DCC #79.5 – Tower of the Black Pearl

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

bp

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 1

Once every decade, the tides of the Empyrean Ocean recede far enough to reveal the highest eaves of a mysterious undersea tower. Long ago this was an eldritch fastness of Sezrekan the Elder, the most wicked wizard ever to plague the Known World, but now the tower is known simply as the final resting place of the fabled Black Pearl – an artifact rumored to bring doom upon all who dare to posses it. Tonight the moon nearly fills the sky, and the tides have already begun to recede. Adventurers have eight short hours to explore the tower before the dark waters return. The fabled Black Pearl will be theirs for the taking…if they can survive the Pearl’s curse.

This is a moderately interesting exploration of a wizards tower in search of The Black Pearl. As such, it’s full of freaky wizard shit and a throw-away group of rival adventurers. It’s got a linear map but, as with most of the new DCC, is still pretty interesting. Not the best Stroh has ever done but still better than most adventures.

Sezrekan is one of the awesomely powerful patrons from the DCC core book. Seems he left his mortal remains in a tower off the coast. Once every decade, for one night, the sea recedes enough for people to gain entry to it. Inside is the fabled Black Pearl and whatever other aweseominities that Sezrekan had in life. The hooks provided are pretty lame, from being hired to finding a map. “Vecna’s tower is offshore” should be MORE than enough hook to get any self-respecting player in to this adventure!

The tower is purely a linear affair. While there’s no seawater inside there is also no alternate routes. The core concept it a teleportation arch that you have to get working to get to the final tomb/pearl location. Getting there and looting the pearl causes the tower to flood, ending the adventure. Arrayed against the party are some pirates running around the first half of the tower, also looking for the pearl, a couple of golem/construct-like things, and the weirdness of the tower proper. The pirates and “fetishes’ are not super interesting. The tower, however, is.

One room is full of candles, and a book. Each cable represents the life of one lawful hero. Put out the candle and end the life. Relight an out candle and bring them back from the dead. Neato! There’s also a rickety bridge over a lake, and a straight-out-of-Charon ferryman. Portals activated with blood and unique magic items round things out., along with some traps that don’t seem overly-grimtooth but are still varied and interesting enough to engage. Like the room full of poisonous sea snakes! How ya gonna deal with that Mr. Adventurer?! It’s up to you, no real solution is offered, which is just exactly the way it should be.

Stroh does a good job with the room descriptions. The encounters, the non-monster ones anyway, are varied and interesting. At least one of the pirate encounters is a good one (sneaking up on drunk pirates) while the others are just the standard filler combat encounters. It’s a decent enough adventure to keep.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/120707/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-795-Tower-of-the-Black-Pearl?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 16 Comments

Adventure Number Ten

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

10

by James Edward Raggi, IV
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Pretentious bullshit

You will die.
You will be afraid and you will be in pain.
Everything you do in life is but an effort to distract yourself from this inescapable truth.
There is only one way to foil Fate’s cruel plan for you.
Choose the method yourself.
Make it happen.
Now.

Fucking Christ Raggi. This is what passes for product? “Hey y’all, check it out! I shit in this envelope! it’s a pretty cool statement about the juxtaposition of contemporary RPG content over form. I call it ‘Poopy.’ Who wants to buy it for 10 euro?” Ok, that’s not Raggi. That was me after seeing an Ai Weiwei exhibit. Still, there’s a lot in common between the two.

The back of the book says something like “Don’t review this. Don’t discuss it online. Don’t mail me what happened. It is poison I am expelling from my system.” Uh-huh. Oh oh oh, and it goes on to say something about how life is pain and we’re all just waiting to die and how we all look down on those who CHOOSE to take control and end their lives and how Raggi was a cutter. Seriously man? Look dude, just go buy a sports car and a copy of Epicurus the Sage.

There are sixty-ish vignettes, one per page, that make up the “adventure.” Each one is a kind of little vignette that the party will go through. There is no “winning” (remember, “life is pain”) instead there is only surviving and ending the vignette so you can go on to the next one. How about a sample of this brilliance? A kid runs up the players and says his mom is going in to labor. If the players ignore him then the woman and neonate die and the father & sons (currently away from home) are experienced retired soldiers who hunt the party down. If they help the woman then she & baby still die (stillborn) and the father & sons still hunt the party down, but are just villagers. If they save the mother the baby still dies and the villagers hunt the party down, thinking that the healing they used on the mother sucked the life out of the baby. Page after page after page of this shit. All of the groups money is actually copper pieces. Their henchman beats and rapes a young woman at an inn, is killed, and the party held responsible. It’s just scenario after scenario in which the fix is in.

It’s hard to figure out what is really going on here. A few of the vignettes are interesting (a woman shows up with a small baby claiming its one of the characters. It happens in every village. The character doesn’t recall the tryst. No one is lying.) but its just a lie. The core problem with this is that it’s a misrepresentation of what it is. It’s not an adventure. I’d argue it’s not a supplement. It’s some kind of a work of fiction or something. Just nonsense put on a page. The present King of France is bald.

Listen, the LotFP rules are pretty nice. Nice class differentiation. Nice magic system. Nice encumbrance system. I liked Stargazer and Death Frost Doom. How about putting out something decent for a change instead of the pretentious performance art crap you’re releasing? You know, you need to do that occasionally in order to keep the suckers biting. This is the worst kind of dreck. Some kind of Forge nonsense where we all explore our feelings around being molested as children that is being marketed as an adventure. Bullshit.

I’m gonna go watch Empire of the Sun videos now. They are four orders of magnitude more D&D than this shit pile.

Posted in Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 7 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #20

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

d20

The Ship of Night

Wolfgang Baur
AD&D
Levels 7-9

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

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

 

 

White Fang
Nudel D. Findley
AD&D Solo

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

 

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

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

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

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

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 7 Comments

DCC #76.5 – Well of the Worm

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

ww

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 1

In ages long past and best forgotten, the world was ruled by worms. Deep within dreaming jungles, and high atop monolithic temples, fell priests sacrificed the blood of man and his kith to the mammoth war-worms. One wizard would return the world to the rule of the worm. From deep within the blood-soaked earth, calling upon the spirits of the slain and blood of the dying, rising from the moldering bones of fallen warriors, the war-worms have returned. Their foul Mother – last of her kin – births more crawling horrors with every passing hour. The age of the worm is once more upon us. The call is sounded: Who will rise to purge the darkness?

This is an exploration of a lair in a well full of vile giant maggot-things with human faces. Fun! It’s got lots of weird locales, monsters, environments, and magic items, just as you’d expect from the new line of DCC adventures. Even the map is decent enough. For a small adventure, clocking in at sixteen digest-sized pages with a lot of full-page illustrations, it packs in a lot to like. Approved.

Harley Stroh has a talent for describing some very interesting and evocative locales with a minimum of words, and this is no different. The plains of the Barrowdown are located between two baronies and every spring the armies face off, littering the fields with the dead. The fields can’t be plowed for all the dead … but the farmers make a nice living looting and selling arms. I am ashamed of myself for summarizing the background in such a shitty way. Harley builds up a little view of an environment in a much better way than I could ever communicate it. Anyway, it’s short and just background information. But still pretty cool. It’s at this point that the hooks show up. Crappy hook #1: village elders call for volunteers blah blah blah. Crappy hook #2: Sleeping in an inn the party hears cries for help blah blah blah. Awesome hook #3: coming in to a village the party meets a grizzled and bitter old vet. Everyone else has left, but he remains, fending off the blood-sucking giant maggot worms, but now too weak to fend them off. The first two are just the normal old boring same-old same-old be a hero hooks that are just some throw-away nonsense. Number 3 though … that’s got some chops to it. It starts with some hackneyed “returning to your childhood homes” nonsense, but then … you’ve got some kind of awesome Charlton Heston I Am Legend shit going on and that’s pretty bad ass. The whole “worms show up at night and suck out the villagers blood” thing is pretty cool in all three. It’s got to be the primary monster though, the giant worm maggots, green, with human faces. VERY nice. That’s all just the background/hook stuff though.

The adventure is a short eight-ish room dungeon. It’s surprisingly interesting considering its small size. Tunnels in the floor go other place, a devil face covering another room, and three or four elevation changes, none of which seem like they were just thrown in. Pretty good for the size! The dungeon starts off well: there’s a cracked wall in the well whose crumbling mortar can be pulled apart to gain access to the dungeon behind. I know it’s hackneyed but I love it. It must have something to do with how Stroh describes it, or some appeal to the world of the fantastic hiding just behind the mundane veil. Inside there are mucus covered walls straight out of Alien with arms, armor, and victims embedded in it. Sweet! I love a good Alien vibe! There’s the predicable mother worm, but also a great devil face with a pool of blood with worms swimming in it. Nice! Maggot blood bath! There’s a decent magic item or two as well, like a dagger that exudes a slimy coating of poison and can be commanded to poison more. It’s well described with a brief, but interesting, history/description.

This is good. It’s short, it’s got a great entrance, the monsters are good, the environment is gross and exciting … It’s worth keeping, and probably worth having.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/120375/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-765-Well-of-the-Worm?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 3 Comments

The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

so

by Vincent Baker
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
LotFP
Level: Pretension

se•clu•si•um si-’klü-z?- m
n. pl. se•clu•sia -z?-
1. A place to which a wizard withdraws from the world to pursue mastery.
2. A place of magic and plasms and grotesques and horrors and treasures and doorways to other worlds.
3. A place which, when abandoned by the wizard but with its treasures and dangers remaining more or less intact, is a terrible and antic catastrophe in process.
4. A place which makes for marvelous location-based adventures.

This waste of time details three wizard lairs and has a bunch of tables to help you generate your own. Surprisingly, it’s both a preachy/pretentious design by Baker and another mostly useless publication from LotFP. Wait, no, I didn’t mean “surprisingly”. I meant “predictably.”

I don’t even know where to start with this. I guess the tables. The back half of the book is a list of tables to help you generate a wizards lair. One table, title “How did the wizard appear?” let’s you determine his eyes. Calm eyes. Vivid eyes. Dull eyes. and sixteen other choices. When you tire of that you can move on to their face. Wrinkled face. Stern face. Plain face. And fifteen other choices. Seriously? I paid for this? WHAT. THE. FUCK. I don’t know about this. It’s clearly an idea generator, or meant to be one. You flip through the pages and pick out a couple of tables and roll on them, get some choices, and then, hopefully, that spark some imagination in you to help you create the wizards lair. It doesn’t work for me. Telling me there’s an unusual fountain, or tree, or an iron post just doesn’t do it for me. You roll and roll and roll and generate ideas and then, hopefully, you can put it all together in your head and something sparks and you can then have your Eureka! moment and go create a map and populate it with dozens of rooms that you now have an idea for. I doubt it. It just doesn’t click that way for me in these tables. The choices are, somehow, too mundane. This isn’t the weirdness of the Random & Esoteric Creature Generator, or the immensely imaginative lists of the Dungeon Dozen. This is more like the endless lists in the back of the 1E DMG. “Pile of dust in the corner” or “wizards employees rooms are all spartan and bare.” There are dozens of sites that will generate random idea lists for a DM. You can search Dungeon Dozen with the following google: site:roll1d12.blogspot.com [YOURSEARCHHERE] What’s the point of this? “The people nearby are afraid of the wizards lair”, “the people nearby are distrustful of the wizards lair” Come on. I’m paying for that?The whole thing is laid out weird and hard to use and find things in.

The adventures, or, rather, wizards seclusiums, are another let down. It’s just a series of ideas, and not fully formed ideas at that. “The kitchens are: (roll on a table) 1. Tiny & Cramped. 2. Plain and Functional” That’s what you’re paying for. It goes on and on like that, table after table that describes nothing meaningful. There’s no adventure here, just some bizarre mimicry of what someone thinks D&D is after playing a game of telephone. It’s like Baker heard that random tables defined D&D and so he delivered some … only his tables miss the point of D&D. He tries to build up some bizarro-world version of D&D that isn’t bizarre at all, in spire of the central premise of the title being that wizards lairs are bizarre and weird and full of the fantastic. Here, here’s a genius table from the Three Visions lair: “The staffs personal rooms are: 1. Tiny & cramped. 2. pare & meager. 3. Plain & functional.” Seriously? That’s supposed to generate adventure? That’s why a guy drove 22 minutes to get to my house? Three non-choices, none of which generate anything close to an idea, all of which are essentially the same choice (“boring”) and NONE of which is gameable. Thats fucking absurd. In comparison, here’s a random entry off of wizards “Eldritch Side-Kicks” table from Dungeon Dozen: “Dragon’s attendant/bodyguard: bright young troll ruthlessly conditioned to respond instantly and decisively to widely varied sets of stimuli.” That’s interesting. That’s gameable. That generate ideas. The sample worksheet that comprises the three wizards lairs does none of that. It’s laid out badly, its almost indecipherable in its description of the lairs and provides little gameable content.

Like a lot of recent LotFP titles it sells itself as this great thing but what it delivers is something mediocre at best. Jim: Time to deliver something that doesn’t suck. I HATE feeling like I’ve been cheated. More than anything other product in recent memory, I feel like this product has cheated me. Maybe it can generate some ideas. MAYBE. A BIG maybe. But its not fucking worth it.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/117258/The-Seclusium-of-Orphone-of-the-Three-Visions?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 23 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #19

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

d19
An interesting observation: a lot of adventures try to force square pegs in to round holes. They want to do something other than a location based adventure but all they know how to do is emulate the location-based adventures they’ve seen in other published adventures. Hence we get social adventures … built around a location-based keyed room description. Or mystery adventures … built around a location-based keyed room description. Even then the keyed room descriptions tend to fit a standard format that has some kind of OCD need to mention everything thats in the room “4 daggers and 3 cloaks” when they have no bearing on the adventure. Words are precious. Every one should be used for maximum impact. If you’re running a stealth based infiltration adventure then provide me with the details pertaining to that. If you are running a scavenger hunt adventure then provide me descriptions based around that. Don’t just list footlocker contents because the last adventure did it that way.

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 6 Comments

The Complete Dungeon of the Bear

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

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by Jim ‘Bear’ Peters & Mike Stackpole
FBI
Tunnels & Trolls
Levels 1-…6?

This is four levels of charm and imagination that has seldom been reached since. It’s a mess. It’s for Tunnels & Trolls. It has more imagination and whimsy than many many modern products. As some point in the RPG hobbies history the concept of ‘imagination’ became standardized for your enjoyment. That’s too bad. There’s a charm and whimsy present in SOME of these older products that is generally not found today. I was introduced to The Bear at GenCon a couple of years when I played in a game run by [name drop here.] I fell in love with the … zaniness? Whimsy? Whatever it was I loved it. I went back to the FBI booth and tried to buy it, only to be told they had been sold out for many many years. Fast forward to this year and the FBI booth had a fresh 2013 reprint. I know this is for Tunnels & Trolls, but I think a little prep work, or with none, you run it on the fly for D&D.

The adventure has an above-ground ruined castle and three dungeon levels underneath. The thing REEKS with ‘Dawn of the Hobby’ charm. Invisible demons guard doors and ask riddles. You can pull the gold teeth out of a charnel scene to grab some cash. Gold plates are hidden behind freshly plastered walls. Rats bit the hands searching for treasure. Rickety floors collapse and over-powered magic swords lie waiting, clutched in their dead skeleton masters hand. One of the guardian demons demands ‘a sieve full of water’ while another demands ‘a rope with no end.’ it’s up the players, not the characters, to come up with solutions to these puzzles. There’s a pond on the ground floor in which the party sees gold pieces. But Wait! They are actually leeches that look like gold pieces!

The dungeon proper has a giant ballista the size of godzilla that can be fired at the characters. There’s a classic rolling ball trap. One room floods with water … and then a bunch of piranha are dropped in. When’s the last time you saw that in an adventure? The magic items and monsters are as charming as the encounters. A 10′ long serpent is actually a beautiful maiden that was forced to swallow a gem that polymorphs her … and anyone else, who swallows it. Another gem melds with the person who touched it and turns them in to a giant badger … until sunlight touches them and then the gem melts out again. You just don’t get that kind of stuff today. One room has an orc in it holding a 500# boulder over his head, which he throws at the party when they enter. He’s got a ring which increases your str by a factor of FIVE, or TEN if you’re an orc. There’s a magic treasure chest which turns copper in to gold … but make you weaker in the process of doing so. It just goes on and on and on in its awesomeness.

The rooms are some weird mix of the bland, awesome crazy encounters, and weird ass scenes. There’s a giant statue submerged in a lake with a sword above his head.
I think this thing is, like $6, IN PRINT. And it’s like $3.95 on DriveThru. You are a FOOL for not having this.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/65655/Dungeon-of-the-Bear?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments

RD1 – Tale of the Ruby Dragon

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

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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.

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