DCC #77 – The Croaking Fane

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Bryce Lynch

77

by Michael Curtis
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is available on DriveThru.

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

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

DCC #79 – Frozen in Time

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

79

by Michael Curtis
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 1

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

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

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

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

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

This is available on DriveThru.

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

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #17

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d17

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 6 Comments

DCC #70 – Jewels of the Carnifex

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

ca

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the adventure is. Go buy it.

This is available on DriveThru.

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

Posted in Level 3, No Regerts, Reviews | Leave a comment

SNS2 – Castle Baldemar’s Dungeon

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

sns2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is available on DriveThru.

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

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

Dungeon Magazine #16

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

SNS3 – Ice Tower of the Salka

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

salka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is available on DriveThru.

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

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DCC #69 – The Emerald Enchanter

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Joseph Goodman
Goodman Games
DCC Rpg
Level 2

Villagers have been disappearing—and some of them are your friends! A number of clues, various old superstitions, and a handful of vague omens point to the brooding citadel of the emerald enchanter. This silent monolith has sat undisturbed atop a windy ridge for centuries. Legends say that a green-skinned sorcerer dwells there, where he conducts strange experiments and builds enigmatic machinery. His emerald constructs patrol the grounds of his citadel, and he is seen only rarely when he ventures out on nefarious errands that end in horrid screams and strange lights coming from his citadel. Now you believe he is holding your friends captive. To rescue them—and potentially acquire some loot along the way—you set off to invade his inner sanctum …

This is an exploration of a wizards tower, with a skull, and emerald theming. It has all the usual charm of modern DCC adventures: unique monsters, a good homage to Appendix N encounters, and decent freaky shit. It falls short on the magic item front, resorting to (mostly) lame standard potions & scrolls. It’s got a decent map but suffers from from verbose text and the mundane bits seem out of place. Worth keeping.

The text in the publishers blurb is the only real background provided. There’s a short paragraph that could be called ‘a summary of the current situation inside the wizards fortress” but there’s no other backstory. Which is good. I hate backstory. I want to see text useful to me running the adventure not ancient history form 10,000 years ago that has no impact on the adventure. What WOULD be nice is a SLIGHTLY more detailed hook or locale. Two sentences about a couple of village NPC’s prisoners or three about a recent raid. That’s all; if done in the DCC style then there should be more than enough detail in those short descriptions to get the DM off and running with a good foundation to set the adventure in.

The encounters in the wizards fortress almost all harken back to those strong archetypes that somehow the hobby has moved away from. There is a weird portal table that things fly out of and that he party can leap through. What are those things? Why Emerald skulls with bat wings and red ruby eyes! Come on, how much more of an appeal to appendix N can you get? That is some great shit. It can be summarized quickly, provides great imagery in the DMs mind (which then should translate to them being able to create great imagery in the players minds as he translates and fills in the gaps) and has an instant “Oh Shit!’ coolness factor to anyone encountering it. What’s great about this adventure, and most of the modern crop of DCC product, is that manage to pull it off time and time again. A mural golem that pulls tiles from the walls. A chained demon in a salt pentagram. A mass of protoplasm with a great eye and pseudopods in a jail cell. Mummy’s heads and brains of ancient wizards who you can consult with. These encounters appeal to something ancient in me, almost like an ancestral memory of appendix N. All of those issues of Heavy Metal, Thieve’s World, and 60’s/70’s fantasy lit are still alive deep under all of my post-secondary analytical training, and these encounters appeal to them and dredge up those feelings … allowing me to instantly fill in the detail needed to bring the encounter to life.

The magic items in this adventure blow chunks. I’m used to seeing weird and unusual things from DCC, things that certainly did not come from any book. Instead we get potions of spider climbing and scrolls of light. Lame. As I type this, the spider potion could turn the characters limbs in to spider ones, which would be nice, or the light scroll could create a tiny star, also cool, but both of those would be better as one-time use objects WITH THAT ADDITIONAL FLAVOR TEXT instead of just another lame potion/scroll. Scrolls should be ancient magics (and there is an example of this in the adventure) while potions should have horrible flavor text associated with them … and NEITHER should in ANY way resemble ANYTHING EVER done for D&D. Ever. I paid my $9.99 (maybe plus tax, I got these at GenCon) and I want the extra detail of a non-book item dammit! I’m paying for YOUR imagination and for you to enable mine, not for a 1E DMG retread.

The text for the encounters is too long. There IS a lot going on in several of the rooms but still, too much text. I recall that Many Gates of the Gann had a lot going on as well but the rooms seemed much shorter. In this adventure Goodman falls in to the classic trap of starting a land war in Asia explaining things. Explanations suck. Explanations remove mystery. Explanations contribute to Wall of Text syndrome. The burning need to EXPLAIN things ruins D&D. If the toilet isn’t fun there shouldn’t be one. If the barracks are not fun then there should be one. It doesn’t matter “The Emerald Enchanter engages in many alchemical and magical experiments.” No shit Sherlock; that’s the basis of the entire adventure! That text adds NOTHING to the description of the laboratory room. If it were just one sentence it wouldn’t be bad but there’s multiple lines of what are essentially filler text about background, history, and the like. One day I’m going to learn something about the publishing business so I can call out the fuck with that doesn’t push back on this. Aeryn Rudel, the editor? Did YOU not push push back on Goodman? Was it your job to? Either way, the text ends up the adventure and there’s too much of it in the room, and the process repeats in the other rooms.

I wrote a lot of negative stuff up there but that shouldn’t dissuade you. While the adventure has its issues its overall good enough for me to keep … and that’s saying something because I have very high standards and keep only a VERY small percentage of what I review. Other publishers write better adventures but so far no other publisher has managed to consistently produce the high quality that the new DCC line is currently rolling out in they quantities they are doing. They are solidly producing B material are a fast rate, with some reaching A levels. B’s are no insult coming from me. Nice job Goodman Games!

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/103720/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-69-The-Emerald-Enchanter?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 2, Reviews, The Best | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #15

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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The Wreck of the Shining Star
Richard W Emerich
AD&D
Levels 4-8

This is an empty little adventure on a ship wreck. Over three levels and about thirty rooms you encounter an octopus and an undead. The Rooms are devoid of anything interesting to play with and there’s hardly any interesting descriptive text. The adventure mostly consists of a list of what each room contains. Perhaps an adventure that actuaries might find interesting? There is one interesting thing in the adventure, a unique magic item, and it takes half a page to describe. Perhaps someone is trying too hard … and in the wrong ways?

In Pursuit of the Slayer
Carl Sargent
D&D
Levels 6-9

This is a case mystery. The party encounters the remains of a massacre and an obviously evil person. As they follow and chase him to bring him to justice they get information that the evil dude has been known as a good dude for a long time. It’s got a time based element so the longer the party dallies the harder the final fight is. It has some decent monsters from the Creature Catalog which mixes things up a bit … for a moment I thought there was some originality here. Bits of this are ok but it seems to telegraph its intentions well ahead of time.

The Dragon’s Gift
Thomas M. Kane
AD&D OA
Levels 2-7

I like a lot of the OA adventures in Dungeon, mostly because they have a strong fairy-tale like element. The Celestial Bureaucracy, talking animals and spirits that do more than just “Roll for init as they attack!” add the whimsical element that I am usually looking for. This is a bit of linear railroad, but a mostly enjoyable one with some great encounters. What do you do when you mean a giant along a narrow path, with no room for either to pass by? The “paperwork” trope which always seems so tiresome in most adventures with monster bureaucrats doesn’t seem out of place or forced. I suspect that you could mine Dungeon Magazine for OA encounters and sprinkle them throughout your own games and get a lot of the whimsical element that I look for. There’s a kind of enforced politeness in these because of the OA character classes/honor nonsense, but if you instead just see it as “you can talk to all the monsters” and VERY few things immediately attack, then you can see the attraction to adventures like this one. Maybe that’s because, even though it’s linear, the addition of the social elements provide the Choice critical to a good adventure. Oh, yeah, in this one you travel up a river to meet a water spirit who wants to give you some treasure. And he means it!

The Glass House
Wolfgang Baur
AD&D
Levels 4-6

I’m not sure what’s up with this one. It’s just a simple raid on a house that a giant inhabits. There’s a huge backstory with love, selkies, undead, and tragedy. None of which matters because the hacking is going to be short and sweet as the party cuts down the giant and his wolves. There’s are elements of the norse in this, with a frost man named Sigurd and a magic cauldron. With some good theming you might be able to salvage something here. MAYBE. If you set the guy up as some place the party had to go, complete with his lazy troll servants, and then added the tragic element to it later then the party would have a nice little quandary on their hands.

Roarwater Caves
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 1-4

A decent adventure! In Dungeon! Woo Hoo! It all starts with a good name: Roarwater Caves. It’s a dungeon crawl/raid. I swear I like things are NOT dungeon crawls, but not in this issue. There this guy in town that’s buying fish from Xvarts nearby for a fraction of their value and undercutting the local fishermen. Lately his shipments have stopped because the Xvarts have been taken over by bugbears. The xvarts want him to find someone to come kill the bugbears. That’s a pretty decent set up. Monsters that are not psychotically evil, some good human natures stuff in there as well. There’s also a good end-game chaos play where a large band of kobolds raid the Xvarts as the players enter The Big Fight. Then a bunch more Xvarts from another faction show up, creating even more chaos! AND there’s a bunch of shit in the dungeon that the players can use to make things even more Chaotic. Sweet little set up. It’s supplemented by a GREAT rumor table that applies to the adventure and is not overly simplistic, some good rooms in the dungeon that are not straightforward, a great map with lots of elevation changes and pallisades/barricades, and the dungeon getting cut off by high tide … and ALL of this has some clues dropped around to let the players know what’s going on ahead of time. It’s got some good flavor as well, like a container of pitch dyed yellow (which explains the old xvart adage “as yellow as pitch.” It’s that sort of thing I get really excited about. Nice job. Worth grabbing. Oh, there’s a bunch of crappy shit I left out, like the Xvarts double-crossing the players. That’s lame. The players need to learn to love again and reinforcing the Kill Em All attitude because of a double-cross is uncool. There is a cute section that has the xvarts detaining the players ‘for medical reasons.’ which is a nice jab.

The Elephants Graveyard
David Howery
AD&D
Levels 5-7

This is an isle of Dread clone, maybe mashed up with the old Source of Nile bookkeeping game. Go on a jungle adventure with pack animals, encounter hostile cannibals and natives, find the lost valley and collect loot, then explore the ruined temple with some Indian Jones traps thrown in. It seems mostly like an exercise in tedious bookkeeping as you manage your pack animals load, supplies for your porters, and the bullshit disease and heat rules from WSG which do NOTHING to add fun to the game.You might be able to lift the hook. Imagine lots of copies of a fake treasure map going around town, being sold to suckers. Except one sage KNOWS its not fake, or part of it isn’t anyway, and hires a group of Tomb Raiders. I like the hidden knowledge aspect of that as well as the ‘wagon train of idiots’ that could happen because of it, ala Gone Fishin’!

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 18 Comments

SNS4 – The Mires of Mourning

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Greg A. Vaughn & Kevin Wright
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level 6

Adventurers are needed for a simple job: escort a catatonic prisoner of value to the Crown to a sanitarium where he can be safely held for treatment. What could be easier? But the sanitarium lies at the heart of the Creeping Mire, and it’s the rainy season. No patrols or contacts have been able to get through in weeks. What dangers await along the Swamp Road, and why don’t they want the prisoner to reach the sanitarium? And why does the sanitarium staff want the adventurers to place the prisoner in their care and leave as quickly as possible? What secrets are held within the mute man’s head that some would kill for…or worse?

Oh boy, a Pathfinder conversion with a plot! And a bajillion word backstory! And lame ass treasure and NPC descriptions! I can’t wait!

Backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory escort some dude to an asylum in a swamp. On the way you get attacked by some generic giant mosquitos and a small band of bugbears. Both of these, as well as the wandering monster table, are good illustrations of what is wrong with adventure writing. There is a great deal of text present in these two lead-in encounters on the way to the main adventure … but very little text to actually help the DM. The swamp teems with these blood-sucking brutes. They come in the rainy season. Not commonly know, they prefer to feed on the wild garbunzo, of which there are none in the nearest 500 parsec area. Most remain under dry branches during the rainy season and so many die of starvation. What the fuck? There’s NOTHING in that that helps me run the damn encounter. There’s no flavor, just bland history and ecology. Hey! You! With the face! THE PURPOSE OF YOUR WRITING THE FUCKING ADVENTURE IS TO HELP THE DM RUN IT! Not to illustrate why your great american novel can’t get any response from a publisher. Let me help you with that one. YOUR WRITING SUCKS! That doesn’t really matter here, because you’re not writing me a novel. Your writing a fucking adventure. Tailor your writing to its purpose!

The party gets to the asylum and drops the dude off. They are invited to stay the night, during which the place is attacked by a mixed band of bugbears and dragon, which free a bunch of deranged inmates, and a general chaos ensues. Danger Wil Robinson! Danger! PLOT PLOT PLOT! The point of this is to free the prisoner, kill the asylum keeper (but not before he can reveal the 99 page backstory to the players with his dying breath(s)) and give the players a trail to follow to the next lameness. Almost no one here has a personality. There’s a brief mention of the orderlies and servants, but just in brief with very little character to them. Perhaps the only good part is that the entire asylum room key is one one page. This is smart. The characters are only going to be here a short while and the purpose of the map is to run the NPC encounters (which don’t really exist in this adventure) and run the nighttime raid. It’s PERFECT for that. Short, terse, just enough detail (little more than room names and a sentence) to let the DM run the night raid. THAT’S what I mean when I say I want the writing and content targeted at the DM. THAT helps me run the damn thing at the table. It’s still lame. After all the build up the raid is little more than “a dragon and N bugbears attack and nuke the NW tower.” I’m used to seeing little vignettes in these things, where the party encounters something, etc. Some ideas to use and spring on the players would have been nice. After all, that’s what we’re paying for, the imagination. Instead it’s nothing more than “they attack and the dying curator vomits forth the length backstory.”

The characters are expected the follow the retreating monsters through the swamp to find the backstory inmate, and get access to the The Black Ward and the treasures within. This is total bullshit since the monsters combined lair really nothing more than a wide-spot in the swamps with a note that says “hey, go back to the asylum to find The Black Ward.” The Black Ward, with all its build-up, then consists of seven linear rooms. There is exactly one interesting thing in: The Brothers Shank, a pair of ghouls with a nice backstory that provide a great deal of inspiration on how to run ghoul encounters. Are they alive & depraved or just undead? The Where the Fallen Jarls Sleep and its sequels, the treatment of the undead as The Unknown rather than “its just a zombie” provides the sort of inspiration I AM looking for in an adventure.

The treasure here is almost the worst I have ever seen. The worst I’ve ever seen is “put in as much as you thin is appropriate” while this adventure frequently turns to “treasures worth 946gp, 7364SP and 2673CP.” Again, we’re paying YOU, the fucking moron who wrote this adventure, for the detail of the treasure. Fuck you and fuck the Story/Plot mentality that, inevitably, is used to justify this sort of fraud.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112796/Saturday-Night-Special-4-The-Mires-of-Mourning–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?1892600

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