tenfootpole.org

by John Turcotte
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 4-6

Once again evil threatens The Land Of Song and heroes must be found.

This is an adventure in the dungeons of a destroyed fortress where evil forces are beginning to mass once again. It’s got a lot of neat little details in it … which are surrounded by boring guard room encounters. A LOT of guard room encounters. A lame hook but a nice little OD&D feel at times … which is a compliment. 🙂 This is a sequel to Where the Fallen Jarl Sleeps. It does devils very well.

The cowardly northmen are at it again! After failing to protect themselves in Fallen Jarl the northmen once again seek out the heroes to save them Their old enemy has seemingly returned: Her Dark Majesty. The hook is short and not very motivating or clear. The wise woman foretells the evil ones return so the Jarl sends the heroes to take care of it. They have to be strong, they have to be true and they have to belong to the night. There’s a nice little rumor table, but the introduction and background are not very involved, which is a good thing. I hate being bored to death by backstory. There’s a decent little wilderness journey to get to the adventure site; just over a week probably. That’s going to be about 24 wandering checks, with a 1 in 10 chance. The lowlands, hills, and high mountains all get their own eight entry chart, charts which are very good. There are some wilderness hazards like avalanches and blizzards but the real attraction are the creatures. The designer does a good job providing a little extra information for each to make them standout a bit. Coffer Corpses, cloaks flapping in the wind, A Grim looking to help out, highlander berserkers, a helpful snow maiden, or refugees with horror stories to tell. They tend to have a paragraph or so of detail, amounting to a couple of sentences, and that;s generally just enough to make them stand out and provide a little assistance to help me run them. It gives a taste of the Northlands which could perhaps be a bit stronger, but the encounters do stand out.

The dungeon under the ruined fortress has four levels with about 35 or so encounters on the first three levels and about 20 on the lower level. The maps are not terrible complex, from a looping design standpoint and do also show a touch of the hated hated symmetry. They do, however, have multiple areas on each level that can generally only be reached by going lower and them coming up a different set of stairs. It’s not the full blown “multiple paths between levels” that is encountered so rarely but it does provide an extra little touch that I appreciate. There are also notes about creatures on lower levels responding to noise on upper levels, especially at the stairwell rooms. Well done.

I found the encounters frustrating to no end. There are all sorts of cool little details in some of them and references to stairwells that go different places and so on. That can get me very excited when looking through an adventure. I REALLY like an OD&D feel: that strange and wondrous combination of whimsy and idiosyncratic which is impossible to mi/max rules lawyer your way through. It can make a player think they have no idea what is going on. That’s exactly what they SHOULD be thinking since this is a fantasy world and not a Victorian catalog of botany. Open a door and billowing choking fumes roll out of it followed by swarms of carnivores flies … now that’s what I call a portal to hell! Or sit in a chair that summons an invisible servant to do your bidding, or command the skeleton in a room; these are all great examples of cool little things that help bring a dungeon to life. Those are the kind of details I’m looking for to help me run a room. This is supplemented by allies in the dungeon. No, really, allies! There are slaves, prisoners, and actual damsels to be rescued! There are even mushrooms you can eat that not only DON’T kill you but also provide nourishment! Far,far too often published adventures contain only things that want to kill the players. All food items poison. All damsels are polymorphed demons. That kind of adversarial design discourages players from really exploring and getting in to things. Why rescue someone when you just KNOW it’s a doppleganger/demon/etc? Why eat a mushroom; it’s just gonna be a save or die … None of that here; it feels a lot more neutral and because of that a lot more fun to explore, I suspect. Both this adventure and Fallen Jarl features devils in it and the devils are well done. They tend to be the leaders and use their illusions well. The devils feel like the evil masterminds they are supposed to be, and all without the railroady DM bullshit that some modules use to make the point. They are done simply and well. Bravo! There is also a little hook nin the dungeon which could lead to a truly epic rivalry, reminding me a lot of the Galactic North SF story. It would be really cool for the party to encounter to rivalry over and over again, in song, person, or symptom, as they pursue the rest of the adventuring career.

But those tend to the exceptions to the rule. There are a LOT of guard rooms in this place. That’s not really a problem. The problem is that the guard rooms tend to be boring. Another guard room with gnolls. Another guard room with evil dwarves. And guard room with the Black Watch. Zzzz… The room holds six duergar. They are armed with blah. They are armored with blah. Their leader is blah. He is armed with blah. He wears blah. There are coils of rope and fishing nets in the room. Repeat. Repeat a LOT. There is also a scattering of other rooms with creatures that can be boring also. The rooms need to be spiced up a little. Not all of them, but some. They need some variety. They could also use a better Order of Battle. These guys are supposed to smart and led by a genius; how they respond to the players incursion could be more laid out, which would be a great help in running it. The mundane treasure is generally well done, with good descriptions of the items. The magic items tend to be generic book items spiced up with a few special weapons, like a sword that does extra damage to fey, or frost-brands, or swords of wounding. I appreciate the extra details but they could have used a little more. Maybe a bit more description or a little more unusual effects for some of them. That kind of detail can turn Just Another Item in to a treasured item a player keeps long after it’s game usefulness ends.

There are at least three modules in this seres: Where the Fallen Jarl Sleeps, this one, and Stormcrows Gather. As I work my way through these modules (Stormcrows should appear next) they are growing on me quite a bit. The production values, which I don’t usually comment on, are top notch. I’m guessing this is donated time by the Dragonsfoot collaborators and they’ve done a fabulous job. The series proper is a good one, each one building the shared mythology of the Land of Song. Despite my mocking of the Northmen this is a very good series; one of the best, free or otherwise. My problems with them relate specifically to the ‘be a hero hook’ and my perceived view of the encounters being a little relentlessly monotonous at times. Yet more Undead in Jarl, or Yet Another Gnoll/Dwarf room in Towen. If you want vikings, or a human-centric campaign, then the series would ratchet up quite a bit.

by Mike Calow
Distributed Freely by Dragonsfoot
AD&D 2E

The party has come across a ruined church situated between a forest and a swamp. A thorough search reveals nothing other than a storm cellar door, which shows signs of recently being uncovered (the rest of the ruins are overgrown with weeds and grasses.) There is, curiously, no graveyard.

This is another expansion of the sample dungeon is the 1E DMG. The first three rooms are the ones in the DMG while the rest of the rooms attempt to expand on it. This one claims to have deep ties to Ravenloft but in reality it’s really just Yet Another Module with little to distinguish it. It’s supposed to come across, I believe, as a creepy old church whose brother monks have turned to cannibalism/tuurned in to ghouls/ghasts. That doesn’t really come across very well though.

This one pretty much jumps right in to the action. Without only a paragraph or so of introduction it adds a couple of new rule variations for undead: ghoul paralysis that impacts limbs instead of the entire body and some alternate energy drain effects. These are clearly meant to limit the impact of a couple of serious effects, but I like them anyway. Monsters should feel mysterious and dangerous and adding variety to them is a very good thing. I would never want a player to be able to quote monster powers back to me, verbally or subliminally, at the table. The game should be full of wonder and mystery and The Unknown, not a min/max exercise. These sorts of rules supplements are a welcome addition that help achieve that. I also like, in general, seeing additional information on the theme of a module. If you’re going to have an undead-heavy module then a few BRIEF additional rules/descriptions/thoughts on the undead are nice to see. Got lots of bags? Then how about a bag generator? Got lots of bricked-up walls? How about a few supplemental rules for breaking them down! The rules don’t have to hang around forever and Variety is Spice.

The encounters here are not that dazzling. In fact, it looks like even the first three, straight from the book, have been watered down. There’s no yellow mold. The rooms are mired in mundanity. Each one starts with a short, and generally uninspired, read-aloud paragraph followed by a paragraph of meaningless text. I know it was the style at the time to wear an onion on your belt, but the read aloud thing is stupid, especially as presented here. The supplemental text after the read-aloud is uninspired. The rooms are too mundane; there’s nothing much interesting going on. There are three exceptions. In one room you can find a body stuffed in a pickling barrel. In another opening the door will cause the contents to spill out, down the sloping corridor. Finally there’s a nice description, in the read-aloud, of a maggoty corpse: “When you open this door the smell that reaches you is enough to make you gag. Lying on the floor is the maggot ridden remains of a human male.” Yes, that’s a good one; something is going on. Otherwise … the rooms are not so interesting. Skeletons, ghouls, ghasts, trash … just lots of boring little rooms. “This room was once opulently decorated but has been allowed, almost encouraged, to fall into disarray.” What’s the point of that? Why not put that in the DM text and allow me to describe it? This room has two ghast lieutenants who fire crossbows as soon as the door opens. Not the most dazzling or interesting of rooms. There is an hourglass which opens a secret door when turned over; that’s an interesting and strange little effect. This adventure needs a lot more of that type of thing.

While there are no new monsters the variable paralysis/energy drain effects in the beginning should have much of the same effect. The mundane treasure isn’t too bad, with things like a golden hourglass filled with silver powder. That’s some nice detail that should distinguish it from just another XP-giving loot. The magical treasure is more disappoints, just being book items. Spear +1, “potion of clairaudience” and so on. I really dislike book items, although the emphasis on consumables is welcome. I want magic items to invoke a sense of wonders in the players and to be mysterious. That’s not going to happen when they find “spear +1.” More troublesome is the lack of treasure. You’re looking at about 2000gp in coins and not much in the way of items, with only one room really having anything in it.

Monastery of the Order of Crimson Monks did this much better.

by John Turcotte
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Leves 3-5

Take a little of the ICE supplement Bree & the Barrow Downs and combine it a dash of that room in which the earth mother was killed in The 13th Warrior. Creepy barrows with a shit-ton of undead. Gird the clerics loins boys! It’s Turn Undead time!

Evil, pure and simple! From the Eighth Dimension! Err… plane! This is an undead hack in a bunch of barrows/caves carved in to the walls of a valley/gorge. It’s got a lot of undead. A LOT … and little else. It also has some bullshit ‘be a hero’ in it. And the party gets gimped on treasure they recover. Stupid Northmen! You don’t want your ancestors tombs looted? Then don’t go hiring mercenaries to solve your problems!

The homesteads of the northmen are being attacked by evil! Undead! The leader has called in outsiders to help because Northmen are all cowards and/or quitters, being demoralized after six of their champions failed to return. The background/introduction here is only a page and a half or so. Long but not Russian novel long. There is an excellent four paragraph note on running the undead, since this adventure is so heavy on them. It basically consists of a brief rules clarification on the turning of undead and a little advice on running them. Ye old DMG1E has all of the answers and things I thought were broken in Turn Undead were clarified by the designer. Very Nice. He also does a good job in giving advice on running the undead, based mostly around descriptions, which should add a nice element of horror and quite a bit of mystery to them. I LOVE it when the players are left guessing about the monsters they encounter and that’s what a decent amount of the advice boils down to. Describe the creature, not the Victorian Categorization. Zombies, Coffer Corpses, and Mummies can look a lot alike. That’s good advice for ANY game.

There’s a short journey to the burial valley involved so there’s also a little wandering monster chart of twelve or so entries. Each entry tends to have a nice little bit of detail to help run the encounter in an interesting way. The Gnoll Raiding party, for example, has been having trouble with the wandering undead, the very problem which motivates the characters, and are willing to parley and negotiate. There’s also a nice Hag encounter, Berserkers that make sense, and some survivors with some pretty good ghost stories about their dead children returning to knock on their doors at night … that’s some good detail there. It does take some decent amount of text to provide that detail but it doesn’t feel verbose, or maybe it’s just on the edge of feeling verbose. I like a short encounter description with enough detail to get my own imagination going but not so much I have to wade through it to pick out the important details. This does a pretty decent job of hitting that while trending just a little to the verbose side of the house. There’s another good little bit that’s changed my thinking also. It’s a devil leading an undead patrol, but the devil is different. He’s using his illusion powers to appear to be a 7′ tall naked giant with a big carved pumpkin where his head should be. That’s quite an interesting take on a bearded devil, and why not? A world where devils ALWAYS use their illusion powers to appear to be something else, and someone out of human nightmares, is a much better take on a devil than Just Another Monster Manual Entry.

The players eventually reach the valley/ravine where the burial crypts are carved in to the walls. This is also where interesting things stop happening in the adventure. The valley is a bit like the one in B2: Keep on the Borderlands. The walls are lined with caves but unlike B2 the caves are really just a single room. Imagine a small 15′-20′ corridor and then a small 20′ round crypt/room. Then repeat fifteen or so more times. A couple of the crypts are a bit larger but not by much. The end-game crypt with the Big Bad has maybe twenty rooms over five levels. The problem is the large number of undead. The adventure seems to transition from a vaguely Finnish horror story feel to Just Another Hack, but this one with undead. A LOT of undead. One room has thirteen shadows in it and that’s not an unusual encounter. Good luck with those STR stats. The large number is probably mitigated by the Turn Undead power, but it’s still a lot. The real issue is that the monsters tend to be presented in a rather bland way for the most part. “Another pair of ghasts can be discovered here” or “within this mound await another 13 shadows”. While the crypts themselves have some token descriptions (insert ludicrous deeds of the fallen jarls as memorial runes) the undead themselves tend to not have any. They get turned in to the very generic Just Another Monster that the introduction warned against. I appreciate the advice but the sheer quantity of the undead means I’m gonna need a little more help with the various encounters. Help that is not present. There are a couple of exceptions, like the room with a couple of fat ghasts dressed like kings on a burial bier. It’s a longish encounter text that could have been much much shorter but it does provide that spark os inspiration I’m looking for to help me run an encounter. The number of non-combat encounters is an issue also. I like things for the players to play with in the dungeon as well as other non-combat things to do and those are generally missing.

There’s a decent job done on the treasure and monsters in the module. While most of the monsters are just from the book the advice in the beginning does make en effort to keep them fresh. The Gorecrows, Heartless Ones, and Black Watch are all nice little additions to the monster mash. The mundane treasure is pretty decent with at least a token description of each, such as “silver necklace set with jet” or “platinum pendant set with amethysts”. The magic items are generally book items with a few standouts. There are some ‘spears of fire’ or ;+2 dagger, +3 vs shape-changers’ which at least makes an effort at making the items a little more wondrous and magical. There’s just not enough of it though; most of the items come straight out of the book in “sword +1” variety of descriptions. That robs the adventure of the cred it’s built up with its horror and norse themes. There needs to be more items like the Berserker Cloak (fur cloak/skin that lets you take the form of a brown bear, and might curse you as a werebear eventually …) or the +1 shield with the name and standard of one of the former jarls. Better yet is the chunk of amber with a wasp stuck in it that can be summoned! That’s the kind of weird stuff and/or twist on a book item that I can really get behind and support. It makes the game seem to be something other than a book game. It lends an air of magic and winder to a game.

by John Turcotte
Distributed freely by Dragonsfoot
AD&D

This is an alternate dungeon to swap in to Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits. The DM replaces the spider ship in that module with the dungeon found in this module… The Demonweb Pits! It’s a pretty good emulation of the style at the time … iand it’s mostly a hack-fest, just like Q1 was.

The designer was unhappy with the spider-ship finale in Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits and set about creating a dungeon that he thought was much better fit to the tone presented in D3: Vault of Drow. Once the final set of bronze doors is navigated in the web levels then the party ends up here instead of at the spider-ship. Several of the rooms have the same themes and occupants that the spider-ship does although the environment is completely different. The influence of the ICE/MERP Cirith Ungol supplement shows through as well and the Demonweb Pits turns out to be a mashup of the encounters in Q1 with a map/setting inspired by and similar to the Cirith Ungol tunnels. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked that supplement over but the nostalgic memories I have of it are certainly well represented. It certainly feels a lot more like the lair of the Demon Queen of Spiders.

The Pits are some caves that appear to have been eaten out of the natural rock of their abysmal layer. They spiral and curve and vary in width and open on to natural caverns. And they are FULL of webs. Some are completely filled with them and others just have them in abundance. There are spiders EVERYWHERE of all sizes … but those, as well as the dead husks of creatures are just windows dressing creep out the players. There’s about a quarter-column or so of flavor text that describes the general vibe of the place and it does a pretty terrific job of setting the scene. There was just enough information to get my own imagination going in to overtime. I also appreciated the small section on ‘burning the webs’, as will anyone else who has read the actual play report of the same dungeon in the DMG. The map has a pretty decent variety of changes in elevation and the like even though it is essentially just one level with about 37 rooms. The wandering monsters are spiders, spiders, and spiders, with spider-like things thrown in and a couple of demons, trolls and ogres for good measure.

The yochlol greeter, matron, and handmaidens show up again, although in different settings since these are not the polished interiors of the spider-ship. Instead we get the scene described earlier: web filled rooms with spiders and dried-out husks everywhere. This then is both the charm and problem with the dungeon: it’s cribbing a lot from Q1. I grinned when I saw the matron and handmaiden encounters, but Q1’s encounters were generally uninspired, according to my vague recollections of it. Room after room of guards and creatures for the party t hack down. It reminded me, as does this adventure, of the Norkers in WG4: a pitched battle develops and everyone shows up to join in the fun. Lolth and the demons are smart and they are going to organize and hunt the party down, gating in as much help as is needed, until the party dies. The party in turn is going to have a terrible amount of hacking to do.They might be able to do it in something other than a pitched battle if they are good, but that just means the monsters die alone in their rooms instead of together with their buds in the next room. The rooms here are just not that interesting. Lolths throne room is described well enough since it will likely be the scene of a large battle, and there a nice little evil temple for the creature LOLTH prays to. I found that to be a pretty nice little encounter. Otherwise though the party is just facing trolls, ogres, spiders, demons, and more spiders in rooms have nothing interesting going on in them. One or two have some nice gruesome descriptions but that doesn’t excuse the fact that they are just a different setting to hack something in. There’s more than one “demon pretending to be a beautiful girl/boy” encounter. You know what I’d do in this situation? Kill em and let Pelor sort’em out. It’s the frigging Demonweb pits … I figure I get a pass from the big sun guy for kill the demon queen of spiders and patron of the Drow.

The mundane treasure has nice detail (copied from Q1? I wish I wasn’t on a plane right now.) to it but it’s still of the pretty standard gems/jewelry variety. The magic items are almost all book items, although some of the more unusual items appear, like an iron flask. Arachrist also makes an appearance, which I seem to recall originally being in Cirith Ungol.

This is an interesting adventure and a good replacement for those turned off by the spider-ship in Q1. It does a much better job of capturing the feel of the Demon Queen of Spiders even if it does suffer from ALSO being a hack-fest (GDQ a hack-fest?!?!?!! *gasp* Say it isn’t so!) I’m happy to say it avoids most of the gimps that high-level modules usual come up with. The restrictions from the planes are still there but otherwise just some stronger spider-venom shows up, and at pretty reasonable -2,-3 save vs. poison levels. It’s a cute mash-up of Q1 and Cirith Ungol and worth looking at if you’re familiar with both. I wouldn’t have a problem replacing the spider-ship with this … but G1 and D3 are really the only decent modules in that series anyway.

by Lorne Marshall
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D 2E
Levels 1-3
This is a 2E module. IE: two small encounters somehow turned in to 44 pages with “mood setting” read-aloud text, almost no treasure, and irrelevant backstories galore.
A) The Dragonsfoot guys did a great job on making this look like a professional product. B) This product describes a village and two small adventures and somehow comes in at 44 pages. How does it do this? By being a near perfect example of the style I strongly associate with 2E. Railroad hero nonsense before the unnecessary bits were boiled off to in subsequent editions. Fair Warning: I LOATHE this style.
It takes nine pages to get to the first relevant information, the village of Goblin’s Tooth. Cover page, title page, copyright page, table of contents, forward, prologue, and then two pages of DM background. The six dense paragraphs of Forward reads like standard boilerplate: tune it to your campaign, beginning players and DM’s, read-aloud text, how the encounters are marked on the map. Ug. The prologue, though, tops this. It takes three long paragraphs to frame a fourth paragraph of read-aloud text. The text in question? Flowery bullshit that describes an eclipse. This is supposed to be read aloud to the players before they reach the town. “[blah blah blah]The ribbons of light shed by the full moon caress the landscape with their inconstant arms, shrouding hill and tree and road first in deep blue, then silver, then velvet [blah blah blah].” Sorry, I couldn’t finish the quote; I threw up a little in my mouth. Fucking second edition bullshit. It has absolutely no purpose in the adventure. Yeah, the eclipse is referenced later but that’s just some pretext. That prologue, and the two-plus page DM’s background, which is full of the history of the area is too long and not necessary, leads me to believe that a certain someone is a frustrated author. There’s no place for this kind of stuff in an adventure. It gets in the way of someone actually trying to run the adventure. An adventure needs a few words of inspiration and then it should take off. It should provide just enough information to let a DM fill in the rest themselves. I need something that inspires me, not something that tramples on me. I fucking hate 2E.
The village has twenty-two places described in it and houses about 250 people. Yeah, the ratio of non-farmers to craftsmen is off but I don’t really care about that; I’m looking for fun and interesting, not realistic, in my home base villages. The various places get a decent amount of description. Generally there is five of six sentences that describes the business, appearance, and temperament of the people who live and/or work there. This is a little strange in some places, such as the three paragraphs it takes to describe the dairy. The village feels lifeless, especially given all of the background data and all of the descriptions. I think this is because the villagers don’t really interact much with each other. While some personality is given for many of them they don’t really have much going on in the village; they don’t interact with each other or hate each other or are in love with each other, or have rivalries, or anything like that. Ok, there are a couple of engagements listed but that doesn’t really go anywhere other than simply noting it. What brings a community to life is the relationships between the people and there’s just none of that here. Oh, hey, guess what else … the village has a dedicated guard of at least 20 and a militia of quite a bit more. Of course with all of those people they just can’t spare a single man to go handle the two problems/adventures … the Heroes get to do that. Yeah, you heard me right: Heroes. Not mercenaries. Not murder hobos. Heroes. You know what that means, right? I’ll tell you what: no fucking loot and bullshit story awards. FUCK YOU SECOND EDITION!
Adventure The First: The Bear.
Another two pages of background. Goblins are back and they’ve killed a farmer. The guard and militia mobilizes but can’t spare a man to go out to the farm where the attack occurred. Queue the chumps^H^H^H^H^H^Heroes. The farmhouse and dead farmer are not in the style the goblins usually leave people. If someone in the party makes a wisdom check then the adventure can continue otherwise you don’t find the trail and there is no other option for continuing. Oops. That’s not cool. No fucking skill checks or attribute checks if the players NEED the information. Ok, the players make the check and they find the goblins and they talk to them. If they don’t then they start the next iteration of The Goblin Wars. Oops. It’s pretty obvious that the goblins are friendly, but still, that’s bullshit. They got kicked out of their cave by a bear and for some reason are incapable of finding food on their own. Why does living in the cave mean they are well fed? Stop asking questions. That’s the problem with words: you stick too many in and I start poking holes in what I’m reading. You leave it fast and loose with a little inspiration then I can fill in the blanks and I don’t/can’t poke holes in the plausibility shroud. There are some wandering monsters in the forest but they mostly suck, even though they are long entires. They generally boil down to: the monster attacks. Oh, hey, there are, like, five places along the trail in the forest to discover. One of them has goblin bodies. If you bury the bodies you get XP as a story award. Isn’t that nice? I guess those of us who would take a dump on them don’t fit the designers vision of “Heroes” and don’t get anything. Otherwise, there’s an ettercap in forest, a couple of traps, and a cave with a 5HD bear in it for the players to kill. Oh, and the treasure! Mustn’t forget the 51gp! You want some XP? Then do what the designer wants you to do.
Adventure The Second: Wrath of the Hooded One.
Another three pages of extraneous background, this time detailing the meal choices and excretory habits of the villain, or something like that. The vast majority of irrelevant and anything that’s tangentially relevant is expounded on in great detail. Seriously, there’s an OCD amount of background here to tell us that a wizard has taken over a goblin tribe via a disguise. It’s like a fucking Russian novel, and not the good ones full of sex where chicks throw themselves in front of trains. Oh no, this is like one of those ones where you learn EVERYTHING about some tertiary character who the protagonist passes on the street on his speeding horse. Anyway, the goblins from the first adventure tell the town that a new giant goblin has shown up and taken over the tribe to the north and is planning on attacking the town and blah blah blah irrelevant motivation blah blah blah floating wagons blah blah blah wizard twice removed creates novel blah blah blah eclipse show of power. The Reeve is SUPER busy and just can’t be bothered to spare a fucking man to go find out about the horde so would the murder-hobos please go? Oh, you won’t put your life in danger out of the goodness of your heart? You want a reward? Ok, how about 100gp for going out to get yourselves killed? Not enough? Then he asks the characters to leave the town and there’s no adventure. Why not just have him shout “I’M A LAZY FUCK AND YOU’LL DO WHAT I TELL YOU TO OR FUCK YOU!!!” I believe I may have suspended my disbelief somewhere along the line. Anyway … GO THE WAY THE DESIGNER WANTS YOU TO OR DIE UNDER A HAIL OF A HUNDRED GOBLIN ARROWS A COMBAT ROUND FIRED FROM BEHIND SUPER COVER!!!!! Right, so the players get to go through the swamps because that’s what the designer wants them to do. How do we know this? Because he spends two pages describing the instal-kill death-trap goblin ambush that happens if they DON’T go through the swamps. Just run the four pre-prorgammed encounters and shut up. Blah blah blah, swamp, blah blah blah lost patrol blah blah blah. The encounters all take a page because of the crappy-ass flowery text and needless detail. Once in the goblin village the players find no goblins; they are all out at the death-trap ambush five hours away. The new leader is hole up in an old mine with three levels and twelve rooms. The party of ten kills four goblin guards, four more guards, and then an ogre and the fake goblin/wizard. That all happens in the first four rooms. They then get to pick up their meager loot (weeee! 164gp and some gems!) What if they explore the rest of the mine though!!! Giant rats! And then some piercers! Oh, and a goblin scout from the other tribe that can lead the party back to town faster. Don’t forget 400xp each for completing the mission! Yeah you! You are winner! Fuck you 2e! Fuck you for condoning this kind of bullshit in your modules TSR! I know it was fucking you! I remember the 2e crap you put out! FUCK! YOU!
Hey, I’m pretty sure there’s a second module in this series …

by Lucias Meyer
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
BECMI
Levels 1-3

… Even today, in the darkest times for the once great Empire, legends persist about the wealth of Dragonmount. Anyone who spends an evening in any tavern throughout the Province of Karathfen is sure to hear at least one exaggerated tale of the place. It calls to adventurers like the winter calls birds south.

This is a basic first level adventure in a ruined keep. Some treasure details, a new monster, and some named monsters elevate this adventure a bit but it’s still a rather generic first level adventure.

The adventure begins with about a page long description of a hill, as well as the fortress and keep located on the hill. It’s a longish description but would be a great introduction for a megadungeon. It has just enough mystery in it to pique someones interest and make the “like the winter calls birds south” line plausible. This isn’t a megadungeon though, it’s just a couple of levels of a ruined fort that sits on top of the hill. There’s no reason offered for the players to explore. Hurray! I HATE it when the characters are sent on missions. Actually, I find it generally off-putting and am much happier when the PLAYERS are engaged rather than the characters. PHAT L00T! is a great way to engage the players.

The fort has two levels with about thirteen rooms/encounters on the first floor and another six or so on the second. The maps are pretty symmetrical and I REALLY don’t like that. I think it removes a lot of the ‘exploring the unknown’ element in a game if you know what to expect. The designer notes that he dislikes symmetrical maps also, but justifies it because the adventure is for new players and they should get an easier dungeon. Plus, he says it makes sense for keeps to be designed that way. Maybe … but I’m not looking for realism in a game. I want to have fun and symmetrical doesn’t hit that. Besides, if you’re going to put in a symmetrical map then use that to your advantage: put in a secret door or something that rewards players who pay attention to the map. “Hmmm, there should be another room here …” The wandering monster table comes from the creatures in the for but is uninspired: rats, cockroaches, skeletons and Evil Monkeys.”

The encounters are not that bad but I don’t seem to be able to get excited about them. Maybe that’s a better description of the entire adventure: decent, but I’m not excited about running it. The rooms all seem to have a little something going on in them. I don’t mean just a monster, or a trap, but something more interesting. Graffiti on the walls, or a locked room whose door opens _just_ a little … enough to tantalize the players and frustrate them in their efforts to get in. Actually, that rooms a decent example. It’s a room whose door is held shut from the inside by an Immovable Rod. It’s a bit loose, so the door opens just a couple of inches .That is a GREAT room! Unfortunately it takes the designer two longish paragraphs to describe the room. That’s a total buzzkill. There are other great rooms also. One clearly has something locked inside of it. Another has a spellbook trapped in some green slime. The place is littered with dead adventurer bodies. All in all, most rooms have something quite interesting going on which gives the place a sense of life … which is then trampled by the excessive text.

The new monster, a monkey with a kind of scorpion tale, is nice. It drains DEX until you’re paralyzed. There’s also a decent good done on some of the mundane treasure. Fine wine, silk shirts, rings still on fingers and so on. In contrast. most of the magical treasure are just book items and not presented that interesting. The rare exception is a potion of poison which gets a nice little description. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for in monsters and treasure: something fantastic. Something with a little something going on so I can expand it further. “sword +1” is boring, but add a little flavor text and give it some unusual power and now I’ve got something my feeble imagination can run with. A couple of the creatures also have names. In my mind this implies that they can/will interact with the party in some way other than combat. I wish something a little more explicit had been done with them; as it stands they seem to just be there to be hacked down. The ghoul and bugbear could have offered up some interesting interactions. I’d note, also, that the climactic battle with the stinger monkeys fails to mention how many monkeys there are. Oops.

It’s a decent, if a bit generic little adventure module. It suffers from too much descriptive text but it’s not at the level of 3.x modules. It’s got some decent little rooms. A little bit of work on the magic treasure, names monsters, map, and some editing could turn this in a great module. It’s a cut above other freebies, but I’m not sure how much of a compliment that is.

by Mark O’Reilly
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
for AD&D
Levels 7-9

Being dropped into the middle of a strange and eerie island, your adventurers have to fight for their lives to escape the evil that inhabits this weird island.

This is yet another adventure in the “Night of the Living Dead/Zombie Assault” genre. You can check out my review of Dusk of the Dead for a similar adventure. This one is set in Ravenloft and covers most of the required horror bases. It’s not terrible but nor does it particularly stand out. There’s a set of additional higher quality maps available at Dragonsfoot for those who are interested in that sort of thing; I’d use them if I ran it.

This is a timeline based adventure. The players are transported to the island just just before dawn through some DM fiat mechanic. ‘The mists’ are suggested but I believe something like a reprobate sorcerers spell would be appropriate also, as would a curse or geas. Anyway, the players arrive on a beach that is the scene of bloody carnage. A large number of zombies with meathooks come shambling out of the ocean and engage the players, only to retreat back in to the ocean a few rounds later as the sun rises. This starts the countdown; it should be pretty obvious to even the most clueless players that the zombies are going to be back at nightfall.

Investigating the very small island reveals two key features: there’s a small boat with a gash in its side that could be repaired given enough time, and there’s a house further up in the island/hill. The house has boarded up windows, some smashed through. All of the doors are off their frames. The inside is full of spilled blood and scratch marks and appears to be the scene of many a last stand. Tick tock, tick tock, look at your watch now ….

The timeline covers the period from 6am to midnight and has two types of events on it. First there are the four zombie horde attacks. These happen from dusk through midnight and simply indicate which group of zombies attack and what their tactics are this time. The second set of events are all flavor-text. Screams from elsewhere in the house, blood oozing from walls, frost in the basement, and a mysterious bonfire lighting. An examination of the boat reveals it won’t be able to be seaworthy until 9pm or so, well after sunset. The players are clearly meant to make a stand in the house. Searching the house reveals some journals describing some history or the situation and a parts of a broken artifact and the spells required to make it work. There are also a couple of things to help fortify the house: planks and acid chiefly. That then is the adventure. Players are stuck, they search fortify the house, the zombies attack, the big bad appears/attacks at midnight with the last horde and then the players dismiss him with the artifact.

The sea zombies are pretty good. There’s a decent horrific description of them and their meat-hooks have a nice effect where they ‘hook’ a character and drag them off. Similarly the Big Bad has decent horrific description. There is almost no treasure at all though. A +1 dagger, a basic spellbook and a couple of coins. I know the module is going for a horror feel but this is AD&D; the players need treasure to get XP.

I’m not really sure about this one. The zombie assaults have 30, 45, 45, and 90 zombies, respectively. That’s quite a few. The players could potentially have some 9th level spellcasters which could make the boat repair much much faster. I know it’s supposed to be a slow build up but I’m not sure there’s enough to keep the players interested during the adventure. In addition, the breaking down of the boarded up windows and doors, as well as zombies climbing the walls, are a major part of the adventure; some guidelines on running that or some new mechanics would have been a good inclusion.

If I was forced to run a Night of the Living Dead adventure on a moments notice I would pick this one, but I’m not sure that’s high praise.

by Lawrence Mead & Edward Winter
Distributed freely on Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Level 10 characters?

A very basic kind of adventure, this has a couple of nice ideas however for the most part it seems like a mash-up of several disconnected elements. Things thrown together with tenuous ties and without much interesting content. There are a couple of interesting bits to steal though.

The characters are asked to go discover the fate of two local explorers who were sent off to find some of the healing relics at a temple that is now disused. The temple once used bee honey to make magic healing items but fell in to disuse and is now the base for an evil illusionist and his minions. I actually kind of like the set up on this one. The background, while a page long, isn’t too overwrought and the temple/bee honey/disuse thing makes enough sense to be a good pretext without drowning in detail. It does rely on the party being do-gooders AND the party is a little high in levels to be helping out lowly villagers, but I’m going to ignore that in favor of being a hypocrite. Err … I mean, “there’s no accounting for taste.” The temple is two weeks away through the wilderness (which I like, nice and remote without being absurd) however there’s no notes about the wilderness journey. The maps are nothing special. Both the upper floor of the temple and the catacombs beneath are a kind of branching hallway design: imagine a long hallway with side corridors and doors found along it for the catacombs while the upper floor is just a series of interconnected rooms. There’s a token wandering monster table made up of about two unique creatures found in the dungeon.

Most of the encounters are nothing too special. Empty rooms and rooms with some kind of generic book monster. Minotaur, Ogres, Mummy, Lamia, Medusa. A couple of the encounters do stand out. There’s a charmed treant who can cause sticks to snakes. The imagery of him causing the trees to drop dead branches and then snaking them is a good one. There’s also a poor apprentice who was the victim of a wand of wonder. He’s now 2 feet tall and looks like a bush and still wields the wand. Those are pretty good encounters; nice and imaginative and not just a monster from a book. There’s also a nice encounter with a room full of rats bursting through a door. Again, nice and evocative and gives me enough information to run with it. The others are … not so interesting. A medusa and her charmed minion. (I guess her lover never looks at her?) Lizard-men in ambush and Lamia just hanging out. The eighteen encounters/rooms just don’t have enough interesting going on to make this an adventure worth pursuing. And the lizard man thing just doesn’t make sense at all: they block the illusionist in the dungeon from his lover upstairs … and neither of them give a shit?

There is a flying rust monster bird that’s provided which is quite nasty. There is also a decent amount of variety in both the mundane and magical treasure. That’s not really enough though. Many of the monsters in the adventure have illusion powers and I’m sure that’s meant to kind of beef the place up, but that’s just not enough. There’s no real exploration element and most of the rooms have just-another-monster syndrome or are meaningless. It feels a little like the players are running the gauntlet, however in reality they just need to follow one long corridor to the end, open the door and kill the Big Bad. A Big Bad which has Lareth syndrome: there’s no build up to him at all. The players just run in to him and hack him down, not knowing that he’s the guy behind everything. There needs to be some build up to him and that’s just not present.

by Craig Pitt
Distributed free on Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 8-12

Can your group of trusty adventurers save a small village from a monstrous evil? For 6-10 characters of level 8-12.

Think hard: Have you ever actually _seen_ a Monty Haul adventure? Well, you have now. This thing has … issues.

The adventure starts with statement from the designer to the effect that limited-use magic items should be the norm in a campaign. Potions, scrolls, charges in a wand, etc. Things that get used up. I was happy to see that statement, it matches my own views. Unfortunately he then follows this statement with an adventure that contains a complete set of ioun stones, helm of telepathy, ring of mind shielding, gauntlets of ogre power, boots of striding/springing, crossbow of speed, collar of stiffness, rod of absorption, bag of holding, sword of dancing, amulet of 30% magic resistance, ring of x-ray vision, robe of the archmagi and a +1 dagger. And that doesn’t count the more standard limited use magic items like arrows of demon slaying, rods of cancellation, a ring of four wishes, a complete set of books (vile darkness, exalted deeds, understanding, quickness/action, clear thought, bodily health, etc) amulet of life protection, and javelins of lightning. And then there’s all of the portions and scrolls on top of that. Because, you know, most magic items should be consumable. Like the blaster rifles in Barrier Peaks.

The set up is painful. Monsters are attacking a village and the king has sent you to take care of it, his army being otherwise engaged on the border. He gives you 100gp each. Whatever happened to rumors of PHAT L00T and hot elf chicks? Anyway, the party will be exploring the complex of a dead archmage who was killed by a summoned demodand. The dungeon is full of the archmages minions. The demodand hasn’t killed them yet because he’s afraid of triggering some kind of containment trap that might be present.

The dungeon layout is simple, just a set of branching hallways that dead-end in rooms. There are 22 rooms/encounters (yeah, all those items are in just 22 rooms. And there’s more, I just got bored typing.) There’s only one wandering monster, a Penanggalan, that attacks at night if the players camp outside.

Every room has a monster and just about every room is stuffed full of treasure. Black puddings, white puddings, cyclopskin, achaierai, arcanadaemon, shadow mastiffs, thessalhydra, scarecrows, the penanggalan, an enveloper, protein polymorph, vision, stone golems, the demodand, ghost … all living together in perfect harmony, ignoring each other and just hanging out in their rooms. The hydra and shadow mastiffs are such good buds that they left the hydra wander through their room so he can get out and eat. Look, I don’t need realism. In fact, I HATE realism. I do however need more than a series of simple rooms on a map and list of random monsters tied together with “they all worked for the archmage.” There’s more to this dungeon than my vitriol would imply, however that’s not what it feels like and certainly lacks the … imagination? that I’m looking for in a product.

There’s a hallway cloaked in continual darkness with a brown pudding on the ceiling. The aranadaemon is trapped in the last 20′ of a corridor. At the end of a corridor is large ruby on a pedestal, which triggers a poison gas trap (a classic trop worth stealing.) Let’s see, there’s a green slime trap, a deva trapped in stasis, a nice obvious pit trap, a couple of fake traps and a “burning the spider webs triggers a Power Word Kill” trap. You now have experienced the module. There’s just not much exciting or interesting in this place. Text is wasted on history and explanations instead of evocative imagery or interesting things. The monsters are book monsters thrown together seemingly randomly. The magic items are too many, too powerful, and are all generic and boring book items, with a single exception (a Rod of the Rust Monster.) The map is simple, the rooms are boring, and text uninspired.