tenfootpole.org

by Todd Hughes
Freely Distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Level 6-8

The troubles in Rashtan have been caused by the mysterious Isensan, can the party discover his secrets and stop his wicked plans in time?

This is an adventure with two small dungeon crawls and a short wilderness adventures to get there. As the cover indicates, the finale is with a blue dragon. It handles the dragon in a somewhat intelligent manner (lots of minions serving him) and does a decent job with magical and mundane treasure. It ends up feeling a bit bland though, with not enough non-guard encounters.

The village is not covered at all this time around. Instead it’s been spawned off in to its own product, which is probably the right thing to do given its featured role in … five modules now? ANyway, our party of 6th-8th level adventurers are offered 2000gp to bring in a bandit leader, dead or alive. There’s a small bump for each pair of bugbear or hobgoblin ears brought back. The ear bounty is GREAT. I like that kind of color. I think I’m gonna steal it for tonight but have some evil demi-humans convince the humanoids to cut off their ears and go halfsies on the bounty. But at 6th-8th level? I think not. Probably better to just announce that the bandit leader is a dragon and rely on the parties greed to show through. There’s an 8-day wilderness adventure to get to the first dungeon, the one the group cleared out in the .. second module? The wilderness wandering monster tables are just simple things that could have come straight out of the 1E DMG.

The first dungeon is a small thirteen room affair with a simple branching design. It’s the same dungeon used in (HM2?) and is an example of a dungeon being repopulated. The rooms are full of skeletons of the creatures the party killed the first time around, as well as a series of new things that have moved in. Carrion Crawlers, Yellow Mold, Green Slime. There’s a small encounter with a group of bugbears, 14, that leads to the ‘clue’ the players are supposed to discover: a captured mage. He’s actually the leader of the bugbears but ties himself up when he hears the party killing them. The bugbears are so afraid of him that they won’t blab if captured. That sounds a little far-fetched. His only reason for being there is to clue the party in to the location of the dragons lair and pretend to be their friend so he can backstab them in his lair. DEEP in his lair. After the group has probably slaughtered about a bazillion of the dragons minions. It’s a pretty long stretch to get to that point, but whatever.

The Dragons Lair is another small 22 room branching design. There’s no Daphne in sight though. The design is so simple that you only need have one encounter before taking on the dragon. Just a simple branching design in some caves. The vast majority of the rooms just have guards in them: 34 gnolls, 8 trolls, 22 bugbears, 19 bugbears, etc. As I said before, the idea of the dragon having minions to do his bidding and help guard his lair is a good one. It’s just very poorly implemented here. The monsters don’t really react in an organized fashion. The module implies that they do, when guard horns are blown, but it’s organized in a poor fashion for a DM to coordinate the response. Each room lists who they respond to. This is cumbersome. It would have been better if the room in which the horn was blown listed which rooms responded. That sort of Order Of Battle helps make things run faster. Then again, it’s nothing that a read-through and pencil notes couldn’t solve.

Theres a decent encounter with some Abolteth that are co-lairing in one of the branches. They have some of the dragons minions as slaves, and are doing the whole illusion thing also. It’s a pretty standard Aboleth encounter, but it’s still nice to see. Other than that … Guard room with 22 bugbears. Guard room with 8 trolls. Etc.

Some of the magic items are nice though. That’s not too surprising since the guy write ‘The Tome of Minor Magic Items.’ A bow that can give you a little strength bonus. A ring of comprehend languages. Elven leather made out of leaves. They could use a little more description but the effects are certainly not book standard. There’s a whole series of staffs that are pretty lame. Essentially they allow the wielder to cast a single mega spell, like Ice Storm of or something similar. The dragons shaman guards, in his lair, are wielding a pair. IE: They each have a single one-shot hard hitting spell. I never understood this. Why not just say “He can cast ice storm once a day” instead of gimping the party with a single-use magic item.

by Todd Hughes
Freely Distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Level 1

A thief is loose in the town of Rashtan, can you stop them?

This is a small & short mystery/hunt in a small flavorless village. Hear a rumor, get a mission to find out what’s going on, conduct interviews, explore a small cave complex with rats and centipedes. IE: Clean out the windows attic.

Other adventures by this author include “The Goodly King is Actually an Evil Doppleganger” and “The Green Devil Face is a Sphere of Annihilation.” The cover picture and the title pretty much give away the entire adventure. Wally the farmer has gone missing. People are complaining about small valuables getting stolen. Someone else disappeared a few weeks back. The sheriff is offering a reward, cause spending the towns money is easier than doing his job. Clues are given at six of the 23 locations in town. None of the locations are described other than name and maybe a sentence or two in the clue. IE: The dive bar is run by Boris “one-ear”, a surely man who doesn’t like people snooping around his customers. I’ve been giving this series a lot of shit but it’s been getting better. The descriptions for the various clues are great at times. A dive bar run by a Surly/private Boris ‘one-ear’ is pretty much the exact level of detail I need to run a place. It’s short and it’s got some good imagery I can expand on myself during play. The other clue locations are similar. The city hall has a janitor that you can get a clue from. If I ignore the RenFaire 2E bullshit in the last statement then that’s ok also. As is the tavern owner who thinks the other tavern guy is behind things. Oh, and the guy is the head of the thieves guild and is worried that the thefts at his place will draw attention to his activities. He hires a guy to join up with the party as a hireling to spy on the group and feed information back to him about the thefts. Nothing nefarious, just report back. That’s a pretty good inn description without ever describing what was in the inn! The rest are not so good.

The dungeon/caves has five rooms and is located under the well in town. There are giant rats. There is a giant frog. There are giant centipedes. There is an Osquip. And there’s the 4HD Meazel. That’s a lot of nasties located in the center of the village! The cave system is described as having TONS of rats, which is a nice little bit, especially for use in the cramped hands & knees tunnel crawling part of the adventure. Should do a great job of freaking the players out. Each entry has read-aloud, which is a waster of time and space. Those sections add nothing to the locations. Not that the DM sections add anything either. The rooms down here have nothing interesting to offer.

The monsters are book monsters and boring, bringing none of the mystery or excitement a D&D game should have. The same for the treasure: a small number of coins, some gems, and a +1 dagger and golden Ring of Water Walking. The dagger is a serious disappointment. I wish more had been done to make it stand out. The ring is slightly better since I like these sorts of minor magical items. I think I fell in love with items of that sort when reading Bree & the Barrowdowns back in high school when it first came out. Maybe because they don’ SEEM like book items? The barrow treasure certainly wasn’t book, at least not the combs that kept tangles out of your hair. The +30 armor is a different story. 🙂

This is clearly supposed to be an introductory D&D adventure. In my mind your first adventure should be full of mystery and wonder, whimsy and The Fantastic. It should make you feel like you did the first time you ever met a monster in a D&D game or wondered what something was or what it did. “Dagger, +1” is just going through the motions of playing D&D.

by Todd Hughes
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 4-6

The ancient halls of a long lost wizardpriest of chaos Belzir have been rediscovered. Can the party discover this secrets and find his legendary amulet?

Behold, an adventure! This is a dungeoncrawl in the dungeon of a dead wizard to retrieve an artifact. It has flashes of good content and interesting things that are surrounded by poor content and boring things. It’s either the best bad adventure I’ve ever reviewed or the worst good adventure I’ve ever reviewed … I’m not sure which. It’s free, and worth a looksy if you time.

This module is frustrating. It has a decent amount of interesting things going on but it’s surrounded by things that make me cringe. Let’s take the hook as an example. There is a great four line conversation that the players will overhear in a tavern. Two old farmers gossiping and the line “Gold. Gold and lot;s of magic. That’s what he’s offering.” Woah! Perfect! As a PC I’m already interested! It continues “Yeah, Gold and magic and a fool’s quest. Everyone who’s gone has never returned.” Danger! Foreshadowing! Build up of tension! Ya Hoo! “Well, cept that first feller. He came back with that book.” Ooooo! The plot thickens! “Yeah, but just him. The other three didn’t come back did they?” O. M. G. As a player I would be absolutely DROOLING at this point. It’s short. It’s simple. There’s a lot of room to ad-lib and yet it provides enough for the DM to work with. An absolutely WONDERFUL hook for an adventure! Now, let’s fucking ruin it. “Mitner” the sage in town (ug) is offering a reward (ug) for people that go to an old dungeon and explore it for him (ug). The book was a diary “ug” and the sage wants you to fetch him an amulet in the dungeon so he can keep it safe cause it might be a danger (ug). He warns the characters not to suffer from temptation and take the amulet but hat he will reward them with a whole bunch of magic items if they return it to him. (ug) This is terrible! Absolutely terrible! Why not let the players make their own decisions? Why send them on this mission from a patron? Why not just drop hints of gold, magic, and a POWERFUL ARTIFACT. Cause that’s what the amulet is, an artifact-like magic item. That doesn’t come across at ALL until almost the last page of the adventure. The tavern hook, combined with rumors of the artifact and its powers, maybe combined with a STUPID low offer from the sage, would be enough to get the PLAYERS going. And that’s what a good hook does, motivate the players.

The village of Rashtan, where the previous two modules in this series have taken place, is almost usable as something more than a throw-away. A recent gold rush has caused the place to grow in the last couple of months. There’s not 23 locations, instead of 4, including a dive bar. There’s still not much going on and the descriptions are pretty lame. The guy that runs the Sink Hole, the dive bar, is named Boris One-Ear. It then notes that one of his ears has been torn off. Seriously? I need you to tell me that? That’s the kind of wonders you can expect in the town description. Actually, no, that’s a highlight of the town descriptions. A good town description concentrates on the RELATIONSHIPS between the people in town. Who hates who, who’s in love with who, and how the people in the town interact. That’s what brings a town to life and there’s none of that here. Unless … there’s a 20-entry rumor table. You could take this table, as well as a cross-section of the town, and work up some matrix, using the rumor table as a kind of “whats going on in town” table … which is probably what they should all represent anyway. Rumor 9 is that the new priests in town are all really devil worshipers. Let’s work with that … the laypeople of the old church in town are spreading that rumor without the knowledge of the old priests … in fact, it’s all been started by old Widow Harlock who is a bitter, shrew of a person. Or maybe she’s in league with one of the old priests? Ooooo … they are secret lovers! NOW you’ve got the start of some good town action. Go to the next rumor ands repeat. Thus you now have 20 subplots in an otherwise boring town. But you are going to have to invest time. Like I said, Frustrating.

The wilderness journey to the dungeon has one of the most boring wandering monster tables of all time. It looks just like it was copied verbatim from the 1E DMG wilderness tables. Just a random assortment of animals, humanoids, and vermin. It adds nothing. The journey also includes a couple of programmed encounters. The first has the group finding a wagon on the side of the road, tilting to one side because it’s busted a wheel, while some women look on and some men try in vain to shift the wagon to fix it. Meta-gaming time! Something is going to happen … either the group os going to get attacked by ogres or something or … Yes! the wagon people are actually a bandit group that’s out to waylay the party! It’s not a bad encounter but it takes up WAY too much space at almost a half column AND it has a 3rd level assassin assassinating the party MU. Ouch! I always hated the assassin class. The other encounter is also with bandits but it’s more of a “traditional pit trap in the wilderness with bandits attacking” sort of thing with nothing special. There’s also a bandit lair that has a second entrance to the wizards dungeon. Cool! Not only can the party track back/torture the monster lair out of the killed/captured bandits but they can also find another entrance to the dungeon! And … the bandit lair sucks. Simple layout and just boring old rooms with a couple of traps stuffed with bandits to hack. Orcs & human bandits. There is a brief note on how the bandits react to attack and who comes to the aid of others and rallies. I like these things in intelligent/humanoid lairs since cuts down on my searching through the module to see who responds when the inevitable Alarm Gong gets rung.

The main dungeon is two levels with maybe 21 room son the first level and another 10 or so on the second level. Kind of. It’s hard to count because of the Pocket Dimensions! Maybe I’m excited about pocket dimensions because of the whole Bottle City and Machine level thing I’ve been seeing lately online. Maybe not. They do FEEL different than the pocket dimensions I’ve seen in other products, even though they are all pretty simple affairs.

The dungeon starts with … a welcome mat. That’s my kind of humor. 🙂 The rooms have a kind of light/mild funhouse feel to them, which is probably why I like many of them. They have a certain OSR feel to them. A statue that animates. A pool of water that can bump stats, heal you, kill you, etc. There’s a statue who’s arms you can move to do things, and another room with levers that move GIANT blocks of stone to block off some hallways and open up others. There are a few more examples of things like that in the dungeon. I like that kind of interactivity in my dungeons. It gives the players something to do, dares them, tempts them, and gives then an environment that they can try to use to their advantage. Several of the rooms have some clumsy elements, like plaques on the walls that are the equivalent of ‘Eat Me’ messages. There’s also a decent number of very boring combats in boring rooms with boring treasure. This is VERY frustrating after the Change Pool, the State Arms, or the Block levers. The pocket dimensions are really not much more than a bunch of wandering monsters checks through a wilderness interspersed with a couple of set encounters and ending in some encounter where you get part of a key and get teleported back to the main dungeon.

There are a few decent non-standard magic items int he adventure. A ring that gives you bow proficiency, a nice intelligent sword, and THE AMULET, which is essentially an artifact. Otherwise it’s all book standard items and even the ring/sword don’t have very good descriptions associated with them. The mundane treasures are just piles of even numbered coin amounts and gems. There are a number of new monsters, and a lot of new undead to mix things up a bit for the players. New monsters mean the players don’t know what to expect and good treasure makes the game magical.

by Todd Hughes
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This follow-up adventure to “The Disappearance of Harold the Hedge Mage” sees the PCs return to the village of Rashtan.

Hang on here, let me copy/paste most of my (poorly done) review of Harold the Hedge Mage … Ok, not as much reuse as I had hoped.

This is a short little adventure that feels a lot like a quest you’d get in a D&D video game. A PS2 video game. It also brings a decent little bit of flavor and color. Those bits keep it from being a complete waste of time but there are better things floating around. Skip to the end for the good parts.

The party, in a small village, somehow takes it upon themselves to go find the missing asshole Ishtan. It’s totally not clear why the party give a shit, but they do. The sheriff, who the guy escaped from, certainly doesn’t seem to care. A diary (yes, a fucking diary. Talk about overuse of a trope that was crappy to begin with) in Ishtans shop directs the party where to go. On the way they they visit a Company Town, take sides in an Eagle Claw dispute, and kill a patrol. They then clear out a very simple hack-n-slash dungeon. The best parts are on the road to the dungeon.

The adventure is super simple. The wilderness wandering monster table could have come straight out of the book and is therefore probably unnecessary. There’s a rumor table; can’t have an OSR adventure without a rumor table. It struck me today that, while the rymor table was nothing special, you could use rumor tables to kind of flesh out villages. A false rumor about the priest being in league with Orcus? Then something must be going on; somebody hates the priest for some reason, legitimate or otherwise, or hte priest is doing something strange. That kind of thing. In which case I’ve been giving most villages, at least those with rumor tables, a bad rap. The whole adventure is rife with read-aloud text, but it’s REALLY quaint read-aloud text. All of the shops have a little bit and they all end with the shopkeep saying “How can I help you?”And it’s still read-aloud text and it still sucks. Ich liebes du nicht Du liebes me nicht. Da Da Da.

The mine map is super simple also. The mines have a simple branching layout with most of the rooms just having some humanoids in them waiting to attack and/or get slaughtered. A LOT of humanoids. We’re talking Caves of Chaos orc caves here, at least. It reminds me a lot of the orcs caves in B2 … if there was read-aloud in every room and no orc babies to kill. IE: boring. Just a straight up hack in rooms that have nothing else going on. Boring. VERY boring. At least most of the read-aloud is very short. In fact, it’s almost written like younger players were GM’ing and playing.

There are some good parts here. There’s an enemy encampment in which the party can collapse a cliffside on to most of them. That’s some nice terrain involvement. There’s also a good encounter with two giant eagles attacking a hill giant and ogre who were trying to have their eggs for breakfast. The giant is yelling for HELP, which is what brings their attention to the party. The encounter is written to assume that the party helps the eagles, but the eagles give no boon if the party does so. It would be MUCH cooler if the party helped the giant/ogre! That would be AWESOME! You might even get a hill giant or ogre ally, which is going to be more useful in a dungeon and a lot more fun overall then a couple of eagles who telepathically say “thank you” and fly off. That’s fucking lame. The least they could do is let the party ride them. Gwaihir is supposed to be cool, not a jerk.

Finally there is the Company Town the party comes to in their first day of travel. It’s a quarry town with everyone essentially in debt to the quarry owner. He sets the party up to get killed by ogres and it’s assumed the party comes back to deal with him. The owner ends up groveling before the party and as the group leaves they see a mob of villagers/workers rioting in the village, looting the company tavern and beating its barkeep. Then they come up the hill to the owners manse in full on mob/torches/pitchfork mode. It’s the best village mob scene I’ve ever seen. The writing is tight and evocative and feels right. This sort of actions/consequences thing is also something tat rarely gets covered in modules. There was something similar in my recent review of Har’s Point: the party solves the immediate problem but probably not the larger issue and then the village suffers for it. In that case it’s offered as an off-stage epilogue and in this case the party is witness to what is about to happen as they are leaving. This is VERY good stuff.
After all is said and done it was right for you to run.

The hamlet of Rashtan is missing it’s Hedge Mage. Can the PC’s track him down?

This is a short little adventure in a house and mine that feels a lot like a quest you’d get in a D&D video game. A PS2 video game. It also brings a decent little bit of flavor and color. Those bits keep it from being a complete waste of time but there are better things floating around.

Bob Herzog and I have something in common. In my Monday ‘Uh … are we sure this is a zombie apocalypse?’ game my 42 year old overweight lazy suburban housewife has executed 2 cops with shots to the head for mouthing off to her. Susan don’t take no shit from NPC’s.

The players come in to a town and the 1/2 orc barkeep tells them about his buddy, Harold the Hedge Mage, who he hasn’t seen in awhile. He, and Harolds niece, ask the party to go check on him. He lives a day away. He’ll give you 50gp each. The barkeep can’t be bothered to check on his buddy personally though because … I don’t know, maybe this is like Brewsters Millions and he has to get rid of all his money or something. The sheriff was informed but he can’t check on Harold either. You see there’s this magic line outside the village that the sheriff can’t cross or he turns in to  pile of poo. No, wait, tat’s not it. Oh, right: the sheriff can’t go BECAUSE. Why even put a sheriff in? Why raise the issue? Who knows. Anyway the group goes to Harolds house which is some kind of mansion out in the woods even though it’s a day outside of town and monsters prowl the woods. Inside they party finds .. monsters! Killing them leads the party to an old mine where they find more monsters. After killing a bunch of orcs and hobgoblins the party finds out that someone sold out Harold, a rival, but there’s no sign of Harold. Going back to the village the group finds Harold in the tavern talking to the barkeep and his niece. It turns out he went off to town for a few weeks. Then Susan knifed him in the throat and used his wand to shove it through the barkeeps ocular window and grabbed the niece by the hair and slapped her repeatedly while shouting “WHO THE FUCK IS MISSING NOW BITCH!” … Susan don’t take no shit from NPC’s.

The adventure is super simple. The wandering monster table could have come straight out of the book and is therefore probably unnecessary. There’s a rumor table; can’t have an OSR adventure without a rumor table. The whole adventure is rife with read-aloud text, but it’s REALLY quaint read-aloud text. All of the shops have a little bit and they all end with the shopkeep saying “How can I help you?”And it’s still read-aloud text and it still sucks. Ich liebes du nicht Du liebes me nicht. Da Da Da. There’s a really nice little bit in the village about a rival potion maker and the names he gives his potions and what they look and taste like. It’s PERFECT for what it’s describing. It adds that touch of flavor that should really make it stand out in the players minds.

The house and mine maps are super simple also. They house is just a bunch of looted rooms with some orcs in the basement waiting in ambush while the mines have a simple branching layout with most of the rooms just having some humanoids in them waiting to attack and/or get slaughtered. A LOT of humanoids. We’re talking Caves of Chaos orc caves here, at least. Two of the encounters stand out. One is an encounter with a next of stirges. In their room is the dried out and desiccated body of an orc. Yes, that qualifies as ‘Standing Out’ in this adventure. The second is  hole in the wall of a rom that leads to large cave with a 9-headed hydra in it. WHAT?!?!?! Oh yeah! Now the adventures getting interesting! Come on! Gimme more More MORE! Alas, there is no more. The hydra doesn’t even have anything cool, just some coins. Still, I like the imagery of a hole broken through a wall that you crawl through to find a large cave … with a hydra in it! THAT’S a classic D&D moment. The adventure needs more like it. It reminds me a lot of the orcs caves in B2 … if there was read-aloud in every room and no orc babies to kill. IE: boring. Just a straight up hack in rooms that have nothing else going on.

There are a couple of decent magic items. A ring that lets you hit monsters that can only be hit by +1 weapons and some homebrew healing potions. Again, I REALLY like the whole potion thing that’s going on in this adventure. “Ishta’s Wondrous Elixer tastes like dirt, because it has dirt in it, and you have to make a con check or retch and vomit. It heals 1hp. 🙂

After all is said and done it was right for you to run.

These super-short Dragonsfoot adventurers are starting to get to me.

by R.N. Bailey
Distributed freely by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 2-4

A few weeks ago a ship was wrecked off the hamlet of Har’s Point. Rumours abound that the ships was carrying wealth, and the unhappy spirits of the dead sailors walk the nearby beaches.

This short adventure reminds me more of a Harn adventure than D&D. It has monsters in it to slay, unlike Harn, but it focuses on setting an environment in which an adventure takes place rather than just providing a set of keyed encounters. The adventure has a generic feel to it but the designer is in the right state.

There’s been a shipwreck off the coast of Har’s Point and the locales are abuzz with rumors of the treasure they think it contained. This draws the Murder Hobos in and they soon learn that some folk have seen the dead sailors walking on the beach at night, burying their treasure. The group will poke around the village, beach, and wreck long enough that some Sahuagin will show and it’s likely they’ll be contacted for help by a Selkie. There is a nice little section at the end suggesting various consequences as a result of the players actions. It’s pretty good and most of what the players do will ultimately just solve the short-term problem and eventually lead to the destruction of the village. I don’t mean to suggest that this is a rail-road at all, but rather the side-effects of Murder Hobos: they fix a symptom and don’t cure the illness, in general.

What the adventure provides is a bare bones description of a cliffside fishing village. A small map of the village, very brief descriptions of the mayor, general store, church, and tavern. This all takes up about a page, if the map is ignored, and is completely generic. The most interesting part is that the mayor is a fisherman, works six days a week, and hangs out in the tavern on the seventh to do his mayor’ing. A short timeline is provided to help with action taking over over the few days the group will be in the village. This isn’t a railroad set of events but rather it describes what the Sahuagin will be doing during their evening activities. The bad guys are out searching for something they lost so they spend a lot of time wandering around and searching at night. Sometimes they run in to villagers. The events have a number of disappearances and culminate with a full on assault on the village as the Sahuagins desperation finally wins out. The event list is very nice and plays well of the coastal region, as does the 12-entry rumors list.

The rest of the adventure is a description of the areas in and around the village. The looks like a typical encounters key but in reality it is describing each area much more like, say, a regional setting would. The shipwreck area is described. The wreck is described. How to get on to it, how to not fall out, what the players find, what happens if they fall in the water, what’s different at night vs. the day. Chances that the Sahuagin will be there when the party is, and so on. The total effect of the five or 6 locations described this way is that you get a decent region that you can run in a very free-from manner; very nonlinear. I very much like having the adventure laid out this way. It gives me the ability to run the adventure on-the-fly, rolling with the punches the party throws at me. I can improvise what’s going on and deduce what should happen and fill in the extras. It’s a good way to lay things out and is what I’m referring to when I talk about it being Harn-like.

Of course the content is almost all completely generic and uninteresting. Sahuagun near a coast village. They have sharks. They attack people. And eat them. Woah! That’s new! Usually the fish-men are just described as being depraved and evil but nothing more is said. In this module they are all about eating people. They eat fellow Sahuagin. They eat villagers. I’m sure they would eat the Selkie if they could. That extra little bit of flavor text stands out and helps bring the Sahuagin to life. Nice. There’s also a nice little encounter on the beach with a couple of fishermen/beach bums looking for treasure. They are wary of party, since they want the treasure for themselves, but may eventually warm up. The whole thing does a good job of painting these two guys, though rather broadly, and again gives me enough to build them up and add to the encounter.

The sites descriptions do suffer from the problem of being overly long. There’s a lot of detail in each one. Mini-rules for getting a boat close to the ship, for experienced and non-experiences sailors. Mini-rules for getting from the groups boat to the rock/reef the ship is run-around on. Mini-rules for getting from the rock to the ship. Mini-rules for falling of the ship. Mini-rules for what happens if you fall in the water. Mini-rules for the appearance of Sahuagin on the ship. Rolls for finding hidden objects in the wreck. It adds up quickly and turns in to just a mass of text. The encounters are also pretty tough. 15 2HD Sahuagin, 2 5HD sharks, a 5HD giant eel … all while suffering through the water environment and the penalties it imposes. 2nd level characters are dead men swimming. The magic items and mundane treasures are nothing special. +1 ring of protections, +2 daggers, oil of sharpness (actually, I like that book item …) and small gemstones/pearls/coral worth money. The one exception is the item the Sahuagin are looking for, the Crown of the Briny Deep, and it can only be used by Sahuagin. Phooey! The magic & mundane treasure needs to be spiced up so the players will actually get excited about them and want to keep/use them.

Short adventure. Nice try but way too generic.

by R.N. Bailey
Distributed freely by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 2-4

A few weeks ago a ship was wrecked off the hamlet of Har’s Point. Rumours abound that the ships was carrying wealth, and the unhappy spirits of the dead sailors walk the nearby beaches.

This short adventure reminds me more of a Harn adventure than D&D. It has monsters in it to slay, unlike Harn, but it focuses on setting an environment in which an adventure takes place rather than just providing a set of keyed encounters. The adventure has a generic feel to it but the designer is in the right state.

There’s been a shipwreck off the coast of Har’s Point and the locales are abuzz with rumors of the treasure they think it contained. This draws the Murder Hobos in and they soon learn that some folk have seen the dead sailors walking on the beach at night, burying their treasure. The group will poke around the village, beach, and wreck long enough that some Sahuagin will show and it’s likely they’ll be contacted for help by a Selkie. There is a nice little section at the end suggesting various consequences as a result of the players actions. It’s pretty good and most of what the players do will ultimately just solve the short-term problem and eventually lead to the destruction of the village. I don’t mean to suggest that this is a rail-road at all, but rather the side-effects of Murder Hobos: they fix a symptom and don’t cure the illness, in general.

What the adventure provides is a bare bones description of a cliffside fishing village. A small map of the village, very brief descriptions of the mayor, general store, church, and tavern. This all takes up about a page, if the map is ignored, and is completely generic. The most interesting part is that the mayor is a fisherman, works six days a week, and hangs out in the tavern on the seventh to do his mayor’ing. A short timeline is provided to help with action taking over over the few days the group will be in the village. This isn’t a railroad set of events but rather it describes what the Sahuagin will be doing during their evening activities. The bad guys are out searching for something they lost so they spend a lot of time wandering around and searching at night. Sometimes they run in to villagers. The events have a number of disappearances and culminate with a full on assault on the village as the Sahuagins desperation finally wins out. The event list is very nice and plays well of the coastal region, as does the 12-entry rumors list.

The rest of the adventure is a description of the areas in and around the village. The looks like a typical encounters key but in reality it is describing each area much more like, say, a regional setting would. The shipwreck area is described. The wreck is described. How to get on to it, how to not fall out, what the players find, what happens if they fall in the water, what’s different at night vs. the day. Chances that the Sahuagin will be there when the party is, and so on. The total effect of the five or 6 locations described this way is that you get a decent region that you can run in a very free-from manner; very nonlinear. I very much like having the adventure laid out this way. It gives me the ability to run the adventure on-the-fly, rolling with the punches the party throws at me. I can improvise what’s going on and deduce what should happen and fill in the extras. It’s a good way to lay things out and is what I’m referring to when I talk about it being Harn-like.

Of course the content is almost all completely generic and uninteresting. Sahuagun near a coast village. They have sharks. They attack people. And eat them. Woah! That’s new! Usually the fish-men are just described as being depraved and evil but nothing more is said. In this module they are all about eating people. They eat fellow Sahuagin. They eat villagers. I’m sure they would eat the Selkie if they could. That extra little bit of flavor text stands out and helps bring the Sahuagin to life. Nice. There’s also a nice little encounter on the beach with a couple of fishermen/beach bums looking for treasure. They are wary of party, since they want the treasure for themselves, but may eventually warm up. The whole thing does a good job of painting these two guys, though rather broadly, and again gives me enough to build them up and add to the encounter.

The sites descriptions do suffer from the problem of being overly long. There’s a lot of detail in each one. Mini-rules for getting a boat close to the ship, for experienced and non-experiences sailors. Mini-rules for getting from the groups boat to the rock/reef the ship is run-around on. Mini-rules for getting from the rock to the ship. Mini-rules for falling of the ship. Mini-rules for what happens if you fall in the water. Mini-rules for the appearance of Sahuagin on the ship. Rolls for finding hidden objects in the wreck. It adds up quickly and turns in to just a mass of text. The encounters are also pretty tough. 15 2HD Sahuagin, 2 5HD sharks, a 5HD giant eel … all while suffering through the water environment and the penalties it imposes. 2nd level characters are dead men swimming. The magic items and mundane treasures are nothing special. +1 ring of protections, +2 daggers, oil of sharpness (actually, I like that book item …) and small gemstones/pearls/coral worth money. The one exception is the item the Sahuagin are looking for, the Crown of the Briny Deep, and it can only be used by Sahuagin. Phooey! The magic & mundane treasure needs to be spiced up so the players will actually get excited about them and want to keep/use them.

Short adventure. Nice try but way too generic.

by Lorne Marshall
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 1-3

I like some things a lot. Megadungeons. Barrows. Fey. Gonzo. Weird. I dislike some things a lot. ‘The 2E Style’ may be at the top of that list.

This is a railroad tavern murder mystery that ends the way these things usually do: with the villain hiding out in the dungeon. This time it’s a doppleganger behind things. There’s tons and tons and tons of backstory and read-aloud. There’s very little monetary wealth and therefore XP. It does a couple of things right, so I’m going to cover that first so you don’t have to read the rest.

First, there’s a magic sword in the adventure that the players can find. It’s a good item. Multiple bonuses, speaks, has extra powers, gets a decent physical description (albeit in a different location), has some local mythology surrounding it, nice flavor text ability on the sword (it’s a goblin-slayer and ‘salivates’ when used against goblins, shedding droplets of water that fizzle loudly in to stem. Cool!) It’s a REALLY good write up of magic sword and is EXACTLY the kind of shit that drives players wild when they find it. Power Fantasy, Ho! I’d prefer it if it also had some kind of drawback, but I’m not going to bitch too much. It’s one of the best magic items I’ve ever seen written up. This is the kind of thing that excites players and makes them giddy.

Second nice thing: The sword is hidden in the dungeon WITH A CLUE TO WHERE IT IS. It’s hidden somewhere that is pretty obvious, once the players figure it out. That’s kind of cool. “Oh! THAT’S why that thing is special. Duh!” The clue is the good part though. Not the exact clue used but rather the fact that there IS a clue. Something the players find gives a hint that there is something hidden in a part of the dungeon the players have already hidden. That’s the kind of stuff I like. The place is not just a collection of rooms but has a kind of … mechanic? to it. One room impacts another. You have to backtrack. THings in one area lead to the discovery of things in a a different one. It only happens once in this adventure but it IS a nice impact.

Third nice thing: There’s a brief couple of bullet paragraphs on conducting a barroom brawl. Mugs of ale, punching, benches, buckets of scum, and mutton legs are all covered. All of the classics. Nice!

That’s it for the parts I liked. This thing is, otherwise, a 2E abomination.

Two pages of DM backstory that explains the emotional state and background of the doppleganger. Half a page of read-aloud to describe a tavern brawl starting. Half a page of text that describes the need for the DM to railroad the party and presents a variety of solutions to that age-old demon of all plot bullcrappery: the pesky ‘Party Free Will’ problem. The brawl is a pretext to get two NPC’s to appear to hate each other and have them both get out of the tavern so one can die in a field a few moments later. This sets the second one up as the murderer, since he’s got no alibi. The doppleganger is counting on the patsy to get hanged for the crime so he can woo the barmaid that he thinks he’s in love with. Of course, he could have just killed the other suitor outright but then there would be no plot.

So dude 1 that snuck out turns up dead and witnesses saw dude 2 kill him. They go through a whole ‘verified by magically lie detection’ shit THAT I ABHORE. This is the ‘magical society’ 2E view of D&D village life and I hate it. I hate the way it tries to explain things. I hate the way it tries to set things up. I hate it when magic is commonplace in society. It devalues magic. That should be the realm of the party and vile sorcerers. The magical lie detection reveals everyone is telling the truth: the witnesses did see dude 2 and dude 2 is telling the truth when he says he didn’t kill the guy. Oops. Sherlock Holmes time for the party; they get to question everyone. Too many pages later the DM is just encouraged to tell the party “No one has mentioned Myathas. That’s unusual. Maybe you should go investigate his home.” That has to be in there because the whole thing is so convoluted that even Poirot couldn’t follow it. They go to the guys house. Ohs Nos! It’s guarded by the town guard! And they won’t let the party in! The party goes back to town to complain to the Reeve, only to see most of the guard come back for the night. Yeah! They can now to back to the house! Only to find 2 militia guys there guarding, who defer totally to the PCs. IE: there had to be a way to telegraph that the guard captain was evil/obstructing, even though that is completely meaningless to the adventure.

Hey, you know how a bunch of older editions had henchmen & hirelings in them? And you know how it was pretty much a staple of survival to hire a bunch and take them with you to the dungeon/adventure? Well, the designer thinks that sucks. He thinks you should be a hero. Heroes don’t treat the two henchmen the party just received like the henchmen they are. Heroes don’t make them accompany the party. Heroes don’t send them in to the home first. Oh, and if the party does then the DM is directed to have the monsters inside NOT attack the guardsmen but rather direct the kobold attacks on the party. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Inside the party finds a DIARY! Yes, that old staple of crappy design makes an appearance here. And while fucking around the house the doppleganger has kidnapped the bar maid and taken her to his dungeon lair. A dungeon lair with such a bad reputation that none of the guardsmen, militia, or baronial guard in town will pursue. What evs. The room descriptions for the farm range from half a page to a page each. More lengthy read aloud. A wilderness travel adventure to the dungeon in which the DM is encouraged to go easy on the party so they arrive at the dungeon at nearly full strength, etc. The dungeon is full of read-aloud and lengthy DM description, maybe 3 rooms to the page on average. They don’t really have anything interesting going on. The second level has some ‘Tuckers Kobolds’ action before the battle with the doppleganger.

The party receives a grand total of about 300cp from completing this adventure. Good luck leveling.

by Charley Phipps
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Level 10-14

Far to the North, in the upper reaches of the land of dread Iuz, lies one of the possible resting places of the ancient evil sorcerer, Acererak. Rumored to lie inside are deadly traps and terrific treasures, but all pales in comparison to the awesome power of the Demi-Lich.

This is a short 11-page module that channels the Tomb of Horrors. It is just about as close to the Tomb as you can get. Sequel. Preqel. Whatever … it’s another Tomb and it’s related to the first since it Acererak designed it to be a false tomb. 21 rooms, linear layout. Demons summoned if you go astral/ethereal, false doors, mosaics on the floors, ceilings, two false entrances and a real one. It’s all here. If you want to play the Tomb of Horrors 2 then this is the module for you. I hate Tomb of Horrors. I recognize it for what it is and the role it plays but FAR too many people think that the thing is the ‘right’ way to design and run an adventure.

Given a page of maps, an intro page, a new monsters page and 1.5 pages of background, this thing is pretty terse even though all of the rooms are essentially complicated set pieces, just as with the original. The journey to the tomb and background are about as detailed as the Gygax version. What is different, or perhaps what I don’t remember, is the wandering monster table for encounters on the way to the tomb location. This chat is NOT messing around. 30-120 orcs. 1-10 hill giants. 20-80 gnolls. Patrols of 150 soldiers. That’s some bad ass encounter tables right there. Several of the encounters are expanded upon briefly, which is I prefer to just a single line entry on a table. The context helps me run it better.

The map is linear, just like the Tomb. There are some dead-end corridors, just like the Tomb. There’s a whole lot of text to describe each the set pieces in each room. (Although that’s relative, I guess. It’s still a short module.)

I’m not sure what else to say about this. It’s the Tomb of Horrors. There are some mechanisms I don’t agree with. Pits with a 100% chance you fall in. One monster, undead, has an amulet that does the whole “-6 levels to turning” thing. I hate that. Just bump his level or make him a Vampyr or Vampire Lord, or Demon Lord or something. But don’t just throw in a stupid gimp for the players. Likewise, perhaps the tomb should be extra-dimensional instead of just declaring you can’t tunnel in to it with spells? I don’t know, that seems lame also. Otherwise the encounters and layout and rooms channel the spirit of the Tomb perfectly. “A light mist of acid dissolves your gear” but you don’t notice it until it’s too late. A page long backstory of an NPC that leads to some other hook for further adventure.

It’s the Tomb. Do you like the Tomb? Do you want an adventure like the Tomb? Would you like to expand on the Tomb? Then this is for you. Just please, dear lord, do the D&D world a favor and never tell anyone you think the Tomb is good. It has a purpose but that purpose is limited.