The Book and The Spring

Posted on July 7, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Christopher Letzelter
Anachronistes Press
OSRIC
Levels 4-7

PC’s get more than they bargained for when they undertake a quest to destroy a recently-captured tome of black magic. Standing in their way are an unforgiving desert, a cursed and ruined city, an ancient tomb, and a dried-up spring. Oh, and lots of unexpected foes and tricky situations, of course.

This 52 page adventure is a Real Deal lost city adventure, with over 350 rooms, primarily in two large multi-level dungeons. It is also, I think, nigh-unrunnable without devoting a couple of weeks, or months, of your life to it, illustrating just about every surface-level bad design decision possible. A major, major overhaul of this would turn it in to a classic of the genre.

The parties intro to this is much in the same format as G1; the armies of light have been going at it against the Evil Dudes and a group have returned with an evil artifact, a book that is indestructible. While everyone else is off waging war against the moat house and temple, the party is given the task of destroying the book, which the seers say can be done in a lost city out in the desert. 

A lost city with the tomb of an evil king (multi level dungeon) guarding by some good pilgrims, fending off incursions of an evil cult who are lairing in the palace of the evil wizard (multi-level dungeon) with some outbuildings to explore, an underground passage out StoneSky, and a couple of independent entities in the ruins, like a dragon and lamia … as well as the usual hangers on of vermin, undead, deserters and so on. The two major dungeons have over 150 rooms each, meaning we get about eight rooms per page … in an adventure that is pretty much, front to back, nothing but encounter keys with only a little front and back padding. It’s got some light Sumerian theming, which drew me to it in the first place. (Fun fact: in a con game, revealing you have a brand of Gilgamesh means you always get to play Gilgamesh!) 

In a world of mini-adventure and four-hour complete games, this is a complex adventure. This is more of an expedition, and a hard one at that, more akin to Gaxmoor or other products. You’re gonna need to bring everything with you and plan to stay for a few weeks, I suspect. Cause this place is FUCKING HARD. While the majority of the human factions are 1HD fighters (yeah! Great to see that!) there are a wide variety of 4 and 5hd monsters, numerous, along with hard traps and the like that are going to make multiple forays in to plays a necessity. And then, of course, the factions may hit you back while you camp. Or that dragon may come by for a snack. (Ok, dragonne, close enough.) Wanderers, while tending to be generic desert encounters, are checked twice a day and twice at night … which may give enough time for some recovery.  While I usually prefer my wanderers with a little more life in them, somehow the generic desert stuff like pit vipers, dust storms and nomads, seems to work well in this environment. I think it’s the slower/longer playstyle with established party camps that can lead to better emergent play opportunities. I understand shorter self-contained adventures are the norm these days, but this shows one of the strengths of a longer game … and, in contrast, what you need to do in a shorter game in order to help recreate that emergent vibe the longer ones help foster naturally.

This thing is a mess, from a layout and writing viewpoint.

Read-aloud can be a quarter of page long, and in italics, leading to both usability issues for the DM and “another droning room description” for the players. It can be sprinkled with overly dramatic language like “you feel tiny, helpless, and uneasy, as if someone or something is watching you.” … which commits the sin of telling instead of showing. Ideally you want to write a description that makes the players think they are tiny, helpless and uneasy, instead of telling them they are … and “you” is almost never appropriate in read-aloud because of this. It further dips in to simulationist territory with a lot of exact dimension and detail in the read-aloud, instead of leaving that for the party themselves to discover and thereby contributing to tearing down that key game element: the interactivity between players and DM as they explore and discover. “Two open portals beckon in the north edifice.” *eyeroll*

It engages in that favorite device of the hard adventure: gimping the players. No divination spells, creatures turn as two levels higher, and so on. The party has earned their abilities and they should be able to use them as such. Figure out another way or accept that for every divination spell cast to gain an edge there is a fireball not being cast. It also engages in something more natural. The heat causes issues for fighters in full armor. “This module will be that much more enjoyable for the players if you enforce these armor penalties.” Well … not in my experience. I get it. It’s trying for a naturalistic nerf and there’s a little simulationst thing going on here also. But, simulationism is only good in as much as it helps with the suspension of disbelief. And while I’m generally supportive of these more natural ways to nerf a party (the wizards tower is on top of a 1000’ high tree, fly if you can …) I don’t think I have ever seen heat or cold handled in an adventure in a way that is both not cumbersome and fun. It has always come across as punishment for playing the adventure. And in a level 4-7 adventure that is already quite hard? It just seems grueling, the party are no demi-god levels of powerful yet. Fuck, they might not even have fireball.

It does also engage in some other questionable design decisions, like a sepia snake sigil. Well done, there’s a cobra drawing on the wall so its not a throw away, I still raise my eyebrows at anything that seems like it’s trying to use the rules to create a in-game effect, rube goldberg style. (That’s a normal noun now, right? I mean, you don’t have to use it like a proper name? xerox VS Xerox?) And, of course, the required “you can’t open the door until you defeat the monster nonsense. I can think of one random monster encounter in the desert, with vultures, in which if you kill a vulture you are cursed. Just out of the blue. Step on a crack and break your mothers back. If you’re going to do this sort of thing then you need some hints or some way to telegraph it, or make it a conscious choice. LOTS of vultures around, you’re starving, and you know that they are sacred to Old Asshole the Very Active God of Punishing People Who Fuck With His Sacred Animals. Otherwise, this is just an arbitrary negative consequence … again, punished for playing the game.

DM text is long and confused as well. There’s a mix of in-line stats and stat blocks. While I’m not religious about either, I do find that the inline stats in this adventure just make things all the harder to scan. It could be the formatting selected and/or fonts and bolding, parens, etc. It seems to break over multiple lines, three or so, which causes you to lose what’s going on in the room. Then there’s the embedded history and backstory of the room. One room with gnolls, states “Their previous employers were more interested in building a temple stronghold and magical gain; this group is seeking a greater financial reward, and will fight heartily to keep the little bit they’ve plundered and stolen . One of the gnolls has just recently been grabbed and eaten by the inhab- itant of 12.” Well, ok, that adds nothing to the encounter at all. But that sort of thing does make digging through a simple gnoll encounter in to a pain in the ass to scan. And while treasure gets a good treatment, it tends to be ALL treasure that gets this. Even coins. Like CP and SP. “each gnoll has pouches or folds holding …” and “that is valued at …” and tons of other padding that does nothing for the comprehension of the adventure. Nothing positive that is. Ug, and we get LONG empty room descriptions. Simulationist again, above playability. “If anyone ventures past the entrance with a light they will see …” Uh huh. Just describe the fucking room man. This turns a nice and interesting little jaunt through the desert around the walls of the city, filled with sinkholes, in to a painful affair you have to fight through in order to run it. 

A disturbing number of encounters, the vast majority I’d say, do something like “they will have just spotted the characters” or they surprise the characters. Or they are waiting for the characters or something like that. And this leads to the bigger picture.

This place is too complex with no help for the DM to figure it out. There are NO summaries of what’s going oin in these place. Order of battle is mixed in to room descriptions tens of encounters away. “Frank will gather his friends in #21 if he hears sounds of battle in room 2 and will respond by …” ARRGGG!! This goes in room 2, or up front as a general reference! You can’t fucking run someonething like this. In these hundreds of rooms bases/lairs/dungeons, you need a summary of what’s going on, where things are, how things might go and so on. Given the amount of padding, figuring it out for yourself is going to take a hard core week with a highlight and a fresh notebook. 

And, frankly, I’m not going to fucking do that. I’m not going to buy an adventure and then burn an absurd amount of prep time in order to run it. Sure, big adventures DO need some prep time. But not this much man. I like the maps, clean and interesting. The adventuring environment is at least as interesting as most adventures and more so generally. But the usability and evocative writing here is just terrible. Yes, evocative writing is hard, I will give you that. 

Still, I’m so close to giving this No Regerts. A real deal lost city adventure, an expedition that feels titanic and varied. But fuck, it needs a COMPLETE overhaul in its writings and presentation. 

This is $9 at DriveThru. It’s sold in a weird way, with the encounters in one PDF and you have to buy a separate product to get the maps and wanderer tables, appendices, etc. SO you HAVE to have both of them to run this. And yet they are sold as two separate products. LAME! And, the preview doesn’t work. *sigh*

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/253075/The-Book-and-The-Spring–Encounters–Sourcebook?1892600

Blah blah blah blah reviewing everything on my wishlist as a pretext to not actually write the main book blah blah blah balh

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

The Valley of Karaccia

Posted on July 5, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Matthew Evans
Mithgarthy Entertainment
B/X
Levels 1-2

Responding to a flier promising payment for kobold heads, the party gathers in the town of Brink. From there, they set out on an expedition to the Crimson Caverns, a known kobold lair. After proving their met- tle, the PCs will be hired by the Church of Erm to recover a needed artifact from Fallsbarrow.

This 24 page adventure features three dungeons with multiple levels and about seventy rooms. It’s got a clean three-column format, but is essentially minimally keyed with just a hint of a few extra words. It’s also going to be hard as all fuck for level one and two hobos.

Our action starts quickly. The column read-aloud details the party having a meal in an inn, getting taunted by a local worthy, and then traveling to a cave full of kobolds to stand outside it …  there being a reward for kobold heads. No real fucking about here and, I must say, my preferred way of starting a level one campaign. Short to no time in town and lets play some fucking D&D man! The additional of the taunting by the local bravo is a nice touch, even though he and his friends are found dead in the very first room. Nice detail AND a missed opportunity, all at the same time. 

The rooms here are essentially minimally keyed. “Bones from a few different creatures litter the floor beneath the drop here. Otherwise this area is empty.” or “Two ghouls sitting on the floor rise to attack.” That’s not much for a DM to go on. I get it, minimally keying is a thing and I would certainly prefer it to the text onslaught that most adventures seem to suffer from. It does allow for putting fifteen rooms on just two pages, with the extra text mostly being things like details like “ghouls paralyze creatures of less than an ogres size, make a save blah blah blah” … rules notes that offer little. However, it’s 2021. A little extra room description would go a long way. Something to create an evocative environment, or even a creature description. This can be done without a significant amount of extra text and in most cases can replace the notes on “make a save to not be paralyzed” and so on that pad out this adventures text.

A certain number of rooms do receive just a little bit more text. “The two statues in the north and south are made of green marble, and are of previous patriarchs of the church. The eastern statue is made of crystal and depicts the goddess Erm. All other niches contain sarcophagi.” So, fact based and not a lot to get the DMs juices going. 

The maps are mostly simple star and branching things. One of the systems does have a shaft with three level exits, which provides some decent variety. The first kobold dungeon has two levels, while the second dungeon has one level, then you go to the “shaft” caves to get an item and return and use the item to open up the second level. This is good. A little non-linear play and at least the fetching of the red key for the red door, or the statues missing gemstone eye in this case, is at a secondary location.

The homebase doesn’t overstay its welcome, only being a page long, but it really add nothing to the adventure … it could not be there at all and you’d not be missing anything. Well, anything except the level fourteen cleric in town who gives you the mission for the second dungeon. Eeek! Why doesn’t he go do it? I guess because he’s 60? And he offers raise deads for about 1500 gp at first level … that whole thing doesn’t make sense at all. He hook for the second dungeon is that his apprentice is cursed by an evil object and he wants you to go to the second dungeon to get something to cure her … with no real mention of the thing that cursed her in the first place … a sure miss since the players are sure to inquire and want to follow up on it. Still, level 14 … How about we put him in a cart and wheel him around and act as his bodyguards while he cures, turns, and stuff?

And I say that because the poser levels here are crazy. Decently sized groups of 2HD ghouls, a 5HD queen ghoul, a 6HD bone golem. That shaft dungeon? It’s main shaft is 100’ long and is full of 2HD vines that fuck up the party. I get it, OSR and all that, you can run away. But a star with branching off hallways doesn’t give a lot of tactical options. This just seems beyond what even Run Away offers.

There are other nits. If you bargain with the priest and roll less than an 8 on 2d6 then there will be no adventure for you. That’s a lot of fun. Some rooms say things like “the sounds of battle in the next room attract the monsters here.” … which should really be in the room with the sounds of battle, or noted on the map or something.

It’s basic, nothing wrong with that. When you combine this with minimal keying a little effort at evocative writing, well, maybe you’re in to that. I’m not. There’s a bright spot or to, like exploring down the long shaft full of vines. Ultimately, you have to ask yourself what sort of value you expect to get out of an adventure. Rooms with little more than a monster standing in it, with little to no descriptive text … Meh. I got better things to do with my life.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is thirteen pages. Pages six and seven show the kobold lair, so, from that you can get an idea of minimal keying and decide for yourself if its something you want in your life. So, good preview!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/359427/RC1–The-Valley-of-Karaccia?1892600

This is episode Oh God How Long Can This Go On of Bryce reviews everything on his wishlist.

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

Tales of Highcliff Gard

Posted on July 3, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Simon Todd
Monti-Dots Creation
OSRIC
Low Levels

The Tales of Highcliff Gard contains complete mapped building descriptions of the valley of Highcliff Gard, each with their own adventure hooks, characters and their histories and at least two full dungeon adventures. Whether you have bought The curse of Highcliff Gard or Necromancer’s Bane or not, The Tales of Highcliff Gard provides a rich resource for a campaign of your own making or an inspirational read for fantasy gamers of all systems. 

This 73 page thing is … I don’t really know what it is. I guess it’s supposed to be a regional guide for the village of Highcliff Gard and some small environs around it, where two other adventures are set. It has a small dungeon described and several event-like things that could happen in the area, as well as about ten locations fully described. In detail. Excruciating detail. It’s more a … I don’t know, maybe one of those little books that local county historical societies sometimes put out?

This was going to be the bonus feature for my last review, since I didn’t think it was an adventure. But once I opened it and saw the page count and saw “two full adventures included!” and about twenty pages devoted to encounters, about a fourth of the book, I decided to make it a main review. My bad. I’m not good at regional settings.

I like towns, and regional settings. I like the concept of local places for the party to get in to, to have little things sprinkled around during their downtimes that build up through emergent play between “the real adventures.” Recurring personalities and places; I think it adds an enormous amount to a game. I just don’t know how the fuck to review them.

I do know that there is a level of detail appropriate to a location, and its purpose. The full history of every rock is probably not appropriate. Nor is never mentioning the rocks in an adventure about rock people. As the region is zoomed further and further out the degree of detail should be less, and more targeted at what’s relevant. Which is not to say that you can’t mention the old quarry close to the town, if it has nothing going on, but maybe you don’t need to fully stat it out. Further, the emphasis on what is described and how it is described should probably be on things that could lead the DM to real play, either directly, as in an adventure, or indirectly in the case of a regional guide, serving as something for the DM to sprinkle in and use. If you’re going to write three paragraphs on the various quantities and varieties of trees in the local woods then that should probably either be directly related to something going on or have some potential for the DM to use it in an obvious way. Otherwise we enter the realm of the simulationist and anecdotal … hence my comparison to the local county historical societies booklet on the history of the Robinson household and their 2000 acre holding. (Church cookbooks and local historical society booklets: Fascinating!) 

“Tales of Highcliff Gard has entered the chat”

This is a small town, Highcliff Gard, as well as just a little bit of the region around it. Just a bit. It’s the setting around which two other adventures take place, The Cure of Harken Hall and Necromancers Bane, both of which I believe I have reviewed in the past. This place is a mess. And not from an adventuring standpoint, but from a purpose standpoint. It covers the wrong things and covers them in the wrong way. What we have here, for the locations described, is far far too much detail about the wrong things. One of the described locations is an inn. The innkeeper has a family. Here’s the description for one of his kids:

“Lavinia, known as Little Vi, is 13. She has spent her childhood having adventures of her own and getting herself into trouble. Arno remains both proud and perplexed by her and swears she is the reincarnation of Marduke. Arno has the burning desire to see his family linked with the nobility beyond association and plans to marry Lavinia off to one of the Harken sons. Lavinia is horrified by the idea and currently ‘hates’ her father. Her mother maintains a tough stance advising her to do as her father bids. Vi can often be found with the Harken daughter Leonora and they plan to adventure together when they are older.”

This is how you get to 73 pages. 

Or, perhaps, the description of a washroom? 

“6. THE WASH ROOM. Water is brought up using the attic pulley on the north side of the building (7.) then heated on a small stove. This room is humid and often filled with steam. Most linen is cleaned here in baths before being hung on lines in the court yard of the tavern. This also doubles as the washroom for the staff.”

Very nice. Irrelevant to anything going on, but very nice. The major locations, about of those described, take a lot of pages to describe, with descriptions of mundane bedrooms, common rooms and the like. After each there might be five or six adventure hooks like “Someone at the inn has been killed. The owner wants the party to find out who did it before his reputation is ruined.” Very, very general.The location descriptions, the people, etc, are generally very focused on the LOCATION as being the primary important (or person, etc) rather than how they might interact, or be interacted with, by the party and the potential energy of situations that might develop. The focus is on the wrong aspect.

In the rear is twenty pages of encounters. There’s a wandering monster section that is little more than a table, and a little section on how winter changes the place. Then there are a number of little adventure ideas, or sort little things. Like you are escorting a messenger and they get attacked by an overwhelming number of bandits … the party is expected to run away and then come back to find out they are soldiers from a neighboring kingdom. That’s the extent of it. Or some mob villagers picking on a gypsy to lynch them. Maybe a couple of hours of play from most of these. One is a tad longer and might take an entire evening; the sighting of the local “if you see her you die within a month” ghost of a weaver girl. Tracking down the why of her ghost and then fixing it. This is about two pages of a mix of high level content. Then there’s a little dungeon with twelve rooms. The first room takes about two pages to describe. A column or a page is not uncommon. This is unrunnable. 

Too much detail, covering the wrong things, that’s the best I can do to review something that is not an adventure. 

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages. While not perfect, you have to imagine the writing style on those pages is present throughout, for everything, at this level of detail. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/192985/The-Tales-of-Highcliff-Gard?1892600

This has been episode “No one really gives a fuck, Bryce” of Bryce revieweing everything on his wishlist.

Posted in Reviews | 5 Comments

Ominous Crypt of the Blood Moss

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Bryce Lynch

By Frederick Foulds

Oneiromantic Press

B/X

Levels 2-4

They say Ursodiol the Mad was the greatest mind to have ever breached the great Cosmic Void; that he looked beyond the myriad stars and the blackest depths of the hells into the swirling magical protoplasmic morass that is the beginning and end of everything. When they found his corpse, so hideously changed was it that it drove those who saw it to madness and despair. Fearful, they entombed him in the crypt of his forbears and sealed it tight. But little did they know that Ursodiol brought back something with him from his cosmic journey. And it is hungry…

This 51 page digest adventure features a ten room dungeon with a decent amount going on in each room, enough to justify its page count. It’s a pretty basic adventure, with elements of otherworldly horror, using a bullet point formatting that it mostly gets right. A lot going on ni each room for a basic adventure.

So, little village has an issue, people going amnesiac, crops withering, rocks beeling, and so on. This leads to a teen room family croyt, with some undead, animated statues, vermin, and an otherworldly plant-like creature with hints of The Thing. Poke about in the rooms, maybe get some undead pointers, and then hit the thing with acid and fire, hopefulling looting enough to make everything worthwhile.

This has an … interesting format. It starts off with a sentence or two, in italics, that gives some kind of overview of the room. This may, in fact, be the absolute weakest part of the adventure, in every room. It’s a little purple in places, and gives a kind of overview that doesn’t seem to be a room concept, and doesn’t seem to be aimed at the players, and doesn’t seem to be aimed at the DM. One of the first is “Grandly decorated, a statue of G’vane stands in silent judgement of those who approach, whether they are here to mourn or to gain passage to the Great Beyond.” And another “A small chamber of religious respite, where bodies were brought to be viewed before being entombed in the crypt proper.” The rest follow in this manner. So, kind of like a room concept? But the writing is closer to what I would expect (overly grand …) if I were expected it aimed at the players as read-aloud. But then it goes on to reveal too much. It doesn’t seem to really have any place in the room, providing nothing to either the player or the DM. 

What follows are a series of major section headings, noting large rooms features. Each of these then has a series of bolded words, followed by a few words in parens. So you move from the general to the more specific, making it easy for the DM to follow up on things. Very good in concept. In practice … there’s enough in the rooms that, combined with the digest format, the major headings run over from page to page. There’s A LOT to note. 

In the first decently sized room. About 30×30 with a statue in the middle, according to the map. Our major headings are “Atmospherics, Decor, White Marble Statue of G’vane, Iron Doors, Giant Rats, Stairs, Secret Door” And then a large stat block for the Giant Rats and a table of diseases. (Good adventure support! That’s one of the reasons the page count is higher than normal for an adventure this size.) Our second level bolding, for the Decor, is “Grand, Stone Owls, Lined with tapestries, Cracked Flagstone. Then, at the third level, the parens for these elements are “20’ high rib vaulted ceiling carved with painted oak leave, stand by each corner quietly staring, faded and mouldering, cover the floor.” It make more sense when you see it in action. 

There’s a LOT to look at and poke at and clean ovv and examine in each room. That’s good. A door covered in rust reveals a family emblem and motto, that is useful later. I don’t call each room a set piece, but they definitely take more time and are more indepth than the usual dungeon fare. 

The primary issue I have is the selected major and minor headings. I get sections for atmosphere, decor, and the major elements, but it seems like it could organized much better, and perhaps trimmed back a bit. In the example text, the status is the most obvious thing, and maybe the grand environment, and the iron doors. I might lead with those elements, or put them in some kind of summary paragh/sentence. There is SO much going on, in terms of details and things to examine, in these rooms that the selected format is close to be insufficient. (It could be that the printed book uses a two-page spread and is thus a bit easier to grok “at a glance.”)

The adventure, proper, is a pretty basic family crypt, with defleshing room, osuary, chapel, the family crypt, statues, and so on. There are a decent number of things to play with, secret compartments to find, walls/tapestries/doors covered with something to clean off, statues holding things to play with (books, balance, etc.) There’s a lot to do and a lot to explore. And then you add the blood moss in. It’s a kind of alien plant that animated skeletons and has its own pseudo-pod thing like attacks, and a some mental attacks as well. This gives it a kind of vibe like The Thing. These elements could have pushed more, the blood red tendrils covering everything, an the horror of the creatures, to help magnify those aspects of the adventures. It’s not really an after-through, but it could have been pushed more to make it more forward, since it IS a major element of the adventure.

I’m not sure about treasure it does seem a tad light. A thorough looting (which the spirits inside are going to take exception to) might get you a lot more, I think? It’ still seems a little light for a B/X game. I guess, maybe, as an evenings adventure that gets you 25% of the way to the next level? Meh, ok, that seems ok to me.

So, straightforward adventure in a tomb, that you could have its horror elements pushed more and using a decent format that perhaps needed a reworking of the selected keywords, and reordering, to help with the length of the rooms. A decent attempt!

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is eleven pages and does a good job of showing you the rooms and writing. Check it out!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/319604/Ominous-Crypt-of-the-Blood-Moss?1892600

Episode blah blah blah of me reviewing everything on my wishlist. Yeah, yeah, those long expensive things you requested ages ago are finally going to show up.

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 5 Comments

Chewer of Fingers

Posted on June 28, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Glynn Seal
MonkeyBlood Design
S&W
Level 3

The PCs are heading to Fetterstone because there is a 20 gold quid reward for the capture of an escaped criminal called ‘The Finger Chewer’. He absconded from Middlemoor Gaol five days ago and is believed to be hiding out in the surrounding oft-foggy marsh. The marsh is notoriously dangerous and even the lure of 20 gold quids isn’t enough to entice the locals into its fetid clutches.

This 32 page adventure uses eight pages to describe four encounters. It’s got those idiosyncratic setting details that help cement a locale in the mind of the players, but the lack of content, both by page count and “kill three dogs is the sum of the adventure”  is disheartening.

For $15 and 32 pages you get four encounters. First, you might help an old shew of a mean lady pull her cow out of the mud. Second, you visit the inn and maybe get arrested or get glared at by the local witchfinder. Third, you go to the prison on the hill and search the convicts cell, learning that he does indeed chew fingers and one guy saw the direction he left. Fourth, you follow a trail if fingers in to the swamp (which is handled in as many words as I just typed), find his dead body, and fight three rat-dogs. ChChing! Profit!

Yeah, that’s it. There’s an appendix showing a cave system map you could expand in to your own dungeon. There’s a description of local farms in the neighborhood, that will not ever be explored by the PC’s. There’s a description of a few other prisoners in the prison, that will probably not be used. There are some very nice maps for all the locations and wilderness settings. 

The maps list the location names on the map, along with t keys, and are nicely done. No complaints. It’s exactly how a map of this sort should be handled. 

The setting location is interesting. Gloombugs, rolling mists, sullen villagers you tell you to piss off while serving shitty food. A witchfinder up in your business. Exactly the kind of people you want to stab for breathing the same air you do. There’s a collection of weird laws (like … not helping someone unstick a pig stuck in mud …) that are cutely display on a handout, and a disturbing amount of references to turnips. It’s got that specificity that you need in order to hang your hat on.

It is also LONG. That opening scene with the fucking pig, cow, whatever, if four pages long, including the map. To deal with a grumpy old lady and stuck pig minigame or “getting enough weight behind it and stuffing enough ginger up its ass. 

I’m not the biggest fan of the format here, straight up paragragh text. It does use some highlighting and some decent whitespace to break things up, but, it is still essentially just long form paragraph use that you have to dig through. Three pages of digging through for that first encounter. 

I’d be interested in the setting, but the adventure? There’s just nothing to it. I DO like fucking around in town when I play, but there’s got to be adventure also. And talking to the locals DOES count, but, come on, one combat with three dogs for $15?

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is decent, showing you the writing to come. Go ahead and take a look at the long form text. Nicely specific.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/329417/Chewer-of-Fingers?1892600

BONUS FEATURE! – Encounters Fantasy Scenarios

Fuck me. Another oldy from 1990. Sixty pages of “tables” to help create an encounter using a tarot deck (*sigh*). It’s a dense wall of text. This is getting tossed on my “read on my deathbed while waiting to die” pile.

I’ll pay someone $10 to write a two page or longer review of this.

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 2 Comments

Carnage Amongst the Depraved

Posted on June 26, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By John Josten
Board Enterprises
OSR/Legend Quest/die-20
Level 6

There are trolls, close to the city.  Why?  What are their plans?  And when will they choose to start acting directly against the humans and elves who live in the region?  Perhaps the best question might be will the party be able to do something about it?  In this adventure, that is the challenge – Can they find a way to beat the trolls, because simply facing them sword to sword is not going to work against soldiers this fierce.

This sixty page adventure uses fourteen pages to describe a 23 room hack of ogres and trolls. It’s MASSIVELY overwritten, with everything pebble having a backstory and justification for it being there. Fuck me, the 90’s were a bad time for adventures. 

Yes, the 90’s. This is some reprint of an adventure for a 90’s heartbreaker system. There seem to be a dozen or more adventures in it, so they kept at it. And continue to, it still seems to be alive today. Be it that 90’s style at the time or the same traits that lead to developing your own game system “that makes sense”, this thing shows all the hallmarks of over investiture. 

Sixty pages, of which only fourteen are actually the dungeon. That means a  lot of backstory, a lot of history, a lot of appendices, and a lot of telling the DM how the game should be played. We get to hear all about how to play dumb characters and creatures. Then the adventure proper shows up, a simple hack rescue. The first encounter is a page and a half, a lot take a column and a few empty rooms get only a paragraph or two. 

Everything … EVERYTHING gets a fucking backstory. Nothing can be simple. Everything has to be padded out. The opening room, a simple guardpost, gets EIGHT paragraphs. There’s a troll and ogre behind a cracked door. The troll is eating some mutton and the ogre is unconscious, having been beaten by the troll. Eight fucking paragrapghs to describe that. And how can this be? Is it the Kwisatz Haderach? No. Here’s just one of those eight paragraphs: “The trolls do not consider the dwarven fortress to be of any value and do not think of it as an entrance. This is not so much a room as an intersection of hallways. Many of the trolls like this assignment because they feel there is nothing to do but sit. The area is lit by a single torch set in a brace on the wall.” 

This is my life. Long italics read-aloud. Wall of text DM text full of meaningless backstory. “Strange and disgusting scents”, full of abstracted descriptions. Room descriptions that make you fight them just to understand how many creatures are in a room. All for a simple hack in a dungeon full of ogres and trolls. 

The opening recruitment section does have some bolded sections to help the DM when King Whoever’s agent is responding to the party’s questions. That’s good. It recognizes that the DM needs to be able to find and reference information quickly. The bolding calls attention to this, offsetting it when scanned, so you can find it quickly. And that care  is absolutely NOT taken in one other place during the actual adventure. 

It’s unrunnable. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages and only shows a few f the essays and background up front. Nothing of the encounters. Bad bad bad preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354481/Carnage-Amongst-the-Depraved-aka-All-About-Big-Stupid-Monsters–World-Walkers-edition?1892600

This has been episode “It’s too cold this morning for a bike ride and the liquor stone dont open for another hour.” of Bryce reviews everything on his DriveThru wishlist.

BONUS FEATURE! – Building Adventures

This is about a hundred digest pages on how to write an adventure. It follows the basic plot-based 3-act structure that overwhelmingly dominates these days. As a basic introduction to that it’s not bad. The purpose of the villain in the opening act is to X. The purpose of the villain in the middle act is to Y. The purpose of the villain in the ending act is to Z. It covers the basic structure of an adventure, from introductions, beginning the adventure, and a VERY basic adventure outline structure, ensuring the budding writer includes those elements that we’ve all come to expect, like a background/introduction.

You might think of it as the 3-act structure focused on D&D play. As such it’s ok. Too wordy for what it is, and you could probably do better getting a really good 3-act book. Besides, after two thousand reviews the problems with adventure is not that they use a 3-act structure or that they fail to make the 3-acts compelling.

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 2 Comments

For Coin & Blood Adventure Pack

Posted on June 23, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Diogo Nogueira, Elizabeth Chaipraditkul
Gallant Knight Games
For Coin & Blood

It seems that this is actually two separate adventures, totally distinct downloads, bundled under one product listing on DriveThru, with the teaser photo being the core Coin & Blood cover photo. 

The Hunted – Diogo Levels 2-3

This sixteen page digest thing is a description of an NPC hunting the party. That’s it. That’s the adventure. Oh, you get some ideas on how they do that. FUCKING LAME!

I was disappointed when I saw the two downloads thing, but then was upbeat when I saw Diogo’s name. He says, a couple of times, that his is an “unconventional” adventure. Yeah, no shit. Because it’s not an adventure.

You get a description of an NPC bounty hunter, a tale for why they might be hunting the party, one for sme tactics they use, a table of traps they mights use ot places they might attack the party, We are told to sprinkle the stuff in during the parties other adventures, a kind of expansion of their downtime. 

So, look, I’m not opposed to this. In fact, I think downtime shit can be one of the more memorable parts of a campaign, And I love sprinkling stuff in to a game ahead of time in order to make the world seem more real and lived in. I’m just opposed to everything about this.

We get a 2.5 page description of the NPC. Only a few sentences are the actual description and mannerisms, and they are fairly generic. Tall muscular woman with dark hair. That’s great. My imagination burns. I’m not fucking around, other than dark leather armor and a crimson cloak, that’s what two paragraphs gets you. The rest of the pags of her description are right out of a “let me tell you about my character” story. She has basilisk skin armor and it’s hard as metal and if you hit ger you make a save or take 1d3 damage and are at disadvantage net turn and she has a sin seeking dagger which ignores your armor and does 1d4 damage per round and she has a …. 

After this are a couple of tables. How she undermines you, who hired her to kill you, and some traps. “A former ally hired her who was hired by the powerful opposition …” “a demon who needs the parties souls but can’t take direct action against them …” the usual not very good stuff and controted reasons. Traps like “oil barrels open and spill contents on the party as they pass under a bridge” or “in a wizards lair she puts fake books on the walls.” Contorted stuff. If this is how Coin & Blood is played then I’m super not interested in it.

The “undermine the party” table is not too bad, but still has that implicit contorted game world shit where she does this instead of just poisoning them with cyanide, or something. She starts lies about the party, she sends messages from people the party has killed in the past, she fucks the parties home base inn, etc. A little too much “she uses her doppleganger cream” in them, and, still, the whole “just kill them” thing, ala Dr. Evil & Scott, but, whatever. Magical ren world.

Oh her and her former adventuring partner broke up because of an “emotional conversation.” Why, isn’t that generic? Nothing like that to liven things up and cement an NPC in your minds.

Not. Good.

Sickness, Elizabeth Chaipraditkul, No Level Range

This sixteen page thing is one of those skeezy abstracted adventures, mor forge-like story than an adventure. Guidelines? Toolkit? Or, maybe, “I had an idea and wrote down four ideas and then expanded it to sixteen pages but didn’t include anything to support the DM.” I am not amused.

Maybe you could have an adventure on the way through the city while looking for who framed you. Maybe the party should find out who cursed them and spend some time in the city doing so. Maybe there are guards at the house and maybe the party bribes them or something.

This, then, is a cardinal sin. If the job of an adventure is to support the DM, what if the adventures DOESN’T do that? What if I jotted down some notes on a notepad. Something like “Get hired by a cult that uses a theater as a base.” “Kidnap a guy from a naor for them.” “Get cured with an illness.” and “Evil baddie behind it all was at the manor all along!” That’s your adventure! Pay me!

Ok, ok, I’ll expand it some. How about I write A LOT of read-aloud in italics, so it’s hard to read? How about I support the DM with some ideas. Like, I could write that there are some guard patrols at the manor and the party could, like, ambush a ship captain to steal an invite to the house. I’m only half-assing this, so I’m not going to write much more than that, above. Oh, and one of the “acts” is for the party to go find out who cursed them. They should go do that. “They should go do that”, that’s enough support for the DM, right?

This “adventure” is devoid of content. Abstractions and generalizations. A lack of specificity. No actual support, AT ALL, for the DM. Just some ideas. Hey, maybe the party should find out who cursed them. You, the DM, should handle that. What the fuck? Seriously? 

Thanks to this adventure I do haze a skeezy new business plan to offer my readers. Find a newly released RPG. The hotness. Write an adventure for it. Maybe, I don’t know, have like four ideas and jot them down, expand them very generically, don’t try very hard. Slap a cover on it and release it for the game. Profit. Maybe do a second one, or just move on to the new Hotness. I expect 10% of your take. 

“The person he wants the characters to abduct is a young man by the name of …” Padded out enough for you? Jesus H fucking christ. It’s all conversational long paragraph form writing, impossible to follow or reference during play, impossible to find anything or key in on the interesting bits. This is the perfect example of an empty shovelware adventure. 

The entirety of “sneak in to the mansion” is handled with “Players could avoid the guard entirely—by watching the guard’s patrolling pattern the character could slip into the mansion without noticing.” like, seriously, what the fuck? No map or anything? It’s just a list of fucking ideas of things that the party could engage in with little to no support for them. Sandboxy? OSR. Plot based? Modern games. Opened AND plot based? Devoid of content. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. I’d be pretty fucking pissed if I got this for Christmas.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/334236/For-Coin–Blood-2e-Adventure-Pack?1892600

This has been episode “I knew there was a reason I skipped over shit on my wishlist!” of Bryce reviews everything on his DriveThru wishlist.

BONUS FEATURE! –  The Anatomy of an Adventure

It seems Senor MT Black is going to tell us how to write an adventure! Let’s see if it’s better than the DCC one. Or Vengers. Or any of a billion other ones …

Clocking in at 106 digest pages, this is less a book on how to write an adventure and more of a designers notes for some of Blacks adventures, that serve as anchor points for some lessons in marketing, player choice, and a few other concepts. I like designers notes, so, as a “this is how I do adventures” it’s not a bad read. Further, there is absolutely a place in life for people to get inspired and gain the confidence to do the thing they dread, and this could serve that purpose also. I mean, I listen to the Frutiness mix of Welcome to the Pleasuredome and get a brand, but, if you need to read about someone else doing what you want to do, good on you. Plus, his essay on meaningful plater choice is a good one, although not really covering much new ground. He does have a great bibliography in the back with only a few stinkers in it. A light read and covering a genre we could use more of: How I Do The Thing. The definitive guide is still missing on how to create an adventure. Well, until, you know what happens.

Posted in Reviews | 13 Comments

Wide-eyed Terror

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Nick Baran
Breaker Press Games
DCC
Level 1 (or a funnel 0)

A blood-curdling scream rings out, traveling in the autumn air. A door slams. The sound of something breaking branches tears through the brush and is followed by several sharp, unnatural barks. Then, near silence as the wind kicks up. The only thing heard for the next few moments is the rustling of the wind and blowing leaves.

This twenty page adventure features a very small farm being raided by a few cultists. It’s short, and laid out in a way that makes interesting play a little hard to occur. It does have some interesting DCC combat effects, and a decent NPC.

There are only a few encounter locations in this one. A farm house with a couple of rooms, a barn, an outhouse, and the small courtyard in between the three buildings. Each location has a creature in it, and thus the space to adventure in is confined. This exposes a certain contention between straight up combat and interesting exploratory elements. The locations have some interesting things in them. A disemboweled goat, graffiti in blood on the barn door, a dead farmer in the house living room, mom hiding her kids in the outhouse. This is the typical sort of thing that players would like to investigate. Take a closer look at the goat, or the graffiti, or talk to the mom, and so on. A pause, or break in the action to investigate/interact. Yet, the adventure is more of a combat focused one. Mutant dogs in that courtyard are most likely going to be the first thing encountered, and certainly any attempt to look at the barn or outhouse will elicit their response. From there, how could you not draw in the cultist in the barn or in the house? Ending in some kind of big melee, with the investigation a kind of afterthought. “Hmmm, wonder who it was we just slaughtered?” So, rather than a build up you get this pitched battle kind of thing.

But the adventure isn’t written like that. It’s written, one assumes from the investigatory details, that the party would be looking at these things. Why else include them? (Ok, if the adventure is a part of a larger campaign them you learn some things about the big bad, not present, behind the things.) Yet, it leaves THIS adventure as little more than a pitched battle.

This is further … undermined? By the combat details of the cultists. There are some great details here. The one in the kitchen uses a cast iron pan to scoop embers from the fire in to someones face. The ones in the hayloft throw down crates on the party. But … is this how things will happen? Not in a pitched battle scene. And that leaves the DM in a quandary. Do they stay in place and ignore noises for these little tactics notes, or do you do the right thing and have them come out?

Read-aloud can be extensive, and in italics, with weird bolding to it that doesn’t really go anywhere and isn’t elaborated on. His combines with weird “As you enter the room” sorts of direction in the read-aloud, never a good thing. The maps are small and cramped, maybe ? of a digest sized page, with lots of little details on the map. And you know, I just LUUUUV squinting while running an adventure. 

Mom, hiding in the outhouse, is in shock, but is a grim fighter to protect her kids. This is a good detail, and she could become a party follower. This is a great little thing and, just like the creature tactics, shows that the designer can bring at least a little spark to the adventure.

So, a short little encounter, that is mostly a fight. As a pause, or brief session, in the context of a larger game, I can see this working a bit. If this were just one encounter in a larger sanboxy/plot/regional setting then it could make sense. You’re learning about the villain to come and how evil they are. But, as a stand-alone adventure, or something to drop in to a game, its really laid out wrong. You need it to be a part of that larger context to work right. As a standalone product I don’t think it works. Shifting the format from the zine to make one of many in a larger adventure? Sure. Although you’ve still got the issues with read-aloud and irrelevant tactics. And at $7? Hmmm …. No.

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is just a few pages and shows you nothing of the actual encounters, which is not a good thing at all. You do get to see the mom NPC, but, alas, that format isn’t really used for the of the adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/355113/WideEyed-Terror-Zine?1892600

This has been episode I forget what eight was for, of the Bryce reviews everything on his wishlist penance.

BONUS FEATURE! – The Dwarven Glory

An early adventure from the VERY earliest days of published adventure (1977), Precis Intermedia puts out this reprint of a 34 page classic. There are maps with about seven rooms per map, with most of the maps being linear corridors with rooms hanging off of them. 

The encounter text is longer than the minimalism of Vampire Queen, or even B2, but it’s not necessarily adding substantially more to the adventure. Not quite expanded minimalism, there’s more going on here than that, but closer to it than not. Generally the rooms get an environmental detail, like bones scattered on the floor or walls lined with picks and shovels. What follows then is a brief little encounter, generally, Goblins who might negotiate … unless dwarves are present, for example. We get the usal weirdness in older adventures, like an tavern in the dungeon run by a half–orc. It’s almost funhouse in its design, with encounters just thrown in, like an ogre who plays a lopsided chess game with the party. A typical room, although ont he short side, might be this one “Storeroom with 5 empty barrels and a small empty chest (fireball trap, 1-12 pts damage extending 3 feet in all directions).” 

The section with some ogre brothers, a troll, and minotaur is perhaps the most interesting, in terms of non-linear play, although it must be said that a decent number of the intelligent creatures are not immediately hostile … refreshing. 

I’m not sure this stands as anything other than curiosity for those interested in early days publications. Certainly, something like the T&T Bear adventures seem more playable. It’s just a tad too minimally expanded and random to make sense, although a few of the levels could certainly be nice as standalones. Hmmm, now I’m rethinkng this. It’ all over the place, with a good mix of mundane encounters and weird shit. Combined with the non-standard use of monsters and magic items … it does appeal to my sense of non-standard D&D.

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

Orbital Vampire Tower

Posted on June 19, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Joseph R. Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
Labyrinth Lord & 5e
Level 3

The ancient world of Harth withers beneath its dying sun…but it’s not dead yet. High in the night sky, a vampire’s tower is torn apart by a rampaging angel. People and monsters are trapped. Magical treasure lies scattered everywhere. It’s all yours for the taking, if you can find a way out before the angel finds you. This adventure is a one-shot dungeon-delve into a wizard’s tower. In space. With vampires. This is an alien-survival-horror-movie of an adventure (or at least, you can choose to play it that way).

This 26 page adventure features a multi-level spacestation/tower with seventeen rooms. Well laid out, evocative writing, and a bunch of NPC’s make this an interesting and solid little dungeon. If you’re in to that sort of thing. Vampire spacestations in space, that is.

The designer, correctly, points out that this is just a wizards tower. A central staircase with a couple of rooms per floor. Only the “breech the walls and depresurize” thing comes in to play as a space mission, and that could be solved by, I don’t know, putting it underwater or in the swirling chaos void or something if the space thing turns you off. There’s an insane immortal angel on the loose in the tower, tearing shit up, and everyone in the tower lives in fear of it: the servants, staff, and vampire lord that rules the place. Everyone has essentially looked themselves in their rooms. The party gets teleported up when they use an known teleportation circle and find themselves faced trying to find a way out, since the return teleporter is broken. Thus this is a kind of escape the tower mission, as the party tries to get back home, grabbing loot along the way and trying not to get killed. This is how the adventure is for level 3’s, since there’s not a lot of roamers, the NPC’s are generally willing to talk to get ri f the threat of the angel, and so on. The designer notes level 5’s would be better for straight up combat, although, I think that’s only with the slightly modified vampires that inhabit the place.

This uses the standard Dungeon Age format, which is a good one. Each level starts with around a column, explaining what’s going on, who is here, what is here, and so on, a kind of summary. There’s a little read-aloud for each room, offset in a different color thats easy to read and clearly distinguishes itself as readlaoud. The read-aloud is short, only a few sentences, and contains some bolded words that are underlined. Those bolded words are then followed up in the DM text. So “A smeary trail of blood leads to the closed door.” would then have a section in the DM text, a list of bullet points, with one of them being the bolded word “trail.”

The DM text is, as noted, in bullet point form with each ullet starting with that bolded word. There will then be a a few words. Or a sentence, maybe two, that describes that thing and gives more detail. There may be other boxed text on the page to give more detail to a magic item, for example, or some such other “footnote” kind of information. 

What’s nice here, beyond the easy to use formatting, is that the designer recognizes the core feature of an RPG: the back and forth between player and DM. The read-aloud contains things, hints we might say, of things for the party to follow up on. Too much is never given away in the read-aloud, but, rather, held back for someone to investigate, allowing the party to learn as explore the rooms instead of spoon feeding them all the information int he read-aloud. 

The writing itself is pretty good, in terms of being evocative. That smeary blood trail from ealier. Scratched wall. Flickering red torches. Flimsy closet doors lie in battered pieces. Not the use of descriptive words, adjectives and adverbs to add color to what would otherwise be boring facts. This is what evocative writing should be doing. 

The chief, but not sole, component of the interactivity here are the NPC’s. Everyone is in fear of the insane immortal angel and generally willing to deal to have something done about it. Or, potentially deal, that is. They are still vampires. But, we’ve also got clueless newborn vampire clones, an evil chaos lord split in to three parts, and the staff and servants who are generally just trying to survive. Along the way we get the usual assortment of acid eating through bulkheads and airlock shenanigans, tapestries to walk through and 2-way mirrors to talk to the neighbors. Who, it must be said, will send a group of “cleaners” to the site if they think something is amis … always looking to expand their own resources. And, of course, by sending someone they bring a lifeboat … a potential means of escape. Thus the party has a large number of options at their disposal for dealing with the situation and escaping and grabbing loot. (Which, I note, seems to be on the low side in terms of money but there are a deccnt number of magic items. Mundane potions augmented by some interesting unique items.)

“An adult male corpse with soft bubbling red skin. Dead, partially exploded arm, leg, and belly. His face a rictus of pain.” Ouchies!

It’s advertised as a one-shot, and as such its pretty good. The “locked in their rooms” situation does make it a bit static, at least until the angel wakes up or the cleaners (or a rival treasure party) shows up. The “museum” nature that tends to led is decently mitigated by that, although the simple layout of the tower (it’s a tower with a central staircase and several doors on each landing” doesn’t give one a lot of cat and mouse room. I think this sort of thing is whats causing me some reservation in it. With the formatting and writing not an issue then the design of the adventure, proper, comes in to play. It’s not BAD< it just feels al little limiting, or maybe slow? Again, until the other agencies add some chaos to it. I think it probably works better in play, and this might take some play to see how well it actually works out.

But that’s just dithering. All of the elements are present, and the only thing at question is how much of the best it actually is, an 8, 9, or 10.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing. Check out that sweet sweet format! It’s not the only way to format things, but it does work well.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/358520/Orbital-Vampire-Tower-A-Dungeon-Age-Adventure-5e-and-OSR-versions?1892600

This has been episode <something> of Bryce reviews everything on his wishlist in order. 

BONUS FEATURE – Elegant Fantasy Dungeon Generator

This is a 21 page document full of tables to help inspire a dungeon. You roll on the tables and then riff on them to create something. I like these sorts of things when I am creating a dungeon to kind of give me a kick in the ass to get the creative juices flowing; you need someplace to start the imagination up. 

You roll for a general location, which has some features to help you, like a house location migt have servants, kitchen, ballroom, horrors, etc. Then a general mood table, “Elegant” also has Rich, Noble, and decadent as options, and sentence of tips on how to communicate that. Ornaments everywhere, heavy curtains, framed pictures. A table for origins, how it became a dungeon … so let’s say “an outpost during a war campaign” and it fell because of “something that dwelt there before” with its last denizens being soldiers who camped there for some time. The dungeon heart, the key room, is a tomb. Then you’ve got some layout guidelines/generation, and a lot of room features table.

It looks like it would work as well as any of the other “riff on” generators available, perhaps better since all the tables, except monsters, are here. I use a computer app IPP, Inspiration Pad Pro, to do these sorts of things. In my non-existent free time I may enter this in and see what pops up. AFTER the book is done. 

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 7 Comments

The Bleak Holdfast of the Heartless Queen

Posted on June 16, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Rob Alexander
Medium Quality Products
OSR 
Levels 3-4

High above the snow line there is a castle on a crag. It is an object of fear and hatred, because the Heartless Queen holds court there and she is pitiless in her anger and host to terrible friends. Between the Frost Wyrms, the Ice Harpies, and the Frozen Thing that Guards the Bridge, even getting in is difficult. Most locals stay as far away as they can, but between courage, pride, and burning vengeance there are always some willing to take a shot at it. And travellers from the soft, warm south might hear stories of the Queen’s fantastical treasures and be oblivious about the horrors that protect them.

This 64 page digest adventure uses about thirty pages to describe a three level point crawl dungeon of an icy despot with about seventy rooms. When its firing on all cylinders it does a great job with descriptions, but it lacks a cohesiveness that makes the entire dungeon feel like its one place. A little too disconnected, which is not helped by the selected layout choices. A lot of unrealized potential here.

Ice queen lives up on top of an ice hill in an ice castle. What ho! Time to do some stabbin and grabbin!

The designer has a remarkable ability at describing things, both NPC’s, rooms, objects, and situations. The lighting in the castle “dulls colours towards in the way an overexposed photograph doe.” Which is a great way of describing that certain lighting effect and your mind immediately conjures it up. A witch uses as a weapon the embalmed right hand of her disobedient son, sharpened to a claw. Ouchies! The ice queen proper is described as “Tall, incredibly pale, bleach-white hair. Has a bloody hole in her chest, slightly to the left, and she features this with her clothes and accessories (e.g. a silver ring around the hole). When she is animate, the seeps blood, at a modest rate. Again, she dresses so you see this.” You know, I always say, it doesn’t matter what fashion style you have as long as you HAVE a style. And she’s certainly got one.  How about a monster “It is a 9’ high spider-thing with six arched legs and a crude human- esque face that hangs below its rough-ovoid body like an old leather bag.” Sweet! That’s going to have some party members quaking in their boots! Or a magic item, a human skull decorated with electrum pieces, a MU can use it to summon the freezing ghost that whirl around them, stealing the heat of everyone in a 10’ radius for 1d6 damage a round for three rounds. Usable once a day, unless they kill someone, in which case they are sated for a week. Sweet!

This extends to little room situations, like an out of the way place with some graffiti, including “we are all seals” … which comes in to the adventure later. Or a Skeleton, frozen in ice, with s stake through its heart and some long incisors … with a gleaming speal behind it. Want that spear? Gotta thaw that body! That’s a perfect example f he delicious kind of temptation that a good adventure will offer a party. Everybody knows what the fuck is going to happen when you thaw that body … do you want to do it? 

When the adventure is hitting these notes it’s doing a great job. It just doesn’t do that enough. And the digest format, with its wide whitespaces, doesn’t help. Or the fact that it’s a pointcrawl. Let me elaborate.

There’s something going on here, and not in a good way. The entire thing feels somewhat disconnected from itself. Not that the rooms are too far off theme, but, rather, it just doesnt feel like the whole thing works together well. The abstracted pointcrawl map, working with a kind of monster-zoo of NPC’s all packed pretty tightly together on the same level, and the other various rooms of the castle, just don’t seem to jive together. The NPC’s, full of color and description and personality, are just kind of THERE, in their rooms, all essentially right next to each other. There’s not a lot of potential energy BETWEEN the rooms, even though some of the NPCs have motivations that would tend to lead the adventure that way. 

The pointcrawl nature helps lend to this air of disconnectedness, I think, r at least doesn’t help it any. Then, in digest format, you’ve got this kind of big expansive thing with lots of pages, but with the generous whitespace allowance you’ve got this kind of sparness in the words. It doesn’t feel much like a reference document and, with a lot of NPC’s and it not being rare for them to be on two pages, it doesn’t really feel like something easy to use. 

And the elements which ARE good, the NPC’s descriptions, the better rooms, and so on, they are somewhat buried by the rest. There’s A LOT of leadin padding, of the environs, how the castle works, and so on, that I just can’t see being used in play, it being dropped out of neglect by a DM because of its verbose and somewhat generic nature. Yes, the appendices are, essentially, up front and there is more room for expansive text in an appendix, but the rest of it is NOT, and it just gets lost.

The hooks are a good example, taking up a page and not saying anything at all other than the usual “kill the queen” or “loot the place” type of stuff. If it’s just boilerplate then why include it? It just gets in the way.

The severity of my standards come in play with something like this. This one walks the line, trying to reach Regert status. I’ll probably end up putting it there, it does have some decent NPC’s and situations and items in it, along with good descriptions. It just isn’t the whole package. Which I guess is why I made that category in the first place.

This is $4 at DriveThru.The preview is eleven pages and ives you a good look at things, jumping around to several sections. On page twelve you can see the somewhat generic encounters, trying to do more but not reaching it. And then on pages 47 & 50 some room descriptions. This gives you a good iea of the mixed nature of the rooms. How they do so many things right and yet still don’t quite reach a good level.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/353923/The-Bleak-Holdfast-of-the-Heartless-Queen?1892600

This has been episode I Lost Track of Bryce reviews everything on his wishlist.

BONUS FEATURE! — Vaults of Vaarn #2

Holy fuckballs, this thing is great! It’s a kind of city support supplement for a post-apoc-like city. It would fit in ok with Eberron, maybe Dark Sun, any f a number of sci-fi RPG’s and so on. It’s got a brief description of a water-poor city and then it starts in with faction description, about twenty of them, about one per page, supported by a few more minor factions. This makes GREAT environment to have an adventure in. They are flavorful, colorful, and full of potential energy without outright telegraphing where they should go. This is then supported by a FUCKTON of tables for creating noble houses, npc’s taverns, merchants, whatever … which reminds me a lot of the Ready Ref sheets. The entire flavort ofthe city is told through the factions and the tables and they work GREAT to do that. This place is ALIVE and boiling over with fun shit.

I would view this as a kind of companion piece. I might create a small neighborhood and some adventures and then use the stuff in this book to augment it on the fly as needed (the tables) and use the factions to hep help create some adventures. As a support product, it both serves to inspire and rest as the foundation f your game, as well as serving as a handy tableside tool to roll a quick NPC or some such to help come alive during play.

Great fucking book!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/343612/Vaults-of-Vaarn-2?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 5 Comments