tenfootpole.org

By Joseph Mohr
Old School Role Playing
S&W
Level 1

For as long as anyone can remember the ruins stood at the top of the hill overlooking the valley below. They had stood there longer even than the village at the base of the hill. A band of warriors stood in battle there long ago fighting off the Orc invaders who swept through from the wild lands to the east. It was said to have been an epic battle: A last stand of a small group of men against a massive group of invaders. It was the stuff of legends. But that was ages ago. No one now even remembers their names or why they chose to fight when so many others ran before the invading hordes. Now all anyone remembers is that the walls are crumbling and are dangerous. A few children have climbed up to the top of the hill and found themselves trapped in the falling stone walls. Parents in the village are careful now to keep the children away from this dangerous place. What mysteries might be found there? What forgotten treasures might still be left? Brave young adventurers might cut their teeth exploring ruins like these.

This twelve page single-column adventure uses three pages to describe six rooms. It’s the reason I started reviewing. It has the distinction of having a one star rating on DriveThru, Something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

Mohr just keeps cranking them out. Old School Role Playing! Starter Adventure! Free! All the right words to suck in a new person to the hobby and crush their dreams. When I came back to the oSR< all of the forum people were listing all of these great adventures. Best Ever, they’d say. You get excited. Dreams of all of the great times you’ll have. Laying awake at night. You go grab a few, and then a few more. Paying money for some. Others are free. You take a look at them and you think Is That It? This Is Good? But, everyone is saying how great they are. You shake your head a little. You adjust your expectations a bit, maybe. This must be what a good adventure is? But, of course it’s not. Not even close to being good. It’s just fanboys. And forum friends being supportive of each other. And reviewers softballing shit so they don’t make anyone mad at them. 

Note that in the publishers blurb there’s nothing about level ranges. Or on the front cover. Or in the title page. Eventually we get to something buried in the text that says “starter adventure” and “low level characters.” Perfect. We’re starting strong out of the the gate.

There’s a village at the bottom of a hill. On top of the hill is a ruined castle. Like, 100 feet away? No details on the village, which is explicitly called out in the text. Great. Nothing but the village ruin. Got it. And two crocs, with 3HD each, live, like 50 feet from the village. Sure thing. Absolutely. 

Up the hill and in to the ruin. Which has three rooms. Fight two goblin lookouts. Then fight like 2d4+2 goblins inside the room they are guarding. There’s also a giant spider in a ruined tower. Which you already know if you’ve ever played D&D before. There is ALWAYS a giant spiderman the ruined tower. Let’s see, you get a magic battle axe, a magic ring, like four magic potions and about 500gp in loot. Off to your next adventure1

“Bryce, you always swear off Mohr” I know, I know. Dude has some kind of genius level marketing skills. Between covers and marketing descriptions. 

This is just junk. A quick write up that no doubt took an hour, seemingly, and he pushed out. It’s 

This is free at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, which lets you see like four of the encounters. Good luck with those.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/430208/The-Stonehill-Ruins?1892600

By Luiz Eduardo Ricon
Hexplore Publishing
OSE
Levels 2-3

Everybody knows Brumeer, the dwarf, a locally renowned merchant. When a farmer named Arcbold failed to meet him at the market square, he hires the PCs to find out what has happened to his friend. The answer might not be pleasant, or safe…

This eighteen page digest adventure has a couple of encounters in a farm overrun with vermin. It’s got some ok sentences here and there, describing things, but it’s also just a straight forward plot adventure with little going on. 

I play about twice a week, some times a little more if I  join an online game. And, you know, I’ve REALLY  been wanting to take my games to the next level. So, imagine my delight when this thing popped up, promising just that: to take my games to the next level!

Ok, so, Genero the Dwarf hires the party to go kind Archie the farmer. He bought a bunch of vegetables from him and he hasn’t delivered. He’s giving you 10 GP to go do it. 

So, lets pause the fuck a moment here. TEN GP! Fuck yeah I’ll go do it! The little orphan scamp will do it for 1. Fuck man, the widow Merry will do it for half that! Ten fucking GP! How the fuck much is a carrott going for? Remember the early days of panic buying when they announced the shutdowns and the milk, eggs, and meat sold out? Maybe this is some kind of reverse thing? All the veg has sold out and rough greenery is now 10gp a bundle? Or, is this like a Chinese peaches thing where rutabagas keep the black death away? Fuck man, let’s all become farmers! Fucking WAYYYYY better than going down in to a dark hole in the ground with a fucking torch. Have you heard about what goes on down there? No fucking way I’m getting my brain sucked out! Who has cabbage seeds? Or, hey, maybe it’s something else? Maybe this is a drug deal? LIke, it’s actually meth and not veg, but Genero cant really hire you to go get his meth, right? That makes sense. 10gp. Fuck, man…

Good things first. Dude can write up a scene when he wants to. “Covered in cobwebs and hay, his skin turned gray and his hollow eyes and gaping mouth producing a cascade of tiny spiders crawling over his body or tangling up and down in silk threads.” This, my friends, is a ghoul. What a delight! Good description and good job taking a creature that you create and then just saying yeah, stats as a ghoul. I mean, it is a ghoul, not stats as a ghoul, but still, you know what I mean. This is going to be a freaky ass encounter for the party. VERY nice job. Likewise, the farmers house is covered in webs inside with hundreds of spiders of all shapes and sizes crawling over the walls. You had to be there. It’s good in the descriptions. The entire adventure is full of small vermin as window dressing, and its not always handled well. It frequently isn’t. But when he tries he does a great job. In addition, dude telegraphs a future encounter. Outside you find a goat in a giant spider cocoon. It’s still barely alive. WHich telegraphs that someone inside, in the spider webs, might still be alive also. Brings it to the front of the parties minds so they don’t just burn the place down. Good design there.

Let’s see … hooks … “Your former patron referred you to this town.” Who, exactly, is that written for? The DM? Then why use ‘your?’ It’s so aggressively generic. Abstracted to a point of uselessness. One of the wanderers is “A bard offers news of the road.” Well? What fucking news of the road is he offering? Nothing. At the end you need to return a magic rock to the place where the farmer found it, in the swamp … two hours away. With no directions. And nothing to go on except MAYBE a word that “Archie found it in the swamp.” But the adventure is written like you walk right there. It makes no sense. And, sometimes, the descriptions go a little overboard. Cocoons “hang like dreadful ornaments.” Oh come on mman. That’s just purple prose. We don’t say htat to players and if aimed at the DM there are much more effective ways to communicate the vibe.

So, show up and kill some orcs. Then kill some giant rats. Then some more rats. And then a ghoul. And then a giant spider. IDK, maybe I forgot another round of giant rats in there somewhere. There’s your adventure, in eighteen pages. 

If this were paired WAY down, and the descriptions beefed up, and it was in a magazine as a side-trek then it might be ok. That’s a lot of if’s. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages. You get to see the intro/hooks, wanderers, and orc encounter at the farm. Then entire adventure is like this, so, good preview from that sense. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/416373/The-Curse-of-the-Dreadstone–The-ideal-SECOND-adventure-for-starting-players?1892600

By John Cavalcante
Self Published
OSE
Level 1

In the borderlands of a dying empire, in the Duchy of Gauvadan, the village of Braildorn now cowers in fear. This is the birthplace of the Blood Treatment: a miraculous Panacea created by the arcane scholars of Liardnia University with otherworldly influence. However, the days of prosperity and miracles would end soon. With the mysterious fall of the University, came a curse: The surrounding forest, once blessed by the fey, was transfigured into a cursed and dangerous swamp. People now are disappearing in the dead of night, and the noble house is the prime suspect to be behind everything, arousing anti-empire separatist sentiment. In these dangerous times, only one question remains: What will you do?

This 48 page adventure (riffing on Bloodborne) uses around eleven pages to describe about fifty rooms in a three level mansion in a “gothic with some firearms” setting. The writing is terse and well formatted. It does not make me hate my life. It also brings me no joy, lacking interactivity and evocative descriptions and scenarios.

Ok, so, I feel like maybe I need a new category: “Obviously, you tried.” Because dude tried. There is a certain “spirit of the OSR” present in this adventure, a kind of kit-bashing that was prevalent in the early OSR days. Dude has grabbed some house rules from other OSR products, and, perhaps, even some room ideas. The map is easy to read and there are AT LEAST four ways from the first floor to the second in the mansion. The keys start with a bolded room name “Living Room” and are followed by a short description and then some bullets for things going on in the room. The mansion tropes are here. Body in the chimney. Dude tried. 

There are a couple of things that are pulling this adventure down. Well, more than a couple, but two major ones. There need to be more cross-references in the text to make locations data, especially named NPCs, easier. The rumors are pretty generic, like “The house is now haunted because a wizard did it.” and so on. And the layout, the size of the map, is relatively small, at twenty rooms for each of the main levels. It’s just hard to get a really good environment going with that without some really good situations. The major issues, however, are interactivity and descriptions. 

The descriptions here are terse … and minimal. Nothing wrong with terse, that’s what they should be. But, also, they are minimal. We don’t really get the flavour of the room. The pantry says that it has naked walls with shelves full of rotten ingredients, and also kitchen and dining tools. Sure. That’s a pantry in a haunted house. We’re starting off pretty well with “naked walls”, but then it drags to just a standard description of a pantry. Peeling wallpaper. A jumble of collapsed shelves. The smell of old cinnamon. . A jumble of beaten up pots? We’re really looking to bring this room alive, and it’s just not going there. The kitchen next doors has “A central cooking table with a mutilated corpse in it, and 5 Ghouls in chef’s garb using rusty tools to prepare the meat and hurl it into a boiling suspicious soup.” So, the same kitchen in just about every haunted house adventure. A boiling soup can be great, but suspicious is a conclusion rather than a description. Mutilated is a little abstract for the horror that the kitchen scene is supposed to be conveying, and our ghoul friends are rather perfunctory with no description to speak of at all. The place abounds in “religious frescoes” with little more to go on. And by “little” I mean “nothing”. The rest of the adventure is more of the same. A degree of writing that is is trying, but the words choice, or the ability to convey the imagined room via the written room, in order to convey it to the DM, just isn’t getting there at all.

Interactivity is about the same. We’ve seen the ghouls in the kitchen. The rest of the rooms pretty much fall in to this same category. You can stab things, of course. And there are, to it’s credit, a decent number of things to talk to, especially among the servants. The interactivity, though, is fairly lacking. You get a body in a carpet of smoothing, the kitchen ghouls, a poltergeist playing a piano to summon specters (at level one!) and so on. Thus, our interactivity is somewhat related to combat, and generally to how combat starts. That’s not bad, in and of itself, but it’s lack of interactivity beyond this that drags the place down. We want things to investigate, leverage, figure out, discover, and so on. A challenge beyond merely what’s on the character sheet. 

This is, at its heart, a pretty standard haunted mansion adventure. We’ve got the undead running around, a couple of barely functioning servants, a ghost butler, dead-ish family members, and so on. Shadowbrook and Xyntillian remain the gold standard in this genre, towering above everything else. This is an also ran, but a good first effort for the designer!

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is 24 pages … more than enough to get a sense of the product and the the rooms. So, good

preview.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/428210/Curse-of-the-Blood-Moon-A-Bloodborne-Inspired-Module?1892600