tenfootpole.org

• By Frank Schmidt
• Adventures in Filbar
• OSR
• Level 1

This eleven page adventure presents nine encounters, in linear order, as the party passes through a mountain pass. Single column. Linear. Read-aloud telling the players what their characters feel. Forced combat. It feels thrown together.

I don’t know what to do. I told myself I was going to find the joy in D&D adventures. Concentrate on the positive, and just mention the negative off hand. And then, this adventure was the very next one I encountered.

So, I like the cover. I used to draw little stick figure army man battle scenes when I was little and have had a fondness for them every since. Man, I used to love those little plastic army men and their playsets. And the name is nice: Murder Hobo Inc. I’ve used the Murder Hobo idea as a kind of crutch for getting the party together. Never having seen each other before, they instantly recognize their bond with one another as fellow murder hobos. Those daring few willing to live life on the edge and with gusto!

And the party has a map of the countryside showing a safe long journey around the mountains to their destination city, and a little mountain pass that’s MUCH shorter with a skull and crossbones on it. What ho! No self respecting player would ignore telegraphing like that! Adventure awaits! It’s charming.

There are several elements to the encounters that also fall in to this charming category. Berry bushes with fruit that heals, for example. Far too often adventures only include bad things. Everything you mess with is dangerous and kills you, so the party learns to not mess with things. Interactivity drives D&D, and learning to NOT interact is not the lesson we want to teach. Likewise there are some hippogriff chicks to capture. With a sale price listed, I’d be much more interested in training them, and would have appreciated some advice in relation to that. Finally, there’s this tree with some bodies hung up in it, swaying. This imagery has always appealed to me as a DM. Scarecrows, warnings, etc, always give a kind of warning, a message to the players. His serves to both set the mood, providing some subtle subconscious atmosphere, as well as providing an explicit warning to the players: dangers ahead, be on guard!

And it would have done that here had it appeared BEFORE the dangerous encounters, instead of after them. 🙁

I can take barbs because of my taxonomy, but it comes from ruined expectations. This adventure is labeled “OSR.” Look, I know that no one can agree what it means, either literally, in the case of the ‘R’ or figuratively in what it espouses. But this isn’t OSR. Some will argue that yes, it is, because it chooses to label itself OSR. And by that it loses all definition and we are admitting that everything is meaningless. ‘I liked it.’ becomes the rule of the day, of life. You can have no expectations. Of anything. And that should be ok.

Agony and Ecstasy. To live free from expectations, and thus also the disappointment that it can bring. A utopian vision that each of us is charged with, to create our own brave new world. Of course, reality that is that we subject ourselves to the petty tyrannies of life all day long, for our filthy lucre, to hand over to someone else in exchange for a car, that arrives without wheels, an engine, and looks strangely like a bag of imitation doritos (empty), for the low low price of $36,400, financed at 7% over 96 months.

The adventure starts by telling us it is linear, literally, it tells us it is linear. The party must walk in the trail and cannot climb the walls or avoid the encounters as presented. The encounters are forced fights, with little more to them (with exceptions) other than “roll for initiative.” One encounter, the DM is encouraged to rearrange the adventure to make the betrayal of the party more effective. The read-aloud tells the players how their characters feel. And it asks for a DC14 medicine check in one place. What then? And streamed on Twich!

What then?

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is two pages. The second page shows an encounter, representative of the typical encounter. The first page, second paragraph of the “DM Background” section. Last sentence. Linear Adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/261388/MHI–0-Hansons-Gap

By Travis Legge

• Self Published
• 5e
• Tier 2

Deep in the jungles of Xen’drik, embedded in the side of a mountain stands the tower of the Mad Mage Xeffon. Though his various servants can be found flowing in and out of the tower on a daily basis, the elusive wizard has not been seen in many years. Some say he no longer lives, while others postulate that he is locked up in his laboratory, tinkering with magics that could alter the face of Eberron!

This eighteen page adventure is in an eight level wizards tower with seventeen rooms. It is the usual drivil that one comes to expect of the D&D marketplace, bereft of value. I guess I deserve it for looking outside the Adept box.

Imagine my surprise in buying an adventure and finding this tasty tidbit: “This is not an adventure. It’s barely a supplement. Really, it is a toolkit which I built to use on my stream and I am sharing now with you.” Then why is it in the adventure section? Why isn’t it in the “fluff supplement” section? Because it won’t sell as well? Because people won’t mistakenly buy it then? Regardless of Bryce puffery, it IS an adventure. Travis, it appears, thinks he needs a plot to have an adventure. Adventure Location is fine, and most times tacking on a fetch quest plot makes the thing worse instead of better.

Anyway …

The map is garbage. I had to blow it up to twice normal size to make it even partially legible. Maps are not art, they are play aids. They can be pretty, but not at the expense of legibility. Screwy number fonts and a greyscale map that’s too tiny to read/use/interpret does not help the DM run the adventure.

The blurb mentions “flowing inside and out of the tower” which implies an outdoor portion, but that’s not there. This is JUST a description of the towers eight floors. The only view in to the area around the tower is the picture of it on the map. There IS no surrounding context. It’s just eight levels of a tower. Not even a description of the outside of the tower. Barely a supplement indeed!

The rooms, proper, are boring and disorganized. A neat barracks room stuffed full of lizard-people. Well-kept rooms with beds made and personal items in footlockers … is that how you picture a kobold lair? I recall making a similar complaint in some official WOTC drow barracks. Either make the kobolds kobold like or put in humans. You dilute the meaning of kobold when they are used as a substitute for human foes. Oh, you were just building an encounter and wanted something of the appropriate hit die? That’s a terrible idea and also explains why this adventure is so generic and bland. There’s almost nothing wizard-like in this tower. It’s all boring blandness. And what there is is described in a manner that makes you fall asleep. Not evocative writing at all. There’s no burning passion behind wanting to run this, based on the writing.

The room organization suffers also. There’s a writing style were you put an overview first and follow up with more detail. There’s another style where you give no thought to how the DM needs the information and just throw all the words you can think of down on the page and expect the DM to read and memorize the entire adventure for immediate recall. You can guess where this one falls …

A very basic example is the first floor. The description goes: “This floor is used as the latrine for every inhabitant of the tower, including the ogres. The sewage covers the entire floor, roughly four feet deep. There is a potpourri odor thanks to a minor illusion on the area, but it barely penetrates the sewage stench. The room is dimly lit due to several dancing lights throughout the area.” Note the first sentence. It explains the floor, providing justification for what follows. It’s not needed, at least not as the first sentence. Far more important are the next three. The floor is flooded, it smells, and there are lights. THAT’S what the party is looking to know right off the bat, and therefore what the DM needs immediately. This is a great example because it’s easily understood and a terrible example because it IS just one sentence.

Transitioning though, to room seven as an example, yields more fruit. Paragraph one: you see light and here’s a bunch of mechanics. Paragraph two, there are are some big rocks in a circle and here’s some mechanics. Paragraph three, there’s three monsters in the room and here’s some mechanics. The DM needs to read three paragraphs in order to present the room to the party the first time. No. A well written room allow the DM to glance down and in half a second relate the room to the party.

There are a heavenly host of other issues. Treasure is abstracted away, destroying yet more wonder to the game. The history of rooms are in their descriptions sometimes, providing nothing but padding.

Just another adventure by someone who doesn’t know how to write an adventure. I always applaud people’s effort to publish, I just wish they took more time to understand how to do it instead of leaving it to the rest of us to pick up the $2 bag.

This is $2 at DMSGuild. The preview is six pages and shows you the first ten or so rooms. That’s a good preview, doing what a preview should do, letting you know in advance of what you are buying. Check out Floor one and room seven for the examples I provided of misorganized text.

• By Keith Salamunia
• Pinupsbyindi
• OSR
• Levels 1-5

… the adventurers are hired by a mysterious benefactor to aquire parts in a remote region, that ultimately leads to a seige to hold off an army of the undead.

Well, this is a thing.

This 24 page adventure contains a series of nine related one page dungeons. You collect some objects for your patron, and then defending a city from an undead army. The dungeons are linear and not written very well, but the art is nice. That makes sense because I’m pretty sure the designer is an artist.Any, the entre things is handwritten so … art was placed over usability.

Rule 1: It’s gotta be usable at the table. The font used in this is either a handwriting font or its actually handwritten. Either way, usability suffers. If I have to fight the text to get the adventure out then, well, I’m not gonna fight the text, I’m going to move on to something else. I get it. Artist. The One Page contests are full of artists. Cartographers are, on rpggeek, classified as artists. Great! Form + Function, right? (or so says Helmut, the proprietor of the Form+Function furniture store where I shop) Except when it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work here. Hero needs to remember to keep his head down and designers need to remember that legibility is important.

The maps are linear with about six to eight rooms each. Do I need to explain why linear maps are bad? It doesn’t since the entire adventure is linear. Do adventure one. Then two. Then three. Keep going. No freedom. No original thought. For your convenience, consumption has been standardized.

The writing is the usual stream of consciousness stuff that one expects from the majority of products, with little thought given to organization or editing. Focusing in on the first dungeon, we get such gems as: “Family crypt full of coffins. When door is open Zombies will arise. If they are defeated a modest amount of treasure is in the coffins.” Note the multiple if/then statements. The back of my noggy noggy brain (all gone for beer and tobacco) is working on a theory that this and the linear nature or the dungeons and adventure as a whole is related to the same thing. A must happen before B. That is how adventures work, right? That shows up in map, the adventure plot, and the motivation for zombies and quantum nature of their treasure. I put three things to you, gentle reader. First, the quantum shit annoys me. Second, it is related to the original sin of linear plots. Third, it is sloppy writing that pads out the descriptions with filler words, clogging it up like an Elvis colon full of fried peanut butter and barbiturates. There IS treasure in the coffins. The zombies animate when the coffins are fucked with. The world exists outside the actions of the party.

Room four, in the same dungeon, is … something? “After unlocking The door ‘n, playas find an old coatroom.” First, quantum and padded again. Second, WHAT?!?! Playas? ‘N? WTF is that shit. It does continue with with one of the better room descriptions: A couple of old coats hang on hooks, the wallpaper is peeling, and everything smells damp. Tree roots are growing through the raimenents(? sp?) of the destroyed bathrooms. I don’t know why bathrooms are related to coat closets, but, whatever.

Room eleven tells us that a guard chamber contains old beds for warriors. Two ghouls still guard the room even in death. Nothing usable is in the room, except for a small bag of coin under the bed. So … the first clause is irrelevant, just say there’s a bag of coin under the bed. Again, padded, and another example of a writing style that is loose and not thought out or edited.  

The final room has the ghost of Lady Eris, a spellbook, a ruined philosopher’s stone, and a Deck of Many Things. A) NICE FUCKING JOB! Decks are wonderful and more designers should put fucked up magic items in adventures, no matter the level. The Deck represents everything wonderful about D&D. Free Will, good and bad effects, pushing your luck. Second, the goal of the adventure is to retrieve the Heart of Eris. I thought it was a gem, but I can find no reference to it, except in art which shows a red rock. I guess, though, it’s the heart of the ghost? Not clear. And Not Clear is Not Good Design.

The other dungeons are similar, and range from actual dungeoncrawls, like a tomb, to a wilderness, town, or castle defense section.

You got your art in my peanut butter. Normally I wouldn’t care, but, in this case, the test sucks. Mostly not particularly evocative, illegible, and unclear.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is six pages. It shows the art style, and page four show you the first dungeon (which is why I concentrated on it in my review.) It’s representative of the dungeons, but, again, there are more event-drive “one pagers” as well.

by Andy Law, Dave Allen, Ben Scerri
Cubicle 7
WFRP
Beginning Players

Legends claim the Beast of Ortschlamm stalked the marshes near Ubersreik for centuries. But few believe it… When the adventurers agree to help Rutger Reuter, a charismatic, young merchant from Ubersreik, little do they realise what’s in store. What starts as a simple job guarding building supplies, soon turns to tragedy, horror, and murder. The Characters will not only need their wits about them to negotiate the double-dealing camp of Reuter and his business partners, but also the Beast they have unwittingly stirred…

This 28 page introductory adventure has the party as camp guards during a mill construction. A couple of good design ideas do nothing for an adventure that is meant to be read instead of played. Even among bloat/obfuscation adventures this one ranks high.

You start on a river barge and meet the dude that hired you. The barge overturns and a giant fish attacks. You go to a construction camp, meet the two other co-partners in the venture, and are asked to dig up some standing stones. The dude turns up dead and you’re tasked with following monster tracks in to the swamp. There you meet three villagers who killed the dude & faked a monster attack … being attacked by a real basilisk. Coming back to camp one of the co-partners has stolen the paybox and the other was behind hiring the crooked villagers to kill the dude. IE: two fights and a little roleplay.

This is published in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Product Identity Style. Which means a shitty font that’s too small and lots of italics for read-aloud. I can do without the font with legibility issues, the tony font, and the italics. All three make you feel like you are fighting the adventure to pull content out of it.

This is exacerbated by the FUCKING AWFUL organization of the text. Long paragraphs with details buried in them and seemingly endless number of them. It is CLEARLY laid out to be read and not to be used at the table. Bullets, whitespace, headers, organization, things to draw the DM’s attention to them while scanning … all are missing. It’s just one big text blob.

The NPC are organized like shit, two pages for the opening scene with your new employer, the co=partners mixed in later in their own shitty long text paragraphs. It is, essentially, a linear adventure with a couple of roleplay scenes separated by a couple of combat scenes. I don’t find that format particularly compelling and wish it would have taken a more open ended approach

It does do a decent job of presenting some dialog in the NPC’s voices, although better NOC formatting would have made this much more additive to their personalities.

It also does something pretty interesting with a skill check to find some treasure. An astounding success gets you the treasure. All other successes get you the treasure also, but with increasing difficulties. This ranges from rumors around the camp, or a pickpocket, or your employer showing up and watching you like a hawk. Turning the roll in to an opportunity to roleplay and add roleplay complications is quite good design.

It’s too bad this is so shittily organized/written to be read instead of played. The double/triple cross stuff with the partners is interesting, as is the digging up of the standing stone and some of the roleplay possibilities with the workers, the swamp villager crooks, etc. While a small and simple adventure those elements really elevate it. It’s just SOOOOO hard to wade through the text. At this point the product identity is just mimicking shitty cost-based choices form the 80’s and is not a detriment to the line.

This is free on DriveThru. The preview is four pages. The last page is the best example of whats to come. The italics, wall of text, etc.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/259270/WFRP-Ubersreik-Adventures–If-Looks-Could-Kill?affiliate_id=1892600

Stephen J Grodzicki
Pickpocket Press
Low Fantasy Gaming
Level 3?

This fifteen page adventure has an eighteen room ruined temple inhabited by frogmen. With the bulk of the adventure in six pages, it manages relatively focused room descriptions while making some decent stabs at evocative writing. But good wanderer actions can’t save an also ran in the frog man adventure arena.

Challenge of the Frog Idol and Tower of the Were-Toads weigh heavy in this review, alas. Unfair to compare! Unfair to compare! Yes, life IS unfair.

Some dude wants you to go with him so he can collect artifacts at a abandoned elf temple. Not exactly an archeologist, it’s more of a “elves are extinct and I’ve got a thing for them” than it is the academic archeology of so many adventures. Any way, the old temple is partially flooded and has some frog men living in it. The history, background, and hook all come in a single page that gets in and out quickly and is fairly forgettable and ignorable for folks just wanting some frog men in an old elven temple.

There’s a good action-oriented vibe to the various encounters. This ranges from the wilderness encounters, to the wanderers in the temple to the actual rooms. A snake looks for food, frog men play in the water splashing, or giant eagles land in trees engaged in a mating ritual. It’s enough to get the DM going to create something, which is what they should be doing.

The descriptions are going just a little extra also. A forest is ancient and lush, with trunks as broad as houses and an intricate canopy obscuring direct sunlight. Snakes try to drown their prey, stirge swarms buzz, frogmen playfully leap out of the water, a mirror is stained and spotted with mold while objects gleam in a clearing. Nothing if “big” or “large” or “red” or “huge.” Note the use of intricate, or laping, or buzzing, or other more descriptive word choices. There’s an attempt to paint a picture and that’s the kind of value add that I think adventures should provide.

That said, it’s still not the most evocative writing. There’s a … layering? Missing. Rooms feeding off of each other to layer up a vibe. Yeah, the frogmen flooded rooms are next to each other, but it doesn’t feel like the whole is more than the sum of the parts, as far as evocative writing goes.

It’s also the case that the designer cuts a few corners. That gleaming from the wooded clearing (a clearing full of foreboding, good writing in that) isn’t described. And laughing coming from a hollow in the tree is not either. I get it, the designer is allowing room for the DM to expand further and riff of of unexpected things. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’ve bitched so long and so hard in thousands of reviews about the lack of value add that when I see someone TRYING to do something it still sets me off. Anyway, it probably deserves a pass.

What doesn’t deserve a pass is room nine, and I want to use this to illustrate a larger point. There’s this HUGE partially flooded cavern. If you drew two lines across it to divide it in to thirds you’d have rooms seven and eight and nine. Seven and eight are the entrance and middle and nine of the back third, up above water. Nine has an frog god idol on it. And a torch illuminates it. But no mention of that is made in roos seven or eight. So you get to nine and suddenly there’s this eerie torch illuminating an idol. LAME. LAME LAME LAME! Think of the effect, in entering room seven, of the DM noting the flickering light in the distance, and then it becoming more distinct, the frog idol, etc. There’s a kind of lack of “big open area” awareness in this, and this is not the first adventure to ignore it. A bonfire on the roof of an abandoned castle, or eerie lights in one corner of a graveyard … designers don’t seem to take a look at the map and note sounds, lights, or monsters drawn in from other areas. That’s too bad, seeing something in the distance can be both a good motivator to get the party going and a good way to get them focused on something so they ignore something else. 🙂

There’’s some good magic items, nice and unique, and some poorly thought out org choices, like putting monster stats before room one instead of at the end. I should think that would make it harder to locate the stats during play?

Anyway, bullywugs, errr, frog men,  riding dragonflies are cool, but things are a little too … staid for me, where frog men are concerned, especially considering what Challenge and Were-Toads did with them. This is a decent adventure, it’s just not a GREAT adventure. And I can’t tell you what a pain it is to live like me every day, with standards that high.

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is only two pages long and only really shows you the one page of background/hook. A page of room descriptions would have been nice, to give people a good idea of what they are getting. Also,how about trying to put a level in the DriveThru description?

By Jeff Dee
UNIGames
AD&D
Level 1-3

What strange being has taken up residence in the long-ruined swamp-circled castle, and what is its connection to the increase of Orc raids in the region?

This eleven page adventure uses three pages, plus map, to detail a small seventeen room underground dungeon. The descriptions tend to the vanilla+ side of the spectrum, with things little too journeyman for me.

It is always with some trepidation that I review things by folks from the early days. It has been my general impression that they tend to copy their earlier styles, for better or worse. The nostalgia that clouds our memories, combined with the many uplifts in formatting and presentation, can lead to, uh, misaligned expectations. Jeff’s sins are not as major as some of his peers.

There is an odd division here between vanilla and what “cess-pit of the bog mother” would imply. Imagine in your mind those scenes from Aliens that depicted the slime tunnels at the bottom of the complex, full of victims, etc. If you had seen the movie and heard me describe it to someone as “alien slime tunnels” would you be disappointed with my description? The content of this adventure has potential but the writing is weak.

Muddy, tree roots from the ceiling, pools of water, trails of slime … these are some of the elements of the adventure. But it comes across in the writing as: “This is an empty, muddy earthen cave. There are several pools of muddy water on the floor. Roots dangle down from the ceiling.” Okkkkkk…. So, yes, that’s all true. But it is much more fact based than impression based, I might say. It certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it’s also not particularly evocative. When I say vanilla+, it’s what I’m referring to. The writing is generally solid, but not very interesting.

I might also cite a couple of editing issues. Note how that room description beings. “This is an …” A LOT of ofthe room descriptions begin that way. It’s pointing your finger at someone and naming it, instead of using it as some kind of implied potential energy. There’s a lot of “appears to be” and other little “weasel words” that steal the energy from the text and the writing.

Room six, in particular, has issues. This is the big baddies room. Almost a page long, the description is all over the place. I’ve talked about this before, but ONE of the better ways to write a room description is to start with a very general overview of what the players see/experience when they enter the room. That’s the very first thing the DM is going to need when running the room, so by putting it as the first thing in the description you give a nice little overvview for the DM. While the players are reacting to that First Post, the DM can be glanceing down at the follow-on details, perhaps organized with whitespace/paragraph, etc, around the major room elements. But in this room its all over place. You have to read the entire thing to get a sense of what is going on and then process it and then relate first impressions to the players. Uncool for a page long description. The adventures lack of bolding, or even much formatting beyond the paragraph break, is not a positive either. Again, a focus on helping the DM is missing.

There are other small things that set me off. The hag baddie creating healing stuff from a swamp herb … but its only usable if your evil. This is usually seen in the form of an artifact that is only usable by evil folks, but the entire “you can’t but they can” shit is lame. And then other weirdo things like a lack of tracks in the ruins above the dungeon etc. It’s just not very deep in a lot of places that are not specifically “slime monsters.”

The map, though, is fine for being a small one. Not really. It does a good job of showing detail in it and overloads the map with information for the DM. For a small map it’s pretty interesting with its features and loops, etc.

Is this BAD? No. Is it GOOD? No.

This is $2.50 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages. Only the last page gives you an idea of the writing, and that’s for the wilderness area. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/119609/JD1-CessPit-of-the-BogMother?affiliate_id=1892600

By David S. Kenzer, Steve Johansson, Jolly R. Blackburn, Mark Plemmons, Benjamin Sharef
Kenzer & Co
Hackmaster BASIC
Levels 1-5

Holding its lonely vigil high in the rocky hinterlands, on the furthest reaches of civilization, sits the military outpost known as Frandor’s Keep. Perhaps you come to the Keep as soldier, merchant, bounty hunter or wanderer, or merely to seek payment for a debt owed (continuing the adventure begun in White Palette, Ivory Horns). No matter, for you are here now, in a wilderness teeming with strange creatures and fraught with danger — the perfect forge for you to hammer your career upon.

This 160 page book is about half starting settlement/regions and about half adventures. Another Keep on the Borderlands, it expands the keep and town and mini-adventures in them/around them, as well as providing several larger Things To Do in the area. The town/keep/region is interesting, the background boring, the mini-adventures nicely done, and the main adventures suck.

The first chunk of this book, about half, describes the regional around the Keep, the town outside and Keep proper. IE: the starting base. The next chunk, about a chapter, outlines (at about a page each) some of the hooks mentioned in the region/town/keep as little mini-adventures/things to follow up on. The final large chunk of the book, again about half, describes some the adventuring locales in the region. The first two sections, though chapter eight (of eleven+appendix) are really quite interesting. It’s focused like a laser on being a starting location. The regiona, town, keep, NPC’s and little side-quests are all well done and relate to interactivity with the players.

SKipping past the background information gets us to the regional information. It is from that point on that the quality level stays high, until the main adventures are reached. It’s all pretty fucking focused. There’s a gembuyer in town. Turns out she’s just an apprentice to the main gembuyer in the keep and she only handles the small stuff. Oh, and she gets a payoff form the thieves to let them know who’s carrying. We’re looking at three focuses, all on the players. You can sell her stuff. She can introduce you in to the keep. And finally she provides a pretext for the thieves to hit the party and some follow up as the party tracks back to her. Focused. On. Play.

To be sure, it gets caught up in its own bullshit a little too much. Background, past lives story, etc, all go on a little too long for each entry. A little bit of the past is enough for the party asking around, we don’t need more unless it impacts play.

It’s hyperlinked and indexed well, providing references to find more information. It FEELS like a living and breathing place, with people having interactions at more than one locale, and being connected to others in different locations. There’s even tips in how to mix in some mundane shit to make it seem even MORE alive, like soldier patrols, woodcutters, and the like on the roads/wilderness. And, there’s an NPC reference chart! Hooray! It needs some personality on it, but it tries. And wandering encounters are doing things! And there are a FUCK ton of rumors, indexed, with context in different situations, all in voice. My Hero!

The last good chapter has a list of minor little adventures and subplots that were mentioned in the main town/region/keep text. Collected in one place, some expanded upon to a page or so outline, describing what’s going on, whos involved, etc, it’s a good way to handle those little side-quest thingies that come up in any large place.

There’s a lot here to steal. It’s a good read, and provides the sort of rich environment, the interconnectedness, that you need in a good town. I also mourn for the person trying to use this. It DOES go on too long with bullshit backstory. This is the sort of place you have to read a dozen times until you KNOW it, as if you created the content yourself. It’s rewarding as all fuck, but shows its age (2009.) It’s remarkable for it DOES provide, as a play aid from 2009, but this is not going to be an easy to use town. I’d love to see it republished using a more focused approach to play at the table.

And then the adventures start. The main adventures. Ug. Long LONG read-aloud text, long rambling room descriptions. Writing that tends to the boring side of the spectrum. Again, the interconnected nature of the things in the adventures are nice, and there’s a certain relatability to things, even a goblin lair, that is a nice realism, but jesus fuck, wading through that text is NOT worth it. A column to almost a page per room is NOT worth it. The challenge is to provide a rich environment while still remaining easy to use ta the table. This doesn’t meet that criteria.

You know, this reminds me, in a way, of the material in the big Rappen book that dealt with the environs outside the dungeon. There was a lot, and some of it quite rich.

Someone asked so I reviewed this. It places me in an interesting position. I don’t review regional/sourcebook type stuff. It’s all fluff and how much fluff appeals to you is a matter of personal taste. A starting base, though, is something else. I was genuinely excited as I read the town/base portions of this and day dreamt of how to incorporate it in to some of the games I am running. Likewise the ad-hoc and small adventures … while lamenting the quality of the main adventures. The first section is a fun read, in the way I imagine some people only read those Adventure Path things. But, its gotta be usable. And it ain’t.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The only preview is one of those “quick” ones, that don’t show you anything but an eagles eye view of the layout. IE: worthless.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/116018/Frandors-Keep?affiliate_id=1892600

By David McDonough
Self Published
5e
Levels 2-3

The town of Whitehaven is beset with undead. The townsfolk are quick to blame the so-called Witch of Whitehaven, who lives nearby with her partner in the Surbrin Hills. Yet a more insidious evil lurks in the midst of town, cloaked in a holy man’s robes. And far underground, an ancient evil artifact stirs. The town is in need of heroes. Will you answer the call?

This forty page adventure details a baddy in a town becoming one with evil, blah blah blah, and some blame shifting to the local witch. It’s trying. It’s got some decent ideas and tries to implement good design. The major, major sin in this is the complete inability to understand the purpose of what an adventure is … exemplified through levels of useless verbosity in descriptions and backstory that match Dungeon magazine. What decent ideas there are is not worth the effort to dig them out.

David, I’m going to address you directly. I don’t know if you’re ever going to see this. I don’t really care if you do or don’t. This blog is entirely for my own benefit, but I’m a hypocrite, and in my arrogance I’m going to just assume you’re going to see this. You don’t deserve what I’m going to say, no one does, really. But I note that you’ve also been told, repeatedly, that this is an awesome adventure and been given five stars over and over again. Those people have done you a disservice. The culture in online D&D circles is to love everything and give everything five stars. I’m going to appeal to the academic in you to recognize the truth in what I’m saying. (Although, I see you mention “policy” as well, which leaves me disheartened on your background …) You have some ok principals that you follow in design, but you have no idea how to actually write an adventure. Work on that. But you tried, and the good things you did have me making a stronger effort than usual to explain what you did wrong, for the two thousandth time.

Let’s first cover a few of the better things David does that, frankly, surprised me.

There’s an evil artifact in this adventure, the Orb of Undeath, used by the baddie. Generally the Black Falcon Idol of Doom is only usable by the bad guy, melt when he dies, kills the user instantly, turns you to evil immediately, etc. In other words, the designer shoves in a mechanical bonus for the baddie and then doesn’t allow the party to have the item. That’s crap design. In this case though the item is left for the party. There’s some DC20 8d6 damage nonsense throw in, but it’s not outright banned from usage. That’s good. The party SHOULD get unique magic items, artifacts SHOULD be given to them, and when you toss in “its evil” or something else like it then you also give a little nod to the roleplaying aspects of the game. It’s MORE than just a mechanical bonus/effect at that point. The game is magic. The game is mystery. The game is wonderous. Mechanical shit is none of that. The appendix description is a little heavy on backstory and mechanics needing more in the way of evocativeness than the mechanics. It also does no favors by making the intelligent item cold, unfeeling, and bereft of humor. Since it communicates it could use a personality that is more than a lack of personality. Again, it’s a wondrous item and should come across as such.

There’s also a tendency to give advice on how things can go wrong. If the party doesn’t find the lever then you can do this other to make the adventure go forward. This happens in several places. First, it’s nice for a designer to note how things can and do go wrong when the irresistible force of the party slams in to an adventure and offer assistance to keeping things moving along. It’s gets to my core conceit: the adventure should be a tool to helping a DM run it at the table. So, Good Job! But, I have to ask, why put those roadblocks in at all? Or, rather, perhaps we can divide it in to two piles. Things can and do change when the party hits the adventure and advice on that is good. But in other places DC checks are placed as obstacles to continuing the adventure. I call this Roll To Continue Playing D&D. If the adventure depends on the party making a DC5 skill check then why is in there to begin with? In the first encounter we roll to find blood tracks, etc to track down some farmers. If this fails then you hear the farmers cry out for help. Woah! Why the fuck am I rolling the dice in the first place then? Or, putting the secret room behind a hidden level … and putting an imp in the adventure that leads the party to it if they fail to find it.

There’s also a good scene or two. At one point you catch two witches in the process of interrogating a demon in a circle. Fun! There’s some hackney shit should “forgiving” if you attack one of them, but, still, the setup is good. There’s also a nice bit where the townfolk rebel against the evil in their midst while the party is out fucking around in the woods with the witches. I can’t say enough how refreshing it is to see that. There’s some buildings on fire, some blood, people hold up in homes, attacking zombies, all its missing are a couple of bodies swinging from lampposts. It’s nice to see villagers not fuckwits for once AND that the game world has shit going on in it outside of the parties actions (or, maybe, as a result of the parties actions.) I note, also, that this gets to Rients assertion that gameworlds should be shaken up. It’s written like crap, but the core sentiment of this little section is a good one. There’s also a nice little bit of advice on what happens is a bad guy escapes, the consequences of that.

Now, on to the shitshow …

What is the purpose of an adventure? It is to help the DM run it at the table. That’s it. AT. THE. TABLE. All those people commenting on the rich backstory, etc, are fuckwits. Why? Because that does not contribute to running it at the table. In fact, it makes it HARDER to run at the table. When the party goes through a door in to a new room that DM gets to glance down at the adventure for a fraction of a second, grok the nature of it, and then communicate it to the party. Everything the adventure does needs to contribute to that. While the party is reacting the DM has a little more time to glance down and take in some more information. If you have to stop and read a page, or a column or information then the adventure has failed. [Aside: you can also write “sticky.” This is fucking hard. Google: Old Bay, the elderly hill giant who retired to eat giant crabs.] You have been infected by people changing what the concept of normal is. First, this the professionals, who write based on pay per word. All they care about is taking one idea and strapping enough words on to it to get paid. Second, there are failed novelists who write adventures with rich backstory, with no intent of running at the table, and companies who cynically pander to this market knowing that most adventures will never get run so why not cater to the larger market of people who only read adventure … and to whom this endless backstory/motivation shit appeals to. Finally, people have grown up on this shit and think that’s how you write an adventure. They know no better, It’s the normal way. IT’S FUCKING NOT. Fucking publishers.

Motivations, backstory, justifications, if you have to have them then stick the shit in an appendix. Then the fuckwits get their nonsense and you get to the keep the core of the adventure focused on its purpose: helping the dm run it at the table. When you bury important details in columns-long text you are not helping the DM run the adventure. On page seven important towny flavor stuff (wary/excited about strangers) is buried in otherwise garbage shit that is irrelevant. (Meaning, someone will justify it as tangentially relevant.) NPC’s with a column long description on how to roleplay them? No thanks. You get a sentence each, at most, for description and personality, and then you bullet point or use whitespace to effect to make it trivial for the DM to locate what they relate. Backstory and motivations in the main text? NO. Only what you need to run the adventure RIGHT THEN goes in the main text. What is relevant, IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY RELEVANT to the parties interaction? [Aside: Pedants like to take this to the logical extreme and say that’s my position. A special note to them: Fuck Off.]

Note location W3, The Tower, a location in town. The Name is “the Tower.” Then there’s a bunch of read-aloud. THEN you get a paragraph of DM’s notes telling you what the purpose is. How the fuck does that help me locate the mayors office when I’m running this thing? Seriously? Reading ALL of that? If I hand this to someone blind and say “tell me where the mayors office is in the first section” then thats a much more realistic simulation of running it at the table.

And, speaking of read-aloud … yes, there’s too much. You get three sentences. Maybe two. That’s it. There’s a study. WOTC wrote about it. People don’t pay attention after that (at the table, that is.) Bullet points. Improvise. Creative a terse and evocative description for the DM. The DM is the MOST powerful tool a designer has. Terse writing/organization contributes to running it at the table. EVOCATIVE writing leverages the DM’s brain to fill in the void left by the terseness and is MORE effective at creating atmosphere than ANY length of verbose writing. If you can jab a FLAVOR in to the DM’s brain then they can extrapolate indefinitely. Ug, and the FEELS. You don’t get to write read-aloud telling the party what they do/feel. “As you walk cautiously …” no. They didn’t walk cautiously. They ran willy nilly. But your fucking read-aloud doesn’t jive with that. Do you get it? “As torches spark to life.” No. We all have darkvision. We used continual light spells. We burned the place down.

And, of course, we have to suffer through mundane room descriptions. “There’s a side table in the dining room.” Well, whoop de doo! That’s certainly added a lot to the adventure! Seriously, what’s the point of this? To tell us what a dining room looks like? It’s fucking dining room, we know what a dining room looks like. Concentrate on the aspects of the room that are important.

Oh, what else? A thousand things. The hooks are all mission assignments. Those are boring. That’s an appeal to “do you want to play tonight or not?” D&D. It’s the most throwaway form of a hook. You practically have to beat two farmers to get the first part of the adventure. They are sent for help and yet you need to beg and plead and to be allowed to help them. I fucking HATE adventures that make you fight for the hook. Obviously, the bad guy is actually good and the good guy actually bad. Duh. This is so obvious I almost didn’t mention it. The first whiff of this is in an inn and its immediately obvious, so much so that I’d just stab the baddie in the throat right there … which to its credit the adventure addresses later on in some advice. But, still, wouldn’t it be refreshing if the wise woman was actually the bad guy?

Oh, the LG honorable ghost knight doesn’t have the heart to protect the party from the evil shadows attacking them since they were his followers once. Geee, LG much? The undead attack stuff is not handled well, there’s not much build up to it, no tension. A will O the Wisp is just presented as another thing to hack down, ignoring thousands of years of it luring people to their doom. (My favorite one imitated the scent of gold … in a game where dwarves could smell gold.) Important facts, such as things in the village like rescusing people, should have been presented in an overview section, etc, to introduce how the village was meant to work, etc. Same for the wilderness section, which just has section headings.

You can write adventures to make money. You can write adventures that are actually this kind of novel-thing that most fall in to. Or you can write adventures meant to be run ta the table. If you’re gonna do that then THINK. Question the core assumptions that have led you to think that more is better.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The previs is twelve pages! Nice! Pages five and six show you begging farmers to be allowed to play D&D tonight. Page seven shows you a VERY long inn entry that fails at transferring information to the DM efficiently and effectively … as well as Ye Olde Mayor’s Tower … that you have no way of knowing without digging in. The last page of the preview shows you some of the developments/advice for the unexpected. Overall, a good preview, with the writing typical of what you should expect to see in the rest of the adventure … https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/257361/The-Priest-the-Witch-and-the-Lost-Temple-An-Adventure?affiliate_id=1892600