Bonepicker’s Tower

Posted on August 22, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By WR Beatty
Rosethorn Publishing
S&W
Levels 2-4

They say the old baron went mad. They say he killed his lover. They say those ruins where once stood his opulent castle are haunted. Most people avoid the Broken Tower high on Eagle Peak, haunted or not. Bad things have happened up there. But some winged demon has been terrorizing Glynn Rock and something has to be done. They say the demon has been seen roosting on the crumbling crenelations of the Mad Baron’s Tower. And then there’s the bones…

This 34 page adventure describes a small region with about eleven locations and two small dungeons, including the titular one. Great interactivity and a relatively easy to scan format are augments by good treasure, magic, and decent descriptions. This entire thing FEELS like a place of mystery you want to explore.

The woodcutters boy is sick. You know this because there’s a merchant selling a magi dagger that he bought at a cut rate from the woodcutter. Get it? A round about hook. Nice! Or, Baron Wyrmslayer wants you to go kill the Bonepicker, the flying beast demon that lairs in the old ruined tower. Nice one that also. That drips with imagery … the flying wyvern lairing in the tower. Note how it’s not a Wyvern. It is, in fact THE BONEPICKER. Monsters gets names. That brings a mythic vibe. Also, the wyvern has pus nodules all over it because its suffering from a curse … the same one laying over the tower. The same one impacting the woodcutters son. A small village, not described much at all, just enough, with GREAT supporting in voice rumors, to give you what you need to run the adventure. A wilderness with eleven or so areas, a few decently expanded upon. There’s an ancient fey giant in the forest, dressed in bearskins and wearing a woven hat of leaves. There’s also that woodcutter, desperate for a cure for his son … and his QUITE alluring wife … give her a kiss? Ancient ruined gates stand in the wilderness. The Green Stone waits in the forest for the party. Then there’s that band of 64 gnoles, replete with human slaves, waiting to bring down the wrath of the gnoles on the villages in the area. And the goblin band. And that giant … he’s looking for the gnoles … him and his buddies got a score to settle. And, of course, then there’s those trees. The ones with circular areas of their bark removed. And some sigil cut in to them. Beyond, a dense green mist hangs in the forest. Uh … it’s a shortcut? This fucking things BRINGS IT. Augmented by EXCELLENT art choices (and you know how seldom I mention art …) all of those locations spring to mind instantly. Just the idea. Just the set up. Right outside of the village, right outside of the reach of civilization, just beyond the boundary of the forest … the world is magic again. The grass a little greener. Mist hangs in the vales. The sun shines a little brighter. Interconnected, fully realized (for whatever that means …) the place FEELS real like the MERP products felt like real places. This is a very, very good accomplishment.

Interactivity is high. From the wanderers, always up to something, to the various NPC’s to talk to and the things to play with and investigate. And it’s not just the same old same old shit either. A body at the bottom of a well, a bag of rocks tied to his waist.  The Black Pudding in this FEELS not like a black pudding but like a nameless horror of a blob. Ghosts and Spirits abound, looking for weal or woe. The BEST fucking doppleganger I have ever fucking seen in any fucking adventure. Why? Because the entire place FEELS real. You’re invested. Because this thing has that most elusive of design principles. That thing I seldom mention. DESIGN. 

And yet … I have three specific criticisms. 

First, the monsters are … weird? I mean, I like unique monsters. I love them, in fact. But in this case we get a monster name and no/little description … with “no” being the most common. Thus the Crawling Horrors, the Skin Spirits, the Hostile Spirit etc, get no description. This is a serious miss. Maybe they are the S&W book, and are just rethemed for copyright purposes, from OFFICIAL d&d? Or in some supplement? Or in a Rosethorn campaign guide? I don’t know. But, even if they were, cross-references would have been nice. I do like a description for a creature, like the Firbolg giant with the hat of woven leaves that I mentioned earlier. Even a brown bear, in context. This don’t do that. Again, open to being wrong, if these are in a book somewhere.

Descriptions are likewise somewhat lacking. “…ragged sheets of some translucent material hang from the wall […] Skin Spirits re-possess their physical remains and tear themselves from the hooks anchoring them to the ceiling.”  This is not a tour-de-force of evocative writing. Which is weird because the IDEAS in this are QUITE striking. They recall those ancestral/cultural memory imprints we all have, which should lead to STELLAR outcomes for the DM … but the descriptions just don’t make it there.  

Finally, there’s a format used. The designer notes that they are experimenting with a new format to help with scanability and usage at the table. Yeah! Groove On! I applaud you! They note they are trying something from Castle Thadrian for Engines & Empires. (A brief interweb perusal indicates this is a physical product from 2009, and I see no copies readily available to consult in my library in the Volcano Lair.) I assume, though, I get what’s been taken. Rooms start with a box of text divided in to at least two sections: First Impressions and What Happens. From there the rest of the room is described outside of the boxed text, in a more traditional format. I get what’s being tried here. The first part, in particular, of First Impressions, is more like what the party sees when they enter the room and the second What Happens, a summary of the rooms deal-e-o. I’m not sure though that the format used is more effective than a more traditional Summary Paragraph (with bolded words) and the bolded words followed up on in subsequent paragraphs. I said I’m Not Sure and I mean that. I’m not sure. It seems weaker in this particular implementation, but there could be other things going on and it could be tweaked, I think, to provide a decent organization system. More evocative writing and those bolded words in the First/What sections followed by those bolds being expanded upon, or something like that? I don’t know. I can say, though, that it doesn’t feel more effective or better in this implementation. 

The Crooked Dwarf is catatonic. If engaged in combat there is a 50% chance he will turn in to an albino fish for d4 rounds, otherwise he will fight with long sharp claws. In his mouth is a single gold tooth. Magic, of course, when placed in a toothless gap. Good stuff.

This is not a home run. More evocative descriptions may have made it so. But it is still a solid solid adventure. It is immersive and brings magical wonder, mystery, and a kind of realism … without becoming simulationist. Design is nailed. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is 18 pages, which is more than enough to get a good look at the wilderness and dungeon encounters and see how they are written and get a sense of the adventure. It’s a great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/322457/Bonepickers-Tower?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 23 Comments

Escaping Edgewild

Posted on August 19, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Joseph Robert Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
5e/OSR
Level 1

Last night you went out to do your chores, or run your errands. Maybe you went out for a drink? Or maybe you went out to slit a purse string, or a throat? But this morning, you wake up shackled in a dark, filthy prison cell surrounded by strangers. A man outside says you’ll be sold to a slaver in a few hours. And slaves don’t live long… So you’d better start making some friends, coming up with a plan, and trying to escape from Fort Edgewild!

This eighteen page adventure describes a jail break scenario with the party trying to break out. It has about seventeen locations, with good NPC’s, descriptions, and set ups, but lacks a little in the SOMETHING department. If I knew what SOMETHING was I’d have used that word instead. Otherwise, it’s good. I mean, except for the ennui I feel. Can you write a good adventure and  I still be full of ennui? Sure. why not, it’s 2020 and goes with the murder hornets.

You wake up shackled in a cell with six other people. Slavers will be here in four hours to buy you. Good luck! It’s a decent enough way to get a new group together, and as an alternative to a bar fight I’m ok with it. I’m usually quite negative about DM fiat types of things, like an adventure starting with you captured, etc, but at level one, to start a new game it’s a decent enough tohing to do. You gotta start with some pretext and putting the party together this way is fine.

Zo, task 1, get out of your shackles and out of the cell. There are some little tables to determine what you have in pockets (I got fingernail clippings!) and some notes about things you might find on the floor … only one of your hands being shackled to the wall. There’s also some extra NPC’s for the DM to scatter amongst the party to liven things up. Job one, use whats in your pockets and on the floor to think of as way to get out of your bonds and the cell.

As an aside, designer dude knows how to write a fucking NPC. Terse. Iconic. On the shit that matters. Emily is 25, curly brown hair, wild-eyed intense look. Cerlic of Gideon. PRO: Healing Magic. CON: Violent Zealot. Forcibly heals anyone/everyone. Nell, 30, red-hair, freckles, pale, depressed, hungover. Local addict. PRO: Medicine & Chemistry. CON: Severe depression. Same with the guards and all of the NPC’s in the adventure. You get these little snippets that make it easy for the DM grab on to them, remember them, and, better yet, add color to the adventure. WHich is what a fucking NPC should do. Otherwise, why do they exist? It’s not paragraph after paragraph. We don’t need to know Nells fucking life story. Just fucking addict part and the quirks she has. The rest comes to mind and we can make it up.  Perfect.

Ok, so, you’r eout of the cell and now you’re down in some “dungeon”/jail. Eight rooms. Full of loud things that might summon the guards, who come by every hour anyway to check on the prisoners. Some more makeshift stuff, a few weapons, and the parties gear, ultimately. And those other prisoners. Loudmoths … so I hoped you freed them too. But, they are a pain also. What to do, what to do? 

Then it’s out of the jail and in to a palisade compound, the other guards and other buildings, trying to escape from the inside, not be seen and have the wrath of the guards fall on you. 

Descriptions are short and evocative. It’s well organized and easy to locate information. 

But there’s something wrong in Muddville.

I don’t know what. This is an open-ended sandbox. The tools are there to run it as such. But, still, something is wrong. Too straight forward, maybe? That wouldn’t normally be an issue with me. Usually all you need to do is set up a decent situation (Which this is) and provide a decent environment (which this does) and then let the party fuck thing sup with their plans. I don’t know, maybe it’s the scope? The Fall of Whitechapel(?) did something similar, but that seemed more dynamic and interesting than this does. I think, maybe I’m feeling the constraints of size/length? It’s written for a single session, but … that can’t be it, can it? Maybe I wanted more? Well, yes, I feel like I’m wanting more, but … not in that way. I don’t know in what way. I’m left confused, something that rarely happens. 

So, hey, this is a decent adventure. For some reason it feels like something is missing. All I can point my finger at is interactivity; its what the party makes of it. Do they cause trouble, come up with a wacky plan, etc. 

I’m going to Regert this. But I feel wrong. I’m open to second opinions here. Buy it and tell me what I’m missing? Or, just check out the preview and do the same thing, the preview is long enough to get a sense, I think. But, you could also do worse things in life than throwing $2 at the Dungeon Age dude; he generally writes stellar shit. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages and shows you more than enough to make a good purchasing decision.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310516/Escaping-Edgewild-A-Dungeon-Age-Adventure-5e-and-OSR-versions?term=escaping+edgew?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 19 Comments

The Endless Tunnels of Enlandin

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By S. Ballard Poag
B/X
Dragonsfoot
Low Levels

Does your group have the nerve to explore the endless tunnels of the mage Enlandin? Many have tried and all have failed.

This 21 page adventure contains a three level dungeon with about ninety rooms, using about sixteen pages to do so. A classic basic dungeon with a decent map, Poag has an ability to write a little vignette scene without verbally running over. When it does that, it’s good. When the monsters wait in the darkness to attack the person who opens the door … well, it’s not so good. I’d say it’s on the higher-end of being a typical B/X dungeon.

Let’s talk The Art of the Vignette. If we take the unhold Bryce trinity of Ease of Use, Evocative, and Interactivity then when their powers combine we get this little burst of energy jabbed in to the DM’s brain in a flash that reeks of potential energy. A kind of sparkle in the DMs eye, a gleeful internal cackling, all obtained in just the split second the DM glances down on the page. Is this good D&D? No, but it FACILITATES good D&D. The DM is now as ready as they can be, running a prepared adventure, to lead their players in to Good Times(™.) One sort of room/encounter type is the little room vignette. When Poag is ON IT he is writing good room vignettes. “The very pale body of a dead elf is in the middle of the room, dressed in chain mail with a sword and longbow. Only two arrows are left in the quiver. Two giant ticks are clinging to the ceiling above and will drop for a surprise attack.” Oh snap! Look at what Poag did! He creates little vignettes in just a few words that describe a situation. I wouldn’t call this a masterpiece by any means, but it does deliver in an above average way. A pale elf corpse in the middle of the room. The party investigate … down come the ticks! Oh! The DM is cackling gleefully and the party all say “Oh shit! Obviously!” That’s a good encounter. When the surprise hits and the party says “Of course!” then you know it’s good. Another room has a grim reaper statue, with scythe, in the middle of a room along with a headless corpse. We all know the deal and we all know that we all know the deal. It’s glee! Unadulterated glee! Poag can do this.  Even in a shitty “they attack!” room he can do this. Zombies come out of the darkness in a room to attack. That’s not exactly perfect, but even this shitty “they attack!” moment brings a little extra, with them coming out of the darkness. Your mind should fill in that picture and even with it being simple I’m excited to run it. Another room has a halfling with a crowbar in the middle of opening a chest … paralyzed, while three giant centipedes are about to/are eating him. Oh man! Stick that in your fucking hat! These are not rockstar descriptions but they are significantly above average. They describe a scene with energy waiting to happen. They have a few extra words that add description to the scene, flavour. And they do it without taking a fucking column of text to fucking do so. Combined with the decent maps, I’d give this adventure a solid C+/B- and a No Regerts.

Well, I mean, I WOULD, if it were consistent. But, for every room that’s a little vignette there is another that is a straight out They Attack! Worse, they are waiting in ambush. The eternal ambush room. Orcs with bows wait in the darkness at  the other of the room, eternally, for you to open the door. There are multiple, multiple examples of this. Yeah, D&D has combat. And there’s a place for ambushes. The tick room is good and is, essentially, a They Attack room. But creatures on guard waiting to attack when the door is opened? No, not so much. There’s a good way and bad way to handle it and this adventure does both, in about equal amounts, I’d say.

Combined with the book treasure (which may, also, be a little light … IDK, feels like it, I would have to add it up) and an interactivity that TENDS to combat, then I would give this one a pass, but it’s close. Pits lead to the second level. Rooms rotate and there are simple puzzles. But it doesn’t feel like it happens all that often. It feels more like a heavy They Attack dungeon with a mixture of better stuff thrown in. Or maybe a heavy Room Vignette dungeon with a whole lot of boring/typical thrown in? If/then statements abound, and the standard room format is the simple paragraph. A well written one, organized, and, by keeping it short it remains functional. It’s right on the edge. 

This is an early dungeon, from the 70’s, rewritten, I assume, in the modern day. As such, it shows both the good and bad. WHen its good then its short and terse and evocative and exciting all at the same time. And when its bad it looks like a bad minimal key expanded. I suspect that the interactivity lack is from the 70’s. What WAS interactivity in the 70’s? It was this. 

I’m a fan of this, as an artifact. I’m a fan of where this adventure was going and the potential it showed. But, in a world full of billions and billions of adventures, I would probably pass this up for that hits more regularly. Compared to most of the dreck that comes out, though, it’s great!

This is free over at Dragonsfoot.

https://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=CD&fileid=163

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 20 Comments

Darkness at Nekemte

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By G. Hawkins
Self Published
1e
Levels 5-6

Deep in the fetid swamp lies abandoned Nekemte, ancient serpent man city of the Jade Empire and home to the royal house of Nekemte – cruel, tyrannical sorcerers and practitioners of necromancy, corrupted cultists of Yul. The great swamp consumed Nekemte following the fall of the Jade Empire, its buildings crumbling and falling into decay. Throughout the centures, terror of the serpent man sorcery hung over the ruins, and shadowy creatures stalked the crumbling edifices at night, feeding on the warmth of the living. A party of looters recently dared the ruins and stole into the lower tombs where they unearthed the Arimax Stone, an artifact of great power, in the process unwittingly awakening an ancient, slumbering menace…

This 54 page adventure uses sixteen pages to describe about seventy locations in the ruins above a dungeon, as well as the dungeon below. Evocative. Good Organization. Interactive. This is a solid, solid adventure. Not necessarily breaking new ground, but a good, solid adventure is a rarity in and of itself and worth checking out.

I harp a lot on ease of use. The primary objection many people have to pre-written adventures is that they are hard to use, and therefore not worth the trouble of prepping and using them. In this sense, almost all adventures fail at that most basic of tasks: being of use for their primary purpose. There are a lot of ways that an adventure can fail in this regard, but, commonly, it has something to do with it being hard to scan at the table. When the party enters a room you want to be able to glance at the entry, for just a brief couple of seconds, and take in what you need to relate to them. This keeps the interactivity between the party and the DM high, since that’s the core of the game, and there are no lulls as the DM reads the room. Likewise, as they investigate things in the room it should be able for the DM to VERY quickly locate the thing and scan it, to run it. “Effective Writing” might be shorthand for this, but adventure writing is really technical writing, something most designers miss. Effective writing is GENERALLY terse and well organized. This adventure does that well.

The room headings are clear, using a nice bold font that, while not Time New Roman, are still easy to read. They provide some sort of room description through their name. Thus rooms are “20: The Pit” or “21: Broken Urns.” The DM is immediately oriented toward the room. The mind is now ready to run a pit room or a broken urn room, and receptive, oriented, toward the description to come. It then follows with ONE of the formats I think is the easiest for a designer to follow. There’s a brief overview of the room, with certain elements bolded in it. The overview is almost read-aloud, but not quite. Terse, just a few sentences. The bolded words are then followed up with in their own paragraphs, that start with those bolded words. It’s easy to scan and locate information. This is a relatively simple format to follow, and if a designer can manage it while keeping the writing terse then it’s pretty hard to screw up. It’s not the ONLY way to write a good room, but I do think it’s one of the simplest and easy to grasp.

Ok, so, I’m not writing this review in order. I just drank half a bottle of Japanese whiskey and stumbled down to the gas station to buy a chocolate ice cream cone, a bag of Ruffles, and a pack of menthol cigarettes (I don’t smoke.) Yeah, #LifeDuringWartime. Got a couple of sofas and sleep on the loveseat. Don’t even know my real name. It’s Fritz, by the way. Anyway. I regret not buying some 100% sugar candy. And I’m out of WHiskey now. Which means I have to drink that crap Blackberry wine from Ohio I forget to pawn off on Prince or TGI Fridays Mudslide mix from my kids room. I’d have some delivered but it would ake too long. Maybe Lyft?

 (<—–WOKE! Not using Uber!)

The writing is decently evocative. That Pit, I referenced earlier, is lost in darkness. The walls are rough AND hewn. Cool winds waft up. Deep charms bisects rooms. Air is hot and stale. Dude knows how to write a brief little evocative snippet that brings the rooms to life in the DMs head. The DM can the expand it; it comes to life in their head, an image formed, and their brain fills in the rest. Good writing. This is a non-trivial skill and it’s present here.

Likewise, interactivity. There are things to do. Coffins to open. Urns to mess with. Holes in the ceiling. Crevices to navigate, waterfalls, chains hanging from the ceiling. This is a real environment full of things to intrigue and mess with. This is one of the cores of any adventure, especially an exploratory one. And … there’s a timeline! The serpent men will be doing things out in the world if the party fuck around too much, and the environment arund the deungone changes. Nice!

This is supposed to be themed as “Serpent man” and that falls a bit flat. Oh, there are carvings of them, and undead ones, but it tends to come off more as a city of the dead, or mausoleum more than fetid jungles. This in spite of it taking place in a fetid swamp. It’s not bad, but I think maybe the designer missed what they were going for and instead hit the next target over over very well. I’m not even sure what “serpent man” means, not being in to that genre, but that’s not the vibe I get from this. It certainly DOES bring an ancient ruins/civilization theming though, so, no harm no foul.

So, WHAT IF I sold my house and moved in to the place that was closest to the gas station? I could stumble over and buy booze, Noble ROmans, DQ, and snacks at any time of the day of night. I wouldn’t even need a kitchen! HARC CORE! I WOULDNT EVEN NEED A BATHROOM! HARD CORE!

It also suffers some, in two ways, from a lack of overview. The swamp and ruins are just thrown out there without much introduction or an overview of them. Taking just a paragraph or two to describe the locale, an overview of the entire region, to place this in its context, would have been helpful. And, then there’s the above ground ruins. This suffers from the Vista Overview issue. Let us assume that you come to the top of a small rise and look down in to a valley on the other side. What do you see? What catches your eye as landmarks? A towering spire glowing green? A bonfire with figures dancing around it, scattered ruins throughout? Whenever the party see SOMETHING laid out in front of them it’s wise to provide a brief overview of the highlights, otherwise the DM is left digging through the encounters, before or during the session, trying to relate a general overview of the situation. This might go hand in hand with noting sounds and light on a map; what is obvious before you get to within 30 feet of it? The adventure has a room or two with loud sounds, or lit rooms and those could be better noted on the map to clue the DM in to things needed to be related to the party. 

Rock solid little adventure. If most adventures were this good then I wouldn’t be reviewing adventures. 

This is $7.50 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages and shows you several (above ground) encounters that are representative of the writing throughout. You can get a good idea of what you are buying, so, great preview!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/317631/Darkness-at-Nekemte?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 5, Reviews, The Best | 11 Comments

Reaping at Rivers End

Posted on August 12, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ben Barsh
Pacesetter Games & Simulations
S&W
Level 8!!!

The town of River’s End has always been a quiet sanctuary for those outcast by society. These exiles share one thing in common: wither rot. This disease relentlessly withers the body down to a corpse in a short period of time. However, with the help of magical healing properties provided by the Ravenscroft River and an advanced mage named Mortimer, the people of River’s End have been able to create a fruit called Dragonberry. This fruit stops this ailment from running its course. However, Mortimer has recently fled the town leaving nothing but an ominous note of revenge. Without him interacting with the crop and river, the upcoming Dragonberry harvest will be incomplete leaving the people to once again suffer the full consequences of their wither rot. It is up to you to help the vulnerable citizens before Mortimer and this malicious disease successfully destroys the respite of River’s End.

This 28 page adventure uses about eleven pages to describe a two level dungeon with about thirty rooms. The writing is verbose, dull, and there’s not much interactivity beyond stabbing shit. But, who am I to tell you what to like? 

So, this is one of those “it’s a trap I use to lure adventurers in!” dungeons. Not a super big fan of those. It seems like lazy design. Like, I can’t think of another reason for all of this shit to work together so I’m going to just say it was on purpose as a test, challenge, etc. In fact, let’s discuss free will for a minute.

The people in this village suffer from a disease. Every year a local wizard casts a spell which allows the villagers to grow a fruit that staves off the deadly disease for one year. This year the wizard got pissy and left the village. You’re sent to stop him/bring him back/blah blah blah. It’s a little vague. Anyway … do the villagers have the right to force the wizard to cast the spell and/or expect him to? He’s not getting paid, there’s no vow of eternal servitude, etc. Further, what is the wizards obligation, morally, to the villagers? If he can save the lives for 250 people is he then OBLIGATED to, morally? What if it took a year off of his life? Or just an hour off of his life? Does he, in fact, have ANY obligation AT ALL to the villagers? How about with regard to the spell? Is he obligated to share the spell even if he doesn’t cast it? What are the implications as the price of the spell approaches (calculus wise) “eternal indentured servitude?” Have you stopped beating your wife? How about you, Mr Adventurer, acting as the third party agent for the villagers in this scenario? As a  villager, you don’t hire a private army and not expect to use it for some killing. What’s the point of having a nuke if you don’t use it? 

Ok, so, none of this is actually a part of the adventure. I mean, the wizard can cast the spell and if he doesn’t then the villagers WILL die. Oh, and, conveniently, he IS a poly’d evil dragon playing “the long game”, so, being evil, you can just stab the shit out of him. Not a super fan or orc babies, but this one kind of interested me. Rather than a potential future represented by orc babies, this deals with the free will of someone when others will, ultimately die. I think the adventure would be better for having a “good” wizard in it, instead of an evil dragon, and then just let things play out. As a GM, you don’t make ANY moral judgements at all. No alignment BS at all, just let the players do what they will. Actually, I don’t mind orc babies either, as long as they are handled in exactly the same way. Who cares what choice you make … I mean, beyond yourself and how you just defined yourself? 

Long time readers know that when I go off on a tangent like this then it’s because there’s not much to say about the adventure. And there’s not. 

“A sudden and loud noise comes from the forest. The sound of uprooting trees fills the air. As you turn, you see two trees-like figures uproot and begin an attack!”

“Unlike most dragons, they create a complex lair strictly to watch wanderers or adventurers suffer inside.”

This campsite was set up by an adventurer a long time ago. He stumbled upon the cave and rushed in when the treants attacked him. However, he was wounded badly and bled out. Mortimer already took his belongings, so there is not much of value on his person.”

“The shark tooth necklace is a magical item created by Mortimer. However, he is just beginning to dabble in the creation of magic items. The necklace functions just as a ring of swimming.”

The descriptions, as noted in the examples above, are full of “you do this” and “you do that.,” They embed history and backstory in them, explaining why, padding out the text. Interactivity is quite low, beyond just They Attack!

This is just another of the sort of plot based adventures that contain muddled text that make it hard to run and have little to intrigue a party. And it’s all a test, to lure in adventurers. *sigh*

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is only four pages but it does a decent job of showing you the writing and encounter style used throughout, so, good preview.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/306373/Reaping-at-Rivers-End-SW?1892600

Why are you still reading this blog? It’s as empty as this adventure.

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

The Basilisk (review)

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Louis Kahn
Starry Knight Press
OSRIC/5e
Levels 6-8

RUMOURS SPEAK OF A VILE WIZARD WITH A PENCHANT FOR PETRIFACTIONS.

HE IS SAID TO DWELL IN HIS TOWER HOME, GUARDED BY HIS PETS & ALLIES.

CAN YOU STOP THIS FIEND BEFORE HE SOLIDIFES HIS HOLD ON THE VALLEY?

This 32 page adventure describes about twenty rooms in a six-level wizards tower, all with a “turned to stone” theme. It’s just combat, and hard to read.

What IS an adventure? Yeah, you know its a good review when I start with shit like that. 

If I buy a laptop and open up the box to find two pieces of cardboard hinge taped together then you can expect I’m not going to be happy. Yeah, it’s a laptop, you say (as the seller) but I didn’t say it was a GOOD laptop. Or, maybe you say it’s a prototype laptop. Or, maybe you actually believe it’s a laptop. If I manage to get Windows 10 running on an 8086 with a 80×40 resolution, is it still a laptop, even if it takes two weeks to boot up? If you advertise it in the Laptops section of Amazon, do you implicitly make promises? 

I don’t assert these are easy questions. Is something like The Habitation of the Stone Giant Lord an adventure? A “retro” product? An art/design heavy product? I would assert that these things are not laptops, or adventures. They are something else. Art, maybe? But I don’t think the primary usage of them is as an adventure meant to be run at a table. At some point a product gets close enough to the line that we have to start asking ourselves “but is it just a BAD adventure?” Pathfinder adventures might traditionally fall in to this category. If I make the adventure fun to read but hard to use at the table did I cross the line in to Not An Adventure or is it just A Bad Adventure?

This thing emulates a typewritten adventure from the 70’s. It uses a typewriter font, full of weird kerning, misplaced keys, and sloppy and light ink. Bolding is not really bold. Legibility is sacrificed to the gods of aesthetic, something that the “I emulated the old T$R style!” and something that out Art Punk friends fall in to. I suspect no ones goal is to produce something unusable … or maybe I hope that, but at some point the appeal of authenticity of the style sacrifices enough legibility that the product is no longer useful as an adventure, or even a bad adventure. It stops becoming an adventure and becomes a curiosity or an art piece. And yet it is still listed in the laptop section of Amazon.

A discussion in a similar vein might take place over what it means to be an OSR adventure, or a 5e adventure, or some such. If you are writing for a Gold=XP game system and the GOLD is light to non-existent, is it really an OSR adventure? Or does it just have OSR stats? Or is it just a BAD OSR adventure, or at least one with bad OSR qualities? If my Boot Hill adventure takes place in space with everyone being surgeons on a spaceship is it still a Bot Hill adventure? Even if I just take a normal Traveller adventure and change “Traveller” to “Boot Hill” on the cover? (Your homework assignment class, is to describe why Ulysses is literature and not Performance Art.) 

Do I really have the high standards that others seem to think I have? Is it so much to ask, in a sea of crap, that something be easy to use at the table? Particularly when the chief complaint against pre-written adventure is that they are impossible to use and take too much prep? Usability is not the only thing. Something like Thracia can be good and still sacrifice usability. But, fuck man, how many things arise to the level of Thracia? A sea scallop, cooked for ten minutes on a side, is no longer a sea scallop, I assert. And yet we gulp them down and shout “Delicious!” when WoTC and Paizo serve them to us.

Nineteen rooms in ten pages. The map is very small, being a Dyson affair that the designer did not format correctly for the adventure. They just dropped the PDF?JPG in, so all six levels take up about half a page instead of them being arranged on a page, blown up, and easy to read. Legibility. Hard to read. 

Typewriter font. Hard to read. Weird kerning. Faux ink ink and heavy ink. Hard to distinguish bolding. And, generally, hard on the eyes to read.

LONG descriptions. They can be a column long. Little bolding, no real use of section headings or other organization techniques to help scan the text. Just long paragraphs of data dumped at you. The descriptions are full of what the room was used for in the past and who lived in it and other details that just get in the way and clog up the ability to scan the text effectively.

Weird organization at that. The path to the first room/entrance/outside is described in the room one text. Order of battle stuff is described in the room with the responding creature and not the room when the response should occur, required you to be a precog to know what is responding. IF the adventure do X THEN Y will occur, a kind of quantum writing style that is just padding and and further obfuscates the text.

And, it’s really just a hack, with little to no interactivity beyond combat with a theme of monsters turning you to stone. Little to no treasure, at least level appropriate treasure. Two pages of backstory. There’s just nothing here but padding and stabbing.

Which is too bad. The designer has flashes, sometimes. In the hook a merchant can, if initially refused, debase themselves in front of the party at the inn common room, getting down on their knees and begging. That’s good! But that sort of thing is missing from the general room descriptions. It’s just expanded minimalism in the rooms, rather than useful detail.

Yeah! You did it! You successfully emulated a bad adventure from the 70’s! Well, except, they never had as much text as this one does. Not An Adventure. Just some curiosity masquerading as an adventure.

This is $7.50 at DriveThru. There’s no real preview, just the mii “quick” preview. People, put in a real preview. Let us see what we are buying BEFORE we buy it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/319075/SG5-The-Basilisk?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 14 Comments

Cascadia Caverns

Posted on August 8, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Frank Schmidt
Adventures in Filbar
OSR
Level 4

After starting your adventuring careers, you arrive in Runnymede a small village. A man in the center of the community is spouting something and you quickly discovered a child has gone missing. The citizens are reluctant to send the city watch out and that gives you the opening you to jumpstart your careers!

This nineteen page adventure features fourteen rooms in a cave full of goblins. Big fan of stabbing goblins with low-effort editing? Look no further!

Small village outlying farm is burned down and a young girl kidnapped. Rather than mob up or use their militia the villagers instead hire the party to go kill a bunch of humanoids in a cave and save the girl. The first adventure I ever provided feedback on, prior to publishing, had some kids disappearing in a house and the families mobbed up outside, refusing the house. I pointed out this was rather unlikelyBut, it’s  a D&D adventure and we’re ignoring logic today, so …. (Although, I will point out that the books Town and Fief are a pretty good look at life during the village time period. It provides a lot of good background for running adventures and, while relatively expensive at $20/pop, they are a good read. For example, the townsfolk in this adventure would NOT turn to strangers to help. You need someone to vouch for you. Anyway, segway, I guess …)

The writing here is long winded, in single column format. Lots of “you sneak down the hallway” and other first person narration in what I assume is the read-aloud portions of each room.

“After another hour of trudging through the dark forest you reach the other side. Staying close to the river has allowed you to stay on tracks and intermittent signs of passage have been spotted including several blood smears on trees. It is apparent that someone or something had been seriously injured. Breaking into a meadow you hear the crashing of water as the river goes over a cliff and deposits into a lake. Noises are heard near the edge of the forest on the far side of a meadow!”

That’s just one example. It’s trying to provide, obviously, that “movie camera” experience and thus, like all adventures that try to do that, fails at both doing it and in being an adventure in which the characters have agency.

It’s full of passive perception checks and short & long rests. Make a DC12 vs DEX or take 2d6 damage. (In the OSR, seriously?) One place lists the adventure for level four but the text continually implies that it’’s a level one adventure. IE: this is a conversion. The extremely light treasure, for a level one, is a telling sign. For level 4’s it is criminal.

The text is confusing and I still can’t make out how certain places are supposed to be laid out and experienced. Most rooms just have a few goblins in them for you to stab. There IS an order of battle in places, but that’s about the last good thing I have to say. Oh, and he map, a digital one, is somehow blurry. How the fuck does THAT happen?

This is $3 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Otherwise you’d never buy it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/321498/MAR2–Cascadia-Caverns?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 11 Comments

A Wizard (review)

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Donovan Caldwell
Self Published
OSR
Mid Levels?

A Wizard, mad with power, has terrorized the charming hamlet of Canny before escaping to his Tower on the Hill. The heroes must find him and stop him, before his curses descend upon every hapless citizen!

This 68 page digest adventure uses half its pages to describe a wizards tower in a body horror/horror genre type environment, like some cross between The Thing and Alien. Good descriptions, a little arbitrary in places, and, as with most horror, could cross genres pretty well to any type of RPG you’d like. As written, it would be a good horror one-shot, which would circumvent the arbitrary nature and complete lack of loot.

There’s a wanted poster in the general store and a vivisected cow in the bakers barn. 40gp if you deal with that wizard that lives in a tower up on the hill. This is the end of the theming, after this it’s all weird body horror stuff right out of The Thing and Alien. The tower is fibrous, and there’s lots of goo and sticky web-like stuff. As such this adventure can cross genre lines pretty easily. There’s nothing really that ties it to fantasy. Call of Cthulhu, or any other modern game, could use this just as easily as long as you’re willing to have some kind of vaguely alien-like fibrous body horror like stuff in your game. Horror adventures tend to do that easily, or, at least, good ones do that easily. I would call this one a decent horror adventure, at least for a one shot.

And why is that? There’s a 25 room wizard tower on several levels, which would tend to be a normal wizard tower exploration thing for fantasy games. Wizard Towers have to FEEL different, in the same way that an undersea adventure or a cloud castle adventure environment should feel different. Good ones do and bad ones just feel like yet another series or boring old rooms. This one brings the weird-ass environment one would expect from a wizards tower, but also brings a decent amount of arbitrary happenings that do not lend themselves to OSR gaming, or, at least, campaign play. Unless you’re in one of those fucked up LotFP games that I strongly doubt exist in real life due to THEIR arbitrary nature.

So, a couple of examples. “If a character is ever alone in a room with the wizard, he picks them off. Describe something running at them very fast, being yanked up into the ceiling, dragged through a vent, etc. Then move on. There is no need to worry about them anymore.” You made it to seventh level, eh? Well, kiss it goodbye sucker. In another case there’s a door that, when opened, has acid flooding out of it. As written, these are arbitrary, in particular the first. You could ignore it, as the DM, but then you’re losing the effectiveness of the technique.  There’s no in between, you die or you don’t. For your mid-level character. Even as a one-shot this seems like a bad idea. “Uh, I guess you get to sit out for the next three and half hours …” NPC’s are the usual method of telegraphing this shit, but I find even that a bit Deus Ex, unless it happens, like IMMEDIATELY, and is almost telegraphed. And the door, I supposed, could be written off as a trapped door, but it’s not really written like that. And good traps tend to be telegraphed through description for clever players to pick up on … although, again, at higher levels it can be expected that the party needs to burn some spells to protect themselves and non-telegraphed traps DO start to get a pass. Otherwise the wizard is nothing but lightning bolts and the cleric nothing but heals. All of this tends to lead me to put this in the One Shot category, based on the arbitrary nature of some effects combined with the high-level of it. 

Oh, and there’s no treasure. Uh … none of at all I think, except for that 40gp reward at the beginning. And I’m including magic items in this. Someone might get a parasite caterpillar that lets you see invisible and kills you if you remove it from your brain. That’s kind of cool. But that’s also about it. You won’t be levelling from this death trap. 

The very brief town section gets great NPC descriptions (kind, speaks slowly spectacles) or (rugged, charming, eternal stubble.) Likewise the town is well described in just a few short sentences. Flowers, everywhere, of every kind, coating the green hills and walking paths and trails. Comforting smells of steak, apple pie or cheesy omelettes. Children playing the streets. That’s nice imagery. The tower, proper, follows through on this. “Spacious dim, sweet scent like cotton candy. Sticky floors make a smacking sound as walked on. The walls are of a fiberours quality with circles and spirals. It does this over and over again, for each room. They are easy to scan and flavorful. The rooms are organized well and easy to scan and locate information. (Even though the exit situation is a bit OVER explained, taking up half the room entry in some cases.) 

Maps are shitty art-house stuff. Hard to read, with level interconnections not the best explained. I don’t like to work hard to read the map. Legibility is a thing. Yeah, I know, fancy fonts and arty maps make you C0ol! But if I can’t read it, or struggle to read it, then I ain’t gonna run it and you fail at priority one: usable at the table. Don’t fucking fail at priority one!

 I haven’t really mentioned the body horror elements. The thing is gory being being … I don’t know … explicit? Spider things erupt from peoples mouths. Bellies bulge as people melt from the inside and other bodies explode ala that Monty Python Wafer-Thin Mint scene. It’s as tastefully done as it can be while still retaining the body horror element in full effect. Really nice job on the horror elements and the descriptive language here.

This is $8 at itch.io. There’s a nine page free preview available to download. It shows you the small town and the first two rooms. That’s enough, you get a good idea of what to expect from the writing and the rooms from that preview, which is what a preview should do. LESS COOL IS THE LACK OF A FUCKING LEVEL RANGE! Put one in. 

https://donnyc.itch.io/a-wizard

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 18 Comments

(Cthulhu) Forgotten Duty

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Paul Baldowski
Just Crunch Games
The Cthulhu Hack

A visit to the University of Navarra—located in Pamplona, Spain—in search of a rare book—the chronicles of a monk who claimed to have witnessed visions of other worlds—leads to a grim investigation.

This 35 page adventure uses about eighteen pages to describe some skill rolls, err, I mean, “investigation” and a small manor home. It’s a special kind of mess, wherein it is absolutely clear in the way it puts good text in the wrong places. It’s like someone did an Excel pivot table on the adventure.

After D&D, CoC (pronounced ‘Cock.’ You will now never unsee that & You’re Welcome!)  is my second most played game. I know the score, you hit the local newspaper office, the library, and keep ten gallons of gas in the back of your pinto. I assume The Cthulhu Hack is much the same. But I don’t know, so, take that as it is given.

You’re in town looking for a book at a museum. They loaned it to some count dude up on the hill. Turns out he’s been “alive” for 2000 years and is going to use the book to complete his ritual in two days time. Who coulda figured?

Also, like, EVERYONE in Pamplona is mind-controlled by the insect inside the dude. Ok, not everyone, but, ANYTHING that needs explained in the adventure is explained by “blah blah blah insect mind controlled them to get it to happen blah blah blah.” Including the dude at the museum who tells you the count has the book? Why does the mind-controlled dude tell you this? Why, the count likes to lure people to him, of course! Ug! This smacks of the “I cast two dozen wishes to make the dungeon immune to your passwall spells!” sort of thing. There’s a combination of Deus Ex and nonsense throw-away explanation that makes the whole thing VERY eye-rolly., It’s a pretty low-effort explanation on the designers part.

The investigation part is first up in every Cthulhu adventure, followed by the sneaking in, followed up the Fucking Up And Body Count portion. The investigation here is both poor and MAY be influenced by the system, The Cthulhu Hack, which I know nothing bout. This is where the first of those Pivot Table things comes in to play. The information is organized by “SKILL CHECK TYPE” in bold, followed by the information, which may have the source of the information buried in it. A false example might be “LIBRARY USE: You find an article at the newspaper office about the count.” This IMPLIES that what matters is making the skill check. That the player will say “I want to use Library Use to find out some information about the adventure.” This smacks of the 4e Skill Challenge nonsense. That ain’t the way I rodeo. You can rodeo any way you want, but I’m gonna tell everyone else that your way SUX. You go to the fucking newspaper office and talk to the dude behind the desk and get access to the michofiche/archives and THEN you roll your fucking skill check. You fucking roleplay. So, either, A) The Cthulhu Hack don’t do that and you just roll the fucking dice until you succeed or B) The Cthulhu Hack don’t do that but this designer does that with their games. Which suck. Or C) The designer plays the game the right way but really fucked up in how they wrote down each and every one of the skill checks. Normally, I’d say it was C) that happened, but, again, I don’t know Cthulhu Hack. In any event, this weird fucking way or relating information through skill checks is what is always used. And it sux. 

It does the SAME FUCKING THING with the NPC’s and the locations. AT one point you find an abandoned car. It tells you that the partially melted keys for the car are in the fire pit, a different location. But the fire pit don’t tell you that. Or Some locked chest freezer in the basement that tells you the keys are up in the office, but the office doesn’t mention the fucking keys. What the fuck kind of organization is that? Some kind of system where you have to look through EVERY FUCKING PAGE of the adventure in order to determine what is in a room? Is there an NPC in the room? I don’t know, I had better go check the NPC section and read through each of their descriptions to figure out if they hang out in Office … and all of the locations to see if there is anything else in the office important. It’s Nucking Futz! 

So, a dumb Deus Ex kind of plot and an organization THAT FUCKING DEFIES LOGIC … along with a dubious method of investigating via skill checks. NPC’s and events just kind of tossed out there without much more than a single sentence of support from the text. But, I mean, otherwise it’s perfectly legible. 🙂

This is $4.50 at DriveThru. There’s no preview, SUCK IT SUCKER! Bwa hahahahaha! I’ve got your $5 now! Man, put in a fucking preview next time.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/320893/The-Cthulhu-Hack-Forgotten-Duty?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

Marsh Goons review

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Joe Banner, John Gregory
Technical Grimoire Games
Tunnel Goons
Level ?

A Tabletop RPG mud-crawl adventure.

This 32 page thing is not an adventure. It’s more of a region. Except it’s not. It’s more of an I Had Some Ideas For A Region And Here They Are. The digest doesn’t really even get to the region until maybe page 25. It describes some factions, in too many words, and describes a couple of locations using abstracted/generalized text, and then puts seven locations in the swamp in two pages and gives you five ideas for things that might happen. Maybe. It’s somehow related to the Bone Marshes.

Maybe this IS the Bone Marshes, after the situation in that volume is resolved? I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m greatly disappointed. The first 25 or so pages are really just some rules and/or rules adjustments for a 2d6 based system. It does introduce an interesting mechanic, the Mud Die. Playing the swamp gets you muddy. When you’re muddy you roll the roll die and that’s how many slots of gear are now taken up by mud until you clean off. That’s interesting and simple. It’s one of the hallmarks of both the OSR and the adjacent systems that they play with the more tedious aspects of the game. Inventory/weight is a critical component of old school, but tracking weight and encumbrance is a major pain given the GP system. How many GP is a pike, again? The revolution in systems like the LotFP “just write it down” slot system, and other techniques for torch and arrow inventory in other systems allow the core of the resource mechanic to be maintained while reducing the Papers & Paychecks bookkeeping mechanic.

But everything else … ug!

Faction descriptions take up about two pages each in a long text format that will make finding personalities, goals, and resources for each faction relatively impossible to find. Highlighter and notes. Highlighter and notes are the only way to solve this. In which case why didn’t the designer do this in the first place? Make it easier to find this information? Because they don’t know good design and are overly familiar with their own works, and thus don’t recognize the issue? People HATE pre-written adventures, and for good reason: they tend to be terrible to use. And if people are not using your adventure then you’ve failed at task one for a designer.

The wandering table is nothing but a list of creatures, they don’t do anything, which is a pain. Include a little extra to make life easier for the DM. Give them DM something to spring off of! Likewise the monster descriptions. “Flying scavengers operating in groups of two or three that prey on the weak and vulnerable”, so says the Marsh Vulture. That’s NOT a creature description. The sea-bear is as close as the adventure gets to describing a monster: huge, semi-hairess. The soul of evocative writing, that! “Zombie-like creatures with leech heads.” Well, ok, getting closer. But these don’t convey much if any useful descriptive detail to the DM. 

The location descriptions for two of the main locations come without maps. Just text descriptions, which almost always SUCK donkey balls and they do in this. “There is a guard room with blue eyed simians” buried in one paragraph. How many? Meh, not told. Maybe that’s a feature of the system? I don’t know. But I do know that abandoning the traditional room/key format, for the exploration element of an adventure, is drought with peril. The actual swamp locations are seven, contained on two digest pages. And they are very abstracted and general. Nothing very specific, just as with the creature descriptions. Augmenting this is five ideas of things that could happen in the swamp. It’s all very “maybe this and maybe that” without much specificity to help a DM along. 

It’s not an adventure. It’s not even a region to have an adventure in. It’s more of “here are some ideas that you could use to creature your own adventure.” And, I would suggest, it’s not even very good at that, not being bold enough to actually present ideas but just the META of ideas.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along. Move along.

This is $5 at DriveThru. And there’s no preview. Because why would there be a preview to see in advance what you are buying? 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/320903/Marsh-Goons?1892600

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