The Curse of Harken Hall

Posted on March 15, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Simon Todd
MontiDots Limited
OSRIC
Level 1

Clovis Harken, Lord of Highcliff Gard has but six months to live, at least if the family curse is anything to go by. His wife, Karlina is going frantic as he has forbidden any from investigating the curse. But he has gone on a hunting trip, and Karlina has sent word to the wayside Inn asking for investigators to explore a mysterious door hidden behind a mural in the oldest part of the manor. It’s easy money if it were but a simple coal store….

This thirty five page adventure details the dungeon behind a newly found secret door in the manor of a cursed lord. With twenty-one rooms over thirteen pages, the rooms are … expansivly encountered, with each rooms many features generally ALL having some sort of thing associated with them. It could use a hard organization overhaul to deal effectively with the organizational consequences of that dense content. It can also be a little bland in its treatment of treasure and goes overboard with DM advice and mixes setting data in through a repetition I found tedious. This adventure feels like … I don’t know. It feels like a good old-school basement adventure in which each room has a lot of stuff going on.

Every lord of the manor dies at forty, because of some curse you hear about from a bard. A summons to the manor from the lady reveals her husband is out hunting and will return in six hours. She wants you to explore a new secret door she found, thinking it may contain information on lifting the family curse. The house guards are loyal to her husband, who doesn’t want anyone poking around with the curse.

I described the rooms in the dungeon as expansive, or perhaps dense is a better word. The first room has maybe six different things going on. There are spiders in the ceiling joists, with big wiggling food sacks hanging. There’s a chest and a mound of burlap. There are banners under a sheet, and 7’ tall statue, along with a table and a rubbish/slurry pile near a locked door with an obvious key missing from the keyring next to the door. Don’t go poking in the rafters and the spiders keep to themselves, you may not even see them. Fuck with their food sacks and rats run out of the walls to investigate. The wet burlap has rats in it. The missing key is in the rubble at the foot of the door, along with some giant centipedes. And on and on it goes, to the tune of a page and a half. The writing is not exemplar in its use of terse & evocative language, but it’s not exactly full of garbage irrelevent history and backstory either. Well. Usually. It IS more verbose than I would prefer in places. “Inform the player that the spells are instantly readable by a magic user” is the advice when you find some scrolls in a chest. Or “A cleric, magic user or druid is able to identify the dried herbs as St. John’s Wort, a plant used as a ward against fae that can also be used as a bug repellent if burnt.” In the table description there’s “On the table are gauntlets and a battle axe with a leather cover.” and then “the battle axe is serviceable.” This sort of thing happens again and again. I’m not sure I would make the choices to include this information … but it’s also pretty hard to damn the product for it. Well, but for …

The density of the rooms, combined with the organizational style, makes the extraneous data stick out more than usual. There’s just SO MUCH that you start looking for ways to manage your way through it. More than the detail I think this is an impact of the style. The rooms almost always start off with a read-aloud. In the case of room one it’s two paragraphs long. It’s pretty fact based, which I generally rail against, but it also touches on nearly every thing in the room to investigate. If you believe that the DM should feed “follow up” hints to party, for them to inquire further about, then this is the read aloud for you! Here’s the read-aloud section for the spiders and cocoons: “The rafters, 10 feet above your head, are coated in cobwebs. There
are seven cocoons about two feet long at intervals dangling from the ceiling. They twitch erratically.” Other read-aloud bits mention the table, statue, sheet covering something, the doors, and so on. Actually, the cocoon read-aloud is not bad for evocative imagery, but the rest IS pretty fact based. The various sections are then bolded out in the text. IE: “The Table” is a bolded section heading, as is “The Banners” and “The Chest and Mound of Burlap” and “The Statue” and “The South Wall.” Note the disconnect between the section headings and the read-aloud. Banners? No banners mentioned in the read-aloud. They are under a sheet that IS mentioned. The South wall? That’s the door on the south wall. Then there’s an entire section of text after the read-aloud and before the first section heading which describe a pool of seeping water, a stairway, the wall symbols the walls are painted with, the cocoons and spiders. Then the monsters are bolded in the various section, in a slightly larger font. It really needs slightly better organization. Consistency in the section headings, the monsters maybe indented instead of bolding with larger font, and the section heading being consistent. I recall another product I just reviewed that had a kind of bullet point layout. That format, I think, would have worked wonders to help group and call out the content in this dungeon. None of which means it’s BAD, just that it could be better.

The whole thing FEELS like a classic dungeoncrawl, even if the map is really just a couple of rings of corridors/rooms. The content of the rooms leads to this exploratory vive that’s going on. You can interact with stuff. Search the garbage for a key. Peel back peeling paint to find a door. Fuck with the statue. It’s quite interactive and some rooms, like the first room, are bursting with interactivity. More than anything else it feels like those old 1e DMG example dungeon rooms, with the holes filled with wood, the trapdoor, and the stream with a skeleton and scroll case in it.

Loves of B2 will rejoice knowing that the manor gets a small write up also … along with its considerable treasure and magic items contents. Murder Hobos, Represent! The adventure does get a little heavy in places, especially prior to the dungeon proper, with setting data. It tells you about 200 times that demi-humans and humanoids are called Erle Folk, clerics are multi-religion, and MU’s can brew potions. Maybe it’s the repetition, but the setting info felt a little too much, even though it does have a kind of interesting Ars Magica/Harn-ish vibe to it. More fantasy than those two settings but still skewing more in that direction than most adventures do. The treasure is generally pretty good. The magic items skew towards the book variety but they do have some decent details, like a +1 dagger with an ivory handle with inlay in the form of a sinister faun. (Which fits in to the “alien fae” theming as well.)

The exploratory nature of the dungeon as well as the variety in non-standard encounters (floating skulls shooting magic missile! Trapped fae spirit!) makes this one of those rare cases where I think it’s worth pulling out the highlighter. My impossibly high standards do a disservice to these journeyman works. One day I should collect them all on a second page. In any event, this is good enough to make me want to see more from the publisher/designer. Expect to see some more in the near future.

You can find this on DriveThru, but we warned the preview is pretty useless in determining what’s up with the actual useful content. (Ha! A new area for me to bitch about! “The preview doesn’t show a useful page.”)https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/192981/The-Curse-of-Harken-Hall?affiliate_id=1892600

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The Beast That Waits

Posted on March 13, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Curtis Lyon
Three Sages Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 1-3

Welcome to Graven, a quiet and peaceful little hamlet. Or is it? The Baron hasn’t come down from his keep in three years. Bandits and worse have been stalking the road. People have been disappearing down by the river. The mine has become unsafe since a recent earthquake… And something has started killing villagers in the night. There is a need for brave adventurers…

This is a 52 page region in trouble with various little things to do scattered throughout, and interconnected. It’s not really enough to call it a regional sandbox; more of a description of the lands around a village. It needs a little more ‘going on’ for the DM to throw in and suffers from a word count issue … but mostly because the sheer size of the product. IE: It’s more of a usability issue than a wall of text issue. It’s ALMOST where it needs to be to be a good product.

The “adventure” is really just a description of various locales around a village. The village proper is described, along with a dungeon and a barons keep and three or four wilderness regions. Supporting this is an appendix with a name generator, rumors, bestiary, and a couple of pages that offer solutions to the various more open-ended mysteries found in the village … larger mysteries than the ones explored in the adventure proper.

The wilderness sections are presented in about two pages each. A short paragraph overview and then a couple of wandering tables. There are no “set” encounters in the wilderness areas; everything is on the wandering table, which is an interesting idea I can kind of groove on, given the minor significance of the the locales on the table. The wandering tables are generally something like: “If you’re in the road in the forest”, with day & night options, and then also “if you strike out off the road in the forest”, with day and night tables. This is followed, mostly, by the stats of the creatures encountered, with little no extra context text. EXCEPT when there is. And then it goes on a paragraph. These are generally NPC encounters or some kind of encounter related to the various little things going on. “The Red Lady” in the woods is a ghost, with a little data on her (mostly things important to the game at the table!) At the end there’s a little section on “Clearing” the region. If you do certain things then the region becomes safer, here’s an XP bonus, and here’s how the impact on the regional/village. It’s a nice touch. It’s also the case that clearing a region generally requires some exploration of one of the OTHER regions. IE: the ghosts body is somewhere else. These little things are the primary points of the adventure. Hmmm, no, that didn’t come out well. Each one of those little things (a few per region, maybe six regions total) end up as a kind of To Do list for the adventurers, and that To Do is the primary adventure in this product. Arg! I still don’t think I said that well. I’ll table it. More on that point later.

The three major non-wilderness areas are the village proper, the old mines, and the barons keep. The later are both primary adventure locales, with above average maps (but not exploratory-dungeon type maps) having some elevation changes and other non-generic features. The keep is full of bandits … and maybe a werewolf, while the mines have gnolls and undead. There can be some social interaction in both areas, and MAYBE even some allies/faction play a bit with some evil folk. There’s not a lot, really only a couple of words for two people, if memory serves me right, but it’s there. While I’m on the social, let me say that this play is CRAWLING with potential hirelings. The village, the wilderness areas, and the keep … you could have a small army of followers. That’s a nice non-traditional resource and/or reward for the players, and goes a long way to showing that their actions have an actual impact.

I feel like I could write about two dozen pages more on this adventure, both positively and negatively. The villagers refer to the primary monster as “The Beast that waits” (although I’d shorten it the the beast), which is much better than “a couple of trolls been giving up trouble.” The brigands are part of a gang, with a name. There are tips about things the party will want, like silver weapons. The villagers, like the little adventures, have a few interconnections to other villagers. The “boss fight” in the mines is fucking ROUGH! The treasure is abstracted in some places and the magic items boring book shit. The imagery is sometimes useful (in the mines in particular) and mostly not. There needs to be some quick villager quirks/events to liven things up and get them going. I think though, I’m going to expand on only two more issues, both negative.

First, the adventure is a little … oh, I’ll say verbose. The issue is that the NPC’s all have personalities, goals, and descriptions, over a couple of paragraphs each, and they are all at the locations they are usually found at. I think this is a cumbersome way to present information FOR ACTUAL PLAY. Either keep the current descriptions and provide a 1-page summary of all of the NPC’s (“Farmer Ted: Short, limp. Hates his father. Loves his mother like norman bates. Location C16”) OR reworks the descriptions in to something that MUCH easier to scan during play. I don’t mind a paragraph or two for an NPC (when it’s full of gameable data) but I HAVE to have something to use at the table, and text paragraphs of NPC’s don’t fit the bill. That means a highlighter, at best. And Fuck You, how about you, the designer, highlight for me since I’m paying you? Hmmm, that came off a little strong for the degree of sin, but, the point remains.

Second, there is a REAL lack of motivation for the party. To be fair, the designer points this out as being key. The party MUST be engaged in the village. But the hooks provided (the most mundane of hooks at that) just get the party TO the village. Why they would want to get involved in ANYTHING is not covered at all. “Because”, I guess? This lack of motivation (other than the usual do-gooding …) Makes things rough. You could strike up a love interest, I guess. But what’s really missing is what the designer correctly points out in the notes in the appendix: why the fuck does the party care? There’s nothing present in the adventure to help on that one crucial point. Marrying them to the locations, literally, or perhaps figuratively, would be what’s needed. Maybe the king appoints the lands to THEM, or they are rightful heir, or some such. That would give them a reason to clean up this one horse region.

This is a decent little regional area and reminds me of Scourge of the Demon Wolf … except without the motivation events that Demon Wolf had. I was not expecting much and was pleasantly surprised with what I ended up with. A second edition, solving the problems, or perhaps two pages of free errata/expansion, would serve this product quite well. A few more events, a few more colorful villagers, a reference sheet of NPC’s, some better mundane & magical treasure, a reason for the season … this could be a great little product.

This is on drivethru. Check out the last page of the preview for a look at the wilderness format. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/134360/The-Beast-That-Waits–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 2 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #125

Posted on March 11, 2017 by Bryce Lynch

There’s nothing to see here.
Save yourselves! Flee now!

The Three Faces of Evil
By Mike Mearls
Level 3

Part 2 of the Age of Worms adventure path. Surprise! There’s a religious cult! They don’t believe in desecrating any of the elements with the dead. They can’t be buried or burned. They can’t be, cast out to sea. Oops. No. Sorry. That’s a song lyric. This is a boring hack-fest; a Temple of Elemental Evil, light. Go in to some mines. The main room has three exits. Each exit has an evil temple complex. Kill everyone (Because … D&D?) Then fight the big demon that arises because you’ve killed everyone. There’s an order of battle/reaction notes for the temple, but, the pretext here is SO light. The rooms are nothing but combat and the reasons for killing everything are essentially nonexistent. Someone who knows, please tell me: is this really representative of the best of Mearls?

Pit of the Fire Lord
By Andy Collins & James Wyatt
Level 8

Part three, the final, of the Shards of Eberron arc. Fucking seriously? Five rooms of combat? I see that Dungeon has just given up trying. “Go fight through these five rooms. Because.” I am both excited and depressed at this new Dungeon style. Depressed at the lack of trying and excited because the “reviews” I provide are now much easier. But the reading of them is not …

Seekers of the Silver Forge
By Tim Hitchcock
Level 15

Dear Lord, why? An underwater adventure. As I read it, you need to make a saving throw every minute or take 2d6 damage, from pressure, and a save every ten minutes or take 1d6 from the cold, even if you can breathe water. Gill-men gith, undead gith, and saughaun are the three “Factions” in this adventure. You can talk to the gill-men gith and to stop the undead menace in the seas you need to wipe out the saughuan. It’s just fighting underwater, and little more beyond that.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 21 Comments

Automata Run Amok

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By John Ivor Carlson
Dwarven Automata
OSRIC
Levels 1-2

Out-of-Control automata have driven a wizard from his shop. He would like the PCs to solve the problem (without damaging his creations) while his rival will pay for evidence of the wizard’s dabbling in forbidden knowledge.

This is a 22 page adventure in a wizards tower with about nineteen rooms. It’s laid out quite well, using a bullet-point style, and has several great new monsters & magic items/treasure. The tower is in a city and there’s enough extra detail about the city to allow the DM to spice things up a bit before, during, and after the tower adventure. It’s a little one-note for me, being just “monsters in a guys house”, without the house itself adding much. It’s PWYW, so for a $1 it’s worth checking out the interesting format used.

The adventure is laid out in three sections. The last section is the appendices, with the bestiary, magic items, and the like. The middle section is JUST the wizards tower, and it’s laid out in landscape format, further delineating it from the first and third (last) portions of the text. The first section is all the introduction, lead-in, context, and follow-up to the keyed encounters. I find this quite interesting. It recognizes that the adventure is really in two parts: the dungeon and everything else. It’s a small point but I think it shows that the people behind this really thought about how to use the thing. In addition to this the monster stats are found on the map of the wizards tower (which has a front door, back door, and balcony entrance!), allowing for a quick reference kind of thing, and little mini-maps are scattered throughout the dungeon pages, on facing pages. Again, the way these features contribute to the actual usability of the adventure is quite nice.

Complementing that is the format used for the rooms. Each room has one sentence, which could be mistaken for read-aloud, that gives the vibe of room. FOllowing that are some sections headings like “Occupants”, “Exits” and then room features like “Shelves” or “Display Case.” Under each of those section headings are some bullet points, one per interesting thing, with some text. What this results in is a way to quickly at a glance scan the room to relay information as needed. It’s like heaven after all of the wall of text stuff I’ve seen!

Copy/Pasting a room wouldn’t do it justice. Here the “description” for the study: “Expertly staged salon for impressing clients with plentiful money but little sense.” That’s followed by several section headings. One for Exits, another for bookshelves, fireplace, and high-backed chair. Thus we now know, at a glance, that bookshelves, a fireplace, and chair are major features of the room. For the fireplace we get the following:
Fireplace:
• Imposing stone replace occupying the entirety of the study’s western wall
• Stocked with Birtmin logs, which release a heady scent and blue ame when burned

Just the basics, expertly arranged for use in play.

This is all augmented with a nice little section at the beginning, about a third of a column, describing the city and major events going on, complemented by a couple of great tables that describe some random encounters, etc, tied in to city events. It’s a nice little additional that really supports the DM well in bringing THIS city to life. The adventure pretext provides, in very little space, five different ways to get the party involved in the adventure, all related. Two groups on the docs, some beggars, some children and some shop folk. Eventually one of these is going to catch the party’s eyes. It’s a great example of providing multiple opportunities to hook the party without it feeling forced. Those hooks are complemented by the nasty little guys who are interested in the party’s services. Academic, rivals, guild members, they don’t like each other, and thus you have the opportunity for backstabbing as well in some loose “outside the dungeon” factions/complications. (The preview on Drivethru shows most (all?) of this lead in to the dungeon proper. I’d check it out!) Scattered tips through the adventure are also pretty useful for running the game. It has a nice little “Playtest notes” kind of vibe to it. Finally, ALL of this is complimented by the art for the monsters. I don’t usually mention art; I think I have only a handful of times. The monster art is quite nice in evoking imagery, particularly the “Undying” piece in the bestiary. The treasure, both mundane and magical, is well done and a cut above the usual book items.

Clearly, I want to like this adventure, but it’s got a problem. It’s flat. Or maybe I mean One Note. The amount of interactivity is a little low. Other than the monsters roaming about, the rooms proper don’t have much going on. Oh, there are details. And things to look at. And things to search for loot. But, other than the combats … there’s not much else to interact with. It’s a bit like walking through an Ikea, except some rooms have a monster in them. You look around. You pick things up. You move on. Without the extra interactivity of the tower you’re left with the room descriptions being out of place. By this I mean that MOST of the descriptions are superfluous to the adventure. The fireplace, above, doesn’t actually have any impact on the adventure. It’s window dressing. As is almost everything else. An item or two serve to house some treasure but the rest just EXISTS, as if you’d succinctly described the major features of the rooms of your house. It’s not that I don’t like window dressing. I think it can do a good job helping a DM paint an evocative picture of a room. (Sometimes …) But in case it’s ALL window dressing. Or, close enough to “all” to be functionally the same. That same sort of thing DOES contribute to a more dynamic combat environment. Monsters climbing shelves, pulling the shelves down. Using an large armchair in combat, all of that is great detail for rooms in which combat might take place. I know this isn’t DCC, but a dynamic environment is still appreciated, and the rooms, with their descriptions, certainly do provide that. I might be a little unfair with this. I seem to be saying it’s not a classic exploration tower. And it’s not. The adventure is more of a “clean the spiders from the basement” variety. If that’s all you’re looking for then this does that and does it well.

It’s Pay What You Want on DriveThru, with the preview being most of the first third of the adventure. IE: everything that’s not an appendix or the dungeon proper. I think the preview is worth checking out, and the adventure proper, also, for the formatting/layout used, if nothing else.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/198834/Automata-Run-Amok?1892600

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The Brigade

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Brian Fitzpatrick & Vincent Florio
Moebius Adventures
Mazes & Perils/OSR
Levels 1-2

Your heroes have come to the village of Nubonne on the borders of Domerre and Orde to help the villagers stop vicious attacks by giant wolves and local bandits. These contested borderlands have been unpatrolled and lawless in recent years and the people need brave adventurers to step up to the plate. Will your heroes help these kind folks who have lost children and friends in senseless attacks?

This 28 page adventure describes a ten-location village and a fifteen-ish room ruined fort with some brigands in it. It is laid out well but is just about as generic and bland as an adventure can be. It is magnificent in its ability to convey bland facts in an organized, yet wordy, manner. The adventure has exactly one bright point, at the end.

Some borderlands village is being attacked by a monster wolf, along with some men who claim to offer to protect the village form it. The party works for 100gp to go look in to things. Or they do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Or they have “bad dreams.” This is the first indication that something was up with this adventure. Three hooks, all generic and uninteresting. A hook to stir one’s soul?! No. You get paid 100gp. I note that the protection racket is charging 50gp A WEEK. If I were a player I’d take over the brigands work and optimize it, seeing a far more lucrative future in their work than in goody-goodying.

Anyway, the village presented is boring. The ten-ish keys are presented in about a column per key format. Sometimes they have QUITE lengthy read-alouds. On the order of three paragraphs, full of flowery “may the sun and moon bless us!” kinds of shit. The long area descriptions are supplemented by lengthy NPC stat blocks. And both provide NOTHING of interest to a DM. “Shaved head and well-kept beard. Wears brown robes.” That’s the priest description. His possessions are listed as “staff, holy book, robe, pouch.” This is the wal of all the NPC descriptions. They have no meat to them. All facts, and boring facts at that. There is absolutely nothing memorable in any description. The inn serves “fair quantity at a fair price” or something like that. The smith is a big man with a good heart. It’s like a magic white people village where everyone is that dude from the Lego Movie; so bland that they are immediately forgettable. There’s nothing here to hang your hat on. And yet they STILL go on for a column of text. A generic idyllic village in which there is absolutely NO drama, except for the wolf. This sort of stuff is not helpful to a DM running the game. A blacksmith who fits the stereotypical blacksmith mold needs no explanation. Likewise we do not need a in-depth description of what a bedroom looks like if its a normal bedroom. The designers role is to give the DM something to work with. To describe what’s different & interesting FROM A GAME ABILITY standpoint. Play focused. Otherwise it drifts, as this adventure does, in to the realm of description for the sake of description.

The ruined fort likewise suffers from the same fate. Descriptions of things that are not very meaningful. There’s nothing interesting going on. A bunk room. With a long description of a normal bunk room, with long descriptions of of the brigands that add nothing, Not even any mention of how the brigands react when invaded. The ONLY interesting thing in the entire adventure is that the boss commits suicide when you bust down the door to his room. (Because ofthe 6HD spectre haunting the room.) THAT’S interesting … but will leave the party bewildered, a mystery mired in a backstory that is independent of the party and only impacts them by being window dressing.

The simulationist mess extends to the wanderers table for the wilderness trip to the ruins. “You see a squirrel and it runs away”, along with a separate entry for a rabbit and fox and … a bird. What?!?! No mention of the fallen tree limb that stands its ground, unwilling to yield to the party’s approach?!?!?

One room skews THE OTHER direction. The jail cells read, in part “each cell has a 25% chance of loosing a ghost if opened. Even if unopened, any ghost spotted by a PC has a chance to Frighten the party. (Save vs spells.)” THAT is closer to gameable information than anything else in this adventure.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/190236/The-Brigade–A-Mazes–Perils-Adventure?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #124

Posted on March 4, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


Erik Mona
The Whispering Cairn
Level 1

Part 1 of a promised 12-part Age of Worms adventure path. And a mixed bag. There’s dungeon where you meet a ghost that wants you to bury his bones with his family. In return he will open a door for you. Leaving you find his family graves looted, leading to a small necromancer tower and then back to the dungeon to finish up the exploration. It’s got some decent puzzles and traps and I like the “exit and return” sub-adventure. It feels like it’s been explored over time but it doesn’t feel forced in either that aspect or the dungeon reset component. This thing has a solid core. But … you can also tell it’s a plot dungeon. In fact, it feels like a video game dungeon. Go to the central core. Go to wing one. Go to wing two. Go get key for wing three. The ghost fetch quest also FEELS like a fetch quest. The pretext is just too obvious. The real problem is the text. Mona has done a terrible job in creating something usable by the DM without MOUNTAINS of work. Read-alouds can stretch to four paragraphs. Endless detail in both the read-aloud and DM text. (And the returns of column long stat blocks.) It’s all nonsense background and vague non-specific descriptions. This is another one of those things that needs a SERIOUS edit. Doing so would reveal a decent plot-based adventure.

Temple of the Scorpion God
By Andy Collins & James Wyatt
Level 6

Part two of the Shards of Eberron adventure path. Six rooms, six monster fights. Calling this piece of shit an adventure is an insult to the word. And you know what? It makes PERFECT sense. The intro says these came from a D&D session at GenCon in … 2004. My experience with organized play/RPGA/DDAL have been UNIVERSALLY negative. Nothing more than min/max hack & slash fests. One time they took the character out of my wifes hand when she announced she only had a +1 to hit, stating “you must have built your character wrong.” This adventure is PERFECT for those kinds of ass hats. And before someone chimes in with “Different strokes for different folks.”let me come in a preemptive FUCK. YOU.

Chambers of Antiquities
By Robert J. Kuntz
Level 16

This Maure Castle level is full of treasure vaults and studies. The Maurer levels in Dungeon are so frustrating. Rob has some good ideas and they are well implemented. And they hide behind mountains of useless text about history and background, making the damn things hard to use. There is an INTENT that comes through through, and his DM text, where mechanics are concerned, are pretty well done; understandable without droning on about mechanics. But then you have to wade through three paragraphs of garbage on backgrounds and history and old room uses in order to get there. I wish we could get these levels without all the garbage. Like some of the other levels, the stairs come down in an great open room. Like some of the other levels, the introduction read-aloud for THAT room is pretty great. Like the other levels, the read-aloud falls to simple facts after that, generally useless and uninspiring. And then there are exceptions. For every two well-done mechanics rooms there is one where the mechanics and effects go on for a page. It’s hard to not recommend a Maure Castle level. If you have any interest in the castle then you need this. And if you don’t, or are just intrigued, then start with the old TSR adventure Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure. For it’s faults, its probably one of the closest things every published to the old Greyhawk-ish campaign dungeon style.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 11 Comments

The Sinister Tunnels of Greenfields

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Laurent B
De Architecturart
Generic
Level 1-3

You will find with “The Sinister Tunnels of GREENFIELDS” a sorcerer, terrible rituals, forgotten dungeons …. and a little more than that.

This seventeen page “adventure” in a village is more of an adventure outline. Pretty maps abound, but it feels more like the outline for a short story then it does anything usable at the table. The keyed encounters are not actually keyed encounters, but merely mentioned in a long paragraph, while the NPCs and backgrounds get too much text. The hook and villain are, at least, more fresh than usual. I WANTED to run this adventure … but I don’t want to devote the mental effort to do so. I think this is French, translated to english.

There was a plague in a small village about fifteen years ago, followed by a famine since no one was there to work the fields. A merchant moved in and built a spinning mill, providing food & jobs ad place for the orphans in the village, and region, to work. I’m sure you can work out the major thrusts of the rest on your own. He’s evil, caused the plague, and has nefarious purposes. In this case he’s a (relatively) low-level evil wizard who is using the kids to remain young. (A classic! I love the classics!) He only hangs about for fifteen years and his self-imposed time limit in this village is almost up. Two of the three hooks are a bit fresh: you’re guard for a merchant going to visit him for normal spinning-wheel business. This is a decent pretext to put the party in the middle of the village while shit unfolds around them. The second is a lord who lost his entire family 30 years ago due to an epidemic identical to the one in this village, and hires the party to go look in to things. The idea of an ancient dying lord, hunting down with vengeance his family’s murders, but too old not to pursue it, is another trope I like because I think it appeals to players. The wizards low level nature, the classic theme of eternal youth, and his benefactor status in the village all VERY strongly appeal to me. These are things that a DM can work with pretty easily, I think.

In support of the DM there are some column-long descriptions of the village’s mayor (loyal to the villages benefactor), his loyal manservant, and an orphan-finder who roams the countryside seeking out new workers. All three are well done, but their descriptions go on much longer than they need to. A couple of sentences, or maybe a short paragraph is all that should be needed. More than this requires notes & highlighters.

You also get maps of the village (Harn-like … my favorite sort of village-area map) and three maps of underground areas/tunnels. The maps are beautiful, as one would expect from a French illustrator. Top notch (isometric?) cutaways of the areas showing a decent amount of detail. The maps are much more vertical than most, and have nice elevation elements present. There are multiple entrances, through various wells and so on. It is, essentially I think, a linear design with a couple of room hanging off of it. The vertical elements save it, and while it’s not an exploration dungeon-map it IS quite a bit better, quite a bit, than the usual plot-maps. Winches. Wooden platforms, ropes, tunnels in to the dark, ladders stairs, ruins, the maps do a great job of being evocative and providing the chaotic sort of environment that I think a good exploration map provides. Here’s a link to one of them:
https://plus.google.com/photos/photo/106785353548003542653/6383193990268215122?icm=false&sqid=114959286898953661246&ssid=17497f00-1ba8-4ab0-94b0-967209d2c64b

There are some things going on to spice things up. He’s getting to ready to move. He’s about to/will sacrifice several children. That also creates ground tremors when he does it. There’s a monster under the water that appears when he sacrifices kids. There are goblins ready to invade the town. The mayor is a die-hard supporter. There is at least one visiting “merchant.” I’m not sure if any of this is faction-like, but it is enough going on to create the sort of chaos I like to see in an adventure … without it FEELING like it’s manufactured chaos (as it is in so many Dungeon Magazine adventures.)

Alas, I am now out of kind things to say. The adventure is only an outline. A seventeen page outline, but an outline nonetheless. No orphans presented (but for one “a mute girl”), no villagers presented but for the mayor. No encounter keys presented. WHAT?!?1 Yes, the entirety of the undergrounds 21 rooms are covered in about three paragraphs of free-text. Imagine if you will, at the end of a paragraph … “Several rooms dug around are used to store weapons and equipment to gear up a small troop of mercenaries and to accommodate it if necessary (16, 17, 20 and 21).” That is the extent of four room descriptions. All of the others are like that. Roughly in order, but skipping around abit, with text mixed freely.

Imagine you came upon a map and numbered it and minimally keyed it. “Storeroom”, “merc bedchambers” and so on. You also scrawled “kindly wizard disguised as merchant who actually sacrifices kids to stay young” along the top of the page. You would have this adventure. And you will again since you’re going to have to print out those map pages and take notes on it.

I’ve been accused of having a rather strict taxonomy on what an adventure is, and it’s because of product this like one. If you sent your husband out to the store to buy an adventure and he came home with this, for your game tonight, you’d probably sigh and pronounce it worthless. It’s not an adventure that one expects to get.

But I don’t think the product is bad if you accept that it’s not an adventure. If it were advertised as an adventure planner, or outline, or something like that then I think it’s an interesting product. As a reviewer you’re faced with a lot of the same and so products like this stand out. I can imagine something similar, for example, as a kind of outline for Scourge of the Demon Wolf. “Here’s the framework for an adventure. Go add the details.” Not an adventure. A framework that you need to work on to add to. Kind of a more expanded “Adventure Seeds” that clog up DriveThru/RPGNow. Something for which to inspire. In that vein, a few more villager details and intrigues, as well as orphans, would be called for, as least in outline.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/201589/The-sinister-tunnels-of-GREENFIELDS?1892600

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The Mines of Wexham

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Gerald D. Seypura PhD
Southerwood Publishing
Champions of ZED
Low Levels

This thing goes by Mines of Wexham and also by Mines of Wexcham. The adventure says Wexcham while most of the marketing/references not in the adventure refer to it as Wexham. I believe the designer has passed away since publishing, and I think I tend to grade on a curve when details like that pop up. Be Warned.

This is a nineteen page adventure in some old caves/mines with small wilderness portion. It has some of the charm and all of the problems that one would expect from an pre-1975 adventure. Minimal keyed in places, weird formatting & layout that do NOT contribute to usability, and, in places, the idiosyncratic encounters of imagination before rules. I’m not sure what the history of this is; it looks like a kickstarter add-on, but I THINK it’s a new adventure, not a find from pre-75.

You get a map that shows the supposed location of a legendary lost mine from an ancient empire. It’s three days by foot or a day and half by ship. EITHER you’re playing the pre-gens provided OR they are a rival NPC party (or, more specifically, YOU’RE the rival party to them!) Anyway, off to the mines you go. The mines are presented on three maps: the ground level, an old troll cave, and the underground mine map proper. The maps are basic but well done, by which I mean they provide the complexity required to run an exploration adventure. Loops, with all three maps connecting, and multiple entrances/exits from the maps lead to an element of mystery, with about 34 locations total across the three maps.

The encounters fall in to three types. First you have the traditional minimal keys. “6 giants rats” with stats, is the total of the encounter description. Two trolls. Four spiders. You get the idea. The second type is that of the “old room.” The old room has something old in it. Duh. 🙂 Some old bones. Some bits of leather. And then when you touch something it disintegrates due to age. These almost always have some sort of clue or minor treasure associated with it. Finally, there are the Type III demons. These are the core rooms with something nontrivial in them. There’s really only one or two of these, and the clues and several minor treasures relate to it. There are ghostly soldiers in the mine (but … not actually undead that can be turned …) They attack those not associated with their old empire. You can find some objects, like armor with insignia, that let you pretend to be old empire soldiers also. Eventually you find a banner which will allow you to command them. The clear presumption is that you will use them to attack … the room with seventy orc warriors in it … Yeah. The last couple of rooms have masses of orcs in them.

The wilderness adventure is laid out on a day by day basis. One day one roll for wandering monsters twice. On day two rolls to hear a howl in the distance. On day three … and so on. If you instead choose to go by ship something similar ensues, except the DM gets to roll every other TURN for monsters … and if you roll a 6 you see a pack of sharks in the water … This is all mixed in with what I presume to be read-aloud, not set apart from the text, and the phrase “How do you wish to proceed.” It all a colossal mess. You can decipher it, but it’s VERY stream of consciousness. The “Wish to proceed”, being used as a section break, tapers off through the adventure, disappearing halfway through the mine room descriptions. To be fair, the nonsense settles down by the time you reach the mapped/keyed encounters with only the introductory pages and wilderness adventure being victim to the issues.

There’s a certain nostalgic charm to this adventure, that kind that comes from the early days. A clumsiness of format/layout combined with the sorts of minimal keying with the sort of embedded-adventure that one would find in B2/Borderlands. The kind that fights you all the way. A good DM can take this and run the hell out of it. But then again a good DM can do that with anything. It’s hard to suggest this, even to the nostalgic crowd. Other older products, like Dungeon of the Bear, conjure much of the same vibe.

It’s on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/180519/The-Mines-of-Wexham?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #123

Posted on February 25, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


Salvage Operation
By Mike Mearls
Level 2

An adventure on a twelve-room wrecked ship, with vermin. Get to the hold, get a crate of loot that you’re paid 200gp for (containing a +5 cloak of protection and several figurines of wondrous power) and then exit the ship while it’s being sunk by a giant squid. The “vermin on a ship” angle is ok, and Mearls read-aloud in this is generally a cut-above the usual Dungeon fare (“Thick webbing coats this room. Bones, shriveled limbs of men and animals, and other gruesome remains dangle from the sticky tangles.”) Still, it has empty skill checks (“If the party doesn’t make the check a random sailor points the fact out.”) and it feels both … empty? And, in spite of the nice-but-not-overdone vermin theme, a little procedural. I really got the sense, in reading this, that it is just a generic adventure formula spiced up a bit. Hook. Slow explore with a couple of monsters. Bad Guy. Dangerous “hidden” area that’s the true location. And then a quick escape! It’s a generic formula and works sometimes, but when you can TELL it’s the generic formula .. .then it loses some luster. It feels constructed rather than imagined.

Crypt of Crimson Stars
By Andy Collins & James Wyatt
Level 6

This looks like it could be the opening for another adventure path. You’re hired for 2000gp to go get a dragonshard from a crypt. Tribal halflings rising velociraptors guard the tomb and must be killed. Lip service is paid to bargaining with them, but you can’t actually get anything out of it except “we delay the combat until you come out of the crypt.” Then you get to “explore” a three room crypt. At least it’s only eight pages for three rooms?

The Amarantha Agenda
By Phillip Larwood
Level 13

Nine pages for one encounter. An evil druid & her tree have taken over an elven outpost and destroyed a nearby city. You get sent to figure out why the outpost didn’t warn the city of the attack, and find/kill the evil druid.

Quicksilver Hourglass
By Anson Caralya
Level 30

The world is ending and you need to stop it. I only hold back a *yawn* because at level 30 “the world is ending” seems like an ok thing to me. This is a dungeon crawl full of combats full of the usual “you can’t skip the encounter” movement/passwall/teleport gimps and ends with a potential 750hp combat with a god. It takes care of the “1 combat work day” thing by aging the party while they are inside “the hourglass”, forcing them to get their asses in gear or die of old age while they long rest. Some of the monsters in this are conceptually nice. “The sphere of Ruined Bodies” and giant undead heads. Otherwise it’s just combat tactics porn, room after room., with a decent little story behind it of a god committing suicide. Too bad that little story/epic premise was wasted in this hack-fest.

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Tukram’s Tomb

Posted on February 22, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Davide Pignedoli
DaimonGames
OSR/Crying Blades
Level 1

The…village is abandoned, and within one hour walks from the tomb. There is not much left: the wooden houses have rotten and collapsed, and only a few stone buildings still sort of stand. There’s nothing to loot, there’s no food, no tools, no riches. Centuries have passed since when the village was abandoned, and anything value has been already taken by others.

This is a sixteen room twenty-eight page tomb of a barbarian. It is, generally, a tomb full of traps with a couple of undead or statue encounters,and leans heavily to the “quiet exploration” side of the D&D adventure spectrum. It’s overly verbose writing style combined with a conversational organization style leads to difficulty in finding information.

There are lots of pages in this but the actual content is a bit light for a sixteen room tomb. A rumor table, a random villager table, and a brief wilderness monster table make up the first twelve pages, interspersed with a generous amount of public domain art. The rumor table is nothing special, and the random NPC table seems a bit out of place. The wilderness monster table has a few entries and each one has a bit more to it, by way of an extra sentence, than a pure listing of monster stats. The vampire tree holds the corpse of a old victim. The fairy demands gold coins and favors one PC. The lone wolf is lonely and scrawny. These extra little bits help, I think, a DM create a nice little scene around the monster with minimal effort. There’s also a ruined village provided, on a page, with no map. It’s basically a ruined tower next to a graveyard and some random dead show up at night. It’s long for what it is but it’s still a nice little encounter.

The tomb is based on a real map and is almost entirely of the trap/trick variety. There are a variety of classic tropes, including a balanced scale trick, the old spikes from the ceiling, creatures that follow you out of the tomb (if you loot) for revenge, and an exit tunnel that collapses if you loot the main tomb, forcing you to dig out. I like the encounters. Many are pretty classic tropes and those are always winners. In addition, it includes little map snippets on most pages to help orient the DM to nearby rooms/encounters. That’s nice … but probably a little unneeded for a dungeon this small … IE: the whole map fits on one page and is easy to follow.

The whole thing has a very slow feel to it. Imagine a slow and careful “real life” exploration of a tomb filled with traps and the like. That’s the vibe this adventure puts out, probably because of the lack of any pressure. There are not really any creatures around to pressure decisions or a slow careful exploration.

The dungeon has two key issues that make it hard to recommend. They are both related to the actual writing. It’s long. Quite long. There is quite a bit of conversation DM advice integrated in to the text. In addition, there’s a lot of very specific descriptions about how the traps and effects are meant to work. The “spikes from the ceiling” trap gets over a column of text to describe it. Triggering it, the pressure plate, and multiple technical facts about the trap. There are not enough spikes to prevent passage. The spikes don’t go all the way to the walls. One person walking slowly won’t trigger it. The spikes don’t return to the roof as long as there is pressure. Except the description provided is MUCH longer than my summary. The writing is, in effect, ONE dm’s description of how they interpreted a ‘spikes from the ceiling’ trap. Rather than giving a few guidelines and letting the running DM handle the details the details are instead spelled out. This significantly lengthens the text and, I think, makes it harder for a DM to run it since they must dig through all of the text. I’m not saying that the text should be “Spikes come from the ceiling” and nothing more. I’m instead saying that it is the role of the designer to provide JUST enough detail to get the flavor of the trap across to the DM … who can then fill in the rest. This sort of thing is not isolated and happens a lot.

Secondly, the conversational style of the adventure leads to a weird organization style. The details of each room tend to be spread out over multiple paragraphs. What do you see when you enter the room? I don’t know, let me dig through the next five paragraphs and find out … It likes the effects were placed before the cause. In one room the treasure chest and mural on the wall, the fact that they exist, is placed after two paragraphs of text that detail how to dig through the coins in the chest and how the coins get in to the chest. Not ideal for finding information as you run the game.

It’s a slow adventure. You could hire a team of villagers and just dig the place out from the roof (it’s a barrow type place under a small hill) and get all of the secrets, avoid most of the traps, and PROFIT!

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/203444/Tukrams-Tomb–OSR-dungeon?1892600

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