tenfootpole.org

by Jeremy Crawford & Christopher Perkins
D&D Next/5E
WOTC
Levels 1-10

WOTC has done about as well as can expected with this adventure. It contains a lot of very very good content in it; a great number of good ideas and ‘advice through examples.’ It’s also a railroad with a whole of bad ideas thrown in … but maybe that a given these days, at least the railroad part anyway. I suspect the real goal of 5e/Next is to produce content that the entire range of D&D editions can use, as well as the Pathfinder crowd. I don’t think this product does that. But it is close … a lot closer than anything that has come before. It’s close enough that I’m keeping an open mind and will buy the next one.

This 288 adventure is broken in to four parts and also contains a playtest version of the 5e/Next rules. The playtest rules take up about half the pages with the rest being the four adventures. The booklet is designed to take players from level one to level ten. I’m going to ignore the rules and instead concentrate on the adventure and speak a bit about the presentation. Haters gonna hate, so let me get that part out of the way first before I comment on the good … and there’s a lot of good. This review concentrates mostly on the content in the first adventure, although most of the comments apply to the other four as well. (I took good notes in reading the first adventure but not in the others.)

First, the outline. There are evil guys. They have a plan. They need four keys. The players slowly unravel the mystery. Blah blah blah. It’s the usual stuff. It’s a set of linked adventures and I’m almost certain that it’s going to be tied in to another product and/or set of adventures.

Therein lies the first problem with the product. One of the first things the adventure tells us is “The adventures are structured in such a way that makes it difficult for the characters to obtain the four keys. Even if the characters do everything right most or all of he keys are likely to end up in the bad guys hands.” In other words: there’s no point to this adventure. The players can not impact it or change the destination of timing of the railroad they are on. You might find the ride enjoyable. This is not the freely structured adventures of the playtest modules, like B2, X1, or the others. This is more like the best D&D Encounters adventure ever written, except it takes a lot longer to find out that your characters actions were meaningless. This is consistent with what the D&D team are saying. They want to “concentrate on telling great stories”, according to at least one published statement. This then is the primary sin of the product. Either you are ok ‘telling a story’ or you want a setting to explore. This product does NOT marry those traditions and in that respect it’s a fail. I suspect that the adventure could have been restructured to make it more of a setting with personalities and locations and thereby accomplish both goals by providing an outline of how the adventure usually works (the railroad.) As it is the thing is written in such a way that it’s clearly broken down in to four parts to be completed sequentially and without deviation. It is not going to be easy to restructure it on your own.

There’s another example of this plot railroad that sets up in the first adventure. A shapechanger means someone important harm. Clearly the designers are setting up something to happen in a later adventure but, this being D&D, secrets are hard to keep. You have to keep the mole alive and their identity hidden in order to get the payoff later but D&D is FULL of magic that prevent you from keeping secrets. This typically means the designer has to jump through a lot of hoops: rings of non-detection “immunity to mind reading” and all sorts of other VERY forced things, all in order to try and mislead the players. This adventure does that. A powerful NPC could kill he party at any time but instead watches them, tricks them, lies to them, and so on, all disguised. That’s a pretty bad description of what’s going on and it KIND OF sounds ok. It’s not. The actual situation is much worse and should not have been included. It’s leading the party around by the nose and smacks of a DM’s pet NPC. It’s low & common. Given the excellent ideas in the rest of the book they should have been able to come up with something else.

Finally, there’s a very common mistake. You have to pass a skill check to go on the adventure. Seriously, if you fail the check then you don’t get the information needed to go on the adventure in the first place. Easily fixed, right? The DM just feeds the players the information … after all, that’s what’s actually going on. Someone makes the check and the DM feeds them information. What exactly is the point of the skill check then? Just roll a die and give it to someone. Or better yet integrate it in to the adventure. The whole adventure does a great job of integrating learning examples in in to play but this is not one of them. It reminds me of why I hate skills in games. People don’t know how to integrate skills and skill checks in to games. Not even the designers, evidently. This is NOT the correct way and by placing it in an introductory product you are tacitly telling people this is how the game is played. (More on that later.) Someone who knows how to use a skill check should have caught this in the edit and fixed it. I know, that’s a lots of complaining for something simple but the published adventures are how people are going to learn how to play the game. If they are crappy and consist of nothing more than combats then that’s how people are going to play their home game. If they are nothing more than Tomb of Horrors deathtrap suckfests then that’s what people are going to think the game is and they are going to emulate it. Skills, in particular, are very hard to integrate in and deserve VERY good integrated examples in these early products.

There’s another example of ‘bad play style’ (or maybe “substandard stye”) in a green slime room. There’s a green slime above the interior doorway of a room. A character opens the door and slime drops on them when the first character passes through the door. That’s ok but it could be far better. A simple note like “waiting a bit will allow the characters to notice a bit of slime dripping from the ceiling” or something similar about seeing slime on the floor. Maybe the floor glistens, rewarding characters who ask why. It’s not the fact that you can never have a slime ball drop on a player but rather this is an excellent teaching opportunity to pass on a certain play style. It’s the back and forth between players and DM that D&D thrives on, especially the exploratory aspects of D&D.

Let’s talk read-aloud text. There’s a lot. WAY too much. WOTC has published articles about the problems of read-aloud text, but they still do it poorly. I was trying to find a reference I came across once. It said something to the effect that players eyes glaze over after two or three sentences of read-alound. I think it was a WOTC article but it may have been on rpg.net or therpgsite. I know my eyes glaze over when reading it and I stop paying attention when someone is droning on … where droning on is … about three sentences. I LOATHE the long read-alouds. I know they are supposed to be evocative. I don’t care. It’s far far better to provide some terse but evocative descriptions to the DM and keep the read-aloud VERY short … if you have to include it at all. This has A LOT of read-aloud, almost none of which does anything required at all. It doesn’t provide good play examples or communicate important things by doing something specific. It just sits there and increases page count and acts as something for the DM to read and not care about and for the players to ignore.

Speaking of verbosity … this thing has a lot of meaningless stuff in it. Sometimes it seams like every rock and bush has a motivation that needs to be spelled out and described … rocks and bushes the PC’s will never encounter. SOmeone has clearly gone to a lot of trouble to try and make every one and every thing work together, but it’s too much. All of the words just run together and make it hard to find information. All of the verbosity in both the room texts and in the general background sections need a SERIOUS edit. Everything is spelled out for the DM in a painful level of detail. The product doesn’t need this. Provide a general outline and reveal more of it in the text of the encounters and focus on providing flavor seeds rather than specific details. DM’s need enough information to get their imaginations going so they can fill in the rest, not a level of detail that tells them how the price of tea in china impacts the fluttering butterfly wings in Canada on April 3rd 318 years from now. I want terser descriptions and explanations that contain the flavor of the thing. This sometimes extends in weird ways. The monster stats are not included in the adventure text (but references to their page are. Yeah!) but the adventure goes out of its way to note that a specific door is immune to psychic damage. Now, I don’t mean one very special door, I mean a normal wooden door. And this is done for EVERY door encountered. This harkens back to the bad old days of including a 2-page monster-stat in the adventure right in the heart of it. Seriously? You need to tell people that a door is immune to poison? Seriously? That’s a real example, I’m not making it up. Every door description indicates it’s immune to poison. Come one guys, I know some asshat players somewhere is going to argue his poison should count for the damage done to a door. I know it. The DM should then punch that player in the face and that should be the end of it. This sort of common sense stuff needs to up to the DM. I don’t want to see it padding the page counts. Speaking of padding … the verbosity here is different than the 3e-era padding that was done by the pay-per-word guys. You know, some contract writer would be paid by the word and so would pad his adventure with a bunch of worthless detail and description. The verbosity here doesn’t feel like that; a lot of it is good and relevant, it just needs to be shortened or removed entirely. There’s also some inconsistent text conventions. Specifically I’m thinking of some built-up swamp gas in a couple of rooms. There is clearly a convention for this that is followed for most, but not all of the rooms. That inconsistency is a bit jarring since you suddenly encounter swamp gas in a room description rather than offset as it usually is. Not a good thing when you are running an adventure.

Let’s cover the good stuff … and I think there’s far more good in this adventure.

There is A LOT of good flavor included. One of the first is the public hanging of a wizard who’s eyes and mouth have been shown shut before he is hung. The description is PERFECT. It instantly communicates the brutality and reasoning behind it and it does so in a very terse manner. It happens to be buried in other text that sucks that that nugget is exactly the sort of thing I look for in an adventure and what helps me run it at a table. From that one bit I can DM my way around the rest of the encounter/description. There are a lot of those little things scattered throughout the text.

A similar example is something they do with a clan of half-orc bandits They give them names and a short history AND IT MAKES SENSE. This isn’t a 2 page overview of bullshit customs and who killed who. The seven of them are the sons of Mama Booga, their mother/shaman, who’s also present. That’s good. It quickly communicates to the DM how to run the encounter and provides a decent amount of realism without resorting to tedious descriptions and histories. Those histories are present and they are tedious, but that Mama Booga stuff is almost all that’s needed to run the encounter. That’s the kind of stuff I’m paying my cash money to get; not the history lesson.

Speaking of monsters/creatures, they tend to be done very well. The party can talk to ALMOST everything in the adventure and the things they can’t talk to, like vermin, act like vermin. The party can talk to the bandits. They can talk to an evil dragon. They can talk to lizard men. This gets back to my comments regarding teaching people to run D&D through the ‘examples’ provided in the official published products. Taking to a monster provides for more options than just hacking it down. And you can always resort to hacking it down later. By having this early product provide numerous situations where characters can talk to monsters it reinforces that this is the accepted play style. That’s a good thing.

Along with this the vermin encounters also provide teachable experiences, both to the players and to the DM, just as the intelligent monsters do. A stirge has flown in to one area and flying around recklessly trying to get out. If the players hang around too long then it attacks them. The anima-like monster is acting like an animal! It doesn’t just attack! How unusual to find in a published product! It also provides an excellent warning to the players. Maybe they hear it. Certainly they see it when they enter the room. “Look, a monster!” and if the characters hang around after seeing an animal/monster then they deserve to be attacked and if they quickly leave then they deserve to skip the encounter. PLAYER skill is rewarded, and not through system mastery. This is not an isolated example; there’s at least one more with centipedes and another with fire beetles. Leave the animals along and get away. I’m very happy to see this; it provides an excellent way to reinforce a certain type of play (AHUMCORRECT STYLEAHUM.)

Similarly the encounters give some advice on monsters nearby reacting to the players presence. If you fight the monsters in room three then the monsters in room six and seven will react in two rounds. Or maybe two different types of monsters react if they hear the players in a certain area, or someone runs to room nine to fetch the guys there as reinforcements. I wish more adventures did this, or just included a summary of which creatures are where. The list is really only relevant in some kind of fortress or lair of intelligent creatures who will come to aid of others, but in that situation is helps IMMENSELY. I hate having to look through to see who reacts and usually end up making notes on the map on who lives where. The various reactions/order-of-battle that the text describes goes a long way to being helpful in actual play.

I’m running low here so let me go all stream of consciousness and just start listing other great details and ideas in the adventure. The adventure does a pretty decent job with the NPCs and monsters. They generally have enough character for the DM to run them well and the notes in the adventure go a long way. (They have too much detail, of course, but I’m starting to beat that point to death.) In particular I want to cite a local female baron. She’s Lawful Evil. It makes a lot of sense in context, it’s not overblown, and again it provides an excellent learning experience for DM’s on how to handle evil characters and NPC’s. In fact, it’s almost the case that NONE of the evil creatures are just rampaging for the sake of being evil. Revenge, greed, and other traits all act as decent motivations for them and it’s done in a natural and realistic way rather than being cartoony or over the top.

The treasure is done well. Really well. Jewelry and objects of art are described well; just a couple of sentences but that makes all the difference. A silver unicorn statue with an amethyst horn is SOOOO much better than generic treasure. That sort of description is the standard throughout for treasure, exactly as it should be. Likewise the examples of magical treasure are very good. There’s a magic shield (like, +1 or something) with an apple tree on it. Once a day you can pluck a magic apple from the tree to use as a potion of healing. That is a kick ass magic item! That’s the kind of thing that a player will have his character keep long after +2 and +3 shields start showing up. It’s a magical items that full of wonder and whimsy and actually seems magical! I wish they had done that with all of the items, it would have nipped the ‘book items’ meme in the rear before it got started. The only other criticism I may have is the lack of trade goods in a certain dragons hoard. EVen that’s a pretty lame complaint since there ARE bolts of silk and the like. At one point in the adventure the party gets a baby dragon as a pet. That’s cool. It’s done very well and can provide loads of roleplaying and entertainment value. Just killed a baddie? Guess who wants to eat it … Babies drool, right? Guess who’s constantly drooling acid? Uh huh. Like I said, VERY well done. I note that there is also a chance to acquire dragon eggs. The eggs in question are corrupted and no good. I suspect that was done to keep the players from having baby dragon pets. That’s too bad. I’d love for the adventure to have included one or so good ones. That’s good non-standard loot or a great henchmen to have. It’s a baby so it doesn’t have to be overpowering and again, it’s good loot. It’s a lost opportunity. Another good example of treasure is placement. At one point the characters can explore a section of the dungeon that’s hard to reach, but obvious, and clearly not the way they are supposed to go. If they do so they can win a magic item that is helpful later on: a ring of acid resistance. That is MUCH more interesting than putting the dragon-slaying arrows in the hoard of the dragon. It directly rewards exploratory play and players who are curious. I was very impressed. There’s also a great example of a cursed item that transforms a player. It’s cosmetic, but it also provides for those situations that D&D is famous for: some bizarre thing happening to your character. It’s not forced in situation, it feels natural. Again, excellent job.

The map is ok, but not great. A couple of loops and alternate paths but not much more than a really REALLY good D&D encounters map. The wilderness wandering monsters can be tough: there are trolls and a hydra on the table. That comes directly from the old days when you could not beat everything you met and I loved seeing it. Some of the wandering encounters are expanded upon and some are not. Some are mysterious with no explanation, which is great thing to see. D&D should be about mystery and wonder. The one I’m thinking about is also referenced later in the adventure. There’s a lot of that. Something in one place is referenced somewhere else or an item found in one place and used someplace else. A bad example of this can be a fetch quest but in these cases they are well done. Statues that talk and can be questions and robes to wear and treasure from elsewhere … It’s like a mini-puzzle for the players to figure out. It’s not required, rewards players that do, and fits in nicely. (And they all have too much text wrapped around them, but, again, that horse is already dead.) There’s A LOT of this sort of thing in the adventure; references to other adventures in the series or in the same dungeon, clues to other things … it’s well done.

That’s a lot of commentary for an adventure that’s 10-15 pages, depending on how you count fluff and background. The general commentary and principals of the first adventure hold true, to varying degrees, to the next three in the book as well. It’s a good adventure. It provides excellent teaching opportunities for a new DM. It could have stronger foreshadowing and build up of the villains (the lizardmen and dragon and bandits) … building up a villain or encounter leads to all sorts of fun emotions in the players prior to their characters meeting the bads. It’s limited by the railroady nature inherent to ‘telling a story’ although _I_ think they could have avoided that altogether by rearranging the adventure in to more a setting/locale/personality type thing. This is good enough to take a look at if you are at all curious about Next/5e. It’s also good enough for me to want to to take a look at the next adventure they produce … it’s NOWHERE NEAR 4e’s “write-it-all-off” poor adventure quality.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/123270/Ghosts-of-Dragonspear-Castle-DD-Next?affiliate_id=1892600

by a shit-ton of authors
Precis Intermedia

The Task: design a complete dungeon in one page. The Complete 2012 Collection. Includes all 106 submissions, including the 24 winning entries.

Welcome! I’m Bryce Lynch! I review OSR material, mostly. I’m a tough reviewer. REALLY tough. I’m generally not TOO arbitrary and I have a set of standards I TRY to keep to. Next time I do this I think I need to do a bunch of longer reviews, maybe three to five in a ‘single’ review. As it is now I think these are comments to the authors rather than reviews people can use?

This is a print collection of all of the entires in the 2012 One Page Dungeon contest. Great as a coffee-table book. Great as an idea generator. Some of the entries would look sweet blown up and framed on the wall. Many are obtuse or one-trick ponies and oh what a clever boy am I is rampant. So, generally meaningless for running adventures but worth having for the diversity of ideas it presents. I really like the print compendium format of the collection. It allows for a kind of pick-up and peruse use of the content.

A few reply comments have stuck with me. One of them was something to effect of: “for many of these adventures yours will be the only review or feedback they ever great.” So, uh, no pressure. Or, rather, let’s graduate from bashing one person per post to bashing LOTS of designers per post! Huzzah!

Meckwick’s Pair o’Dice – Aaron Frost & Mundi King – Winner: Best Dungeon Generator
This includes a pair of cut out dice that you assemble yourself. One die determines the shape of the room you are in and the other determines the enemy you face in the room. There are three big bad guys in the dungeon and if you roll the right thing on both dice then you encounter one of them. I’m pretty sure that’s a 1 in 36 chance of rolling a certain bad guy, or a 1 in 13 chance overall of rolling a Big Bad, since there are three of them. Otherwise you might minions in the Undead, Goblin, or Dread Beast category. The enemy range from skeletons to whights and goblins to Owlbears … given the Meat Grinder nature of this probability/enemy combination, I suspect only high-level parties need apply. It also seems really boring since all there is to do is fight.

The Return of Hectate Rose – Aaron Kavil – Winner: Best Science Fiction
A pretty straight-forward exploration of a derelict spaceship. It’s claim to fame is that it’s written like a mission briefing, cleverly obfuscating shit for the DM and falling squarly in the Art School camp. The party is the second team to be sent, the first having of course not returned. The ship is full of nut jobs and the like. There’s clearly some alien shit wrapped around the coms tower however that fact is hidden from the party because they are inserted from the rear of the ship, far away from the coms tower. IE: railroad and any group with their own shuttle, etc would look at the ship first, see the thing, and bow the crap out of it. SF is not an easy genre.

Splashdown in Fiend’s Fen – Alan Brodie – Winner: Best Science Fantasy
A crystalline alien spaceship crashes in a swamp and is worshipped by some bullywugs. The inside is small, just six rooms with some kind of goofy crystal thing in each room. The room that makes you reroll INT is nice, as are the complications: crystal plague, bizarro monster release, crystal invasion. The ship is too small and not weird enough. A ho-humm sort of thing.

The Monastery at Dor-Amon – Dale Horstman – Winner: Best Library
Nice art, worthy of display. Also a decent side-view of a megadungeon to expand on, but the teasers/overview lack much to spur the imagination. There’s a pretty sweet demon, but the whole thing is more of an idea seed to expand upon than a real adventure.

Water Genie vs. Undead Mermaid Gladiator – David Gat – Winner: Best Gonzo
This is a decent adventure mislabeled as “gonzo.” You give a giant squid a magic hat and let him cast spells and people pigeon-hole you. There’s a Merid palace that gives you a hook, but too much space is wasted on the ‘friendly’ setting instead of beefing up the lair setting. There’s a decent amount of stuff to work with in this.

One Last Tribute – Eran Aviram – Winner: Best Tomb
Reverse fetch quest to place flowers on the tomb of a dead guy in the swamp. Pretty traditional, but also with something interesting in each of the 11 chambers. Lamest part is being forced to talk to the dead guys wife before she will open a door for the party. I liked the lttle interesting things in each room. Worth dropping in as is. Low level as written.

The River of Stars – Fco. Javier Barrera – Winner: Best Ruin
Confusing map. I think I’m supposed to transition from side-view to overhead in several places. It would be cooler if it were more vertical ala: DL1. Weirdly disassociated with things like “Trap: 1d12 + paralysis” … uh … nice to have more detail there? “The Origin of All Evil” doesn’t deliver … maybe some translation issues hampered this one?

Holy Sword – Gene Sollows – Winner: Most Fun
Art School project that would look nice framed in the basement. Actual dungeon resembles S2. I have no idea what’s going on in the upper third of the page.

Devil Gut Rock – Greengoat – Winner: Best Theme
Nice use of height in the map, although it’s generally not taken advantage of. Decent monsters related to the environment (chupacabras and canopic jar zombies.) Generic treasure statements degrade the theming.

Sell-Swords of Mars – Jason Kemp – Winner: Best Wilderness
A small wilderness hex crawl that is not particularly martian. The 15 hex encounters lack action. There are just monsters in a lair at a certain hex … they aren’t DOING anything In this manner it resembles the encounter of Isle of the Unknown more than the Wilderlands or Stater.

The First Causality – Jason Shaffer – Winner: Best 1st level dungeon
A mostly linear cave system with a couple of good) attempts at terrain: passage running under another, passage the bottom of a pit, a stream passage. Nice new monsters but the reliance on ‘mundane’ beasties (stirge, g spiders, dire rats) ruins things for me.

Crypt of the Four Brothers – Jeff Shepherd – Winner: Best Riddles
Tired riddle trope combined with tired layout trope combined with tired themed area trope. I guess the challenge is in how much the players suffer before figuring things out and skipping the rest?

A King with No Crown – Jerry LeNeave – Winner: Best Temple
Very nice treasure integrated in to the adventure. Many of the encounters are some of the best underwater rooms I’ve seen. There is a bullshit “defeat all the guardians” room and I don’t dig the ending, but it does have a good setting. Much better than I thought it would be.

A Rough Night at the Dog & Bastard – Kelvin Green – Winner: Best Relationship Map
A relationship map for the visitors of an inn. Nicely done relationship map with a decent mix of people. It feels a bit … shallow? though. It needs something more. Maybe some events to go along with the relationships? Idk.

Fungal Infection – L.S.F. – Winner: Best Fungoid
A one-trick pony fungus adventure. Close the flood gates and drown the fungus queen in the mine. Could have used some better mycanoid guard powers/weirdness and maybe some more fungus weird stuff also.

The Faerie Market – Leslie Furlong – Winner: Best Situation
Not whimsical enough for my tastes, although the encounters section is decent. I can only compare it to The Goblin Fair, which had a much more whimsical market. IE: It didn’t seem like a faerie market to me.

Seven Spindles and a McGuffin – Lester Ward – Winner: Best Modifiable Map
A big dungeon with a rotating map gimmick. Very generic. The goal area lies behind something like a dozen secret doors. That’s not my usual hyperbole. Bereft of flavor or charm.

Deep in the Purple Worm – Luka Rejec – Winner: Best Integration of Art and Story
Another Art School project. This REALLY needs to be a poster print on my living room wall. Kick ass location, nice rooms, but hard to get all the detail. Seriously worth expanding.

Operation Eagle Eye – PJ Cunningham – Winner: Best Espionage
A generic espionage case that reads like a blueprint for the genre. I feel ripped off by the Jane Austin genre tweak, and many of the other genre tweaks feel like someone was not trying. Tinker gnomes and shamens, really?

The Cave of Kull Cove – Ramsey Hong – Winner: Best Cave
Oh boy, ghost pirates in a sea cave! Linear with lame content and the ghost pirates have left little notes everywhere. I stayed in a B&B like that once, and I didn’t like that place either. The whalebit vendor and skull with gold tooth are the high points. Mermaid Gladiator had a better giant squid.

The Tomb of Oddli Stone-Squarer – Roger Carbol – Winner: Best Multiple Factions
More interesting than it first appears, which the players will notice eventually as well. Nice history, multiple entrances, looks like a dungeon restock with a hidden area. Ready to drop in to your game.

Old Bastard’s Barrens – Roger SG Sorolla – Winner: Best New Presentation
52 pages does a hex crawl. Nice presentation but only a couple of interesting encounters. The emphasis on lair encounters gives the place a static feel. Hex encounters need lots of active things.

The Tomb of Nesta the Mischievous – The Seven-Sided Die – Winner: Most Bountiful
I don’t get it. The joke is a fake trap, or the skeletons with brooms? Just Another Tomb?

Tomb of Snowbite Pass – Will Doyle – Winner: Best Eye Beams
A cute little funhouse ‘challenge’ where classic tropes aplenty. I got lost after the magic pool room. Dark Doorways? Stairs?

Here We Stand Again – A.A. Bunkerclub55
Minigame with a GREAT premise. Th evil artifact has awakened the dead in the royal tomb complex … but you’re one of the dead! Yp, everyone is a king, general, high priest or hero! Plays out like a mini-strategic wargame. Reminds me a lot of those minigames from Dragon. The GOOD ones from Dragon.

‘Relaxx’ Spa – Aaron Bianco
A whole lot of ‘this used to be’ room descriptions which do nothing to add value. Why is this set in a spa? Stinks of tinker gnomes and magical ren-faire, even though none are present.

Quarentine! – Aaron Webb
Interesting use of height and an honest to goodness non-sucky sewer-like environment. Non-sucky because it’s an aqueduct and not a cistern, I guess. I found it evocative and it gave me great descriptive ideas … good ones you asses, I’m not always a dick. Replacing the gargoyles with something else would make it better IMHO; something closer in theme to the gibberrers, maybe? A better/color map would have really made this kick-ass and help commincate the vertical. Two ore notes: A) You don’t to get hand-write unless you’re doing some kind of useless art school dungeon. B) My spell checker hates that spelling of the title.

Temork’s Descending Dungeon – Andre Bogaz e Souza
Suffers from the presentation. Just keep repeating “evil fairy tale” and then everything will make sense. Evil elves riding spiders with captive children in bags? HELLZ YES! Evil bitter dwarf WITH SPIDER LEGS?!? Jr. High portions suck (acid on the floor, etc.)

Hellmarsh’s Monastery – Andres Cuesta
Nice entrance to a megadungeon. An entire book of 1-pagers like this would be better than 99% of the crap sold as adventure supplements. Needs more … imagination? A ledge with a corpse? Give the party a reason to want to fuck with it. Etc.

Time Shear – Andrew & Heleen Durston
The very definition of a linear shit pile. If this was sandboxy it could be a great adventure. Fleeing through the atomic undead wasteland, hiding, being hunted … alas, it is not to be.

The Moriah Museum of Dwarven Artistry – Benoit
What was the point of this? Boring rooms with boring descriptions . Magical chamber pots with spheres of annihilation in them? That’s always a sign the designer has their priorities wrong. I’m sure this is a very historically accurate and realistic adventure. THAT IS BORING.

The Shimmering Portals – Berlin Kinsman
This is more Grimtooth Traps than a One Page Dungeon. One room with goofy set up that isn’t even goofy enough to be a funhouse room. It’s one of those bullshit constructed environments meant to do something cool.

Goblin Well – Bill De Franza
A decent little vertical adventure that doesn’t have enough interesting things going on. Reminds me a bit of the troll in 100 Bushels of Rye.

Watery Palace of the Ooze Behemoth – The Ebony Obelisk of the Snail Demon – Boric Glandumm
Nice premise and good theming in rooms one and two but then it turns in to just another boring symmetrical temple. Too bad, it could have been the most awesome thing EVAR!

The Ichor of Vercingetorix – C.M. Lebrun
Set in the sewers because NOT TRYING. Decent backstory but only one interesting room: 2 gnolls gambling over a small child. Otherwise just sewer after sewer of monsters to kill with nothing else interesting going on.

The Plague Years – Chris Engle
A story game with preset scenes ala Shab-al-Hiri Roach. The Roach is the only story game I like, but I don’t get the same vibe from this. A pointless little exercise in time wasting, but probably an ok one if you’re in to that kind of shit.

Cult of the Tyrant Kings – Chris Longhurst
A decent climax to an adventure It could use more theming in the introduction to set the mood. Otherwise: crawling claw hordes, flaming skull hordes, etc. NPC’s could use some factions/personalities.

Tomb of the Sword of the Vampire Princess – Chris Olson
Tomb with traps and fetch quests to remake a sword. The magic stream puzzle/combat is decent, as is giving a vermin escape route to a prison trap. The place doesn’t feel like a vampire tomb; a real opportunity for theming was lost.

Slime in a Bottle – Christian Hollnbuchner
The inn & surroundings need more stuff in it/description if it’s going to fulfill the sandboxy story/combat that’s suggested.
Besieged at the Inn” is a common trope, this needs more to make anything other than an a two sentence adventure seed.

Momentum – Clarabella Chong
I have no idea what this is. Some kind of chase resolution mechanic, maybe?

The Giant Ant Nest – Clay Thomas McGrew
Generic and non-descript ant lair. The aphid milk is nice. There should be stuff/encounters like that. Flooded chamber is good because it lures the party in to a clearly dangerous situation.

A Hole Lot of Goblins – Dakota Dornbrack
There’s too much mundane in this. From the hook to the minimal key, it needs more of the fantastic. The gem ants are great; this needs more of that. NO CURSIVE FONTS EVER!

The Final BattleGround – Dan Roy
A Battle Royale that only work if the party is VERY high level or 4e. In the first case we can rename it Dark Druids 2. In the second, the movement/displacement powers are taken advantage of. Looks like a 4e D&D encounters evening. NO CURSIVE FONTS EVER!

Watery Palace of the Ooze Behemoth – David Brawley
I don’t think I understand the map. Again, a great opportunity for weirdness is lost. The shell encounters are lame, as are the hook horrors. Theme it up with ooze, goop, innards, and new monsters/items. Eat the snail eyes for clairvoyance, etc. Instead it’s a boring trip to the Grand Canyon. 🙁

The Chaotic Dungeon of Morvant the …… – David D. Dornbrack
I guess this is supposed to help you come up with ideas? It’s just random & chaotic which, in spite of the dungeon name, is not done in a cool way. Sham has a table on his site that works better. OMG! Is it too silly for Bryce?

The Ovens of Ar-Gar – by David Thiel
Great encounters and nice incorporation of the vertical and alternate paths, although it’s still too linear. The whole thing works well and the Pie content is only lightly encountered, making it easy to swap out. Too bad the treasure was generic. Worth stealing MULTIPLE ideas from, if not used in its entirety. Big Bag needs some foreshadowing to build up his rep.

Hermit Alchemist Tower – David van Slyke
It’s a cooking competition! Sam didn’t cook anything! By which I mean: It’s hook is ghouls, but there aren’t any. This feels forced and random, with the rooms bearing little relation to each other. Needs more interesting things.

The Hidden Shrine – Diogo Nogueira
Decent adventure, great map. The usual low-level monsters spoil the thing a bit. Could use more interesting treasure, monsters, and ‘lures’ to get the party messing with the insect swarm, for example. Better environment for most of the fights needed also. Nice bone island and alternate routes!

The Dutch Oven – Dylan Hartwell
The monster gauntlet is a lame “kill everything to open the doors” thing. Otherwise this is just a single room. Lots of editors on this one didn’t make the soup better.

Goblinville – Edward Green
Could be decent if Tuckers Kobolds methods are used. I fucking hate giant rats. Other than the “rock wall climbing/attacking” this has nothing to recommend it, being full of realistic, and boring, content.

In the Dying Light – Eric Harshburger
I get the journal gimmick. It makes my eyes hurt and there’s not enough eye shadow for art school. The crank wheel with goblins nearby is nice, giving an escape but with consequences. The dwarven skeletons in the stalagmites is a nicely evocative little bit also. The maze, goblins lair, pit, and mine offer nothing of interest. The rescue mission hook could be cool.

The Vault of Illusion and the Cube of Power – Eric Minton
Illusion dungeons don’t work if you know it’s an illusion dungeon. It’s not terrible, and better than the illusion level in The Darkness Beneath from Fight On!. The map is too simple, being just a simple branch. I like the pits with spikes and goodies, the monsters, and the glass maze. Actually, I like most of the encounters. The ‘kill everything to unlock the doors’ room is bullshit though, as is all rooms of that type. Needs more interesting treasure. The cube hiding place is bullshit; don’t be a dick Eric.

Zombie Elves – Vangelis Vafeiadis
To much ‘attempting to build tension’ and not enough interesting after the tension is built. No use of terrain or freaky zombie elf shit. Why not just burn the whole place down? Encounters are uninteresting.

One Page Dungeon – Felbrigg Napoleon Harriot
Ug. A fucking story game about defeating traps. Blah blah blah story games suck. Go find an old drug addict and listen to his stories at the public library hippy!

The Oracle of Pagebrin – Gabriel Perez
Inside joke/art project.

The Graveyard – Gerardo Tasistro
The map is incomprehensible. I think it’s trying to show two or three levels at once. I think. The encounters are not interesting. No interesting terrain, monsters, or rooms. The spin is a good one, but you need to put clues in the adventure to hint what is going on AND the party needs to be able to find them before getting eaten. Generic giant rats are fucking boring.

Ankhor Deeps – Herwin Wielink
An empty but pretty map. The Stairs and waterfall look interesting and hint of that stair scene in Moria. Lava and a sluice gate do not an adventure make. Nothing to see here, move along.

The Necromancer in the Three-Lobed Brain – Ian Johnson
Aren’t you a clever boy … who tries too hard. Nice premise but trying too hard ruins it. I’m a sucker for things kicking over tables to fight behind and anything with the words ‘targeting system’ in it. Use your words more Mr. Artist and put in more shit like that.

The Lost Temple of Moradin – Jan Pralle
Uh … it’s a map of a (mostly) symmetrical temple with, like five rooms, and nothing more. Why are temples symmetrical?

Ship of the Lost – Jasper Polane
The ship is hampered by its small size. This could have been a nice adventure similar to Inn of Lost Heroes but instead it resorts to giant rats. Too small and too much room devoted to rules rather than evocative text or interesting encounters. It’s a ship! Use the sails and rigging!

Lair of the Minotaur – Jeff McKelley
Interesting use of the vertical and inaccessible areas. A more interesting map/location would facilitate better level transitions (ala DL1.) Desecrating the Zeus temple summons a large angry goat. Nice. Otherwise the encounters are not too interesting and I LOATHE the ‘gimp the party by taking away teir stuff’ trope.

Baron Fel’s Vault – Jeff R
Jesus H Fucking CHRIST! NO CURSIVE FONTS! A decent location for a heist caper. This one could provide hours of fun as the players scout and plan their theft. NPC’s personalities and factions would make it all the more interesting and exploitable.

Close the Gates – Jens Thuresson
Needs a lot of help. The characters are locked are locked up with their equipment, or they are expected to fight their way out of a demon-infested prison with no gear? The apocalypse is coming but there’s no hint to the players that it is, so how can be expected to stop it? The rooms need more interesting environments to fight in and/or descriptions. In an adventure this short/constrained why waste time on an empty storage room?

Watery Palace of the Ooze Behemoth – The Tesseract Prison of the Putrescent Lord – Jim Pacek
Nice imagery and a good random table combined with a serviceable map. Needs better monsters and better loot. I wish there was more to this.

The Wanderers Tomb – JohnB
Linear gauntlet=bad. A room where you just take damage. Joy. I like the sunken glass pit room as an obstacle. Otherwise: forced and uninteresting.

The Mourning Wight of Brakhill – J.E. Geoffrey
Boring rooms. Boring layout. Uninteresting environment. The wanderers are doing something, which is good, and the Ending the Adventure section is a nice touch. Now fill the middle with interesting things.

Enbeserth’s Island – Joshua Taylor
Well, is you a hex crawl or is you a tomb? The tomb is a throwaway addition. The searching mechanic makes people pay the PER skill tax or they fight more monsters. The island needs an obviously overpowering enemy that is foreshadowed so the group can flee and have an OBVIOUS time pressure.

Shrine and Shield – Kabuki Kaiser
As I read this I sat with my arms crossed tightly and a scowl on my face. This is an art school project. The titular Shield is a nice item.

The Maximum Utility Chambers – Katie Simpson
Cute small set of rooms that drives home the evil of the Drow. Could be dropped in for Mind Flayers or the like also. Players are going to be freaked out in this place, but there’s no over the top gore/descriptions; your mind fills in the details. Nice. Could use some interesting treasure/equipment besides reagents. Great set of rooms to add evil flavor text to an area.

Tomb of the Sea Dwarves – Kevin Heuer
A bad guy in the sewers raising an army of undead. Haven’t seen that before. Three rooms, one of which is a skill challenge and one of which is black pudding fight. Basically it’s a beholder combat in which he animates dead dwarf skeletons. On the plus side it’s helped me realize I’m a bitter old man.

Collateral Damage – Konrad Ferlangen
A curse made by spreading ground on bones on the road is my kind of thing, as are the reanimated horses and simpleton innkeeper. The village needs more life and events, like an actual witch hunt. The old farm is not connected with the rest of adventure; as a central point it should be. A decent side-trek adventure.

Shrine of the Demon-Monkey God – Mark Garringer
Hey, here’s an idea. How about putting some demon-monkey stuff in your adventure if you call it Shrine of the Demon-Monkey? Just the same tired old traps and routine priest fights. It’s an evil shrine. Put in some evil shrine shit. Make them throw feces and have a subshrine to Mr. Peanut. ANYTHING.

Turtle Shell Bandits – Mark Morrison
They live in a turtle shell. They don’t wear turtle shells. I feel like I’ve been cheated. Just another boring bandit hideout. No room stuff to play with during combat. No turtle bombs. No traps with turtles falling from the ceiling. No turtle silk blankets on the bed. The rooms need things in them to keep combat interesting. The bandits need personalities. The layout is boring. The theming is non-existent.

Lazzer Bears!?! For Teh Win – Matthew W. Schmeer
A silly adventure tat has more whimsy and imagination than 99% of the crap produced for RPG’s. A lonely moronic junion ent? Win! Rutting honey badgers? Win! Bloated ropers? Win! Giant hand of Orcus that smacks adventurers? Win! LAZZER BEARS?AMERICA! FUCK YEAH! Here’s a quote from the adventure: “He won’t stop screaming hysterically the whole way back. Even if the PC’s knock him out. And they’ll want to knock him out.” What the hell else do you need to know to run this NPC? Terse and evocative descriptions for fun rooms that dance around the line between silly and whimsical. Could use better/any treasure. Maybe the head of a lazzer bear?

The Burning Lair – Micah Blackburn
Linear branching map with rooms stuffed full of enemies and generic loot. The first monster room is good because they are doing something: trolls eating a captured adventurer. The subchief monster is not terrible since he’s non-standard. Boring monster barracks.

All Creatures Great and Small – Matthias Hoefler
How’s it coming getting your novel published? I can smell a frustrated author a mile away.

Dungeontown – Michael Prescott & Michael Atlin
A cute little town encounter gizmo. You could use this to have evening after evening of fun in town, be it a dungeontown or no. I enjoyed the idea generator portion and the Rep mini-game.

The Diagnosis – Michael Bonet
Some kind of bullshit story game thing. I’d mock it by calling it ‘Childhood Trauma, the story game’, but I’m pretty sure that already exists.

Dungeon of Doom – Michael Woodhead
Proving ground dungeon where the goal is to escape alive, but there is no exit. Simple skill challenges that involve just rolling a die, mostly without modifiers. Roll 50% or less and you win the challenge. Yeah! Includes a ‘fight yourself” mirror room. Ug. No treasure to speak of. But there’s giants rats! Can’t have a crappy adventure without giants rats!

The Panopticon of Peril – Mike Monaco
The boss guy here is a kind of mummified head, which is nice. Th rest of it … I feel like I’m missing something. There’s just not much here. Some loose notes about guards and prisoners … not really more than the glimmer of an adventure seed.

Project Phaeton – Nick Wedig
A one-shot on a spaceship. The cryo-crew wakes up and finds the ship damaged and must repair it. What, a series of skill rolls and then you go back to sleep? Not much tension here.

Cave of the Hunted – OtspIII
Nice theming, but a bit linear. Good take on a humanoid cult with suitably bizarre landscaping. Needs some treasure to match the theming. I like this one, a lot. It does a good job of producing an environment that feels different and yet somehow makes sense.

Axo’s Dungeon – Paolo Greco
A VERY nice map that combines the horizontal and the vertical. The monster encounters end up feeling a bit samey and it needs better/more interesting treasure and some hints on how to use the statues, etc. Feels more like a fortress attack than a dungeon exploration. Still, I like this A LOT.

The Kobold Coalition – Peter Regan
A dungeon with a tactical assault vibe. Good realistic fortifications. It feels like a ‘clean the hole/monster barracks’ adventure rather than an exploration. A good monster lair/base if you need that sort of thing. Needs more interesting treasure and, IMHO, rooms not related to the base assault.

The Forgotten Bath House – Radulf St. Germain
Not ‘ruined’ enough for my tastes. I like the idea of goblins poisoning wells (the hook) but the bath house rubs me the wrong way and the encounters inside just don’t have much interesting going on.

Fine Art – Ricky Anderson
Reminds me a bit of te Fleshdancer in BG2. Better if integrated in to the campaign over time. I don’t dig ‘explore the artists shop’ type of things, and the adventure needs more interesting treasure. Worked in to a campaign of a city game this could be a decent arc. As a dungeon or normal night of D&D it sucks. .

Rot Tower – Rob S.
A nice realistic adventure that you could easily drop in to Harn, and yet retains just a touch of the fantastic. Vertical dungeon, lepers, a gang of toughs, and a beastie at the bottom. You know the deal: the treasure is not interesting.

Paranoia Pyramid – Rodney Sloan
Just a map with some notes on it. I’m not opposed to this style, but the map has to be clear and this one isn’t. There are four maps here, and I think they each show an individual room? I can’t figure out how they fit together or even how they work individually … I see one interesting note: “croc refills bomb.” next to a crocodile?

The Lanisha Crisis – Roland Volz
A near-future tactical assault on a shuttle carrying passengers taken over by kidnappers. The map is too limited to be anything other than just a single encounter.

Raven Ridge Mansion – Ryan Lucas
Wander around a modern haunted house looking for clues while freaky shit happens to you. The usual suspects: a buried body, demons, a killer. Pretty straight-forwrd mystery.

Snaked AND Chutes and Ladders – S. Harlan
Nice theme, especially the whole giant snake folklore portion. I also like the pit viper wight. I’m not opposed to the ladders and chutes, etc and think it’s a great concept. The random nature of the rooms is lame though. I’d prefer to have them be separately keyed with more variety to the encounters.

Cave of the Stone Sepulchre – S.D. Hilderbrand
A nice map with lots of interesting features and hints at what could be … but still just map. I like the varied terrain in this as well as the variety of obstacles and implied ‘things to do.’ Then again, it was supposed to be just a map. 😉

Twilight House – Scott Slomiany
Another haunted house, but with multiple versions of the house in multiple dimensions. The encounter table is interesting and non-random, meaning the adventure is not just a ‘experience how awesome the GM is’ kind of thing. The dimensional hopping houses thing is pretty nice, as are the various versions of it and the interactions with the little girl.

The Tears of Mother Pestilence – Sersa Victory
Good theming in this ancient temple to the goddess of decay & pestilence. Hap-hazard difficulty: avatar of a god and carrion crawlers! There’s a quest to go on in here but there’s no way to know what to do. A couple of the encounters seem arbitrary, like the one that kills everyone in the world. Players should have a choice to do that, not just have it inflicted without them knowing the possibility. Map is a bit simple. Some of the encounters seem too realistic, at the expense of fun.

Bathhouse Trouble – Shrang Biswas, Gracie Gage
An adventure in a bathroom. Nice towel serpent, and the floating dead body gives the appearance of time passing outside of the PC’s. Otherwise … encounters need more interesting things to do in them, and terrain to play with.

Down Draft – S.J. Harris
Assault on a flying fortress full of flying creatures. It doesn’t take advantage of the ‘flying’ part. One small part has some sections open to below, but there is no elevation features to speak of. Not much more here than a monster barracks.

Beloved of Set – Simon Dale
This is a rarity: a decent desert adventure. Decent environment things, decent hooks, decent scenery, decent lich burial crypt. Lots of things to springboard to another adventure all integrated also. Bonus: it has actors and it doesn’t feel forced or stooopid.

Watery Palace of the Ooze Behemoth: Level 1 – The Sunken Temple – Simon Forster
Oh boy, a symmetrical temple! Map needs a lot of work, although the presence of flooded areas should add much to the gameplay. The various rooms mostly lack interest. “Broken furniture litters this room.” There needs to be more variety and interesting things going on, such as the rusty broken ladder rungs. The Mud Lord needs more build up in order to a good boss.

The Mae’s Prison – Tom Denton
This is a puzzle dungeon, or maybe “a puzzle encounter that kind of looks like a dungeon.” It’s not bad for what it is (IE: a single room puzzle disguised as a dungeon) but the prison the puzzle leads to is kind of lame. A little throw-away text about the prisoners would have been cool.

Haunted Tower of the Forbidden Gods – Tony Dowler, Ben Wray
Decent hook & wandering monster table. I like the gods a lot, but the ‘dungeon’ needs to be expanded. As it is it’s really just an adventure seed. But a pretty good one.

Evil Experimentation Lab – Vivian Smith
Just a map of a modern day lab with ‘spooky’ rooms names like “Dissection” or “Radiation Studies.” As far as I can tell there is nothing interesting going on.

Night in “Al-Farahad’s Pearl” – Vladislav Volchenko
Oasis Inn that the players are captured in. Players HATE to be captured and separated from their stuff. Large for a 1-pager but at the expense of interesting content. It’s just stuffed full of the mundane.

Will No One Rid Me Of These Troublesome Goblins? – Warren Abox
The cave map is evocative and makes your mind leap, but it’s a tad small. (Hey Bryce, it’s a fucking one page dungeon, what do you want? I WANT MORE OF GOOD SHIT LIKE THIS!) The black ooze pool, and the flavor text it integrates in to the goblins, is very nice. Nice magic & treasure … A decent goblin adventure, which is not an easy thing to do.

Makmurdo’s Infinite Sewer – Wayne Snyder
Not just a sewer, an infinite sewer. Joy. Wander the sewers until the players are bored to tears and then find the wizards lair. I did something like this on the Genocide mud. Everyone hated it. Not enough encounters to sustain an infinite sewer. Slug, cultists, rats, Zzzz…

Tentacle Thing – Xyphon
Decent way to describe a town but the NPC’s need better personalities. Pretty bland overall. REALLY bland. Needs NPC interactions, factions, things going on downstairs, etc.

The Bioshpere – Yves Green
I like the wanderers, but the treasure table is too good and the encounters are too mundane. It’s post-apoc, do something interesting with the water purifiers, etc! It just doesn’t feel interesting or fun. Too normal.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/236712/One-Page-Dungeon-Compendium-2012-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

by Patrice ‘Kabuki Kaiser’ Crespy
Self-published
Labyrinth Lord
Multi-level

Deep beneath the streets of the City-State of Cryptopolis, sanctuary of the lich-thieves and abode of the Red Goddess, sewers and ancient ruins mingle together into a labyrinth of horrors and wonders.

I wouldn’t normally review something like this but it’s getting close to GenCon so I’m trying to eek out a few more reviews before I refill the review pile at the con. That means non-adventure stuff, older DCC, Dungeon magazines, and probably even some 4e. To get you through these trying times just keep in mind the pile of Frog God, OSR, and DCC stuff that awaits in the holy shrine of the god of commerce at GenCon …

This is a random dungeon generator for solo play. You know those tables i the back of the 1e DMG that created a random dungeon? This does something similar, except it has a few more rules. Campaign rules and the like. The experience ends up being a little like playing Warhammer Quest with the expanded campaign rules in that game. Fun … in a certain kind of way for a certain kind of person. It reminds me a lot of those boardgames that came out at the dawn of personal computers. Super complex and involved boardgames that you could play as a kind of campaign … a genre that TOTALLY died out when people found better solo activities on PC’s.

Basically you create a group wander around town for a few days buying gear. There’s a chance each day that something strange will happen to you. This ranges from goofy merchants to love interests to ghouls or shadows attacking you. Then you proceed to the dungeon and use the random tools to create a dungeon map that you explore. There are a decent set of rules for most aspects of exploration. The whole adventure is predicated on keeping a kind of Captains Log of your adventure. If you don’t write down you are searching for traps then you are not, and so on. Thus over time you get a written record of your adventure. Of particular note is the depth of the traps table and the number of different magical effects that can befall your group. There are also some rules for coming back to town, selling your loot, and doing things like buying a stronghold, getting on the city-council, getting married, and so on. It seems like a decent little mechanic for blowing some time until you die.

It doesn’t, though, seem particularly interesting in the environments it creates. Maybe it’s because I reviewed WMLP #4 yesterday and it had a random encounter generator in it. That one created crazy and wondrous environments that a DM could then fill in. I think I rolled something like a ruined enchanted stronghold with mineral deposits, which immediately brought to mind giant glowing ‘fortress of solitude’ crystals thrusting up through the ruins of mighty stronghold, destroying it. The WMLP table was full of strong imagery that your mind rushed to fill in the details of. This creates rooms with a broken pot in it. It’s not the same. Not at all. Not even close. There’s a great deal of attention paid to the mundane but not much paid to the fantastic. Various lighting types in the hallways. Or the dozen variations of stone and rubble combinations that make up the corridor builds. Oh, the corridor is dark and moldy. Or its got a puddle in it. Oh, I found a hat in the hallway. Great. And there’s a battered shield. Zzzzzz……It’s all pretty generic, mundane, and boring.

I’ll probably keep it around and me and the wife will try it out together as players, as a kind of campaign boardgame. Maybe.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/109821/Ruins-of-the-Undercity?affiliate_id=1892600

by John D. Kramer
Usherwood Publishing
OSRIC
Levels 5-7

… before your eyes a room materializes as sand through an hour glass. But you have a feeling of uncertainty as to where the chamber actually exists. Valen’cya herself seemed to fall into the deepest depths of fear during your battle, just before … just before all went black. And now, she is gone, but the heat of her wrath remains behind. Through an open window you see that your group stands in a chamber, high atop the tallest spire of a castle. At the feet of the castle lay a sprawling port city. Huge it is, yet oddly quiet, and dark, and deserted it seems to be. And then, a disembodied voice chants quietly, and purposefully, but from what direction you cannot tell …

This is a 43-ish room linear railroad through an evil mage-kings tower. It reminds me a bit of Tower of Gygax or a decent little “Let’s go kill Sauron!” kind of adventure. It FEELS like an evil dudes tower, full of ancient evil THINGS. That doesn’t make it less of a railroad though. Kramer admits it’s one in the introduction, and to a certain extent that is required of a tower adventure, but it still irks. BTW: full of ancient evil THINGS also means: lengthy rooms descriptions full of puzzle-like things that will kill you. I’m struck with how similar it feel to a competition module, or maybe The Eight Kings.

In my youth I recall lusting after some of the old MERP products. The Barrow Mounds! Cool! Sauron’s Tower! AWESOME! Cirith Ungol!  Inevitably they did not really live up to the heights my adolescent mind had built up for them. What I wanted, I think, was for them to be like this module, full of the things this module is full of. This adventure contains four or so levels of linear set pieces. Generally a level will be described and it will have some kind of a VERY lengthy thing going on in it, channelling a Kuntz-like depth of things to do. Then there will be five or so “rooms” that are really more like stair landings, on the way down to the next level. The landing will generally have some kind of puzzle or encounter to be overcome, and are generally unavoidable. The final level, the catacombs, has a little more depth to the map, but only a little, and in fact it probably has fewer physical room features than the upper four levels of the tower.

Typically the rooms on the levels have a little set piece full of detail. Hidden alcoves, or niches, locked, trapped, sarcophagus, pillars, torches, and the like.  Braziers summon things, carvings beg to be kissed, colored lights … er, carpets, hypnotize and sparkle. Murals and paintings draw you in. There’s some D&D continuum of Fucking With Shit Gets You Killed. 4E is one end and Raggi’s modules are at the other end. This is closer to Raggi-land but not so far gone as to make playing with the toys worthless. And Traps! OMG there are traps! Chests, doors, triple-trapped … the Mage-King is playing for keeps!

The sub-levels/stair landings are a bit different. From two to three there are nine different landings that must be traversed to get to the next set of stairs down. These are done in order and each is some sort of challenge. These serve as the wandering monster tax and provide temptations for the party to expend resources prior to their getting to next real level and its bounty of Freaky Evil Things That WIll Kill You.

I’m not really sure what to think about this. It’s a better Barad-dur than the MERP one. It’s also pretty linear, some of which necessarily comes from it being a tower adventure. I suspect it a pretty decent high-level adventure, especially in light of the challenges that come with writing one of those things. I think it’s better than 8 Kings, but high-level adventures are sooo difficult to write and so few that I’m not sure how relevant that statement is. It’s certainly an evocative place and your players will remember it, probably more so than a trip to the Tomb of Horrors.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/108888/In-the-Halls-of-the-MageKing-PDF?affiliate_id=1892600

by Gavin Norman
Psychedelic Fantasies
D&D
Level 4 Characters

Each adventure in the Psychedelic Fantasies line revels in unconstrained imagination. Every monster, every magic spell, and every magic spell is a unique and never-before-seen creation of the author. No orcs, fireballs, or +1 swords will be found within. Leave the familiar behind to explore hitherto undreamed of wonders …

This is a 38 room dungeon on three levels of an old wizards lab. I’m torn on this one. It’s full of unique creatures and unique idiosyncratic items, but it feels … cramped? and maybe somewhat forced? I’m not sure what the right description is. Maybe Linear describes it best. Not a railroad, but Linear.

So, big radiant dome. Shifting colors on the outside, a night sky interior, and a set of stairs going down. Mythic Underworld crossover was done better in the first Psychedelic Fantasies module. Inside on level 1 the problem starts to show. Hanging off of the first room is a cryo-freeze chamber and also a great cavern. The cavern is forested and has two smaller caves “mini-cave systems” of three or so rooms each hanging off of it. This is not exploration. The party will, essentially, interact with the natives of the great cavern, maybe slaughter them and maybe make friends with them, and maybe get a key. I’m sure a good DM could milk the locals for some great roleplaying fun, but there’s not nearly enough here. The first level seems more like one of those “Side Tracks” adventures from Dungeon or Dragon magazine. It’s not really much more than a one-trick pony.

Levels two and three are a bit more involved, but the maps really are not. Just a simple branching design. Corridors with halls with rooms hanging off of them. The adventure tries to force room exploration by placing the big treasures behind locked doors. You need to seek out the keys. Hopefully in the process of exploring the party will play with some of the wonders herein and have an adventure. I’m not convinced. There ARE things to play with dials on the walls and swirling clouds of color. Giant crusher machines with some bait in them. Goo balls that turn in to random things when thrown and vats to immerse ones self in. Something seems off though and I don’t know what it is. There’s some gonzo here. I should love gonzo. There’s some OD&D weirdness here. I should love that. I DO love parts of it. The monsters are, as promised, unique and weird. Blobs people/things with objects embedded in them. Uranium Zombies. A giant maggot thing. Weird wands and rings and swords that all bring the idiosyncratic. The items and monsters are EXACTLY what I’m looking for in an adventure. They are strange and unpredictable and new and do cool things and give the players a chance to explore with their characters instead of just sighing at the presence of another +1 sword.

I’ve struggled to write this, as the length shows. I don’t know what going on here to put me off. Individually many of the elements are strong. The maps not great, but that shouldn’t alone result in the buzz kill I feel. There are lessons to learn here. I spend a lot of time talking about unique this-and-this and non-standard that-and-that. The gist being that non-standard magic items, non-standard monsters and detailed mundane treasure are important. And they ARE important, but they are not the end all and be all of making a decent adventure. Neither is a map. Or buttons to play with. Or any of a whole list of things. A lot of elements have to come together to have a decent adventure module.

This thing absolutely has an OD&D feel. But it also feels cramped or maybe limited. I don’t know … the purpose of the review to tell you what this adventure is like and I’m unable to do that well for this one.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/121370/Within-the-Radiant-Dome-Psychedelic-Fantasies-2?affiliate_id=1892600

by Morten Braten
Xoth.Net Publishing
Pathfinder
Levels 8-10

There is a land far to the north, past the black hills of Lamu and beyond the frozen moors of Tharag Thule; a dreary land of mist and thunder, where the white people of Yg have dwelt since ancient times. The free men of Yg tremble when fools dare to utter the name of Arkanth Mal, witch-king of Galuga, for he is the greatest and oldest of the tyrants of this primeval land. And now, the drunken bards of Tartuun whisper, the witch-king of Galuga seeks a new queen. For his minions sweep across the borders of Tharag Thule and Lamu, slaying men and taking only young women as slaves back to Galuga, the Citadel beyond the North Wind!

I have no idea what definition of “Old School” is being used to describe the XOTH products. It’s not one I’m familiar with. This is another bland and flavorless Swords & Sorcery adventure with no goals, plot, timeline, treasure, motivation, or anything else of interest. If you remove the crap you could reduce the page to just a single page.

I don’t know why I review the XOTH stuff. They have cool names, cool covers, and, more importantly, advertise themselves as Old School and are touted by fans as such. Uh … No. The idea behind this adventure is that some witch-king is kidnapping women and having them brought back to his citadel. He’s searching for a perfect body to resurrect his love witch-queen lover. She lives in a box much like the Ark from the Indiana Jones movie and her show owl familiar is flying around. There’s another evil guy living farther north, he killed the chick. Ok, that’s it. You don’t need to buy the product now. You know everything communicated in the product. Oh, there’s a shit ton more words in the product but it doesn’t amount to anything. Just meaningless description with no joie de vivre.

There’s a town that’s described but it has no flavor at all. It might be mechanically correct but it offers little in the way of action, excitement, plot, or anything else. “The North Gate is where men and women from other towns and villages of Yg arrive to barter their produce in return for the crafted items from southern lands.” Seriously? That’s part of the adventure? You’re willing to tell me that the moat is 10′ deep and the palisade 15′ high but not give me something to expand on and run with? There’s a hunter selling a large snow owl with perfect white feathers. Yup, the familiar. But it’s buried in otherwise meaningless text and not expanded upon AT ALL. Seriously, it’s not mentioned anywhere else in adventure. It has absolutely NO important at all. It’s completely up to the DM find some reason or excuse to do something with it. On and on it goes. Boring and meaningless descriptions, one after another. A bar/tavern with nothing interesting about it. Slave traders. A town hall and trading station. BUT IT’S ALL BORING AND MEANINGLESS. “The front door is brown.” Seriously? Why the fuck do I care? The NPC description are even worse. This being a 3e game the stat block is a quarter page by itself, per person, and then there’s some moronic description. I wish I could better communicate how stupid the descriptions are. There’s a physical description. There’s a description of their job. And there’s absolutely no information at all on using them in the game or anything at all inspiring about them or their job. The output from a random NPC generator would have been better than the descriptions included. There would still be no suggested uses but at least they’d have some character.

The actual Citadel has three levels: the Palace, the Prisons, and the Pits. “The Citadel is dominated by the palace of Arkanth Mal.” … With it’s thirteen rooms. “A frontal assault will be a disaster!” What, you mean from the six low level guards that are present in the place? The rooms as so So SO boring. Meaningless description with no flavor and no inspiration behind them. The prison and pit levels, with ten or so rooms each, have the requite tentacle abomination and the by now familiar boring rooms. The final section, the other evil dudes place, doesn’t even get a decent description. It’s just presented as a general outline. Uh … I’m sorry, I thought I was paying you for content. I see now that I was wrong.

I don’t understand this adventure at all. It’s like it wants to be some MERP region supplement in place, presenting things in a kind of non-judgemental format. In other places it wants to be an adventure. But almost none of the content is inspiring. Almost none of the NPC’s have anything to distinguish them. Almost none of the locations have anything interesting about them. It’s like someone tried to make a scientifically/historically accurate Sword & Sorcery adventure and forgot the parts that actually make S&S fun.

This is as bland as bland can be while still containing the number of words it does. As bland as a 3.x stat block, maybe?

You want Swords & Sorcery? Go get that Blood of the Dragon adventure.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/119373/Legend-Citadel-Beyond-the-North-Wind?affiliate_id=1892600

by Patrick Wetmore
Henchman Abuse
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 2-4

The Anomalous Subsurface Environment is more than just robots and lasers — its clowns and dinosaurs, too! Levels 2 and 3 of the critically ignored gonzo megadungeon are finally available — with more classes, more tables, and more cruel and unusual ways to die deep beneath the surface of the post-apocalyptic Earth!

An overall fine product with a lot of gonzo elements. It sometimes crosses the line from ‘goofy gonzo’ to ‘jokey joke’, and those are the lower points of the levels. That’s not too hard to fix though and if you’ve enjoyed ASE1 then you’ll want this also.

Continuing where ASE1 left off, this massive 144 page booklet covers the next two dungeon levels. Each level has about 130 rooms on it, and there’s a sublevel with another dozen or so rooms, and several large portions of the dungeon levels numbered with sub-parts. For the money you are getting A LOT of content here. There’s an absurd number of new monsters, at least 40, as well as new spells, new magic items, new tech items, new wizards, new NPC parties, and even a couple of new gonzo classes, like robot, insect man, or moktar. Patrick brings the content.

The level design here is as good or better than ASE1. The levels are large with lots of sub-areas and lots of corridors connecting them. This allows for a freedom of movement and exploration that most products can’t deliver because of their small/cramped map style. A decent effort is made to connect levels via multiple methods and non-standard paths. Slides, open areas water features, these are all used to connect levels. There’s also a decent amount of same-level stairs. The map does get a bit dry in places and some additional terrain and room features would be nice to see. If nothing else these do a good job add variety to combat. The map isn’t in Thracia/Benoist territory yet but it’s far FAR better than the maps in most products. It also does a good job describing some features of levels not yet explored/seen as well as having alternate entrances to the dungeon.

The dungeon levels have factions. This is a good thing. A VERY good thing. This isn’t just ‘lair’ factions but also includes ‘named’ individuals like The Bonelord or the Dr. Giggles. The various group operating within the ASE, along with the map complexity, should allow the party to approach their problem with varied methods. It doesn’t have to be a pure hack-fest. You can get new hirelings, maybe get some healing or stay the night. Team up with one group against the other, or go get some help to obtain the Amulet of Power, or whatever. This changes the dynamic of the adventure. Not only is the dungeon a dark and ominous place full of things that will kill you, now you have to be on your toes and on the lookout for potential allies and double-crosses. This makes the play far more varied and interesting. Me, I like to make sure the parties allies visibly and ostentatiously display their wealth. Nothing like turning the murder hobos in to murder hobo’s … now who’s doing the double cross Black Dougal? The second level has The Painted Men squaring off against the Necromatic Midgets and the Trogs. These three groups each know some information about the dungeon. What these groups DON’T have, and need are some immediate goals/problems for the party to participate in. They all want bodies, to eat, and that’s about it. Their rivalry for the level, and bodies, is mostly static. It’s referenced but not shown much. COmpare this to Level 1 of the Darkness Beneath where various encounters are with groups of trogs and crab-men fighting, or of trogs just finishing up a fight, or of an older battleground littered with broken weapons and body parts, etc. That kind of thing give you a sense of what’s going on in the dungeon. It makes it seem like the dungeon is alive and that the groups really ARE at each others throats. Level three has cod-men, goblins, a hinge-man expedition and an incursion by the moktars through a new entrance to the ASE. Again, the various groups know things they could share with the explorers but again, they don’t really have many/any goals past “kill the other guys.” If would have been interesting to have a couple of teasers about their plans to accomplish their dominion. “If only we could take the Birthing Pools!” or “We assault the northern corridors tomorrow.” Just a nudge towards some events.

The encounters are good. Laser attacks. A room that replaces your head with a different one. Giant lakes and caverns full of weird stuff. A door with heads nailed to it. An obvious trap with obvious bait (a cod-man egg.) Turning to any page and picking just about any random room will result in you finding SOMETHING interesting to interact with. I like dungeons having things to play with and explore. I like factions that allow you interact with monsters. I like a dungeon with a decent amount of variety and yet enough consistency to allow the players to ground their characters actions in certain sections. ASE2-3 does all that and it does it well. There’s so much stuff going on in this place that it’s hard to focus on individual elements to describe. Beyond the factions there are others in the dungeon. The Sewage Prophet: an otyugh so old and well-fed that he’s prophetic. The Man From Below is some stranger in a cavern wearing trog hides. Tranitaxin the Bone Lord is running around. And the there’s all of the traps rooms and all of the rooms with freaky-deaky stuff for the party to mess with. The depth and variety here is really impressive. There’s a wide variety of things for the players to have their characters explore with the DM. There should be a very healthy back and forth between the players and the DM as their explore black plates on the walls, globes of glass containing screams, and any of the seemingly ENDLESS wonders of the ASE.

And then there are the clowns and the circus. At some point messing around and having fun and being gonzo turns in to a joke dungeon ala Castle Greyhawk. Not Dungeonland-like but “Gamma World powered by 4e” bullshit. I’m pretty tolerant to this kind of stuff in actual play and I’m not opposed to seeing it in a product … in moderation. When a product TRIES to do this consistently then the problems starts to show up. Or, rather, my problem with a product starts to show. Humor as a byproduct is different than encoded humor which is different than a humorous setting. One of the first areas in 2-3 is a circus with clown-people, a big top tent, circus acts, carnies, and booth games. This is my redline that separates goofy post-apoc gonzo fun from jokey. It’s not too hard to tone down, even while running on the fly, I’d suspect, but it does leave a bad taste in my mouth. Getting ripped off by Castle Greyhawk when I was 18 probably has something to do with this, but, whatever.

I do, however, have a pretty decent tolerance for new items, spells, and monsters. I’ve got no problem with a toilet monster, or a Beard of Bees, or any of the other MARVELOUS new items or monsters. They are well done, fit the theme of the dungeon/setting, and are supplemented by a lot of non-traditional treasure, like silver wiring and the like. This sort of the thing isn’t done enough in adventures. Players are TERRIFIED of new monsters. They never know what they can, what they are immune to, if it level drains or eats their eyes or whatever. There’s a new kind of trapper, this one resembling a curtain … or maybe “sewn together skin parts that are being used as a curtain.” Ouch! Likewise the Sword of Unlife, or a solid silver skeleton contained in a red dehydrated gelatinous cube are the kinds of interesting treasure I’d expect to see in an adventure … and generally don’t. Why would anyone ever put in a “+1 sword” when you could put in “Aidru, Slayer of Men. Continually slowly drips blood because of all the people it’s killed.” THEN you can give it a power. Even “+1”. I’ll take the Sword of Unlife and Aidru, Slayer of Men over a hundred +1 swords. Players get attached to unusual and unique magic items, be it their powers or their descriptions. They have their characters hang on to them long after they are useful. That’s the kind of thing you want to have happen in your RPG.

It’s not clear to me that this COULD be better than ASE1. The first ASE was a decent departure from the bog-standard D&D world and contained so much interesting setting information that it seemed like a bolt from the blue bringing gonzo mana from heaven. ASE2-3 CAN’T have the same impact ASE1 had. It does, however, build well on ASE1 and provide another couple of marvelous levels to the complex. I’m a tough reviewer. Don’t let my nit-picking get you down. If you you have ASE1 then you should go get this also. And if you don’t have ASE1 then you are a tool and need to go buy this AND ASE1.

Seriously though, why haven’t you picked up ASE1? It’s one of the best things ever put out by the OSR. Oh, I’m sorry, are you too busy genuflecting to a 30 year old TSR adventure? Look man, I like S3 and G1 also but they are THIRTY YEARS OLD. Expand your world-view a bit. I’ll tell you what: You go get a _good_ OSR product and we’ll consider it an apology for you never buying a Judge’s Guild product back in the day. Cool?