Shipwreck at Har’s Point

Posted on November 20, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By R. Nelson Bailey
Dungeoneers Guild Games
OSR
Levels 1-3

Nothing much usually happens in the sleepy fishing hamlet of Har’s Point. Recently, however, a ship has crashed on the rocks outside of town. Now rumors concerning treasure it supposedly carried are running rife amongst the fisherfolk. Some of these rumors hint that dead sailors from the ship are now walking the nearby beaches at night. Even more concerning, a mysterious stranger has been spotted around town. A few inquisitive adventurers might be able to discover what exactly is going on in Har’s Point.

This sixteen page adventure details a couple of locations in and near a seaside village and a few events related to a … sahuagin attack. It’s more a “sixteen page overly wordy outline” then it is an adventure. And it’s pretty brutal as well for the level range given. What was U3? Something like 3-5?

Well, the little sahuagin bastards have, once again, lost a religious artifact and need to find it so they go a raiding. You’d think their gods would punish them more, given how much they seem fuck things up.   But no, they keep hanging around, showing up in every sea adventure EVAR.

There’s a shipwreck which, ostensibly, occupies the party. While messing about with it and staying in the village to do that, some people go missing That you probably never hear about. And then eventually a weird woman shows up. And then eventually the sahuagin show up and try to kill everyone. I know, right? So, the party is in town. They want to go out to the shipwreck, that has lots of rumors of gold on it, and of dead sailors wandering the beach at night. To get there they have to take a little boat. Which costs 400gp to buy, ten times the going rate. Or, I guess they can steal one. But then, for the last two hundred yards to the shipwreck (its on a reef) there’s a 50% chance each turn it capsizes, likely killing everyone because you take 2hp of damage each turn you’re in the water. AND there’s a 5 HD giant eel that prowls the place and attacks anyone in the water. Don’t worry, if you’re a seaman background then it’s only a 30% chance per turn of capsizing! What the fuck man! 200 yards of this? Once there you find no gold, but trade goods. “Ah ha!” sez me “Even better! Goods from foreign lands!” Alas, there are no details given. Just “trade good” with no value. 

The sahuagin are searching the shore/land around the wreck, looking for their lost artifact. They search three hundred yards a night. The text explicitly says they search an area that is six miles from the south of the little village to four miles to the north of the little village. Ten miles. At three hundred yards a night. That’s like, what, two months? But wait! They end up attacking the village on like the third night. So … I don’t know what the fuck is going on. 

The idea of events is a good one, for a general outline of an adventure like this, but it seems ass screwy in this. The events take place over three or four days … and yet the party is likely to hit the shipwreck quickly and probably move on. It’s like it wasn’t thought through, with the capsizing thing. I like the sort of a “locale and general outline with events”, almost like a little sandbox, but …

The first event is the disappearance of two beachcombers, at night. Who are killed and eaten in an isolated location. Which means no one knows they are dead. WHich means the event doesn’t really impact the party. It’s the same as listing “Bob & Martha thought about having sex but decided not to.” How the fuck does this impact the adventure? Leaving a bloody mess, near the boats, or on the way to them, or somewhere else … THAT would serve as some sort of inciting event to get the parties ass in gear. As written, though, it’s a non-event. “But Bryce”, the whiners say “you can change it.” You’re damn right I can. And I would, too. You know what else? I’d also write my own adventure instead of using some poor quality thing like this. It’s the designers job to do this shit, to inspire the DM, to give them the ability to run a good game … if not then what the hell are we paying for? SOme stats out of the DMG?

The church is the center of social activity in the town, we’re told. That’s it. That doesn’t play in to the events. That doesn’t play in to the townfolk. It adds no local color. No local color is provided. It’s a good fucking idea, but you have to then anchor that with specifics. When the party come in they are having a wedding, or a town meeting, or something else, going on all the time. WHile the baddies attack there’s a sewing bee at the church. WOrk it the fuck in for vecna’s sake!

There is, essentially, no treasure to speak of. Instead we are provided with milestone/goal XP. Which means that the party has to read the DM’s mind to figure out what they are supposed to do. “Ha! You didn’t figure out that the crown was what the baddies were looking for! No 200xp for you!” or “No, the chick dies, you don’t get your 200xp for that.” There’s multiple problems here. First, the fucking system is gold=xp, so that’s how the party is going to play unless the DM is up front with them that there is no gold here. Second, the party can’t succeed unless they know what they are supposed to do. Are we do read the goals out to the up front? I’ don’t have a problem with that, if we’re goal based, but it also kind of kills the game flow, IMO, given the SPECIFIC milestones mentioned. Compare to more modern systems, like 5e, where the milestone system is used and it’s more “complete chapter 1.” Finally, it implies there’s a right way and a wrong way to play the adventure. I hope you’re goody good who help fishermen for no reason, because anything else and you’re not getting XP from this adventure. It’s bullshit. It’s like saying “Ha! You were supposed to roll low on all of those to hit rolls instead of high! Suckers!”

And since I’m on a tear, let’s talk about rumors. The rumor table is laid out traditionally, with fifteen or so numbered rumors. But not all rumors are known by everyone. Only the fishermen know some of them, for example. But, you have to sig through every rumor to find who knows what, it’s not organized at all. Organizing it by “Everyone” “FIshermen” and so on would have made much more send.

In the end this is just another poorly organized adventure with too many words laid out in a long text paragraph format with little to no though made to usability. IE: the usual.

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. The only worthwhile page is the last one, showing you part of the village description. It would have been better to show the actual encounter areas so people would know what they are getting for their sixteen page $6 adventure.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/289789/Shipwreck-at-Hars-Point-DUNGEON-DELVE-SIDE-QUEST-1?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 20 Comments

Geir Loe Cyn-Crul

Posted on November 18, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Anthony Huso
Self-published
OSRIC
Level 9

The entrance to Geir Loe Cyn-crul is a towering doorway hidden in the crook of a precipitous ridge. As a manifestation of greed supplanting ancient veneration, the doors have been torn off and cast aside.

This 78 page adventure describes a one level dungeon with 103 rooms in about thirty pages. The fundamental ideas of this are (mostly) quite good but it fall down somewhat in execution being, as the designer notes, a hack & slash job. As a strategic puzzle it’s interesting in that regard. As a more traditional adventure, only the vibe delivers on promises.

This is a different thing. It reminds me, somewhat, of a few of those Frontier Settlement adventures where the party is faced with hundreds of humanoid foes. It’s got a strategic bend to it that it going to fit better as a high level adventure. Every ten rounds, inside, you have an encounter, with about a third just being cave crickets. One area has 12,000 piercers in it. Another has a couple of hundred trolls. The rooms, chambers and halls are cyclopean in size. It gives the feeling of some of those scenes in Moria and could, potentially, support a small army deployed inside of it. Like, maybe, a small PC army in support of their mission …

It’s one level, with those cyclopean halls and chambers, and a couple of “Warrens” attached to the core chambers. You really get the sense of size from the map. There’s also a great ruined thing going on … but also it’s lived in. Imagine this DID house the Throne of the Gods, and over the years it got ruined and support of the location has stopped … but it’s still guarded by some who are doing their duty. That’s what you get here. Cyclopean halls, ruined, but with the loyal guard still repesent … as well as a fuck ton of vermin and interlopers near the edges. Huso delivers on the vibe. The map works well with the text and the concept to deliver on a feeling of sad majesty and the glory of days long past. 

And it is a mother fucking hack. Almost every encounter is just pure combat. The 200 trolls, multiple giant guards with dragons, drow with “hydras”, chamber after chamber stuffed with monsters that amount to one or two sentences and then a long stat block and a longer treasure block. Again, seen as a strategic challenge it’s interesting, but as an “adventure’ it feels much less so. 

The map is both glorious and frustrating. It’s provided in page-sections at the back of the book, so, like twelve pages to deliver the entire map. High res and a full map are available on the designers blog, though you have to dig a bit (or google straight to it.) It delivers on the promise of the ruined Throne of the Gods, and has height in places as well as multiple routes in/through areas. Solid. Frustrating as you try to piece it together holistically, especially as certain lair maps spill out in to other map pages. An overview would have helped. Creatures are located on the map, squads of smaller humanoids or individuals for the larger ones. This is relatively good: you can figure out if someone can see/hear/react to the parties incursion/noise/light etc. I did find it VERY hard to read though. The floor is grey colored on the map and sometimes that blended with the, rather smallish, monster letters that made it hard on my eyes and non-trivial to locate the nearest monsters. Size/dimensions are also approximate, with the scale given on the map compass and no traditional square grid overlay on the map. Too small and/or busy, I’d guess. It’s a bit disconcerting. It both feels like it supports the cyclopean vibe but also that it has abstracted the map in a pointcrawl type of thing. It IS a traditional map, just without the grid. But it feels pointcrawlish, perhaps because of both the scale of the halls and the lack of a grid. DIsconcerting, and the monster letters don’t work well in execution even though it IS the correct methodology to take. 

Uh … I think everything in this is hostile? There may be one wanderer that is not immediately hostile if the party is strong. Otherwise every wanderer is of the “it attacks” type. Likewise IU think that just about every creature encountered is hostile. In a traditional adventure that would be a minus, but this almost feels like a, idk, Battlesystem thing? Approached as such, as a strategic campaign of war, it makes more sense. In that same sense, the exploration element mainly revolves around the next time the party gets ambushed. There is a puzzle of two and those are pretty well done. And with divination magic the party should get by pretty well. It is, after all, an adventure for levels 9-12. Order of Battle is noted in a few places when it is not obvious from the map which creatures will react. 

There are a couple of puzzling choices. One has stars that drop off in to a VERY deep chasm. This being high level D&D, though, the party can easily get to the bottom. A line or two about that would have been nice. Likewise I think that a page or two about “strategic campaign play’ could have been in order, giving the DM advice on how to handle various aspects of assaulting/supporting this place with an army, literally or figuratively, of followers. A missed opportunity.

Huso’s got a striking aesthetic in his products. It works well. The vibe in this is excellent and the art and map helps with that. The writing supports that and while generally on the terser side of things it does get conversational at times. That supports the vibe, but the challenge it support the vibe with the words AND make it obvious. The language seems a little too forced a few too many times. Much of it comes across as window dressing, but, that supports the vibe. 

Run as a strategic puzzle this would be interesting, but you’re going to have to support that play style yourself. Run as a typical exploration adventure it is quite lopsided to combat and falls down on the puzzles/roleplaying/interactivity. It DOES support a high level play style though, only gimping the party in maybe two ways: fliers get the attention of doombats and piercers while fucking up with the Throne of the Gods kills you and no Wish will save you. I can live with those.

I’m disappointed. I recognize the vision, and it being partially implemented. Going more in one direction (strategic) or another (exploration) would have helped with this. As would some tweaking to the actual writing to maintain the vibe while increasing clarity.

This is $10 at Lulu. There’s a preview available but it requires Flash, and I ain’t got flash at Lulu.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/anthony-huso/geir-loe-cyn-crul-digital/ebook/product-24229481.html

(Also, FUCK! I was gonna put the Throne of the Gods in MY megadungeon!)

Posted in Reviews | 7 Comments

(Pathfinder) Dark Days in Stoneholme

Posted on November 16, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jonathan McAnulty
AAW Games
Pathfinder
Level 3

Waves of supernatural darkness sweep over the subterranean city of Stoneholme, quenching lights and bringing with it foul creatures of shadow. After heroically defending a group of dwarven children from being ravaged by a group of these shadow beings, the PCs are approached by Shtawn Deppenkhut—one of the king’s own advisers—and are offered the task of finding the source of the darkness that threatens the city. The PCs investigation takes them through the Underworld to hidden caverns, where demon worshipping priests offer living sacrifices in an attempt to plunge Stoneholme into everlasting darkness, a first step in destroying the hated city once and for all, but as it turns out the priests aren’t the only ones behind this unfolding plan to destroy Stoneholme.

*Withering Sigh*

This thirty page adventure details an eleven room dungeon in the underdark, and a couple of linear city and “journey there” combats. It shows no understanding of formatting or organization, other than the stat block. Wanna fight? That’s all you’ll be doing here.

Evil McEvil-man hires the party to look in to some evil. He’s got an evil plan and, for some reason, hires the party to meddle, no doubt to further his evil plan. This is like, what, the six billionith time an adventure has done this? Whatever. It’s all crap anyway. SO you save some dwarf kids from baddies in the streets, get hired to look in to a warehouse, and from there get hired to go through the underdark to kill some goblins in their lair. Then you find evidence that … some fellow dwarves were behind it all! Oh the humanity! Errr, dwarfmanity.

The typical massive amount of stat block place is present. Also present are HUGE amounts of poorly formatted DM text. Just long paragraph blocks full of words running on and in to each other. The paragraphs are all left justified as well, so you can’t really tell where one ends and another begins. Excellent for for making your content as incomprehensible as possible. Seriously, this thing has NO idea how to format a paragraph or convey information. To quote Gauntlet “I have not seem such bravery!” or something … 

Information is repeated time and again for no reason. Dwarf construction is weak-ass stuff, wil recent constructions breakings. Huh. I thought the trope was the opposite? Shadow rats, which could be cool, get no description at all and instead are just black looking rats. There was some real opportunity to generate horror and mystery with them, but no. Not to be. At multiple times in the adventure there are DC check gates. AT the end, find a DC14 letter to reveal the dwarven conspiracy, the rest of the adventure/dungeon essentially just being a pretext for this skill check. I wonder what would happen if the party failed it and the DM didn’t fudge it? That would be fun.

This is just crap on top of crap. Linear design. Fight a monster because it’s in your way and you’re on the way to that final skill check. Combat after combat. Tactical information but no real exploration or interactivity. Boring ass writing that’s not evocative at all. Absolutely NO attempt to make the text usable by the DM at the table, instead just vomiting words with no thought or care to their presentation.

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, but you don’t get to see anything of the adventure, just the preamble. As shitty a preview as one could possible provide while still providing a preview. These things just scream “Look! I paid for a pretty background text and art!” while giving you absolutely no idea how useful the actual adventure is. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/145615/U01-Dark-Days-in-Stoneholme?1892600

Posted in Pathfinder, Reviews | 31 Comments

The Necropolis of Nuromen

Posted on November 13, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Justin Becker, Michael Thomas
Dreamscape Design
Blueholme
Level 1

… introduce a group of 1st level characters to the thrills of Underworld exploration as they attempt to unravel they secrets of the evil necromancer’s lair and deal with some bandits, too.

Yes, this line is for you.

This 22 page adventure features a two level dungeon with about thirty rooms. Classic encounters harken back to a time when D&D was fresh. Inconsistencies, and twice as many words as needed, require highlighting and notes to use it as intended. 

Sweet cover. And that cover is indicative of the mood created by the adventure. There’s a malaise, or ennui, presented in parts of the adventure. A feeling of weariness. Not in the designers, but an intentional effect in the setting they have created. The cover, the Harry Clarke illustrations (does ANYONE do elves better?) the elves wearying leaving the world, the downfall and doom of the mage Nuroman; the elements combine with the writing style to produce this effect. A magical world of folklore, a weariness in it. It’s done well.

The elements present in the encounters are classical ones. Bottomless pits, rushing underground rivers, skeletal arms wielding swords, or skeletons dicing at a table. There are statues to fuck with and riddles to learn secrets to elsewhere in the dungeon. A sparseness of creatures is balanced though by the wanderer table, and I suspect we could all learn a lesson from this. Is all monsters were lair creatures, and sparsely populated, then the wanderers push the party forward, limiting their careful explorations. Ten creature encounters, about half of which are avoidable and/or triggered by a careless party. There’s a good mix of interactivity and creature encounters, with roleplaying possibilities present in a few and others, as noted, avoidable. 

There’s a decent amount of treasure, probably the correct amount for a Gold=XP game, as well as other rewards like stat bonuses and being labeled “Elf friend” by the elves. It’s always good when the party receives accolades when they choose to be good. Magic items are all generic book items and that’s a major disappointment. Not OD&D, but book monsters and book magic treasure means Holmes. Which is what Blueholme is, but it could have been better.

The adventure is plagued by two major issues: excessive trivia and inconsistent details. The later first.

Early in the adventure there are sections describing the forest, the town, the people, the road, and so on. Buried in that is a small section describing a rocky hilltop, ruins, and a black hole in the earth. Then it quickly switches to another rando forest section, leaving those two paragraphs behind. Later on when the dungeon environs proper is reached we get a second, much weaker, description of the area. It has none of the mystery and melancholy of the first section. It doesn’t feel like a writing or editing mistake, but rather a layout issue, lie someone took one of the most effective “dungeon entrance” description and just pasted it in at random earlier. All of that melancholy is lost in the actual dungeon entrance section, which is much more genero ruins oriented. To continue with the entrance, the hole is described as 100 feet deep with last fifty feet choked with rubble. But then, the actual “room one” at the bottom has none of this. It’s not the bottom of a rubble filled pit. It’s a room with a river running through it and you can see the remains of the bridge collapsed in it. And the map shows a room that is, essentially, devoid of rubble. The adventure does this repeatedly, the map and text disconnected and different parts of the text disconnected from each other. Perhaps the two designers did not marry their individual efforts well? Double Doors, mentioned in the text, are single doors on the map. Doors that can’t be closed are represented as standard door symbols. The different elements just don’t make sense together. This, then, is basic consistency checking that an editor can provide. I can be hard on editors, but MOST adventures, even bad ones, can pass some basic consistency checks. 

The encounter writing, proper, is full of trivia. I suspect the adventure could be trimmed of at least half its words and the end result would be better for it. I am, frequently, met with a common response to his criticism: “More is better, right?” and it’s cousin “The DM might need it.” No. These are not true. Excessive detail gets in the way of the DM actually running the adventure during the game. It requires a highlighter, notes and a ton of prep work beforehand. If the trivia were NOT present then the DM can focus on the elements of the adventure that actual impact the play of the game. Scanability it much easier. Everyone is happier. 

The devil, of course, is in the definition of “Trivia.” What is trivia vs what is needed to run the room, or add flavour to it. Because, of course, we want all of the flavour with none of the trivia. Room 3 is titled “The Old Armoury.” Given that this is a ruin, and that has been properly established, and that it happened in an instant, what would you, gentle reader, then make up about the room, in play, if that’s all you had to go on? The first line of the “The old Armory” is “Here Nuroman’s guards stored their shields, armor and weapons.” The adventure does this over and over again. It will introduce a room and then tell us that the Kitchen is where food was prepared. We know that. It’s a platonic quality of ‘Kitchen.’ This is a classic example of superfluous text that gets in the way. (In fact, I think the classic online example wherein I was introduced to the concept did indeed involve a Kitchen. On rpgsite?) A centipede “that has crawled in through some unknown fissure.” Again, detail unneeded. This is an attempt to explain WHY, and those attempts are (almost)always unneeded. It’s a giant centipede in a dungeon. Vermin need little explanation, except perhaps in extreme circumstances and even then perhaps only if it provides some springboard for the adventure. Coins litter the ground “where they fell from their owners frayed purses.” Worldbuild, history, justifications for what IS. “The magical bones must be defeated before the treasure can be had.” Yes, and while technically correct we do not have a line in each room that says “the door must be opened before someone can walk through it.” Padding, conversational padding. I’m not heartless, throw in some goodies every once in awhile, an aside, or something. But too much and you clog up the text, as is done here.

We do get abstractions though. A scabbard is ‘macabre.’ That’s a conclusion. A good description would make the DM and/or players think “man, that’s macabre!” The challenge is to NOT resort to a conclusion and to communicate ‘macabre’ in a terse manner. This is GOOD detail, the kind that impacts play. The adventure needs more of it. At one point there’s a key hanging on the wall. Only it’s not recognizable as a key, just as the lock it fits is is not recognizable as a lock. That’s it. Nothing more. What does the thing look like? What does the lock look like? Nothing. That’s exactly the sort of thing you SHOULD be spending your word budget on, the things that directly impact the adventure and it’s actual play.

What this all leads to is a foul smelling room, that is then described in two paragraphs as an elegant dining room. Halfway through the third paragraph we’re told it’s befouled with harpy excrement. Well shit, that’s the sort of detail that goes in the first paragraph. Things immediately noticeable should (generally) go higher up in the description where the DMs attention will immediately be focused and thus be able to communicate it to the players. While they interact and ask questions the DM is scanning the next section of text. You can’t make a DM read four paragraphs of text, during the game at the table, before they describe a room. It takes too long and it’s too much to hold in your head at once. 

I will make one more Monday Morning Quarterback observation. In one particular room there are skeletons at a table, engaged in a dice game. It you touch the dice they come to life and attack. BORING! They should instead invite the players to dice with them. Then, things could devolve in to a combat. A bit of the ultra-violence is always an option in an RPG, but it’s almost always advisable to have something else BEFORE that, or that leads to that. Plan B, stabbing the fuck out of something/someone, is always an option. It’s the fact that a Plan A also could exist that gives RPG’s some of their charm.

I’m not gonna Regert this, but it’s close. If only the writing could be gotten under control in more places.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3. There’s no preview, but it is Pay What You Want, so essentially you could just buy it for $0 to get a preview. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110292/BLUEHOLMETM-The-Necropolis-of-Nuromen?1892600

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 11 Comments

Mystery at Morfurt

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Todd Pote
Arcana Creations
S&W
Levels 1-3

Hey, I was told I’m not supposed to be ashamed and embarrassed to note I have a Patreon. It still feels wrong. If you join, then you get to read my daily musings about my continual guilt over the subject, self-doubt, and procrastination. That sounds like fun, right? https://www.patreon.com/join/tenfootpole?

Several children have gone missing from the village of Morfurt and they seem to have disappeared without a trace. The villagers fear that evil has returned to the ruins of an old abandoned tower. Answering the plea for help, the Earl of the region dispatches a party of adventurers to investigate.

This 28 page adventure features a twenty room dungeon in an old tower. It has three themes: abandoned, hideout, and old secret area. That’s a good mix, but the massive read-aloud, history trivia, heavy mechanics, and low treasure make this quite skippable.

You spend some time poking around a village, and then eventually wander up to an old tower ruin. Inside you hopefully find a little hidden path and make it past the “ruined” appearance to the part of the tower used by a gang of slavers. Eventually you’re confronted with a dark hole in the floor and/or bars over an underground creek, both leading to a secret area that has several obstacles and the only real treasure.

Read aloud is MASSIVE. Half a page in some cases. That’s poor design. It’s overly descriptive, trying to describe too many things in too much detail for an “initial” burst of data about a room. “There’s a 12 inch by 6 inch by 18 inch chest in the room.” No, the room is decked out bedroom, or there’s a small trunk under the table. Done! Individually, a detail may be ok but then you layer detail on top of detail on top of detail, in the read-aloud, it very quickly violates the Keep It Short principal. Further, it detracts from the back and forth between the players and the DM that is a key to a successful D&D experience. (Hmm, does this go for ALL rpg’s? Or just “exploratory” ones?)

Similarly, the DM text gets VERY long as well. Trivia and mechanics, for the most part. The ogre like saffron on his desert. The innkeepers other daughter lives in the nearby village of Kraughton. The bars were built ages ago by the priests that used to live here. These add nothing to the adventure at all, but they do detract from the ability to run, making it harder for the DM to find the text they actually NEED while searching past this trivia. Yes, many things COULD be useful, but unless you can make a strong case of it being useful at the table then Fuck. Your. Worldbuilding. I’ve got a game to run. Now. And it’s in the way. 

Have you ever wondered how much you can get for pumice stone? Well let me tell you, at least 200gp is you mine the vein in this adventure! At one point there are bars and we’re told each can take 15 points of damage before they break. Of course, this isn’t in a combat situation so the mechanics are entirely superfluous. Inclusion of unneeded mechanics, again, clogs things up. Further, let’s say it DOES matter to the adventure … do you still need it? Is it enough to note the bars exist? I suspect the answer is No, you don’t generally need it. Unless it’s key point in the adventure where the party is trapped and time is short and the situation tense; a constructed vignet. Otherwise we run in to that garbage from other official adventures where each door and object in an adventure had a break DC and hit points. And man, is that ever fucking tedious …

And then there’s other decisions made that are mind boggling. There’s a couple of timeline events embedded in descriptions in the village. In one home/business we’re told that in two days time her child will be the next to disappear. Why not remove this to a separate timeline area instead of embedding it in a room description where you have to hunt it down? I’m not looking at the Weavers Hut while I run the adventure, I should be looking at a timeline or reference table. And in other areas there’s a maddening lack of detail. One room is full of a pile of bodies/bones, and yet no mention is made of it at all in the text. Every fucking party that goes in is going to look at it … but no aid to the DM is given. Then there are the confusing text descriptions. The text tries so hard to make things clear, in detail, that the minutia gets in the way of actually understanding what’s going on. At one point there’s a dry, slick streambed, in a channel I think, but you’d never know that from the text description. And after reading it three times, I’m still not sure of the layout. The amount of treasure is quite low. Maybe 2k and almost all in the final hidden area. This could be confused for a Milestone system adventure instead of one for Gold=XP systems.

There multiple areas, abandoned, hideout, hidden, are nice, especially the inclusion of a hidden area with a treasure for those that push past the boundaries of the hideout world. There’s a detail or two that is nice also, especially in the “abandoned” section, with skeletal arms sticking out from under rubble and so far. Putting monster stat blocks in a sidebar is a good idea, but you have to deliver on the RA and DM text also to make it a usable adventure.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages and shows you nothing except some long boring droning background data. A good preview needs to give you an idea of what you’re buying, which generally means at least a few encounter descriptions. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/288397/Mystery-at-Morfurt?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

(5e) Sinner’s Manor

Posted on November 9, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By James Eck
Mind Weave
5e
Level 1

*sigh*

This nineteen page adventure details a four level manor with about twenty five rooms in about five pages. It’s just combat encounters in a non-keyed long paragraph descriptive format. Combined, of course, with counter-productive skill checks. A few interesting details show some potential, but this is just Yet Another Garbage Product.

And I’m the asshole. I’m the jerk faced jerk because I protest the torrent of shit and vomit that erupts like a firehose in to my face. How bad is this adventure? It’s got three stars on DriveThru, THAT’S how bad. 

So, old manor house in a town. Abandoned for multiple centuries. Rumored to be haunted. Over the years people have gone in to never come out. Still standing intact. Some dude in the town is obsessed with it and wants you to investigate it out so he can move in. Inside are the seven deadly sins. You go from room to room, finding one and then fighting it. That’s the entirety of the adventure. A straight up hack right out of the worst that 4e ever produced. Maybe worse; those had terrain.

I’m pretty sure that 5e still pays lip service to the three pillars concepts. Combat, roleplaying, and exploration. This is just combat. Nothing more. Any joy or wonder that D&D has is entirely non existent in this adventure. There’s nothing to explore, nothing to interact with. It’s just rooms with combat.

Oh, I’m sure it THINKS its exploration. But there’s nothing truly to discover or interact with except the monsters. 

And the format, oh my. The section headings in the text are by floor, and then by room. So, First Floor and then a subheading Kitchen. Of course, the map is numbered and doesn’t have the room names. This means the room numbers are put in to the text of the paragraph and you have to look there. Further, those subheadings? There’s not one per room. The Serving Room, not described, is mentioned in the Kitchen subheading but not elsewhere. This is not an isolated event, most rooms don’t have any description at all and are just mentioned in passing.

Why are they mentioned in passing? Why, to pad out the text by describing the doors on the map. The north door is open and leads to the Kitchen, for example. You know, THE THINGS A FUCKING MAP TELLS YOU. 

A house, with windows, yes? That you can look in? The text makes a point of telling us repeatedly that kids throw rocks at the glass. Well, no windows on the map, or even a hint of them in the descriptions. There’s absolutely no thought at all that has gone in to thie as a real environment. Mostly.

There IS a decent idea or two. A fireplace has ashed out on to the floor and there are ashy bootprints across a rug, as if someone was pacing. Oh course, you see the someone probably before you see the bootprints, and they attack you immediately, so the impact is lost, but the idea for a creepy descriptive thing is a good one. Broken glass from windows on the stairs. Again, a pretty good detail. 

These little bits show some promise, but they are VERY few and VERY far between and do very little to redeem the lack of interactivity and terrible format.

And you don’t even get real treasure. You’re told to put in a CR2 hoard. THAT’S THE FUCKING JOB OF THE DESIGNER! That’s is LITERALLY why we’re paying you. (Or, well, turning to a pre-written adventure in the case of a $0 or PWYW adventure …)

Oh! Oh! I almost forgot! Skill checks! It’s full of useless skill checks! In fact, the skill checks run COUNTER to the adventure. In general you make a skill check in this to determine how some rando body you find died. And the details are creepy. But if you don’t make the skill check then you don’t get the creepy. Is that the point? To NOT creep out the players?  No, of course not, you want them shitting themselves with fear. But you hide that behind a skill check. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.You get all nineteen pages in the preview, so it’s a good preview. Page four of the preview (page two of the text) shows you the long-form descriptive stye that is indicative of the writing in this adventure.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/292525/Sinners-Manor?1892600

Posted in 5e, Reviews | 12 Comments

The Temple of the Bear

Posted on November 6, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
John Fredericks
Sharp Mountain Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 5-8

Explore the TEMPLE OF THE BEAR in hopes of rescuing a hostage. There they will confront an evil wizard and his minions who hope to bring back a forgotten, evil cult.

This thirty page adventure contains a dungeon with fifteen rooms and a couple of outside encounters in about nine pages. It’s just long-form paragraph descriptions of each encounter location. Low interactivity, poor usability, uninspiring descriptions. The usual trifecta.

The DriveThru description does not have a level range. The cover does not have a level range. What does have a level range? The back cover. Which is only available once you purchase the adventure. It’s not even clear to me why these things have back covers. Isn’t that used for marketing purposes in game stores/bookstores … and don’t these products exists only as PDF’s? So the designer is slavishly following some template without regard to the actual purpose? And it results in a blind buy without knowing the level the adventure is for? 

Villagers are missings. The party, I guess, is somehow motivated to look in to it; the pretext doesn’t really exist in this one. Except … someone missing is the mayors daughters boyfriend. She’s 18. The mayor lets the party take her with them on the adventure. WTF? Seriously? I’m NOT giving my 18YO daughter over a group of murder hobos! Didn’t he see The Last Valley? Jesu Christo! 

From there we switch to the road in to the forest … which only leads to the dungeon, so if you kep following it then you’ll arrive there. Big mystery, I guess? Anyway, you get attacked by owlbears because forced combats are evidently a thing in Old School D&D. Oh, wait, they are not? There’s a thread on a forum RIGHT NOW about character death in D&D and the impact of forced combat mindsets? Oh. Well, bad design then I guess.

Oh, wait, fuck, no, I forgot. The town? It notes how it’s a good starting location for the party/campaign. Note again the level range if 5-8. I guess you’re either starting at 5-8 or you bought this adventure for the two paragraph town or the designer has, once again, not given thought to the context the information is being presented in. 

Information in the encounters is relayed in long form paragraphs. Multiple paragraphs per room. With lots of padding. Ensuring that you need to scan everything to run the room. And that the adventure text will be padded out. To nine pages. In a thirty page adventure. “First bob will do this and then he will do this and then he will do this and then he will do this.” Yes. Perfect. Exactly the sort of writing I expect.

A certain trap takes three paragraphs to describe. It’s giant jaws that snap down, kind of like a giant half-open bear trap. Three paragraphs. 

An evocative description in this is “After encountering the monkeybears, the party will come upon the Old Shrine. This area has a stone altar, a broken pillar, and broken stone benches.”

Interactivity is confined to traps, monster fighting and a ghost you can talk to. 

Monetary treasure in this adventure consists of 77gp and a 20gp gem. That’s a joke, right? This is a Gold=XP game, right? LabLord? Yes?

This time I promise I promise I promise I’m going to remember the name Sharp Mountain. Next time I promise I promise I promise I won’t tell myself “its been awhile, maybe they are better now? I should check in …” No. No I should not.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and shows you nothing of the adventure, so you have no way of understanding the encounter quality before purchasing. Which, while bad for the consumer, is great for the producer


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/292194/The-Temple-of-the-Bear?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 11 Comments

The Mud King of Stoney Creek

Posted on November 4, 2019 by Bryce Lynch
Created with GIMP
By WR Beatty
Rosethorn Publishing
S&W
Levels 5-7

Beavers have dammed up Stoney Creek… but the villagers who went to break up the dam have not returned. Perhaps something sinister is going on here?

This nineteen page adventure details a small wilderness with ten locations and a troll cave with eighteen more. I might call it a Lair Adventure & Environs, since it’s a small-ish location and is … a lair. It’s firing on all cylinders with good usability, creatures doing things, good treasure, and decent interactivity.   

Do I like Rosethorn? I recognize the name but I can’t recall previous quality. Anyway, this one is good. The monsters have arranged for a beaver dam in a remote section of a road. They they ambush travellers who are camped for the night in front of the new lake. In the village, a couple of villagers went up a month ago to clear the dam. They didn’t come back. Then two weeks ago four more went to look for the first. They didn’t come back. Then a mob went up with all the villages weapons. THEY didn’t come back. Ouch! One of the hooks has a trapper going there to bust the dam, and looking for protection, which could also slot in well as to Why The Local Lord isn’t Involved; he hired the trapper. Then again, at levels 5-7 in OD&D the party is pretty Big Shits themselves … which I choose to ignore. 

There’s a nice little wilderness area described around the dam, lake, road, and cave. It all makes sense. A dam, a stream, a stirge tree, an attacked campsite, an inviting campsite, a lookout. It feels like it all works together well and makes sense together. A lot of this can be summed up as “they are trolls, they don’t care about the piranha/stirge tree/razorwire.” Take the beavers. D&D being what it is, you could spell a conversation with them, and the designer has provided notes on what they knew. Along with other creatures you might capture, just a few bullets on what they can relate. The piranha are attracted after a few rounds. They patrol the banks for a few rounds after a feast. Too much blood and MORE piranha show up from pools deeper in to the caves. A retreating troll might shake a tree full of stirge; he doesn’t care about them. A stirge, injured, flees to not return. It all kind of makes sense. 

And then there’s some monster actions mixed in. The troll, fleeing, might shake the stirge tree. A goblin, fleeing, might jump in the water … and get attacked by the piranha. Another might be thrown in elsewhere to attract the piranha and creature a diversion. There are some charmed trolls inside … but charm works both ways; they tend to ignore the party is they don’t directly attack them or they are ordered otherwise. It’s this very neutral way of writing the adventure that leads to opportunities. 

Obstacles present themselves. The aforementioned streams/pools of piranha … I mean “NeedleFish.” In the water there is some razor sharp wire strung as obstacles to overcome. Treasure is stored in a steaming hot 180 degree mud pool, or deep in a pool of piranha or a water monster. These are open-ended, with no suggestions given, just something for the party to devise a way to overcome. And it doesn’t FEEL like it’s a gimpy set up, it feels like this is natural and how things should work.

For the most part. The razor sharp wire is pushing things a bit as is the existence of a MU with charm in service to the troll king. I’m not sure the Charm MU is really even needed; it doesn’t feel like the charms provide that much of a needed background explanation.

Treasure is good. Magic Lead. Weapons with names and (brief) histories. Items described sometimes with non-mechanical states, like chains that cannot be broken. Mundane items also get a little description, adding to their flavor. There’s a wandering monster table that has them doing something. There’s a monster reference stat chart at the end. The map is interesting, for a lair, with water features, terrain, collapsing tunnels, various levels and the like. Good job on it. There’s probably enough treasure, also, which is rare for a GOLD=XP game. You’re not gonna level, but there might be 40k or 50k, which is good for a lair. 

On the weird side of things, it sometimes engages in tables for the sake of tables, it feels like. A goblin has four possible reasons for being outside. A water monster has a table of random special abilities and weaknesses. The wanderer chart is a full page … which is great from a usability standpoint, it’s easy to find. But in all of these cases it feels like there’s more content than is needed/expected. That’s not bad, i just found it a bit strange.

The map and text, while both good, could work together a little more. In particular light is strange. Room ten mentions it is lit … and also that room six is … but room six doesn’t mention that. With a simple map, like this, you don’t necessarily need to note light/sound on the map since it’s easy to scan ahead in the text as the party leave down the hallway to the next room. Nut … it’s also nice for those details to somehow be conveyed to the DM ahead of time. It’s related to the “outside vista” issue where the party can see a lot of an environment at once, looking down on a ruined keep for example, but no overview is given, focing the DM to scan everything to tell the party what they see “in one go.” 

These are minor though. The evocativeness of the writing is the major shortcoming. And by “major shortcoming” I mean the area for most improvement that the adventure has, not that it’s a major problem. The writing is terse and the environments well described and interesting, but the writing is also a little flat. Hmmm, no, not flat. It’s not generic. But it also doesn’t really spring to life in your minds eye. And let’s be clear, I’m being kind of a jerk here. The language use is fine. But of course I want everything to be perfect. Tersely writing an evocative description that springs to life in your mind is not an easy task. Again, not that it’s bad here, but it could be better. Have I inserted enough qualifiers yet?

This is easily a Best. When you want an adventure and go to DriveThru to buy something THIS is EXACTLY the sort of thing you are hoping for. I wish every adventure ever written were at least as good as this. Yeah? Fuck it. This is my new baseline. I now hold your Rosethorn adventure up as the platonic example of a journeyman quality adventure.  Writers could do A LOT worse than emulate the format & style of this adventure. There may be other ways to achieve the same thing, but this thing is easy to relate to.

This is $2 at DriveThru.The preview is five pages and shows you outside encounters and a few inside, including most of the piranha pools, the fleeing goblin, troll, stirge tree, etc. It’s a good representation of the type and quality of writing/adventure you’ll be getting. The last page, has room I3, and shows some of the “not flat not the best” writing I spoke about. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/290849/The-Mud-King-of-Stoney-Creek

Posted in Level 6, Reviews, The Best | 15 Comments

(5e) The Convent of the Weeping Moon

Posted on November 2, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
by Nick Smith
Black Arts
5e
Levels 4+

On a misty hill, far from the hustle and bustle of the big cities, lies the blasted ruins of a long-forgotten Convent. A village living under the shadow of the darkened moon. An Innkeeper’s daughter and her fiancé missing. The PCs are asked for help. Have the tentacles of an ancient, long-banished heresy resurfaced, to glide silently through the Convent’s moss-covered stones?

This pleasant surprise is a 44 page adventure detailing a three level ruin with about sixty rooms in about twenty pages. It does a decent job being spooky, evocative, and interactive. While it could be organized better it’s much better than most. It’s not great, but it’s better than most.

Check out that cover! Not the usual garbage soft-genero-fantasy cover here! Striking and sets the mood well. My only comment would be that the impact from the lit window is distracted by the white text of the adventure name. The window ends up being almost unnoticeable. Too much emphasis there, though, and the players will probably fixate on it. But … Did you need to put the adventure name, descriptions, edition number, mature audience warning, and publisher on the cover? Not to be too big of an ass here, but … this is a PDF only product. While you might want those things on the cover if this were to be sold in a traditional game store … is it necessary for something that will only exist as a filename? Or, even if it’s a boutique printing, like Lulu, folks have already selected the adventure, you don’t need to convince them. The DriveThru blurb text in the description does all the work that the cover text usually did. Not that I really give a shit but it points out of the possibilities that exist for a product as PDF only, or boutique print only. If you’re gonna go out of your way to have such striking imagery on your cover then why muddy your vision? Anyway, this is the height of nitpicking from me, and a terribly shitty way to start a review of a decent product. 

This adventure does a lot things right. Maybe not to the full extent it could, but it hits a number of points high enough. It’s specific in its descriptions. It provides evocative text. It has a fair amount of interactivity, and it’s usable enough at the table … with a few notable exceptions.

You arrive at an inn. The reticent villagers eventually tell the party their plight. The party trapses off to find the innkeepers lost kid & fiance … even though everyone else in the inn thinks they just ran off together. As they get close to the ruins they catch a glimpse of them in the moonlight, an eerie light in a high window, and hear a bell tolling in the distance. Coming over the last hill they see the convent fully. Not intact with the eerie window light as you first saw. No, just a ruin with most walls less than chest height. 

Reticent villagers. Most of them think the couple ran off. They don’t want to help the innkeeper search anymore. Pretty believable in context. It’s a lie, of course. The innkeeper doesn’t have a daughter and the inn regulars do this to send selected travelers to the cult in the ruins. The regular villagers are scared as all fuck. The bell the party hears is the innkeeper ringing the village bell to warn the cult people are coming. (And it’s spooky as all fuck also, in context.) Moonlight, mist, darkness, ruins, a lonesome bell. The brief glimpse of the convent, which then is ruins in full vision, is a great introduction to the Mythic Underworld concept. You Are About To Enter Someplace Else. Beware! And then, when you get back out of the convent, you get to deal with the 0-level NE villagers who tricked you there. Hapless evil fuckwits, noncombatants who put up no struggle. What cha gonna do with them orc babies? There’s not a direct advice on this, but it’s mentioned and, in context, its done well. It’s a consequence to the adventure and that always makes them feel more immersive.

In the ruins there’s the old office of the old mother superior. There’s a hidden compartment. It has some old parchment, the mummified hand of a child, and weird little figurine. Something to find. Something creepy. A pedestal with a moon phase puzzle, simple, just match it to the current phase of the moon shining overhead. Things to open, as simple as that, interactivity is obtained. The cultists have a brief mention of some order of battle/responses, as well as the briefest of tactics advice (fake surrenders, etc.) Just enough to help the DM out without it droning on and on and on. The maps are well done for being relatively low room counts, there’s a side view present, and the mundane treasure is well described. Crystal decanters with perfume. A silver covered mask with moonstone inlay. (Theme!) But I didn’t notice much in the way of magical treasure beyond simple book potions. (But they are, at least, in green and red bottles. Again the extra word of specificity helps immensely ground imagination enough to let it soar.)

The NPC’s in the inn, at the start, have short little descriptions, just a couple of words on appearance and maybe a sentence or phrase on what they think happened. Not a life fucking story, but information directly relted to the fucking adventure at hand. Imagine that! Likewise, what they have to relate to the party is presented in bullet form, easy to find and relate by the DM. This is all great.

Let me now skip mentioning other good details and shift to what could be better, because I am never satisfied.

The first level is mostly ruins. Chest high walls AT MOST. This brings up the Lord Of All I Survey issue. When the players can view an area at a distance and take it in then there should be some notes about what they see. Notable features, etc. The alternative is the DM scrambling through a dozen room descriptions or more trying to figure out what they see, in response to that question. When the players can see a lot then the designer should help the DM with the notable features they see. A pool of water NE, Stairs in the left center, etc. I THINK the map covers most of this, but it could do a better job showing the elevation change (implied by stairs) between the two halves of the ruins … an important detail for some secret doors and potential multi-level combat that is going to take place. I should also not that most of the adventure takes place behind the aforementioned secret door. That’s generally a No No. Putting your adventure behind something that the party can fail at (finding a secret door and/or solving a puzzle in this case) means we have to cheat to keep playing. Better to do something else to hide the doors. (ALthough, the issue is somewhat mitigated in this case because there are two possibilities, finding the door and just solving the moon phase puzzle, but, still.) It does something similar in another place in the adventure, putting a body behind a secret door and then stating the DM should fudge it since its important for the party to find the body. Well .. then why’s it behind a secret door then?

Read aloud gets long in places. This is almost always because the read-aloud is including follow-up information. The text tells you that you find, among other things, a small figurine. And then it goes on to fully describe it. That lengthens the read-aloud and REMOVES interactivity. A key part of D&D is the back and forth between the players and the DM. Describing the figuring in the DM text keeps that back and forth and shortens the read-aloud. And, again, read-aloud isn’t always bad but long read-aloud IS always bad. People pull out their phones and attentions wander. Monologues are not engagement.

There are a couple of other issues also. The cultists inside really need a small section on what they know, etc, oto handle the inevitable torture/speak with dead that happens when players capture/interogate prisoners. And the stat blocks, especially for the cult, get long. Condensing the stat block is an age-old problem … but important to solve nonetheless.

The most serious issue is, though, the general style used to format the room entries. There’s a small section at the rear which describes this. It’s trying to use background coloring and other offset words to highlight and bring attention to section breaks and so on. It doesn’t really work at all for any room that has more than a little complexity to it. Room nine on the second level is the perfect example of this. Long read-aloud. Multiple read-aloud sections. Plain text breaking it up with words like “a normal perception roll reveals” before more read-aloud. A whole lot of conditionals for things the party might look at that are, esentially, headers for read-aloud. It tries to break this up with line breaks. So, previous read-aloud ends. Empty line. Plain text that says something like “the open coffin:” then another empty line. Then the read- aloud for the open coffin. Better, I think, to eliminate the additional empty line. That makes the read-aloud belong to the text more, instead of it just being a page of paragraphs and sentences broken up by empty lines. The background-colored sections then intrude also in to this mix … without much reason. Why do the Iron Doors to room 14 get background text but the open coffin doesn’t? The format doesn’t work.

5e reviews are a pain. Do I grade on a curve? There’s so little decent for 5e that I want to. In the end I shall not! And I regert that decision not!

This is $5 at DriveThru.The preview is four pages. It gives you four pages of the actual adventure, so it’s a good preview, giving you an idea of what to expect with your purchase. You can see room nine of level one in the preview. It’s a good example of how the format, which works ok elsewhere, tends to break down on the more complex rooms. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/291250/The-Convent-of-The-Weeping-Moon?1892600

Posted in 5e, No Regerts, Reviews | 5 Comments

Plague, War, & Famine 1

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Peter Rudin-Burgess
PPM
OSRIC
No levels given

Can the characters save teh(sp) starving city folk? Can they defeat the impending invasion?

This fourteen page adventure details six scenes in eight pages. While not exactly linear it has more in common with modern plot-based adventures than a more open older style. It’s also an absolute MESS in presenting information. One of the worst.

It’s listed as OSRIC … but it also makes reference to the players using their skills and players with strong social skills and using first aid skill, etc. This would lead me to believe that it’s a conversion … ah, yes, I see now on DriveThru that it’s available for a slew of other systems. The usual conversion issues are present: no fucking treasure means no XP and the combat, if used, tends to be forced. Neither are good in OSRIC. The OSRIC gang would probably be ok with the adventure, mechanically, since it’s only mechanics are some stats for some new monsters. But there’s also no level given on the cover or in the publishers blurb or anywhere in the adventure, except for it saying “this is an introductory adventure.” I guess that means level one’s?

This is more of an adventure outline than an adventure. The first scene and last scene are required and then the middle three depend. There are two abandoned ships in the harbour locked together and your mission is to tow one back. Thus the three additional scenes: if you board ship one, board ship two or just tow ship one back. Each of the scenes consists of MANY paragraphs, over a couple of pages, describing “first this and then this” types of things in a very abstracted way. I mean, Bloody Mage/Stink in Golanda abstracted. It’s all very high level, there’s a lot of it, and it’s not organized very well. The delete key is a designers best friend, and removing text and highlighting other things with bullets, indents, etc would have made the different sections, and important text stand out more. I really do mean the comparison to, say, Stink in Golanda by BM … this adventure is just barely there in the most abstract way.

The first scene has the party in a hold listening to a combat above them as they come in to port on a ship. Then they get involved in a food riot and given their mission to go out to See A Ship In The Harbor and tow it back, since it contains much needed food for the city. “At some point someone accuses the party of stealing food or cutting the food line” is the extent of the food riot and food line description for the town. Like I said … REALLY high level and then it’s combined with A LOT of information, most of it superfluous. 

Each “scene” has an optional combat, so a kind DM can ensure that NO combat happens in the adventure. It’s all “the floating could attack the parties ship” and so on. At one point there is an opportunity for the party to get in to a fight with about 400 2HD/3HD bug-monsters on one of the ships. That’s something you don’t see everyday. It’s handled terribly, but I applaud the “We done fucked up!” opportunity. It’s in the last scene, the return to port, that critical information comes to light: there are bug eggs hidden in the flour on the ship they’ve come to tow back. At least I think there are. The adventure says about as much “there are bug eggs in the flour; it’s their plan to get them in to town that way”, but that’s it. Nothing more. Further, it mentions several times that the ships are tuck together but gives no mechanics or words of advice AT ALL on how to unstick the two ships, even though it’s likely to be the parties first line of questioning. 

And did I mention that the tug you take over has 96 slaves below deck rowing? I guess this was Zweihandler conversion? I tend toward a rather pragmatic style of D&D play, but even as a player I usually don’t let slavery go unmurder-hobo’d unless the DM fiats my inability to.

I don’t understand the decisions that adventure designers make. I suspect most are just overly enthusiastic about their creations. Which is great, but I wish the final products were better. It’s not one of the worst I’ve seen … but it’s a breathe away from being one of the worst.

(I should note also that I’m pretty sure this is an English as a Second language adventure. There are some misspellings and grammar issues, but while noticeable they don’t make the adventure unplayable in any way. The long form text descriptions and abstracted adventure do, though.)

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. And what do we say when No Preview comes a calling?  


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/290406/Plague-Famine–War-1–OSRIC-Compatible?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 7 Comments