The Laboratory of Melifex the Mad, DCC adventure review

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Stuart C Killian
FSH Professional Ltd.
DCC
Level 2

The city of Pinecliffe has tolerated the presence of Melifex the Mage for years, but his corruption and increasingly unusual experiments eventually had him driven out of town and to a secluded tower on the ridge overlooking the city. Now, no one has heard from Melifex “the Mad” for two months, and the city is becoming worried. Did Melifex die from his corruption or has he unleashed a sinister force that could destroy the land! Answers, adventure, and priceless magical treasure await the party brave enough to find out.

This thirty seven page adventure uses twelve pages to describe an eight room dungeon. It makes me loathe my life. 

This is my usual “oh my god why do I do this. Hey, I’ve got a Pateron, why not drop me some cash so my life can be a little less meaningless and I can buy some whiskey and cigars.” section.  https://www.patreon.com/tenfootpole

“Hey, Bryce, you should review more DCC adventures!” they said cheerfully. “That 5e stuff is garbage” they said. “I can sometimes salvage stuff from DCC adventures” they said. Yeah. You people know who you are. I’m looking at you. Glaring, actually. 

“You know, they’re right!” I said to myself. I was just talking to someone about how I’m a sucker for marketing, reveling in it. Swallowing wholesale the constructed reality I quickly assemble in order to justify the asserted reality that the marketing vomits up. I mean, I basically sopped reviewing DCC because they *tend* to be linear. Look, I know this is the way people play D&D. I’m ok with people playing D&D like that. They’ve been playing stuff like this, in home games, forever. Very loose plot, a little lair dungeon. Since the 80’s at least. *I* think it can be a substandard experience to a more free form game, but, I’m not gonna shit on someone elses fun. I mean, drinking pretzels and eating beer with a little escapism is the ultimate point of it all, right? I do, however, find the more free form stuff more satisfying, and encourage people to go down that path when they are ready and want to. But, I digress. I stopped reviewing DCC because the adventures were linear. “Hypocrite!” my own inner judge says. “5e adventures tend to be linear as all fuck and you review them all the fucking time!” Hmmm, inner judge is correct. A little brutal in its assessments sometimes, but ultimately correct. And, these other folks want me to review more DCC. I DO like DCC. I think it’s the perfect system for that linear beer & pretzels D&D experience that 99% of the people on the planet want. It encourages the stupid shit happening at the table that makes for an enjoyable time and the inevoatable boring-to-everyone-else “let me tell you what happened last night at D&D!” stories. So. More DCC reviews.

Yeah, yeah, I’m getting to the review. 

And, you know, I AM a sucker for small press and indie works. It’s the romantic idealist in me. A small designer, slaving away, creating an uncompromising product that adheres to their own vision. None of this corporate garbage. None of this publishing guidelines. None of this THE MAN telling you what to do and the money men ruining Don Quixote! Hmmm, I may be projecting there. 

Oh course, none of this is true. Well, ok, it COULD be true and there are examples of it being true. In reality its just someone sitting around pounding out something. Hopefully because they are excited about it and not because of money. I WANT them to be excited and to share their vision with us. I want to be excited with them.

Instead I get The Laboratory of Melifex the Mad.

So, I’m trying to cut 80/20 aluminum for my truck camper build. And I’m programming my Baofeng, amused at the antics of the virtual Hardees coffee club on the airwaves. Maybe I should do forty spanish lessons today instead of twenty? That would let me put off writing about Melifex some more. Downtown, the Air War over Hanoi is a nightmare. I could read those rules. And there’s always Federation and Empire. Maybe a computer game? Hitman 3? Dark Souls? Nuclear Throne or Crossroads inn? Crusader Kings? WW2 squad tactics running on WIn95? Staring out the window drooling mindlessly for hours on end? ANYTHING to keep from writing this “review.” 

That’s what this did to me. ALl I want to do is ANYTHING other than write this review. It’s just another crap product. It doesn’t matter if it’s DCC, or 5e, or OSR. It’s just another crap product. And I get to find something to say about it. I could rant at it. Let The Feels out all stream of consciousness style. But it has sapped all of my energy. My will to live. And yet, I must. I must, I must. I must increase my bust. And, I can’t do what what I really want. I really just want to say “it sucks.” A two word review and leave it at that and move the fuck on with my life. But oh no, mr inner judge is back. “You need to write more asshole. Writing more is training. Also, you feel obligated to [I fucking HATE feeling obligated] This is only review this product is likely to get. The designer deserves some feedback. What the fuck, you have something actually MEANINGUL to do? You know that’s not true, Mr Camus.” And do, instead, I go to the store and make Rio Grande Egg Puffs so I don’t have to say the same shit I always say. [Whipping meringue and deep frying at 7am in the morning for breakfast is not something I can get into.  The onion & adobo sauce is great but, again, not something to be cooking this early. Tomorrow I’ll be making home made cottage cheese on the stove for breakfast, because I never learn.]

The read aloud is in italics. There are COLUMNS of it. Routinely, column of read aloud. Now I get to explain why both of those are bad. For, like, the three thousandth time. But it doesn’t matter. THIS designer hasn’t read those three thousand explanations. This is the first time they are reading about it. AAnd, no, I won’t take a shortcut and link to  an article explaining why. That is pragmatism and pragmatism seldom leads to anything interesting. Ug, there’s mr inner judge again, noting that this Life Less Ordinary shit is what leads to this and mr I don’t define myself with labels, aren’t you just doing that with your turn left when everyone else turns right identity? Self reinforcing bullshit.

So, italics are bad because they are hard to read. Long sections of italics I mean. And read-aloud should be kept to a couple of sentences, if you choose to use it. Players generally don’t pay attention after that. There have been a couple of studies on both topics, so it’s not me spouting off. 

The adventure is clearly meant to go a certain way. You have the plot imagioned in your head and, the final fight/encounter with the dragon, reinforces that. You have these cool moments in your head, both with the setup and with the conclusion of the adventure. That is wrong. This indicates an over-investment in the adventure on your part. You’re trying to force outcomes. Instead of this just write it in such a way that an adventure can flow from it, rather than trying to force an outcome to the adventure that you think will be cool, or result in a cool moment, etc. The DM text is too long also. It shouldn’t take a column to explain a room. You don’t need to tell us that the +1 Gallant Longsword is described later on in the adventure in the appendix. You don’t need to tell us that the +1 shield is undamaged. That’s like saying that the air in your house right now is breathable. Yes, of course, we assume that. This pads out your word count and a padded DM text makes it harder for the DM to find the information that IS important to running the room. 

That’s enough. That’s all I can muster. The usual stuff. My will to live is gone. I’m off to take twenty spanish lessons and a couple of HAM practice tests. I will now be flooded with messages from HAMs telling me that my Baofeng sucks and I should …. You should prepare yourselves, though, as I will then thoroughly, and quite undeservedly, destroy you with Socratic methods around Use Cases. If I’m bored and drunk. Or, I will politely ask for more information and engage you in conversation. Am I just humoring you to be polite, or am I actually interested? Can both be true at the same time? Everyone is self-centered. It is the acknowledgement of that basic fact and the attempt to move beyond it that defines not being self-centered, not actually not being self-centered. At least, that’s the lies I’m framing for myself to live with my hypocrisy today.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. There are no encounters shown, so It’s a bad preview. You do get to see some of the italics read-aloud, and DM text, so, just pretend that all of the pages for the preview are the text for one of the rooms. That’s hyperbolic, but it will still leave you will the feelings of …despair? Ennui? Resignment? That I got from the room encounters.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/311957/Killians-Krawls-The-Laboratory-of-Melifex-the-Mad-An-adventure-for-Level-2-characters?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 21 Comments

The Inverted Pyramid, D&D adventure review

Posted on February 15, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Gustavo Tertoleone
Black Dog
OSR
Level ?

The Inverted Pyramid, a dungeon located in Thebes, Egypt. The place was built as a gigantic tomb to hide secrets and technologies from the Ancient race who had enslaved humanity millenia ago.

This 35 page adventure uses nineteen pages to detail a four level twenty room egyptian themed dungeon … with grey alien/ancient astronaut themes. It’s definitely not dry, with decent, if predictable, interactivity. Language use and organization though suffer. 

This could be thought of as just another egyptian temple themed adventure. But, then, there’s the grey aliens aspect to it. That makes things … strange. Interactivity in this one tends to the better side of the spectrum and that is, in part, thanks to the presence of the alien theming. There are alien devices and pools and statues to mess with, things to open up and puzzles to solve. Oh so many puzzles to solve.

That is a good thing and a bad thing. These sorts of tomb adventure, especially egyptian ones, seem to be trap and puzzle heavy and this one is no exception. Most traps are hallway ones, which I have an aversion to. I think they slow down the game. But, whatever, you’re free to your own (wrong) opinion. But, when too many puzzles and traps are in an adventure then I think the adventure suffers. “Oh, it’s one of THOSE adventures …” IN particular, there are riddle puzzles in this thing. Riddle puzzles that I would say are out of place and break the tone of the adventure. It makes it seem more like a published adventure than an adventure locale to explore. The very first room is a  door with a picture of Ra and Amon on it. Where their staves meet there is an indentation. There is a riddle present. “Feed me and I live. water me and I die. what am I”. You put some fire in the alcove, 5th element style, and the doors open. It’s not bad. But, also, it IS bad. The riddle explicit aspect, here and in other places, is more in place in a fun house dungeon rather than … whatever this is. It’s the explicitness of it. The funhouse nature and the mismatch in tones.

But in other places things fit in well, well, as well as a spaceship egyptian themed adventure can. Pools to play with. A monster, a kind of mashup of body parts from different creatures (what’s that called again?) is in a room. It has a monstrous number of hit points. The wall of the room are covered with tiny little bits of papyrus, with writing on them. Hitting the monster causes some of the runes to flash or glow. It’s a puzzle that just LOOKS like a fight!

There was a little intro that was nice also, describing (if it can be called that) the area above the dungeon. It’s devoid of physical description, but it does have some notes about potentially putting in bandits or grave robbers or something. Which got me thinking. What about grave robbers. Kind of friendly. Kind of rivals. More opportunistic than anything else. That could have been a fun little thing to have. 

Other areas have a room with mummies hung upside down, hung in chains. Freeing them causes them to return to life … rejuvenate, and potentially be longer term campaign enemies. Nice! Likewise a room full of mummies. Just normal ummies. But you FEEL like they are all watching you as you move about. Paranoia! I love it!

But …

The writing can be, let us say, overwrought. 

“The forgotten chambers resting below the desert were kept in the dark for millennia, glancing the light only when groups of brave thieves dared to enter this place in search for treasures.” Is this Poe, or a Hammer production of Poe? Likewise “so macabre that any heart will start racing as soon as the characters’ eyes meet the gaze of the monster.” Uh huh. Padding. Commentary. Writing for the DM as reader rather than the DM as DM.

In other places the writing can be downright confusing, like “[the dungeon is] accessed by moving the three main stone pillars in the center of the ruins closer to each other, uniting them as one single pillar.” You move a pillar? That’s all there is, no map, no better description. I’m not really sure what I should be putting in there. In other places there’s a kind of shorthand used that does the DM no favors “This room has the exactly same details as the room 9 and its entrance can be found in the exact same way, “ 

These issues hint at the issue of organization of the text which, as is usual, is present. It looks like this is a English as a Second Language design, but, I don’t really think that’s the cause of the confusion. The designer is imagining the fuck out of things, they just don’t know how to get it down on paper correctly and are, in places, a little too hackney for the adventures own good.

Also, you can get five spaceships, that fully recharge in sunlight and shoot 3 times a round for 2d10 damage and move at 300 miles per hour and … you get the idea. 

This is $5 at DriveThru.The preview is four pages, all actual dungeon rooms. That’s great! Good preview!  That first page of it is a good example of the rather lengthy DM text that is all over the adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/345118/Three-Temples-for-the-Ancient-Ones–Adventure-1?1892600

The same designer has a zine: “Vomitations of the Grotesque Princess is an infamous zine from Brazil” says the author. It is 11 pages, costs $5, and its lead article is “A Brief Text on Existentialism.” I admire this persons moxie!

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | Leave a comment

Barrow of Sorn, D&D adventure review

Posted on February 13, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Mason Waaler
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-2

The final resting place of Sorn is a crumbling ruin; a barrow mound of piled stone and dirt. A forgotten tomb from a previous age. Locals are wary of it, their dreams haunted by a stone coffin and a skeletal king.

This twelve page adventure features a twenty room “tomb” dungeon. It’s got some decent writing in it which takes more of the more tried & true tropes and uses them in a decent way.It fumbles about from time to time but is, generally, a decent tomb dungeon. I generally start with the positive, but I’d like to start with the negatives on this one, understanding, that, I’m going to give this one a light recommendation. 

The read-aloud is in italics. I LOATHE long sections of italics. It’s hard to read. Also, I’m not sure it’s read-aloud. It’s formatted kind of like it’s read-aloud, but it might just be a DM overview of the room. I say this because many rooms start with “Dry, Cold, dusty” or “Empty & Cold” or some other really brief hit of an idea. This makes sense for DM information and is a little weird for read-aloud. So, I’m gonna call this “Read-aloud”, for convenience purposes, but I’m pretty sure it’s just an overview of the scene aimed at the DM.

So, anyway, italics. It also seems to be trying too hard in places. “Chiseled ruins mar the floor …” Ok, so, yeah, mar is a word and it is better than nothing. “Three pillars guiard the western wall and three guard the eastern.” Yeah, I get it. I get what the designer is trying to do, and I’m happy they are trying. I do, however, take exception with the specific word choices. It doesn’t look effortless. It instead looks contrived. “Loom over the western wall” or “tower” or something else would have probably been a better choice. This is a common problem in this adventure. Yeah, I’m a fucking asshole. But, it is absolutely coming across as contrived rather than evocativly imagined.  On the right track though, absolutely. DM text can also get a bit long in places and has bouts of “[the skeletons] are implacable, unfeeling, and dedi? cated in a way only the dead can be.” Which, to be fair, is true and cool, but I’m not sure adds a lot. An off hand comment here and there is fine though.

On the plus side, it gets most things right. For example, wanderers are doing something. A spider is dragging a corpse along in a web. A red wraith weeps smoke. Similarly, the monsters themselves get great little descriptions. A wraith made of crimson smoke and a shadowed cowl. Gleaming green-black glaives. Howling, whirling and quick. Or skeletons with red script spiraling across their brows. Spiraling, isn’t that a great word?And crimson? In contrast to the “Read aloud” the monster descriptions are great and don’t seem forced at all. And, the magic items are sufficiently different to be interesting!

Other details are great as well. Those dreams of a skeletal lord in a casket? The local “wearily remark …” when questioned. It’s fucking great! You IMMEDIATELY get the sense that they have lived through this shit forever and are both tired of it and tired of explaining it to n00bs. The crypt proper? It belongs to the King of Ghosts, from when the Last Lich ruled the world. Nifty mythology! Barely glowing runes CRACK when you kill something like skeletal guards, providing a nice cause/effect thing for the party to observe. Wraiths flows from ruins. A mosaic on a wall has an eye made of an emerald … with a button behind it. It’s this kind of stuff that really marks some high points of the adventure. Parts of it make sense and FEEL imagined rather than constructed. And that’s a sign of good design. Likewise the sulky ghost who refuses to talk to you if you break in to the room where his body is stored … that you should do in order to free his soul. (For certain definitions of “should.”) 

There’s a little too much “emerging from hidden alcoves” in parts of the adventure. There’s also some conclusions thrown about instead of descriptions, like a mural depicting a wight beheading a kneeling man. This should be a description, not a conclusion. 

A decent adventure. It’s not going to win any awards, I don’t think, but it does bring a certain competence to the table. There are things to improve upon, but there usually are. 

This s $1 at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing, so, Nice Preview! You get to know exactly the sort of content you are buying! Check out the new magic items on the last page, like The Wraithstone. Or, check out page six of the preview, the first page of keyed entries, for a sample of the room. Nice job!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/344994/Barrow-of-Sorn?1892600

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

The Palace of Unquiet Repose, D&D adventure review

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Prince of Nothing
The Merciless Merchants
Labyrinth Lord, OSR, etc
Levels 3-5

Uyu-Yadmogh. Prince of Princes. Archmage. Devourer of Children. Under the earth he built himself a palace in which he could abide eternity. Now he is only half-remembered legend. The ground trembles, the earth is split asunder. In the sunken depths of the earth, the Palace awaits. An adventure for those who dare.

This 50 page adventure details a funerary complex dungeon, and the ruined city and environs around it. It is rare to encounter something that FEELS like it should. This FEELS like the funerary complex of a mighty evil magical empire. It oozes a kind of baroque evil. And it’s not just stuffed full of undead. They are there, but it doesn’t FEEL like this is an adventure full of undead. It feels … mythic? Nice job.

Tomb of Horrors delivered a trap filled vaguely vanilla dungeon with a demi-lich at the end to stab. The mausoleum in Rappan Athuk wanted to deliver a mournful kind of place that served as the threshold for parties to enter the Dungeon of Graves. Various other dungeons have tried, and generally failed, to evoke a kind of quiet horror that comes from graveyards. Many adventures speak of long-dead empires of evil magic users and attempt to transport you there, in spirit, through the dungeon that is related to them. This, though, does a great job of conveying the vibe that those adventures are trying for. This is this sense, in almost every encounter, that this place IS the legacy of a long dead empire of evil magic. The sense of dread is never very fall way. A sense of the cyclopean. Of ennui. Of forgotten things. It’s all in there.

A statuary garden on the shores of a mist-covered lake of mercury, great figures with great urns, as if they are pouring things out of them, in a semi-circle. Anointing yourself with dist from the urns makes things happens … Baroque armor, inhabited by te souls of long-dead generals. “Two chimeras of god, scorpion and lion carved from gleaming black stone flank the stair entrance of this oppressive shrine. Five statues bearing great urns upon their shoulders surround a circular podium. A hundred carved faces stare dolorously from walls of ash-grey stone.” Holy fuck, what the fuck did your party just sign themselves up for!

[Special note: the art in this compliments the text very well, helping to convey the atmosphere and tone of the locations. Perfect!]

Back in town, before the adventure, youtube a host of NPC’s you can hire, each with memorable quirks. Some of the hooks are decent, like a sage who “offers his weight in gold and three of his daughters to anyone who can bring him the grimoire of Uyu-Yadmogh.” I’m generally not a fan of “someone hired you” but I am a fan of weights of gold and three of his daughters, as well as bounty hunters, mercenaries pursuing jobs. 

“The dusk stalkers prowl the wastes, leaving behind no trace, shrieking for blood and souls.” one of the monster descriptions tells us. From that the mind races. You can imagine an encounter. The creatures howling in the distance, building tension in the party. Keeping them on edge. And that’s what so much of this adventure does. It builds tension through it’s art, use of writing, and interactive encounters. A room has a basin on the opposite wall. The basin is obviously full of gold coins. The walls of the room are decorated with carvings f faces, all of their mouths open. Oh come on, EVERYONE knows that will happen! And that’s what makes this a great encounter. It’s a classic, lure, trap, mouths pouring forth something. 

Factions run through the ruins around the ancient tomb. They are in conflict with each other. They might be in conflict with the party. Some of the factions have internal rifts within them that can be exploited. That’s the way you do a faction. Give them a goal, give them relationships with those both internal and external to the faction, and then let the party stumble and bumble their way through things. 

I can’t say enough about the writing, the sense of baroque dread. You come upon a camp. There are bodies laying down in a circle, as if asleep. Their throats slit, no sign of violence otherwise. Forboding. 

And the sense … the head of the dead god of dreams mumbles almost incoherent prophecy. The demi-god of strength is chained to a throne with an adamantine chain, roaming in search of killing you. He, and a mist that animates the dead, roam about, always serving as an adversary to be avoided by the party. Something to use cunning to avoid, overcome, or use to your advantage.

Captain Sarakur, leader of a faction of warriors without peer “… cares nothing for his men and doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice them if it means survival or reaching the palace.” Sweet! Khabareth Who Comes Before “attempts to seduce one of the PCs with the aim of feeding him to The Wolf of Final Night.” How the fuck can you not love that? The specificity! The detail! And yet it’s done without droning on and on and on. The imagination runs wild with these half fainted things!

At one point there’s this bit of treasure “a tarnished silver circlet shaped like a snake devouring its own tail with an empty eye socket.” Wanna wear it? Normally I’d jump at the chance to do so, but after being in this place a little … you’re scared to! Not because magic items are death to touch, the mistake so many adventures make, but because of the atmosphere of dread and foreboding that relentlessly works upon you!

Formatting it great. Cross references, bolded keywords followed up with indents and bullets to explain more of those topics. It gets a little long in places, but this is because the rooms are stuffed full of things. It never feels like too much to run, although it feels like its close … which is probably a good thing.

Great formatting. Great writing. Great encounters. Great world building. Great adventure. Easily on the The Best.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you one of the cave complex entrances to the valley/cave that the Palace resides in. As such it’s a good introduction to the writing style, formatting, and interactivity of the adventure. Good preview, although, I might put the level range in the product description addition to on the cover.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/341381/The-Palace-of-Unquiet-Repose-LL-Version?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 5, Reviews, The Best | 20 Comments

Dread on Demon Crown Hill, DCC adventure review

Posted on February 8, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Michael Curtis
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 2

Long ago, Frygorix of the Thousand Lies, a foul demon, ruled with fear from atop a lonely tor, spreading death and plague across the land. Two brave siblings, one bearing an enchanted shield of great power, challenged the demon, vowing to slay it and free the land. In their climactic battle, black towers of six-sided stone arose from the hilltop, an eerie outcropping called the Demon Crown by some. Stories hold that the shield lies untouched within the Demon Crown, but who knows what else might dwell within those weird, dark pillars of unearthly rock?

This twenty page digest adventure details a dungeon with about thirteen rooms in it. Workmanlike, it feels constructed rather than imagined. 

You hear about a magic shield in a cliffside area similar to the Devils Postpile/Giants Causeway, etc. IE: a bunch of hexagon stone “tubes” all mashed together. You wander about inside of them until you fight a demon and some rock monsters. 

Goodman does a good job with their DriveThru descriptions, noting page count, levels, and so on. Further, they don’t fuck around in the adventure with a long boring backstory and a lot of meaningless drivel about making it your own game, how to roll dice, etc. It is, essentially, unpadded. Just like that short and sweet into to G1, there IS a little backstory, but it’s not excessive and it doesn’t get in the way of running the adventure.

Curtis understands the genre and his events and scenes fit in well stylistically. At one point you (could be) meeting with a trog queen sitting on a throne of skulls. The skulls speak in unison and translate her speech to common. There are multiple classic elements there, from the throne of skulls to them speaking in unison to the translation. In other places a sword can be imbued with the spirit of a long dead warrior. Things are embedded in walls (which seems to be a favorite of Curtis …) and sometimes pull themselves free. The elements are there.

But, I also find Curtis to be one of the more inconsistent DCC writers. While he understands the material, whatever it is, is doesn’t always get translated on to the page well. Some adventures, like the Chained Coffin, really translate the style well from Curtis, to the page, and back to the DM. Others don’t. Still others feel more constructed than imagined. And that’s the case with this one.

It feels more like a series a rooms each with something in them. It doesn’t feel like a whole but rather separate parts. The setting location should be fantastic, but it comes off as a little dry and boring, not interesting to explore. (Which could be writing or the design, this is the old “the dwarves are stoic builders” trap; they then come off as boring Brutalist. Looking good from the outside, but that’s all they got.)

Woven bags, not of human skin but just woven. Rock monsters pulling themselves out of the rock walls … who just do slam attacks. That’s boring. (As opposed to the fire harpies in another area that breathe fire gouts. That’s cool!) There’s just not a lot going on, and that leads to a kind of matter of fact nature of the rooms and their contents. Not exactly bad, but not really something to recommend it either. Also ran, as it were.

Dovetailing in to this are the Mighty Deeds. You need an interesting room to do these well. Something to work with. The brutalist architecture just doesn’t really you with anything much to work with. It’s an empty room. Try and do something.

One of the weaker, but not the weakest, of the Curtis adventures. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages. You DO get a chance to see some of the adventure. Note the boring rock people art, and the last page of the preview, with its read-aloud and descriptive text. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310999/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-925-Dread-on-Demon-Crown-Hill?src=newest&filters=44544_2110_0_0_0?1892600

Bonus blog feature: Tower of the Hanged Men. This is a one pager that uses the art on the map to good effect. It’s a hard adventure to puzzle out, but, it DOES use the map art to help augment the adventure text to bring more than the sum of its parts to the adventure. Looks like maybe there’s some English as a Second Language issues. Remember one page designers … you also get the back of that page, if it’s printed two-sided!

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

Shadow of the Beakmen, DCC adventure review

Posted on February 6, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 1

Towering obelisks stab the sky. Monstrous knights with blazing lances prowl the night. Huts burn, and entire villages are taken as slaves to be fed darksome pits. The cries of terror and panic give the horrors a name: the Beakmen have come. But you are no mere peasant or serf, cowering the in the dark. You and your companions are reavers, with bloodied blades and spells wrenched from the dreams of demons. You stride through chaos while others flee, turning your steps towards the great stone obelisk, the source of the beakmen and their alien magics.  Whether for the cause of justice or merely to acquire these strange blazing weapons for you own, tonight there shall be an accounting: a blazing brand thrust into The Shadow of the Beakmen.

Well, Harley know how to write a fucking adventure!

This sixteen page adventure details about twelve encounters, mostly inside a beastman obelisk. Evocative & interactive, the adventure does a great job creating a feel in the DM that they can then translate to the players. 

Harley knows how to write an adventure, both from an interactivity and from an evocative standpoint. Let’s look at the opening encounter: “A hellish light fills the night, as one of the huts is set aflame. Moments later, a silhouette staggers free of the smoke and fog, stumbling towards you through the mud.” Ok, so, hellish is a conclusion, but, note the scene it paints. Smoke. Fog. Stumbling. Silhouette. Aflame, with the strong strong smell of smoke that work evokes. Mud. That’s how you write a fucking description folks. And, the action implied. The potential energy. There’s no “What do you do?” explicitly stated because it just hangs there, looming over you. AIII!!! WHAT TO DO?!!? WHAT TO DO??!!? A shadowy figure stumbling out of a flaming hut. That’s a fucking classic and this encounter brings it. There’s this hanging moment. What do you do? That’s the soul of adventure. It puts the party in a situation and then begs for them to do something without actually begging. A little on the nose, for an example, but that’s why it makes a good example. 🙂 Harley is able to do this time and time again. He sets the mood and imbues it with potential energy. 

Another encounter has the party seeing a short dude with a huge bulbous head. And 23 Beakmen. The numbers here are SO overwhelming. It’s not a fight, it’s a puzzle in the guise of a fight. Defeating the boss man leaves the minions helpless. More evidence? When you save that dude running out of the hut (assuming you do …) then he will become your Man at Arms. Fuck. Yeah! That’s a reward! That’s gratitude! That’s the sort of Actual Play character and game development that makes a campaign meaningful and personal to everyone involved. Doesn’t treat you like shit. Doesn’t ignore you. Rewards you with service. Gold is fleeting. Service? The players will remember that scene every time they interact with him. There’s this section, at the beginning, where you are moving through a village under attack by the Beakmen and their knights riding crocodiles (!) (Hmmm, Trog Knights on their lizard mounts from Darkness Beneath?) There’s a little table to help simulate the chaos of an ongoing attack through a village. It’s great! It’s exactly the sort of little idiosyncratic thing that a DM needs to help run this section … and so Harley provides it.  Monsters get little flash cards with their stats on the back … more of that DCC specialness from Goodman Games! The map of the dungeon isn’t exactly linear, with a couple of choices to be made; it’s just enough that you get to pick your poison when exploring, while still heading towards your final destination room.

And sometimes that specialness gets in the way. The formatting could be better in places. Longer sections of italics don’t work well; they should use some other formatting technique that is easier on the eyes. Likewise they use an incomplete formatting style for the rooms. Treasure and monsters get offset by bolded headings, but the sun-sections of the rooms do not, causing you have to hunt for information as you run it. They could do better in that area.

Still, though, an excellent little DCC adventure and it does a great job recreating a kind of atmosphere thanks to the interactivity and writing of Stroh. 

“The wide-mouthed, oval chamber is lit by a luminescent pool of glowing slime. Partially submerged in the ooze are dozens of large white sacs, seemingly spun from light. A low, dull hum can be heard, vibrating in your bones and the walls and floor.”

This is $6 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Boo! BooI say Sir! Boo!


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/307225/DCC-Day-1-Shadow-of-the-Beakman?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 5 Comments

The Den of Iron Pearl, D&D adventure review

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Andrzej Son of Jerzy
ASJ
5e
Levels 1-3

Iron Pearl is a legend to treasure seekers. She discovered many flooded

cities and extracted various treasures from them. Often working on the

order of the world’s most powerful people. She was equally known for her

love for the pearls as well as her toughness. She had an aversion to society,

few people that knew her used to say that she felt more comfortable being in

the water than attending feasts. One day she disappeared without a trace,

what enticed rumors to spread like wildfire. Sitting by the bonfire,

adventurers and bounty hunters of every race and age told stories about

wealth she kept. They speculated that Iron Pearl hid all of her treasures in

several secret vaults, but no one has ever found any of them. This is about

to change.

This eight page adventure uses four pages to describe six rooms in a linear dungeon. A weird mix of decent formatting, shitty decisions, and a lack of design understanding makes this a frustrating one to review. It’s opposite day!

Good things the adventure does: it puts its clues/important elements in to bullet points for easy reference during play. This is a combination of traditional DM text, read-aloud and then the bullets that expand upon the information. That’s great! It totally helps run the room!

It does, at times, encourage en interactive play style through hints in the read-aloud. For example, the read-aloud in one room mentions a banner. Examining the banner (noted in a bullet) reveals that it is fluttering slightly. This leads to the secret revelation. Perfect! That’s exactly what a room description and further elements should be doing. It leads the players in to deeper examination, the observant ones anyway, end encourages an interactivity play style between the DM and the players … which is the soul of D&D. 

Otherwise, it’s pretty shit.

We get read-aloud in italics which is hard to read. Long sections of text should NOT be in italics. Further, it uses single word italics in places to call attention to certain keywords, mostly in the bullet point items. That’s great! That can be a proper use of italics! But it also uses a fucking fancy ass font which hinders legability. Boo! Boo I say sir! The DM text needs to be pretty trivial to read and comprehend and this fancy font shit don’t help that. 

The read-aloud is also a mixture of styles that switches up. In one place it is in the correct tense. In another it says things like “you arrive” and “you don’t see Arno here”, incorrectly using terse to address the players and their characters instead of just describing a scene. (Yes, that’s wrong. No, there’s not room for opinion.) In other places it changes audience yet again and says things like “ … that the players can see”, addressing the DM in the read-loud? Weird as all fuck. Further, the read-aloud draws conclusions. “This table must be a work bench judging by the …” NO! No! Stop! Don’t fucking do that! Just describe the fucking scene and let the players draw their own conclusions. Describe the crushed shells on top and the tools hanging from it, or its scarred surface, and ket THEM make the conclusion that its a work table. Remember, interactivity!

The front door to the dungeon is a puzzle. You need to roll a DC10 to understand its a puzzle. That’s depressing. Why do this? What if they fail? No adventure tonight? They won’t fail 10? Then why put in a roll at all? The DM will fudge it? Why put in a roll at all? This is NOT how you use a skill check in D&D.

Oh, yeah, that table I mentioned earlier? It’s in an empty room. A room with a table in it. And an ambush from four bandits. How do they hide and ambush the party in a nearly empty room? Who the fuck knows. Just shut the fuck up and roll for initiative, its combat time now. 

*sigh*

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is three pages. The last page shows you the first room, so you get to see the formatting, read-aloud etc, and gives you a good impression of what you will be facing in the adventure, as a DM.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/343655/The-Den-of-Iron-Pearl?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 4 Comments

The Evils of Illmire, D&D adventure review

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Zack Wolf
Spellsword Studios
B/X
Levels 1-2

A whole classic campaign in your pocket! The Evils of Illmire is a “mini-mega” hexcrawl adventure module designed to provide dozens of sessions of perilous wilderness exploration and dungeon crawling. It features an evil cult, a doomed town, a dangerous wilderness, and a variety of vile monsters. The zine aims to provide plenty of free-roaming adventure content, but with an over-arching threat that looms over the entire region.

This seventy page digest “zine” adventure contains nineteen hexes, a town, and a fuck ton of lair dungeons scattered throughout a region. The designer knows what makes for a good regional area: a lot going on. It is pushing hard up against the limitations of the format, being as big as it is, but is not so off the rails, in verbosity, format or design, as to make it unusable. A de-light-ful little region to toss some PC’s in to!

Rarely do I find myself saying to myself “Holy fuck I want to run this thing!” … but that was the case with this adventure. And it was the case from the very first real page, the adventure synopsis. Illmire is a town that the party ends up at, rumors of treasure in dungeons in the surrounding region. (There are some “investigation” hooks also, but those are as crappy as one line investigation hooks always are. GOLD always works well.) So what you have are the towns hex and the eighteen hexes nearby that make up the region. Each of the hexes has something going on in it, at least one thing (6 mile hexes), and generally a lair dungeon or two … a designer finally figuring out how to make good adventure of the smaller Dyson maps. So the party comes to town and explores the surrounding hexes and dungeon, rumors abound, etc.

But that shits not in the synopsis. Oh no! Kidnappings in town. Bandits on the road that now pose as militia. A cult in town, spreading paranoi and fear-mongering. The temple boarded up, an abomination hidden underneath it. Pod people villagers, the town watch and militia under control, a cult assassin on the prowl, a new priest full of hellfire and brimstone extoling people to confess on themselves and their neighbors to be saved … and blackmailing them while sowing fear and paranoi in town. The town well poisoned, giving the villagers nightmares. A sickness in town, afflicting the elderly and children .. .the mayor on his deathbed. People dying a slow miserable death. And, out in the swamps, THE OVERSEER, a root cause of problems who, academically, doesn’t really care what happens. 

Oh, I was so stoked to run it from that description! And then the hexes start in. SOmething going on in each one, at least one thing. And multiple dungeons, usually, in them. Chances to talk and make friends. Climb the highest mountain to the crystal palace of the mountain giant who feasts you and hears your tales of bravery! And challenges you to quests! The lumberjacks with their boss, in the forest, plagued by fishmen. A floating tower. Sylvan glades. Mushroom forests. This fucking thing is PACKED.

And that is fucking great. A homebase SHOULD have a fuck ton going on. I love that the town, the home base, is a center of evil, and related to some sites out in the hexes, but is, also, an opportunity for downtime fun … getting involved in local affairs, brining the town to life and sucking the party in to its drama while they want some phat l00t out in the wilderness. It’s fucking great!

And its greatness is pushing up against usage. 

The adventure is generally devoid of summaries, except, perhaps, that synopsis at the beginning that mostly covers the cult in the town. This is rough, because there is so much going on that its hard to keep track of. If would really benefit from a page with the major NPC’s and factions on it and a page of summary for the major things in each hex. You need SOMETHING to be able to integrate the adventure as well as its MEANT to be integrated. This is exacerbated by the scattered way in which the places are described. Each hex is described and then the dungeons are described. And they are in some weird fucked up order. SO the hexes are not numerically arranged or alpha arranged, but something else. And it looks like the dungeons are also. This means a hunt for information. The result is everything scattered throughout the books. The town has the overview cult in one place, the town hex in another, the town “dungeons” in another, a town map in another. I don’t want to hunt the wumpus! Other areas, like the militia/bandit fortress, loose their meaning when the context of the fortress is not found on its page but rather earlier in the book, leaving it in isolate and in danger of not getting the full impact out of it. The entire book doesn’t seem to be arranged to play it as an adventure. It seems more like … the things were developed in isolation. And, this is in spite of the areas ll being pretty tightly integrated with each other! And yet they don’t feel DESIGNED to be used together, at all. 

I’m not saying this is adeal killer. THis thing is good enough that I would maybe put in an hour or two to prep my own summary and NPC sheets, with a highlighter in hand. And we all know how fucking much I loathe doing that. But this is GUUUUUDDDDDD. 

I note, in passing there is also some confusing word order in use, mainly in the dungeon keyed encounters.  A barrel has 50 gold nuggets, hidden under rubble in the NE corner. Compare that to Rubble in the NE corner hides a barrel with 50 gold nuggets. This word ordering exacerbates the already large problem of holding this thing in your head. Add to that a little TOO much backstory in some of the descriptions. I’m all for an occasional few extra words to add some context, but when it gets too lengthy, or too often, then these asides to the DM start to detract from comprehension.

Still, this designer knows how to design. Now they just need to learn how to layout and edit in order to pull the entire thing together. It’s not that it’s a mess, and it would probably have worked fine for a smaller volume. But, as adventures get longer and longer then the effort required, and focus required, to keep them coherent increases to need levels. This needed a little extra bit of love in that area. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. That’s too fucking bad. It needs a preview, as well as the level range in the product description. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/343439/The-Evils-of-Illmire?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 30 Comments

River of Frozen Souls, D&D adventure review

Posted on January 30, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Allen Farr
WinterBlight's Challenge
Generic
Level ?

The River Of Frozen Souls has shattered. As the remnants of this once mighty frozen fortress drifts south on the Sea Of Broken Blades, it carries with it the Anvil of Ice, a powerful artefact capable of bringing eternal winter to the world. Will this winter be your last?

This 49 page adventure tries to describe a northern town in the middle of winter, along with a series of dungeons in iceberg fragments. It’s very creative and has all of the elements required for a good adventure, it’s just that the designer has absolutely no idea at all how to put them together in to a coherent package for use. And I mean that more than I usually mean that. 

You get hired on as town guards. You get sent to a northern town for a few months. Your first day you get assigned to a murder that is causing a gang war. That leads to a series of dungeon fragments contained in icebergs off the coast. 

There is a pattern to these. After mountains of text laid out in a near-incoherent paragraph form, with embedded encounters, there will be a period of more free form player action. These are supported by terrific little vignettes for the party to interact with. There is a surrounding world here, or at the feel of one, that is terrific. It’s alive and full of potential energy. This is augmented by “themes” for the various sections, which are usually just environments conditions or some such. This adds to moods trying to be created, like the hostility of the weather or the strangeness of the north. Evocative writing can be almost good in places, like “At the far end of the room is an ancient throne entwined by the dragon’s tail and bedecked by large luxurious furs.” 

As guardsmen some of the “one liner” encounter range from a group of children challenging the party to a snowball fight to a distraught woman begging the party for help, because a ship sailing out has her son on it as a stowaway. There’s nothing else, that’s it. And it’s clear that you mind can run away with these little things. They are full of energy. Likewise things like your sword freezing to its scabbard, or an increasing number of villagers found froze to death in their homes, to bring home the severity of the winter. A great job.

Of course, the formatting is atrocious and makes the entire thing almost incomprehensible.

Columns of information, combining backstory, justifications, multiple plot events, and the like are the normal course of business. It almost makes you think that you are reading a summary of whats to come, but, you soon find out, no, this is the actual adventure. Arriving in town, hired on, ambushed by thugs, trained by the guard sergeant, these get just a couple of words each, almost as much as I just typed about them, embedded in longer paragraphs. This is no way to run a railroad, or format an adventure for use. 

Bold italics for read-aloud sections making it hard to read. An appendix compsigin almost half the page count, subtracting from actual value. A generic adventure, with no stats, written in an almost abstracted way, making it hard to pick out traps and creatures and certainly no detail on what they could be. Just stat the fucking thing for D&D man! Any decent DM can convert it and the non-decent ones are not going to use it anyway, in its generic form.

“The entrance to this room is constructed from the open maw of Blizzard, an ancient dragon that pledged its services in death to the master of the fortress.” You can see, from this section, how we both get a nice little feature, an entrance from a dragon maw, and how its ruined by all the backstory. And this is one of the more terse backstory elements. They go on and on, adding depth that will never be encountered during play. “… his hand outstretched as if holding something defensively. That something was the Rod of Thunderous Upheaval. It was the Rod of Thunderous Upheaval used in the heat of combat that shattered the River of Frozen Souls and Fortress Frostfang, see Arcanum.” There we go, a load of backstory for a corpse that adds nothing to the adventure. The adventure does this time and time again. 

It’s a shame because there’s some interesting things going on in this. It needs a TOTAL rework, with a complete focus on running it at the table and the expansion of the section where the party investigates the murder and the factions in the town compete. Then this would be an adventure to write home about!

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages and gives you a look at some of the seventeen “iceburg dungeon fragment” locations. These tend to tbe the shorter elements, with some decently evocative writing in places. It’s good for getting a eel for the generic nature of the adventure, as in system neutral, and how that detracts from the adventure overall.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/343301/River-Of-Frozen-Souls?1892600

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

Clock Strike Zero, D&D adventure review

Posted on January 27, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Bill Petrosky, Matt Sisk, JP Fridy
Minor Realm Games
OSRIC/5e
Levels 2-4

Join a cast of ambitious, fledgling adventurers as they stop if in the bucolic backwater of Blackwyrm on the road to the capital of Herlivik. Intending to make a quick stop to rest at the local inn before resuming their journey, the intrepid travelers realize that things are not what they seem in this odd little town, and their pit stop spirals into a full-blown adventure as they’re drawn in to investigate a growing peril threatening Blackwyrm’s people.

This 45 page adventure describes a few combats in a town. Railroad plot in dysfunctional wall of text with emphasis on A Reader rather than play. Yet more meat for the grinder that is the modern adventure market. If only there were a way for the general populace to not suffer through first efforts.

An adventure made to be read and not played. But first, one nice thing.

At one point you are exploring an old church, rumored to be haunted. A tapestry can kind of fold back upon itself and a spectre emerges from it. Or … “then the tapestry will mystically form fit to the shape of a body, at once, emanating a chilling green ghastly glow from underneath of it.” This is a pretty decent way to handle the appearance of the undead, especially a spectre. When I talk about inspiring the DM to greatness then this is one of the elements I am referring to. It’s about putting an image in their mind and then letting them leverage that to greater effect. This isn’t a great example, but it’s on the right track, certainly. It’s also a rather isolated case from an otherwise poor adventure.

The first encounter of the adventure is a good example of what’s wrong in the adventure, and most adventures. It’s five long paragraphs. The first one reads “The party hikes the rustic byway of Roland Pass in the center of Western Zearus. A crisp autumn air chills them as boots meet the firming soil, with the smell of the pine and the sycamore setting a fragrant, comforting tone for what could be the most exciting time for a new unofficial clan of young adventurers.” This isn’t read-aloud, but DM text. It is clearly written as a novel. It’s using crisp autumn air and so on to create a novelization of an adventure rather than an adventure. The other paragraphs go on and on this way. “The party walks this trail as modest adventurers seeking acclaim in the north and a bit of coin in a journey filled with both heroism and self-exploration. But of course, they’ll also be seeking some fine ale and good times along the way!” This is text without purpose. It’s background information. It’s the writers guide for a Tv series or shared world. It’s not writing that is directed at a DM to help them run an adventure. It’s just allpadding, irrelevant. The last paragraph describes three hooded individuals coming out of the forest and coming straight for the party! All of this lead up. All of this build up. All of those irrelevant words … and the one part that SHOULD get a few notes is nothing more then three people in hoods walking out of the forest and attacking. Where is your spectre tapestry now? Now nuance. No build up. No tension. Just They Attack! 

And this is the commonality to the adventure. There is all of this build up, background, motivation, related in the text. And then the actual encounter is just an afterthought. This is not the way an adventure is to be written. It should be written to be run at the table, not to be read. I know, I know, all adventures are written to be read. The industry has done a poor job of providing examples.

Ignoring this, and ignoring the long sections of italics (which are hard to read and should never be done), ignoring the first quarter of the page count which is a travelogue,  ignoring the long read-aloud, and ignoring the fact that a major town with a 500 foot tall clocktower is called a bucolic backwater … 

There are at least two major adventuring sites with multiple locations. Neither gets a map. This modern design trend to not include maps is crazy. You have to fight the fucking text to try and figure out where things are in relation to each other. I THINK it’s all just a linear thing (but not the haunted church?) but a fucking map would have dispelled all of this. It’s NOT designed for ease of use. It’s not designed to make the DM’s life easier. I don’t know what the fuck it was designed for.

And the adventure design, proper, is a confusing mess. A woman wants you to find her missing son. But, just as with the bandit attack, the ACTUAL thrist here is handled as an afterthought. You’re supposed to go to the church to search for him. There’s no tips on other places, or running the search. There’s no how to get the players in to the church that is handled in any meaningful way, just a “get the players to the church” note. That’s the fucking adventure! The search and hunt for the kid! But it’s handled as an afterthought. Not to mention why a local is turning to strangers to find her kid …

At one point the adventure presents “Adventure Path A” and then later “Adventure Path B” … without any idea of how or why one would go down one path instead of another. Where is the turning point? Is it meant to be a turning point? Who knows.

In another place you’re meant to follow a group of town guards taking a dude to jail. AT least, that’s how the linear adventure is written, as if you sneak follow them. But there’s no hint that this is the case, or that’s what you should do, or what happens if you DONT do that. 

There’s no support for the DM, just endless text for a person who buys it and reads it, never to play it.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There’s no preview available. There should always be a preview, showing the potential buyer a few meaty parts of the adventure, so they can make n informed decision about to buy it or now.


drivethrurpg.com/product/341721/Clock-Strike-Zero?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 8 Comments