Embrace is a voyage into the heart of an evil plot. Something strange is happening, and long-held beliefs are being perverted to fit another’s evil ways. How the characters accomplish their task and handle the looming crisis, is another matter all together…
This 46 page adventure is the typical Lovecraft Call of Cthulhu adventure converted to 5e. Actually, it appears to have been written for Sword, Shield & Spell and converted to 5e. But the publisher also sells the Colonial Gothic RPG game, which appears to be CoC in colonial america … and if you think “What if HPL wrote his stories set in colonial america?” and then converted it to 5e then you’d have this adventure. Everything about this is CoC. The pacing is HPL CoC pacing and the writing is straight out of every CoC adventure ever written. IE: bad.
Some woman’s husband has disappeared and not been seen for two months. Seems he was a university professor specializing in religion and went to some village to look in to something, not being seen since. The party is hired to find him. Sound familiar? Like every HPL story ever? When you think of D&D do you think of university professors? This thing is full of stuff like that. “Coach inns” abound, and some of the art looks more like a colonial american inn than D&D … Anyway …
The usual has happened. A cultist came in, took over the local religion disguised as a druid, and then converted people to Shub worship. There’s a strong wicker man/creepy village thing going on, down to the artwork showing a burning wicker man, along with the usual “everyone in the village is cultist”, people staring at you, the local sheriff is in on it, etc. If you’ve played any Call of Cthulhu game, ever, or read a rural New England HPL story then you know what the adventure is. Wander around investigating, locals rise up, and then confront the EHP.
So, long read-alouds. We know that’s bad and why it’s bad. No one pays attention after three sentences. Then there is MOUNTAINS of DM text. But it’s CoC Dm text style, which means it’s written as a “first x and then Y and then z happens” which is impossible to follow and run at the table. You can’t scan it. Bullet points and/or white space formatting is in painfully short supply. You can’t find shit, it’s all buried.
NPC descriptions are long and written in the same style. We’re not reading a novel. We’re trying to run something at the table. The writing and formatting needs to be oriented towards that. If all the other Call of Cthulhu adventures jumped off a bridge would you also? Bandit stats, in 5e, are a column long. How ever did older games manage with inline stats? Oh, the horror of recognizing what’s important in the game and it’s not stats, The Horror!
At the start of the game the party gets a letter the missing guy received. It’s signed W. The DM text tells us the wife “probably doesn’t know who W is …” How does that help us run the game? The inexplicable nature of that line boggles me to no end and is representative of the complete lack of understanding of what an adventure is and how to write one. “I had an idea and I threw a bunch of text down on a page in a roughly linear manner” is no way to run a railroad/write an adventure.
Also, there’s no indication what level this adventure is for on the DriveThru page or on the adventure cover. Bad publisher! Bad! How the fuck am I supposed to know if I should buy it for my group of Level 1’s? Oh, I should just buy it? Oh, you didn’t think of thigns like that. See, get my point, YOU WERE NOT THINKING ABOUT THE NEEDS OF THE DM WHEN YOU WROTE IT.
It’s a CoC adventure. It’s another point in my favor that Horror translates well between all settings, from SciFi to Fantasy to 1920’s. It’s not bad, at its core, but it’s just the usual CoC tropes, handed down from HPL himself.
Also, I now associate the 5e brand (and Pathfinder, for that matter) with suckage. When I get ready to go buy one I ask myself “I wonder just how bad this one will be …” I’m guessing that’s not the image that WOTC & Paizo are trying for. Mixing official shit with homebrew in the storefront was a bad idea, as was allowing the cross-branding. Hey WOTC, when you finally get that 10 picture movie deal done (You belong to Hasbro for cross-branding purposes. That’s it. And we all know it’s mostly or MtG) I’m going to think “I wonder how bad this one will suck?” because of your paper publishing strategy has led me that way. That’s what you were going for, right?
This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is perfectly representative of the paragraphs long writing style that you’ll find in the adventure. So, good preview in that you tells you what to expect: a disorganized mess.
By John Bertani & Aaron Fairbrook Merciless Merchants Gold & Glory/2e Levels 4-7
The Crimson Legion has gained a foothold in the Dragonback Mountains. Having taken over Trollback Keep, they’ve gathered wealth, power and now seek to expand their territory. Villages of man and gnome have been sacked or enslaved. And now the Crimson Legion may be close to discovering the lost Shrine of Deralugos. Lord Brie and his men are busy fighting the raiding bands that are ravaging the area. He’s offering gold and glory to those who can find the source of this incursion and help put a stop to it!
This 34 page adventure details a couple of dungeons and wilderness encounters in a small region. The humanoids have a keep they are launching raids from, and there’s a gnome shrine and dungeon also. It’s a good well-rounded environment with lots of opportunities to get in to trouble … exactly what D&D should be.
Well, it looks like SOMEONE has been paying attention. The wanderers in this are doing things, like orcs congratulating themselves over an elk they’ve downed. AND there’s a reference sheet of monster stats/locations. AND the there’s some cross-referencing of information. AND most of the information is related in bullet form. AND there’s some new monsters and magic items. The astute among you will recognize these as all things I bitch about. That having been removed, I will have to find to find new things in this to bitch about. 🙂
I REALLY like the dungeon map in this. Laid out around a river, it has elevation changes, stuff carved out, the water can be used as a bypass, there are islands, same level stairs, features on the map. The river naturally divides the place in to some little sub-areas. It’s visually interesting with lots of features for the party to explore.
It brings some faction play and interactivity to the table. Gnomes can be added to the parties forces, and they can clue you in to some barbarians nearby who might want to ally … but they don’t like the gnomes. There’s a captured giant to free and the various humanoids in the keep could be turned on one another. It’s a complex social environment and that’s great interactivity. Beyond that the dungeons proper have interactivity, like a corrupted fountain that, if cleaned u p, comes to life for a moment and blesses the party. Part of the place is a gnome temple, which is an excuse for a few funhouse elements, like the boulder roll halfpipe from Dragon’s lair. They don’t come off as odious gnome tricks at all, which is an achievement in itself.
The area keys start with a nice little description. A recently gutted and oozing elk carcass hangs from a tree near a cauldron next to a pile of crushed goblin corpses. An especially warty and fat orcs stirs the cauldron occasionally. Good imagery.
Some of the descriptions get long. Some of the bullets get long. As length increases the ability to scan drops off. It doesn’t delve in to the history of a place, or trivia, but lets say instead there’s a wealth of pertinent information presented. There’s some correct balance here and, while its not bad, it strays a little close to the “too much” line at times. A lot of times. Because of that you don’t get the sense from the text that it’s easy to scan and run. I’m not saying its NOT, I’m saying you don’t get that sense. Looking at it you might sigh, but it IS well organized.
Well, mostly. There’s a thing where they put the monsters at the end of the encounter, bolded, at the same indent level (or, rather, a lack of indent) as the room key proper. This can make it seem like the monster is crowding the next room and lack a kind of intuitive layout. Page ten room 2&3, I’m looking at you in particular.
Also, the art choices are a bit weird. It’s not clear why you might choose to include a generic barbarian pic over a pic of the new translucent snail people who you can talk to. Likewise, a pic of the main keep could have been nice.
And that last point is related to the largest miss in this. There’s a part of this adventure that MIGHT be: gather some NPC people and siege/invade/sneak in to the keep to kill the humanoids. That could have been handled better. An iso view of the main keep, and a littlre more attention to “things high nearby that let you look down in to the keep” or other elements that support a base assault would have been welcomes. There’s a kind of order of battle and some day night notes in places, as well as guards and alarms, but I think that needs to come as part of a package. More variety in the keep yard to hide behind/use in combat. More features in the area around the keep. Some more notes on NPC tactics, etc. [Fair warning: Far Cry 1 is in my top 5 list and I loved the open-ended nature of the base assaults there. And I loved playing Danger International and the base assaults we did in that. So … yeah, I love base assaults and have lots of thoughts on them.]
But … this isn’t a bad adventure. It’s a good one. It’s organized ok, and has interactivity and dynamism to it. I’m fond of the emergent play origin story of the adventure also (I rolled three monster checks in a row and wanted to piece them together in a larger picture.) Man, I’m not gushing, am I? It IS good, just pushing the boundaries of thick a bit and the layout/summaries/bullets, while helpful, could use some tweaking to make the points come across better. I’d say MM have just about cracked the code of producing good shit on a schedule.
This is available for $5 on DriveThru. Easily worth that. The preview is 8 pages. Pages 5 & 6 of the adventure show the orc camp/chef I talked about, and more of the preview shows you the writing typical of what the adventure is.
By Charley Phipps, Thom Wilson, Mike Badolato ThrowiGames & NTRPGCon B/X Levels 2-4
This 28 page adventure details the Daves of the Unknown dungeon from B2/Keep on the Borderlands, that was initially left blank for the DM to populate. It has about 44 encounters in the main Caves of the Unknown area, and expands the Lizardman mound and a couple of wilderness areas. This adventure provides an answer to the question: can you be both minimally keyed and wordy?
I picked this up at NTRPGcon. After writing this review I discovered that it appears to be physical copies only … and those copies are hard to come by. Oops. Sorry, I don’t usually do that. It looks like BadMike sells them in this storefront. Uh, I mean … SUCK IT FOOLS! I HAVE SOMETHING YOU CANT HAVE! Bwahahahahaha! Until I sell of my collection again. But first I have to rebuy it. Anyway …
Three authors and three separate sections: Charley with the Caves, Thom with the additional Lizardman mount and Mike with the three supplemental “one room” caves.
The second two are easy: they are too long. Column long rooms in the lizard mound and page and column long descriptions of a grizzly bear cave are too much for me, given the basic nature of the encounters.
The Caves of Unknown have more meat to them. And thus more sins. The writing style in all three is quite loosy goosy. Almost stream of consciousness. There’s a lot of padding, and I note in particular the Quantum nature of it. “IF the characters search the [x] then they find …” Or a room “appears to have once been …” This is not effective or efficient writing of descriptions. Ray goes over this in his Writing with Style booklet for RPG writers.
The padding is strong with this one and the loose style does not help scannability. The dungeon is pretty close to Vanilla and minimally keyed, which makes the “four to six rooms per page” stand out, even with the larger font size. There’s a snake under the rocks near the secret door. Further, there’s context involved in the descriptions which often clogs things up. We learn that the lost Thouls get their water from the room with the harpy, sneaking by her while shes asleep. Of course, they attack immediately, so this is a just an appeal to ecology. And explaining of WHY something is. The Thouls must have a water source! The bugbears are working for someone! And so on. D&D seldom needs a WHY.
Otherwise, it’s pretty vanilla. Skeletons wear amulets to make them harder to turn. [Not one of Gygax’s great moments, and certainly not something to emulate.] Ghouls jump out of sarcophaguses when opened. Treasure is generic book items … and I’m sure B/X got its kiddie reputation based on the preponderance (exclusive) use of book monsters and magic items. They’re generic at this point.
And yet, there are hilights. A burned body on the floor … except for his robe, one of fire resistance. The naked woman in the forest ISNT a nymph, but a werewolf, looking not to kill but to infect others to grow a pack. A decent map, with underground river and several different encounter areas/themes … even if 85% of the dungeon does lie behind an easily missed secret door. Seriously … do no clues at all for that door? That seems a bit rough. I mean, the tossing a 44 room dungeon after room five seems a bit much.
It’s just another dungeon. And that can be ok, but it should be easier to use. Also, I’m not sure I like inline stat blocks combined with fat fonts. Putting them at the end of the room would have made scanning the room easier, I think?
Anyway, how would you, the reader, know? You’re not gonna see a copy of this. 🙂
By Kevin Crawford Sine Nomine Publishing Stars Without Number Levels 1-3
Hard Light takes a band of young adventurers to a system blazing with the murderous light of a red giant star. The hard-bitten novium miners of the Brightside mining station maintain the only outpost of civilization in a system filled with lethal light and stellar outlaws on the run. Will the players find the riches of the ancient asteroid sky tombs and their alien makers, or will they fall prey to the seething rebellion that boils beneath Brightside Station’s steel skin?
This 38 page adventure describes a spacestation and the small system of asteroids in system. It has three Space Asteroid dungeons and a system to create more: the aline Sky Tombs. It’s got a great core concept with strong social dynamics, but man it is THICK and DENSE with text. Like, “study it every day for a couple of hours in order ro run it” levels of density.
Let’s start off with me saying I don’t know nothing about SciFi gaming. I mean, I love it. I played Traveller with a group that consisted of me and five Astrophysics PhD’s. Nothing like sitting bored for an hour while they argued the laser distance inside a dyson sphere. Oh, Colonel Gil Richter, how I miss thee … Anyway. I love SciFi and have no idea how to run it. It seems to me like it starts out at level 32 with the characters as gods. [Seems like I should do something with that. Maybe on my Patreon?] And I don’t know anything about Stars Without Number. I missed that part of the cycle. And I’m late to the SWN/Hard Light party. Like … ten years late? But people asked and besides, it’s a good test to see if my conceits hold up across genres.
So, Keep on the Borderlands. Take the keep. Make it more interesting by adding two major subplots and maybe six minor ones. Then describe three of the caves of chaos and put in a generator to help the DM make more. That’s this adventure.
The dungeons are the Sky Tombs, some burial/pilgrimage places for some aliens that are in an asteroid belt. You get three described, one of which is full of pirates. Another one is pretty much fully abandoned and the third in the middle of an alien standoff. Three types of dungeons which we might call social, ruin, and normal-OSR-fireworks-factory-storing-gasoline. All three have completely different vibes. While remaining true to their vibes I might characterize each as a slow burn. Each one has a few things going on in it with a decent number of “empty rooms that have something in them but it’s really an empty room” to spread out the action. I’m sure that in play it will scare the shit out of the players and in to their characters pants. Not so much from a horror standpoint but from the tension and unknown. Maybe a little slow compared to most adventures, but you gotta have space to build tension. And this does that.
The station, proper, is a powderkeg. Loans, miners, admins staff, crooked staff, pirates showing up, tense work environment, DANGEROUS work environment. And a couple of major subplots with embezzlement, resentment, and revolution. And then a lot of interpersonal dynamics with people hating each other or secretly in love. It’s a great place and feels alive. It’s better than 99% of the starting village stuff I see, at least, and it’s all because of the downtime/social subplot stuff. And the hooks, several presented, make sense. Yeah, they are caravan guards in one, err, security staff on a supply ship, but it fits in well and each tends to tie the party in to a major NPC, with favors and resentments abounding in them. They all have some good roleplay in them. “Yeah, I owe you $8k? Well, I don’t have it on hand, you see. It’s gonna take me a few days to dig it up and right now I’m totally preoccupied with the water situation …” The entire section on the hooks and subplots is a great example of to bring your stuff to life.
But …
Man, this thing is THICK. DENSE. HEAVY. Words after words after words. I’m sure this all makes sense to Kevin, since he write it, but the thing is going to take several read-throughs, at least, with a highlighter and pencil notes in order to make it runnable on the fly in a meaningful way. Sure, You can run it out of the box easily enough, in a superficial way. It you print out the NPC summary sheet (Great job! And it’s all on one page!) the party could arrive from one of the hooks, run a couple of roleplays from the sheet, then send them off to a dungeon to explore. And you’d be losing a lot that the social aspect of the station has to offer, and will fumble through details like life support, blackmarket, etc. Then you’d hit the dungeons, which you prepared ahead of time, right? Or if using one of the three, you’ve highlighted it ahead of time?
Because man those things are thick also. The third one, the more “typical” OSR dungeon is written in a terser format and is easier to run with only a single pass. The second, the “ruin” is thick and dense with room effects. The first, the pirate den … man I don’t know. It’s clearly got a social aspect to it, and also a “clear them out” aspect to it, but it’s written like the second and the social elements are not supported very well at all. It doesn’t make it easy in supporting the DM in helping the party get in to trouble/have complications. Other nits abound, like an order of battle for the dungeons with smarties in them, and quibbles like warnings in trap rooms, etc.
But the text density, man. I don’t want to come off like an asshole (too late! Ten years too late …) but man, I don’t know. Normally I’d suggest bolding, whitespace work, insets, summaries and the ilk. But it’s SciFi. You HAVE to address air. You HAVE to address “lets just blow it up” and you HAVE to address vac suits. It comes up every time. Maybe level one SciFi is easier to write, and level four SciFi is where it gets harder.
The room keys need a major overhaul. The station needs a major overhaul. There need to be more summaries. Things need to be easier to locate (radiation, vac, blowing it up) and easier to scan (room keys.)
It seems to me that this is a great fucking place, but I have NO idea how I would get it in to runnable format at the table. I mentioned highlighter and pencil, but I’m not even sure that could get it in to a form that would it justice. And justice it deserves. It’s coming in just under No Regerts and is close to that mythical line of something really cool that is hard to use that you find at the used book booth.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and is a pretty good representation of the adventure. I would prefer a page of dungeon also, or maybe the hooks page, but check out those five pages. If you can make it through it in a single pass and hold the information in your head for a week then you should have no problem running it.
By Carl Niblaeus Stockholm Kartel LotFP "Low Levels"
Something stirs within a mountain on a forgotten planet somewhere in the Cosmos. Legends talk of a God living in the mountain, a God that has recently woken up again. Some of the inhabitants of the abandoned planet instead whisper of a mad wizard who has returned to the area. And among the elders there are still some who remember the disappearances and abductions many, many years ago. In the dark woods on the mountain there is a strange clearing surrounded by ancient statues, that only bold adventurers dare investigate. What will they find?
This twenty page adventure describes a kind of wizard lab/tower with about fifteen rooms. Nice ideas and an interactive emphasis can’t save us from column long rooms. Even if there is an attempt to provide an overview.
So, wizard tower. Wizard is home and about to Call the Stars (Mummy reference! That right bitches, I played VtM when it came out! And was Prince of Indy in the LARP. So I’m REAL royalty! FU PoN! 🙂 /Complete the Ritualistic Ritual of Ritualism. Also running around inside are some helpers, some abominations, some dum dum homunculus clones,and some space pirates. Yup. Space Pirates.
And OMG I luv Luv LUV them so much! No-gooders, stopping at nothing in their hunt for treasure. On the lam from the Galactic League. Led by Tunguska Slim, wearing a tooth necklace and singing blues tunes with a raw growling voice. Their spaceship is parked in the woods nearby. Uh … I’m supposed to point out, in this part, how I like gonzo, right? That’s really just a one-off though, the rest of the adventure is devoid of the gonzo.
But it IS full of wizard labbyiness. There’s a metric Fuck Tun of shit to mess with in this. Helmets, thrones, chairs, crystals … sit down, fuck with some crystals, push some buttons. The third leg of Bryce’s Good Adventure stool is interactivity. I think it’s one of the few things, outside of the DM, that can make an adventure fun. You can’t MAKE a party have fun. And the DM contributes mostly to the fun (along with the group. IE: people are important) but an interactive adventure trumps a non-interactive one. Do you want to walk down the street and look in the windows or do you want to go in, try on the clothes, play with the toys, and get free perfume samples? If usability for the DM is one leg, and evocativeness the other, then those two tend to have more of an impact on the DM. Interactivity though leans more towards the players than the first two. And a fucking mind-swap helmet brings the interactivity!
It has a summary sheet that goes along with the map. It’s one page, lists all of the room numbers, and then bullet points the interesting things about the room. A kind of cheat sheet for the DM when running the adventure. It’s a good idea, but I don’t think it’s implemented well. The bulleted summary comes off a a bit generic, losing the flavor of the rooms in favor of the facts and I would prefer to have both. “Room1: Five statues around a large sphere. Pressing bronze disks on sphere reveals entrance to below.” Ok, sure. But a few more adjectives and adverbs would have helped. And what about that formerly manicured walkway? The bullets lose the flavor of the room. Yes, there’s only so much page real estate, but I think that’s a solvable problem. The margins are wide. The bullet form is slavishly followed. Column break space is large. Individual lines in a half point smaller font. Headers/footers. There are a lot of ways to fit more on a page.
This is important, I think, because the main text is a mess. It’s long and hard to dig through. Long is necessarily always a problem, but hard to dig through is. Formatting, layout, word choice, whitespace can all make long things easier to dig through and find the important bits. But … why have a preponderance of unimportant bits? Sure, some are nice, but not to the extent they get in the way. And man, this is a textbook case of “could be easily fixed.” One room starts with “This 40’ circular chamber is the room where interested guests to the laboratory were greeted.” Guess which room that is? Yes, it’s the reception room. I left out the first part “1: Reception Room” And we know it’s 40’ from the map. The first thing the DM sees is garbage text. That’s not conducive to running it at the table. [And, a note for those who like to see room dimensions in room text. A: I don’t care. B: You get to like what you like C: You’re arguments carry more weight if you can make a case for them better than ‘i like it.’ And remember, you’re fighting against Core Principal One – Make it easy to find shit]
Likewise the text is full of notes like “If the PC’s look behind the curtains …” or “if the PC’s search the boxes in the room …” These are not quantum events. They don’t exist when the PCs do things. Less snarkily, those are filler phrases that do nothing. “Behind the curtain are …” or “The boxes contain …” is better writing. Ray(?) has an entire book on this shit. What’s that called? I gave it a recommendation. Oh, Writing With Style by Ray Vallesse. Someone needs to buy Carl a copy. (https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=4366) “Six armchairs, once beautiful, now ragged and decayed.” You mean 6 ragged & decayed armchairs? I think we can infer the once beautiful part based on context.
A major, major edit, both by a good editor and by Carl proper, would clean this up enough to at least hit No Regerts. But not in its current form.
Also, did I miss the Aldebaran thing? Lovecraft? Howard? I know it pops up all the time in shit like it has some meaning I missed.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggest price of $2. The preview is meh. It does show you the map summary thing. It’s a good idea. It also shows the rumor table, which seem ok to me. The beginning of room one is on the last page. That starts to give you an idea of the writing, in an imperfect way.
This is level 9 of the community Fight On Megadungeon The Darkness Beneath. It has nine locales in a large cavern system, with each of them expanded upon in to a number of keyed entries. Deep in its own mythology, it rivals the Ghoul Kingdom. And has no idea how to organize itself for play at the table. Ultimately, a disappointment.
Some of the upper levels of Darkness Beneath rank among my best of all time, including what I think of as THE best of all time, Level one. It’s simple, terse, non-standard and creates child-like wonder. I would argue that the Citadel of the Dark Trolls is has the most expectations of all the levels presented. That “dungeon map” that rides along with every Darkness Beneath level has had it staring us in the face for many years. Yeah, it’s not the LAST level, the Tomb of the Dark Lord remains there as desert, but Citadel has the kick ass name and the teaser right from level one, with the great doors on the underground highway. Lee has written something that lives up to the expectations set. It’s deep and rich and full of that hinted at mystery and mythology that Kingdom of the Ghouls (Baur) also did so well. You get a real sense for the place, and it’s not generic AT ALL. I have an issue with expectations and you can see that in many of my reviews. It’s not my most charming quality. But this dungeon met my expectations. It FEELS like the Citadel of the Dark Trolls.
The caverns have about nine major locales. These are large open areas and the like, on a grand scale ala Descent in to the Depths of the Earth. Not really a hex crawl, but there’s a sense of large space/distance here. It’s a nod to the ecology and the “kingdom” of the dark trolls. Each locale is expanded upon, some more than others. There are fully keyed out locations, like the citadel proper, and then other locations that get more than a nod, like the troll “farmlands.” The hand-waving gets a little deep at the some places, like the farmlands/supporting “countryside” but it’s at a level that is about appropriate for something like this. It’s enough to give the DM something to work with, as a sideline if the party should flee there, for example, but I think also recognizes that this is not a 90 page supplement but rather one article/dungeon in a magazine with about 20 other articles in it also.
I’m going to concentrate on three points to the review, two minor and one major. First, I quibble with the overview map & key. Oh, did I say key? I mean, it doesn’t actually have a key. The “big map” has a hex-like map of nine locations, each with a number and a little embedded “#1 is the gatehouse” chart on the map. And then the main text has GATEHOUSE instead of “#1- Gatehouse.”I’ve seen a couple of adventures do this lately and I’m not sure where it’s coming from. (Since this was written a few years, I guess from this?) There’s this reliance on textual headers to convey location information. I don’t get it. How does that make it clearer? Maybe if magazine page numbers were on the chart also or something. But forcing me to fig through the text to find a one line offset entry for “GATEHOUSE” is not the way to earn “I am the friend to the DM” points.
Secondly, the linkages to the other levels seems a bit light. As an example, the gatehouse notes that the guards will let you through with a legitimate reason. Three are listed: legitimate bounty, an identifying item/pass, or you want to fight in the pit games. I know, all too well, how hard it is to link up a deeper level to an earlier one when you’re writing it at different times, and yet that’s the challenge to overcome.
Both of those are symptoms of a larger problem, the need to think about how the adventure will be run and orienting the writing and layout towards that. For example, on of the rooms at the gatehouse tells us what happens if people fly over the gatehouse. It’s the room with the giant ballista in it. Ok, that makes sense, in a way. But … isn’t it more likely that the party will just fly over the gatehouse and the DM will be left digging through the adventure looking at keys, ALL of the keys, to see what happens then? Why would you not put this information “up front” outside of the keys? That’s where the information is likely to be needed. Buried in room 23 of 76 would wouldn’t have a note about what happens if the party doesn’t visit the dungeon, would you?
But, the major issue is that I like to think this level is incomprehensible. Each and every room is so THICK and DENSE that you can’t make out what is going on and how it relates to the issue/room at hand. Rooms are a third of a column, or a column. Paragraph breaks are few and far between. I’m looking at room 2 of the gatehouse right now. It’s about half a column of text without bolding or paragraph breaks. There are long digressions in the rooms of things like:
“Skaemir was returned to the Citadel by posturing goblins, his lacerated flesh sliding from exposed bone. To chastise the troll nobles, Gorangol kept the Prince’s equipment, ate his Blood Thump, and demanded that a week-long party for her wild goblins be held at Dagendreng Hold, free of charge. While recovering, the angry Prince learned that the Shamans blamed an outbreak of disease on his combined failures to uphold prophecy.”
Uh, ok. I guess so. Is the middle of a room description the best place to put that fluff?
And fluff it is. Fluff after fluff after fluff. That section comes from a column and a half that describes fighting styles and other information. WITH ONE PARAGRAPH BREAK.That’s what this level is. It’s a fluff regional setting book. I don’t review those. Since fluff is solely inspiration, and I think that’s totally subjective (or, maybe, I don’t know how to review subjective shit) I don’t review fluff. I like it, and don’t mean fluff in a derogatory term, but it’s not an adventure.
This is 27 pages of fluff masquerading as an adventure. Ye Olde Pushbacke &| guidance seems to have been missing.
It’s fucking cool, but I’m currently running a game, not reading the background guide for a Tv series writer.
A recent archaeological expedition in Icewind Dale has uncovered a remarkable discovery: the Spine of the World mountain range is, in fact, the actual spine of a great giant. The discovery confirms an ancient legend, that giants as tall as mountains once roamed the Forgotten Realms. Lead archaeologist Silja Stengravar knows the truth. Centuries ago, a lich, threatened by the giants’ ancient elemental power, banished their race to an abandoned planet known as Kaiva. The lich was defeated, but its curse remains, protected by its minions in the heart of Garagai Mountain. Held captive to the curse, the giants are suspended in time, unable to roam free and claim Kaiva as their own. Silja’s discovery has summoned the portal to Kaiva. Will adventurers brave the perilous journey through the hostile and awe-inspiring planet to destroy the curse and reawaken the giants?
This seventeen page adventure has about six pages of actual content. Laid out in three scenes, the party travels through a hollow mountain, that is actually a giant, kills some shit, and then runs away as the giant they are inside of starts to move again. Ignoring the scene-based structure and the “archeology” bullshit, the organization of the adventure is a nightmare. It could be worse, but the lack of content and the free-flow organizational style hide a simple linear adventure.
First, nice cover! That’s the kind of place adventurers should be dying to go to! The touch of the fantastic this brings to the adventure is wonderful. Of course, the players don’t actually get to see that, since the place is supposed to look like a mountain and not a giant. Or … does it? The advice to the DM is to do whatever you want, make it look like a mountain or like a giant like the cover shows.
This then is our first major point of divergence: the role of story & the DM. This adventure is firmly on the side of “DM as storyteller.” Want it to be a mountain? Make it a mountain. How long should the players have once the mountain/giant wakes up in order to escape from it? It’s up to the DM, as they control the pacing. Should the players be trapped on the other planet if they fail? It’s up to the DM since they control things. Somewhere around 2e the game shifted. Instead of an emergent story that develops around the party the style changed to the DM as storyteller. I find this hollow. In it lies a thousand sins. The players no longer have agency in their own action. The rules won’t let you die anymore and neither will the DM because their “story” has something going on. The baddie must escape. The artifact must trigger. Blach. So what? Someone dies and they make another character. They don’t escape and they get to have adventures on another planet. Or they have an entire campaign inside a giant. Or any of a thousand other possibilities. But it’s the players who have the action token and not the DM. This whole DM as Storyteller thing has Giovanni Chronicles in it. A hollow & empty style of play that can never be meaningful because there was never anything at risk or any chance to change the world in anyway. The plot says that at level 20 the evil god gets summoned, so whatever you do is meaningless. It’s going to happen 19 adventures from now. Just pull out your phone and play some Bubble Bobble.
So, this adventure is a part of a playstyle I abhor, and can make a logical well reasoned argument as to why it’s bad. Let’s accept for the moment that someone responds with the No-Accounting-For-Taste “But That’s the Way I Like To Play.” What then?
Then we fall back to Ye Olde Rule-e One-e: the only purpose of the adventure is to help the DM run it at the table. Does this do that in any meaningful way? No.
The data is laid out in some weird paragraph form. Inside of each “scene “are some bolded subheadings. Each subheading with have a couple of paragraphs and the various encounters are laid out in that text. There is no real organization other than “if you read the entire thing from start to finish then you will see the order of things as thing one comes before thing 2 or thing 3 in the text of the paragraph.” This is terrible, and is now the second or third time I’ve seen it. I don’t get it AT ALL. What’s the point of this? Is room/key now not being done at all? Is it impossible to just bullet point out important information, or number it, or do ANYTHING other than just list it in paragraph form? Again, the DM is scanning the adventure text at the table. They need to location the information quickly. Burying it in a paragraph is not the way you do that.
There’s a couple of inset boxes early on, when the “archeologist” is talking to the party. (This i, I think, the only time inset data is used. Or anything other than just paragraph data transfer.) The first is some … flavor text(?) about the archeologist. The second is a point of data about a curse. The inset about the curse it good. If I’m the DM, looking at that page, I can immediately find the curse data. But the archeologist flavor text? What’s the point of that? Their personality & looks are would have been much better served to have been highlighted instead of being buried in the sentence data in the paragraph before the insets.
I can quibble with the other choices. An archeologist wants your help. Why? Why not a wizard? Do we have to live in a world with archeologists and museums and shit? Why not embrace the fantasy? Easy enough to fix, they’re a wizard now. But there’s other things. There’s some note about how killing a wolf is an evil act if it hasn’t attacked yet. And it then attacks. What? Hang on there. Uh, no, it’s not an evil act. You mean it’s an evil act the way YOU play D&D. In my world it’s not. This kind of DM enforced morality garbage is a blight on the game.
This is a low page count low content adventure. It is no way lives up to the cover, even given the “run away to escape the giant” gimmick ending.
The designer runs an RPG Writers Workshop and appears to be an author. The content of the workshop appears to be of two types. The first section appears to be things you might see in any writers workshop. Storyboard, moodlists, outlining, creating villains, NPC’s, etc. The second part is about layout, editing, publishing, etc.
I haven’t gone through this workshop, but the agenda leave me with a raised eyebrow. Adventure writing is not similar to story writing AT ALL. Adventure writing is technical writing. You are trying to transfer information out of the designers head and on to paper in such a way that it enters the DM’s head that they can use it to run the adventure. All in about the three seconds you get when they glance down at the page. I don’t see that in this workshop. Joyce may have been a great writer but if they wrote a D&D adventure in the style of Wake then it would be a disaster. First, technical writing. Then evocative writing detailing interactive encounters with the POTENTIAL for combat. D&D is about interactivity and too many designers confuse combat for interactivity.
It is my great hope that the great masses of humanity who know only the WOTC/Paizo echo chambers do one day get exposed to the better writing & formats os the inside & OSR scene. There are certainly a huge pile of garbage in that community also, but they seem to be more actively thinking about these things, and experimenting with formats, etc, than the WOTC/Paizo crowd. The major publishers are really doing a disservice to everyone by not caring about information theory in their own products. People see it from the the official publishers and think that’s the right way to do it. There’s no right way. Some are easier than others, but there are many paths to good design. The WOTC/Paizo garbage is not it though. These designers get all these 5-star reviews and accolades, never knowing what’s over the next hill
This is Pay What You Want at DMSGuild with a suggested price of $1.
Rumors have reached the adventurers about the recent discovery of the legendary Throne of the Gods. This epic level journey will take the adventurers to places of unimaginable danger. But the adventurers may not be the only ones seeking this artifact.
This 34 page adventure describes a two level dungeon with about thirty rooms that has the Throne of the Gods at the End. Or, as the cover states: “The THrone of the Gods.” It is basically just a series of fights. Monster Zoo, with padded writing.
What is a D&D adventure? A series of challenges to overcome? But if that model is adhered to too strictly, ot literally, you can get a flat adventure. Just a series of rooms with monsters in them. Or a series of puzzle traps. Or a series of riddles. Or … Whatever. It’s hard to argue that those elements are not a part of D&D adventures but when the D&D adventure starts from that framework I think you get substandard work.
And that’s the case with this adventure. It doesn’t feel like a real place. It doesn’t feel like it started out as caves, or a throne room, or whatever. It feels like it started out as a series of challenges to be overcome. Room after room of high HD monsters. Roc’s. Mind Flayers. Beholders. Dragon Turtle. Devils. Titan. NPC Parties. It’s a monster zoo of high HD enemies.
The designer does say that high level adventures are hard, and I would agree. I’m not sure anyone has cracked that nut. It’s certainly one of the largest unsolved issues in D&D. A dungeon full of monsters to hack doesn’t do it.
To it’s credit it doesn’t gimp the party. But it’s really just room after room of monsters to cut down with a couple of dead-ends or a puzzle/evil alter or two. It feels more like a 4e adventure with its focus on combat.
And then there’s Maude. Err, the text. ¾ of a column to describe a dead body. Padding the text with phrases like “Should anyone climb up the statue and inspect the mouth of it they may find a …” or “Should you use divine magic then you learn [something irrelevent.]” Or telling us, at a certain pit, that a Monk may be able to reduce their falling damage through the use of one of their powers. Well, yes. Why tell us that? Do you also explain how to use Thac0 in every combat, noting it was optional in 1e? Or how MU’s cast spells?
On a mission to request aid from the Enchanter Tyrion, your band of volunteers will be traveling along the Weatherstone Road. A well traveled route, there are few travelers on the road now and what you do find isn’t friendly. And then there is the lurking menace, the monster that has come to dominate the fears of travelers and locals alike, the Beast of Briar Creek.
This seven page adventure has two encounters in it, in a linear format. You walk up a road rom your village to a wizards tower. Get attacked on the road. Visit an inn, maybe. Maybe get attacked. By kobolds. Cross a bridge with a monster under it. End.
So, it has read-aloud and the read-aloud is short. It’s not the best read-aloud, but it doesn’t suffer from things like describing room dimensions or other problems. And it is clearly making an effort to paint a decent picture.
The DM text after the read-aloud tries to describe a situation for the DM. It has a paragraph or so of things like a mud-bogged road, and so on, and then says something like brown blobs attack from the trees. If I squint hard I can maybe see what the designer was going for. What is comes across as is “you’re on a muddy road and some blob monsters come out of the woods and attack.” I think though the designer may have been trying for something else. Let’s say that instead of free-form text the DM text was a list of bullets. The first one said. Something like “the road bogs down in mug, travel is quartered. Shoes get stuck in it and come off feet. People slip.” and then another one that said something like “2/3d across the valley blob monsters come out.” or something like that, or more. Then you’ve got a little scene. The DM is going back and forth with the players. The mud is reinforced. They are trying to avoid it, or keep their shoes on, or wipe the mud off when slipped. Maybe even some muddy puddles that LOOK like the blob monsters. Now you’ve got a little more than “you are walking down the muddy road and get attacked.” Certainly the text doesn’t preclude the little extras I mentioned, but it relies on the DM to add it. The bullets, extra detail, etc instead give a clearer picture to the DM of the environment and encourage further play without necessarily being prescriptive. Which is assisting the DM in running it at the table.
A lot of the intro text is abstracted. The weather is foul. The crops are rotting. The water has gone bad in places. Rumors of monsters in the night. Village elders held a meeting. This is all abstracted. Old man Crawford’s well went bad his plow ox died after drinking it. 3 weeks of rain and the fields are waterlogged. Old Man Martin is again going to the wizard for help but Crawford is distraught and wants his help, gummit! This cements things in a way that abstracted text can never. There’s buy in.
Finally, lets talk price. I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I think I’ve mentioned it before. This is $2 for seven pages (which includes the cover and legal statement.) There are five encounters, one of which is just a “leaving the village” read aloud and one of which is just “visit an inn.” Further, a third one might not happen if you skip the inn, do it right. Is it worth $2? G1 is a good adventure, is 8 pages, and was $17.50 in 2019 dollars. And yet I see people bitch about $2 adventures that have 50 rooms in them in a good dungeon level format in 6 pages. There is a bias, I think, against short page counts. We expect shit to be padded to hell so we don’t accept a short $2 adventure. Which means it has to be padded to hell to justify a page count to justify the $2. That’s not cool. Cool things can be short. I will say again, I wish DriveThru had a no questions asked return policy.
This is available on DriveThru for $2. There’s no preview. Otherwise you wouldn’t buy it?
It’s the dead of winter in the High North. People are going missing, rumors abound of savage creatures in the wilderness, and the outpost town of Jotnar’s Folly is teetering on the brink of starvation. You must travel to the frozen foothills of the Spine of the World and put a stop to whatever is causing this suffering. Will you be able to survive the freezing temperatures, solve the mystery, and defeat the threat in time to save the town from certain destruction?
This 22 page adventure has the party trekking through bitter cold (environmental hazards) and meeting some gnolls before hacking a frost giant and his pet remorhaz. Pruning back the writing and some tweaks to the organization/support information would go a long way to making this an inoffensive adventure. At its heart it’s just a boring old set-piece battle with the added complication of a gnoll parlay.
Set in a far northern town, the children don’t drink lemonade but they do get hacked down. You pick up a couple of quests in town, go to a farmstead to find some dead bodies, find some gnolls at a campsite that you might be able to roleplay with, and then fight a frost giant and his pet.
This adventure tries hard. You can see the designer trying to do the right thing and then kind of leaving out what they needed to succeed. I’m going to assume it’s because of a lack of exposure to good design principles.
The adventure is set in the frozen north and the environment is supposed to be a big part of the adventure. There’s a little section at the beginning on sights and sounds that tries to help the DM introduce some atmosphere. Crunching snow, glare off the snow, etc. It’s got some nice ideas in it. But, what the adventure needs, is reinforcement of those ideas. Including that section in front kind of sets the DM’s mood while they are doing their initial read through, setting up the lens by which the further encounters can be viewed through. The encounters, proper, though need this data reinforced. The data should be repeated, not word for word but elements of it, in the various encounters. When you reach the ruined homestead a few words, under the title, like [crunchy snow, glare off the featureless plain] would have done wonders to help the DM set the mood WHILE RUNNING IT. Remember, the adventure needs to be focused on running it at the table. So while the initial sights & sounds are ok, the DM needs that brief environmental data reinforced in the actual encounter that they are looking at. The DM’s attention is drawn a hundred different way while running the game, helping them recall is a good thing. But, you have to do it without getting in the way. Hence the suggestion of the “feelings” under the encounter title.
Likewise the adventure tries to set up a situation where travel between the various encounter sites has an element of the environment in it. Face a blizzard or hide in a cave? Go over a frozen lake or maybe go the other way to have a monster encounter? These little things have a number of problems. First, the table they are presented on only has three options, driven by a survival check. Given the multiple travel options it’s certainly possible that the same one could happen more than once. It would have been better to tweak this in to something else, like removing the check. This ISN’T messing with player agency because of my second point. It’s not always obvious what the consequences of the players decisions will be. For the decision to be meaningful the players must understand the nature of the decisions they are making. Going over the lack will reduce time but it looks treacherous. The other direction looks safer but maybe has monster spoor. Or you can see a blizzard in the distance, or something like that. They need to know that the blizzard is coming and/or that it will delay them. Otherwise the choice is random and you take the players agency away, things just happen to them. The adventure is not necessarily doing this on purpose but it doesn’t make it clear. Finally, the linkages between the hazards are weak. It mentions, for example in the “Rock and Hard Place” line on the survival table that the party might have to survive the weather and then has a section about a column away called Surviving the Weather. That’s generic, and could apply to the entire adventure when it’s MEANT to apply to this one line on the survival table. Rock & A hard place on the table could be called “Blizzard or Yeti?” and the blizzard referred to as “Event: Blizzard” or something like that. By being cute with the names you make the comprehension harder for the DM.
Read aloud is contained to just one entry per “major section” but can be long, and, as long time readers know long read-aloud, being more than 2-3 sentences are bad. Instead, rely on bullet points or other techniques to rely information to the DM so they can easily find it and convey it. Further, flowery read-aloud is almost always bad, in general, and is in this adventure as well. “Arrows stick out of the snow like frozen flowers.” is not good writing. Evocative writing is a good thing to strive for but metaphor is almost always a bad idea. In my experience it almost always comes off as groan & eye-rolling worthy.
It’s handles survival mostly through the 5e exhaustion check mechanism. This is a decent way to include it but not focus on the tedium of outdoor survival, like so many adventures do in the heat or cold. It would have been better, though, to include a brief summary of the exhaustion rules and maybe some modifiers, etc, in the adventure, maybe on the last page or something, to make the DM’s referencing it during play easy to find. I don’t want to go hunting in the PHB or leave the page open in the hardback during play. Remember, the designer should be focused on helping the DM run the adventure during play at the table.
But, to that end, a little travel table is provided between sites showing distances and typical number-of-days travel time. That’s the kind of helpful data I’m looking for, so well done!
It’s got a couple of other nice things it’s trying to do also. The mayor is being blackmailed by a protection racket, leading to some of the hooks, and provides better depth than usual to what would normally be a throw-away hook. That’s great. It’s exactly what I’m talking about when I ask people to think about their hooks just a little more He needs the lost protection money back, and it also leads to potential further adventure at the end of the adventure. Likewise, there’s a cowardly sheriff, a hero in his own tale, that has caused some trouble. This is a non-trivial element of the adventure, as he has killed a gnoll and they can be, potentially, allies of the party if the sheriff and gnoll tension can come to a end. The sheriff thinks he did the right thing. The gnolls are pissed he killed one of them. They are not necessarily hostile but potentially hostile. That can be a good encounter, with no enforced right or wrong to it. [The gnolls come off a little too do-gooder for me, like humans wearing gnoll costumes. There could be some more nuance there but its painfully easy to see where the designer is going.] The entire idea of the sheriff and gnoll group, with factions in the gnolls, is a great idea. It just needed some more work.
Folks will recall that Rients suggests shaking up the campaign, and the giant could very well fuck up the town. That could be GREAT!
It also tries to do something interesting with hooks. Four locations are described in town, each with a hook related to the adventure. This goes a long way to the concept of leaving out the shit don’t matter. Four ways in to the adventure, or further nuance to it, and thus four locations described in the town. That’s focus. The NPC’s are left to the appendix to describe, and I’d prefer a couple of keywords in the description to riff off of, but, at least they are short-ish.
The DM text tends to the medium and unfocused side of the spectrum, needing more whitespace/bullets/pruning back to enable focus on what matters when running it. Finally, it’s got a trigger warning at the start noting that some innocent people get killed as a part of the adventure. Uh … Seriously? If anything I’d say it doesn’t go far enough in this area. Showing why a bad guy is evil, instead of telling us, is a key way to motivate the party. I’m not looking for graphic depictions, but the current descriptions are abstracted enough that they don’t bring anything/much to the table.
Finally, This is really just a three encounter adventure. Go to homestead and find some bodies and the sheriff. Go to campsite and find more bodies and the gnolls and hack them and/or roleplay. Go find frost giant and his pet and kill them. Three encounters in 22 pages, for $4, is not exactly “Participation Award” worthy. Yeah yeah, environmental encounters between the main ones. Whatever. I don’t wandering monsters in OSR adventures and I’m not counting Wandering Environment encounters here. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that, if you hack the gnolls down, there’s any way to figure out there’s a giant involved or where he’s going. It’s assumed, I guess, that the gnoll roleplay works out. Strengthening the “ought oh! The giants the bad guy!” part could be better. Or, maybe not, and you just let the giant fuck up the town. But that smacks of the designer saying “you better talk to the gnolls or else!” and that’s NOT good design.
For 5e it’s decent. But most 5e adventures are dreck. If instead its looked on as the initial effort of a first-time designer then there’s maybe a little hope in the future that they improve and bring us good things in their coming products.
It looks like this was produced from an RPG writers workshop the designer attended. I can’t say that it was perfect, but this one did come out better than most first time efforts. Maybe next week we’ll take a look at the workshop runners adventures. In any event, I do hope a lot of these 5e/Pathfinder designers expand their horizons and get out of their echo chambers. There is so much GREAT design work going on outside of the mainstream, and so little within 5e/Pathfinder. Broadening their perspectives would be great for these folks, if they can buck the emulation echo chamber trends.
This is $4 at DMSguild. The preview a good one, eight pages. You get to see the town and how the plot hooks are integrated in to the locations. You get to see the first two encounters (most of them anyway) and their read-aloud. The lack of NPC personality (it being relegated to an appendix) and the more conversation style of DM text that comes off as unfocused and hiding the details the DM needs.
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