a more strategic sense. This would all lead to me saying that yes, it is a hex crawl but it’s not a very good hex crawl, missing what makes a hex crawl a good hex crawl. And that is this adventure. It can, at times, turn a decent phrase of description, but it also seems to miss thes of what makes an adventure an adventure. The WHY of how things are put in to an adventure to drive gameplay.  

The mayors son is missing, trying to free some ghost chicks curse. The city is on the edge of the ghost wood. There’s a haunted house one hex away, before you get to the wood proper. A hex away from that, in the woods, is the witch chick who controls the woods and knows everything going on. A hex away from that is the big bad monster. None of the other woods encounters really contribute to this ghost lady/woods/monster/son plotline. They are just things like “Frank lives here in this house and can’t get out because of the animated vines” or something like “50 albino goblins, bloodthirsty, live in a cave complex here.”  They might stretch to, say, two or three paragraphs, including a read-aloud paragraph, but there’s not really situations unfolding. This is far, far closer to Isle of the Unknown. Perhaps not quite as obviously from a generator, but also not with anything larger or more interesting going on in them. 

The town is minimally described, which is fine. It does, however, have an encounter table. Thisis one of them: “Old Farmer Dale has seven daughters whom he’d like to marry off; Patience, Prudence, Mercy, Grace, Faith, Hope, and Charity. None live up to their names. “You could do, really, but I wonder for which?” So, yeah, but, also, what’s the point? Yes, it does add a bit of local color. But I think that’s all it is, Some local color to add in to some kind of home base place, that the party is likely to return to time and again. And in that case I’m not sure I make this a random table at all. 

What’s frustrating here is that sometimes the text is decent. At the site of a drowned woman in a river: “The skies grow cloudy here, and a cold breeze blows down the river. A single tree stands beside the water, its roots reaching in to drink” We’re going to ignore the “roots reaching to drinks” purple prose, but the rest of it is decent. It sets a good melancholy mood for the site of a drowned woman. There’s a forlornness that this description invokes, helped along by the room title “The Drowned Lady.” THis is how a room title sets the stage for what’s to come. It gets you into the right frame of mind for the description to come, helping to conjure more than the sum of the words used. The adventure des this a time or two, and when it does it’s a really great description. But those are by far the exceptions.

I mentioned that haunted house a hex from town. That place has 23 rooms in it. They are described in essentially ONE COLUMN. Jesus fuck man! You get such rooms as perhaps this one: “10. Guestroom. Huge plants.” Well, that’s something right out of Vampire Queen I guess. I’m not really cherry picking. It’s almost all just a room title and one or two words, an object to be found in the room. “Robes 300gp.” Yes, the room titles are decent (although, perhaps “RUINED guestroom” or “OPULENT Guestroom” would have been better.) but that’s it. It’s an extreme minimalism. To fit in twenty pages, I guess?

IN other places there is a distinct note of information missing. One fine example is “If the hill is dug into, it will reveal a large hoard of golden coins and rare treasures” With no details of what that is … although the consequences are spelled out large. It’s baffling.

There is, I guess, a mix here of two adventure styles. The hex crawl/exploratory  where you create your own adventure and a plot adventure in which you have something explicitly to do. I guess, if I squint hard enough, i can see adding some plot to a hex crawl to get things moving … but then you put the endgame to it next to the basE? And the hex encounters are not really the sort of strategic/dynamic situations that make hex crawls thrive? And the dungeon is straight out of Tegal? Nope.

This is Pay What You Want at Drivethru with a suggested price of $3. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/500040/a-walk-in-the-harwood?1892600

By Mr Pilgrim Tomes
Self Published
OSE
"Expert Levels"

A sunken cathedral on a quiet mountain lake hides a long forgotten temple to Mathanoga, God of Knowledge and wizardry. Abandoned by Man for centuries ,  but protected by the legend of man-eating fishmen lurking in it.  Or until a few weeks ago the young wizad Elric embarked on its expedition. With help from the accademy of Greykeep he found the temple and began to explore it, hoping to uncover its ancient magical secrets. Now the wizard is missing and the accademy has put a bounty on its head: its weight in silver to whoever will find him and bring him home alive and well.

This twenty page adventure uses about eight pages to describe a temple complex with about fifteen rooms. It’s a basic adventure of this type, with basic encounters, non-evocative room descriptions and straightforward puzzles that are poorly described. I guess that means it’s inoffensive? Which is not a recommendation in any way.

Oh no! Some wizzo has gone missing! You’re sent by the guild to find him. As the intro tells us, the fishmen in the temple “have attacked Elric’s camp, fatally wounding the wizard.” To be clear, in this context, “fatally wounded” means that he’s made it through four or five of the temples rooms and then turned himself to stone. Which is a different definition of fatal then I would use, but whatever.

Let’s dig in to this, shall we! Room one is the upper lever, with the rest of the temple being underground. As yes, a room with a statue and an altar, with the altar having the inscription: “I’M KEY TO EVERY DOOR SOUGHT BY SAGES AND SEERS SINCE THE DAYS OF YORE”.” That’s it. What do you want to do? No, fucking with the statue and altar don’t do anything and there’s nothing else to find. What do you do? This is, obviously, a riddle. Answer the riddle. ANSWER THE FUCKING RIDDLE! Did you answer it? No, there are no clues. No, you cannot continue the adventure until you answer the riddle, because that’s what makes the secret door appear. At least Gandork knew there WAS a door. This, of course, a classic example of putting your adventure behind a skill roll/secret door/etc. You shouldn’t fucking do that. Yes, the DM can fudge it. Yes, the DM can also buy a different adventure, one that is actually good and doesn’t put the adventure behind a secret door. Anyway, the answer is at the bottom of this review if you’d like to play D&D tonight. 

But, hey, let’s move on to a different room, yes?  Let’s see “First Trail: The room is designed to test the intelligence of newcomers, and to remove those unfit for study.” Oh fuck me. It’s a trial dungeon. Great. I fucking hate trial dungerons. Lets are the weakest example of a pretext for an adventure. And, of course, we have the aside text telling us that the “first trial” room is a test to weed people out. No shit. Who woulda thunk it. Overly explaining and justifying rooms. Bleech.

How about another puzzle room them? This one has an orb in it. It has “the four alchemical symbols carved in it”  and on the four walls a dwarf head, a bird head, a flaming head and a fish head. So, yeah, I think pretty obvious. Except, of course, I’m not sure I know WHAT the four symbols are? If you asked me, I don’t know, I’d good the fifth element and steal from it? There’s no description of the symbols at all. The whole adventure is like this. It just seems to leave out pieces of information or hand wave past it. It’s weird as all fuck.

I don’t know, the combat encounters seem bullshitty to me also. They get stuck at the bottom of room descriptions, where they might be more appropriate in the middle IE: if there’s a statue and approaching it activates a monster then maybe we say that around the statue description instead of describing a hole bunch of other shit and then dropping the monster at the end. I think there’s another room with a statue in it with an inscription on it and if you read the inscription you get attacked by four monsters. This seems MAJORLY arbitrary and I think is the kind of shit that turns players in to bad players that are unwilling to engage with rooms .When something as simple as reading a statue inscription kills you … why read anything? Yeah yeah, explosive runes, etc. But this aint that. We WANT people interacting with the rooms, not doing some pavlov shit so they learn to not engage with them. Risk/RewardPush your luck are the goto’s, not arbitrary wandering table tables. 

I guess, ultimately, it’s inoffensive. Not bad, just not good at all. Oh, and, yeah, before I forget, PUT THE FUCKING LEVEL RANGE ON THE FUCKING ADVETURE.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/497244/the-sunken-temple?1892600

The Fucking riddle answer is Knowledge.

By Joseph Mohr
Old School Roleplaying
OSRIC
Levels 10-14

The sect has not been heard from now for hundreds of years. A few ruins and relics of their order can still be found for those who know where to look for them. One such place is a long forgotten cave complex once used as a temple to their order. There are a few whispers about the cult making a return. Children have gone missing. Strange symbols have been painted in prominent places across the land. Rumors of their imminent return are on the mind of many in the land today. No one knows for sure if there is any truth to any of them.

This 27 page adventure uses about eight pages to describe about 27 rooms in a simple cavern. More shovelware from Mohr, it’s poorly produced, full of errors, and consist of little more than hacking un underdescribed chambers. 

Tricked! I was tricked in to buying this! Tricked by my own incompetence in selecting adventures, anyway. Whatever qualities Mohr has, he’s a master of designing a cover and blurb that instantly draws me in and makes me buy something … without looking at the designer or publisher first. I’ve caught myself several times in last few months, before I hit the purchase button, but this one slipped through. And thus we find ourselves here. With a theme of, shall we say, not giving a shit.

The map is, at first glance, fine. It’s mostly a cave with stream and pools and several nice topology features. But then we get to play the Find The Key game. The key numbers are small and, if its possible, in the same font as the gridlines? The same line width as the gridlines? In any evet, they are disguides. You have to really hunt to find them. And I don’t like spending my time and energy just trying to figure out which rooms the party is in on the map. Or, where the next key is so I can check to see if there’s something over there that can see/hear the party and react. I prefer a little reaction note on the map, to draw my attention, but i’d settle for a number I can see, especially in a large wide open cavern type map like this. For it’s size it’s a surprisingly compact place, with the encounters almost on top of each other. I think I counted a 10HD a 20HD and another 10HD encounter almost all on top of each other at one point. The design of the encounters, their placement, is pretty shitty, with illegible keys on a map that is too open and too cramped with encounters for its openness. And, of course, there’s no order of battle for the cultists. Just stand around and get slaughtered dudes!

Speaking of those cultists. Most of them are level ten. At least the ones that are not higher than level ten. If I recall my distributions correctly, I suspect that every level ten character in the entire world is present in this cave. What is it, one in a hundred thousand or something like that? Well, there’s a dozen or so of them in this place.

The encounters are hacking. Oh, there’s a trap now and again, like a rockfall, but it’s mostly hacking. A 20HD golem. A 10HD mist. A dragon turtle. Eight ropers in a room. That’s it. Just walk in a room and stab something. Nothing more complex than that. No nuance. Just a stabfest. This is the WORST way to write a high level adventure. I’m not even sure why th Grand Druid and Master of Autumn decided to go on this adventure. 

Did I mention the green slime? It has 20HD and 2-16HP and is worth 4000xp (plus forty per hp, of course.) Nice! A typo you think?! Perish the thought! 

Ah, but what about our use of language, you ask. Here, then, is the description of room one: “The trail up the mountain leads an area just outside two entrances to the caves. A stream of water rolls down the higher reaches of the mountain and into the mouth of the cave. A pool of water gathers near the north entrance. A short set of steps has been cut into the north cave entrance. The southernmost entrance is much wider but is more difficult to climb. “ This is, literally, just a description of the map page. If you looked at the map and write a description this is what you would get. Other rooms have such magnificent descriptions as “A child’s doll has been left here on the steps.” Or, perhaps, you enjoy backstory and padding in your descriptions? Worry not, this adventure has you covered! “A large fish has swum into this area from the larger pool at area 18. That pool also connects to an underground stream and a much larger lake miles from here.” Yeah! Now you know why there is a fish here! 

High level stabbing with minimal descriptions. That’s all this is. And it’s poorly done at that.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3. The preview is seven pages and show you none of the keys. Poor preview, not giving you any help in making a purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/498578/the-summoning?1892600

By Marco Giulio Fossati
Hellwinter Forge of Wonder
OSE
Levels 6-8

The Antrum was a temple dedicated to the chaotic god Chryzothuul, but the priests dwelling there abandoned it some years ago after a plague decimated them. The Antrum lies in a small valley amidst the Rolling Red, rugged plains and hills covered with sanguine-red grass.

In the last months, rangers and lonely travellers spotted an undead presence near the Antrum. So, the local authorities decided to send a group of adventurers there to investigate. Who or what is behind those undead?

This twenty page adventure presents an old temple dungeon with about seventeen rooms in about five pages. It is boring. Boring in interactivity. Boring in descriptions. Low effort does not begin to describe it.

Right about now I should be waxing philosophically about the measure of a man and so on. It’s traditionally, when I see a poorly designed product, to speculate why as you describe the hows, I think. But not this time. I HATE this adventure. It represents everything I loathe. It is low effort. No one seemingly cared about it during its creation. Instead a coat of paint was slapped on and it was called done. Be it to satisfy some deadline or some other reason, instead it received nothing. 

Let us begin with the original sin: the level. Levels 6-8. And the hook? “The characters are the adventurers sent to investigate the undead presence of the Antrum, and they have been hired by a reasonable law force in the area, such as a military commander, a local reeve, or the council of a nearby town” Yes. my level eight got hired by the village reeve. That’s exactly what happened. I’m currently engaged in a bloodbath in the village ala Kid Marvelman and the village Reeve walks up to me and hires me. Great. But, sure, whatever, yes, I do want to play D&D tonight. The adventure, proper? It’s full of undead. “You gotta bring a cleric!” says the designers note to the DM. Actually, no, you should NOT bring a cleric. And why is that? Room one: eight skeletons. FOr your level six through eight cleric. Or how about some zombies? Shadows? You’re just gonna blast right through each and every undead in the adventure. I don’t think there ARE any undead present that are not an automatic turn. Did you actually even ever run this for ANYONE? Now, I know that D&D-mine’s favorite hobby is changing the Turn Undead rules, but, still … I think I understand the OSE rules. It’s like an auto-turn. And most of the time it’s an auto-destory. There are new undead in the appendix, created just for the final boss fight, and they get auto-nuked also. The custom monster you created for the boss fight is an auto-nuke. And they are ALL like that. The designer made it and the editor looked at it. Or said they did. The same person did the layout, which presumably means the C00l color scheme. Maybe, instead, do the work of an editor?

But, hang on. Let’s change the levels. Let’s say its, I don’t know, level four or so?

Reven now, in the magnificence of the descriptions! “Two stairs, both going down a few steps. At the end of each stair, there’s a closed door. A small alcove lies in the south wall.” Behold now the modern wonder of the full power of this designers evocative text! “There are still some old chests in this storeroom abandoned long ago.” That’s the fucking room description. I didn’t cherry pick one sentence from it. Are you not inspired?!?! You know, you really should be. After all a good DM could … spend their money and time on something worthwhile? 

Shitting fucking descriptions. Nothing evocative about them AT ALL. And, then, that kind of writing style that I just abhor. “There are still some … “ This kind of passive voice description. Just tell us about the storeroom and the chests. The absolute best bits of this are when the designer IS getting specific. When they mention the consistent low haze of the plains on your overland journey or the pulsating shapeless blob sitting on an altar. But those may be the ONLY examples of decent text in this. There is little specificity. It’s abstraction. Our rumors read “The Antrum still contains a sacred relic of Chryzothuul. (true)” No, it does not contain a sacred relic. It contains the head of saint whatever, missing its blue tongue, or some shit like that. Specificity, not abstraction. Abstraction is boring. We’re paying for specificity. 

How about mechanics? It takes a day to get to the temple through the grasslands. You have a 2 in 6 chance each day of getting lost.. If you get lost three days in a row then you automatically find it on the fourth day. You can find some laser gemstones. They shoot out a 2d6 laser beam, continually. Well, that’s fun, anyway!

The overall effect is one of low effort. Clearly not play tested. The writing is abstracted and not evocative in the least. Boring stabbing encounters sprinkled with a few simplistic traps and not enough treasure to warrant a walk through the plains for my level eight. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is the first seven pages, which doesn’t show you any encounters. Not a very good preview of what you would be purchasing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499189/the-antrum-of-chryzothuul?1892600