Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier

Posted on February 5, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Gus L.
Ratking Productions
OSE
Level 1

Welcome to the Crystal Frontier, a desolate magic stained wasteland where fabulous crystal spires and fortresses plummet from the skies to tempt the desperate and the bold with magical gems and golden treasures. Find your fortune or find your death as you plunder the fallen sky tomb of an Empyrean despot. SCHEME with the unnatural denizens of the Crystal Tomb! UNRAVEL the secrets of the Dead King and his realm of misrule! LOOT strange magics and opulent treasures from beyond the sky’s vault!

This 61 page digest sized adventure presents a “classic” dungeon crawl with about eighteen rooms in about as many pages, along with associated murder-hobo town. It oozes with the Gus L flavour, is well laid out and edited … albeit pushing the boundaries of what can be done with the selected style, and is full of interesting situations. A classic dungeon-crawl of the best sort … with a little weird world of crystals thrown in.

Normally I’d cover what’s good about an adventure and then rip it apart. Normally, adventures are bad. But this isn’t a bad adventure. So, instead, I’m going to cover first what could be improved and then go on to fanboy’ing over what’s good.

So … the map. It’s a good map. Don’t get me wrong. It’s got some elevation changes. Some terrain features. A few alternative paths. It’s pretty clear and evocative and matches the vibe of the adventure well. Little map sections are also included in the adventure for reference during play. IE: this is the picture of the room you are currently in. But, in addition to the “main” map there is also an isometric map. Isometric maps generally excel in showing elevation changes. And that it does! You can see room features like ledges and cliffs very well. It fails, I think, in some of the corridor elevation changes. Or, maybe, doesn’t match what the text of the adventure says? It’s a minor thing.

Second, the adventure setting. The land of Gus is full of crystals. It makes sense in the context of the world, but that world is not one of high fantasy or even middle fantasy. Grewhawk and Forgotten Realms players will be out of their element. Unless you run an exclusively Red Wizards game. This tends much closer to something like the world of ASE1, a world in which the wizards are in charge and they are fucking brutal. It’s not quite gonzo, but, The Warlock King of the Bull Kingdom is the land next door and people get diseases that cause them to grow crystals out of their body. I think it kicks ass and would fit in to my default game world style. But Greyhawk it ain’t. 

Finally, the format and/or layout. It’s good. It’s VERY good. It’s using a great general format, providing a brief room overview of a few sentences and bolding a few of the keywords in that overview, that then get their own sections of follow up information that is easy to scan. Rooms generally get between half a page (digest sized) to two pages, depending on complexity. The longest sections tend to be about about a quarter of a column. What’s he managed to do here is pack a tremendous amount of information in to a very little amount of space .ALMOST too much. It’s not too much. But man, you look aat it and you’re like “this is a lot.” and then you go through it, and, because of his job in editing and formatting, it’s not. You can locate and scan information quite easily. I don’t know, though, how much farther this can be taken. If this were a much longer dungeon would I still feel the same way? Or, if the rooms were even more packed can the same sofmratting hold up? I don’t know. So, yes, my bitch is that it’s MAYBE not future proof and triggers my past adventure review trauma when glancing at it before actually looking at it. 😉

Gus knows what he fuck he is doing, and this is oriented towards a new DM. Or, perhaps, a Dm not accustomed to the OSR play style. He offers advice both up front and in the rooms, as sidebars, on how to handle things. 

One room, a large cavern ,has, like, 500 bodies in it that animate when disturbed, as zombies. “Ah!” i thought “A puzzle room!” and indeed Gis then has a nice little sidebar pointing out that this is NOT a combat encounter and how to run it not as one. Also, uh, room with 500 zombies in it! Kick ass!

We’re got factions in the dungeon. There are some interesting puzzles, both literally, as is generally found in tombs, and figuratively, like the zombie room. Crystal Dustremains an environmental danger in many rooms. There are “people” to talk to and Gus makes explicit the ration table in many encounters, reminding the DM to use them by noting how they react. 

I’m going to cite some descriptions from the nearby shithole town he describes, as examples of How To Do Things.

The town is described as “A town filled with vileness, its very atmosphere impregnated with the odour of abomination; murder runs riot, drunkenness the rule, gambling a universal pastime, fighting recreation.” Now that’s the kind of frontier town I like! A deadwood after my own heart. One of the gangs is called Bug Tunny and the DeadHeart Boys. Not bandits. Not brigands. No. Big Tunny and his DeadHeart Boys. THAT’S how you refer to something in an adventure. That’s the kind of specificity that adds so much to an adventure. The kind that “brigand gang” can never duplicate. Also,The  League of Saloonkeepers and Madams for the Common Defense. The fucking name REEKS of the situation in town and you could write an entire based around that name alone because of all that is implied in t! Fuck! Yeah! And he’s got a whole LONG table of situations that could be going on in town. It takes up so little space and adds so much. Rot-Root the lotus dealer is out of stock. He’s waiting on a huge shipment from Aurum Ferro any

day now. The addicts are restless. The market is poised to be upturned by a cunning entrepreneur, or a skilled hijacker. Uh huh. That’s got so much in it!

He does a great job with supplemental information, even providing a tracking sheet, ala Melan, for the DM to track time and the like on. There’s a possession table that is out of this world. Realistic, makes sense, not too punishing but still make syou wish you weren’t possessed. It’s little details, that, over and over again, build on themselves to deliver an impact much larger than the mere word count would imply. 

I leave you with the description of one of the rooms:

Accessible only via a long crawl down a 3’ square corridor. The cold, damp passage descends before finally opening into the room near its ceiling. From the passage is a 10’ drop into the blackwater that partially floods the room—a stark contrast to the milky-white crystal of its walls. At the center of the room is a glass pillar, rising 4’ from the water and topped by a sittingfigure in rotting gold brocade robes. Apricot-sized orbs of fire orbit the figure’s head.

Note tha the first two sentences are you need immediately, the room before the room, so to speak. You scan them, run them, and move on. That leaves three sentences left for the DM to scan. We get the drop, the blackwater flood, the most obvious things, first, with the walls a close second and the then the piller and sitting figure. The order you need things in. A long crawl down. A 3’ square. Both evocative. Blackwater partially flodding The contrast to the milfy white crystal walls. A GLASS pillar. ROTTING gold robes. Orbs or fire. ORBITIING instead of circling .Note the word choices and how they work together. Good Job.

This is $7.50 at DriveThru.The preview is 30 pages. More than enough to get a sense of the world and the dungeon and the formatting and layout style and determine if its a fit for you. Good job!


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/357799/Tomb-Robbers-of-the-Crystal-Frontier?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 36 Comments

Trouble Came to Blackwood

Posted on February 2, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By S.E. Bischoff
Self Published
Zweihander
"Basic Tier Characters"

A beast from ages past plagues the village of Blackwood, hunting the population under the light of the full moon. For the last six months, many have tried and failed to stop the monster, but every attempt has met with death. Desperate for salvation, the villagers of Blackwood have concluded that what this beast wants, and the only thing that will save those still alive, is a sacrifice conducted by the beast’s very own worshipers. As luck would have it, the arrival of the PCs has provided a fresh supply of sacrificial lambs.

This seven page adventure details the usual “village cult captures the party” scenario. I’m using “details” mildly. There are good things that the adventure does, but it suffers from the usual inability to transfer information to the DM well, as well as setting up what I think is a no-win situation. More help for the DM in that area could have been done. Still, it ALMOST get the level of details right for a village/cult sandbox. 

I didn’t notice this was seven pages when I bought it. That’s enough for an OSR adventure, but not enough for a “two session” adventure for a non-OSR game. I mean, it SHOULD be, but nothing published ever works out that way for a non-OSR game. Still, I was moderately hopeful at the start after seeing the NPC section.

This is the usual thing for a cult village scenario. Party arrive sin village. Village cult kidnaps party, hold them for a bit, then ties them up in the center of the village for The Beast to come eat them, as a sacrifice. It’s been done a bunch. Has it ever been done well? Meh. Is it done well in this? No. It’s not terrible, but it’s no where near good either.

It’s got a few things going for it. There are more than a few relatable situations in this. The inn owner, with kids, who just wants to be left alone so the rest of the villagers go pick someone else other than her family. The zealot priest, complete with gun in hollowed out bible, leading the villagers. The peasant mob, led by some hotheads. A broken down palisade, with destroyed house, from a previous attack. A hunter, maybe on the parties side, with four hunting dogs … two untrained. You just KNOW how that’s going to go, right? A village meeting in the church, with the party not let in to it. You can kind of piece things together from this. The very relatable NPC’s, with their motivations and archetypes, and the trophy little scenes, like the destroyed house/pallisade and village meeting in the church. 

But it’s not nearly enough. There are minor things and bigger things.

The NPC”s, while having relatable motivations, are not done in such a way as to make them usable by the DM easily. You need to read an entire paragraph and pick apart people they know, quirks, and motivations, scattered about in them. The village is supposed to have a “center” where the sacrifices are made, but its not obvious at all from the map what that is. In fact, I’d say the ,ap is more than useless. It’s basically just some squares representing houses, along a river. There’s nothing about it that would facilitate the adventure. The “palisade” around the village is only shown on one side … what about the other sides of the village? There’s an island in the middle of the village, with houses on it, and no way to reach it? That’s never mentioned? Nothing on the map makes sense, even for a map that would be more evocative/arty than true mappy reference. The hooks and rumors are all just lame throw-aways, but, nothing new there, right? The “beast” doesn’t really get a good description. Oh, it gets one, I guess? In a long paragraph at the end of the book n the new monsters section, where you would expect it. But the actual physical description is scattered throughout the paragraph. Like, line of description, line of BS, line of description, line of BS, and so on. Monsters descriptions should be up front, the lead thing, in a monster entry. That’s almost always the first thing the DM needs to know about the creature, so make it first in the entry and puti it all together. This is all part of the “making it easy for the DM to run/scan the adventure and use it philosophy. And you get three corruption for killing the leader of the mob?

A timeline embedded in the church entry. The location descriptions for he village are about the right size … except when they are not … like there are no clues in the ransacked house or palisade.

But, really, the adventure is short and weighted towards the village, which might be realistic but not fun. I’m not sure how this is supposed to go. The mob comes after the party. The party runs off?  The mob chases and then the adventure is over, maybe? Or, the party is captured and held? Then there’s no guidance on for the DM on holding a jail break and making that fun. There’s just “you’re taken to the village center and tied up” for the beast to come and eat you at night. Gee, that’s fun. There’s no “chaos as the party escape when the beasteats the villagers instead of the party” or anything else to help the DM handle the breakout, the beast attack, the party escaping, or being given a fighting chance. I don’t see how the beast showing up ever happens as a gameable moment. The party either runs off when trying to be captured, or are captured and sacrificed … in which case the DM monologs the party death. If they escape they run off again, right? Or they kill everyone? But, and this is my point, there is no scenario in which they are tied up as sacrifices in which the beast showing up is anything but a monologue.And, the party is meant to be captured, like, two days before the beast shows up? That’s a ong time. And a long time to be captured. It seems like a prison break is in order … but it is completely unsupported. It’s this lack of support for what should LOGICALLY happen, either the breakout or the sacrifice … and even support for the mob capturing the party. More village vignettes up to the start would be cool also. There IS support for tracking the beast back to its lair, but, again, I don’t see how that happens given the timeline, unless you have a very aggressively do-gooder party.

This is $1 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. How can I know what I’m buying without a preview?


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/363572/Trouble-Came-to-Blackwood?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 7 Comments

The Halls of Light

Posted on January 31, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ivan Richmond
Self Published
OSR
Level 1

The gnomes of Rockswald have asked for your help.  They operate a mithrl mine, but it has recently been invaded by goblins.  They will reward anyone who can rid them of the goblins.

This twenty page adventure features a mine/dungeon with about fifteen rooms or so. I have had a strange relationship with my own mortality since my early twenties. This adventure helped me resolve that. By making me wish I was dead so the pain would finally be over. If dude isn’t going to try then neither am I.

So, the entrance to the dungeon has a small tunnel you have to crawl through and centipedes and beetles crawl on the party and they have to push aside cobwebs. That’s pretty cool! It’s not something most adventures deal with, but, the mundanity of the situation and the notes of visceral realness add a lot to the entrance. It’s the kind of thing I wish more adventures would do, imagine the scene in terms of real life, the messiness of it all. And I don’t mean cobwebs, but the messiness of thescene laid out before you. Shadows flickering. Wet. Guano. And even centipedes and cobwebs. Imagine every time you’ve anted to crawl in somewhere and the environment and how it made you feel. I love that this does that. 

It also has a second entrance to the dungeon, a stream that you can follow in and two hidden rooms that can only be found by going up the stream. I love that off the beaten path kind of stuff. It rewards the players who think outside of the box. It’s also got a weird pacing to it, where you explore the upper caves, find a gnome village beyond them, and then explore the gnome mines, killing goblins in them. Kind of a pre-journey, just to get to the main adventure. Again, I like the realism of that.

But, those are all conceptual things I like.

In reality you get exciting room descriptions like “They enter a cavern full of stalactites, stalagmites, flow stones, and columns. Tunnels lead off in various directions.” or something like “It is full of giant quartz crystals.” That is seriously a room description. I get it, yes, but, maybe include a few more words to make tha scene come alive? Write something evocative? One of my favorite rooms is “This cave complex contains the lair of the West Goblin tribe.” Come on. This is nothing but facts. Regale me with descriptions! Throw in some things! These are the yellow cap goblins, right? The cave should be the lair of hte yellow cap tribe, for example. Describe whats going on. The noise. The smoke from the fires? The goblins from the other tribe roasting on a spit? Something? Anything?

Instead we such compelling content as “The New Mines

If they go right from the Gnome Village, it will bypass the Mithrl Vats, since they can’t get there

that direction, but allow access to the Mithrl Refinery. If they go right from there, instead, it

will take them to the east entrance to the Halls of Light (left) or back to the Gnome Village (right).” … The exact same thing that is shown on the map. 

This is my life.

Hey, who wats a magic sword! You can get one in the dungeon. It is a magic sword! That’s all you get. Nothing more. “Magic sword.”  I am inspired.

And yet …

The gnomes made a gazebo out of mithral. If you go in then it begins to spin and  turns in to one of those carnival rides. It forces the party up against the razor sharp crystal walls. And a buzzsaw comes out. Ok, sure. That’s something that the gnomes make. … And put in the mine portion of the mine. 

You get a suit of mithral chain mail that a wizard can wear and still cast spells if you clean out the goblins. 

Yeah, D&D!

Mamma said there’d be days like this.

I don’t want to shit one someone. Seriously, I don’t. But ,come on! You gotta make a fucking effort! You’ve seen an adventure before, right? It gets the coveted 2 out of 10 rating.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages. Try page five on for size. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/383744/The-Halls-of-Light?1892600

Posted in 2 out of 10, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 6 Comments

Deadly Waters

Posted on January 29, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Adventure Bundles
Self Published
5e
Level 4

Halenshire is a small town built in and around natural springs. Since about 1 month there has been a mysterious disease spreading among the population. Some people only experience fatigue and vomiting, while some other unlucky ones even die. The people are afraid, mainly because it appears to be spreading randomly. There have been cases of people from same households getting infected, and others where only 1 family member got it and died. In other words, it is a mystery. Is it a curse? A sign from the gods? A sinister act? No one knows thus far. Some other stories say that the dead had been drained of blood, others that the local cleric is sinister. To make matters worse, some of the dead bodies seem to disappear during the night. Suspects exist plenty, especially in a town as Halenshire which sees a steady influx of visitors. The local Cleric is new in town and has been acting strange and overzealous, there is talk about the tavern being in the middle of things, and the traveling circus which arrived at the city almost at the same time as the first infection appeared. The party will have to investigate as many possible suspects to get to.

This 24 page adventure details an investigation in to plague deaths in a town. Conceptually, it’s a decent investigation and does good things in that area. As implemented though, it’s far too wordy and hard to follow, in spite of efforts to the contrary. It also is one note, with deviations from the investigation being noticeably gamey.

At this point I’m doing 5e adventures essentially by request only, and this was a request by the designer. We are a kind and generous blog, and are known for that, so, I’m brook no disagreement you fuckers!

The standard 5e format is to go to a town, find something wrong going on, investigate some, and then go to a lair to kill something. This follows that format, yet, the … depth? Of the investigation makes it more than that, almost to the point of a mystery. Mysteries are VERY hard to pull off in D&D, cause Spells, but this one demonstrates a way it might make sense … which is tending more towards investigation.

You’ve got a town and people in the town are dying from a disease. Plague isn’t being thrown around, but, I like to think of it that way. I don’t think the designer frames it that way either and the adventure would have been better, I think, if the adventure was more angled towards “town in the midst of a plague” rather than just a disease. This sort of framing issue will happen more than few times in the adventure. The elements come across gamey instead of real-world, and real-world would have more visceralness to the adventure. More on that later. 

You come to town and get hired to look in to things. That’s lame. It’s the usual “this is bad for business, go figure out happened” hooks. Hiring the party, as troubleshooters, is usually the worst kind of hook, and its the fact here as well. Some tie in to the plague (and framing it as a black death kind of thing) would have gone better. You go questions people, follow up leads, and have a final boss battle in the cistern of a bathhouse … that is pretty damn fucking huge and elaborate for a bathhouse. Like, parisian sewers vaulted ceilings in a room that’s 80×80. We’re pushing the suspension of disbelief here. The towns fairly small. I know WHY, to have the boxx lair fight, but still, maybe a smaller cistern and an attached big cave? 

What makes this adventure interesting if the misdirection. The creature living in the cistern is poisoning the water. A slow kind of diseased death that not everyone gets. It then visits the “dead body storage shack” and drags the bodies back to its lair to eat Cool! The disease takes days, and you die of “exhaustion” or “fatigue.” (You can recognize in this 5e game elements. And while tha might be correct from a rules standpoint, and maybe even from a real life standpoint, I think dehydration/diarrhea/etc would have been a better way to put this to the players, another example of the “disease/plague” framing issue.) Along the way various things pop up. What’s the linkage to the inn? Or the brewery? Why are bodies disappearing from the charnel house? What’s up with the Wrath of God preacher in the temple? And there’s a circus in town. With a snake woman. You can see the misdirection. The priest is a “they must have deserved it/had it coming” kind of guy. That’s usually the go to dude to kill in adventure. But not here. And he takes care of the bodies before the burials … and the bodies go missing. Another vote in just stabbing him. I usually just burn down a circus, first thing, in an adventure. But that’s not the case here. And a snake woman in the circus? Double burn it down! A brewery drugging people? The tropes are all here, but they all have mundane explanations or just “meh, sometimes priests are assholes” explanations. This is great. Expectations subverted! And this sort of subversion happens a lot, but it never feels like a Gotcha! It’s a slow untangling of what’s going on. And that’s why it’s a good investigation.

But it lacks in two critical areas. The first, as mentioned, are the framings it uses. From a disease (yes, sure, technically, ok) to a Plague!!!! And other areas in which the word choices and framings are just a little too clinical. You’re going for a village gripped in fear in an adventure like this. This theme continues with the word choices used by the adventure in relating happenings. So, snake-woman see osgood behind in a back alley by the temple. First, she didn’t see Osgood. She should be relating the physical features of what she saw and the adventure should be helping the DM by providing that to them at the snake-woman interview section. Osgood is a conclusion, one step removed from what the DM needs, Likewise you have a talk at one point, probably, with a guy whose got the disease. Only later in the adventure does it relate that he’s in the middle of a fever. That makes sense! It would be great to have a delirium patient in a fever being questioned! But that’s not how the scene comes across. Again, abstracted and a little clinical. Gamey. You have to lead with the fever thing. And, seeing the creature in the back alley? No, you want the snake woman to leading the party even more to the temple and priest. Make him even more suspicious instead of just tangentially relating that it might have been near the temple. 

It also throws some fights at the party. As in “adventuer must be boring, so lets throw in in some monsters.” In the brewery some nuisance fire elementals show up to cause some havoc, not related to the adventure. This smacks of that terrible advice to start games with a combat to get the party in to things. NO! These come across, again, as gamey. Yes, I agree, the adventure could use a little more in the confrontation department. The priest, or local toughs, or a Plague Watch vigilante group could fill in for this. But just tossing in rando monsters is not a good thing. 

“At the rear of the chapel is an alter to the deity” is not a very good description, and describes, in a nutshell, the abstracted nature, the gamey nature, of the encounters.

Decent ideas, and concept, and design, but way way WAY too wordy, with the threads between locations being a little hard for the DM to sus out, even though they are explicitly mentioned multiple times. This is no doubt because of all the extra words, not related to the actual happenings. 

I’m bored now and am going to do something else.

This is $5 at Drivethru. You get the entire thing in the preview, so ,good preview,


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/364585/Deadly-Waters?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 8 Comments

Monkey Murder Manor

Posted on January 26, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ripley Caldwell
Self Published
Mork Borg
Level 1

Within the Manor is the Pit, a hole in reality that spews out hordes of otherworldly monkeys. The Manor has done its job and killed them, over and over again, for decades upon decades. As the woods darkened and the blood was spilled and the Manor was forgotten, something changed. It grew bitter and hateful, and now the seal has been broken.

This 59 page digest adventure features two levels on dungeon with about 35 rooms. A good format, interesting situations and an evocative writing style help overcome the absurdity of what is essentially a funhouse dungeon. Not the usual Mork Borgian shovelware. Not at all.

The Mork Borgians do NOT have a good reputation at this point. I’m sure, upon seeing “Mork Borg” listed, a great number of my readers, rolled their eyes and said to themselves “Ug! Not again!” Basically, it has devolved in to a system that a large art community has gravitated towards. These folks are moderately interested in interesting layout and art designs and less interested in creating something that can be played. It reminds me for the 3e/3.5e days when loads of shovelware came out. A system so popular and welcoming that it attracts a certain element, that then tends to gain a niche reputation, that then becomes the reputation of the system, leading to less “normal” product and even more niche product. Which, I guess, is fine?  But your eyes then tend to gloss over products for the system because so many are crap. I don’t dislike Mork Borg, I just dislike that SO. FUCKING. MANY. Mork Borg adventures are not actually adventures but just circle jerk wank off art projects. Go sell the fucking thing like that instead of calling it an adventure and I’d be fine. Or, maybe they think they are, since they list as Mork Borg? 

But this adventure ain’t like that. It is, essentially, a real adventure. With a few caveats. I’m going to turn things around and cover those issues up front, and then follow with the positives. Keep in mind though, that the positives are very positive and I’m going to ultimately recommend this adventure. With Dick Cavetts. They came in two basic forms: why the fuck are we doing this and the absurdity of the situation. They both involve the suspension of disbelief and the first, at least, is a common issue with adventures.

Starting with the absurdity seems like the right thing to do. I’m a big fan of the absurd. But I like the absurd specifically because of the hubris involved in the suspension of disbelief. That’s what its toying with, in general, in film, tv, books, and other media types. I’m not sure, though, that the absurdity, and the suspension of disbelief, or lack thereof, that it engenders, works in a D&D environment. Comedy, and that’s what absurdity ultimately is, is a VERY hard thing to pull of fin RPG’s. The best Paranoia adventures don’t go for comedy but simply set up a situation. When Paranoia tries to be silly it fails, and, I think, ultimately led to the failure of the system. I’ve seen this time and again in D&D as well. ASE1 works. It keeps it straight. And then the clowns show up in ASE2 and things fall apart. I don’t believe anymore. It’s not a Bioshock vibe anymore. I don’t give a shit. 

In this adventure we have a kind of hell pit that disgorges evil corrupted things. A wizard builds a house over it to research and help contain things. Then he goes away and we’re left with a manor home on autopilot. Pretty classic trope; wizards do love to build their houses on places of power. But in this case the things being disgorged are monkeys. Look, I’m in TOTAL agreement that monkeys are evil little shits. I think I’ve had three wild encounters with monkeys and they’ve always ended up with me coming away with the impression that monkeys are evil little shits. So, yeah, I’m with you man. But, as an adventure element it strains disbelief. The name, itself, makes me groan and think “Ug! This is gonna be crap …” As a genre, also, I’m not sure were this fits. Not as a modern adventure, or in any genre other than fantasy, I think. But while I’m usually a fan of the mundane as monsters in fantasy, I don’t see this working. I’m not sure why. Maybe people, even me, think monkeys are cute? It’s just that it comes off as an absurd premise. And, yet, I’d also be pretty pissy if it were goblins or some such? Something FEELS off. Maybe it’s just me? I’d be interested in others opinions of this. It both feels like a real issue and a made up issue, so there must be some framing I’m not understanding.

And then there’s the Why The Fuck? Issue. Why is the party doing this? Ultimately, it’s always because we want to have fun tonight and D&D is what we selected to have fun. DO you want to play D&D? Then do the fucking adventure choad. I get it. Just lack week I drank some citronella oil and set my face on fire because I was bored. But, also, it’s another element that leads to issues with suspension of disbelief. With little treasure, we’re left with “be a hero” or “it’s what we’re doing tonight.” I’m not saying this is equivalent to Original Sin, but it’s an issue. Just because A LOT of adventures have the issue means nothing. Yes, the players must find motivation for their characters I get that also But, also, there’s a spectrum here and getting too far on to the “fuck you” side of it is an issue. Give us something to work with. Admitidally, gold=xp does this well, as does rumors of gold in place. And Be a Hero can do this. But, we need things that appeal to the players to get them going. Or, maybe, we don’t need that but when an adventure does it then its smarter than your average bear Boo Boo.

Let’s move on to some good things. Of which there are A METRIC FUCK TUN.

And the first is one of the hooks. I frequently talk about hooks needing just a little more to support the DM. “Caravan guards” is boring as fuck ,but if you dump in something interesting, a nextra sentence or two, then it can no longer be a throw-away hook but something interesting. It’s not longer a waste of word-count. One of the hooks in this is: “A teenage boy (his name was Wemut) is found dismembered in the street, still missing a leg, and a trail of gore leads to an abandoned, moss-covered hut. There, the characters will encounter their first (but certainly not last) monkey, a macaque with too many arms, still gnawing on Wemut’s severed leg. It escapes through the window and leads the…”

That’s a fucking hook! Notice the specificity that brings it to like. Dismembered, Missing a leg. Teenage. In the street, still missing a leg. Moss-covered hut. Too many arms, gnawing a leg. This description paints the fucking picture WELL. It’s not too many words, especially considering tha the DM will be running the entire intro hook from it. What you think, maybe 30 minutes of content, maybe more, in that one brief word count? That’s pretty good density. It’s breezy, moves along, creates an evocative picture of the environments/situations. Very good.

And it does this over and over again with its descriptions. The designer has a talent for describing an evocative situation. Something happening. 

One room has “A wounded, screeching orangutan dragging itself across the room. A grim-faced butler in trim clothing pursuing the orangutan, knife in hand.

If not interrupted, he finishes stabbing the orangutan to death, wipes his knife off with a handkerchief, and blithely addresses the characters.” Uh … fuck yes! That’s an introduction to what’s going on in the manor! Specific. Paints a picture. This comes over and over again and over again. All with a kind of sly black humor. “Participating in impressive monkey violence” can earn the manor homes favor. Nice. 🙂 An NPC party is wanted for crimes of “excessive blasphemy,” A slyness to it. 

Another room has a “A pale wooden box that moves and shudders as if it’s breathing. As soon as a character moves within striking distance, it opens, a mass of spinning saw blades, crossbows, and ropes on twisting articulated limbs. This is interesting because it is both specific AND generic and the genericism itself is leveraged ti create an evocative picture. A mass of spinning saw blades and articulated limb things and crossbows. Your mind races to cartoon like imagery of such things. 

Items can be great also.  Full wine glass, the wine full of gold flakes. A tiny monkey with insect like wings in a jar. Guess what eating it does? It hits time after time after time.

And the format is easy to scan. Descriptions that work from general to specific. Building. Bullets. A focus on keeping important/obvious things first. There’s a miss or two here, some choices I would make differently, but, that’s BY FAR the minority. It does what an adventure should do, make using it easy. And I wouldn’t say that it’s aggressively minimalistic/terse either. Some of the text FEELS long, looking at it, but, it’s done in such as way that during play I don’t feel like it’s an issue. It’s still a breezy read and easy to scan and get to the players easily. 

I could talk more about this. The pointcrawlish manor map. The window/door external issue and so on, but, I’ll skip that. It gets A LOT right. If you can deal with the absurdity of the situation and get the party in and motivated to explore then this is a good adventure. Imagine me, talking about suspension of disbelief in a game where elves fart fireballs. 

This is $10 at itch. There are some room preview pages that gives you a good idea of the format. I’d check them out. It’s pretty good format to empulate, if you can match the energy of the writing style and situations presented.

https://ripleyc.itch.io/monkey-murder-manor

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 19 Comments

Cursed Scroll #1 – The Hideous Halls of Mugdulblub

Posted on January 24, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Kelsey Dionne
The Arcane Library
Shadowdark RPG
Level 1

Cursed knights channeling demonic power, mist-addled forests where witches and warlocks stalk the trees, and crumbling castles housing ancient, eldritch creatures!

This fourteen page digest adventure features 33 rooms in a classic exploratory dungeon crawl, with factions. It’s for the Shadowdark RPG, a 5e-type system that attempts, it seems, to bring some classical OSR sensibilities to the modern genre. It is one of the better modern “classical” dungeons.

This is a classically expiration type dungeon of Kelsey Dionnes Shadowdark RPG. I’m not going to comment on the RPG or its ability to retain the elements of classical play style that make exploration games fun. We’re just going to ask the usually OSR questions of if this is an interactive environment that could encourage fun gameplay. 

And that it is! The map, with 33 areas, contains a variety of features, from chambers to cave and river section. It’s got some different monster zones going on, as well as some simple loops. We’re not talking full on megadungeon fill-the-page loops, but for a modern OSR design it’s pretty good. It notes monsters on the map for reaction purposes, has a decent order of battle for the factions within, and is both visually interesting AND easy to read for the DM. Good job!

The rooms follow a kind of bulleted bolded keyword format. You get a short little section at the top with some brief bolded keywords and some general descriptions that you might get at a first glance. Like “People: Group of short, tan-cloaked figures pacing around” And then those bolded keywords followed up on in bullets below with more information about them. It’s a decent format that runs from the general, what the DM needs to know first to relate to the players to the more specific when they make additional inquiries and thus scanning the text is easily accomplished.

Dungeons live and die by their interactivity though. We’ve seen a thousand different ways to make a boring dungeon. From empty chambers with nothing going on, to combat heavy hack fests, to Greenwoods Don’t Touch museums to absurd levels of “hidden depth.” You need a good mix of elements in the rooms in order for the players to get the full experience of a multi-layered environment. And this does that. 

We’ve got several factions running around inside. You’ve got some corrupted family, former owners of the ruins above, as well as a newcomer group vying for control with the older group … both ostensibly worshipping the same entity. The entity that s found in the dungeon! So we’ve got the independent elements providing danger as well. And then we’ve got the newly intelligent mutated catfish running around … sometimes literally. All of these can be hostile or you could work out some kind of deal with them. 

Mixed in to the social element are a decent number of traps, items that serve as puzzles, creature encounters that are not what they seem, hidden doors to find, and corpses to cut opwn … or, rather, TRY to cut open, to get the goodies within. There’s a dagger that does 1d100 damage to someone who picks it up … tlegraphed through the corpse on the floor holding it. Bane or Boon? Like the best elements, it could be both depending ont he context the players find it and use it in. The wanderers here are doing something. There’s a statue that you see, from an adjacent room, gliding across the floor. That turns out to be a gelatinous cube! I LOVE it when a classic monster is integrated in to the adventure in this way. That is EXACTLY the sort of thing I expect out of a designer. A pointer to make an encounter fresh and meaningful. An encounter that MAKES SENSE. 

There are a few things that could be done better. Occasionally the layout format fails, with the wrong keyword bolded for easy scanning. IE: a glass bowl on a pillar of lumby stone is probably the pillar noticed first and not the glass bowl. There’s also an occasional weird word choice. “Wispy cracks” around a secret door threw me for a loop, until I figured out what was meant, how wispy was being used in this context. I’m supportive of the overloading of words and using them outside of their traditional contexts … but sometimes its non-intuitive. 

There’s a decent attempt here to bring the various factions to life. The old manor family. The new cultist intruders, and the catfish. What you don’t get, though, is the idiosyncratic nature of the personages. Or, for that matter, very many personages in general. Most of them are generic “family members” and so on, with only the leaders getting some additional specificity. Thus the vibe is thrown off. They feel like generic baddies instead of, say, the depth of what Xyntillian delivered. It’s a challenge, no doubt, to bring this in a terse format, but when done it delivers a fully integrated vibe that is SO much more rewarding.

Finally, the descriptions themselves are a bit lacking. There is ABSOLUTELY an attempt here to bring the evocative writing. Reference the ‘wispy cracks’ above. The evocative nature of the writing is not quite where it could be. Admitidally, I think this IS the hardest part of writing … finding just exactly the right combination of words to deliver the maximum imaginative impact. It’s not that it’s bad, at all, but it does seem a little formulaic at times. I THINK it’s because there’s an attempt to provide an adjective/adverb in front of certain words. So, for example a “moldy scroll of charm person.” This is better than just a scroll of charm person, to be sure. But also, it seems a little like “I slapped an adjective in front of it.” There’s certainly a tradeoff here to providing a terse description. I might suggest that there is a spectrum in writing room descriptions evocatively. Adding an adjective or two can certainly brighten up a description and is FAR better than the generic descriptions that plague adventure writings. This is good. And then, beyond that, is an IMAGINING of the description. What does this moldy scroll actually look like? Can you write a description of it that conveys the essence of a moldy scroll … and not use a lot of words to do it? A more naturalistic style, we’ll call it. It’s a mix, or generic descriptions, dumping in an adjective or two, and communicating the core, that in a really good adventure comes naturally and are used in combination to provide a meaningful experience.

But, that’s like masters levels of bullshit coming from mouth today.

This is a good adventure. Have I called Kelsey Dionne Not a Fucking Idiot yet? If not, they are close to earning that moniker.

The rest of the zine has some devily in it, as well as a hex crawl that looks pretty interesting, in scanning it. Interesting as in the hex encounters seem to be loaded with potential energy. An orc village on silts that wants to trade for human meat to stave off an incursion … with “trade” perhaps being a loose word for “obtain”. 🙂 There’s some fucking roleplay potential in that ina hex crawl game!

The entire zine is $9 for the PDF over at The Arcane Library.

Cursed Scroll Zine, Vol. 1: Diablerie! PDF (Shadowdark RPG)
Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, The Best | 13 Comments

Star Dragon Rage

Posted on January 22, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Joseph R. Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
OSE
LOW/Mid Levels

The ancient world of Harth withers beneath its dying sun…but it’s not dead yet. The pastoral village of Kettle nestles on the banks of a strangely warm lake. A few people are missing. A few creatures prowl in the shadows. Then the cemetery erupts. A stranger reveals that a magnificent city lies hidden below. Wondrous treasures sit forgotten in towers and vaults, but deadly monsters roar in the darkness…and they’re clawing their way up!

This 61 page adventure describes a number of civilized areas, all interconnected, along with their surrounding “adventure locales”, and some inciting events to go along with it. It retains the functionality that is a standout with Dungeon Age Adventures. The supplement describes a rich and flavourful environment, though not perhaps as bizarre as it should be? Such is life.

This adventure is more of an … adventuring environment? I mean, they all are, I guess, in a way? But this one mixes civilized areas with wild areas much in the way that a starting locale village will. You have your home base. It has some questy-type things associated with it. There’s some surrounding lands with some adventure spots, some related to fetch questy things and some not. And, then, let’s add ANOTHER home-basey type place UNDER the first one, with the same sort of mix of home basey more civilized lands and outlying adventure areas. And then let’s add ANOTHER one under that. And ANOTHER one under that.  

This is all in the typical three-column format used by Dragon Age. You get about a page of intro for each major area and then it stars in on the keys, with three columns. You get a short little description with certain words bolded and underlined. Those keywords are then called out in the DM text below, making them easy to find, with a short little text section that elaborates on it. And maybe those sections also have a keyword, if needed, that are elaborated on further below. It keeps the individual sections terse, and thus easy to scan, and the bolding makes it easy to find the sections you are looking for and glance at other things to riff off of them in the moment. Which is what a good description format should be doing for the DM. The intro sections give a brief overview of the entire area, what’s gong on, what can/could happen, some random encounters and so on. 

The general idea is that there’s this village full of the usual village shit. A few quests, etc Then one day a hole erupts in the local graveyard and a disheveled figure emerges. Turns out there’s an underground city under the village, full of weirdo humans! And it’s suffering a kind of apocalypse. Dragons are burrowing up and rampaging through the city! This causes refugees, etc, full of weirdos. We get a couple of levels of the city, the upper level, the city proper, the lower level, and then the basement where the dragons are coming from. Along the way we get lots and lots of fetch quests and weird things to explore and do and people to help … or not.

There’s a good sprinkling of things in this adventure, all with strong imagery attached to them. The lake next to the first village is quite warm … from a giant crystal lantern in a save underneath it. The lantern, a major point of the adventure, and be “snuffed out” … but, the warmth also keeps asleep a giant crocodile at the bottom of the lake. And I mean a GIANT crocodile. The dragon eggs, waking up and rampaging, offer a kind of tension element and timer, driving things forward. Magic items/treasure is strong, like The Song of Life: “Once per day, you can sing this song to a person who died in the last minute. Three weeping ghosts appear and resurrect the dead person.” That last bit, three weeping ghosts. That’s the kind of specificity I’m talking about when I refer to it. It harkens back to classical elements. It’s terse, and it adds SO much more flavour to what’s going on. This is the flavour you want to add, and how you want to add it. A quick hit, a burst. 

On the downside …

The thing gets long. And the multiple environments, with the many people, get a bit complex to keep track of. This is really pushing the ability of the layout style to handle. It WILL take notes to run this successfully. Mostly, because it is a campaign and not an adventure. Or, rather, a series of adventures? It’s a larger environment, more akin to a regional setting in some ways, or a hex crawl, then it is an adventure. I don’t meant hat it IS a regional setting, or that it IS a hex crawl, but, rather, the scope is such that you can compare it to those … and those sorts of things need a little extra help in this area. Cross-references could be quite a bit stronger, helping the DM locate things. For example, the blacksmith has lost his tools. He can tell the party about it. They are sure to ask “Ok, where?” … Hmmm, let me find that reference in the text and page through things looking for it …

And, the bizarre underground city full of weirdos? It could be weirder. Or, the people more weird, I guess? The marketing had me sold on a ASE sort of city, and what I got was … well, I don’t know. I didn’t really come across with any impression at all of the city and its people. 

It’s a good regional kind of setting. I can see using this as a city supplement. This is the home base, and, over time, as you are exploring dungeons and such nearby, thie shit in theis adventuree starts to pop up. One day a baby dragon pops out of the ground and rampages, or the cemetery opens up. It’s got A LOT going on, which is how I like my cities/regions/home bases. As time goes on the party could explore these “new” city elements, get in to more trouble, while also doing their normal dungeon exploring nearby. It’s not laid out for that, and you’ll need to take notes. I’m more generous in allowing notes in cities and regions, but, still, notes is notes. Is it worth it? Maybe? I don’t think there are really a lot of very interesting home base places, especially those with expanding “Baldurs Gate” style environs and plots.

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is 30 pages. More than enough to get a sense of the product. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/380091/Star-Dragon-Rage-A-Dungeon-Age-Adventure-5e-and-OSE?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts | 4 Comments

Delve of the Handsome Repeater

Posted on January 19, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Brine
Beasts & Barrows
"Low Levels"

A face protrudes from the ground; an ancient giant, buried to the chin and left for dead. Volcanic rocks drape the mound, giving the appearance of jagged tufts of sable hair. An agape cave mouth emits whispered echos from below. Locals avoid this place. They call it “The Handsome Repeater”. An ageless subject of rumor and superstition; its origins long since forgotten. Lately… creatures have been breaking free from its eerie depths.

This eighteen page adventure describes an eleven room mostly linear cave dungeon. It has some classical (as in Greek) themes and features Tricks more than monsters. But what there is can be quite interesting. It makes no sense, but, I’m intrigued, as a mini-dungeon that pops up in, for example, a hex crawl.

This is a mostly empty dungeon with a few things to poke at. But, it does, at points, have a kind of mythic feel. A lonesome, despondent vibe is present … made all the worse by the lack of creatures in the dungeon and/or the way the wanderers behave. It is this vibe that I want to explore first.

Read that marketing intro again. A giant face, mouth agape as if screaming, covered in volcanic rock. Did you rock form around it or did the was it carved, or did the creature melt in? Who knows. But, the design is certainly … weird? Mythic? You know you are somewhere else. Then, the dungeon itself has a lonesome feel to it. It DOES have references to Echo and Narcissus in it, which help contribute, and a lack of creatures, which helps contribute to this vibe. And, then … there’s the monsters. There are none. I mean, Echo appears in one room. That’s the extent of the creatures. Everything else is handled by wanderer rolls. “When the DM sees fit and/or the paty tarry too much.” I’m not a fan of that mechanic. It’s arbitrary, and not in the good way that wanderers are supposed to drive the game forward and provide a time pressure element. It’s just “fuck you, have a wanderer now.”

Having said that … oh what wanderers there are! I often talk about the wanderers needing to DO something. How they should not exist to only attack. They need something to spur the encounter on, to inspire the DM. These wanderers do NOT follow my advice. Or, maybe they do, but in an unusual way. They make noise. Scary noises. Thus the wanderer table has a monster name and the noise they make. I am a GREAT man of foreshadowing in an adventure. This usually comes in the form of avoiding Lareth the Beautiful syndrome. Other adventures sometimes leave clues around, like monster spoor on the ground. This is closer to that. What you get is something like “mortal bellow and the abrasive sound of metal on stone, dragging.” Let’s say the DM works that in a bit, dropping it around. Then, the players will be SHITTING themselves in fear. And the best D&D moments impact the players instead of their characters. When the actual minotaur shows up dragging its axe, then the players will all immediately GET IT, which is a great moment, they love figuring things out, and feel foolish for not getting it, and get to reap the rewards of their fear. Or, how about deafening screams and the flapping of heavy wings? The stench of rancid meat and sticky slitherings? It does a great job providing some meat to the encounter beforehand. The pre-ride line at DIsney, so to speak. 

Other than this, the adventure can be a hit and miss at times. The local village is only described in one word “shantytown” with “Dewy Churls” being used to describe the occupants. The’s probably all you need for an adventure like this. The rumors from the churls are an interesting lot. They range from the usual/generally poor of “echos from the delve curse all who hear them” ro “its the home of a beautiful naked angel “ and/or “the face is devilishly handsome … these are the real rumors that would flying around. Boobs! I can get behind the others. The echos, the “gateway to hell” and so on. I can wrk with them, but they don’t resonate like “naked chicks” do, when delivered by the local worthies. 

Encounter descriptions are clean. Mini-maps are provided on facing pages to hep the DM orient. Encounter descriptions are short-ish, less than a page, with generous bullets and descriptions that focus on the task at hand with little in the way or irrelevant detail to clog the works up. Bolding and brief italics are used to good effect. A very journeyman effort, providing good support for DM scanning.

The encounters are kind of puzzly. A pool of water that reflects things … your own image stepping out to kill you. But, not really evil … it can join the party! Thats something you don’t often see. The mirrored pool of narcissus acts as a gateway to another room, as well. A cup of poison in a silent room lets you speak if you want to take the poison of the people talking. Subtly there, eh? A maze of rooms, represented by just rolling random dice until you “win” the maze .Yeah … so … that’s not good. Basically the party just roll a die and waste time, with no modifiers to help or puzzle to solve, until they roll 50% enough times. Not cool. 

Oh! Oh! One more thing! That entrance to the mythic underworld? The mouth hole of the cave (literally …) with stairs in the back? It has a fesco on the back wall. Of a beautiful boy. A serene scene. That someone has crudely drawn a dick on. Oh, the locals! That’s exactly what WOULD happen in a dungeon entrance like this and I love this dungeon for putting that in. 🙂

So, a lonesome kind of dungeon. A few puzzle rooms. An overreliance on wanderers … whose effect/impact could have been achieved a different way. It’s just a little too quiet in this place for a “normal” game, I think. But, as a small dungeon in a hex in a hex-crawl I think it could work 

This is Pay What You Want on Itch, with a suggested price of $4.20. Which, I guess is funny. 🙂

https://casadeocio.itch.io/delve-of-the-handsome-repeater

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 9 Comments

Roseate Growth

Posted on January 17, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jordan Boschman
ATypicalFaux
System Neutral
"Low Levels"

A labor dispute at a valuable mine reveals the horrors that preceded it. The fossils of a little-understood ancient plant, glowing the color of a dragon’s fruit, are crushed to a fine powder and diluted into a rare, luxurious, and intoxicating spice with unknown consequences. A monastery of a small but influential religious order harbors a dark secret. A hapless group of adventurers will face the potentially far-reaching implications of these intersecting arcs and decide what will remain hidden and the shape of the conflict to come.

This 35 page digest adventure features a dungeon with around 24 rooms with a mine/monastery/StrangerThings theme. And none of the themes really comes through very well. I get what the designer was going for, but it don’t come easily.

So, there’s this mine. The people running the mine are all CompanyTown/ HearstFromDeadWood, forcing miners to work to extract some fossils, that they then powder and sell as a drug. There’s also some kind of monastery with monks. I think it’s in the mine? It’s not clear at all. Or, maybe, I mean to say tha the mine is in the monastery? The “monastery” section is absolutely there. As are the Aliens caves beyond the monastery, full of UpsideDown monsters. The idea here is that you get involved in the miner dispute thing, then transition to finding the overrun monastery, then transition in to the Aliens caves. 

This is all, I think, because of the map. The map starts with caves, transitions in to some worked halls, and then transitions again in to caves/tunnels. So to make the map work you’ve got a mine (I think?) and then the monastery and then the caves beyond it. 

But the mine thing never really comes through. There’s actually a trigger warning in this for “Anti-labour massacre.” But, there’s not really any support for that. The whole thing is supposed to revolve around the miner thing. The hooks begin it, with people pooling money, the poor and underclass, to get the party find their loved ones. Or mine guards pooling money to get the parties help with the anti-labour thing. It’s actually decent, the extra few sentences for wach, fleshing out something. The asshole want to hire you because they are being pushed too much and need one little thing done … 

But the support for the miner part ends there, at the hooks. There’s no local company town, or anything about the guards or the put upon workers or their families. There’s nothing to bring this aspect home and make it visceral and make the party care. It’s just “hey,. Here’s the dungeon now,” A dungeon with no real mine, in spite of it being centered around a mining dispute. There’s no real signs of mining and nothing to bring that home. TO the extent that I’m not even sure this is MEANT to be the mine; it may actually be meant to be elsewhere and this, this dungeon, is just meant to be another location. Needless to say, not supporting yor core premise, either on the map or in town/setup, isn’t a good thing. The other two sections don’t feel right either. Like, why is the monastery being caves? Or why are the caves behind it attached? It’s too small. Everything is too small. There’s no room to breathe. But, I guess it matches the mixed-up map (a decent one from Dyson that I think I’ve seen before) so … lets shove stuff in until it works?

The format is trying. It’s basically just paragraphs of text, with a bolded word ot phrase here or there to call it out. But the wrong stuff is bolded. It leaves things out. It bolds that the entrance room is dark … instead of bolding that you can see a light up ahead. It doesn’t bold a bridge you can see ahead. It’s trying to keep things in their own paragraph and use the bold to call attention to it, but,  it’s not really formatted to work that way well and instead you just get a lot of text that you still have to dig through.

It IS trying though. A stairwell choked with bodies has some good imagery in this. But, the alien nature of the tunnels beyond the monastery, or the monastery being overrun doesn’t really come through in the descriptions at all. The focus is in the wrong areas, in the text descriptions, now being evocative or painting the picture of what horrors are unfolding. There’s potential in it, even given the confusion, but it just doesn’t deliver on the core concepts.

This is $6.50 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages, with the last two showing the format for a couple of room, so, decent preview.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/380943/Roseate-Growth?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 1 Comment

Asymmetric Monastery of the Deranged Berserkers

Posted on January 15, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Dan Collins, Paul Siegel
Wandering DMs
OSR
Level ... 4?

Dan and Paul. the Wandering DMs, set themselves up with the challenge of stocking an entire dungeon in under two hours on their weekly live stream. What you see here is the output – a one page dungeon style adventure through an ancient monestary that has been long neglected and ravaged by nature. It features a sentient extraplanar ooze and a group of deranged warriors who worship it as their slimy overlord!

This four page adventure is actually a “two page’ dungeon with twelve rooms. An exercise in creating a dungeon in an hour, it comes off better than most dungeons, but, mostly, because they are forced to keep things terse and tight. I scoff at the methodology used and the results obtained.

By now we should all be aware that I love people who play with design ideas. Challenging the hows and whys of established design theory and process is always an interesting idea. Sometimes it will work and you’ll gain new insight in to D&D and how it works. And sometimes it doesn’t work. I’m always interested in the new ideas and always ready to tell someone that I appreciate their attempt, but, No. 

A few years ago I got seriously disgusted with the overwrought crp that was coming out. “How hard is it, really, to write an adventure for publication?” I asked myself. So, Criag Pike set out to test that. The goal was to write an adventure in an hour. I created four or five levels of a megadungeon, and, by the end, was doing thirty or so rooms in about ninety minutes. So, not hard. Along come these two dudes, who have a YouTube channel, and they want to design a dungeon on their channel in about an hour. Ok, sure, gimmick for the channel. But, also, buys in to the Bryce core conceit – That this shit ain’t hard and all the crap adventures coming out is because people are fucking idiots who don’t spend any time at all trying to figure out what makes a good adventure.

We’ve got a dyson map, twelve rooms, better than his usual small maps. An underground river runs through the middle of the map, allowing for a few hidden places and some multiple paths to rooms on the other side of the river.

The first issue is the selected format: the one page dungeon. Or, two page dungeon, for this, since the map is on one page and the twelve keys on another, along with a small art piece. This is a bad idea. One page dungeons. Bad idea. The original idea was that the constraint, in the contest, would invite innovation and keep things tight. Which it does. But it also limits the possibilities, especially in true one page design format. I have to ask, why are you limiting yourself to just one page of keys? What if you ran over in to a second page? Is it the end of the fucking world? No? Then why? I get that the format can help to force a terse keying, which is great, but, there are other ways to do this as well.

Looking at the adventure we get a shitty little wandering monster table. Six entries, not doing anything, just lists of monsters. And, while evocative of the monsters in the keyed descriptions, it comes off flat and boring. Have them doing something! Just another couple of words that amount to something other than laying in wait to attack.

The encounters are the real issue though. They run a huge variety of quality. We get a door to the room being boarded up with to giant lizards inside. The boarding up is ok, but there’s nothing more to this, a symptom of the format. We also get four berserkers camped out roasting a giant beetle legs over an open flame next to the underground river. That’s great! A near perfect example of a terse key. Maybe another environmental thing, like smokey room or something, but still very good. Compare that to “Supply closet breached by 3 giant ants.” Just like the boarded up door, it’s boring. Describe the situation, the breach, the moment the party comes in. There’s enough space for this, even in the selected format. One room has prisoners bound ready for sacrifice … one on a +3 shield soaked in flammable oil. Nice!

The adventure does a decent job of telegraphing encounters. In two situations, in particular, there are hints of whats to come. A room with rubble in it betrays an unstable ceiling, while an oily sheen on water hints at the bombardier beatles lurking overhead. Great examples of including a small detail that an observant party can take advantage of … and that cause a careless one to say “oh fuck! Oh course” once they are screwed over. 

I’m not the end all and be all of design advice, but I do think that the one page format, or even the two page format used here, is empty for anything other than performance art purposes. A page for a map, maybe two more for keys, a page of monster stats to get them out of the main text (and the space they therefore take up in it) and a page of intro/wanderers/extra stuff seems to me to be just about the perfect format for a “small” dungeon. You get the tightness that you need to retain focus, but still are not all that limited. 

As a website gimmick, and the first of one also, I can see the value in this … if I squint hard. But, just a little more thought would do this right and produce something good instead of just performance art.

This is $1 at DriveThru. There’s no level range listed anywhere (Bad!) and the preview is too short to get a sense of what’s up. No bueno.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/380067/WDM01-Dungeon-Design-Dash-1–Asymmetric-Monastery-of-the-Deranged-Berserkers?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 3 Comments