Colossus, Arise!

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

ca

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 8

Giants stalk the shifting sands as the lost city of Stylos awakens from its deathless slumber. The Fourth Age of Man is at hand! All that stands between the gigantic hordes of Stylos and their conquest of the world is your band of adventurers. Sinister traps, implacable foes, and the crushing tread of the dread Colossus all lurk within these pages, eager to test the courage and cunning of even the most accomplished adventurers.

This is a hard adventure to grok. The first time I read it I thought it held promise but ultimately sucked. The second time I read it I studied the map first and then things clicked for me. It’s also going to be a hard adventure to use in campaign play. To use it best you’re going to need to digest the background pages long in advance of running it and integrate the mythology in to your game. If you do that you’re going to have a KICK ASS adventure for your players. They will be simultaneously drooling and messing themselves in anticipation of what’s to come. It’s a lot better than the ‘old’ DCC adventure line.

So, the worlds ending. Nothing we haven’t seem A BAJILLION times before, right? It’s one of the worst tropes in adventure design. If you’re going to use that as your plot/motivation then you better bring the noise. Harley brings the noise. In one page of big fat old man font Harley lays out a mythology for the end of the world. it’s tight. It has shades of the greek classics. It seems plausible and he doesn’t beat the horse after its dead. There are four ages of man, we’re in the third age, and the fourth is nigh upon us. Pretty standard bullshit stuff. But Harley makes it real through his writing. This, and the hooks to follow, are the key to the adventure working, I think. If you can integrate the mythology in to your campaign then when the hooks show up the players are going to slowly come to realization of what is going on and then GO NUTS once it hits them fully. There’s mystery here and there’s wonder, and that leaves room for the DM to fill things in. About a third of a page is devoted to working the mythology and hooks in to the motivations of the various character classes. Patrons & Divine are pretty straightforward, and, I’d say, overall the weakest. But just mentioning them gets your mind racing on what YOU could do to get things moving with the patrons & divines in your game. The other classes are more straight-forward: loot. By dropping hints and rumors and myths about the treasures and wonders, and the specific magic items/artifacts in the module, over time in your campaign then the players will be drooling when the opportunity arises. And the best hooks are the ones where the PLAYERS want to go on the adventure. Then come the triggering hooks events. Three options are given. The characters lords request an audience and demand they do something about invading armies. Or a giant statue shows up outside the city gates and throws a a necklace of “two score heads” at the group, declaring the end of days has come and on the new moon the city will be razed and all killed or taken by slaves. Or there is a section of dire portents and omens to experience. Seventh son of a seventh son with a birthmark, etc. This shit gets your mind RACING. Think of what you could by combining these events and slowly working them in to you campaign over a four or more game sessions! Omens appear as off-hand comments from the DM. Rumors of war and marauding bands, wildly varying, while the group is doing other things. The lords appear and demand action .. and then the statue appears. That sort of natural continuity is GOLD. The triggers and mythology really got me thinking about longer-term integration in to campaigns and the payoffs thereof. That’s good. That’s the reason I’m paying my filthy lucre to some game company. I want something that fires my imagination and gets me thinking. Something I can riff off of and gets me excited to run it. Harley brings the noise.

Then the adventure actually shows up and … and the review gets more complicated. The monsters here are top notch. There’s finally a good reason for fighting those LG titans from AD&D land. There are vile monstrosities. There’s a giant brain monster. The language used to describe these creatures is tight, and evocative. You really get a sense of them and that helps you then communicate that sense to the players. The treasures are top notch as well, as one would expect from a DCC RPG module. The magic items are unique, there are ‘mundane’ items to exploit, and the standard treasures are well described and interesting. The map is small but not necessarily bad. If the players are focused and know what they are doing then there’s only a few encounters they have to have. The rest of the maps is laid out in such a way that the rooms can serve as a diversion or distraction for the party. It’s not really an exploration as much as it is managing your party resources If you go exploring places you don’t need to then you’re going to probably have more trouble at the end game because you are weaker. Or you get some kick-ass magic items to help with the end game. And now the complicated part …

This adventure channels Kuntz in many places. That means ‘Hidden Depth.’ This is mostly constrained to the optional rooms on the map. How you feel about hidden depth, and crazy long room descriptions/details, is your own business. Suffice it to say that, just like the 8 Kings and Halls of the Mage-King, there is A LOT going on in many of the rooms. These are not the tight and terse rooms that I so much enjoy. Some of this is the hidden depth and some of this is the verbosity in describing that depth. When Harley is hitting all of the notes you get great evocative descriptions. And when he’s not your eyes are glazing over and you just want the fucking thing to be over and why the hell is he telling me that and so on. The rooms are more verbose than evocative.

I want to call out three encounters specifically for special comments. The first is the ruined city in which the temple/adventuring site lies. The exploration of this and the parties interactions with it are mostly abstracted. I like this, and perhaps could have used a little more. The group is 8th level. Abstracting the travel through a ruined city, and perhaps the exploration of it, seems like the right thing to do. I may have included a few more “you’re attacked by a hydra but quickly dispatch it” story-like elements in it, but then again that may be my personal taste, It feels right though, given the mythic elements of the adventure. The second is the first numbered encounter in the adventure. A large army lies before the entrance to the temple. This is handled in a very sandbox style. Several suggestions are given in how to adjudicate several common actions like sneaking or distractions. I like this sort of sandboxy encounter since it leaves a lot of room for players to come up with those wacky plans that make D&D fun. Finally there the final encounter. It’s more puzzle than combat … and the players success will depend on them figuring that out before it destroys the entire world. It can certainly feel epic and a campaign-topper if the DM expands the encounter a bit and let’s the creature run wild through cities, laying waste, and the like, while the party tries to stop it.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/115606/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-76-Colossus-Arise?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 8, No Regerts, Reviews | Leave a comment

Grimmsgate

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

gg

by Matt Finch
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 1-3

Deep in the wooded wilderness, the village of Grimmsgate is an outpost town on a seldom-traveled trail, right at the edge of nowhere. The village’s half-ruined temple of Law, dilapidated inn, drunken blacksmith, exiled trader and a few fur-trappers are enough to keep the bloody-minded denizens of the dark forest at bay, but nobody really expects the village to still be there in another ten years. The woods have become too dangerous for the trappers who once caught animals for fur, and merchants no longer travel the poorly-maintained road. What great evil and what fabulous treasures are to be found in these lands? A brave band of adventurers might make their fortunes here. Or perhaps they might never return…

This is meant to be an introductory adventure. It has a starting home-base, a brief wilderness around it, and an adventure in an old temple to get the characters going. It’s sprinkled throughout with “helpful” advice. The introductory village is not terrible, and the wilderness not bad, though small. The ancient temple is … I don’t know, bland? It’s got it’s high points, for sure, but it’s not what I’ve come to expect from Finch. I’d call it an average effort (meaning it’s better than 90% of the crap produced) but I’ve got no time, space, or energy for average. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy nut, but this thing is so far removed from the ‘voice’ in other Finch works that I actually googled to see if it was ghostwritten. The writing is a lot closer in style to Rappan Athuk than it is Tomb of the Iron God.

The village of Grimmsgate, on the borderlands, is on the decline and has been for some time now. Trade no longer comes through, trappers and farmers disappear in the forest enough that they no longer try their luck and have moved on elsewhere. No lord wants to claim the land because of the dangers in patrolling it (Ha! Land is power to a lord, no way no one would claim it. Maybe not give a shit about it, but they’d claim it.) The players somehow end up there. Some lame hooks are offered. The Priests of Law charge you with a holy quest to investigate … sorry, brb. Ok, back, had to go throw up. No? How about ‘You inherit a dilapidated house in the village? Lame also?Ok, how about ‘Baron Somebody sends you look in to things for him to see if adventurers can succeed where a host of knights failed.’ No look, my fucking standards are not actually that high but they ARE higher than “crap laying in the curb.” That last one might actually be nice if you changed it A LOT. Maybe the players are a new knight or free farmers and are sent to the village … it becomes their holding in liege to their lord. That doesn’t suck nearly as much and would also seem to get the players MUCH more interested in the fate of the village. Might make a neato campaign. A mini-hex crawl.

The village is not terrible. There are maybe 11 or so buildings on top of a hill. The bases are all covered: inn, smith, store, cleric too old to go adventuring but who has some good scrolls to use like raise dead. Several of the other people are also covered as well, meaning farmers. The village is plagued by read-aloud text that seems forced. “This is a well-tended stone building with a roof of wooden shingles. The sign over the door says The Hilltop Emporium.” In fact, that entry serves as a good example for this entire section. As the sign implies, the shopkeeper has delusion of grandeur. All of the little NPC’s running around have some nice personality to make them memorable without being over the top. The descriptions of the people are very well done, communicating themselves strongly in just a sentence or two. But then it’s wrapped inside of shit. I LOVE foreshadowing, and there’s a bit of that at the beginning which serves as another good example. As the characters approach the village there’s a big block of read-aloud. It talks about their journey over the last several days and ends with “Do you head toward the village?” Totally fucking lame. Better to play out a little journey, not taking too long in it, and present the information in the read-aloud naturally. Because the information is GOOD. The characters pass weird shit on the road on the way. Bones in a circle around a human skull. A small red-stained wicker basket abandoned by the side of the road. A shallow unmarked grave. Some REALLY good creepy shit to sprinkle in an adventure to Pigstye. Ruined by being wrapped in a block of text.

The “Wilderness” map is small. It has four places of note on it. A 6HD black dragon lair, an ogre who’s taken over a ford, a (small) group of bandits, and a hill with some statues on top. None of these encounters are fleshed out much at all, just a sentence or three. This leaves them pretty open to interpretation by the DM to flesh out for additional adventure. So, not really something appropriate to the adventure at hand. The ancient temple complex is … oh … a pain to review. It’s arrayed around a hill with multiple entrances, ala the Caves of Chaos. That’s great! It’s a thoughtful feature, especially the hidden entrance in the woods. The majority of the temple though, under the hill, is one LONG hallway with smaller hallways and rooms hanging off of it. It immediately smacks of ‘linear’ but is slightly more thoughtful than that … but not by much. The main temple is on top of the hill and the rest reminds me of the basement/workrooms at Monticello: long hallway ending outside.

Lots of lame read-aloud text in the encounters, but not a lot of interesting things. There are a decent number of ‘flashback’ ghostly images showing the temples past. This ranks just slightly higher than ‘diary entries’ in my ‘things I loathe’ list. They are not doing anything more than showing the history of the temple; a history that is not useful in the adventure. There are a couple of interesting choices scattered about. A secret door revealed by leaves on the floor. Leaches (normal) in a pool of water. A ghostly spirit who’s not just there to be killed. That encounter, in particular, is one of the better ones, although longish. The spirit can reveal information to the players and reward them with grave goods, etc. Taken in that context the flashbacks are not AS bad, since it means the players may go ‘Ah Ha!”, but the game effect is still meaningless.

I’ll single out the monsters here for special mention. The adventure has manes, mutated cannibals, and mole-man hybrid cannibals. The art, which I seldom mention in reviews, does a great job at conveying the flavor of the cannibal-type monsters: gaunt, tall, horrific. The main villain is well atmosphered as well, with clouds of ash about his person, etc. Centipedes are described as bright green and shiny. Very nice imagery on the monsters. Well, SOME of the monsters. It’s inconsistent. Not all centipedes get that description, and the manes demons get none at all. The treasure is a great disappointment. The gems are just “4 gems worth 100gp each” and the magic items are just generic “mace +1” or “sword +1.” After reading an aside in the module about you can add flavor by creating your own monsters (the mole-men cannibals) to then encounter this blandness in magic items is a real shame.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112616/Swords-and-Wizardry-Grimmsgate-Introductory-Module?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | Leave a comment

Dungeon Magazine #2

Posted on September 7, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d2

Uh … nice thong?

This seems to be a stronger issue than #1, although half of the adventures are … unusual. It’s important to remember that Dungeon Magazine is still in 1e land, 2e not having appeared yet. A cursory search shows that the only other set of review of Dungeon magazine are on rpg.net, and the poster only made it to issue #17 in two years of writing. My views seem to vary significantly from his. The Dungeon Index, a summary of all adventures, appears to currently be down.

The Titan’s Dream
by W. Todo Todorsky
Levels 5-9

This is an adventure through a Titan’s dream. It’s a weird and confused, or maybe disjointed?, affair. Of all the dream adventures I’ve seen it tends to be one of the better ones. Which still means it’s total bullshit, but it tries harder than the others. An incredibly long and useless backstory and introduction lays out the situation: there are three dreams, each with five acts in them. The players randomly wander about from act to act and dream to dream in no particular order until they do the right thing in an act. That act is then unavailable. Once they complete everything then the titan wakes up, they are released, and they can proceed with the bullshit hook from the backstory.

I’m being a bit too hard on the backstory. The titan here is a classical greek titan sitting in a classic greek temple. He’s an oracle and the party is sent to him to solve a dilemma for The King. The Titan eventually answers in a riddle. That’s actually a pretty appealing scenario once you yank out all of the specifics. Yanking this adventure and providing the titan as an oracle for the party to go visit to find out how to do X could be pretty interesting. It’s the kind of classic adventure trope that I can really get in to.

The dreaming … not so much. Same old issues … no real threat and no real consequences. Fake XP awards and fake treasures. Yeah, sure, the party can die. Dream adventures always do that. But somehow these always seem like ‘kp duty’ adventures; they feel like punishment and no one cares about the outcomes.

Each act has a brief description, two paragraphs or so (Yeah! Terse!) and then some suggested tasks that the party can complete to ‘win’ the act. Generally if the party does some kind of good or heroic act then they pass and if they don’t then they get to repeat the act at some later stage. For example. Merchant Bob didn’t sacrifice to Poseidon so he stole Bobs fiancé. Act 1 has the party arriving outside Bobs house in the midst of a crowd just after Bob has learned the news. The party can pray to a god to intercede on Bobs behalf, volunteer to go on a quest to recover his fiancé, or restore order in the somewhat rowdy crowd. All of those are examples of a pass condition. Very classical. Most of the potential combat situations have a couple of suggested tasks that don’t involve combat. There’s no magic items available in the adventure, they all dissolve when you return from the dream, but some coinage, 2,000-5,000 per character is suggested as being allowed to bring out. That’s not too bad at the lower end of the adventure scale (level 5) but at the upper end (9) it may be more worthwhile to kill the titan and loot his ass.

As an early type of story game driven by the D&D engine it’s kind of interesting, as is it’s reliance on the Greek Classics. Maybe a good Mazes & Minotaurs adventure? I want to like this adventure but it may be that my ‘hate dream adventures’ conditioning is too strong.

WTF is up with the lack of treasure/XP in these things?

In The Dwarven King’s Court
by Willie Walsh
Levels 3-5

The characters get to investigate some thefts in the court of a dwarf King. Let me get this out of the way: mysteries don’t work in D&D, or most RPG’s. The players have access to just too many ways to get information. At this level we have Augury, Detect Charm, Know Alignment, Speak with Animals and maybe Speak with Dead and Locate Object. And that’s just the clerics list. Druids and Wizards will have their own allotment. The only way past this problem is with a bizarre assortment of customer tailored magic items just to fuck with the players and deny them the powers their characters have earned. So, the adventure sucks.

A decent attempt is made at a character-driven story by giving some decent details of a dozen or so key NPC’s, their personalities and how they act and react. It’s like a Poirot mystery: everyone has something to hide. This is ten ruined by providing overly long and uselessly detailed room descriptions in order that they make up the majority of the page count. It would have been REALLY helpful to have had all of the NPC’s detailed on one summary page for the DM to refer to during play. Of course, detecting one secret door virtually ends the adventure before is starts, through the use of a ghost and his ring of wishes. The hook is lame: the characters get visions telling them to go the dwarf kingdom. How about you don’t even make an effort next time?

There’s a lot of stuff to explore with the NPC’s and with the environment/rooms (incriminating evidence and red herrings) and if you put some hard work in to prep’ing it you could get a decent murder mystery to run. But then the party will ruin it in 5 minutes by casting a spell.

But, hey, you get 500gp at the end of the adventure! Talk about a rip off …

Caermor
by Nigel D. Findley
Levels 2-4

A devil worshipper cult in a remote village. This is a pretty tight little adventure. It’s got a good low-magic/peasants feel to it and a couple of strong NPC’s. It’s got the “too many words” problem and could use a lot more village color: more locales and NPC’s to interact with. Some local ‘petty evil’ types have summoned a devil … and it worked! They are now in over their heads and don’t realize it. The villagers blame someone else for their troubles (ripper apart sheep, etc), and can be stirred by the evil doers. There’s a decent little ‘insular mob’ vibe that goes well with the ‘inbred morons’ vibe. It really conveys the spirit of some of those elements from the Lovecraft stories. There’s another group of adventurers in the village but almost nothing is done with them. There’s an attempt at giving them personality but not much in the way of a timeline for them. If you fleshed this out a bit while summarizing a lot of the content in the adventure then it would make a decent low-level game.

The Keep at Koralgesh
by Robert Giacomozzi & Jonathan Simmons
Levels 1-3

This is a decently-sized four-level dungeon. It’s a BASIC adventure and so we have to sit through the usual condescending crap, like “don’t tell players they just found a +1 sword” and so on. Only a page and a half of backstory/introduction, only half of which is read-aloud, so this one wins the “briefest introduction” award. There’s a slightly generic feel to this combined with some random specific content. It reminds me a lot of the Palace of the Silver Princess or Castle Amber or maybe even the Lost City … the way their content was bit generic and then they would have something specific. Really a kind of disconnected set of encounters, I guess.

There’s a very nice rumor table included as well as some creepy-ish wilderness wandering monster entries in order to highten the tension prior to reaching the dungeon. The first level is my favorite: caves with lava pits, fissures, and a couple of puzzle type rooms. The second level has a totally generic looking map (hints of symmetry. Ug!), with levels three and four having more interesting “keep interior” maps.

It’s quite an extensive adventure with a decent number of things to discover. It’s just the generic magic items, generic monsters, generic rooms, etc that I’m having a problem with. I’m probably being too hard on this … it’s not weird and I like weird & unique but it DOES have that same strong vibe that Silver Princess, Castle Amber, and Lost City have. Those are not terrible adventures (as I recall them, anyway …) and neither is this one. It just needs a lot of work, IMHO, to beef up the creatures and magic items.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 2 Comments

Curse of the Weaver Queen

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

cwq

by Tim Kask
Eldritch Enterprises
Generic
Moderate Level

The lunar goddess Arianhrod presides over the great wheel of life. But centuries ago, some saw the Wheel as a Web: a spider’s web. And so began the Cult, and so it has festered, hidden, malignant… waiting. Now they come scuttling out of the dunes at night, silent and deadly. Only a very lucky few have survived the ravaging horde. The bugs. The huge spiders. The Gatherers, taking what is man’s and returning to their lair. That area of the dunes is strange. You’ll see. You can find it easily. And with luck, you may live to tell the tale.

This is an adventure in an old temple dedicated to a spider goddess. This may be the worst organized adventure I’ve ever seen. Somewhere buried in the mess are a series of fine little things for the party to figure out and play with, as well as unique magic items. It would be a decent adventure if Chris & Frank, the supposed editors, had had the balls to tell Kask he was fucking the thing up.

Ten pages. It takes the designer ten pages to get to room one of the adventure. Of those about 25% of one page describes the temple exterior. About 50% of one page describes a new way to adjudicate swarm attacks. The rest of it is all garbage background, and introductions, and bullshit nonsense, and grognard nonsense and, this being an EE adventure, a page describing their generic adventure format. Of this entire pile of words there may be two interesting things of note. First, swarms of vermin erupt from the temple from time to time. Nice imagery. Secondly, the overly long backstory has a nice little section about recent events: a sheep disappears, then a cow, then a couple of infants etc. Instead of taking a page it could have been boiled down to little more than that, but then you wouldn’t get as much value, would you? I don’t know why designers insist on doing this kind of stuff. Why do they feel the need to explain EVERY SINGLE THING in the adventure. Great, it’s a spider cult temple. Wonderful. I described in six of seven words. You took a couple of pages. Mine is as good as yours because you are not introducing ANYTHING new or interesting in your description.

There seems to be some weird fetish with monster stats in the adventure. They are everywhere. In the introduction text. Inline with the room descriptions. Included in the bestiary in the back. Included in the appendix in the back. Is it padding or just bad organization? I have NO idea. Most of it just looks like a copy/paste job. While I’m on the topic of “crappy layout and organization” let me mention a couple of other things. Recall, I don’t usually give a shit about this kind of stuff; it has to be REALLY bad for me to comment. It’s really bad. Besides the monster stats pasted in to every nook and cranny there’s also this weird thing the designer does where he splits up important information. He puts critical information in the bestiary, or the appendix, or the introductions, or in a different room. This is crazy maddening. After reading the adventure three times I STILL can’t figure out where the hell the books, mentioned in an appendix, are or what role they play in the adventure. The room encounters themselves are some stream of consciousness thing where the designer inter-spreads key information in to the room description in a kind of parenthetical way. It’s also most like he dictated this in to a tape recorder and then types it up later without organizing it … and then his two buddies, the editors, didn’t tell him what a mess it was. I get trying new things. I do. I appreciate it. This doesn’t work and your editors should have told you as much. If they did, then you should have listened to them. The whole mess is then further obfuscated by the use of the Eldritch Enterprises generic stats for things. I don’t know if they are still terrified of T$S legal, or are bound by contracts, or are under the impression that someone NOT playing D&D will buy this … but it sucks. It sucks hard. It ESPECIALLY sucks hard given the mess of the rest of the adventure. He makes things even MORE obfuscated by refusing to describe some of the treasure in straight-up terms. “It’s worth as much as a whore for two nights or a wagonload of turnips.” No, that would be interesingt. He actually says “the crown is worth as much as a set of plate armor” or some such thing. Jesus man, just put a price on it. Especially since you’re not even consistent about it in your own adventure: there’s coinage all over the place.

The spider temple has three levels. It does not have the most interesting layout but it does have, potentially, a layout which will encourage returning to various parts of the temple later in the adventure. There may be rooms that the party bypasses early on and then figures out they need to return to, or figures out what to do in a room. This is a good thing. The whole layout works together to provide a kind of mini-puzzle for the party to figure out. Or not. You can also just the hack the place and kill it with fire. This sort of double engagement is interesting to see and makes me wish the adventure was more coherent. Going to the scriptorium can provide clues to other rooms and together those rooms can provide more background about what’s going on. That’s neat and rewards players who are in to that kind of stuff. Or you can just dump in some boil and the hack the boss down.

I want to call out two encounters in particular. We’ll cal them Agony and Ecstasy, since I’m in a Hellblazer mood. Agony is a lich astride a devil horse in a room that the players are bound to enter. He’s level 22 and kills the party, since they will be MUCH lower level. If the party does manage to kill him then his magic bullshit crown and magic bullshit mace and magic bullshit robes, all of which he uses to great effect in the combat, shatter. So, fuck the party over and then gimp them out of the treasure. Nice job Kask It comes out of nowhere and doesn’t fit the rest of the temple at all. It’s out of place and weird, and not weird in a good “OD&D” way. Ecstasy is the first first set of encounters in the adventure. A giant talking stone face with gemstones in its forehead and weird little demon create that is some combination of fruit bat and lizard. Those are some pretty cool and weird encounters. And that time I DO mean weird in an OD&D way, which is a very good thing.

The upper level of the temple is by far the most interesting, with the lower levels being mostly just vermin rooms. Kind of nice from a creepy standpoint but less so from the “weird D&D” standpoint. The boss is insane and either attacks or talks to the party, and switches it up a lot. There’s a way to win WITHOUT killing it, but it’s made hard by the whole “randomly attacks people” thing and the fact that there’s really no reward for NOT killing it. Oh Well … *HACK*.

The monsters and treasure range from decent to good. Most of the monsters are unique to this adventure and strange enough to give you nightmares … I’m remembering that scene with the bugs in the newer King Kong movies. The magical treasure is also unique. Amulets that make spiders ignore you. Staves that shoot fire. Weird magic ropes … it’s good stuff.

There might be a decent adventure hiding in here, in the upper C, lower B range, but you have to work to find it.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110744/Curse-of-the-Weaver-Queen?affiliate_id=1892600

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Night of the Black Swords

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

nbs
by Allen Hammack
Die Cast Games
AD&D
Levels 10-12

This is a tournament-style 10 encounter adventure for evil characters through the depths of hell. It’s ok for what it is but has limited use outside of its tournament context.

The evil party belongs to an evil secret society known as The Black Swords. They get tasked by a shadowy figure to go to hell and rescue some evil guy who usually pretends to be good but is in danger of being exposed as evil by baddies who are positioning themselves to take down the shadowy figures boss. IE: It’s a plot by one faction of arch-devils to weaken a different faction of arch-devils. That’s more of a pretext than a hook though. You’re going on this adventure because you’re at a con and it’s a tournament. The evil aspects of the party are not really emphasized other than one brief encounter with a seductress, and I guess even that is handled in a tasteful fashion. Being evil is just a reason to rescue some other evil guy and not be attacked by a subset of hells denizens.

There are ten encounters in hell for the party to navigate their way through. Some are combat and others are role-play encounters and more typical tournament “that’s not our goal, ignore it” encounters. While I’m not a fan of the linear tournament style, I did think that the encounters were interesting enough, at least interesting enough to steal some ideas from. In particular there’s the good encounter with some Rakshasas who are pretending to be someone else. It’s nice to see a classic monster being presented in a classic fashion: trickster spirits tricking people. It reinforces a great way to present these monsters in your own game. The actual details of the encounter are not that interesting, just the fact that the creatures are using their ESP and shape-change ability to lure the party pretending to be someone else. It’s a nice bit.

Along a similar vein there are devil gate guards that the party need to get by. It’s the usual BS city guards at the gate encounter that I use all the time, except this one is in hell and the guards are devils. I was disappointed to not have the ‘hell’ aspects played up more. In fact, that could be a common complaint of the entire module: it doesn’t feel particularly like hell. Then again I guess there’s a line to walk before crossing over in to the prurient. The only thing remotely hell-like is an arch-devils girlfriend putting the moves on one of the party members … and the party getting points for going for it.

The end of the adventure has a fight with an arch-devil in his palace. It’s also possible to avoid most of the fight, I suspect. Most of the adventure is just figuring out how to avoid the encounter in front of you by using your high-level abilities and magic items. That’s not bad, but it’s not particularly interesting in terms of ‘content I am paying for’ either. There’s not much new and interesting in this adventure, if anything at all. STandard magic items, standard monsters, flavorless but verbose encounters …

Theres not much to recommend here, unless you just want a straight-forward tournament module.

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Dungeon Magazine #1

Posted on August 31, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

dr1

I’m a supporter of the OSR and strongly believe that a decent percentage of the newer products outshine the adventures published back in the Good Old Days. But, content is content and I’ve not seen many reviews of Dungeon magazine. I know that at least a couple of the adventures in its pages are good enough to use outright and I suspect there are a lot of good ideas to steal. My plan is to publish one review a week, on the weekend. I’m going to keep them fairly short; mostly an abstract and a few general comments so I don’t end up repeating myself over and over again.

Having recently completed my collection at GenCon, we’re off!

The hook for Calibar isn’t terrible. Assault on Edistone Point would make a decent realistic or low-magic adventure. Into the Fire is a decent dragon adventure with good wilderness encounters. Guardians of the Tomb is rough puzzle/trap/monster encounter.

I hate 2e. I hate the magical RenFaire stuff and the magical society environment and the streetlights of continual light and the garbage disposals of spheres of annihilation and the way it treated the magic and wonder as routine, ensuring that nothing was magical or wondrous. I would have SWORN on deck of many things that these were 2e adventures. When checking it turns out that issue #1 came a few years before 2e. Wow. I had no idea that 1e adventures sucked ass so much.

I hate boxed text. My eyes glaze over when I listen OR read it. I start to think about succubi art. I groan. I LOATHE it. There’s a lot of boxed text in these adventures. There’s also a lot of arbitrary forced decisions. “There’s no cleric available to join the party” and the like. It’s some kind of enforced DM fiat for no particular reason. It’s easily ignored but it shows and reinforces bad style. Along those same lines there’s some “You can’t do X because it would ruin the adventure” crap. Characters have scry spells for a reason: to keep their 7th levels character alive. Yeah, they are gonna know there’s a dragon. Better to let smart players plan than punish someone just so you can surprise them. After all, we’re rewarding player skill, right? There is also this annoying tendency in some of these to quote the rules back to you. Weapon Speed rules. Disease rules. Other rules. Great. You know more than me. I’m happy for you. If your adventure depends on me knowing obscure rules then you write a sucky adventure. If your adventure doesn’t depend on me knowing obscure rules then why are you wasting all this time telling me about them?

But there is a special place in my heart, next to my ball of white male rage, that is reserved for the Overly Detailed Backstory. Look, I get it: there’s dragons and white walkers and they are gonna fight. I don’t need page after page of what color gout the swineherds brother has when the swineherd is only barely glimpsed from the road. There is A LOT of space wasted on backstory in these adventures.

I threw up a little in my mouth when reading most of these.

The Dark Tower of Cabilar
by Michael Ashton & Lee Sperry
Levels 4-7

A Prince is setting off to retake his kingdom but he needs his ancestral crown. The backstory is too long but the root of the hook is a decent one with the godmother hiring the party. I can see this as ‘one task of many’ to retake his kingdom, with a shrewd godmother and so forth. It could be a decent campaign or a good series of adventures to take place sprinkled through the background of a different campaign. It’s also just about the only good part to the adventure. A vampire lair with charmed monsters of every type scattered throughout, it’s full of boring magic items, monsters just thrown together (although from the Fiend Folio), and bullshit encounters, like a charmed mimic acting as a stairway step. There’s a powerful magic items … usable only in this dungeon that must be destroyed to get out. Lame to the core.

Assault on Eddistone Point
by Patricia Nead Elrod
Levels 1-3

There’s some signal towers and the local mayor hasn’t heard from the nearby one in awhile. If you go fix whatever then I’ll give you 2k in coin. Too much backstory, again, but the ultimate plot involves a merchant house doing some sabotage to get ahead a bit. It’s mundane enough to be a decent low-magic adventure or maybe an intro adventure to some kind of City of Intrigue or Merchant Wars campaign. Make me think of Harn. (That’s a compliment for a low-magic adventure.)

Grakhirt’s Lair
by John Nephew
Levels 1-3

Local heroic lord comes up with some lame excuse why he can’t go solve a problem with norkers and instead sends the party. Local NPC’s of note stair in to the air and whistle while twiddling thumbs when asked for help. This is mostly a lame dungeon crawl that ends with an invisible assassin assassinating a party member. That’s uncool. One part of the text spends almost half a page describing the operation and construction of a single secret door … I can taste the bile coming up again … There is a monster you can talk to and a little monster intrigue the party can play a part in, but the monsters all fight to the death and don’t go get help and their uber-super boss scries the party the entire time but doesn’t help any of his minions out … IE: the designer wants the boss fight to be cool so he gave the DM a way to Cosmic Zap anything interesting the party does. Lame. There are some decent loose ends at the end that could be turned in to more adventures.

The Elven Home
by Anne Gray McReady
Levels 1-3

A fey home, so the Elves in the title are more ‘fey’ than traditional D&D elf that has had all of the whimsical fairy sucked out of them. I like fey, but this one was hit & miss. This seemed a little mundane for a fey home and was organized pretty poorly. It’s more a short side-trek or wilderness locale than an adventure. A couple of the outdoor elements are interesting. Needs to be A LOT shorter and A LOT more evocative.

Into the Fire
by Grant & David Boucher
Levels 6-10

The cover adventure … so a dragon. The usual ‘too much backstory’ nonsense but overall a decent adventure and the highlight of the issue. The backstory and hook aren’t TOO terrible, once you wade through all the text, but neither are they average. The king sends you to look in to blah blah blah. There’s a decent amount of wilderness travel in this and those encounters are decent. They are LARGE encounters. Hordes of pilgrims. LOTS of soldiers (~100) on patrol. A force of 20 ogres or 12 trolls or 100 bandits. I thought that an above-average number of the random wilderness encounters were terse but evocative. Not quite old Wilderlands territory but pretty decent. The dragons lair is pretty good and it’s presented as a challenging 88hp foe. There’s a wizard’s tower that seems almost like an afterthought and is not done well at all; I wanted more weird magic stuff in there. The dragon has too many gimp items: anti-scrying, cold protection, etc. I guess it makes sense he would use them if he had them, but it seems a little too convenient and ‘lets gimp the players’ to me. There’s a decent non-standard magic sword and lots of hooks to follow-up on. One of the better high-level adventures, I think.

Guardians of the Tomb
by Carl Smith
Levels 3-5

Another short one. Just a single room tomb on a swampy island. The party gets locked in and is then assaulted by SCORES of shadows. Ouch. Extremely verbose and ultimately more trap than adventure, since there’s almost no treasure.Would make a decent wilderness encounter, if you were an asshole DM that thinks 3x as many shadows (3HD, drain STR) as characters (levels 3-5) is fun.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

Fate’s Fell Hand

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

ffh

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 2

Awash in a sea of phlogiston, three wizards battle for mastery of reality! But with each new day all gains are lost and the game begins anew. It is up to the adventurers to upset this ancient balance, winning free of the shrinking demi-plane before all is reduced to the roiling stuff of raw Chaos!

Will you strike a bargain, swearing fealty to one of the fell masters? Or will you attempt to master your own fate, pitting your luck and skill against arcane foes? Whatever you decide, you must act quickly, for gray worms press in from all sides and time grows short!

A pretty decent site-based adventure with an event timeline, good NPC’s to interact with, and good magic items. It’s a pretty solid adventure. In many ways it reminds me of what I think Castle Amber should have been. In fact, a Castle Amber mash-up with this adventure could be VERY cool.

Let’s get the confusing stuff out of the way right up here at the top. DCC (3e) adventures suck. At least that’s been my experience with them. But my one experience with the DCC RPG was very positive and I came away impressed with how the game fostered the “D&D turned up to 11” feel and helped encourage those great situations that become stories we tell and retell about some bizarre things that happened. And it did it in such a way that didn’t seem forced or fake like some BS story game. And then there are the NEW DCC adventures, for the DCC RPG game. This is my first experience with them and I came off happy. I’ve reviewed a couple of the older DCC adventures in the past, either for OSR games or ones that had OSR elements. I was not amused. But not this one. This one is good. So, Old DCC modules: Suck. New DCC RPG: Great. New DCC Adventure modules: This one is pretty good.

So, there’s some hook. It’s one of the weakest parts of the adventure, just as the hook was lame in Castle Amber. “You wake up there.” Great, thanks, Genius. This one uses some dream sequence stuff to lay out some teasers and the such and then the party is there. There’s an oracular device in the module that I think would have made a better hook. Having the players want their characters to find that for some reason (id some magic item or something?) would have them WANTING to go to this place. It’s always better when the players dig their own graves under a tree where they string the rope for you. Otherwise it’s more of a “this is the adventure we’re playing tonight” kind of thing.

The characters find themselves in a small land surrounded by grey waste. There’s a manor home, a small lake, and tower framed by the moon. Slowly, day after day, the grey waste closes in, putting a time limit on the adventure. What’s very interesting here is that the three locations get eaten at different times on the timeline but the ‘plot’, which involved collecting objects from the three locations, isn’t derailed by the destruction of these locations. It’s quite clever. You need all of the thingies in existence, which are scattered among three wizards at those locations, but when the place get destroyed, well, you still need all of the ones in existence but now there’s fewer in existence .. Get it? It’s a good work-around.

The adventure is arranged as a kind of site-based adventure. You get a description of the locations, a rough timeline, a pretty good write-up of the various minor and major NPC’s running around, and some goals for the characters to accomplish. In this respect it’s actually one of the best puzzle/mystery adventures I’ve seen, although it’s not really a mystery module. The NPC motivations are short and communicate their motivations and personalities well. The area write-ups have some read-aloud text, but it’s usually not more than two or three sentences, which is about my limit on schnitzengrubem. There’s not a whole lot of encounter ‘things in the adventure. Instead you get some mythic places. A lake with fireflies that the light the way underwater, a tower framed by the moon with a magical moonbridge to get there, and so on. It feels like a magical otherworldy place. But again, this isn’t really about the encounter locations it’s more about the NPSC’s that are running around and how the players interact with them to obtain information and accomplish their goals. That’s not to say that there are not ANY encounter goodies, they are. A throne, a scrying pool, and so on still exist.

One of the things that struck me about this adventure was how it resembled the Psychadelic Phantasies line. Recall that these OD&D adventures contain no book items or monsters, creating a unique experience for the players to explore. In many ways this adventure has that same feel. The monsters seem unique, as do the magic items. I really like that. The magic items seems magical and the monsters are frightening. In particular, the NPC/monster magic-users are handled more in the OD&D fashion where they are just monsters with some special powers, rather than a full-featured MU class. I love me some reprobate/weird MU’s and they bring it in this adventure. One of the more interesting magical items is a shield that requires sacrifices to funtion ‘well.’ That’s a pretty cool item.

The descriptions are a bit long in places and frequently seem to duplicate or expand on the flavor seed in the read-aloud. I find that disappointing. There’s also a a problem with one of the core elements, I think. There are some plaques/cards that play a central role in the adventure. Given their important I suspect the players are going to obsess over them and the many ways in which they can exploit them. Several of the mechanics surrounding them seems a little loopholey. Usually I don’t care about such things but given the important of the items, and how players focus too hard sometimes, their loopholes seem important. Oh, that reminds me, there’s some pretty decent non-railroday stuff in here also. Things like “the players are trapped overnight … unless they have a magical way to get don form the tower” and so on. That’s an excellent reminder and in stark contrast to the railroad bullshit that happens in a lot of adventures” you can’t do this and you can’t do that”, usually because of the issues it has with derailing the train. None of that crap here!

I’m happy with this. It’s a solid adventure.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/118464/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-78-Fates-Fell-Hand?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 2, No Regerts, Reviews | Leave a comment

MCMLXXV

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

mcm

by Bill Webb
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 1-4 (Ha!)

This is a wilderness adventure, following a treasure map. It’s very tough, as wilderness adventures are wont to be. It is treasure poor, very deadly, and might be considered a teaching module because of the encounter descriptions. You might imagine that someone recorded a hex crawl journey and then made a D&D adventure from it, in spirit anyway. It has many charming parts.

Ok, let’s get this out of the way. I’ll say again: I think this adventure is charming. Some people are going to think it’s boring. I think those people drive mini-vans because they are practical, have lost the will to live, and don’t know what joy is. Joy is the very first time you ever met a weird monster in D&D. You didn’t know what it did. It was menacing. You were scared of it. You say the gleaming pile of treasure. Joy is fields of flowers and fairy dragons. This adventure is a flower field full of fairy dragons. You can look at it as just a list of common encounters with too much description, but then you would be a member of the Technocracy.

This is a pretty simple adventure. The players are just following a trail on a treasure map, having pre-prorgammed and random wilderness encounters along the way. It’s fairly linear in that respect; there’s not really a wilderness hex map to explore. In fact, there’s not really a map at all. The GM map is more of a diagram with no scale on it. While the designer points out how many miles a day one can travel it has no bearing on the adventure since the ‘map’ has no scale.

The wandering wilderness encounters are very detailed and vary quite a bit: Environment effects, strange goings-on, and monsters encounters. The text that describes these has a decent amount of verbosity, to the extent that 36 wandering encounters take up three pages of text. This isn’t exactly pay-per-word 3e-era bloat but rather a kind of authors voice coming through. You get a pretty good sense through this text of how the designer runs his own D&D games. This same sort of descriptive text is used in the pre-programmed encounters as well. I think they, far from being boring and samey, have a certain degree of charm to them that’s communicated through the text length. And let’s be clear, 12 encounter descriptions per page isn’t exactly a Dostoyevsky level of detail. The text does a decent job in communicating what it intends: this is the how we played the encounters in 1975. Why the fuck do I sound like I’m defending this module? I’m on the defensive for some reason and now idea why. Anyway, I think it does a good job given that the purpose of the module is to communicate to newer players how things were played in an earlier time.

I like the encounters. There’s a giant rat sitting on a log that begs shiny objects from the characters and trades shiny objects from its collection. There’s a giant beaver in a dam that can be friendly. There’s a nest in twisty tree roots near a river that has a fairy. Give it liquor and offerings to make friends or capture it and force the location of its pot of gold! That one encounter does a decent job of describing both the charm of the module and why I like fey. It’s on the longish side for this adventure, coming in at just under 1/4 of a page. In that text the designer does a great job of communicating the flavor of the encounter. A kind of rats nest is described as being contained high up in some tree roots, with fishing hooks and the like in it. The whole things is described wonderfully, much more so than I can summarize, and give you an instant feel for what the place looks like. This evocative, and brief, description allows me as the DM to expand the encounter description as I need to since Bill was able to so completely communicate the flavor of the place, without droning on. The creature , a leprechaun, is briefly described as well, at least his personality. It’s classic fairy leprechaun: likes offerings, like to drink, pot of gold, helps or hinders the party depending on how they treat him, and most probably is completely ignored by the players since he remains invisible. Well, unless the party leaves a lot of booze in which case he gets drunk and becomes visible. This is a CLASSIC fairy leprechaun. The players will recognize it and come up with all sorts of plots to get his plot of gold, or be kind to him, all drawing from the tales and memories of their youth. THIS. That’s it. That’s D&D. You get to experience the wonder and glee of whimsical encounters. It’s not a monster. It’s just a thing living out by the river trying to catch some fish who likes his booze a little too much. And the players know that .Not because they’ve read the fucking monster manual, but because that’s what EVERYONE knows about leprechauns. That’s what the encounters in this module are. They communicate the very first time you played D&D. Not everything is out to get you, not even the ogre who’s cave you break in to. There are weird things to marvel at, like strange obelisks and parts of giant broken statues.

WIlderness adventures can be tough. The standard wandering tables in the old DMG had you meeting hydras in the wilderness. It didn’t care what level you were. The designer claims that this adventure may be a push over for characters over first level. Bill Webb is fucking crazy. This adventure will kill MUCH higher level characters. There’s a 6 HD dragon. And a Vrock. And the kobolds are CLEARLY of the ‘Tucker’ variety. The party is going to have to be ON. THEIR. TOES. or they are gonna DIE. The treasure here is good, though sparse. The coinage is sparse and a lot of the treasure is mostly ‘other’ goods. A fine cloak. A crystal decanter. A nice broach or cup, that sort of thing. There’s a decent amount of it, all low value. The party had better have brought a cart; they are gonna look like Sanford & Son by the end of the adventure. There’s a decent amount of scroll treasure that I think is well done. A torn up magical scroll you can put back together, A cluster of scrolls all having the same spell, and so on. It seems real. There’s a couple of other magical items as well that are non-standard and wonderful. This is a tough-ass adventure for XP though. Bill describes an alternate XP system that provides even LESS xp than the minimal amounts S&W gives you. Combined with the low treasure totals, even at the X marking the spot, the players are gonna have rough time in the XP department.

Danger, Wil Robinson! Bryce Pet Peeve Ahead! The worst part of the adventure is the introduction, which is a kind of three page designers notes. It’s meant to be a description of how they played in 1975. It’s interesting to read and does a decent job communicating that style of play. He also comes off as a die-hard grog who is talking down to newer players. It’s ok to like a certain style of play and to prefer it. It’s less cool to condescend. A lot less cool. Bill comes off as just another quaint old geezer who everyone puts up; kind of like your un-PC older relatives at a family reunion. That’s too bad. I’d like to think it isn’t on purpose but I see a lot of this sort of behavior online and it drives me nuts. Old dude is Old and is using it to justify his condescending behavior. Maybe this is why I am on the defensive on this module? Idk.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112617/Swords-and-Wizardry-MCMLXXV-Introductory-Module?affiliate_id=1892600

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

Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

Scan 2

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

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Poll Time!

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

I try to minimize the non-review posts, but since I’m nothing if not a hypocrite …

I think I’m going to do some reviews of non-OSR adventures. Maybe older published stuff, maybe newer 3.x or modern era stuff. Almost certainly HEAVILY weighted to fantasy. Older & Newer DCC, Pathfinder, the shit-fest that was D20, re, etc. I’ve been collecting Dungeon Magazines lately and may review the adventures in them also.

Would you rather see these sort of reviews in the main page/feed or would you rather I keep the main feed/page “OSR” and put the non-OSR adventures on a separate page/feed?

Go take the damn poll.

 

Oh, and at 10:00am Thursday next week I’ll be picking up my pre-order of the first 5e adventure, Ghosts of Dragonspsear Castle. Then I’ll be hitting the OSR booth, Frog God, Trolls, IPR, and others. Expect to see a photo of the massive pile of irrational consumerism run rampant. err… adventures. That should replenish the review pile and get things moving around here again.

 

 

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