tenfootpole.org

by Christopher Perkins, Adam Lee, Richard Whitters
WOTC
5E
Level 1

The Underdark is a subterranean wonderland, a vast and twisted labyrinth where fear reigns. It is the home of horrific monsters that have never seen the light of day. It is here that the dark elf Gromph Baenre, Archmage of Menzoberranzan, casts a foul spell meant to ignite a magical energy that suffuses the Underdark and tears open portals to the demonic Abyss. What steps through surprises even him, and from that moment on, the insanity that pervades the Underdark escalates and threatens to shake the Forgotten Realms to its foundations. Stop the madness before it consumes you!

This is a 250 page two-part adventure in the underdark that is, ostensibly, centered around demonlords. Some jackass drow cast a spell and now the demonlords have appeared in the underdark … but no one really knows that yet. The party starts off as prisoners, escapes, and makes their way out of the underdark, all in part one. In part two the party goes back into mess up the demonlords. It ends with a Royal Rumble, with each of the demonlords duking it out in a mass giant demonlord melee … that the party can determine the location of.

WOTC has given a couple of interviews in which they compare the underdark in this adventure to Alice in Wonderland. That is marketing nonsense; there is none/very little of that in this product. It is a serviceable adventure that will takes mountains of time to prep to play. It does a much better job than Hoard/Princes in presenting an adventuring environment, and even shines at times in some of the things it puts forward, especially with NPC’s and factions. It is quite weak in two ways: organization and what I’m calling, today, evocative specificity. In spite of this is manages to do an ok job presenting a sandboxy like environment with a plot. It’s light on railroads and heavy on needed DM prep … but maybe there is a way around that. As with all modern WOTC products, no one who has ever run a game at the table seems to have been involved in this product.

Let’s get the negative out of the way first and we’ll start with the organization of the product. There are roughly thirteen underdark locations descriptions, each in a separate chapter. There are also three of so “events” that get a separate chapter. Finally there are two chapters, one for the first “escape” half and one for the second “invade” half, that describe moving through the underdark. What there is not is an introduction or overview of the adventure to help you figure out what the F is going on. I’m a HUGE fan of plot coming out during play. Deep Carbon Observatory did this wonderfully. It was also much shorter and had no plot embedded in it. For a 250 page adventure with a plot there needs to be an overview that tells you how things work together.

The second part of the organizational problem lies with the chapters themselves, and more specifically with the locale chapters, which make up the majority of the book. They are laid out terribly. Each of these chapters is trying to do two things: describe the location and describe what happens at the location … to the party. This is the principal mechanism in which this sandbox has plot. You get to choose where you go, and what you do there, but there are events and motivations there as well, all related to the plot. The locale descriptions revolve around places, personalities, and factions … and it’s generally mixed in the plot portion. What you end up with a disconnected eventi-sh based description of the location. If the party doesn’t follow the script you’re left hunting the wumpus. Separating the two types of data would have been a much wiser decision, and allowed for better organization … which means better support for the DM. This is combined with ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE layout templates that WOTC is using for these. The headings, colors, size, break-outs, etc all run together. It is terrible from a “easy on the eyes/picking out what I need to” standpoint. I’m pretty sure Princes and Hoard used the same layout.

The end result of this is that the chapters are hard to read and understand. This is not an adventure you are going to be able to pick up, read through, and run at the table. There will be a lot of rereading, photocopying, note taking, reference sheet preparing, and so on. Combined with the sandbox nature, that MAY mean you need to do that for several locations at the same time in order to be able to deal with the party’s free will. Maybe. The one saving grace here is the “Travel in the underdark” chapters. The chapter locations are relatively far apart. Two to three weeks of travel to get between locations is not uncommon. This COULD mean that you could roll some random encounters in the Travelling chapter, etc, and that can serve as a breakpoint for the DM, giving them enough time to run content until the end of the evening and, presumably, a week off to prep the next location chapter. That’s not a valid excuse for the crap organization job of the chapters, but it is a decent workaround.

The second issue is a general lack of detail, or, perhaps, misplaced detail. The drow guards sleep on pallets. Gee, that’s exciting. Wouldn’t it be much cooler if they slept in spiderweb hammocks, or maybe cocoon pods? That would reinforce the Alice in Wonderland nature that WOTC claims to be present in the product. There are multiple examples of this all over the book. Choices are made to describe something in length and detail which is completely unjustified. Meanwhile, other things are left a little too open-ended for my tastes. For example, there’s an EXCELLENT wandering encounter with The Society of Brilliance. There are some “monsters”, each of which has an 18 int and is fluent in multiple languages. They are dedicated to solving the problems of the underdark. That’s about it. That’s a GREAT encounter, but with just a little more it would have been even better. Instead of paragraph after paragraph of detail that is meaningless, a sentence on the NPC’s personality and maybe the problem they are specializing in? That would have really brought these folks to life. There’s this fine line in providing inspiration to the DM. It’s easy to provide too little and, perhaps, claim it’s left to the DM. Frequently when something is TOO open-ended the mind can’t focus. By constraining things just a little the mind can then explode onward. Not a paragraph. Not “Doing the DMs job for them.” Not a bunch of read-aloud. Just a sentence more to narrow things down a bit. This adventure is much better than Hoard/Rise/Princes in this respect, but still pales in comparison to a well written adventure. Another nice example of this is the madness that is infecting the underdark as the demonlords influence grows. There was a great opportunity here to provide some bizarre examples in each locations of freaky stuff going on. Instead the madness manifests as “psychotic rampage” … over and over again. No OCD scenes. No random mandelbrots in blood, while blind. Nope, just Monster Screaming Demonlord Battlecry and Attacking. Seriously, just about every time they yell “For the faceless one!” and attack, or something similar. They didn’t even try and make it interesting. L>A>M>E The magic items are almost always just as lame. No Alice/demontainted stuff here. Generic book treasure. Yawn.

Obvious railroads are few, but jarring when you run into them. The locations are, otherwise a little formulaic. There’s this “random” cave in of the tunnel which blocks off your access, front and rear, but opens a side passage to a temple next door to the tunnel. Uh huh. Nice one there. [Aside: the temple is in the process of flooding. It could have been just a bit more obvious that you NEED to make it flood to get out.] There’s a second one also, AN EVENT, that clearly represents someone in a meeting saying “We really need a big finish for the first part of this adventure. What can you give me?” There’s this “the drow are chasing us” mechanic going on through the first half of the adventure. Choices the party makes will cause the drow to get closer or fall further behind. It’s GREAT … if only partially implemented. The location chapters have details on actions to cause the drow to advance/get lost, but they don’t have much in the way of how that manifests. As a result the party doesn’t really know they are being chased until the drow catch them. A small table at each location for how the various chase levels manifest would have been great. That’s that lack of detail thing again. Anyway, I digress. As the party are leaving he underdark they are attacked by the following drow who have caught up to them! That is a TERRIBLE thing to do. None of the parties choices have been meaningful. They’ve all been taken away in an instant because some jackass wanted a big combat scene as the party exit the underdark. That’s stupid and insulting. It stinks of the Hoard/Rise style instead of a more open-ended style from Phandelver and most of this adventure.

Things DO get a bit formulaic as well. Show up at a location. They try to capture you as slaves/arrest you/offer you a job. One factions, the leaders, want to suppress another faction …. invariably the one touched by the demonlords madness. It seriously happens every time in the first half. Capture you, offer you freedom if you kill the other faction. There ARE factions, sometimes more than two, and that’s GREAT. It offers wonderful opportunities. The lame captured/arrested/hired mission style of play IS one way to add plot to a sandbox … but it’s far too formulaic in this. The worse example is the dwarf city in which EVERYONE is trying to capture you as slaves or arrest you for any reason … so you can get offered your freedom in you go on a mission.

That’s a lot of negative, and I do tend to focus on the negative. On the positive side it IS a more open and less linear style of adventure and that’s very refreshing coming from WOTC. The presence of the factions EVERYWHERE is a great thing. There are memorable NPC’s, quite a few of which are willing to join your party. How about an intelligent gelatinous cube as a hireling? The first chapter, the prison break, starts you off in this regard with a HOST of fellow prisoners with different personalities, goals, and are quite memorable. [Too much of a good thing? The DM could get saddled with too many extras to run. Anything smelling remotely like “DM pet NPC” sets off a hair trigger for me.] The fungus level is a nice little place that is the closest to a “Bizarre/Alice” theme. The end of the adventure has each party member taking control of a demonlord for a titanic battle royale among the various demonlords. That alone is a nice end cap to a campaign. It DOES manage to marry plot to sandbox in at least a halfway decent manner that is NOT completely full of railroads. It does stretch its legs sometimes and get VERY good, such as with portions of the Society of Brilliance.

It’s worth noting as well that the adventure uses quite a few of “minor rules.” Madness, exhaustion, downtime activities … all are represented in the adventure. They’ve done a fairly good job integrating them in. Crossing an underground river? I bet someone wants to make a raft! Downtime activities. Similarly, the madness rules are used to help represent the incursion of chaos from the abyss and the impact it has on those nearby. These minor rules are presented well and integrated well into the adventure. They don’t feel like a tack on. Nor do they feel onerous as, say, the rules from Wilderness Survival Guide did. Instead they are abstracted to a degree that they are not a burden to play and, in fact, support it. Nicely done.

I would suggest that it’s the best adventure from WOTC since Phandelver. It’s going to take MAJOR work to prep the chapters/locations, but in the end you’d have something halfway decent to run. I just wish WOTC didn’t you work so hard to have fun. 🙁

This is available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Out-Abyss-D-Accessory/dp/0786965819/ref=sr_1_1?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=tenfootpole-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=119e03f84e594146a85750096bee3191&camp=1789&creative=9325

by Edgar Johnson
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 5

For a thousand years Mezar-Kul has known only war, and now the Overlord reigns supreme. From his gargantuan metal fortress he rules the blasted remains of the planet’s last city. Hope seems lost – until visitors arrive from a distant world, bringing uncanny, magical powers. Your adventurers must pick a path through twisted ruins, ancient missile silos, strange monorail systems, and a conflict with four deadly factions to save a world – or destroy it!

This is a frustrating sandbox adventure set on another planet, with mostly technology/Gamma World theming. In a ruined city, with faction, the party is asked to seek out The Great Egg and use it against The Overlord. It is presented in some confusing style that is part sandbox and part linear. There’s something here, but it’s poorly organized … some maddingly generic-but-specific thing going on. My head hurts.

The party is transported to the ruined planet. The pretexts given are all pretty light. “They find a spaceship,” or “A book transports them.” While I’m sure that, yes, one of those things can/could happen, they are quite generic. For example “The party finds a device capable of transporting them to Mezar-Kul.” Well, yes, true. But really very interesting, is it?

That same sort of thing happens time & time again in the adventure. Very specific read-aloud for rooms the party is likely to never encounter, combined with generic imagery and prose. “Itai promises rich rewards from the Spider Goddess.” Well … While perhaps factually true it’s not very interesting for the DM. That last bit is supposed to be the main motivation for the party. It’s not very inspiring, for the DM, is it? From that you need to create some rich rewards for the party.

That little bit is from when the party meets the leader of the first of four factions in their area. When the party arrives on planet they are immediately attacked by The Overlords troops. (Faction: Evil Bad Guys.) This first faction, their arrival having been foretold, comes to the parties rescue, and escorts them to their leader whereupon they get their mission, Along the way are a couple of more Overlord attacks. The party isn’t forced to ally/accompany with the first faction, but it’s what most groups would probably do.More on this “sandbox but not” nature later.

The first factions base is weirdly described. The various rooms get, essentially, two descriptions: one if you came willingly and one if the group is invading. This sort of weirdly specific read-aloud/descriptions is present in many areas. It’s as if the adventure can’t decide what it wants to be: a sandbox or linear. The best possible reading is that a headquarters is presented for each of the factions, along with some descriptions of their mini-bases. The problem with this is the weirdly specific text, combined with the overall genericness. It’s like the emphasis of the development was given to the wrong areas.

The four factions are well-detailed in their motivations, goals, and how they react to the party and each other. It is a little repetitive, but the information on the factions is very good, even if the “bases” are ignored. They feel distinct and the information is more than enough to mox things up a bit with the players and work on an ad-hoc basis.

The adventure doesn’t tie itself together very well, or present much additional data beyond the linear path assumed to be taken. The “reward” section above is a good example. The directive for detonating the egg (the Mcguffin) , and controlling its energies, while key to the adventure, doesn’t seem to come out anywhere. Nor does the reaction between the first faction and the faction that has the egg. It’s almost like someone assumed that there would be an additional section of data/background provided, but it was never completed/included. You can kinda figure out what the plan was, but …

In addition, going off script doesn’t get much support. Yes, you can strike off on your own and there IS an encounter table, but it’s more of the same very high level generic stuff. Some additional flavor regarding faction encounters, or the like, would have been a welcome addition to the wandering tables.

This is a frustrating adventure. You can kind of figure out what is supposed to go on, but it clearly could have organized better. There’s also a distinct lack of relevant color & flavor. The bush gets described (your mileage may vary on the quality of the description) but the core elements gets abstracted in to boring facts. I like facts. I also like color. Two great tastes that go great together. But not here.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/154981/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-87-Against-the-Atomic-Overlord?1892600

by Michael Curtis
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 4

To save a soul and forge a ring! A ghostly enchantress calls for aid, her salvation hanging in the balance. Brave heroes are needed to complete the creation of a magical ring, a process that will take them from gritty city streets to sun-scorched deserts to the ruins of an ancient fortress atop a windswept peak. Are the adventurers up to the task or shall a sinister demon claim the souls of not only the enchantress but the heroes as well? Only luck, courage, and wits will triumph against adversity and allow the adventurers to claim the Ghost Ring for themselves!

This is a linear combat-oriented adventure that lives up to the “convention style” reputation that DCC has. Ghosty McGhosterson appears and asks you to go do three things for her. These three tasks will complete the construction of a magic ring and save her soul from the devil. In return you get the ring. While I’m put off by the fetch-quest nature of the adventure I must say that the twist here, you get the ring because the ghost has another prize in mind, is certainly nice to see. Ghosty teleports you to three places: a warehouse to rescue a kidnapped halfling, a short egyptian tomb to plunder, and a the lair of the tarrasque. FInally, you get ambushed on the way back by demons. Dishes Done.

Linear fetch quest is a linear fetch quest. I’m not sure there’s anything more to say about that. I will say that there is a little fit of free range thinking in the tomb, which is by far the best part. A polymorph “trap” can be exploited to explore further. I like that kind of thing, a sort of “DM neutral” environment for the characters to explore in and in which clever thinking is rewarded. There’s also some nice monsters in the form of Gas Spores (in the shape of mummies) and some disembodied limbs ala Tower of the Stargazer. The first and last sections with the urban warehouse and the tarrasque have nothing even approaching this level of … inventiveness?

The treasure found tends to be BIG, and because the party is travelling by teleport is is likely not lootable. I’m generally not into gimping the party, but a little “action item: go back to that warehouse” is not out of the question either. Of course, coin is generally meaningless in DCC but a few choice trophies would have been nice to see.

There does seem to be an excessive amount of read-aloud, and it’s generally of the uninspiring kind that adds little to the adventure. More importantly I found the environments a bit flat. Mighty Deeds work best in a dynamic environment in which there are things for the party (or DM) to riff off of. No chandelier means nothing to swing on. The combat encounters tend to take place in flat and uninteresting environments without a lot for Mighty Deeds to work with. There is an exception in a junk filled room, but others are just … flat? barren? Certainly devoid of interesting of interesting things. DCC can invoke an epic and awesome vibe. You can do this by making flying demons attack you in the caldera of a volcano or you can do this by providing an environment for the party to exploit. It’s hard to not provide a giant soup cauldron “on purpose”, but certainly having a fight in a “giants kitchen” provides cauldron, and other, opportunities for interesting Might Deeds while “fight in the middle of a barren plain” provides far fewer opportunities.

I like the tomb. There’s probably enough here to have a decent one-shot game. There’s not quite enough here for a more interesting game. And DCC adventures are still better than most being published.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/151823/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-85-The-Making-of-the-Ghost-Ring?1892600

by Simon Forster
The Sky Full of Dust
OSR Systems
Low-levels

Several leagues off the main road is a portal to the realm of fairy; a ring of standing stones resting in a clearing surrounded by ancient trees. Once a year, from the full moon to the next full moon, this portal opens and allows the fairies to cross over, to wreck havoc and cause mischief in the mortal realm.

This is a very basic and bare-bones adventure with four locations. It’s a fetch-quest to get some items a few fairies have stolen from an inn. While staying at an inn some fairies sneak in and steal things. The next morning you’re offered a reward to get them back. The fairies left a trail that splits off into three directions. Each direction has a location to have an encounter in: a one room cave, a well in a clearing, and some standing stones in a clearing. There’s really not much to this at all. But …

It’s also an excellent example of a fine adventure design (if short …) for running at the table. There are about nine or so NPC’s at the inn with the characters. The designer summarizes them all in one table. What they do, who they are, a couple of words for personality, and so on. Every adventure should do something similar. Not necessarily a table, but some way to present them all to the DM in a manner in which they can EASILY refer to them and recall who/what they are. Help the DM. Cue them. It’s what the adventure is supposed to do … and it’s done here.

Another example of this design is the time-table. The monsters have plans of their own and is the party linger then the adventure changes as they summon their reinforcements and, eventually, the massacre that is to come. This is briefly presented in tabular format as well. While this sort of thing is not always appropriate to an adventure, for one with a plot it IS almost always appropriate. The result is that you get a places with some activities going on that the party can interact with, rather than a railroad in which The Party Interrupts At The Critical Moment Yet Again.

This adventure has great treasure descriptions. It has great magic items descriptions. It has great monster descriptions. If you read through it once you can easily run it from memory and only use the book for reference, which is easy to do. Every adventure should be like that. It’s a fine and perfectly serviceable journeyman one-shot … if a bit uninspiring.

I hesitated a lot in writing the rest of the review, below. It seems unfair to take this out on Simon’s adventure. His adventure DID cause me to think about these ideas, and I think it’s a very good example of what I’m going to talk about, but I don’t mean to pillory him. Let us instead view these comments as a more academic examination.

The adventure is presented in a … boring? manner, and, I’m going to assert, could have solved this with two minor change. As one reads this brief adventure the monsters are referred to as fairies, or Fir Darrig. This is the only description of them until the very end, in the New Monsters section. Once you get through the entire adventure and get to the end you come upon the description … and they are wonderful! Suddenly the boring generic “fairies” come to life as little child-like rat-men in frock coats and flat hats, with dandily dressed leaders. If I’d know this, prior to reading the adventure, I may have had a MUCH different view of the encounters. As presented they come off a bit, oh, I don’t know. “Generic” isn’t fair. Lacking in color? Indistinct in the mind? I think it’s this last one. I recall the encounters easily enough, but it’s indistinct in my head. Having had the descriptions beforehand I truly believe I would now be making up little stories in my head as I read the adventure, with the little pompous ass rat-men in their coats and hats screwing with the party. I might also point to the map in this regard. It’s a great map. Line draw and and looking like a “real” map, it’s actually an abstracted map. I really like it a lot. Again, I think having seen the map before the adventure would have … set the mood? better.

Maybe that’s the problem I’m having. Without setting the mood properly, with the DM, the adventure starts in a mundane manner: thefts at the inn. Rather than “fey adventure!” instead what comes to mind is “boring and generic inn hook.” By shifting the map to the beginning and maybe including a one line description of the fairies/creatures in the text, rather than at the end in the appendix, it would set the mood better and cement the style. I think this would have done a much better job of planting the seeds of good ideas in a DMs head. Really, that’s one of the key things I’m looking for. When I read the adventure does my mind race to fill in the details? Just those minor tweaks would have, I think, turned this around for me.

I see Simon is also doing a book of lairs. This adventure got me thinking about that. This adventure is a little shorter than I prefer, probably coming in at one session of gaming. But, if I were running a hex-crawl and came across an inn and wanted to fill in some details … I think a book of one and two page “adventures” organized to support a hex-crawl would be wonderful and this would fit in well to that. Similar to those Dungeon Magazine Side-Treks, but not sucking like they do. 20 “Inn” adventures. 20 ”villager” adventure, and so on. “I need an inn.” BAM! There it is.

[ARG! I bought the boring brown cover. I wish I had bought the full cover one I put in the review!]

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/154149/Mischievous-Monsters?1892600

by Jobe Bittman
DCC
Goodman Games
Level 6

Hail, wizard of Aereth! Forget everything you think you know about the magic. Mastery of the occult lies beyond the comprehension of your world’s primitive societies and warring kingdoms. Your cantrips and legerdemain are mere parlor tricks in the face of true power. The Star Cabal, peerless practitioners of the arcane arts, extends a rare invitation to join their ranks. Hurtling through the cosmos in a marvelous flying city, the magicians are revered as lords of creation by the spacefaring races of a thousand suns. Ascend to the stars and seize your rightful seat in the vaunted halls of power… if you dare.

This adventure has problems. Notably, I’m not entirely sure if it is an adventure. It’s probably closer to a setting book. Or maybe an adventure outline, much in the same way Hoard of the Dragon Queen was. I’m not opposed to fluff; I like fluff and think it’s great inspiration to creating your own game. My problem in this area revolves around expectations. When you expect X and you get Y then … well, not good. It’s also got some organization problems and can at times be maddeningly non-specific.

The book describes the conclave of wizards and their floating space city, as well as a bit of outer space around it. It tries to tie thing together by having an “adventure” of three scenes woven throughout it. The party gets an invitation to join the Conclave of Wizards, but has to seek out the portal to get there. Then the city is described, along with some NPC’s. Then a wizard duel is briefly described as part two of the parties initiation into the COnclave. Then they need to go to a planetoid for a briefly described part three. The organization of the three parts, woven throughout the fluff of the city/conclave, is a bit off putting and confusing. Compare this to Scourge of the Demon Wolf or Valley of the Five Fires which give you the setting up front and then spend a few pages detailing their adventures.The barrage of information mixed up in the book makes becoming familiar with the environment a pain and makes picking out the actual adventure a pain. Uncool.

The city/Conclave is an interesting place. A kind of techno/wizard enclave in space, visited by aliens, it comes off a bit like the city in Vault of the Drow, a cosmopolitan place full of wonder. It does a much better job than Vault in conveying that Wondrous vibe, and the Conclave comes to life much much much better than anything in Vault. A rearranging cityscape (Vornheim anyone?) combined with a mysterious wizards guild combined with aliens. All done DCC style so it’s not grim-dark but more Ankh-Morpork turned up to 11. (As DCC is wont to do.) The wizards of the conclave are wonderfully DCC, each different and with a touch of the bizarre. It really does a great job of conveying the weirdness of the city and of the wizards in the conclave.

Parts of the city though are frustrating non-specific, in the same way the 5E DMG adventure generator is. “Hmmm, [roll], there’s an invasion, ok, [roll], and the villain wants power. Hmmm. Ok …” In some ways the wandering table in Vault of Drow is better for conveying the weird of that place. ASE1 may be the gold standard here, with it’s tables providing a wonderful amount of colorful things, events, people, etc. In contrast this book gives us “1d8 cabal guard and 1 guardian” or “a band of rival initiates attacks.” This is part of what gives it the outline feel, as opposed to colorful things you can run at the table. I REALLY disliked Seclusium of Orphone, and this feels more like in that places than it does the more specific and colorfull far of a ‘normal’ DCC adventure.

The actual adventure is vaguely described, again leading to the outline comparisons. You get a message, maybe a bird drops it. You go to an island with a volcano. There’s a monster outside a tower. You go in the tower. End of part one. I’m obviously being hyperbolic here but there really isn’t much more than that. [Also, the amulet you need to gain entry to the tower is never given to you. Not a big deal, you can throw it in, but its absence is, I think, representative of the confusing nature of the organization.] The second part is perhaps even terser. It amounts to little more than “You need to challenge a wizard to a duel. The map of the arena is on page X.” Again, hyperbolic, but not overly so. The guidelines are “pick a wizard for the party to duel.” The third part of the adventure is longer, but again maddeningly generic. There are a dozen or so planetoids, a wandering table that doesn’t have enough to support a breadcrumbs adventure, and a finale location that, again, is more generic than evocative.

The book DOES do a good job of making Wizard characters feel special. From special quarters for the wizards to NPC’s referring to the rest of the party as hirelings, the wizard in the party will get a kick out of being special. The city and Conclave/guild is also a good plot hook device for launching the characters into grander adventures. In a sense, you’ve graduated from defending your planet and are involved in Bigger Things, Green Lantern of Earth.

It does have some nice DM advice, in particular explaining the hook and how characters might come to find out more about the rumors in it. The entire “adventure” is more of an outline. “Here’s a bunch of stuff. Pick one of these plots. Listen to your players and determine what happened to the missing NPC based on what the party is talking about.” Clever, but … unfulfilling?

This is a nice setting/locale supplement for DCC. You can certainly get a lot of inspiration from it, and it would be a much more interesting model for Sigil than I ever found any Planescape product to me.

I don’t often mention art. The cover is kick ass. It probably set expectations with me that could not be met.

Also, I’m now out of peach vodka. 🙁

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/169644/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-88-The-998th-Conclave-of-Wizards?1892600

by Daniel Bishop
Moon Dice Games
DCC
Levels 5+

Saturn. Well known for the weird magnetic energies of its core, which attract even non-ferrous metals, and which pulled many a would-be Crawljammer to his doom in the early days of space exploration. Saturn. Legendary home of fierce Ape-Men and even fiercer giant worms, which devolved from a great civilization that once worshipped the vast demon-god Tsathoggua before the first great reptiles appeared to dominate long aeons upon the Earth. It is said that the collapse of that civilization caused the weird energies of Saturn’s magnetic core. Many, but not all, of that demon-haunted culture’s works were drawn into the planet’s crust, there to be crushed and consumed. Even so, there is a flux to that strange magnetic attraction. Once in several thousand years, the magnetic forces wane for a period, and ships may safely approach or land upon Saturn. The technomancer Satrampa, who has long made her cold dwelling upon the frozen ocean-moon Tethys, has predicted that such a time is near, and seeks adventurers willing to brave the ringed world’s dangers. There they must locate the Vault of Zin the Meticulous. She will pay a man’s weight in gold for the black onyx ring long-dead Zin once wore upon his right hand. Failing that, she will pay the same weight in silver for proof that the Idol of Tsathoggua which one strengthened the ancient sorcerer’s spells is no more.

I bought this based only the strength of the front cover. I’ve got some weird fascination with what I call “70’s fantasy art”, but which in reality probably spans the late 50’s to the early 80’s. Anyway … This is part one of a two part adventure. It represents the hex crawl with the Vault of Zin presumably appearing in part two. There is something appealing about this adventure … even though I find many of the elements difficult. It could be that I found some of the elements very appealing and am romanticizing them over the other content.

Saturn has intense magnetic fields and you can only be on the planet with metal items for a brief window every 1000 years or so. The amount of time the window stays open is variable, and even then using metal objects can be difficult. The party hears about the window and Zin and maybe even Satrampa, and goes to Saturn. A hex crawl ensues, from the Crawljammer landing site to the Vault of Zin.

The group could meet Satrampa at the beginning. They could not. She’s a very interesting NPC and it’s one of the elements I found appealing. Unknown to all, she’s Zin’s former lover. She spreads rumors/hires groups knowing that either they will recover Zin’s ring … and be possessed by him, thereby bringing him back to life to join her, or that their souls will be gobbled up in pursuit of the ring and thereby fuel Zin’s continuing undeath. I’ve seen “NPC sending the party to their doom” before, but this one appealed to me. A kind of melancholy “Killing an Arab” bit of mood, the enui that immortality brings, but with a purpose behind things. I also liked her guards and the mechanical brain controlling them. Nice opportunities for mighty deeds and built with weaknesses that the players can exploit. It’s too bad that this entire section may not get used. Nice fluff/background material for a Crawljammer game though.

The hex crawl is … not the strongest. Saturn is briefly described as a kind of Dakota badlands sort of environment. It’s not very interesting. Riverworld-like canyons run through it, and these represents the paths the characters will most likely take. The hex-crawl map is about 42×42, with each hex being ½ mile. In these 1764 hexes there are about 10 static encounters and a simple d7 wanderers table. If we are generous in saying only about 10% of the hexes have a chance to be realistically explored, then it’s still about a 5% hit rate for pre-programmed. I’m not a hex-crawl expert but it seems sparse with a far too small wandering table. I may be wrong here. The wandering table DOES give a nice activity, four or so, for each encounter. IE: a returning war party has four or five different things they could be engaged in. This bring the wandering table up to 30 or so entries, which IS enough to sustain play. Particularly with the social element of the ape-men emphasized the way it is. This social element, and the detail on the wandering table, is one of my favorite parts of the adventure.

Some of the ten static encounters are quite nice. Different sorts of ape-man villages, from friendly to war-like. A large decaying Dune-style sandworm. Nothing gonzo off the charts but nice solid little encounters. I particularly like the way the ape-men are portrayed. Not explicitly war-like … even the war parties. They got their own business going on. This lends an air of authenticity to them while still proving some contact opportunities in which the party can either get in to trouble with them or help them.

I’d like to call attention to something the adventure does that is important. The mechanical guards of Satrampa (that the party will likely never meet) have a weakness (or two) that the party can take advantage of. Likewise, the “evil” ape-men in the adventure have a weakness, built in. If the party is captured then they are taken for sacrifice. Not too surprising. But Bishop has built in an escape plan. Their idol reacts to the player’s presence by opening it’s mouth! Which scares the shit out of the evil ape-men villagers since they’ve never seen it before, their village being MUCH newer than the last time non-Ape men visited the statue. This is a nice way of building in an escape plan for the party. Both of these are good examples of a “neutral tone” for the adventure. (The social villagers, who don’t attack on sight, might be another good example of this) This reflects the DM as neutral judge rather than the adversarial relationship that some (most?) adventures tend to take. It’s refreshing to see.

The imagery in this is a little flat. The canyon-lands environment is not presented as … alive? as I think it could/should be, especially for being on Saturn. Otherwise, it’ a decent adventure. It’s right on the edge of something I would keep, I think. It’s got enough different elements though I think I’ll keep this one. Let’s hope part two lifts it up even more.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/150508/Crawljammer-The-WeirdWorm-Ways-of-Saturn?1892600