Mirror, Mirror – D&D adventure review

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
Paul Siegel
Paul's Game Blog
OSR/5e
Levels 4-6

King Nuno has summoned the party to track down the missing knight Sir Lucan, who vanished just as his nemesis, Zeroun the Enchanter, escaped from prison. The fate of the kingdom, and the happiness of Princess Ardella, lie in the hands of our brave adventurers, but not all is quite as it seems.

This 31 page sandboxy adventure presents several locales along with a situation that is going on, leaving it up to the party to come to some resolution. It’s got an ineffective manner of presenting information and is missing clues needed to lead the party to different locations … making this, mostly, another adventure to skip, even though it IS written in a sandboxy way. Which is refreshing to see, especially given the adventures 5e origins.

This presents a twist on a classic fairytale. You know, where the dragon is good and the princess is evil. No, wait, everyone is evil. No, everyone is good. Well, almost everyone. The party walk around and talk to people, somehow figuring out they need to go to a new location to talk to other people. Interactivity is limited, essentially, to that: talking and stabbing. Although, I guess there is at least one opportunity to do some sneaking around … in front of guards with infravision. Anyway, not much interactivity here.

The dipshit princess falls in love with the good wizard Bob. Guard captain sees Bob talking to some hobgoblins and he and the good knight Dumbass put in him jail. King Dunderhead betroths the knight to his daughter. Daughter contacts wizard Bobs hobgoblin friends and they jailbreak him. In parallel, some dirt farmers think their drought is cause by a nearby wisewoman, and, coming after her with torches and pitchforks, she baba yagas her hut to run away. Knight encounters villagers, they point him at the witch, and she turns him in to a toad. Baddies are: the village mob, who blame the witch for the drought, led by their priest. The knight, or, rather, his LAWFUL sword, which can only detect evil intent and has a complex and is dominating the knight, and the hobgoblins, who slaughter a bunch of guards, a fact which is both implied and neatly glossed over. The parties best bet is to do nothing. In this case the wizard Bob gets carried off by a demon in three days time. Also, there’s no real loot in this adventure. At least, not any to tempt a party to adventure, given the GOLD=XP convention of old style play. This is, alas, a failing of many adventures converted to old school play. The designers don’t understand the need for Gold=XP.

But, let’s talk positives, lest I be confused with a Negative Nelly. It’s a sandbox. And a real one, to the extent allowed by the size of the adventure. The NPCs are presented, with their motivations and goals. The places are presented. The party is tasked with finding the knight and then the DM is left to it. It’s not got plot all over it, and it’s not written to be linear. This is GREAT. The party is allowed to roam and explore and do as they wish. This basic format is something that almost every 5e/Pathfinder (and many OSR) adventures could benefit from.

But the designer screws up nearly the entire execution after that.

NPC’s are a page long. This includes their personalities, appearances, backstory, and what they know about what’s going on. This is no way to format an NPC. Short, terse, easy to scan. Personality and appearance summarized in a couple of words each. What they know organized by topic, with whitespace or bullet points to call the eye. “Long Form Paragraph” is just about the worst way possible to present information IN TECHNICAL WRITING. Which is what this i. An adventure is a reference work, for use at the table, not something to pour over a thousand times until you know it better than the designer. 

Simple mistakes abound. Fort Gall, the site of the prison jailbreak, is not noted anywhere on the map, or in the text. It has a map of its own, and keys, but where is it? Who knows. The village of Rylsk, where in the trail of the knight is picked up, is just randomly on the map, away from all of the action with the jailbreak. How do you find yourself there? Are there any clues? No. There are no clues. As far as I can tell, there is no way for the party to WANT to go to Rylsk, or even stumble upon it. Thus the village dirt farmers, witch, and knight subplot are, essentially, absent. Unless the DM just tells people to go there. For that matter, the entire matter of breadcrumbs is poorly handled. Other than the first: go to the ruined fort, sez the king. From there I guess someone tells you to go to the broken manor that has the wizard in it? It’s unclear.

Just what do the hobgoblins at the jailbreak/fort know? Just how do they react to the party, and an incursion? No advice given on either subject. Friendly? Not? Fire and torture? The World Shall Never Know.

I’m not looking for hand holding. But the basics of the breadcrumbs are missing. A sandbox adventure needs a few linkages. Follow things from A to B to C, with a few extra clues thrown in. This don’t do that. But it does like to talk, giving us backstory and history and irrelevant information about rooms and encounters. Information needs to be focused on the play at hand. Sure, an occasional aside is fine. Sure, more information is fine IF it doesn’t get in the way of running the adventure. But that’s not the case here.

I applaud the attempt at a sandbox adventure without a railroad, but the issues of formatting and organization are too much … which puts it in the same space as nearly every other adventure written. As a result this is just a mediocre effort tat needs significant improvement before being worthwhile to run. And, instead of devoting your time to that, why not just pick an adventure that is better for you to run in the first place?

Alas, once again, vision does not meet execution.

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is the first eleven pages. You get to see the NPC”s and all of the backstory, but none of the actual encounter areas. Getting rid of some of the background fluff and putting in a few pages worth of encounters, etc, would have been a much better preview. As is, you can’t really tell what you are buying. But, hey, you do get to see those page long NPC’s.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/325204/Mirror-Mirror–OSR-Edition

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

The Spire in the Hills, D&D adventure review

Posted on October 5, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Bill Reich
Self Published
OSR
Levels 3-5

It is mid-summer, a time of hot dry days and cool, almost cold nights here in the basin.  Someone, perhaps the Saka scout from the previous adventure, has heard that shepherds on the north edge of the basin have seen a tower or spire that was not seen last summer, the last time that they brought their sheep to graze in the cool hills. Others have probably heard about it but there has been no word from any of the guilds in the town or any of the nearby bands of Saka that anyone is doing anything about it. Someone the group knows, very likely the High Priest of the Blue Pool, looked for mentions of a tower in those hills in the library. They found ample mention, from before the basin dried up. There was a wizard in the hills who was creating new spells and had not accepted any apprentices in many years, so little was known about his activities. He married a wealthy merchant widow and had a tower constructed and was not seen in towns or cities again. The word “wizard,” sometimes “true wizard” meant something other than “a powerful mage” back then and it still does. He was reportedly quite wealthy in his own right. Nothing has been heard of him in centuries and the Initiate thinks people stopped seeing his tower several hundred years ago. They think that the tower must have been hidden by a spell and either the wizard had intended it to reappear or the mana powering it ran out.

I’m not gonna regret this. I’m not gonna regret this. I’m not gonna regret this. I’m not gonna regret this. I’m not gonna regret this. I’m not gonna regret this. I’m not gonna regret this. I’m not gonna regret this. 

I’m going to regret this.

I just said it. I JUST said I would take more time to find things. “This looks great! I’m sure it’s gonna be wonderful! Small things from new publishers are great!” I’m not making fun of myself. Well, I am a little. That’s what I actually thought. Never get off the boat.

This 32 page adventure has some kind of overland adventure through the desert and then a wizards tower with four or five levels and about ten rooms, with a dragon and lich in the tower. 

For those of you new, a Dragon and a Lich would be pretty serious opponents for a party. And a third level party? TPK. “But, it’s the OSR, I thought you people were ok with unbalanced.” Sure, absolutely. But that assumes a sandbox, not a linear railroad. When you can’t skip fights, maneuver, plot, then its a Fair Fight. And the OSR don’t do Fair Fights. RUN AWAY! Only works if you can run away.

Usually, when I talk format I’m speaking about how an encounter/room is organized. Is it easy to scan and find information etc. There is, though, another definition that I seldom mention: basic breathing and heart pumping. Does the product use words. Are there sentences to comprehend? You can see an occasional appeal to this when I mention the horrors of single-column formatting and maybe even my tirades against long italics/legibility. I don’t feel I’m too harsh on this account; I generally give our foreighn friends a pass with some awkward verb tenses and word choices. But Jesus H Christ there are bad things out there. Take for example, this adventure.

Single column, of course. Single column is hard to read. You lose your place as you travel from line to line. Remember, this is technical writing, and as such a reference work. Single column is almost always bad (certain digest formats excepting. This is an 8.5×11 issue.) You know what else is bad? Left justification of your paragraphs. You know, when all of the left hand words are exactly in line? Which means you can’t really tell where one paragraph ends and another begins, except by looking at the last paragraph to see if it ends ealy. How the fuck is this supposed to contribute to legability, scanabaility and ease of use? Certainly, not all of the pages are left justified, but the fact that even a few are is crazy to me. 

How about some basic sentence structure? “The pride of one male and five females, with a number of young.” Hmmm, that don’t seem right. How about: “Unfortunately, the pool where the party was going to replenish their water supply and camp for the night.” Weiner weiner chicken dinar! (A dinar being a unit of Kuwaiti currency, of course. What, you thought it was a misspelling?!) This is nigh on unusable because of these basic walking & talking at the same time issues. (My apologies to Bill if this is a English as a Second Language issue. But, still, get yourself an editor.) 

Encounters are weirdly inconsistent in length. One of the first is a wilderness encounter with a pride of lions. It takes three pages, if I include the page of clip art to be shown to the party. Three pages for some lions. But when you get to the wizards tower you get encounters like “This door is open. Barrels and jugs and bottles here once held wine but all is now dust.” This feels like baiting me. Like someone is emulating that old Dungeon Magazine example that I held up as the worst room description ever, the platonic example of bad room backstory and everything wrong with Dungeon Magazine. How about “4: Another open door. From what you can tell, this room held more kitchen supplies.” Conversational. Not evocative. A mix between DM and read-aloud? I don’t know. 

The map for the tower is drawn on hex paper. 1 hex equals ten feet. But then the rooms are drawn in white boxes that hide the gridlines, so you don’t know how big the rooms are. “The ghost registers as undead if you cast Detect Undead.” You are in a narrow hallway, you must provide light.” 

Sadly, this is the state of D&D. 

I assert that WOTC D&D adventures are only a little better than this one. Sure, more art, and better. And they are, at least consistent in their (bad) formatting. But the hollowness of their evocative, interactive, and ease of use match this.  And while that might be a LITTLE hyperbolic, it’s not exactly too far from the truth. 

This is $1.50 ast DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages. It’s enough to know what you are getting yourself in to. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/327194/OSR-The-Spire-in-the-Hills?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

Hunters in Death, adventure review

Posted on October 3, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Tim Shorts
GM Games
OSE
"Low Levels"

Hunters in Death is set in the Komor Forest. A place that’s consumed civilizations and birthed abominations. Yet there is a single outpost, Hounds Head, that holds back the darkness. It’s a beacon for adventurers. Silver and blood are promised. And delivered. Some adventurers return with sacks overflowing with coins and jewels, but most fertilize the forest with their blood. Adventure is only a rumor away at the tavern, a trusting resident’s plea for help, or by striking out into the forest to explore the many ancient ruins. There is no path to follow, no road less traveled. Forge your own path with steel and magic. Nature does not negotiate.

This 32 page zine digest is a small regional setting with a couple of things going on, notable a couple of undead dudes killing people in the forest. It does a pretty decent job of presenting interesting situations, with decent writing, but falls down in spurring the party to adventure. 

This is a small regional setting. There’s a small “village” of a few businesses and a countryside with a few situations going on. You use the “village” as a base and then, the idea, is that you branch out, getting in to trouble in the surrounding forest area and responding to a few requests for help. 

The village is brief, just six businesses described, with a note that “several homesteads are within a short walking distance.” The businesses are relatively terse, just concentrating on what an adventurer needs with some decent flavor text thrown in. For example, the inn has hirelings, but they are only allowed to stand along the outside walls, the tables are for paying guests, and “Some are grown children wearing pots for helmets, barrelheads for shields, and sticks as weapons.” Or, the bookshop that has a double roof so there will be no water damage from leaks. It’s not the silliness of it, which they do tend towards, but rather the specificity that grounds the atmosphere of the locations. The locations, and NPC’s get these little things and you know, instantly, from these little details, how to run the entire place. What frame of mind to get in to in order to riff and add more content on your own. That’s good, specific detail, without going overboard trying to describe every last thing.

Wanderers get a decent treatment, with them usually doing something, and many of the entries are cross-referenced, to one degree or another, to help the DM locate information. Perfect.

“1. Entrance. This is the original entrance to the crypt. The trapdoor is decayed and collapsed, allowing access. It drops 20’ to a stone floor.

A pool of murky water lies below the entrance. Bits of ceiling have fallen into it. The remains of a warrior dressed in rusted chainmail rest at the bottom of the pool. A broken spearhead lies a few feet away. Beneath the warrior is the glint of silver. There are 19sp in a rotten leather pouch.”

That’s the entirety of the room 1 entrance to one of the dungeon/adventure site locations. It’s a decent description. A collapsed hole in the ground, murky water, bits of ceiling, remains of a body. That’s a pretty decent description. I can imagine it easily, and because of that I can run it easily, and riff on it easily. The designer has pushed their idea for the room from their head, to paper, and successfully gotten it in to mine. That’s what evocative writing does.

Rooms occasionally have backstory in them, and the adventure is weaker for it. A sentence, here ot there, doesn’t really matter to me, but when the rooms consistently engage in it, or a room goes overboard on the the backstory, then the adventure is weaker. It’s harder to locate actionable play data when its hidden by this trivia that in no way matters today, when the party is exploring the locale. 

But, the real issue here is the motivation of the party. This is the primary sin of most hexcrawls and/or regional adventures. The party needs a reason to get going. To get moving through the first and hitting those wandering monsters and finding those adventuring sites and following up on those breadcrumbs. I’m not talking plot, I’m talking Inciting Events. Something to get them moving. This don’t do that well.

It;s got a little section in the beginning that talks about “jobs” in town, but that’s pretty simple, like, someone runs in to tavern saying their dad is being attacked by goblins down the road. But that doesn’t lead anywhere. Kill the gobbo’s and there’s nothing really to follow up on. Almost all of the little things are like that … nothing to really follow up on. Event ‘A’ doesn’t lead to the wider world. Again, I’m not talking plot, but the product would be better if there were some breadcrumbs to follow up on, so small things to lead to the bigger encounter areas, or at least get the party moving through the forest for some other reason than “well, it’s there, I guess hat’s what we do next …”

Still, a pretty good job. I’m not sure I would run this, as is. I’d REALLY prefer a kick in the ass for the party, or a better one, anyway. For a self-contained site though it does a pretty decent job.

This is $5 at DriveThru. Alas, there is no real preview, just a mini, that gives you no idea of the writing style. This needs a real preview, showing you a page of the town, and maybe a few pages of the actual encounter sites, so a potential buyer can make an informed decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/328232/Hunters-in-Death?1892600

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

Echoes From Fomalhaut #07: From Beneath the Glacier

Posted on September 30, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Gabor Lux
First Hungarian d20 Society
OSRIC
Levels 5-7
  • From Beneath the Glacier: Venture into the ice caves underneath a melting glacier, and discover the source of the nighttime raids on the mountain valleys. Dungeon module for 5th to 7th level characters, 21 keyed loations.
  • The Hecatomb of Morthevole: Morthevole has skeletons in the basement, and he needs to have them cleared out. Fun side job soon turns into horrible slaughterfest. Mini-dungeon for 2nd to 4th level adventurers (or plucky first-levelers!), 12 keyed locations.
  • The Tomb of Ali Shulwar: An article presenting one of the major Underworld complexes beneath the City of Vultures. Two entrance levels, three main levels and multiple sub-levels, from the hideouts of fantastic conspiracies to locked-away secrets and an enchanted forest beneath the face of the earth! 4th to 6th level (mostly), 66 keyed areas.

This 44 page zine features three dungeons and a smattering of other interesting information. I’m just going to review the Glacier adventure, but the other two are similar in style. The maps are cramped, but otherwise it’s another fine job of writing and interactivity from Melan.

Melan does these little zines pretty regularly. They each contain an adventure or two and a number of background articles. Published as a zine, physically, they tend to be available as a PDF after a bit, with a PDF thrown in if you purchase the physical copy. They feature high quality content, as one would expect from someone who has his shit together, like he does. I tend to skip over them when doing reviews, which is totally uncool of me, because they have a known quality of being good: you don’t need me to tell you that, Melans work is an auto-buy. But I had a specific request for this one, so I’m reviewing the adventure that was requested: From Beneath the Glacier.

Outlying homesteads are being massacred  and water is running off the glacier; it’s melting and, evidently, something frozen inside has woken up. This is indeed true. Trogs and Cavemen are thawing out, the way they only do in D&D, and waging war against each other … the cavemen generally on the losing side. Thus what you have here are an adventure of caves, ice, slushy cold water, and dudes and things half frozen in ice. 

The designer has a way, with words, formatting, and interactivity, that few others can compare to. I generally recommend that new designers use a style that is more rigid than the one used here. I think the more rigid style helps with the formatting and focuses the attention on what’s important in the adventure, allowing the designer to really get a good view of what they are doing … with an eye towards editing it to making it better. But that’s not the only way. There is no “only way.” You can generally write a good adventure using any style, as long you pay attention to to the goal: usable at the table. Some may be easier for people struggling to learn the skill … but once you’ve mastered what matters then you can generally do what you want, as Melan does here.

The encounter areas are generally laid out in a paragraph format, usually one per room with a second or so in some cases. In cases like this it’s critically important the writing remains focused; no weasel words, no backstory, nothing to get in the way of the DM scanning the room. And that’s what is going on here. The writing is TIGHT. This is combined with a bolded word or phrase in places to highlight to the DM important features, drawing their eye to it. 

This is then combined with evocative writing, showing an ability to paint a picture for the DM, inserting the vignette in to heads with a minimum of words and maximum of effect. And then, of course, there’s what’s actually going on in the room, the interactivity.

Putting it together we get something like 

1. Gorge: The mountain river rushes through a gap between tall cliffsides; great boulders and broken pines offer a way to climb upwards through the cascades. Caught among the rocks the purifying body of a troglodyte still holds an elk’s jawbone and a flint-tipped javelin. […] (it then goes on for one more sentence, noting a secret trail leading up to the cliffs.)

Note how the first word is bolded,the room name, and how it orients the DM to the encounter. It is a gorge. You’ve now got that framing in your head. Then comes one sentence, with a few words, that both offers an evocative description of the scene. Rushing mountain river. Great boulders. Broken Pines. Nothing is “big” or “large.” The trog body doesn’t hold a bone, it’s an elk jawbone. A bone would be abstraction, this is specificity, using just one more word to evoke the primitive nature of the humanoid. Further cliffs are jagged. A dazzling ice plain. A spacious low-ceilinged ice cavern bisected by a CHURNING river. You’ve got a thesaurus. Imagine the scene and use it and then agonize over the editing to create an effective, low word count description.

The adventure does this over and over and over again, as do the other adventures in this zine. Short, terse descriptions, just a sentence or so, that use language to put an image effectively in to the DMs head, allowing them to then add to and expand it. 

Mechanics are not harped on. They are present, inline to the things they refer to, but they don’t overstay their welcome. A secret trail found 1:6 or 1:3 by rangers or druids. 

Interactivity is great. Tings frozen in the ice lure the adventurers to fuck with them, rewarding or creating additional hazards/encounters. 

I want to call attention to the way he handled magic items also. Many adventures drone and on in describing their magic items. They destroy any mystery of the thing by going in to too much detail on the mechanics of them. A brass Jug of plentiful water is described as “This jug can pour an unlimited quantity of water at a leisurely pace. The flow persists until the jug is stoppered. That’s it. No going on an on about daily limits or flow rates. It’s leisurely. Interpret it as you will, you, after all, are the DM. 

My only criticism of the adventure would be the maps. In support of interactive and exploratory play they are great. Feature, height, tunnels running under things, sinkholes, boulders, rubble, etc. Lots to keep the party interested. No, the issue is the legibility. They are hand drawn little scrawls, limited by the digest sized pages of the zine. It’s not that you CAN’T read them, but rather that they don’t easily show detail as you need them, because of the size and cramped nature of them. The Glacier map is actually the best of the three, in terms of legibility, and even that has some substantial issues. It must be a pain, balancing how much effort to put in to them, especially for a quick and dirty zine. I don’t have an answer, because something like CC3+ has its own issues to contend with, but some extra effort in this are would pay off in terms of legibility. 

This is a bargain of a product at twice the price. Easily one of The Best.

This is $6 at DriveThru. Note how the descriptions show you the level range and how many encounter areas you are getting. The preview, at ten pages, shows you sixteen of the glacier rooms as well as the map. It’s a great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/322655/Echoes-From-Fomalhaut-07-From-Beneath-the-Glacier?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 14 Comments

Treacherous Gold

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Peter Rudin-Burgess
Azukali Games
Rolemaster/Harp
Any Level

Treacherous Gold sees the characters stumble across a group of orcs escorting some hostages. The orcs think the characters are those they are meeting to exchange the hostages with for gold. The characters may choose to do so, or they may get ambushed by the orcs either before or after the exchange.

*sigh* I thought the publisher looked familiar. Did one of my “gentle readers” suggest this, or did I stumble upon it on my own? Yeah, I know, it’s Rolemaster, a system that has always intrigued me, in spite of my “light rules” preferences. Probably because of MERP. Anyway, it says generic (and it very much is) and I thought that maybe a Good Adventure is a Good Adventure, regardless of system.

This 32 page “adventure” details one encounter between orcs and the party. That’s about three pages. The rest of the product is a bunch of battle maps to print out. Still, one encounter in three pages is pretty impressive, right?

The idea is that the orcs have some hostages, encounter the party, and mistakenly think they are the ones they are meeting for a hostage ransom. You can pay and go on your pay with the prisoners. If you do pay then the orcs track you down that night and attack anyway. Because.

That’s it. It takes three pages to describe all of this. A group of orcs, hostages, some scaling (that’s the “Any Level” part) The rest of the adventure is a bunch of full size battle maps to print out. I remember this publisher now, as soon as I saw the maps. 

One encounter. Three pages for it. A product description that implies you are getting more than you are. Endless useless text about orc motivations. 

Ok, I’m seriously going to make a better effort on this shit. I’ve hit a string of these “not an adventure” lately and I don’t feel like I’m providing any value in “reviewing” them.  I’m not going to go all “Melan” and only review good/decent stuff, but I am going to make sure it reaches some bar. Like “an actual adventure.” Yes, I’ve said that before. This time for sure!

I’ve hit a bad patch with product, sorry gang! It does, though, provide some insight in to me. I’m always thinking that the product is going to be great and, in spite of repeated examples to the contrary, I never do the prep work required to determine if something is adequate before purchase.

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. The preview is all 32 pages. That’s a good preview. I should have used it. I’m a fucking idiot.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/324764/Treacherous-Gold?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Reviews | 10 Comments

(5e) The Crypts of Caverndel

Posted on September 26, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Daniel Anderson & Cameron Foster
The Bugbear Brothers
5e
Level 4

The Crypts of Caverndel have been ransacked! A giant deer-skulled demon, beset by plague and pestilence, has torn the dwarven watch limb from limb before squeezing through the Hagmaw and disappearing into the crypts. The Crown has offered entry into an upcoming knighthood competition to any who might prove their bravery by entering the crypts and slaying the beast. In turn, whoever wins this prestigious competition would be granted rule of one of the Crown’s vacant demesnes.

This 24 page adventure describes a six room dungeon with more than a hint of Guillermo del Toro. Freaky deaky shit has some good base ideas, but it suffers from a poor communication style and inconsistent descriptions. It’s also essentially just combat with room modifiers. IE: 4e. The designers are, though, on the right track.

Nobility has a crypt. It’s been invaded by a demon, the guards killed. You’re sent in to kill it. Along the way you learn, maybe, that there’s some extra plot behind it all. It’s a six room dungeon with a few town locales attached. 

Both the town and the dungeon locations show a certain knowledge of making things memorable for the players. IE: having a kind of strong concept for the DM to hang their hat on when running a room, or NPC. The town doctor is dressed up all plague doctor like, never taking off his outfit and has a high ethereal voice … and wants things. A patient has a weird undead leg, pegleg style. There’s an eyeball/palm monster straight out of (What’s that fascist Spain del Toro movie that’s all just an allegory? Arg! Memory fails!) There’s strong strong imagery in this, including the deer-skulled demon thing, and more than a few of the rooms. It DOES tend to the freaky deaky side of the house, which makes things a little easier for a designer to work with, but the underlying concepts, freaky or mundane, are the same, and they pull it off. 

But …

Our room descriptions, six of them, along with the business descriptions in town, use a muddled format. The Panopticon room tells us that it’s circular with a high domed ceiling, the surface riddles with hundreds of golden twitching eyes, following your movement in the room. Nice! Note the “twitching” element, and golden. That’s really good use of language to add specificity and detail, and evocative writing. Then it goes in to detail on the mechanics of the eyes. Then, in paragraph two, it tells us that over time the chamber has turned in to a lake, having been flooded by groundwater, and in the center sits a small island. Floating on the lake are countless bloated bodies of dead soldiers that have been hacked to smithereens. A couple of problems here. First, good job with those floating bodies! I might suggest that smithereens is not the best word, but the rest of the description is pretty good. But, then it’s all fucked up with the backstory. DONT. FUCKING. CARE. about the over time bullshit. It’s a fucking lake with bodies in it. The rest is just filler fluff explaining why, and that’s almost never called for in an adventure. Further, the description of something THIS important and obvious is in paragraph two. And then there’s the third paragraph also, describing he creatures in the room. 

Better would have been a short paragraph describing the room, circular, high dome, golden twitching eyes, that sentence. Then follow it with a lake in the center, with island, with countless bodies floating, that sentence, then the creature in the middle. Perfect! Then you can have three extra small paras, each starting with a bolded word, like “eyeballs” (bolded) and the mechanics for it. Then Body search  9bolded) and the mechanics for it. And all of the bullshit backstory of the room dropped. That would be a VERY effective format, delivering information concisely and maintaining reference ability. Hmmm, maybe i’ll do a (bad) rewrite of that room at the end.

Treasure can be abstracted in this. “You find wealth worth 1000gp” Well, fuck that’s exciting, I guess. Don’t abstract treasure, be specific. It’s what a decent number of players are after, even in a non Gold=XP game. But then it goes and sticks in a warhammer, magic, made from the molar of a front giant (mjjolner, anyone?) That’s great specificity. Inconsistent.

The adventure could also use more cross-references. When it mentions “the panopticon”, in reference to a room, it should be “the panopticon (r5)” or something like that. Likewise when it mentions people or places. Just give us a hand on where to look. Other weird things like putting the description of a hallway, outside a room, in the description of the room 30’ away. Clearly that should have been another locale. 

And then there’s the interactivity. This is mostly combat. Rooms can have a combat modifier, like difficult terrain from hands and arms reaching out to grab you, or the eyeballs confusing you. That’s very 4e, a focus on combat and terrain/combat modifiers. More interactivity. Exploration is a pillar also! 

So, decent attempt but they need some serious work on the layout/organization of their room entries and to be more consistent with their descriptions/abstractions. And something besides combat. Town is not for RP and Dungeon for Combat. You can mix it up. And put in some other shit in the dungeon also, besides combat. And I don’t mean just traps. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages, but it just shows you the town locations. You can get a look at some of the NPC’s and some of the muddled descriptions that are indicative of the issues with the rooms. It would have been better if it showed one or two rooms.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/316220/The-Crypts-of-Caverndel?manufacturers_id=15533?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 2 Comments

(5e) Hell Prisons

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Filip Gruszczynski
Self Published
5e
Level 5

Welcome to an infernal dungeon run by fiends! The devils are trying to tip the scales of the Blood War by establishing soul conversion facilities. These terrifying prisons are used to torment souls with an intention of creating more powerful devils and filling the battlegrounds of Avernus with powerful soldiers. Only brave adventurers can disrupt this horrifying scheme.

This 24 page adventure describes a three level dungeon, in hell, that is a prison run by devils. It has a nicely bureaucratic take on ell, and its devils, which adds a delightful aspect to the adventure. The map is simplistic, the read-aloud longish and the DM text could be formatted much better, to the point my eyes kind of glaze over. But, great room concepts!

Is there anything more conforming to our modern souls than seeing the concepts of of our lives exaggerated, just a bit, and then having the phase “it’s actually Hell. No, literally, it is Hell”: added to it? There’s a fine fine line here. You want to make Hell bureaucratic, and depict the Lawful evil nature of the devils and their corruption, but you don’t want to go all the way in to farce, depicting an actual DMV, for example. You’re taking the movie Brazil and then setting it in Hell. The scenes must be recognizable, approaching farce but not quite reaching that line. 

This adventure does that, and that’s what I mean by “Great Room Concepts.” It’s taking things we recognize of bureaucracy and power and just pushing it a little bit more, and adding Devils and Hell to it. The Devils, this being a prison, have a commissary. Plus, you know, this is Lord Mammon, greedy boy that he is, looking for some extra lucre. But no one figured that the prisoners would have nothing to buy with, so a bored devil sits behind the counter. Or, a torture device workshop, Mammon,getting the loewest price contractors to work on it, some slave Duergar … who ar enote particularly interested in attacking the party … unless there are dwarves present, of course. The devils in the barracks could not really care less about the party, being off duty at the time. There’s also an element of bribery involved with the devils … they always being willing to make a deal, well, generally, as long as its in their favor. You recognize this shit from your job. You recognize it from trying to get customer service from some megacorp, or dealing with some government bureaucracy.  It’s familiar, and therefore fun, with not pushed to the level of farce. Or, maybe not to level of a literal DMV in Hell anyway. This is a Hell, maybe the first one I’ve ever seen, that I can really get behind and see having fun running. The devils are their own worst enemies, or at least their LE nature is anyway. LE Hell finally makes sense. You can imagine an exasperated Cobra Commander …errr … Megatron … errr … Asmodeus, wondering why he just can’t get anything done. (Fun Bryce Fact, I own four action figures. Johnny Cage, who is not afraid to die, a giant Starscream, cause he’s the best, a giant Cobra Commander, cause he deserves better, and a giant Grand Moff Tarkin, cause he hold Vaders fucking leash. Yeah hierarchy!)

This is, though, the end of my compliments.

Read-aloud tends to be long, six or seven lines, and fall in to the common trap of over explaining. In the aforementioned Torture’s Workshop you see hunched silhouette gathere in the middle of the room loudly discussing a new contraction … and iron chair by the look of it. TMI! TMI! This destroys the ability of the characters to ask “what are they looking at?” Preceding the part I quoted is a pretty exhaustive list of things in the room, parts mostly, again, just adding words without depth. You want your read-aloud to be evocative but not to destroy the interactivity of the room, the back and forth.

DM text is then likewise long. Again, the torturers room, we get the backstory of the outsourcing vs unskilled labor thing Mammon has going on. That’s fun, but not really relevant to the actual play. (An aside or two like this during the adventure, for the DM, is ok; I’m not a total killjoy.) But, what’s missing, is WHAT they are talking about with the chair. Just replacing the Mammon stuff with a line about “Yes, but can we get the blood sausages any cheaper?” or some such would have added a lot and given the DM something to spring board from when the party asks “what are they talking about?” Better formatting, in general, separating the mechanics from the excellent fluff, could also be in order. It kind of runs together frequently and distracts. 

The map is simple, just a circle with rooms hanging off of it for each of the three levels. No real exploration. And there’s no real key. The rooms are “Bedroom” or “Barracks.” Please put in numbers. It’s almost always the right thing to do, a traditional key, in a dungeon like this. Some rooms have quite the screams coming from them, or steam pouring out. This is SOMETIMES noted in the section before the read-aloud, sometimes not, but it would also have been nice to note it on the map, letting the party know whet they see/hear/etc BEFORE, while looking/listening down the hallway. I always appreciate map queues to the DM.

The prisoners also tend to be generic. “Humanoids” appear a lot, without anything else. There is one small table of prisoners, but without personalities, just “warforged cleric of Bob” or some such. One page of good NPC prisoners would have gone a long way. Likewise, there are three examples of deals the devils will make, but a little table, or morse guidance here, would have gone a long way. It’s also doing this thing where “roll three times on the DMG table to see what magic items are for sale …” No. Just no. Put the magic item in the adventure. Just do the work ahead of time for us. It’s ok. We appreciate it. And, of course, there’s no level range on the cover or in the product description. Bad publisher! No “Regerts” for you!

A nice idea, but it needed more work to bring the ideas home in a gameable way. But, it knows what to do with the concepts, and that’s a far sight more than most genero plot adventures.

This is $2 at DMsGuild. The preview is three pages and all three show dungeon rooms. Yeah! You can see the sample NPC table, the expansive read-aloud, and messy DM text. Good preview.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/325286/Hell-Prisons?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 11 Comments

Garden of Bones

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Diego Nogueira & Guiseppe Rotondo
SpaceOrange42
Gold & Glory
Non-novice Adventurers

The Garden of Bones was created by a powerful necromancer to be given as a present to a love interest of theirs. Once the gift was rejected, the necromancer turned the garden into a place of nightmares and horrific creations they built to externalize their frustration. It fell into obscurity after the ages passed away, and it became a myth. Now, a scholar with sinister interests has located a map they believe to lead to this mythical garden and desires to be taken there to admire the garden and possibly collect the legendary Ghost Lotus.

This 24 page digest “adventure” is just a series of random room rolls. It has a touch, here and there of evocative writing, but overall fails to deliver any meaningful interactivity from it’s poor encounters and descriptions. 

Gold & Glory is a Savage Worlds D&D-like adaption. It’s well disclosed on the product, so no hints of deception in the marketing. The blurb for the game says it delivers an OSR-like D&D experience. Does it?

Well, maybe? I don’t know. The adventure certainly doesn’t.

It’s another in a long line of rando adventures. There’s no map, you just roll for a new location every time you enter someplace. And “entering someplace” means “walking through a wall of fog that surrounds the current area you are in.” Of course, everything changes behind you. And, of course, this means that the exit is not fixed. The DM needs to roll a 20 on the random room table and then an exit appears. And when you leave that area, not going through the exit, the exit disappears, because the place changes all behind you. 

This is lame. I have no idea why designers think this is fun. It’s not delivering the exploratory element of OSR D&D. It’s delivering a “suffer through the random rolls” element. Just sit there, bored, with no control over your own fate, until the DM rolls a 20. That’s fun, right? You need some direction over your own fate in order to create tension. Do you continue or not? Are we pressing our luck? Delicious tension … absent from these random things.

The random rooms are, for the most part, not interactive and just window dressing. “A crushed skeleton under very thick dark vines.” reads one entry. “A 3 feet tall fanged skull with a small fire burning inside.” reads another. That’s the entirety of the encounter. A few years ago I made an observation that helped ruin the DisneyWorld magic for me. You sit down on something and it moves through a track and you look at little vignettes. This is the same thing. Walk in, look at something spooooooky, but there’s nothing really to do so you move on to the next vignette. Unless there’s a wandering monster. I guess you roll for one of those in each room also. 

You roll a d20. If you get a 2-10 then there’s a wandering element present. If it’s a 5-9 then it’s a creature. Why leave out the 1? Why put the monsters in the middle? Why not have it be 1-5 are monsters and 6-10 are “some other freaky thing?” I don’t know. Maybe a 1 means something special in the game? You got me. It’s a bizarre fucking way to organize things though.

The rumors are not in voice, which is lame, and you have to succeed on a roll to get one. I’m not a fan of hiding fun behind a roll. Just give the party a rumor. It’s fun. There ARE some more powerful rumors present, generally on the separate “i go to the library to research” table. That’s ok. Maybe a roll that’s modified by a skill check success level would have been better. Roll a d6 and 7-8 are the really good ones, that you get to by adding a +3 from reading a book? 

The descriptions are meh. At least they tend to be quite short. Too short. Monsters, in particular, you get bad descriptions for. “Half undead cultists” is a conclusion not a description. There’s just nothing about them, physically, to help bring home the mystery, wonder, and horror to a party encountering them. AGain, not an argument for a much longer description, but rather a much better one. I don’t care about the origin or backstory, what’s important NOW is what the party experiences. Perhaps the best example of this is a bone spider that shoots sticky blood from it’s mouth. That’s decent. The rest, though, are meh.

The general description of the garden is ok. “… extensive valley hidden by deserted rocky hills in a cold, mountainous region. The ground is completely covered by loose bones that rattle when walked upon …”  But then, of course, we’re told later, far deeper on the page that the place is covered with a constant greenish cold fog. That should have gone up with the general description of the valley. As you crest the hill, what do you see? You look down upon a valley. What do you see? You get an expansive overview of the area … and the general description should cover not, not put the fog in the “Walls” section. Yeah, it’s serving the purpose of a wall, but the party should be told about the fog initially, and for ease of use that should go up with the general description. 

So, it’s a wander around bored adventure, experiencing random things and maybe, occasionally, one of the unique encounters to interact with, until you find the flower you’re looking for. Then wander around some more until the DM rolls a 20. How about, insead, I roll a d6? On a 1 you find the flower on a 6 you find the exit. On any other roll I just roll again? That’s a fun night of role-playing, right?

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see the two rumor tables. Suck ass preview. It should show up a wandering monster page and/or an encounter page. We need to be able to actually see the content we’re paying for, not the supporting material or title page nonsense. Bad preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/324122/GoldGlory-Garden-of-Bones?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 17 Comments

Valor in the Prison of Despair

Posted on September 19, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By John Josten
Board Enterprises
OSR
Levels 5-6

Deep underground there is a prison where they keep some of the most terrifying monsters found in all of fantasy.  But these are predators, not prey.  How to keep them fed?  That answer is far worse than you have already imagined.  Are you ready to take on but prisoners and jailors?  If not, could it mean the end to the city?

This 76 page adventure uses about 24 pages to describe a one hundred room dungeon. Kind of. It’s basically just shit to stab and VERY long room DM notes. A textbook heartbreaker.

Look, no one is born with some kind of innate ability to know how to write an adventure. Adventure writing is technical writing of a special sort and it’s foolish to think that, BAM, right out of the gate, you’ll write a good one. Yeah, yo know where this review is going, don’t you?

I tend to focus on three main pillars of writing: interactivity, ease of use, and evocative writing, while bringing in that Special Sauce, Design, on occasion. All of these areas require some understanding of the purpose of an adventure (to be run at the table) and take some skill to pull off. None of them are gating conditions, but, in general, I’m much less forgiving if an adventure is easy to use (“it didn’t make me want to stab my eyes out”.) 

The chief complaint of adventures is that they are hard to use and require too much prep. This generally gets to the length of the text and in the encounters and how it is organized. This adventure gets it wrong in almost every way. It takes 1.5 pages, for example, to describe the gates in the dungeon: open, closed, controlled, and destroyed. One and a half pages. It goes in to detail not only on the description of the gates but also on the DM mechanics of opening a gate. This is crazy. I’m not messing with that. It’s too much to hold in your head and too long to easily reference, especially as presented in the text. 

The text relies a great deal on read-aloud. In italics. I will continue to harp on this point: long sections of italics, especially in a small font, are hard to read. If your own personal experience is not enough to convince you (after all, Mr. D, a demon might be deceiving you …) then there have been numerous academic studies stating the same thing. And yet the text here relies on LONG sections of it, in a small font. Essentially, th read-aloud. My eyes glaze over. I hate it. 

And then there’s the room text proper, mostly DM notes, that drone on and on about trivia. This room used to be. How the room is currently used but there is no one in this empty room to use it that way. The room “appears” to be something. It’s crazy how much of these rooms are padded out with text that makes no sense in the adventure. The designer is confusing text length, and a fully fleshed out description/purpose of the dungeon, with it being a “good” room/adventure. The purpose of the adventure is not an academic paper on the lifestyle of the dungeon inhabitants. It’s to run a great game at the table. In this regard, more is not More, More is Less. It makes the text long and hard to scan during play. It pulls the DM out during long pauses. The padding out of ineffective text, like “appears to be … “ just adds to the problem. Rooms that are a column or longer are not unusual. “It currently has no one in it.” Well no shit; the adventure tells us when there is. 

And, what is Interactivity? Is it stabbing shit? Is combat the only purpose of D&D, especially older D&D without its tactics porn to keep it company? To its credit the adventure does several factions and prisoners to talk to, but that’s only one part of good interactivity. There is no exploratory elements, no mystery, no wonder. No statues to fuck with and buttons to push. No fruit trees to poison yourself with. The resources to interact with, and perhaps exploit, are just not present. There’s a mini-game where you could avoid the big wandering monster boss in each section of the dungeon, but that’s not real great either. Room after room of boring and boring stabbing. 

Finally there’s the hardest thing, Evocative Writing. Good writing is hard, I will admit, and takes practice. “A huge ugly earthworm appears.”  Huge is a boring word. Ugly is a conclusion. Nothing make up good evocative writing. Use your thesaurus. Show, don’t tell. Agonize over your words to come up with a great, but terse, description. In fact, the earthworm is the exception, most monsters don’t even get descriptions in their entries, their appendix being just culture and history shit, boring to the players about to stab it. “The walls of the chamber are fairly smooth.” “There appears to be no one in this chamber.” A bizarre creature with huge legs. The entries do not come alive.

The designer clearly had a vision, witness all of the extra pages that describe background and how to play Old School. But they failed in their execution, byt a long margin. I would call this almost the textbook example of how to write an ineffective adventure. “Don’t do anything this adventure does.”

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see the background and none of the room entries. Not a good preview; the preview should dhow s some of the actual encounters. That’s the purpose, to see if what the designer has written is worth our time. And, in spite of it being stat’d for OSR play, it does not tell us the level range before buying it. The level range is buried somewhere in the mountains of text inside of the adventure. I weep for the future.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/318051/Valor-in-the-Prison-of-Despair-aka-All-About-Wandering-Monsters–Game-Masters-edition?term=valor+prison?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 12 Comments

Of the Rakuli

Posted on September 16, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Simon Miles
Dunromin University Press
OSRIC

[…] These days there are few that have ever heard of the Great Old Ones, fewer still that have heard of the Rakuli.  Learned scribes argue over the legitimacy of any trace of their ancient culture.  Their artistic relics and magical items are often misappropriated by lesser species.  They have passed into the mists of irrelevance. So what were they?  What happened to them?

And why are adventurers returning from the deep Darkworld telling tales of powerful entities and carrying strange and powerful items they have stolen from these new foes?

This 52 page supplement is not an adventure. It just details the history and culture of some evil ancient race. 

Note that it is in the Adventure section of DriveThru. Note that the blurb talks about adventurers returning. Note that the blurb says “there are adventure hooks …” implying that there is an adventure. 

There is not any sort of adventure in this. 

I am NOT amused.

I am VERY MUCH not amused.

This is an ongoing issue with DriveThru. Not only is poetic license taken with putting non-D&D in the OSR category, but the publishers/designers seem to revel in placing non-adventures in the adventure category. I’m guessing this is some kind of cross-listing ploy, in order to maximize the visibility of a product?

Whatever it is, it sucks. Now I’m stuck with this thing. Frankly, I’m surprised this doesn’t happen to me more often, given the frequency with which I buy. I guess I’m getting better at figuring out from the descriptions that things are not D&D and/or not adventures/cross-posted crap. (And to be clear, it’s crap because of the trickery, regardless of the quality.) It seems amazing to me that you can’t actually buy what you intend to buy anymore. I ordered a power supply for my kids computer last night … and the same thing popped up. Right size? Right rating? Right format? Who knows.

I’m convinced that the key is a generous return policy. In this case it’s Pay What You Want, but I wish DriveThru had a more substantial return policy.

This is Pay What you Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $4.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/325933/SM14-Of-the-Rakuli?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments