tenfootpole.org

By David A Hill
Mothshade Concepts
OSR
Level: ?

First, some secret shame. I have a Patreon! It’s got free adventures, commentary on adventure design, and random musings about RPG’s, etc. And, it does help me buy adventures to review. It’s at https://www.patreon.com/join/tenfootpole?

llthrix was an evil genius that liked to kill adventurers. His dungeons and traps earned him a measure of infamy matched by few villains of the age. He’s dead now. But, you’ve found a way to his hidden lair – Illthrix’s own home. A place rumored to contain special trophies and treasures from the long career of the famed trapsmith. Illthrix wouldn’t bother to trap his own house, would he?

This 35 page adventure details the house of a master trap maker and wizard, with about thirty rooms. There’s some nice ideas in this, but it lacks any real keying, has long DM text, and I find the read-aloud off putting and uninspired. Warning: I’m not fond of these “challenge” dungeons.

Some years ago Bob the trap wizard made a bunch of trapped dungeons and invited adventurers to come explore them. The party has found a map to his actual house, so off they go.

The fun starts outside. There’s a tree next to the house and some clouds in the sky. Climbing the tree causes some of the limbs to catapult you to the ground. Also, the clouds can either descend like a cloudkill spell or just solidify and fall on you. That’s cute. When the adventure is good its got that kind of outside the box thinking. When it’s bad it’s got some Bad Grimtooth going on.

In multiple cases doors slam shut behind you and then something bad happens in the room. This happens in the read-aloud. The read-aloud says things like “the door closes behind you with a soft click” or some such. Other read-aloud causes you to click latches on doors, and other things that no sane minded adventurer would do if they knew this was a trap dungeon, or after the second trap in a row had been sprung. This sort of forced player movement is a bane and should not be done.

The traps are sometimes telegraphed. The read-aloud for the clouds notes that they are tinged with green and turquoise. The front door description notes that they are two doors, one with  un motif and one with a moon motif. It is from this that one is expected to know that the sun door is used during the day and the moon door and night, otherwise a fire or cold trap is triggered. Initially, you don’t know it’s a trap. Once you know it’s a trap dungeon then these little trap clues make more sense. I’m still a little … iffy? about them though. On the front doors, for example, my own style is to do something like mention charred grass or a bare patch or something like that. Thus while the trap CAUSE is the focus of these read-alouds I tend to go more with a trap EFFECT in my own DM’ing. In any event, basically anything mentioned in the read-aloud is a trap and just about every room has one.  

The map is hand drawn. I like hand drawn maps. You know what I like more? Legibility. The map is small with words outside the rooms pointing back to the room. Not ideal for quick comprehension. Further, the keying of the dungeon is done via words. So there’s a tiny box on the map and some words outside the map, proper, that say “Study” with a line pointing at the tiny room. Then in the text of the dungeon there’s a section heading called “Study”. No, that would be too simple. It goes further by having the section heading say “Beyond the metal door (study) or something like that. As a reviewer you see a lot of the same stuff over and over again, so seeing novel new ideas is a joy. But the designer can’t lose track, as they did here, of the purpose of the adventure being to help the DM run it. Getting cute with the room names and relying on a non-key to key your dungeon doesn’t do wonders in that category.

The read-aloud tends to be bland, with “small” things in rooms, and other plain adjectives and adverbs. In other cases the read-aloud leads the party down the wrong path, a critical error in a trap dungeon. One room specifically notes the stairs are not slick, although the air is a bit damp. The DM text then notes that the surfaces are damp. I get it, not slick doesn’t mean it’s not damp. But we’re splitting hairs a bit in actual play. Telling the party its not slick is almost certainly going to lead to them thinking “not damp”, which doesn’t help them when the damp ass grey ooze shows up. There’s this thing tha DM’s, and adventures, sometimes do when they want you to say the exact thing. “I check the door over for traps and unusual things” isn’t good enough, because the trap on the hinge and you didn’t say you were checking the hinge and so … This sort of pixel bitching is not cool. There are a few places in the adventure where this happens, like the ooze, but it feels more like it’s from unclear or confusing read-aloud then it is from a deliberate attempt to jerk the players around. In other places the read-aloud leaves out text … in one room there are three homunculus rooting around, but no mention in e read-aloud. Again, not cool.

But, then there’s clouds falling from the sky thing, or the catapult tree, things that new under the sun. There’s also a nice little scene with a will-o-the-wisp that’s “at rest”, looking like a silver dandelion puff. That’s great! When the adventure is doing these sorts of things its firing on target. But then it goes and puts in a long backstory and embeds important information about an NPC in it.

Or it does something like “not putting a level range on the adventure. I still don’t know. 6 Maybe?

Finally, I leave you, gentle readers, with this little snippet from the adventure. It’s been a hard haul to get some treasure, for a GOLD=XP game, and then you come upon this section. I don’t like this. I like my designer to put a lot of the work in. If I wanted to put the work in I’m do my own adventure.

“For treasure, the Referee may include specimens of valuable metal ore, or rough gemstone. Other possibilities include rare antivenins, a variety of large pearls of various sizes and hues (10-800 gp each), curative pastilles or elixirs, valuable pieces of amber (20-500 gp each), and alchemical powders that replicate the magical varieties of “dust.”

This is at DriveThru for $3. The preview is six pages. You can see the hand map on the second to last page and tree/clouds on the last page. None of it really gives a good idea of the actual rooms though, so a poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/271320/House-of-Illthrix-Adventure-Module?1892600

By Casey Christofferson
Frog God Games
S&W
Levels 3-5

In the pale light of the witching hour when the moon shows off its twin horns,
Tis said that a devil rises from the deep with a murderous taste for the soul.
You will know ere he stalks for the crows love to talk
About how they have picked clean your bones.

Let’s see what the Frogs are up to these days!

This 39 page adventure details a small regional with a bandit camp, some gnolls, an inn, a druid, and some loggers. There’s a meta-plot thing going on where the inn, bandits, and a ghost have some stuff going on. It feels more like the outline of an adventure, with a lot of generic detail added to it. The emphasis on act 1 & 3 is too short, I think.

Part 1: You arrive at the inn. It’s about a page long and then the inn is described, room by room, up until about page 20. The inn room description is 9 pages long with the “mission introduction” contained on a 10th page. You get your mission: defeat the bandits &| druid. Part 2: the wilderness including the bandit camp, gnoll camps, druid, evil mountain altar, logging camps, etc. 6 pages, 8 with the wanderers. Part 3: After defeating the bandits/druid you come back for a feast. Then all hell breaks loose. 1 page.

This feels more like the outline of an adventure. Imagine I wrote a page of plot. Then I write the outline of some locations to go visit. Then I expanded those locations with a bunch of generic detail, over several pages. That’s what this feels like.

The introduction/hook is a couple of paragraphs about four bandits (1hd) attacking the inn, a lady inside yelling at the party to kill them, and then her asking the party to kill the bandits and their ally, the druid. It’s almost a throw-away. I guess it’s meant to be expanded by all of the context provided in the NPC backgrounds and situation overview that appear before this. It feels like a cumbersome way to handle things. Yes, all of the NPC’s in the inn kind of make sense, but the way the “plot” is condensed in to just a couple of paragraphs seems awkward. I think maybe it could have used a little less of NPC description up front and maybe a little more in the “welcome to the inn!” sections.

Likewise, the wilderness sections are weird. A wandering monster table followed by some wilderness locales. There’s a couple of gnoll lairs that expliplify this. Just six or so cave rooms, with some generic descriptions and generic gnolls. Leaders, wives, bodyguards, young … it could be the B2 cave. It feels flat, and somehow could be replaced with “gnoll lair with 6 rooms, 12 gnolls, a chief, 2 wives, 8 young, and 2 bodyguards. 300gp” It feels weird. There’s a lot of text but it doesn’t really DO anything.

Party 3 kind of exemplifies this. It’s about a page and deals with consequences. A dinner party, maybe escaped prisoners if the party captured any and then a hunt for them in the inn, and a ghost possessing people to cause trouble, and maybe an attack by gnolls and bandits on the inn, all at the same time. First: AWESOME! I fucking love chaos in an adventure, especially at the end. A billion things going on at once! Delicious!

But, more to my point, it’ feels weird. It’s almost like THIS is the actual adventure and everything else just led up to it. But it’s covered on one page. Suddenly, the EXTENSIVE room by room inn description makes sense. If the party is doing a hide & seek with the escape prisoners then you need a full map and room description. It’s still weird though … the extraneous detail of the inn. And, yes, the designer is right, the party is likely to explore and get in to trouble in part one, so a map kind of makes sense then also. But nine pages worth?

It’s all a kind of super-weird choice. There’s this evil mountain alter that has a magic item that will be pretty hard/impossible to recover, given the permutations and lack of hints. But then it once again becomes a focus in the end of party 3, when a ghost can possess someone there. Except they can do it in part one also.

There is something to this adventure, but the emphasis and the way ideas are presented is out of whack with the clarity. Specificity is missing, and instead we get this kind of outline format that’s then expanded upon with genericism. And then it’s WAY long while the more interesting sections are very short.

And then the treasure is quite light for S&W. The gnolls have 400gp. The bandits little more. What/how the bandit officers patrol is buried in the description of the officers tent instead of the camp overview. Information is misplaced and wrongly emphasized all over the place.

Again, the concepts are not bad, but it’s quite cumbersome. Well, the inn people are baddies who betray you, which triggers lifelong D&D trauma of always sleeping together in inns and never eating or drinking their food and never making friends/allies anywhere. The DM’s party in murder hobo survival is an important tale to tell.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Sup with that froggies? How about letting us see what we’re buying ahead of time when you charge us $10?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/270859/The-Devil-of-Murder-Cliffs-Swords-and-Wizardry?1892600

(No designer listed)
Mesozoic Press
B/X
Levels 1-3

Explore an abandoned elf treehouse!

This eleven page adventure details a nine room elf treehouse that has some living plants. A conversion, it’s has good magic items, lack monetary treasure, and a has cumbersome writing style. Just more grist for the gristmill.

While walking through the forest (this is a drop in adventure) the party sees an area with larger undergrowth, wild, with trees 50% larger than normal. Investigating, they see “an usually shaped construction” up in the treetops, supported by three trees. Turns out it’s a big old elf treehouse.

The intro DM text does two things well: it brings a slight sense of wonder, with large berries, larger trees, etc, notifying the players that THIS IS AN ADVENTURE SITE. Same as the entrance to the mythic underworld, it denotes that things are going to get D&D around here. Second, it provides a hint of what’s to come. No one can encounter overgrown plants without getting their Round Up spells ready. Plant monsters ahead!

The magic treasure is also above average. A belt buckle, in the shape of leaves, that is a ring of protection. Herbicide. A couple of berry types. A broach in the shape of the leaf slows falls “to that of a falling leaf.” Good theming.

And … that’s it. It’s only been a couple of months but everything is rusted and ropes decayed. The “unusually shaped construction” in the trees is an abstraction, a conclusion. “Well, what’s it shaped like” says the players …”unusual” says the DM. Not cool.

Treasure is LIGHT. This is quite clearly a 5e conversion. Cash is meaningless is 5e. Cash is everything in B/X, it’s your XP. Sure enough, there’s a 5e version listed on DriveThru. These conversions Drive. Me. Nuts. It’s like you marketed a “Spooky CoC adventure!” and then filled it converted a normal d20 Espionage adventure. It’s fucking shitty. These games require cash to level and yet there is no cash. Meaning the designer has little understanding of how B/X actually works.

Tis the writing, though, that sucks most, as per usual. The rooms have exhaustive lists of contents. A walking stick, boots and cloak in the cloakroom adds nothing to the adventure. What it DOES do is subtract from the ability to run it. The text is written, one paragraph after another, each describing one thing in the room, with n intro/summary paragraph. His means that to run the room you have to read the ENTIRE entry. The characters walk in. “What do we see?” Well, hang on, let me read these five paragraphs so I can tell you. The only way this works is when you have a bit of summary as the first paragraph to orient you to what’s to come. Then, while the players are fucking about, you can scan the appropriate paragraph. This shit is KEY. And this thing don’t do that.

Paragraph one of room one tells us “Entryway: The slope leads up to a wooden platform that juts out from the main building. A large wooden trough stands in the north east corner used to collect rain water but it has become dark and stagnant with a film of slime across the top.”

1. Good job using a room name, and bolding it. We now know all mundane features.
2. We don’t need to know about the slope. It’s shown on the map and is mentioned in the intro text before the keyed entries begin. It’s just detracting from the important text.
3. The trough text is overwrought. It’s “A trough with dark & stagnant rainwater, a film of slime across the top.” Done.
4. There are four more paragraphs of this shit.

It’s a lot of filler text with very little content that either evocative or actually gameable. Two rooms with a couple of plant monsters in them does not an adventure make.

This is $1.50 at Drivethru. The preview is three pages long and shows you almost nothing. Just some shitty backstory and the parts of room one that I quoted above.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267962/Ruins–Adventures-2-Aldairs-Arboretum-B-X-Essentials?1892600

By Tyler A Thompson
Sad Fische Games
Zweihandler
Beginning Characters?

[…] Most robbers and bandits will balk at the notion of anything near a fair fight and pick their prey accordingly.  This is not so for Robber Baron Karl Duval. Duval and his crew are known to target travelers, caravans, and brigades of essentially all sizes, from the poorest wayfaring peasant, to the most modest and well-guarded merchant, to even wagon trains carrying Imperial troops and supplies.  Far from foolish and reckless, such attacks are quick, organized, and surgical in their tactics- never mind staggering in their ferociousness and shocking in their brutality. Gaunt, cruel, serious, and a voyeuristic sadist, Duval now resides in a fortress somewhere in the wilds of the Valley.  He must be put down.

This fifteen page adventure details a bandit camp/area with about 100 bandits. No real surprises in the description, but it’s a mess in relating and organizing information.

In this game/campaign you represent petty lords and their retainers, which takes care, nicely, of the reason why the local lord isn’t involved. They are. It’s you. Down in the valley there’s a robber baron who’s got a small fortress (wooden palisade in the woods) and control of a small village that he uses for slave labor to keep people fed, etc. There’s your adventure. A general description of the village and a general description of the fort.

And by “general” I mean general. The thing is written as, essentially, free text with a subject heading every now and again. “The Blinds” and “The village” and “The barn”, for example. Under those heads will be a couple of paragraphs, or columns, of information about those subjects. If I had an idea for an adventure and If I were putting together a 15 page outline of it and sending it off to someone to actually write it then it might look like this adventure. The text is both general and specific, with not much organization beyond some simple headings and a paragraph break. The detail is abstracted. There are villagers, some broken, some full of rage, but that’s all we know. That they exist and there are about a hundred in total. The robber baron is a cruel man and his men engage in abuse of the villagers, with a DM note that it is the game masters discretion on how to depict that. It’s all very general with little in the way of the sort of detail that can bring something to life.

The wandering monster table is a good example of this. “You are attacked by large predators” or “you encounter a small animal.” Uh. Ok. “You have an encounter with a merchant who has something interesting to sell.” You can see how there’s very little in the way of further prompting, the sort of specificity that can make an adventure come alive. Not two paragraphs, or even two sentences, but a different write up with specifics.

Random things I find annoying that pale in comparison to the horror of the free-flowing text descriptions: no bandit talks or reveals information. They are all resigned to their fates. Seriously? You’re telling us where the camp is in exchange for liquor, cigs, and being let go, not pledging your eternal soul. The map of the “fortress” (which is much like the Steading) is in a kind of greyscale no greyscale format which is about impossible to read. And the entire thing is in .docx. Uh … print to PDF much? I’m pretty such Word docs continue to be one of the primary virus transmission methods; I almost didn’t open the doc because of that.

It DOES make sense, from a “yeah, this is what a bandit lord would do” kind of way. A little rigor in the men, some officers who have not completely nought in, slave labor in the village … but there’s just nothing more outside of this to justify its existence. Which is too bad, I think the concept of a Birthright type of game could be cool.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of 50 cents.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/268340/Of-Men-Who-Are-Monsters–Adventure-for-ZweihanderRPG?1892600

By Gregorius21778
Self-Published
OSR/Generic/Veins of the Earth
Lower Levels?

The Pilgrimage of Hunger is a small cave system written for Veins of the Earth. The idea behind it is that it came into being in response to the hunger of the living, sentient minds and souls of the Veins. If it is the creation of cruel and dark gods, of a devil or demon, something from the Outer Dark or of some strange underworld godling of hunger that has devoured its own name is up to you as the GM. It is assumed that the existence and rites of the chapel are known to at least a few dwellers of the Veins in the wider area, and that those in the know make regular “pilgrimages” to the chapel (for the sake of survival).

This seventeen page adventure describes an eight room cave complex. Veins of the Earth style with living darkness and the more realistic cave system descriptions, etc are all present. While it is deep and rich, I would make the case that it’s not very interactive and suffers quite a bit from a writing style that’s not conducive to actually running it.

The caves here modeled after the Veins style. The darkness is alive and it takes time to go from point A to B, up and down, with it abstracted in to a pointcrawl. That’s all fine and it’s good to see something coming out in this style. The darkness description is contained in one small paragraph near the beginning, in italics. I think at this point it’s clear I don’t like long italics blocks. A few words, ok, but more than a sentence is hard to read. Further, the darkness, tactile, smell-o-vision atmosphere is supposed to be ever present. I would have like to have seen it front & center in everything. There’s a little border design on every page … I can’t help but think that putting the general atmosphere in that border, or a border of keywords, would have been much more effective in helping the DM integrate it in to all aspects of the adventure. Or, maybe just on the page that has the abstracted map? When running a game you need certain things at your fingertips almost all of the time, the map being one of those. Putting other “general need” reference information on it makes sense. As does something like a border, etc. Both make the information readily at hand for the DM to use, prompting their memory and cueing them to make use of the extra.

The various encounters are interesting, in a way, and interactive in the sense that if you fuck with things then things will happen. The text is deep and rich, conveying a layered approach. It’s rich and deep enough that it’s hard to convey. I get the same vibe as I do when reading William Hope Hodgson or the knocks off stories. Airy, deep, mysterious. The keywords there would be “when I read it.” In the realm of “RPG Adventure as a Lit thing tending to being read more  than played as a substitute for people tired of Drizzel Durden Genre Fiction” then this thing out-Paizo’s a Paizo “adventure.”

That, of course, is not a compliment. I’ll take a Hodgson vibe all day long, but I won’t read it at the table. The thing is DENSE, with about a page per room description in places. Multiple paragraphs, not much in the way of whitespace organization beyond a simple paragraph break and just a little italics. Headings, indents, other techniques used to draw attention, group information, and the like are few and far between or not present at all. This leads you to long silences to read the room and try to hold it in your head. Craig the dwarf dropped to his death as he tried to climb the shaft. His corpse lies at the bottom of it. The preamble adds nothing to actual play but a lot to the Paizo-nature.

Kent would argue that one buys an adventure, studies it, takes notes, and spends many hours in preparation. And, yes, you could do that. But that’s not where I’m coming from. I think, that in 2019, we can expect more from the shit we spend out money on (or time, an even more valuable resource.) I expect us to have learned something about design in the last fifty years of D&D publishing. I expect the designer to add value that way. There’s always a role for something fabulously imaginative that eschews organization. A product that you must study to use serves as fluff, inspiration, or possibly as a cornerstone to many many sessions. But why not both? Is that concept really so foreign?

I would argue, as well, that while the encounters in this are interactive they are not the right kind of interactive. In a lot of (older?) Greenwood adventures it can feel like you are touring a museum. Raggi-land punishes mercilessly if you interact. Kuntz can hide things so deep you can’t find them. In all cases you can interact. Good interaction drives the adventure. It gives you reason to interact. There’s a flower. Eat it and some weird thing that you could never anticipate will happen. Well … why would I eat it in the first place? Because I have death wish? At higher levels maybe a little more of this can excused; the party has enough divination magic that they should know better/in advance. But what of the rest of us? Why the fuck would I ever eat from the flower? I didn’t make level 4 by eating strange shit FOR NO REASON. Likewise, a weird old man with little memory, in a cave. Uh, ok. And? It comes off as weird for the sake of weird, with no force or lure to interact.

I want to be delicate in these next comments. I’m pretty sure this is an English as a Second Language adventure. And that’s great. I love adventures from outside the english-speaking world. The various takes on things, influenced by their own cultures, Scandinavian, French, Asian, are all great and I would hate for this comment to be viewed as a pushback. And lord knows their english is better than any language I know. I tend to overlook a lot of minor things, but when it starts to interfere with comprehension then it’s a problem. A quick read-through by a native english speaker, with a highlighter, could have perhaps focused the designers attention on certain areas that could use a second look. It’s a relatively minor thing in this, but it does stick out a little more than some of the French or Scandinavian stuff I’ve seen. Not a full on editor, just a pass off to friend with a request to highlight the more awkward sentences/phrases.

And there’s no level present? On the cover or the DriveThru description or in the description?

Imaginative, the bones of something good, but the “good” interactivity is lacking, with little drive to explore (almost no treasure at all) and risk, combined with a somewhat “normal” writing style in paragraph form that hides information from scanning and location during play.

This is Pay What You Want at Drivethru with a suggested price of $2.50. It’s PWYW, so you, in a sense, get the preview for free. But, it also provides the ENTIRE thing as a preview, for free. I’ve seen a couple of products lately do this and I’ll on board for it to be a trend in 2019 and beyond. There’s so much shit on DriveThru that a requirement to post the entire thing in the preview would also be a blessing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/269908/Gregorius21778-The-Pilgrimage-of-Hunger?1892600