Kallista’s Floating Keep

Posted on April 13, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Artem Serebrennikov
Self Published
5e
Level 5

Again, the image has nothing to do with the adventure. I just google searched on floating keep and “keep floating” popped up and I liked it.

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Fear the mists, fear the tides, fear the seagull’s call! A sea witch from a bygone age has returned to exact revenge, her floating keep spelling doom for surface dwellers!

This eight page nine room adventure features an “under da sea!” theme, without actually being under the sea. It’s got some nice imagery in places, and great use of integrating magic items and creatures i nto the design in a natural way. It’s also a little fun-housey, but, not bad for a 5e adventure.

So, get this … stop me if you’re heard this one before … there’s this fishing village and dark mists have moved in , the fish have dried up and bad shit is going down!I kid, but, that’s what we’ve signed up for here. There are rumors that a dead sea hag has returned and the party is rowing out to her keep in the mists to stop her. Along the way, in a very early paragraph on the first page we get this gem “During the journey, the PCs encounter foreboding omens (a lone albatross with a broken wing moaning Kallista’s name, shapes of enormous fish appearing and vanishing underwater, seas turning blood-red, etc.).” Uh … fuck yeah man! That’s some good shit, the use of “etc” aside. I wish more adventures would do this, insert omens and “the land has turned against itself” type of shit. Too many times the party just walks up to the dungeon. No! The world is WRONG and only some fucking idiots (IE: the party) goes out to meet it. Gold, glory, whatever … normal folk heed the warnings. This kind of thing sets the mood. What was it, the latest Witcher PC game, that had that tree full of corpses hanging in it? That set the fucking mood. Andm a lone albatross with a broken wing (nice classical callback!) does the same thing. Before the party gets to the main event you want the fuckers quaking a bit. The entrance to the mythic underworld, in action! Set the fucking mood, just like Artem did with an almost throw-away paragraph. 

This “typical” 5e adventure has a few things going for it that set it above, better than the usual 5e adventure. The keep itself is made up of everflowing black water. That’s cool! And in one of the early rooms you get Fourteen human skeletons in tattered sailors clothing, cutlasses tucked in their belts, suspended on ropes tied around their necks with placards on them saying “PIRATE.” Uh, yeas, thank you! They are, clearly, gonna be skeletons that attack the party. But it’s not just throw away bones that assemble themselves. The callback to hanging pirates, replete with placard, a few extra details, this nails the scene! Oh, and, there’s a skull sittong on a chest in the middle of them, complete with eyepatch. Noice! That’s whatthe fuck a pirate lair looks like man! 

And, that skull? It’s a “flaming skull” from the 5e monster manual. That’s good. Note here that the skeletons and the skull FEEL like the monsters that they are. It’s not just throwing in a flaming skull as an enemy, but, the party gets to “see” them first, and then they turn in to what you KNOW they will be. The flaming skull feels natural, just as the pirate skeletons do. This designer does this repeatedly in this adventure. It’s a good skill to have, turning what would otherwise be just a “12 skeletons” from the monster manual in to MORE than just the manual states. It’s almost like the designer decided what to have in the room and THEN went looking for stats for me. Imagine first THEN find some way to make it gameable.

And, then, there’s the magic items. There’s a golden scimitar/cuttlass, which makes perfect sense in this room. (it lets you float on water and does extra damage to water type creatures.” And, that pirate skull with the eyepatch? The eyepatch is magical, acting as goggles of the night. Not goggles. An eyepatch. On a pirate, who always wear eyepatches. It FITS. It’s good retheme. Later on there’s the hag who is clothed in anemones. Which, when/if you defeat her act as a robe of scintillating colours. Perfect! It takes a natural element of the adventure, for this encounter, and turns it in to something in the book. If you’re gonna use a book item then this rethemeing is the way to go!

The pirate skeleton room is kind of funhousey, right? Well, how about “dozens of oysters nested in its niches. They open and close rhythmically to the sounds of calypso, produced by a tin pan and drumsticks, hovering in the air and playing seemingly by themselves. Thirteen enormous crabs are gamboling in a round dance around the Instrument.” Ok, so, i can’t argue that this is bad imagery. It’s pretty cool. But it is most definitely funhousey, as is the room full of mounted fish on the wall with a sign saying “Plant a kiss on your favorite hanging fish and see what happens.” Uh, ok sure. I shall admit that funhouse designs are not my favrote, and yet, this thing does them in an almost OD&D/Tunnels & Trolls style, and there’s a charm in that. Ot just the same old boring heroic battle bullshit, but, having a little (or a lot) of fun. Tonally, it’s not my thing, but I bet a lot of 5e players would eat this fucking shit up. 

The formatting here is one of the weaker parts of the adventure. I don’t want to go too far down this road, but, it’s a simple paragraph format with some boldings and italics in it. It’s getting a little wall of texty, or, tending in that direction without fully going over the edge. I’m sure it was probably just some two column format in a word processor, and, for that, it’s decent. But, it could benefit form breaking things up a bit more. 

And the interactivity, well … ok, so, yes, there’s interactivity, but it feels set-piecy (or funhousy, I guess) if you know whatI mean. There’s a lot of springing to life when you enter or touch something and that’s a cumbersome way of doing things. 

Overall, though, I would not be upset to play in this in a con, or even run it if it were dropped in my lap with 5 minutes till the game starts. 

Snag a copy here:

Kallistas-Floating-Keep-by-Artem-SerebrennikovDownload
Posted in 5e, Reviews | 5 Comments

Palace on the Pink Waves

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Michael H
Self Published / (@the_fun_cube on twitter)
Cairn

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Lament the Wine Sea, with its pitiless tides and fearsome depths! Forlorn castaways are drawn to a lonesome island where lords and beggars alike scrounge to make the most of their terrible, drunken fate.

This eight page adventure details a seven room “palace” floating on a pile of jetsam in the middle of a bottle of giant wine. Yup, you read that right. It’s creative and well formatted enough to run … although not maximally so. I’d run the fucking place!

This one is weird, in the grand tradition of fantastic locations. Bottle City? The L:iving Room? How about a pocket dimension that is literally a giant half-filled bottle of rose wine. Floating in the middle of it is a pile of jetsam with a “palace” made of jetsam. On the shores of the tiny jetsam island, barely large enough to contain the palace, are a few fellow refugees that have been here awhile. All transported, as you were, by drinking a magic bottle of win. The palace is currently occupied by homunculi, in a kind of manic micky mouse sorcerer’s apprentice style of crazy going on inside. Wine dark sea, indeed!

This thing has got the right amount of crazy for me. Not gonzo, but fantastic and filled with that wonderful variety of nutso NPC’s that can truly bring a D&D game to life. We start with the hook, the way the party gets transported: a magical wine bottle that sends you there when you drink. With great advice like “don’t include it in a hoard, no sane adventurer drinks shit from a hoard. Instead, when they come back to the inn to celebrate, have the innkeep go in to his celler and produce the bottle of his finest wine. Excellent! (And, it translates well in to the other NPC”s the party members will meet. All of them also transported by a bottle of wine, some
Gifted” it by others …”) Whoever drank it ends up being plopped downin to the ocean, along with everything withing 10 feet of them, including party members who didn’t drink and what will become the jetsam of the Wine Sea. Clever eh, how it all works together to feed the core elements of t he adventure? That’s pretty fucking well constructed. 

You see the island and swim towards itm being greeted by the NPCs huddled on its shores. There’s a great reference sheet, a page long, tha details them, their story, what they know, want, etc. It’s a great fucking resource and puts to shame those teeny tony NPC reference sheets from other adventures that provide minimal, and useless information. Everyone is a little drunk in the Wine Sea, since the sea provides nourishment. There’s sober sam, who ISNT drunk, and is dying because of it. There’s hobgoblins and goblins, relatively friendly by blamed for everything by everyone else. Lizardmen nobles, and another faction of artisans. Some humans round thingsout … and the mer-folk who are the bogeymen of the wine sea, attacking rafts, etc. And then there’s the palace, made up of ramshackle refuse … and currently being occupied by some crazed homunculi.

Inside we’ve got more NPC’s, and a variety of situations to get involved in. Rooms are a couple of pargarpghs long, in general, with good bolding to call attention to important features and descriptions. “The wrecked remains of a communal tavle, cabinets of domestic supplies (dining sets, games, books, etc) and beds for lizardmen nobles” read one bolded entry. “ The homunculi are going absolutely apeshit on the place.” Reads the next line. Nice! I can picture that! “If they spot the party they shriek like a dying cat and attack.” Like a dying cat. Again, something you can recognixze and work with. 

The adventure does this, room after room. Providing brief little snippets of description, situations to be resolved, and well though out descriptions that paint vidi pictures. Exactly what it should do. Eventually it ends up with the chief instigator being found, and, perhaps, a way out of the bottle dimension being discovered … through a journey down in a diving bell to … the cork. 🙂

There’s more I could comment, on, Good treasure, described just enough and imaginative (and, including a double barrelled shotgun … something near and dear to my adventuring heart. Worry not gentle readers, this is not a gonzo adventure or full of lazer zappers.) 

The basics of the adventure are pretty simple, the homunculi in the palace. The NPC’s, while vivid and fun, seem to play a much lesser degree of involvement then I perhaps implied they do. It’s not that that is bad, but, perhaps, it’s a lost opportunity. A little more in this area could have been welcome, a little more intrigue and so on. Oh, they are set up, in the NPC’s, for some involvement with each other but the general situation with the palace takeover seems almost to override this. Somehow involving them more, without it being forced or being contrived, could have added another dimension to the adventure. I imagine it is imagined to be run that way, it’s just not as well communicated through the text as it could be … even though, again, I believe its implied. 

A great fun little environment to drop in to your game!

Snag a copy at:

https://the-fun-cube.itch.io/palace-on-the-pink-waves

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, The Best | 35 Comments

Surgerock Vault

Posted on April 9, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Malrex
The Merciless Merchants
OSE
Levels 7-9

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

The very oceans and seas tremble in fear of the floating rock that parts its waves, traveling to destinations only the gods know. The pock marked monstrosity defies sinking as it roams the sea, it’s cargo a mystery. What deadly mysteries reside within this strange floating rock?

This ten page adventure features about nine rooms in a  keep that floats among the waves … housing a powerful magic item. It’s got interesting things going on, decent formatting and a descriptions that don’t suck. I struggle with the confines of the contest.

This time it’s not a keep floating along and disgorging raiders on the villagers but rather a keep floating along the waves – ready for someone to plunder! There’s no real hook or anything else, nor does there need to be one, it’s just a place, fantastic, and ready to be fucked with.

Malrex does a couple of good things here that is relatively rare in an adventure. FIrst, he(?) has a formatting style that mostly disappears in to the background. It doesn’t standout as a formatting style, is what I mean. The rooms are easy to read, scan, and run but it doesn’t FEEL like Malrex is trying hard to make them that way, or that there IS a format to the rooms. There most definitely IS one though. Rooms start with an intro paragraph, describing the most obvious things in the rooms, ready to be paraphrased and expanded upon by the DM. This is the key to this kind of formatting. It doesn’t FEEL like anything special is going on with the formatting. The initial paragraph outlines everything major in the room. You can riff off of it. There’s just enough information to relay to the party. It doesn’t overshare and the descriptions are at least a little evocative, sometimes with a keyword bolded. What follows then id a series of bullets describing the major things going on in the room. This is easy to scan and locate follow up information. The whole thing just works well.

The other thing done really well is the .. theming? of the encounters. Not really set pieces, but, anchor items in the rooms/scenarios which everything tends to revolve around. You have this major thing and the room builds around it. And they tend to be pretty iconic, at least at this level. The entrance to the keep is described as: “Thousands of skeletons of different races (mostly lizardman) scramble forever towards a rune-carved portcullis archway that borders a tall entry that punches its way through the rock” Fuck! Yes! I’m pretty sure this isn’t a literal scrabble, but rather more scree-pile-ish, but, still, either way, works for me! Also, pulsing runes on the massive doorway and a gong that sounds as you approach … the doors opening automagically? That’s a fucking entrance!

What follows is a series of rooms that range from more set-piecey (a stone giant and basilik throw statue heads at the party in an arens-like place) to less so (an ancient stone giant is fishing, and thats all he really cares about. Kobold vermin parly for boons, a chimera with a personality. These are highlights, with minotaurs in a maze-like area and cave bears being more “normal” encounters. There’s nothing like having the bloody head of a lizardman thrown at you to start an encounter off right! There’s good specificity here, anchoring scene elements and then allowing the DM to further riff on them. Exactly the way things should be. And a surprise or two thrown in, like a doppelganger that might actually trick the party without it being a total gimpfest.

Writing is evocative enough. This is, I think, the hardest part of adventure writing, creating an evocative description. Formatting is just a science, and encounters are something that, hopefully, rely on your imagination and it not being crushed out of you. But, crafting an evocative description is art and requires a lot of work. It’s ok here, not boring, but, still could use work to more fully bring things alive and avoid phrasing like “the thirsty sand absorbs the blood.” That’s a bit flowery, Mal. 🙂 It DOES communicate the vibe of the sand, so, good job with that. Maybe I should accept the groan I uttered when reading it and move on, enjoying the vibe alone?

I’ve got a criticism, and its related, I think, to the level range. It’s not balance related but rather my usual complaint in this area: does the adventure/scope match the level range? I wouldn’t say this is a railroad, but, the design of the levels means that you WILL be going from top to bottom and ending the adventure in the final room. It FEELS constrained, especially given the scope and level range. Then again, I’m the asshole that dictated the number of rooms and page count limit, so, you know, fuck me for imposing it. And, Mal does the best theu can, repeating “room 5”, a kobold lair, a few times in order to beef up the number of rooms on the map if not in the key. Still, it feels a little constrained and therefore more crafted-as-a-DnD-adventure than a natural place. Such is life, I guess.

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


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/390976/Surgerock-Vault?1892600

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

Hello Daddy Stirring!

Posted on April 9, 2022 by Bryce Lynch

hi!

Posted in Reviews | 5 Comments

Tidal Terror Tower

Posted on April 6, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Olle Skogren
Self Published
ACKS
Level 6

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Be scared of the water, the current and the ocean too! A frightening tall building of hard material moves around the seas, disgorging its killer shipment of reptilian reprobates wherever it chances to beach itself!

A fearsome tower of stone prowls the salt-drenched coast! It appears at dusk to disgorge hundreds of rapacious lizardmen who carry off treasure and captives never to be seen again. By dawn, the tower is gone. Deliver the coastline from the terror of the tower! Earn a barony through your bravery or see the coast descend into poverty and piracy because of your failure!

This seven page adventure features a tower on the back of a giant snail filled with … more than 480 lizard men! Yuperoo Buckeroo, this is thing is an ACKS adventure and is brining the mass combat, potentially, to the adventure! Decent flavour, takes advantage of ACKS … It’s a fine adventure for pitched battles and mass combat. I guess, anyway? I don’t know how to review those.

Ok, so, big tower going up and down the coast raiding villages. Surfaces at night, all submarine style, and about 500 lizardmen jump off and raid a village until morning. It’s a tower, riding on the back of a GIANT snail. The adventure outlines raiding the tower at night while most of the lizardmen are out raiding (hence, the room keys), as well as attacking the tower/snail with a ship/siege gear and meeting the lizardmen raiders with your own army. These are nice touches for a sixth level adventure in ACKS where mass combat and ship combat cou;d/should start being a thing. I don’t know how the fuck to review that shit, though. There’s a bout a page to support these things, along with some notes about what happens if the party succeeds or fails at stopping the raiders. Including, you get your hex given to you by a local lord … and the old hex owner comes back with an army to take it back!) 

So, it’s got kind of a sandboxy nature to it, at least in that it details the coast, the raiding, the mass battle and hex owner shit. Assuming you take the battle to the tower while the raiders are gone, this is where the traditional room keys come in. The rooms are pretty minimal, basically one big room per tower floor (six in total, with a few more off to the side I’ll cover later) and generally having about thirty lizardmen in it. They are tormenting some captives by throwing pebbles and ud at them in the dark. Or, in the infirmary: “impatiently recuperating. All have an arm or a leg in various stages of regeneration. Some are chewing on amputated limbs. One squats by a shield used as a flat bowl and stirs a mix of blood and crushed seashells.” So, we get a little bit of evocative writing and a little situation in each of the rooms to help the set the scene before th big pitched battle starts. Just enough, I guess, to provide a meaningful pretext that this is something other than a bunch of big fights. I mean, it is, and, I don’t mean my comment in a shitty way. It is what it is. If you’re gonna raid a tower full of lizardmen then there are gonna be some big fight and the room descriptions DO provide a little bit of flavour before that starts. It also does other little things like noting sounds and lights for adjoining rooms, and, has a great little encounter with a lizardman champion looking for single combat … and who could become your henchman if played right. Awesomesauce! And that encounter also has a little giant clam mini-game with snagging treasure from three of them and not alerting the big room of lizardmen below by using sledgehammers, etc, to get in to them.

There are some nice magic items also. The hair of the undine, which causes one to show up if you are drowning to help save you … and who dies of a broken heart if you DO drown. Awww, that’s sweet! And a magic sword, +1/+3 vs pirates, The Corsecuter! I do love me the name!

There are elements to the adventure that repeatedly stress the more open ended nature of this one, trying to be of larger scope and/or support a slightly different style of play, getting in to the domain area, than a typical low level adventure. I appreciate that a lot, including a scrying stone bowl that one could, presumably, cart off. The lizardman henchman, taking the giant snail captive and exploiting it, and/or somehow taking whats in this and stretching it out a bit to fit more naturally in to your game as several villages get raided, rumors swirl, etc. 

I think Olle does a good job here. I think. As a “normal” adventure it would be a little lacking because of the large pitched battles. But it’s not a “normal” adventure. It’s taking the party in to the start of domain play, which should be happening around sixth level anyway. I just see this shit so infrequently that I have NO idea how to process it. I THINK it could maybe support the beginning of the adventure a little more, the investigation of the ruined villages, the lizardmen raiding them, a build up, etc, and maybe a couple of battle events for a big pitched battle? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

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

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/390208/Tidal-Terror-Tower?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 6, No Regerts, Reviews | 10 Comments

Gravestone Deep

Posted on April 4, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Cryptic Keyway
Self Published
B/X
Level 3

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Be scared of the water, the current and the ocean too! A frightening tall building of hard material moves around the seas, disgorging its killer shipment of reptilian reprobates wherever it chances to beach itself!

This nine page adventure details a tower with about ten or so locations. It’s got a great format, good interactivity, and great writing and creativity. An excellent example of what you can do in a short amount of time if you actually give a fuck. 

I was gonna trash this things marketing blurb as being lame … but then I saw it included the word reprobate, and since my own D&Dmine if Ruffians & Reprobates, well, clearly, this thing deserves high marks!

What we have here is a great effort, someone who is close to graduating from journeyman to master in adventure writing. The basics here are the same as most of the other adventures in the contest: a tower appears at sea and has reptilian raiders in it. In this one the raiders don’t come ashore but rather its hooked out that the party is raiding the tower. 

The first sign that this adventure was going to be above average was in its first hook: “Weird local fisherman Lucien Halibut has offered 20 prize salted mackerel as reward for anyone who can drive out the occupiers of the mysterious keep that appeared last night at the edge of the sea. These aren’t ordinary mackerel, they’re quite valuable. Seriously, do this, Lucien mentioned you by name and may come looking for you if you don’t. You don’t want that.” Specific. Slightly farcical. Something  you know how to run and fill the rest in on our own, and do a good job, just from the couple of sentences mentioned. Another has graffiti appearing on walls and “Find an answer in the creepy tower that appeared that same night, before demographic paranoia broadens to include the PCs’ generation.” Not the best, but, I appreciate the snark and I AM inspired to run a paranoia thing from it, which is the point of a hook. 

Continuing on, the descriptive details here is good. It’s specific aand imaginative. The exterior walls of the tower are constructed from old gravestones, with weathered writing on it and covered by graffiti. Also, bonus, easy to climb because of it. Yeah! I love it when the designer doesn’t gang up on the PC’s. Gravestone walls SHOULD be easy to climb,so they are! Right after that we get a little note about the party seeing a tiny dingy out at sea … with a vengeful fisherman in it armed with a harpoon and grimly singing sea shanties. Fuck yea! I can run that! That’s what specificty gets you. Your mind races. You know what to do. And this adventure does that! I can go on and on. Most of the adventure has something you can easily riff on in most locations.

The format is good. We start rooms with three or four olded words, describing a general vibe, like “metal grate floor, ammonia smell, sound of snapping bones.” Thats the basics of the room. Then you get a short room description of a couple of sentences, then some bolded words for major paragraph headings to orient the DM to whats contained in those paragraphs. The writing is focused. It’s easy to scan. It does exactly what it should do. There’s a monster reference sheet, all of the creatures on one page in the back. The maps are clear (using Dungeonscrawl? Looks like maybe an interesting mapper, even though its online only?) They are annotated well. They also don’t have fucking numbers on them, just words, with the corresponding words in the adventure. In this case it’s probably short enough that doesn’t matter, but, I’d still probably just number the fucking thing. 

I note, also, that the designer has used the EXIT section of each room in an interesting way. I usually rail against such things as being redundant (with the map) and just taking up space and padding things ou t. In this case they have used the exits section of each room to describe sensory information for the various exits. You hear laughter behind this door, or you smell cooking beyond this one, and so on. I can get behind that. Other interesting things include a 2-axis wandering monster table with a preview, the monster encounter, and teh aftermath of the monster appearing on the table. Nice touch and brings the extra element I’m looking for in wanderers. And, it really takes up almost no more space than a traditional table.

It’s hard to get across just how well this thing is done in the creativity department/specificity department. Easy to run NPC’s. Unique treasure and magic items. It’s all in here and all will create memorable play without it being overtly PUSHED to do so. It’s walking that line very well indeed.

I note an interesting thing while going over this: the one time magic item. What do you do with these in your game? A longsword with a one time use smoke bomb in the hilt, or a bottle of whiskey thatinduces vomiting … the ensuing vomit instantly hardening like a web spell. These sem, to me, like things that are to use in game in practice. How do you figure out what to do without voiding the magic items usefulness or communicate the effect in such a way it can be leveraged? Otherwise you’re just moria-gulping potions at random when you’re out food and hoping something good happens.

Also, you could have done more with the cover crone. Just saying. And rando sentry mentions that are out of place in that first room, the foyer.

This thing shows what you can do with a “basic” adventure. There’s no crazy gimmicks. There’s no real gonzo. It’s just your “normal” adventure. But it’s a WELL DONE normal adventure. Gonzo gimmicks may hypnotize, sparkle someone else’s eyes.

Snag a copy here:

https://cryptickeyway.itch.io/gravestone-deep

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 14 Comments

The Floating Tower from Atlantis

Posted on April 2, 2022 by Bryce Lynch

That’s just some rando meme I pulled down for the blog image, it doesn’t belong to the adventure.

By D.M. Ritzlin
Self Published
B/X
Levels 1-3

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

When Atlantis began to sink, the wizard Oulvert invoked powerful magics to teleport his tower to a place of safety elsewhere on Earth. However, inaccuracies in the spellcasting combined with the destructive energies of the cataclysm resulted in an unforeseeable conjuncture. The three topmost levels of the tower were swept away on the tides of Chaos, and Oulvert found his home floating on the desolate seas of another dimension. As the years went by, the hands of Fate continued to pluck the tower from one world and deposit it in another, always placing it on a large body of water far from land. Now Oulvert’s tower has appeared in your campaign world…

What we’ve got here is a nine room wizards tower bobbing up and down on the ocean like a cork. It’s got decent focus and interactivity, and while the writing is not overly evocative it also is not generic either. A decent little wizard tower with the de rigeur wizard tower twists.

THis is a bare bones wizards tower, ruined, of course. The conceit is that the top five floors have broken off from the rest and bob, like a cork, up and down in the ocean, mostly upright, and then teleport from world to world sometimes. Thus we have some small opportunities to take advantage of the ocean, and the ruined lower levels/flooding, as well as a “everyone to the right side of the room!” mechanic to get it to lean … although that’s really nothing more than what I just mentioned I still like it and it could have been used more. While it shows up to, perhaps, open a secret door, another usage of it could have been cool also.

Wizard Tower means Fantastic Tower, which means Interactivity Tower. That’s what the trope is: it’s a fucked up place and you mess around and find out … and maybe get some treasure. We’ve got a stairwell on the lower floor that leads to the ocean underneath (spiral, of course …) and some broken floor that also drops off in to the watery deep. Fruit trees for eating shit, and scrying chambers to fuck around in (which, also, nice note, allow you to take the 1’ diameter giant scrying eyeball with you! I’m happy to see this. Of course, you also have to hit it up with forty drops of blood a day ala eye drops, but, hey man, you’re the one with the one foot diameter scrying eyeball. Think of it like changing your oil.) We’ve got the alchemists lab, of course, with a potion to drink … that has a gelatinous cube in it. Ouchies for the poor sucker who drinks that one! So, about one interactive element, of one sort or another beyond mere combat, in each room. It doesn’t FEEL like the designer is putting one in each room, it feels more natural than that and I adore adventures that FEEL right.

Formatting is decent. It’s basic two column, with mini-maps of the rooms appearing in the adventure in appropriate places. Bullets help keep major room concepts separate and the general format is that the most important/obvious things appear first. So, in the first room of the tower the broken windows are mentioned, sinc ethats what the ;ayers are likely to encounter first from the outside. Then the flooding, then the books floating in the flooded water and so forth. You get it. It’s done well. A bit of bolding might have helped a bit, there is a bit of a wall of text thing no matter the bullet format, or, perhaps, some more white space. There’s also a kind of “run on” with one room sometimes flowing in the next because of a need for whitespace to help separate it. It’s hard to describe … it’s not always a “read the entire column” thing but rather a “go to column two to finish the room and then back to column one again for the next room” kind of thing.

We are a little wordy in the descriptions, in places, and a little shy with the descriptions. “However, if opened without the use of a key …” is a bit conversational in tone. Certainly I wouldn’t expect a purely mechanistic description, with the joy of language in it or those snide DM asides that I love so much, but a little more focus on the editing could have helped. Then again, there was a short deadline in this contest. Likewise the descriptions are a little light in place, or, I mean, the descriptive phrases and adjectives. Our wanderersa re “orney lizardmen” or “inquisitive locath”, which, while better than nothing on a wanderer table, could use a little beefing up with an extra word or two, maybe. This sort of minimal approach is better than nothing, but really could use a little more work, in the room description in particular, to beef things up to the next level. “Murals were painted on the walls, but are not covered in so much reeking mold as to be illegible” Not bad. Not great, but not bad. Nice reeking. 

So, decent little concept and adventure, better than most wizard towers, but not quite reaching the heights I would like. (The correct response to this is: “Fuck You Bryce, you gave me a week to fucking write it!”)

You can snag a copy here for download:

The-Floating-Tower-from-Atlantis-FinalDownload
Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts | 11 Comments

SinkingStone Keep

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Eric Johnson
Self Published
AD&D 1e
Levels 1-4

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Fear stalks the swamps! The ruins of SinkingStone Keep has thrown its lizard like shadow over the village of Soggy Bottom. Can you and your fellow adventurers root out this festering evil and destroy it? Beware, many who enter the swamp are never seen or heard from again!

This eleven page adventure details a lizard man lair with about ten locations, but a swampy village and brief overland. It’s a true blu AD&D adventure, with the attention to detail. Writing is effective at times, especially in the village and overland, but falls down in the lair proper. The lair is also pretty much one big hack/frontal assault. I would prefer more, but, for what it is is it’s pretty decent.

So, This is an AD&D adventure. What’s an AD&D adventure? Well, I’m going to say True to the Rules. Meaning that it mentions, and takes advantage of, the actual rules in the book. Straight up front it’s got a section on Morale. And then a brief note on movement rate through a swamp, and then Quicksand rules from the Wilderness Survival Guide. Following that is Holding your Breathe rules and something on Swamp Conditions from WG6 that details your shit (mostly food) rotting in the swamp. (That section strikes me as a bit lengthy. It’s not completely the onerous shit about desert/swamp/snow that I usually rail against, too rules heavy, but, also, it goes on a little long. I might say that it coverers longtimeframes, like metal starting to decay after two weeks, but, then again, A&D players camp out to heal to a rotting table that include a 2% chance of rotting every ten days might be ok. I pity the DM that actually calls for these checks from their players though …) 

But, that’s not all! Oh no, we’ve got some AD&D flavour here! First, this is going to be more of a B2 style adventure. You’re gonna go in to the ruins, hopefully take some lizardmen by surprise, and then eventually blow your cover and face an onslaught of twenty of them in a phalanx formation. You sneak until discovered. After that they form ranks, and, if you return, replace some flosses and are on high alert, having set some traps. AD&D detail at its finest! We’ve also got some nice town detail … with ethe villagers in the nearby swamp town being worshippers of Wastri … and ready to gak the demi-humans in the party when they return and feed them to their toads. (Or, maybe, they just do it anyway. The intro says demi-humans while the conclusion section basically says they double-cross the party at a feast no matter what. Meh. Less interesting that way. Or, maybe it’s just assuming all parties have demi-humans?) 

I’m pretty happy with the intro also. A couple of paragraphs that mentions, a highlight, a low level war between the lizard men and the villagers. The lizardmen raid caravans and burn supplies, but let the people go. I imagine that the villagers hunt the lizardmen and do lizardmen on pikes out front, burned at the stake, etc. Some hateful villager shit. 

The village is terse described, the six or so buildings, but it does a decent job. The trading post is a good example of an entry “This is the social center of the village. At different times it can be a flurry of chaotic trading or completely empty and quiet. The place is empty save for tables spread throughout. Old Bert runs the place and will run the party off unless they participate in the aggressive barter. “Not worth spit!””  I can imagine the place, and the dialog line from Bert, which all of the NPCs get, is a decent little thing that tells you how to run them. Good job, about the right amount of detail!

The overland travel is a decent part of this, but just handled through the overland hex maps and the wanderers table. About half or so get little entries, like goblins “ They will demand that the party pay a toll for being in their swamp.” or some such. It’s mostly the dumb animals that are just entries. 

Once you hit the keep where the lizardmen are then it devolves. Basically, there are watchposts. If they get away to warn the inside, in the basement, then it’s gonna get a pitched battle. And since there are about three watchposts upstairs, it’s hard to imagine that not happening. Also, with the close environs of the basement, and it being dark, torches and combat are gonna alert the place fast. So, pitched fight. Hope you got a lot of sleep spells. I’m not the biggest fans of those, I think they are a pain to run in D&D, but, it happens and I recognize its an important part of the game. 

Descriptions inside the “dungeon” (a very small eight room cave) start to fall down a lot. “Area is lit by torches. 4 guards are posted here.” “A crocodile is cooking on a spit. It is being tended to by 5 females.” Nice croc detail, but little else. The stairs creaking as you descend to the dungeon is the closest you get to something truly evocative, I think.

It’s relatively terse and, I would say, outline writing. No, not really an outline, but, tending toward that style, much in the way B2 is. You get the requirements to run the room, and maybe an evocative keyword here and there. In fact, I think the B2 style is the closest to the style here. Imagine the kobold cave writing style. That’s what you get here.

Yeah, it’s eleven pages and the contest says nine, I think? But, there’s a cover and a license page, so, nine pages of content, plus, I like having a cover to post on the blog. 🙂

I suspect that the AD&D true fans will like this. It’s a little abstracted for my tastes, but, I recognize the style and that the true AD&D crowd leans that way. It’s hard to suggest more room detail/evocative writing when it’s just gonna be a pitched battle, because of the close confines of the cavern rooms. It FEELS like the adventure, including the town, wandereing/hex, and keep, are minor parts of the adventure though, with the supporting info being the majority of the page count. Fourish pages for the overland and keep and village? What about the other five (seven.) I get it, maps, but still, it feels a little like the supporting info is taking over.

I’m left both liking this, for what it is, and being unsettled by it, because of the strong AD&D style, which is not my fav. When the B/X person is confronted by the true AD&D 1e adventure, they are left a bit bewildered. 🙂 I’d be interested in the opinions of the hard core AD&D 1e crowd. Not you lightweights actually playing 1e as B/X, but the true 1e fanatics who can appreciate a Wastri reference.

(Also, the map numbers are a little difficult to read on the full colour maps. They needed to be in an inset circle with a white background or something, to be easier to read.)

Pick it up for free over at the designers dropbox! (The designer who, I note, lives relatively close to me and yet still hasn’t gone drinking with me yet!)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/34tgq41rjab5r5x/TFP1%20SinkingStone%20Keep.pdf?dl=0

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 13 Comments

What Lurks Beneath Tidewater Tower

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jordan Rudd
Self-published
5e
level 3

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Despite its benign appearance, Tidewatch Tower has an interesting history. A few months ago it served as the hideout for a group of unscrupulous seafaring adventurers led by a rogue named Mad Karli. After a particularly lucrative and dangerous outing they hid their  booty in the caverns under the tower. Mad Karli then betrayed, poisoned and murdered what remained of her crew. Unfortunately this was the same day that the sea harpies decided to move in and she was drowned and eaten in short order, her remains cast into the sea

Hmmm, I do seem to be stumbling on a lot of sea keep adventures lately … weird. 

This nine page adventure details around nine locations in and under a tower on a small rock surrounded by the tides. It’s got some good specificity in places and keeps things relatively terse, especially for a 5e adventure. And doubly especially for the first adventure the designer has written. A little more attention to bolding and a few other details would help shift in to a journeyman effort.

I was struck by the ludcriness of the background, in a good way. The background is something that only the DM is going to see and seldom influences play. But … not seen in this is the second paragraph about mermen hiding a cursed idol in the tower. Following this through, I can see chaining together about twelve other misfortunes, in a Rube Goldberg kind of way, for the DM background. I know I harp about tersity all the time, but, I also appreciate a little side eye to the DM running the thing, and sly remarks in the adventure … to an appropriate degree. A paragraph to lighten the DMs day, pushing this, struck me as a cool little thing. But … I digress.

We’ve got a little rumor section up front, with three rumors. They are trying to be in voice, and in fact are, which I appreciate. The added color is good when the rumors do this. They are also a little direct. Let’s imagine three different style of rumors. “Pirates hide treasure in the tower.” This might be the more traditional, a minimalist approach. Then, the one from this adventure “I heard that ol’ scoundrel Mad Karli hid her treasure in the tower. Her crew aint been seen on these shores in months, but some other strangers have been asking after her.” We’ve got extra specificity and some in voice going on. This is great, let’s call this the minimum acceptable level. But, again, it’s a little direct. The pirate hid treasure in the tower. I’m suggesting that you want to IMPLY that, but not SAY that. 

Our adventure starts outside, on the causeway leading to the tower. Covered during high tides and waist high water during low tide. And two sea harpies looking for folk to munch on while they wade out. The waist-high water is a good detail, and it notes that there IS a movement reduction, but not what it is. A cross-reference to a rule book page would have been nice ,or a footnote or paren comment or some such reading (half movement) or whatever it is. Also, the fucking things run away to their nest on the tower when heavily damaged. Great! We’ve got smarties to fight! The terse but interesting causeway details, the sea harpy attack, the naturalistic difficult terrain … all great and don’t SEEM like the pretext they are. It feels right, as opposed to a lot of 5e where this sort of thing feels contrived in a wargamey way. 

There’s some good specificity in this adventure, tossed in. One harpy wields a rusty cutlass while another wears a jaunty tricorn hat. Hmmm, that’s weird, but makes sense given they killed Mard Karli. A necklace of fireballs is made up of glass globes with swirling red glittering inside. And pirate dudes have love letters with bad spelling. So, both an occasional light-heartedness and specificity. 

There’s some creativity beyond the specificity also. A fetish/necklace of a fishhook is a minor magc item giving you advantage on catching fish/survival checks. I like the more naturalistic manor of this (being a big fan of the minor magic items in Bree and the barrow Downs as a child.) There may be a bit of video-gamey element to this, as one takes off and wear various fetishes, but, still, it’s coming from the right place. 

And, there a natural way of dealing with the short=rest/long-rest issue. You get one short for free, but after that you get some extra pirates showing up! The ones mentioned in the rumor, her boyfriend, who wants answers as to why shes missing … from you! That’s a great control on the long-rest situation. At least the first one anyway. But, also, this is what would happen. You’d just slowly fuck that place up, resting as you need to. Such is life when the dungeon is close to town, although … perhaps others are looting also? Maybe that’s a control on the frequent rest issue, beyond the wanderers? Anyway …

Good descriptions, decent magic items … what’s lacking here? There is about three pages of monster stats … an issue that is hard to handle. How much in the way of stat blocks do yo include vs forcing people to reference something else? With almost three pages you could do A LOT with an adventure, and yet, no stat blocks would be a pain in the ass also. Such is the life of a 5e designer, I guess. 

There’s also a bit of cumbersome work in the formatting, the descriptions, and the core interactivity. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not BAD, at all. In fact, compared to the usual 5e garbage this is a masterpiece, but, OUR tenfootpole is made of stronger stuff. The interactivity is a bit light, beyond the usual sort, A little roleplay with the pirates that show up and some fights that are a little set-piecy. There … methodology? Of the rooms, or, the formatting and descriptive style, is what I think I’m noting. It’s not bad, but it does show a certain degree of … clumsy? Lack of focus? Neither of those … inexperience, maybe? It’s not the usual padding or overwritten, but, perhaps, a lack of emphasis on certain areas and a focus on others … not necessarily tangential to the adventure. And while the descriptions are better than average, a little work on that could be useful also. “Four bedrolls are on the ground – three are occupied by corpses. They are clothed in tatter and the flesh has nearly been picked clean by the dozens of decayed algae-covered crabs laying on and around them” The second half picks up steam, with the crabs, but the corpses is a light description, as are the bedrolls and clothes. Further, I would suggest the crabs, rotten and legs up, or some such would also serve this description well. 

So, ok, but not a home run. 

You can snag a copy here:

What-Lurks-Beneath-Tidewatch-Tower-v1.2Download
Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 4 Comments

Rolling Deep Keep

Posted on March 26, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 

By John Turcotte
Self Published
B/X
Levels 1-3

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

The night is dark and stormy. Terrified riders have arrived from the south, gasping desperate warnings from foaming lips. A dreadful stone tower roams up the coast, somehow riding the waves, disgorging swarms of ravenous lizardmen at every seaside town. Fear the tide, fear the tide!

This eight page/nine-ish room adventure describes … a keep on the back of a dragon turtle and its lizardmen raiders! It’s going for a kind of weird vision of the sea, and succeeds, at times, in conjuring that otherworldly vision. It’s also quite wordy, which makes the rooms cumbersome to run at times, stuffed as they are with detail. Still, it’s not padded.

Oh no! The raiders are coming! The party is in town and has the night to prepare for the raid. I love the adventures that let you prep for a big raid ,defending and building fortifications and rallying the local populace. This doesn’t quite do that … the town proper is not mentioned and the prep is mostly, I think, the party resting and memorizing, etc. At least, that seems to be the way things are written with little guidance on little else in this section. Still, good idea! And, there IS guidance for how to run the party if they intercept the island keep before it hits town proper. If they row out to intercept it, wait for the raiders to disgorge, or wait in town or hit them as they enter the harbour. Nice touch. It goes on a little bit long, I think, or, maybe, it feels like it does because of the difference scenarios it runs through. And, you DO get guidance on recruiting some local fisherfolk, etc. (I could have misread this, but it felt like it was rallying them during the raid rather than the night before,) So, decent job here. A little long, but the core concept is a strong one. 

The outpost proper gets a nice little map, with around nine rooms on four or five levels, and cool little side video also. It’s a decent map, with crumbly walls and open gaps for the clever party to exploit. Plus, it all drawn with a turtle underneath … I’m a simple man; all I want in life is a pencil drawing of a turtle underneath a keep. 🙂

The environment is a bit weird, in an “under the sea” kind of way. I’ve been quite disappointed in the past with the ability of adventures to conjure the vision of a truly weird under the sea vision. Something like the (City of Rapture?) from Bioshock, or the visions you paint in your mind of R’yleh. Here it’s done to decent effect. Corals and barnacles, uncanny blueish wood (I shall excuse the word uncanny here as an abstraction) and venomous serpent heads. Tranmogrified lizardmen and crumbling coral stairs zigzagging. Ivory cameos, torn, soiled and spoiled garments in a heap, a dazzling mosaic of varicoloured abalone shells. Pictographs of men with nautilus heads. This hit me hard with a ceiling above featuring a bas-relief face grimacing down, cracked and damaged, a face no longer discerned but for huge empty oval eyes, haunting, and what may be a mustache … or tentacles around a contoured mouth. Spooky shit to have the ceiling above you! And, of course, a quilt of wooly fog pushed before the keep proper, as it appears, looming impossibly over the waves. Nice imagery in all of that, and more to boot! Great use of evocative writing if, I think, a little abstracted at times. (And Bryce don’t like the words large and huge, generally, as the come off a bit generic.)

My primary issue with this is the density of the rooms. They generally get a couple of paragraphs and some of the later rooms stretch onwards to nearly a column or more or relatively dense paragraphs. The bolding used generally identified creatures (good) but the formatting for the rest if generally not present. This tends to make my eyes glaze over. This isn’t exactly wall of text, and the text is certainly not padded out with empty phrases and the like. The rooms are just DENSE and the writing used, overloading all of the objkects in the room, becomes quite a bit to handle. A section of scroll cases is one of the shortest paragraphs, and reads “Dozens upon dozens of cracked and ruined scroll-cases are still here, their contents ruined. At the DM’s discretion, a treasure map or clue  to a future scenario can be found here.” There’s nothing really wrong with this. It’s doing things right. And yet, when the rooms are packed, and each thing in it tends to get this treatment, it becomes a bit troublesome to dig through. The details, also, the major details, are scattered throughout the text, making the initial room grok a bit hard since you’re digging through everything. 

I’m at a loss, really, to understand what to do about it. Usually fixes are easy. In this case though the overloading of words and depth ande detail tend to contribute to that otherworldly under the sea vibe that I enjoy so much. Maybe an intro paragraph, detailing a room overview, with bolding to draw the eye to the keywords of the followup sections? That is some common advice of mine, but it feels somehow wrong in this case. I don’t know. It tasks me!

A fine adventure! A good “sunken island risen” thing going on, along with decent raid details. I just wish I could grok it more easily.

Snag a copy here!

ROLLING-DEEP-KEEPDownload

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts | 9 Comments