Wherein Evil Lies – The Black Chapel

Posted on December 18, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
Richard J Leblanc
New Big Dragon Games
OSR Stuff
Levels 3-5

The Black Chapel adventure

Lemures have begun to emerge from the small shrine known simply as the Black Chapel. Surely, some sort of evil has been set upon the world and must be stopped before it’s too late!

This is a digest sized zine with 47 pages that focuses on evil type things. It includes an eleven page dungeon adventure with about thirty rooms in an evil chapel of hell. It’s a fun little interactive and evocative place that could use some trimming of superfluous information and phrasing. Which means it’s good but not great.

The zine, proper, has some new classes, spells, monsters/undead, and a few (great) tables in the back on Quirks when you become unhinged, methods of sacrifice, and evil hooks … like “local river turns to blood.” Sweet! I approve! But the focus of this review is on the adventure, The Black Chapel.

There are a couple of rooms above ground and quite a few more, thirty or so, below ground in the main chapel proper. The blurb about lemures, while true, is just some bs; there’s no real reason or hook beyond a “farmers have 10kgp” … I’d instead use a few of the evil hooks from the last page of the zine, drop them in to my campaign over time, and eventually lead the party here. It’s just a place.

Interactivity here is good. “Delicious”, I might even add. There is a lot for the party to play with, from unholy water fonts, to holes to put your fingers in. One room is a hallway with statues. They have names. There are two empty pedestals with the names “self.” It’s pretty obvious you should get up on the pedestal IN THE EVIL TEMPLE and say your name … IN THE EVIL HELLSPAWN TEMPLE. Do you wanna do it? Huh? Wanna say your true name in the evil temple to hell? That is fucking wonderful. It’s that’s delight of both the players and the DM kind of knowing what is going to happen … a situation telegraphed, and a challenge accepted by the players. It’s wonderful and this adventure has several of those moments. 

Even better … nothing bad happens when you say your name. In fact, a secret door opens! This follows the rules that you can’t fuck over the players time and again and still expect them to swallow the bait. You have to have some bad with the good and this adventure includes that. Interactivity is high and really good.

Magic and treasure are pretty good as well, usually with an evil bend that is not TOO evil. Loose 1HD and gain a point of STR. A ring of summoning hell hounds … that attack everyone except the summoner. Choices to be made and magic items, with flaws, to leverage results in players making choices about risks to take and that kind of tension is fun in an RPG. The items in this, beyond being unique items, offer those choices in many cases. 

Description are decently evocative. You really get the sense of a forbidding black chapel to evil. Black granite baptismial fonts of unholy water. Hauntingly-beautiful frescoes of cult members in loin cloths who are self-flagellating. The smell of oil permeating rooms. There’s a good effort here to up the descriptive game. And, as mentioned, it all works together to build this feeling of dread.

And it goes overboard in places. “the scent of burnt hair sneaks past the nostrils and into the mind.” Ok buddy, we’re pushing flowery prose more than a bit with that one. I get the idea, which is good, but I also cringe a little a it. I’ll take that, though, over another “large chest” and bother boring descriptive words that make it in to the text. Or phrases like “It appears to be …” and other padding. This is another case where Ray’s editing/style guide for RPG’s would have been useful.

There’s also a large number of asides and purpose/historical notes in the text that only serve to pad it out. “(once Master of Malbolge, but now exiled from the Nine Hells)” and “(and was likely carved when Moloch held higher standing)” and so on. Purpose, history, asides … you can get away with an occasional one but paying in too many makes the text harder to read.

This combines with a certain tendency in Leblanc’s writing to focus a bit much on the physicality and mechanics of things. A pedestal 1 foot wide and 3 feet tall … or a text description of the length and direction of a hallway, that copies what is already present on the map. Combine with the other issues and the room descriptions can be pulled to the mundane instead of the wonderfully evocative. 

But … it’s still a decent adventure. And, overall, the zine proper is worth it just to steal some of those tables!

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/282689/Wherein-Evil-Lies?1892600

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The Vaults of Obryn Sapravda

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Steve Wachs
Red Pub Games
1e
Levels 4-6

… But now the long lost abode of Obryn Sapravda has been found!  Your band of brave adventurers has been hired to explore their depths, and learn the fate of the legendary mage.  Your mission is frought with secrecy and intrigue. Can you unravel all the mysteries of The Vaults of Obryn Sapravda?

This 111 page dungeon adventure uses 54 pages to describe  a few dozen rooms spread across four or five levels. Interesting interactivity and some decent magic items are present, but the entire adventure is done in the verbose tactical style of 4e, this being a 4e conversion, that makes it very hard for me to imagine being playable without substantial effort on the DM’s part. And is almost universal that “requires substantial effort on the DM’s part” ain’t an adventure I’m gonna recommend. 

In ten-is years of reviews I’ve come to recognize certain styles of adventures. One may be the overly verbose style of the Dungeon Magazine era. Another is the indie no room numbers” stye, and another the scene-based style. 4e adventures tended to have their own style as well. The rooms tended to be more like areas and encounters were set pieces. There was an emphasis on terrain, and these set pieces would run to several pages in the adventure. Maps emphasized the battle map nature of the game. (All of which emphasized the tactical mini’s approach 4e seemed to encourage, but, whatever, I’m not here to slam 4e yet again. But … Fuck 4e and “tactical miniatures” rpg’s!) This adventure is a conversion from 4e and thus has all of that.

Given my “Fuck 4e!” comments you may be surprised to learn that I don’t hate this adventure. Well, ok, I don’t LIKE it, but I don’t LOATHE it either. 

There are common elements shared between 4e and a more freeform experience that are positive. The emphasis on terrain, for example. While 4e inevitably emphasized the movement/combat tactics issues, in a mechanical way, with terrain, it’s also the case that varied terrain in a room or dungeon is a great thing. Shelves, precipices, sam-level stairs, muddy areas … those add to the varied environment. 

Further, this adventure has things that the usual 4e adventure did not. Multiple levels are present here, around five or so, I think. Non-standard magic items are present, and the one that do tend to book are offered smoe variety, like a bronze-headed +1 mace. A little extra description can go a long way to make the boring +1 weapon better. Mechanics are, I think, one of the worst magical effects, but by beefing up the description you can still have something interesting. And this adventure does that with all of it’s magic items, at a minimum, and puts in some others, beyond book items.

More than this though, it is the adventures emphasis on interactivity that sets it apart from just about every other 4e adventure … and most OSR adventures as well. 

Interactivity is fairly high in this, even without the “set piece” like combat rooms. As a kind of platonic example, you can find a scroll in one room under a false floor. In another room is a statue in the middle of a basin, the basin filled with sludge and goop … the kind no sane adventurer fucks with. Fucking with the statue results in some bubbles in the sludge … you can get it to move, revealing a hold underneath, and a magic rope that the statue will hope in it’s hands … it’s will respond to some commands to lower/raise people in to the hole. This is the sort of interactivity that makes dungeons comes alive. Potential danger, explorations, discovery, and wonder. That’s D&D.

But … this thing has deal breakers.

First, there’s no map. The last fifty of so pages are full of battlemaps, and each room has it’s own little reference map, but there’s no single unified map. This makes understanding how things fit together quite rough. You have to rely on the notes for each room to understand tat exit hole A goes to entry hole B in room B4. This is CRAZY. Given the length I can’t understand why an overview map wasn’t included. The overall impact is a significant contribution to these feeling like individual isolated set-piece encounters instead of an integrated adventure.

Second are the entries proper, and their length. We’re talking four pages for a room, in some cases. Tactics notes. Read aloud. Multiple read-alouds. Overly details dimensions. Its hard to actually understand how the room is supposed to work b ecause there is soooo much spread out over sooo many pages.

A Trap! The chance you trigger it is 100- 1% for each point of dex -40% if you have infravision. Just a quick little calculation!

This text is dense and detailed, waaaayyyyy too detailed for each room. Exactly as one would expect from a 4e adventure.

And, at the end, you get up to 1500 XP as story rewards. I can haz sadz. 🙁

I understand this was all the norm in 4e. That doesn’t make it right then, or now, even though this ia 4e conversion. What it DOES do though it give me hope that the designer will get better in organizing their material and concentrating on the proper aspects of the adventure. Like I said, the interactivity is there. Some of the imagery, also, like the bubbling from escaping air under a sludge pool. What e needs to learn to do is delete about 75% of his writing. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. The last two pages begint to describe the dungeon and show you the first (small) and room and begin to show the next room, which is MULTIPLE pages long … but you just get to see the first. Note the emphasis on the physicality of locations, where things are and how big they are. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/85791/Vaults-of-Obryn-Sapravda-4E?1892600

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(5e) The Hanged Man

Posted on December 14, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Davis Chenault
Troll Lord Games
5e
Mid Level? or High Level? It says both ...

A long journey under an azure sky filling with brackish, boiling clouds ends at a large oak tree. Here, from a muscled branch, a man hangs limply by a thick rope strangled around his neck. Beyond, a dim, rising, yellow moon silhouette’s a village. Snaking, ashy tendrils of smoke coil above rooftops, lights glitter in windows while a miasmal fog creeps down upon the village from freshly churned fields. Then, as sudden as lightening, a fife and fiddle begin a joyous tune. This stops as abruptly as it started. All that now can be heard is a rope straining and groaning with the weight of the hanged man.

This 21 page adventure describes a village with about two dozen homes and about twice as many people. A number of who want to kill you. The setup is good, the people are interesting, their descriptions are evocative … and it’s mostly unusable because it uses room/key format on the village instead of providing the DM the tools they need to run a village of murderous people.

Some people in the village hung an innocent hang. The man hanging from the tree is the first thing the party comes across on their way in to town. What they don’t know is that in punishment the gods cursed them the abyss, and they can only appear in the mortal realm, village and all, for two days a year. During that time some are content just to live their lives as they once did. Others are now murderous, corrupted by the abyss. Also, their heads are not well attached to their bodies and their bodies rot over the 48 hours, especially the last 12, that they are in the mortal realms. In to this the party stumbles three hours in to their return. Also, if the party can kill EVERYONE in the village inside of the remaining 45 hours then the curse will be broken … although it’s not clear to me from the adventure how the party learns of that. There’s one couple who seem to be willing to, slowly, reveal the curse, but that’s it.

So, about 48 people in the village. About Twenty or slow motivations/how they react. About 48 or so different descriptions. A pseudo-timeline of events. And each has some kind of idea/something they know, or don’t, about the hanged man, which investigating is the pretext to start the adventure … although this is never explicitly mentioned.

Unfortunately ALL of this is buried in room/key format. Building 1, from the map, someones home, with the key named as such: “Bill & Bertha Henderson.” Then there’s a description of what they were like in life, before the curse. Then there’s a description of what they do now, their current personalities. Then there’s a description of what they know about the hanged man/that situation and some more personality about their characters now. Then there may be notes about events and/or how they react to the timeline/party that the villager is getting ready to throw. Then there’s some notes about how they react to being attacked. Then stats.  Then there is a description of both of their heads … since they can fly off of the body and fly around on their own, eventually. And this is repeated about 24 times, once for each building. For about forty people in total all the buildings. 

And the content is great. From what they know about the hanging to their current goals, to the head descriptions. It’s almost all oriented towards actual play. “Almost” meaning theirs some information about their past lives and other details that are NOT actual play oriented. Normally I’d comment how this gets in the way of the encounter keys, but not in this case.

That’s because in this case it ALL gets in the way of running the adventure. I believe this adventure is unrunable in its current form, at least without serious highlighting and note taking. Embedding the timeline as well as the subplots in each NPC home description was NOT a good choice, at all. 

What this needs is a seperate timeline section, with the subplots integrated in to that and cross-referenced to their NPC entries and a seperate section for the subplots. Thus, a list of of subplots/how NPC’s react. A timeline. A brief NPC description. A table of NPC descriptions and personalities/notes that is cross referenced to the timeline/plots/events/map. THAT would make this adventure runnable, a hell of an adventure at that.

Are you willing to put in that work?

I’m not. I believe it’s the designers job to do that. This would be a terrific adventure rereleased in a usable format.

This is $10 at DriveThru, with a C&C version available also. The preview is six pages. The last two pages give you two entries for homes in the village. That should give you idea of what to expect with this adventure, how things are laid out, etc. Note the intermingling of data. Keep that all in your head. Then augment it by twenty more houses and forty more people. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/292858/5th-Edition-The-Hanged-Man

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The Isle of Forgotten Gods

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Chance Dudinack
Self Published
B/X
Levels 3-5

An age of splintered tribes and infighting ended with the death of the priest-king of the Hunahpu people. As punishment, the gods sealed their sacred pyramid with powerful magic. Generations later, those old gods and their kingdom have been forgotten. With their powers diminished, the seal on the pyramid has broken, leaving all its ancient treasures ripe for the taking.

This 38 page digest adventure features a fifteen location pointcrawl on a mezo-american island and two expanded locations: a dungeon with about 25 rooms and an evil frog-man village with about ten. It does a good job at a passing pop-culture meso-american, and the entries don’t overstay their welcome. 

Ok, island, one village, deeply rainforested, hence the pointcrawl. Rumors of ancient treasures in the jungle. Go!

And thus begins your pointcrawl through the jungles. Verdant valleys, meso-ruins with pyramids, jaguars, evil tribesmen … and lots of vampires and demons. I guess the vampire thing fits in well with the blood thing that we sometimes think of meso-america as having? I like them here, their more primative and gaunt look doesn’t scream vampire and its a good template for a weirdo monster for the party to encounter. Likewise the demons, which are unique in this, have some personality to them and they fit in well with the weird, primitive, brutal vibe thing going on in this. 

The encounters, both in the pointcrawl wilderness and in the dungeons, are pretty well put together. They feel just a little bit different, and because of that a bit fresher. Caves with sharp teeth entrances seen on the distance. Fire opals in lava pools. Bodies in trees and jaguars peering down at you. Statues with heads to turn. Fangs on snake sculptures to pull like a lever. And, of course, a decent amount of blood sacrifice required in various rooms/locations.

Magic is decent, as is mundane treasure. It’s all well described without being pedantic and varies, in about half, from book standard objects. From an obsidian tipped spear to a suit of jaguar-skin armor … as +1 leather that lets you speak with cats. And it can go further … how about eating the still beating heart from someone to get a +2 stat bump, or using a coutyl feather for a stat bump OR experience? This are all good example of turning a book items just a little, be they monsters or magic or mundane, and in putting in exceptional items for the party to play with and experiment with. Exactly what an adventure should be doing. Treasure is probably ok, especially is you bring back the main one, to make the adventure actually worthwhile.

There are misses. Rumors that could be more in voice. A lack of “what landmarks can I see” both from the coast and upon entering a courtyard. A few magic items don’t try very hard, like a ring that gives you a +! Level when turning. Boring and out of place, especially compared to things like shrunken head magic items also present. In at least one location an order of battle is missing, when you encounter evil frog-men in their open compound. In other places the text can be a bit confusing. “A coiling feathered serpent has been sculpted over the back wall of the room.” one room tells us. Then we’re told you can crawl through the mouth, but nowhere previous do you really get the sense of SCALE of the sculpture that this would imply. Just little bits like that in various places where initial encounter impressions don’t match, I think, what was intended. A choice extra word or two would have helped.

How can you not like an adventure that has a swarm of venomous spiders swarming from the mouth of a corpse, ala Mummy. 

This is likely to be an acquired taste, with its strong meso-american theming, but a nice little place a little funhousey, in terms of high interactivity, without being silly. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages long. It shows you several of the pointcrawl locations as well as four or so of the dungeon locations. It’s an excellent resource for telling if the writing, amount of detail, and theming are what you are looking for.

Also, the only place the adventure level is mentioned is on the cover. Bad designer! Put it in the DriveThru description also!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/295092/The-Isle-of-Forgotten-Gods?1892600
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Encephalon Gorgers on the Moon

Posted on December 9, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
Encephalon Gorgers on the Moon
By Casey W. Christofferson
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 7-8

The Forest of Night has always been a strange place. The trees are far too tall and far too thick here. Even the bravest of hunters shy away the forest’s higher paths. Now, the folk who live upon the slopes of the mountain have complained of strange occurrences, especially around the time of the full moon. Weird shrieks have been heard in the trees. Some suspect an ancient curse centered on the mysterious ruins on Midnight Mountain. Who will investigate on behalf of the terrified locals?

This 25 page adventure details about twenty wilderness pointcrawl encounters and about ten more rooms … in Moon Domes! Good ideas abound, spoiled by an overly generic style betraying the attempt at THE FANTASTIC  and the Frogs, now seemingly typical, lack of care in editing. 

Hmmm, how to organize this review? The party is engaged because of fears of a plague in the local animal population. They explore a point crawl forest that leads to a moon gate, travel through a pointcrawl weird moon, and then hit some rooms in side a crystal dome, hopefully saving the earth from these weird invaders.

It’s doing a pretty good job at some of the theming. The forest section hashas some theming around cats, with Cat Lord backstory, which fits in well with the moon theme and those half-remembered tales of cats and the Dreamlands. On top of this, intellect devourers are featured, with packs of house cats hunting them, protecting the forest. Again, nicely done and it fits in well with the descriptions of the environments given and, ultimately, the “weird moon environment” that is to come. The moon is full of crystals and fungus and brain eaters, almost certainly the Frogs version of the (IP protected) Mind Flayers. 

The use of the cats, intellect devourers, mind flayers, crystals, fungus … it all works together well. This is augmented by other encounters, like an evil red mist in a dome of vampires and a small child hooked up with golden wires to machines, with vat brains the like coming calling as well. As an alternative Mind Flayer vision, or a weird moon environment, the ideas here are good ones that work well together and the text tends to use of language which both emphasize each and fit them together. During the lunar transport the party feels “… a sensation like a hook snagging their guts as it rips them across the gulf …” That’s good language to convey a mood.

The Frogs, though, have an issues in their presentation. The editing is sloppy. I’m usually forgiving in this area, especially with frced language issues with our non-English speaking friends, but the Frogs issues are different. Theirs are issues of care: Random simple editing mistakes and logic flaws. In many places in the text there are just random characters hanging out. ”… figure appears. egd Another intellect devourer …” 

But logical inconsistencies about. At one point the text tells that a certain farmers land is the first place the characters pass before getting to the bend in the road that leads in to the Night Forest, the first wilderness pointcrawl. Except it’s not. The map show another path in before this. A lack is mentioned as being 300×600 yards. Except the map clearly indicated it’s about 120’x350’. In fact, the scale of the map proper seems WAY off, with one pointcrawl map indicating a scale of 1 square is 50’ and the moon pointcrawl map indicating one square is 60’. Clearly noted on both maps. This, of course, makes for a  laughably compressed adventuring areas. “Fields of massive semi-sentient and sentient fungi coat the craters and cliffs of the region.” … which might be 500’ in diameter. Not my definition of fields. On top of this there are hold overs in this version to other converted systems. “Make a Delicate Tasks check …” to unhook the brain child from the wires. No one caught this? Again?

And then there are more serious issues. Treasure is light. VERY light. Unless you’re playing 5e or Pathfinder, which I assume this is converted from. But the Frogs should know better, they’re an OSR company, right? Right? On top of this the entire upper half of the moon map is empty, devoid of encounters. Wasted opportunities.

Wanderer encounters are in a small bold font. But the actual monster stats for that encounter are in a LARGER bolded font AND they are “outdented” from the encounter header. Who thought this was a good idea? The first encounter is at the inn, which has a list of guests present. But the timeline is PRESENT in their entries. Thus to understand what is supposed to happen you reference the NPC descriptions. This is a mixing of “NPC” and “timeline” … again … WTF? 

Some stairs connecting the moon domes can be moved. Some cannot be. This is noted in a section of offset text. But the maps here are very good … why not note it on the maps as well, in another color? Doesn’t that help the DM with the tactical situation once the mind flayers are alerted? You know … the thing the text keeps mentioning but provides little guidance on. These themes continue … one room has notes on what happens if the players are captured … but itsn’t that more appropriate for some other text section instead of burying it in a rando room description?

This is $8 on DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages of the product. It would have been better if, say, one of the moon pages were shown also. As is it’s hard to get a feel for the actual writing from the preview. Page six has the farm ‘description.’ Note the nifty idea and also the somewhat outliney description. Page four has one of those 50’ scale maps.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/280638/Encephalon-Gorgers-on-the-Moon-SW?1892600

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(D&D 5e) The Howling Caverns

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
The Howling Caverns
By Colin Le Sueur
By Odin's Beard
5e
Level 1

The hunched beast prowls the forest, sniffing at the still air. The roiling sky flashes and thunder breaks the silence. The time is near and the beast senses it. The monstrous form bounds toward the darkened village, a demonic howl in its throat… Shipwrecked on a perilous shore, a group of adventurers stumble into a blighted land and come face to face with a great black beast with a terrible curse. Can they unravel the mystery and solve the Barghest’s curse before it’s too late?

This 58 page ravenlofty/dread adventure details a small dungeon with about ten locations and some locations outside on the way to the dungeon. It is TERRIBLE. No, wait, that’s what Colin was AFRAID I’d say when he asked me to review it. It’s fairly well done with decent interactivity and good writing and layout. It builds tension. A better job with monster descriptions could be done as well as a few other nits. Impressive effort for a first offering and can easily trump a lot of WOTC/Paizo offerings.

The Mists! The Mists! Oops, no, not the mists this time. A shipwreck. A common trope that is overused as a railroad handwave, but fine for a campaign start, and this does look like the start of an adventure path-y sort of thing. Washed up on shore you find yourselves in a Ravenlofty type of land, full of ominous things and, as you find, ruled over by the vampire Strahd … err I mean Sylva. The setup here is a little rough; the adventure states that there is only one town in this land … and then as DM’s notes that its actually a ruined town covered by a glamour. This would seem to make follow up adventure in this land rough, but we’ll wait and see what happens before judging.

So, shipwrecked. A Barghest shows up on the cliffs and howls, curing the party to only 24 hours of life. Then the dead sailors come back to life and attack with the party then making their to town and learning more about the barghest and where it is located. A short journey overland ensues, with a small dungeon at the end. 

58 pages for a ten room dungeon would normally be a cause for concern. In this case the ten room dungeon takes up about twenty pages, which would still raise eyebrows. It does, however, use the page count to its advantage. Little mini-maps of the rooms in question and some decent art related to the various room features take up some decent real estate, and then the formatting is generous in its use of whitespace, bullets, section breaks and headings. The result is one of those rare things: an expansive page count that’s not fluffed to fuck all with irrelevent trivia. 

A small read-aloud section heads each section and then some bullets describing each feature. Following this are some bolded sections that describe features and give more details, such as mechanics and so on. At the end of each section are specific headings for exits, encounters, and treasure, further elaborating on details mentioned high up. If you are willing to accept the more verbose style of mechanics that 5e has then this format works fairly well to deliver results. You can find information easily, mechanics are easy to pick out, and it doesn’t focus on the trivia of the encounters, instead focusing on short bursts of descriptive text. The rooms, even the complex ones, tend to not overstay their welcome. Good indeed for a 58 page adventure with two pages per room, on average. 

An example of the forethought comes right up front. The designer explains that if the room has magic, evil, or undead, something that the party might detect/be detecting for, its listed up front in parens. (Undead, Evil) and so on right at the start of the room description. This is great attention to detail, anticipating common issues at the table and providing a solution to assist the GM. “Yes, you detect evil.” can be offered instead of a “well, hang on, let me take a minute to read the description. Hmmm, no, I don’t think so.”

NPC’s are well described with short little bursts of detail, like a bartender who’s dirty shirt doesn’t cover his pot belly. Magic items get a little extra flair, like a blue scarf that makes undead appear human or human appear undead … with undead enemies not really focusing on them granting them a kind of limited invisibility. Nice! A new spell, Words Take Flight, causes words on a page to turn in to various birds and fly away to deliver messages. How wonderful! Just a simple sentence brings wonder back to a magic spell! The wandering encounters deliver a kind of creeping dread vibe. Zombies claw a tree with a hanged man in it. Or a dire wolf and wolf fight over a corpse. Mood is set. Players are on edge. Excellent!

I shall now nitpick this thing to death. Do not confuse this with I Loathe It.

There are some details that are missing. An alter has a journal on it with entries from several days ago. But nothing is offered about what it is/says? And, I must say, the use of a journal is generally bad form. It’s twin sister, Bad Guy Monologue, while not present here, is also bad. Some clues are a little … obvious. One of the dead skeleton sailors in the first encounter has a note about barghest details in his satchel. Hmmm … a little too “coincidental” for my tastes. Evil vampire chick engineered the characters shipwreck to have them kill the barghest. Ug, not my favorite trope, although the reasoning here, never stated but obvious, is a good one. The adventure gives some tips of barghest sightings, etc, to add more tension and these could be a little more up front in the text. 

There are some formatting issues in places that are odd. Some offset information (which is used to good effect throughout the adventure) appears in the middle of text paragraphs sometimes, in a way that is jarring. And sometimes it’s not clear what a skill check is doing. Am I making a perception check to find the hidden panel or am I making the check to find the hidden path BEHIND the panel? This happens in multiple places. There’s also clases in the text descriptions. Can a road be both well-trodden (the road description) and unused? (the description of the road in the town’s entry)  Another room mentions lit torches in the wall … in a room that hasn’t been entered for awhile. Magical? Something else? We’ll never know, they are not mentioned again. Just little discrepancies like that.

On some more non-nit-picky notes: 

Wandering encounters/vignettes have a “better than average chance” of happening. I have no idea what that means. It’s followed by “or just place one that you like.” I’m usually against this sort of thing, if you’re going to do that then just make them a part of the adventure proper.

Room Names in the dungeon are fact based. The Wizards Library, and so on. I might instead suggest using a name title that conveys a more interesting vibe. Decrepit Library, or something like that. Same thing: it’s a library, but now we’re embedded some additional information in it. Now when the DM scans the room they are already thinking “decrepit” instead of the far more generic “wizards.”

The town, and the sailors from ship, could have both used a little more detail. A couple of sailor names, with personalities, to die horribly or get attached to before the shipwreck. Or, in town, just a tad more detail on a couple of villagers, etc. As is, the town is an Inn. There’s a ruined stable and ruined temple, but the only “real” place, lived in, is the inn. This leaves the DM to fill in the rest and a couple of a extra entries would have been some nice resource. 

I guess my chief complaint might be with the monsters. There’s a decent pic or two that shows some of them, but I wish the descriptions of them were a little more evocative. Ghouls crawl out from under garbage piles, but the ghoul, proper, or vampire, or whatever, gets little in the way of detail/description. Given the atmosphere developed in the wanderers then it would have been nice to see this carry over to the monsters as well. 

If you accept that 5e is a little more verbose and/or that this is for beginner DM’s, then you’ve got a solid adventure on your hands. It doesn’t PANDER to new DM’s but it also doesn’t handwave the way I can sometimes advocate for. And, in particular, it doesn’t really let its handholding get in the way of finding information or running a room. It supports the DM. The descriptions do feel a little flat at time, or, perhaps, a let down after the good atmosphere developed in the shipwreck, wanderers, town, priest, wilderness encounters. It FEELS to me like the format is somehow clashing with a more evocative picture being delivered. I’m not sure that’s it though. But, that’s just keeping it from being great instead of just good.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you several dungeon encounters. It’s a good preview and also gives you a good idea of the format used in the adventure, the writing style, and how they fit together.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/295047/The-Howling-Caverns-5e?1892600

Posted in 5e, Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 1 Comment

Melan, Prince and Bryce meet in Ohio

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Bryce Lynch

So, there I am, in Ohio, researching my families murderous past in the Appalachia region of the southeast, near Athens. Low and behold, it turns out Prince is there! I quickly drop my shovel and crowbar, kick over the headstone and head to Athens … to a motel that charges by the hour and you can pay in cash. Hmmmm.

Much liquor was consumed, in to the night and blackberry mead starting at 8am, lasting throughout several days. We discussed all of you, talking about each of you behind your backs.

But Lo! Who did we run in to but Melan! It’s true! We were out hiking a part of a conservation trail and we saw him upahead, coming out of some kind of tall grass patch. WTF?A?A That can’t be Melan?!?! But it was!

He was in that part of Ohio also, for work, consulting on traffic circle design! We had no idea, but there he was! Fortune favors the reviewers!

We quickly found a latrine with all thee of us wallowing in our kingdoms of filth, in to the wee hours!

The next morning we got some someone to take our picture together at a local diner! We stayed, discussing the finer points of Encounter Critical, until they kicked us out.

Observations:

I give this meeting of the three of us a 10/10!

Posted in Reviews | 43 Comments

The Misty Halls of Kalavorka

Posted on December 4, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
The Misty Halls of Kalavorka
By R. Nelson Bailey
Dungeoneers Guild Games
1e
Levels 5-7

A lost vale located in a high mountain range is home to a clan of mysterious giants. Sages believe the giants have strange powers that no other of their kind possesses. Yet, no one has heard anything from these giants in decades. Do they still dwell in their misty fastness? Do they really possess these reputed powers, and if they do, what are they? Crafty giants, evil gnomes, and a weird guardian await any adventurers who go seeking the lost halls.

This 44 page adventure features an overland journey through the mountains ending with a four level dungeon with about thirty rooms that used to be a cloud giants home. Social notes abound and one or two interesting rooms are highlights, while a dense DENSE text, hack-a-thon, and the text density subtracting from usability make this a miss. If you lied Gygax’s later TSR adventures then you’ll like this.

Ok, cloud giant dude lives in the mountains and you’re going to see him for pretext reasons. This is more of a location to drop in, so reasons exist in your game and you dropped this in, which is fine. You journey through fog covered mountains for a week or two, arrive at dudes house, and meet his fog giant servants. Who eventually attack you if you don’t attack them. Turns out dude is dead. 

R. Nelson has created something that trends close to the simulationist side of AD&D without going over the line. Multiple encounters have a social aspect to them, folk react the way you would expect and are doing things you would expect. It feels like a realistic environment … if that environment had giants and such in it. And then it has a room or two of weirdness in the end is one of the better, if not best, representations of the ethereal plane and other dimensions that I’ve seen. So mundane adventure. And then the end is weird, much like Tharizdun. 

Wilderness encounters, both random and set, as well as rooms in the manor are relatively lengthy, taking up a column or a quarter column is not uncommon. This generally involves some sort of reaction roll and social encounter notes and then maybe some monster tactics porn. The concepts behind both these are good but their execution is lacking. This is how the Berserker tribes reacts to you, and if you do this then they react that way. These short notes are great. Likewise, combats starting with the baying of the yeth hounds from a distance … great evocative notes. And in fact the adventures writing is at its best when it is dealing with those more evocative areas. It then, though, devolves in to overly prescriptive text, with the tactics porn being a good example of this. First the monster casts this spell then they do this. Then they cast that spell then they do that. These overly prescriptive parts of the adventure are not the best. Skippable, yes, but …

The writing and layout choices in this thing makes my head hurt. The font, spacing, kerning, font size, and layout all seem to contribute to an extreme feeling of DENSITY of text. This is then combined with those prescriptive paragraphs. This is then further exacerbated by a more conversational tone in places and brief sentences or phrases about history and purpose of rooms, areas, etc. Brief adds up. It all combines with a lack of good bolding and whitespace use to create long sections that feel like wall of text. When my eyes can’t focus on the text that’s not good. 

“Thorogang’s ancestors designed this octagonal room to thwart uninvited visitors to the complex. This area holds a large pool, and four false doors.” This is the main description for the Chamber of the Pool, room two in dudes house. Note how it tells us nothing. We already know its octagonal, and has four false doors, from the map. We know it has a pool, from the map. The history of the room doesn’t contribute to the running of the adventure for the players  in any way. This is a bad description in every way. There are seven more paragraphs to this room to dig through. The only thing uncommon about this room is that the initial description is a bit short and not wholly representative of the writing.

The text is padded out. “Furthermore …” or “Simultantionaly two things happen …” This all leads to the extreme length of the text which further contributes to the wall of text issues. Other rooms repeat text. Bobs sitting room is the title of the room and the first sentence tells us that the room is Bobs sitting room. This shit matters; it contributes to the eyes glazed over thing going on in this, and that’s not good. In the end we’re left with writing that is quite long, for a variety of reasons, but not that evocative.

But there are some good things going on in this which makes the rest of the issues a shame. There’s a decent order of battle presented for the giants, and the briefer tactics notes (maybe “guidelines”) are appreciated. But the general text length and formatting makes it hard to take advantage. Likewise the emphasis on social elements is great. Encounters are likely to start with some kind of social element and then perhaps devolve in to combat. This FEELS right. The design here is pretty strong, if not the execution. The baying of the Yeth Hounds and brief little occasional sentences describing fallen and ruined gates, the entrance to the mountain steps of the cloud giant manor, these are section that are short, a sentence or two, and quite evocative. Maybe a little on the drier side, as the entire adventure is (probably due to the length of the text) but you can see these flashes of good text in it that INSPIRE You to run a great encounter. It just doesn’t fucking happen far enough.

A special shout out to the last couple of encounters in this. There’s a brief otherworldly/ crystalline entity room, with some ethereal shit going on in the room right before it. This combines with excellent use of a Thought Eater and some imagery ideas that are quite good. Again, execution could be better, but the ideas are sounds and the imagery that IS present is pretty good, you can recognize it without squinting too hard. Silvery puddles of liquid on the floor … hmmm, I sure that’s ok …

In thinking about this I am reminded both of the wilderness section of Tharizdun (or was is Lost Caverns?) and the steading in G1. There’s an overland travel journey in this and then a giant home that is mostly a tactical hack with the giants using hit and run tactics and making a last stand in a certain room, etc. And like Tharizdun, Lost caverns, and the Steading, most encounters are combat, with a little social roleplaying thrown in, generally based on reaction rolls. Exploration and Interactivity are on the low because of this and, I would suggest, essentially non-existent, comparing it to the interactivity, or perhaps type of interactivity, found in G1.

One of the better Dungeoneers Guild products, if you thought Tharizdun was the pinnacle of adventure design then you’ll probably like this.For me, it comes off too day and too wordy/hard to use. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. It’s just the first five pages though and doesn’t show you any of the encounters, so it’s hard to really tell about the writing style and encounter style. I think, though, that if you read that fourth and fifth page of the preview you can get an kind of idea as to the general writing style and formatting issues. If you can handle that and the review seems appealing then you’ll no doubt like this.

Also, Dungeoneers Guild adventures seem to be getting better. Which is GREAT!


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/289788/The-Misty-Halls-of-Kalavorka-DUNGEON-DELVE-3?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

Salvation

Posted on December 2, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Darvin Martin
Design Mechanism
Mythras
Level 3

Jesra Vorak, a renowned Fighter from Greymoor, hires the characters for a perilous adventure into Ravenholm. On a mission to find her family sword, Salvation, and destroy the enemy that inhabits her ancestral home, Jesra seeks only the most heroic allies. Many dangers await the characters in Ravenholm, most of them unknown; Jesra is determined to fulfil her destiny and cleanse her bloodline of its darkness or die trying. Will the characters become legendary heroes, or be doomed by the Jesra’s obsession?

Well jackass, you’re the one that tosses yourself in to these situations.

One encounter has a merchant on the road in a wagon. His wagon has 30 feral cats in it. They are all polymorphed lesser devils. Do you NEED to read the rest of the review now to get a sense of the adventure?

This fifty page adventure uses twenty pages to describe the lands around a small castle and the castle proper, containing a vampire. It’s an escort mission for a DM Pet NPC and it’s heavy on facts, mechanics, and long paragraphs on the beach that go nowhere and hide the sunset. Yeah it’s fucking Ravenloft, but I’m not going to review it like that.

Are RPG’s about the story the DM is telling? Are RPG’s about an antagonistic DM? Are RPG’s about the DM at all? Are RPG’s about the pedantic way some people roleplay their characters, forgetting they are a part of the group? No, RPG’s are about the players and their characters, together. The story is emergent but it IS about them. 

This adventure is not about the party. It is about an NPC. For this adventure and everything in it is centered around a DM Pet NPC. You get to escort her to her ancestral homelands, find her ancestral sword, travel her ancestral lands, and visit her ancestral castle and kill her ancestor, the vampire dude. Along the way you will be subject to a long masturbatory description about her ancestral sword, that only she can use. Along the way you will face numerous challenges … that only she can overcome. And then of course you will face ol grandpappy vampire dude, who only she can kill with her sword. This is fucked up. We’re not talking Giovanni Chronicles here, but it’s still pretty fucked.

The actual design of the adventure fights play. In the initial village you have to make skill checks to convince the guards to let you in. You are sworn to note tell your real mission, but everyone is a very skilled lie detector and hates you if you lie. And if you tell the truth they probably kick you out. In the village you have to find out that there’s a well with a secret door in it. But it’s a random rumor on the rumor table. So you probably won’t hear it. And if you do then there are guards near the well who don’t want you messing with it (ok, that’s ok, it’s a roleplay/crazy scheme opportunity) and then inside the well you have to have a character who can see in the dark and THEY have to succeed on a perception check. How many fucking secret doors are going to put the door to the rest of the adventure behind? Jesus H Fucking Christ, do not NOT want the party to play the adventure? You know what’s going to happen, the DM is going to fudge it. So why the fuck is it in the adventure? There are a lot of better ways to handle this shit.

There are long Long LONG sections of italics text that make my eyes bleed they are so hard to read. Save your fancy fucking fonts and make do something to make the text easily readable. 

Mechanics and details are embedded in in longform paragraphs, hard to pick out and hard to find during play. Bolding is absent. Does this room have a monster in it? Let me spend ten minutes reading all of the rooms nearby to see who reacts …   this is a thing of NIGHTMARES.

On the plus side there is a room that rains holy water. There’s a 40% chance it spoils when exiting the room. So, continual rain of holy water with 40% of it spoiling is still … yes, that’s right, an infinite amount of holy water! Vampire Dude here We Come!

In spite of my assholery, there are some ok sentences in this A typical room entry might contain:” [] room is badly damaged, showing signs of impending collapse.Mouldy parchment lies around a stone bookshelf set against the south wall, and the remains of a writing desk sit to the west. A door carved with the Vorak crest leads north.” That’s not a terrible description. I did cut all of the pedantic dimensional data and this IS one of the shortest room descriptions. But it’s not terrible, if you ignore the following paragraphs with the mechanics that are hard to pick out. And the 30 polymorphed lesser devils. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. It should have a preview. Everything should have a preview. And the preview needs to show meaningful parts of the adventure, not the title page and the masturbatory backstory. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/257909/R1-Salvation?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 6 Comments

(Review) Red Dead Redemption 2 is a bad game

Posted on December 1, 2019 by Bryce Lynch

Heresy!

I know, hang in there and keep an open mind. It’s not a good game and is, in many ways, a bad game. And I promise I’m not branching out to other game genres. I just had to get this off of my chest.

I’ve bought a PS4 twice now with the explicit purpose of playing RDR2 and have been unsatisfied with the controller in what is, essentially, a shooter, and have sold it. I’m a PC gamer and thus when that version came out I bought it and have been playing it for several weeks now. 

 RDR2 has an excellent open world, full of people and an environment and subsystems that can really bring the world alive, from hunting, to cleaning your guns, to brushing your horse, just to name a couple. The sheer number of different activities you can engage in is mind-boggling.

The voice acting for the main character is excellent, as is much of the voice work, character animations, the script, and for the most part the story. The camp you are a part of, the people and how they interact and what they do, is top notch. Really some of the best I’ve ever seen.

And yet I think it’s a bad game. This comes from two core components: the gameplay and the mechanics. Mechanics first.

The game is slow and tedious. Doing anything seems to require substantial travel time between areas. Even after unlocking fast travel it’s slow to return to your fast travel base, because of choices made. Travel by stage and train requires long load times with useless animations. Further, your character and horse feel sluggish. “Real world physics!”, I can hear the shouts ever from here deep inside the volcano lair. Maybe, but tedium in sacrifice of fun is not a good choice on the designers part. It’s their job to solve those problems. Looting bodies takes forever as you watch a slow animation scene. There are parts of the map where you can’t run forcing you to suffer through long slow tedious walks  and mini-animation scenes. 

Even a month on the game crashes at least twice a day for me, and I don’t play a substantial amount. I’ve got a decent rig, why do I suffer with slowdows, crashes and stutters? I bought the game through Epic and couldn’t get it to work, requiring me to return it and repurchase through Rockstar proper. Even then I need to run a third party CPU app to keep it from pausing because it can’t manage its CPU itself. And I STILL suffer from pauses and stutters, but at least its playable now.

Moving on, all of those mini-games? Pointless. Hunting is tedious and the upgrades it provides are unneeded. Poker, dominoes, mumblepeg, photography, and a seemingly nonstop amount of other activities from collecting flowers to collecting dinosaur bones … all of that is useless. It doesn’t actually get you anything meaningful in the game. They are just tacked on little items, useless. 

The core story missions and the side missions suffer from a lack of depth. The side missions, popping up from time to time in the world, are some of the more interesting parts of the game, from a variety standpoint. Dozens of interesting little vignettes. That generally are just “go collect X things” or “give me something” or “go talk to someone.” They feel formulaic and shallow in the extreme. Interest setups that have no depth and whose formulaic approach to them shine though almost immediately, taking the luster off of them. Go watch a youtube video of all of the setups/intros for them and you’ll have a better experience … without the tedious travel they require. 

The core story missions, while having some interesting depth behind them, if the pointlessness of mans existence (Dutch)  is depth (and I think it is, from an existential standpoint) are problematic. They are rail shooters. Watch a slow cutscene. Engage in slow travel. Engage in slow button-press activities. Then engage in what is a rail shooter. And, in many cases, have your weapons taken away, or be forced to use only your handguns. 

For you see you no choice. You WILL engage with just your handgun, in spite of having a shotgun on your horse. Weapons WILL be locked in the stores until you get further along in the story. And, if you dare engage with the mission in any way other than the railroad your forced on to, well, the game will fail you. The best example is when the house you are hold up in is attacked by a rival gang. You are outside shooting the other gang. The game tells you to return to the house. If you stay outside to shoot some more the game fails you, telling you that you didn’t return to the house.

All of that choice, that big open world, everything in it .. .it’s just an illusion. This is a rail shooter. A sluggish rail shooter. 

I’m reminded of a Deus Ex game. The big selling point was you could go through the game without killing people. Well, except for one boss. You see, that boss fight was farmed out to a sub in development. It was the typical boss fight stuff, figuring out how to kill them, etc. And that’s what this game feels like. It feels like the big open world was developed and then mini-games were farmed out. And the story action scenes were farmed out. And because of this none of it is integrated well. 

The game is not satisfying. It is frustrating for what it COULD have been. Yet another example of a railroad story told by a DM. The emergent story is always better.

Posted in Reviews | 16 Comments