Beyond the Burning Teeth

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Amanda P
Hopeful Weird Wonder
BX/Cairn/D&D
"Low Levels"

Don’t get excited. The Burning Teeth are a mountain range.

A charismatic exiled warrior lord Dakon Lazard drove his followers to an ancient warrior temple in the Burning Teeth mountains, looking for redemption at any cost. It has been a month since any of the warriors have come from their vault. Villagers have begun to go missing, merchants are losing trade goods, and the earth rumbles more furiously than ever. Explore the volcanic mountains and discover what has happened below in the Sunken Grave.

This thirty page adventure describes a 21 room dungeon with a boring disposition. Devoid of most evocative writing, or interactive elements, and slightly generic in the way that system-neutral things can be. I should have gone with the four page two hour dungeon instead.

You get three things here. First, a small town. You get descriptions like “Respite has had to be relatively self sufficient as a border town. As you wander, you can find carpenter’s shops, cobblers, and any other craftspeople you might find in a small village.” So, you know, totally worth the page count to describe a generic small town. Unless you are doing something memorable then there’s not much reason to spend a whole lot of time on the town. The best of the town entries is “Two large, homely men play cards at a table while the other two guards on duty whisper to themselves as you approach, eyes grim and deadly serious.” Note the difference between that description and the previous one I pasted in (which, was another location, as generic as it seemed …) In the guard one you have something going on. They are playing cards. They are glaring. They excuse danger. This is specific information. And in the world of evocative writing specificity rules. Not detailed, but specific. 

Part two is a kind of wilderness journey, I guess? There’s a watchtower on a hill and a side-view map showing a cavern system with around eight rooms. The rooms get descriptions like “The Cavernous Descent is a dank hole with a hidden ladder under a wooden trapdoor.” or “The Fountain of Ignus. A heavy door (locked) leads to an ancient shrine to a forgotten fire deity. A place for dreadful healing, soothsayers and curious sights.” Completely abstracted text. I’m not sure why the designer even bothered? This is not the second adventure I’ve seen recently that has a cavern system as a “front door” to the main dungeon. It’s not a bad idea, but, why provide these descriptions, abstracted as they are? There’s nothing here. Or, perhaps, you’re putting work on to the DM? I don’t understand AT ALL why this section exists.

Finally you’ve got the dungeon proper. The rooms are formatted in a bullet point kind of system, maybe four or so per room sometimes. But, they aren’t really in an order that makes sense. One room starts by telling us that a plaque hangs over the door to the next room. Then it tells us that door is broken and hanging from its hinges. THEN it tells us the room is full of pipes and shower heads pumping out hot steam. With acrid simple and burning cinders. Uh … Hello! Burying the lead! Finally, it tells us that thee is a great eye carved in to the door. Which door I don’t know. The one in to the room? That would make sense in the other room though, the one that leads here? It’s all just blasted out, without any consideration as to what he DM needs when.

But, mostly, there’s a sense that things just don’t work together. One rooms description is “The air singes your lungs and the hair on your arms. Sweat pools on your palms. The steps were carved long ago by a workman’s pickaxe and chisel.” So the workmans pickaxe thing is all padding, but the environmental stuff isn’t. Excet, it really has no purpose. It’s not like the next room is the furnace room or anything. It’s all just window dressing. 

And EVERY room feels like this. Like they are just window dressing. Like nothing in the rooms matters. One tells us that “In the Drywell: a 40’ pit. At the bottom, skeletons forever longing for their lost loved ones or raging at having been deceived.” So, ok. And? I mean, that’s fine, as a kind of side note to a room, but as the whole thing for the room? And for EVERY room to have this sort of window dressing and little else? 

This extends to a “random effects” table. It’s just a table full of things that can happen to you in certain rooms. Like, now you glow green. Great! Why? Because the dungeon is evil. Uh, ok. I guess I’m corrupt now? But it’s all just window dressing. No good or ill effects, really. Grow a small antenna on your head that has no impact. Sure, whatever. Next room?

A room with a bridge, over bubbling acid, is written as the most boring thing in the world. The entirety of the description is “The collapsing bridge. Above the bubbling sulfur boiling acidic water. SUpports one person at a time. You get scalded every turn you are in the water if you all in. A set of bronze armor likes at the bottom of the lake”  The armor thing is good, but, otherwise … thats taking an exciting room concept and making it in to nothing. 

This is $5 at DriveThru, The preview is eleven pages, but it’s the first eleven, so you don’t actually get to see any of the content you are paying for, preventing you from making an informed decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/381410/Beyond-the-Burning-Teeth?1892600
Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 5 Comments

Dungeon Magazine 152 – The Last Breaths of Ashenport

Posted on January 10, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
The Last Breaths of Ashenport
by Ari Marmell
D20
Level 6

A special request for a Dungeon 152 review!

This 44 page adventure is the standard Call of Cthulhu scenario, except written for 3e (3.5?)  You’re in an Innsmouth, it’s cut off, freaky shit goes down, you raid the church and then you raid the sea caves. I’ve played and run enough to these that I know how it’s supposed to go down, and you can see the basic outline and what the designer wants to do, but the scenario doesn’t accomplish it.

I like CoC. I think CoC is great. Non delta-green versions of CoC are the perfect one shot/con game. What I do NOT think, though, is that investigation adventures are meant for D&D. D&D has the Divination problem. The players can and will cast Detect Evil/Locate Object, etc. This is because D&D is not an investigation game. D&D is a dungeon exploration game. The spell lists are crafted for a party raiding a dungeon and finding a princess and wanting to know if they are gonna get a kiss and kingdom as a reward or a level drain for their problems. And for every Detect Evil you memorize that’s one less Fireball to toss out. It’s a give and take and resource management game. And I don’t really give a flying fuck how YOU play D&D. That’s irrelevant. The Spell Lists are created for this type of play. It’s built in to the game and WILL be built in to the game until someone reworks the fucking spell lists. 

Until this happens the only possible solution is to gimp the fucking party. I still remember being stone’d by a Medusa who the adventure said was evil “but not enough to register on the spell …” Uh huh. And in this adventure there is a vague evil detected in the village but nothing specific. Because two evil altars are masking the fact that everyone in the village is an evil Dagon cultist. Combine this with the standard “You are trapped in the village by a raging storm” mechanic. I know, I know, it’s a standard trope for these things. Or, rather, it’s a standard fucking trope for a game in which you are normal people facing the terrible unknown. I can teleport without error and he regularly communes with his god and rides the sun chariot around the night sky with him. We don’t get trapped in villages. It’s trying to force a scenario type in to a game that doesn’t support it. Just like you don’t explore dungeons in CoC, you don’t investigate in D&D. That’s not how the game was built.

Ok, so, that’s out of the way. Let’s say something nice. There’s a paragraph of advice up front that is extremely useful advice to the DM: “When describing them [ed: the fish-men], however, don’t use either of those terms. In context of the adventure, they’re not “pseudonatural kuo-toa”; they’re fish-men of Dagon. It may sound like a minor point, but the proper use—and, just as important, the careful avoidance—of particular terms can go a long way toward making the PCs, and indeed the players, feel like they’re truly facing the unknown.” No truer words. This gets to a core point: making the party afraid. You don’t tell them they face a troll. You describe the troll. You don’t say “dragon”, you describe it. You describe eyestalks popping up out of a bit, not say the word “beholder.” The specific advice given is different (they are fish men, not kua-toa) but the concept is in the same neighborhood. Don’t remove the mystery and fear from the game by naming the thing.

There’s also a pretty good in-voice bit from an NPC. If you question a rando townsperson about an inn, when you first arrive in town, you get this little gem: “Might meet you there later to hoist a tankard or two; gods know I’ll not be doing much else ’til the sky stops weepin’.” Pretty good! An NPC acting like a normal person for once! The adventure also let’s you roll, after 24 hours, to determine that the weather is not normal. A nice naturalistic way; it takes time. 

We are now done being nice.

The standard long read-aloud. The read-aloud is in italics, making it hard to read. Nothing new there. The read-aloud has a lot of “you’s” scattered in it: “their eyes glare at you in hatred” and so on. It does solve the “long stat block/enoucnter” issue by removing all encounters and placing them in the rear of the adventure. So a room might say “run encounter ‘from the sea on page 24 now.’” 

The adventure does two things majorly wrong, which would be wrong even in a CoC game. First, it relies A LOT on questioning captives. It fully expects you to knock people out and question them so you can find the next breadcrumb location. Not cool. And if this doesn’t happen then the NPC’s in the inn, the other travelers, will spoon feed info to you. “It looks like everyone is going to the church!” or some such. SO much so that at one point it advises to give the party a story award if you DONT have to have the NPCs do this.  This Adventure Plot extends in to other areas as well; when the party is magic’d to walk in to the sea to drown themselves, if they all fail their save, then an NPC in the inn will save them. IE: This is all just window dressing. It’s meant to be exciting, but not dangerous. You don’t actually have agency and there are not actually any consequences to your actions. Not cool.

It’s also using a standard room/key format for the town. The mayor is in the town hall. The sheriff is in the sheriffs office and so on. But, this isn’t how an adventure gets run. They shouldn’t just be sitting there, waiting for the party. The sheriff is a small town bully. He should be out, harassing the party around town, having goons do things and like. His entry even says this. But, his description is just hidden there, in the sheriffs office entry. There should be a section, up front, describing events and actions and things to happen in the town. The towns vibe. It’s a dynamic, fluid place … or, at least, it should be. This is not an exploratory dungeon. This is a social investigation adventure. Room/key isn’t the right way to present this information in order for the DM to be able to run a smooth and fluid game in which that asshole small town sheriff is out causing trouble. It just comes across as a throw away comment, and too much is left fo rthe DM to infer. The DM is not supported.

I can see exactly HOW this is supposed to be run. I can get the vibe the designer is going for. It’s not the utter garbage that most Dungeon adventures are. But it’s also no where near runnable in order to get the full experience that I think the designer was going for.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 15 Comments

Fractious Mayhem at Melonath Falls (No ArtPunk #8)

Posted on January 8, 2022 by Bryce Lynch

Number seven(?) in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

Fractious Mayhem at Melonath Falls
Trent Smith
1e
levels 3-5

This eighteen page adventure features four interconnecting cave systems around a waterfall with about forty or so rooms. A monster lair assault ala B2. It’s dense. It makes no apologies. 

Throw a dude a fucking bone Trent. Ok, so, let’s say your write the amazing adventure ever published. But you did it exclusively in iambic pentameter, in Inuit. And when people are like “Dude, can I get a version I can run?” you take a brief moment to glance at them and say quietly “fuck you.”

This is not the worlds greatest adventure. There is no explicit “fuck you” in it by the author. What it is, though, is a good adventure that is plagued by usability issues. And while I can’t be certain, it seems logical to assume that Trent knows about usability issues and has made a conscious choice to not worry too much about them.

This all means that I’m not running this adventure. Hey, this bottle of wine rates a 96 on Wine Review and costs $900/bottle. Or you can have this bottle that rates a 95 and runs $3 at Aldi. Look, that’s not a perfect analogy but you get where I’m going: why put up with X when I can have Y that is almost the same thing? Every adventure ever written is now available to a DM. This isn’t an appeal to the massive production values of the overly laid out monstrosities that haunt certain segments of the hobby. But, presumably, we share out works with others because we’d like them to get some use out of it. If they aren’t going to use it then what’s the purpose? Creation for the sake of creation? Sure. But that’s not an adventure. That’s a personal art project. It’s 2022. It’s time to beef up our formatting/layout/usability skills … just a little. I’m a firm believer that you can get to about 80% in about a week. Spend a week for a big step up.

It should be obvious where this review is going. I like this adventure. It’s a more intelligent B2, with a lot more depth to it. Four interconnecting cave systems with multiple paths through it. The maps have a good deal of variety and depth to them, loops, multiple paths, halls running over or under others. And the verticality of the waterfall itself. 

We’ve got a pretty traditionally lair complex. You’ve got the beast caves, made up of bullywugs and giant catfish/frogs/etc. You’ve got the rando monster cave ala the Owlbear in B2. Hook horrors in a cave cut off from the rest of the system. Then you’ve got the Xvart lair, with a fully fledged Xvart society. Women, kids, MU’s, stevedores, etc.

Who are gonna FUCK. YOUR. SHIT. UP. They busting out of secret doors. They got an order of battle. They ain’t taking no shit from the party. It’s quite the complex environment, replete with wererats doing their conspiracy shit, prisoners, and the like. 

And it’s all wrapped up in what is essentially a wall of text. I’m looking, right now, at a full colum of small text that describes the secret room of the wererat boss. It’s furnished with a bed, lounging chair, brazier, desk, rug, and chest, the text tells us. And then a LONG paragraph about how the assassins guild views him. And then one that starts by telling us that thened, chair rug and brazier are remarkable, though the rug has a resale value of 500gp, it’s encumbrance value. And on and on and on it goes. 

What we have here is minimalistic descriptions. The classic minimal description. Bed, rug, chair, brazier. But then, when something IS remarkable, then EVERYTHING about it needs to come out. Rooms are large, chambers are empty. Descriptions aer not evocative. But the entire thing is DESIGNED. This IS a xvart cave lair. The descriptions are not laundrylists of room contents. It’s not expanded minimalism. It’s a weird mix of minimalism and then picking a topic in the room and expanding on it, hidden depth style. 

It’s fookin DESNSE. And you’re not gonna get ANY help from the designer in running it. It is what it is and you’ll gonna have to live with it. Take it apart. Highlight the fuck out of it. Take copious notes. 

And I don’t do that anymore. That’s not what an adventure is to me. I’ll pick something else, equally good or better, that is easier for me to run.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 7 Comments

Vault of the Warlord (No Artpunk #7?)

Posted on January 5, 2022 by Bryce Lynch

Number seven(?) in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

Vault of the Warlord
By Justin Todd
1e
Levels 1-3

This twenty page adventure features a dungeon with thirty rooms as well as a nearby town and wilderness area. It’s got a Deathtrap vibe, but not an unfair one. A good example of pushing your luck, over and over again. Smart play yields rewards. It’s also a little light on the evocative text.

What a strange little adventure. Strange in a good way. It feels like one of those dungeons of old. Multiple entrances ,lots of whit to fuck with. Almost verging on a funhouse vibe, but never crossing the line in that territory. I can see analogies to Tomb of Horrors, without as much Deathtrap. 

We get a small town nearby. A temple the party can take over and get worshippers, a wise woman and her witch sister. A thief to fence shit … that may screw the party over. And the local lord who “will house & feed a man, provided he submits to bathing.” Specificity. That’s what he town has. Little details like that the DM can riff off of. Just enough description to run it and riff. Which is the way I like things in town. The town provides rumors to a cursed dungeon, and off to th wilderness the party goes. To find a number of interesting encounters, from a bandit gang, to Karl the Ogre … who is a troll cursed to not harm men except in self defense. A tribe of giant beavers has build a great dam … and underneath is the dungeon. If you get them to drain the lake, or do it against their will, you will get a new dungeon enctrance. One of several scattered throughout the region, from traditional entrances to others like the beaver lake or one guarded by Karl. It all kind of works together. There’s a kind of mellow vibe to the writing, but the encounters make sense and have just enough detail to generally bring them to life, with a few exceptions.

The dungeon proper is basically a giant room with several doors off of it, and several side corridors with rooms off of them. It’s an interesting design, and reminds me a bit of Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure. There are flooded areas and partially flooded areas … or maybe not depending on your beaver damn experiences …

 Formatting is good and easy to use and scan. The encounters are interactive. Some sodium bricks for your flooded water journey. Or finding a coffin with a staked vampire in it … and some magical swords at his side. What to do what to do? The pushing your luck thing. You know what’s gonna happen. Nother vampire has stakes through her eyes and is weakened … a continual threat. A ceiling held up by an immovable rod. You want the rob, don’t you? Treasure can be generous … but it’s always got something going on, like the vampire, or the ceiling, or swords that are catatonic until something else happens. You’re gonna have to work for shit. It’s the Hidden Depth that is sometimes talked about … but not the depth that is esoterically twelve layers deep. It’s accessible and approachable by the party.

It is the writing that I’d like to comment most on. It’s terse. Maybe too much so. The situations are interesting, and they work together to give you a good sense of the place, but the individual encounters can lack quite a bit. 

“There is an enormous set of Drums of Panic stored here.” Well, ok. Not much really interesting or evocative about that description is there? Either for the room or for the drums? Or, maybe something like “This area contain the ruined bodies of several cultists, with only tatterred robes and skeletal or desiccated remains.” That’s in a room with the title “Profane Temple.’ You need to run with that. Or “hundreds of corpses are piled & stacked here …” These are not bad words in and of themself (though I could take exception to the “this area contains …” padding) but there is just nothing more beyond that. I could use just a sentence more, on the context the object is in, and maybe a descriptive word or two more for the object itself. 

Oh, and some rooms have something that could be considered either read-aloud or a DM overview. It’s cringe. “The air is stale & fetid. Too-cold water laps the knees. Death visited this place.” Uh huh. That’s a little fantasy novelist try-hard. There ARE zombies under that water, which is a classic encounter, and one of them has a jewel in its gut. Yeah for gutting monsters like I am 13YO again! So, great encounters, but the writing needs to be bumped up a notch.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts | 1 Comment

City of Bats

Posted on January 3, 2022 by Bryce Lynch

Number six(?) in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

City Of Bats
Dashwood
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 4-6

This eighteen page adventure details two levels of a dungeon with about fifty rooms. Excellent maps, a delightful interactivity, and a casual depth to the encounters makes this one a great thing to pull out at the table.

This is the kind of adventure you hope to run across. Some person sitting in their basement cranking out rocking good adventures with no effort. That’s what this feels like. Like someone just sat down and said “I’m writing an adventure for tonight” and just cranked it out in a hour or so. I don’t know that it took an hour, but it feels that way. Not in a rushed way. But in a kind of naturalistic way. No pretension. Handwrought skills. Just gonna draw a map and then type out some keys.

The maps. The maps are GREAT! They are just two, one for the upper level “Cave of Mists” and then a second for the “City of Bats”, that the cave of mists acts as the Door to the Mythic Underworld for. Just a piece of graph paper and a pencil and some person cranking it out. It feels … right? It feels like there’s some room to breathe in here. I mean, it’s still just a couple of small maps, with sixteen rooms on the first level, but the interconnecting hallways, secrets, branching rooms and loops make it all feel right. Level two continues the themes, with rivers, statues, pools, rooms withing rooms. These are excellent maps that looks like someone just sat down and cranked it out in a few minutes … cranked out an excellent map, that is.

The dungeon keys are interesting.You get mossy floored caves, misty caves, bat guano and fluttering bats. Everything is going on swingingly. Keys are short and sweet, generally, with things like “A group of nine man-sized wooden sculptures depicting twisted half-man half-animal hybrids stand in a circle. The sculptures are coated in bat guano and other filth.” Ok, no problemo! I can get behind that! And then you reach the lizardmen. The first solid stake in the ground.

“Five Lizardmen stand guard in this cave. When first encountered they will be roasting skewered cave locusts over a small fire and gambling for jade beads. Light and noise coming down the tunnel will alert them, and one of their number will immediately go to warn the rest of the tribe at area 10.”

They are doing something in their room. Theres an interesting scene being painted for the DM in the a few words, but a few words that paint a great image. There’s a reaction … (and later an order of battle for the lizardmen.) The next room is their lair. “The cavern is illuminated by yellowish light cast by giant fireflies held in reed cages. It is home to a small tribe of Lizardmen who dwell in the side-caverns. The tribe’s warriors, clad in crude hides and smeared with black warpaint, will swarm out of their holes and attempt to encircle the party, baring their fangs and hitting their weapons on the stones.” Alright! Swarming out! Baring fangs! Hitting weapons! Primitive posturing! I can get behind that! That’s what fucking lizardmen do! And then, maybe, you meet the idol they call their god. The one that booms at you for tribute. And then, if pushed, gives up and is like “Hey, alright man, chill. Yeah yeah, I’m not an idol, I just pretend to be one cause it’s an easy life.” WTF?!?! It’s fucking magnificent. It doesn’t use the words I did, it makes sense in context. It’s brilliant.

And that’s what this adventure does. It just throws these simple little things at you. They seem simple. But they also seem RIGHT. They seem both classic and fresh all at the same time. It’s got a basic D&D flair to it. Not the kiddie D&D basic, but the OD&D basic, the kind of weird, brought to life, without being gonzo. The cave behind the waterfall, symbolically, again and again and again.

I could go on and on. Great treasure. Splashes of greatness there. A room with giant flies in it … big ones. And then a Chasme flies out. Fuck yeah man! Cause that’s how an encounter like that goes down! It’s all so very NATURAL. It FEELS right.

I do have a complaint. It’s in single column. If this were double column it would be less stressful on the eyes/cognition to scan. I know, I know, that’s the most trivial of things. But it’s also true. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run it. You absofckinglootly should run this. It’s awesome, in the same way as that first level of Darkness Beneath is awesome.

That’s two great adventures in this volumen, so far, making this the buy of the year at $10.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute. A subtle dig?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 8 Comments

Dust & Stars (No Artpunk #5? #6? idk)

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Bryce Lynch

Number SOMETHING in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

Dust & Stars
Settembrini
OSRIC
Levels 9-12

This twenty pages adventure describes a tower with about thirty locations. It’s got a cohesive backstory that makes you want to know more and does a good job placing monsters in an intelligent fashion in a high level adventure. It’s also single column and could use an edit.

The Space|Time War. The fleets of the Eternal Empire. The Star Pump. Cosmo-port. A dying god. A river of dust, fine as silt. Celestial Cult. That’s how you write a fucking backstory man! Taking up most of a page, it offers no real explanations of what the fuck is going on but you just star at it, trying to take it all in, wanting to know more. It’s exactly the kind of “Don’t Explain Things” that I’m talking about when I mention that topic. It makes the mind race!

If you say the name of the tower, outloud, then something weird happens. Why the fuck doesn’t this happen in more adventures? Especially high level ones? Because of COURSE thats what happens when you say the name of something powerful outside. ANother room in the tower has a creatures name on a door “Frank may not pass!” Of course! These elements FEEL right. A trapped man turns in to a bodak. An elemental, over time, turns in to a mud pool … which is handled like a black pudding. Because that’s how to handle this shit. It is an imagining of the environment FIRST, and then an attempt to figure out the D&D mechanics shit later. This is the cure of the sad old tropey D&D. The D&D that only uses the book shit. Or, rather, uses it first/. “I need a EL12 encounter. I can use four of creature X. They are in the room. Yeah! Next room!” No! From the books came evil in to the world! Or, rather, STARTING with the books brings evil in the world. And not in that Good Way that we all secretly look forward to. The books are the death of imagination. They allow for someone to not try at all. But, this adventure (and, it could be argued, the entire contest) is push-back against that. You start by imagining a thing and then you find something in the book to make it D&D-able. Or, at least, you snake it SEEM thats what happened. 

A tower full of high level enemies, traditionally a monster-zoo type situation. This solves that, a bit, with solid reasoning behind things, that doesn’t overstay its welcome. One sentence on why creature X is here. A little relationship chart to show who they like and hwho they don’t for a little extra talky talky fun. 

The format is single column and the editing could use another pass. It’s approaches wall of text territory, and the language use needs to be tightened up for scanning.  “An iron cage once existed, covering the walk from the entrance door to the spiral staircase. It is rusty, broken and destroyed.” Once existed it the key here. And, while it seems like such a simple thing, not something to worry about, it’s the repetition of the concept that drags things down. A rusty, broken, destroyed iron cage covers the walk from the door to the spiral staircase.

I’m a big fan of this, in concept. This is one of oldest of the old adventures that you have to dig through and grok and work on to get in to your brain. I also suspect this is a side-effect of all high level adventures. They are complex. Given that complexity more time needs to be spent to ensure that they are clear. And this needs that. Taken out of single column, put in two, some sidebars, better formatting of the text, cleaning up the text with some editing, and so on.

But, still, a good example of how to write a high level adventure and make it challenging without simply resorting to writing a low level adventure with high level creatures in it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute. A subtle dig?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

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

Caught in the Webs of Past and Present – (No ArtPunk #5?)

Posted on December 29, 2021 by Bryce Lynch

Number two in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

Caught in the Webs of Past and Present
Gabor Csomos
S&W
Levels 4-6

This eighteen page adventure contains a two level ruined elven palace with about forty rooms. It’s got great evocative writing, knows how to write a room description for play at the table, and does a great job using basic and standard creatures and tropes to fresh effect. It is what we in the biz like to call “a good adventure.” 

A good adventure. What is that? Full of gonzo and breaking new ground? No, not at all. It doesn’t have to be that at all. I see a lot of adventures, ince I review a lot of adventures. There’s a common complaint, in reviewer culture, that reviewers only like the new and fresh. That’s not true. Reviewers, of all types, are not addicted to new and fresh. What they want is to see something REALIZED. A concept, fleshed out, and brought to life. Sometimes this is new and unique content. But it doesn’t have to be, and, in fact, it may be easier to NOT be new and fresh. I lament, frequently, the post-Tolkein age of fantasy where all fantasy looks generically the same. But at the same time I love the more folklore based stuff. It FEELS right, in a way that generic fantasy tropes do not. The issue is not it being folklore or trophy. The issues is someone realizing the vision. And Gabor Csomos realizes their vision. (Apologies to all of my non-English readers. Gabor has some of freaky foreign accent things in their name, the kind that scares Americans, and I’m too lazy to figure out how to make it work on my keyboard. So, please insert of random accent marks and pretend I’m not a lazy shit.)

There’s some elven ruins nearby. A part of adventurers chased a monster in them. They didn’t come out. A small series of hooks plays on this. Maybe they were your buds, and there’s thing where they came to aid a few times or buddied up to you in the bar, and now you kind of feel obligated to save them? GREAT hook, the kind of integrates in to the campaign through play, rather than “your mom got kidnapped” sort of BS. A hook that appeals to the PLAYERS. Or, the Iron Tyrant, an enemy of that party, wantsyou to go find their bodies/any survivors so they can properly punish them with a limetime of torture. Sweet! Those are some fucking hooks man! Great examples of a short, one or two sentence hook, that brings SO much more life to the adventure than the usual generic shit.

Our wanderers include an evil NPC party (Yeah! Gutboy parties are used nearly enough!) a troll, collecting stones to build a new bridge nearby, and a ghost who sometimes stares at you from a distance and sometimes tries to kill you. It’s name, in the statblock? The Strangling Ghost. FUCK YEAH! That’s how you add color to an adventure. Not ghost. Any fucking adventure can have a fucking ghost. STRANGLING ghost. One extra fucking word. Just one, and it brings that fucking dumb ass wandering monster encounter to life in a way that most designers could never even dream of. One fucking word. The RIGHT fucking word. That’s the key to this shit. Terse, evocative. It feels right. A troll with a bridge? Duh, right, exactly. How the fuck do you think bridges get byult in fantasy worlds? By trolls, of course!  Duh! It feels the fuck right, right? He’s not at his bridge though, that’s the trope. He’s building it, a little twist. Perfect.

“If you want to be a gladiator then act like a gladiator” says the OD&D advice for responding to player who want to be a gladiator. New D&D would have a bunch ofmechanicssurrounding it. OD&D says “act like one.” The vargouille on the wandering table. You know, the head/neck/spine/inestines monster? It’s elves. Or, rather, “the flying angry heads … of what used to be elves.” Because its an ancient elven ruin that’s been cursed, that’s why! No need for special rules or new monsters. Just theme the fucking perfectly and move the fuck on. 

Look, I can go on and on and on on this adventure. A staff floating in water with a clear blue gem on top. That’s a fucking magic item. You all know its a fucking magic item. How? Cause its fucking cool. It’s a cool fucking way to find something. It summons the cultural memory. And you’re right, it is a magic item. It’s a staff of fucking power with fifty fucking charges! Ex-fucking-caliber man! Fucking Epic!

The entrance to the complex are come vine covered columns with statues in them, and a saying. You are entering a new place. The mythic underworld. The body of a dead adventurer is full of wasp larvea inside. Gross! And exactly what SHOULD happen in a room with giant wasps in it. A risty metal statue stands outside of a rearing horse. Ispective characters may notice the ground aroun it frozen. Brown Mold! BECAUSE THaTS THE FUCK HOW IT WORKS! This is fucking perfect. You see the description, you don’t think brown mold, and then after you fuck up you’re like “fuck! Yes! It was obvious!”  And it’s just vanilla shit from the book. Valinna and generic are not the same, as this adventure points out time and again.

Formatting it good. The descriptions reveal enough to the party to follow up on and bolded keywords guide the DM to those elements. Traps are foreshadowed. There’s a fucking EVIL ass arena that stalks the party. It all makes perfect sense. The encounters FEEL fresh even though they are only book items. An alter to evil has a pentagram drawn in blood with a goat skull. BECAUSE THATS WHAT ALTERS TO EVIL LOOK LIKE!!! 

This adventure, alone, is worth the pice of adventure to the No Artpunk book.

A good adventure. Using only book items. Not the best adventure ever written. Not gonzo. Not special. Just a rock fucking solid examples of what a good adventure fod D&D looks like. Would that every adventure be like this!

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute. A subtle dig?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 23 Comments

Tower of the Time-Master – No ArtPunk #3

Posted on December 27, 2021 by Bryce Lynch

Number two in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

Tower of the Time-Master
Ben Gibson
Levels 1-3

A pale blue glow surmounts the weathered tower. The gentle babble of the nearby brook is drowned out by an alien cry from above. A shadow passes over the sun as a strange beast launches itself from the high crenellations. Beware, for the pets of the Time Master seek intruders to his domain.

This fifteen page adventure uses ten pages to describe ten levels of a wizards tower, each with about five to nine rooms. Ben has a style that allows him to describe expansive areas with a minimal of fuss, and that’s on display here. I think he could have done more, with the space he allotted himself, to make the place seem more alive.

Ben tends to write at a relatively high level. Not abstracted, and not an outline, but rather close to an outline of an adventure. Or, in this case, the outline of a room. This style, generally done well by him, allows him to cover a lot of ground. Grand sweeping adventures contained in only fifteen pages, with enough information for the DM to run many,many sessions from it. It’s a fine line between writing down your idea for an adventure, an outline for one, and providing the DM what they need to run an adventure but at a high level, and its one that Ben usually gets right.

We can see that here. Ten levels in ten pages, with five to nine rooms per page, a style that is NOT minimally keyed, and relatively interesting environments to explore. That’s a lot of ground to cover in that number of pages … and yet it generally works in this.

This place is local wizards tower. The villages around it pay homage. The locals might work as guards there. He ostensibly pays fealty to some lord somewhere. The hooks and rumors reflect all of this. This is not a ruined tower, or some place out in the wilderness, but the local wizards abode. The hooks are a great variety, that, I note, allow the party to approach the adventure from different avenues. Is this is a raid, a diplomatic mission, a sneak thief? The variety of hooks each provide a different reason for poking your nose in to this place … something that, I think, is seldom seen in adventures. Very nice job on their variety. Or, perhaps, I mean, the different play styles they would enable.

You get one page per tower level, with a map on that page the five to nine keyed locations for that level also located on the page. There are a few extra pages to note NPC relationships, guard rotations, and the wide variety of entry and exit points to the tower.

This, itself, is interesting. The map goes out of its way to note exterior windows and doors. Balconies and the like exist. You can pick your poison for entry, even going so far as to risk a grapnel to the Aviary. Multiple stairs and exist between levels are inside the tower also, as well as trapdoors and vertical shafts. This helps with the verticality of the adventure, allowings for something other than a straight-line adventure up or down. And, quite an impressive feat for a single page per level. 

Interactivity is good, with NPC’s to talk to and interact with, and various weird things that will need to be fucked with .. or not. The tone here is very similar to G1, with mundae things given a slight twist … like a t-rex with ruby eyes … and ans snapping jaws. Or a skull that begs to be placed on the neck of a body … promising all of the secrets of the universe if you do so. That’s my kind of guy!

There are, I think, a couple of areas that could be better. 

Bens descriptive style works well for grand sweeping adventures and slightly less so for these smaller venues. (Where a ten level tower is defined as “smaller”) It’s not that its bad, or unwieldy, but that it lends itself to slightly less evocative imagery. I assert that this is a self-imposed limitation … which I shall elaborate on in a bit. Ben also notes the guard rotations of the floors in an upfront section … and they would better be noted in the individual level descriptions, on those pages proper. As it is now, there’s page flipping or jotting down notes … and there’s room on the pages more information. 

Speaking of things missing … it feels like the format is limiting. Or that Ben put limitations on himself. There is room, spacious room, on many of the level pages. This could be exploited to bring more depth, or evocative writing, to the sparser room descriptions. The guard rotations/patrols were already mentioned. A grand hall with a description … but not noting the balcony around the top … because thats on an upper level? Kudos for the window notations, but the large gaps of whitespace just feel like they could have been exploited to better use.

Further while there are notes on the NPC’s present in the tower, they feel … dead? Static? They just don’t seem to have any life to them. Noting them up front and then noting, in the keyed encounters, that the cook is in this room … there’s just not any joie de vivre in them. Again, this feels like something that could have been spiced up in the room encounters, or even up front in the general NPC descriptions section.

And this is, I think, what I mean by the style being limiting. It’s great for the kind of grand & epic campaign that Ben can write … and it seems to be working less well for something like this, a more traditional room/key location place. He’s trying to do a lot here, ten fucking levels after all!, but it just never comes together and feels fully formed. 

Almost there though!

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute. A subtle dig?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

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

The Well – No ArtPunk #2

Posted on December 25, 2021 by Bryce Lynch

Number two in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

The Well
Jon Bertani
OSE
Levels 1-4

This fifteen page adventure uses about eight pages to describe a temple with about 25 rooms and a few surrounding wilderness areas. A primitive frontier setting has a very Harn-like feel … but is too wordy and … cumbersome in its language for me to love this special-ops assault.

A dude walks out of the forest and gives you a tallystick. “Show up in the village of Pigsty by noon on the 25th and you may get an inheritance.” You show up to find a village out of 13th Warrior, all wooden palisades on the frontier-like. Indeed, even the village chieftain is a too-old warrior. But, shown the tallystick, he greets you with respect! There’s something fucking different! Finally, we don’t have the fucker in the throat 137 times! You’ve inherited a farmstead! He warns you the frontier is dangerous and sends a man to show you. Arriving, you find the gates hacked down, brigands looting, and the big mastiff dog shot and whimpering! Bastardi! Shall you track them back to their lair to recover your livestock? A small overland adventure ensues, with you finding an old temple facade in the side of a mountain. You then transition to a spec-ops sneak-in, probably, and then the usual  hack-fest when the gig is up. 

This is a hard adventure to review. It’s not my thing. But it is my thing. It’s a very frontier-like adventure. There’s a vibe of wooded palisades surrounding towns, tribesmen in the hills, danger over the next hill, lumberjacks and so on. 

Or, at least, that’s what the vibe is SUPPOSED to be. It comes off more than a little bland. The individual elements are there, a little bland, but they don’t seem to work together well. There’s a whorehouse in town. The madam is a fat rotund woman who treats her girls well. Ok. So … pretty bland description. The next thing described in town are the lumberjack mill. Ah! Now I get it! The lumberjacks are over the whores at the whorehouse! You don’t get this from the adventure. There’s no inference, explicit or explicit. The whorehouse isn’t rowdy. Or full of lumberjacks, or anything like that.You, the DM, have to make that connection. The old lord in his hall, the description never mentions his daughter … just provides her stat block. Make of it, riff off of it, as you will. Which I can appreciate! … to a degree.

The entire adventure is like that. Everything in it. You find your livestock taken off. What do you do? Go back to town? (And, the town is 1 mile from the farmstead currently being raided by the brigands … uh … shouldn’t that play some part in what is going on in town? I guess not?) What this needed was just a little bit more in each area. A small amount of riffing from one area to the next. More colorful interactions, like a better description of the whorehouse. As is, it, and the rest of the descriptions, are a little generic. Not vanilla, but generic. Here’s the whorehouse:

“A two-story stone structure with colorfully painted shutter. The sign hanging over the entrance shows an image of a shapely woman. This is a brothel, run by a middle aged woman named

Mother Eddith. She’s a woman of ample form and a pleasant face. Her workers are well cared for here and learn other life skills as well. They earn a measure of the coin they make and may leave at any time they so choose, just so long as they don’t open up

their own business in town. Eddith is one of the wealthiest people in town. She has one guard, her son Igmus, a simple minded giant of a man. He considers all the working girls his siblings and will protect them to the best of his abilities, which when angered are quite formidable.”

The elements are there. The madam. The son. His sibling relationship. But that’s it. The interactivity is not present. The color from the rest of the town. The town and wilderness encounters absolutely fall in to this, and the templebrigand lair less so but still. 

You eventually track them back to their lair, a facade in the side of a mountain. Turns out its an old dwarf temple. With a symmetrical map. Ug! We do get an alternate entrance, behind a waterfall. (Yeah!) What follows is kind of a harn-like assault on a mostly linear map. You will attempt to sneak in, kill guards and hope the alarm isn’t raised, eventually finding a pitched battle. 

Descriptions inside are much the same as the town: a tad bland. Intellectual? The latrine tells us that “This room is fouled with the stink of offal. It’s obvious the bandits are using this area to as a latrine and toss other waste here. Rats scurry away into cracks in the walls when light is brought here.” The writing is a little … hoity? High-handed? There’s no viscereality to it.  There are better example of thes in the adventure, such as: “A triangular fire pit burns with low oddly coloured flames. The flickering flames reveal an arc of runes upon the wall.” This is not the worst writing. But it comes off a little forced and as an academic version. “The flickering flames reveal” is a little too tash trope literary. It FEELS forced, rather than natural. And because of that I think it comes off as uninspiring.

Eventually the bandits are defeated and/or hidden parts of hte temple are revealed, with their dwarven challenges and rituals, or caverns with the newt-people in it. (Which seems a little out of place. I get adding secrets. I love that. It just seems to be missing some potential. Like, lets rally them to help defeat the bandits or something … but they seem almost an afterthought, thrown in at the last moment. 

Individually, the elements here are quite good. The lumberjacks keeping an elf captured in their basement to torment until he reveals his treasure. The shot dog. The newtmen. But they just don’t seem to work together. It’s the academic language of Harn creating an academic environment. And I get it … that’s a genre. I mean, the place is full of humans and ½ orcs, with an occasional small number of bestial orcs and an ogre tossed in … textbook examples of my preference for humans as opponents with a spash of bestial humanoids. But, together, it doesn’t ring true. A little too much explaining. A need to cut at least a third of the words, if not more, and bring the language down to more evocative descriptions and away from the academic or Harn and AS&SH. And … a hard fight for level 1’s.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute. A subtle dig?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 25 Comments

The Temple of Hypnos (No ArtPunk #1)

Posted on December 22, 2021 by Bryce Lynch

Ok, I’m back from vacation. The stupid fucking script I wrote can chill out now.

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

The Temple of Hypnos
Olle Skogren
Level 5
ACKS

On the shore of a great lake, in a verdant valley surrounded by steep cliffs, lies the Temple of Hypnos. On a sunny day the brass eyes over the main gate will flash and be visible from across the lake. A hooded ferryman in a narrow boat ferry visitors to the sandy beach near the Temple. Only 6 people with little equipment can be ferried at once, the trip taking 3 turns each way. The other way in is by the Road to Sleep which goes through a narrow pass into the valley.

This thirteen page adventure uses five pages to describe about 21 rooms inside a temple dedicated to the god of sleep. It uses standard two-column well, sucking all of the formatting life out of it, and provides good evocative descriptions and an adventuring environment full of things to explore. I consider this Baseline Quality.

Where to start, where to start. We’ve got a temple to the god of sleep and rumor has it that weird shit is going down in there all of sudden. Plus, you know, there’s this cloud giant in the forest that is too big to fit in and he’d like this silk tunic from inside. Also, Glaucas the greater is camped nearby with a group of 100 dudes, getting ready to raid the place. Might not be enough loot to split one hundred ways … might want to take a little looksy before he gets there, eh? That’s how you write from fucking hooks man! A fucking cloud giant with a voice like a whispering gale? Uh, fuck yeah! A dude gathering men to raid the place … and the party sneaking off early to raid it before he does? Uh … fuck yeah! And, get this, dude will show up AFTER the party loot the place … better pay his ass off if you want to keep the loot! That’s how to write some fooking hooks man!

This things is nothing to look at, formatting wise. Meaning that no fancy layout software was used. It looks like the designer just wrote the fucking up in a standard word processor, maybe even Google Docs, and stuck it in two-column. With intelligent use of bolding, underlining, italics, and text centering/alignment. I really can’t compliment them enough on this. It serves as magnificent example of just what you can do with the free shit on the Internet. The most basic of things, a two-colum from Gioogle Docs, provides decent formatting and ease of use. Sure, there’s a place or two where things could be better. A little more use of white space, and some of the treasure lists tend to run on line after line. Think of things like spell lists and paragraph breaks without indents, for example. That could be much better, but, again, google doc two-column! You don’t need fancy fucking tools to crank out an adventure. 

The map looks like the most complex thing in the adventure, from a formatting/tools standpoint. It’s pretty clear map, not at all symmetrical (Ug! I hate symmetrical temple maps!) with some light use of color to help, along with simple stars for statues, relative to their size, and so on. Very clear and easy to read, with only the room keys being too small. That might be better if it were printed out, but, I still think a little work could have been done here to improve things and make the keys easier to immediately grok.

The writing style is generally very good. It’s evocative and relatively terse. The entrance is described as “50′ tall Doric columns hold up a massive roof of black-gray shale slabs. The frieze is crowded with painted carvings of humans and monsters in repose. The parting triglyphs are carved into poppies and painted red.” That’s not bad at all! It forms a strong mental image. Or in room one 20’ tall doors of blackwood with a pair of brass ovals formed as sleepy eyes hanging over them; one is crooked creaked an unhinged impression.” Short and sweet. I like it! One room description has “a domineering satyr teaching an increasingly frustrated bugbear the harp.” Domineering. Teaching. Frustrated. One short sentence overloaded with the right words to create an effect that helps the DM immediately know how to run the room. Monster descriptions are great. Bugbears that look like large shaggy men in midnight blue robes and beaten copper masks in the image of hypmos. Voices droning & monotone.  That’s how to write a fucking monster description people. MIDNIGHT blue. BEATEN copper masks of Hypnos. Simple descriptions that use the right words to immediately evoke the vibe. Rock On Oll whoever the fuck you are! Note the tserseness and the specificity Not cultist garb. Not robes. Midnight blue robes. Not masks. Beaten copper masks. Two extra fucking words making it specific. That’s the fucking specificity I’m talking about! 

Interactivity is great. It’s written as a location that exists aside from adventuring. Things are going on inside. It’s not written explicitly to expect the adventuring party. This gives it a more “module”or sandboxy feel. Feel free to drop by and visit for awhile. Witness the freakiness. Try to avoid being abducted. Covet the loot out in the open. And then maybe get holy hell rained down upon you. One of my favorite moments is a well, a shallow pool full of water. Shadows dwell on the bottom, but only attack if you fuck with the water. A kind of well of souls kind of thing. In other places, shadows could meet their former human zombified bodies and merge with them, coming back to life in a daze. This makes sense. The elements here are, as with all No-Artpunk entries, standard D&D. But they are used in a fashion that makes sense. It’s not the throw off kind of D&D where you just walk in to a room and fight three shadows. They MEAN something here, specific to their environment. This is the kind of neutral adventuring environment that I love so much. Neither against or for the players, but standing apart to exploit or be exploited by an adventuring party. 

I have no idea who the fuck the designer designer is. Hey, Olle, whoeever the fuck you are: Good jorb! If this is typical of the winning entries then this will be a very strong volume of adventures, indeed!

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute. A subtle dig?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 5, The Best | 19 Comments