DD2 – Stealing the Night Away

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

dd2

by Bill Silvey
Delvers Dungeons
AD&D
One First Level Thief

This is a very short Breaking & Entering railroad thievery job for a single first level thief. The background is that the local tuffs catch you stealing and make you do an initiation, robbing the Lord Mayors home. It’s meant to teach someone how to play AD&D. It reminded me, in spite of my deep nostalgia, how bad AD&D is.

This is a super-short, with only about 10 keyed encounters over three pages. And they are not 1-page dungeon pages either; this precedes those ideas by quite a few years. The introduction is a bit railroady but I can live with that. It’s easy enough to change it and role play out the introduction in a less odious fashion than a couple of giant read-aloud chunks.

The home is a small house with walled in grounds and a small outbuilding out back. The idea is that the character will sneak around to it and find a secret door behind a bookcase, follow a tunnel to the root cellar, and then enter the house that way. There are no other options given; the house and grounds are not described enough to give the player free will over how they approach the problem. This stifling of player creativity, or rather writing the adventure in such a way, approaches criminal, especially when new players and DMs are concerned. These are not the lessons that n00b players and DMs should be learning. They should be learning sandboxes and creativity, exploration and imaginative play.

I don’t think the designer understands AD&D. He calls for numerous Move Silently rolls, one every round while sneaking around, or some guards will approach to investigate the noises. That’s like a 10% chance every round to Move Silently at first level, isn’t it? Oh, you can Hide in Shadows to avoid the guards if you blow the first roll. 15% isn’t it? Yeah … about being a thief … That happens all over the place in this adventure. It’s just setting the player up for failure and then coming down HARD when they do fail … the Lord Mayor is 7th level and the guards are numerous. Picking a lock? Better roll that Move Silently! Ug.

Then there are the monster encounters. The tunnel to house has 2 giant spiders with very weak poison, not so bad, but the garden house has something like seven giant rats in it, all of which are at least a powerful as the character. I’s a railroad, there’s only one way, and that one way has railroad fights full of monsters that the thief can’t possibly defeat. Sup with that?

There IS a nice treasure table for what the player finds in the parlor. Lots of unique little mundane treasure that the thief can pilfer. No way they are going to make it that far, but hey, nice treasure table none the less. I like mundane treasure that’s unusual and descriptive; it add a lot more flavor to the game than “jewelry, ring, 100gp.”

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

The Maze of Nuromen

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Justin Becker & Michael Thomas
Dreamscape Design
Holmes
1st Level

This is an introductory adventure for 1st level characters through a two level dungeon with many classic elements. The room descriptions wear at times and it’s a bit vanilla. Still, it’s better than most of the products released. As an introductory dungeon crawl it does a decent job and would be great for complete n00b players because of the relatable experiences. It could use a healthy dose of a little more exotic fare sprinkled in.

Over a page of background we learn of the wizard Nuroman and his wicked way, how he built his tower and and the evil town that supported it, and how it was all destroyed in a flash because of of Nuromans tampering with things best left alone. Pretty standard fare combined with the standard “elves leaving the world” and “goblins filling in” trope. Once upon a time in a hole in the ground there lived someone who thought this was fresh. But … it IS accessible. The elves leaving the world and the dark things filling in is something that almost anyone new to RPG’s would recognize. It grounds them in something they can recognize in order to then introduce them to stranger things. This is something that will repeated over and over again in this adventure … except the strange things never appear. The first encounter, in the wilderness, is another good example. The group meets a band of high elves on their way to leave the world. They tell the group of an elf prince killed in the maze, his crown lost, and how the elves would dearly like to see the crown retrieved. They give the party a token to allow them pass any elven guards present in the wilderness near the ruins, and retrieving the crown makes the party elf-friends. ABSURDLY classic. Nearly the platonic ideal, from the token of passage to the elf-friend tagline. And COMPLETELY accessible to someone who’s only knowledge of fantasy comes from the Lord of the Rings movies. It’s impact is heightened even more by the art and language used.

I don’t usually comment on the art and language in an product. It has to be exceptional, one way or another, for me to notice. I noticed it in this. The art is Harry Clarke and the language … i don’t know … airy, or unusually worded maybe? Maybe some slightly archaic sentence structure? The art and language marry well to the content of the introduction and give an immediate strong feeling to the DM. These are the sad elves of epics. I’m pretty sure Clarke, or an imitator, was used in Polaris and I seem to have transferred a great deal of that games feel to the introduction and this first wilderness encounter. I can’t remember if the Rankin-Bass LOTR had a scene with the hobbits seeing the elves on the journey home, in the forest. I confuse the introduction of The Hobbit, Fellowship, the books, the movies, and the cartoons … but IF you saw the passage of the elves in the forest in the RB style then you’d a further look in to the vibe present. It’s some strong imagery and should give the DM a lot to go on. And it pretty much never reaches this high again.

The dungeon maps contain some interesting elements but are essentially just some simply branching deigns with a couple of small self-contained loops. There are some fireplaces, same-level stairs, pools, and so on that appear and those are all nice elements that add variety to a map. There’s just only so much you can do with maps this small. Maybe fourteen keyed rooms on the first level and ten or eleven more on the second, with a few empty rooms thrown in also. There’s a decent attempt at mixing things up a bit: exits through chimneys, waterfalls to the second level, a blocked off section and so forth. That good; far too many dungeons are just two-dimensional affairs, but I want more More MORE! More complexity! The wandering monsters are a real disappointment. It’s just a pretty standard list. No words of explanation, no flavor text, just a list. This is a failing for a product that’s targeted as an introductory adventure. You want an impactful first adventure that the group will never forget, not a meat-grinder of flavorless encounters.

The encounters generally contain a classic element. A bottomless pit that stirge fly out of. A rushing underground river that can pull a character under and sweep them away. Skeletons sitting at table that animate when their gambling stakes are disturbed. A skeletal arm with a sword that animates. A giant centipede in a rotting carcass hanging in the kitchens. Statues that open secret doors when their are turned the correct direction. ‘Ghosts’ that appear and do strange things, dispelled by the characters actions. A secret door behind a bookcase. Magic mouths. The list goes on and on. The encounters are all extremely relatable to someone with no fantasy RPG experiences. Players like to recognize things. They like to feel like they have figured something out. There are a couple of Save or Die traps, which seems a little harsh in a first level dungeon. The keyed encounters are a bit wordy. They do a decent job of providing a certain vibe but it seems like they could be shorter and still retain their flavor. There is a LOT of text about rusty weapons and skeletons laying on the floor where they died.

The monsters are nothing special. Really just classic encounters: a zombie in an iron maiden. A hollow-voiced wraith and so on. The mundane treasure isn’t very interest either: a jeweled ring and that sort of thing. I like my monsters a little more non-standard and I like my treasure VERY descriptive, to the point that the players want to keep the ring for their characters. There’s not much of that here. The magical items are a mixed bag. There’s a fair amount of boring old book items, like a +1 dagger or a potion of flying. I’d prefer a jar of glowing flies that you swallow in order to fly. There’s a non-standard item or two but they feel more like ‘tricks’, the notable example is the elven crown in the introduction that provides a one-time bump to Charisma.

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

Systema Tartarobasis

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Gabor Lux
Freely Self-published
Castles & Crusades
Levels 3-5

The adventure puts characters in unfamiliar environments and situations as they move deeper into the ruins of technologically advanced subsurface cities.

This is a crazy awesome setting/adventure from one of the best in the OSR, Melan. The players are transported to a strange Orwellian post-apoc cityscape where they must attempt to negotiate the thugs who run the place in order to find their way back home again. It has a strong technology element to it, or perhaps “fallen technology” would be a better description. It’s strong product with a heavy heavy open-ended adventure which could use more organization/layout.

People complain too much. For all the asshattery that the Internet brings it also exposes us to new ideas and things that we would not otherwise ever see. Gabor Lux/Melan is one of those things. He’s very very good at creating interesting ideas and this adventure is no exception. The players are transported to some kind of ruined undercity full of Moorlocks, except the Moorlocks are real people. You get the idea though. They are alone, in the dark, in a strange environment, most of their gear is gone, and contact with deities and refreshing magic are both not available. Trapped in a strange Orwellian city the group must get out. Or rather, they must first make it out of the complex they are in, then out of the wasteland and in to the commoners quarters, and then in to the main city, and then in to the grand techno-temple that contains a teleports to get them home again.

Quote a bit of the adventure is spent detailing the people and culture of the undercity and the social environment in which the adventure takes place. This adventure is, at its heart, a city adventure, and those revolve around the social interaction of the players and the people around them. The designer does a great job of laying out the Orwellian environment they find themselves in. It’s a bit like one of those Fascist episodes of Sliders. The group KIND of looks like regular citizens, but they can give themselves away easily and they are always being hunted by the government. Because they are outsiders AND because the government keeps a stranglehold on its citizenry. The designer lays this out quickly and briefly in only a few pages but does an EXCELLENT job of building up a picture of a paranoid fascist government that controls the people through fear, religion and force. Really excellent work. Many of the named NPC’s have agendas of their own, or at least have room for them or ones that are implicit, and this makes for excellent role-playing as the party try and orient themselves and find a way out. (“Oh No! The slider device is broken!”)

Most of the adventure describes general locations within the city. The outlands, the commoners quarters, and the upper city. These are laid out in broad strokes and clearly require quite a bit of DM improvisation in play. There’s generally more than enough detail to run the adventure in these sections and I didn’t really feel like things were missing. Several important buildings have their interiors mapped and keyed out, as does the initial ruin location the party arrives at. This first section, while not too terribly exciting, does serve to introduce the players to this new environment. Disney does something like this on their rides; the queue area is themed to get you in the mood before you end up on the actual ride. I assume this is the purpose of the ‘transport location ruin’ in this adventure. The net effect is something sort of like Vault of Drow. An environment that is minimally described with both more color, in the form of the culture and social interactions, and less because of the human-centric focus and the lack of the bizarro wandering tables from Vault. The treasure is lacking, consisting mostly of lazer pistols and little else in the form of wealth for the party, while the creatures are almost entirely just low-level fighter classes with a robot or two thrown in, as well as the terrible Ash-Men. I assume the treasure thing is some sort of Castles & Crusades thing and cash isn’t used in that system to advance?

The whole thing could use a few more section headings. It has some hand-drawn maps with numbers on it and then the numbers are expanded on in the keyed descriptions but the numbers don’t themselves have a heading. You have to read the text to find out what he location is, making is very difficult to scan during play to find a certain type of location. Just numbers may be fine in a dungeon crawl but in an open-world design you need to be able to quickly find something. “We’re looking for a brothel; is there one around here?” Uh …. let me quickly scan 12 pages of text guys … It’s nothing a printout and highlighter won’t solve, but annoying.

This is a very richly described environment and I encourage you check it out. It’s free and it’s author is probably the best designer currently active in the OSR.st

Posted in Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 9 Comments

The Mad Demigod’s Castle

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

mdc

by Richard Graves
Self-Published
AD&D
1st Level

I’m probably soft-balling this one. Fuck off. I like big dungeons.

This is an introductory level to Castle of the Mad Archmage. Both of these products, I believe, are meant to emulate the experience of adventuring in the original Castle Greyhawk. Castle Greyhawk, of course, has never really seem the light of day so these products and some forty year old memories are the only thing we have to get a feel for what one of the original megadungeons was like. There’s no introduction and no background beyond the couple of sentences that convey what I just described. It launches right in to the dungeon.

This particular level has 122 keyed encounters on the map. A really, really nice map. It’s complex. It has multiple exits off of it to a variety of different levels. I’m a SUCKER for a well you can climb down. I LOVE classic elements and this has a well the players can climb down. Yeah! There are lots and lots of rooms and hallways and alternate routes weird room arrangements. This allows for the players to avoid encounters, get ambushed from behind and maneuver to get around other encounters. It fills four pages and, while cramped, doesn’t quite feel like a random map or a ‘hallways for the sake of hallways’ map that the famous ‘over the shoulder’ Gygax map seemed to indicate was the norm. It doesn’t have much in the way of unusual features, which is disappointing. Ledges, slopes, same-level stairs, chasms, etc are all missing, as are any secret doors. Those would have turned this in a stellar map. The wandering monsters are a bit random and ordinary. Skeletons, zombies, goblins, kobolds, and lots of vermin. Just a complete random assortment of level 1 monsters. I usually don’t like that, and I don’t like that here. My theory is that I’m paying for the designers imagination and copying a wandering monster table from the DMG isn’t an exemplary piece of imaginative work. It’s all book standard. I get that this is a minimally keyed dungeon, probably using the tables in the 1E DMG (I don’t know that for sure, but it seems like a good guess), and I’m now complaining that it does it well. If it’s actually performance art disguising itself as a dungeon then it should be up front about that. Otherwise people might get confused and think this is ‘correct.’ Let me be clear: it’s not.

The encounters are … well, I don’t know. Random, maybe? It looks like a completely random assortment of encounters that just thrown together, one per room, with some kind of random room contents generator thrown in for good measure. This results in a situation where the various rooms feel more like a wilderness hex crawl type of thing than a themed dungeon level. Each room feels like it’s own little environment completely disconnected from everything else around it. Mad Props for seeing that style through to the end and coming up 122 different rooms for people to adventure in. It is, however, probably a bit too random to sustain anything other than ‘Tower of Gygax’ type of play. They are imaginative enough, I guess, but they don’t really make any sense.The first dungeon room is of a statue/pool of frolicking girls. Drinking the water will cause uncontrollable laughing for 1d6 round. The water has a tarnished silver spoon in it. This is a good example of all of the other rooms. No rythm or reason as to why there’s a silver spoon there. No real reason for the laughing, other than the statues are laughing. It just IS. Room three is another good example. A wooden table and stool. On the table is a box with 89 nails. There’s a leather backpack with a dead mouse an an empty potions bottle in it that is under some wooden debris on the west wall. Like I said, it looks completely randomly generated with maybe a little DM power to put it together. “Eight Gobilns armed with clubs can be found here.” is a good example of a monster room. It’s not quite a minimal key but is close to it. And you know what? It’s at LEAST four times more interesting than Dwimmermount. Seriously, I know its rather gauche to do, but while reading this I kept coming back again and again to my thoughts about Dwimmermount. That dungeon tried to present itself as a unified whole with some reasoning behind it. And it failed miserably in its ‘expansive minimalist’ key that focused on boring details. This dungeon embraces that sentiment SO much that it ends up being interesting. It’s like a completely random assortment of stuff and that should be obvious to any group of players going through it. No wasting time trying to figure out what is going on … nothing is! In that sense it’s more out there than anything in ASE or WMLP. Grand over-arching theme with subtle plots and history intermixed? Norfolk & Way pal! This is just some random shit we threw together and spent 30 seconds per room cleaning up a bit.

I’m absolutely serious about his being used as a kind of hex crawl tool. I tend to plunder those products for cool ideas that I can then insert in to my game, either on the fly or as some kind of planned thing going on in the background. You could totally use this product the same way. A DM could flip to a page and pick almost any room and insert it in to a dungeon or get inspiration from it and build sections of their own dungeon from it. A kind of cure for writers bloch. (Get it?!?! Get it?!?! BLOCH!!! Get it?!?! Oh man … I’m the best guy I know!) You could take that “laughing ladies” statues/pool and build a section of your own dungeon it so that it made sense in context. Seem from that viewpoint then this is one of the strongest products ever produced in that genre (Dungeon seeds?) As an actual dungeon to play … well, you’d have to have the right group in the right frame of mind. If your players don’t need meaning and are willing to tackle rooms one thing at a time without a larger context then this is great.

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

SM4 – Beneath the Darkshroud Peaks

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Stuart Marshall
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 2-3

The player characters hear rumours of a barrow to the north that is supposed to house an evil mage and his minions! The players will certainly find great riches and danger in the dungeons beneath the barrow. Shortly after hearing of the barrow, a trusted person offers to give them (or sell them for some reasonable price) a map to the area where it can be found. The hunt is on!

This is a dungeon crawl through some crypts full of undead that is also being used a lair for goblins and a base for an evil wizard. There are massive numbers of enemies in the complex. While there are a few goodies to be found it mostly a slight above average crawl with an unusual map. It’s an unusual module and, since it’s free, I’d suggest taking a look at it just to get a sense of how different it is.

The Start for this adventure is a bit strange. In the last several adventures in the series it’s been stated that one of the townspeople is a penanggalan. That’s never really explored very much, but this adventure assumes that she’s run off from town and has been causing trouble. The abrupt start is that a local farmer has located her new lair. The lair and her defeat is glossed over in a sentence. The focus is on a set of papers the group finds which indicates she’s been directed by an evil MU in some barrows nearby and that he’s planning in attacking the town. The party needs to raid the barrow and slay the wizard in order to save the town. I mean, assuming you want to save the town. The core discovery is nice, if a little abrupt, although I’ve never been happy with “Be A Hero” hooks. The only other notable thing about the introduction is the inclusion of a 0-level mercenary troop available to hire. The parties gonna need it.

The maps are … strange. The first level has two small complexes with goblins connected by the barrow entrance. There’s not much exploration here; really just a collection of rooms … something like a central room with a couple of rooms hanging off of it and maybe a corridor or two with more rooms off of it. There might be a dozen or so rooms in each of the two goblins lairs. The barrow is completely linear and has about seven rooms in it. Level two has multiple sublevels not connected, and level three has a couple of distinct parts and includes a stair back up to a disconnected level two portion with a balcony overlooking it. This isn’t Dark Tower or Thracia sublevels though. It’s really just a mostly linear complex with sections that are symmetrical. It’s a really strange map. It looks interesting, but I don’t think it actually provides a good environment to explore; it’s not complex enough. But props for doing something different.

The map key is also a bit unusual. Each section starts with something like “there are 80 goblins in this section of the dungeon” along with a brief description of the various bands =, weapons, armors, and a check box for each goblin. Each room in that dungeon section then says something like: “there’s a 75% chance of 2d6 goblins being in this room” and so on. One of the rooms will say “all of the rest of the goblins are to be encountered in this room.” It’s kind of an interesting way to present the creatures. There’s also a nice little section on what the goblins will do under certain circumstances, like retreat, flight, infiltration, morale break, rear attack, etc. That’s pretty cool and something I like to see that helps me run the encounters. The actual room descriptions are pretty standard, and thus boring. This is an interesting way to present the entrance to a wizard/leaders lair. The party has to make it through his minions before getting close to the wizard. The barrow is presented in exactly the same way: there are seventeen ghouls max to be encountered. The barrow is slightly more interesting. Most of the rooms have something going on to investigate. I like this kind of variety. Jars full of goo with goodies at the bottom. Spiders in cubbyholes. A “bad dreams” curse that lengthens the time grave robbers have to rest to recover spells, and nooks and crannies with more goodies in them. The room descriptions are a bit on the long side, but you do get a nice “what the ghouls do if turned” section. Uh … run the other way down the corridor? It’s a straight line.

Level two continues the “lots of creatures with a % chance in each room” method. Quite a few of the entires are just “50% chance of 1d6 nightcreepers” Not exactly inspiring. This entire section though is meant to be a creepy kind of “Pitch Black” environment with the darkness closing in and sounds in the night. Following that level is a set of rooms with the hallways full of statues with magic mouths that scream, zombies, and japanese ghost-like kiddy-wraith (literally.) The last level has the MU’s gnoll guards and a hatchery and then back up stairs to his main lair and more gnolls. The entire dungeon feels more like a funhouse that you are advancing through than a dungeon you are exploring. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be that way but it feels too checkpointy … too much linearity and things around for no particular reason. It feels a lot like an assault. Then again, it IS an assault. That’s a different kind of adventure than many players will be familiar with or is presented in many modules.

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

The Corrupt Crypt of Illmater

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Jesse Muir
Freely Distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 4-6

This is a short adventure in to an old crypt system. It’s pretty plain, for the most part, and uninspiring. There’s no background, so it’s just a pure crawl small crawl to drop in.

There’s no background here; the adventure jumps right in to encounter one on the wilderness map. This is more than a little strange to see in an adventure module. Ultimately I don’t think it matters; most hooks suck and most dungeon backgrounds suck and it’s pretty common to replace the hook or the background with something else. Still … it very weird to just see the locale detailed in a background-free way. I’m not really sure I know what to what about it.

Outside of the crypt complex there are four encounters while there are four more in the graveyard before the group descends in to the crypts proper. Outside there’s just spiders, were-rats and ghouls. There’s also a druid that can be troublesome if the party desecrates the forest. Otherwise … nothing much going on outside. The druid encounter could be used as a kind of hit and run series of encounters if the party linger about and earn his anger but that really doesn’t seem likely given the length of the adventure. The other wilderness encounters are just … boring … with read-aloud text. The four or so cemetery encounters are well enough for token encounters for potential tomb robbers but there’s just not enough there to sustain an exploration of the many graves.

The maps are simple linear/branching affairs, with a couple of secret passages that are going to be VERY hard to find without magic. It’s a very simple lay out with a very simple set of wandering vermin to go along with it … mostly rats of one type or another. The rooms here are really not very interesting. There’s a blocked-up stair passage and set piece with a were-rat on a throne but otherwise it’s just monster boring room, monster boring room. The second level is more of the same but this time it’s undead instead of were-rats. Shadows, ghouls, vampires. There’s a single interesting room, with a basin in it that can perform a variety of healing. Otherwise it’s more of the same: see room, fight monster, loot room. I realize this is a boring-ass short review but there’s just nothing in this place to interact with. Yeah, you can loot some graves. And you can pry out some inlaid gemstones. That’s nice. But there’s just so much “enter room fight monster” stuff that’s it becomes repetitive … and the module is short!

There are a couple of examples of better magic items. A chalice that can make healing potions and a magic sword that boosts strength for a short period of time. The items could be fleshed out a little more but, still, it’s an attempt. Other than these it’s just standard boring old book magic items. I really wish designers would put in more of an effort here. The new monsters are both vampire derivatives; lesser vampires of varying degrees. As “you face generic undead” opponents they could be pretty good. The party wouldn’t know what kind of undead, or perhaps even creature, they face. I always like that in a module.

Too short, too simple, and too mundane for my tastes.

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SM3 – Shrine of the Oracle

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

oracle

by Stuart Marshall
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
1st Levels

This module contains a small religious temple, well done, and a near by basic and tough two level dungeon. The shrine is quite nice but the dungeon too simple, although difficult. The shrine is worth lifting.

This adventure is eighteen pages long and the shrine portion of it is only about two and a half, with the rest of the module being devoted to a nearby dungeon. There’s not a lot of messing around with bullshit background in this one. There are just a couple of paragraphs of background information combined with some hooks to get the players moving to the shrine before the designer jumps right in to the shrine. I like this. I’ve always hated being bogged down in pages and pages of background information. I’m not reading a novel. I’m prepping for a game. The designer does a good job in providing some background that can link up with the previous modules or stand alone. For example, the temple leader is interested in the club-footed girl in the village from the last set of adventures, or she could be linked as a source of information for a vampire-like creature prowling around nearby. Anyway, it’s short, clear, plausible and interesting enough to provide the needed pretexts.

The shine proper has about eleven sites described. “Described” may be the wrong word to use. The eleven various sites all get a short one or two line description but, to borrow a word from the last paragraph, the sites are just a pretext for the real meat: the NPC’s. The site descriptions range from basic, like the guard barracks, to basic and strange. The Pen of the Holy Goat. The Omphalos carved with vaguely disturbing glyphs. The monoliths, supplicants cells, and naked bathing pools. The latrines. Wait! Wait! I know, latrines/lavatories in a module is usually a sign if a crappy module. They show some need to “explain” things. Not here. In this one they are a hook for an NPC. And in fact that’s what most of the eleven site descriptions are. Reading through then I found myself continually thinking of how they could be used by the NPC’s to interact with the characters and how the players would get themselves in to trouble at the sites. And that’s just EXACTLY what site descriptions in a NPC locale should do. They are not some frumpy Victorian catalog of an accurate depiction of village life. They are springboards to adventure. You just KNOW that someone is going to try and get a look at the naked priestesses bathing in the springs. Or mess with the goat. Or the holy rock. That’s why things get described, or should anyway: so the group can interact with them. Most of those eleven sites have something going on that can lead to a bit of fun without too much of a stretch. That’s not the best part of the shrine though. The best part are the NPC’s. The shrine is down to the last few priestesses, three in fact. A small frail leader who blinks nervously, a flighty and giggly 25 year old, and an overweight slightly bitter and older ‘junior sibyl.’ Those would be good descriptions to run with but there’s more. The leader has a reputation for being fabulously wealthy and a giant slayer. The flighty one is an act covering a calm and composed woman. The older junior is looking to shirk her menial duties. These NPC descriptions take place in a short quarter page or so, including stat blocks, and provide more than ample nuggets to get any DM’s creative juices flowing. Combined with the site descriptions you get a really nice little shrine description that could be dropped in to almost any game. Further, the head is high enough level to cast Raise Dead and other other spells the party might need, making the groups interest a natural. The Splinters of Faith series from Frog God tried to describe a bunch of temples of different faiths but they came off hokey and uninteresting, despite ratcheting up the fantasy elements. This shine, in contrast, comes off realistic enough to be plausible and interesting enough, with enough potential hooks implied, that I WANT to use it and throw it in. It really is the kind of the thing I like to lift to include in my own games.

The rest of the adventure is less than good. The priestess gives the party the mission of checking on another group that disappeared in a nearby dungeon. That’s a lame and uninteresting hook. There is a nice little wandering monsters table on the way to the dungeon. The forest is full of protective centaurs (playing the “we barely tolerate humans” game) and petrified goblins, as well a a few bandit and humanoid encounters. Each of the encounters gets a sentence or two to expand on them a bit. I like that extra detail; I think it really helps cement the “feel” of the environment a lot … in this case a pretty idyllic forest with a few invaders a sense of the past lurking underneath.

The dungeon is not very good in most respects. There is almost no background provided at all. “A group of adventurers went here and didn’t come back” is just about the extent of the background. No reasons at all for it to exist, just a simple note of “Room 1. Entrance Chamber” and off we go. It needs just a little background to help the DM fill in the missing details. Wizards lab? Old fortress? Former haunt of The Evil One? The map is quite disappointing also. It has two levels, with about 36 rooms on the first level and 25 or so on the second. Both tend to be a linear branching style of map. The first level, in particular, is divided in to three distinct sections with a single way to each section. Explore section one, then section two, which leads to section thee, which leads to the entrance to level two. The first section has a couple of very small “room loops” but the entire thing has a layout which really doesn’t support explorative play. IE: you can feel like you’ve cleared the dungeon, and tat’s not a good thing. The wandering monsters are mostly vermin without further explanation.

This place is ROUGH. 40 jermlaine in the first and second sections. 60 tribesmen in the third section. 120 tribesmen in the second level. And that’s in addition to the ‘normal’ room encounters with vermin, skeletons and the like. Ouch! Nothing wrong with that, some of my favorite modules have a shit-ton of enemies in them. I like it! It IS going to be a surprise for the 3e/4e players though. The rooms generally have something going on, but they feel disconnected from each other and lack … flavor? even though they each seem to have something. A dead gnoll female with tattoos and rot grubs. A locked bronze door (empty storeroom on the other side, how exciting!) A waterlogged chamber full of fungus. A poltergeist rooms. Rooms full of dead vermin (evidence of the last party) The writing is terse enough, with 7-8 rooms to the page, but there’s just not enough interesting going on in each room to support any kind of interactivity. The clues to the last groups location are nice, and work with that hook, but there’s not much beyond that. The lack of a good dungeon background makes the problem worse since it’s harder for the DM to fill in a coherent story. There’s a bad guy at the end of the dungeon but he suffers from Lareth the Beautiful syndrome. There’s build up to him so when he pops up he’s just another monster to kill. There’s sense of tension.

The treasure is truly disappointing. The mundane treasure is mostly in the form of boring old coinage and the magical items are almost entirely book items like “+1 swords” and their ilk. The previous modules from the designer used minor magical items extensively but only two show up in this adventure. That’s a serious disappointment. Magic and mundane treasure are a reward and should feel like it. They should feel special, the magic items in particular, and convey a sense of mystery and wonder. “Sword +1” doesn’t do that.

Steal the shrine and ditch the dungeon.

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SM1 – The Spider Farm

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

sm1

by Stuart Marshall
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
1st Level

This is a small ‘tactical’ adventure in which the group frees a small farm from goblin invaders. The setup is a bit free-form, with no presumptions about how the the party will resolve the situation. The magic items are interesting, as is the location (although it trends towards 2e silliness.) Otherwise it’s a pretty average adventure. Which makes it better than 95% of all adventurers ever written. But still, average.

The adventure takes place in and around a spider farm. There are maybe twenty buildings above ground and maybe fifteen or so locations below ground in the spider pits. The farmer raises spiders below ground and then harvests the spider silk, further processing the spider bodies when they die. It’s a cute little business description for a fantasy world, if you’re in to that kind of thing. I’m not really in to that kind of “magical society” environment, but I must admit this one is done well. It’s not the throw away description that usually accompanies a business description. As I mentioned, there are twenty or so building descriptions and a decent number of workers, 25 or so. Again, not something that you usually see in an adventure. Industry is usually skipped over.

The building descriptions, including the spider pits, are pretty mundane. Realistic and mundane. There’s just not much going on in them, except for the goblins. The buildings, post-invasion, show how many goblins are in each one. This is laid out pretty plainly. The net effect of these two conditions, the building descriptions and the goblin descriptions, as well as some comments about playing the goblins intelligently, give you a feel for how the adventure should run. You have a farm described. You have some goblins described. You have some advice for how to run the goblins and a hook to get the characters going. GO!

The adventures problem is two-fold. First, it’s hard. This is NOT an introductory adventure. Oh, it says first level all right, but any 3e or 4e or n00b group is going to get themselves killed off FAST by a 25+ strong, intelligent, goblin raiding band. There’s nothing wrong with its style, but it’s written for experienced PLAYERS with inexperienced CHARACTERS. Second is the environment proper, the farm. It’s a bit boring. There needs to be a little more going on. Maybe some scaffolding, or giant boiling caldrons, so something similar. There needs to be more for the players to work with and use in the environment over the course of the adventure. It’s a minimally described and realistic location … it needs more to sustain imaginative play.

The treasures are, once again, excellent. Stuart write a free downloadable book called something like ‘The Tome of Minor Magical Items.’ This adventure has several. From a mug that fills with ale (created by a group of ale gremlins in a extra-dimensional pocket … who don’t use enough hops) to items that give you an additional first level spell, or give the cleric the ability to roll twice for cure light, taking the best of the two rolls. They SEEM magical. I love that kind of feel. A lot of the mundane items are similar: the are objects rather than just raw coinage and have enough little flavor text descriptions behind them to make them nice.

I think the real issue here is that the adventure seems like something that an experienced DM came up with 15 minutes before the players showed up. Given a short description of “Spider farm with 25 workers gets invaded by a 20-member warband of smart goblins.” what would YOU come up with during actual play? The amount of additional exposition/flavor is rather small. The goblins worship Lolth and sacrifice 3 people a day to the spiders until the last of three days when they sacrifice everyone. The spider mother is gross and bloated and can’t move well. There’s an egg sac with 95 more in it. The spiders launch continual attacks. Webs don’t really burn well.

It’s a good set up but it’s missing a lot of imagination and environment that would turn it in to a really excellent adventure.

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SM2 – The Melford Murder

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

melford

by Stuart Marshall
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
1st level

The people of the small village of Melford are stunned when one of the most prominent citizens is found dead one morning. Clues are scarce, suspects are everywhere, and the constabulary is stumped. A rich reward has been offered to anyone who can help drag the killer out of the web of shadow and intrigue they have woven around themselves.

A rare beast indeed: a murder mystery module that doesn’t suck. The players will be kicking around a small village trying to discover who killed the innkeep. It can end with the pursuit of the villain to her brothers hideout … and he’s a kind of mad scientist/necromancer guy. The village is done right, the investigation is done right. The end feels out of place. Not a bad little adventure.

D&D murder mysteries have a serious problem. ESP. Invisibility. Know Alignment. It’s hard to keep a group of PC’s off of your back if you want to engage in a bit of secret villainy. Most modules do some serious bullshitting to get by this. Amulets of mask alignment, Anti-mind reading rings, Shapechangers, etc. This adventure takes a different approach, and a much more intelligent one. It’s written for first level! None of those magical evil-finding powers are present with the party yet, most likely, and this the murderer is safe. It acknowledges the need for a lower-magic environment and looks the problem straight in the face. It’s a good solution to a bad problem and someone should have done it sooner.

It does something else many others don’t do: the villagers are written to be much more real than many modules do. Almost four pages are spent just on the NPC’s that are the suspects. They get a tony stat block in their description and then a small amount of description. Some have club feet. Some are lonely and isolated. All have something to them to help the DM run them and bring them to life. There’s also an EXCELLENT flowchart that shows how the people of the village, or at least the suspects, relate to each other. Felona tried to seduce Brad but he rejected her advanced … he’s in love with Deborah who considers herself too good for him, but she’s doing business with Ulayah and is in love with him …. and so on. This really brings the village to life. A village is about the way people interact with each other. So many modules just give he bar-keep one ear and make him surly and describe how much ale costs. That’s not what makes a good village. Just like factions are important in a megadungeon, interpersonal relationships are important in a village. It helps drive the background scene that going on around the party and make the place and the people seem more real. And provides hooks aplenty. 🙂 Really, really nice village. Did I mention one dudes a cuckold? Yeah, this village is good and saucy without being bizarre.

The murder mystery/investigation is handled on about a page and a half of easily read/laid out text. In that space you get two versions. The ‘minor’ version is for parties that hate investigations. Basically, of the party talks to everyone in the bar they should get an idea of who’s lying. Maybe. It relies on the group paying attention. Groups NEVER pay attention. The clue is not a slam dunk and only appears once. That’s not a recipe for success … but we’ll let it slide. The ‘major’ murder relies on the same information except that one ‘no-slam dunk’ clue is removed. In this version talking to people yields only the salty gossip and love affairs that also appear in the minor version. It relies entirely on a single physical clue that is not present in the minor version. A clue in a locked room that only one person has a key to. The murderer. So …. yeah. Ultimately it’s still a murder mystery module and some groups will NOT be in to it.

There’s some weird shit in this module. One of the villagers is a penanggalan. As far as I can tell, that plays no role at all in the adventure. She just is. Weird. There’s also a secret hideout that the murders deformed brother lives in outside of town while he conducts hideous experiments. It’s completely out of left field. Oh, the four rooms are creepy and weird as hell and I enjoyed it, but it just seems REALLY out of place. Dude is wearing ‘manskin armor’ and has body parts and worms crawling about his place … uh … SWEET! The several new monsters are nice as are he few new magic items. UH .. .and the manskin armor …

You could run this as written and have a pretty decent time, if your group like mysteries. I’m going to use this in a different way though. I’m going to split the “lair” from the murder. I’ll use the NPC’s in the my Moondays group inn/homebase town. Introduce them over several sessions of play and get the NPC’s and personalities integrated in to the normal background the players interact with. Then I’ll do the murder. That should be much more interesting than the “reward poster” hook presented in the module, and much more impactful since the group will has a history with the NPC’s. Plus, they are not then required to solve the mystery. They can ignore it and go on their normal dungeon-delving if they want or if they get bored. I’ll keep the penanggalan and have her do something else … start setting her up to be some kind of future hook. I’ll take the mad scientist ‘manskin’ and his lair and maybe either put him in town as a bizarro merchant or outside of town as a potential NPC, evil perhaps, that the group interacts with for sage advice, etc. He’s available for hooks in the future also as he plays with things man was not meant to know.

This is a nice adventure for low level characters. The format is good and you can plunder some good content. It does a village right.

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L4 – Devilspawn

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

l4

by Len Lakofka
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 3-5

In this module the party defends a small series of villages from various mass humanoid attacks and an assassination attempt. It’s confusing, with an insane level of detail. It has a LOT of overpowered villagers and a strange vibe I can’t put my finger on. High fantasy mixed with … idiosyncratic stuff? Bits of this adventure are highly imaginative but man, you have to work to get it out.

I tend to write my reviews in a very stream of consciousness style. This module reminds me a lot of my review-writing style. My reviews are four or five paragraphs long. This module is 137 pages long. I think you can see where I’m going here. This module is in DESPERATE need of a heavy edit. It was quite hard for me to figure out what was going on, when it was going on, where it was going on, and how it all fit together. It’s just like everything was all mashed up together … maybe in the order you might need it? It’s got a HUGE amount of detail, which is pretty obvious once you consider there are only four encounters in it. (I think? After two read-throughs I’m still not sure.) At some point in my life, I don’t recall when, I owned L1. I recall trying to read it several times and just being confused. Deja-vu.

I _think_ there is a timeline of events which involve humanoids attacking villages and the players moving from village to village to protect them, combined with an assassination attempt on a nobles wife. There’s also a dungeon straight of Tower of Gygax. How/why the dungeon fits in I’m not sure. There’s also a Sword of Evil and a Mace of Destruction floating around that appear to be involved somehow in the plot. I’m pretty sure all of the attacks are being masterminded by an evil noble and his son. I have NO clue how any of this fits together or how the party is supposed to figure out where to go.

Page 1 has an introduction and a sequence of events for the module. The introduction is three paragraphs long and says, essentially, that there’s a supplemental book that contain pre-gens and calendar information and please read the module carefully. No Shit! I take back all of my bitching and moaning about long introductions and backgrounds. This thing needs at least a page that describes how all the bits fit together. The sequence of events should help but its all but useless. There are six entires. Three are background. One is “the party arrives. There is snow on the rooftops and on the dock!” WTF?!? Is that important? Is it winter? Or the middle of summer? I never did figure out why the snow was mentioned or if it was important. The last two entries are eight days apart and start jut 1 day after the party arrives. The first is that a knight leaves his town with some troops. The second, and last date is “The attacks on the village of Tellar.” The eight days in between those two events make up the adventure. Those are the eight important days for an event summary, and yet nothing is mentioned.

All of that shit in one column on page one. The second column is, perhaps, even more bizarre. The DM is told that the new party should travel to Grest based on the information provided in the introduction and if they don’t then the module is useless. Uh … there wasn’t ANYTHING about the module in the introduction … There’s some read-aloud after this advice, and some details. Maybe it means that? Nope. A tavern-keeper has breakfast with the party and tells them 37 people died and 30 more were injured, along with some details, like the names of the people who were killed, if the party asks. There’s also a long list of other people killed and buildings burned down, which refers back to L1 and/or L2, I guess, but has no other bearing on the adventure? The detail here is SO strange. It’s like … watching the Attack on Foy battle scene in Band of Brothers. You see some action. You hear some names. Oh look, a haystack. Interesting and detailed … but not really relevant to timeline of WW2. And from this the party figures out they need to go to Grest?

The next section is a day heading: Patchwell the 10th. The party leaves for Grest. The barkeep gets ready to bury some friends. Uh .. didn’t they die like 8 days earlier? Wait, I’ve got an idea. Maybe the calendar isn’t numerical like we think. Maybe its, like, logarithmic? So there are not 8 days in between events. The barkeeps friends died yesterday! Ah Ha! The Copper Rise comes in to sight. What the hell is that? Is it relevant? Fuck, I feel like I’m watching a Fellini movie without subtitles. What the fuck is going on? Who is that? Is that important? They meet some copper miners on the road with a wagon, a man and a boy. The man is a fifth level fighter and the boy is a third level fighter. No, wait, there are three people now. The 19-year old is the third level fighter and the 8 year old … *whew*, he has no levels. WTF are the copper miners doing with 8 levels of fighter between them? Uh, you do get negative experience for killing them though? Ah ha! So the party is supposed to be hero’s and this is a railroad! Got it!

The party arrives at an inn where they are interviewed by the Knight of Grest, who is on his way to the village that was attacked, with a war party. After the knight and his troop leave the next day then the inn is attacked by a hobgoblin war band 30 strong. Uh … the innkeep is a fourth level fighter and his wife is a fifth level cleric. In fact, there’s a shit ton of high level people in the town. A 7th level dwarf, another 4th level cleric. Lots of second and third level fighters … I guess the party is supposed to help out? There’s a silly level of detail. Things like “the common room has six large octagonal tables with eight chairs around three of them and six around the other three (six of the chairs need to be repaired and in the kitchen against the back wall.)” Huh? Is that meaningful? Does that somehow represent some event in the directors childhood or relate to the priests sexual thoughts and his relationship with God?

The whole inn thing is only four pages long; terse in comparison to what’s to come. The next day the party gets to Grest. There’s an event in Grest the evening of the the 12th, but it makes no sense? The module then skips to events in Grest on the 14th, an attempted assassination in castle Grest of the knights wife. “It’s the last scheduled event in the introduction.” What? This was all introduction and not the adventure? Wait … when the fuck did this become a Chech film? There’s like, 28 pages of Grest, at least. And a dungeon under ruins nearby? Uh … I don’t know why the party goes to the dungeon? It has a cool maze. Oh wait, the module is describing Grest again? So that was just, like, a 12 page sidebar stuffed in at a random spot? The villages of Teller and Cobblethorp are also described. Teller gets attacked. Cobblethorp doesn’t, but has a bad guy in it? And then the wilderness around the three towns gets described? I think you get the idea. It’s a confusing mess stuffed with strange detail.

The vibe here is very strange. All of the people in the villages seem to be very high level. There’s two tailors who are both 5th level wizards! There’s also A LOT of powerful things running around. How about an 18th level Angel shape-changed in to a halfling apple seller? His donkey is a bronze dragon. And then there’s the little girl who’s actually a polymorphed silver dragon. She gets upset if the group steals some pearls. No one helps the party, or course. Oh, and there’s like a crazy number of gods running around with a decent chance that some show up. Usually to smite a party member who’s not on the straight and narrow. It’s bizarre! It’s like the players are the only ‘normal’ people in the entire place! I don’t groove on the whole “tailor and his wife are both 5th level wizards/doorman is a 7th level fighter” type thing. Nor do I get off on the whole “punish the party for stealing and looting the good temples” or “Hahaha! puny human, do what we dragons say or else!” thing.

But there’s a whimsical side of this that’s pretty cool also. The whole “Baphumet come to visit hi old paladin buddy” and the idea that anyone/everyone is actually someone else much more powerful … that might make a cool campaign, right before your players strange you. The situations are just sooo bizarre and there’s so many of them that it ends up being some kind of High Fantasy/0e mashup done first edition style. Len like his magic items also, but he does do some work to add variety. Potions of wood rotting, daggers of blood-letting, and so on. There’s a LOT of highly imaginative content in this … if you can wade through the rest. The module is worth downloading just to read the weird color-based teleportation maze on page (40 or 42.) Six confusing and wonderful pages!

 

Hey, what’s up with the editing Dragonsfoot? Did you even try?

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