Meet Navo Purebrew, a master distiller with a new way of distilling spirits. But when something of extraordinary quality is produced it is bound to draw in trouble. Navo could never have imagined that trouble would find him in the shape of a huge elemental spirit made up of his very own beverage. Visit the renovated chapel / bath house of Sharess, deity of indulgence, and help navo defeat this power-drunk creature alone.
This twenty page adventure describes a three level site with about twenty rooms. Mixed read-aloud and long DM text could be much better. Much. The designer is a reader of the blog, soon to be former reader, and asked for a review. It’s really that simple.
Genre warning: this ain’t my thing. Quest dude made friends with a genies, was given two water weird helpers, who in turn have a bunch of kua-toa buddies who show up? And dude lives in an abandoned temple to the god of hedonism, which he’s renovated back to perfect form? I don’t think my preference in this area impacts the review, but be aware.
There’s a magic ring of protection in this that is in the form of two arms hugging. That’s good.
You come across a drunk man on the side of the road. He says ice and water monsters have invaded his home. Could you please? There is no reward. I understand that, no matter what happens, the players are having this adventure tonight, but, still, just a bit more a pretext would have been nice. The outcome is the same, the party goes on the adventure, but I do prefer not pushing the suspension of disbelief this early in the adventure.
Many of my reviews concentrate on the read-aloud and DM text, and this review will be no different. There’s a basic usability issue that most DM text and read-aloud make up the primary cause of. The ability to quickly scan the adventure and find the information you’re looking for, at the table, is what theis scannability enables, when the DM text and read-aloud is done well. Further, the read-aloud generally touches both in interactivity and evocative scenes. Done well the adventure is joy and done poorly it comes off as bland. Using words, as this adventure does, like huge, and such. Unbearably strong smells, and looks of horror on peoples faces. These are boring words and descriptive text that features conclusions rather than descriptions. The read-aloud also has a touch of that overly flowery and conversational style that one associates with novels rather than adventure read-aloud.
DM text is similar. It tends to mix in background information and has a conversational style that adds little to the adventure. East is the seating area and west is the entrance room, just as the map shows. This room used to be … and this room held a battle between X and Y. Mixed in to the middle of all of this is a great sentence: Tiny ice shards cover the floor and blood is sprayed across the southern wall of the entrance area. More like that, please, and less background and trivia and needless padding. “This room shows signs of a battle” No, it doesn’t. It has those little ice shards and blood splatters. “Before you stands …” No.
A noisy room is hard to hard in advance. Brush that is meant to hide a wooden fence, and provide an actual in play obstacle, is not shown on the map and only buried in text. Bullets points are used … in the initial adventure background information, where it’s not needed and paragraph form is ok. But then the rooms, where it would stand out, it’s not used. Weird. It’sd use in NPC information, the quest giver is good, but that’s essentially it.
Other than that, how was the play Mrs lincoln?
This is Pay What You Want at DMsGuild with a suggested price of $2. The preview is six pages and shows you the intro and a few of the encounters, so, good preview.
[…] Pravus was a dedicated follower of Ragnar and decided to keep hold of the temple. Pravus and his fellow priests headed under the temple to wait out the war and maintain prayer to Ragnar. With continued dedication to Ragnar, the god bestowed upon Pravus the knowledge of a ritual called Everlife. The Ritual of Everlife was a guarded secret that wasn’t widely shared with mortals. This ritual grants priests that Ragnar deemed worthy the ability to gain an everlasting unlife to continue their worship.
This fourteen page adventure features a two level temple complex with nine rooms, three above ground and six below. It has a couple of gnolls up and the usual shadow/wights/lich below. It just seems like someone wanted to write a short adventure with a lich in it. The read-aloud and DM text could be the platonic example of how to not do things.
I don’t know what to do here. It’s coherent; I guess that’s good?
Yet Another Abandoned Temple. And a small one at that. Your level eight party is going to kill seven gnolls, to start with. Is that a challenge? Do you even try at this level or do you let your torchbearers do it?
The upstairs is a ruined temple with three rooms with those seven gnolls in it. The adventure, proper, is behind a secret door. The entire adventure of six more rooms. So you won’t be going on the adventure unless you find the secret door. Which means that if the party doesn’t find the secret door then the DM is going to fudge the roll and let them find it. Which begs the question: why have a secret door? Don’t put your fucking adventure behind a die roll of any kind. You have to succeed on a spot/secret door find/negotiation/diplomacy in order to continue the adventure? Don’t do it. A treasure room at the end is one thing, but the main fucking adventure? No. This is bad design.
The DM text is full of useful information like “The characters can arrive from any direction and at ay time of day.” I am now empowered. It’s full of things like explaining what an ossuary is, what it was used for, how it was used, and other trivia that has no bearing on the actual play of the game at the table at all. It’s nothing. I’d say it gets in the way of the useful data ut I’m not sure there IS useful DM text. It’s just a monster listing, that attacks when you open the door, and some treasure, separated by the background trivia.
The main baddie, the lich-priest, granted eternal life by his god for being a good worshipper, lives in a locked room behind a metal door, with the key to open the door in another room. Why s the main priest, granted unlife by his god for being a faithful worshipper, locked in his room? Who knows. As in, I’m not looking for (more) backstory here, but the set up makes no sense. Why would he be locked in?
Gnolls grunt and yelp at each other upstairs, according to the read-aloud. Given the ruined nature of the temple, with no roof and broken down walls up top, shouldn’t we be able to hear that before we enter their “room?” Noting things like this, things that impact other areas of the dungeon, in their own room tiks me off. It shows an lack of thought for how actual play works. People listen. They hear things. This shit needs to be noted elsewhere, or on the mpa or something. If you’re in a 1000 floor wide cavern and something as bright as sunlight is glowing on the other side then you don’t wait until you get to the other side’s read-aloud to tell us there’s a light in this area.
But, the read-aloud. It is, perhaps, the most magnificent ever. You get evocative writing like “this large area …” to describe a room. Don’t use common adjectives and adverbs. English is a very descriptive language. And you can steal words from other languages. And you can make up words and use them in wrong way. You can do ANYTHING to get your vision across. Was your vision really as boring as the word “large” implies?
The read-aloud is quite bad. It explains backstory that the characters would not know. It provides details that should not be provided. “When the temple wasn’t in ruins, the lower level of the temple was used as an isusuary for patrons and a crypt for the priests.” What the fuck is this? Is that what the party is experiencing right now? A monologue from a lecturer? Another room goes in to detail on what the party sees, what frescoes look like, their damage, detail on what statues look like. This DESTROYS interactivity in the game. You provide a general overview, then the party follows up with questions, searing and examining the frescoes and statues. Of you tell them all of this up front then there’s little reason for them to look at them further. This back and forth between the DM and players might be THE key mechanic in a RPG, and yet these sorts of overly-descriptive read-alouds destroy that.
Let’s see, this is four to six characters of levels eight to ten. Let’s say five level eight characters, an average of, say, 120,000 XP needed for level 9, each. The haul from this adventure is going to be about 15,000 in gold, divided five ways, that’s going to be about 3000 XP per adventurer. If the party goes on forty more adventures like this then they can make level nine! So, look, I know. Walter wanted to put in a cleric lich and worked backwards from there, to a short adventure Travis would publish. But it doesn’t work, not in a campaign.
This is $2 at DriveThru.There’s no preview at all. Why would you deserve a preview? So you can determine what you’re wasting your cash on beforehand? I think not!
When our heroes return to Ravenreach all is not well. The castle is in lockdown and the town hasn’t heard from anyone there in days. Worse, our heroes learn they are wanted for attempting to assassinate the baron. Sneaking into the castle through a secret entrance at the bottom of the hill they find a way in via a slippery sewer drain. Snaking up through the dungeons below they unearth ancient secrets, encounter deadly monsters, nasty traps and twisted abominations. As they piece together the sinister plot to frame them, the party must take care to avoid killing friends while fighting foes as they navigate through the dungeon and castle. At last they encounter the usurper and his guard of monstrous henchmen for a final boss fight!
This 24 page adventure is a tangle of forced combats, ineffective read-aloud, long DM text and, of course, no treasure. Because it was probably a conversion. Great art though.
I try to learn something from everyone I’ve worked for. I once worked for a guy that was utterly incompetent in everything he did. But he still managed to get an AVP job and hold it for almost two years. So, you can be totally incompetent and still succeed. Why is this relevant in a Frog God Games review, you might ask? At least they use different covers now. Also, both the layout and cover style have been refreshed sometime recently. They are cleaner and easier, nice job! The art in this is really top notch also. It’s quite evocative of the scenes, from the cover to the interior art. And it seems to walk a line in art styles that I find appealing, not going too far in any direction without seeming to pander to a middle of the road approach. In fact, I’d say the art is the best part of this adventure, and I don’t mean that as an insult. Later on I’m going to comment on the mess of text the rooms are. But, the artists have taken that and really imagined the hell out of it. I would have NEVER envisioned that room on the cover that way. I doubt anyone would have. Except for Joshua Stewart. Interior art also, especially a scene with characters exploring a dead dragons cave by torchlight, skeletal bones in the background. Not actually in the adventure, I think? I think the text states the bones are elsewhere, but, still, nice art. Art art art. Are you sick of me talking about art yet? Well, what the fuck else nice am I going to say?
I guess the inn in town is done well. It’s described in about two sentences, which is about the right amount of text to describe a building in town. A small appeal to a description featuring animal pelts and bones and the two people that work there, with a couple of words on their personality. Just about the right length. And the rumors from the inn are easy enough to scan, using bullets. The adventure also does a pretty decent job in trying to integrate itself in to your campaign. Used as a sequel to another adventure in the series or as a standalone, there are bits of advice on how and why to do things to fit it in. And then, unfortunately, the adventure starts.
The maps a mess. It’s scattered through the book and I still can’t really figure out how the dungeon connects to the ground floor and first floor and reconcile it with the text descriptions. “They will come up in the great hall …” but it looks like to me like the dungeons connect elsewhere? I don’t know.
And all that “how to integrate the adventure” advice? It includes a nice little “if the party kill bob & Ted in the last adventure then they were Raise Dead’d to appear in this adventure.” Yeah. No. Seriously? Are they that important to the adventure that they show up again? It didn’t look to me like they were anything other just someone else to hack down. I guess there’s some “recurring villain” thing that’s appealing? But I remember a Warlord comic (fuck Conan. Travis Morgan bitches!) where Deimos shows up resurrected for one issue just to be killed again. Like, what’s the point? I mean, if Bob & Ted show up in EVERY adventure from now on, then, maybe, but the whole Deus Ex to shove in a villain … and then on top of it they don’t really do anything? Uh, no. Bad design.
The read-aloud can be long in places, going in to great detail. That’s not good. Read-aloud should be short, I’ve harped on that enough by now, but overly detailed read-aloud also takes away from the interactivity of an adventure. When explaining too much in the read-aloud you remove the players ability to go over and read the text on the wall, or see what the pillar looks like, and so on. Besides “A storm subsides as you row across …” is a lame ass style. It’s failed novelist syndrome. Don’t to this. Or, read-aloud that says something like “the carpet is worn away because of all of the fights the regenerating knights have gotten in to.” Seriously? How does the party know that? Was that a fuck up in the layout, and not supposed to be read-aloud? (Oh Frogs …) or just bad read-aloud writing? Also, who cares about why the carpet is worn if it has no impact on the adventure?
The adventure does this over and over and over again, explaining WHY. “This gold is the last of Evil Iggy’s treasure from his kingdoms down south.” So? Does that matter? No? Then why’s it included? No one gives a shit. And, all this background shit creatures a wall of text (Oh Frogs …) that makes it hard to actually use the room encounters.
You walk in to a room and things attack. This, I suspect, if the main conversion error from 5e/Pathfinder, the appeal to the linear dungeon map and “they attack!” sort of interactivity. And the light ass treasure haul. There is NOT enough loot in this for a part of 4-7’s. S&W means Gold=XP to level. Who the fuck does these conversions? Not that it matters, the level range isn’t actually in the product description or on the cover anyway, so you don’t know it’s for levels 4-7. But, hey, speaking of treasure, you, the DM, do get to pick out your own treasure because the designer can’t be bothered to select which scrolls to put in.
Your reward, if you save the Baron held hostage in the castle, is that he gives you 5k in gold. Ok, sure. But there’s no treasure vault in the castle. Where’s the 5k come from? Cause if it were here I’d have looted it. But, alas, no. Deus Ex. I’m not a simulationist. I think that shit sucks. But you gotta at least appeal to a light pretext.
Do not be alarmed. The new cover style, cleaner layout, and better art is not an alarm. This is the same old same old from the Frogs. When Zeitgeist gives it 4 stars you KNOW its not good.
This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages, three of which are worthwhile. You get to see one page of the maps, andone page each of the intro and the “hook” encounter scene at the inn. Those two are indicative of the writing. Imagine the encounters were in the style of the long-ass intro. And then, the inn encounter, with it’s two sentence inn and bullets, if the high point of the design and layout.
The forces of Law and Chaos engage in open war across the continent of Dorangar. Will your players choose a side or walk the tightrope between warring factions until harmony and peace prevail?
*sigh*
This twenty page adventure features ten-ish adventure locations, mostly in a cave. It’s full of page long read-aloud, first person read-aloud, and an emphasis on physical dimensions in the read-aloud. “Not your kids 5e” and “harken back to the days you remember of TTRPG’s” are the marketing lines used. Dis-a-fortu-nata-mente, it’s not the glory days that you’ll remember, but rather the 2e-3e era. It makes me rethink the choices I have made in life.
There’s a ring of regeneration in this. It lets you get 1HD of HP extra back after each short rest. And every time you use it it shortens your life by one day. That’s a fucking kick ass magic item! It’s specific. It has a downside. It tempts the players to use it for the bonus at the cost of something bad. I fucking love the tension it creates!
In short: you wake up in your army tent as your camp is under attack by gnolls. You run in to the forest and fall in to a pit that have a seven room cave and then emerge in to a bullywug village.
As I pondered my life choices that led me to this point I was diverted in to two other tangents. First, what is the breakdown of “I use numbers on my dungeon mamp” versus “I use letters to key my dungeon map?” What’s the percentage breakdown and what chooses one designer to pick letters over numbers? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it (I think?) but I’m curious.
Second, I now know why lair dungeon are popular and they all have seven rooms! A revelation! Also, “PC stands for personal computer, I just got that” remarks Killface. It’s because that’s what you can reasonably get through in one session of 5e and everyone writes adventures for one session of D&D! I know, it’s fucking obvious! But, I just got it. It’s ok Megatron, I would have brought Starscream back also.
Ok, I’ve avoided this adventure enough now. It’s written in single column format. Single column is hard to read. SSeriously, studies have proven it! Your eyes have to travel ALL the way from the left side of the page to the right side of the page and that causes more eye fatigue than a two column format, as well as it being easier to lose your place as you track back to pick up the next line. Don’t use single column indiscriminately in your writing. It’s a pain.
The read-aloud sections in this are long. I mean REALLY long. Like, four or five paragraphs each. Or a page. Or a page and a third of another. In one long chunk. Players don’t pay attention to long read-aloud. They get bored. They pull out their phones. They stop paying attention. You get two to three sentences of read-aloud. Maybe four. That’s it. Again, there was a study. WOTC did it! They watched a bunch of tables in the 5e room at GenCon, iirc.
[It is, at this point, that regular readers will be complaining about the repetition of this point. It seems like every weekend, or even every review, mentions this point, in almost exactly the same way. I know the RA rule. Almost everyone who has seen this blog know the RA rule. But Neal doesn’t know the rule, otherwise why would he have done it? Someone once suggestedI just write some articles on it and just put in a hyperlink to it when it happens, but that seems unfair to Neal. Disrespectful. Yes, that’s right, I said disrespectful. I, the potty mouthed asshole, don’t want to disrespect Neal. Because Neal is different from the thing-that-Neal-wrote. Neal is not a bad person and deserves respect. Unlike the-thing-that-Neal-write, which is total crap. This is fun. Hey, am I actually a review blog? Am I really just one of those “don’t really talk about anything useful in particular” blogs, but I disguise myself as a review blog, all Cute Little Bunnoid On A Stump style?]
Ok, so, four or five paragraphs of read aloud, three sentences of DM text, and then another four or five paragraphs of DM text. And the read-aloud is in first person. YOU are dreaming that … YOU are listening for sounds. YOU open the door. This assumes the players have their characters do things. It assumes that they have written their characters a certain way. It takes away agency from them. It’ TELLS them what is going on instead of SHOWING them what is going on. I’d explain more but right now that “link to the article thing is looking for and more appealing. Also, I’m now out of whiskey. (Remember: contemplating life choices? And you thought I was kidding.)
Agency Agency Agency says Marsha Marsha Marsha. The read-aloud tells you that listen cautiously, even if you don’t want to. As you flee some attackers you don’t get to climb down a cliff, or be cautious, because if you do then more gnolls attack. You WILL do what designers script tells you to, or else you will be attacked! Shut the fuck up and do what he says! He knows best! Fuck you and fuck your players agency! Jump off the cliff in to the damn river like I want you to!
Read-aloud (why the emphasis on read-aloud? Because it makes up up a hefty chunk of the adventure, that’s why) also tells you that “the bulk of the gremlin tribe resides here” or that “2 gremlins rush to attack anyone emerging from the tunnel.” In the first, the read-aloud is revealing too much information. This is a conclusion and not information that the players would have knowledge of. By stating it explicitly you’re removing the uncertainty that drives the decision making inherent in the tension in an RPG. The back and forth between DM and player is what RPG’s thrive on and read-aloud that is too in-depth removes that. Second, I just don’t even know what to say about that other sentence. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about read-aloud? Or DM text? Or … something else? “They rush to attack anyone emerging from the tunnel.” I guess maybe, in the Bryce taxonomy is sins, that’s abstracting a description? They should instead rush to attack when they see you emerge? Which is still embedding PC actions (But we were invisible!) in to the read-aloud, but at least it’s not abstracting it to some … fourth-person viewpoint? I don’t even know what to call it.
This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages long, with only two being relevant. Those two show you the read-aloud and DM text that is typical of the adventure. Not exactly easy to intuit that this is what the entire adventure is like, since it’s the intro scene, but, it IS what the entire adventure is like.
The sorceress Shar’Almana built a vault long ago to hide some magical items that her Lord had no use for, intending to sell them once her service was no longer needed. However, for unknown reasons, she disappeared and her Vault laid unclaimed for centuries.
Well, so, I guess the jokes on me.
This is a review of The Secret Safe of Shar’Almana, an adventure in Silver Swords issue 2, a forty page digest zine. The dungeon has two levels, thirteen rooms over three pages (two digest pages having the keys) and … is minimally keyed with abstracted treasure. It is a non-entity. A nothing. One tenth of one step above Vampire Queen.
I’ve got an excuse. I saw that this issue had a setting where the Sun kills the Moon and the entire campaign world revolves around that. Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon! If you wanted to make the worlds best pessimist how would you start? Well, with an optimist full of joy. Duh. Of course.
The adventure here has nothing to do with that. That’s some other article. This adventure has thirteen rooms in a large font spread out over two pages, which includes the map on one of those pages and the intro on the other page. This leaves little room for the room keys. Never fear though, they are minimalist. Yeah, I know, I already said that. Hang in there. It will make sense.
The map is one hallway. There are doors off the hallway. Open the door and see a room. No other exits from the room. So you go down the hallway and open the next doorway. To the next room. There are several map styles that one could use. This one is, without a doubt, the worst possible. Yes, even lower in my mind than a strictly linear map. (Hmmm, maybe the “long hallway map” is a sub-genre of the linear map? I’ll have to think on that.) Anyway, the linear map at least can make the claim that it’s part of a plot based adventure and not exploratory and thus is aligned to the assumptions of that plot-based adventure. (Wrong! But it IS an argument that can then be debated.) THis don’t got that. It’s just a hallway with rooms hanging off of it. Minimally keyed.
How about that abstraction? Go in a room. Find a chest. What’s the chest have? The DM consults the text: “Give rewards appropriate for 2 levels higher.” Or how about “locked chests have at least 1 magical consumable.” Is it becoming clearer, now, how a pessimist is made? Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon! Oh, wait, it’s minimally keyed. Room 4. Goblin Warren. 4 goblins. [stats]. Yes, I feel all of the power of the poetry of the language exercised in that brief statement. The long line of adventures stretching back to Vampire Queen. Lo, I see them. Lo, they call to me!
Well, no. They don’t. It’s minimally keyed. They don’t do anything.
So, you’ve got rooms that have maybe seven or eight non-statblock words in them. And those words are abstracted, pushing the work back on to the DM.
This has two things in it. First, it has a talking brazier in the first room that is chatty and is you feed it 5# of food it will answer questions. Second, it’s got a room with shattered mirror glass on the floor. If you bring in a big mirror it shows a passage through a blank wall to the treasure room. You know, the one with a treasure 2 levels higher. That’s good content, both of them. There’s something fucking going on. It’s not described evocatively at all, but you can least see some interactivity there, a chance for adventure beyond “4 goblins.”
There’s nothing here. My inner child is, once again, wounded to its core. And I have only myself to blame.
This is $3 at DriveThru. The only preview is the little flip-book preview, which doesn’t let you see what you are buying. Put ina real preview, so we can get an idea of what we are buying beforehand!
FCA quality is not good. But the removable wrangler roof means that the tent access is through the INSIDE of the Wrangler since it’s a full Wrangler replacement roof. Ranger is 2 feet long, which causes me a little anxiety in town, but that also means 2 extra feet of storage space for STUFF. Wrangler will let me go more places and NOT having a Wrangler leads to some anxiety about “what if I can’t get someplace I want to go in the Ranger?!?!!?” Realistically though, I can probably get every place within my (non-existent) skill level with the FX4 XL Ranger? And, the Ranger is, I think, substantially cheaper? I’ll do the full cost breakdown today. You can assume KO2’s, winch, recovery gear, etc on both.
Yeah, that’s right, I just ended my shitty Dungeons & Dragons review is a #vanlife post. Suck it! (Are you a pessimist yet?)
By Jeremy Reaban
Self Published
1e
Levels 6-10, or so
From the depths of space come the Outer Ones, better known as the Mi-Go. They travel the universe looking for metal to mine and brains to steal. Now they have landed on a planet ruled by sorcery and steel…
FYI: Google docs knows how to auto-correct shub-niggurath. Ponder the implications of THAT revelation of Glaaki …
This twenty page adventure describes a 22 room alien Mi-Go outpost. It’s got a decent mix of elements that are relatable and does a good job of fitting in with a D&D campaign world. The writing is flat, lacking the ability to communicate an alien vibe evocatively. Interactivity is pretty good, primarily being alien machines to play with and experiment with. The writing can get long and it uses an encounter organization style that kind of makes sense, but is difficult to scan quickly.
Jeremy runs OSRNEWS, a blog that watches DriveThru for new adventures and supplement and, as such, is one of my goto sites for discovering new releases. He’s been writing adventures for awhile now and while this one is older (2015?) it shows the same kind of fundamental understanding of D&D that his more recent adventures do. And it also shows the same flaws.
This is a site based adventure, so, a dungeon. The local village has a rumor table, and it’s pretty decent rumor table at that, imbued with a little local color. It’s all kind of pretexts to get the party looking for the base. The rumors are pretty good, a little bizarre (my haystacks walked away!), and I would probably use all of them at the same time. (Although, the reference to the “sky-visitors” in one rumor is probably telegraphing a little too much, IMO.)Locating the dungeon and travel to it is not covered, it just jumps from the rumors to the base.
Inside are the usual assortment of sci-fi things. There’s a kitchen. There’s an operating room. There are medical devices. There are weapons. Jeremy does a thing that I really like in adventures: he uses a kind of real-world thing. In most adventures this would be things like a pool full of piranha, or a giant tarantella/black widow, or a giant komodo dragon. This is a kind of specificity that players find relatable, as opposed to the more generic and abstracted “giant lizard, giant spider” stuff. In this adventure it comes across as “a chainsaw attached to his arm” or a bionic sasquatch, or a griffin that can shoot out chaff. There’s this appeal to the world we understand combined with a specificity that make these things instantly recognizable and visceral. Combine this a bit with a little bit of Cthulhu, like a Hastur-cult or Shub-niggurath, or even the mi-go themselves. But it’s all pretty lightly done, in a way that makes sense without going to extremes. Likewise the magic items “fit.” A lightsaber knockoff is really just a slightly modified sword of sharpness, while a chainsaw is essentially stat’d as a sword of wounding with its bleeding effect. Like I said, he knows what he’s doing.
And this continues with his background, intro, and designer notes. Short, just a paragraph or so for each section to ground the DM before they get in to the meat of the adventure. Preparing their minds for what’s to come instead of droning on and on about useless backstory. And, at times, injecting a bit of wit for the DM through the use of asides and a few words of commentary. A failed attempt at the “Dismiss shub-niggurath” incantation has no effect. Except for annoying shub-niggurath. These kinds of little asides, DM advice and so on are great. They inject some of the designers personality, are a delight to discover on a read-through before running the adventure, offer great advice to the DM, and do so without droning on. Four extra words to bring all of that to the table! His wandering monsters have this same little bit of life in them, just a touch, to get the DM going down a path to running them. Just a little bit is all a DM needs to get their brains going down a path to riff on.
There are a number of minor issues in the adventure and two major ones. The base map is roughly symmetrical and those tend to be boring for exploration purposes. While there’s a certain “hub and spokes” design to this one, and that does leave room for “the unknown menace coming from behind us”, at least in the players minds, it’s also a little boring. The order of battle for the mi-go is essentially not present, except for a brief note on how they respond to an alarm in the prison. Good for the prison, but maybe moved up front with a note about it being an alarm in general would help finding it during play if there’s an alarm in other areas of the base. And then there’s a group of rival’s a Hastur-based NPC party. They can be used to get the party out of the prison if captured, or as a rival group they encounter. Both kind of work, but they also feel under-utilized … although I’m at a loss to figure out how to fix that. Maybe with an expanded role for the village/wilderness nearby?
The major issues though are with the flat writing and the encounter/room organization. The rooms can get lengthy at times and kind of explain one thing fully, and then another, and then another. Because of this is can be difficult to get an overall sense of the room, especially when it’s three or four paragraphs. Several rooms have creatures in them but they are buried in the second or third paragraphs. Because the first is totally devoted to all of the details related to, say, how a latch on a box opens. Switching formats to an “overview and then detail paragraphs” style could fix this, as could better use of bolding to call out the pertinents overview/”first impressions” data for the major parts of the rooms. I do find the writing flat. This should be an exciting place, full of bizarre things, but the overall first impression, from the writing, is that this is just another in the long list of slightly generic dungeon environments. And this is in a place full of brain cylinders and the like! This, I think, is something that many people struggle with. Getting over that hump of abstracted slightly generic descriptive text to a place where the room/encounter comes alive, without it resorting to verbosity, can be quite a challenge.
As such, with the non-evocative writing and organization issues, it would be a pass for me.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.50. The entire thing is in the preview, which is great. Also, it’s PWYW, so it’s entirely a preview anyway. 🙂
An ancient shrine in the center of a small jungle island is filled with small, lifelike statues and ape-like monsters. Dangerous fruit and a deadly fountain round out the perils in this short adventure for the world’s greatest roleplaying game!
This seven page adventure uses 2-3 pages to describe about six encounters on a small jungle island. It waffles between decent organization and evocative writing and the usual bland and unfocused writing that is the hallmark of most adventures. It gets closer than most though, leaving me hopeful for the future.
So, island, covered in jungle. From your ship you can see some ruins poking up through the jungle … as well as three wrecked ships on the beach. You stop and go check out the ships and ruins because that’s what we do on Wednesday nights. More seriously, the usual pretexts are included, from on the trail of an evil cult to some kind of treasure map. There’s a gap niche, I think, in adventure pretexts and complications. How does a ship and/or sea voyage actually work? Something that told you that would help you run and/or design adventures that include a sea voyage. Like, the ship needs to take on water and therefore stops at he island. Or, the mill has flour in the air that can explode. Interesting things, oriented at adventures, that matter in actual play and.or design. Anyway …
Having diverged once, let me diverge again. A 2-3 hour adventure? “Explore a forbidden jungle island”? World’s greatest roleplaying game? I guess the last is a reaction to the trademark stuff from Teh Hasborg? But, I would suggest there’s a slight disconnect in the marketing of “Explore a forbidden jungle island” and a 2-3 adventure, along with everything implied in “forbidden.” Marketing is marketing, but, still, it backfires when you get peoples expectations up and they go away disappointed. IE: the story of my reviewing life. Finally, 2-3 hours? Is four hours not the standard anymore? I’m being serious here, not a douchebag (for once.) I know that gaming store play has changed the culture a bit, but is the norm now 2-3 hours? This adventure, in particular, feels like it could have done better if it were a bit more open/larger/longer. You could get a 4 hour session out of this if the designer put in a little more work, and easily another session if the island were opened up a bit.
It is, essentially, a bunch of linear encounters. I’m no fool. I know that this is how people play D&D at home. But, as I mentioned above, it feels like this could have been more if it were opened up more and has a little more freedom. As written, you go down a jungle path, part some vines, and get attacked. There’s just a little too much linearity/”lack of pretext” in that for my tastes.
Enough of my bitching though, let’s cover the good in this. And there is good! More than usual!
It’s sprinkled with little boxed sections, a sentence or two at most, that have designer notes, advice to the DM, and so on. This is great. It’s SO hard sometimes to try and figure out the vibe a designer meant. This sort of inspiration for the adventure, what I was going for, etc, is great. It’s boxed off, doesn’t get in the way, and can be full of advice to help the DM run the adventure. It FEELS like the designer is a part of the community, referencing online tools and the like, rather than just a pure simple “PAY ME! PAY ME NOW!”
The organization is a mixed bag. At times the adventure uses bullet points to convey information, and it does this relatively well. The wrecked ships, for example, just get a couple of passing lines in a bullet point in the beach section, telling you whats up with them. Not too much detail for an elements that doesn’t really drive the adventure. That’s great! (I might complain a bit, though, that while it’s not too much It might also not be enough. A ship name and or one or two sentences each, for the party, might have been in order. They are sure to search the ships and try to figure out what’s up with them? Especially since it’s the first thing they encounter? And maybe a missed opportunity for future adventure hooks, or petty rewards from brining back a sailors boots to his wife or some such? Yes, it can be hard finding the right balance. I am hartened (get it?! Get it?!) though that there’s not too much detail.) In other players the lack of formatting is telling. Monster and room information buried in paragraph text. The long-form paragraph is not the best wa for communicating some data. I’m thinking, specifically, of the text for the four or locations in the ruins, the shrine.
I note also that sometime it feels like overview text is left out. There are fruit trees that play an important part of the adventure, but they are handled just as a bullet. A) Good! B) This could have been mentioned perhaps in a bit more detail in some kind of overview text. IE: “you see three ships and also some trees that seem to have fruit on them.”
There’s good DM advice, as I mentioned, especially around tactics. Many designers can either leave this out or go full on tactics porn on the issue. Here it’s covered briefly and flavourfully. Apes, being the main enemy, get some flavour in their combat. They tear off huge chunks of bark ad throw it at the party! Flavour! A thing an apre would do! They hang upside down and swing from vines! Not just a throw-away monster, but it FEELS like an ape monster. Nicely done . Irrelevant background text is generally handled well, at least in the beginning, it being just afew words at the end of a scene surrounded by parens. It doesn’t get in the way, being both at the end and signaling to the DM via the parens. It’s also inconsistent at times, with other background information deeper in to the adventure not doing this and just appearing. “This ledge used to be.”
Evocative writing, like organization, is hit and miss. Bare masts rising up above the trees is a good bit. Other times it feels a bit on the blander side. Not full of “large statue” boring territory, but as if there were missed opportunities everywhere. There’s a room with an alter in it, a spider alter. But there are jewels in a loot pile. Better, i think, to put them in as a part of the spider alter? Who don’t like desecrating psider alters for jewels? It’s great imagery. Likewise, a folding boat doesn’t get a name or any details other than “it makes a loud clanging sound when unfolding” That’s good, but it’s also a missed opportunity, just like with the other magic items and most of the other descriptions, to add just a little more flavour with better word choices.
A few rando notes: It comes with both a print-friendly version and a “pretty” version. Nicely done, keeping the greyscale background template off the printer friendly version. Also, the “pretty” version is laid out in such a way that the background imagery doesn’t interfere with the text that’s on top of it, something that more designers should pay attention to. It gets hard to read when your text runs in to the background imagery and you don’t also use a box, shading, etc. The monsters, listed in the appendix, could use a bit of description. As is we get some description in the adventure text proper “tall thin ape-like creature with long curved claws.” Not the most exciting description and, also, buried in the text of one room. A line or two in the general description/monster appendix would have been in order. (And a little more opportunity to be evocative also …) Finally, the map is very clean for ruins. Nice clean lines with 90 degree angles, etc. Black on white. Trust me, I feel your pain. Getting the fucking maps right, with all the shitty or complex mapping tools available, is a serious pain. So, while I won’t hold this against a designer I will say that’s it’s an opportunity to learn, grow, and do better.
So, an ok adventure, better than most. Limited somewhat but it’s smaller size/shorter length. It doesn’t engage in excessive text sins, which makes the lack of organization tolerable, especially given the attempts to make things more scan-able for the DM. The mantras: better organization, tighter writing, more evocative writing. Once those basics are down you pass the first hurdle: not a fucking nightmare to run. This makes you better than 95% of other adventures and you can then concentrate on evocative writing, interactivity, and holistic design. A little more work to get over that first hurdle, I think. Still, I wouldn’t curse the world TOO much if this were dropped of fon my me five minutes before a AP con game started.
This is $3 at Drivethru. The preview is seven pages, showing you all of the pertinent parts of the adventure. Nice use of bullets in some places (the beach) and less other places (the shine rooms.) In fact, the bullets in the beach pretty much encapsulate everything about this, both from a positive quality (the mast/ship descriptions, bullets, high level/correct level overviews) and bad (ruins lack flavour, ships lack appropriate details.)
By Dave Tackett
Quasar Dragon games
OSR
Levels 2-4
Lying undisturbed for ages, this accursed tomb is discovered by the characters and a great evil is encountered. Will they survive this brush with darkness or will they become its latest victims. An OSR compatible module for any old school RPG or modern clone, The Temple/Tomb of Asibare is designed for character levels 2-4 or an especially harrowing first level.
This nineteen page adventure describes a twelve room temple/tomb with a vaguely middle eastern theme. Long read-aloud, mountains of backstory text in the rooms DM text, wall immune to everything but a Wish, this adventure has it all! Well, except treasure. So, not exactly an OSR adventure. More of a “Great example of how to not write an adventure” adventure. What RPG system is that? All of them Frank, all of them. Also, which one of you “gentle readers” suggested I review this? No christmas card for you this year!
Recall the new basic Bryce criteria for adventure success: Do I want to use my cheap yellow/beige mechanical pencil to stab my own eyes out when I try to run this? IE: is it bad? Evocative writing and interactivity might be “not boring” but making something not easy to use at the table easily earns you the BAD moniker. This is BAD.
You’re caravan guards. There’s a new building revealed out of the sand at an oasis you are stopped at. That night some other guards get killed. The next morning the caravan master asks you to take twelve(!) other guards and go inside to try and see what killed them. Ordered to your doom by those who control the means of production. Typical! And not even a bonus for your trouble!
The read-aloud in this adventure is BAD. It is LONG. Very long. Several reach a column in length. Read-aloud, is used, can’t be long. It has to be short. Why? Because people stop paying attention. You get a couple of sentences. 2, 3, maybe 4. No more. No one FUCKING CARES after that. They are here to play D&D not listen to DM monologues. No, listening to the DM is not the core D&D mechanic/loop. EVERY RPG thrives on the interactivity between the players and the DM. Back and forth. The DM presents. The players respond. The DM follows up. Then the players. And so it goes. Short. Bursty. Interactive. Long read-aloud breaks that cycle, people get bored, phones come out, and the DM wonders why no one is engaged.
The read-aloud in this adventure is BAD. It tells instead of showing.Instead of describing a locale, scene, event, it instead tells the players what their characters think and feel. “Every instinct tells you to run.” “By the flickering of your torchlight …” This is some hollow and false attempt to write an impactful encounter by making the players feel something. But it’s doing it by TELLING them instead of SHOWING them. You write a description that makes the payers feel a certain way, yo udon’t write a description that TELLS them tey feel a certain way. Besides, it’s also embedding actions in the read-aloud, assuming they are using torches, etc. This is never good. “You walk around the pyramid and see nothing”, again, in the read-aloud and again, assuming player actions and destroying the interactive loop of D&D. When you put extra descriptions in the read-aloud then you prevent the players from taking the actions with their characters. Instead of the read-aloud describing the first room and every detail of every aspect, instead the adventure should give a general overview and then allow the players have their characters investigate, with additional details coming out as they walk around and look at things. This preserves the interactivity loop.
The DM text in this adventure is BAD. Mountains and mountains of backstory in the rooms. This monster is here because of X, Y, and Z, which goes on for a paragraph. This is not what goes in to a D&D adventure. Or, to be more specific, this is not what should USUALLY go in to a D&D adventure. This sort of backstory, why the monster is there, why the trap was placed, what the room used to be used for, etc, is only of interest if it somehow drives the action of the adventure. The Why’s of things are less important than the current interactivity. The Why’s are for readers. The Why’s are a plot guide for a series Tv writer. Interactivity is, instead, aimed at ACTUAL PLAY. That thing we’re supposed to be using this for? And the Why’s get in the way, clogging up the text, making it hard for the DM to find the information they do need during actual play.
And then, at one point, you see a succubus in a circle. As a read-aloud, one of your twelve henchmen guar buddies walks over the circle and gets kissed out by her, drained. *sigh* I knew this was coming when I saw you had twelve buddies going with you. Not this, explicitly, but something like it. The NPC’s being dumb.
There’s nothing to see here in this adventure. Just room after room of undead, etc, animating and attacking when you enter the room. All combat, no treasure is not exactly the crafty OSR play I am expecting.
Maybe my car will get hit by a truck today.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The preview is six pages and shows you the intro and several of the room keys. So, a good preview since it shows you some of the encounters, the core loop of the adventure, so to speak. Take a look at some of the read-aloud and bask in it.
Travelers have long considered Hagsjaw a place to avoid. The town is known to outsiders by whispered tales of witches and strange doings in the old days. Once terrorized by a wretched coven of witches known as the Karnley Hags, the town was held in a grip of fear that saw its citizens oppressed and its children stolen. Anyone who dared oppose the hags was viciously murdered. When the witches were eventually overthrown and hanged in the town square, they muttered a unified curse with their last breaths, promising nothing less than misery and doom for all who remained in Hagsjaw. That was a century ago, and now Hagsjaw is little more than a forgotten watering hole. Time has not treated the decaying town or its folk kindly; it seems to die out more and more as each generation passes. The farms at the edge of town are empty of cattle and crops, the town’s buildings are crumbling, and even the sagging roofs of the abandoned, twin steeple church don’t look like they’ll hold up much longer. There’s little left to suggest that the town hadn’t withered away completely… until recently.
This 22 page investigation adventure is fairly straightforward and OOZES with flavour. Mostly horror/investigation, it’s basic form should translate easily to just about any genre, from CoC to Modern and maybe even to SciFi. The evocative writing is long and there’s significant room for improvement in that area.
Let’s start out with two important notes. First, I love decrepit towns and villages and adventures in them. Second, I think that adventures with a strong horror theme translate well to almost every genre and RPG system. If you’re allowed ANY supernatural in the system then horror is horror and good horror adventures tend to use simple non-genres specific creatures (ghosts, witches, etc) of which the theming is more important than the specific stats, and the themes tend to genre-hop well.
Horror this is. The creatures you face are a blobby-like gelatinous human-ish creature … stat’d as a gibbering mouther. But because the emphasis is on the description rather than just saying “there’s a gibbering mouther in the church” it allows the creature to translate well. It’s a gelatinous blob/human/form creature first. This is EXCELLENT. The emphasis is on the creature and what the stats say is of secondary important. Flavour tends to always triumph over mechanics. This extends to the strange lights on the edge of the foggy forest … and a cliff. Will of the wisps. The use of generic “witches” and a witch coven in the backstory. That crosses genres well. They come back, as a kind of spirit of posession-ghost, taking over villagers and then charming more. That translates well. And then you have a mob of villagers, possessed, bribed, etc. Again, translates well. A straight up ghost? Yup, translate well. Maybe the only thing that doesn’t translate well is a halfling and a stayr. The halfling feeds you information because he was alive to see the witches hang, originally, a hundred or so years ago. Turn them in to an old man and shorten the time a bit and it works. The satyrs could just be degenerate villagers in the woods, ala HPL, and it wouldn’t loose anything. It might even work better, if The Old Gods didn’t play a part in your game world. Anyway, takaeway is that a well-written horror adventure relies on themes, like hanged witches, 3’s and the like, and this is a well written horror adventure. Not exactly scary, but you FEEL the creepiness viscerally.
And you feel it not only because of the well executed themes but also because the writing is evocative. This great writing extends even to the hooks. Throw away hook. The worst ever. Caravan guard. Sent by the church, etc. But given fresh breathe by how they are written. The caravan guards? The first line is “Storm’s a comin’ … we better get off the road.” BAM! Instantly sets the tone, even before someone says “that place don’t nobody e’eer go.” Twist the language. Torture it. But communicate the FLAVOUR to the DM, and this does that. And it does it over and over and over again. Great, well written sentences. Great word choice that makes you FEEL the scene, and therefore be more likely to translate it to the players.
The writing here is very sticky. You remember the FEEL of the place. Which is good because it’s not organized very well. Details are buried in those evocative paragraphs. While they do a great job conveying a vibe that vibe is useless to the DM at the table running it if they can’t remember it. This is typically solved by writing text that’s easy to scan. But paragraphs don’t scan well without bolding, italics, bullets, whitespace, indents, etc. And this don’t do that. What is DOES do is bury information in weird places. The local farm has a great little thing about whipperwools. But that information, that there were hundreds, isn’t where you need it. The farm doesn’t tell you that, a person will tell you that. It needs to located someplace where it’s useful to the task at hand: an NPC communicating it. Otherwise it’s useless text that clogs up the DM’s ability to scan the text while running the game. And it’s TOO good to give up. This happens over and over again. Great NPC’s, over written, or, perhaps, not organized well enough to easily run them during play. (And the NPC’s are really really good. From the old coot to the rando’s you can throw in. Tropes, leveraged, are a good thing when done well.)
Treasure is light for a S&W game. But it’s also got versions for 5e and Pathfinder, so I suspect no one upped it for S&W. The Frogs could do a MUCH better job in that regard. It would help better communicate that they give a shit about S&W. Although … layout seems cleaner and more modern than the Frog adventures I remember in the past, the memories anyway, so maybe they are stepping up their game? Anyway …
Let’s talk some magic treasure! How about this? “This silver ring is fashioned to look like monstrous, overlapping claws clutching each other in a circular pattern. Once each day, the
wearer can summon forth a swarm of disembodied, clawed hands that crawl over one creature …” Great physical description (again that evocative writing) and effect (that then gets a mechanical description, but, at least it starts with the non-mechanical.) A certain potion is “horrible-smelling black ichor.” Good writing, even if “horrible smelling” is a conclusion that is telling instead of showing.
The adventure design relies on the party being nosy nellies. Or, ratherm a mob attacks them the first night and the party is expected to follow up on that if they have not followed up on things previously. There’s also a trip in to the woods which I don’t think is telegraphed as clearly as it could be. Essentially, half the adventure lies in the woods, or comes from it, and there’s not much i9n the way of pointing people to that as the next step. Easily solved by a DM dropping some hint in questioning, but, still, a slight weakness in the adventure there.
The whole things FEELS like someone who had never seen an RPG write an adventure and then stat’d it for the mechanics and that’s a VERY good thing. And I don’t mean the mechanics are wonky or don’t make sense, they do. I mean it feels like someone came up with ideas and then looked to see what the closest thing mechanically was to them. That’s a great way to design. It’s not a blob because it’s a gibbering mouther. It’s a gibbering mouther because it’s a blob. The church in town is boarded up and you have to break in. But it feels more like a real world imagining of a boarded up church you’re breaking in to then it does some kind of fantasy lockpick/knock kind of thing. The basement of a farmhouse is unnaturally cold. IN a supernatural adventure? Really? Yes, it has brown mold. Shit makes sense in this. You can telegraph it, it makes sense, layers still won’t get it, until AFTER The encounter, when they are kicking themselves. That’s good.
You probably can’t save the village from the decline it was going through. But, if you save the villagers then “They carry the names of these heroes with them as they tell tales around the campfire or trade news with those traveling through.” The actions have consequences and the parties fame will grow. That’s a good reward.
So, overall, a great adventure. I’d recommend this if it were organized a bit better. As written, it is highlighter and note taking fodder to run it. It’s the designer’s job to ensure I don’t have to do that. Design is good. Evocative is good. Interactivity is good enough. But it needs better organization. And I got No Regerts saying that.
Also, there’s no level designation anywhere on the cover or product description. That’s a MAJOR fail by the publisher.
This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is only four pages and doesn’t show you ANYTHING of the adventure except the background. That’s a shitty preview. A couple of town entries, or a page of encounters is what should be in the preview, to let the buy know what kind of writing to expect.
Cha’alt is the beast of a book (218 pages) I’ve been working on for the past year. It’s a ruined world focusing on a couple of introductory dungeons before getting to the main event – the megadungeon known as The Black Pyramid. The Black Pyramid is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Unique design, purpose, feel, magic items, NPCs, monsters, factions, motives, agendas, strangeness, the works! There’s a decent amount of setting detail besides dungeoncrawling – space opera bar, domed city, mutants, weird ass elves, desert pirates, a city ruled by a gargantuan purple demon-worm, and much more!
This 218p book is part setting and part 111 room dungeon. It’s Venger doing what Venger does, in terms of creativity, and Venger Under Control when it comes to his worst qualities (writing too much, for example.) As written, the setting is better than the main adventure, The Black Pyramid dungeon. You could tweak it and make it better. Then it would be one of the best Rifts hexcrawls ever.
So, two books in one. The first chunk is a description of the world the Black Pyramid dungeon sits in, as well as a couple of smaller dungeon. Those two mini-dungeons are perhaps representative of some of Vengers worse work. Linear-ish, and maybe starting off by nuking your L1 characters with a fireball from a 7HD invisible wizard in the first room. But, let’s ignore those two efforts.
The game world is a mashup of every post-apoc trope ever. Independent city states. Giant mecha city. Domed city. Roving tribes of primitive wastelanders. Giant sandworms. Cthulhu shit and cultists. Galactic Star Empires. Heavy Metal. You name it and Venger threw it in. Dune-like Spice fracking, methcrystals, and even sex panther cologne from the Anchorman movies. El Senor Venger Assman don’t know know restraint, and that’s a good thing for something like that. So, take about half of those RIfts supplements books, distill them down to about a column each, and call that your game world. Groovy. Best Rifts/Gamma World setting ever. I remember some blog that had something like a UFP Starship crew messing around on Carcosa. It reminds me a lot of that, except you’re not the starship crew. Probably. I call this a Yul Brenner. And it’s a decent Yul Brenner. Enough detail in those columns to inspire the DM, which is what fluff should do. Basically, while exploring the main event (The Black Pyramid) the party might need something/want to do something outside of the dungeon and that’s where this support material comes in. Healing, complications for the DM to throw in, get a replacement arm that’s robotic from the robo-surgeon in the domed cities, or sell your chthonic artifact. That’s the real purpose of this section, which lasts about half the book. Like I said, I’m kinder these days about background fluff.
And then there’s Maud. I mean, The Black Pyramid. This is the focus of the book and the reason you bought it. This is an absurdist funhouse dungeon with no pretext to it. Blue Medusa may be the closest analogy. A bunch of vignettes, a set piece in each room, described and the players encountering it. Blue Medusa, though, had some internal logic. There was some pretext. Some of the rooms worked together. It kind of made sense.
Not this. “Funhouse Dungeon” is thrown around a lot. I suggest that we are all individuals, err, I mean hyperbolics, at least in this area. The Black Pyramid has no logic at all behind it. Imagine an army of 10,000 men in a 10×10 room. And 18 Cthulhus in the next room with 12 Abolethethsin a desert room in the door on the other side. I’m not a simulationist. Food, water, bathrooms, neighbors … I don’t think I’m really hung up on that shit. But here Venger pushes past any semblance of suspension of disbelief. Suspending your suspension of disbelief, as it were. One room has a movie theater, with patrons. How did they get there? What do the people next door think? Travel rights? Nothing matters. It just is. Run it. The Peewee’s Playhouse room? Just run it. Any of a hundred other joke rooms? Just run it.
This then is your main qualification for wanting this, at least to run. Do you want to run a game like that? A game in which nothing matters? I realize that statement could be taken as me poking fun, or being negative, but I’m not being that when I say it. Do you want to run a funhouse? A REAL funhouse? Then this is for you.
It’s got an index. The rooms are fairly well organized, maybe tending to the lengthier side of things in places, but not terrible in that regard. Something is going on in each, in some fashion, so it’s not the expanded minimalism that others engage in. It’s ok. I’m too traumatized, still to this day, by WG7. I can’t enjoy a real funhouse dungeon.
But …
Listen to the Voice saying Follow Me …
Venger ‘The AssMan’ Satan has missed a real opportunity with Chaalt. Or, maybe, that opportunity still exists. This COULD be the greatest Rifts/Gamma World adventure to ever exist. EVAR. Both of those have a serious fanbase behind them and neither has anything like “Anything Good” to support them. Of course you can’t call it for Rifts cause Kevin will sue the fusk out of you.
But …
If you take The Black Pyramid, each of its little vignettes, and instead give it room to breathe … you turn it in to a HexCrawl! The most bestest post-apoc hexcrawl evar! Then it has room. The pretext is handled almost automatically. The fucking dungeon is really a pointcrawl anyway, this one in particular. Venger’s got some pretext “connecting tubes’ thing to connect his little vignettes in extradimensional space, but why not instead just go all in and make it a hexcrawl, turning each room in to a hex? You spend, what, two months rearranging the rooms a bit to make a bit more sense and fitting them in to the most minimal pretext and logic possible. This, then, would be a chance for Venger to go mainstream. Capture all of that Rifts/Dark Sun/Gamma World/Eberron demand.
This funhouse would work that way. The pretext is easy. It’s a hexcrawl, that’s how people got there. A little bit more work, a couple of months, rewriting and rearranging. Then it’s yours Venger! All of the success ever in the world! But you gotta put in a little extra work to turn it in a hexcrawl is a little pretext. I suspect, though, Venger is morally opposed to that though.
This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is the first 32 pages. As such you get to see the Gamma World like game world. It would have been better to also include a few pages of actual encounters in the pyramid, maybe one of its maps also, so people knew just how funhouse and pointcrawl they were buying.
The link to the product in this review is probably an affiliate link. If you follow the link and buy the product, I make some money. Just thought you should know.
