The Dachshund Dungeon

Posted on May 9, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Nick LS Whelan
Self-published
OSR
Level ?

Send your players to visit the cordial society of the Gentledogs. Presently they’re beset by a moral quandry: trying to live up to their own values while pressed on one side by imperialist forces from the Underdark, and on the other by a treasonous wizard attempting to engineer a fascist coup

This eight page adventure features a fourteen page dungeon described on one page. It’s full of intelligent dogs. Pugmire, then, I guess? But it implies it is not? And the dogs have guns? Anyway, it’s all Stonehell style, with a few intro pages and then a half page map with a page of keys. The key descriptions are pretty ok, focusing on what they need to. But I have to ask: why? And to what end? It feels hollow.

These little dungeons are always hard to review. Both from a size and a page count aspect, but, not this one I think. 

So … Pugmire, I guess? Pugmire is OSR now? I mean, the dungeon has a backstory, it’s full of intelligent dogs, they have rifles and pistols in a kind of 19th century England landed gentry kind of way. There’s no level range mentioned anywhere on the cover, description or product … It’s clearly D&D-ish with morale .. .but something else called the Hatespark? The backstory implies that the dogs were created by a wizard though just to guard the dungeon. So … I have no fucking clue what is going on here. Lets’ make them Mushroom-people with swords and bows and take care of the entire thing.

The backstory is a bit humorous. To quote: A couple hundred years ago a wizard who could feasibly be described as “good” defeated one who was “bad,” but could not kill her. This is the kind of DM writing I can get in to. It’s Just a few little enhancements to the verbange and punctuation and you bring so much more to an otherwise generic backstory. This is great, and it’s a good example fo what I mean by focusing the power of your writing and brining detail and specificity and colour without adding a lot of words. 

And then there’s the  hook-ish/intro to the dungeon. There’s a tunnel in the sewers. It’s long. No one knows where it goes. It takes two days to traverse it to get to the dungeon. Smarter than your average sewer adventure; the sewer is just the front door.

Five and a half pages in to an eight page adventure and we get a small fourteen room map on half a page. A couple of loops. A crevice running through a couple of rooms. It’s serviceable, not stellar.

And then the room keys start, all on one page … with room for art at the bottom. I’m going to bitch a bit about things left unsaid in this adventure, and I feel like there was some internal constraint that the room keys only take a page. Which is too bad; the problem with all one page room keys is that they are limited by their format. Basically the judgement comes down to “Is it good … FOR A ONE PAGE DUNGEON? The “for a one page dungeon” has to be added on to every statement. Why do that? The one-pagers are, essentially, performance art. Why constrain yourself if you don’t have to? (Says the six page dungeon man.) 

The room keys are pretty good though, at lest when it comes to conveying evocative flavour through terseness. The first room is “1. Metal hatch opened by a wheel. Pipes to the left and right expel sewage into the tunnel.” I can visualize that. I can run that. It’s at least three details: hatch, pipes, sewage, all in one line of text that takes us less than the full width of the page. Or maybe “Chugging water pump pulls water up from underground streams. Bedroll in the corner, dirty plates stacked beside it.” Short, terse. These could both be better, but they ARE a great example of how a terse room description can be both scanned quickly and be evocative at the the same time. It’s not really mundane detail. It’s not really trivia, or useless backstory. It’s focused on the meaningful parts of the room and at least an ok description of them. (Ok, of course, being a high compliment from me.)

Treasure and creatures, though, suffer from this format. They tend to be more abstracted. Treasure are described, such as “L: White lace hemmed with gold is draped along the walls. These curtains are delicate, religiously significant, and valuable.” That’s your treasure. For a generic adventure I’d say that’s pretty well, and given the dog-stuff and rifles, I guess not assuming a system is a good thing. It’s also feels abstracted to me, with the conclusions of the curtains rather than a description of the curtains, and I never like that. In addition the creatures are somewhat lacking in motivation. You get a half page or so write up on the races, but the specific creatures lack motivations. They feel like they wait in their rooms, behind a glass wall, for the party to look at. There doesn’t feel like there’s any tension. There’s one “baddie” of note, at the very end, but even he comes off like not having any tension. This could have been a dungeon that was a political boiling pot, ready to explode. Parts of the intro imply as much. But then, the rooms don’t do anything to help that along. Eight dogs discussion philosophy. Ok.  It reminds me of that chess room in Dwimmermount, where nothing happens.

The whole thing needs a good SHOVE. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $2. The entire thing is in the preview, all eight pages, which is GREAT. You might check out the room keys and jusge the writing for yourself. I think it’s tending toward the good side of the evocative spectrum, which, I also think is perhaps the hardest part of writing adventure keys.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/276120/The-Dachshund-Dungeon.?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 24 Comments

Hoard of Delusion

Posted on May 6, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Mark Ahmed, Sean Ahmed, Scot Hoover
Axe mental Productions
OSRIC
Levels 1-4

Hidden below the Black Fen lies the fabled Hoard of Delusion.

This 117 page adventure presents a village, wilderness region, and fifty room four level dungeon. It’s easy to see what it wants to do, but is bogged down with not knowing how to get there. Good ideas marred by poor execution; this needs a full rework to be usable.

This is striving to be like the adventures of Ye Olde Days, the better ones anyway, with a village, a wilderness region, and a multi level dungeon. It’s built around the dungeon, with village and wilderness encounters supporting/proving hints to the dungeon. The village and wilderness have interconnections within thm, and a couple of sub-plotty/other shit going on things going on. There’s even a keep in the village. The idea of a village, wilderness area and dungeon environment supporting each other is great, it’s what adventures of this type SHOULD be doing.

Further, the dungeon environment has some good ideas. New monsters, and classic elements abound. Giant octopus, mimic-like things, a giant eyeball on a ceiling, cracks in the earth that mist flows from, a rope bridge, and brains in jars. 

It’s marred, though, by being nigh unusable because of the description style used. And some pretty hairy encounters.

Level 1-4? Great! The area in the ruins, outside of the dungeon has a 5 HD hydra. The first room of the dungeon has a 7HD baddie with a gaze attack. 10HD black pudding? Toss it in there! A 12HD monster? No problem! I get it, OSR, you can run away. But the first room? And the dungeon entrance/ruins outside? This seems more like an issue of scaling. 

Further, the treasure is low throughout. It notes that the wilderness areas can be used to gain levels/experience before tacking the dungeon. (You know, the one with a HD hydra outside and 7HD monster in the first room? The one with the gaze attack?) But the loot is low, WAY too low, for anyone to be doing much leveling. Not quite comically low, but it’s hard for me to see a party leveling to three, and two might be difficult if you don’t recover everything available.

The village is described incorrectly, of course, most villages are. The mundanity and backstory of the people, with little assistance on the subplots or a reference on where the party might like to go. Villages are not explored like dungeons. You don’t walk down the street looking in to every shop. You get directions to the General Store and go there. And yet, this is laid out like a typical dungeon. 

And then there’s small map issues and other mistakes. No stairs on the map in the first room of the dungeon. Encounters left off of the wilderness maps. Just sloppy stuff.

But, the real issue is the encounter descriptions. As always.

The descriptions can be long. VERY long in cases. Page long rooms. No one can run a fucking page long room well unless the formatting and layout are par excellance. And they ain’t here. It doesn’t matter: village, wilderness, dungeon, the encounters are all done in the same manner and SO. FUCKING. FRUSTRATING. Ignoring, for a moment, the usual tavern descriptions and  how everyone on earth feels the need to redescribe it, the rooms are a fucking mess. This room used to be. However frank looted all of the bodies. A paragraph of backstory. Important details mixed in to the backstory descriptions. Conversational, with no knowledge of how to organize a description. The inn has three or four tables and a booth. Great. A wonderful night of D&D was then had. This fucking shit is garbage. This is a bit hyperbolic, but: Does every fucking word of your description contribute to the ACTIVE adventuring environment? No? Then fucking cut it. And then, when writing a description, put the important and obvious shit up at the front of the description.

When the players open the door to a room I’m not taking ten fucking minutes to read the fucking room description to myself before conveying it to them. The fucking phones come out, and rightfully fucking so. I’d be a shitty shitty DM if I did that. But what other choices do you have? Ye Olde Highlighter, going through the adventure highlighting and making margin notes? Seriously? If you have to fucking do that then the adventure was not written well. It’s failing at its core purpose: being useful to the DM as a play aid at the table. Why the fuck is this so hard to grasp? People bitch a blue streak that they don’t use adventures because they are a pain and require prep, note taking and highlighting. They are fuckign right. 

What’s all the sadder is that you can tell what this wanted to BE. The village, the wilderness, the dungeon. The interconnectedness. The classic dungeon elements. Iconic rooms that don’t feel like set pieces. But in the end none of that matters, because it’s 117 pages of unusable adventure.

This is $12 at DriveThru. The preview is 80 pages. That’s what I like to see! Take a gander at room one on page 58 of the preview/54 of the book. Good idea. Some useful imagery. One of the better rooms and MIGHT be salvage if all of the other rooms were as good ths this. Maybe.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/302841/Hoard-of-Delusion?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 51 Comments

Night Crystal Pass

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Matt Kline
Creations' Edge Games
S&W
Levels 2-4

You’ve been hired by Silver Hammer Trading to investigate a river trade route, running through Night Crystal Pass, that has fallen into disuse. Unfortunately, the dwarves they send along as observers have their own agendas. And then there are the goblins… hideously transformed goblins.

This 23 page adventure describes an eighteen room small dyson map of a dungeon/temple along a river. The usual. DM text long and unwieldy. Read aloud fairly staid and misused. A couple of NPC’s accompany the party. They add nothing except a hidden victory condition.A pretty typical OSR adventure, with all of the implied meaning that phrase has.

Ok, you’ve got a six hour river journey ahead of you, with two tag-a-longs, and you roll for wanderers every hour. 3HD and 4HD wanderers. With 2d6 being the roll and 2, 12, and 7 being “No Encounter.” Yeah .. this thing is a little rough for level 2’s. 

Hanz and Franz go down the river with you to make notes on the journey. One wants to collect magic crystals and the other LUVS a dwarf goddess. That’s their secret agendas. So, they wander off at times, or can, to do their things. It’s not really an issue with party interaction. I would probably let them wander off and not care.  Until, of course, you get to the end of the adventure. THEN, if they are not with the party when you reach the town at the other end of the river, you don’t get paid your 1000gp. So, it’s a fucking escort mission with two dumbasses but you don’t KNOW it’s an escort mission. Easily solved by an up front DM, but it still pisses me off. It reminds me of that Cracked sketch about every escort mission ever.

Read aloud is the usual. Things are described as “large” and “low.” Boring adjectives and adverbs that do little to convey any real concrete impression of an area. “It looks like an attempt was made to …” that’s a conclusion. Conclusions don’t go in read-aloud. You describe an area in such a way that the players draw the conclusions about the area. That’s a big part of the fun of D&D, or any RPG for that matter. The discovery of something. If you tell them everything up front then it’s just a slog through combat after combat and you can do that in Advanced Squad Leader instead. Or maybe Gloomhaven. There’s also broken interactivity through oversharing in the read-aloud. The read aloud goes in to too much detail. Rather than present an opportunity for the party to investigate, and discovery, through an interactive back and forth with the DM, it instead just tells you the secrets up front. It’s fucking boring.

DM text is long, of course. Full of the history of the rooms, of course, that add nothing to an encounter. Full of conversational style of detail that makes it hard to scan. A page for a simple encounter with a couple of monsters and a barrell in the room.

This smells, at this point, of someone just cranking shit out for the sake of cranking shit out. That pisses me off. I feel cheated, as if our goals are the not the same. Someone seeking the lucre as opposed to doing the best the can because of enjoyment of the game. I come back to publishers who have done bad work, time and time again, because I’m always hopeful that they’ve improved their game. Some have! There are positive examples! And then there’s the people who are just cranking shit out. Tomorrow, I do something different, I hope!

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. The preview is the first four pages. Which is all filler. So you don’t actually get to see any of the encounters. LAME! Do you think, perhaps, I’m wrong? Perhaps I’m wrong and the reason for the preview button is to ensure that it is black text on a white background? No? Yes? I don’t fucking need this shit in my life on a Monday morning during a lockdown, or, to be frank, ever. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/309712/Night-Crystal-Pass-A-Swords–Wizardry-MiniDungeon?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 8 Comments

All Through the Long, Dark Night (5e)

Posted on May 2, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By William Fischer
Sneak Attack press
5e
level 1

In generations past, the villagers of Widderspire marked the eve of the winter solstice by leaving out gifts for a fey creature named Ember John. After the Aruandans conquered the Runewild, Aldric Widderspire, the village’s new lord, became determined to end this practice. He trapped Ember John in an iron cage and sunk the fey to the bottom of Widderspire Pond. Today, the inhabitants of Widderspire commemorate Ember John’s defeat by gathering around Widderspire Pond each winter solstice to exchange gifts, drink warm cider, and skate on the pond’s frozen surface. Though banished from the mortal realm, Ember John is still alive. Recently, one of John’s sprites, the icy-hearted Jack-o’-Frost, located John in a frozen corner of the Fey Realm. Instead of setting free his master, Jack stole John’s magical staff and proclaimed himself the “Lord of the Long, Dark Night.” Jack and the other sprites now head to Widderspire to seek vengeance against the mortals who defeated them nearly a century ago.

This thirteen page adventure presents a winter-festival gone wrong and a journey in to the fey realm with a couple of combats and a decent number of skill checks. It’s got a coherent plot that is fresher than most, without pandering to the “gimmicky christmas special” components that ruin so many seasonal adventures. I can take exception with the skill check mechanism and the DM text length, but overall it’s not a disaster and provides a compelling vision of a fey centered campaign world without going over the edge.

Yeah! Solstice Winterfest! Cider, ice skating, roasted acorns, gifts, maybe a mistletoes kiss! And then the frozen pond cracks and some icy fey come out, killing some villagers and freezing others in a block of ice. Rumor has it that Ember John the fey is imprisoned under the ice, and his bag of embers can warm anything up! Down in to the pond you go to find Ember Johns Prison and get the bag of embers. All of which means fighting three ice mephits and a giant toad, as well as a bunch of skill checks.

The theming here is very good. I am quite fond of a fey adventure, or, more specifically, a folklore-like adventure. Done well they summon up those half remembered tales from childhood and books and become more than the sum of their parts. The winter fest in this, with its ice skating, mistletoe, roasted acorns, and the like, helps sets the idyllic mood. It’s seasonal without pandering to a certain holiday, being more solstice party and without any overtones that would lead the party to believe that something evil is going on. Its well done. And, then, the journey in to the icy pond through the crack, the ice toads cave under the pond, with great icicles hanging from the ceiling and swirling vortex of snow that’s a gate to the fey realm. A powerful blizzard to fight through to reach a peaceful winter glade, and Ember John in a cage made of iron to keep him contained … his only responses being grins and smiles. And, of course, a bag of embers. This all feels wintery and folklorish without it going overboard. I like the elements and I like how they fit together, which is something I seldom say. I take it this is a part of a series of adventures and an campaign setting, and it’s something I want to know more about based on just this adventure.  Quite the compliment indeed!

I’m not a big fan of the skill checks in this adventure. Some of it is preference, some of it is tuning, and some of it it just badly done. DC 8 to ice skate or fall. DC 8 to puck an acorn out of the fire without taking 1 HP of fire damage. DC8 to blah blahblah. DC 8, 10, 12, 15 to remember something about the legend of Ember John. This feels either like rolling for the sake of rolling dice or guarding certain information behind dice rolls. Just tell the players what they need to know about Ember John or make them talk to the villagers, without a skill check, to get the information. This is really, I guess, a personal preference. I don’t do skill checks for mundane things in my games and I don’t like hiding information behind a skill check. If it’s going to enrich the game and/or experience I like it to just be out there, or behind talking to an NPC or something.  Rolling the dice is to gain and advantage or not die.

Speaking of not dying. Make those skill checks! Roll 3 times to dive down in the icy pond to the cave underneath. (Frozen over pond on the coldest day of the year … I would have made the pond unnaturally warm also so as to hint the party could dive in it.) Anyway, fail your roll and take damage. There’s a lot of that. Endure X by making a skill check or take damage. When you’re lost in the blizzard after entering the fey realm you need to roll a 15 multiple times, each failure meaning 3 damage. There’s some real death possibilities there, from just BS skill checks that the designer has forced on you to complete the adventure. If the skill check is a blocker in the adventure, its a gate that must be passed through, then the skill check shouldn’t be open ended. Don’t roll until you succeed. Instead apply some sort of penalty to failure, if you must include the mechanism

DM text doesn’t get to the point, instead it is the usual long and drawn out affair full of random trivia and unfocused sentences that make it hard to pull of the information you need. There’s a knack to writing good DM text, text that is terse, clear, easy to scan and find information … and there’s some mental block in most adventures, especially 5e/Pathfinder, that seems to be endemic to the writing. Emulation of what others are writing? I don’t know. But it’s a pain to work with. 

There’s also a certain sort of aggressive genericism present, especially in the winter solstice festival part. The villagers can relate details to the party about folklore, but it’s not really spelled out, or good examples given. Villagers proper don’t get a decent summary, instead the adventure pointing to a campaign supplement. What NPC summary there is is more like an … index? The details are not really adventure focused. It seems afraid to get specific. A snowball fight instead of the specifics of a snowball fight. This is the time to build specificity in; bully John, or sweet girl Clara. And yet, it’s just not there and is a poorer adventure for it.

But, not bad. I do like folklore adventures and this is one of them. It tries, as best it can, to offer multiple solutions to some problems and decent dynamic combat situations with elements for the party to take adventure of.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no real preview, just one of those flip-book ones. Bad designer! Put in a real preview that shows some examples of the actual encounters!


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/261993/Seasons-of-the-Runewild-All-Through-the-Long-Dark-Night?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 1 Comment

The Place of the Skull

Posted on April 29, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Mark Hess
Self published
LotFP

A Sci-Fantasy adventure for old school gaming. A princess has been kidnapped, the players must save her by infiltrating a strange fortress of unknown origin. Weird tech, mutants, and evil swords abound.

This eighteen page adventure uses five digest pages to describe thirteen rooms. A little sci-fi, borrows from Conan and He-Man (and probably others) and uses a minimal format … although a decent one that concentrates on the right things. Still, a little light on the encounters for  my tastes.

So, kings daughter has been kidnapped by Skull face. King brings out platter of rubies and throws them at party, saying that riches mean nothing next to the love of your daughter. Oh, and she’s a warrior princess virgin, so in addition to Conan and He-Man we’ve got some She-Ra stuff going on also. And probably more. There’s the Fun Guy, who has fungo growing from his head. It’s got some sci-fi elements to it, broken computers, a couple of plasma rifles and so forth. And also magical elements, like the Doomsword, which turns you chaotic and melts your face off so you can be the next Skill Face. It’s over the silly line for me. A little too on the nose with cultural references. Instead of allusion it’s direct reference after direct reference. Maybe as a silly con one shot but, as always, comedy and references are tough in adventures. Placed in directly, there’s no buy in and the game suffers. Referenced tangentially, they allow the DM and players to refer to those memories and the expanded meaning that they refer to.

There;s not much to this, just eighteen pages overall and just thirteen rooms over about five digest sized pages. That keeps the descriptions terse, all right! “The cave entrance branches to the right and left, only to meet on the other side. A hewn hallway leads to a set of stone double doors. The doors may be pushed open.” The hewn part is good, nice imagery of a hewn tunnel, I think, even if the right/left just repeats the map data and doors opening are doors opening. The throne room has “A large chamber with a wicked looking throne of shaped stone. The throne and the raised dias it sits on are surrounded by an anti-magic field.” That’s it. Large is a boring word. Wicked is a conclusion, but would be used ok if  the throne stones were described as jagged or something like that. But, basically, this is all there is to the rooms. A kind of abstracted description with a little bit of iconic imagery referenced and not much beyond that. There’s just not much here to work with. MAYBE one thing per room, a little abstracted at that. You can see where the designer wants to take it but it never reaches any potential.  There’s just not much here. It’s almost like an outline rather than an adventure.

This is $2 at DriveThru. There’s no level range given, but the preview is six pages and shows you the first four rooms, and the lead in information. So, decent preview, EVEN IF THE LEVEL RANGE IS NO WHERE PRESENT ANYWHERE.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310386/The-Place-of-the-Skull?1892600

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

Beneath the Remains

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By D.S. Meyers
Oldegrave Adventure Company
OSR
Levels 1-2

What will the characters sacrifice to save the Western Wood?

Soooo … yeah.

This 54 page digest adventure details about forty locations outside and in two small fifteen-ish room dungeons. Weird bullet format and a strange … forced? Nature to it, along with some abstracted detail, make this one a miss for me.

While staying in the town an old guy shows up in a wagon, shot by goblin arrows. His kids have been kidnapped, so the party traces them back to a fey circle and then a rose petal path to a glade. The fey queen says he was abusive and they killed him and are keeping the kids. Oh, by the way, could you go clean out a bunch of undead from some ruins nearby? I’ll give you The Gift of the Forest if you do. (Amulet of +5 CHA vs Fey/woodland.) The ruins are about eleven locations, with two mini-dungeons of about fifteen locations each. One of them has this artifact. A PC has to willingly give up their life to destroy it. If they bring it back to the fey queen then she kills them all for doing so and not destroying the artifact that she has never mentioned before. So …. Yeah. Obviously more than one thing wrong there. The overall vibe is a good one, enhanced by the old timey public-domain art selected. Well, good up until the point the fey queen sends you off. Then it’s just a boring old slog. The entire tone and style of the adventure changes. It was better BEFORE the dungeon stuff started.

The encounters for the ruins and two dungeons are trying to be useful to the DM. basically, each encounter has, like, three bullet points and then some stats and maybe a small section on treasure. There might be another small section explaining something or some development in some of the rooms. GL02-Hall reads “*3 goblin skeletons approach from the bend in the hallway. * Close quarters fighting.” Well, ok. I guess maybe that’s define in OSE? GL04-Kitchen. Big Chef Goblin Skeleton and 2 other goblin skeletons. Timer for ceiling collapse as the chef swings cleavers aimlessly hitting walls. Uh …. This is minimalism, or just a hair beyond it. And minimalism is No Bueno. I can roll on the monster charts in the 1E DMG and do minimalism. 

The timer, mentioned above, is one example of them in this adventure and there are a few others. They seem … weird. I guess maybe the goblin chef one is ok. You can at least see him hitting the walls and I guess, somehow, you know they will collapse? But in another place the timer is just used to have some raven fly through a window in a few rounds. What’s the point of that? Suspense? I mean, the party doesn’t have any choice over it.

And, then, there’s the issue. The party has no choice. Not with the kidnapped kids. Not with the quest pretext. Not with the artifact that makes you have to kill yourself to destory it. Not with the fey queen who kills you if you dare bring it back to her, presumably wiser, guidance. Or with the ravens and maybe the chef. Interactivity is important in an RPG. Without it there’s this false sense of mission. You know you have no impact so you don’t buy in, or, worse, buy in to your character instead.

The town has sixteen locations. A few sentences each. None of them really doing much with the locations. They don’t overstay, except in the way that no content overstays. They just don’t really matter in any way. 

Other details are abstracted. You can’t really talk to the kidnapped kids, or, lat least, the guidance on running them doesn’t exist. Likewise a fairy shows you the way to the undead ruins … a fairy with no name, description, personality or anything other than “ a fairy,” This is not assisting the DM. Is the party really unlikely to talk to the fairy?

GL01, the first room in the first dungeon is missing. It’s on the map but just isn’t in the text. 

Look, I get what the designer is trying to do. But the bullets are just minimalism instead of interesting detail. A bullet that says “They attack when the party enters the room.” isn’t adding value. I applaud the attempt at being easy to scan, but I also want the content behind the scanning. It had an interesting thing going on with the fey queen and her no solution parley. But then it turned in to standard old minimal dungeoncrawl.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you several rooms. In fact, it’s mostly the first few rooms. So, great preview! I encourage folks to take a look at it and review the format used. It’s not a bad layout, it’s just the content that is lacking.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310162/Beneath-the-Remains?1892600

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

The High Moors

Posted on April 25, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
Stephen J. Jones
Unsound Methods
5e/OSR
Levels 1-9

The High Moors beckon… Little is known of the Ieldra – a race of cruel and depraved elves that once ruled the northern tableland called The High Moors – and no one has seen an elf in living memory. Their civilisation is dead, destroyed by an incursion from the Far Realm brought about by their hubris. The ruins of the High Moors have lain undisturbed for centuries. With news from a successful expedition, people have finally considered the treasures waiting to be discovered in the forgotten north.  A number of expeditions have now been dispatched to bring back magic and riches. Unfortunately, danger, horror and madness awaits most of them.

This 198 page “adventure” is actually a mini-campaign setting, taking characters from level one through about level nine by way of a hexcrawl with about seventy location of varying depth. It’s above average, as hex crawls go, in terms of the situations developed and the adventures support for it. For $10, you get an entire campaign … not a bad deal at all!

So, a campaign setting. This means gods, races, leveling, coin systems, and other details have been changed. This hex crawl makes sense in the world that it lives in and would be quite the challenge to move it, unless it’s a pocket dimension, etc. It is such a Of This Place that conversions are going to be difficult. It’s a Gold=XP system, for 5e (and easily enough older school D&D) that also has attached to it unique roles for dwarves, elves, goblins, halflings, demons, giants, and a myriad of other races. It’s going to hard to fit this in without some effort … but … it does contain enough adventure in it to handle levels one through nine. So, why fit it in at all? Just start a new campaign using this, make it the centerpiece, and off you go!

The core of the adventure are the hex locations, about sixty scattered across three maps, each of which is about 11 hexes by 15 hexes, with a 1 hex=12 mile scale. These tend to stretch out to a page or so, especially where stat blocks are involved. In spite of this, they entries are relatively well organized. Each one tends to starts with an overview, what you might see from a distance as you approach, and then additional detail as you get up closer. Finally, the individual elements of the “up close” view get their own little bolded section that describes what it going on with them in a format that is relatively easy to scan. These locations have SUBSTANTIAL mysteries to solve, things that are missing, NPC’s to interact with, and so on. There is definitely some potential energy in the vast majority of the encounters.These are not the static models of Isle of the Unknown, but rather something more akin  to the newer Wilderlands, that had more detail and the old Wilderlands. Interactive, lengthy, but generally easy to follow. There’s only so much you can do, though, via a pig-man village and the intrigue therein without running the words the top of the bowl. The same with the ruins, or mini-dungeons prevalent throughout the hex crawl. There’s just a degree of abstraction that you have to accept with a hex crawl. The hexes need to do a good job to inspire the DM because there’s just no word budget for detail. Nor should there be.

A substantial element to a hex crawl campaign is getting the players crawling and keeping them exploring. Numerous hooks are suggested, both more generic ones and then also more race-specific ones, which come off a little like secret society missions. Combined with the need to explore for coin purposes (you spend your coin, one GP to train for 1 xp) and magic then you get a nice little loop of coin, hooks, and missions you pick up out in the wilderness/hexes. It’s good. I think it more than adequately covers the pretext needed to play D&D tonight.

I’m pretty happy with this. The setting has a lot going on, factions and the like, along with some substantial “game world” mysteries to resolve. There are numerous opportunities to screw things up “Broodmother Skyfortress”/Rients style. There’s good cross-referencing, generally, and good imagery. The setup for the various sites seem interesting and more than throw-away sites. At one point there’s an invisible chain, going up in to the sky, that you can hear but not see. Climbing up it reveals a platform and a building to explore. It’s done very well. And almost everything is done well in this. There are significantly more highs than lows. 

It feels like this was done in word, or some such, with a 2-column format used. This FEELS off, in place, maybe a little amateurish? I appreciate the singular effort of a designer, but the product could have been better with good layout. Not that it’s bad. Maybe it just REMINDS me of the look of products that ARE bad?

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is eleven pages, but not very good. It’s just the first eleven pages, which cover a bit of the overview. A few of the hexes would have been a much better preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/309401/The-High-Moors?1892600

Posted in 5e, Reviews, The Best | 10 Comments

The Ghoul Prince

Posted on April 22, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Zzarchov Kowolski
DIY RPG Productions
DCC
Level 3

Behold the gripping terror of the GHOUL PRINCE, bargain your very skeleton to the unsettling BONE LADY, and claim the powers of the mysterious DEMON IDOL.

This 22 page adventure is a stunt dungeon that uses four pages to describe the same dungeon in five different ways. Decent map for its size, nicely evocative interior, interesting monsters (as all DCC creatures should be) and good magic items combine with some pretty good interactivity. An interesting project that proves the point it trying to make.

Sometimes designers have interesting ideas and want to explore them, and this is one such case. Can you take a standard dungeon and write it in such a way that you can retheme it easily/ Can it be written so that it can be a desert tomb, or an alpine mausoleum, or an iron-age bog tomb? Can you seperate the theme from the specifics and/or do it in such a way that it can serve several purposes? That’s what Zz is trying to do here, and what he succeeds at … at least in a dungeon of this size.

So, twenty rooms and four pages in a 22 page adventure … something is up, right? Eight or so pages are concerned with the specific theming. For each of three environments, plus your own, two pages are spent on what the various elements are themed as. What do magic symbols look like in a desert tomb as opposed to a bog tomb as opposed to an alpine mausoleum. What is does the trap on the chest consist of? What type of sword is the magic sword, and so on. There are a few more pages explaining the stunt concept and then a few giving some background on the guy whos tomb you’re about to rob, and his relationship to a new patron. The end of the book as new magic items, new monsters, a patron, etc. 

The idea here is that you are going to take the two pages specific to the theme you’ve chosen and have then ready as a reference as you run the four pages of the actual dungeon. Here’s an example of how this works with the dungeon rooms. The entrance, body, wards are all described in the theming page, with the bodies being described as “Leathery bog mummies.” 

A: Entryway

A sloping set of stairs lead down from the [Entrance]. A [Body] is curled into a foetal position at the bottom, surrounded by crudely made [Wards].

Monsters and magic are good, exactly as one would expect from a game with no monster manual or magic item list. Everything is nicely unique, with their own non-standard abilities. The lack of standard monsters and magic items is one of the things that makes DCC great, and Zz does a good job creating some new monsters and items to fill in nicely. Terrifying, unique powers, and objects of desire.Keeping the players on their toes, never knowing what the monsters abilities are, no monster manual to memorize and therefore remove the fear from a terrifying new encounter. No mundanity and victorian-era lists to catalog and remove the wonder of discovery from new items. 

The map is a small dyson one, with twenty rooms, but one of the better ones. There are a couple of places where one section crosses over another, or same-level stairs, details are nicely placed on the ma and it looks suitably rough for an old tomb. I’ve been down on Dyson maps in the map. Too often a designer will take a small uninteresting one and try to build something around it. He does do good ones as well, even at this small size. I wish people would gravitate towards those instead.

So, put it together and you’ve got a pretty decently themed dungeon, with good interactivity. It’s got a nice villain to chase you around, Jason-style, things to use in the dungeon against him, mysteries to unlock and lots and lots of ways to die. All in a package that is four packages in one. You could take any one of themes and have a pretty good dungeon exploration with it. I DO think, though, that the format is going to wear a little thing in larger dungeons. There’s only so many ways you can say “magic wards” and have it come out inspiring and well. T some point the two page reference sheet will grow longer and at that point the utility will break down. For these smaller style dungeons, though, sure. Three dungeon themes to fit your specific campaign world, plus a couple of blank sheets to fit in to your.This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. You get to see the intro, background, and part of a theming page spread. Ok, but a room encounter would have been nice as well.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/238775/The-Ghoul-Prince?1892600

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 8 Comments

The Lighthouse of Anan Marath

Posted on April 20, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
Jim Stanton
Frog God games
S&W
Levels 5-7

From the shoreline of the village of Saemish, waves can be seen tossing their salt and spray upon four small islands, the largest of which is Anan Marath. A great bridge, aged and deteriorated, spans from the mainland connecting these islands and ending at colossal lighthouse of Anan Marath. Each might y structure is created from the deep-green bedrock found only in the bedrocks of the watery abyss. For Decades, the Lighthouse of Anan Marath has remained dark. Slowly devolving into a state of shappy disrepair. But no longer! The village council has decided-narrowly and after angry debate-to restore the lighthouse and clear it of its dark and bloody past.

This thirty page adventure details fifty or so rooms of a lighthouse complex off the short of a small village. It has an interesting approach with the map environment and the writing can be quite evocative, if a bit unfocused in places.  Some additional “context” work could have/should have been done, but otherwise it’s a solid effort.

Off the short of a small village is a chain of three islands, connected with a stone bridge, Florida Keys style At the far island is a lighthouse. Trade is returning to the region and the locals need someone to sort out the lighthouse so they can relight it, after many MANY years of disuse, allowing them to bring trade back to the town. It’s not  abad set up and gets to that “points of light” theming of reclaiming the world. It also has a nice little non-standard reward: in addition to what you find they are willing to give you a percentage of all the trade goods/trade that come by. An investment in your future! I like that, and I like the way it cements the village in to the characters lives as a someplace other than a “one and done” adventure. There’s a bit of a disconnect in place: the lighthouse complex is either 250’ off shore (according to the text) or 50’ offshore (according to the map) and it’s stuffed FULL of evil baddies, from monsters to cultists to pirates. Why any one of them haven’t laid waste to the town is anyone’s guess. It’s pushing believability/pretext in that regard, but, at worst, it’s the town sewers problem all over again. And if I can deal with that I can deal with the baddies only being 50’ offshore of the village.

The writing here is not bad at all, from an evocative standpoint. Rotting trapdoors, mix with scrub and surf, wait-high crenels, bridges glistening with salt & spray and dark green seastone with the waves lapping up against it. It hits more than misses in this regard, with the locales really coming to life in the DM’s head through the word choice of designer. It doesn’t feel forced, it feels natural. I love this. The ability of the designer to put an image in to the DM’s head is one of the pillars of a good adventure. If the DM can really GROK the location then the chances they will communicate a great environment to the players is all the better. It really feels like the designer visualized the environment and then brought the power of the language to bear to describe it without going and on and on with the descriptions.

The map here  is interesting, or, perhaps, the locale it is describing. Because it’s a causeway, it lands on the top of towers. Thus in many cases you are exploring DOWN, to the towers proper, or even to the rocky islands that support the towers the causeway lands on the top of. Likewise, the lighthouse is entered, in one possible method, midway through the top, where the causeway lands, giving opportunities to go down and up, with additional underwater tunnels. It’s a good effort of breaking the mold of just exploring down or up. Although, not always the clearest in it’s descriptions. There’s some puzzling to do to figure this out.

It does tend to lack focus in its descriptions. It mixes background and history and “this is why X is Y …” in to the descriptions. Regular readers will know that I eschew this. It detracts from the ability to scan the room at the table and relate the information to the players in a quick manner. The usual mistakes are made, from explaining why. Blah blah shaped this by magic, who were actually cultists of god blah blah blah. This is trivia and just gets in the way, and its done over and over again. Again, this is more like the writing I would expect in a style guide for the world rather tan in a technical resource for the DM at the table. In other places the writing isless direct, like with “This place has recently become the lair of an X.” Good that we’re being told X lives here, but it can be done in a more direct manner. These two things make the actual locations quite a bit weaker for use than if they were not present/used. 

Of secondary interest is the lack of a polish edit. Certain things are confusing, or could be more direct. It mentions an arrow slit in one case, and only by extended thought does it turn out to be an alternative entrance to the lighthouse. The initial description, therefore, is not really effective in what it’s trying to relate: this is an entrance to the lighthouse that the party can use. It implied, rather than stated, and not implied very heavily. There are multiple examples of this in the adventure, things that require some puzzling out to figure out what is meant/intended. In other places there are opportunities missed. That one that sticks out, but its not the only example, is of the old town drunk, dead in a cellar from a beastie. He even gets a name ‘Cooter.’ That’s great, but the emphasis on this, up front, n the village, or an mentioning it up front in such a way that the party can learn it, is missing. There are passing references to clutists emerging from sea and ships in the night, but the emphasis and follow up isn’t there, up front in the overview and village, and this the opportunity is lost unless you read the entire thing and take notes. Not the strongest support and substantial missed opportunities for support play in the village before the adventure proper starts. There’s also a bit of lost opportunity to give overviews of the situations, since you’re outside and can see the entire thing. Thus if you want to do this you have to read the entire thing, figure out which parts are “visible” and try to come up with something on your own. Again, these sorts of “vista overview” descriptions are worth their weight in gold when trying to relate the overall situation to the party. If you can SEE cobwebs on the island, from the bridge, then that needs to be up front, not in the room key that describes that location.

Some of this, I think, is due to the Frogs lack of good editing. Simple mistakes crop up, like the HD3 fighter who is level 7. And, of course, the level range is missing from the cover or the product description on DriveThru instead hiding on the title page of the adventure … I wish the Frogs would make a fucking checklist and continously improve on it for these little mistakes ther continually make. At least they’ve stopped slapping the wrong cover on things. 

Order of battles for the pirate and cultists are missing, but there are other strange comments like “If the party strikes up a conversation with this group of pirates ….” the ones guarding something, that you just killed a bunch of other pirates to get to? Are they in a talking mood? The adventure strikes me as a hack with little opportunity to talk to people implied in the text, so this comes out of nowhere. 

But, still, a decent effort. Good environment, nicely evocative. Strains believability in places and the DM text is muddled, but, such is life in the age of cholera. 

This is $11 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages and the last page shows you the first encounter description. It’s relatively good for determining what the writing is like for the rest of the locations, but I’d like to see more of them in a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/304474/The-Lighthouse-of-Anan-Marath-SW?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 4 Comments

(5e) Fell Deeds in Felfair Grove

Posted on April 18, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Simon Goudreault
WanderingDM
5e
Level 2

… you will search the Witchwoods for missing people, overthrow a tyrant, and bring peace and justice to a small frontier town by the name of Bromwich. 

This 54 page adventure uses about 25 pages to describe a hunt in the woods, avillage, and an small fight with the mayor as the climax of the adventure. Weird mechanic choices abound in this, as well as the usual “I don’t know how to write an encounter description” issues that plague nearly every adventure. 

There’s a convoluted backstory to this which I’ll complain about in a bit, but, first, the basic adventure outline. You’re hired to find some missing lumberjacks. Each day, when you are searching the woods for the lumberjacks, you roll survival. If you roll over X then you could encounter any of the encounters, on the chart, with a survival DC<=X. So, a chart full of fourteen encounters of various DC’s, once of which has the lumberjacks. After finding the lumberjacks the party is betrayed by the person who hired them. They are then rescued by the sheriff and given the “real” mission, to find someone to replace the corrupt mayor of the town. You go talk to some people, and then tell the sheriff who you want to be the new mayor. You then ambush the corrupt mayor, who offers to reward you if you take his side. And then the adventure ends, one way or another, with the party choosing a side and finishing up the combat.

The adventure is trying to have some complexity to it and be a little sandboxy. There are other quests to perform in the lumberjack camp, little fetch things, etc, and the “mayor candidates” that you talk to, pre-revolution, MIGHT have some things to do. The NPC’s are laid out up front, for the town, as well as descriptions for ten or so town locations. There’s also a pretty open-ended “get your stuff back” section, that is not supported by the text AT ALL, but feels like an infiltration from the few words there are about it. Further, there’s at least a bit of complexity to the otherwise stock characters, in places. The corrupt mayor COULD actually surrender, and he COULD keep his word, if the party throws in with him at the end. Further, his (nice) son is probably the best equipped to be the next mayor but, of course, no one trusts him. There are a decent number of opportunities to roleplay and gain allies as well. So, Simon tried.

Tried and failed.

The mechanics of this are terrible, and you know I seldom talk about mechanics, so they must be egregious. Fourteen locations on the forest chart, you can find one a day and only one has the lumberjacks. Further, the other locations do NOTHING to make your search more productive. At most, you might get rid of wandering monster checks. (which are fucking lame in an adventure like this, especially in the throw-away form they are presented here. Wanderers do different things in 5e than in OSR. Just make some decent encounters to scatter in instead of a traditional chart, if you’re going to use them.) So, just roll a check every day, have an encounter, and hope that, randomly, you get the one you are looking for. No chance to influence. The worst kind of random. Just suffer through without ANY ability to influence your fate. The journey IS in fact the destination, but no ability to influence your fate is a shitty shitty journey.

Likewise, when you talk to people, mayoral candidates, you need to convince them to take the job. They each have a different chart. If you do X things from their chart then they will take the job. BUT YOU DONT KNOW WhaT THE THINGS ARE, as players. It’s just fucking random. Did you do all of the bulltin board tasks? Do you know Bobs spouse was kidnapped? He won’t tell you that. This is all BS. You can’t engage in meaningful decision making unless you know the decisions you are making. “HAhA! Gotcha! You should have carved your initials in to random tree #2353 in the forest! You didn’t, now you loose!”  Of course the DM is gonna cheat and fudge to make things happen and keep the action going. Is that the point of a DM? Maybe, but it’s more the job of the designer to keep that shit from happening in the first place.

So, you find the lumberjacks. And are then backstabbed by Mayor McDickCheese. He’s taken all the money he would have paid you and instead bought sleep poison. He poisons you and throws you in the river, tied up, to drown. Why not just kill you? Why not use killing poison? Why not just PAY YOU? Because, gentle readers, Wandering DM thinks they are STORYTELLER. FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR STORY! IT”S THE PLAYERS STORY, NOT YOURS! This sort of forced shit really pisses me off. If you make your save DC then bandits burst in and shoot you with sleep poison crossbows. The room has no doors or windows ,locked, everything set up against the party. Fuck you. Adversarial, railroad designer. Fuck. You. All so you can tie them up and throw them in the river so they can make a DC10 check or drown. That’s fun. Or, they missed? Don’t worry, the sheriff will rescue them. Because fucking plot. Shitty, shitty, shitty design. The players are viewers in their own adventure instead of participants. 

Read-aloud is weird. There’s not much, but it’s long and in italic (bad!) when it does poop up. You have to read the fucking backstory to udnerstand the hooks and what exactly is going on. Again, terrible design. Encounters and NPC descriptions are full of meaningless trivia and backstory instead of tools and ideas to help the DM bring the adventure to life. “Karl moved here 25 years ago after a life of adventure” is meaningless trivia backstory. “Karl runs an underground booze ring and is looking to X with Y if he can” gives Karl a reason to be in the adventure and the ability of the party to interact with him in a meaningful, adventure driven, way.

Blah blah blah, says the generic ad copy, “discover a dark secret.” Zzzzz…….

This is $5 at DriveThru.The preview is fifteen pages. You get to see the setup, the NPC’s and town locations and their lack of adventure-driven focus in their writing styles. That’s about it though. A fifteen page preview should also show some encounters (and yet, the NPC’s COULD be encounters, so, ok, it does show some, but, still, real encounters also, please, so we can make an informed decision.) Two five star reviews as of my blog post. Geee, that’s surprising.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/306191/Fell-Deeds-in-Felfair-Grove?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 7 Comments