Grackle’s Vale

Posted on February 19, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Randy Musseau
Roan Studio
OSR
Levels 3-5

The otherwise peaceful village of Grackle’s Vale has been terrorized of late by a creature that has taken up lair in the nearby ruins of Reeker’s Keep. It is a Boarman, a foul lycanthrope said to haunt dark forests and murky mires, feared for its savagery and accursed tusks. At least a dozen people have gone missing after attempting to track the beast, the most recent being a Ranger of some renown. A reward of 1000 gold pieces has been offered to anyone willing to help free the community from the Boarman’s bloodlust.

This 24 page adventure uses about ten pages to describe … thirty encounter locations in a small valley and dungeon. It’s verbose, boring, not formatted to any particular manner, and has little to no treasure, as compared to the needs of a party of three to fives. “Worldbuilding” at the expense of adventure.

This is in two parts. The first part is the village of Grackle’s Vale. It’s a fishing village on a coastline. The Barons men don’t get involved in the villages affairs. The adventure spends ten or so pages describing the village, but, “fishing village” gets you 95% of the information contained in this part of the adventure. Many many MANY words are spent describing the village.Which is just a fishing village. There is absolutely nothing special or interesting about it. I don’t care the the chick that runs the local bakery lost her husband at sea  awhile back. That does nothing for me. How does that create adventure? How does that create interactivity? How does that inspire the DM to something to do in the game? Instead of a couple or three paragraphs describing her and her bakery I might instead say that she grins too wide, is kind of slow, and makes a show of putting in her SECRET INGREDIENT to her special buns. I have now done more for this adventure, in one sentence, than the ten pages of the village description ever did. Jesus christ people, I don’t need yet another description of a smith or tavern. Give me something that I can run with the fucking party. It doesn’t have to be a fucking evil cult, just make it something that is gonna be fun or interesting at the table. Compelling. Conceptually dense. Not yet another description of the shopkeep having blue eyes. That only works if everyone else in the village has black eyes or blue eyes mean you’re divine or the devil or some shit. “Dogs are commonly used for work and as guard animals. The lower valley is quite fertile and harvests have been abundant”.I loathe these fuckign descriptions. Someone spent time and effort on each and every one of those descriptions. They wasted their energy and creative juices on page after page after paragraph of boring ass mundane descriptions instead of using it on compelling and dense content. I’m sure, though, that the actual adventure will be better? 

Well, no. Part two is a trip up a little rift valley. Seems there’s a boarman up there and you’re being offered a thousand gold to go get him. A thousand gold! Oh my! What ever shall we do with all that cash?! Anyway, lack of compelling hook otherwise, up the rift valley you go. You have thirteen encounters, all in a row since it’s a rift valley. At one point you probably take some tunnels up so you don’t have to climb a waterfall. That’s another fifteen or so linear encounters. Then you find a ruined tower and fight Yet Another Wereboar (that’s the fourth or fifth in this adventure, I think) and the adventure is then over. Yeah you!

Slog ye through … and encounter with a wereboar and his overly described cabin! Slog ye through … two ogres and a bear in a bear trap! Slog ye through … some zombies! SLog ye through … combat after combat. Maybe a spike trap here and there. Toss in a hobgoblin and some redcap and a couple of shadows and you’ve got yourself an adventure. The adventure up the waterfall, which is the closest thing to being interesting, had the potential of feeling like the Fellowships slog through Moria. Dark hallways and chambers. Echoes in the distance. An enemy unseen. Natural hazards and stumbling upon crypts. Instead it comes off as Just Another Room. A large dark chamber. A small cavern. A 30×20 room that serves as the quarters of the redcaps. These are the actual starts of room descriptions. And they don’t get better. Instead going on for sentence after sentence, expanding upon nothing interesting, backstory, meaningless things, instead of concentrating on an actual interesting encounter. 

Theres a throwaway sentence about one of the guardsmen in town being infected and the loyalty of his fellow guardsmen. That’s the only thing remotely interesting. That could have been expanded with another sentence and turned in to something really good. A kind of Dawn of the Dead (remake) and the tenseness of a transform vs the love and loyalty of your fellows. Real human shit. But, hey, why not tell us who has blue eyes and who has brown instead.

“The journey will take two days (unless magic is used.) Yes, wel, thats understood in all contexts, correct? And the treasure here is subpar. The magic items might be books, but are about the right amount, I think., The mundane, gold-xp treasure, though, seems far too little. 

And the maps all seem backward. They are kind of isometric.Not really, but drawn to give perspective. And the focus, then, is confused. The waterfall tunnel map seems backwards from the keying, as does the town map. As if one were drawn North to south and one was drawn south to north. You can figure it out, but it takes a minute (or ten) to figure out what you are actually looking at and how it fits with everything else. Not really a bitch, but, an interesting observation. I don’t know I’ve encountered this kind of map dissonance before.

Anyway, A combat slog with WAY too many words, little to not formatting to help the DM through them, little to no interactivity beyond combat, too little treasure, and nothing really interesting going on. I get what the designer wanted to do, but the whole thing feels wrong. And the lcimax, with the boarman, has a Lareth the Beautiful thing going on.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. You get to see part of the town. It would have been better to show a page of the dungeon as well, or at least the wilderness encounters.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/155692/grackle-s-vale?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 2 Comments

Parlour Tricks

Posted on February 17, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Daniel Herz
Stromberg Press
B/X
Levels 1-3

Zolberg the magician runs a small discreet tavern called The Silver Globe. With the use of a magic item, he charms the unfortunate patrons to stay and suffer through his magic show, day after day.

This four page adventure describes a tavern with nine rooms. More location than adventure, it has no idea how to do what it wants to do: be an adventure.

Zolberg runs a mundane magic  show at a little tavern he owns. It’s a really bad show. But it feeds his ego. So uses a Gem Of Control to poison the ale. It forces people to stay and enjoy the show. When he’s done with them he kills them and put them to rot and be eaten by a green slime in his basement. He’s got a couple of thugs in the bar, also, to keep order. That’s the adventure. That’s all of the adventure. There are not events. It’s just a nine room room/key. The party drinks the ale and stays in the bar, watching the show, or they don’t and, presumably, do something about the show. It has exactly one interesting thing in it: there’s a red disco ball over the stage … a red herring for the party. 

The bar has nine or so NPC’s in it. One of them, the miller, has the following description: “The miller. His wife believes him to have abandoned the family but his son doesn’t believe it.” None of that is from the millers perspective. It’s what people OUTSIDE the tavern think. It’s not gonna have any outcome on the adventure. Maybe you can riff on it. But, the other descriptions for the NPCs are generally as weak as this. 

The entire adventure centers on this gem of control in an ale keg. It turns the ale in to potions of human control. Like, 192 doses a day of human control! This is an absurd magic item to put in the parties control. Further, the description of the potion, that it lasts two hours, as given in the appendix to the adventure, kind of contradicts the adventure plot as a whole … what happens when it wears off? It doesn’t make sense. Or, even better … the only actual mention of kegs in the adventure is in the kitchen. Mixed in to its description It says “A collection of large beer kegs sits in the southern corner.” That’s it. The main focal point, the gem and the ale, is not even really mentioned in the adventure!

The magic show? The one that runs three times a night? Another focus of the adventure? He does popular tricks like pulling a rabbit from a hat or sawing a lady in half. I think it’s a one sentence description and nothing more. There’s no interactivity here. There’s nothing for a DM to riff off of.

This thing is a fucking mess. I wouldn’t even call it an adventure. It’s the description of a tavern with a magic show. It’s like you took one location, a tavern, in one city supplement, and then took one NPC from that tavern and tried to expand the entire thing in to one adventure. I can’t possibly see how this thing could last more than … ninety minutes? At best?

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. 

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/462735/parlour-tricks?1892600

That was short. Bleech.

There’s a one pager on DriveThru called Frans Cave. Here’s the description for room three: “Lower Chamber: The north entrance to the cave leads to a large chamber that slightly descends into the earth. It’s cold and wet, yet due to its large size there’s not a lot trouble moving around. There’s various candles lighting the chamber (and the rest of the cave).

Terrible description. Mostly filler. If we trim the filler we get to Cold & wet with various lit candles. I’d work that concept and try to make it more evocative.

Bonus #2!

The Heart of St Bathus (OSE) by Frog God. No page count listed in the DriveThru description. Also, NO ACTUAL DESCRIPTION in the DriveThru description. A new low from the Frogs? They do not give a fuck and only want your money.

Posted in Reviews | 10 Comments

The Blue Lotus

Posted on February 14, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Sylathar
Xal Sylath
OSR
Level 2

If you’re a novice GM: everything will be OK. Its all simple. You’re not supposed to be Kurt Vonnegut , Hermann Melville or Stephen King. Its a social game and the players are responsible for their fun. “What if everything goes wrong?” Consider the movie “the big Lebowski”…every character in it, has a plan that fails eventually yet the ending is satisfactory to say the least.

This ten page adventure features five scenes, the last of which is a dungeon with ten rooms. It answers the age old question: what if a D&D adventure was written by a smug & condescending asshat. A collection of ideas, mostly, by someone who likes to hear themselves talk and thinks they are the cleverest person on earth.

People who use the phrase “the players are responsible for their own fun” are usually asshats, in my experience. Sure, that’s true, but, it’s usually meant to justify something the speaker has done, or more frequently, not done. It’s more that you don’t have to spoon feed the players, not that you don’t have to try. 

There is a page of this sage game advice right up front. And, the, after the first scene, which lasts half a page, there is ANOTHER half page of this asshattery. Condescending and patronizing. “Your zen moment: the guys at lake Geneva and the Twin Cities, managed to create out of war games and ‘make believe’ – a form of game and quality more associated with Art. Its much more abstract than it appears to …” … sorry, threw up in my mouth a little. Hang on … speaking of game commentary “… nitpicking on mechanical differences and taste is usually regarded as an attempt to educate other people about their logic. Don’t go there often. It can be, at times, a subliminal cesspool of passionate chaos.” And, yet, you just vomited up a page of this shit, kettle. Shall we continue? After the intro we get the following: “What’s written above is the framework. The cliche. The basic story told in kindergartens all across the world. Its something known and the Ether around it is the actual adventure. We might find out Aibon turned into a nazi/cannibal or a unicorn dancing in the meadows – but the goal remains the same” And I’m supposed to take this seriously? There’s a footnote on the page: “*for those too young to know who the hell was Dennis Hopper – watch blue velvet/apocalypse now or enjoy this link:[youtube link]” Why, in the name of all that is unholy, would anyone every listen to anyone this condescending? I ask myself this, and, yet, there are fuckwits who think that Taylor Swift is some kind of pentagon agent. Anyway, dude who write this adventure is a condescending ass and the adventure is full of it.

And, he likes the sound of his own voice and thinks he is the most clever person in the room “Here be the gang of Vorjas the cruel (since he’s a gnoll – no point calling him Vorjas the babyface is it?!)” And we have to listen to these little quips spaced VERY frequently throughout the text. And this is what I’ve selected as a hobby. 

Ok, so, five scenes, the last of which is a ten person dungeon. The scene framing is mostly garbage. Scene one is your hook and one of the scenes is the wilderness journey, so, more of a typical adventure structure but  with the added asshattery of calling them scenes.  Rich merchant dude has a sone. He’s gone to look for the Blue Lotus, which can cure his wife’s illness. But, since then, his wife got better. He’s portrayed as nouveau riche, and slightly racist. “I’m thrilled to know dwarves use forks …” It’s not bad. It appears as a confused mass of text that has too many shit fucking quips and condescention in it, but also, not bad. Dude has his interview with you in the garden, cause he doesn’t trust you in the house. If you bluff or sneak in to it then the following is provided as some ideas for the DM: 1: flirting with his daughter/younger

son/trophy wife (they’re all over 18 ok?!), 2: Finding a pentagram made of flour at the kitchen and a weird mute cook. 3: Get bitten by the pet greyhounds (1 HP damage).4: Offered to buy for a fraction of the actual price – some jewelry from a thieving servant. 5: Find Ariana smiling for nothing, all dosed on sedatives and a doctor explains she’s hysteric

Man, that’s pretty good shit. In another scene, at a farmhouse, you meet the farmers kid, maybe. He’s lost his mom a couple of years ago. He’s made friends with a fey who visits at night. Kid in trouble for stealing milk and cookies. The party might overhear the kid and the fey: “The kid will pour his heart out to the fey (“I miss mommy so much…” – “she’s dead kiddo…just remember her in your heart…now the cookies”)” Both the compassion and the greed! Noice! And, then, if the party attacks the fey: “The kid will run to his rescue with a small switchblade and his father will stand by the kid of course” A fucking switchblade! 

I note a couple of commonalities in these. First is the emphasis on situations. You’ll note this in the merchants home, in particular. And, then, the reliability of the situations. The kids father, of course, siding with him. Even pulling a switchblade. Not a dagger. This is a place that has been imagined, without respect to the rules. And that’s how to create an adventure.

The forest part of the adventure has the advice “let them wander around a bit,” Which, as always, is terrible advice. Not for 5e or some such, but not in an OSR game. 

The descriptions, when not referring to situations, are middling. Better than average but still not the quality I’d like to see. From the final room in the dungeon: “Description: A rock filled cave. Dank and full of dirt. Suffocating aroma. Blue mushrooms give a pale light. All is miserably worthless…yet there beneath the rocks stands the blue lotus…Royale blue.”Dank, dark, dirt, suffocating. Not bad. Needs some polish but not bad. The encounters, though, are really just combats or empty rooms. The situations, so strong in the rest of the adventure, are no where to be seen here. 

It’s all a muddled mess. Just a bunch of ideas thrown down on paper, for most of the adventure, without thought to formatting. No real structure. The ideas not expanded upon at all. Just a lot of “wing it” advice. Which, is great if you are a DM … but, we’re not paying for a designer to tell us to wing it. We’re paying for design. Without the pretentious condescension. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/437041/updated-the-blue-lotus-a-one-shot-adventure-for-the-novice-and-the-master?1892600

Bonus Review – Sisyphus Dice Game

Who doesn’t love Sisyphus?! Since the death of God we’ve only him and his eternal struggle to comfort us. Roll a die . 1-2 you go up the hill a little. 3-4 you stay in place. 5-6 you roll to the bottom again. We deserve better than this. But this i s all we’ll get.  This kind of shit used to be on blogs and now it’s for sale?!

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 6 Comments

The Crimson Monastery

Posted on February 12, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
Sebastian Grabne
Dawnfist Games
Adventurous RPG

The adventure takes place in the Shaded Valley, where the village of Lakeview is located. The Crimson Crusade is a fanatical religious order that have recently arrived in the valley, and made an old monastery their home. At first they kept to themselves, but about a month ago they started to violently interrogate the locals, suspecting them all to be undead in disguise. Which is of course false.

While looking through things to review I came across a lot of “trouble in my community” shit. Ala Yor First Gamma World adventure. What is it with my community? Next thing you know my mom is gonna get kidnapped/murdered off screen, as an inciting incident. Pfft. Anyway, this one don’t do that, which is why I’m reviewing this one …

This 32 page adventure presents, in eleven pages, a small region with a few things going on. It’s got some good ideas  but fails to execute any of them with enough life to make a solid impact. 

We got this valley. It’s got this small village in it. They herd a lot of goats. Some crusaders showed up and have started being rough and interrogating people. Recruiting/investigating. Also, a wyvern has been eating goats. Also, there’s this trading post about a days walk away. Also, there’s this hidden tomb somewhere in the valley. These are the major points of a small sandboxy regions for the party to explore. It starts with the party seeing the end/march out of the order from the village and the gossip of the villagers. WHich might include the local worthy bitching about his goats. And can include some clues to the lost tomb. Also, people gone missing, you could get hired on to do that, or escort some folk to the trading post. You can even go visit the newly arrived religious order, in the Crimson Monastery, and they can ask you to look in to some of THEIR missing men … yet another wyvern incident. So, you can talk to a lot of people and there are clues in the wilderness to certain things, brought up by the wandering table, people to talk to, and so on. 

There are some decent ideas here. The idea of the inquisition in town. Or, perhaps, a freelance inquisition. That’s fun. Some low level violence with the threats of ULTRA violence. That’s pretty chill. The  entire idea of a small region, with things going on … I mean that’s the classic regional setup. Up to and including being able to talk to the inquisition and maybe do some missions for them without actually joining … with some subtle and not so subtle pressure on them to join up. You even, in the lost tomb, have some skeletons, reanimated without consent, screaming DESTROY ME as they attack. That’s fucking brilliant! 

But, also, it’s all missing. All of it. It’s just … missing.

So, what do I mean by that? The concepts introduced are a little clumsy and not followed through on. They are almost abstracted. Not quite, but pretty close to that. The undead, for example, the skeletons. They scream DESTROY ME!! Does that sound right to you ? Destroy? Maybe, Kill me? Maybe pleading? Maybe regrets about the people they left behind, or things left undone or some such? The pain of it all is just too much? No? Just DESTROY ME? 

And you need to hold on to that DESTROY ME, because the same thing is going to happen in about a dozen other places in this adventure. I get that may be enough for you. I don’t think it is. I think it is, at best, cumbersome. Maybe more clumsy than Orcs Shooting Knucklebones as a room description, since I think the word choice is off. But, that same thing happens all over this thing. It’s almost abstracted. 

One of the quests is something like the religions orders patrol gone missing. Little to no clues. But, in the wyvern lair we’re told: “Among the waste the PCs will find evidence that the missing patrol was killed and eaten by the wyvern, see “Missing patrol” on page 7” Hmmm, that’s a little anticlimactic, yeah? “Evidence the missing patrol was killed” That’s a conclusion. A classic conclusion. And an d adventure should not work in conclusions. It should work in evocative descriptions that allows the players to draw conclusions for their characters. One room tells us that “Multiple chains are attached to the western wall, used to restrain Snowmane’s victims as she experiment on them.” Well now that’s not really the chamber of horrors of an inquisition, is it? You gotta work, really work, to bring that to life and make the connections you need to get yourself some viscera on the floor, bloodcrust, the implements, etc. This follows for the NPC descriptions as well. While nicely summarized, with wants, goals, and secrets, they come off a little abstracted and conclusion rather than actionable. 

The formatting is mostly right. There is weirdness here as well. An overreliance on bullets for meaningless information and a need to indent here and there to call out sub-information. For the cultists/templars/whatever they are … do you bury the fact that they veins are all bright red and stand out at a distance? Or do you kind of lead with that? I should think one would lead, instead of burying it. The map of the cathedral is more of a dungeon map. Yadda yadda yadda. 

But, none of those are too major. The kind of abstracted descriptions are … and the lack of proper motivations for an adventure. It comes off a little MERP adventure, as in here’s a site and then a paragraph about how to have an adventure there. It’s not quite that, but it’s still closer to that side of the spectrum then I think can make a good adventure. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages. You get to see the town on pages seven and eight, along with the NPC’s. The town and NPC”s are both pretty well done, but missing that extra ACTIONABLE and STICKY stuff … although the town information is almost correct.


https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/415353/the-crimson-monastery?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 6 Comments

The Sphinx

Posted on February 10, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Masters of Evil
Self Published
OSE
"Low Levels"

A Sphinx sits proudly in the sands of the desert, constructed in honour of the forgotten potentates who once ruled the lands in time immemorial. From the abandoned camp and scaffold, it would seem either graverobbers or archaeologists were recently here, but where have they gone and what lies within the bowels of the Sphinx?

This seventeen page adventure presents a small egyptian themed tomb with thirteen rooms in nine pages. Dry, with some sloppy wording and poor interactivity, but also committing no cardinal sins. 

There’s just not much here to go on. I usually try and mention a few nice things about an adventure, something I thought it did well or a concept that it had that was interesting, even if it didn’t actually pan out … and I’m having trouble doing that with this one. It’s just kind of … there. As if both the highs and lows were smoothed out. There is this concept of a Ushabti. That’s a statue like thing that moves from room to room. If you’re in the room with it then you get a glimpse in to the room in the underworld. That’s something that has been done before in myriad ways … from the underworld and fy realm and so on. There’s not really much to it though. You get maybe a secret passage revealed. Otherwise it’s just more window dressing for the room you’re in. Window dressing that you can’t control, since its governed by the status thing and its random movements. Not really puzzle tool or anything like that. And the statue dude thing is immune to all damage but fucks you up if you mess with it. So … yeah. There’s just not much going on with this feature.

And the rest of it is … meh? 

“The air is heavy, pregnant with a thousand years of decay …” Ok, so, heavy is good. I might even be able to stomach pregnant, as a sense of anticipation. But the thousand years of decay bit? We’re bumping up against getting purple. In other places we get text that tells us that skeletons are “undying guardians animated by the power of the alter!” Ok, so, yes, that’s what a skeleton is, an undying guardian. And there’s no need to tell us that they are powered by the power of the alter, especially since there’s no indication that we can destroy or alter it in order to put them to rest. It’s just an explanation for why the skeletons are coming to life. There’s no actual gameable content in the phrasing. In another place we’re told that there is a golden sarcophagus, plated with gold plate … and no worth placed upon it. You can’t tell me the entire room is made of platinum and then not tell me how much the party gets when they scrape the metal off to sell it. And, traditionally, we also roll for wanderers when counting grains of sand on the beach.

Things that look like rea-daloud end with “the door in the west wall is stuck” so, clearly, not read-aloud. And yet that standsin opposition to the rest of the text in that (the first para in each room) section that is worded like it’s an initial room description for the players. It’s just … nothing in this is well thought out and to the effect of it on the game.

I can’t point to any one thing that makes it stand out as bad. I can say, though, that it comes off as rather boring. Using words like “large” to describe things. The lack of evocative descriptions, in spite of some lapses in to purple prose. Not really much of interest to investigate. It’s all much like the real pyramids in Giza. Once you go inside it’s super anti-climactic. “Oh, a large room of rock.” Kind of like going in to an empty  room made of cinderblock. Ok. I guess I’m here now. It’s not that they are devoid of anything, but they certainly FEEL like they are devoid of anything. Like the descriptions are all just a little plain. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is also nineteen pages, so you get to see everything.


https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/468650/the-sphinx?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 6 Comments

The Rusted Tomb

Posted on February 7, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By WR Beatty
Rosethrone Publishing
S&W
Levels 1-...7?

A short adventure location – a shrine and a tomb for a nearly forgotten godling.  Rumors suggest this is the resting place of He Who Forged Heaven and Hell. Craftsmen and Smiths pay their respects at the Rusted Tomb, but few others care, though some say there’s ancient magic behind those rust-streaked walls.

This twelve page adventure presents a small temple with seventeen rooms … that houses a dead god. It’s less adventure and more place where you could have an adventure, being somewhat … statically described? And then presenting some adventure ideas in the rear. Meh.

Beatty does a great job with one of the rumors/hooks in this adventure. Here’s the entry: “There’s this old guy who comes to town once in a while, Demos or something like that. He leads those blacksmith worshippers up on the North Road on the way to Tiresh Village. They call that the Rusted Tomb. Anyway, he’s an odd lot. Always loads up on vegetables and smoked meats and tobacco and the like… Nothing odd there, but he always asks about old nails.” It’s in voice, which bring out a little bit of character, giving the DM an idea of how to introduce and run it. And, as we all know, I’m all for helping the DM out without spoon feeding them. The goal is to provide information that enables the DM to greatness. And that rumour/hook does it. Also, it’s very human. We’re talking about the tomb of a god here, or, at least, an angel. But the temple is in decline and this is most like the last generation of priests … once these four go then there will be no one left. The world has moved on. And all of that comes out in that text. Those blacksmith worshippers. Buy vegetables and smoked meats. It’s very mundane and very real with how things became mundane over time. People acting like people, or, at least, hyper realistic versions of people, brings so much more to D&D. 

There are a couple of other interesting things here. SOme gold trimmed white cloths as magic items. Worn over the head as a kind of crude veil, they filter out poisons giving a bonus to saves. Kind of hard to use in a combat, also, right? Very nice. And, at one point the party finds a twenty ton anvil bolted to the ground. “How to unbolt and move the 20 ton anvil is left up to the parties ingenuity.” Absolutely! 

But the rest of this …? No. 

The thing is kind of generically described. And I don’t mean that in the usual way. Rather it’s more of a MERP adventure way. It’s as if we took everyones presence, their life and sense of it, out of the adventure. There are rooms with objects in them, but not people. There is no sense of worshippers being here. Or even priests except for maybe two rooms … and even those seem devoid of the life of living. As if they were laid down for people to use but never had. It’s sterile. Devoid of life. Literally, since there are no encounters on the main tomb level. 

And this is on purpose. It’s related to that level range of one through seven. The back page has four separate adventure ideas. One for 1-3, one for 4-7, one for 8-10, and one for high levels. There are a couple of guidelines, and outline really, in a quarter page, for each of them, in what the adventure may look like. One mentions that they high priest might hire some guards. But, bringing the thing to life, personalizing it, putting people and worshippers and all of that in to it, is all up to the DM. 

A linear map. Items worth stealing that don’t have values. This is made for the DM to set an adventure in. As if someone published a village of sixteen pages and then said that you could have some adventures here. As such its more window dressing FOR an adventure. It is a place for situations to occur, rather than the actual situations that occur. And, thus, isn’t really an adventure. More of a regional setting where the region is “seventeen rooms.” 

And, I don’t review regional settings.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/265610/the-rusted-tomb?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 14 Comments

The Most Secret Conspiracy

Posted on February 5, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Maksim Kotelnikov
Monthly Adventures
Generic/Universal

A small group of adventurers through the fault of chance are caught up in the investigation of a mysterious conspiracy: someone is turning the entire city into a strange magical rune.

This 29 page adventure details a “plot” from … eons ago? To destroy … humans? Weird shit happens in a city, you’re led around by the nose, things happen to you rather than you doing things, and it’s all presented in a very story-game driven way while giving the trappings of the party having agency. Not something to do, in spite of a decent premise.

What attracted me to this adventure was this statement by the designer: “There is no main villain or his minions, nor are there any necromancers, cultists, or thugs. There is no opposing evil here to antagonize the heroes. This is an adventure in which they face their own incredulity and paranoia as they unravel the mystery of a weapon designed for a long-forgotten war.” Which is pretty intriguing, except for the long-forgotten war part. 

Long ago the elves lived and loved and were happy. And then the humans showed up and cut down trees, etc. You know the drill by now. Anyway, the elves have this mage dude who does this spell that Makes The Land Itself protect itself. It goes off, but takes a few millennia to get to power and work. Meanwhile, someone builds a city on the ancient burial ground, err, I mean elf lands. Twenty years ago weird shit starts happening in the city. Mayor Dickcheese and Wizard McWizardson figure it out and start building and demolishing streets and buildings to turn the layout of the city in t a giant anti-magic rune, to protect everyone. And they don’t tell anyone about it. This is the extent of the the whole “no evil cultists” thing. The party shows up, see some weird shit, investigates, and then goes and gets a magic item to complete a ritual to save the city. 

I don’t know. Good premise, with a couple of good elements going on in the adventure. At one point you look in to two weird deaths. One of them has a dude who has choked on a moth. The other has a woman who has hung herself from a tree branch .. that she could not reach. Kinda nifty. A little frustrating since there is no way for the party to arrive at an answer, until the very end of the adventure, so it’s just window dressing to fill up time. But, still, nice ideas.

The entire adventure is, though, a hunk of junk. On page one we’re told that this is a “Script for a tabletop RPG” Ought oh! Script. Tabletop RPG. And, sire enough, the adventure is arranged in Acts, under the heading of The Story. Sure, you can do this and have it not be a shit show. But that rarely happens. 

The first half or so of the pages are devoted to locations in the city, a kind  of overview. The mayor, the museum (which is more of a Believe it or Not attraction, so I’ll not bitch much about it existing), a tavern, and so on. And then the mayor, the only mage in town, Timmy te Weasel (a mary sue) and the leader of the smugglers, wh o is a lycanthrope. But while the designer acknowledges that all lycanthropes are evil … not these lycanthropes. Okey doke. The locations, such as the hucker and the bar, are not too bad. They are overly described, but at least they are not the standard fantasy fair. Also, they don’t really matter AT ALL to the adventure. As a general town feature, sure. And the NPC”s are also overly described. Paragraphs of information that don’t really mean anything or have an impact on the game. 

On to the adventure proper!

It doesn’t really exist. It’s just an outline. Act One is a page and half of Let The Party Get To Know The City, finishing with them fucking some elf bard chick in the tavern. Act two are just a couple of vignettes … rats come out of the bakers shop, from a hole in the ground, that guards wont let you investigate. And, of course, the two dead bodies I mentioned before. These are both handled in a paragraph, with nothing more to them. The first is, in its entirety “The first of them was named Radomir, and he was a rather plump burly man who had recently worked as a glassblower in the weavers’ quarter. All the evidence suggests that Radomir simply suffocated while he was taking a leak. A careful examination of the body reveals no marks on the neck or any signs of poisoning. However, a common night moth was strangely lodged in the poor man’s windpipe.” Fill in the rest. And, I note, this is one of the more detailed things to happen. 

And this happens over and over again. A sentence about what could happen and then another explaining what really is going on and how the party can’t really do anything. No real encounters. No real challenges. Eventually you make it to the sewers, near the end of the seven acts, and get attacked by the weres, who were driven insane by the spell. Thats all you’re getting for detail though. Make up everything else yourself. 

It’s all very abstracted. An outline in First This Happens And Then This Happens paragraph form. There’s no real agency here. You’re told to interfere with the party doing things, by using the guards, etc. This is a story game, but, it doesn’t lean in to that. It’s trying to be a traditional game, but it doesnt lean in to that either. He licked the one. He chased the other. And then he ended up dead. It’s what you got.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages and shows you a bit of the town locations, which are moderately interesting, but not so much so to take up the space they do and, ultimately, are just window dressing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/456491/The-Most-Secret-Conspiracy?1892600

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The Legacy

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Marcel Wirtz
Ondaris Publishing
OSR
Level 0 Funnel

Unveil the mysteries of Oak Grove in “The Legacy,” a thrilling adventure module where the discovery of an inheritance causes a stir in the village of Oak Grove: Is there really a treasure to be found in an old tomb in the cursed heath? Will any brave villagers dare to search for it? And what else lurks in the vaults beneath the cursed heath? Are you brave enough to uncover the secrets?

This fifteen page adventure uses … five pages? To describe about eighteen rooms in a trap-filled tomb. The set up has a sweet Gamma World vibe, but the dungeon, proper, is nothing more than three sub-standard one-page dungeons with about five rooms per level.

This one is wildly frustrating. I can see, I think, what it’s trying to do. And what it’s trying to do is groovy. But it fails at actually accomplishing it. Or, rather, it does accomplish it, but in the totally wrong way to create an interesting adventuring environment.

This is a funnel. There are no funnel rules, or guidelines, or anything else in this, but, I’m sure you can probably find some funnel guidelines for whatever system you are using. More interesting than that, though, is the intro. This thing has some PROMISE. You’re in this small village. Living in huts. The world outside of the village is VERY dangerous. The War of the Gods and The Great SCaring was 500 years ago. The splendors of the world were destroyed and now everyone is isolated and trying to eek out a living. It’s got a very traditional Gamma World vibe where the first adventure is your tech 1 village living in fear of everything. Almost Kingdom Death. I’m down for that, given my love for Gamma World, and a great starting vibe for the OSR is “i dont wanna be a mud farmer like me pa.” It’s doing a pretty decent job is setting things up. And then it ramps the fucking shit up. Someones mom is dead. [I’m generally against this sort of thing, but, in a funnel, at level 0, in the first adventure, I think it’s ok … as long as we don’t lean on the relative thing too much. There’s a reason players play murder hobos … to keep the DM from fucking with their families.] Dad is long gone. The village sent him to the Town a couple of years ago with all of the crops, etc, to buy supplies for the winter. He came home, having been robbed on the road of all of his belongings. The funnels family has been living under a kind of cloud since then. Several people died that winter. Dad was not the same after that; trying to get people together to go in to The Heath … the ravaged lands, to look for glorious treasures. Then he withered and died. Crops have failed over this summer and its looking kind of bleak this year also. A really good job is done here with the initial set up. Then, while cleaning out moms shit you find a letter from dad. Seems that, in town, he was seduced by the takes of glory, in the tavern he ended up in, of the guild of Adventurers. He sold all of his worldly good … the villagers bounty, to join. He got a clue: a great metal demon head in a hill in The Health, with some cryptic inscription beneath it (a handout.) But then he died, never getting anyone to go with him. Great twist man! 

The adventure shall never reach such heights again. The last room of the tomb has the party (maybe) opening a sarcophagus. Dude inside wakes up and rips the heart out of the PC who opened it. Oh shit! A lich! (It is, after all, a funnel.) Then he’s like, oh, sorry, my bad, you’re not the people who entombed me. Hey, wanna be my minions in return for lands and wealth? Pretty good! 

But the rest of it … not so much. The first real encounter is the bronze demon face in a hillside. It take a column, seven paragraphs, to describe it and the trap. It’s padded out. It over explains. It states the obvious. AT one point you find a document in code. The text tell us “If the players deciphered the writing it would be advantageous to them.” Well, yeah. And if they didn’t TPK in every encounter then would that be an advantage to them also? It does this over and over again. 

It goes this. It goes on and on and on and on on a topic. But, that’s not the adventure. That’s the front fucking door, in this case. The adventure is a series of three one page dungeons. A flat dungeon level, in isometric view, with about five rooms per level. And a little text bubble with a couple of sentences pointing at the room where the text occurs. CLassic one page dungeon vibe. So you get some text like “A key is hanging on a hook on the wall opposite the door – there is a chest underneath. The chest is a mimic that attacks approaching players, the key would open the chest in level 2.” That’s it; that’s your room. And, that’s not even typical. Almost every single room/encounter is not what we might of as one, but, rather, a hallway trap. (or, room trap out of grimtooth.) EVERYTHING. There are literally two creatures encounters: a black pudding and the lich dude at the end, which, is not actually a combat since he’s a lich.Sure, there’s a wandering monster table, but no actual room encounters with creatures or tricks or things to investigate … except for traps. You know how old school dungeons used to just draw pit symbols on the map, without keying them? This is the equivalent of that … except they are keyed. And that’s all the dungeon essentially is. 

Great set up. Seriously, people fuck the setups all the time but this one was great. And decent ending with the lich. But everything in between is shit. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages, so you get to see that rad set up. But nothing more, so, a bad preview overall since you’d get the wrong impression from it.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/467438/The-Legacy?1892600

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Echoes from Fomalhaut #10

Posted on January 31, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
Gabor Lux
First Hungarian d20 Society
OSR

The Temple of Polyphema: The temple of the cyclopean goddess has been taken over by a band of marauding gnolls. Are you a bad enough dude to drive them out, and avert the terrible curse that would befall Polyphema’s gutless followers? Levels 2-4, 25 keyed areas.

Time to suck off The Gaborian again. Seriously, how do you people run a game when 90% of the people at the table are named Gabor? Nice cover on this one, with the … dancing bear?

Echoes from Fomalhaut #10 continues the tradition of fine products from First Hungarian. Seriously, other than, maybe, Fight On or Arduin, the Echoes line is producing one of the best sets of adventures and supplements in the hobby. There are others, such as Dungeon Age, who are consistently producing fine work, but the addition of a kind of consistent tone and theme really sells this in a way that few other supplements have. Do you think he’ll let me buy a complete hardcopy set if I rim him a bit also? Maybe, for like, $1000? I’ll pay for shipping. One Yul Brenner, please!

In this 56 page issue you’re getting the Temple of Jeng, a killer adventure. The Gorge of the Unmortal Hermit, a weirdo place, Oom the Many, a god/cult description, Guests of the Beggar King, a mostly civilized “kingdom” you can visit with a lot of weird shit going on and, mayhap, be a standin for mighty Kyshal as a home base,, and the Temple of Polyphema, which I’m going to talk the most about.

More than most, though, I want to talk about specificity. It’s something I cite a lot, in a positive manner, in its efforts to really bring a work to life. It adds character, as opposed to detail which just adds to the word count. Specificity gives the DM something to hang their hat on. Something to leverage in to more. It inspires, rather than the ability of detail to simply make the text longer and harder to comprehend. This specificity, along with well chosen adjectives, can help bring something to life much more so than without it.

We’ve got this temple on a mountain and a village below it. They are cursed; if they don’t worship there every day then they slowly turn in to goats. Oops, don’t piss off the goddess of polymorphism, I guess. Anyway, some gnolls have moved in and a couple of the villagers are now sporting goat heads. 

The temple has a copse of woods outside. What does that make you think of, to imagine? Ok, now, what if I told you that it’s actually a grove of olive trees. Now what? It’s a grove, not a copse, and they are olive trees. This conjures up the greek, yes? You’re now in a different headspace, you have a different framing for all that comes after. The context is different and we’re now working with different cultural baggage to leverage. This is the difference between the generic and the specific.

We see this in other areas as well. One room, the main rooms for the gnolls, has fifteen of them in it “four of them with human heads”, the text tells us. Uh, right on! It IS the temple of polyphema, after all. And, in the same room “The walls are lined with grimacing theatrical masks, their mouths stuffed with rags – the gnolls were afraid of the ominous moaning wind blowing through them.” Not useless backstory, for it tells us what happens when the rags are removed from the mouths. It has integrated the backstory in to the description in such a way that the word count is no more. 

In another room we have some old, decaying furniture swarming with large creamy centipedes. Harmless, but can deliver a vicious bite, the text tells us. Do you frequently see this in an adventure? A normal creature? Almost as window dressing, but not quite. Those six legged possums in The Upper Caves that I am so fond of. The mundane, or nearly so, presented to the party. 

Let us look at a magic item: “Golden apple: This gold apple is worth 4000 gp as a piece of jewelry. Carrying it brings a constant bless spell. Those who learn of its existence must save or desire to possess it by money, guile or bloodshed.” It’s just a fucking bless. But, also, it’s a golden apple … with all the historical context that implies. And, note that curse like thing. Kick ass man! I wish almost everything came with some of that artifact shit attached to it. A decanter full of moon-silver liquid? Sign me up!

Elsewhere in the issue we find a sickle that feel unnaturally heavy … a non-druid picking it up must save or start cutting ritual wounds in to themselves. Isn’t that fun? SO much more fun han “cursed, -1 to hit” or some other shit. How about a cel littered with gnawed bones. Psych! Restless skeletons bitches! I love it when the players slap their heads and say “Of course! They were bones! Of course!” 

I could go on and on about The Court of Beggar King also. A fucking kick ass place to sally forth from. And, get caught up in the intrigues of. For every opulent welcoming feast there is also three hanged heroes suspended from nooses in the treasury room. 

This is $6.50 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages and you can see the first few pages of that Poluphema temple. Rend thy clothes and weep at thy own feeble efforts at adventure writing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/414336/Echoes-From-Fomalhaut-10-Guests-of-the-Beggar-King–EMDT76?1892600

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The Great Mansion Heist

Posted on January 29, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ben Gibson
Coldlight Press
OSE/5e/Pathfinder (Conversion Notes for stats, etc)
Levels 1-2

More than a mile away from the sweaty market town that bears his name, Merchant Lord Salmo spends most of his time in his formidable manse, luxuriating in wealth and style…wealth that nobody, not his slaves, nor his workmen, nor his rivals, would mind him losing…

This 22 page adventure uses four pages to describe a local lords manor house, framed as a raid to steal him blind. It covers the necessities nicely, with plenty of situations and possabilities. A little staid, perhaps, but it does a good job of being what it is.

You’re ripping this dude off and/or doing some murdering, as needs be. In town  we’ve got a short little table of rumors/hooks to get you going. A failed handless thief will tell you shit for an ale … that’s gotta be a great sight. Or the failed drunken steward offers a map, for vengeance. Or the dog handler talks treats or there’s a dude hiring new guards. Implied, in each of these little one sentence things, is more than enough information to get a DM going and inject flavour in to things. A failed handless thief? You betcha! A doggo lover? A KILLER doggo lover? Noice! One short little table, that could have been a throw-away in any other adventure, injects a major amount of flavour in to this one. And that’s the goal. The specificity. We don’t need details, we need specificity. 

The Logos map is fine. A basement two floors above and a little turret and widows walk thing. Clear enough, although, again, I might have made note of where there are generally servants located, for sound and light purposes. We do get a little table to handle patrolling guards and some general guidelines on how they handle sounds and react. 

This IS the heart of the adventure, those reaction notes. There is a small one page key for the twenty rooms, but that is noting mostly the existence, or not, of servants and anything worth looting. But the reactions are where this thing is at. The cook, who is kindly and sweet and “worn down by a lack of appreciation for her modest gifts as a cook” will try to talk you in to fleeing. The steward is proline to fumbling and ignores all strange noises, since he’s new to the mansion. The accountant barely registers threats. The dogs are lonely and respond well to kindness … and prone to bark at squirrels. There are notes on holidays and dinner parties, on food & wine delivery wagons and how the guards react when their lord is there (more cautious about blowing their horns) You can see how each and every one of these notes, and more, are ALL oriented towards actual play at the table. Everything here is laser focused on the party sneaking or bluffing their way in, and what then happens. And none of it is overblown. Jesus, the thing uses four pages, how can it go on at length? No, just enough. Just enough specificity to bring it to life for the DM to launch it as their own. And then it moves on. Just enough guidelines to run a holiday or dinner party, two or three sentences to do a vibe, and then it moves on. Focused man, just absolutely focused on the game at the table.

Let’s look at some descriptions!! “Dingy and dusty, with improvised table and chairs used by shirking guards” Great. The magicians bedroom smells of sulfur and ammonia. The upper gallery is well lit and cool with a gilded statue in a nook. 

Notably, there’s not an over formatted description here. The description and the game elements are just integrated together in to the description. This is, I think, my favorite description style. It’s hard to do, requiring focus and great writing skills, but produces a text that that feels natural and everything just fits together nice and smoothly. 

It’s the little details here, the specificity, that bring so much more to this. Just little off hand phrases. Like the no hands thing. Or the fact that the wine in the wine cellar is worth less “watered down due to servant and guard pilferage.” The shirking guards, the attention to the garden and the tree that can be climbed to leap to a tower roof. Extending this snarkiness to the pregens, we get a collector, reluctant muscle, and a couple of freelance murderers. Alright man! I dig it!

And, like all good adventures, you can piecemeal some treasure together, but the real hoard is going to take some good work to get. I could do better with the magic item descriptions, but, otherwise, a pretty good job in crafting an adventure for an evenings play! Maybe just a little less than what I prefer, but I’ll err on the side of checking this out.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The preview is just a couple of pages but is essentially all of the actual parts of the adventure, so you can see what you are getting and how it focuses on on the reactions, etc.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/464648/K6-The-Great-Mansion-Heist?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 5 Comments