tenfootpole.org

By Stephen Smith
Mr Smith Design
B/X
Levels 1-3

The farms and fields around Turnip Hill are being plundered. Desperate locals need heroes to investigate—and stop whatever’s threatening their livelihoods. A straight-forward job—but things have a way of getting complicated.

This four page adventure features a fourteen room dugout cave/dungeon/warren under a hill. Nicely evocative but it’s just a hack and doesn’t really lean in to the Bone Tomahawk aesthetic. 

Fuck you. It’s my blog and I’m clearly intrigued by the possibilities that a shorter page count could imply. We all know it’s not going to fulfill all of my hopes and dreams (well, I don’t …) but we must carry on anyway, the search for meaning in a word cruelly devoid of it. I mean, how many fucking pages do you need to stab shit if you’ve got a dozen rooms and are getting eight or so to a page? Maybe six, I’ve decided. If we accept six to eight to page, with a page of monster stats and shit, then a couple of pages of Village Investigation and/or Overland Travel. Hmmm, no, I should think more about the perfect ratio of leadin/support and appendices to encounters. 

“We’re at our wit’s end. For the past few weeks something’s been making off with livestock and supplies. No tracks, no broken fences—just gone. Folks around here say they’ve seen shadows in the fields after dusk—the unnatural kind. I don’t know if I believe all that, but if we lose much more, our families won’t make it through the season” So we’re framing this as Heroes rather than adventurers, but, whatever. This isn’t bad at all, but that’s all that there is. No one to talk to, and no guidance on investigation in order to eventually find an entrance to a warren. Well, there’s a wanderer table for above ground which will lead you there, but each of the four entries literally leads you there. “You hear wind whistling from the entrance” or “You see a druid observing a hole.” And why the fuck doesn’t this fucking druid do something? Oh, because he’s a druid. Fucking neutrals. Anyway, it’s clear that I’m a little disappointed in the above ground portion. It feels like there was a page available so something was tossed in to fill it. Which means I feel like this was a stunt dungeon: majesty revealed in four pages! Look, use the page count you need to bring the work alive, just don’t fucking pad it out. That seems simple enough. 

The map here is above average for being so small. A little isometric, it gives a nice “warren under the hill” vibe via the map/art style used. There’s a great number of ramps, same level stairs, columns and such on it. It also fails somewhat in being a map, with some of the room exist not being shown in the best way, as well as a lack of walls (doors imply walls, I guess) that would get in the way of the visual impact. How close to a Rothko can you get before your patron starts to question if you’re doing a portrait of their spouse? This one is probably ok if you dig through the rooms first to better marks exits, Yeah, I do like the map even though its simple.

There’s some decent descriptions inside. The rooms all have these tree roots and things growing through the ceiling. “The air is damp, musty, and smells of soil. Footing is uncertain—shifting between eroded flagstones, soft patches of earth, and scattered debris.” or “The floor of this wide corridor is extremely broken and low-hanging roots require frequent ducking. Loose stones make the uneven stairs somewhat precarious..” That’s not terrible. “Wide” isnt great, but we’ve got low-hanging roots and loose stones on a set of stairs. It’s the modern style of presenting something that COULD be called read-aloud but isn’t labeled as such so could be DM notes. It does, in places, lead to over-reveal if used as read-aloud. “Then don’t use it as rad-aloud.” Ok. Another point toward that is the lack of creatures in the faux-read-aloud. These come later. So, in essence, this kind of room overview up top, then a little listing like “3 Giant Centipedes drop from the ceiling” and then a mechanics note or two like “-1 hit from swinging weapons” or a list of treasure to be found or something else. It’s not a bad format. The weakness, in all formats, being that they ARE formats and the designer always needs to keep a little willingness around to deviate from it in order to achieve the needs of the room/encounter/adventure/whatever. 

This is a hack. Monsters in the room attack. Not much in the way of interactivity beyond that. D&D has a long history of hacks, but the more interesting play expands upon that a bit. The hack as a fail condition is also a meme, but something closer to that. Things to explore and play with and so on. Something to discover, if only a hidden treasure behind a waterfall. 

But is it a GOOD hack? Well, there’s little in the way of an order of battle. Which means essentially no order of battle. And while the adventure makes a point of the lack of lack in this place the monsters also don’t seem to recoil to respond or get warned by light and react appropriately. Circle the wagons, do the defensive thing, use the halls to get behind people … nothing of any of that. Well, there is this: “If Chieftain loses 3 or more HP, he sends up an alarm-whistle. Any remaining Grimlings will add to the fray in 3d6 rounds.” There’s the extent. 

This thing is certainly moving in the right direction, much more than most of the endless line of adventures coming out. It’s tight, the writing tries to be evocative, the map is nicely evocative and things are least themed to a non-generic degree with the burrow/tree root/dugout thing going on. Slave to the format, be it the encounter format or the page count, means having to focus more on form over function, to the detriment of the adventure. Also, loot feels lite for B/X.

This is $2 at DriveThru. There is no preview. I don’t care if it’s $2 and four pages, I still want a decent preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548444/trouble-at-turnip-hill?1892600

By Scott Myers, Daymon Mills
Shadow Drifter Games
OSR
Levels 1-2

Being hired to accompany a noble on a bear hunt was supposed to be an easy way to make some gold during winter. But when a frost dragon chases the group into a mysterious cavern, survival and escape become the goal. Not to mention keeping the nobles alive to prevent them from becoming wanted men.

This 31 page adventure uses about thirteen pages t present thirteen rooms in a little cave/dungeon complex. Mostly linear maps, and an escort mission, with a whiny aristo, what more could you dream of? You stab things in underdescribed but over-explained situations. Is this the Tree of Woe?

I’m not the biggest fan of these “inciting event” adventures, but I know they have their place. As a First Adventure, this is how the arty gets together, and you bond over all becoming outlaws because you let someone die or you bond over your hero status because you saved him, and thus the rest of the campaign is launched and you all know each other. This is general handwavery stuff for me in my games, but I know some people want a little pretext, hence a starter adventure like one.

You’re hired by a dipshit heir for a bear hunting expedition. He’s a whiney shit, has a loyal bodyguard, a tracker, and four or so men at arms besides the party. On day two you find a bear, and then a dragon swoops down, kills the bear, and corners your little group in a cave. Oops. But, hey, bodyguard dude thinks he saw a door in the rear of the cave, it must lead out, right? So you snake through a small, mostly linear, dungeon until you pop out the other side. Whiny aristo heir will be dead, in which you get a bounty on your head by dad, or not dead, in which case maybe you get some cash or maybe you get some hero status from a grateful dad. The escort mission, with the whiny brat, is just the campaign kickoff. If the campaign is on a deserted island then you gotta wreck on the island first, so we can allow a little more leeway. Besides, there’s no real moral judgement here, just dad doing what dad does, using his power, if the party are shits. IE: there’s a balance to tormenting the PLAYERS, and this handles it fine.

The actual adventure, though, is painful. We can place this squarely in the “just another linear hack” category. And, straight. I might have gone a little farcical with it “oh, whats this big red button do?” and so on. But that’s not to be found here. Just a room with some skeletons to kill. Or some goblins to kill. Or some giant spiders to kill. Excitement abounds. Stabbing is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. 

There is a trap. An arrow trap specifically. It takes a page to describe. Classic trap and door porn where there’s a fixation on it. An unwarranted fixation on activation, reset, deactivation and so on. With diagrams. At least its not the kitchen room that “appears” to be the kitchen. *sigh*

Let us look at the first real chamber you encounter: “This large, cold room has only one prominent feature, an intricately carved fountain. The stonework fountain is covered in carvings of manta rays, sharks, and other powerful sea creatures. Filled with fresh but frozen water, the fountain has a mechanism beneath it that used to cause it to flow; it stopped working long ago. This room is filled with skeletons waiting for the door to open after hearing the group in Area 3 moving stones. These skeletons have only the barest tatters of clothing and armor left on them (both styles are a few generations old)” The mechanism stopped working long ago. Great. The fountain does nothing, its window dressing. Nothing here really does anything. It’s just a long description of nothing important. Just like: “The ring is a ring of invisibility. Studying the skeletal remains with a successful and appropriate INT Check would determine that the skeleton is of a male elf, and the bones in the area of the sternum and ribs have several deep cut marks, most likely caused by bladed weapons. Anyone rolling an 18 or higher on the roll would determine the skeleton has been dead for less than twenty years, and minor gnaw marks indicate the flesh was eaten by small creatures (rats).” Nothing here, beyond the ring, is important. The dead body, the slashes, the aging, the gnawing. None of it matters. It’s just padded out detail for the sake of being padded out. 

So, suffer through some long and meaningless descriptions that lead to nothing but hack after hack. Bumbling aristo, overprotective bodyguard, terrified men at arms, solo guide … none of it really comes in to play in the various rooms. The men at arms don’t even get names or personalities.Dude needed to be 3 days and a wake or something, with another one Hicks and so on, They were there, use them, don’t just hand wave them. 

This is Pay What you Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The View of the Pre is three pages and shows you absolutely nothing but the credits and the chapter page. The purpose of the preview is to give a potential buyer a chance to check out what you’ve written, say, by showing an encounter page or something. SHowing the title page and chapter page doesn’t do that. At All.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548491/the-caves-of-cold-death?1892600

by Wayne Peacock, Dee McKinney
Kismet Games
OSR
Levels 1-3

A ragged sailor speaks of an island no chart has ever shown—one he claims rose straight from the sea, crowned by a bone-colored lighthouse that casts shifting, multihued light across the waves. His tale might be madness… if not for the opalescent, fist-sized pearl he carries as proof. When both sailor and pearl end up in the possession of Gokleve’s notorious twins Valde and Valada, the pair hires you to voyage to this impossible island and return with whatever pearls you can pry from its shores. Are the pearls the true prize… or just the bait?

This 28 page adventure uses six pages to present seven rooms in some sea caves that have you fighting. Right out of the 4e era, you’ll be stabbin and everything else is a pretext. Or maybe it’s the 3.5 era since there’s not much terrain. Whatever. 

This is weird. The sea caves, the actual adventure locale, are just a few pages long, six if I recall. The lighthouse, the one that features so prominently on the cover and in all of the adventure lead-in? Not covered. Or, rather, it is essentially a rock formation on the island. It gets about three quarters of a page description which amounts to “The lighthouse which pierces the island is a magical device, not a building.” There are a few odds and ends, like seaweed covering it, but that’s the description. Which I guess means you can’t go inside? Which is why I’m calling it a rock formation. It’s got that beam of light, rotating, at the top, which is clearly magical. But there’s no notes about fucking with it. About climbing the tower, flying up, or painting the lenses with tar or anything else. When you make your entire adventure about the fucking lighthouse then you’d better do something with the lighthouse, or have some way of communicating to the players “Hey, its not about the lighthouse” once they reach the lighthouse. Yes, you can see a cave mouth, which is where the party will end up, so, good on yeah matey. 

Ket’s mention the quantum blind dude. He’s on the top of a mast of a wrecked ship. Unless the party doesn’t go to the wrecked ship in which case he’s in a wrecked lifeboat at the cave mouth. Its actually called “QUANTUM [Dudes Name]” Why? He’s not crucial to the adventure, so why the focus on making ABSOLUTELY sure the party meets him? And, during that HUGE leads in to the adventure we get LONG sections about V&V, the crime lords who hire the party to go the lighthouse. Like, pages of this shit. (Clearly, we have a hard on for V&V the crime lords. And for the quantum dude, for some reason. Search me. But I can tell when someone is a mary sue DM pet.) With some nice fucking LONG  read-aloud. In Italics. In a fancy fucking font in italics, and long. Look, I promised not to do the screencap thing anymore, but come on man, this shit is falling closer to the illegible end of the scale than the legible. Weird flourishes at the ends of e’s. I guess its supposed to be nautical-ish? BUT ITS FOR THE FUCKING DM. The DM has to be able to read the fucking shit and communicate yor long ass soliloquy to the players. I’m all for tormenting the players with handouts that nigh illegible, but not the DM. The DM needs information presented in a way that they can absorb it and transfer it to the players in an efficient and effective manner. Also, the island “appears to have a working lighthouse.” There’s a giveaway if I ever saw one. No. It has a working lighthouse. There’s a tower with a light spinning at the top. As far as anyone else knows its a fucking lighthouse. Nobody needs to know it’s not actually a lighthouse. (Although, isn’t it? Is it form or is it function? It’s tall with a rotating light you can see. It’s a lighthouse. The purpose of the light is to attract ship … so its function is not that of a lighthouse?) 

Oh, what am I bitching about here … the interactivity is just stabbing shit. Go in to a room, stab the monster, go in to the next room, stab the monster, go in to the next room. Repeat. There’s a person or two (See Also: Quantum Dude) who are like “we shipwrecked!” and are now have facehugger ova in them. They get, maybe, one sentence. Actually, most things get one sentence. Stab stab stab. Stab stab stab. I’m gonna call this a 3.5 adventure since there’s stabbing without the terrain effects needed to make it a 4e adventure. 

Room two of this exciting sea cave adventure: “2. Nest. The nest is home to the tenders.” Are you not eNtErTaInEd?! There’s a couple of bullet points for the DM to embellish upon, but the core room dynamic is more than a little lacking here. And, it’s just stabbing after all, so any description is just wasted. I guess this genre is for people who want to play mini’s but, I don’t know, want more? Roguelike D&D where combat is the main thing but you can level up and the graphics are raytraced?

And that’s all too bad because there is some imagery here and there that is decent.  “Bodies lie about the wreck, some wedged into the rocks where golden crabs feed upon them.” Noice! Always great when the crabs have some steamed human legs. And eyes. Nothing like a good rotten crab feeding frenzy to conjure the nausea, or, there’s this water elemental you can meet. It looks like an eel, its totem creature. That’s a great idea. Its tormenting a fisherman: “darting under to menace the trapped fisherman. The fisherman was harvesting eels, the elemental’s totem species, which pissed it off. It now plans on drowning its victim, Lars. The more prolonged the terror, the better.” That’s great! I mean, it’s all useless here since you’re just gonna stab it. But the potential man … and lets make lars desperate, so even though he KNOWS there’s this eel creature, there are also a lot of eels, and his families hungary, or he owes a lot or something. And maybe tie that in to the crime lords? Who have hired you. Great! Or, we could just put in some backstory for no reason and then just make the encounter a combat. *sigh*

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is the first four pages, which is useless. Title pages, credits, one page of background. The purpose of the preview is to show us enough so that we can make an informed purchasing decision. Like, show us an encounter so we can understand your style of D&D.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548411/the-cresting-pearl-light?1892600

By Connor McCloskey
Black Gambeson
Knave
"12HD worth of characters"

TWO MONTHS AGO: The hedge-wizard Inatuy hired a troop of dwarven miners to excavate a sensitive area, beneath which he believes he has discovered the location of a potent magical artifact, The Key of the Condemned, rumored to allow a dying man to entrap his executioner at the moment of death, and live on. The dwarves made swift progress, and the hedge-wizard was impressed until two weeks ago when they failed to report their status. After a second failed report, he has hired a contingent of adventurers to investigate.

This eight page adventure presents about eighteen linear rooms in a dwarf mine. It’s Aliens, but with ankheg. Decent descriptions some nice horror elements. I am unfairly turned off by the directness of the appeal to Aliens rather than In The Spirit Of. 

I hate comedy adventures. Just to be clear, this isn’t one, I’m just saying that I LOATHE them. Some humor in an adventure is fine, but I don’t like joke adventures. D&D doesn’t have to be serious, but when humor comes in it works better than when it is forced in. But, let’s say I come across the greatest comedy adventure ever. It’s perfect in every single way. Except it’s a joke adventure. All Mordenkainen Movie Studios and shit. There is no reason for me to hate it. ID STILL FUCKING HATE IT. 

This is Aliens. Some wizard gets some dwarves to go find the key of blah blah blah and they excavate a mineshaft to do it. Wizzo doesn’t hear from them for two weeks so he sends you see what they are up to. You find the place looks deserted, somewhat wrecked, and signs/body horror slowly reveals itself. So far I’m down and loving this. A nice ‘inspired by’ idea, but this time with an ankheg next. I’m down with taking a monster from the game and trying to craft a slow burn/build up horror adventure out encountering it. 

“You arrived at the mouth of a broken dwarven mine lift shaft in a small natural cave, chains dangling down into darkness with no sign of the lift itself. Small natural rivulets of water leak from the surrounding cave, and the sound of clinking chains & dripping water echo somberly up from the dark.” Hey, so that’s not bad! Chains DANGLING downRivluts LEAKING from wall, The sound of CLINKING chains. Somberly is a little purple, but whatever, it’s a decent description. And, as the entrance to The Mythic Underworld it’s not bad either! In that hole adventure awaits! How you getting down? Or, how about “Smell of vomit near unbearable. Once a cozy set of stables, the straw and dirt here are slick with the pulpy remains of three emulsified mules. Two large puddles of some sort of caustic biological waste burn the nose and block the path ahead.” The room title here is “Grisley Stable”, so the “once a zo stable” portion might be redundant, but it’s also not droning on, so we’ll let it slide. Otherwise, smell of vomit, caustic puddles, burning the nose, PULPY remains? Sounds great! This is all a part of the build up. Getting the party on edge. Really earning that first ankheg warrior attack. That attack, mot likely coming as a wandering encounter, will be earned and SO much more than just an attack thanks to the build up these early rooms provide. Nicely done.

Th dwarves had a pet badger, Jonesey, who is happy to see you, and gets visibly nervous when there are hidden monsters near. Ok. Sure. Lizard the little dwarf girl is hiding in a hole, the last survivor. Uh. Ok. There’s a sensor crystal to track incoming hostiles. Come on man. This isn’t an homage anymore. There’s a clay colum called Wehlun, or whatever that name is, who is a little sketchy, or can be. Dwarf chick is trapped in wall, half live. Uh huh. And, of course, there’s: “DWARVEN BURROWER (RM. 15 / 12): Large walking dwarven mining machine mech suit” 

You lost me man.

I was pretty much down for a horror thing with ankheg, and taking some vibes from Alien/Aliens. But this is on the edge of farce territory, or at least a direct retheming. Sensor crystals. Recording crystals. Nah, I’m out.

Should you be out? Meh. It’s essentially a linear map. So you’re having “ an experience” rather than doing an osr rpg. Which maybe you’re cool with. The descriptions are fine, the build up is chill. The body horror has elements of The Thing without leaning too heavy there, The elements are all here. I just can’t run something this linear or something that is this close of a emulation of a movie. 

Perhaps, though, there’s something original by the same designer?

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548230/ankheg?1892600

By Edwin Nagy
Parallel Dimension Gaming
OSE
Level 1

Construction camps along a new mountain pass are being destroyed, and danger awaits along every twist and turn. Can your heroes uncover the source of these deadly attacks?

This 33 page adventure details a little wilderness journey and a small thirteen room mine full of murderous dwarf miners. It’s fucking weird; it’s got the underpinnings of something decent, but never goes all in on it and pads everything out terribly. Lost potential, I guess.

Getting trade goods from Town A to Town C means taking the river through Town B, which is run by a tough, and probably corrupt, business family who controls a portage. So Prince Dipshit builds a road through the mountains directly to Town C, bypassing Town B. Groovy. Except the road construction camps got attacked. Since this is an important project he hires a bunch of no-names to go figure it out rather than sending the army. Well, to be fair, the party is supposed to present each of the towns guilds, which does seem chiller. Playing up the guild angle would have been nice, but as is you don’t get anything more than “they represent each of the towns major guilds.”

And that IS the major problem with this adventure; it hints at things but never goes there. The “evil town” doesn’t get much more than the fact they are shrewd and a maybe a little shady. The freedom fighters get that “they meet in the basement of the local pub and are all talk.” Clearly these things, covered in the thirteen page intro, are meant to provide some play opportunities, false paths, other various sorts of entanglements and fun. But they don’t show up again. 

Instead you get to plod along a half-built road, with a work camp about a day apart, four in total. Here’s a sacked one. Here’s an abandoned one. Here’s one with three dudes in it. Focusing in on that last one, you have three guys patrolling camp. Nothing else. There’s a mention that they are charmed and that the party can roll to detect that they are. That’s it. Stats? No. Direction, like they attack, or challenge the party or something else? No. What do they know if they wake up? Nothing. In spite of this being about a column … of large type. What’s a boy in love supposed to do? “The horses are anxious to eat and drink not having been fed in a few days.” Ok. And the dudes? What about them. NOTHING. Absolutely Nothing. It absolutely boggles the mind how one could leave out something so trivial. And, there are lots of editors and producers and the like attached to this. 

No one cares. Remember. No one cares. Your publisher does not care. If something decent pops out then thats great, but they do not gie a SHIT. Someone, somewhere, has to care about the adventure that’s about to get published. Sometimes we pay an editor to care. Rarely a small press publisher cares. And seldom does anyone else. If you pay them then they care. If they pay you then they do not care. Usually. Blech. I hate it when I’m not optimistic. 

Somewhere along the road you’re gonna be the victim of a rockslide. Caused by a dude who triggers it. I guess the party sees him do it? The entire layout isn’t clear, there’s the road being constructed and a ravine and a dead-end and a mine entrance and none of it makes sense. In my own head I don’t know who you see the dude who triggers the rockslide (and then retreats in to the hidden mine entrance.) And, therefore, I don’t see how the party finds the hidden mine entrance. And this is important because this is where the actual adventure is. I’m open to being wrong here (Page 14 of the document/page 15 of the PDF) in that I’ve missed something or an not understanding something. But I don’t think so. So, good luck finding the actual adventure.

Inside the mine you’ll get a bunch of boring rooms that described in a boring way. “Crossroads This is the first area of worked stone, with passages leading in each cardinal direction.” Exciting! And then six lines of text telling us where each corridor goes. Joy. That’s the fucking map. That’s the purpose of the fucking map. I know some of you fuckwits like it when the text explicitly describes the room exits and where they lead, but I think we can all agree that when it SUBSTANTIALLY outnumbers the room description/text then we’ve lost site of the goal. Don’t do things by rote. Do them because they make sense in the situation you currently find yourself. Yes, there are guidelines, but don’t follow them off of a cliff. 

Anyway, inside you find some dwarf miners. I guess this is a kind of illegal mining operation and they feel threatened by the road being constructed. I don’t think there’s really any way to tell this. You can see where a barge might come up one of the mine entrances and infer, I guess. But, also, the miners always come screaming out of the darkness and attack the party. That’s it. No playing dice or whatnot. They just come charging out of a hallway and attack. All … eight of them? In two encounters? Plus Lareth, of course, in charge of everything, with no foreshadowing or hint. Wasted potential everywhere, Lareth. Mom always knew you were gonna grow up to be a failure.

Not mentioned: the single encounter on the wandering table that only occurs once. About a messenger found dead on the road. Roll twice on the random message table to determine the contents of his message. Don’t fucking do this. That’s not how randomness is used in an adventure. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Joy. That seems to be a trend these days. We need a preview, a substantive preview that shows us some encounters, so we can make an informed decision on if to buy or not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548592/arden-s-adventures-vol-2-highway-over-the-mountain?1892600

By Graeme Davis
Mondiversi
OSE
Levels 1-5

Rudgen’s Square is a small open space in one of the more modest parts of a city. You can place it in any city or large town in your campaign. Named after a long-forgotten hero whose cracked and weathered statue – now headless – sits on a plinth atop a fountain at its center, the square sees a modest but constant stream of foot traffic, and a few small-time merchants have set up stalls around the edge selling all manner of goods

This 22 page adventure details about four hours in a street market as things happen around the party. It’s two pages of content, padded out, in a museum tour of an adventure. At least it ends with people shitting and puling their guts up in public while zombies attack. It just needed more of that.

Dude claims to be the inventor of the “multi-plot” adventure, for Warhammer, back in 87. I don’t know, it’s just a lot of things going on at once. Maybe. I take it for granted now, but, also, the concept of Romantic Love, right? In any event, our definitions of “a lot of plots going on at once” are a little different.

You are sent to the marketplace to find The Maltese Falcon, or whatever. Slimy junk merchant has it and he wanted like a bajillion million dollars for it. This is the first place the adventure breaks down, and maybe the most critical. Do they just stab the dude and leave? Do they steal it and leave? Or do they hang around for a minute? The entire adventure hinges on the party hanging around for a bit. If they do not hang around the marketplace then the adventure is not going to work. For it relies on, about every fifteen minutes, some kind of event happening in and around the party. There are a number of plotlines, seven or so I believe, and they unfold over the next four hours at about one event every fifteen minutes, related to one of the subplots. A dude smuggling himself out of the city as a poly’d horde. Food poisoning. A Romeo & Juliet lovers tryst. The dude that has the Maltese Falcon has sold a crime lords kid a love potion that actually turns him green. Maybe the answer to DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! Should be Yes if its the crime lords son and you’re a shady merchant? 

Anyway, every fifteen minutes or so some observant person in the party, asking questions about whats going down, is going to be asked to make an intelligence check to get some kind of extra knowledge. I hope they succeed on the roll. A lot. Or else everyone is going to be quite bored tonight during the game.  

The inherent concept here, of having a lot going on, is in fact correct. That should be the default for just about any adventure, and a town and/or social adventure adventure especially. There SHOULD be a lot going on at once. That gives the world a lived in feeling and creates a sense of urgency; you can’t deal with everyone at the same time, right? Faction play in a dungeon. The outdated mind map relationships I like for villages/social encounters. But the problem, gere, is one of passivity. 

In a perfect world, for the party at least, you steal the Jade Skull and/or kill the slimy stallkeeper. And then leave the square. So don’t stick around. So nothing happens after you get the skull. That means that the action must take place between the initial bargaining dialog (“ONE BILLION DOLLARS!”) and the party putting in to motion their inevitable wacky scheme. And during that time they must succeed in a number of intelligence checks to see other trivia going on. And there scheme must take more than four hours to implement, all while they stand in the fucking square, so they can the rest of the plotlines develop. Oh, chick sitting by a statue alone. Dude comes up to her, her obvious lover. They approach the horse merchants. They go off together. Noblemen come in to the square looking for her. They leave. Couple comes back to hide ta the horse merchants. Etc. And this sort of thing unfolds for each of the plots. 

So the entire concept here is for the party to NOT take action. You must be in the square to see whats going on. You must be there at the end for the shit/puke/zombie fest. You must succeed on your rolls to get the context of what is going on. There are these competing passive things going on. It is, obviously, putting interesting things behind skill checks. Don’t do that. Share interesting things. Don’t make the party beg and plead over the course of four hours in order to be able to get the hook from the king. You WANT the party on the adventure and them invested in it. Watching what happens with the check, understanding a bit of the situation and missing other parts, is what is going to make this a fun and zany side-quest that the party is invested in. And then they must stand around, taking four hours to implement their plan, in order to see any of it at all. You want the party invested, so don’t put that shit behind skill checks. And rework the adventure such that the timeline is greatly advanced or something else, in order to handle the “stab and grab”, or some derivation therein, of the party. 

You know the deal, other than that how was the play? Meh. Some decent chaos at the end when people start shitting themselves and vomiting and a bomb goes off killing a bunch of people and then they reanimate and start Brains!’ing. That, alone, as the climax, perhaps deserves some set piece treatment instead of just another paragraph. The rest of the adventure is full of long timeline events that lean toward the prescriptive end of the spectrum as well as long descriptions of “The Stall of Martha Johnson.” And the bombing is pretty random. Some old woman drops off a bomb at the junk dealers, leaving her shopping bag, and then sprinkles poison on food at several food stalls. Which is weird. I thought it was just some kind of rando deus-ex thing, but there is another thread, one event in which a protection racket causes a mess at a food stall. So maybe its a protection thing? But blowing up a stall and killing a bunch of randos? I get that the bandits want revenge for a fake love potion, but, mass murder? That seems a tad excessive, even for an RPG?

Dude might be a fine DM. And he might have invented the “multi-plot adventure.” But this is not a good implementation, either in its form or function. Long backgrounds and trivia. Detailed events to dig through, a set piece end that is not a set piece. And an overall assumption about the length of the time in the market that is almost certainly not accurate. Yeah, we want to play the game tonight, but too much of that, or too blatant, breaks the illusion of agency.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Bad Publisher! No cookie for you! We need a substantive preview to determine if we want to buy it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548756/mayhem-in-the-market?1892600

By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE 
Level 1

The characters find themselves thrust into a fight from the very jaws of death in a dark cave system, only to discover upon their escape that they are in a strange realm. None of them can remember what they were doing before they came to this place…and they soon realize that more of their memories slip away each day the longer they remain here. Hunted at night and in the dark places of this confusing world, the characters must find a solution to their lost memories, or risk becoming a husk of their former selves, wiped clean of all that they once knew or loved.

This 137 page adventure has five “acts” that mashup the Tv show From, The Good Place, and being dead. It drones on, bores the DM and the party, and sometimes does something interesting. The amount of trivia here is beyond belief. 

Dude is pumping out about a hundred pages a month, so this is likely to be my last Christopher Wilson review. It says it’s not AI. Meh. You start the cave in a dark cave chased by monsters at level one. You have no memories. This is fine, it’s level one, it’s the campaign starter. You are then attacked by 2d4 shadows with 11hp each, AC7, and strength drain. Presumably you don’t all die. (Later on you get attacked by 8 ghasts. AC3, 4HD, paralyze. You fucking enjoy that.) Someone, I guess, exits the four room cave to find a road with crucifixes down it, the dead party members on it, clinging to life with 1hp each. You head down the road to a town. People in the town forget things.  At night monsters that look like people come out to try and get inside buildings. But if you have this holy symbol inside and the doors and windows closed then they can’t get in. Yeah, I like From also. Spoilers! I think it’s … well, I won’t spoil it. But let’s just say there was a popular book about two people in Victorian times. DONT FUCKING RUIN IT IN THE COMMENTS. Mail me instead 🙂 Anyway, after the first night you bury some dead villagers (why were they out after dark? It’s not mentioned?) and then you fuck around until you hex crawl. There are a couple of places to explore in a rather large map, including a lighthouse in the mountains. Yeah, I like From also. Anyway, eventually you find out you’re actually dead and meet Charon in a bar and he takes you over the Styx and his brother picks you up in this carriage. It’s a long journey, you listen to Bro drone on and on, you get attacked, and make it to the halls of judgement, where you get reincarnated without any memories. So it’s all pointless. 

The designer notes that this level one adventure is exceptionally dangerous. And that if a PC dies they can walk out of the woods or the ever present fog or something, back again. So. No consequences. Ever. For anything. Do you think it was supposed to be a nihilistic metaphor? No, I’m reading too much in to it. Drawing parallels between it and reviewing adventures? 

You meet Madge, in the village, who monologues a giant exposition dump of read-aloud. A lot of things are behind “roll to continue” checks, so you nly get to go on to that part of the adventure f you pass a skill check. Which is always dumb. Sometimes monsters are highlighted with bolded text in the wall of text. Sometimes they are not. No idea; you got me. 

There are hints here and there of more interesting ideas, that are almost never followed up on or emphasized. There’s a key called “A Dirt Path That Was Once a Road.” That’s evocative. There’s also this enoughter is a crying baby in a basinet. And when you go check the crying stops and you find a dead baby. Ewwww! That’s great!

But these little moments are few and far between. And I’m not even sure I’m be able to list any others that struck me as much as those two did. For the most part it is exposition dump at you and being led around by others with little to no consequences for your actions or die rolls. I like From. I think the way they leave you with questions is a PERFECT implementation of leaving mystery and things unexplained in a campaign world, a setting, a key, whatever. It makes the mind race for an explanation, gets you excited, you want more. And, the core concept is decent, being implemented here as a village with a road and monsters that come out at night. It gets far, far weaker when it transitions in to the Undead/Stux/Charon nonsense once you find the ferry. The wilderness crawl has a point or two that is good, such as dead baby manor, but it just doesn’t feel meaningful or like it advances anything, either in the plot or in the characters.

Aimless, I think I’d call this. It doesn’t feel like free-form D&D and it doesn’t feel like plot D&D. As if, perhaps, the designer didn’t really know what they wanted to do here.

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is a pretty worthless first eight pages. It needed to show us some keys or something else of the actual adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/542852/town-on-the-edge-of-shadow-ose-edition?1892600