RD1 – Tale of the Ruby Dragon

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

rd1

by N. Alan Patterson
Pacesetter Games & Simulations
AD&D 2E
Levels 1-5

This is a journey through a swamp to a wizards home, and then an adventure inside of it. It is the craziest product I have ever ever seen. Wait! Wait! Go read my review of DF26: The Forgotten City of Al-Arin, or go grab the adventure, it’s free on Dragonsfoot. That may have been the most silly module I’ve ever reviewed. Or maybe Palace of the Vampire Queen was. They are silly in different ways. This MASTERPIECE combines the two in to some new MAGNIFICENT form of performance art! As far as I can tell, it is completely serious. I can’t tell. I’m not familiar with the Forgotten Realms. I have no idea is the silliness is from the Forgotten Realms setting or unique to this adventure. Doesn’t matter. THIS IS AWESOME! I have a copy of Designers and Dragons on my sunroom table. I’m going to replace it with this. In spite of what it is, a mostly juvenile attempt at an adventure, it also has some crazy kind of imagination behind it that A LOT of product is missing. Dear god, go buy it. But not at $35; find it cheaper. Then buy it. And read it. You can’t use it but it will stand proudly on my shelves right next to the joke/serious copy of Die Macher (Hey kids! Who wants to play a 6-hour game about west german political elections!) and my reprinted Palace of the Vampire Queen. Get inspired!

This thing is CrAzY! I have no idea where I got; given the Pacesetter back cover I suspect I picked it up at their booth at GenCon. Looks like it ran me $35 for numbered copy 80 out of 95. There’s a little bit of history on it over at the Acaeum. Near as I can tell. It’s some kind of self-published amateur adventure that Pacesetter picked up to do a republish of, that looks more like a mimeograph than anything else. It belongs to the same genre as Palace of the Vampire Queen, but dials that style up to 11. Let me quote:

“… Sloath (mature Bronze dragon from 7,000 years ago) was hunted by a league of Silver dragons from the Talons of Justice. They caught Sloath outside of his lair and captured him. He was brought to trial and found guilty of his crimes by Sardior the ruby dragon., judge of all dragons.” …” About 3,000 years ago a young red arrived at the council of the Talons, and declared he had killed Sloath and demanded that the curse be lifted so he could claim the hoard of Sloath. The hoard had been kept under protective custody by the council since the trial, at least what was left of it after paying restitution to the cities and towns Sloath had destroyed.” … “a squadron of silvers flew to the spot in the which the young red had said he killed Sloath.” and it goes on and on! It’s like the most bad ass junior high dragon boner fantasy of all time! The ruby dragon comes from the astral plane with his honor guard or emeralds and jades! Evil dragon sour out of pocket dimensions to kill him! On and on it goes!

This may be the most brutal adventure I’ve ever seen in my life. I LOVE IT! On the way through the swamps there’s some killer wilderness encounter tables. On the Tun plains you can meet B. Anna, the level 12 druid, female elf, traveling in Baba Yaga’s Hut! In the swamp you can meet hydras, trolls, ghasts, ghouls, a catoblepas, and ALL sorts of other interesting people. It’s just a d20 table with a single entry next to each line. 19. Hydra. 8. Catoblepass. It’s wonderful! The set encounters are ever better though! Encounter one is a WIll O’ Wisp that leads you some mound sin the swamp … that house THREE SHAMBLING MOUNDS! And if the mounds are taking too much damage then the Wisp strikes the mound with its electrical attack to heal it 2d8! AND THIS IS A FIRST LEVEL ADVENTURE! I’m TOTALLY serious. It was written for a con and there are 8 1st level pre-gens included! Encounter two is a Sea Hag! And it goes on and on! You could play this fucking thing like Paranoia and give everyone six lives and it would STILL be a bloodbath disaster! But … ready for this? it’s still better than many other adventures! There are at least two encounters in which the party can make friends, with bullywugs and with ogres! There’s some foreshadowing as well, with ravens picking at a dead ogre body. The deadly stuff goes on and on and on! Even Jim Ward would have trouble with the number of deaths this things offers!

The wizards house/temple is ever BETTER! Almost every other room is a dead end with a secret door leading to it AND NO DESCRIPTION. Now look, I don’t need a description for every room. As the author indicates in the text, a lot of room s are empty, just make up a description. But a SECRET room? On a long hallway with LOTS of other rooms? With AT LEAST half of them being secret rooms? Can I at least have a room title? No? FUCKING GENIUS! I don’t know where to go from there. The room with two giant badgers in it, and a cat litter area? Oh! Oh! No! The first room! The walls are hung with banners, even though its just a small 10×10 room. Behind one of them is a hole with a water moccasin in it. Who is this guy? He may be the most imaginative person of all time! And behind another is a fine silver shield with the symbol of an oak tree on it, +1, that druids can use without penalty. Oh be still my heart! He gave the shield a description AND made it non-standard! This adventure tears me to PIECES. One the one hand it is a complete piece of junior high dreck. On the other hand it shows just how much imagination there can be, and is, behind such things before life (or, a degree in Set Theory, in my case) beats it out of you.

The whole adventure is like this. This kind of crazy mish-mash of ideas just thrown together, almost at random, with just enough bizarre behind them to make them work in some kind of insane logic. Don’t get me wrong; there is no way on gods green earth or his gamma irradiated red one that I could EVER run this. It’s just … wow … but as an example of the kind of free-flowing imagination of a pre-teen? It is a pretty damn fine example of that.

I’m gonna frame this thing as an object of art and put it in the entryway of my home. I’m totally serious. I know it sounds like I just insulted the adventure and its designer ten ways to Sunday but god damn I love the charm of these older/amateurish products. It’s like buying a house designed by the guy who designed the cities sewers in 1876: it has style and charm that is unique unto itself.

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #18

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

d18
These early Dungeons seem rife with the Wall of Text issue. Far, far too many times the wall of text doesn’t add anything useful to help the DM run the adventure and is simply useless background and history. This ends up being distracting and makes it harder to find the important bits during the game. There seems to be this mania to describe ancient history and provide explanations as to WHY something is going on. LONG explanations. Explaining something kills the mystery & wonder.
Irongard
Ed Greenwood
AD&D
Levels 1-3

This is a short five room exploration of a wizards lair. It starts by doing everything wrong that I loathe in an adventure hook: a railroad hook. While walking through a marketplace the group sees a wizard sitting on a backpack. Then he just disappears, leaving his pack behind. If the characters mess with the pack then the wizard reappears, accuses them of looting his pack, and curses them. If the party doesn’t mess with the pack then the wizards reappears and curses them. If the characters attack him … well … he has 80 bajillion protection spells cast. and if brought to 6hp or less he instantly teleports away, and, if the DM wants, all attacks against him have no effect. It seems like this goes on and on and on. What’s the point of this? Why all of the justification for protecting the wizard when, in fact, you just end up saying “nah, you can’t kill him.” It’s a lame railroad hook and it’s a lame “DM fiat” wizard.

The adventure, proper, isn’t bad. It does have the usual “WAYYYYYY too much text to describe something simple” problem. What it does have is a lot of unique little items and decent little scenarios. I am a big big fan of the vibe that OD&D brings. There’s a certain mystery and wonder that I associate with (a good) OD&D adventure. It’s almost like you travel back in time to the first time you’ve ever played D&D .What’s that?!! A secret door behind a staircase?! A monster!!!! What’s it doing! EEEK! Things that are NOT from the books, magic items and monsters mostly, help deliver that vibe. This adventure does that. There are, to be sure, monsters and magic items from the books but also more than few that are not. Healing potions that make you glow blue. A staff with feather fall and light powers, and a 1 helm that face plate that phases in. These are good items, at least compared to the normal book items that infect these early Dungeon Magazines. Magic items should communicate wonder and mystery, not be a victorian-era listing of predictably catalogued powers. This adventure tries. There’s also some decent imagery in the adventure. A great statue marks the entrance, with a stone slab to be shoved aside. There’s a skeleton on a throne … there’s flying daggers and stirge in a box. I know! I know! It sounds hackneyed! They are, instead, classics, and I love the classics. The difference is that Greenwood provides enough visual imagery in his writing that the scene comes alive in your mind. The descriptions appeal to all of that deep down buried memory in your mind and dredges it up. The scene comes alive in your mind and you start to fill in detail yourself. THAT’S what an adventure description should do. It’s taken a little description and made it possible for you, the DM, to expand on it and riff off of it and, in turn, communicate the awesome to the players. This does that.

This is a short adventure with too much text to do what it tries to do, as was the style at the time. Greenwood does a good job on the rooms and most of the treasures.
Whitelake Mine
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is a hunting expedition in a lake to kill a giant pike that ends with an attack on a marrow lair. The gnomes are mining gemstones on the lake floor with a diving bell, the pike recently showed up and the group is hired to get rid of it. In spite of a large amount of text the gnomes and their village are not really described in any meaningful way. There’s no magic, no mystery, no alien culture, no cute little customs. Just a couple of names and some throw-away text. It doesn’t help that there’s a gnomish inventor involved and I LOATHE LOATHE LOATHE that trope. There’s just not enough interesting detail about the gnomes to help a DM bring them alive. The lake has a similar problem. While it’s supposed to be the central focus of the adventure, with the characters given a full week to explore and solve the problem of the pike, there’s just no detail about the lake at all. There’s a throw-away wandering monster table that adds nothing to the adventure at all. The lake portion, along with the map provided, is completely useless, it adds noting beyond the central pretext for the adventure. The marrow lair isn’t too terrible, with livestock grazing and mushroom rooms, and dung buckets … but it feels like a lair for a group of LAND ogres, not aquatic ogres. There’s a couple of pools of water in the cave, but that’s really the only aquatic call out. The ogres are given names, and personalities, but their personalities are just ‘kill everyone’ and they are given no pretext to interact with the party. That’s a sad waste.

There’s nothing here to help the DM run a gnome adventure. Or a lake adventure. Or a marrow adventure. Or any monsters or treasures that are not just straight out of the book. For all its size its bland and lacks detail … which seems to the the style of the time.
Tallow’s Deep
Steve Gilbert & Bill Slavicek
AD&D
Levels 4-7

This is a 35 room adventure through a goblin lair. Miners broke through to the goblin caves, got slaughtered, and a guard party has disappeared. The party is sent in to deal with the puny goblins. The twist is that these goblins are played intelligently, in both tactics and in lair defense/traps. This turns in to a Tucker’s Kobolds type of adventure, with a scattering of Grimtooth and a finale battle with 85 goblins in the common room. A decent amount of the page text is given over to goblin hit-and-run tactics and several of the rooms have a third dimension to them. Both of these are fine additions and something I wish more designers would do. The goblins have a reaction matrix, with who responds where under what conditions and how the lair changes when it’s on alert. The third dimension, through ledges, two story rooms, sme-level stairs, and the like, offers both tactical options to the characters and the goblins as well as providing the confusion, or, perhaps, lack of certainty, that I find is critical for keeping players in the dark. Players want to stamp out all uncertainty and weird mapping works against that, thus contributing to the apprehension that is so critical to setting mood. This is a tactical adventure, and little else. There’s not much to investigate, and not much unusual of different about the lair (except for the traps) except for an encounter or two at the beginning with some random monsters that have been thrown in. This is much more of a ‘realistic’ goblin lair, and will be extremely deadly if the party is not prepared for that. Some of the traps seem a little forced, aka: The Grimtooth Factor, but are not beyond the realm of possibility for creatures defending their home. Dropping giant centipedes on the characters heads through holes in the ceiling, for example, and similar use of dungeon pests, appeals to me, as does the use of the goblins breaking a dam to flood the party out. This should have a very claustrophobic feel, just as Balin’s Tomb does in Fellowship, and even goes so far as to include rhythmic drumming. This one is all about that feel of a slog through vietnam war claustrophobia.

 

Crocodile Tears
Marcus L. Rowland
AD&D OA
Levels 4-6

I like OA adventures. I can’t stand the game but I love the adventures; the talking animals and demons and celestial bureaucracy stuff has such a fairy tale feel to it … and I LOVE a fairy tale feel. It works directly against the typical BE A HERO/BOOK-STANDARD D&D vibe from the time period. This adventure has the party venturing in to a cursed village to win a bet. Along the way they run in to a variety of situations right out folklore, all with the usual (WONDERFUL) OA vibe. I even like the hooks and I almost NEVER like the hooks in adventures. In this one there’s a great two-fer offered in which the characters are tasked by their lord to keep their eyes & ears open for unusual things in the province since there are rumors of rebellion afoot. OR the party could be from a neighboring province and keeping their eyes & ears open for THAT lord, looking for signs of weakness to he can invade. For some reason these just strike me as excellent hooks. It’s a decent pretext for the party being together, being in the area, and investigating things, all without the entire set up being too forced. Anyway, the group meets a couple of asshole in a inn, neer-do-weels pretending to be travelers. But, rather than just being of your usual D&D-adventure murderous types, they are just jerks to the party, and after introducing the concept of a cursed village nearby, bet the characters they won’t go. Honor and cold hard ch’ien are at stake AND the party is supposed to be looking in to freaky shit in the province. Multiple pretexts! Not the best of hooks, those appeal directly to the players rather than the characters, but still very good. There’s a little sub-plot about everyone finding someone to hold the stakes while the party goes off to bring back the signboard of the inn in the cursed village. (I LOVE the bit about the signpost. It’s so simple and just feels right as the way to prove you’ve been somewhere.)

There are five or so encounters on the way to the cursed village, but only two are really meaningful. They do pack a punch though. One is a peasant woman who warns the party to danger ahead … who is actually a ghost … but not a malicious one … unless the party are jerkfaces. That’s a very fairy tale thing to do. Similarly, there’s a gorge with a cut rope bridge, forcing the party to go over a ford at the base, where a kappa lives. A kappa that loves cucumber. This is one of those great talking animal encounters straight out of folklore. Be nice, put up with it and flatter it and offer it gifts and get off free. Be a jerkface and face the monsters wrath. This is how almost EVERY intelligent creature encounter should be in D&D. The cursed village has more good encounters, from a trapped baby tako caught in a bear trap to old mud-covered buildings and dead samurai with warnings, and, of course, the giant crocodiles of the adventure title. The final battle with the crocs could use a little more detail and a little more set-piece build up. The village is decently described but not generally in a way that assist in running a “the party is fighting a giant croc that is crashing through and demolishing buildings” kind of way.

The OA adventures in Dungeon have been a high-point for me, generally successfully delivering that folklore/fairy tale/non-standard feel that I prefer in my D&D.

 

Chadrather’s Bane
AD&D
Paul Hancock
Levels 4-6

This is a wilderness/area adventure while the party is shrunk down to 1/50th their normal size. Unlike most Dungeon fair this is not a plat based or linear-ish dungeon crawl but rather a far more open sandboxy style location that can be dropped in … in spite of the central concept of “shrunken party.” While its certainly possible to drop in almost any adventure to any game, this adventure, and the subgenre it belongs to, do it much much better. It’s closer to having a small region described, with lots going on in it, than a single location. It’s this concept of “lots of things going on around this place” that gives the place the air of realism and open-ended play that I so very much enjoy. I believe the old word, since co-opted, is “module.”

The adventure revolves around an out of the way wayhouse and its surrounding plot of land. Everyone who stays n the area more than 30 minutes get shrunken down. There’s a massively long and convoluted (five or six pages) backstory and explanation of the shrinking effect, which really just boils down to “the group is short now. So is a lot of their stuff.” The absurdly long introduction, background, history, and shrinking details can scare you off but you should stick with it, the adventure get good. This mania for describing things and making them make sense is something I don’t understand. I get the suspension of disbelief thing; too much and or breaking the rules you’ve laid down make the players roll their eyes. This is something else though that seems very common from the 80’s onward: some manic desire to explain WHY. You don’t need to explain why. You’re the DM. It works that way because of magic. Elves walk around and fart fireballs. You don’t need to explain, as this adventure does, that a living force surrounds everyone and rubs off on their gear and that all that stuff gets shrunk down but not other living stuff because blah blah blah … just let it go man. You’re not being arbitrary by saying “a magic item in the fountain shrink people and their stuff.” That’s all you need.

Anyway, there are 20 or so locations described in various degrees of details, some with a dozen or so more rooms/places described in them. IE: The giant rat tunnels is one of the 20 and the tunnels might consists of a dozen or so more chambers The net effect is the building up of a kind of miniature world (get it! get it! MINIATURE! I MADE A FUNNY) of locations to visit, each with something going on. Faction. Play. Or, rather, something that could be faction play with a little work. Essentially there’s a big boss man running a little kingdom and then there are a bunch of other groups kind of hanging around the edges of the kingdom, and then several other locations to visit. You end up getting this kind of Flash Gordon/Mongo vibe, with a bunch of little kingdoms either ignored or loosely allied with Ming, but no one really happy but Ming … and Ming has his own plans. All of these groups provides a possibility for a depth of play rarely seen in Dungeon. Little of this is explicitly called out in the adventure, nor is the drone of that old favorite “they attack immediately” appealed to … too much anyway. Instead you have goblin tribes, wild elves, halfling villages, the big bads Bartertown-lite, and several other groups and NPC about in the area of the inn & gardens. I would have preferred it if a little more emphasis had been given to the social aspects/possibilities, but for the time period I think this is a home run in the “social adventure that is not some lame forced masquerade ball” genre.

I could go on at length. Goblin rapelling down form the rafters on ropes. Giants cracks in the floor under which live huge rats. A hidden staircase carved in to a table leg. A 200 foot tall fountain … jerkface gnomes, a grape press for making wine … the miniature world element is not lost nor is it overplayed. If you were looking for some inspiration and maybe a little project, I would suggest this one.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 12 Comments

Contest Winners! Bryce’s 2013 Adventure Design Contest is OVER!

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

 

Contest Over! Entries Read! Reviews Written! Post Contest Analysis … NOW!

I was really disappointed with the context entires. Given the timeframes involved I really expected a different level of quality. Instead I got a bunch of adventures in which NO ONE SUCKED! Huzzah!

That’s right. No. One. Sucked. I will not get to use my “Worst adventure EVAR?!” tag on my blog. Each and every adventure had a decent vision for what it was trying to do and, even if it didn’t make it, I could generally see where they were going. I believe I could pick up each one, read it once, and run it at a con. To be sure, they could all do something better. Some started great but trailed off in the middle and quite a few tried to do some hand waving in certain aspects. Hand waving not allowed and you have been called on it.

You’ve all done something I have not: written and published an adventure. I know I get ranty at times but I have a lot respect for anyone who puts themselves out there for criticism. You all have more balls and imagination than I. I would hope that my comments are never taken as discouragement for the work. There’s alot of hurdles to overcome in doing anything and I would not want to engage in anything that discourages people producing.

Caroline Berg wrote a d20 sci-fi adventure Amoebas in Space! Episode 23: My Spaceship for a Sandwich. This is a delightful little romp through a hotel/resort having issues. She does a great job of taking some classic elements, like angry guests, and attaching them to some bizarre Space Opera elements, like making everyone involved an Amoeba. She also tried some hand waving in certain important parts of the adventure. DENIED.

Karl Larsson wrote Dreams in the Cloud Castle. He wanted to communicate the FANTASTIC environment that Numenera embodies. I wanted to commit suicide while reading his adventure. But that was because of the movie I was watching, I promise! He started strong with a great environment and a strongly flavored temple. His cloud castle fell down on communicating his vision for the environment and in the strong dream/nightmare aspect. I wrote Karls review while a sad little boy sat in a snow storm. Also, Let the RIght One in was on Tv. Ouch! But my drama over it did catapult to #1 on The Hotness. Congrats Karl!

Phil Sbszine wrote Hive of the Giant Bees. This is a charming old school adventure full of weirdness and would be perfectly at home in any hex crawl. Given the importance of the native village Phil could have beefed up his NPC’s a bit, and been a little clearer on the bee hive proper. IE: the walls and chambers.

Simon Fairweather wrote The Missing of Cloud Bluff, a fantasy adventure. While a bit unorganized and having a few elements I loathe, he did a great job on his encounters. Many of them were great little unique set ups that provide a wide deal of variety.

Mixu Lauronen wrote a Call of Cthulhu adventure The Possession. The village and social aspect of it was well done and it had a decent CoC vibe. Again, the organization could have been better and the beginning of the end game could have been clearer.

Alex Schröder write a fantasy adventure To Rob A Witch. This one page adventure packs the full punch that one would expect from Alex. Great NPC’s, great little encounters, all delivered in the “expanded crib notes” format that a one-page dungeon provides for. Good outline of a good adventure.

Pete Douglas wrote a fantasy adventure The Six-Thousand Steps. It was full of bizarre reprobate townsfolk, good social possibilities, great environment to adventure in and nice challenges to overcome. It’s also part 1 of 2. You better finish it you SOB!

Nicholas Coriz wrote a fantasy adventure called The Tower of Madness. He got this to me in time for the contest but it is still struggling its way through the database addition, which I would pretty much be a dick to ding him for. It’s got some decent flavor in the town and set up and some decent imagery in the adventure. It also tries to get away with some hand-waving. DENIED!

I’d like to give a special shout out to a couple of folks who went above & beyond in the art department. This had no impact on my reviews, but I did find them charming. Phil has a great side-view of Middenhell and the Monastery in his adventure. Alex’s art that supplements his one-page adds a lot to the adventure. Cloud Bluff has a great hand-drawn map in it with lots of old school charm. Amoebas in Space has one of the greatest covers of all time, rivaling the Wizards Mutants Lazer Pistols covers. Hive of the Giant Bees has not only a great cover but also a great illustration of a bee-man shaman.

I’d like to also call out Karl for his layout. He did a great “2-column plus sidebar” layout that made his adventure quite easy to follow. When you compare reading his adventure to some of the others that just used a flat file it really showed by columns+margins are great. I’ve added “work up a standard adventure temple format to my ToDo list. [And this falls in to that ‘dont want to discourage people’ thing I mentioned earlier. Flat file is better than nothing.]

On to the prizes! In no particular order:

Tower of Madness wins 180GG and a random module from my collection! Yeah you! You also get a Dancing Monkey microbadge and a special autographed toilet paper roll that declares “I tried my best!”

The Possession wins 180GG and a random module from my collection! Yeah you! You also get a Dancing Monkey microbadge and a special autographed toilet paper roll that declares “I tried my best!”

Dreams in the Cloud Castle wins 180GG and a random module from my collection! Yeah you! You also get a Dancing Monkey microbadge and a special autographed toilet paper roll that declares “I tried my best!”

The Missing of Cloud Bluff wins 180GG and a random module from my collection! Yeah you! You also get a Dancing Monkey microbadge and a special autographed toilet paper roll that declares “I tried my best!”

Amoeba’s in Space! wins 180GG and a random module from my collection! Yeah you! You also get a Dancing Monkey microbadge and a special autographed toilet paper roll that declares “I tried my best!”

Hive of the Giant Bees wins 180GG and a random module from my collection! Yeah you! You also get a Dancing Monkey microbadge and a special autographed toilet paper roll that declares “I tried my best!” oh, and all the rest of the empty toilet paper rolls.

To Rob a Witch wins 180GG and a random module from my collection! Yeah you! You also get a Dancing Monkey microbadge and a special autographed toilet paper roll that declares “I tried my best!” You also win a real live mix-tape containing all of my favorite songs!

The Six-Thousand Steps wins 261GG and a random module from my collection! Yeah you! You also get a Dancing Monkey microbadge and a special autographed toilet paper roll that declares “I tried my best!”
You also win $100 CASH, AMERICAN MONEY and the VERY prestigious title of “I sucked Less Than Everyone Else in 2013 Bryce Adventure Design Contest” YEAH! YOU ARE WINNER!

I need addresses from all of you so I can mail out your prizes!

Congratulations One & All!

 

To Rob a Witch

Alex Schroder
Self published
Labyrinth Lord

You have a treasure map that leads to Kurmatesha, a witch of Hel. Find the second root of Yggdrasil, follow the frozen river to the Isla of Black Trees in the the Sea of Fog. There you shall find her greatest treasure, the Horn of the Raven Warriors, stolen from a high priest f Odin oh so many long years ago.

This is a one page adventure with A LOT of flavor. Alex hits almost all of the high notes in brining flavor and style to an adventure … in exchange for a relatively linear adventure. There’s a branching path or two here or there, but the adventure is essentially a linear plot … although it’s VERY flavorful.

The party has to find a way to the world tree and then navigate to the witches lair. Along the way they have some pre-programmed encounters. Some GOOD pre-programmed encounters. Alex has a knack for coming up with exactly the right words to use to bring a maximum amount of flavor in a minimal number of words, and he exercises this talent well in this adventure. The Freya temple is a wooden longhouse with a wold or goat head over the door, run by Anja, the priestess of a weak temple, and offers the following “Niflheim? Beware apathy and despair! It is the hell of the old and sick.” That’s pretty good stuff. It communicates a blast of flavor and gives me a pretty decent picture of how to run that part of the adventure. The entire adventure is full of those little things, ESPECIALLY when it comes to NPC’s. NJAL the drunk priest and guide. He carries the book of snakes, his wife was killed by a Set cult, and like enemies of set, honest characters, and another drink. I’m not sure how much clearer his description could be. Anyone reading that should have a great idea of what makes the NPC tick and how to improvise his actions from that point forward. It’s done in SUCH a small amount of words that it almost boggles the mind. There are maybe a half-dozen NPC’s described in that fashion and they are all very well done. There’s a ghoul tree, an evil treant with 15 arm-less ghouls hanging from its branches. Yikes! If THAT doesn’t freak out your PLAYERS then I don’t know what will! There are also some call out to some classic tropes. A silk merchant sneaks in to this hell to sell colorful things to the inhabitants of an otherwise dreary world, and a gunslinger hunts devils seeking repentance .. because he ignored his family & friends in life in order to hunt devils.

This one-page, is, essentially, just the notes that many DM’s will write up before an adventure. A rough outline. “First the party has this, then they go here, then they talk to Bob, he tells them about Y and then then they can go to Z …”What Alex has done to this classic flowchart/plot/scene-based format is provide just A LITTLE extra. Twenty words more add SO much flavor to each of the encounters. If the entire one-page contests were made of up works this good then the publishers would be in a great deal of trouble!

This is a very strong adventure and worth checking out.

The Possession
by Mixu Lauronen
Self Published
Call of Cthulhu/1920’s

A young girl possessed.
English countryside plagued by eartquakes.
Talks about wolfman and frogmen.
What’s going on?

This is an investigation of strange goings-on in a small English village that, inevitably, involves Deep Ones. I’ve never understood the fascination with the Deep Ones; it seems like every other adventure involves them. I’m land-locked in Indiana, so maybe its something primordial that comes form living next to the sea? Anyway, the party investigates the strangeness in a village and probably gets slaughtered. Multiple times. By multiple groups.

Did you know I LUV CoC? Two Origins in a row I did almost NOTHING but play in CoC adventures, three of four a day for five days. That’s a lot of CoC for even ME to handle!

There’s earthquakes that happen every day at 1:40pm. There’s a little girl who’s insane and probably possessed. There’s a folklorist that’s disappeared and there’s livestock that are in an uproar. In to this sleepy little fishing village with a lot problems the PC’s find themselves thrown … which is almost inevitably like throwing gas on a fire to put it out. I used to say that an adventure is just a pretext to get a bunch of people together so they can come up with zany ideas that blow up in their faces. That’s as much true for CoC as it is for D&D.

The center of the adventure takes place in the fishing village and this CoC adventure suffers from the same problem most do: why the hell are the party together? A table is provided, with ten or so entires, that tries to offer some pretexts as to why. They have been called in by the doctor (or priest) to consult on the little girl. They are fishermen or farmers living nearby. There’s a lot of options, none of which bad, and all of which are as forced as every other CoC ‘monster squad’ group.

The village is moderately well described, if a bit disorganized and missing a few key descriptions. The emphasis is on who lives where and what they know. This isn’t bad, in fact it correctly recognizes that the core of the village adventure is the interaction with the NPC’s. It is, however, a little … I don’t know … forced? Strained? It’s written like a D&D adventure where each person is described in their house, which makes it seem a little like the party is going to go door to door knocking and interviewing. What the adventure really needs is some events or a timeline around the folks in the village. At 6pm these people are generally in the pub. At 5am these people are coming back from fishing and visiting X house to sell/clean up, or at noon every day the doctor does Y and there’s a town dance scheduled for 7pm on Tuesday. There’s al little bot of this scattered through the entries “Bob visits the pub at night”, but it could be better organized. In addition the town is lacking a few things that the CoC players always want to visit or buy. Namely, there is no recorders office, newspaper office, etc, and many of the buildings in the town lack description of where you can buy gasoline, guns, and axes and the like. That’s going to be important later in the adventure. VERY important.

There are a couple of major clues in the village which are a little … hidden/stingy. One family is strange and the missing persons rented house is an important, and non-obvious, place. In addition the monster lair is not all that obviously found, and in fact I’m still not sure, after two readings, how the party s supposed to discover it. This could maybe be sorted out with a ‘clue list’ that has who knows what and/or how you can learn the key details of some of the important parts of the adventure. Finally, there’s some references to a non-violent solution to the adventure. I find this difficult. The thing is written in a way that make combat very likely and its not very clear how the party could broker a peace or even learn of the even BIGGER monster that is lurking in the adventure.

This isn’t too bad of an adventure and could stand in for a relatively run of the mill CoC adventure. No, I’d say above average adventure given the village people descriptions.It just needs a little more focus and organization to it to help someone run it who is not as familiar as the writer with how the entire thing fits together.

The Missing of Cloud Bluff
by Simon Fairweather
Self Published
AD&D
Levels 5-8

Orphans have been disappearing at an unusually high rate, and the party are sent to investigate. Could this be related to weird noises and strange goings-on around the cliffs at Cloud Bluff?

The opening line begs the question: just what _IS_ an acceptable rate for orphans to go missing? In my world the answer would be “110%’ SINCE I FUCKING HATE ORPHANS!!! Uh … I mean, I hate orphanages in adventures. Why do I care? Orphans are being used as slave labor by a gang of criminals in some nearby caves that also serve as a mine. Well, finally, a good use for orphans in a D&D adventure. But get this: rather than reward the orphan slavers the party is expected to be do-gooders and stop them! My wife was just watching some Moonshine reality show on Tv and the moonshiners got busted by the land owner. They had to cut him in on the action. THAT sounds like the D&D I want to play! “sorry about stabbing your best guards in the face 27 times. Looks like you might need some new protection now. How about you pay us 1000 gp a week and we wont accidentally stab any more in the face 27 times?” Maybe I’m being a little harsh. I know that not everyone like the same things in an adventure. For example, some losers like high fantasy and being a hero and saving orphans. Anyyywayyyy …

The adventure has roughly three locations: a warehouse, a cave system, and an orphanage. The problem is that its not really clear how these three sites are connected. I believe the warehouse may only be found by exploring the caves, and its pretty obvious from the rumor tables/common sense that the orphanage is a place to visit. I guess that there’s a secret door in the orphanage that leads to the caves, but the linkage doesn’t seem that strong. It’s also laid out a bit strange, with the caves up front, then the orphanage and then the warehouse.

The maps here are good, with decent detail on them that provide more than just a spatial reference. Small hallways, stairs, stone pillars and so on. There are a couple of way to get on to and off of each map, which is a detail I like to see. Many of the locations have something interesting going on in them. A weird sounding tidal pool, or a room of sand infected with nano-particles or hormone producing polyps, or the bodies of dead children falling from the ceiling. WHAT?!?! Yes! It’s raining dead kids! Bad Ass! There’s also a decent assortment of magical items present in the adventure. These range from a flash-bang ring to a “bag of holding” locket, to a cube that summons a gelatinous cube … 3′ above the users head. There really is a wide variety of encounters and magical treasure here, as well as a=some decently described non-magical treasure.

The adventure has a couple of areas that could use some more work. First is the NPC’s/monsters/smugglers/slavers. Given the possibility of investigations around town and the interactions between the thieves guild, the gangs, and the main villains, there should be a little more details bout the personalities & actions of the various NPC’s, as well as turning some of the nameless slavers in to the real boys, with motivations and actions taking place outside of the sight of the characters. Secondly, some work needs to be done on the format. I don’t usually complain about layout, and I’m not going to ding an amateur work for problems there, but the layout of this adventure does serve as good example of some poor layout. It’s essentially just a WORD file with one column and broad fonts. The amount of whitespace on the page, from the kerning, line spacing, margins, etc, is really large which I think makes it harder to focus on the text at hand. Its almost like its tiring. A little work in this area would help bring some focus to the adventure which I think it could use.

Hive of the Giant Bees
by Phil Sbszine
Self published
D&D
Levels 2-4

Thirty years ago a meteor shower fell onto a remote isle or plateau. As luck would have it, the meteors were composed of some freaky magical or radioactive rock. The rock made the local bumblebees really big. Now, a primitive tribe of the area has taken the giant bees as their new spirit totem. Oh yeah, and the MacGuffin you’re after is in there with all the honey and stingers and stuff.

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Phil includes some pidgin english and “Aunties” references that prey upon by white male guilt and make me uncomfortable. I also have a hard time talking to the local natives at the frontier historical reenactment park for the same reason. Whatever. Maybe its my problem. Or maybe Phil like to push buttons, like “Whats the sexuality of the prison warden?”

This is a great little adventure in a classic location: a giant bee hive. It’s really a location based adventure with some weak hooks to get the players there. The hooks are vaguely generic and don’t match the idiosyncratic and interesting content found later in the adventure. “A renowned collector want new species” or “and alchemist wants some freaky magic rocks for an experiment.” Nice try buddy, but I want detail! You can throw in a couple of adjectives and adverbs to liven up the hooks!

The hive has a tribe of humans living under it, which are mostly level 0. I like that; far too often the tribesmen are level 99 bad asses, and I hate that. If the party wants to wipe them out then they should be able to. The locals have some quaint customs and some interesting wandering events that are terse and give you enough to build off of. HOWEVER, if you’re going to put a village at the base of the adventure then you need to put some people in it that the party can interact with. Obviously, you can do that with the villagers present in this adventure, but what I mean is that I expect to have a couple of NPC’s detailed to an extent that if the party hangs out in the village then I can come up with some shit for them to interact with. There’s a bit of this with the shaman and his ugly son and so on, but there could be a bit more in this area in order to bring the area to life a bit more.

The bee hive is nice. It’s still not entirely clear to me how the hex map/cells work, but the encounters are fine. A: Giant Bees. How can you go wrong with that? There’s the usual honey, pollen, etc stuff for the party to mess with, as well as things like a giant bee egg, which, according to the adventure “you know, an idiot could mistake this thing for a giant pearl.” THIS! THIS! THIS! THIS! THAT’S the detail I want in an adventure. a giant bee egg that the players could mistake for a pearl! That’s money in the bank for an evening of adventuring! It’s got some great magic items, like the headdress of bee vision, which gives you 360 degree compound vision, a +2 to armor class, and a penchant for collecting pollen. BAD. ASS. Again, money in the bank. There is no way in hell any D&D player worth his salt would NOT wear that. I doubt they’ll take a helm of brilliance over that thing if given a choice. People want that kind of goofy, weird, fun magic item.

This is good stuff, go get it.

Amoebas in Space! Episode 23: My Spaceship for a Sandwich
by Caroline Berg
Self Published
d20/SciFi

A taste of things to come… After defeating the Warbling Zizifrex of An-Emhavla III, the crew of the Starship Lobosa feel they have earned some down time. After contacting their superiors at the Galactic Amorphous Space Patrol, they have been granted shore leave at the closest planet in the system, Mabrox V. Mabrox V is know for its delightful spas, spacious hotels, and gourmet sandwiches. Travel time from the crew’s present location is two days. Two uneventful days pass. The crew can almost taste the sandwiches. And then the ship lands in the stellar parking lot. As the team leaves the ship and locks it, they notice a few issues. The parking lot is strewn with red tape. There is a crowd of irate patrons milling around. And several overworked security guards are hurrying in their direction. “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to ask you to leave, the Gastronomic Glitterati is closed.” Unwilling to leave before knowing what has happened, the crew shows their credentials. The change in the guards is immediate. “GASP is here! We’re saved!” Somehow the crew no longer thinks this vacation will be as easy as pie…

Yes, it has a silly name. And yes, basing all of the adventure around various types of amoebas is a little strange. As is any attempt to make a sandwich as the goal of an adventure. But it’s still quite a bit less silly than Hitchhiker and its full of some classic tropes. It also misplaces its priorities in places and devolves in to victorian lists where it should be creating interesting situations.

The resort is in chaos, the place is abandoned, the interior is full of rogue amoeba, the parking lot is full of irate customers and gawkers, and the group just wants a sandwich. Such is the stuff of legends. It starts strong. There’s a wide variety of folks milling about outside. Irate customers. Wealthy patrons (They have reservations! ) Security guards, local police, hotel staff, hotel administrators, gawkers, sightseers, tourists, nosey townfolk … that’s a lot of people hanging around … and A LOT of opportunities to role play. There’s nice rumor table for the party to pick up bits and pieces of weird things. And here is the issue. There’s no detail. Rather than provide some interesting folks for the group to interact with, instead there’s a lack of detail. This extends in to the descriptions of the hotel. The rooms get descriptions, to the point of some of them being static lists of what is in the rooms and what they look like. But that’s just it, they are static. There’s no action. All of the encounters are left to the DM, with just general advice like “xxyyxxyy likes bread and can be found on the lower two floors.” All of the work to breathe life in to the set up is left to the DM. And while that’s certainly part of the DMs role it is also the responsibility of the designer to help provide the mechanism to do this.

That’s just not present in the adventure. While there is a nice little list of where you can find the various components for a sandwich scattered through the locations, there is not any thing that would assist the DM in providing the gameable action that is needed to surround and give life to the adventure. So, nice set up but it needs much more detail. It needs the NPC’s that the party will interact with through the adventure and it needs the set up of a dozen r so events happening inside the buildings, caused by the foreign creatures.

Tower of Madness
by Nicholas Coriz
Self published
Fantasy/D&D
Mid-to-high levels

On the outskirts of a boring looking town that holds magical secrets, characters will come face to face with bizarre chaos in an abandoned magical academy- where they’ll meet a host of dangerous weirdoes, wrestle with filth, destroy a legendary demon, and find the surprising true mystical culprit behind an explosion of unadulterated madness… Will they survive with their heads on straight? Or will they join a trove of twisted terrors in a haunted, old rickety tower until the whole universe collapses on itself? Unfortunately, there’s only one very risky way to find out…

This is an adventure through a wizards academy gone bad. It has some decent theming and the 10,000 foot view is good but it falls down when it comes to the detail. Something bad has happened at the local wizards academy and it’s sucking in other MU’s through some subtle forces. Inside is a mad world, with the mages going crazy and everything falling apart. I got a very Bioshock vibe off of it.

Let’s start with the town and the adventure lead in. The designer is going for something here, but I’m not sure he succeeds. It’s got a very magical ren-faire vibe, but then he tosses in some gonzo to top it off. It’s a town full of towers with some long involved back story that is completely unnecessary. They don’t like outsiders but value them and thrive on trade and treat them with reverence. Three towers, unmarked, have teleport portals in them to bring in good … but they are heavily used. Most of this is just lame bs … but then we get to some more interesting bits. The Oracle del Marr protects the town, and the guard ritualistically blind themselves to increase her perceptions. Cool! Even cooler if she has, like, a cloak of eyes or something that meld in to her skin and then you can steal it and use it yourself after you stab her! The Blindgaurd, the town guard, are made out to be some kind of ninja warrior class of super tacticians/blind samurai nonsense. That’s lame. Better would be if they were all MAJORLY incompetent as guards BECAUSE THEY ARE BLIND and the townsfolk don’t have the heart to tell them because of their sacrifice … or maybe they are like the agents in Flash Gordon who are all linked together with those weird eye visor things? Both are cooler than Ninja senses.

The inside of the mage academy is supposed to be some kind of twisted fallen place, kind of like in Bioshock, with Chaos Magick everywhere. There are some crazy NPC’s running around, suffering the effects of the Chaos, and some token weird shit rooms. But there’s not enough here. There’s just a list of suggestions for monsters in the tower (weights, elementals, displacer beasts, etc) and suggestions for some anomalies, like an endless hallway or stone people. The anomalies get closer, but there still isn’t enough detail. There needs to be a longer and more detailed description of the academy, its various rooms and the freaky-deaky stuff in them. Matilda the giant intelligent bat is a good example, as is the perfect cube laying on the floor covered by red and gold cloth … a mage who has accidentally compressed his body in to a perfect cube. Ewwww….! Gross! More weird, more gross, more bizarre, more Bioshock, and less “make up your own stuff.”

Dreams in the Cloud Castle
by Karl Larsson
Self published
Numenera

The town of Hypotos is for dreamers, or at least it used to be. Now the sleepers here are haunted by unbelievable nightmares. The town need heroes, heroes that can enter the Dreamlands and make dreaming right again.

This is an adventure through a cloud “castle” high in sky while the characters are dreaming. I’m not a big fan of dreaming adventures; the consequences always end up as “you die if your dream dies” or “it was all a dream and doesn’t matter.” This one is kind of a different matter though. It’s got some nice imagery to the adventure that fits in well with the Numenera mythos and avoids some of the usual traps in dream adventures. There’s a kind of … airyness to the adventure that seems … languid and … dreamy.

There’s these severn clouds that always hang over one town. No one in the town ever has nightmares its a great place to reset and rehabilitate. Well, until recently. There’s a bunch of lame hooks about being hired to investigate and the like, Once you get past all of this you can get on to the nice stuff, like how everyone who walks in to the temple falls asleep, so the priests tie ropes to peoples feet to pull them out again. The group journeys upwards, through the roof and clouds in to …

Let’s break there for a moment. Karl does a really good job on most of the beginning. A great job is done in communicating the kind of fantastic locales that I associate with (my secondhand) knowledge of Numenera. He does an excellent job in creating a picture if this little town with its dream temple and the kind of pseudo-magical/technology hybrid seven clouds/dreaming temple sort of of place. I did get more a high-medievel/Renaissance vibe from the town/region because of Karls choice of words. This places me on guard for the magical ren-faire environment of 2E, which I loathe. If instead though I back off of this and go for a ‘holy shrine’ kind of vibe then I get a much gritty/primitive vibe. Something like a shine/pilgrimage location in Harn. And once you reach there then you find out the rumors are true! It IS a magical wonderland! Anyway, the background town/shrine/set up/pretext is a good one, even if the hooks are a bit generic.

Once the core of the adventure starts, well, then, nothing. It is at this point that the adventure breaks down. The interior has a symmetrical layout and the rooms and corridors don’t really have any strong imagery associated with them. Likewise the monsters are just nightmare creatures without any real strong descriptions associated with them. The group can meet a couple of NPC’s in the castle that appeal: an old woman with a dream scepter and a man at the console of a machine. Of course, the group is tasked with repairing a broken machine, guarded by a nightmare creature, and then that fixes the broken nightmare machine and everything is fine & dandy.

The corridors and rooms are lacking something. If Karl had a strong vision then I missed it. There’s a reference to a white metal/glass feel, with the glowing footsteps sci-fi thing. There’s also a reference or two to a curved wall with a giant holoscreen type viewport that displays dreams. This, though, is as nifty as it gets, I think. I’m pretty sure Karl had a vision for this, and I can just barely grasp the edge of what he’s going for. The same goes for the monsters. I’m not completely familiar with Numenera so I could be wrong, but I think some of the monsters are from the book. That’s cool, but they need a little more to put them in context. Not just a Ravage Bear with the tips of fur purple, but he needs to be slathering, and his circling needs to be … probing, or something like that. More adjectives. Similarly, the dreams and nightmares that the adventure centers around need some beefing up. A full page at the end with a bunch of ideas of what the party sees in these bits & flashes would have added quote a bit to helping the DM come up with ideas on what to communicate to the players about what they see. Finally, there are the Spirits of the Dreamlands that the PC’s encounter. Ain’t no PC in his right mind gonna let these people get by without a cross-examination of who they are, their lives before, what the place does, the history of the world, the meaning of life, can I have 18 wishes, where are the super weapons, what the story behind Numenera. It’s the same as Gamma World, D&D, or any other adventure in which the players get a chance to get a leg up n the DM. You gotta be prepared to deal with it, and I don’t think the adventure helps you.

This is a little frustrating. I feel that Karl almost had a hold of what he was trying to do but that it slipped through his fingers.

The Six-Thousand Steps
by Pete Douglas
Self Published
OD&D

At the centre of a sprawling jungle, a great pillar of jale rock thrusts upwards to scrape the clouds of heaven. Atop the pillar lies Greyhook Monastery. It is a hallowed spot where for centuries pious monks have sung psalms in worship of gods ancient. The tolling of Greyhook’s famed bell sends the savage Winged Monkeys that call the jungle canopy their home into frenzied flocks that wheel about the sky. At the base of the pillar, the ramshackle hamlet of Middenhell services the virtues and vices of a steady stream of greasy pilgrims.

Now, the grand bell has fallen silent and snatches of psalms are no longer borne down on the wind. Such holy sounds have been replaced by the thundering crash of bodies raining down from the firmament. ’tis the splintered flesh and bone of monks… aye, and pennies amassed from centuries of pilgrimage. A fortune in gold and glory awaits those who would tread the six-thousand steps to Greyhook.

Well, SOMEONE knows how to play some fucking D&D! I choose to ignore that he also wrote a Fiasco playset. So, there’s this wretched hive of scum & villainy called Middenhell at the base of this giant cliff with a monastery at the top. Did you get that bit at the beginning about bodies raining down on the town from the monastery? Pretty cool! Did I mention that The Red Rooster has oiled lady-boys, pliant dogs, and a shit-pit out back for all of your sexual vices, as well as indecently decadency red-wine pies spiced with the juices of potent men? Pete knows how D&D works! No subtly here, just strong strong theming and the communication of imagery like a brick to the head.

You gotta get to the top to have the adventure, unfortunately those flying monkeys from the teaser are about. They are led by a mutant alpha ape who is super intelligent and has the lower body of a spider and … oh hell … are you seriously still reading this review instead of the adventure? Or how about the urns full of mummified monks? Or the orbs that can only be broken by people with an ELEVATED heart rate?

Let’s talk NPC’s, or, better, NPC descriptions. Jan van Tahon, the innkeeper, is greasy in flesh and mind, concerned about his livelihood now that the pilgrims are gone, and he’s on edge. Just like Tarantino after a few beers. That’s good. The designer had an idea in mind of this guy and was able to communicate it over to me quickly and strongly. Likewise Redleg ben the rum-soaked veteran regaling people with gory battle tales (Brian blessed in Flash Gordon … who one of my cats is named after) or Kostakurtis who, taking time off from his football career, is now turning a buck selling scrolls to folks in order to benefit from the monastery trouble … Walter-White mid-arc in Breaking Bad. As a DM I don’t HAVE to run these NPC’s the way they are described, I can change anything I want any time I want to fit whatever mood I am in if something better strikes my fancy. But the writer has given me a great default option to go with. If he had instead just said there’s an innkeeper, a mercenary, and a scroll salesman then I have to do the work to come up with their personalities on my own. But by providing them strong personalities I’m free to take a great NPC or riff of of it, or whatever is currently happening in the game, with the starting bar placed much higher.

Likewise the town of Middenhell, which plays such a big part as the default settings below the ‘dungeon.’ You might think, given the purulent description of the town, that I just like it because it’s gonzo and full of beer & pretzel guys night D&D shit. That’s not true. I like it, and gonzo in general, because it does a great job of communicating a style & theme. You can certainly do that with a standard high-medievel setting, or any other setting for that matter. But the mundane is not D&D and the mundane is not the stuff of spy stories and the mundane is not the stuff of Lovecraft. It doesn’t matter what the genre is. The adventure needs to turn it up to 12. Not just a little bit more at 11, but all the way 12. Everyone has had a hard day. The DM has been at his job. Fred has had a fight with hif wife. Mary’s cat died and Sue was studying all day for a test. This is not Papers & Paychecks. You got a limited time at that table tonight and you need to bring the noise. As the designer it is your job to help the poor schmuck running the game. You need to beat them over the head with IDEA.There should be absolutely no doubt what you intend for this (NPC, room, monster, etc) and it should be AWESOME. An orc with a +1 sword in a barracks with a victorian list of the room contents is the anthesis of that.

This adventure brings the noise. From a globe with a homunculus in it, to juvenile flying monkeys crawling all over the wall of a room, to a hundred other ideas and details, The Six Thousand Steps makes Girls Rock Boys.

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 5 Comments

DCC #77 – The Croaking Fane

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

77

by Michael Curtis
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 3

For as long as men remember, the Lord of Evil Amphibians carried out unspeakable rites in his squatting temples situated far from civilization. Tales of human sacrifice, squirming servants, and rich but loathsome treasures were whispered of his followers. Now, unexpectedly, his servants have seemingly vanished, leaving behind their fanes to molder in the marshes. A brave band of adventurers gathers to explore one such tabernacle, eager to discover what riches—and terrors—the Lord of Evil Amphibians has left behind…

This is a 30-room or so two-level looting of a temple dedicated to a frog god. Not THE frog god, but the one before him, that he deposed. Rumor has it that its been suddenly abandoned with all its PhAt L00t left behind. Time to get looting! The pretext is ok, and the atmosphere in the adventure is above average. Some of the encounters really bring the freaky-deaky It’s quite difficult to get past the verbosity in places and some of the imagery could be stronger. Well above the industry average but below the stellar heights that the new DCC line generally hits.

The current frog god deposed the former one quite some time ago and the former gods followers went in to “seclusion”, where that is defined as “everyone knows about the temple and that it exists but they don’t really make themselves a pain so we ignore them.” Now rumor has it that the followers have all disappeared, leaving their temple in the swamp empty and full of treasure. Murder Hobo Time! There’s a decent amount of backstory provided, none of which is generally useful to running the adventure. Likewise there is some hand-waving done about a swamp adventure before getting to the frog temple, but no real meat provided. Both of those tend to be the norm in the new DCC line; they concentrate on the meat of the dungeon after explaining in too much detail the background. It’s not as bad as the Dungeon Adventures I’m slogging through, and certainly does not fill several pages, or even a page, as many OSR adventures do, but it’s long enough to annoy me since it’s length doesn’t really add anything useful to the adventure. In total, the lead-in to the actual encounters is only two pages long, so I should probably just shut up about length and advise everyone that you can just completely skip it.

The maps here are simple. Level one is just your typical church layout while level two is a simple branching dungeon layout. Neither bring much interesting to the adventure, other than the most excellent DCC annotation style of embedding artwork and notes on to the map. In fact, the artwork in this adventure really adds to it. I don’t usually mention art, most of it doesn’t add much to running the adventure. DCC maps, however, are always thick with extra detail, sometimes to the point of being difficult to use, with lots of little pictures embedded in the map. The general artwork in this adventure adds a lot also, more so than the text does. There’s a lot of artists listed in the credits and I must say that they’ve all done a great job of depicting the mutated frogs and their ilk that are about in the temple. More so than the text, the art in this one delivers that imagery that I’m looking for in helping me run the adventure. The strong flavor it communicates feeds my head, which then riffs on it and allows me to in turn build up an image for the players. The room descriptions tend toward the mundane rather than strong imagery. “The wall here bear yet more peeling frescoes.” Uh, thanks, but … that’s boring. Curtis needs a better thesaurus and about twice as many adjectives and adverbs as he is using in this.

The encounters, proper, are fairly good. Heavy sarcophagus lids to be shoved aside and mummified toads to be looted. A fountain basin, screaming out to be looted, is full of carnivorous tadpoles that can strip the flesh from bones. That’s a good example, even though its the first encounter. There’s a valve at the back, hidden, that can drain the water which will in turn leave a bunch of tadpoles flopping around to die. Great little set up imagery, great “trap/monster/weird thing happens to the players”, good way to bypass it, and nice imagery when bypassed ti search for the treasure. Which is … a ring shaped like a toad whose tongue makes up the band. GREAT treasure! And it’s magical to boot, helping the wearer avoid some targets of frog attacks. This one little encounter hits almost all of the marks, providing strong imagery, things to mess with, weird and freaky effects, a good treasure that the party may keep, and a magical treasure with an unusual effect. There are several other encounters that get pretty close to this as well, providing decent set ups without them being obviously set-piece encounters. The monsters are, of course, all unique, just as they seem to be in all of the new DCC line.

I have incredibly high standards. This adventure is pretty close to the line but I’m going to keep it. For the new year, 2014, it is my hope that the new DCC line continue on, and find a way to tighten up their writing somewhat while keeping all of the fantastic unique environments and wonderful imagery.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/116945/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-77-The-Croaking-Fane?1892600

Posted in Level 3, No Regerts, Reviews | 1 Comment

DCC #79 – Frozen in Time

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

79

by Michael Curtis
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 1

Eons-old secrets slumber beneath the forbidden Ghost Ice. Since the time of the Elders, the local tribes have shunned the crawling glacier, knowing it as taboo land that slays all who tread its frigid expanse. Now, the Ghost Ice has shattered, revealing hints at deeper mysteries entombed within its icy grasp. Strange machines and wonderful horrors stir beneath the ice…

This is a trip through a twelve room or so sci-fi complex. It has a decent-enough map for its size as well as the usual assortment of weird machines and stasis creatures, weaponry, and call-backs to modern earth. it also features the typical ending of an overloading power plant. The environment and descriptive test can be hit and miss, with a some decent imagery intermixed with blandness I’m not used to seeing in the new DCC. It seems closer to the old DCC line … and that’s not a good thing.

A time-thief from the far future has built a base in a tiny backwater dimension in order to hold his stolen treasures. He died there, and not his base, under a glacier, has been exposed to the locals. Inside is the usual assortment of ‘modern’ rooms. There are power plants, kitchens, trophy rooms, stasis fields and anti-grav tubes. You can play with the control panels and get shocked and zapped with radiation. Some of the anti-grav tubes work and some do not. There is the usual key-card/etc door opening mechanisms. There are stasis tubes full of monsters, and maybe an ally or two. There is a trophy room with The David, Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, and alien blaster rifles. The elements are all here for a great adventure.

Something is missing and I don’t know what. It is lacking that certain something that seems to make the new DCC line great. There’s a ant-man from the atomic wars. That should be fodder for a lot of great things … but it is somehow lacking. There’s a yeti-man that can be an ally … and yet is utterly devoid of personality. There’s a mark III blaster rifle from the android wars …. The problem with these items, and much of the adventure is the lack of interesting and gameable material. It gets close … “from the android wars” or “from the atomic wars of 2525”, but it just doesn’t go for that last critical bit … adding character to the game. It needs some sort of interesting description that help intrigue the players. The rooms descriptions continue this trend, suffering from a lack of interesting descriptive text and gameable action elements. This being DCC, the environments need to be interesting enough to give the players something to riff off of for their characters heroic deeds. Theres a bit of two that manages to get closer … rooms with floors covered in soaking wet carpet, glass, and rotting fish … that’s good stuff right there … but far too little of it.

This one needed another serious edit pass before being let out.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/118737/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-79-Frozen-in-Time?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #17

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d17

Next week I take up the fallen banned of Dungeon Reviews on RPG.NET, with issue #18. Expect the review to be a bit longer, as I elaborate more, and for me to be banned quickly for my strong opinions.
The Pit
Randel S. Doering
AD&D
Levels 3-5

This is a short 18-room ‘complex’ at the bottom of a pit. It’s inhabited by the remains of some evil cultists. The map has some interesting elements but it is essentially linear. Were it arranged differently it would probably serve much better. The entrance to the dungeon complex is through a pit and reminds me of the entrances of old. Rappan Athuk, Lich Dungeon, and many other older dungeons seemed to have some gimmick to get in to the dungeon or something similar around its entrance. This one has a nice pit with a hangman tree lurking about and some machinations at the bottom that belong in Grimtooth. After the entrance rooms (four or so) the things turns in to your typical Dungeon Magazine suckfest. The rooms are not very interesting and have A LOT of backstory embedded in to each one. The backstory is unneeded and detracts from the ability to run the room. There’s a temple room that, if edited down, might provide an interesting room in some other dungeon. The end boss fight is with a monster that gets progressively tougher to fight and can be defeated by a weapon found inside the complex. An entire page is given over to the description of an evil book that the party can’t use. The amount of useless detail provided is staggering, especially when compared to the amount of generic descriptions given the treasure, magic items (straight from the book) and in the descriptions of places and objects. Instead it fills us in on what the high priests second in commands assistant boot washer had for a snack two decades before any relevant events.

 

The Hunt in Great Allindel
Richard W. Emerich
AD&D
Levels 4-7

This is a wilderness adventure in an elf forest that’s been taken over. The party goes in only to find the magicks of the forest working against them and they find themselves being the hunted … by goblins. The wandering table has a nice little description for several of the monsters which I find adds a lot to the adventure. Ogres coming down from the mountains because the forest isn’t guarded, or ghouls sitting fat in the middle of clearing full of dead elf bodies. Some nice little details in those entries which help me build up an encounter around them. The same goes for some random agic items that can found. While the items are out of the book they to tend to be ‘better’ miscellaneous items, with some details about how they are found. That helps me build up an image of the scene in my mind which in turn helps me communicate that to the players. The attached 23 room dungeon is nicely laid out with lots of rubble piles and since its a monster lair there’s an order of battle presented that details who comes to reinforce when. I think thats a critical element thats usually missing from most adventures in intelligent lairs. The monsters seem a little under-powered …. until you reach the dungeon and then the forec of the place falls down upon you. The ‘hunting’ or ‘chasing’ aspect isn’t too well done, and its hard to believe given the small size of the goblin patrols. If you beef up that element and inserted a little more intelligence (the whole thing is being run by a mind flayer) then you’d have a nice little adventure. And it’s probably too much work to salvage.

 

 

The Waiting Room of Yen-Wang-Yeh
Greg Kramer
AD&D OA
Levels 5-6

Woo Hoo! OA! The OA adventures in Dungeon have generally been very good, delivering on the fairy tale vibe that I like so much. I think a lot of that comes from the talking animals, demons, and monsters who are all involved in some sort of bureaucracy or some such. They come off as much more real and the encounters are more interesting to run because of it. This one has the party traveling to a cave complex of an existential nihilistic cult. Not really evil, but more ‘were doomed to die, lets just wait for it’ sort of thing. Too much Cure and Sisters of Mercy, I guess. There’s a nice NPC monster group who want the party ot find one of their missing dudes, a brother, and another subplot about the last group to go on the quest. The NPC monster-brother who guides the party (potentially) also has some great parts. Once the tombs/caves proper are reached the thing falls apart a bit, with some predictably boring monster encounters and not enough ‘sample encounters’ to provide the detail/gentle idea push that I’m looking for in adventures. Oh, and it seems like every OA group adventures eventually involves some ancestors bones. If someone does an OSR version that should totally be worked in to it.

 

 

Out of the Ashes
Grant Boucher
AD&D
Levels 8-12

Flame is the red dragon from the first cover and major adventure in the first Dungeon Magazine, #1. This convoluted piece of shit adventure pulls out every dirty trick in the book to gimp the players, all to push its major conceit on them. The big Ah Ha! moment is at the end of the adventure, after everything is over, the red dragon shows up, the one the party killed in Dungeon #1, and does a surprise attack on the party. The contortions used to justify this are incredibly screwed up. The dragon, of course, had a ring of three wishes that just only had one wish left and it wished to be never die or be brought back to life or some such nonsense. Oh, and he’s set up some kind of stupid adventurer trap to get access to a giant diamond in a door he can’t open so he goes through all these contortions to summon adventurers to open it but he also wants to hide who he is so, of course, he has one of those fucking amulets of non-detection bullshit that, along with the “super evil area, -2 to turn attempts” should have NEVER made it in to any written product EVER. Yeah Gary, I’m calling you out! Oh, don’t forget that the giant fortress is actually some kind of testing grounds, etc, and that the walls can’t be passwall’d, etc, so the party HAS to do the adventure. This is all just stupid. The designer wants to run a low-level dungeon crawl for high level parties so he has to put in all this gimp shit to force things to happen the way he wants them to. Hey, here’s an idea … how about you earn the fucking money they paid you for this piece of shit and instead write a level-appropritae set of challenges? What? No? Instead you want to just have a room with a vampire, beholder, and Medusa in it? Ok, whatever. At times it tries hard, like with the Boris the Phase Spider encounter, and several of the traps are involved affairs, but the entire thing just seems like some kind of in-joke adventure, slightly less absurd than WG9. Oh, and did I mention that the kobold tribe is all suicidal, as another way to gimp the party? L A M E.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 6 Comments

DCC #70 – Jewels of the Carnifex

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

ca

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 3

At the end of a forgotten back alley, in the weird and otherworldly marketplace of faiths known as the Bazaar of the Gods, stands the ruins of a forgotten chapel. Once the cult of the Carnifex was celebrated throughout the City of a Thousand Gates. But a band of holy warriors rose against the cult of executioners and torturers, casting down her signs and scattering her devotees to the winds. The fate of the cthonic goddess, and – more importantly – her fabled jewels remains a mystery…until this night.

This is a small eleven or twelve room crawl through an old temple complex. It’s got the usual ‘new’ DCC elements: very strong imagery, unique monsters, interesting encounters, weird effects, and decent magic items. It also has the usual cramped/linear/modern adventure map … although in the new DCC line there’s a decent number of limited offshoots which tend to mix things up MUCH better than the old DCC maps. It’s new DCC. I feel comfortable by now jst telling folks to go buy it without a review. Goodman, Stroh, and Curtis have things down by now and their new style is even better than these older/launch titles. They are not perfect, but they are CONSISTENTLY good.

The sprawling decadence of Punjar. Go read that intro again. “Forgotten back alley”, “otherworldly marketplace of faiths.” I have no idea how they do it but Goodman Games delivers the flavor. This adventure has one of the oldest hooks known to man … which is then described in a way that makes it seem new and fresh and full of awesome. It’s so simple it’s stupid. The players win a map in bar game. How many times have you seen that? And yet in this adventure … there is enough GOOD detail that a little throw-away hook seen a thousand times before instead comes alive. Won from Magmar the Lucky, a rogue of no small repute. Just that alone gets me going! The map, a few scribbled notes on the back of some wine-stained vellum … maybe it’s stolen from Magmar while he sleeps off an epic black lotus binge? COME ON! You’re soul has to be DEAD to not get worked up by that! I don’t do justice to the writing; it’s better than I intimate. It is, however, the core of what makes these DCC adventures good. They are able to communicate extremely strong imagery to the DM in a short amount of space. This is strong powerful flavor and is EXACTLY what a DM needs in order to run a game. THAT’S the purpose of the written adventure. [Hyperbole time!] It’s the purpose of EVERY written adventure. Once you can communicate the essence of something to the DM then they can fill in the extra detail. The writer has a vision and they need to communicate that vision to the DM in order for them to then be able to translate it to the players. Good adventures do that in a very evocative and strong manner. I don’t know if it’s the elements they choose, or the adjectives & adverbs, or what. However they do it, GG does a great job at it, with Harley possibly being the best of the three core writers they rotate between. Harley delivers consistently in the encounters in this adventure. Each one is strongly evocative of a place and happening.

A rushing waterfall over a narrow ledge that has to be passed to get to a door sealed with lead. A DOOR SEALED WITH LEAD!! Did you read that? To loot the place the characters are going to have to break in to something sealed with lead! I’ve seen lead sealed doors before. They suck. None of them stick out. They are generally some way to fuck the players over in some room in a dungeon. But in this adventure its how you get IN to the dungeon. It’s not a gimp, or a lame trap, but the front door. That’s cool. The adventure continues to deliver room after room of this sort of thing.

Uh … the temple has some guys in it, horribly disfigured. Ostensibly they are good guys guarding a great evil … in the form of a hot chick goddess OF EVIL! Who favors the party with bonuses! The whole thing probably culminates in a great big running battle between rooms. These are DCC rooms though, so there’s lots of stuff to interact with in the running room battle.

The room text could be tightened up. Many of the rooms have A LOT of text n them, very little of which adds to the room/encounter. The great mass of text distracts and confuses and obfuscates the good parts of the room that the DM needs when running the thing. This, more than anything else, is the nail sticking out in the new DCC line. They need to find a way to make the room descriptions smaller while retaining the strong imagery in them. Some of this may be simple editing “why are we telling them this is where he has his lab? Its the name of the room, maybe they’ve already figured that out.” or “perhaps this trivial background data form 3 eons prior isn’t relevant to running this room …” and some of it is going a bit lighter on the rules mechanics. 3e+ adventures, of which DCC falls in to, generally seem to beat rule mechanics to death. DCC is better than most but still spends A LOT of time explaining how things work. That’s not a good thing.

But the adventure is. Go buy it.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/104220/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-70-Jewels-of-the-Carnifex?1892600

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SNS2 – Castle Baldemar’s Dungeon

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

sns2

by Scott Casper
Fro God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 6-8

While in the small town of Corvusrook, the characters are accosted by the mage Framnagle. The irritated mage insists they undertake a quest for him, exacting revenge on his former apprentice Hymor – who now lives in the form of a Blue Dragon in the dungeons of the deserted Castle Baldemar.

This is a single dungeon level with 28 rooms that tends towards the funhouse side of things. The forward claims it is based on the first half of the Gen Con IX Dungeons from 1976, with expanded text. It’s tournament heritage shows, with the encounters being a lot more like set pieces than a typical dungeon and lots of things to district unwary players. It’s ok as far as tournament adventures go … better than most modern ones because it’s less linear.

You’ve been warned: this comes from a tournament adventure and has some leftover parts from that heritage. Things don’t always make sense and the hook is a completely unfair. While in a bar a wizard stumbles in to the party, takes offense at them, and then is belligerent until they “agree” to go on a quest for him. Causing a commotion will bring the Captain of the guard … who supports the wizard. Basically you go on the adventure or die, just like the preable to G1, except this adventure takes a lot more words to communicate the same thing … Thanks Lame Read Aloud text! Like I said, tournament adventure. What IS interesting about this introduction is the description of the town. It takes about half a page (one column) and does an EXCELLENT job of summarizing the town with enough detail to run it without beating things in to the ground. Some of this comes a dense paragraph listing the important inhabitants of the town. Comments like “mostly retired bandit and now head of the laborers guid” or “rake and secret leader of a band of poachers” give the NPC”s a bit of personality and get the DM’s mind going while still leaving enough room to improvise and elaborate. The rest of the town description does much of the same, sprinkling in little extra details all over the place that can be used to expand upon. It’s DENSE with ideas while not being verbose with the text. Nice!

And then there’s Muade … err … the adventure. It makes absolutely no sense as a whole and is just a collection of loosely tied together rooms. That’s not entirely true, it’s kind of charming in a way. The ruined castle above is abandoned. The first two levels of the dungeon, not described, are well looted and empty. The third, this adventure, is a bustling little place with a lot of disconnected shit going on. There are three minotaurs guards in the first three rooms who are part of a larger tribe (not detailed or mentioned further) who are on real guard duty. WTF?!!? Like I said, it harkens back to an earlier age and play style when that shit wasn’t important. The encounters are fun enough, they have a leader, they surrender when a certain one if dead, one is bored and throws shit in a well, one fights with two morning stars, and so on … lots of little details to help bring the encounters to life.

And that’s the adventure in microcosm. The rooms act more like 3e or 4e set pieces except without all the hype and overblown nonsense that typically comes along. Pre-1e set pieces. IE: Funhouse. There’s a couple of new monsters and a couple of magic items that are non-standard that add a little variety to the magical treasure front, but for the most part it’s +1 this and stone golem that. It all ends with a dragon encounter that’s not straight up combat, which is ALWAYS nice to see. I like to view the dungeon as a town three states over in the US. Some people are dicks but for the most parts they just want to get by. And sometimes they want to eat you or have orders that no one gets in to the club without paying the cover. And sometimes they have piles of PHAT L00T that the players very much want … That makes things a lot more interesting.

Worth it? I don’t know. It’s decent enough to be a nice contained one-shot for a con or a tourney. It’s a little implausible for a campaign, but DOES have a decent amount of that OD&D encounter charm that I like so much. There’s a fair amount better than this and A WHOLE LOT worse than this.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112792/Saturday-Night-Special-2-Castle-Baldemars-Dungeon–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?1892600

Posted in Level 6, No Regerts, Reviews | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #16

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d16
This issue is interesting because it has several location-based places to visit with strong social elements: a castle, and three different towns. The first has the strongest possibilities, I think, due to the limited scope of the castle, but the pirate town tries hard and the Dwarves have some good NPCs floating around. This is one of Dungeons stronger issues, thus far, if you are looking for things to lift and rework.

It’s interesting to see the designers struggle with the format. Everyone is clearly used to using the room key format from the many published adventures. It’s pretty clear though that the format fails in many of these. These are not rooms to be explored but rather NPC personalities with motivations and goals, factions and large expanses in towns that need general flavor, not room descriptions.

Palace in the Sky
John Szinger/Martin Szinger
AD&D
Levels 7-10

This is an adventure on a floating castle full of cloud giants. With only 400-ish review under my belt I can’t speak definitively of the genre, but it IS the best Floating Castle adventure I’ve seen yet. The usual cloud adventure elements are in here: some parts of the cloud can be sunk through, lots of flying creatures, raids on lands the cloud floats over, and so on. What IS interesting is that this isn’t a straight up hack. The giants have names and personalities and even a sentence or two about goals. There are several factions running around on the cloud island/castle, from several giant factions to humans to dragons. If you go in with a “the characters are foreign ambassadors trying to stop the raids on their homelands” then the adventure will make a lot more sense. Talk with people, get involved in the politics, maybe take care of a problem or two for one of the factions … you get the idea. Think of all those adventures where some monster is visiting another one (the cloud giants in G1 stand out, but there are many examples) and you get the idea. The characters could be here for awhile in that scenario, providing a nice change of pace without a plot being forced down their throats, although it could use a bit more in the ‘suggestions for further play’ category to give the players something to do while on their embassy. It suffers from the wordiness and lack of the fantastic, both of which seem to be style at the time. It doesn’t feel particularly like you are in a fantastic location and there’s a lot of text wrapped around the rooms in order to provide the uninteresting detail that does exist. A modern version might have less emphasis on the room key and more n the flavor of the place, while keeping the factions & NPC’s that are the key takeaway from this. They are not particularly clever factions or politics involved, but …. any port in a 1989 storm.

The Dwarves of Warka
Fran Hart
AD&D
Levels 3-6

This is a 14 page adventure describing a dwarf village/town and The Unexplored Caverns that are vexing them. The caves are only two pages long, and have very little going for them. The rest of the adventure details the dwarf village. The map seems a little small for all the activity implied. And there IS a lot of activity implied. There are random street encounters for day and night but they are all of the Flavor Text variety, describing everyday life, rather than the Murder-Hobo-Fun-on-D&D-Game-Night-Monday’s variety. The NPC’s have a couple of paragraphs each but they don’t really have any interactions with each other. This is a critical missing element. In the Cloud Giant adventure the way the various inhabitants of the castle interacted with each other is what made the adventure interesting. The NPCs here are more like static mannequins, stuck in their home/places of business, with no thoughts or motivations with anyone else. There’s a cute dwarf tavern encounter table, but then entire adventure, including the table, lacks anything new or interesting about dwarves. We get the usual Dwarf stoic/home/family/craft values and the tavern encounters are just things like “Someone shouts out “By my beard” and so on … not exactly an alien culture. The Darkness Beneath in Fight On! magazine has spoiled me on cave adventures. In comparison to those excellent ones, or even Stonesky Delve or Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom, this one is VERY mundane. There’s not much weird or interesting or even realistic, as in Stonesky.

Necropolis
Nigel D. Findley
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is quite a short adventure for Dungeon, only five pages. A thief is extorting a village by pretending to be an undead guy at the local barrow. The real undead guy shows up. The characters explore a village (not detailed) for clues, then go to the barrow and discover not the thief but the undead. The core of the adventure seems decent enough, with some good extortion efforts on the thief’s part and some decent clues for the party to follow up on (signs painted in blood, and a classic: mutilated livestock) to figure out its not really the famous general back from the dead suddenly demanding cash. The dead general actually has a modicum of a personality as well. This could be salvaged in to some decent background noise near the players home base, with the general maybe being a resource, or thorn, for the players for many a session. The village needs work and the entire adventure could fit on 1 page easily, so you have to dig through padding, but worth taking a look at.

Vesicant
Randal S. Doering
AD&D
Levels 4-6

This is a pirate town, with associated politics, and a dragon adventure at the end. Pirates are raiding shipping with the aid of a dragon. The characters are there to bring the place down … although the whole hook/mission part is really not dealt with at all. That’s fine in this adventure; the main attraction is the pirate town. The town has four sections: the leaders quarters and the quarter belonging to each of the three captains, roughly differentiated by race. Each section of town has its own encounter key and wandering table with enough variety to keep things interesting for a short while. There’s the usual “looking for a fight” gangs, as well as at least one organized street gang and several notable personalities from a 1/2 orc prostitute/assassin to a grumpy jailor, and spies of ever sort. Each section of town generally has a bar or two detailed as well as a notable or two, and then a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter like the orc barracks and ships stores and so on. There’s a lot of factions mentioned and more implied and that come to mind. At the end of the entire thing is the dragon in a decent lair. With work you take this one and turn it in to a little mini-campaign within your campaign by adding some subplots and beefing up the personalities of the various spies in town.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

SNS3 – Ice Tower of the Salka

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

salka

by James Boney
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 8-12

Sixty years ago, a mysterious flood of glacial ice utterly buried the tower stronghold of the Salka, a powerful and evil sorceress known throughout the land. Now, fissuring of the deep ice has revealed the rooftop of this lost tower. The secrets and treasurers of the Salka lie within, awaiting a band of powerful adventurers to explore the depths of her ice-entombed stronghold.

This is a four level wizards tower with about fifty five rooms in it. There is a hint of something interesting here but the encounters and adventure fail to deliver on the implicit promises made. “This will be cool!” is what the adventure and encounters promise … and instead vague generalities are delivered. Many adventures seem to fall in to this category: someone has a decent idea but fails to deliver on it. It’s a high-level adventure because of he high HD creatures and no other reason. That’s the most trivial, and useless, way to make an adventure high level. Boney needs to make a second attempt at this adventure and really work hard on it.

The Salka! Her tower has mysteriously engulfed in a glacier 60 years back and now no one but the old even remember how to get there. A party of hunters recently found a crack in the glacier with a mighty cavern inside, and a set of flat stones with a trapdoor set in to them. The tower has been rediscovered … and the one hunter who dared venture in did not return. The intro and background is short on this one and does a good job at evoking the mystery that all wizards towers should have. This extends even to the name; It’s not Bob the Wizard but rather … The Salka! It is at this point hat the adventure starts going downhill, sadly. What follows is some kind of exercise in generic, dull, and lifeless adventure descriptions with a modicum of interesting content thrown in. Interesting content that is generally devoid of the joie de vivre that gets one excited about running it.

Room 1. If you don’t say the password that no one knows anymore then walls of force slam down over the exits and fireballs start going off in the room two turns later. Did you catch the problem here? It’s not the password; the party is high level; they should have cast some spells and the non-asshole GM should have rewarded them for their legend-lore/etc. Twenty minutes after the walls go down the fireballs go off. Or did the designer mean rounds? Or segments? Good thing the editor caught it. Oh wait, they didn’t. Ug! Back to the central issue: the entire room description consist of “two intricately carved pillars.” Oh, there’s a lot of text on how the trap works and damage, and so on, but the only description of the room is what I mentioned: two intricately carved pillars. I’m not paying for rules. I’m paying for the fluff. Somehow, somewhere, D&D supplements became about rules and the actual goal of the product, providing interesting content, was lost. And no, the mechanics of te rules are not interesting content. I paid my $9.99 plus tax, how about ONE sentence about the pillars and maybe another about the room proper? Two red pillars intricately carved with baroque designs of thousands of dragon heads in a room whose walls are blackened, blasted, and cracked? I suck and have no imagination at all but my description is miles better. That’s what you’re paying for. That description. And we didn’t get one. Which means we were ripped off. As an optimistic midwesterner i REALLY don’t like feeling like I’ve been ripped off, which is why my reviews are always so bitter.

Lets me cite another example that is related but not identical. Two rooms on this level have a weird door. It’s a normal door that can’t be opened, period. There is detail beyond detail on the door, the room, and, ultimately, the demons that come through it. That’s the only reason for the door: for some demons to come through and attack te party WHILE THE PARTY IS IN A DIFFERENT ROOM. So, when the party is in a different room and can’t see the door some demons come through the door, go to the room the party is in, and attack them. It is impossible for the party to pass by the doors before the demons come through because of the map layout. What this means is that all of the text used to describe the doors and how the demons come through them and the rooms beyond is all completely useless with no point to it at all. How about “two demons get summoned” as text instead? Ta Da! All that text removed. The content is neither interesting OR game-able in this case. The content in an adventure MUST fit one of those categories, and hopefully both. Otherwise its just useless backstory and description that has no impact n the DM running the adventure. And, remember, that’s the point of the product, TO HELP THE DM RUN THE ADVENTURE.

The monsters are almost all straight out of the book. The treasure is almost all straight out of the book. The mundane treasure is boring. “4 gems worth 200gp”. What’s the point Boney? If you’re just going to appeal to some boring ass magic items in the DMG then why not just tell the DM to roll on the tables themselves? Or maybe we can just shortcut all of that and just tell the DM to make their own damn adventure and use their own imagination. Yeah, the imagery of an urn of ash & sand with a skeletal hand in it and magic rings is decent, one of the few decent things in the adventure. How about doing just a LITTLE bit more and actually putting a modicum of effort in to the treasure so it feels magical and wonderful and something the PLAYERS would want? Or, you could not try and just include shit from the DMG. You know, like you did.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112794/Saturday-Night-Special-3-Ice-Tower-of-the-Salka–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?1892600

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