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This is not a strong review. One adventure is a joke adventure, one is a 1-on-1 adventure, and one features tinker gnomes. I don’t need D&D to be serious, but I do need it to not suck.

Once upon a time when I was young I saved up my money and went to the game store. In front of me was WG7 – Castle Greyhawk. I was so excited. Perhaps this was my personal Loss of Innocence. I don’t know, but I do know that joke adventures are hard to pull off. A lot of what I do with these reviews is motivated by combatting the bullshit synopsis that publishers use to market their games. Yeah, I want quality, or at least my definition if it. Yeah, I get to feed the habit by buying RPG products and tell myself its ok since I review them. But I try hard to tell people what the adventure is ABOUT, so you can figure out if it fits your needs and your definition of quality.

I won’t hit that high mark in this review.
The Dark Forest
by Daniel Salas
AD&D
Levels 2-3

This is an adventure in a little seven room cave system. It is certainly the best adventure in this issue and tries a couple of things that are unusual for Dungeon. It starts with the group coming up behind a small trade caravan is four wagons and over a hundred guards. They are attacked by flinds, and in the process the caravan makes peaceful contact with the party. The wagons are each independent and at night approach the party to sell things (at least the ones who are merchants.) Finally the group is approached by one of them who wants to hire the party to go get some red fungus from a cave nearby. The caravan reacts realistically, the party are not guards, the merchants have some flavor to them and actually DO have things to sell the party. Not just generic “healing potion” or “+1 ring”, but paintings and books and the like. Even the hiring of the party for the mission is worked out in a fashion that is not just a throw-away. It all works together. The cave system has a dwarf maze that is handled in a a non-standard, abstracted way. Room 2 is at LEAST 6000′ feet long, and maze-like. The party eventually stumbles on a group of mycanoids. THAT ARE NOT HOSTILE! They actually talk to the party! The group can negotiate with them to get the fungus. This leads to a ceremony in a fungus garden, and then a spore-circle ceremony that MAY leave everyone a coma … or gifted with healing potions that infect the party with weird fungal infections … BAD ASS! There’s eventually a big combat with a flind group and the mycanoids. This is a small adventure and doesn’t have much in the way of treasure of unusual things, and it has, of course, the endless text of the time. The beginning is strong, as is the mycanoid sections and the abstracted maze is at least an interesting mechanic. The middle portion is weak, with the party just kind of hanging out in the (uninteresting) fungus garden for a few hours while (boring) wandering monsters happen. Generic wandering monsters. But, it tires.

The Leopard Men
by David Howery
AD&D
Levels 8-10

This is a small swamp journey the end in a raid on an evil temple. The hook is nicely morally ambiguous. A big shot in a jungle trading post wants the party to take care of The Leopard Men, an evil cult that is subjugating the various native tribes. It’s a win-win-win: the big shot gets to open up trade with the locals, the locals get to trade for things they want, and the big shot gets to loot the leopard men temple which is stuffed FULL of loot from decades of tribute from the locals. This sort of moral ambiguity makes the set up quite a bit more interesting to game through than a simple morality play would be. The journey through the swamp is lame, although I found the imagery of water fowl and crane nicely evocative. The swamp wanderers are just generic and the programmed encounters are all hostile. Instead of the bullywugs or lizard men or cannibals being social encounters that COULD end up in combat instead they are just boring old “they attack!” encounters. This in spite of the fact that all of the groups are natural enemies of the leopard men cult and hate them. Being allied with cannibals would be much more fun to role-play through the rest of the adventure. The leopard men are all monks and their temple is a boring and mundane affair. “This room has several meditation mats on the floor and bundles of sleeping blankets stacked by the east wall. A scarred dummy stands in a corner.” Not exactly a paragon if interesting. The read-aloud doesn’t mention it, but there are 19 leopard-men in the room. That’s 19 chances to add some individuality to what’s going on, none of which is realized. There’s a garbage chute with a black pudding at the bottom. My own personal sign of a crappy adventure is the presence of spheres of annihilation, black puddings, etc, located in the bottom of drains and waste chutes. As soon as I see that I have a pretty good idea that the adventure will suck. There’s not really much in the way of an organized defense and in spite of having named NPC leaders, nothing is done with them. It would have been nicer to see hunting parties or tactics or an organized defense or some kind of weird jungle temple effects … but alas it is not to be.

 
Tomb It May Concern
by Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 4-6

This is a one-on-one adventure for a paladin. A paladin with amnesia. *groan* It’s a quest to find his warhorse, which turns out to be a little amulet that can turn in to a horse. In a little nine-room tomb. Full of undead. I can think of few things more boring. There’s a room, some pretext of a boring description and then endless paragraphs describing the skeletons or zombies. Everything immediately attacks. The rooms get boring little descriptions like “full of ruined sofas and tapestries.” A kind of generic decay description that infests the fantasy adventure market. “This was once the lair’s armor but holds little more than dust now.” Then why did you put it in the adventure? Because a room with dust is fun? Because you are constructing a realistic view of what an abandoned room would look like? Because that’s fun? The was the hobby strays from its task is amazing. We’re here to have fun. PUT SOMETHING IN THE FUCKING ROOM! Something that the group can interact with. Something that does something. The Evil Bad Guy knows the paladin is in his tomb “but waits here to see if the person entering his lair is a worthy opponent.” I am so sick of that lame excuse. It was tired and lame in 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and it’s tired and lame now. The evil undead bad guy attacks immediately and unceasingly. There’s a surprise. There’s nothing here.

Unchained!
by Bruce Norman
AD&D DL
Levels 6-10

LOATHE.
Dragonlance. Tinker gnomes. Gully dwarves. Are you still reading? Why? Why would you keep reading after I disclosed all of that? In this adventure you wander through a forest trying to kill a clockwork dragon possessed by an evil dragon spirit. The party gets techno items from the gnomes, which turns the adventure in to more of a trip to R&E in Paranoia than a D&D adventure. Dead knight bodies, a pissy wounded copper dragon, a gully dwarf village. This is just an utter piece of shit. Wander the forest in the company of a gully dwarf guide while doing nothing but encountering boring patrols and lame wandering encounters. An NPC mage shows up, crazy, who is mildly amusing. It’s not enough. This thing is 14 pages long and has six encounters. The designer tries to interject some flavor by giving some of the wanderers some personality but there’s no way its going to come through in the brief combats that happen. This adventure is an exercise in how much torture the players can take from the designer & DM. Gully Dwarves! Bullshit tinker gnome crap! Oh boy, what FUN! I can’t wit to try on the iron man armor that malfunctions! Returning the dead bodies of the knights gets you some recognition from their order, which is a nice touch. The NPC mage was previously driven mad by the tinker gnomes, so, maybe, a better way to run the adventure would be to ally with him and wipe out the tinker gnomes and gully dwarves. Murder Hobos …. HO! Sic semper evello mortem Kender!

Holy shit! That’s a great campaign idea! Mashup the necromongers from Riddick with the BEST D&D game world, Spelljammer! The party roams the D&D universe wiping out the most annoying people. Think of the pure unadulterated JOY of wiping out gully dwarves, tinker gnomes, and kender! Dragonlance would be like El Dorado, the culmination and reward for all he hard work cleansing the other planets! Too much, you think?

Rank Amateurs
by John Terra
D&D
Levels 1-3

Hey, John Terra, FUCK. YOU. ASSHOLE. The designer, John Terra, contributed to one of the worst RPG products of all time: WG7 Castle Greyhawk. In this pile of steaming crap he has the players taking on the role of the humanoids. They go to a humanoid inn, explore some ruins, and go to a town on a mission is diplomacy. And almost everyone talks in a new gersey/ganster accent; how fun! This is a joke adventure. I like humor in my adventures but I don’t like adventures written by people who don’t like D&D. Bar fights, drinking contests, more bar fights, follow the marked trail, explore some ruins with the bugbear ghosts that talk in the same lame jersey slang. There is a nice skeleton pit where they claw and grab at ankles and a hill giant NPC to make friends with. Once the group gets to town the townspeople attack and you get to cut your way back to the gates.

I drank most of a 5th of Black Bush in 3 hours yesterday; this is not my finest work.

The Cauldron of Plenty
by Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is a celtic-themed adventure in a giants cave. There are four or five pages of backstory that amount to the characters needs to grab a magic food kettle from a giant in order to feast the kings warband so they’ll go raiding. There’s a good celtic theming in this, and while the cave is small and straightforward in its layout (about 18 rooms) the adventure does do a good job with the monster. Namely, you can talk to some of the monsters.The wandering table, in particular, for the wilderness areas has a good little sentence or two after each encounter listing which adds quite a bit to the encounters. Goblins are looking for a lair, ghouls with a grievance against their former lord, and ogre looking for a goat or fox to eat. Some of the encounters are ruined by “they attack immediately!” in the case of the ghouls or “they try to get close to the party to attack” in the case of the goblins. But the additional detail there is more than enough to NOT run the encounter that way and that’s invaluable. The actual encounters in the cave run to mundane, which is too bad. There a cave with a waterfall in it, but its completely wasted, there’s nothing to it. So why is it in the adventure? Everything should contribute to the adventure, and this doesn’t, nor do many of the other rooms in the caves. Some of the rooms have a bit of nice window-dressing (a collection of helmets, some quite dented!) and a nice tea storage room. Those are both nice bits of flavor, but they don’t save the rooms from the mundane that infect them. The treasures and magic items are not very interesting, for the most part. A wizards lair provides a bit of variety in treasure but “jewelry to value of 3000gp” is not trying at all. There is some nonsense about bargaining withe the giant, and percentages of success, but the real is on one of the solutions mentioned: getting the giant to join the kings warband in exchange for the cauldron. Double-win for the king and win for the giant, a perfect solution!

The Bane of Elfswood
by Stephen J. Smith
D&D
Levels 15-18(!!)

This is a trip through a forest to hunt undead. The high-level challenge comes simply by making the undead 12HD. That’s a pretty simplistic way to create a high level adventure. The idea is that the group wanders around the forest, having wandering encounters, and then eventually the primary undead picks up their trail and attacks them. The wandering encounters are generally not great, just a simple list of monsters, almost all of which seem out of place for an elf-protected wood A gargantuan orc is presented as a straight-up combat instead of the cool roleplay experience it could be. Two other wandering encounters involve a band of trader sprites and a pixie wandering hermit. The hermit is particularly irritating since he talks in riddles and doesn’t give the whole story of the forest. There are a small handful of programmed hex encounters, six I believe, with the only interesting one being a group of ogres lynching one of their own for cowardice. It’s presented as a combat, which is too bad because it has endless social opportunities, if only the encounter offered more detail in that area. There’s not much to like in this one, it being just a straight-forward undead hack where the undead are wandering a forest.

Jammin’
by James M. Ward
AD&D SJ
(Any Level)

Spelljammer Alert! Speljammer Alert! Spelljammer is, of course, one of the best campaign worlds ever published. And this one by Ward! Note the Ward influence immediately: it’s any level. This in spite of the fact that the party will face hordes of weird creatures. This is an Old School attitude. Load up on chickens and blankets, it’s time to go plundering! This isn’t really a Spelljammer adventure. It’s the exploration of a Spelljammer ship that has crashed on the PC’s world, and thus perhaps GIVES them a Spelljammer ship to play with. Ward is the soul of brevity: only two pages of background before the adventure begins! The party is hired by a of a thief to go check out the ship and turn over a finders fee to the rogue (classical usage of the term) and the a couple of thieves guilds. The ship is 22-ish encounters with … the undead! So many of these adventures would be so much better with an elevator pitch right up front to get you in the mood while reading. Ghost ship, tattered sails, skeletons around, spectre captain whose goal is to wipe out all life in the universe. If you went in knowing that then the adventure makes A LOT more sense. The captain floats around and keeps an eye on the party: fleeting shapes just out of vision, ghostly faces in walls, the usual ghostly stuff. Then when he thinks he knows who he is dealing with, he comes at them. Supplementing the spectre are a bunch of “balls of bones”; a rally clever way to store and launch your crew at another ship, IMHO. They are stacked up and just WAITING for someone to mess with them so the whole pile comes down and they reanimate. There’s great magic items in the adventure, like a book that you can shove food in to and pull food out of, and ghostly wheelocks (which I don’t usually get in to, but they work well here) and a small amount of backstory in a BRIEF ships journey to give a little background. I usually HATE logs & journals and diaries, find them just a cheap way to communicate things. A ships log makes sense though, and, besides, doesn’t really play much part in the adventure, just being a cute add-on for players who are interested in discovery. I note that the ship crashed because of a lack of magic items items for the furnace, yet the ship seemed stuffed with magic. Go Figure. Oh, and the helm on this ship is a Black Dragon throne/recliner thing with the furnace in fact of that. I imagine the dragons eyes glowing when the thing is fired up! Who WOUND”T want that? You’d have to be crazy! That’s the key to a good item, it makes the party drool over it and thing “Awesome!”. Sword, +1 doesn’t do that. Ring of Feather Falling doesn’t do that. Black Dragon throne with glowing red eyes DOES it. Nice job on this adventure.

Incident at Strathern Point
by Matthew Maaske
AD&D
Levels 8-10

This is an adventure at an abandoned river trading station, that turns out to have some demons in residence. It’s got a nice realistic looking map and a grim and gritty feel. The demons, four of them, are well described with lots of variation to their features. The layout of the station has lots of interesting features to get in to trouble with: a barrel ramp, rough cut steps outside, a couple of towers to fall of of, and a barge to end up on. I really like this, you can just imagine PC’s getting trapped in a tower, leaping off of it, being assaulted by barrels, and slipping on the rough stairs as they run. The variety of terrain and features in the map bring a nice little tactical feel to it while still feeling VERY realistic of a river trading station. More so than most of the adventures, this one feels real, hence the grim and gritty vibe. It deals with death, trauma, demons, domestic abuse, and revenge in a really good way. This FEELS like a demon-haunted adventure. It’s wordy and the treasure count seems low to me, but it delivers. It would work well in either Harn or 2E, which I think speaks well to its design. The best encounters kind of stick with you. You read them one, maybe twice, and they are completely internalized. You need not hardly refer to the encounters again during play, its like you wrote it yourself. This entire adventure is like that. Read it once, maybe twice, and just run it with the map and maybe some creature stats. That’s all you need.
The Chest of the Aloeids
by Craig Barrett
AD&D
Levels 6-8

This is a linear adventure in ancient Greece. The players get transported there, back in time, and go on an adventure to save Hermes before he became a full god and ensure the gives the lyre to Apollo. The characters see an omen. From that point on they are led around by the nose, told to go from a to b to c, and have the adventures at each location before moving on. It’s not that he individual encounters are good or bad, its that the characters are led around by the nose to most of them. Getting off the railroad means fighting your way through hordes of centaurs. Go to a oracle shrine nearby to get your omen read, get transported to ancient Greece, meet a hunter, who directs you to a village, who sends you to a beekeeper, who takes you to a caste. They all have a decently Greek feel to them, but in total it doesn’t feel like Greece, or even a region. It just feels like a set of disconnected events. The citadel of the Cyclopes, the finale, may be the worst. It’s got a map and lots of rooms but just has a general description. The players are meant to find Hermes and then they get to watch him run around a play a joke on the cyclops. Whoop-de-doo. I love being a spectator when I ‘play’ D&D. Too many of the encounters are too tough for he party and yet presented like violence is the answer. I must say though the rewards are good. It works out to be a kind of wish for each character, but takes the form of a kind of cell phone to Hermes. You got him out of trouble so he’ll show up and get you out of trouble. I like those sorts of things. I don’t think players gets wishes frequently enough, especially when they come so strongly flavored.

The Ship of Night

Wolfgang Baur
AD&D
Levels 7-9

This is an underdark adventure, ala D1, to find an abandoned dwarven city and “the ship of night”. Some old lame hook wants the party to bring back word of what this weird thing is; her only references are a budget in some accounting references and the name of the project: The Ship of Night. What follows is an underdark adventure straight out of D1, complete with player map and hex & line map of the underdark showing major, minor, and natural passages. I really really really don’t like the hook; it strikes me as not trying at all and that MAKES HULK ANGRY!!! A sage wants you to go look in to things. It’s not even a Rosebud type thing, which be kind of cool, just the normal everyday old “sage wants us to go”. Dragonslayer AND Citizen Kane did it better. The underdark has six programmed encounters and a wandering monster table. The wandering monsters table is used, as instructed, to “liven up a dull section of travel.” That is lame. In a dungeon the wanderers act as a kind of push your luck timer; the more time you are in the more danger you are in as your resources are depleted. Wilderness wanderers though, because they only happen once or twice a day, should be full fledged encounters; interesting things that happen with interesting folks, be they monsters or otherwise. This is just a generic underdark wandering monster table that isn’t particularly interesting at all, at least not in the way D1, D2, and D3’s were. The five encounters are, generally, less than thrilling. Two are guardposts, straight out of D1. Just little set pieces with derro (the primary enemies in this adventure.) There’s also a little derro mining camp, a gargoyle lair, and the main derro encounter, in the lost city the players are traveling to. By far the most interesting encounter is the lair of a drow necromancer. She’s got a nice little set up going, along with her juju servants and, remarkably, does NOT attack on sight. Her area is well described and interesting and she’s put out there as an ally to the party. I find that sort of thing MUCH more interesting than a plain old ‘she attacks immediately!’ type of encounter. Roleplay possibilities abound when the monsters & creatures are treated like real people with their own ambitions other than simply murdering the party. Don’t get me wrong, I love shivving an NPC in the throat with a dull spoon till their head pops off and then using it for a puppet as much as the next PC, but at least give me the option, and the background support, to talk to them first. That way I can get to know them, get avarice over their treasure, and weigh my chances for murder hobo’ing. There is some oblique references to her being at odds with the derro but this is never really explored or explained, just a reference to ‘her enemies the derro.’ and another in their section about her being an enemy. I’m not sure if something was left out because of a bad edit or what, but that needed to be expanded upon.

The main derro kingdom/encounter is weird. The whole thing is set up with heavily guarded gates such that you can’t sneak in. And the derro attack on sight. But then there’s this whole ‘market day’ thing going on inside, as well as a secret cult opposed to the derro king who is causing all the trouble, and other references that make you think that it should have SOME social component to it. It’s a little underpopulated as well, and lacking any notes on what a coordinated response to an attack from the party would entail. That sort of thing is critically important in any lair encounter with intelligent opponents. There’s some handwaving about them all being geniuses but not acting together because they are chaotic, but the whole place just feels wrong. A lot of work could turn the derro kingdom in to a Kua-toa style encounter with a social element. You could also just steal the drow necromancer for a different adventure. As with most adventures from this time period, it takes more work to prep and salvage things from it then it is probably worth.

White Fang
Nudel D. Findley
AD&D Solo

A solo adventure for a 10th level human thief. I don’t review Choose Your Own Adventure books, although I sometimes enjoy them. I suspect that every “all thieves” adventure ever written would work better as a solo thief adventure, so there’s that.

Pride of the Sky
Randy Maxwell
D&D
Levels 8-12

This is an adventure through a man-scorpion temple to grab some long-forgotten loot. It tries REALLY hard to deliver interesting content, and, for the most part, succeeds. But when it’s bad it’s REALLY bad. The bad starts with the backstory. A floating sky ship business lost one of its ships while it was transporting the treasure horde of a wizard form one city to another. The ship crashed and the players get a map willed to them by a dead relative. I LUV the gonzo of Spelljammer but I don’t get in to the magical ren-fair/economy thing that is implied behind the “magical airship transportation service” background. I also don’t dig the whole “you get a map via a will” thing. That’s a hook that’s not trying at all. Maybe some Nigerian 419 scam thing or an underworld deal with shady intent would be a better way to introduce the map to the players. Both are certainly more interesting than “you inherit a will.” That kind of curtsey/simplistic stuff that shows up in the world of Mystera/Basic D&D never struck me as cool though, even though basic D&D is my favorite system by a long shot. There’s an overland journey involved but nothing interesting in it, just some throw-away encounters on a wandering table that add nothing to the adventure.

The man-scorpion temple, the core of the adventure, is another matter. It is FULL of flavor, but it is poorly communicated in many places. It’s supposed to be a cave-like place made out of the skeleton of a HUGE red dragon. The bones and so on make up the ceiling walls of the rooms while a whole shit-ton of melted and slagged treasure make up the floor. That’s pretty nice in concept but fails in practice, as the map is just a generic “square rooms” thing and most of the descriptions don’t take advantage of the the skeleton or treasure as one of the room elements in anything other than a window-dressing sort of thing. Even then, it’s not really well described. The manscorpions get a nice treatment though. They go bare-chested, decorate themselves, braid their hair, and paint their giant scorpion pets/guards with bright colors and intricate patterns. The temple doesn’t really do anything interesting, encounter-wise, and the undead section tacked on to the end feels tacked on. Nice concept for the adventure but poorly executed.
Ancient Blood
Grant & David Boucher
AD&D
Levels 3-5

This is an arctic overland expedition followed by the exploration of an old giant fortress. It’s got a strong norse feel to it. The players are hired to deliver a box of dried plants (herbal medicine) to a village about 200 miles away. Once there they see the headman/king get killed by a frost giant ghost. They then travel 300 more miles, hopefully, through arctic conditions to get to an old frost giant fortress to break the ghosts curse. There’s a whole “wilderness survival guide”/”torture the players with bookkeeping for rations, etc” thing going on that I don’t think adds any fun to the adventure at all. I can go to work if I want to find the crossover point to carrying rations/winter supplies to travel speeds. I’ve played Source of the Nile and it isn’t fun. The journey to the village has a nice little wandering monster table that adds some encounter notes/suggestions next to each entry. I like that sort of thing. it prompts the DM to riff off of it and loads their imagination up to run the adventure. Tribesmen are from one of the villages and may travel with the party back. Animals act like animals. These little notes add a lot to the adventure. The programmed encounters, two, are nice also. The party passes by a steaming crack in the ground … who wants to go look! Just that visual imagery of seeing that after a snow adventure is enough to sucker me in. There’s also a nice little encounter with a group of half-ogre trappers. It’s written more like a straight up combat, even through they each get names and some description that would imply there can be a social element. The social path would be much cooler and interesting. The village the group reaches has a nice little “get there in a blizzard and be ushered in to the great house to get stranger out of the storm” thing going on which, again, I think builds a lot of cool things up in my mind as I’m reading, which in turn allows me to communicate the scene and feel better to the party. There’s a page-long read-aloud in the longhouse that night that ends with a railroaded killing of the chief. That’s less cool, but I understand why its there. The group then travels to an old fortress and explores it. Both the journey, a shield-wall, and the fortress proper is full of GREAT imagery. Blood fountains, centuries old sacrifices hung out, and other great little staged scenes. It does have a very ‘desolate beauty’ thing going on, similar to the snowy cabin/forest in Legend, but much better done, with crunchy snow drifts, giants tables, and eerie silence everywhere. It’s got a kind of quiet horror thing going on that only an abandoned and silent place in the snow can deliver, combined with the weird proportions brought by giant sized tables and rooms. A nice nordic gothic feel, if there is such a thing. It’s a little slow for my tastes but beefing it up would ruin the slow burn. If someone can figure out how to solve that paradox then this would be worth running, if the “wilderness torture” game problem could also be solved.

An interesting observation: a lot of adventures try to force square pegs in to round holes. They want to do something other than a location based adventure but all they know how to do is emulate the location-based adventures they’ve seen in other published adventures. Hence we get social adventures … built around a location-based keyed room description. Or mystery adventures … built around a location-based keyed room description. Even then the keyed room descriptions tend to fit a standard format that has some kind of OCD need to mention everything thats in the room “4 daggers and 3 cloaks” when they have no bearing on the adventure. Words are precious. Every one should be used for maximum impact. If you’re running a stealth based infiltration adventure then provide me with the details pertaining to that. If you are running a scavenger hunt adventure then provide me descriptions based around that. Don’t just list footlocker contents because the last adventure did it that way.

By the Wayside
Tim Villademoros
AD&D
Levels 6-10

This is a weird little adventure. It’s a little village in a swamp with a monster leaving nearby. That’s it. The idea is that the party comes to the village looking for [something] and while there gets messed with by a hag. They eventually go in to the swamp and kill the hag and her buddy. I _think_ that’s the goal the designer was going for anyway. There’s some description of the village, some description of the a couple of people in the village, and a lot of detail given to how the hag can fuck with the party without the party getting wind of it. There’s a relatively good scummy bar/inn in the town, with a couple of decent NPC’s running around in it. In particular, there are a couple that are there just for the PC’s to hire. That’s a decent addition and something that few town & village adventure do. They both have a decent little bio and some motivations, which is exactly what they should have, and need, in order to run be run effectively. There’s a small garrison well described, as well as an alligator farm, and the home of an old wise woman. That’s not exactly a wealth of information to run a town adventure, but what is provided IS good. Well described and very flavorful. The hag runs around, invisible, changing self, passing without trace, undetectable, etc, etc, etc, messing with the party. The old wise woman, who the village hates, is also a target that the hag uses in order to foment trouble with the party and distract them. The swamp adventure is really just a little throw-away wandering monster table that ends in the hag lair. There’s a little tactical challenge in defeating the hag and her monster ally. What IS really interesting is a lot of the treasure. Tim does a great job putting in wonderful descriptions for many of the magic items. It’s not a helm of underwater action, it’s a helm of highly polished steel, with a crest in the shape of a kraken throwing its tentacles down in coils to form the eye and nose guards, with green crystal lenses over the eye guards. That’s a pretty sweet magic item. Likewise, the crystal ball and bowl of commanding water elementals get great descriptions. That’s exactly the sort of detail that I’m looking for and expect. THAT”S what the designers job is: communicating their imagination to the DM. This is a rough adventure; its going to take a lot of extra work for the DM to run the village appropriately and add the flavor that the swamp deserves. And if you can do that then you don’t need the adventure and probably resent having to wade through all the text.

 
The Vanishing Village
Marcus Rowland
AD&D
Levels 3-5

This isn’t really an adventure; it’s a single encounter. There’s a bunch of mimics the size of houses that pretend to be a village. How is that an adventure? And how does it take three pages to describe it? But, hey, at least there’s no treasure! There is nothing to this. Yes, the pretext is nice. No, it doesn’t justify being in here. It’s just an idea that someone had that deserves to be expanded in to a full adventure and instead gets a single encounter setup.

The Serpent’s Tooth
Nigel D. Findley
AD&D
Levels 3-6

A seedy little dive bar in a seedy part of of a seedy town. The group is hired to case the joint for the town guard. Over five days they hang out, watch the place, and report in. At the end they get paid. A couple of days later the assassin that was impersonating the town guard kills the bar owner. Yeah! There are a dozen or so NPC’s that are well described, to the point of being overly described, and there are a decent number of events that take place over the five days. It takes six pages to get through the background and NPC’s before the meat of the adventure is arrived at: the events! which take up one third of a page. Hmmm … misplaced priorities anyone? The inn gets a pretty exhaustive room listing, the vast majority of which is completely useless. The purpose of the second floor description is for the party to sneak up and map it out. The emphasis should be on aspects of the rooms which enable that, or provide red herrings or other things for the party to report on. But not here, oh no, just line after line of useless descriptions of how many toothpicks are in a jar in a forgotten locker in a useless closet. The core concept here is good but there is not enough emphasis on the events and the NPC’s have too much description. You need a brief summary of the various actors to make it easy to refer to them during play.

 
Encounter in the Wildwood
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is another non-adventure. Five pages to describe an ambush by a set of monsters in a glade. It’s a bunch of weird mish-mash monsters, like cyclopskin, a boggle, needle-men, and the like, all thrown together in order to provide a tactical challenge to the group. That’s an encounter, not an adventure. It’s also a SHORT encounter in any form other than a Dungeon magazine article. It IS interesting to see a kind of early lead-in to the 4E mixed monster encounters/tactical setups with artillery, controller, and basher monsters.
House of Cards
Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 9-12

This is an adventure in the hideout of a criminal gang. The hideout if half mundane hideout and half weird tomb place. Sometimes you have a good idea and you try REALLY hard to build an adventure around it … but it just doesn’t work. This is an example of that. Or maybe it isn’t and DOES work. But I doubt it. There’s a gang war in town with the old guard criminal gang, a VERY loosely organized of crime buddies/groups. The new gang, the Night Masks, is coming in and running a kind of gang war. The group is charged to go fix it. And then there’s the bullshit. There must be a PAGE of text that describes how the party is NOT supposed to fix it. No baseless accusations. No mercenary hiring. No militia. No fun. This sort of stuff is repeated later on in the adventure when it takes a page or so to describe how the doors open and the 99 ways that the group CAN’T use to open the door. No magic. No passwall. No teleportation. No Bibgy’s hands. No polymorph. No fun. No creativity. The doors (some of them anyway) DO have an interesting mechanic with a Deck of Many Things card set in to the door. That’s the “bright idea”/gimmick of the designer, and it’s a decent little idea. It takes forever to gi through the 99 permutations of how the party can’t bypass the doors, which is lame. The adventure should encourage player creativity, not limit it. The headquarters is divided in to two halves, the first half of which is just mundane and consist of long and boring descriptions of various guardrooms and barracks. It’s not really interesting or special and just consists of boring and uninteresting room description after boring and uninteresting room description. The second half, the old tomb portion, is more interesting. Of course all of the wall are lined with lead, etc, in order to gimp the party. There IS a cool encounter or two inside this section, including a charnel pit packed FULL of undead. Skeletons, wraiths, a shadow, a yellow mustard, all down in the pit and clawing to get out. That’s pretty sweet and the picture that accompanies it adds a lot to the flavor. The idea of a gang war with a couple of competing groups, and each group having a bunch of of little sub-groups, is also cool. The Shadow Society, the Sultans of Sunset, and the Midnight Maharaja’s are all gangs that are referenced, through throw-away monster encounters in the dungeon, but the entire surface/city portion of the adventure is pretty much glossed over. That’s too bad. I’d have really liked to have a seen a good social adventure up in the town that is then combined with the dungeon/fortress portion, maybe with an infiltration aspect. Instead we get the little tacked on “gang war” sentences and an idea forced upon us that, while cool, is hammered to death in the details.