Dungeon of Crows – The First 28 Rooms

Posted on January 23, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
by Daniel J Bishop
Crowking Press
Labyrinth Lord
Level 1

Within you will find what remains of the Skullheap Goblins, a few vermin known and surprising, a mysterious rhizomatic growth, and the blue and red goop PCs will surely interact with.

This adventure describes the first 28 rooms of 170 rooms on the first level of a megadungeon. Column long, or longer room descriptions, One and two paragraph read-alouds … There’s something here, but you gotta fight for your right to party. Maybe just try the next house over where you have to struggle much less?

I was super excited when this popped up on Jeremy’s OSRNEWS blog. A megadungeon that I missed! I got over my excitement fast. Like, “room 1” fast. Jeremy pointed out that megadungeon plans frequently fizzle, and I would agree with him as to a reason when looking at this … the text is LONG. That’s gotta be burden.

There’s a great map here, hand drawn, with 186 or so encounters on that TINY squared graph paper. It looks like there might be another level under this one. This adventure describes the first 28 rooms on that map. The map alone is worth the $2 PWYW. (Hey, pay the suggested price you cheap asses! Who the fuck pays nothing? View the suggestion as the floor, not the ceiling! Why are you making these designers lives harder?)

There’s an adventure here. The first 28 rooms have an old goblin tribe, now massacred, so the rooms are full of bodies and blood and spooky things. It keeps up the tradition of the first-ish part of a megadungeon having this vibe of ruination and desolation. [Speaking of Desolation: Hobbit cartoon Smaug – the platonic dragon?] I like the encounters, at their core. The room ideas are good ones. Hints of what took place for the players to piece together … players LUV that shit. Strong vermin infestations with a skeleton thrown in. There’s even a hint in one place to other encounters and areas of the dungeon. Clues and foreshadowing are good, they build anticipation and mystery.

But, man, the thing is so completely overwritten that it’s no wonder the project fizzled out. The read-aloud is at least a long paragraph per room, and sometimes more than one(!) The DM notes fill out a column of text, or more. The usual suspects are at play. Room dimensions. Text telling you how you feel. History lessons in rooms things of no import to the NOW. Stuff that should be follow-up embedded in the read-aloud. In the throne room we’re told, in the read aloud, that the skeleton of the goblin chief “He was as big as a human.” That is absolutely a detail for the DM notes, not the read-aloud. This is a game of interactivity between the players and DM. When they go over and look at the skeleton on the throne THEN you tell them he was as big as a human. You reward curiosity and interactivity. This writing comes off as flowery.

There’s good and bad detail. Take, for example, this description of a treasure: “Within this hidden niche is a silver necklace upon which green beryl gems are strung, the whole worth 1,500 gp, and known as the Necklace of Gahwynna, for it was made by the dwarves of the Grey Hills for the bride of the Lost Lord of the Hopmarch some 250 years ago.” Take a moment and ask yourself why the above detail is good. Really consider the issue. No, really, do it. I’ll wait for you.

The treasure is 1500gp, a not insubstantial sum. Some PC is gonna wear that necklace, or sell it. Thus the treasure is, essentially, serving the same purpose as a treasure map. It’s a hook to more adventure. It can cause a complication in another game. Someone notices, knows the history, turns in the party, or it gets them in good with a noble, or the dwarves. The necklace detail serves to expand play and interactivity. That stands in contrast to useless detail about the past which serves no purpose other than paint a rich picture of history. Perfect. That goes in the writer’s guide to your campaign, but not in the adventure.

This is Pay What You Want, with a suggested price of $2, at DriveThru. The full size preview is 404’ing out, but the flash preview gives you a good idea of the map. Like I said, the $2 is worth it just for that.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/133541/The-Dungeon-of-Crows–First-28-Rooms?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 7 Comments

Dragonsfoot #24 – The Ruins of the River Gate

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 

Andrew Hamilton
Dragonsfoot
AD&D/OSRIC
Levels 3-6

This is one adventure in the latest issue, #24, of Footprints, released by the Dragonsfoot community.

This is a nine page adventure with about 43 rooms over several smaller levels. Featuring the ruins of some towers next to a river, and the dungeons underneath, it does a good job actually feeling like a ruin. Workmanlike, its writing could be more evocative and it relies a bit too much on history and explaining, but still manages to present a relatively terse and scannable room descriptions.

This does a good job feeling like ruins. Vermin, ooze, rubble. There’s a (sery simple) ruined tower on each shore, each with a cellar underneath and then a hidden dungeon level that connects the two. Much in the same way the gatehouse in Stonehell or some of the ruin in MERP felt, this does a good job conveying a ruined feeling.

The writing is serviceable. Note that I find about 70%-80% of adventures NOT serviceable, so,  Good Job! It does a decent job using whitespace, bolding and formatting to call attention to and separate information chunks. This, combined with a writing style that is on the terser side of the house, make the adventure easy to scan and therefore use at the table. You can FIND things.

It engages in some activities that makes sense. Destroy the evil mural or defile the evil alter and gain some XP. There are game world meme’s that make sense and this is one of them.  It also does a decent job with some of the wanderers. A grey ooze wanders one level, and rather than a traditional table you roll to see if it’s in the room you just entered. Likewise one partially flooded level has giant leeches in it and the wanderer check determines if one has found you. It makes sense, and both contribute to the ruin-like vibe of the place. The rumors are also a cut above normal. They have a little context in them, and are tied in to the place in a way that makes them feel natural. Not quite in voice (Boo! Boo I say Sir!) they still are a little bit more interesting than the usual and show some work has been put in to them.

Also, I’m never satisfied, so now is the time on Sprockets when I pick it apart.

There’s a host of small issues. It might just be my eyes this morning, but the maps seem blurry, maybe made worse by their small size. Also, in quite an annoying fashion, DOWN stairs are noted on the map but not the up stairs. Yes, I think it’s always the first roo on that level that has the stairs, but it’s still a interesting choice to not put it on the map. The Leech wanderers turn up on a 1 in 20 checked each turn. My, that’s a lot of rolling! I wonder why this was chosen over a 1 in 10 every two turns? IN the past frequent wanderer rolling has seemed fiddly and cumbersome to me. I think “every turn” also paradoxically, is LESS interesting than every two turns. Every 2 feels like the party pushing their luck to stay inside, while every turn becomes routine, maybe?

The text chooses to engage in some history and justifying, which stands out because of the otherwise terse nature. I stuck some example down at the end of this review. These add little to nothing to the adventure.

The room with the big baddie and his minions is also interesting. It states that he goes to investigate disturbances on the level. I might have instead placed that text as a kind of preamble to the level, or in the first room, so the DM was sure to see it immediately.

I’d like to focus on two things though. First, the order that information appears. One room in particular made me think of this. It’s ruined, a little flooded. “Olive slime has established itself here. Looking like scum on the water …” This appears a few sentences in to the description. In cases like this I much prefer to see a general description of the room, including scum on the water, up high/first in the room description, and then following that a little blurb about the scum actually being two patches of Olive slime. This organizes the information better for the DM during play.

Second, and my major issue, is the workmanlike descriptions, which I’m using a little negatively here to describe a lack of evocative descriptions. Room 33 is the evil chapel and room 34 a throne room, and yet both have very little in the way of description other than the room title. A profane alter with 3’ of water in the room. The throne room is a little better with a water logged and rotting throne sitting on a dias, painted gold. Profane is a conclusion; the designer should show, not tell, something that makes the DM/players think “wow, that’s profane!” It is this lack of evocative descriptions that really keeps my opinion of this restrained. Again, evocative descriptions don’t have to be long, just a few words or a sentence that paints a picture for the DM.

The Footprints magazine is free, at Dragonsfoot:

https://www.dragonsfoot.org/ft/

“There is nothing of value here, adventurers having searched the wreckage and carried off every copper piece long ago.”

Hidden by a bandit that laired here a few years back,

8. Empty Room
This room is completely empty.

PCs may be alarmed by the presence of the fungi, but it is normal, harmless, and serves as food for rats.

The Lord of the River Gate used to sit in audience here, pronouncing sentences on captives.

Rats and other vermin got to the supplies that were stored here centuries ago.

The water in this room (3’ deep) is inhabited by an evil spirit: a young woman that was hiding when the elementals flooded the dungeon. Once a plaything of the Lord of the River Gate, she now manifests as a water weird and exacts vengeance upon any living creature that chances upon the room.

Posted in Level 3, No Regerts | 14 Comments

(5e) Quest for the Demon Slayer

Posted on January 19, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
by Ed Shatto
Self Published
5e
Levels 3-5

For levels 3-5. This is the first of four modules in a series. In this module we learn of an impending demon war, and go in search of a magical sword. Full of battles, riddles and puzzles.

Hey, it’s Saturday, that means non-OSR stuff, in general. I’m going to try something new and repeat myself more/rehash old dead topics, since they will be less familiar to the 5e crowd. We’ll see how long this lasts.

This 31 page adventure features a twenty room nearly entirely “text/challenge” dungeon. It is, essentially, just a series of linear combats interspaced with linear riddles. I’m at a loss to find something positive to say. I guess … it’s coherent?

We start with a two page backstory. Yes, I’m kinder about those things these days (unless important things are in it) but in this case it’s a taste of what’s to come. The 2 and half page read-aloud that begins the adventure. Yup. 2.5 pages. Players don’t listen to long backstory. Did you know that WOTC did an informal study and found that players stop listening two to three sentences in to read-aloud? That’s a lot less than 2.5 pages. It is far FAR better to provide a few keywords that describe the personality and then do something like bullet-point paraphrase the salient issues. Then the DM can do a little more back and forth with the players and it comes across more natural and is interactive. D&D is supposed to be interactive, between the players and the DM. A long monologue has NO place in D&D.

It takes a week for the party to sail to some old ruins, wherein they are looking for a sword. The sea voyage has four entries. “Pirate, mermen, dinosaur, sahuagin.” Just a 1-4 and those four names, nothing else. It’s up to the designer to add value to the adventure in order to assist the DM in running it. “THEY ATTACK” is boring. The pirates need some character, the sahuagin some mechanism of attack. Each entry deserves a few words, no more than a sentence, to give the encounter some character. Then the DM has something to work with during the game.

Arriving at the ruined city the party is presented with a map. The only encounter is the tower at the center. What happens if you search? Do you have random encounters? Is there ANY guidelines for the ruined city at all? No. “The party should go to the tower, it is the next stop,” Linear adventure design is BAD adventure design.

The rooms in the tower either have a monster that attacks or a fey that gives you a riddle/challenge. This is what I would expect from this, and it is boring. Again, D&D is an interactive game. You need to give the party something to do besides fight. And no, solving a riddle aint it. The purpose of the room is not to have a combat or to solve a riddle. That’s the height of bad design. Something else should be going on, something more, and the combat and/or riddle should be a part of that, but not the sole reason for the room existing.

The final room is the old “12 foot pit and 11.5 foot board” thing, and you’re not allowed to bring anything in to the room, says the fey who meets you outside, because the door won’t open otherwise. IE: do what the designer says you should do and don’t be original. Look at the D&D spell list. Imagine the very first time, back in 1971, that a player encountered the 12 foot/11,5 foot thing. Look at the spell list. Know why dimension door exists? So the players could skip that puzzle. At the cost of a spell splot, a precious resource. Someone at the table said “fuck this shit, I’m researching a new spell: dimension door” and thus it became part of the list. When there is only one solution allowed then the players are not playing D&D, they are just doing what the designer/DM wants.

And, and that book title trap? I couldn’t read it on my copy of the adventure. Since the titles only exist in the picture I can’t really figure it out. Was it meant to be a handout?

Also, there’s a line in the backstory about a wizard who attempts to control an archdemon. It goes something like “Only a fool would attempt to control such a Being…” Hey! Yo! Prejudicial much? You never hear about all of the time a wizard controlling an archdemon turns out well, only the bad stuff. I think our nameless narrator suffers from a lack of archwizard vision!

You don’t want to get anywhere near this adventure.

This is $2.50 at DMSGuild. The preview is six pages. You get to the the two page backstory and the 2.5 page read-aloud, and that most excellent wandering monster table. The preview should show you a couple of rooms/encounters, so you can get a feel for the types of writing and encounters to be expected in the product.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/264023/Quest-for-the-Demon-Slayer?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in 5e, Reviews | 3 Comments

The Things Lost to Time

Posted on January 16, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By James Andrews
Stormforge Productions
LotFP/OSR
Levels 1-3

Deep in a mine is an ancient vessel. Something so ancient, it sunk under the stone like mud. A vessel alien to this world, yet here longer than most of human history. Can the players harvest its strange technological bits before being disintegrated by deadly lasers? Or will they be enslaved by the odd pink aliens which have been unleashed on the world?

This 22 page adventure details a 22 room spaceship buried in a mine. The miners are now undead cyber-zombies, the aliens floating balls of tentacles, and there’s a crazed robot to avoid. But, treasure is abstracted, the rooms all need a second pass for logic and to clean up unneeded text. Still, there’s a good cat and mouse idea here.

The (rather loose) hook has some miners having disappeared and not come back, except for one with tales of a metal demon and hellfire. The actual mines are quite small, just a couple of room, before the spaceship begins. It’s a collection of obvious obstacles, like a laser screen doorway to be crawled between, alien tentacle blobs, abstracted treasure, and a killer robot to be avoided.

The patrol bot is the most interesting part. It roams about the hallways, on a loop. If it catches someone it most likely kills them, then takes them to medbay to convert to a cyber zombie. There are guidelines for hiding form it, how hard is searches, vents on the map to crawl through to avoid it, and how it escalates its searches over time in response to interactions with the party. It’s an interesting aspect of the adventure to put on some pressure AND it supports the DM with the maps, guidelines, etc to help them accomplish it.

The rest of the adventure is uninspiring.

There are annotations missing form the map. The robot does something at points A and B, but they are not on the map. Some of the traps are Bad Traps. While searching the lockers in a room one explodes and you take damage. It’s kind of the same as a rando pit in a corridor … just take damage and move on with the adventure. There’s no interactivity with that.

Each room starts with a DM overview and then some bad read-aloud. The overviews are mostly not needed at ALL . The room titled “4. Medical Room” tells us that “this room is the equivalent of an alien medical bay.” Well, yes, could have guessed that. It’s almost all unneeded text. The read aloud if overblown imagery at times, and leaves out details at others. It’s not really evocative at all. The med bay, for example, have absolutely no mention of creatures, until you get far down in the room description where it say “Creatures: 4 cyber-zombies.” Wouldn’t that be mentioned in the read aloud? What are they doing? Just standing there? Do they attack? Whatever the designer was going for doesn’t really come across.

For those in search of tech, you shall despair. It’s all abstracted in to “bits” worth 1sp each.

It comes off as just a generic, abstracted spaceship. IN fact, the surviving miner even calls it a ship. I managed to run S3 once for three sessions and the party still hadn’t figured out it was a ship. This aint that, and not even a glowing red laser fence can save it.

This is free at DriveThru. There’s no preview (although I guess you don’t need one if its free) and the level isn’t included in the text description, although it is on the cover if you blow it up to look at.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/262967/The-Things-Lost-to-Time

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

Treachery Isle

Posted on January 14, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 

By Kingtycoon Methuselah
Game of the North 
OSR (LotFP?)
Level 4-5?

Nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted on Cormorant Isle!  And yet you find that you must rely on dangerous strangers if you hope to leave the Isle alive.  Who are these tricksters and what is the secret that they will kill to keep hidden?

This 73 page adventure contains about ten adventure locales on an shipwreck island, each with about ten or so locations. Imaginative, this thing is VERY hard to decipher. Fonts, layout, rules, phrasing … I actually had a very real headache after the first two pages. I’m going to count this one as a ‘Failure to Review’ … I just don’t think I got it.

I usually review an electronic copy. This one I had to resort to printing out, which yields something a little easier on the eyes. As I noted, it gives me a headache. The format is three-column. The read-aloud font is a kind of dark magenta or brown, with a grey background, in italics.  There are weird section breaks that are not obvious. You’ll be reading a paragraph and the words will just stop mid-sentence. That’s your clue that the section below is a major new section break and you should continue reading from the top of the next column to finish the paragraph you are in … an invisible section break. Except when there actually IS a formatting error and the paragraph just ends WITHOUT it continuing in another column. “The heretic has “ … clearly is meant to convey something, but it just stops right there. The tables presented look like screenshots, with a font, background, color that over the line on readability. You CAN make it out, but for your eye health you should not.  This 24 pages of the adventure, proper, actually failed to print the first time I tried. There is something STRANGE going on, none of which lends a hand to comprehension … at the table or not.

The game system is … not mentioned? “OSR.” A scale walls test is mentioned as a “d6 scale walls test.” Like, that’s the check, as in game system, or you need to make d6 attempts at a check? Other sections reference Search result 1, search result 2, search result 3, and so on.  I have no idea. Things kind of LOOK like D&D. Each NPC and creature gets their own full page character sheet (with something called “Primary Mode” with a symbol in it?) and a “Phys/Men” trail score … but it also has HP, AC, HD, Mv, Init and so on. I just … I don’t know …

The writing is … abstracted? Obtuse? Both? Your ship needs provisions, there’s an island ahead. Through the spyglass you see a battle taking place on the beach. Three ships are burning. You see the last combatant drowning the second to last under the waves.

Huh? Battle between who? The people on the ship? There’s no detail, in the read-aloud or DM notes, of what the fuck just happened, or enough context to infer. This lack of context to infer what is going on is a major, major issue throughout the adventure.

This is in spite of a summary, which comes at the end of the keyed encounters on page 25 or so, that tells the referee what is going on. I note that reading that summary sheds VERY little light on the goings on.

Did I mention that there’s an Exquisite Corpse label on a Lulu product? My eyebrows are raised.

“But Bryce, you haven’t actually reviewed the adventure yet!” Correct. There’s a witch, riding a giant sword, over a beach throwing fireballs to set ships on fire. There’s an illusion of a bonfire. It’s also a teleporter to other, REAL fires. Uh, there are knights, and places, and some Lashan, and a witch and … I have no fucking clue what is going on in this adventure.

I fail. The weekend is coming. I’m going to try again.

Ok, weekend over. Tuesday now. I’ve been through the adventure three more times and feel that I now grasp it, although I’m not sure enough to run it.

Your ship needs provisions so you land on the island, seeing the end of a battle of knights, one drowning another in the surf. Landing, there’s recruitment attempt by the knight to his cause. His group (they have a camp farther in) is here to find and rescue a woman, kept by another group of knights. There’s a small castle that you and they can rush. (From this point out they serve as a kind of greek chorus, getting killed, etc as you explore the island.) You could, also, join up with the other group of knights or do something else … at least that’s what the text tells us, although its not exactly well supported. Somewhere in this the islands witch shows up and burns down your ship, trapping you. From the castle, ruined and full of bodies, you see a tower. Exploring the tower lets you see four other areas, each with some tie to an element. Getting through those MIGHT get off the island. Along the way is a kind of animalistic dragon with mimcry in a lava cave, some leshen, children in masks (another chous, or a sorts, maybe) the witch, and so on.

It’s got strong allegorical ties then most adventures (ie: >0) and some great language in it. Buried behind text that is THICK to get through. A highlighter won’t work in this one.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $7. The preview is six pages. The last four pages show the first encounter sections. I encourage you to TRY and read page three.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/256600/The-Tricks-of-Treachery-Isle

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

(5e) Crimson Harvest

Posted on January 12, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Andy Tam
Self Published
5e
Level 4

… The agricultural exports that once brought it wealth and decadence has since all but withered to naught. A group of intrepid adventurers has taken on the task the escort a vital cache of grains to the ailing town, but what seem to be a simple run-of-the-mill escort job takes a sinister turn for the worse. Ultimately embroiling all involved into a spiral of decay and madness…

This 58 page adventure features a cult in a village and about sixty locations in the manor home/dungeon.There are hints of an adventure in this, but it’s written like a linear plot based thing rather than a normal adventure. The benefit of the doubt would seem to indicate a lack of understanding of how to design a non-linear adventure.

Digging around on DMGuild, I was struck that everything there is either A) not an adventure, B) Some AL nonsense, C) Connected to the latest book. I went out of my way to find something relatively independent and came to this. The baddie here is a Warlock, in service to her patron. Nice! Reminds me of the days when druids were baddies. There’s also a civil war going on, with the village in question being majorly impacted. Muddy fields, bodies face down in the dirt, spilled blood, starving and desperate people … that’s pretty cool. I mean, it’s just gonna be used as a throwaway once this adventure is over, but what if it weren’t? Nice campaign regional.

This thing also tries. It’s got an encounter on the way to the village with an old woman trader doing some profiteering, a source of information, who also steals from the party at night. And it tries to add atmosphere, mostly by having a section at the start called “Atmosphere” with some bullet point ideas. And the entire concept of a village, starving during a civil war making civil hands unclean, desperate people, bodies down in the mud, a good ol’ hanging tree ala Witcher 3 (who also tried and failed at wartime) … ah, warms my DM heart. As does a certain brevity in combat encounters; only a few sentences each, on average!

Oh, and then there’s this bit right up near the top of the adventure, one of the few few words …

“Crimson Harvest is a dark fantasy story presented in the form of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure …”

Ok, no, it’s not as bad as those words would imply. But, man, seeing that can cause your heart to shudder.

The hook has the baddies luring the party to town. Lure adventure suck. They are right up there with Challenge/Test adventures. Then the guy who hires you will commit suicide rather than be captured, if you attack him. This is not going well. Really? He kills himself? He’s bought in that deep? And still passes for normal, enough to put one over on the party? Just let the fucking party capture him, who cares? Besides, the hooks are all lame anyway. Hired or assigned a mission or Yet Another Missing Loved One. My next PC is going to home from an extended close-knit family of about 600 relatives, just to mock all these lame ass Loved One hooks.

The read aloud is extensive. Extensive read-aloud should never be included. Can I say that categorically? Are there exceptions? I don’t know. But it’s close enough to the truth to say it categorically. Plus, it waxes poetic and flowery and presumes to tell you your character’s actions and feelings. Find some vials? The read aloud tells you open them and sniff. Uh huh.

And that atmosphere that I mentioned had bullets? It’s mostly generalized and abstracted, giving you little concrete or inspiring to work with.

But that’s all minor nits compared to the major failures, on two key points. First, it fails utterly in some pretty basic design issues. Like it wants to split the party. This is a fucking disaster for DM’s, because it ALWAYS leaves a group of your players bored and disengaged. The only way this works is if have the ability to regroup almost immediately, and that don’t happen here. It also REALLY hates maps. Which is to say it loves them too much, in the wrong way. Clearly someone put some effort in to making battlemaps for everything, nice and colorful and detailed. But the main DM map is a zoomed out version, hard to read. And basic information like “how many villagers attack the party in the tavern?” are left unanswered because the information is not in the text OR on the map, as the adventure indicates it should be. So you can’t run it, by design, unless you use the battle maps which tell you the enemy count and location … and then the information isn’t on the maps? And, if it IS there, and I missed it, then it’s not clear enough. There’s this weird abstraction of detail, like in a tower with a boy. There’s no map, I think, but the locations are numbered like there is one. But they are weird, like #1 is  painting and #2 are the aforementioned glass vials and #3 is a chest, like there’s a map somewhere of a big room with numbers on it. Feel free to stretch your legs and try new things in design, but you should also make sure they work.

The second major issues is the entire adventure. Or, rather, how it designed. It’s clear that the designer is going for a kind of open ended sort of thing, something akin to a sandbox/independent location that the party find themselves in. But I don’t think they know how to do it.

There’s a strong bend to the writing that is linear and plot based. This then this and then this … not quite that but about as close and you can without having scenes. The militia, as cult members, are stationed outside the manor home to keep the party out. There’s a strong element of capturing the party or directing them to certain hidden entrances. If this adventure is The Wicker Man then everyone in the village is right on the edge of clubbing the party over the head. It doesn’t come off as much as a village with a problem but rather a kind of armed camp ready to assault the party, turning the adventure in to a hack fest almost immediately. The maps have a strong linear dungeon bend to them rather than presenting the place as a “normal” manor house. Look, I hate simulationist stuff as much as I hate linear stuff, but this is clearly close to the plot side of the spectrum, too much for its own good.

Getting out of the 5e echo chamber and seeing examples of good adventures would go a long way to helping the designers next effort. Pruning back the prescriptive writing elements and either returning to traditional map/key or putting more work in to the color battle maps actually helping the DM.

This is $3 at DMsguild. There’s no preview. Andy, go create a preview that shows a few encounters so people know what they are buying!

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/263425/Crimson-Harvest

Posted in Reviews | 14 Comments

Behind the Walls

Posted on January 9, 2019 by Bryce Lynch
  • By John Large
  • Monkeyblood Design
  • Swords & Wizardry
  • Levels 1-4

Ebeneezer Garbett, a local farmer from the mushroom-filled valley village of Otterdale, returned to the hamlet with tales of riches he had found. Now, no-one has seen him since, and he villagers are becoming ill with a strange fungal infection.

This 49 page adventure has the party getting to trouble with a fungus creature in a small village. A good overview and some evocative writing is buried in text that could use some better organization to tighten up the important bits to make them stand out. A nice open-ended adventure, small, but with repercussions ala LotFP.

John hangs out at reddicediaries, his blog, and published Murder Knights of Corvendark, a nice weird little adventure that needed a bit more. This adventure feels smaller and more intimate, in spite of the page count. Set in his Miderlands, a kind of England-ish setting, this one one is right on the border with his version of Scotland. Some farmer found some Goman gold after some heavy rain, now he’s disappeared, people are dying from a sickness, and an adventuring company (! Not adventurers! A company! I love the nod to mercenary that makes this more dirt-farmer than the magical ren-faire connotations that Adventurer has!) that looked in to the coins has disappeared.

Certain elements of this harken back to The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a fungus creature, interconnected colony creatures, and some explicit notes to make it more Pod Person like. It’s not overdone and it related to Thing and Body Snatchers in the way that they are folklore; not really gonzo explicit but more remembrances of a theme that influences how you, as DM or player, relate to the content. That’s the kind of stuff I like, the leveraging of other themes or content to bring more than the writing itself does.

The ending of this has, probably, the giant fungus creature dragging itself up from its small underground vault and heading toward the village, probably caused by or at least witnessed by the party. This feels like an adventure climax without it feeling forced, and it a kind of gentler LotFP apocalyptic ending if the creature escapes. This harkens back to Rients and his Broodmother advice or really fucking up your campaign world, and the explicit advice (in a paragraph) handles the guidelines on the greater world well if the party Oops it up. Plague masks, movements of people to drier areas less likely to fungus up … it’s good imagery.

And there’s a decent amount of good imagery in this combined with JUST enough nods to realism that it feels real, without slipping in to simulationist nonsense. The rumor tables are in voice, which adds richness to the NPC’s. There’s a feast getting ready to go off in the village, in celebration of the new found wealth flowing in from the farmer and adventuring company. A locale of humid mists, lanterns during the day, a valley alive with encounters. Tendrils growing through a door to the creature on the other side and ancient metal weapons missing their wood … it having been absorbed by the fungus creature. A little adventure overview in the beginning kind of ties everything together and orients the D on what’s to come. The fungus creature has bits of bone, gold, skulls, etc visible on its surface as it attacks while its minions try to infect rather than kill. A richness of detail in combat AND outside of combat.

But …

The art and maps, while well done from an imagery standpoint, suffer from usability issues .. .mainly the numbered locations fading in to the map. Pretty map, but I don’t want to fight it to find the numbers.

I can also complain about several smaller things. A location, seen from far off, isn’t really dealt with until you’re right up on it. ANY time the party is outside the designer needs to pay attention to what they see in the distance. It’s that Fallout 4 thin of seeing a red glow in the night that draws you to go explore there. “Oh, uh, yeah, I know it’s night and everything, but, everything is on fire.” Well, how about telling us that as we approach  instead of hiding it in the room 3 description? [That’s not an example from this adventure. In this one I’m talking about a prominent jagged outcropping that isn’t dealt with, well, from a visibility standpoint until your on top of it.] Further, the main farmstead is covered in two separate description locations in different parts of the book, NPC cross-references are haphazard, at best, and an NPC summary sheet, with location, personality, sickness, etc, is sorely missing. The investigation portion is largely social, and social adventures need different resources than room/key exploration adventure sections. The wanderers could really use some personality also. They are a cut above minimal, but not by much. A little personality in the NPC or situations would bring them to life.

It’s also very weird that the fungus is mentioned, in one place, as being highly flammable, but fire is not mentioned as a weapon against the fungus creature or its minions.

The major flaw, though, and what keeps this from a Best Of list, is the mixing of interesting details in to long text blocks. There are some great details in this but they are lost in the text presented. The descriptions and flavor are rich and, while not Failed Novelist long, picking up the pertinent details out of the text blocks is is not easy. The mist in the valley. The mold and mushrooms everywhere. The lamps lit in the day … these deserve bullet points or bolding in their paragraphs. The idea is that the DM reads it once before play and then, during play their attention is drawn to the bullets or bolding and they say “oh, yeah, that thing …” and they include it in their description to the players. This happens over and over again. I would say that it has the scenes set well, for the initial read through, but doesn’t support the DM well, at all, during actual play. Bolding, bullets, summary sheets. What do I, the DM, need RIGHT NOW as I’m running it, and can I find it easy?

This is $5 at DriveThru. The only preview is a “Quick” one, meaning you don’t get a chance to see the content at all, just a hint of the (quite nice) layout. [And rare shout out by me to the person who did the interior layout and art. I know nothing about thatshit, but it looks nice.]

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/261303/Behind-The-Walls

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 8 Comments

Cowpie Mushrooms

Posted on January 7, 2019 by Bryce Lynch
  • By Martin O
  • Goodberry Monthly blog
  • OSR
  • Low Levels

Inspired by real life events! About mushrooms that grow on cow shit! It has cows and doggos in it!

This eight page heist adventure outline is about harvesting mushrooms that grow on cow shit … from farms with uncooperative farmers. Generally well organized, it gets in and out fast with a good  focus on gameable information rather than trivia. A little more lead in and a map would have made this super great, instead of just good. It’s a silly fucking heist, but, the best D&D is Heist D&D, a sandbox area and some stupid fucking plans created by the party. It’s hard to not like heist D&D.

This is really a kind of outline of an adventure. It gives you a brief one page overview of the goals (stealing mushrooms to sell to a rich asshole) and a little background and then launches in to descriptions of the three farms. The descriptions are focused on the task at hand: stealing the mushrooms. You get three power curves: a senile farmer with two cows, a farmer with about two dozen cows and dogs, and a farmer with forty cows and a military background and large family.

The elements present include a local sheriff, about an hour away, who hassles the party a bit in town and warns them about lynch mobs. Note what this does, giving the party two important bits of information. Not only do they have to worry about the farmers, but now they have to worry about the sheriff getting sent for and the local mob militia. But … they also know he’s about an hour away … both of which can now factor in to their plans.

The farms are tersly described. The house and farm, proper, is just a blow off in a sentence or two. The focus is on the people and NPC’s. How they react to both an up-front appeal “let us collect the mushrooms” and how they react to trespassers at night. A schedule for each farm, letting the party know who is where, and brief but sticky personality quirks. You get dogs who go for the face or crotch combined with sweet little quiet bulldogs. You get suspicious teenagers along with a little kid who loves candy and another who loves adventurers.

Note how good things are mixed in the bad. There are things to take advantage of, and things to watch for. The adventure locales are a collection of elements good and bad, for the party to build their plan and attempt to execute.

Bolding is used to good effect to call out certain sections of text, helping the DM locate important bits. The personalities are terse, in just a couple of words per, but stick well. Arthritic beagle, a dog that barks incessantly but it the sweetest dog ever. You know how to run this once you read it. The vision is communicated well.

On the downside …

There’s no map of the farms. Yes, I know, I sound like an ass. But a decent map of the farms and/or surrounding lands would have allowed more caper play, sneaking behind hedgerows and setting fire to things and the like.

There’s also a more that could be done with the summaries. The dogs have a personality summary on one page and a stat summary on another page. A little combined action would have been nice, but it’s not a deal breaker, since the adventure IS only eight pages long.

The map is, I think, a part of a larger problem. The focus is on the three fams and everything outside of that is handled in just a paragraph or two. Just a TAD more in the way of the region/local village/buyer assholes, would have provided a more solid grounding for kicking the adventure off. As is, we’re just told the buyer is a rich asshole. That’s enough to run him for me, but adding another one or two buyers, and maybe the BAREST of villagers/towns nearby, and a little regions map (without more detail) would have provided the DM just a few more tools to kick the thing off and run some of the more interesting complications.

Everything drives the action. All of the details are focused on the task on hand. The words are all meaningful to the adventure. It’s a rare adventure that can do that. This is a nice little adventure.

This is free over at the Goodberry Monthly blog.

http://goodberrymonthly.blogspot.com/2018/12/cowpie-mushrooms.html

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 5 Comments

Praise the Fallen

Posted on January 5, 2019 by Bryce Lynch

There were those demented powers that wanted to return all to naught, to become one with the Ever Slumbering Void.  Pantheons collided and the heavens shattered with war. Untold cosmic powers were lost without their names ever spoken by mortal tongues.  Countless legions fell. Defeated in their gambit of annihilation, they scattered across the universe. Several of the Fallen, fell to this world, forever imprisoned at their point of impact…

This sixteen page adventure describes a thirty room dungeon, home to a cult trying to resurrect the fallen angel that crashed there in eons past. Decent usability at the table and a kind of … starkness (in a good way) of the cult and temple remind me a bit of the starkness of the old Tharizdun adventure (WG4?) mashed up a bit with Death Frost Doom to add a bit of local color.

There was this old 3e supplement from an indie called The Void that I bought at a local indy game store that is now closed. It represented something outside of law and chaos, and in fact as you progressed down the prestige classes offered you lost an axis from your alignment. It had a decent idea, presenting the void as something outside of the normal game. This adventure isn’t exactly that, since it has a fallen angel, but it does capture a bit of that otherness/void/nothing feel. There was a certain starkness, a coldness, from WG4, and this has a lot of that same vibe going on, but in this case it’s brought a little more to life with more modern use than WG4 had. I guess because there IS a cult in this place.

I should mention the layout first since its something I’ve only seen once or twice before. You you took a dungeon map of thirty rooms and divided it up in to sections of four or five rooms each, and then put a mini-map of those four rooms on a single page and all of the room descriptions for the same page, then you have an idea of the layout. Reminiscent of parts of Blue Medusa, and several “a bunch of one page dungeons make up the campaign” adventures, I seem to recall only one or two other adventures also having this exact same layout. It works pretty well, forcing the room descriptions to be short. There does seem to be an unnatural mania, though, with keeping the room numbers off of the map that I don’t understand at all. Both the main map and the mini-maps don’t have any rooms numbers on them all, in spire of the individual rooms being numbered. There are just arrows drawn from the text sections to the point on the map. Arrows that sometimes don’t come through well. It doesn’t seem easy to know which part of the booklet to run to to find the next section of the dungeon the party moved in to, or at least not as intuitive as it should be. The decision to leave room numbers off doesn’t seem to have another purpose, and detracts from ease of use.

The encounters are suitably creepy. “There are 4 statues of angels in various stages of anguish. Each statue has a kneeler in front of it. NE angel is reaching back toward heaven as he falls, his wings distingigrating.” [three more one sentence statue descriptions] [A one sentence description of what happens when someone of law, chaos, neutral kneels on the kneeler.] [The mini-map also has a short one-sentence text box pointing to each statue, describing an item that the statue can give.]

First, excellent layout. What’s the first thing the DM needs when the players enter the room? It’s the first sentence of the room description! Then, the obvious follow question from the players is answered: whats each statue doing? Then a short listing of the interactive effects, based on alignment, with the boons cleverly noted by the other text boxes. There are both good and bad things that can happen to the party, which is good design. If only bad things ever happen when you play with the dungeons toys then you will no longer play with the toys, which doesn’t make ANYONE happy. Tying it to alignment, in this case, isn’t exactly my favorite tactic, but, finally, a use for that Undetectable Alignment spell that doesn’t involve an NPC using it to trick the party, maybe?  Note also the wording. Anguish. A kneeler. Wings disintegrating, not to mention the imagery of an anguished angel rach back to heaven as it falls, with its overloaded cultural attachment that we all have. This is a good room description. Oh, also, if you fuck up in this room then the doors to the dungeon lock and the only way to unlock them is to sacrifice someone while saying “Praise [angel name], the Fallen.” Sweet! And we know this because of the trance someone goes in to when they fail their save which causes the effect. There were consequences for your action, the DM notified you of it, and there’s now this kind of … timer? that hangs over the adventure: how do we get out? Again, good design. You communicate things to the party, raising the stakes.

Another room has a statue (yeah, a number of statues in this one …) reach out as if you grasp a persons hand. Do you? Huh? Well? It looks inviting … The DM knows its a set up. The party knows. The DM knows the party knows and they know he knows. Delightful anticipation and tension, a hallmark of good D&D!

Nice magic items, wanderers doing things, same level depth transitions, in media res stuff, like a little girl about to get sacrificed. Lots of good stuff going on in here, including some prisoners to rescue and some friends to potentially make. A nice ally to the cult, the Phaen Witch, not really a member but more of an independent agent, also shows up, rising up out of the floor in places and times. Good imagery, good NPC vision.

The text description style gets a little much in places, and something as simple as a bolded black dot, between different text sections in a room, would have gone a long way to help in a couple of the longer rooms. And the layout style, while forcing a sparness, doesn’t benefit a few things, such as “2 Swords of Light.” Those probably could have used another couple of words of description. It also makes an appeal to rolling your own magic items and treasure in places. Again, sparness is appreciated, but not to the extent it sacrifices to abstraction. An appendix is a wonderful thing, the adventure could stick room treasure there and still maintain its dedication to the format its chosen. There’s also a kind of “Hey, you just stumbled on to the the ritual that JUST completed to bring the angel back to life!” Yeah, ok, I get what the designer is trying to do. Trying just a little too hard, I think. Maybe a mechanic to push the ritual forward instead of an ex machina would have been in order? The hook here is also not really present. Just a map with a note about it being the location of a fallen angel. So, bring your own hook and place your own reason for the party wanting to be here. “Treasure” ,meaning XP, is the usual reason for OSR adventurers, but the implication is there that there is some GOOD to be done, which, tonally, doesn’t really match an OSR motivation. Making the Fallen Angel an oracle, or you need its dust, or something like that, maybe.

I will mention also, the art style, something I usually don’t care about. Most adventure art doesn’t really contribute to the adventure. It’s just a picture. In rare cases it can really contribute to the vibe the adventure is going for or help communicate something like the horror of a monster. The art here is all a kind of black and white, maybe with negative images? (I don’t know shit about art.) What I DO know is that it does a great job in helping set the mood for the DM on the starkness of the VOID imagery that runs throughout the adventure.

This is free at their blog. It’s an interesting thing. You should pick it up AND encourage the designer to make more. Oh, and !!!ALSO TELL THEM TO STICK A LEVEL ON IT NEXT TIME!!! Grrrr… pet peeve …

https://graphiteprime.blogspot.com/2018/12/praise-fallen.html

Posted in Level 3, No Regerts, Reviews | 12 Comments

The Charnel Pits of Reynaldo Lazendry

Posted on January 2, 2019 by Bryce Lynch
  • By Jeremy Reaban
  • Self published
  • OSR
  • Levels 2-4

After 200 years, a bold band of adventurers plunded the first level of the dungeons beneath the ruined tower of Reynaldo Lazendry. What horrors await upon the second level of the insane mage?

This fifteen page adventure describes level two of Jeremy’s dungeon, with 56 rooms and a Frakenstein/revivification theme. It’s inconsistent and, it seems, jeremy’s heart just isn’t in it.

I’m always happy to see large dungeons, even when they arrive in installment plan mode, like this one. Big dungeons, exploratory things, are what the game was designed around and really show off the strengths of D&D. The mechanics of the game, at least up until 1e, work well with what large dungeons have to offer. To that end, the map here is an excellent exploratory map, with loops and moderate complexity that really allows the game to show off how it works. Loops, bypassing, dark corridors that anything could be lurking down … it’s all present here.

The theme here of a Frankenstein lab level, with some Herbery West thrown in, is a good one. It allows for a lot of room for weird effects. Stitch some new abominations together, give some severed body parts life, and fill in a lot with creepy things floating in strange liquids in jars. This is expanded upon with other moments, like couches whose seats can be searched for loose coins. If you accept that every waterfall needs a cave behind it then you must also accept that couches need to have things in the cushions. Life has a logic to it and D&D should play to that logic. Players LUV it when their theories and logic make good.

But, all os not good in Charnel Pit land. For every washroom with buckets full of weird eyes and baby shoggoths with attachment issues there are also fifteen rooms where not much effort was put. The food storage room, two, tell us the door is hard to break through but can be picked … and nothing at all about the room other than that. Normal food? Body parts? Anything evocative at all? No. Still, room four, the morgue, tell us that it is as cold as the food storage room. So … it’s the same temp as every other room in the dungeon, because the food storage room told us nothing. Room seven tells us, exhaustively, how many wigs are present of each color even though it has no bearing on the adventure?

The rooms are focused on history and backstory rather than interactivity. The Torture pits tells us that “Twelve of these pits contain people who Lazendry brought back from the dead using the revivification process but were incomplete or somehow not right as referred to by ancient wizards as liveliest awfulness.” So rather than focus on the occupants ,the sights and the smells and how the party might interact with them, we instead get a brief bit of history, justifying why the creatures are here. They are here because we’re playing D&D tonight. Or, we want to anyway.

Monsters, especially in something inspired by Lovecraft, should be awful. In this they are … present? We get descriptions like “strange pre-human beings not unlike ogres with very large mouths” or “appear to be a misshapen human shaped mass of flesh, often with bones exposed and large gaping maws. They are ferociously hungry, even though they don’t need to eat.” You can see hints in these descriptions of something better, but its abstracted to the point of providing little of concrete value to inspire.

Jeremy has a style that he likes to write in, and I don’t always agree with his choices, but in this adventure he seems to be slipping even from that. It feels more like a first draft, or rough notes, than it does a complete adventure. Still, coming from Jeremy, that makes it better than most.


This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $.50. The preview shows you the entire adventure, something I wish more designers would do. From it you can tell exactly what you are buying before you buy it. Note page three, the first page of rooms, for some of the writing style issues, and then page four and page ten for some light humor and heavier monster descriptions.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/257586/RL2–The-Charnel-Pits-of-Reynaldo-Lazendry

Posted in Reviews | 7 Comments