tenfootpole.org

By Howard Beleiff & Michael Garcia
Grey Fey
Swords & Wizardry
Level 0-1

“Curses are like chickens; they always come home to roost”, and if these chickens aren’t found soon, the Village of Kith will be doomed! On the edge of the Four Counties, in a backwater village of lost souls, there is a string of robberies that cannot be explained…Farmer Phileas Filson has lost his chickens, or rather he swears that they’ve been pilfered, along with his prize-winning hen Mabel, and no one in town will lift a finger to help.

This is a very simple plot adventure that is absolutely ruined by the amount of text provided. A seven room cave complex takes fifteen pages to describe, with the rest of the adventure 48 pages being devoted to the nearby village. Decent monsters and a couple of interesting details are high points, but they can’t make up for the HUGE amount of filler.

Farmer Ted’s chickens are missing and he’s sure goblins did it. The party tracks the goblins to their lair, a seven room cave, and kills a bunch of goblins and giant chickens. That could almost be a 1-page adventure, or maybe 1-sheet at most. The first 26 pages give endless backstory and meaningless details about the village, expanded upon ad nauseum. Highlights include a long description of the blacksmith, which has absolutely nothing unusual going on, as well as the jail, which has absolutely nothing going on. The inn has a gossip, and a page of rumors, but again it devotes a significant word count to descriptions of the mundane and ordinary. An example of a different type is the carpenter, who is secretly a wizard. There’s nothing to this. No secrets. No big plot. He’s just a woodworker who is secretly a wizard. I guess that’s a decent little bit of backstory/flavor, but not worth devoting the page count to.

That’s the primary issue with this adventure. The word count, which turns in to page count, doesn’t actually enhance the play of the game. That’s the problem with backstory and “mundane” descriptions. History is generally not relevant. It CAN be. It can also be provided in such a way that it doesn’t get in the way. For example, there’s pages here related to ancient history. You can just yank them out and ignore the entire thing without impacting the adventure. But when it’s mixed in to a room key then you’re making it harder for the DM to actually run the game. The DM must wade through the irrelevant backstory, history, and detail in order to get what they need to run the room. This extends even to a pit trap, which takes a page to describe. Here’s a standout sentence, prime for a removal during an edit: “If the characters open a door (or both), they see the following:” What’s the point of that? It’s filler.

Complicating that, in this adventure, is the read aloud. It’s long, lengthy, and is NO way set apart from the DM text. Imagine, if you will, that the first paragraph, above, was all read aloud and the text below it was not. There’s nothing to distinguish or offset or lead the eye. And the read aloud DOES tend to be lengthy also … while adding little to nothing to an evocative environment.

There’s a plot here, and because of that the combat feels like plot combat. It doesn’t feel like you encounter a room with giant chickens and some goblins. It feels like “here a combat room for you to encounter.” That feels out of place in an OSR adventure, especially a Swords & Wizardry one. But then again maybe that’s me bringing my own prejudices to the thing. Forced combat situations in OSR stuff feels wrong. Maybe it’s the writing style here. idk

There is a detail or two that stand out. One cave room is two levels, with wooden boards running as a ramp between the two, and goblin babies sleeping under them so as to not get trampled. That’s good. Of course, they are not there during the read aloud, instead hiding behind a rock. Bad detail, because it’s not used, but a good idea. Likewise a couple of the NPC’s have a detail or two to them that is interesting. Hidden in a page long description. A store owner with lots of mistresses. A happy farmer whose daughters were all fathered by a Satyr. Nice. The goblins are “new type”, with weirdness to them, like feathers and causing gibbering tongues. The chickens are giant and can blink. Both of these are great details.

I’m convinced that this could be edited WAY back, to just two pages, with reference sheets for the NPC’s and descriptions that focus on the interesting, unique, and evocative. THAT would be interesting, and worth the same amount as this thing cost at Drivethru.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/188225/Adventure-Most-Fowl?1892600

By Dylan Hartwell
Self Published
Labyrinth Lord

Extending above a haze of reeking steam rise sixteen peaks of garbage magically transported from sixteen different cities. It spreads, like an ever-growing fungus, across the landscape, encompassing and corrupting nearly fifty square miles. Hideous flies, crows, and vultures circle the piles, perpetually avoiding garbage falling from magical portals thousands of feet in the air. Giant rats, skunks, maggots, and other manner of repugnant beasts scuttle about the surface, surviving off the offal. Underneath, giant worms crawl through the debris. Periodic explosions reform the horizon. Some cultures call it “Sheoal”, others “Kol Katta”. All, however, use the common vernacular “The Heap”. And everywhere its name is synonymous with “Hell”.

This is another difficult to review adventure, mostly because I don’t think it’s an adventure. I’ve been accused before of having too strict a taxonomy and, no doubt, will be again. Rather than an adventure I’d describe this as a fluff book for a region, along with some adventure ideas. In this respect you could think of it more like one of the old MERP regional booklets, a lightweight version of one, anyway. It’s not that I don’t like fluff books, or think that there’s a place for them. I do like them and some are valuable. But, as inspiration pieces, I find them hard to review. Who can tell what will inspire one person vs another? This is why I concentrate on the adventure side of the spectrum. I also believe quite a bit in expectations and getting what you think you are getting. If I buy a low-prep adventure and get a fluff/region book then I could be quite disappointed, regardless of the quality of the book.

The Heap is twenty eight pages long and while described as a sandbox. It’s not, in the way I know the term to be used. It is a region book, describing a certain regional location, a garbage heap that grows magically and is inhabited by a variety of monsters and loose factions. There’s a loose overview map of the region, as well as a couple of locations: cultist tunnels/HQ and a mad wizards tower. Wandering monster & treasure tables, Many new garbage-themed monsters, and a page of adventure ideas round things out.

You could think of this place as a little like The Zone, from the STALKER video games. There’s a loose trader town full of people who make their livings off of the garbage heap. The people in the town set out and scavenge the heap to collect things to sell. There are also a group of people who wander around collecting the stuff in the heap ‘to collect’ and hate the people who sell stuff. There are also lepers wandering about, as well as a group of clerics who run a separate leper colony. Then there is a group of cultists who worship the giant worms who tunnel through the garbage. Finally there’s the mad wizard who wanders about doing mad wizard things, like kidnapping people and so on. That’s a decent mix of factions and several key individuals are outlined with a sentence or two to their goals and motivations.

And that’s about it. A couple of tables for rumors and traps, and a few pages on monsters. On the plus side there’s a VERY nice reference table for the monsters one will find the heap. It reminds me of the table in the Ready Ref sheets, which I LUVED. Another reference sheet of the NPC’s detailed, would have need a nice addition as well.

The single page of adventure ideas are not terrible and they DO start your mind spinning. One of the better ones is a cultist who has lost his cult book. The penalty is sacrifice, so he hires the party to find it, with vials of wormblood in return. IE: Selling cult secrets to protest his hide. That could be a great idea, with the horrid cultist, I’m imagining kind of like a leper, in dilapidated market town, visiting the cult HQ, selling vile stuff as a reward …

But it’s all just the barest outline of supporting material. The town, Sellerton, gets the following description: “A small town of several hundred inhabitants composed of Sellers and their families. Billig visits once a month. Four human fighters patrol the perimeter each night.” A little light, IMO, for one of the major locations. Again, this isn’t a hex crawl, but a fluff book, and it’s a little light on fluff and a little heavy on stats. Or, maybe, in in comparison of the content there’s more in the way of stats than fluff, or so it feels like.

This is the barest outline of a region. There’s just enough here to get things going, but I think it’s a little light on the supporting flavor.

I suck at reviewing non-adventures.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/101236/The-Horrendous-Heap-of-Sixteen-Cities?1892600

By Llord Metcalf, Ian Graham, Christopher Thompson
Fail Quad Games
OSRIC
Level 3-4

Oliviah the local tavern and inn owner has some of the best private auctions in the realms. The mystical armor of Ivan Goramavich has come into her possession and will be auctioned to the highest bidder. It is an item of legend wrapped in mystery. She needs a little security for this one and the security team might have more on their hands than they bargained for!

An “investigation” and then mostly linear crypt crawl define the twenty-one pages of verbose text. It introduces a difficult decision at the end and has a monster or two that is new. It takes a leisurely approach to getting to its destination and could use more focus. It does provide a creepy moment or two in the crypt at the end.

During a rare items auction up comes a set of armor that makes the wearer immune to magic. After the auction it turns out that one part is missing, rendering the armor useless. Having been hired to provide security, the party investigates the bidders and the bar where the auction was held. This leads to a local magic-user who lives in an old shine of the dead a couple of days away. A short little mausoleum crawl later, the baddies soliloquy reveals a vision: if the auctions winners get their on it then they will kill every magic user and cleric in a bloody pogrom. Thus ends the adventure, with the cliffhanger question of: return the armor, fail the mission by not returning it, or do something else.

The investigation portion of the adventure is the first eight or so pages. Two paragraph read-alouds and long passages about what happens are the hallmarks here. A short outline and some bullet points, or some such, would have gone a long way to eliminate the conversational style and make the information a lot easier to locate during play. This would have also freed some space for inclusion of some more NPC’s to mix in, as well as a few descriptions of items also for sale at the auction, something that’s just abstracted in the current text.

There’s a genuine creepy thing going on during the travel to the wizards shrine. Undead rise up out of the ground and wordlessly trail behind the party. When the group gets to a certain size they attack. This is an interesting and evocative sort of thing to include in the adventure and should result in several decent encounters. Three decent sentences can a lot to an adventure to where several paragraphs, or pages, do not.

The ossuary is nine rooms that are in a mostly linear layout. Rooms get about a column of descriptive text each, maybe a bit less in some cases, which is far too long for what is actually going on in the room. In spite of this there are flashes of great content in places. “4 bone creeps slowly scrape and drag their way around [the catacombs]…, and a room with skeletons hung on the walls that predict “terrible personal things”, like “dying of plague at a young age” or “losing a spouse.” This is a good example of the abstract being the enemy of the specific. This room goes on for half a page, but could be edited down quite a bit AND expanded with SPECIFIC saying of the skeletons. A read-aloud sentence or ten about the mustard pus running from their eyes as buboes fill their groins and they die screaming in agony, alone, in the dark. That would have been a good read-aloud. Instead we get the abstract stuff about plague and spouse and so on.

The ending is just a wizard summoning a demon for the party to fight, and then surrendering so he can leave the party with the moral quandary about whether to finish their mission or not and bring back the missing bit of armor. I’ve run in to a couple of these “what happens after the adventure” lately that have had this theme of No Good Answers. I like the complexity of these because they act as springboards to more complications for the party. Not obstacles. Not roadblocks. But more going on in the campaign world to add more color. That’s a good thing.

It could be a lot shorter. It could have more treasure (it’s a bit light in that department for AD&D gold=xp) and more evocative writing for the rooms that do exist, as well as better organization of the investigation. Such is life.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/148883/Midnight-Oliviah?1892600

By Tim Shorts
GM Games
OD&D

It begins with three children missing after a Summer Solstice celebration. The party explores Denizon’s Folly, a tower that was abandon and unfinished. The second leg of the adventure leads the party into the fey realms of Osmolt Village where magic and space are unhinged and the inhabitants are terrified, but keep a horrible secret. The finale finds the party seiging the Tower of Blaspheemus that sits on the cliffside on the Sea of Mist. This is a real fairy tale where never once are the words ‘and they live happily ever after’ spoken.

You are on notice: I luv folklore and fey.

This adventure is three patreon rewards published together. The first two parts are more conceptual than adventure while the third is a mostly linear tower adventure. It has some decent fey imagery in places but is SIGNIFICANTLY more bare bones than I expected. Expectations kill.

The first section covers the disappearance of the children. It’s two pages long with three sentences of background that says the kids have disappeared, there are ruins nearby, and there are rumors of fey in the area. What follows is the description of four ruined buildings, each described with a couple of paragraphs, that make up the “ruins nearby” complex. A house, gutted with flame, leaving a blackened frame and fireplace, with a bowl of perfectly preserved ripened apples on an untouched table … that’s pretty good imagery and is exactly what I’m going after when I say I’m looking for something terse by evocative. There’s another point, later in the third adventure, that has mist rolling out from under a towers front door, down a cliff, and in to a misty sea. Both of those paint an excellent picture and the adventure would be better if provided more of that type of imagery. As it is it’s a little sparse for my tastes.

The second section deals with what happens when you eat the apples and step in to a faerie circle. It’s a small faerie village, unrecognizable as such because their houses are all hidden behind “find secret door” checks/integrated in to nature. This section basically has a table for you to generate a fey type, what they know, and their reaction. There’s a nice dead treant section, acting as a prison for one of the three missing kids. The idea appears to be that you wander about, talking to fey, and their leader, and find the kid in the treant, and get enough information to find the evil fey tower. It’s more than a little … generic? The abstraction of the fey, their personalities, motivations, and so on is, I think, my major problem here. By abstracting that in to a three column table It has become, well, abstract. Instead I would have preferred some details for the fey, and personalities, and maybe some interaction between them. This is a pretty big missed opportunity.

Finally comes the tower where the evil fey, and children, are kept. While it’s presented as an abstract concept, with gravity on whatever wall you choose to walk on, and rooms full of junk, and other bizarro stuff (which does, in fact, invoke fey imagery) it turns out it’s just pretty much a linear series of rooms, connected by a single hallway.

The creatures and treasure all all completely OD&D, when they are listed. Unique items, unique monsters, all with a decidedly interesting aspect to them and certainly on-generic in any way. A bow made from the bones of a displacer beast. You can imagine it phasing around as the party hold it … or a monster that eats memories and experiences. You could probably go through the entire adventure and only have two encounters, and not even that many if you’re super duper smart, so, while the tower IS linear, it’s not exactly forced combat after forced combat.

The ending is decent and does a good job conveying the fear of the fey. The two surviving children, one 20 years, physically but not mentally, older than she should be, are ostracized within a week, the thinking being they are cursed by the fey. Beaten and in worse shape than they were in the fey realm. (Well, except for the “eventually to be eaten” part.) The party, in rescuing the children, have not actually improved their lot much. Very nice touch and keeps in the theming of the fey.

The first two sections of the adventure are a little too sparse. A couple of sentences about the villagers, in the first section, would have done wonders, as would a few fey actually detailed in the section section. And I still don’t know what level the thing is for. Five, maybe? Anyway, by providing a little more details on the villagers and fey (the social parts of an adventure set the scene!) and working a little more on the imagery then this could be a pretty decent adventure.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/168828/One-Waiting-One-Prisoner-One-Sacrificed?1892600

By Johnstone Metzger
Red Box Vancouver
Labyrinth Lord/Dungeon World

The Tellurine Monastery has a serious problem—a band of evil wizards have stolen their holiest relic, the helmet of Saint Anglard, and fled. The abbot believes they are hiding out in one of the region’s many caves, judging by the recent increase in weird occurrences. But can he find a group of adventurous mercenaries who won’t be distracted?

This is a 89 digest-page adventure describes an 11×12 area of hexes that take up 48 of the 89 pages. It describes a small borderlands region with some feature in each hex and a couple of over-arching plotlines going on throughout the region. The hexes need a little more action and the entire thing needs just a couple of more pages to summarize information for the DM.

Let us imagine you created a hex crawl. Then take two of those hexes and link them together and GREATLY expand the data for them, to ten pages or so each. You’d end up with something like this hex crawl. The idea is that there’s a monastery that has had a relic stolen. Some evil wizards who live in a cave did it. Both hexes have other things going on in them and impact a few other hexes. AND THEN THERE’S EVERYTHING ELSE GOING ON. Neighboring rules. The king’s men. Farmers. Wandering magical beasts of note, such as the dragon. The whole vibe here is of a lower-fantasy area and reminds me a lot of Zzarchovs stuff. This kind of harn-like peasant land that is then punctuated by a more folklor-ish type of magic and cult or witches, etc. It’s a style I can really groove on.

The adventure is serviceable, which is pretty high praise in Bryce-landia. I think it misses the mark in two or three areas and I’d like to spend a little time discussing those. Let us not take that to mean that this adventure is bad. It is not. It’s not a home run though and I’d like to discuss why.

One of my main conceits is that adventures should be targeted at the DM actually running them. I’m currently working on the position that is that quality that separates them from fluff. I like fluff, but a good deal of the blog, and the reviews, are essentially about play aids for the DM at the table, during the game. You can think of this, in shorthand, as “Why should I need to use a highlighter on the adventure or take notes ahead of time for use during play?” I expect information to be easy to find and easy to use AT THE TABLE.

This hex crawl has some issues in that area. I’ve mentioned the monastery, which is listed on the map, as well as the evil wizards. Both of these get a decent amount of text, up front, before the hex crawl, to orient the DM to them. Almost too much text, in the case of the monks. What the adventure is missing, most critically, is a brief overview of the REST of the hexes. There is clearly a couple of interrelated hexes subplots about neighboring noble lords. If the adventure had ONE more page that briefly oriented the DM to the interrelated hexes and/or subplots then you’d have a much stronger grasp and/or reference to running it at the table. “Uh, who’s our liege’s rival? Hang on, let me thumb through things until I find those other hexes …” This isn’t a general rule .In other words, not every hex with a relationship to another hex needs it spelled out ahead of time. But it’s very import when running social encounters that you have the context available for the people to relate information to party. The soldiers. The farmers. People you talk talk to will get asked questions by the party and when that happens you need a reference page you can turn to, and I’d rather the designer provided one than forcing me to take notes on the entire thing for use during play. It doesn’t need to be explicit, but needs to be enough that the local yokel can talk rumors and answer questions about the soldiers up the road.

In a similar vein, several of the hexes are missing some critical information that would help orient the DM during the game. There is a CLASSIC example of this very early in the hex descriptions. “In this hex there is evidence of the brown bear mentioned earlier.” I think you can see how this would be used during play. The party finds a kill, or tree damage and maybe that leads to trail that leads in the direction of … wait … which hex actually has the bear in it? Let me go digging through the book/hex descriptions. Oh, that hex. “It leads northeast.” Again, this is not an isolated incident. A few more monks, with quirks thrown in, and/or a time table. Better hex referencing. A general region overview. All of this could have been done quite briefly, and even still in the 89 pages if the evil monastery portion had been trimmed up a bit with a better edit. (The free text portions of the adventure can be quite conversational and wordy, to little effect.)

Second, I’d like to discuss the actual hex encounters, proper. I don’t review as many of these as I do other types of adventures, but I still have a definite opinion about what I’m looking for. I think sandboxes work best when the hexes have an “action” or “verb” slant to them. In other words, something needs to be going on in the hex, it needs to be full of potential energy for the party to release. At the other end of the spectrum might be a kind of tourism hex. “This hex has a tall tree in it.” or “This hex has a rock shaped like a duck.”

There’s certainly a place for tourism sites. “Meet me by the giant oak” or “I hid the body by the rock shaped like a duck.” They can easily serve clues and locales and meeting places, landmarks to get the party going to. But they don’t drive action. They are, at best, fluff, that the DM can use during the adventure. Driving the action falls to the verb hexes and all wilderness crawls need a decent number of those. The adventure has a fair number of verb hexes but could use more. It looks lopsided to the tourism side of the house and it needs to, I think, skew 50/50 or more towards the verb hexes.

A hex with a wolf in it means you can fight the wolf or run away from the wolf or avoid the wolf. A hex with a wolf in it that is guarding a bloody infant staked by a rope to the foot to a tree … that’s got something going on.

It’s a decent enough adventure, but will require some note taking.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/119066/RK2-Evil-Wizards-in-a-Cave?1892600

by Lloyd Metcalf
Fail Squad Games
OSRIC
Levels 5-7

In the midst of the expansive fen south of Lorview, Stonefar the chieftain rules the ogrish community of Gaundelfen. A great goblin army in the southern mountains plague the Gaundelfen and the surrounding hills defending their mines. The ogres maintain a sense of protection for the humans between the unpredictable goblin horde and their village. An unsettling symbiotic relationship has emerged from the precarious situation. The residents of Lorview take a little solace in the idea that their southern border is protected when they hear the heavy ogre drumming on the fen. Little thought is given to the Gaundelfen sacrifice or struggles, only that Lorview can rest easy without ogres or goblins razing the village. Now the ogres have come to Lorview, fleeing in terror from their fen. Smashing barns, eating sheep and spilling blood! Horror has struck Lorview as much as it has the Gaundelfen tribe. Who will stop this plague and find out why the ogres have come to Lorview?What can possibly be happening in the fen when powerful ogres flee in terror from their marsh at night?

What. The. Fuck. This is a 22-page mess of an adventure that has about one pages worth of content, not counting the maps. Formatting issues, confused action, and a writing style that tries to be lyrical when conveying information. It’s got an idea, and you can kind of make it out, but very little of the content in the product helps you run that adventure concept: a chase/hunt through a swamp.

The basic setup is that there’s a village on the edge of a swamp. At the far edge are some ogres, and beyond the ogres are goblin hordes. Thus the ogres provide a buffer … until they show up in the village panicked from all the undead suddenly in the swamp. Unknown to all, the ogre chief has found a fragment of the dark lords soul and is hunting through the swamp for more of them. What SHOULD be happening in this adventure is a hunt/chase in a swamp, at night, full of undead and panicked/fleeing ogres, racing to get the soul fragments/stop the corrupted ogre chief. That could be a pretty decent little adventure.

Instead it’s 22 pages of filler and too many words and background … and I don’t know what. Honestly, how all 22 pages got filled is beyond me, and I’m looking at the thing right now. There’s a map, 10 miles wide by 16 miles long, that the party is supposed to adventure on in one night. That’s a lot of space. There’s one encounter that actually explains what is going on, that can happen anywhere. The rest of the encounters (six others) are just simple undead encounters. “$ ghouls stand back to back” and so on. Seriously. They all fit on one column on one page. There’s almost nothing about fleeing bands of ogres, atrocities, evil/weird shit going on, or anything else that could be of interest.

The gre chief is just listed as being in swamps looking for the soul fragments (which show up as lumps of coal.) That’s it. No movement patterns. No supporting data, other than stats. Like I said, there is almost NOTHING present to support the core concept of the adventure in any real manner.

The problem here is not that this is a sandboxy adventure, or we need our hands held, or that the DM needs to add something. The problem is that only the barest concept of an adventure is presented, along with reams of extraneous detail that doesn’t contribute to the adventure. I generally hold the belief that most poor product comes from the designers difficulty in transferring their vision to the written page in such a way that a reader/buyer can pick it up and run with it. This is a pretty classic example of that. You can tell what the general concept is meant to be but there’s nothing here to help support that.

Also, a technical note:
The PDF was broken for me. There was a giant black square covering about 25% of a column on most pages. Some kind of layering thing, I think. I had to copy/paste the content/text under the square to figure out what was going on.