Sinister Red

Posted on July 29, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Rudy Mangual
Rudy Riot
OSR
Level 2?

A portal leads to a wet, red world. A world of bloat. A world drowned by excess.  A world of perpetual torment. And a world of unimaginable treasure. The wicked baron bade you fetch him this treasure. “Though the portal or to the gallows.” The choice was simple. And so you tumble through a gash in the sky, falling towards a sea, sinister red.

This 32 page digest sized adventure is a point crawl with about 28 locations. It’s got an interesting idea, but flames out with encounters that are too similar to each other. But it’s pretty easy to use and decently evocative. There’s just not enough interactivity. Because I’m a jaded dilettante who lounges about all day in my saffron dressing gown while reading Against Nature. But maybe you like collecting the red key fetch quests and stabbing things more than I? Philistine

Huh. Well, there’s something you don’t see every day. Imagine that …

Let’s take the B Movie Planet of Blood. Or, that sci-fi story about a planet of vampires and the last man alive on a spaceship. Now, let’s make that vampire planet an ACTUAL planet of blood. Why? Cause a young kid with a djinni lamp, of course! That’s the adventure. You get transported to this other planet, in the middle of the sea. You see, the sea was turned in to blood by this kid via a wish and an asshole djinni. Then the blood all congealed. Yuck! You want off the planet? Get three to the capitol city, spared the worse of the sea/blood/congealed stuff. Visit the Vampire Queen and get sent in to The Tower, where time has stopped before her kiddo can ask for this third wish, the one that will make the world disappear. So, it’s a point crawl on the surface of a congealed blood sea until the linear portion at then end. You meet the local (all vampires, essentially) do some minor fetch quests and stab things. Meh.

Yeah, vampires. A whole planet of them. But they are really not. It’s more of a blood themed people who drink blood rather than the full fledged D&D vampire of old. There are a couple, but, for the most part, you face 1 and 2HD enemies with a 4HD boss or some 6 or 7HD NPC vampires to talk to. Mostly its just theming. Gorger vampires, one too fat to fit up some stairs, dudes covered in blood, blah blah blah blood blah blah blah. I think it’s well done. 

One site per page with decent headings, bullets, building, whitespace and indents keeps thing easy to scan. NPC’s and monsters get short bursty little descriptions like “charming, vain, distracted” and/or “Tall, slender, royal robes. Suave but menacing.” It’s not overstaying its welcome and is giving the DM what they need to run the NPC and/or encounter. Good job. Likewise the monster  description dne other location descriptions are short and punchy. It’s using italics for the descriptions but its limiting it to one or two sentences, which is fine for legibility. Leveraging the “Read” and “blood” themes it does a good job using a few words to describe a location and then giving the DM more evocative notes, terse, to allow them to add more as they see fit. Which is exactly what the fuck an adventure desginer should be doing with their description and DM notes.

But the interactivity. Man. 

Frank wants an X, go get it for him and he’ll give you the Jade Monkey. Or some clothes to make you look like vampires, or something. Not that it will really matter, you’re gonna get captured in the capitol city anyway. So, stab someone or do the 7HD dude a favor because they can’t do the thing themselves for REASONS. It’s not that this is BAD< but you recognize the patterns after awhile. I kind of like the little vignettes. A stopped coach, slurping sounds from inside, a vampire sucking on the two passengers. They are well described and come to life. But its too much of the same for me.

I don’t know. I mean, it’s ok, and I’m gonna do a No Regerts on this, but its also kind of meh because of the interactivity. Does a fetch quest or stabby stabby turn in to an ok thing, or an adventure full of them turn in to an ok adventure, if there’s no real interactivity beyond that? I mean, you can talk to some people, but it doesn’t feel like it’s to any end that is meaningful, you still gonna end up at the end doing the same thing no matter your choices. 

This isn’t bad. It’s a fantastic location for D&D that some people are going to bitch at for being Too Far Out There. But D&D should have crystal forests and rainbow bridges and cloud cities … and planets of vampires with congealed blood seas. God effort here, nicely done, but I think it’s limited by its pointcrawl nature. Which makes me want to go back and look at those other pointcrawls I liked and see if they are the same and if maybe I’ve changed my mind over time.

This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no fucking level listed. PUT IN A FUCKING LEVEL RANGE IN THE AD COPY. I don’t know why I get so pissy about that. Anyway, the preview is six pages and you get to see the first encounter. That encounter, but the lead in, should be enough for you to make a good determination of if you’ll like it or not. You can see the organization and examples of the (evocative) writing style and get an idea of the combats, all from that lead in and first encounter.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/318767/Sinister-Red?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, God Effort, No Regerts, Reviews | 8 Comments

The Face of the Temptress

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Brian C Rideout
Deathtrap Games
Labyrinth Lord
Any Level

Twenty Seven Hundred years ago Bassanta was a sorceress of incredible beauty – and subtlety. She was a temptress, blackmailer, influence peddler, and rumour longer. On her whim simple soldiers could rise to riches or power, businesses could grow or crumble, and people could die. She was called “The Whisper-Queen of Lantash.” And the known world feared her… …but Lantash is gone and forgotten. It’s people dust and bones in buried ruins. Her great power: less than a footnote in history. The great and terrible Whisper Queen died in the same disaster as thousands of her country-folk. The gods of Lantash, in their cold wisdom saw that the Hell she had earned would be not nearly as cruel as allowing Bassanta to linger on the mortal plane and see how little her Empire came to.

This thirteen page non-traditional “adventure” is a series of events tied to a cursed magic item. It’s an interesting concept, tying the temptation to possession by an entity and combining that with “meta-events” that occur during downtime. It would be stronger with some retheming sections and by placing important information outside of the event text rather than burying facts in the events. Still, an interesting look at how to handle a cursed magic item.

The party find a magic item and the entity in it slowly tempts the wearer to accept more and more powers, slowly taking control of the player character as they do so. Thus the adventure is actually just a cursed magic item and some some events to drop in around the curse, most of which involve some sort of dream-sequence with the entity until there’s some final confrontation. As such I might call this less of an adventure and more of a seven page description of a cursed item.

It’s heart is in the right place; trying to add depth to a depth to a cursed item and trying to make a possession by an entity more interesting than kind of immediate “you failed your save” event. In this is harkens back to the 1E DMG artifacts, that, I believe, had some note about more powers of the devices becoming evident over time. That’s great! The magic item then becomes less about a simple mechanical advantage and integrates itself in to the parties life and can in turn become the subject of adventure, both to unlock its powers and perhaps to break some curse on it. I’ll take depth, especially in an area that is essentially unexplored like cursed magic items. The way it handles possession is also interesting, presenting it as a series of temptations, things the players want and that they push their luck, essentially making a choice to accept more power knowing that there is almost certainly some price. Push Your Luck is a key element of old school gaming and integrating the mechanic this way is great. (And, to a lesser extent, all cursed items. It’s a +5 sword, but it also requires X to use it … where X is something less than “the blood of innocents” … something on the edge of the players being willing to do.

As implemented, it’s a little weak in this case. It’s mostly CHA based bonuses, with some dream/sleep effect to unlock as well. These are less likely to appeal to players and it’s also got a strong “beauty” component, targeting itself to female characters. You want to be a pretty girl, right? So, in theming it can be a little weak (although that theming is pretty well done IF you want to be a pretty girl) and I’m not sure the mechanical bonuses are enough to overcome in the innate paranoia of the players. The designer acknowledges this, and notes that all eleven events are unlikely to happen due to player paranoia. So, as implemented, the the concept is a little weak in this case.

It also notes, in passing, that the adventure can be rethemed. This isn’t really handled except as an off hand remark. The entire text would be stronger if it gave some advice on retheming to other environments than “pretty girl.” A page or half page on this would be great, although once exposed to the core concept in the text it would be pretty easy to work up something yourself. It’s not exactly a template, but it’s pretty easy to see how you could use it as one. 

I’m less thrilled about the way important information is mixed in to the event text. At the end of an event there may be a note about what to do if the players suspect something, or work against it, etc. These sections would be better if pulled out of the main event text and placed at the front of rear of the event section; making a DM hunt for something is never a good idea, especially when the designer acknowledges that this is just a guideline and things may jump around a bit as the party questions the temptations/entity.

So, good idea but not the strongest implementation. Both the theme “pretty girl” and the power power levels involved are not exactly enough, I think. Further, it could be organized better to provide advice to the DM and handle retheming better. It does have a good write up on the possession entity and what it wants/doesn’t want, which is always a good way to handle an NPC and give advice to the DM on how to handle them.

It’s mere existence, and reading it, can generate a lot of ideas for the DM and as a kind of oblique guide to cursed artifacts its interesting in that respect. It’s not the Be All book for the subject, and is weaker because of its omissions in that area, but if you have some interest in that area (and you should) it’s worth checking out to get some ideas … which is a rare thing indeed for me to say. 

This is Pay What you Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/320636/The-Face-of-the-Temptress?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 4 Comments

Beneath the Ruined Wizard’s Tower

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jonathan Rowe
Fen Orc
BlueHolme
Level 2
  • The haunted caves where Smugglers hide their contraband and the Undead Corsair whose tomb has been disturbed
  • The Temple of the Rat God and the sinister secret society that has infiltrated the unsuspecting town above
  • The ancient Pre-human City where a foolhardy Wizard unearthed something that destroyed his Tower, fifty years ago, and guarded by its own deadly occupants

This seventeen page adventure details level two of the Holmes sample dungeon and has 26-ish rooms. It doesn’t make me wish I was never born which, I guess, is a compliment? But it has some serious map issues and a genericism, combined with a lack of interactivity, that causes the finished thing to suffer. 

Layout was in Word, I think, because it’s in docx format. It’s relatively complex though, so the designer must be quite proficient in Word. BUT … I almost didn’t open the document BECAUSE it was in docx. Don’t put your work in docx. Put it in PDF. Everytime I see a doc file I think “This is an attempt to infest my computer with malware.” There’s no wat around that; unless you’ve got a really good reason then put your work in PDF.

The dungeon map has three-ish zones and is one of the greatest disappointments I have ever seen. Not the map design, proper, it’s ok. Some details, not the worst layout possible, etc. But then it’s hand numbered. Or, well, lettered, since it follows the Holmes example of using letters instead of numbers. And the designer is using some kind of fancy fucking font, or added flair to the fucking letters or something. Little lines at the end of letter strokes, etc. I can’t read the fucking thing. Oh, I can make out a letter or three, but there are some that I just stare at and can’t figure out what the fuck room it’s supposed to be. It took me five minutes to find room ‘B’ on the map. It’s fucking bullshit. Is this really what you want my commentary on your work to involve? “The fucking thing isn’t legible; don’t buy it!”? No, of course not. Just fucking cut it out with the cutsy fonts, etc. If I can’t read the fucking thing then I’m going to fucking run it. 

There’s a disconnect, also, between the text and the map. The text has some good ideas: sea caves, an underground water filled tunnel and so on. But it is displayed terribly on the map. The sea caves look like just normal dungeon rooms. The underground water tunnel is the same. You can’t tell there’s water, or that it’s a tunnel or anything else. Tunnel slopes and light are contained in the room descriptions. “Oops, that tunnel you just walked down was severely sloped. Sorry, guess I should have mentioned that sooner …” The logistics of the fucking map are TERRIBLE. 

The read-aloud is … I don’t know. Generic? It overreavels, that’s for sure. Over and again it tells us things about the rooms that should be for the players to discover. “This room is storage for a pirates treasure.” or “This is a maze of caverns” or “The water extends under a wall down a long submerged tunnel.” How the fuck do the players know any of this? It’s for them to discover, as they interact with the environment with their characters. It’s quite bad. On top f it is the genercism. It’s like the read-aloud is a room note for the designer to expand upon rather than traditional read aloud. “This chamber contains only a deep pit. A prisoner at the bottom shouts and waves, desperate for you to throw him a rope to release him.” So, yeah, that’s iconic. But it doesn’t really have any life and it’s written in some kind of weird manner. I don’t know how to describe it, but I know it when I see it. Genetically iconic? Conclusions instead of environment descriptions? “This maze of caverns is made from an indestructible crystalline material that reflects light and images in dazzling kaleidoscopic confusion” It’s missing something. It’s like its abstract. 

Interactivity is mostly fighting. There are some obstacles to overcome, the usual rope bridge over a chasm and the like. Every once in awhile there is a “solve a puzzle” or “bring item A to room b” type thing. It just isn’t very … exploratory? I mean, you do get to explore, but the amount and number of things you get to interact with, beyond combat, seems very limited.

I wouldn’t buy this. Which is good cause it’s free. But I wouldn’t run it either. There are far better choices that you don’t have to fight to use and are more interesting. Another vision unfullfilled.

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310408/Beneath-the-Ruined-Wizards-Tower?1892600

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

Keys of the Apocalypse 1 – Pestilence

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jay Parker
Dilly Green Bean Games
S&W (Modern)
Levels 6-10

First play as Red Ops as they head to an island off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine to retrieve a Senator’s wife and daughter after contact with the island is lost. But a looming hurricane is making things tricky and a missing Coast Guard cutter is drawing unwanted attention. Not only has that, but something biblical has occurred that will change the world forever…

This 49 page adventure contains brief rules for modern S&W play as well as “three” adventures, only one of which is relevant, and is ten pages. The other two are a solo mission and a Blay as the Bad Guys thing. The “Real” adventure does a good job portraying a survival horror base raid, but it completely marred by the walls of text and lack of any coherent method for organizing the text. And it fucks with the characters too much, even for a one-shot with included pre-gens, which this has.

In high school I played a lot of Danger International. It was/is a low-powered/normal person version of the Champions using the HERO system rules. Spies, special ops, commandos; a kind of James Bond type game that usually had a kind of investigation ending with a commando type raid on the evil bad guy base. This fits in to that genre. While this adventure seems to communicate post-apoc from its marketing, it’s actually more of a Delta Green type type affair with the party being a kind of investigation and special missions type unit set in the modern day. This book uses S&W for it’s system, with first eighteen or so pages having some rule adjustments and character classes, followed by a “normal” adventure, then a solo mission and another niche one that I won’t cover; just the “Real” on in this review … and I’m not covering the rules either. As a result there’s only about ten pages to the “core” adventure. 

Sentaos wife and daughter are missing on a island that has a medical facility they were visiting, no contact, multiple previous teams sent in not responding, and so now it’s the party of pre-gens turns (or, make you own, but pre-gens are provided.) Of course, there’s been a virus outbreak and there are zombies, something that any self-respecting group should immediately pick up once “medical facility” and “no contact are mentioned.” As a result this is a kind of Resident Evil or Silent Hill type survival horror mission.

These things live or die by the vibe they create, and this one does a pretty decent job. Abandoned ship in the harbour, bloody handprints, an abandoned dingy floating, pouring rain, hearing a crying baby, figures seen alone out in the rain … it does a great job of including the kind of slow build/burn environment, building dread and tension in the adventure. It’s not an adventure for the light of day, but uses the typical genre elements or body fluids and dread to do a great job building tension.

The evocative writing lends to this. Sounds of a crying baby building tension, and pale people soaked in rain with a dead eyed stare, holding a pistol loosely in one hand. When the adventure knows it’s trying to build dread it does a great job of presenting a situation that does that. 

But when it’s not trying it is REALLY not trying. “This is a refrigerated lab that is empty.” Well, ok. I guess I can’t ding it for overwriting most of the room descriptions and descriptions for “empty” rooms/ But there are opportunities lost to provide the DM with just a little more information to help them build a scene. Giant tanks, or freezers with cold air mist escaping from the lids, a fog covered room from the mist, and so on, would have helped. I’m not saying every room has to have something in it, but helping the DM out to create an evocative setting is a part of the designers job, and this doesn’t really do that with the environment. When it’s got something to say, when it decides to put something IN the room then it brings the noise, but otherwise it doesn’t really try. Again, not every room needs to be a tour d’force, but I do expect SOMETHING to bring the room to life. There’s a place for an empty room, but the empty room has to be something also, at least in an adventure like this one. 

The major, MAJOR problem though is the wall of text that it brings to the table. The opening intro must be three or more pages of exposition text mixed in with directives to the DM. It’s hard to tell what is what. There’s nothing to catch the eye. There is very little organization, use of whitespace, bolding, headings, etc in order to make it easy for the DM to find information and make it easier to assimilate and run. It’s more of a first this happens and then this and then this and then this … and thats hard to run. This sort of thing continues in the “interesting” rooms as well. There are times to switch formats, and certainly I’m not calling for every room to look like a “good” dungeon room, organization wise, but when you are doing a complex room, or a room with something in it, it requires the designer to put some effort in to make the room easy to run. This don’t do that. 

There are some “gotcha” things as well. The crying baby is a zombie like thing and if you kil it then you release a plague on the world. But there’s no hint that’s the case. And there are sometimes bodies on the floor. They don’t rise up zombie style (well, some do, but not the ones I’m thinking of …) If you get too close to the bodies on the floor then you die, instantly. It’s the arbitrary nature of the scene that makes it problematic, even for a one-shot. By doing what the party normally does, go in rooms, they die instantly without warning. 

It also uses randomness in a weird way. Encountering the abandoned dongy in the harbor only happens on a 1 in 6 chance. Why? This is an encounter to build dread. Why would you make it unlikely to happen? You’re fighting the very nature of the adventure type with this behavior. In other places there is a chance for a random encounter. I’m not talking wandering monsters, those are always ok for driving an adventure forward, time-wise. I’m talking “if you leave the room then there’s a 1 in 6 chance of the following fully described scene to take place.” And the scene takes a page, or half a page to describe and, again, builds horror. This doesn’t make sense in a survival horror genre. Again, I’m not talking wandering monsters, I’m talking fully fleshed out scene. That should be included. There is no principal of old school gaming here; you’re doing a different genre, survival horror instead of exploration, and the tropes and standards for it are different. There may be some things to borrow from exploration adventures but random scenes isn’t one of them. Programmed is ok; it’s not a railroad, it’s part of the room. 

I’d say this is essentially unusable because of the wall of text/organization issues. I can’t say I’m surprised, for all the trouble with OSR adventures not knowing how to do it I’d say that other genres have much MUCH more issues with this. Refer to just adopt every Call of Cthulhu adventure ever written. And that’s too bad. The scenes are good, in a little “standard zombie medical lab on an isolated island” kind of way. It’s what you would expect, but it knows how to do survival horror. It just doesn’t know how to present the adventure in a wy that a DM can actually run it. 

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. There is no meaningful preview, just the usual “thumbnail” one. It needs to show some text of the actual adventure to give people an idea of what they are buying before they buy it, $1.50 or no.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/311241/Keys-of-the-Apocalypse-Pestilence?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments

Tomb of the Frost-Walker

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Nickolas Zachary Brown
Five Cataclysms
OSR
Mid-Levels

There is but one mountain in these lands for which the frost never abates. Even in the height of Summer, when crops wilt in the heat, this peak continue to emanate a chill wind. There is a cave in the mountain, its crystalline walls and floors white with frost, with corpses of long dead things encased in the ice.  Legend has it that a terrible evil is sealed there, an evil that would encase the world in ice.  Where he walks, the forest follows.

This eleven page adventure features a sixteen page dungeon with a “cold” theme. Decent monsters, magic, treasure, and interactivity results in a pretty good environment to adventure in, even though it feels a bit flat, perhaps from the (otherwise excellent) formatting.

This is a pretty classic exploration/interactivity dungeon with lots and lots of cold themed monsters and room, as the name would imply. Almost every room has something to fuck with, with a decent amount having a pretty good haul of treasure. And consequences for careless adventuring. Murals abound. In one room there is one with a dude having three bodies impaled on his spear. Paint the mural with, conveniently provided by a pool, blood results in him stepping out of the mural, bodies still wiggling, impaled on his spear, allowing you to step in to the mural to retrieve the red box inside. Phat L00T! Damaging the mural, though, pisses him off and out he comes. There are obelisks with runs, gemstones on pillars to loot, and icy caskets that can be caused to shatter, releasing their occupants. A frozen fog room with frozen bodies embedded in the fog and box, and a GIANT FACE from which a cold wind blows … Most of the rooms are self-contained, with a few having the de rigueur “need a gemstone found elsewhere” to unlock some effect, or messing with one thing in a room causing a impact somewhere else in the dungeon. Oh, and you’re not going to get too handsy in the dungeon, are you? I mean, you wouldn’t want to release the titular 20HD avatar of the frost god in your search for loot and mindless destroying things/interacting with them. Can & Should are two different words. Great interactivity, if it does get a little heavy on the mural usage in places.

Creatures are great, from ice motes that, essentially, suicide in to the players, with 1 HP each, to a giant hand that erupts from the icy floor to pull someone under. There’s an undead warrior DRAPED in expensive jewelry armed with a flint sword and cold black eyes. Ice wraiths compliment the load out, along with an occasional yeti lazing about, sleeping, not wishing to be woken up. They are all well described, visceral in their description, and those descriptions and stats easily provided in each room for the DM to bring them to life. Treasure tends to be unique, from a weird flaming sword to an ice chalice that lets you breathe frost … with a side effect or two thrown in. The amount of monetary loot seems about right for a Gold=XP game.

Descriptions are short and too the point, with a hint of evocative writing, essentially describing some iconic locations that are easily groked, with the right words generally used in the right places to bring them to life. “Stairs lead to a raised platform against the far wall, whereupon is a large door of pure white ice. The door glimmers with magic. In each corner of the room is an icy stone circle. There is an enormous yeti sprawled across the stairs, fast asleep and snoring loudly. It wears a blue metal helmet.” Bolded words get their own little break out paragraph, with more information on the item, allowing the DM to quickly and easily find the follow up information they need. “A grand casket of ice is embedded in the far wall, flanked on either side by 2 Onyx Obelisks. Each of the obelisks are inscribed with a single rune.” The formatting is great and it’s easy to scan. The evocativeness is … I don’t know. It’s there but I feel like it doesn’t do as good a job as it could in conveying the otherness of the locations. It’s certainly better than most adventures that use many, many more words. It’s concentrating on the right things, but it doesn’t feel like the designer agonized other every description to bring them fully to life. Which is good for the designers mental health, but, I like to really FEEL each room through its description. Again, it’s not bad, and better than most, but it is the area I might recommend them to work on in future projects. 

And that may be because this thing is very close, I think, to being very VERY good. As is, I’d have no problem running it and I think you could probably almost pick ip up and run it without reading, or even scanning, it first. That’s a great accomplishment, especially with all the new monsters, items, and interactivity present. A little work on those descriptions, to take them from Good to FUCKING MAGNIFICENT and you’d have an eleven page adventure that people drooled over, that still fit the traditional mode & form of a “normal” D&D adventure. 

I’m a fan of this, and with work, I could be the biggest fan.

This is $2 at Drivethru. The level range “mid” is only on the cover. The preview is six pages. The last page shows the first three rooms of the dungeon and is pretty accurate as to the content, format, etc you will be purchasing, so good preview in that regard. You also get to the lead-in, anderers, etc, which is, essentially ALL of the non-encounter pages. It does a good job of keeping the extraneous bullshit to a minimum. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/257701/Tomb-of-the-FrostWalker?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 6 Comments

The Mines of Yeblith-mau

Posted on July 18, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Michael Hamann
North Dragon Press
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 2-4

An ancient cave found, lost, then found again holds the key–or perhaps the lock–to an emerging apocalypse that reaches through the void of time. Do those entering the cave control the world’s destiny or are they puppets playing their part in some great design? Dare they disturb the secrets lying within the Mines of Yeblith-mau?

This 26 page adventure uses nine pages to describe a 32 room dungeon. It tries hard. Entries are terse and sometimes evocative. Interactivity suffers, I think, due to an emphasis on combat-adjacent interactivity. It could be better, but it doesn’t necessarily offend greatly. 

Caves/mines. The gnomes that worked them are (mostly) dead. There are some trogs, down on their luck. Their are some mind-controlled trogs, with evil clerics, and mind controlling jelly hanging out. You can meet an NPC or two and maybe even get some of the “normal’ trogs on your side, at least for an assault on the mind-controlled ones. It is supported by a map that is relatively liner, with a long hallway with offshoots running of fot it and an occasional bypass. This make this, mostly, linear, traveling from zone of rooms to zone of rooms. 

The interactivity here may be the more interesting part of the adventure, for both good and bad reasons. You’ve got a trog tribe that will parlay with the party to organize a joint assault against the mind-controlled trogs. This is interesting, but doesn’t really bring much character other than a brief mention to a celebratory “were allies now!” feast of, essentially, bugs. Meh. Bug eating ain’t weird no more. It hints that the party will be a part of the celebration feast should they win, but, allying with the trigs doesn’t really bring much to the table. There’s no real guidance on making them bestial. There are embedded spies from the mind-controllers, but their interactivity is limited to “they attack” during the final battle. This could have brought much more flavor to the table. Compare to the one gnome left alive who, after starving for a year, is still so paranoid and gold-fevered that he will compulsively lie to the party to protect “his” gold. This, at least gives you a little something more to work with during the adventure as this NPC accompanies the party.

The mind-control potions are not really handled well at all. Some notes about capturing the party. But, otherwise, not much in the way of advice other than “they all know when one of them is in combat.” But, in light of that, there is still no order of battle for them. How do they react? Well, they are not surprised, says the adventure. Advice here would have been in order. And this is weird because, in the normal trog rooms, it has a room saying that this room will react to combat in the next. It’s TOTALLY the wrong way to handle this sort of thing, but it does show tha the designer was at least thinking about such things. Anyway, the mind control isn’t much fun; its just a “stabby stabby I was a spy all the time!” sort of thing from a generic trog. No depth at all. 

The rest of the interactivity is almost all “combat adjacent,” Oh, it’s a skeleton! If you mess with it then centipedes come out of its ribcage. Oh, look, it’s a room full of bats! Better cross it right or they will all flutter down and attack/etc. Thus the vast majority of the interactivity (other than an NPC or two and the trog alliance thing) are essentially ways to avoid combat or make it worse. That’s nice, but I wouldn’t call it interactivity. It’s more “what I expect from a combat encounter.” There’s a journal, at one point, with some stuff written in it about the history and clue to a locked door, but that’s about it. This ain’t an exploration/fuck with stuff dungeon. It’s a hack with slightly more depth. The wilderness wanderers do have a thing or two going on, so, there’s that.

The writing is terse though, with some decent bolding and offset boxes to help organize the information. This makes scanning the information easy. On purpose or no, it’s appreciated.

The writing can be evocative in places, at least the read-aloud, which is generally kept to a sentence. “At the end of the steps, the air is damp and thick with musty ammonia, and irritating screeches echo in the cavern. A coating of thick, wet bat dropping slickens the floor of the landing.” Ok, I’ll buy that for a dollar. Not the best but more than average. And thankfully short. That cover scene? That’s a location in the adventure. But the text doesn’t really bring it to life at all, not the way that art piece does. I want a description that makes me imagine THAT … but none of the dungeon really has the vibe tha the art piece communicates.

Hooks are lame, but, I might note that one of them “evil clerics pretend to be good guys to hire you to go find their evil brothers in the caves” gave me an idea. Zombie outbreak! Have the mind-controlled trogs act zombie-like, attack the town, and the party needs to go to the caves to track it back to its source to seal the deal with ending things. This could be supported by additional town segments and a desperate struggle in the caves to finish off the mind controlled trogs before their final assault on the town. IE: some horror combined with The Thing, 

But, this don’t do that. If you’re looking for a combat heavy adventure then this should do you well. It IS a pretty decent first effort from a new designer. Work on the interactivity and punching up those descriptions even more, as well as fleshing out the preamble to an adventure in liu of all of the appendix words, would really make this thing, or future efforts, shine. And you don’t I don’t use the word “shine” lightly.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is all 21 pages that make up the adventure (IE: leaving out blank pages.) Good preview. You know what you’re buying beforehand. I applaud this decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/313827/The-Mines-of-Yeblithmau?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 6 Comments

The Beatified and Damned

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Darren Brockes
Agony Song Games
Labyringth Lord Games/5e/Mork Borg/Trophy Gold
No Level. Recommend a fucking level Darren!

The mausoleum — called the Saints’ House — sits far out from a fort in low hills. Generally people avoid it; it is not a place of worship and no one mourns the saints who have passed, given death is necessary for the status of sainthood. However, that does not stop the rumors swirling in the fort: those men and women who do pilgrimage to the mausoleum return with healed wounds and hearts; blessed bones are found just inside, sold for a fortune; a priest wandering the halls who casts out the ruin from a weary traveler’s soul. All adventurers have pasts in need of atonement, whether for something small or large. As all who follow the saints know, the blood of a martyr is the only true forgiveness in this world. And you have decided to set foot in that mausoleum to seek it. Here is all you know: a true confession of what you seek atonement for, aloud, is the only way in. You will know when and where.

It’s four fucking pages, only two of which are real, for $4, with no preview and uses fancy fucking hard to read fonts. What the fuck doYOU think my summary of it should be?

Welcome to Train Wreck Tuesdays, written on a Sunday and published who the fucks knows when. Wednesday, maybe? Who knows, time no longer has meaning. In this occasional allerative series we find out just how fucking much of a hypocrite I am by examining works we would not otherwise. Besides, pickings are slim and I’m REALLY not in reviewing 100 page adventures right now, it would cut in to my Staring at the Sea Staring at the Sand time. 

Bam! Here come ol flat top, cruising up slowly. Nice weirdo ruined cover, lets buy it! And then we look down to see $3! Great! And then we see it’s only four pages! Ought oh! Utopian hypocrisy time! Small things can be good. Well, I want to believe that small things can be good. And money? Bah! We’re in a post-consumerist society. It’s $3. If $4 is meaningful to you then you’ve got troubles. 

The real reason, of course, is that we’re afraid. Because the price isn’t actually $3. The price is $100. And how can this be? I want to believe, and have said, that quality is worth paying for. Let’s say someone publishes a REALLY good 20 page adventure and prices it at, I don’t know, $50. “Woah!” We’d all look at that weird. But why? I mean, the price isn’t THAT unreasonable, is it? I mean, compared to going out to a first-run movie? And if you knew you’d get 3-4 sessions out of it and that it was good? But, of course, that’s not the case. A) It won’t be good. B) It won’t be 3-4 sessions. If I knew it was high quality and I could get multiple sessions out of it I would absolutely pay $50 for something. But, I mean, it’s not going to be good. Probably. But a boy can dream can’t he? Quality should be the determining factor for price, with a little bit of how many sessions thrown in. But designers all think they write like the demiurge and they all write like cold stinking shit. Well, not all, but it’s close enough to the truth to say its true. No one knows what they are doing.

And thus no, we are in a situation where you just EXPECT that whatever you buy is going to be crap. Isn’t that a great feeling? Knowing that you are burning your cash? And thus, if you buy, say, ten adventures at ten dollars each you might get one good one; spending $100 and becoming substantially more jaded in the process. What a world! What a world!

And thus we arrive, finally, at this adventure. It has no preview, so you can’t tell what you are buying before you are suckered out of your cash, once again. FOUR PAGES! That’s about how long Craigs adventures are, so it’s possible. But then you find out two of the pages are monster summary sheets. Exact copies of each other, one in white on black and one in black on white. Wow. What style. What grace. Avant Garde TO THE MAX. So, now we’re down to two pages. I nte that Agony Song has another adventure that is $3 .. and is only two pages, so this seems to be their schtick. Whatever.

Ah, but then, the summary sheets are hard to read. Because they’ve used some bullshit artsy fucking font. I don’t know, that planescape font, maybe? Wth the “plus” circles and so on? It’s hard to fucking read. You know what you should not be doing as a designer? MAKING THE FUCKING DM’S LIFE HARDER! It’s supposed to be a play aid. All of the bullshit Plancescape font? All of the fancy cursive fonts on the two pages? AITS FUCKING CRAP! I’m not going to struggle to ead your fucking cursive text. And I REALLY don’t like struggling to read plancescape/whatever fonts. Jesus Christ, when did “legability” become a hurdle? I get it. Oooo, I’m artsy!” Fine. There are better fucking ways to accomplish this that don’t make my life as a DM trying to read the fucking text harder.  Hang on, I’m going to link in a section of text. That section makes up about one sixth of the actual adventure, with another sxth being artwork. We’re now down to 1 and ? pages of text for the adventure, 

i hate my life

The adventure, proper, is five rooms. Hmmm, not bad. I’ve seen fewer rooms in twenty page adventures. I’m … intrigued. Hmmm, monster descriptions are … ok? “The Unwashed: They are most noticeable when they pass in front of a beam of light from the entryway; rags moving as if underwater; covered faces; barely perceptible moaning.” Ok, I get it. Not the best imagery, but the designers heart is in the right place and trying to do the right thing. And then there’s a section on their habits: “HABITS: 1. watching just out of sight 2. amassing far above 3. clinging to loose pieces of equipment 4. trying to whisper secrets 5. fleeing to shadows 6. keeping a distance from the font.” I’ll buy that for a dollar! This is done with each of the three monster types; an appearance, stats on one line, habits, and then a little defenses and weaknesses section. In particular, the Unwashed have a weakness to light (the sun, torches) ; AND the ink, tagine shadow. That’s interesting. As implemented the weaknesses are a little mechanistic, but, especially that light and inky shadow, starts to deviate from that in to something much more interest. Something that supports free form play. How do you bless a corrupted shrine in a game? Do you cast bless? Clean it? Pour on holy water? Pray at it? Something else? Games that leave this open, or encourage open-endedness always seem more With It then games that say “If you cast bless you get a +1 For the next day.” The morons may demand mechanics, but for the rest of us it’s the inspiration portion that the designer needs to concentrate on.

The room descriptions are laid out nicely, in theory. There’s an overview, which handles the general description, and a section called “moments” which tends to go in to about one more sentence of detail for everything mentioned in the overview. “Props” seems to do the exact the same thing. Then there are sections on Traps, Treasures, Dangers, and Trinkets. This all happens in about half a column of text, so, fairly tight and covering enough evocative detail in a terse manner to make me generally happy. Here’s an example (fucked up line spacing is my own WordPress ignorance)

The Narthex

GOAL: Confess past regrets to enter the mausoleum. 

OVERVIEW: The entryway of the mausoleum is entirely plundered and weather-worn. There are faded friezes, tall columns, and an inky web blocking passage behind a large font. MOMENTS: + doors, twice the height of the tallest adventurer, cracked open enough for a single person to pass through. + friezes depicting processionals, gift-giving and graphic violence; no faces survived weathering and scratching. + a sudden, sharp smell of burnt paper; a cloth billowing behind a column, not there.

PROPS: + the sacrificial font — a large, black, stone basin, wider than a human and rising to the navel, sits in front of a shadow strung up like a web. + tracts of miracles — delicately carved down the length of each column, every saint’s miracles are recorded.

TRAPS: the unwashed flit and glide through the entryway, unable to enter the mausoleum.

Treasures: none.

DANGERS: none.

TRINKETS: chipped off pieces of friezes; bits of paint ground up into pigment

What you can see here, negatively, is the sad devotion to form. The GOAL is meaningless in most rooms. The Treasures and Dangers in this first room don’t exist and yet we have to have a section heading telling us that anyway. The idea here is a good one but by including the negative. “There is no treasure here” you are, in most cases, just padding out the text. Just don’t say anything and use the space you’ve saved, in toto, to put in another room, more interactivity, opr something more interesting. 

Slapping the monsters in to the “trap” section is interesting, and no really something I’m super happy to see. It’s a new convention, and I’m not gonna slap it for trying something new, but it is atypical. More worrisome is not telling us how many there are. The designer presumably knows their creation better than we do and should be giving us guidance on how to balance it/what they intended. 1 unwashed? 200 unwashed? 3? 6? What do they intend in their design? Otherwise it’s some bullshit “keep throwing them at the party until they feel challenged!” kind of nonsense.  In general, though, the room layout format is decent and specific enough to add color and bring it to life in the DM’s head while still keeping it terse enough to scan quickly. A good job. Interactivity, though, is relatively poor. It’s mostly looking at shit and getting attacked, the usual. The curse of the short five room adventure: there’s just no room to DO things. 

So, interesting ideas here. Interesting format used. Relatively decent evocative writing. But it’s too short. There’s no room here for an adventure to expand its lungs and breathe. Less devotion to the “I’m a clever boy!” aesthetic and more to usability, expanded to a length that makes sense, would really put this in another category for me. As is, now, if I were looking for a little roadside chapel, or something abandoned in the woods/cliffs/etc I might throw this in. It’s certainly atmospheric, but the size means its hollow inside, of actual play adventure. A little longer, a little more usable and less “look at me!” and/or more interactivity and this would easily be a No Regerts. Easily, if not higher.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/319300/The-Beatified–Damned?src=newest&filters=45582_2110_0_0_0?1892600

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

Goblin House

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By WR Betty
Rosethorn Publishing
S&W
Levels 3-5

[…] Every spring, two or three children go missing from the village, every summer a few animals disappear, every fall the harvest is plundered. The locals have begrudgingly accepted the fact that Hope Cross is cursed and wait in terror every spring for what they call “The Culling” to begin another year of horror. It is only through the short winter days and long winter nights that the people find any peace as they pray for the house to disappear as suddenly as it appeared.

This sixteen page adventure describes a two-ish level dungeon with 28 rooms in a classic folklore house of evil fey. Maezels in this case. They fatten them babies up and then eat them. There are some annoying discrepancies/things left out of the text and the writing could be more evocative, but organization is generally quite good. It has all the elements you need for a good adventure, but feels like it could use just a little more work to bring it up to Really Good levels.

The setting here is very folklore/fey, which I am fond of. You’ve got the bezels taking the role of the classic “goblin” type creature from folklore with real goblins serving as their slaves. They kidnap babies to raise and then eat, steal things from villages, experiment with stuff, much more Fairy Goblin Market type of fey than bestial stabby stabby humanoid in a cave type fey.

It’s got most of the support information correct. Good, in voice rumors. Wanderers are doing something and have some simple motivations. There’s non-standard magic items and treasure, and the magic that IS standard goes just one step more. So, a blue viscous potion of healing, for example. There’s a monster summary sheet. There’s a simple order of battle for the monsters to follow when responding to a party incursion. There’s a small table of Meazel & Kidnapped Child personalities. So, all of the minor stuff is pretty much taken care of.

The organization of the encounters is fairly good. General information up front. Bolding. White space. Things are laid out in the encounters in such a way that you can scan it quickly. There are also details thrown in, like a groove worn in the floor from a creature pacing for centuries. Specificity can create an evocative environment WITHOUT indulging in an overly verbose text. That’s good.

But it also has some REALLY dumb mistakes, mostly around what looks to be a Dyson map and how that matches up to the text. There are two room 27’s in the text, for example, and no room 28, as there is on the map. That’s pretty minor. But in other places there are trapdoors and grates and exterior doors … and it’s REALLY unclear where any of it goes! It’s not noted on the map and text doesn’t tell us the room number. It’s these pretty basic mistakes in, I don’t know, proofreading an adventure? That makes me say things like you should always have an editor. I think most editors are crap, but ta least you’ll have a second set of eyes on the adventure to prevent these kind of mistakes of oversight and mistakes of being too familiar with your own work. 

It also fails, in places, to mention important room details high up in the text, throwing them later on. Again, I think this is oversight and sloppy editing by the designer (who is also the editor.)  And, similar to this, it doesn’t do a really consistent job in providing an evocative environment. In one place there’s a cloth draped over a mirror, for example. This would have been an excellent opportunity for a great adjective or adverb to describe that cloth, one more word, or replace cloth with “burlap” or something. It’s something the adventure does in other places, but not in this example. Likewise, demonic visaged statues and so on. It just fails to CONSISTENTLY deliver that organization and evocative writing that I demand. 

And you know what? It’s still not shit. I’t still better than 90% of the crap I review. It’s got a decent, if classic, idea. It follows through with the theming. It gets the support information correct. It just needed to be more consistent in its organization and evocative writing, and have someone proof it for bonehead logic errors. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages and show syou the wanderers, the rumors, the first 23 rooms … that’s a good preview! I wish every product did it like that!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/318693/Goblin-House?1892600

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

The Descendant Revenge: Burning of Novikov

Posted on July 11, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ignatious M
PPM S&W
"Mid Levels"

The village of Novikov is cut off by winter storms. No one can enter or leave. Then a hideous monster attacks and it is down to the heroes of your game to save the village.

**withering sigh**

So, I was at this local used bookstore last weekend to find a copy of Finnigan’s Wake, cause I’m a fucking idiot, and they had these mystery grabbags of books. $5! So I buy one and come home and excitedly unwrap my present to myself. It’s full of Harlequin romance novels. Fifteen of them. (A brief perusal indicates women like Ranch Dudes, Horses, and Bad Boys. So, now you know.) Anyway, so inspired, I’m going to get a new bookshelf for the Volcano Lair I’m going to go BACK to that bookstore and buy ALL of the grab bags, banking on the fact that they are almost certainly all Harlequins. I’m going to STUFF that new bookshelf full of the romance novels. Absolutely pack it. Then, I’m going to buy one copy of every James Joyce novel and randomly disperse them on the bookshelf. The working title for this object d’arte is “Yeesss!”, taken, of course, from the end of Ulysses and having nothing at all to do with the breathless sighs of women in the romance novels. Which reminds me, I should try and read one. 

What? The review? You want a review? I quite assure you that my BS new bookshelf project is MUCH more interesting than this adventure. What? Fine. Whatever. Here’s the review.

This fifteen page adventure sucks.

What?

Ok, ok, ok. It’s an outline, notes, even, with formatting so bad that it CAN’T be intentional. There’s no adventure to be had here.

What this is is one of those “50 adventure ideas on one page” sort of things, slightly expanded, and then padded out to fifteen pages. It’s nothing more than outline, notes, of a general setup. There’s a chick in the inn who hates the dude that owns the town. She has two flesh golems in a mine that sometimes attack miners. In about a month she’s going to unleash her hoard of fifty fletch golems on the town to destroy it. The party are cops. There’s a miner who’s a boxer. You now have your adventure. If you just take what I typed and expand that to fifteen pages (Well, I don’t know, maybe six pages once all of the copyright, title, cover, etc pages are removed) then you’ll have your adventure. But, don’t actually include anything remotely specific.

This is labeled as a great way to start a new campaign. As town guards, finding lost kids, breaking up a bar fight, etc. At “mid levels”. WIth two 8HD flesh golems. And an army of 50 more flesh golems. I seriously have no idea how this all fits together.

The specificity, or slack thereof, is depressing. There are no details at all, on anything. Just “you’re town guards doing town guard stuff.” or “Let the party wander around for awhile.” At first, while looking this over, I though I was reading a summary of the adventure and I was like “Cool! An overview to help orient myself!” No. THen I figured out that this WAS the adventure. It is abstracted to a level I’ve not seen before. There are maps, small Dyson ones, of a, I don’t know, four room mine? But not keyed and no keyring. That 50 flesh golem army? Mentioned, like, once, and no more. There are no rooms. There are no real encounters other than “you meet two flesh golems in the mines if you follow up on the screaming miners.” 

“This adventure is based on the principles of Old School gaming. It does not detail every skill test and challenges down to the specific skill and difficulty level. It is left to the Dungeon Master to set suitable challenges for their players and their characters.” That’s what the adventure tells us up front. But, there are NO skills. No difficulties. No details. No encounters. Not even a coherent message to decipher. This is BAD

And, the formatting if off. It’s like paragraph breaks were forgotten in places. You keep questioning yourself, “Wow, this is a long rumor and oddly specific … OH! There’s a missing line return in there somewhere!” And this happens over and over again.

This is not a coherent adventure. If it were, it would just be some ideas that a boring friend of yours in a bar pitched to you one night for two minutes. There’s nothing here.  Also … I don’t know that there is any burning? At all?

This is $3 at DriveThru. It manages a better preview than most, at six pages and showing some random pages. Pages two and three are the core of the adventure and display all of the issues. Feel free to check them out. That’s your adventure, mostly.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/304455/The-Descendant-Revenge-Burning-of-Novikov?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 13 Comments

Lorn Song of the Bachelor D&D adventure review

Posted on July 8, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Zedeck Siew
Hydra Cooperative
OSR
Level 4?

Weeds trail the water. The sandbar just off the shore shifts. A reptile rumble, a splash. Now a gaping maw. A roar. Claws splintering wood. The boat capsizes. You are in the river, now. He is the Bachelor: a pale crocodile, as long as five men lying end to end. He swallows hunters, families, trading skiffs. Prospectors fear to go out. Witches mutter. They say he causes landslips. They say he is a god, a curse — an old, old sin, staining the river. They say he has been killed, before. He is pulling you under.

This 48 page digest adventure details a small asian-ish river/jungle region.There are about eight wilderness locations and about eight locations in a mythical ancient-civ cave -like place. Flavorful as all fuck, it is organized well and directs its words toward player interactivity, describing situations for them to interact with. IE: a good adventure.

There’s a vaguely SE asian region, a village next to a river in the jungle. Nothing is specifically asian, that I can recall, although just about everything is evocative of SE Asia. The village has locals in it. There are trees in the jungle that can have their essence harvested to great profit. There’s a company, in the business sense, of foreigners there to trade with, who vaguely exploit the locals (paying 1sp and selling the essence for 5gp.) They may be involved in some shenanigans. The locals just want to get by. Well, except for the faction that hates the company and another, a cult, that worships a god-like crocodile in the river (with some faction overlap between those last two.) Also, there are the ruins of an old pre-human civilization, simian. And the wildlife, some helpful and some deadly. And another faction consisting of intelligent dead people that have been eaten by the god-like croc and are not controlled by parasite catfish. Now, let’s add the party to this collection of open drums of gas! 

This adventure shows how you do it.A region. Factions. People who want things. Things the party might want, including perhaps “doing good.” And all wrapped in a package that is well organized with terse evocative descriptions. 

Organized well. Good use of page breaks, sections breaks, keeping topics to one per page, or making the topics easy to find on the page. Cross-references abound, so if someone or something is referenced in the text there’s a pointer for the DM to go find it if they need to. Descriptions are short and punchy making them easy to scan. 

The writing is evocative. The local wise woman is described as “Wrinkled, fireflies around her, sudden trances.” Or the local boss, with silver body paint, left arm missing and suspicious. These are solid NPC summary descriptions from their summary page. Encounters are things like “Half a boat, stuck on a shoal, perfume spices the wind.” Or another riverside encounter with gore-stained stones and drag-marks slipping in to the water. Or a cave floor, wriggling, a luxury rug of roaches and guano. Deafening chips and chatter, with glass-bead glitter of eyes far above you.Or reflected sunlight on steps rising out the water, leading in to a cave mouth, simian statues overhanging, so worn you think they are stalactites, with the murmur of the waves and a breeze like breathe. Solid, solid descriptions. Again, this follows the less is more philosophy, zapping your brain with imagery and leveraging the DM to fill it in for the party. I won’t say this is the best way to describes locations, but I do think it’s the easiest way to describe things for most designers before they, perhaps, move on to longer descriptions … which may not be better. It also helps control the verbosity that plagues so many adventures.

Interactivity is HIGH. All of those factions, all of that stuff going on. In addition to all of this there is a great little section on randomly generated NPC, which gives them all some sort of interactivity, some way for the party to interact with them, or, perhaps, better said, the party WANTS to interact with them. Other encounters are more in the moment. A group from the company is trying to evict a local widow woman. A group of prospectors in a cabin are haunted/hunted by a local with gleaming amber eyes. He took Ludo yesterday! And tonight Ludo will return … changed.This is shit you can work with as a DM. It begs the party to interact and to get involved. Potential energy abounds!

Magic is new and unique, some flora/fauna based, some old empire based and some just different. Effects described rather than mechanics overly detailed. Monsters seems fresh. Cave crocs crawl on the walls and ceilings. Just enough to invoke some realism … and then just weird enough to make the party scream “What the fuck?!” when shit goes down.

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see the titular monster, some good in voice rumors full of local colour, the locale summary and NPC overviews, and some of the random NPC generator, including the interactivity. It’s a pretty decent summary, but would be better with perhaps a wilderness encounter and/or cave encounter also, to give an idea of what those are like.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/295976/Lorn-Song-of-the-Bachelor?1892600

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