Black Marsh is a large wilderness area, most of it and unknown and unexplored. Over the years many explorers have entered the marsh never to be heard from again. Those that have returned brought back tales so outrageous that people thought the explorers were insane. Rumors about the Black Marsh tell about a treasure trove hidden somewhere in its depths. Does your party have what it takes to survive this dreaded place?
This 35 page adventure has the party having their magic items stolen and then venturing in to a 600 square mile swamp to ght a Level 30 Thief/Assassin Lizard Man and his evil druid buddies. There are only about twelve pages of adventure, with the rest being appendix. God this sort of adventure gets on my nerves. This is why I don’t look forward to high level adventures.
Evil druid hates magic items and pays level 30 Lizard Man to steal them so she can destroy them in her swamp lair. Long read-aloud, in italics, so both the players AND dm can be miserable. Thief hires some halflings to steal them from the party on the street. This, I suppose, motivates the party to give chase. It’s all sort of fucked up, with forced shit against the party, cutting open their bags to let them scatter on the street, hiding in the crowd, etc. It’s all one big gimpy set up to force the party to go on the adventure. “Hahaha! They stole everything you have! Hahaha! Guess you have to do the adventure now!”
They flee to a ship, which leaves in 30 minutes so you probably miss it. Except the party is level 10-14 and one does not steal from, or hide from, level 10-14 characters. “You miss the ship!” can be countered twelve ways to Sunday with high level cleric/MU spells.
You track the ship to a swamp town/hideout. It has 26 lizard men. One is a level 20 Thief and Level 10 assassin, while six others are level 9 thieves. The adventure then spends a page and a half on tactics porn describing how they attack the party and how deep the water is at all points. But you get like $50k, mostly in gems, when you search their huts!
Enter now the 600 square mile swamp, with an emphasis on food, water, getting lost, and getting a parasitic infection. Except, again, the party is level 10-14 and so that shit probably don’t happen. Remember how I said the adventure was actually only twelve pages and th rest appendix? Well, i fibbed a bit, the appendix contains most of the swamp encounters. By which I mean the random encounter tables. There are only two encounters, proper, in the swamp, one of which is the climax. There are 4 druid patrols covering the 600 sqmi swamp, so, you know, exciting action!
Oh! Oh! I forgot! You remember that fleeing boat? The captain is level 10, the mate level 8, and all the crew level 6 fighters! Joy. 🙁
There’s nothing to this. Just another ill conceived high level adventure. Throw shit at the party, think up implausible situations like level 30 lizard men, and over describe mundane shit tactics. I suspect over-investiture.
Well, fuck me. I just bought and reviewed Moans of the Dead again. And almost bought Fungus Forest again. Looks like something is up at DriveThru.
This 68 page adventure is more of a small regional setting/sandbox than the typical 5e fare. Centered around a village, there are a variety of plots and several dungeon locations to explore. This is a notch above the usual fare, being crafted and more open-ended than I used to seeing in 5e adventures. That’s a pleasant surprise, and I was going through it I found myself rooting for it. Alas, the issues with organization, summaries, and wall of text are too much more me to even have No Regerts
Pretext pretext pretext, the characters are in a village. Therein they learn about several things going on, maybe get asked to do a few things, and the longer they stay the more happens. This is both because of the timeline of events and the picking up of more rumors, etc. Pretext pretext pretext, relatives, and the usual assortment of crappy hooks. But … got a military or mason background? You’ve been tasked with surveying the old lighthouse by some officials and picking up whatever supplies are left. Nice! The regional government actually doing something with the tax dollars for once! And maybe it gives the party a little authority also … that hook has legs!
It’s a sandbox, just a village with several locations around it that the players will learn of, and several plots to uncover as they learn more about the life and history of the village. There’s a short little timeline to note events that may happen and a little DM checklist to note all of the various interesting things that the party could learn about / get wrapped up in. Like … 18 different things! Explore the Ruined Fort. Explore the town and notice that there are a lot of ‘twins.’ And so on. The timeline is good. The DM overview list is a good idea. The entire sandbox thing it’s got going on is GREAT. Some of the NPC’s are described in like, three words each, attributes they have like young, full of enthusiasm, inexperienced, and so on. It tries to use bolding and bullet points in places and, generally, rooms/descriptions don’t overstay their welcome.
So, it’s trying. And it’s trying REAL hard. It knows what it SHOULD do. It just can’t figure out how to do it.
There’s a short table that tells us how many residents, workers, and adults are in each location in the village. Ok …. Is that relevant, beyond mere trivia? So while the idea of presenting the information in a table is great, it’s not really relevant to the adventure to have it at all.
The map of the village is numbered. But, in my experience, that’s not how PC’s explore a village. They don’t go up to a building and say “ok, what’s next door to this building?” They say things like “I want to find the inn”, or the tailor, or the general store, or whatever. But the village buildings are numbered. You have to go digging though the text to find the [general store] and then find the number and then go look at the map.
With a few notable exceptions (the inn, I’m looking at you) the village locations are pretty focused. Just what you need to know to run it and just what relevant to the adventure at hand with little to no trivia. But … inexplicably there’s read aloud for each location. Dry, boring, read aloud that doesn’t really add anything to the adventure. I guess the designer thought they needed read aloud for each?
The timeline, and indeed much of the text, doesn’t cross reference information. So that little DM checklist I mentioned? It doesn’t really point the DM to any place to learn more about the twin situation. Or the page number of the old fort. Or lighthouse. You have to go digging through the text again. If you reference something then provide a number or page cross-reference so the DM can orient themselves.
And this brings up the overall sitch. I’m not really sure what is going on in the village. All of those 18 things … I’m not sure how they work together (or don’t.) There’s no real overview or summary. That DM checklist could have done the heavy lifting if it had pointed the DM to places to learn more. Instead you have to pretty much read and re-read the adventure until you’re as familiar as the designer. Not cool.
Some information is provided in terse bullet form. Other places the bullets are long. Other places REALLY needed to be broken up in to bullets. The initial caravan trip in to town, wna dhwt athe PC”s know, is a great example of this. Everything is buried in various paragraphs. If it had been bulleted out it would have been easier to scan and find, especially in relation to PC inquiries.
Which brings me, again, to the lack of cross-reference. The Reeve says something to the effect, at one point “i don’t know, I wasn’t reeve then.” This begs the question: who was Reeve so we can go annoy them? Nope, nothing provided for the DM, even though this is the most natural follow up question of all.
Some of the maps are small and hard to read. The read-aloud, besides being generic bad, does things like “The stonework looks recently damaged.” No! No! No! That’s not something you tell the party when the walk in the room. That’s something you tell them when they investigate. The back and forth between DM and PC is a key part of D&D, the interactivity. By saying things like “You look under the table and see a box” in the read-aloud you are taking that away, and this adventure does that repeatedly.
The wanderers do things. It’s a real sandbox location. It tries, hard. It doesn’t commit the sins that most 5e adventure do. But, it’s like the designer hasn’t seen these writing techniques in practice, or is somehow focused on the wrong things. The mere fact that it’s a non-trivial sandbox, for 5e, get’s it a long way up the rankings, in my books, but I just can’t bring myself to push it over the edge in to Regerts. The lack of summary/orientations, and a slipping in to a kind of wall of text writing style obfuscates the adventure enough that it makes be not WANT to read it. And that makes me a little sad because I can tell there’s something here.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is 15 pages, although it doesn’t really show you the heart of the adventure, only the (mostly) useless preamble stuff. The lower left side of page ten has the caravan intro, and you can see how it could be better organized as bullets, etc. Page eleven has the timeline, and you can see how cross-references to pages would have helped immensely in following things. Thirteen is the village map .. needing some named in addition to numbers, maybe? Fourteen are some in-voice rumors that are pretty good, while the last page, fifteen, has a good example of bulleted information on the right and left columns, including that DM Overview that is SORELY in need of cross-references to solve the summary/orientation/overview issue.
By WR Beatty Rosethrone Publishing Swords & Wizardry Levels 8-10
Only vague rumors speak of the ancient Keep of the Broken Saint. Divination fails to reveal anything useful, prayers and powerful magics continue to falter. Yet the rumors insist the place is real and that the Broken Saint has the keys to immortality. Even if the shadows of rumors that make their rounds are not true, surely a ruin that has been lost for generations holds secrets and treasures.
This forty page adventure has about sixty rooms in a keep and dungeon. It has a certain feel, like that of a pseudo-historical saint magical resting place? A non-simulationist version of that, anyway, which is a good thing. Room after room delivers the interactivity. It still needs help in the comprehension category, using some passive voice and layout/writing decisions that do not always lead to good results.
The vibe here is interesting. You know how harn has this kind of realistic vibe thing going on? Let’s start with that. Then add in to it a Saint. Let’s also add the Saints ruined keep. Now, turn the keep in to a mythic place that goes beyond Harn, turning each room in to more of a traditional “fantasy things actually happen” place that Harn doesn’t usually have … but still root it in this kind of pseudo-historical draping, without it fetishizing simulationast or history. That’s this. A ruined multi-level keep of a saint with a couple of tower outbuildings and dungeon levels. With “realistic” historical keep maps that still remember they are used for D&D. Harn and/or Ars Magica, but with actual stuff going on in each room, and thus firmly interactive D&D.
Level 8-10 in S&W is pretty kick ass, and about as close to high level play as I’ve seen. The adventure doesn’t gimp the characters and allows them to use their powers. The various things in the keep (a lot of undead, it’s a broken saint after all) have a decent “talk to the guy in the underworld” kind of thing going on where they interact with you. Bow to you. Ask you questions to pass. Defer to characters in certain conditions. Can get laid to rest and/or not. To this we add some bird people, roosting in historical nesting ground and some enemies of theirs that have taken over.
I’ve mentioned some of the interactivity, undead to question and the bird people and other things you can talk to. There’s also lamps to light, chains to break, fountains to drink from, and so on. Interactivity, I think, is the third leg to a D&D adventure being “good”, once you get past scannable and evocative environments. IE: Can I find the information I need, is the place described well, and is there something to do?
Wanderers are doing things. There’s a monster summary sheet. There are some cross-references. Some of the magical items are new. The hooks are not throwaways. It’s all got some decent bones behind it.
I can take exception to a few things. First, the monsters are not really described. One area has “4 Host of the Broken Saint Archers.” There are stats, in the summary sheet, but no real description. I have no idea what it is, or any of the other stuff, for that matter. There are 46 different monsters on that summary sheet. I suspect that some simplification would have helped a bit and allowed for some extra space to describe a few of them in an appendix.
The formatting does good things in places. Large black banned herald the arrival of a new room, with a place name, so the section breaks are easy to find. There’s lots of white space in rooms. Maybe too much. They come off a bit … large? The information tends to be spread out. The first paragraph deals with things in the first thing, the second with the second thing and so on. This causes you to have to paragraph jump, taking the first line from each, when looking at a new encounter the party has. The writing, proper, isn’t exactly prescriptive, but it tends in that direction, which causes things to be a bit more lengthy than they could be. Together this all causes the rooms to be a little more confusing/wall of text/spread out/harder to grok then I think they could be. It’s not terrible, but it’s not exactly “easy.”
Maybe a little bit more of an overview is needed as well. At level 8-10 the party can command some pretty decent spells for finding things. “Where’s the broken saint” and “where that immortality staff”, and things like that, could use a bit of help in the text to help facilitate.
But, all in all, GREAT mythic vibe to the place. I’m not sure the treasure is all there for some levels 8-10 peeps, but fuck it, it’s a nice adventure.
This is $5 at DriveThru. Page four and five of the preview has a look in to the hooks, while page six goes over a few higher-level ideas/effects of the Broken Saint proper. Both are nice. The last two pages show the first six encounters. Note the disconnected paragraphs in room five and the more “movie watching” encounter in room six. Room two and three show a good example of both interactivity and the more … expansive layout/writing style that I think could be tightened up.
By Daniel J. Bishop
Crowking Press
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 2-3?
“This is the second installment of the Dungeon of Crows. This area includes some nods to HP Lovecraft, a group of brigands, and some other fun stuff. It is fewer areas than the first (29-52), but has a higher page count because the areas take more write-up.”
This is the second installment of a megadungeon … and the project stopped at this “level.” Here’s the link to the first review; the issues and features are essentially the same. There’s about 25 rooms in this installment.
So, really overwritten, way too much text for each room. Same read-aloud issues with a focus on dimensions, etc. And still the same great interactivity/depth to each room.
But first, a note about room relationships.
This adventure has several places where details in a room are important to know about BEFORE someone reaches the room. One room notes that the corridor leading up to this has blackened bones in it. Another notes sentries that should be visible from the hallway/approach, or light sources that should be visible. Another notes that the trogs in the room investigate noises in a nearby room … that comes before the trog room. In each of these cases there are details that the DM need to know BEFORE the party reaches the room. There are several way to accomplish this. In the “room before the trogs” you could put a note, stating that the trogs are alerted, etc. You could note light effects on the map, or sentry locations, etc. Or note in the room before it that you see light ot a sentry or something. I’m a big fan of map detail for hints/clues to the DM, but there are lots of techniques. But you need to do SOMETHING. “Oh, yeah, there a massively loud rock concert going on” is not something you want to tell the players for the room with the connecting door.
And, a note about grouping areas. This installment starts with a couple of rooms left over form the goblin dungeon in the first installment. It’s separate from the rest of the area discussed in this level. It really would have been better to keep those in the first installment. As is, they are clearly out of place, thematically AND in relation to the other rooms on the map.
On to the good.
It still does a decent job cross-referencing rooms from other rooms, notable examples excepted. But, as a main focus, it feels like each room was really thought about and there’s some great interactivity in the rooms. In rooms near the stairs to Level two there are notes that wanderer encounters have a chance of coming from that table instead of the Level one table. The designer looked at the map and that made sense so they put it in. There’s another room with some methane gas … and your torches/flames turn blue when you enter it. Little hints of what’s to come for those paying attention. A pit has a flooded bottom, it can extinguish your lights like torches and lanterns … and has an entrance to sublevel 1a (not included.) Wanna worship at the evil alter instead of tearing it up? There’s a little sidebar about the players becoming worshippers! It also does a great job with masses of enemies. There’s a room full of spiders. 38 of them, but only a 2 in 6 chance they will come down from their webs and attack … but they go in to a feeding frenzy if someone is bit and all 38 mob someone. Great!
So, yes, it does have fourteen line empty room descriptions. If this could be pruned WAY back, so it was easy to use at the table, it would be a great little adventure. As is, amnay of the encounters are great, full of ideas and interactivity and thoughtfulness that doesn’t seem generic.
This is Pay What You Want with a suggested price of $2 at DriveThru. The preview is only one page, the cover, and therefore obviously shows you nothing of what you’re buying.
A noble scion and his retinue from Baldur’s Gate left on an adventure amid much fanfare. That was two weeks ago. Rumours in the taverns suggest only a single soldier returned, bearing grievous wounds and a ransom demand. Is this a simple case of misadventure, or are darker conspiracies afoot? Can you locate and rescue the nobleman, or will you fall victim to the malevolent powers stirring deep within the Temple of the Opal Goddess?
This 44 page adventure contains 36 rooms spread out over about 25 pages. A small multi-level temple, with orcs upstairs and weird shit down, it is a rescue mission that clumsy pushes to investigate beyond the rescue. It has a couple of nice features, like an order of battle and thing-in-a-well, but is a awash with text and formatting issues that make it unbearably. Compared to the usual 5e fare: it’s better than most of the dreck and might be ok if it were cleaned up.
Some nobleman on an archeology expedition gets captured by orcs and you’re offered 1000gp to rescue him, and his retainers if they are convenient. I’m not big on “mission” hooks, but this one does bring a little more. The orcs have sent a ransom note, demanding 10,000gp and 100 battleaxes, the little bit extra about paying for the retainers return and orc ear bounties … not magnificent but better than the usual “if you want to play D&D tonight then do it” that passes for a hook in most adventures. I will say though that a bit of the hook is buried in the background text. The TWO PAGES of background text. I don’t read background text over about one paragraph. I don’t care about your rich detailed tapestry of a backstory. I’m interested in running an adventure tonight. Include if it you must but it’s a failing to force the reading of the backstory. The rest of the adventure should stand alone, without NEEDING to reference the backstory. The hook almost does this. There’s enough that you could probably wing it, but it would have been nice for it to be a bit more explicit. “Antivar’s expedition was well known … “ well, ok, from that I can deduce it is the usual archeology nonsense.
It claims to be a dungeoncrawl but is actually a base assault/rescue, and I wish it would have left out the “dungeonrawl” part on the blurb; one of my MAJOR issues is with failed expectations. Butm as a base assault, it does an ok job. There’s a little section of “what you can see from a distance”, something that a lot of adventures with an outdoor element leave out. The temple/base, proper, has multiple entrances to scout out. There’s a giant bell on top, obvious to all. These are the elements that can help bring a game to life. The party will come up with some plan, using a side entrance, silencing the bell, etc … and then they will execute it and it will go to shit. Fun will then ensue. Tension. Drama. Things going to hell. That’s a major part of D&D and the base assault element in this adventure, including a section on how the orcs react, is built to help encourage this. It’s got all the elements and pretty much does them right. A few more words about “reaching the bell “or reactions to noise in the next room, etc, might have been in order, but it does actually know what it needs to do to enable this style of play and for the most part does it.
The wanderers are good, if long, since they are doing something while out wandering, and some of the weird encounters on the dungeon level of the temple are good, like a snake that lives in a well, half-asleep, that you can wake up. This is good … but better if the party KNOWS there’s a snake in the well that can wake up. Tension. Lareth the Beautiful syndrome. Anticipation. For that to work you gotta know its there, Lareth.
Also, there’s an awakened peach tree in the wanderer list. Nice. He’ll give you a peach if you are nice to him. It’s a normal peach. But … what if it were a GREAT peach? Like +2 stat, permanent, or 5d6 healing or something. Think of all the ripe, delicious, mouth-watering opportunities for roleplaying that would bring to life …
It has some basic formatting issues. First, it uses italics in the read aloud. Bad. Wrong. Italics is hard to read in long patches, like paragraph long read-aloud. It tries, in places, to bold enemies on the DM text of rooms but that also largely fails. The font used doesn’t seem to have that much of a difference between bold and not-bold, and thus the bolding does not stick out as well as it should. Those are largely simplistic issues, though.
It’s verbose. WAY verbose. The usual culprits: flowery text and things relevant to the adventure. Room 1, a bridge over a moat to the temple, had read aloud ending with “You can hear the lapping of the lake …” NO KISSING! Wait, no, I mean, the urge to include this stuff must be fought. Sometimes people confuse this and think I’m asking for facts only. No, there’s a place on the spectrum between facts and flowery and that’s where text should hit. It needs to be enough to inspire the DM, put an image in their head, without engaging in bad WOTC novel writing techniques. Besides, I’m sure the designer knew about the two-sentence read-aloud rule, so I’m curious why they included more? Oh, what? You mean they were unaware of the article WOTC wrote on how people don’t listen to read-aloud after two-three sentences? Hmmm…
Likewise, the DM text. Column long rooms. Full of things that are useless. Recall ye olde bridge-e room? The first two sentences of the DM text are “The bridge is exactly what is seems. It was crafted in ancient times and remains sturdy to this day.” Taken to the logical extreme, would you expect to include those two sentences, it is exactly what it appears to be and this is why”, in your description of every object in the adventure? No, obviously not. Then why do it here? This is useless padding of the text. More is not more. More is less. You see, while running the game I, the DM, have to read this room in about half a second and communicate to the players what they see, what it going on, etc. All of the nonsense irrelevant stuff included slows me down and keeps me from finding the information I need. DM text needs to be scannable and somewhat evocative. I might say that the description needs to tend towards evocative more than facts and the DM text needs to tend more towards facts instead of evocative, but neither to an extreme. (And, in fact, it may be an academic difference for most designers. Just pulling back from their extreme verbosity/facts/novelist stuff may be enough to salvage most adventures, since minimalism, the other bad extreme, is seldom seen these days.)
Room 21, first line of DM text: “This exit predates the occupying orcs, and while Velkesh wanted this security threat walled up, Suthrain talked Grushnak into leaving it as an option (ostensibly for his favoured consort.”
Room 22, first line of DM text: “This is the quintessential ‘savage tribe king’ chamber, and while Grushnak actually enjoys it, it is as much a work of appearance and perception as personal taste.”
These add nothing to the adventure. The adventure is not supposed to paint a rich tapestry. It’s supposed to be a piece technical writing meant to help the DM run it at the table. And not in some abstract more is more way. Technical writing first and THEN make the first part of each encounter evocative, before shifting to more mundane matters, like the DM text.
Courtney recently did a blog post over at Hack & Slash which talks a little about this sort of thing, in comparison to G1. I like G1, I think it may be the best of the original publishing time period. I’m not encouraging people to write like G1, while scannable and “inline adventure” it also makes you work too hard for Evocative. It’s 2019. We can do better than G1 while learning from what G1 did well. Learn the principles that Courtney is talking about rather than taking away that “the adventure must be like G1.”
This is $3 at DMSGuild. The preview is 11 pages. Pages 4,5 show you the hook. I encourage you to just read it and see if you could start the adventure from it. Maybe. Pages 7 and 8 show you the wanderers and foreshadow a bit, the text length issues to come. The last two pages show the approach/order of battle stuff, as well as the room one Bridge encounter I talked about. Note the text length, and how it could be much shorter and scannable.
by Daniel J Bishop Crowking Press Labyrinth Lord Level 1
Within you will find what remains of the Skullheap Goblins, a few vermin known and surprising, a mysterious rhizomatic growth, and the blue and red goop PCs will surely interact with.
This adventure describes the first 28 rooms of 170 rooms on the first level of a megadungeon. Column long, or longer room descriptions, One and two paragraph read-alouds … There’s something here, but you gotta fight for your right to party. Maybe just try the next house over where you have to struggle much less?
I was super excited when this popped up on Jeremy’s OSRNEWS blog. A megadungeon that I missed! I got over my excitement fast. Like, “room 1” fast. Jeremy pointed out that megadungeon plans frequently fizzle, and I would agree with him as to a reason when looking at this … the text is LONG. That’s gotta be burden.
There’s a great map here, hand drawn, with 186 or so encounters on that TINY squared graph paper. It looks like there might be another level under this one. This adventure describes the first 28 rooms on that map. The map alone is worth the $2 PWYW. (Hey, pay the suggested price you cheap asses! Who the fuck pays nothing? View the suggestion as the floor, not the ceiling! Why are you making these designers lives harder?)
There’s an adventure here. The first 28 rooms have an old goblin tribe, now massacred, so the rooms are full of bodies and blood and spooky things. It keeps up the tradition of the first-ish part of a megadungeon having this vibe of ruination and desolation. [Speaking of Desolation: Hobbit cartoon Smaug – the platonic dragon?] I like the encounters, at their core. The room ideas are good ones. Hints of what took place for the players to piece together … players LUV that shit. Strong vermin infestations with a skeleton thrown in. There’s even a hint in one place to other encounters and areas of the dungeon. Clues and foreshadowing are good, they build anticipation and mystery.
But, man, the thing is so completely overwritten that it’s no wonder the project fizzled out. The read-aloud is at least a long paragraph per room, and sometimes more than one(!) The DM notes fill out a column of text, or more. The usual suspects are at play. Room dimensions. Text telling you how you feel. History lessons in rooms things of no import to the NOW. Stuff that should be follow-up embedded in the read-aloud. In the throne room we’re told, in the read aloud, that the skeleton of the goblin chief “He was as big as a human.” That is absolutely a detail for the DM notes, not the read-aloud. This is a game of interactivity between the players and DM. When they go over and look at the skeleton on the throne THEN you tell them he was as big as a human. You reward curiosity and interactivity. This writing comes off as flowery.
There’s good and bad detail. Take, for example, this description of a treasure: “Within this hidden niche is a silver necklace upon which green beryl gems are strung, the whole worth 1,500 gp, and known as the Necklace of Gahwynna, for it was made by the dwarves of the Grey Hills for the bride of the Lost Lord of the Hopmarch some 250 years ago.” Take a moment and ask yourself why the above detail is good. Really consider the issue. No, really, do it. I’ll wait for you.
The treasure is 1500gp, a not insubstantial sum. Some PC is gonna wear that necklace, or sell it. Thus the treasure is, essentially, serving the same purpose as a treasure map. It’s a hook to more adventure. It can cause a complication in another game. Someone notices, knows the history, turns in the party, or it gets them in good with a noble, or the dwarves. The necklace detail serves to expand play and interactivity. That stands in contrast to useless detail about the past which serves no purpose other than paint a rich picture of history. Perfect. That goes in the writer’s guide to your campaign, but not in the adventure.
This is Pay What You Want, with a suggested price of $2, at DriveThru. The full size preview is 404’ing out, but the flash preview gives you a good idea of the map. Like I said, the $2 is worth it just for that.
This is one adventure in the latest issue, #24, of Footprints, released by the Dragonsfoot community.
This is a nine page adventure with about 43 rooms over several smaller levels. Featuring the ruins of some towers next to a river, and the dungeons underneath, it does a good job actually feeling like a ruin. Workmanlike, its writing could be more evocative and it relies a bit too much on history and explaining, but still manages to present a relatively terse and scannable room descriptions.
This does a good job feeling like ruins. Vermin, ooze, rubble. There’s a (sery simple) ruined tower on each shore, each with a cellar underneath and then a hidden dungeon level that connects the two. Much in the same way the gatehouse in Stonehell or some of the ruin in MERP felt, this does a good job conveying a ruined feeling.
The writing is serviceable. Note that I find about 70%-80% of adventures NOT serviceable, so, Good Job! It does a decent job using whitespace, bolding and formatting to call attention to and separate information chunks. This, combined with a writing style that is on the terser side of the house, make the adventure easy to scan and therefore use at the table. You can FIND things.
It engages in some activities that makes sense. Destroy the evil mural or defile the evil alter and gain some XP. There are game world meme’s that make sense and this is one of them. It also does a decent job with some of the wanderers. A grey ooze wanders one level, and rather than a traditional table you roll to see if it’s in the room you just entered. Likewise one partially flooded level has giant leeches in it and the wanderer check determines if one has found you. It makes sense, and both contribute to the ruin-like vibe of the place. The rumors are also a cut above normal. They have a little context in them, and are tied in to the place in a way that makes them feel natural. Not quite in voice (Boo! Boo I say Sir!) they still are a little bit more interesting than the usual and show some work has been put in to them.
Also, I’m never satisfied, so now is the time on Sprockets when I pick it apart.
There’s a host of small issues. It might just be my eyes this morning, but the maps seem blurry, maybe made worse by their small size. Also, in quite an annoying fashion, DOWN stairs are noted on the map but not the up stairs. Yes, I think it’s always the first roo on that level that has the stairs, but it’s still a interesting choice to not put it on the map. The Leech wanderers turn up on a 1 in 20 checked each turn. My, that’s a lot of rolling! I wonder why this was chosen over a 1 in 10 every two turns? IN the past frequent wanderer rolling has seemed fiddly and cumbersome to me. I think “every turn” also paradoxically, is LESS interesting than every two turns. Every 2 feels like the party pushing their luck to stay inside, while every turn becomes routine, maybe?
The text chooses to engage in some history and justifying, which stands out because of the otherwise terse nature. I stuck some example down at the end of this review. These add little to nothing to the adventure.
The room with the big baddie and his minions is also interesting. It states that he goes to investigate disturbances on the level. I might have instead placed that text as a kind of preamble to the level, or in the first room, so the DM was sure to see it immediately.
I’d like to focus on two things though. First, the order that information appears. One room in particular made me think of this. It’s ruined, a little flooded. “Olive slime has established itself here. Looking like scum on the water …” This appears a few sentences in to the description. In cases like this I much prefer to see a general description of the room, including scum on the water, up high/first in the room description, and then following that a little blurb about the scum actually being two patches of Olive slime. This organizes the information better for the DM during play.
Second, and my major issue, is the workmanlike descriptions, which I’m using a little negatively here to describe a lack of evocative descriptions. Room 33 is the evil chapel and room 34 a throne room, and yet both have very little in the way of description other than the room title. A profane alter with 3’ of water in the room. The throne room is a little better with a water logged and rotting throne sitting on a dias, painted gold. Profane is a conclusion; the designer should show, not tell, something that makes the DM/players think “wow, that’s profane!” It is this lack of evocative descriptions that really keeps my opinion of this restrained. Again, evocative descriptions don’t have to be long, just a few words or a sentence that paints a picture for the DM.
“There is nothing of value here, adventurers having searched the wreckage and carried off every copper piece long ago.”
Hidden by a bandit that laired here a few years back,
8. Empty Room This room is completely empty.
PCs may be alarmed by the presence of the fungi, but it is normal, harmless, and serves as food for rats.
The Lord of the River Gate used to sit in audience here, pronouncing sentences on captives.
Rats and other vermin got to the supplies that were stored here centuries ago.
The water in this room (3’ deep) is inhabited by an evil spirit: a young woman that was hiding when the elementals flooded the dungeon. Once a plaything of the Lord of the River Gate, she now manifests as a water weird and exacts vengeance upon any living creature that chances upon the room.
For levels 3-5. This is the first of four modules in a series. In this module we learn of an impending demon war, and go in search of a magical sword. Full of battles, riddles and puzzles.
Hey, it’s Saturday, that means non-OSR stuff, in general. I’m going to try something new and repeat myself more/rehash old dead topics, since they will be less familiar to the 5e crowd. We’ll see how long this lasts.
This 31 page adventure features a twenty room nearly entirely “text/challenge” dungeon. It is, essentially, just a series of linear combats interspaced with linear riddles. I’m at a loss to find something positive to say. I guess … it’s coherent?
We start with a two page backstory. Yes, I’m kinder about those things these days (unless important things are in it) but in this case it’s a taste of what’s to come. The 2 and half page read-aloud that begins the adventure. Yup. 2.5 pages. Players don’t listen to long backstory. Did you know that WOTC did an informal study and found that players stop listening two to three sentences in to read-aloud? That’s a lot less than 2.5 pages. It is far FAR better to provide a few keywords that describe the personality and then do something like bullet-point paraphrase the salient issues. Then the DM can do a little more back and forth with the players and it comes across more natural and is interactive. D&D is supposed to be interactive, between the players and the DM. A long monologue has NO place in D&D.
It takes a week for the party to sail to some old ruins, wherein they are looking for a sword. The sea voyage has four entries. “Pirate, mermen, dinosaur, sahuagin.” Just a 1-4 and those four names, nothing else. It’s up to the designer to add value to the adventure in order to assist the DM in running it. “THEY ATTACK” is boring. The pirates need some character, the sahuagin some mechanism of attack. Each entry deserves a few words, no more than a sentence, to give the encounter some character. Then the DM has something to work with during the game.
Arriving at the ruined city the party is presented with a map. The only encounter is the tower at the center. What happens if you search? Do you have random encounters? Is there ANY guidelines for the ruined city at all? No. “The party should go to the tower, it is the next stop,” Linear adventure design is BAD adventure design.
The rooms in the tower either have a monster that attacks or a fey that gives you a riddle/challenge. This is what I would expect from this, and it is boring. Again, D&D is an interactive game. You need to give the party something to do besides fight. And no, solving a riddle aint it. The purpose of the room is not to have a combat or to solve a riddle. That’s the height of bad design. Something else should be going on, something more, and the combat and/or riddle should be a part of that, but not the sole reason for the room existing.
The final room is the old “12 foot pit and 11.5 foot board” thing, and you’re not allowed to bring anything in to the room, says the fey who meets you outside, because the door won’t open otherwise. IE: do what the designer says you should do and don’t be original. Look at the D&D spell list. Imagine the very first time, back in 1971, that a player encountered the 12 foot/11,5 foot thing. Look at the spell list. Know why dimension door exists? So the players could skip that puzzle. At the cost of a spell splot, a precious resource. Someone at the table said “fuck this shit, I’m researching a new spell: dimension door” and thus it became part of the list. When there is only one solution allowed then the players are not playing D&D, they are just doing what the designer/DM wants.
And, and that book title trap? I couldn’t read it on my copy of the adventure. Since the titles only exist in the picture I can’t really figure it out. Was it meant to be a handout?
Also, there’s a line in the backstory about a wizard who attempts to control an archdemon. It goes something like “Only a fool would attempt to control such a Being…” Hey! Yo! Prejudicial much? You never hear about all of the time a wizard controlling an archdemon turns out well, only the bad stuff. I think our nameless narrator suffers from a lack of archwizard vision!
You don’t want to get anywhere near this adventure.
This is $2.50 at DMSGuild. The preview is six pages. You get to the the two page backstory and the 2.5 page read-aloud, and that most excellent wandering monster table. The preview should show you a couple of rooms/encounters, so you can get a feel for the types of writing and encounters to be expected in the product.
By James Andrews
Stormforge Productions
LotFP/OSR
Levels 1-3
Deep in a mine is an ancient vessel. Something so ancient, it sunk under the stone like mud. A vessel alien to this world, yet here longer than most of human history. Can the players harvest its strange technological bits before being disintegrated by deadly lasers? Or will they be enslaved by the odd pink aliens which have been unleashed on the world?
This 22 page adventure details a 22 room spaceship buried in a mine. The miners are now undead cyber-zombies, the aliens floating balls of tentacles, and there’s a crazed robot to avoid. But, treasure is abstracted, the rooms all need a second pass for logic and to clean up unneeded text. Still, there’s a good cat and mouse idea here.
The (rather loose) hook has some miners having disappeared and not come back, except for one with tales of a metal demon and hellfire. The actual mines are quite small, just a couple of room, before the spaceship begins. It’s a collection of obvious obstacles, like a laser screen doorway to be crawled between, alien tentacle blobs, abstracted treasure, and a killer robot to be avoided.
The patrol bot is the most interesting part. It roams about the hallways, on a loop. If it catches someone it most likely kills them, then takes them to medbay to convert to a cyber zombie. There are guidelines for hiding form it, how hard is searches, vents on the map to crawl through to avoid it, and how it escalates its searches over time in response to interactions with the party. It’s an interesting aspect of the adventure to put on some pressure AND it supports the DM with the maps, guidelines, etc to help them accomplish it.
The rest of the adventure is uninspiring.
There are annotations missing form the map. The robot does something at points A and B, but they are not on the map. Some of the traps are Bad Traps. While searching the lockers in a room one explodes and you take damage. It’s kind of the same as a rando pit in a corridor … just take damage and move on with the adventure. There’s no interactivity with that.
Each room starts with a DM overview and then some bad read-aloud. The overviews are mostly not needed at ALL . The room titled “4. Medical Room” tells us that “this room is the equivalent of an alien medical bay.” Well, yes, could have guessed that. It’s almost all unneeded text. The read aloud if overblown imagery at times, and leaves out details at others. It’s not really evocative at all. The med bay, for example, have absolutely no mention of creatures, until you get far down in the room description where it say “Creatures: 4 cyber-zombies.” Wouldn’t that be mentioned in the read aloud? What are they doing? Just standing there? Do they attack? Whatever the designer was going for doesn’t really come across.
For those in search of tech, you shall despair. It’s all abstracted in to “bits” worth 1sp each.
It comes off as just a generic, abstracted spaceship. IN fact, the surviving miner even calls it a ship. I managed to run S3 once for three sessions and the party still hadn’t figured out it was a ship. This aint that, and not even a glowing red laser fence can save it.
This is free at DriveThru. There’s no preview (although I guess you don’t need one if its free) and the level isn’t included in the text description, although it is on the cover if you blow it up to look at.
By Kingtycoon Methuselah Game of the North OSR (LotFP?) Level 4-5?
Nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted on Cormorant Isle! And yet you find that you must rely on dangerous strangers if you hope to leave the Isle alive. Who are these tricksters and what is the secret that they will kill to keep hidden?
This 73 page adventure contains about ten adventure locales on an shipwreck island, each with about ten or so locations. Imaginative, this thing is VERY hard to decipher. Fonts, layout, rules, phrasing … I actually had a very real headache after the first two pages. I’m going to count this one as a ‘Failure to Review’ … I just don’t think I got it.
I usually review an electronic copy. This one I had to resort to printing out, which yields something a little easier on the eyes. As I noted, it gives me a headache. The format is three-column. The read-aloud font is a kind of dark magenta or brown, with a grey background, in italics. There are weird section breaks that are not obvious. You’ll be reading a paragraph and the words will just stop mid-sentence. That’s your clue that the section below is a major new section break and you should continue reading from the top of the next column to finish the paragraph you are in … an invisible section break. Except when there actually IS a formatting error and the paragraph just ends WITHOUT it continuing in another column. “The heretic has “ … clearly is meant to convey something, but it just stops right there. The tables presented look like screenshots, with a font, background, color that over the line on readability. You CAN make it out, but for your eye health you should not. This 24 pages of the adventure, proper, actually failed to print the first time I tried. There is something STRANGE going on, none of which lends a hand to comprehension … at the table or not.
The game system is … not mentioned? “OSR.” A scale walls test is mentioned as a “d6 scale walls test.” Like, that’s the check, as in game system, or you need to make d6 attempts at a check? Other sections reference Search result 1, search result 2, search result 3, and so on. I have no idea. Things kind of LOOK like D&D. Each NPC and creature gets their own full page character sheet (with something called “Primary Mode” with a symbol in it?) and a “Phys/Men” trail score … but it also has HP, AC, HD, Mv, Init and so on. I just … I don’t know …
The writing is … abstracted? Obtuse? Both? Your ship needs provisions, there’s an island ahead. Through the spyglass you see a battle taking place on the beach. Three ships are burning. You see the last combatant drowning the second to last under the waves.
Huh? Battle between who? The people on the ship? There’s no detail, in the read-aloud or DM notes, of what the fuck just happened, or enough context to infer. This lack of context to infer what is going on is a major, major issue throughout the adventure.
This is in spite of a summary, which comes at the end of the keyed encounters on page 25 or so, that tells the referee what is going on. I note that reading that summary sheds VERY little light on the goings on.
Did I mention that there’s an Exquisite Corpse label on a Lulu product? My eyebrows are raised.
“But Bryce, you haven’t actually reviewed the adventure yet!” Correct. There’s a witch, riding a giant sword, over a beach throwing fireballs to set ships on fire. There’s an illusion of a bonfire. It’s also a teleporter to other, REAL fires. Uh, there are knights, and places, and some Lashan, and a witch and … I have no fucking clue what is going on in this adventure.
I fail. The weekend is coming. I’m going to try again.
Ok, weekend over. Tuesday now. I’ve been through the adventure three more times and feel that I now grasp it, although I’m not sure enough to run it.
Your ship needs provisions so you land on the island, seeing the end of a battle of knights, one drowning another in the surf. Landing, there’s recruitment attempt by the knight to his cause. His group (they have a camp farther in) is here to find and rescue a woman, kept by another group of knights. There’s a small castle that you and they can rush. (From this point out they serve as a kind of greek chorus, getting killed, etc as you explore the island.) You could, also, join up with the other group of knights or do something else … at least that’s what the text tells us, although its not exactly well supported. Somewhere in this the islands witch shows up and burns down your ship, trapping you. From the castle, ruined and full of bodies, you see a tower. Exploring the tower lets you see four other areas, each with some tie to an element. Getting through those MIGHT get off the island. Along the way is a kind of animalistic dragon with mimcry in a lava cave, some leshen, children in masks (another chous, or a sorts, maybe) the witch, and so on.
It’s got strong allegorical ties then most adventures (ie: >0) and some great language in it. Buried behind text that is THICK to get through. A highlighter won’t work in this one.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $7. The preview is six pages. The last four pages show the first encounter sections. I encourage you to TRY and read page three.
The link to the product in this review is probably an affiliate link. If you follow the link and buy the product, I make some money. Just thought you should know.
