tenfootpole.org

By Petras Vaznelis
Archon Games
Generic/Universal

Throughout the realm, there are those that whisper legends regarding the end of days – rumors of a great entity, cast beyond the veil of reality, scratching at the seams with rapacious vigor. Borne on the tide of arcane fires, the breach of their return would yield an apocalyptic cataclysm. As the onset of this pressure fractures the realm, dark intention finds physical manifestation amidst the daily lives of those who inhabit the established territories. Ancient relics, imbued leylines, and twisted fiends all carry traces of this ruinous distortion. Though the omens chime of certain doom, there are those that seek these nodes for their own gain. Cults of all sizes rise and rally around the confluence of arcana found in these treasures, locations, and abominations. Heralds to the onset of Armageddon, the conclaves muster and channel arcane power from beyond the veil. All the while, the reach of the fabled ‘Dark One’ lengthens across the realm.

This forty page adventure is full of overwrought text and a simplistic plot that doesn’t take advantage of the opportunities it does have. I wonder who this was written for?

We’ve got a double helping of tropes today. First, The Evil One is coming back. Second, you’re shipwrecked on an island with no gear. You make your way to the lighthouse, not lit, and force your way inside. The keeper tells you to go to the storehouse for oil and wicks to relight the fire to summon a rescue ship. You fight some barnacles on the way, go to the storehouse, find the keepers helper and some zombifiedish dudes and an avatar of The Evil One. You go back, light the fire, and a ship full of the Evil Ones cultists show up and capture you. Game over. I’m not simplifying at all, that’s the adventure, all forty pages of it. 

Needless to say, the text is wordy. There are DM notes, lengthy, all over the place, as a matter of routine. Such as as “the party will have to force their way inside the lighthouse” or “the party will need to convince the lighthouse keeper that … “ and then some lengthy exposition. Stating the obvious. More than this though is the overwrought text that is presented. I THINK it’s supposed to be read-aloud. “Your balance is rendered naught by the tumult of the waters. As you make an effort to scramble from the boat, you fall into the frigid waters” I can’t imagine ever reading that outloud to the party. But, then again, I also can’t imagine this being notes for the DM to run the scene? “ a small tower stands defiant amidst the wind.” or a window opens and you hear “shouts from the weathered watcher.” 

The text is full of this. Overwrought and purple. Lengthy descriptions without much formatting. Lengthy DM advice sections that state the obvious. And this is to the detriment of actual information. At one point you see some crabs on the beach and can examine them, only to find that they are unusual. Or, as the text says “notice that something is distinctly unnatural about these particular creatures.” But that’s all you get. What is unnatural about them? I’ve no idea. We’re offered no information. It’s just a throwaway statement, behind a throwaway skill check. We don’t want, when designing an adventure, to TELL people things. We want to SHOW them things. We want to provide an explanation that makes the players think “wow, those crabs are weird and unnatural!” But that’s generally not present here.

The adventure presents a straightforward plot that is unsatisfying. We have a lighthouse, on a lonely rock island. Away from everyone, and help. There should be a feeling of claustrophobia here. The party should feel uneasy. Those thrall zombies should be a threat to moving about the island. The avatar should hunt the party. Catch glimpses of it. Fortify themselves in the lighthouse. Be under siege. Work up the tension to a release that is earned  by the tension of the gameplay at the table. A fantastic opportunity to try and light the beacon and keep it lit all while under siege. But there’s not much here at all that would facilitate that. Instead it’s a straightforward “have this encounter and then have this encounter” key, and not many of them at that. 

And then, of course, the cultists show up and capture you, ending the game. Yeah fun!

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and shows you none of the actual adventure to make a purchasing decision. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/483575/dread-shores-black-horizons?1892600

By Todd Leback
Third Kingdom Games
OSE
Level ... 5?

Dry Gulch is built upon the bones of a much older city, Lisau, that fell into ruin over seven hundred years prior to the current day. Almost no traces of the city remain aboveground, but belowground are plenty of re? minders of the old city’s existence. Much of this is unknown to the citizens for Dry Gulch; the Guild of Silence, un? der its current master Uco Fridtack, dis? courages exploration of this under? ground network of ancient tunnels, sewers, and cellars. This is partially be? cause the ruins still contain dangers — creatures and spells of antiquity that have moldered these many years — but also because it is useful for the Guild of Silence to have a network of hidden tunnels that connects multiple buildings surreptitiously.

This 46 page adventure details six mini-dungeons undr a major city, all connected together loosly. I really like the concept, but the execution tends to the dry and overly wirteen/padded side of the adventure spectrum. The undercities of the Petal Throne are still waiting to be discovered.

This is issue 35 of Popilated Hexes. Last issue it looks like they descrived a city in a hex. This issue has a description of the undercities dungeon, rather than hexes. I love undercity dungeons! So off we go! Visions of tube transfer stations and isometric DL1 maps dance in my head! We’ve got six little standalone regions under the city, connected, in one way or another, via some long abstracted tunnels. (Which, for the record, I’m ok with even though I usually complain about abstraction. In this case it serves a purpose and can even add some mystery, as, for example, wthe wizards bring a prisoner down a LONG tunnel to the Guild of Silence area for “supplemental questioning.”) 

Each little section has it’s own, say, primary entrance, and is connected to some other areas as well. In fact, this probabally goes on too long, the entranes that is. We get an overview of areas, a listing of all f the underground entrances, a specific listing of each area in a general way, the conditions of each area … I think there might be another section as well for each area, before we get to the keys. Seriously, you go through, like five different “overviews” for each of the six major dungeon areas. At some point you’ve got to wash your hands of it and put the information in the section for that specific area. I don’t know, the conditions for that area, at a minimum? It ends up that each area is so fragmented, at that so much information for each area is scattered throughout the pages, that it’s hard to put it all together. Lot’s of flipping with this one.

The overall vibe of this thing is … normalcy? Mundanity? I love a touch of the normal,of the real world, in an adventure. I think it adds spice to see real life show up. In one of the rooms you find a journal telling how the thieves guild is entwined with the ruling council, and “as well as a general picture of how profitable the Cantering Stallion [ed: the front taven] is (very) and the frustrations of running a business in the hospitality industry (extreme).” Now see, that’s the kind of sly shit that I can run with and GO. A kind of throw-off sentence that contains mountains of gameable information in it for any DM. When I say I’m looking for shit to riff off of that’s what I mean. 

But, also, those moments are, I think, few and far between in this thing. What’s far, far more common are long sections of text, padded out, that just have mundane details in it. We get a section telling of the apprentices in the thieves guild, working in the front tavern, which include “Heson Du (F1, 4 hp). A young lad, strong (STR 17) and cocky with the assurance of youth, Heson is desperate to escape Dry Gulch and see the wider world. When not working in the forges (Area 8 of Issue 34) he spends his time in the Cantering Stallion, listening to the tales of merchants and adventurers as they tell of their experiences.” That’s a nice background portrait, but not really informative. A few keywords would have done as much. The frail consumptive waif with a brilliant mind, for example. 

And these sorts of long sections of text, overly long for what they are trying to accomplish, are everywhere. And they are do this for the most mundane of purposes. “The stairs level out after descend? ing 15’, into a corridor that runs for an? other fifteen feet before opening up into a chamber measuring 15’ x 15’. There are three exits leading out of this cham? ber: open corridors leading out of the center of the south and eastern walls, and a stout oaken door set into the cen? ter of the western wall. The door leads to Fridtack’s personal office (1.3.2),” Well fuck, that told me nothing. And then we get a hudge section on the door trap and how to pick it. This, the hallway map description and door/lock porn, are the only things in this key and it takes, I don’t know, a column of text? And the next room openes with “Fridtack’s personal office is here, just at the bottom of the stairs, behind a well-secured locked and trapped door.” That’s, I think, the third time the adventure tells us where the dudes office is and which door its behind. Another section has a column to describe ton empty room with two doors in it. And describe is a strong word, I don’t think the room proper is very described at all, maybe a dust trail. But backstory, where the doors go, etymology, etc? All present.

I’d like to also mention two specific encounters, as examples of design. The first is a room, kind of sealed off and blockaded in one of the populated sections of the thives guild area. In it is a kind of abandoned library. There’s a collapsed bookshelf by a door, and a ghost comes out from under it and attacks you. This stands out to me because of the nature of a ghost vs a humanoid monster. If you look at the humand monsters, kobold, goblin, orc, gnoll, hobgob, giant, etc, then you notice that, essentially, there’s just a humanoid monster for each HD. It’s just “a 3hd monster.” And in this case the ghost is being used in much the same way. It’s just something to stab. tit comes out from under the bookcase and attacks. It’s nature, as a ghost, and all of the subtext and cultural heritage that brings, is completely absent. Now, certainly every encounter doesn’t have to illustrate a justaposition between the order and chaos of mankind, but, also, fuck man, it’s a ghost! You know, unfinished business and all that jazz! Sure, I guess it canbe a murder ghost. But its presented as just something to stab, a single enconter and then you move on with your life. B O R I N G!

The second one if with a mummy. In this case, once you kill the mummy you could find some earrings … if you unwrap the mummy. I love this sort of “hidden in plain sight” stuff. Looking under the bridge, at the bottom of the chasm, behind the waterfall, cutting open the purple worm stomach, or … unwrapping the mummy. The assumptions that people make about their environment. “This is a monste encounter and I don’t need to search the monster to find the treasure’ or, maybe “i only need to do a surface search.,” “Mummy” is now a monster, and is treated, by someplayers, much like a naked orc. But, it’s not. It’s body wrapped in bandages. With, potentially, things underneath it. That’s good.

But, really, these moments are. little far apart for my tastes. What we’re getting here, mostly, is some mudanity, for the most part. It feels disconnected from each other, mostly. It doesn’t feel like the undercity. It doesn’t feel lie it’s a part of something larger. It just feels kind of like the interior of the great pyramid of Giza. Dusty, boring, and empty. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, and shows you nothing of interest to make a decision on.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/484818/phm-35?1892600

By David Henley
David Henley Productions
OSE
Levels 1-3

For weeks, your expedition has trekked through the overgrown jungles of these islands in search of antiquities. At last, you reach the crumbling ruins known locally as “The Sunken Sisters” – named for the twin weathered statues guarding the entrance, draped in vines. What looks like a massive stone door once barred entry into the shadowed interior. But it has long since fallen, leaving an unbroken gloom within that puts your torches to shame. A darkness that raises more questions than it answers. What civilization erected such monolithic stonework here, only to become lost to the ravaging jungle? You’ve heard legends of an ancient apocalyptic event known as the Atuang (Sky Fire) that reshaped this region – could that cataclysm be the key to unraveling this archaeological mystery? More importantly, are you prepared for what primordial secrets or perils may lurk unchallenged in the lightless nadir of this forgotten temple complex? One thing is certain – those depths were never meant for the unprepared. Venture inside at your own risk and solve the enigmatic riddle of The Sunken Sisters…if you dare.

This 35 page single column adventure uses about fifteen pages to describe twelve rooms. The dungeon is empty. The titular Sunken Sisters do not appear. You will die in this adventure. Of boredom.

I don’t know what to say here. I guess I try to start with something good? This thing has a void entity in it. I’ve liked that as a concept ever since I saw The Void, as a supplement in a local game shop back in the 3.0 era, when everyone was releasing niche products. This concept of nothingness, more than a sphere of annihilation but more lovecraftian, either in its chaos or in its implied order, has a certain appeal. A violation of the laws of nature. 

So, we’ve got that marketing blurb, above. It talks about the Sunken SIsters. The name of the adventure is The Sunken Sisters. As far as I can tell, they don’t appear anywhere. No where. There are no twin statues flaking anything. The entrance has “A weathered statue of a jungle spirit guards the entrance” That’s not the sunken sisters. It is a rather abstracted and generic description of a statue. One that should have had a description. What the fuck is a jungle spirit? No specificity. Whatever, I guess. They are not inside, they are not outside. I have no fucking clue. The adventure intro is on the last page, weirdly, but it doesn’t say. And the entrance room, full of backstory about the temple, doesn’t say either. I have no idea.

Speaking of inside and outside, I have no idea if this thing is underground or above ground ruins. Lots of stairs down and so on. But, also, there’s this room “• This room’s ceiling is a cracked, partially collapsed glass dome.” So … we’ve got an above ground roof to it? There is, of course, no description of the temple ruin above ground or this room as a secondary entrance. It just is. This makes my heart heavy.

The writing is abstracted everywhere. “Ancient frescoes, marred by cracks and water stains, depict figures who seem familiar yet remain unknown – heroes and heroines of a bygone era.” No specificity to it at all. Specificity is the soul of the narrative. Tell us about the frescoes, not the conclusion drawn from the frescoes. Another room has the description “Linked to the previous room by an open doorway. This circular room lies empty, except for a trapdoor on the floor.” That surly conjures the imagery of a jungle temple, yes? Repeating things we know from the map, like the entrance and circular nature of the room. And yet providing nothing to actually tell us about the room at all. 

The encounters are almost all “roll on a table and see what you get.” And the treasure, what little is present, is the same thing. Roll on a short six entry table and hope you get something. I can’t STAND this. Pick a fucking encounter. A trap, whatever the fuck. And tailor the fucking room to it. Make even the SLIGHTEST amount of effort to provide value. But, no.

There are, I think, four different rooms in this adventure each with a circle of pillars in them. None of them have any special significance. You do get to roll on a random table in one of them. But no special effects or interactivity. In. Any. Of. The. Four. Rooms. It’s like putting a chasm room in a dungeon with a very well constructed bridge over it, with massive safety railings and a current inspection sticker, and well lit so you’re sure there are no monsters nearby to shoot at you. Why the fuck does this exist? Certainly not every room has to be a funhouse or set piece, but the dungeon should have SOMETHING in it, yes?

“While accommodating rituals, the circular Columned Chamber’s primary role was likely as an antechamber through which supplicants entered the grandeur of the main temple’s inner sanctum through the ornate gate passage.” Oh boy! History!

There is nothing here. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is broken. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/485297/the-sunken-sisters?1892600

By Eon Fontes-May
YouCanBreatheNow Games
OSR
Levels 3-4

For as long as we can remember, the landmark has been a facade of solid stone. False windows and doors carved into the rock. But Sly Diego found a way inside. He says it’s hollow, there’s a whole building in there. And now he’s telling anyone and everyone the way in. So… who will be the first to plunder the creations of the mad elementalist and discover his strange fate?

This eleven page adventure uses four pages to describe about thirty locations on a four level wizard home/tower. It avoids a most traditional wizard tower mistake but is padded out with bland writing. 

The old wizzo home is slowly being turned in to stone, from the outside in. Hence it looks like a stone facade. Dude found a way in through an underground river coming up through a well and has been selling the location. Thus we have an adventure in a small two-story home with a connected wizard tower. And when I said “avoids a mistake” I meant that part, the layout of the map. Instead of just a tower we’ve got the attached home as well. We’ve got some good secret doors in the place, some secret tunnels for the servants, teleport circle, extradimensional biomes. It’s doing a good job of trying to combat the traditional issues that a small tower has ni terms of map complexity. It’s still not gonna be the greatest exploration ever. It is, after all, a house. But it does well with what it has for the size to jazz the travel between locations up just a little bit. A mural of a classic garden, and if you push the door handle then you find the secret door in to the wardrobe in the next room. Nifty! 

There’s also a pretty decent magic item or two, like an ever-glowing coal. Which is exactly what it sounds like. What kind of shenanigans can you get up to with something like that? I can think of a lot! And I love magic items like that. Not just a mechanical bonus but something that you can use, creatively, as a player. There’s another adventuring party also and their descriptions are pretty decent as well. “Unarmored and keenly aware of it” or “a bit too brave” or “a real cutthroat.” That’s pretty much what I need in order to riff on it. I’m down for this. 

I mentioned the other adventuring party. A great deal of the play in this, I suspect, is that party interacting with the party. The environment here is a little static and without the other party there to add some hit and run tension then I suspect its going to be a rather unassuming adventure. There’s very little on the other party, but there are designers notes on them. I suspect that, instead of the designery notes that could have been replaced with a tip or two on their hit & run stuff, or a couple of ideas. This falls in line with a desire for the designer to provide the DM options and tools to make the game fun.

And then there’s the rest of the thing.

The map is hand drawn and a bit hard to grok. I don’t like “hard to grok.” One of the major conceits in tenfootpolelandia is that things shouldnt be hard to grok. The monster descriptions are kind of meh. There’s a whole page of them and they just don’t really have descriptions at all. At least not really about how they look, act, etc. It’s more backstory than relevant to play at the table. Make those monsters scary and give them great things to do! 

And, the descriptions are generally poor and padded out. We learn tha the house was built over a small cave with a river in it that they use for fresh water and to dump their sewage in to. That’s pretty obvious from the “Well” thing in the kitchen and the cave being the way in. We’re told that one of the rooms was once the loading room where they stored good, but is now empty. Where have I heard that one before? As, yes, the platonic example, the war trophy room that went on and on only to end with “and now its empty.” Or, for the winter biome, noting that water magic was always the dudes weakest elemental magic so he made it solid water, snow, in order to help him control it. Great. No gameplay effect. There’s a “dread windmill that inspires fear!” but, really, the next sentence then describes the windmill and shows us, instead of telling us, about what it is that causes that fear. “A skilled thief can bypass the door lock and trap, of course.” Yeah, that’s what they do. And a fighter can stab the monster, of course. It must be that every room here is padded out with this sort of thing. This makes the entries long and confusing. 

Not that there’s a whole lot going on here anyway. As I noted, that other party is going to have play a HUGE part of the adventure. There’s some stuff to interact with but also it feels more like one of those museum tour adventures. The “turning to stone” thing isn’t used very well beyond window dressing. A room where dude was growing a gibberring mouther now is all stone and looks like freaky flesh sculpture walls. That’s all. And, we’ve got a lot of stone guardians and the like to battle.

The passage elements here are pretty nice. And, thirtyish rooms in four pages is not bad. But it lacks the verve that good writing brings to the game, inspiring the DM and planting an image in their head. And the interactivity just feels … sullen?

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing, so good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/478704/occluded-keep-of-the-doomed-elementalist?1892600

By Glenn Robinson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 4-6

Once upon a time, this was Dwarf land, with all their stone houses and secret tunnels. But then, they vanished, like they were never here. And we came along, making our homes in this old, empty place. Some of their buildings were still standing, but they were like empty shells, missing all the cool stuff they used to have. But guess what? Folks say the dwarves are coming back. We’ve only heard stories about them, never actually seen one for real. But our grandparents, they tell us if a dwarf’s shadow touches you, you gotta spit on the ground to keep away bad luck.

This 46 page adventure has 32 linear rooms in an old dwarf base under a hill. It’s a weird one in that while it APPEARS to have some descriptions and interesting things, it actually does not. With a decent mythology and final encounter, it doesn’t really give you a decent journey, just a destination.

This adventure has one really interesting thing going on. The final room is a large underground lake in a cavern. In th e middle is an island, and there’s a flooded causeway just a few inches under the water that can get you there. On it is the big boss, trapped, because he’s surrounded by water. If the water level lowers then the dude can get free. Ought oh! The use of water brings back those cultural memories. An underwater causeway is great imagery as well. There’s a big  skull on the island, which is great. All pretty well done. Well, except maybe for the fact that you don’t know what you are doing if you stop the water.Youget a clue, in the form of some wall writing in a room with the flow of water in it, room two: “My flow holds back the darkness Hinder me not, lest you awaken the shadow in our hearts “ We get one hint and it’s a bit ambiguous, not knowing yet that the dude lives on an island underground, etc. Just, hey, don’t push the button. I’m not morally opposed to Fuck Around And Find Out. But, pushing you’re luck, and making intentional decisions about risk/reward just hit better. Knowing what you are doing can cause problem, but, man, I really want that Hand of Vecna … this is the tension that D&D thrives on. So, decent concept for that last room with the overall effect being dragged down by the decisions you make in room two. 

The rest of the adventure, I’m afraid, I can’t be so kind to.

No real backstory. We’re trying, it feels like, to tell it through the keys. Which is a great concept. But it comes off VERY disconnected. There’s a road, for example, running through the forest. It crosses a stream. Further in there’s a pool. The pool is a kind of keyed encounter. It tells us that there is a sign on the road where it crosses the stream that the body of water is Stonegrievers Creek. Well, fuck me man, that would have been nice to know back on the road, yeah? And it does this all over the place. There are these little bits of info that ae out of place of where they should be. 

There MIGHT be a wilderness adventure here also, to kick us off, as you travel to the hill. The hexes are one mile across and you have to travel, I don’t know, two hexes on a road? There are really only three hexes presented, completely, on the map. This is supported by two or three pages of tables for you to roll on. A 2 in 6 chance every turn. Yes, every turn. No less than eight different tables to walk … two miles? Fortunately the vast VAST majority of the stuff is not an actual encounter. It’s a bunny rabbit running away or some “escalate the tension” stuff, like the wind blowing hard. And, the cyclops, dragon and wyvern table. All three. No, not all three. You have to pick one, to lair in the dwarf hill. But all three are presented. I fucking hat eit when they do this. Just pick one and go for it man. Theme the fucking thing around it. Dragon dung, a pair of binoculars torn apart. Pick one and go, otherwise it comes off, as it does here, generic and perfunctory. 

Inside the dwarf home we get … not much in the way of interesting writing.The Well room is described as “clear and fresh.” This is outstanding for this adventure. Most rooms do not really get a description. More of a “contents of the room” instead. And, sometimes, “Reception: 30′ tall space of dressed stone and a mosaic floor with geometric patterns.” The scriptorium trades prose for bullet points telling us about leather books, and then dusty bookcases, and then large crates. The description is disjointed. It doesnt consider the room as a whole and, if we were to go with the formatting it is using, the bookcase and crates should probably appear first, as the objects most likely to be noticed first.

The formatting in this digest is using 2/3rd’s of the page for the text and one third, essentially a side column, for extra information. Not a bad idea. I’m not sure I’m supportive of it in the way it is used here, with things for rooms ‘not on this page’ appear. It’s trying to keep things relevant, but, there’s too much relevant in some places. WHich could mean rekeying to solve the problem (oh, but it’s mostly linear!) or putting the stats in the main text (Heresy! Or, let us not be too devoted to our conceits and instead keep the eye on the ball of usability) 

There’s a lot of magic treasure and it’s quite decent. Nogs Grasping Staff sometimes appears to crackle with electricity and has a hand on the end of it. You can grab things! And, also, shocking grasp! The thing is PACKED with potent and unique magic items, almost to a Monty Haul level. 

But, also “Each room is unlit with a name engraved above the door. Plain stone walls methodically scored by picks.” is not the height of evocative description. At places things are mentioned never to make an appearance again. Any depth hinted at here is lost. I’m not angry at this one, just disappointed., You can see that someone had some pretty decent ideas, with bandits, the lost king, etc. But the size, combined with the lack of follow through and consistency in following up on its ideas, and their implications, causes this one to miss the mark.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is twenty pages. More than enough to see the “intro”, wilderness, and first few rooms. Great preview!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/486391/shadow-of-the-deep-king?1892600

By Tuukka Tenhunen
Nuclear Saints
Fail Forward

Deep in a forsaken desert, weeks away from this life-giving river, lies a ruined city of yore. It was destroyed by our people in the ancient times, for the city was dedicated to a foul god of scorpions. Yet even after all these centuries, the scorpion cult persists. They hide in the deserts and plot doom to all civilization. Now they have struck our beautiful city and stolen my daughter. The cult will take her to their ruined city and sacrifice her to their false god under the next full moon!” “Go forth, bring back my daughter and I will pay you her weight in silver, this I vow in name of the Great Serpent
This 52 page story game adventure takes place in a ruined city with a small dungeon in it. It’s attempting to tell a story, with many encounters that would fit in well. What it does though is fail to recognize what it is, a story game, and model itself to that environment. Not understanding what the text is supposed to do is just a secondary sin in this one. Our story game friends deserve good adventures also. This isn’t one of them.

The kings daughter has been kidnapped and he send you in to the ruined city to save her, along with one of his servants (a pregen.) It seems the evil cult there wants to sacrifice her. But what we’ve really got is a ‘the dragon was the good guy’ thing going on. In reality, the chick is just a peasant and they ARE sacrificing her, but to keep the scorpion god locked away. The king, and his servant, want them NOT to, so the god will be summoned, being the REAL evil cultists. The trope here is not particularly well done, just a few throw away lines. I’m not morally opposed to it, or the intra-party conflict, in a story game, particularly a one shot for, say, a con. Games like the Mountain Witch and so on can thrive on this, contributing to the noir vibe, especially when pulled out in the last moments of the final encounter. Absolutely forbidden in a more traditional RPG, but we’re doing as the romans do and creating a story to talk about in a game like this one.

I really want to talk about three things here that I think are common to (every?) game type. The first is the arbitrary nature of dice rolls. Traditionally, rolling the dice was bad. It meant something bad could happen to your character. We try to convince the DM of the outcome and only then, if there’s risk, do we make a choice. Something like the wandering monster tables, arbitrary as all fuck, are a known risk that forces the party to confront a resource, time. The longer we fuck around the greater the likelyhood of finding out with that group of 1d4+1 owl bears. The worst/best example of this is the Wandering Damage table form an April Fools edition of Dragon. Just roll on the table and take an arbitrary amount of damage. There’s no player choice here. You simply accept the damage. You didn’t do anything, or take any risk, to potentially earn the damage. It removes the benefit of playing carefully and taking Push Your Luck decisions to earn rewards. And we see this show up in this adventure. In various encounters the party must roll on a table and something happens to them. THings like “take one wound” or some such. You are punished simply for playing the game. While I concede that there is some narrative benefit to, say, having a character with a gimpy ankle, the adventure removes the narrative element of that in the encounters. It just happens to you. Take a wound. Arbitrary should not happen in any game. It removes the agency of the players. There can be risk. Calculated risk. Burning spells to find out and improve odds. Careful planning. Zany plans. But simply saying “you take damage in an arbitrary way as a result of simply playing” does not really belong in a game. 

Secondly there’s a voice mismatch in the descriptive test used in the encounters. The adventure doesn’t really know who it is addressing. Is it directed at the players, ala read-aloud, or DM factual text, or DM inspirational text? The voice of the text provided is all over the place. This leads to hard cognitive switches. Our first encounter is with a nomad camp “Nearest point of interest to the entry point is a small desert nomad camp. Their typical tents, colorful and decorated by embroidery, flap in the wind. The camp seems abandoned, but the horrible stench surrounding the tents soon betrays the truth. It is the smell of carrion, there are many corpses around” Read aloud that over-reveals? Text for the DM in order to ad-lib the encounter? It’s a seeming mixture of the two. Another encounter ends with the text “How could such place exist middle of a terrible desert?” In appropriate for the DM and cumbersome if its meant to be read to the players. “Merciless sun scores the characters from the cloudless sky.” We’re getting purple here. II understand we’re going for that Howard vibe, but the text is leaning hard toward prose rather than understanding it’s a technical document meant to run a narrative game.

Finally, and most critically, is the nature of the encounters themselves. I talk sometimes about the encounters and format needing to match the goals of that part of the adventure. I usually talk about this in the context of a village or other social aspect of an adventure where both the type of information presented is different and the formatting/layout/etc are different in order to facilitate that sort of game play. Another example might be Mighty Deeds in DCC. If the room is four bare walls then there will be no swinging on chandeliers or dumping over cauldrons. If we’re working with a narrative adventure then I would expect the adventure to facilitate those narrative elements that the players must bring to the game themselves. And this don’t do that well. The core concepts are here. You can imagine the party sneaking through a dry riverbed, or trying to social their way past guards on a bridge. You can imagine a Howard story in which these things might be elements. But the execution of these elements is not very strong. They are very open ended, with little for the DM to riff off of. The tables driving things, where  there are some, don’t really give you enough to work with and certainly don’t give the players anything good to work with. It also confuses things by providing a general city map, as a traditional exploration game might, and then leaning very heavily on a narrative play style. The marriage here is not a good one.

You have to understand what you are designing for if you want a decent result.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $7. The preview is two pages and shows you nothing of interest to make a purchasing decision from.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/485861/city-of-the-scorpion-god?1892600

By Tobias Helms & Tobias Heidemann
Pink Pony of Death
Shadowdark/1e
Levels 1-3

The wooden city of Narbassal burnt for three consecutive nights and days. Those who couldn’t escape or were spared from death were led into captivity. Man-eating aquatic ghouls (Pale Drowners) have emerged from the depths since then, swarming the partially submerged and charred remnants of the city to feast upon the bloated corpses of the vanquished. Narbassal is now veiled in silence, city of the dead a place that once was.

This 67 page adventure describes a treasure hunt adventure in a half-floating seaside city that has been ravaged/pillaged/burned. It is essentially just a collection of abstracted mini-games and ideas, and is light even at those standards. It needed more focus to turn it in to a more useful adventure.

The premise for this is kind of interesting. We’ve got this city, kind of a primitive Venice. Some rocky outcroppings and foundations from under the shallow water combine with some wrecked ships and flotsom to create a city centered around a kind of Mont-Saint-Michel. And in about seven days some dudes are gonna show up and  invade and pillage and burn it to the ground. Or, as the intro says, it burnt for three consecutive nights and days.” That’s rough. But then the aquatic ghouls show up and make things worse dragging off people, gnawing on them and so on. But … none of that has happened yet. We’ve got a chick, the nascent leader of the thieves guid, who is sick. Because she found a time travel device that will send her a few days in to the future. She’s been looting the city, in its burnt state. Want in on the action? Thus we have a scenario where you perhaps scout things in the non-destroyed city in the present and then go forward in to the future to loot. 

That’s a decent concept with some definite possibilities.  You wanna grab some loot? Groovy! Hey, let’s also throw in some moral and ethical situations surrounding survivors of the city and the invaders. Toss in some quandaries about the survivors, their militia, and balancing revenge vs looting vs relief. Toss in some ghouls erupting from underwater and dragging people down and/or feasting on them in the open. There are A LOT of things that could be going on here, from a lot of different angles. Shades of that magnificent DCO opening, eh? And we haven’t even mentioned the possibilities of the two time streams, present and future; think o the possibilities of that! Even if, I think, managing events in two times is quite hard for an adventure to do.

Worry not, though, gentle reader! For there is little of that depth here! Well, there is and there isn’t.  It’s a fucking mess. First, let’s cover Lotting the Future. The city has ten wards. In each ward you can make up to three looting checks, at like a 12, 15, and 18. If you pas the check then you get to roll on the loot table. That table has twelve entries on it, each unique enough that I doubt you could repeat. That’s the core mechanic of the adventure. Just roll some dice to loot. Lackluster, to say the least. 

The adventure is trying, I believe, to provide resources to make things more difficult on the characters while they do those looting rolls. So you might get a random encounter like “A knocking, and muffled screams can be heard from a capsized galley. 1d6 aquatic ghoul (see 1, p.55) approach the scene at the same time as the PCs.” That’s a pretty classic “someone is stuck” situation. Or, there’s another entry where the dead kings bastard son shows up, returned from patrol with a small group of men. Are you loyal to the new king or an allied to the enemy? Did I mention he’s a snotty sixteen year old? 

The present time doesn’t have a lot locations, but it does have some interesting little conflicts going on at those locations. A new stone bridge is being built and the Ferrymen don’t like it so they are secretly sabotaging it at night. Or a dead merchant is floating face down in one of his urine vats; a relative has hired two thugs to find who did it … and they are not being subtle. These are not really complications, per se, in the present, but they tend to fall in the “local color” category of gaming. It does go a long way to make the city feel alive, but, also, they feel disconnected from the players and their characters as well as the situation (or, soon to be situation) in the city. They needed to be tied more in to things relevant to play at the table, situations for the party to avoid, use, or be taken advantage of. There’s just little relevancy to them. 

There are a lot of tables in this one. We’re not quite at the level of procedural generation; that’s would be too much for this thing. It’s much much lighter in content. Let’s think 1-012 of any one thing. SO, roll on a table of ten entriess to give the players some destruction vibes. Oh, look, once again we get “From where you stand, you can see the burnt remains of Narbassal’s fleet out in the bay” Oh boy. This would have been much more effective if it used the space to provide some keywords that the DM could then riff on. Ships. Burnt. Burning. Intact. Something like that. Also, how many times can you find “The flayed corpse of king Vessalamchir of Narbassal.” Fuck me, and by the using the useless space taken up by the time line ” 23 years ago …” And the “blood sausage with barley porridge and lentil” ‘whats on the menu’ table, you’d have plenty of room. Twenty fucking entries of that shit. 

Which is not to say that all of the entries are bad. When the adventure tries it can bring it. One of the present day encounters could be “A grizzled posse of ghoul hunters (p. 57) on small barges ventures through the muddy underbelly of Narbassal. They are placing chunks of rotten meat as baits, and scan the underside of pile dwellings, and piers. They are armed with long spears, harpoons, and nets. The ghoul hunters have been offered good coin by the king and are ready to recruit new members” That’s got some good color to it! There’s another table for happens if there’s a time mishap. For the most part it’s abstracted nonsense written in the wrong tense, as read-aloud AND abstracted as one would for a DM. But there’s an entry where you go back to the start of life on the planet and see the primordial ooze. And life starts. And then the first action of the primordial ooze is to attack you! That’s fun. I chuckled. I love it.

And then it falls apart in other places. Remember that criticism, where Lucas said the Phantom Menace was for children … and then included a bunch of trade embargo and finance shit in it? Yeah, well, that same sort of contradiction is present here in many of the entires of the rumor table. They are overly … formal? They lack life and don’t communicate the vibe of the rumor. 

So, the looting portion is abstracted. And the additional content is all on tables to spice up portions between the looting. But it isn’t really written in such a way as to do that. Many of the situations are more of an Ongoing thing, but are written like it’s just another random wandering monster roll. More brief problem, or opportunities, should be populating those tables. And there should be a section on, say, faction play, running throughout the entires.  The portion in the present day needs strong influences to interact with the players characters in a meaningful way, either as obstacles or resources in the present to the future. 

The adventure present a lot, but not in a way that drives the adventure in a meaningful way

This is $3 at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/484933/a-place-that-was-is-and-will-be-pink-pony-of-death-1?1892600