tenfootpole.org

by Creighton Broadhurst
Raging Swan Press
Pathfinder
Level 5

Lurking in the watery depths of a fallen orc tribe’s sacred burial cairn amid the bleached, broken bones of savage warriors, honoured champions and mighty warlords the forest drakes Arduthal and Ingeirmaugh have made themselves a comfortable, safe home. Periodically emerging to ravage the surrounding countryside their depredations have reached such a level that Baron Liofa Othen begs the PCs to slay the foul beasts. The cairn’s remote location, inundated, bone?choked passageways and the vengeful, possessive ghost of the orc champion Gork Shattershield, not to mention the drakes’ mistaken identity as green dragons, all stand in the way of the PCs’ victory.

We all have these internal stereotypes about things. A frequent stereotype of modern adventures is that they are verbose, linear, and more encounter based. I try very hard to not fall into those prejudged traps … and then something like this comes along: Verbose, linear, and encounter based Pathfinder adventure. There are some decent parts to this but the slavish devotion to form results in a 21 page adventure with five rooms. And they are not very good rooms.

The adventure proper doesn’t start until page ten. The rest of the beginning is introduction, background, explanation of how to do an appraise check for item value, or how to identify magic items. There’s a room underwater so the adventure also has three pages of filler at the end that includes two pages of underwater rules. For those keeping count we’re now at eight pages for five rooms. TO be fair, the constipation is at the beginning and end, and thus easily ignored, but that still means that we’re averaging 1.5 pages per room for the rest. I’m a softy, so explaining the idiosyncratic rules at the beginning and end is ok with me. The room keys, though, are sacred. And the room keys in this stink.

Long keys. Descriptions on separate lines in each room for illumination, ceiling, and features. Creature descriptions that are half a page long, at least. Each room has three or four features and each one needs a full couple of lines of description.
Bones: Bones cover much of the floor.
Shallow bone piles add 2 to the DC of Acrobatics checks.

That’s about the 900th time time that we’ve been told in the adventure that shallow bone piles add 2 to acrobatics checks. I can’t remember my kids age but I sure as hell now remember the modifier to acrobatics checks for shallow bone piles. The pain in the ass part is that this garbage nonsense is mixed in with some decent stuff. The author says, somewhere in the first 10 filler pages, that they like to present interesting environments to provide tactical options for the players. I might quibble with the reasoning but the outcome is one I agree with. Large piles of bones ARE interesting. So are escarpments, muddy and slick banks into pools of water, and many of the other features presented. It’s just SO verbose and repeated SO many times that it reads more like a 4.0 encounter than it does a environment to adventure in. Does the muddy bank exist because you needed a feature in the room to provide tactical options, or does it exist because it’s a pool of water that, of course, has a muddy bank? For the most part I don’t think it matters, as I mentioned previously, the outcome is the same. But it does come off as lame encounter-based.

The linear nature of the environment doesn’t help. Five rooms, essentially all in a row. A meh background of orcs bodies tossed in a cave and two dragons who moved in. A boring rumor table presented in a fact-based format instead of adding color. It’s all just … boring. Slavish devotion to form. Slavish devotion to the standard fantasy tropes.

What’s frustrating is that there are bits and pieces that are quite good. One NPC is “impressively chauvinistic.” That’s a great description! There’s a great hook for a ½ orc character that involves a vision from an orc god, along with some nice modifiers and a good conclusion. That’s a great little bit to spice things up for the ½ orc. (Everyone likes to feel special sometimes.) A holy vision, with +2 morale modifiers to hit and saves because of the bloodlust/motivation with cleansing the defiled site. Great! And it comes with a reward of turning the bloodlust ability from ½ orc limitation to full orc limitations. AGain, perfect! Non-standard but specific to the character. Likewise the treasure is great. A sword with a dripping blood motif hilt. Scale mail that have the scales looking like severed ears. Those are great! Those are the types of items that tempt the players into keeping them when more powerful, but boring, items show up. The muddy stream, a steep escarpment … all great.

Linear. Verbose. Too much form. Too much filler.

This is available from DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/107461/Dwellers-Amid-Bones?1892600

by Simon Carryer
LOTFP
LOTFP
Low Levels

Xaxus is a creature of pure thought. Manakata is a being of raw power. On an island at the edge of the world, they transform human proxies to act on their behalf. And they war Now it’s you on this island, caught in this battle. Will you remain who you are? Can you?

This is a little sandbox/module in the best/old sense of the word. It describes an environment on an island, and then offers some opportunities to get the party on to the island. It’s not a one-trick pony; it’s more like an eight-trick pony … but one of those tricks is very VERY good. Or appealing. Or something.

What is presented is an island. On the island are two great towers, linked up high by a rope bridge. There’s a number of other minor locations, but those are the centerpieces. The island has a god, in the form of a stone idol. He gifts his followers increased strength and con, at when they fail him their INT and WIS is lowered. They end up looking like some roid-rage blob. Recently a thing from space has crashed. It’s name is Xaxus. It’s an idea. Nothing more, just an idea. He’s a nice guy. And very convincing. Like, 25 CHR convincing. Nothing magical, nothing coerced, just really convincing and likeable. When you freely join him you become a part of a hive mind. But you do it of your own free will, and you can leave again at any time, or your own will. Finally, there was recently a shipwreck, which most likely brings the party to the island in order to find the survivors. With all of this in mind, go read the intro blurb again. Make more sense now? This thing has potential energy written all over the cover in giant red crayon.

This thing has quite a few neat things going on in it, but by far the most interesting is the concept of the Idea of Space, proper. It smacks a bit of Stranger in a Strange Land territory. The groupthink hive mind trope is not too uncommon, but the voluntary nature of this one is what makes it stand out. This, and to a lesser extent the Manakata Bro culture, are both voluntary. This plays on one of my favorite game concepts: temptation. I wonder what happens when the big red button is pushed? Yes, the friendly ogre with jeweled crown has his back turned to you. Hand and Eye of Vecna, sitting right there … This is choice. It’s real choice. No tricks. Both choices are valid. Both choices are both wonderful AND leave you wondering about the road not taken. There’s gotta be some german compound word for this sort of thing. Anyway, it’s an appeal to the PLAYERS rather than the characters. Those tend to be the more effective techniques, and I think it’s really effective here.

Beyond this it’s got a lot of other nice and interesting bits in it. The Xaxus folks can shoot a beam ray when they team up and hold hands. Great Scott! That’s AWESOME! Hive mind cultists joining hands in praise to the larger entity and shooting eyebeams as a result … wonderful! Treasure is on the lighter side and runs a bit into “creative looting”, such as “how much can we get for the glass statue” or “how much for the weird ropes holding up the bridge.” There’s a decent amount of other treasure, generally decently described. On the magic side there’s a ring that stands out. It’s one of those “magic doesn’t impact you” rings … either good or bad magic. And you can’t take it off. And you find it on a severed finger, burnt, in a fireplace. Nice touch. There are not a great many new monsters, but what there is are both described well and illustrated well. I like a good monster description, one that is more evocative than fact based, and the big monster description in this fills that well. The Bro’s are also described nicely.

Touching again on the Temptation theme: both groups on the island are, generally, friendly, or at least neutral. This sets things up well. You get to learn about their problems. You get to learn how they view The Others. You get introduced to the power that will tempt the players. Eventually, the players probably hatch a zany plan and things will end up in some kind of running hackfest, as they always tend to do when players are involved. This module sets that up perfectly.

There are a ton of other neato things in this as well, mostly in the two towers. They range from freaky skeletons (mysteries for the DM to expand upon) to freaky deaky plants, to room puzzles that feel integrated into the complex rather than “puzzle in a room.”

This is nice. It doesn’t have any of the DM torture porn aspects that LotFP have drifted into in the recent years, but it does have all of the non-mechanics interesting content that LotFP tends to feature. Probably because there’s a different designer here.

You can pick it up at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/141036/The-Idea-from-Space?1892600

The Oakhearst Chainsaw Massacre

by John Bennett
Raging Swan
Pathfinder
Level 5

The Lonely Coast’s most remote village, Oakhurst broods under the dark boughs of the Tangled Woods. Rumours of incest, murder and vile rites during the black of night surround its insular citizens. It is a place most wise people avoid as the very air seems inhospitable to strangers. Yet in the rumours is a grain of truth, for something dark does indeed stir in the shadow haunted trees and hunched homes of Oakhurst. An ancient evil, hungry with the thirst for blood, awakens from its eons long sleep. As disappearances mount and the Lonely Coast can no longer turn a blind eye to the blight that is Oakhurst, heroes are called upon to investigate the foul rumours and mysteries that plague the village. As the search for the truth intensifies, they may find themselves the next victims of a rising, bloodthirsty evil. Can they survive Against the Cult of the Bat God?

Pathfinder?!?! Yes, Pathfinder. Don’t be an ass. Every version of D&D is essentially the same. If you can’t run a Pathfinder adventure OSR, or an OSR in Pathfinder, then, well, I’m sorry to have to say this to you: you’re an idiot. This probably goes for Warhammer, The One Ring, MERP, Harn, and every other traditional fantasy RPG. They are all close enough to run. Let’s get the Pathfinder crap out of the way up front. It’s got some magical ren faire shit, like some magic stuff for sale. It’s also got stat blocks for monsters that are a column large, per monster. It’s also got some hideous room/key style that insists on putting break stats next to everything possible, and describing every window, door, and ceiling height, for every room, on a separate line. Pathfinder sells, I get it. But man, the number of trees that died … Do the Pathfinder gamers really not buy stuff if it’s not in this excessively verbose format?

I don’t know where I heard of Raging Swan. I sometimes look at “What’s the best adventure …?” threads on various forums, so I suspect it came up in that. For whatever reason, I’ve got a review box full of the stuff, mixed in with free adventures, con promos and whatever. So you’re gonna get a couple of Raging Swan reviews. Because some idiot somewhere on the internets said they were good. I don’t know what I trusted that idiot over the ones that said some other stuff was good, but I did. So here we are.

This is a good adventure. The better parts of it remind me of Deep Carbon Observatory. DCO presented little scenes, vignettes, inspiration that the DM could then leverage for party fun time. The better parts of this adventure, specifically the village part, remind me a bit of that style. There’s also a little bit of the Steve Jobs “just one more thing …” going on also. One of the hooks has a nobleman approaching the party. His daughter ran away with her fiance to the adventure village and took she absconded with the family jewels … no doubt to pawn. Could you go fetch her back? That’s a pretty standard hook. Just one more thing … you get the feeling he’s more interested in getting his jewels back than his daughter. BLAMO! Just what you need to add a WHOLE lot of life to this interaction with the party. No longer a faceless droid, the nobleman now has something for the DM to work with. There’s a lot of this “little big extra” going on in this adventure. The second hook, by the way, is missing this. The local lord’s steward contacts the party, asking them to look into the village for the lord. What’s missing is that little bit extra: “because he doesn’t trust the reeve he appointed. Don’t contact him.” That turns boring into a spy mission, with additional distrust to play with. Not everything in the adventure is good, as that example shows, but it is at least generally decent, with no railroads.

The adventure centers around a remote forest village. Decrepit and decaying, straight out a Lovecraft story. There are half a dozen notable villagers detailed. There are a handful of events detailed. There is a full percentile table full of “village backdrop” to add character to the village. There’s a handful of businesses presented. There’s a timeline presented for what happens. It’s just about perfect as the centerpoint for a village investigation locale. Try this on for size: Cats hiss at one another, fighting over a piece of rotten meat before howling and running off. A decrepit old man swoops in to grab it and begins to stuff it into his mouth. This is exactly the sort of stuff to bring a place to life. It sets the atmosphere, for both the DM and player, perfectly.

The party is hooked into the remote village. They poke around a bit and eventually get attacked that first evening. Which leads to an investigation of an old manor, which leads to another ambush, and then to a ritual in a dark cave the next day. Poke around, shit happens, do some B&E to get some more information, suffer some consequences, confront the baddie. Pretty standard. And very well executed. Werebats, the creepy village, the creepy manor (“a small sack filled with hundreds of human teeth spills over”), this is a classic example of a well-executed “showing instead of telling” adventure. Telling the party Bob is evil is a “meh” situation. The party discovering a bag of bloody humanoid teeth shows the party that Bob is evil … a much more successful way of making an impact during the adventure. This adventure does that very well. I fucking LOVE the tables in this adventure that are used to add some of that showing. The adventure proper does a decent job and it’s taken over the top by those tables.

I already touched on the verbosity a bit, but let me give another example. It illustrates perfectly the agony/ecstasy of the area descriptions in this adventure. Area M2 is the Animal Pens. “The Wearnes kept an assortment of chickens and rabbits to drink their blood.” Then there’s a little two-sence read-aloud that has a nice little bit about flies buzzing angrily around the pens. Then there’s a little bit about the family neglected the animals kept in here and they starved to death, the stench of rotting bodies hanging in the air. PERFECT. EXCELLENT! Mood set! DM Energized! Then the animal coop is described on a separate line, adding nothing of import. Then the fence is described (along with the require fucking break DC), adding nothing. Then the pen yard is described, adding nothing. All of that is at least as long as the first, good part, and maybe ever a bit longer. Going through the required (Pathfinder?) forms detracts insteads of adds.

Some of the treasure is very nice. A +1 dagger that is shaped like a scalpel with a metal handle. Some kick ass books, which double as spellbooks. Exactly what spellbooks should be. A short collection of profane poems to evil gods acts as a scroll of augury. Cool! The Necrotic Codex of Evern Holstam is bound in tanned human skin with a spine fashioned by a leg bone. It’s a treatise on the undead, and contains all L1 and L2 necrotic spells. Sweet! This is treasure! The party will shit themselves AND covet them! Awesome!

The monsters here are almost all new. While original, and well illustrated, they could use a little bit more descriptive text to communicate the flavor to the DM. But, bonus points for non-book monsters. Or at least using monsters that I don’t recognize.

There’s a miss or two also. There’s a journal present that describes the evil plan. Journals, a staple of Lovecraft and CoC, are a cop out. Find a different way to communicate things. Prisoners or something. The village feels smaller, described, than what’s portrayed on the text. The random village trappings help with this a bit, but it’s still feels a bit … empty and unsupported? I don’t know … I might be wrong about this. The trappings table is VERY strong. The main baddie, a werebat, also uses a Wand of Wounding type thing. That’s fucking lame. Make the werebat do werebat things. A werebat using a wand smacks of DM fiat. let him shoot green rays from his glowing green eyes if you want him to have a ranged attack. But using a monster using a wand is lame. The werebats have already been tweaked. They worship a dark bat god. Why not leverage that instead of jerking us out of the werebat mindset?

This is solid. It’s organization is not perfect, but it does a decent job of laying things out for you so it’s to run during actual play. The tables and information is easy to find, even if they are not reproduced in the back or on a tear sheet.

The PDF is $9 on rpgnow, with the print being $14. If you have any interest in what I’ve described then I would encourage you to look into this. I’ve bought adventures for a lot more that were a lot less good.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/128936/Against-the-Cult-of-the-Bat-God?1892600

by Anders Lager
Lazy Sod Press
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 3-4

Somewhere in Frostreave… “Ever since we left that so-called town at the edge of the land of eternal ice, I’ve been freezing my butts off! And no trace of that were-whatever-thing we’re supposed to hunt down. Our best scout, Halross, says she’s been passing here, into this valley, but I get a bad feeling from all this silence, frost and snow. It’s empty here. No animals. No tracks. No nothing, but ice and snow. It’s not natural… And now we’re stuck in this cave. The blizzard has lasted two days now, and our supplies are almost gone. Hell, I’d give a sack of gold for a cold ale and a hot wench in my lap right now. I can smell the fear of the others – die of starvation or disgust here, or freeze to death out there. And some other not so pleasant smells too… Some choice, huh? Maybe we can roast that gnome’s pony? Would have been nice with some food now… Or, we just roast the gnome… Everyone’s on the edge. No sign of the blizzard waning either. I reckon someone will snap soon… Well, not me. Guess it’s time we get moving…”
This is a short fifteen room tomb complex, mostly linear, in the frozen north. It’s got some decently unique monsters and magic, but it resembles some cross between Tomb of Horrors and Grimtooth more than a dungeon adventure. The adversarial vibe from Tomb of Horrors is present here as well, and it’s something I’ve always had a hard time getting into.

It starts off well enough: “General feel: Dark, cold. Everything is covered in a thin layer of frost. Not disturbed for ages. Faint smell of decay in the stale air. All areas are either cut out of the bedrock or natural caves. The doors are made of hard wood and locked or barred. All scribblings are in an archaic form of Old Elvish.“ That’s some pretty good inspirational text. It sets mood in a very good way. You can build off of that, getting into the right frame of mind to expand the room descriptions. Then it immediately drops off at the first room. About a half page of text to describe a cave with a body in it and a secret door in the back wall. And it’s not good description either. It has advice like “(easy perception roll)” and “Close to the corpse there’s a small triangular opening in the stone wall, leading into the depths of the rock. (average perception roll)” It goes on. A lot. This is a really great example of an unfocused writing style. It’s very conversational. It’s trying to provide atmosphere, and rules, and facts, and inspiration, but it’s not really doing much of any of that very well. Spurious text like “close to the corpse” doesn’t really give us anything to work with, it’s more like a boring fact. “Embedded in its bloody hand” does a much better job, if it is even required. The description is more like a stream of consciousness outpouring from the writer. It’s a decent start, for a first draft, but needs a polish to focus the writing, to dig into what’s important and improve it and drop the rest. Most of the rooms in the adventure are like that.

The grimtooth/Tomb of Horrors vibe turns me off also. It’s a pretty strong reaction from me, and I’m sure I’m prejudiced against this sort of dungeon. A pool of water in a natural cave that’s actually acid, or a sodium ball that drops into a pool of water to explode. Lots of levers to pull to make certain things happen. I like all of these elements, separately, but when put together in a “Challenge” style tomb I start to react badly. I think it’s the whole “the dungeon builder/wizard wants to test you” thing that I loathe, and this resembles that if you squint enough.

The dungeon is pretty linear. The map looks like a Logos-style map, but is’ pretty linear with a couple of offshoot corridors with more empty rooms and “challenges.” It’s not really large enough to stretch your legs in or to get that feeling of dread from not knowing what’s down the road not taken.

It does a decent job with the monsters and the treasure. It’s new monsters and treasure, which is always nice to see. The descriptions are a bit wanting though. “As normal skeletons, but armed with norse weapons.” Not exactly inspiring. Spectral skeletons dripping with ectoplasm (a different monster) is a bit better.

The ending has the undead king arise, 10 turns later, and begin to summon an army of the dead. The beginning has the party find a cross that is used as a kind of key to open some of the doors/traps in the complex. Both of those elements are pretty decent. It’s the middle that suffers a lot. The conversational style leads to the lack of focus in the descriptions, resulting in boring instead of inspiring.

$1.99
This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/158772/No-Country-for-Weak-Men-SW-version?1892600

by Dyson Logos
ZERO/Barrier Productions
Labyrinth Lord
Level 4

This is actually a review of issues four and five of Dyson’s Dodecahedron, and more specifically, of the Erdea Manor dungeon that is spread out between the two issues. The dungeon has four levels with about ninety rooms total. It’s an inconsistent effort, with the upper levels being more interesting and better than the lower levels. It reminds me a lot of my favorite dungeon, Level 1 of The Darkness Beneath, without the “effortlessly interesting rooms” that TDB has.

The ruins of an old manor sit on a hillside. And inside are four chaotic levels of factions and six different groups that feels much more static then the implies it should. Dwarves are hanging around, trying to wait out a siege of ogres that have recently moved in. The ogres have a rogue member who is out for himself. The old members of the family that owned the manor are hanging around in the basements, with, maybe, four different factions. There are vermin galore and a few other humanoids that have wandered in. And yet … it feels more static than that would imply. The dwarves are locked in a room and have no interest in leaving. There’s a bit of a Monty Python/French Knights thing you could do with this, but it’s not really interactive. Likewise the ogres … the intra-ogre conflict is not really a highlight or enabled very well. The three or four factions of the family in the lower levels are also not really … interesting? People, fish-people, and bull-people are presented as branches (As well as undead) but no real reference to their interactions, cooperation, or how they react to the parties intrusions.

The details for the monsters, and for many of the rooms, come off instead as window dressing, or maybe fondant. It looks nice but it doesn’t really contribute very well to core mission. Rather than enabling creative play it comes off mostly as trivia. The springboard to adventure is lost. Individually some of the rooms are quite nice. Gnolls displaced by cave bears who is eating one of their comrades in the next room. Goats hanging on hooks on the walls, or an ogre making dwarf-bone bread. There’s something missing here. Some kind of potential energy, a wound spring waiting to be released.

The treasure is mostly a miss on the hit and miss scale. Highlights are a pair of ceremonial platinum axes and a golden beard-clasp. That’s quite nice. But most of the treasure ends up in the “silver necklace” or “+1 spear” category of treasure.

The maps are what you would expect. They have a lot of nice features, stairs up & down, multiple ways into and out of the dungeon, a good mix of dungeon features. They remind me a lot of the Rappan Athuk levels; individually they can be a bit small but if viewed as a cross-section they get much more interesting.

There’s a good example of the room types in an old meeting room. On the wall is a portrait, almost completely faded. If you raise a toast to the person in the portrait then something happens. But there’s no clue that this is an option. As presented it’s just trivia. If it were a dinner party, with the figure prominent and everyone around him raising a toast to him? Sure, then there’s a clue. The room as written needs just a bit more to give it a push. To turn it from trivia to potential energy.

Erde Manor needs a good polish edit.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/117545/Dysons-Dodecahedron–Vol-1-Issue-4?1892600

by Dyson Logos
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 4-5

“That unholy wailing must be stopped. I sense a great evil lurking in the dark depths of Jedder’s Hole. I can lead you down along the secret paths, but if we falter, the price may be our immortal souls.” – Brother Helmad the Bold

This is a short five page adventure with twelve rooms, in a dungeon/former prison under a (reformed) temple of justice. It’s got some great imagery in it and is well worth whatever I ended up paying (PWYW.)

I’ve always had a hard time with Logos adventures. They are based around his maps and his maps tend to be a little small for my tastes. They are usually pretty well done, with some decent features and good use of elevation, but small. I’m more of a “family size bag of cheesy poofs” kind of adventure guy. But going into it knowing that it’s small helps a bit.

The conceit is this: Suddenly wailing has starts coming from a hole in the Temple of Justice. Bad King Dickhead used to chuck prisoners down there over a hundred years ago. The entire intro section is really well done, with some great advice for the hook. Introduce the temple over several sessions, and then, while visiting one day, the wailing starts up. Maybe in the middle of a ceremony the party is participating in. A wedding perhaps? The wailing, and hole in the floor it comes from, can cause those who really fail their saves to look down into it in horror and then, over 2-10 minutes, throw themselves in … That’s EXCELLENT. A wedding party interrupted, people transfixed in horror … and then the first one throws themselves in, just tipping over the edge! A mad scramble to prevent the others! That’s a good hook, a good set up, and a good effect that allows for great play opportunities.

The imagery in the adventure is well done. Skeletons of former prisoners on the other side of the only door in, having died trying to claw their way through the door. The sounds of bodies being ripped and rended and munched upon, coming from the distance and dark in front of the party as they descend into the hole … Most of the adventure provides these sorts of little bits of imagery that really work well to bring a scene to life in your mind, thereby leveraging the DMs imagination more effectively.

There are a smattering of potential allies in the hole, or enemies for the trigger happy. The magic treasure is quite nicely done. An Amulet of Blood with weird special effects, or a transformed skull that is now a CRystal Ball skull. That’s cool! More adventure should do that sort of thing.

This is a short review for a short adventure. While short is does have a decent amount of stuff going on, with more than enough stuff for the party to juggle in only twelve rooms.

The print version of the magazine is $4. The PDF version if Pay What You Want.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/116433/Brave-the-Labyrinth–Issue-1-PDF?1892600

The Undertemple of Arkon
by Richard LeBlanc Jr.
D&D
Levels 1-3

[This is a periodical, and is my custom I’m only reviewing the adventure therein.]

“A recent report tells of a group of cultists disappearing into the ground where the temple once stood. Perhaps the cult is re-forming in some sort of underground lair. If this is true, then the gods help us.“

This is an underground temple to a panther god (ala Petty Gods.) It’s got about 44 rooms and is keyed in a VERY minimalist format, taking up about six pages of leisurely formatted text. Too minimal/Tegal for my tastes. There’s a highlight or two, all at the beginning, but not enough to avoid the “just another room with a monster” syndrome.

There’s a page of backstory (again, leisurely formatted, so only a couple of paragraphs) that tells of a mysterious giant panther, and the cult that formed around it. It was destroyed by wary villagers, and now rumors are circulating again that the cult is back. AKA, the usual. Attached on this page also is the wandering monster table … which makes little sense to me. Acolytes? Sure. Beetle, cube, undead? Sure. Bugbears and goblins? I don’t get it. The dungeon/undertemple has some captured bugbears, and a dead goblin, but they don’t seem to have any special relation to the temple. Monsters? Rescue party? Escapees? Just a couple of more words would have wonders here. “Escaped Bugbears” or “Bugbear rescue party.” The map is decent; large and lots of loops, a few secrets. It could, perhaps, use more features. Pools, circles, rubble, web, etc.

The encounters are a weird mix of decent and minimalist. The first half dozen or so are fairly decent, but then it drops down in quality quite a bit. Here’s a good example, from room 2:
This room smells sweet, with hints of pine and basil. The columns framing the doorway to the south are smeared with blood and spotted toward their bases with small bloody handprints. The fingers of the hands that left the prints are long and slender–otherwise, it might appear they were left by children.

A little verbose, but quite nice. Compare to this room, later in the dungeon:
Facing the door, armed and at the ready (cannot be surprised), are 2 skeletons with swords and shields

In the first eight rooms there are four or so that are quite interesting. Magical figurines, a slave pit … but then things drop off to “skeleton room” quality. There might be one more later on, with cultists pushing a bugbear at a panther in a cage, trying to make it eat.

The magic items are all +1 sword and +1 shield. The mundane treasure is “gold necklace” or “big sapphire.” This is not the kind of text that inspires a DM. The bloody handprint room? Great! +1 sword? Boring.

Too minimal for me; I’d quite disappointed that the rest of the adventure doesn’t follow the path blazed by those first few rooms.