Cyclopean Deeps Chapter 2 – Eye of the Titan

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

eyetitan
By Matt Finch
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry/Pathfinder
Level 10-12

Eye of the Titan takes the adventurers to the strange, underground fortress of Ques Querax, where they may discover strange secrets if they are unlucky enough…

While on another Kon-Mari binge I came across a few things that I had forgotten about. No doubt because I have, once again, purchased the Pathfinder version. Because I am an idiot.

This is a wide spot on the road in the underdark hex map, a small fortress town ruled over by a giant floating eyeball. It is describing a single hex on the larger hex crawl map from the first in this series. It’s meant to be a home base for the party to strike out from as they explore the underdark further. As such it has the usual mix: a tax to get in, some guards, a couple of bars, a temple, a store, and The Boss.

The fortress is 200’ across, has some guards who demand 1/20th of your total possessions for entry. Inside the home base stuff is hit or miss. Every once in awhile Finch drops the bomb on you in a short sentence of A.W.E.S.O.M.E. Then he writes up something that has nothing going on at all. The human bar is pretty boring, and meant to be a safe place to base out of. A vrock can show up in the bar, but that’s about the extent of anything interesting going on. The Serpent-man bar doesn’t even have that. It gets four sentences, telling us it is the bar for serpent-folk over and over again, and then roughly a little more than a page in monster stats. The jeweler stands somewhere in the middle of interesting & not. His face has been torn off. That’s AWESOME and is a great example of of a small detail adding excitement. The rest of the three paragraphs though are a bit meandering in comparison. Shifting again, Alterations in Ownership is a store (the only one) run by a giant slug with four slaves. That’s pretty boss! And then the Temple of the Head of Terror has an empty room with a severed head in the middle of the floor and three weird priests who are always in the same position and turn to stare at you when you enter. Oh man, that’s great shit. That’s the kind of weird shit/mystery drop all in two sentences that a DM can build upon.

The misses, though seem more prevalent. The guard captains are nothing more than a name and a stat block. Any sort of fun & interesting stuff going on is pretty much limited to fetch quests. “Get me some more giant lizards.” or “Bring me some moss.” The interactivity between the various stores/buildings/personalities is virtually non-existent. When that’s combined with a lack of personality/interesting bits for the majority of the NPC’s and places, and the lack of, say, ongoing events or anything more than “what’s this weeks fetch quest” then the usefulness as a home base comes in to question. Or, rather, the usefulness of this as a DM Aid in a home base comes in to question. The giant slug running the store, the hints of the Leng Men, the head temple, the big boss, the faceless dwarf, the Vat Animal store … these are all great. It just needs a little more to bring the others up to that level and to add some interactivity to the NPC’s and locations in order to sustain the environment as a long term base.Just a little more of a shove.

Part of this is my own damn fault. I look at line after line of Pathfinder stats and wonder why, insead, a little more content couldn’t be there in its place. But, from looking things up, it looks like the Pathfinder version is six pages longer than the Swords & Wizardry version. Ouch! I wonder what my impressions would have been then?

This is available on DriveThru, as a part of a bundle.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/142522/Cyclopean-Deeps-Volume-1-Swords-and-Wizardry?1892600

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Castle Gargantua

Posted on September 12, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

gargCast
By Kabuki Kaiser
Self-published
Labyrinth Lord
Any Level

“Ride the beanstalk and crawl into the sprawling halls of Castle Gargantua. There awaits the most legendary of giants and the fiercest creatures known to man. Delve further than ever for the great doors of Castle Gargantua have swung open once again, and what lies ahead isn’t for the faint-hearted.”

This is a build-it-yourself atmospheric megadungeon toolkit/outline. As with Lapis Observatory, this adventure is trying out some new/old things and, like Lapis, if you are at all interested in design then you should pick this up. For everyone else, this presents a poser. You are going to have to put some work into prep this dungeon. More than a simple read through, you’ll need to roll dice a few gazillion times, either before play or during play, to create the dungeon as you go along. Is there an encounter in this room? An ‘empty’ room, just a treasure … how many exits … You’ll create it as you go. Spicing things up are a series of special dungeon areas, premade little areas to toss in. It is, in essence, a version of the random tables found in the back of the 1E DMG used to create a dungeon … but more focused and definitely not generic.

I’m going to need to cover the design mechanic first. This is a toolkit. It’s focused, unlike many toolkits, but it’s still a toolkit. The core map is a 5×7 grid of squares, each color coded in one of five colors. Each color represents one area of the castle, and each square representing, in an abstract way, 4 to 8 rooms. The DM generates these rooms on the fly or a little ahead of time. Once the rooms in the “big square” are explored (4 to 8, depending on how big the DM wants the castle/adventure to be) then the room exits will take you to the next colored square. Each of the colored sections has a list of rooms you can pick from, and mark off, once used. Morgue, butchery, cold room, barracks, guardroom, crevasse, and a couple of dozen others are exampls from the “blood” section of the dungeon. From there a d4 tells you how many exits and what type. A d6 tell you how big and what shape the room is. A d8 tells you what’s in the room, with four of them being “empty” in the Blood section. A d10 indicates what kind of treasure, if one is called for, and a d12 indicates what kind of monster if one is called for. Finally a d20 indicates atmospheric details. There’s another small table that indicates how far away the next room, down a corridor, the door opening in to it, etc. The monsters & magic are all unique and interesting, as they should be.

An example here might be two broken wooden doors as exits, in an octagonal room 60’ per side, with a bloodstone megalith in it, and the clamor of a distant battle. I’m going to randomly pick “battlefield” off of the list of room types. As a DM, I imagine this monolith type thing jutting into the room from the floor in a corner at an angle, blood red pulsing veins on it, Bodies of various ages and condition all around it suffering brutal wounds, one of the door it a makeshift barricade of wood and bodies piled in front of it … maybe the one the party comes in through. And the “sounds of distant battle” are the creams of agony from someone just having been killed in the room, the last person, when the party is travelling down the corridor to get there. That’s what the tables are supposed to do, they are supposed to spur your imagination and allow the DM to fill in the details with their racing imaginations. Some of you may recognize that this is exactly what I think an adventure SHOULD do. Minimal details, but enough of an Idea Seed to get the DM’s juices going. The “gold” rooms, seven or so provided, are prebuilt little areas of a couple of pages that represent a more traditional format.

The entire thing is level neutral because the creatures scale with the party. HD-party average, and so on. In addition there are quick systems for determining if they are normal sized or huge, and easily scaling up damage, etc.

The entire thing appears to work fairly well in practice. It’s pretty easy to roll a bunch of dice at once to generate a room. I’m not SUPER thrilled with the tables spreading out over two pages, but maybe I’m just being a picky git. The monsters and magic items and theming of the areas and atmospheric effects/window dressing are all suitably interesting and work well enough together to create the little narratives that can allow for a minimal keying. There’s a nice set of reference tables in the back to allow the DM’s rolls to be recorded at the time of play, or maybe even a little ahead of it.

You’re gonna need to read the monsters and traps and weirdness ahead of time and maybe highlight them a bit; they do get a bit “long paragraph”, but I guess that’s to be expected for weirdness. Once you’re through once and hit it with some yellow then you should be good to run on the fly.

It’s an interesting idea. A kind of mix between a preparing a dungeon ahead of time, minimally, and running something on the fly.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/149190/Castle-Gargantua?1892600

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Dungeon #99

Posted on September 10, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d99
Two adventures. A new low?!?! Or maybe stocking up for issue 100?

Quadripartite
By Peter Aperlo
3e
Level 14

The very definition of a lame adventure/the perfect example of a ‘Combat as Sport’ adventure. It’s just a bunch of forced combats held together by a pretext. Evil cleric of Nerull disguises himself and casts undetectable alignment so the party will go get four pieces of a key that defeats a newly awakened chaos creature. He’s not lying, so the disguise and alignment spell just reinforce the lameness of the inevitable betrayal (and he does! Wow, couldn’t see that coming …) You go in a shrine that you can’t passwall, teleport, ddor, etc and answer four riddles, each teleporting you a different location. There you fight three of four encounters to get part of the key. You then go fight the chaos monster. There’s one possibility to negotiate with someone, but that’s it. Just forced combat after forced combat. The whole mindlessly rolling dice in combat thing eludes me. If you like it then good for you, you would like this adventure. I just wish your game didn’t have the same name as my game, mostly so that I didn’t have to wade through your dreck to find my dreck. IE: the story of my blog.

Fish Story
By Adam Jortner
3e
Level 5

More interesting than the usual Dungeon fare. Some Locath have moved into the town mill and the party is encouraged by the town to do something about it. An assault OR negotiation (I know, right?!) gets the story that the locaths old encampment, a flooded village, has been taken over. Going there the party discovers a locath ghost who tricks them into going into a small dungeon under the town. Inside THAT is a kobold vampire and a trapped water elemental. The locales in this are a little more interesting than the normal boring fare, and the creatures all seem to have some motivations.The ending is not as simple as just killing everything and ferreting out the “mystery” and the intersecting goals is a large byproduct of the adventure. It’s not quite a faction adventure but it does have a mystery to solve (if convoluted) or you can just blunder through and come out the other side with more unhappy creatures than happy ones. I wish this would get a stronger formatting and the intersecting goals worked out a little more, that would bring those to the players minds in a much more frontal fashion, keeping them there to ponder the consequences of their actions. As it is, the DM is going to have to recognize this element and work harder at it.

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Cyclopean Deeps Chapter 1: Down to Ques Querax

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

cd1
By Matt Finch
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry/Pathfinder
Level 10-12

I’m digging deep in to my pile on this one.

This is a D1 clone.

Seriously, if you take the core of D1 and replace it with a new hex map and replace the entries on the tables with new entries then you essentially have this product. The hex map has a player’s copy that is incomplete. The hex map has major and minor encounter areas. The corridor types are primary, secondary, and tertiary. The wanderer table has caravans on it. The major/minor encounters are not really described.

I’m doing this from memory (of D1) but that pretty much describes D1, doesn’t it? The fascination with Underdark Hex Crawl is beyond me. This must be the fourth or fifth D1 clone I’ve reviewed and they are all the same. Three tunnel types. Partial player map. Two types of encounter area. Caravans. Is it seriously the assertion that nothing new has happened in Underdark hex Crawl innovation in the last forty years? Wait, hang on, I don’t need innovation. But NOT just copying the format of D1 … is that the end all and be all of underdark hex crawls?

There’s one area described. It’s a steep canyon down with a small “weird thing” area at the top that allows you to teleport past the canyon, avoiding its many environmental hazards. There’s an interesting anti-magic effect here in one area that makes magic flight dangerous. It’s some anti-magic steam coming from a bubbling pool at the bottom. It does that strangest of things: not screw the players! By this I mean that you are allowed to bottle the steam and use it as as a grenade weapon for an anti-magic effect! Imagine that, something in the environment that can impact the players either negatively OR positively! More adventures needs to do this. Far too often they are written in a more adversarial style that keeps [insert whatever] out of the players hands. It’s too evil. It doesn’t work. Blah blah blah. It’s far more fun when you give the players a way to exploit what they find. The ones that think to anyway.

The language here is weird. It’s got a distant, archaic and round-about way of speaking, especially in the first few pages, which reminds me more of Webb style than it does of Finch’s.

So, it’s a D1 clone. Do you want a D1 clone published by the Frogs? Do you already have D1? Not the D1/D2 thing that TSR did, that would have far more content than this adventure. Just D1. Or maybe you have Down the Shadowvein? How about The Rebel Faction? Under Shattered Mountain? No? None of those? Then Congratulations, I present you something new.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/142522/Cyclopean-Deeps-Volume-1-Swords-and-Wizardry?1892600

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The Wizardarium of Calabraxis

Posted on September 5, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

calabraxis
By Claytonian
Kill It With Fire
DCC
Level 1?

Apemen stole our children.

This is an eighteen page adventure in a dungeon/cave with history. The pretext is that apemen have stolen some children. The core of the adventure/keys takes place over two pages (!) describing 24 locations … although a decent number are just doors. This is, in essence, an adventure optimized to run out of a binder. Stonehell provided a one page map/key and then provided several pages of details to help support that key. Like Stone hell, this fits over two pages and then the rest of the pages support the keyed encounters. This could go on facing pages in a binder or on two pages of a traditional DM screen, with the supporting text then in front of the DM.

As with Lapis Observatory, this dungeon has history. An old mining site by ancient aliens, it was taken over by a wizard, and then seemingly abandoned with other folks moving in … like ape men. The style works well for most exploratory dungeon, providing additional flavor and theming, just as it does here. It allows a pretext to modify the monsters and to mix elements of several styles together.

The pretext for this adventure is Apemen kidnapping two children, one from an “elite” and one from a blacksmith. This is the extent of supporting information for the hook, except maybe a sentence about vampires stealing peoples heads, as local rumors of the old days of the evil wizard and a 12-entry table in the rear. This isn’t exactly the colorful locals that I prefer to hang my hat on. It’s trying to walk a fine line between focused support of the DM and minimalism. It doesn’t always succeed and this is one are. A little less in the way of filler text (pages 2 & 3, I’m looking at you!) and a couple of more colorful sentences about the local would have lifted the hook from “as good a 90% of what’s published” to “better than 90% of what’s published.

The rooms each have something interesting in them, generally something to play with and the stuff to play with is fun. Magic stained glass, heads you can talk to, a poop-slide, the 2001 obelisk and so forth, all supported by a map that, while not overly complex, is also not linear. The creatures and magic items are, this being DCC, all unique. The rooms are not difficult to figure out during play, meaning that there is not mountains of text to get in the way of quickly scanning the room and running it.

I would say it does lack two important elements that would really put the adventure over the top. First is the lack of room elements in creature rooms. This is mostly a DCC thing, and mostly because of the fighter actions thingy. Rooms with monsters, such as the first room, with apemen (yes, the first room resolves the hook pretext. Yeah!) need a little more to hang your hat on. The fights need something to work with if they are going to engage their creative fighting style juices. The adventure makes you work a bit for that. A human boy on the floor. “Primitive bedding & tools & crafts on the floor.” This is what the DM has to work with to give the players something to work with. I’m not necessarily making an argument for more text but I am making an argument, I think, for better text. Better text that provides a more dynamic environment for combat. Not a set-piece location but also not four empty walls. And while this is most obviously an issue for the DCC fighter crowd, I believe other systems also benefit from a more dynamic environment. Nothing is more boring than just rolling dice turn after turn as you try and stab each other.

The second issue would slightly related to the first: the descriptive style if quite fact based. It could use a bit of bussing up with some stronger imagery and evocative language. Here’s an example near the end of a room titled Circular Bedroom/lab:
“Door is ajar. Smells strongly of copper. Debris, scientific bric­a?­brac, a cot, and a fob­ watch­like thing litter the floor. Ceiling too high/dark to be seen by demihuman vision.”

Quite focused, I hope you would agree. The ceiling thing is a nice bit of imagery but the other parts are pretty utilitarian in their use of language. I’m not arguing, again, for more but rather I’m making a case for fewer facts and stronger imagery.

The adventure succeeds on two fronts. First, it supports the DM at the table, providing a format that makes it easy to run and yet with reference material handy. Second, it has that wonderful non-generic vibe in the creature’s, room goodies, and magic items that make DCC and OD&D in general the sort of non-generic fantasy environments that I think we’re paying for. If I can pull it out of the MM then why am I paying you? Not true here.

Oh, and one last note. To designers everywhere: Don’t be Claytonian, put a recommended adventure level on your product. 🙂

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131489/The-Wizardarium-of-Calabraxis?1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 4 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #98

Posted on September 3, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d98
Gluttony
By Bradley Schell
3e
Level 4

Side-trek! But man I don’t get this one. It’s supposed to be, I think, a sandboxy little thing in a small farming region. Instead you get one hook location (farmer Ted hiring you), one encounter location (where Ted takes you first), seven destroyed farms all abstracted into the same description, and one more destroyed farm COMPLETELY DISCONNECTED FROM EVERYTHING ELSE. Somehow you’re supposed to find your way there and then fight a couple of rasts (neato enemy!), an evil cleric, and a couple of zombies. The massive text bloat of earlier issues has been backed off of but now a new sin has appeared: the encounter build. A bunch of random monsters thrown together in the “controller, artillery, grunt” style with the barest pretext holding it together. This has always yanked my suspension of disbelief and, I think, shifted the ground too far toward “game” instead of “RPG” … whatever that means.

Wings, Spies and Teeth
By Brian Marsden
3e
Level 8

Side-Trek! A manticore and his lion buddies ambush the party in a narrow river valley. A dire lion appears first, that you can make friends with. That “hint” is done well, with the lion tentative and wounds, new & old, covering his body. That should be enough to get non-morons interested in something other than stabbing. Pretty simple, but ok for what it is. It should really be a part of a larger adventure and is, IMO, wasted on a throw-away side-trek.

Flood Season
By James Jacobs
3e
Level 4

Adventure Path the second in Shackled City.

This second installment continues the tradition of having two “dungeons” lightly connected through some plot. You’re contacted by a cleric, her boss is under attack outside of town, you go to rescue him, finding bandits and him dead (that’s dungeon one: a large inn.) Heading back to town you’re encouraged to find some missing wands that the boss was bringing back. If you don’t, the poor in town are doomed because of impending flooding. A brief investigation gets you the entrance to some ruins under the town (that’s dungeon two) and the main bandit hideout. You slaughter many Bothans and recover the wands. The core centers around yearly flooding, which has been light in recent decades, and the complacency of the town, concentrating on the festival instead of flood prep. One temple tries to hold things back by obtaining some wands of water control from another town, but are ambushed and the wands stolen.

The adventure is decent, for the most part, up to the second dungeon. The priest who contacts you (the hook) is inexperienced and the supporting text really conjures up an image of someone inexperienced and very worried and, I think, allows a DM to channel this into a nice NPC personality. There’s a good creepy roadside encounter with hordes of baboons just stopping what they do and staring at the party while they pass, which reminds me of creepy ass atmospheric shit from ONS1; “Beware Cho-odo!” The atmosphere continues back in town after the first dungeon, with rains, cheerful flood festival prep in the streets … which turns to despair as the rains keep coming and people slowly realize they are about to be fucked by flooding.

The first dungeon is a large road inn with two stories and a basement, a courtyard, and multiple stairs up. It does a nice job of painting a dynamic environment of open space, running battles, and a third dimension. The bandits inside are all drunk with that providing multiple opportunities for the DM to have fun with and the party to take advantage of. This, and the map, turn what could otherwise be a boring set of combats in to a fun little section … including a big bad that eats tongues and mocks a severed head. The little bits add a lot of character.

The section between the two dungeons is devoted mostly to trying to figure out who stole the wands and where they are. It’s laid out fairly well, if generically, over one page. One curiosity stands out: you can’t really interrogate any prisoners from the inn. Oh, you can, but they don’t know anything … even though their comrades are in the second dungeon. It seems strange to shut down this part of and punish, instead of rewarding, characters who took prisoners and played thoughtfully. Instead the location is revealed to the party by a generic scene-based encounter. This DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS the concept player agency, punishing agency in favor of a MEANINGLESS railroad encounter. Thankfully, this is the only sort of example of this bullshit.

The second dungeon tends more toward a long slog of encounters. Where the first dungeon was relatively tersely written this one expands the text, to no good purpose. Combats, traps, more combats, more raps, shit strung together … it feels like a generic exercise in encounter building. And for a base of operations, with a loud alarm, it has little to no guidelines on the bases/guard’s response to that alarm. Further, the encounters seem a little much for level 4’s … or 5’s … or 6’s. There are A LOT of LE 4/5/6 encounters down there, and you need to experience a lot of them in order to find the eight wands. I THOUGH this version was built around four encounters a day also? Idk, maybe I’m misremembering. It’s only an issue in that you must, generally, fight, and there’s a time limit.
It could use some more suggestions of scenes of desperation as the town floods (ala Deep Carbon) and fails in several obvious plotline areas. If the town is in danger why don’t the guard/other factions go in to the base also to find the wands? That would be cool; multiple factions and a lot of armed idiots swarming through the base looking for wands/looting, killing the enemy and each other. All Hail Discordia! But no real text is devoted to seeking help from the town, with “apathy” being the given reason at the beginning. Further, the cleric that hires you is “too busy” to help you with either dungeon, as are all of her minions. Finally, it has a wizard halfling following vecna and an undead gnoll priest in the base, a were-baboon, as well as an emphasis on created wands and a brown mold refrigeration device. These all tend toward a style of play I don’t really enjoy and add almost nothing to the adventure, particularly for the amount of silliness they introduce. It’s all pretty easily ignored though, and (ALL too brief) glimpses of Cauldron are tantalizing. A good adventure, if the second dungeon problem could be suffered through or fixed.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 1 Comment

LG1 – Terror in the Forest of Gizzick

Posted on August 31, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

lg1
By Claude M. LeBrun
Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 3-5

Something has been terrorizing farms and houses that lie in or near the Forest of Gizzick. People are being killed, livestock is being killed or stolen, and buildings are burning down. Even though no one has seen the cause of this terror, rumors abound. Some believe goblins or other creatures are to blame. Others think a demon is involved, yet other people worry this is the beginning of an invasion from some unknown evil. Does your party have what it takes to find and stop the terror?

This is a fifteen page linear cave/dungeon that describes a hobgoblin lair ruled over by a 9th level magic-user. It tends to the “minimal keying” side of the OSR. There’s something appealing to the soul about the hardcore old school monster HP’s and wizard, the likes of which I seldom see. Kind of like seeing one of those old meditating aesthetics that never has sex and subsists on one teaspoon of water a day in a cave on a cliff. Wow. Respect. This is one of those very basic adventures, similar in writing style and design to the lairs in B2, which, while not a throw-away, takes some on-the-fly DM work to run. Wow, I’m really dancing here, aren’t I? You can pick this up and run it. It’s more than the throw-away adventure dreck that clogs the RPG adventure pipeline. But it’s not too far above that line and really the saving grace is that it really IS an AD&D adventure. Hardcore. That doesn’t mean deadly. That means neutral.

It has about two pages before it launches into the keys. These two pages are really an abstracted hook, investigation, and travel to the caves. Maybe a quarter page, three paragraphs, to describe three generic hooks: kill evil, hired by the baron to stop raid, or someone’s friend/relative/village is killed. There’s not really much here to work, which is really the story of the adventure as a whole. Just as in B2, it’s a skeleton. I will note that the whole “dead relative/friend/village” thing is WAY overplayed and causes disruptive behaviour in players. No one ever has relatives or forms relationships because they know the DM is just gonna kill them off/capture them.

The investigation and journey to the lair are pretty generic and lightly covered also. Just a couple of notes about one survivor saying it was hobgoblins and a further hint: there’s a trail of fire going to the destroyed farm buildings. These are both important. Both details reward the players who look just a bit further. A token effort yields an advantage, both in learning the attackers are hobgoblins and that there is some kind of weird fire thing involved. I like foreshadowing, hinting, and rewarding the player that makes an effort. The search for the lair is just a flat 35% roll, or automatic for a druid/ranger/speak with animals and nothing really more than that. Again, pretty much the bare minimum.

The lair proper is only fourteen rooms. About half compose some caves that make up the hobgoblin lair/caves and the other half a little dungeon that make up the wizard’s lair Both sections are, essentially, linear. Or, maybe, “Linear with a trick, each.” The hobgoblin lair is a big room, but if alerted the males hide in some side chambers, ready to attack from behind. The wizard’s lair has a main path through it, with a “pass” that allows the party, or wizard, to avoid the most obvious path. These both turn what would otherwise be throw-away sections into something just a little bit more. Did the party use good tactics and “play the game right?” … because if they didn’t they are about to get their asses handed to them.

It’s pretty minimally keyed, with most of the text, where it exists, being devoted to tactics. This is not all that unusual: “6. NURSERY. 3 adult females, 4 young. hp; adults; 6, 4, 4, youth 2 hp each” The monster HP look rolled to me, and tend toward the low side because of that. It’s so refreshing to see a hobgoblin die when you stab the thing, instead of the combats being long slogs. It’s also going to be tough hitting the wizard. He lives behind a couple of traps, has a quasit to keep him informed, and has an ice storm, fireball, and lightning bolt at his disposal. Dropping on of those bad boys, closing a door, and running away is really going to give the party some heartache. Treasure seems light for AD&D, but there are some nice books on the lore of humanoids, demons, elementals, etc. That’s nice abstracted treasure and a way to give players hints and rewards for looking things up in the books.

This is too generic & vanilla for me. I’m having a hard time knocking it though because I recognize it as the type of thing that I’ve played in before and had a decent time … because of the DM. Te tools are here in this one but there is almost no hand holding at all. I like my text a little more evocative and slightly less abstracted.

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The Mad God’s Jest

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

mgj
By Shane Ward
3 Toadstools Publishing
Labyrinth Lord
Level 6

Deep inside the mind of Captain Sherborne, he’s cracked. His dreams haunted by a Harlot. However nothing is what it seems. He wanders the world looking for brave souls to help him. Will you?

It’s all a dream! Hahahaha! Just a dream! You can’t die! Hahahaha! Shit like this gives me a headache. It’s a 21-room cave complex full of bizarro encounters. There is a high point of two, but it’s too far disconnected from reality for me to embrace.

The hook is DM fiat: Captain Whoever has his crew kidnap you. He gives you a map to some caves and hires you to go into them and recover a boot. I’m pretty sure the boot isn’t in the caves. It makes references, obliquely in several places but never explicitly, to the fact the captain accompanies you. “If he dies” and “when he makes it back out” and so on. So it’s also an escort mission. If the captain dies you get to restart the entire thing, Groundhog Day style. How can this be? Because it’s a dream.

Consequence free adventuring. If you die you just wake up, XP intact. I hate this shit. It turns everything into Lacuna, or some co-op storytelling game. “Monkeys fly out of my butt because I’m an alien from Xrdoz-10.” This is the cheapest and lamest of all pretexts.
Oh, I get it. All D&D is a pretext. It’s just an excuse to sit around the table and have a good time with your friends. From that perspective, who really cares? The game is as serious as you take it. And yet … there’s some kind of suspension of disbelief that comes into play. I’m been arguing playstyles recently with designers who insist Different Strokes for Different Folks, so this is in the front of my brain currently. When anything is possible in D&D it turns it into Lacuna, it turns it into a storytelling game. And yet, w’ve chosen D&D for a reason. We’ve selected it because it has constraints and it has a DM. When those constraints are removed in a blatant way, as is done in this adventure, it’s a slap in the face. No, you’re not playing the game you signed up for. You’re playing this new thing. When the characters are kidnapped via DM Fiat it points out the man behind the curtain. When it goes all Groundhog Day it points out the man behind the curtain. When you wake from the dream after dying it points out the man behind the curtain. I don’t think this is positive, most of the time. Beer, pretzels, and the right mindset? Maybe. But that’s essentially justifying the existence of linear tournament modules. Yeah, they MAY have a place in a certain niche … but couldn’t you just try a bit harder and do something better that doesn’t have those limitations instead of just slapping on some pretext to justify the decisions made?

The encounters, proper, all have two notable features. First, they are the very definition of Funhouse. Second, they are aggressively exhibit based. The first is pretty easily described. There’s a room with a hot tub. There’s a room inside an ice block with a giant cooking the captains brother over a pit/spit/fire. There’s a torture chamber where cultists go to torture themselves. A pool of lava room. A jungle room. A mushroom room. It’s just a series of encounters with nothing to interconnect them except “it’s ostensibly a cave complex.”
Secondly the encounters are all aggressively exhibit based. What I mean by this is that they are all things you SEE. There are no hints of reaction. There are no defaults in the encounters. And I saw “aggressively” because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dungeon. The Pool of Lava room is a good example of this: “There is a large pool of lava in the centre of this room, the pool is manmade (amazingly enough the lava has not eaten thru the floor! into the tunnel below). The room contains 4 madness cultists that are being fed strange colored soup. A manticore feeds them, and yells when they spit out the food.do this before so thoroughly.” That’s it! You get the manticore stats and a list of treasure. It’s like a little Vine movie playing in front of you. It ignores the fact that the dungeon exists for it to be experienced BY THE CHARACTERS. The complete lack of reactions is more than a little off putting, so I hope you’ve got your reaction roll table on your DM screen.

This one is weird. And not in a good way. Not in a bad way either, but it’s going to REALLY take the right mindset to make something of it.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/168802/The-Mad-Gods-Jest?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #97

Posted on August 27, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d97
Blind Man’s Bluff
By Rob Manning
3e
Level 6

Side-trek. An eloquent group of disguised grimlocks (WTF?!) get the party to rescue their buddies from an ettin wight. Once they do so, the grimlocs betray the party and attack from both sides. Oh, the humanity! A group of monsters that betray the party! What fun that, eh? Truly Rob Manning is one of the most original designers on the planet. This kind of shit is what me say things like “Dwarf lepers? I mercilessly massacre all of them.” Fuck your bullshit, DM! Misdirection spell. Fight to the death. All of the usual crappy design bullshit is present. Six pages of crap.

Heart of the Iron God
By Campbell Penney
3e
Level 13

The party comes across a GIANT iron statue attacking a village and the dungeon are the levels inside the statue. This one has some bits of potential in it. The destruction of the village, and the chaos of the villagers, is glossed over where it should be a highlight of the start of the adventure. The gome engineers and hanggliding attackers are a bit of a style turnoff for me, but the adventure does many good things. A decent variety of the rooms are interesting, with things to play with, even though the combats in the rooms tend to be a little boring. More grinding gears and steam pipes and open access ports would have done wonders for otherwise boring old combats. The construct has a number of entrances, which is a very good thing, although there is more than a little gimping going on in the statue being immune to almost every useful spell. I really don’t like that in my adventures: the party should be able to use the powers they’ve earned. If it fucks up the adventure then you didn’t write a very good adventure. There’s a nice order of battle, for alarms going off inside and how the guards react, as well as a nice section on follow-ups after the adventure is over … which mainly focuses on rewarding the players and the feuding factions who want the statue body. That’s a nice touch, putting the party in respected positions and then swirling the chaos around them. The adventure text for complex rooms is quite long in places and badly needs pruned back, and the adventure does spend a fair amount of time on describing mundane rooms and items. On the plus side there is at least one area where you can NOT fight and talk. This is a decent effort for an Dungeon Magazine adventure

Life’s Bazaar
By Chris Perkins
3e
Level 1

This is part one of the very popular adventure path “Shackled City”. CLocking in at 52 pages it’s pretty mammoth. It combines a simple two (primary) location investigation with two large (63 rooms and 34 rooms) dungeon levels. The investigation portions are ok, if overly described, with probably enough hints to get the party to follow the breadcrumbs. The city proper gets JUST enough description to make you want more and the extras presented, like some goons and the mayor’s office (a minor location) are just enough pretext to allow the DM to keep running. The town section, in particular, could use a reference chart of the NPC names & personalities. The church folk who hire the party, and give them healing, could also use some more personality since the party would presumably interact with them more. The inciting event involves a uniquely dressed thieves guild, and that’s an open point in the adventure. They are never really addressed even though they are the first bait the party receives. Not addressing or following up on them is a miss, from a designer standpoint.

The dungeons are pretty classic exploratory places, with a decent mix of encounters. It’s generally overly described and under specific, which leads to a bit of a bland feel to it. While there’s no organized response to the parties incursion (especially on level 2, the “lair” proper) it does have some notes about nearby monsters responding to light noise, in place. The ending has a beholder teleporting in, accompanied by an invisible wizard (classic “we need to explain WHY” bullshit.) The beholder wants to buy a small orphan boy from slavers. Since the party is after the orphans, this is probably going to be objected to. Thus the party gets to eat shit and let him take him OR the beholder gets to pull his punches, for some reason. This is not strong design. Far better for him to show up and just grab the boy and leave, eliminating this suspension of disbelief break.

The adventure outline is ok, and not really a railroad. It’s mostly just a pretext to get the party into the two dungeon levels and have some fun there, wrapping it in some slight pretext of an investigation and the cliffhanger mystery of the beholder. The dungeon is not a travesty but I don’t really feel it supports the DM the way a good design should. I suppose it’s probably as good as one can expect from this era of Dungeon.

Demonblade
By Hank Woon
3e
Level 16

A fiefdom has gone silent, with rumors of demons. The party go to the local castle and kill a lot of demons and slaad. The adventure might be thought of as in two parts. The intro and village and then the castle proper. They both suffer from a lack of specificity (most Dungeon Magazine adventures do, but it’s notable in this case because …) but the first part is quite a bit more … atmospheric? than the second. There’s a creepy abandoned village where terrible things have happened vibe to both the intro encounter and the village. It’s not followed up on wel (lack of specificity …) but it does a much much better job than most Dungeon adventures in setting a mood in the DM’s mind. The second half, though, in the the castle, fails mostly in this regard. It turns in to a “room with an outsider in it that attacks” kind of adventure. There’s an encounter or two with some potential, like the insane mother with her eyes torn out, infected, but again it’s a little too fact based and lacks specificity. There’s a hint of scene-based play in the village, with some programmed attacks, like when the party LEAVES the inn. It does have a nice side-bar with how to deal with high level magic, the advice of which is not as terrible as it usually is. I may not agree with it all, but it doesn’t gimp the players. Fixing this would be a chore, since most of the castle would need shored up, but it is a nice little read for inspiration.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 12 Comments

The Lapis Observatory

Posted on August 24, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

lapisob
By Jacob Hurst, Gabriel Hernandez, Evan Peterson, Donnie Garcia
Self Published
System Neutral

This is a six level fifty-ish room tower. It used to be an elven observatory and then was turned into an elven hotel/pleasuredome for the jaded. (Soulless/Eid elves, not the generic elves of modern RPG.) It conjures a vision of opulence and decadence that Carcosa wanted and was hinted at in Slumbering Ursine. It does this through some pretty stark design choices. It’s absolutely a must buy for those folks interested in design and a pretty good choice for those willing to put in a little work. For this is product is some weird marriage of a location and a toolkit for it.

The tower has five upper levels and one basement level, with access up a stark basalt cliff. The tower used to be an elven observatory was then turned in an elven pleasuredome/hotel. Thus we can check off rules one and two of good adventure locale design. First, the dungeon and/or entrance is notable. There’s a passage of some sort that marks your journey in to SOME.PLACE.ELSE. This is commonly referred to as the entrance to the Mythic Underworld, and while that’s a bit pretentious for my tastes, it is the case that some of the best dungeons do this. It signals that the rules are all wrong and every perversion is justified. You’re crossing thr threshold from the normal world to some place where the normal rules don’t apply. Sometimes it’s a journey across a lake, a well, a long staircase down, or even just a tower in the distance that lightning illuminates as a body falls from it. In this case it’s the tower sitting high up on black basalt spire, and the climb just to get there.

Secondly it leverages the transient nature of dungeons. It was something and now it’s something else. How to Host a Dungeon is built upon this as are some of the best adventure locales. This is a mixing of themes and types that allows for a more varied environment. In a megadungeon is might be strongly themes levels. In this tower it’s the leftover remnants of an elven observatory and then the pleasuredome hotel is became … and then the ruination that further occurred after Something bad happened inside.

It is, at this point, that we need to diverge a bit and address the adventures core conceits: this thing is trying out two ideas in a big way. First, the room descriptions are just bolded nouns with a few adjectives. Second, it’s awaiting population but the DM. Third, it is system neutral. I know, I said two, but the third is interesting also. It does all three of these in a way that I’ve seen discussed online but never seen in a print product. Each, individually, is interesting and in combination you get something … DIfferent. (hence the must buy recommendation for people interested in design.)

Here’s an example of the noun/adjective format:
“1. The Sliding Doors
20′ x 20′, two engraved panels[white stone, highly detailed, le panel broken, passable, crawling, engraved with: stars, constellations, sipopa flower fractals], rubble[door chunks, statue fragments: arms and heads], orange crystal [thick sheet, covers rubble and bottom third of door]

The orange crystal is brittle and shatters loudly if broken”

My copy/paste doesn’t really do the formatting justice. What you have is an excellent room name that is descriptive and cements something in to the DM’s head: sliding doors. Then a short burst of bolded text that your eyes pick up, noting the notable notables in the area: the doors have engraved panels, there’s rubble, and orange crystal. Then your eyes move to the move details adjectives: the rubble is statue fragments. There’s a star motif, the crystal is on the bottom of the doors. Finally, there’s one line of DM notes, explaining a mechanic: you can break the crystal loudly and easily. Longtime readers will remember I’m a big fan of evocative descriptions and leveraging the DM’s imagination to fill in the details. I think this does that. Your mind naturally fills in the details and a pictures is built up in your head, which you can then communicate to the players. I’m not necessarily advocating this style of traditional prose, but it’s interesting and i think it does the job it needs to do … which is rare. We get room after room of this style. Some have more things, some have less. They all tend toward set-piece environments with strong exploration elements. Things to do. Stuff to poke. Note that they are not set pieces, but more the environments that set pieces tend to have. A more fully worked out location with lots of things to screw with that one COULD use in a fight. IE: the big boiling cauldron in the middle of the lair that is begging to be kicked over., or have someone stuffed in to. An interactive environment.

Conceit the second is that the DM gets to populate the dungeon. There’s a 3d6 tables of creatures and a 3d6 table of what they doing and a number f blank lines on the map to write in what you roll up. “A lizardman shaman” and “making a delivery” might be two things you roll for room 2, the entryway. You get this build up of the dungeon that. Again, I would suggest your imagination tries to make sense of and add context to. This is then supplemented by a 3d6 table of “the overall vibe of the dungeon” that roll once on. For example, if you rolled entry 8 then d4+1 extraplanar party goers have arrived thinking the hotel is still open. How now does your brain do with the shamen? He’s clearly delivering something for/to the partiers. Maybe he’s confused, or jaded or a submissive servant. Who knows, but you’ve now got something to work with.

The Seclusium of Orphone was too generic with too much trivia in it. The tables here help drive the action in the rooms. But you have to put the work in. You will need to prep. You’ll need to decide what the population frequency of the rooms are, and roll to populate, and maybe jot down a note or two. But, critically, the adventure provides you the tools to do it. This is the kind of prep I can get into and am happy to do. It’s supportive of the DM and creativity, rather than punitive or the result of poor design. This extends to the magical treasure (which is wonderfully unique & interesting, which in BryceLands earns you a “Meets Expectations” award.) which the DM is encouraged to sprinkle throughout the rooms. And then to the mundane treasure, which is abstracted.The designer correctly notes that how much and what depends on level and the amount of gold in this place could unhinge an economy. While all true, it’s left entirely up to the DM to decide how much and where and what. This earns some grumbles from me, but I also can’t dispute the statement … the thing is system & level agnostic and you need to target the goodies at the level and system. The end result of all of this is something like that unique element to Ravenloft where you decided where the goodies were ahead of time and then rolled with whatever story ended up coming out through actual play.

This ALL hits the buttons I think are the right ones in designs for exploration: A location map, modified by events. Rolls on tables to determine creatures and room elements. An emergent environment/story for the dungeon that comes from these rolls. And then the characters encounter this emergent environment and a story develops on how they engage with the site.

Focus. This adventure knows what it’s trying to do and focuses on it the way few others do.

I’m quite enamored the the monsters also … all new. They have things they want. They have things they do NOT want. They have little seeds and interesting bits scattered throughout that support ACTUAL PLAY. Orange blob people will be obsessed with the body of a dead elf, as they try to imitate it horrified by dwarves because they are so ugly. The descriptions are full of these things which recognize that they are there to be interacted with by the party, and the descriptions support that.

This is a magnificent example of focused design. It’s also a magnificent example of system neutral design, eschewing ALL stats. If I had one suggestion it would be for a reference table for the blob people. There’s direction that they get random personalities (from an included table) and they all have names, so a short worksheet, pre-filled or blank, would have been nice to see. If I had a second suggestion it would be for a little more interactivity in the rooms, beyond the encounter tables. The encounter in the room creates interactivity, in a set-piece kind of way, but the entire site could use a little more in the way of things in rooms to play with and explore. It doesn’t need to be stuffed to the brim, but upping the quantity a bit would really put this one over the top.

Evidently there’s some kickstarter campaign coming soon and this is an example of the style; it’s one of the fifteen dungeons to be detailed in the location? I’ve seen a lot of shit released in support of kickstarters, examples of what you will get. They generally are lame BEYOND BELIEF. Not this. This is one of the very few examples of something doing what it’s intended to do: get people excited about what’s coming. No doubt I’ll forget to follow it and will miss the kickstarter, but I am genuinely excited to see more, and that’s quite rare.

It’s fluff! It’s an adventure! It’s wonderful.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/214829/The-Lapis-Observatory?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 2, Reviews, The Best | 4 Comments