Dungeon Magazine #53

Posted on August 22, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

d53
pellbook Masquarade
by J. Lee Cunningham
AD&D
Solo 3-5

I don’t do solo’s. 🙁

Clarshh’s Sepulchre
by WIllie Walsh
AD&D
Level 1

This is a nice little journeyman adventure. You’re asked to find and loot a tomb to recover a Cube of Force, splitting a share of the treasure found. You have a scroll telling you how to summon the tomb, and a ruined town to explore, containing the objects hinted at needing in the scroll. Once summoned there is a small ten room or so dungeon crawl. The village reminds me a bit of the Phandelver ruined town, and the dungeon has a decent number of puzzle like things to overcome. How do you cross the chasm? Or clear the rubble? The solution to several of them is open-ended. There’s also a nice talking monster. I like the ruined town and scroll; players always like figuring things out and this this gives them that opportunity. There are little clues as to what the buildings used to be, and the scroll alludes to things in a decent way. The whole “loan the party +1 weaponz at the beginning”, so they can defeat 1 undead monster in the dungeon, is a bit lame. Better to just nerf the +1 requirement. There’s also a couple of secret doors that must be found if the adventure is to continue. Probably not a big deal, and easily dealt with by the DM, but “Roll successfully to continue the adventure” always rubs me the wrong way. Worth checking out.

A Serenade Before Supper
by Andrew Venn
AD&D
Levels 3-5

This “adventure” is really just one scene: an ambush by a wolf-were/jackle-weres at an inn. The inn is empty but for the PC’s and the monsters run the place in disguise. The party is supposed to be lured into thinking they are were-wolves and use silver, when they actually need +1/cold iron, I guess. It, inexplicably, has a regional map show where the inn is. That plays no role in the adventure. It has TONS of read-aloud. Not the worst I’ve ever seen, but close enough to make me think about it. The sham is telegraphed by seeing two jackals outside the inn. There’s also all this nonsense about how they watch the party and might not open the inn or attack if they think the party is too tough. Uh … so, now Dungeon is publishing adventures about the Road Not Taken? “Let’s play tonight!” [Nothing happens for 4 hours.] “You guys were too tough, the monsters decided not to attack.” This is the flip-side of the moron-PC’s who “are just doing what their character would.” Great jackass, the rest of us are here to play D&D. Jackals mean jackal-were in my book. There is seriously no reason for this thing to exist as it does. I guess when you “win” you get to keep the inn and that could be a base of operations? A side-trek expanded to six pages, with about as much content as a side-trek usually has. IE: 2 paragraphs worth.

Elaxa’s Endeavor
by Christopher Perkins
D&D
Levels 4-7

I want to like this. A keep has been taken over by brigands. It’s got a force field. You go through a forest to explore a wizards tower to remove the force field and then free the keep, and it’s lord, from the brigands. The first parts of the adventure are pretty good but I’m blinded by a couple of … inefficiencies, in the last part, the keep. It starts with the whole maiden “please rescue my father” thing. Investigating the keep finds it covered by a force-field. The maiden suggests seeking out a wizard who has helped in the past. To get there you go through a forest. So far so good. The hook is lame, Zzzzzz. The forest journey, while small, is classically themed and I drool for the classics. You meet a centaur. You can befriend him. If so some things in the forest are easier. There are werewolves in disguise that can lead you into a trap. Killer trees. Very nice little encounters, particularly the centaur and how it’s used. Friendly, appeals to mythology without being heavy-handed about it (magic arrows, not a complete dick, helpful.) The wizards tower is abandoned and so this is the exploration part of the adventure. There’s a thing done with an illusion that’s not actually an illusion. I haven’t decided if that’s playing fair or not. SOmeone tells you that the wizard likes illusions and that three-headed dragons are extinct and this is just the sort of thing the wizard would do … except the dragon is real. The maiden, and perhaps the centaur, are also accompanying the party, at least for a portion of the adventure. This sets off ALL sorts of alarm bells. I’ve seen DM’s Pet NPC’s a lot and any hint of it sets me off. These are done well, even if there is an implied “have to protect the maiden” escort mission aspect to some of this.

My problems is with the final part, the keep. I freely admit I’m unduly bothered by it. The NPC brigands in the keep are provided personalities. I’m not sure that works. They are going to get hacked down. There IS crystal ball, so maybe the personalities work in that context. Each of the keep rooms gets a full description. This is my major malfunction. This isn’t an exploration adventure. Detailed room descriptions are useless. The room descriptions should have focused on how they would be used by the brigands during the assault. How the brigands react, and ideas for what they do in the room if trapped. The kitchen goes into GREAT detail detailing a normal kitchen. While the brigands have some locations for them, that vary a bit, what tey do when the castle is attacked is not described very well, or at all. But this is the main aspect of the adventure. Instead of Mission Impossible/Where Eagles Dare descriptions we are instead provided with an archaeology tomb description style. 🙁

Steelheart
by Paul F. Culotta
AD&D
Levels 7-9

Just like in the Long Long Trailer, everything old is new again. In this nice little adventure the party is hired by a wizard to bring a young girls kidnapped parents. This leads to the girl goading the party in to killing some dragons at a Cult of the Dragon camp, and then goading them into messing up negotiations between the Zhentarim (Hail Hydra!) and the Cult of Tiamat (Hail Tiamat!) She’s actually a steel dragon and her parents were willed by the dragons at the cult camp. This thing starts with fiction (Ug!) but the rest of it is kind of nice, if you can take the style at the time. The set up with the wizard hiring the party is a little forced (he has a campy personality) but his motivations come across much less forced than many adventures. This is a compliment to the writing style more than anything else. There’s a really good wandering monster table for the party’s journey to the kidnappers region in which the encounters have little bits of extra information. The orc patrol reveals the ambush is captured/questioned, and so on. Just enough extra little bits of information to give the encounter a little kick off. Very Nice. There’s an ambush that’s well done, and a nice “sneak into the camp and kill/investigate things” section. From here the party learns of the EVil Plot that the girl will goad them into messing up. This leads to the next section where two large forces are engaged in negotiations and the party gets to cause trouble to break things up. These last two bits are written quite well. The are presented as a place, independent of the party. This allows the party to interact with them without presupposing any particular actions by the party. It’s then supplemented with a little extra information related to what happens if they do what parties would. This is quite nice; open-ended but with good advice. This is supplemented by little bits of what the various creatures/people do when they encounter trouble; how they react, who else reacts, etc. This is a great help to the DM. It also helps to give little hints. As the adventure points out, during the negotiations, the party will already be familiar with the signal whistles the cult carries because they encountered them at the cult camp. Continuity helps present realism. I REALLY like the last part, where the party has the chance to mess up the negotiations. It’s these sorts of situations in which RPG”s excel. The party is SURE to come up with some kooky plan and the creation and unfolding disaster of kooky character/player plans is one of the great joys of D&D. Also a shout out to the regional map art style Quite evocative and interesting while still portraying facts. A combination of traditional line drawn maps with a kind of cut out vignette glued on it. A very lightweight version of Terry Gilliam, or of an older illustrated map/manuscript. If Hoard of the Dragon Queen had been like this adventure then I wouldn’t have blasted it as much. Too many words, but you can’t avoid that in Dungeon. Nice adventure though, even with the annoying little girl/lies from the dragon.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

Deep Carbon Observatory

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

dco
by Patrick Stuart
False Machine Publishing
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Mid-level

The adventure takes players from a town devastated by an unexpected flood, through a drowned land where nature is turned upside down and desperate families cling to the roofs of their ruined homes, hiding from the monstrous products of a disordered world, through the strange tomb of an ancient race, to a profundal zone, hidden for millennia and now exposed, and finally to the Observatory itself, an eerie abandoned treasure palace, where they will encounter a pale and unexpected terror which will seek to claim their lives.

It’s been a year, time for a signal boost. Go buy this. What.The.Fuck did I just read! Go Buy this. You see, this is what commitment to a vision results in. Go buy this. Shit, now I have to think about how to revise my reviewing model to account for the disruption of my core ideas. Go Buy this. You are a fool if you are at all interested in any version of D&D, Pathfinder, etc and do not own this. You could probably fit it into Conspiracy X, CoC, or any of a dozen other genres as well. You bought it, right? No. I’ll wait. Go buy it. Some people deserve to make a good living from their work. Stewart is one of those. He marries creativity with purpose to a degree that makes it seem platonic.

The adventure has a couple of overland journeys, a couple of complexes/dungeons, and a nice hook/Transition To The Mythic World section. It’s light on mechanics and packed full of imagery, ideas, and gameable content. It channels the vibe that Raggi’s Lamentations adventures try to reach. There’s this sadness and … inevitability present in the adventure that just kind of grows and grows. There’s a river journey, so comparisons to Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now are inevitable. There’s this same sort of Passing By Weird Shit Should We Stop thing going on, combined with a melancholy.

The adventure abruptly starts. Just a few sentences and no real background. Everything you learn about what’s going on is revealed through the use of the encounters. This works SO well. A picture is slowly built up in your head of what’s going on and how it fits together. But the picture is incomplete. Blackness hangs around the edges. This emptiness demands to be filled and your brain works feverishly to fill in the gaps. By the designer providing less information, and working it in, you get a better picture in your mind of what’s going on. There are limits to this, of course. It works well for background and history and not so much in other areas. But it’s used here for great effect. The adventure alludes to things. It implies. It leaves gaps present that you subconsciously fill in yourself. I don’t want to imply in ANY way that the adventure is incomplete. It’s not. The information missing/alluded/implied is not critical information in any way. It’s the fluff that builds a world.

This adventure does what SlaughterGrid did so well: provide evocative encounters. There’s thing DM’s do when creating an adventure that involves minimal keying. Just jotting down a dozen or so separate lines on a paper. “Room 4. Dry well. 4 Ghouls” The home DM can do this. They created the adventure. That text prompts their minds to remember what “Dry well. 4 Ghouls.” means. It’s a shorthand reference to something deeper and more complex in the DM’s head. This minimal keying is terrible in published adventures. The people reading it have no idea what what “Dry Well. 4 Ghouls” meant to the designer. Many designers write up boring descriptions, or resort to a lot of text to try and describe the vision. What’s really needed though is a short burst of flavor. What’s the key to this encounter? By just providing that much, and doing in an evocative way, the DM’s head can, once again, fill in the rest. That’s what this adventure does, over and over again.

“A petty cleric, clutching a log, shouts “All is Lost!” Seltor Tem is the only survivor of his village. He has a key to his church. He will drown soon.

Perfect. P.E.R.F.E.C.T. This is exactly the sort of thing D&D encounters need more of. It’s memorable. It’s tersely described. It’s full of potential energy. As soon as you read this your brain starts to fill in the picture and the gaps. Stewart does this over and over again in this adventure. It’s wonderful and a joy to encounter. This is exactly the sort of descriptions that I’m looking for to riff off of.

I could gush, over and over again, about many aspects of the adventure. The beginning section has some hooks. I guess they are hooks. There is/was this mem in the OSR about the Mythic Underworld. The players needed to cross over some threshold during their journey to the adventure proper. They needed to understand that Things Are Different Now when they entered the dungeon. I think that’s what’s going on in the entire “hook” section of the adventure. You learn you’re not in Kansas anymore. Things are put in motion. Events happen that have repercussions elsewhere in the adventure. There’s a simple time and event mechanism going on that sets the mood and provides that crossing over. From there it’s up the river to find Kurtz, with ever more weird things being encountered. It’s Wonderful how it builds.

I wish I had the words to relate how good the encounters are. As you journey further into the adventure things get more and removed from the traditional Tolkein tropes. It takes the bizarre that was only hinted at, in things like Vault of Drow, and provides full glimpses in to it. Nowhere have the drow seemed more Drow-like than in this adventure. Magic and mundane items are unique and wonderful.

After gushing for two pages I’ll also feel compelled to hand out some lumps. Most importantly: the maps. Most of them are generally ok. I might recommend making the numbers a little clearer on them, by typing them or something. I promise it won’t impact the aesthetics much and the old bifocal crowd (like me) will appreciate it. The map has to be functional. It MUST be. You can also communicate with it creatively but it must fulfill the core purpose. The DCO map, proper, fails most at this. The upper left, the entire right, the upper middle section … Stewart or Scrap need to redraw that fucking thing and publish it. I would also mention two improvements with the NPC group. It’s quite nice they were included. Just a TAD more motivation might have been nice, but I can deal with that. What they really need is a 1-page summary. 1 page with the stats and a brief personality reminder for each. Everyone who runs this is going to have to create that in order to use it. You should have provided it. The full descriptions are good and should remain, the reference sheet is just a prompter to remember the bits burned in to your brain.

GREAT adventure. More than enough content, and the content is VERY easy to build off of.

You bought it, right?

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131801/Deep-Carbon-Observatory?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 27 Comments

SlaughterGrid

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

sg
by Rafael Chandler
Neoplastic Press
OSRIC
Level … 2?

Created by genocidal halflings aeons ago, SlaughterGrid is a strange and gruesome dungeon, avoided by all save the bravest or most foolhardy of adventurers. “Whether is was foolish piety, or raw avarice, or a surfeit of ambition that compelled you to enter SlaughterGrid, it matters not, for you will suffer before you are killed, and no one will remember your name.”

This is a three-level dungeon with a small hex crawl associated with it. It tends towards the Cannibal Corpse side of the gore spectrum. This puts it in good company with Raggi’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess style. The adventure also offers one of the best environments/descriptions I’ve encountered. Room after room, encounter after encounter, the adventure delivers successful room descriptions for the DM to use. On a hit/miss percentage basis, solely on the basis of of the room descriptions, this may be the best described adventure I’ve seen.

I have a much harder time reviewing the better products. I think I gush and don’t do a good job explaining the strengths. This is one of those cases. The adventure has an small nineteen or so hexcrawl associated with it. The descriptions of the rooms and the hexes both share a certain style of writing. From now on I will refer to it as ‘The style everyone should use’, or TSESU. What Chandler does with the descriptions is provide a little adventure. A thing, a hook, and consequences. Every. Single. Time. Taking one of the first hex crawl spaces: there’s a monster that likes/wants/needs some brightly colored cloth. It may attack the party if it sees some. It will also negotiate, especially if they don’t have any, so that the party will bring it some. It’s a monster! It’s a hook! It’s interactive in the way that the game as a whole is generally taken to be. Compare this to weaker hex crawls: “there is a dodo bird here. It is blue.” or maybe “There’s a statue of wizard here. He has a staff.” Note the passive nature of the later and active nature of the former. You can interact with the monster, and not just in a combat oriented way. And that interaction leads to other adventures and goals. The layering of the hooks and goals results in a much more interesting environment.

This same sort of thing is present in most of the dungeon. You find injured orcs, interact with goblins, find weird stuff to play with. Quite a bit of it (QUITE a bit) leads to the players having to make some interesting choices for their characters. The dungeon has factions, the factions provide additional depth, of course. Not everything is a potential ally (or at least neutral), some of the creatures are just dicks, and there are a decent number of the mindless as well to hack away at.

The rooms have a lot going on. Places you can carve out and explore. A weird logic to the dungeon that the players can exploit. Hmmm, more on this. CHandler points out, in the DM introduction, a number of effects that the players can exploit, from a resurrection egg to floating egg sacks. In addition there are, scattered throughout, a couple of things that you can further exploit. Digging out and curing another resurrection egg, or exploiting some of the monsters behaviours … ass some of the other monsters do to gruesome effect. There’s an element of ACTION present it the dungeon that is generally quite rare. Take the old B2/Borderlands. You would go in a room and the orcs would be playing dice. There’s A LOT of that going on … except it’s not dice. It’s eating or skinning a corpse, or something like that.

The treasure here is quite quite good, especially the magic items. A ring that shoots firewalls, named swords, named shields, etc. A lot of them have additional effects. A good example is a shield. There’s a face on the backside. When you use the power, the face changes to show the face is dead. The face changes to someone else. Same thing. Eventually it shows someone the PC knows. And then it shows a party members face. That’s NICE. other magic items self-destruct when used up, and so on. For quite a few the effects are described rather than just mechanically noted, which helps with the visual imagery and DM rulings. The mundane treasure tends to be pretty good also. Not just a crown but a gold crown, with rubies made from giants, and so on.

Chandler clearly knows what elements make up a good adventure. The room/encounter descriptions provide the exact sort of situations that are just waiting for a PC to wade into and stir up. And now for the other …

For all the dynamic room situations encountered, the wandering monsters are just a static little table. They could use a quick additional table to give them something to do while wandering. The new monsters are not particular well described. Compared to the Teratic Tome, they fall far short. I expected to see nice evocative descriptions that would spring to life in my mind. Instead it’s mostly mechanics. I appreciate the mechanics, but I also want a good evocative description. There’s also a kind of … lack of organization? that comes through. This is mostly a problem with the room descriptions. “Bob can tell you secrets of the dungeon.” or “Mary can tell you about the monsters on level 3.” Well … nice, but that requires I go look up the data to convey to the players. Just a couple of extra sentences and that problem would not exist.

Those sentences can come from the unnecessary text present in some area. “There’s a secret door in room that leads to room 20.” No shit, I see it on the map. “Study of the area may reveal a secret door. Normal odds.” Again, that’s quite the revelation. Also, you players roll a d20 to hit in D&D. Shall we mention that as well? There’s not an overwhelming amount of this present but when it shows up it’s VERY noticeable and annoying. Maybe because there’s so much focus present in the rest of the descriptions? What IS valuable is noting what the players can see/hear down some of corridors. Raucous laughter, glowing pink lights and so on. I’ve often thought about incorporating this sort of thing on a map but embedding it in the room descriptions work nice also. What, from this room, can you tell me about the corridor/next room? Dishes Done!

In the finest OSR traditions, Chandler presents some interesting house rules up front. Wandering monster rolls that increase the probability as you go forward. Group efforts to breaking things down. Int skills for monsters being tricked by players, and so on. They are simple and would seem to work fine.

It’s got a bit more gore/shock value than the usual adventure. I’m fine with that. If every adventure published were as high of quality as this one then I wouldn’t need to review adventures. This is really an excellent piece of work. I really can’t say it enough and, again, I don’t think I’ve done a decent job conveying just how good the rooms and magic items are. If I gave number grades then I’d give this a 10/10.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/114494/SlaughterGrid?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 2, Reviews, The Best | 3 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #52

Posted on August 15, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

d52
This review is not up to my usual standards. This issue really weighed on me. “Jesus fucking Christ how many pages are left?” is not something you want to find yourself saying while reading something you’ve bought for fun.

Spirits of the Tempest
by Mike Selinker
AD&D
Levels 9-10

This “adventure” is a riff on The Tempest. In that vein it’s organized in Acts and Scenes. IE: a railroad hell hole with very little free will. While I would not want to discourage folks from trying new things it remains that this thing fails in the core purpose: adventure. I’m using that word in a loaded sense that fits in with my core conceit. It’s clear that many/most adventures fall into these event of scene-based encounters. By railroading the players it fails to provide the adventure that is promised, instead turning it into a simple “roll the dice” game. Mike Selinker, I respond to your Shakespeare riff with a riff of my own: I got this job in a piss factory inspecting pipe.

Pakkililirr
by Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 1-3

This is a simple little 2-page side-trek with a grell. For those of you unaware, side-treks are where dungeon magazine takes what should be a paragraph encounter in an adventure and expands it to two pages. The villagers want you to kill an unknown monster. It’s grell,and lives in a little cave up on a hill. It will push some boulders down on you. *sigh* I like the map though. It’s a nice little encounters map with a road, stream, elevation, boulders, etc. It reminds me a bit of some of the smaller Harn maps … and that’s a compliment by the way.

Welcome to the Krypthome
by Samuel Heath
AD&D
Levels 1-3

Humor in D&D is a tough thing. Best to take it as it comes instead of forcing it. This adventure forces it. Some dwarves want you to find their brother/kill the monsters in a mine. It’s two goblins with a ring of invisibility and a bag of tricks. Lots of hilarity ensues. All of the room descriptions are NICE and long, with lots of read-aloud and DM information. Long even by Dungeon standards. There is one nice bit though: the dwarves have a boot with their brothers foot in it. Nice imagery there.

The Hurly-Burly Brothers
by Kevin Wilson
AD&D
Levels 3-5

This reads like a Grimtooth’s room. Two ogres summon a roc, pick up a PC, and drop them into a net in a ruined tower. It ratchets down through a hole in the floor to a room with a giant scorpion, pit & the pendulum style. The other players get to rescue them. It’s timed, so the longer it takes for everyone else to get to the tower them the closer the captured PC is to their fate. I have no idea how this shit gets in to the magazine. Were the submissions really so poor?

My Lady’s Mirror
by Christopher Perkins
AD&D
Levels 6-8

This is a sequel to “Lady of the Mists”. Many people like Lady of the Mists. This adventure has very little to do with it. This is an adventure in a castle that has been overrun. It’s got quite a few levels, and at 65-ish rooms its quite a bit more substantial than most Dungeon adventures. While the wizards away their Mirror of Life Stealing gets broken and everyone inside freed. The prisoners fight a bit and massacre most of the servants in the castle. Two who escaped plead with you to free the castle, look for their friends, etc. There are six or so of the prisoners left in the castle, and a lot of dead servants and few more hiding, etc. The adventure recognizes that it is, essentially, a social one and takes advantage of that. The former prisoners have several factions and various motivations. Most of these revolve around “getting their stuff back” and “revenge on the wizard.” As such they are generally willing to talk, unless they suspect the characters are in the service of the wizard. There’s some looting going on with the former servants, some hiding, some random demon evil-doing, and so on as well. This layering of things going on really gives the thing a life that most adventures don’t have. The room descriptions are crap and overdone, as was the style at the time. There could be more advice on the former prisoners, and the faction element, timeline of events, could be played up more. S greatly simplified map with the room names written on it, the NPC descriptions/stats, and about a page of text would greatly reduce the bullshit and make this one a solid C or B.

Laughing Man
by Paul F Culotta
AD&D
Levels 5-9

This is just an NPC, really, for a Ravenloft game. It’s a ghost killed when he was laughing. Two pages.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 10 Comments

Valley of the Five Fires

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

5f

Guten Tag Tanelorn.net!

by Richard LeBlankc Jr.
New Big Dragon Games
D&D
Levels 4-9

This is either a region module with strong adventures supporting it or a sandbox with strong adventures and great regional supporting material. Either way, it’s pretty good at supporting play, which is, I think, the major theme of my reviews. If you have ANY interest in anything I mention herein then you should pick this up. What’s interesting is how it does it … which is unlike the vast majority of products … especially those I tend to give high marks to. This product is organized. It’s focused. That makes it easy to use to support play. It’s a sandbox, and a organized one. I’d have to go back and re-read Scourge of the Demon Wolf to be sure, but my impression is that it’s better organized than Demon Wolf and does a better job being a sandbox … and Demon Wolf is pretty good and got a big thumbs up from me. Five Fires is VERY good at what it does well. I’m going to get nitpicky at the end of this review and clarify my comments on how it differs from the style I generally give high marks to.

The first half of this 55-ish page supplement is, essentially, a region supplement. It describes a mongol-like region with five tribes territories converging on a single point. “The Cradle of Man” is a neutral zone and is the titular Valley, with each clan keeping alight one fire on a mountainside to signify their devotion to the neutrality treaty. The valley is off limits to everyone. The region is given a brief history. And I mean BRIEF. The background material here is focused in a way I’ve seldom scene. You immediately pick up on what’s going on and have more than enough information to to carry any adventure forwards. That’s in maybe one column of text. Let me repeat: ONE. COLUMN. Extraneous nonsense is not present and every therein is focused on how the players will encounter the region through their players. It supports the type of information the DM in order to run the adventure for the players. It seems obvious when written, but FAR too few adventures actually do this. There are a couple of new classes and spells. There are some brief descriptions of two towns. These are 1 page each. Most of the page is covered with a reference table of the town vendors. PERFECT. There’s one page on the tribal customs/lifestyle of the nomads. PERFECT. How many times have you had to sit through about a zillion pages on how the New Culture People make eggs for breakfast? This supplement has just enough information for the DM to add some local color and play off of … without wasting your time with endless detail and nonsense. Two pages describes all of the key NPC’s. There’s a reference sheet ala Ready Reference Sheets, for the monsters. There a couple of pages of NPC’s, in table form, in case you need some random tribesmen with detail. They each get JUST enough detail. “Bob is neurotic, greedy, and brave.” Great! Now I’ve got something to work with! The entire first half of the book is the support material. The entire second half are the sandbox/adventures. Literally the second half. I’m not sure if it was planned this way, but the center staple is the dividing line, which makes Hunting the Wumpus for the data you need easy: support in the first half and adventures in the second.

The adventure parts are generally quite nice. You get a “Real” adventure, a quest for some artifacts in the titular Valley. You get some hex crawl features to add to the overland. You get a about three dozen additional adventure seeds to throw in. You also get about a half-dozen so other adventure locations. This is pretty jam packed. If it were me, I’d run the “main” sandbox adventure and throw in just about EVERY single one of the complications and other adventure seeds. Really pile stuff on laye it. Two dozen irons in the fire. After all, a sandbox is about choice and by adding in all/most of the seeds as “tack-ons” to the main adventure then you add depth and a kind of realism to the environments the players encounter. It’ no longer a generic mongol town. It’s now got ALL sorts of things going on that the players can get involved in. Sure, you COULD make the overland a kind of generic travel adventure. Or you could layer on some the pilgrim adventures, etc, to bring the journey to the city, or valley, or sage, to life.

This thing is going to take some study and planning and note-taking, especially in the adventure seeds section, to work in how you layer them all on and make sure you’re familiar with them. But what you will then have will be SPECTACULAR. And the time it takes to turn this spectacular will be A LOT shorter than anything else prepublished you’ve worked with. I promise.

Ok, time to be a dick and pick nits. In order of severity:

It lacks … imagination? Flavor? Something like that. The perfect adventure is some kind of marriage between Apollo & Dionysus. I want the flavor and imagination of an opiate dream related and organized by the world’s best technical writer. Most of the adventures I reccomend fall into the Opiate Dream half of the spectrum. This supplement is one of the rare ones that hits the Technical Writer side. As such it can be a bit dry. +1 swords. Yawn. Wand of Fireballs. Yawn. Remember those NPC descriptions? “Neurotic, greedy, brave.” That’s pretty good, but clearly generic, random, and could use some brainpower by the designer to turn it into something more creative. The writing is flat. As such it comes across as a kind of … journeyman adventure. Fairly normal. An also ran. And that’s really unfair because the core of this is really quite good. Boring treasure, mundane & magical. Boring descriptions. This is the major flaw. The technical writing is good enough to communicate the vision in spite of this. If LeBlanc worked on the color a bit it would be a really stunning product.

A few other minor details. It would have been nice to have the major NPC’s, or at least names/summaries, on a reference sheet as well. The wanderers list, or the map, or the monster sheet or something. Every one who runs this is going to have to write down the names and tribes and personalities/a sentence of goals of them for reference. Might as well include it.

The new monsters could be a bit better described. This may be a subset criticism of the “color” flaw, above. It’s very … reference material from a victorian instead of OMG! WHAT IS IT!!!!

The wandering monster table needs some work. The wanderers need to be engaged in some activity. A small additional ‘activity’ table could help immensely with giving the DM a creativity boost. On a related front, a random entry for a “minor location” on the table would have been nice as well. It’s a small thing and provides a mechanism to get them in to play other than “hmmm, right about time to have something happen …”

Finally, a few of the monster bases could use some information on how they react. How do the mutant ogres, or undead family, or yeti, react to intruders … in an organized way?

I’ve left a lot of the good out of this review. The artifacts are VERY good. Not too powerful. Well described. Pretty good effects. The way some of the locations are puzzles (you need to go through a tiny crack at this location …) and how goodies are hidden nearby (Ah! a potion of diminution!”) I can go on. I’ve left a lot of the good out.

I don’t usually do this, but ….:
Richard J. LeBlanc Jr.: Go buy every Harley Stroh adventure for the new DCC line. If you’re poor then just buy Purple Planet. Take a look at the descriptive style. The language used. Add that. Win all the RPG’s.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/116854/VA1-Valley-of-the-Five-Fires?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 6 Comments

Tales from the Laughing Dragon

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

tld
by David Gerard & Contributors
Basic Fantasy
Levels 1-3

Fonkin the beloved gnome sage is missing. The town guard is busy fighting off brigands and doesn’t have time to look for him. A group of aspiring adventurers must take on the task and follow a clue that leads them to an old ruin and footsteps down into the darkness below …

This is a mostly mediocre set of three adventures, with some nicer touches in the second half of the last adventure. It looks like it may been a group effort project. It abstracts the narrative to a degree that makes me uncomfortable, providing exposition instead of gameplay. Most of the product feels more than a little bland and could use some punching up. COmbined with atrocious read-aloud, this is just Yet Another Adventure.

There are three adventures here. The first has the party searching some ruins (Dungeon Level 1) for a missing gnome sage. The second has the party searching Dungeon Level 2 for some items the gnome lost. The third has the party exploring the ground floor and catacombs of a keep, looking for the last item the gnome lost. It is the catacombs level in which things improve, and I’ll cover that separately.

The abstracted narrative is all in the beginning. The read aloud has five paragraphs of text. WAY more than the 2-3 sentences it should have. The second to last paragraph tells you that you spend the evening questioning the villagers and determine that the gnome must be in some nearby ruins. The last paragraph of the read-aloud puts you in front of some stairs in the ruins leading down into the darkness. This is a little too much for me. Someone has made a decision that all that matters is the crawl. The perfunctory hook is ham-handed, by being presented as soliloquy, and the ‘splaining was lame the first time it was used 30 years ago “the guards are busy.” I guess, if I squint very hard, this is all a valid style of play. That’s my liberal “ Do what you will the whole of the law” thing kicking in. But lordy lordy, I would not want to ever be involved in that style of play nor would I ever hope it was someone’s introduction to the hobby.

What it does is Cardinal Sin #1: Fail to inspire the DM to greatness. This trend continues throughout most of the three adventures. Boring guardrooms with boring and mundane descriptions. Describing what “used as a living quarters” looks like, and noting that there is nothing of interest in the room. Why describe it? Do people not know what a bedroom looks like? Do people not know what “being used as living quarters” means? “There is also a small statue of little value in the northwest corner.” Uh … thanks?

Here’s a good one “There is large crudely made mug sitting on the table, It is empty but still contains the dregs of cheap wine at the bottom.” That’s part of the initial room read-aloud. What’s the point? Oh, oh, I’ve got a better one! Room five is the patrol barracks. The read-aloud is six or so sentences long. It tells us that the room has an empty jar that smells faintly of wine. Note also that the DM text says there are two hobgoblins in the room. It’s like the read-aloud has no relation to what’s going on in the room. Overly descriptive and uninspiring at the same time. IE: the usual. Also, it’s a monster party! Orcs, goblins, bandits, hobgoblins, Trogs, bugbears! Never the same monster used twice in twelve rooms. I’m not a hard core ecology guy but stuff like that sticks out even for me. Better to just make them all brigands. The treasure is generally badly described generic stuff “a small statue of bone” and generic. Vampire SPawn stats are noted as being provided in the rear of the adventure … except they are not.

Let’s shift to the good, which is pretty much self-contained in the last adventure and almost all in the second half of the last of the three adventures. A small boy is in the catacombs under the keep you’ve assaulted. His parents have begged you to find him. This has a couple of interesting things going on and points out some missed opportunities.

There’s a nice undead horror aspect alluded to in the catacombs. A message on a tomb wall scrawled in blood. That’s not uncommon, but although the description is not altogether great, it works here. I think it does because of the continuing thread that it runs with. The undead in the catacombs are the boys relatives and they are protecting him. “Protect the boy” in dripping blood and (the implied) viscera works so much better when that theme is continued in several of the rooms and worked into the adventure. The horror aspect is continued with feeding undead, notably some zombies. D&D adventures need more ravenous zombies feeding. Ghouls get all the fun, and the incorporeal get some nice life-force stuff, but they should ALL feed. It allows the DM to invoke all of the “undead feeding” media they’ve ever seen. There’s also a nice bit of treasure of two here, like a gold comb in the shape of a dragonfly. It doesn’t take much, just a bit more, to add a lot of depth.

Let me mention two more things. There’s a necklace the party is given and, hopefully, the party learns that the undead fear/respect it. It marks you as a part of the family The undead attacks stop completely when the boy gets it. Up until that point it’s handled as a Turn Under modifier. I like the concept but not the mechanics. Tacking on the TUrn Undead ability just destroys the wonder of it. ALmost an attempt to describe WHY the undead cower. How about “it’s a family heirloom and they cower from it.” Done! The appeal to mechanics over flavor destroys the wonder of D&D.

Finally, I think there’s a missed opportunity of two in this last section. It’s implied that the undead haunt the bandits in the upper keep. This is in letters, and in finding an undead feeding on a goblin outside of the keep. This could have been beefed up quite a bit with REALLY paranoid brigands, or the keep actively under siege, undead at the last door, etc. That would have really continued and sold the horror theme that this last bit has. FInally, the entracte the catacombs is, I think, a trapdoor under a rug. (I looked several times and either missed it or it’s not there. Tying the levels together was NOT this adventures strong point.) THIS could have used some read-aloud flavor. A gust of cold dark wind, ominous stench, dust blowing out, a moan, something. This is the party ‘crossing over’ to the land of the dead in a horror adventure. They should wet themselves at the door.

So, the last little bit if better than the beginning and beings to provide some of what I’m looking for in an adventure supplement. The rest is forgettable.

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Dungeon Magazine #51

Posted on August 8, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

d51
Nbod’s Room
by Jeff Crook
AD&D
Levels 1-2

This adventures does what few can: marry a location to events to make it seem “like a living place. Well Done! A haunted room in an inn has teleporters to several other locations. This noted as a solo/5th level adventure or a group adventure for levels 1-2. It’s also an interesting idea that could use expansion. The concept is that there’s this room that weird stuff happens in, which turns out ot be haunted, have a variety of teleportation portal devices in it, and has at least one other thing going to. You “discover” it your first night at the inn, but you could just as easily slip in into a haunted hut, tower, etc, as an adventure locale. I think that’s what this one interesting: you can use it as locale and insert your own McGuffin. The premise is nice, it’s got a nicely described magic item, the command words to the various objects make sense and discoverable with a little work in town, it’s got some nicely developed NPC’s and at least one very good “scene” that’s not a railroad. It’s also wordy and presents information awkwardly sometimes, like when it’s describing the various rumors and NPC’s you can meet. But the core here is good. Teleportation from a normal room is a nice fantastic trope (Lion, Witches, and Wardrobes anyone?) and it’s done well here, like one inside a sea chest with a rope ladder in the inside top. Why’s there’ a rope ladder in the inside top? Well …. There’s also a very nice scene with some classic headhunters doing a ritual, and giant octopus rsing holding them in tentacles, etc. A little buff on the baddies and/or quantity changes could make this useable all the way to levels 3-4 or 4-5, I’d guess. The rumors & NPC’s are in paragraph form, which makes it awkward during play and in picking out information. I’d also like a little more “salty flavor” in my Sailor Jerry’s inn rumors, but at least you get some nice NPC’s to go along with them. Also, a very nice scene in an evil temple, complete with supplicating worshippers, etc, captured in media res. All Dungeon adventures seem to need work. With work this one could be VERY high on the top tier..

Journey to the Center-of-the-World
by Chris Hind
AD&D
Levels 8-10

This side-trek to a dragon graveyard is generic and lame but for two details. Someone in Fort Thunder tells you about an elephant graveyard that is three days away. (Seriously? The region is THAT unexplored?) The journey is not provided, but the graveyard/volcano caldera is guarded by a stone golem at the entrance rift. What’s interesting is the footprints the golem “stands at rest” in will perform a stone to flesh if you stand in them. That’s a nice detail. The actual dragon graveyard is boring and no well described or imaginative at all. There IS, however, a dying white dragon desperate for more life that is willing to bargain with the party. I love adventures where you can talk to monsters and make bargains. The dragon here is presented as dying in a day, or maybe just a few hours, and the bar for healing it is quite high. Lowering the bar or somehow buying more time would be a nice adventure hook. Also the adventure notes that he dragon might keep its side of the deal. This is a momentous day folks: this is the first time I can recall Dungeon magazine allowing an evil monster to not just be a total dick and renege. This location/dragon could serve as a nice sage location: you need some info the dragon has, it bargains for more life, etc. You now have everything you need for that; the DUngeon adventure will provide no more useful information or ideas.

Ailamere’s Lair
by Steve Fetsch
AD&D
Levels 6-9

This is a dragon hunt sandbox that reminds me more than a little of 100 Bushels of Rye, and excellent Harn adventure. As these go, it’s not terrible. The hook is probably the worst part: a bard hires you to track down and study a new type of Dragon “Guerrillas in the Mist” style. There are some villages to start in, villagers/farmers/refugees to question, and an outdoor expanse to explore, with a halfway decent events/wandering table. There’s a strong “Don’t kill the dragon” thing going on, and a magic item that allows you to reset time for that video game “checkpoint” vibe. The magic item is very nicely described and themed, if a bit powerful and gimmicky for the adventure. The wandering table has a nice mix of rumors from people, helpful ranger allies that are not TOO helpful, and random dragon stuff, like sightings, scales, claw marks, etc. The dragon gets some “you can talk to it” treatment, as well as some options for it living in “harmony” with the locals … or at least as close as you can get with a greedy evil dragon. There are some nice complications thrown in with an asshole guide, crooked guides, a vengeful villager, and a few other things like that. Nice sandbox layout with good supporting complications. The usual wordiness, and the “mining camp” needs some more life to it. It could also use some more … interactions? The dragon “actions” table is a little light, as is the wandering table, for the amount of time the party may spend wandering. If you can make the hook more interesting/plausible then this would be a decent adventure to steal.

The Witch of Windcrag
by Steven Smith
D&D
Levels 2-3

There are rumors of a witch living in a mountain cave, but it’s actually a three room harpy lair. There are two invisible traps, one of which provides a warning: “you hear the faint sounds of tinkling” that can be used by smart players to investigate safely. I like traps with this sort of warning mechanism. The second is just an invisible spiderweb. Webs are classic, but the invisible part feels like a gimp. The harpy also has just exactly the magic items she needs, from a sleep spell protection amulet to a couple of rings of animal friendship and the like. This smacks of “providing explanations why there is an invisible spiderweb in the lair” … which is lame. Just. Do. It. The mundane treasure is well described, which I greatly appreciate; for example a thick gold chain with a dragon head pendant and with pearl eyes. Not a lot of extra words but it does wonders for enhancing play. The rumor table tries hard but suffer from META. “A witch who uses air spells lives up there” or “a bard from a far away land.” This should instead be things like “A witch who throws tornadoes at you and whose gaze causes the wind to gust!” or “Princes Arda from the Lands of Musfta.” Must more interesting. Still, the core of “witch on a mountain”,” rumors”, and “windchime & spiderweb trap” are classics, and I LUV the classics.

The Bandits of Bunglewood
by Christopher Perkins
AD&D
Levels 1-3

A “Tuckers Kobolds” adventure. AKA: Killer Kobolds. Something is attacking caravans in the woods and there are conflicting descriptions of what it is … because no one wants to admit they were defeated by kobolds. The party encounters an ambush by the killer kobolds, tracks them through a trap-filled forest, and then enters their lair for a pitched battle. I’m torn on this. I like using the kobolds to maximum effect but the entire adventure smacks of rules-lawyering. “They get a -2 because of close combat” or “+4 because of the dark” or “-2 because of the cave height.” IE: the kobolds are given some fighter levels and “feats” and then every modifier in 2E is used to give the kobolds the advantage. It takes a page and a quarter to describe the 7 kobolds … with quote a lot of repetition of their abilities, all fully described. “Usability” may have been misunderstood … The kobolds are given personalities, which is interesting and a waste because they are just going to be hacked down and/or run away. There’s an optional NPC in the forest which does have a personality that comes in to play. A potential guide with several anger control issues. It does the “attack for one round and then stop” thing, which I can’t stand, but the concept of the NPC is a good one: a troubled creature with anger management issues who flies off recklessly at times. It’s written quite effectively: terse & evocative. There’s also a nice “Warning” in a description … a bird cawing right before the ambush is actually a kobold warning. Hidden things, like traps and ambushes, should get a warning thrown in with the flavor text. Inquisitive PC’s are then rewarded when they follow up with “What kind of bird?” or “What killed the guy by the door?” There are a couple of PC gimps in the adventure, the worst being a portcullis. “Hold Portal won’t keep it from dropping.” That’s lame; it discourages creative play. There’s some throw-away line in a LotFP adventure about how a body will stay dead if “Bless’ is cast. That’s in addition to the mechanical bonus. As the DM, never let the text of the rules inhibit creative and imaginative play. Finally, the rumors are presented as a little read-aloud scene. I like where they are going but dislike the monologue scene. Rather than large chunks of read-aloud for each rumor it would have been better to have a short bullet-list with a sentence or two of flavor. “Ol, Marty, that dwarf cobbler, sez they ‘er trolls. Smelt them they did since it was dark so’s he couldn’t see them.” Done. Next!

The Last Oasis
by Peter Aberg
AD&D
Levels 1-4

Utter and complete piece of shit. This, gentle readers, is the adventure that signals the End Times. This is it. 1995. The year RPG’s died. Previously Dungeon adventures had just been wordy and poorly written attempts at translating the designer’s vision to the purchaser. This one though … this one represents The Beginning Of The End. This is a fourteen page movie.

The characters, guarding a caravan, are caught in a sandstorm. Unknown to them, they are trapped beneath the sands and are slowly suffocating. Their spirits have entered The Borderlands between life and death. Travelling through the desert (they still don’t know they are dead) they encounter several strange things. They then find an oasis. The Last Oasis between life and death. There they meet the guardians and then five events happen on their way “back” to the crossover point between life and death, to return to their bodies. There is no meaningful choice. It assumes you kill the ghul you meet. It assumes you can’t keep up with people you meet. (It’s D&D. the players ALWAYS do something else.) It’s just a movie. No choice before the Oasis. In the Oasis the events start. No choice after the Oasis. The encounters after the oasis are represented as Events but they are actually Scenes. Events imply you have a choice. Scenes imply you do not. You. Do. Not. The movie keeps moving as planned.Do whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 6 Comments

The Tomb of the Sea Kings

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

tsk

by Lawson Bennett & Jimm Johnson
Scribes of Sparn
D&D
Levels 5+

After a successful plunder of the Urchinn Isles, a well deserved night of drinking is in order, during such you trade stories with a local “antique dealer” who tells of a well-financed acquaintance who is organizing an archeological dig. The “antique dealer” goes on to explain that his friend has unearthed a forgotten portal which accesses the island tomb of the ancient Sea Kings (guarded by legendary beasts, of course). The treasures are said to be plentiful and there is rumor that a peculiar magic sword was swept up from the depths to find its resting place in the halls of Blackstone Island.

Oh, where to begin? Vampire Queen? Tegal? T&T adventures? This adventure harkens back to the early days when the dungeon was challenge to be overcome by the players using their characters. Juvenile. Amateurish. And packing more imagination than a thousand modern products. Content is king and I’ll take a dozen Sea Kings before I resort to a lame trope-based generic fantasy suck-fest that passes for mainstream adventures. The encounters are held together on tenuously, things show up for no discernable reason (other than ‘it would be fun to have …’?) and you have to stretch to make it work. IE: It’s a funhouse. And it’s GLORIOUS.

It starts with a lame “archeologist has a mission for you” nonsense. The barest and thinnest of hooks. You are taken to the dungeon via teleportation, a common theme in these early-style dungeons. It then vaults itself into funhouse majesty. Trapps doors shoot black seagulls at you, cursing with a Deck of Many Thing-type table. The traps, some of them anyway, have warnings. People with holes burned in their chests in front of doors mean “Look Out!” I LOVE this type of stuff. “Never give the suckers an even break” is NOT a tenant of the old school. Instead you show them what will happen. You telegraph it. If the players are even casually interested they will notice the clue. And then they’ll trip it anyway. It’s WONDERFUL in actual play. Not enough adventures tempt the players. The players are where its at. It’s where the action is. it’s where the zany plans are.

There’s this weird mix of the sublime and the amateurish in this. Black seagulll curses? Great! But then there are plaques that if you remove from the walls they summon ghosts. Throwing in a couple of words about “howling Indiana Jones style winds as the plaques are removed” would have added so much more to what is otherwise a pretty bland description of the encounter room/area. This sort of thing is present in almost all of the rooms. There’s some terrifically wonderful content. If it’s rooted in anything then it’s closer to the ‘classics’ than it is modern fantasy trope. But they fall a little flat in the … evocative? category. Just a few extra choice adjectives/adverbs would have really brought the environment to life. Still, the content is fresh enough … The tricks and traps are strong in this one, with almost every room a puzzle if you take quite the broad definition of the phrase.

The treasure is a mixed bag. The magic items are nice and non-standard. A candle that burns for 1,000 years. Sweet! A gypsy locket that protects (to some random extent) against life draining. Nice! Magic swords with extra effects. This is all in line with the magic items from the earliest versions of the game, before they became codified, lame, and boring. There’s a lack of mundane treasure, or rather perhaps interesting mundane treasure. There’s a lot of “roll for treasure type H” or “roll for type A” present. I’m a pretty big opponent to that type of thing. It’s supposed to be aplay aid. How about aiding play then?

How about it. The center page it a pull out. It has the map and a listing of all of the monster stats for the two levels. Wonder of wonders! A fucking product that helps the DM run the adventure at the table! A map for your screen? Quick reference for monster stats? Holy Cow! The designer may have actually ran a game at the table before! Now, they do refer you external wandering monster tables … which could have easily been included on the map/stat list …

This is one of the best funhouse adventures I’ve seen. It’s also one of the more imaginative products that I’ve seen. I’m sure the two go hand in hand. This older style is wonderfully imaginative and I’m in love with it. It requires a suspension of disbelief that seems to be frowned upon in today’s environment. I don’t know why. Why is your pointy-eared elf shooting fireballs “better” than a red velvet “Do Not Enter” rope in a dungeon corridor? Somehow we lost the fun. Not the silly, but the fun. It got turned into drama and seriousness, all the while forgetting that the entire base was mud.

A challenge for the PLAYERS awaits! Enter The Tomb of the Sea Kings if you dare!

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/209026/UR1-The-Tomb-of-the-Sea-Kings?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 5, Reviews, The Best | 8 Comments

Cave of the Cybersteed

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

cs
by Raul De La Garza III
Metamorphosis Alpha / Mutant Future

In the quiet and unsuspecting village of Ek-Wyne, the residents go about their daily and mundane tasks not realizing that a terror from above has come to call. One by one the frightened mutant inhabitants disappear in a flash of light. Will those who remain pick up the pieces and carry on or will they seek out and discover who or what is behind this sinister act?

First: Gorgeous Cybersteed art on the cover!

Vaguely generic and maddeningly short on detail, this is more of an adventure outline. The party are all mutated horses. One night, in lightning and thunder, villagers start disappearing in bright flashes of light. This is followed up by some wolf-people on motorcycles raiding the village and stealing away villagers in their cargo trucks. Following the motorcycle tracks back leads to a small 30-room cave complex. This is the home to the wolf-people raiders and a processing center to turn the horsies in to cybersteeds.

You now have almost all the information that the adventure provides, in a far shorter form than the sixteen-ish pages that this module takes. The adventure mashes up new-school “scene based” play with a location-based “old school” wolf base. The first scene is the night horsie abduction. This is a typical example of the epidemic of bad scene-based modern events. Bright lights, horsies disappearing, and no chance for doing anything that could impact events. The purpose of this scene is to give the characters something to do: they need to rescue some of their horsie friends. The railroad aspect of this first scene ensures that at least SOME of their friends will be captured. “Allow the PC’s to attempt to prevent their own or another horsies disappearance” is about the extent of the guidance provided. Not much scenery, not much flavor.

Scene The Second is about a wolfoid raid on the village. They ride motorcycles and have a horsie wagon to carry away captives. Again, not much flavor provided, but at least now the party has motorcycle tracks to use to find the base and, perhaps, their missing friends. I really can’t emphasize enough how little there is to these first two scenes. The description is little more than “some wolves on motorcycle, armed with stun lances, show up and raid the village for horsies. Maybe there’s a running battle on the road if the party capture some motorcycles.” It’s presented as a part of the larger railroad, so, naughty on the designer, but it’s also refreshing, in a madding sort of manner. It’s entirely open in implementation … mostly because there’s no detail. I like an encounter to have some flavor, which is really not present here, but also to have this sort of open-ended nature. “Hey, this is what he wolfoids want to do and here’s a couple of ideas.” I’m not sure what’s wrong here, if it’s the lack of flavor or what, but it’s almost like the whole thing is coming from an oblique angle. Maybe it’s that it’s a brief idea, but presented over two paragraphs? When those two paragraphs could have been used to provide additional flavor?

The wolfoid base has 30 rooms, with some pigoids present as well as a couple of robots. One of the robots operates on captured horsies and converts them to cybersteeds, before they are teleported away. You now know everything interesting the 30 room descriptions provided.

The main problem is that the rooms are mundanely described. Instead of concentrating on what’s new, unique, interesting, or gameable, it insteads concentrates on the mundane and boring. `Things are so loose that the wolfoid leader, while mentioned, I think twice, is never given a location.

Metamorphosis Alpha adventures are few and far between. Someone needs to do a good one one day.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/139369/Cave-of-the-Cybersteed?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #50

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

d50
The Vaka’s Curse
by Ted James & Thomas Zuvich
AD&D
Levels 2-4

An evil guy is cursed to remain in a ship’s figurehead, and becomes a shadow slowly draining those on the ship, year after year. This is a nice little concept, It could be shortened A LOT without losing anything and in that form could serve as a nice Side Trek or maybe an “Adventure Complication.” I like my adventures best when hook after hook after complication after complication is piled up to create a nice living environment. This little thing could easily be tacked on to any existing sea voyage Going to the Isle of Dread, are you? Or maybe one of those viking adventures? Why not add Yet Another Complication to the (usually miserably inadequate and uninteresting) sea voyage that’s presented in the adventure? Just take the core of this and drop it right in to the NEXT shipboard voyage or shipboard adventure. Having a whole lot going on is a great way to build a realistic environment.

Back to the Beach
by Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 1-2

The party is recruited to rid the beach of some giant crabs. The twist, if the party discovers it, is that the crabs are intelligent. You can meet a few interesting NPC’s along the way, and the various crab-men have individual personalities, which is a nice bit of extra detail for the DM to run with. I like this one. The brief portion of the town hook/recruitment could use a bit more in the way of interesting content, and the crab men could have an interesting item or two for the party, but, in the end, it’s a nice little adventure. The monsters don’t attack on sight, which means the adventure immediately has more possibilities. Long-term allies? More hooks in the future? This would make a nice little hex-crawl adventure or a hanger-on to a home base that the PC’s have nearby.

Hmmm, 2 decent ones in a row? What’s issue #50 coming to!

The Object of Desire
by Gary O’Connell & Lucya Szachnowski
D&D
Levels 5-8

An epic adventure … with a very rare thing: a third act! A silly premise, transporting a princess to her wedding, turns in to the inevitable rescue mission to save the princess from a beholder. This then segs into the third act: defeating the evil wizard who has cursed a sulten, transforming him into the beholder. It’s the third act here that saves this adventure. The beginning is the usual hackney’d Princess Escort mission, complete with an asshole Vizier tagalong. The princess is, of course, kidnapped. There’s a nice little beggar encounter in the beginning with a cryptic admonishment/prophecy (depending on the parties actions.) What I found interesting was that the same phrase is used regardless of the parties actions, only the delivery tone is different. I’m a sucker for the classics and rather than a quantum railroad this seems more like clever writing. The kidnapping proper is stupid and sets up one of those “doing everything possible in the rules/fiat to keep the PC’s from knowing what happened” instead of just writing it better. You see, the beholder comes on to the transport ship, but there’s a blinding light, etc, that keeps everyone from knowing they face they beholder. It would be much simpler to have the princess TK’d through a portal or something. I hate it when the DM/adventure gimps the party. The beholder lair is nothing special and is full of bad encounters. No challenge, bad writing and advice (why give advice on turning ghouls reactions if the cleric will D the ghoul on anything but a minimal result?) There’s also a puzzle with a “correct” solution instead of leaving the thing open ended. “Blow chalk on the ink to read the indentations!” Uh huh. That’s kind of a stretch. Nice solution, but a stretch. There is a section that COULD have been nice. The party meets some “Desert Ghosts” … but they are not actually undead. Never encountering them before, or knowing their name, they are unlikely to be treated as undead. But if they had heard rumors of “Desert Ghosts” and descriptions and THEN encountered them? A lost opportunity for misdirection.

The third act has a much different style. Here the adventure enters the realm of true fantasy. Magic flames of immortality, effreet, horribly wounded NPC who is still alive and functioning without pause, a magic peach tree … The elements of this are quite nice and the location, or at least the events, FEEL like an endgame location. I would only have two complaints. First, the efreet doesn’t grant a wish. That’s lame. For some reason writers are stingy with wishes and they shouldn’t be. Giving them to the party allows the DM to fudge without remorse … after all the party now has wishes to undue things. Finally, and most importantly, the party is most likely undercut in the end. The boss is an M19. If he defeats the party then the beholder sultan shows us in some deus ex and anti-magics everything, accidentally, and saves the party, defeating the MU, etc. LAME. Better to ding the MU a bit in levels and make this a tough, but honest, fight. Then the parties victory is their own instead of the DM’s magic NPC pet showing up. It’s that kind of shit that makes me HATE NPC’s when I’m a player.

A much nicer adventure than most. I’d have no problem putting an hour or two in to this and fix it up for play … a rarity for Dungeon.

Felkovic’s Cat
by Paul F. Culotta
AD&D
Levels 6-9

Transported to Ravenloft, kill the evil vampire Baron. Heard that one before? Ravenloft adventures are a one-trick pony: one is all you get before the party kills all Barons, Mayors, etc, on sight. The only difference is that this time you get to keep the domain and rule it as it is transported back to the “normal” world, once you defeat the evil vampire Baron. This starts with opening fiction, always a bad sign. The villagers are ruled over from Castle Pantara, which is in the shape of a cat, and whose guards are called the Black leopards, and their currency is called Pantherheads and Catseyes. Comic Book much? Two pages of backstory, forced & railroaded into picking up a status at the start so you can go on the adventure, “moralistic” approaches to killing villagers attacking you … (You can’t kill the people the trying to kill you? Seriously?) There’s not enough to do in the village/town, which probably doesn’t matter because anyone with half a brain will go to Caster Panther and kill everyone in sight. So, it’s a hackfest with a bunch of … Werepanthers! Bet ya didn’t see that one coming, eh? Hack the werepanthers. Hack four vampires. Done. Lazy, lazy writing, relying on lazy tropes presented in comic book complexity and no charm or depth or detail. On the plus side it does have a Bag of Cats (kind of like a bag of beans) and it does tell you what everyone in the castle is/goes when under attack. That’s something not nearly enough adventures have.

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