Sacrebleu!

Posted on June 27, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Tito B.A.
Self Published
Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells/OSR
Levels 1-3

Discover the island of EREWHON. Fight goblins with WW1 weaponry, eat mold with analgesic properties, get eaten by man-eating black lion tamarins!

This thirteen page adventure describes a village and a few encounters on a small island. Containing both hex crawl and dungeon elements, and elements of sandbox, it’s generally terse, evocative, and a little gonzo. It’s a decent little adventure.

Let’s see if I can get this straight …

It’s a small island, maybe 6 hexes by 6 hexes with each being 6 miles. There’s a small town/village that was just raided by goblins. They splattered the wizard that rules the town during their attack. He founded the town to mine some druggy fungus on the north end of the island. The goblins are, unknown to anyone, led by the wizards father, who was turned in to a goblins by his sons. Seems the wizard left leaving his brother in charge and he was the one splattered while the wizard was just seriously wounded, fleeing to a temple he razed a few months earlier. Oh, and the goblins are lairing in a different temple and killed a squad of WW1 french soldiers that came through a time portal, eating their brains to learn how to use the machine guns, rifles, grenades, and pistols. Oh, and the dwarf CURRENTLY in charge of the town is a little shit betraying the wizard. And I see a ship in the harbor that trades in goblin slaves. And … well, I think you get the picture. The fucking place has ALOT going on. And an adventure with a lot going on is an adventure I can get behind. Add a spark of PC magic to powder keg and watch it BLOW! A small setting with a lot going on gives the party a lot of opportunity to make plans, back one side or another, and in general treat the place like a sandbox. You could kill the wounded wizard and take his shit. Or side with the goblins. Or the dwarf in town. Or yourself. Or the wizard and help him exact revenge.

The supplement supports the DM. The directions for hexes traveled are direct and to the point. As are weather. Not just trivia, but how it impacts movement and the adventure. Most of the shit is directed AT the adventure. It’s not trivia, it relates itself to the adventure proper. That’s rare. And very good. The wanders DO things. There’s even a dragon willing to parlay with the party to remove the goblins.

Did I mention the temple to time, the second temple the goblins are in, was built by the cockroach people early in their history? That’s the kind of stuff that adds flavor!

The plot develops IN the adventure, inline to the text, much in the same way G1 did. The writing is generally short and terse, evocative and easy to scan. There are orders of battle for the goblins to respond. The town has some little subplots and the shit in it is full of potential energy. The treasure is good … like a silver hairnet inlaid with elephant ivory.

The font is some weird art project typewriter thing, which, while not destroying readability, does nothing to help it. Some of the wandering monsters, in particular the ones at the beginning of the booklet, are NOT oriented towards action. They tend to the be the usual “look, you found a basket!” kind of stuff.

Things can also get a little rough. There’s a goblin ambush on the road with an MG, a rifle squad, and grenades … nine in total. That’s kind of rough at level 1. I mean, I like it, and there IS a surprise roll in D&D for that wilderness wandering monster table … but man, rough shit.

Anyway, good adventure. Creative, LOTS going on, a kind of open-ended sandbox design, good treasure … little wonder the designer credits Sholtis, Gus, and other luminaries as helping to inspire them. Easily makes the Best Of list, which can tell by now because of my shitty shotty review of it. I gotta figure out a better way or writing positive reviews.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a current suggested price of 50 cents. The preview is a pretty good one and gives you a good idea of what to expect. Typewrite fonts, good sidebar usage and bolding, both the good and bad wandering tables.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/243550/Sacrebleu?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 6 Comments

Jewel of the Lunar Rift

Posted on June 25, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Extildepo
Verisimilitude Society Press
S&W
Levels 1-3

Things are not right at Du Sharid Manor. Months ago, a deranged parish priest and his most devout followers formed a heretical cult. These self-proclaimed “Seekers of the White Heart” chose the desolate Wild Hills to practice their secret rites; but the strange goings on at the Wild Hills did not escape the prying eyes of the more pious villagers who set out to confront the cultists. Once there, the villagers witnessed something terrifying and unexpected. Since the events of that night, the cultists have vanished, but the remaining serfs of Du Sharid now live in constant paranoia. Your party has been hired by the local bishop to to learn the truth about what happened at Du Sharid Manor.

This 38 page adventure contains an eighteen room dungeon on about ten pages, with the rest of the material being appendices, support material, and a campaign journal of the initial playtest. It feels real, both the town portions and the dungeon, and has that kind of natural vibe with interesting encounters that harken back to the pre-standardized days of D&D. It’s also got some serious wall of text issues that make a highlighter a must.

There is a rich background here of a shire, four namors, and a local priest gone bad who disappears in to a chasm in the ground as a mob descends on him. The bishop wants the situation sorted, which leads to a small dungeon at the bottom of the chasm. I’m usually not a fan of these “hired job” hooks, but this goes a bit further and puts a local priest in charge of the expedition, and its he who hires the party. Again … not usually a fan of the NPC tag a long, but it goes further and gives him a slightly overly-pious personality AND has him retreat to the inn at the first sign of damage to his person. NOW I can get behind it. It’s taken a lame hook, hired, added a lame feature, DM pet, and then subverted both by making it an EXCELLENT roleplay opportunity AND putting the party in charge in a natural way. It feels real and accessible and, in spite of my description, just familiar enough for the party to enjoy without being hackneyed.

I would say that’s a common feature of the adventure, and dungeon. A gatehouse where the guards shake down people passing through. Or a deep and dark pool of water with a tentacle horror in it that awakens when someone slips in … ala Fellowship. Bodies reanimate is prodded (GREAT! That’s a push your luck element! Everyone knows what’s going to happen … do you do it anyway? I love that kind of stuff.) I would say that the themes are familiar but the encounters are not straight copies of others in every other adventure ever published.

It’s got a lot going for. Charming hand-drawm maps that are still easy to read, an NPC summary sheet, even a little bit of faction play in the dungeon with some hyper-intelligent giant ants. And there are 30 goblins down there, that will react to intrusions, making parts of this a hard slog if the party isn’t careful and/or resourceful.

But … it’s not an easy journey for the DM. It’s all in single-column format. SIngle column is a pain. Isn’t there an article someplace in the forums/blogs about columns/readability? It sounds like something I’d read from Guy Fullerton. Anyway, single column, not much/any use of whitespace and/or bolding to improve scanability. Relatively longish descriptions … or maybe they just seem that way because of the single column? There’s not much read-aloud (maybe two, both from an NCP talking to you), but what there is can be long. In one case a farmer relates his pulling down of a black & twisted tree. But just a few entries later there’s a nice little once sentence summary of the same thing that could have been used.

Further, there are a lot of little things that just rub me the wrong way. In one room pillars hold up a roof and you can knock them down. Wouldn’t DELICATE pillars holding up the roof be better? How do the players get the idea that the pillars can be knocked down? Or do your players just knock down all pillars they see? I hugged a pillar once in Tower of Gygax. That didn’t work out so well for me. And the map scales are all over the place and don’t make sense. Trivia, to be ignored, but it kind of serves the purpose of illustrating that this entire thing needed strongly a second pair of eyes to go over it deeply before it made it to PDF. Likewise the NPC summary sheet, which concentrates on stats instead of personality and WHY that NPC is useful to the party. The party is more likely to talk to the innkeep than hack her down … so maybe focus the DM resources in that area? I’d love to see a second version with the text cleaned up, more readable, etc. That would be a good, solid adventure.

Man, I really like this adventure, but it just seems like too much work to highlight it. To be sure, it IS better than most in that area, but it needs a highlighter nonetheless. I’m gonna regert this because I think it’s charming and it’s my blog and I get to be arbitrary sometimes. 🙂

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and shows you nothing but the beginning of the background information. Nic setting .. but it should all be in a setting book and not the adventure.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/244309/M1-Jewel-of-the-Lunar-Rift?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 7 Comments

(5e) Dragontongue

Posted on June 23, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Matthew Maaske
Games What Games
5e
Level 1

Many have heard the songs sung by the bards about Justin the Vindicator and the heroic deeds that he performed with his magical sword, Dragontongue. But the sword once had a different name when it was forged by the dwarves and was used by their own in defense of their lands. Now the dwarves want Dragontongue returned to them. But where is the sword now?

This ten page adventure describes a twelve room tomb with bandits and an undead guy. It has a good idea or two but also has the usual 5e bloat and makes bad choices in presenting the text of the adventure.

Dwarf hires you to go find the sword, buried with a knight. Seems it was once a dwarf relic before the knight took it. Just find it, that’s all. Look around. It’s in a burial mound six miles away. The mound is guarded by a senile knight of an almost disappeared order.

That encounter is the primary bright spot of this adventure. He guards the entrance, and is lawful good. How do you reconcile that with your charge? He’s senile, so you could trick him … how does tricking a LG knight in order to grave rob/enter the tomb of a famous knight strike you? It strikes me as some good roleplay. Mostly. There’s always the possibility that the party WON’T talk themselves in to it. In which case … there’s a band of brigands that have dug a hole in the tomb on the backside. I might have suggested a few words about what to do/how to use the brigands to solve the moral issue if the party talks themselves out of it, but, whatever.

This is the primary high point of the adventure. There’s some business about trapdoors and mirrors and levers controlled by the leader, which should provide some interest, but it’s mostly just a plain old ordinary small dungeon complex. Bandits, an undead guy on a throne in the basement, the usual.

But the choices made in presentation turn it from “meh” to “pain.”

First, there’s the use of a small font AND combined with italics … it’s a pain to read through. Italics should almost NEVER be used, and certainly not for large chunks of text. Yes, I know lots of adventures do it. Italics is a pain to read in large chunks. Don’t do it.

The read-aloud, when it’s not a column long chunk of italics, engages in some dubious behaviour. We’re told that there’s dust on the floor. Then it also has “Some of the dust has been disturbed.” NO! NO NO NO! You save that shit for when the players ASK about the dust. “I examine the dust.” h, ok, then some of it looks like it has been disturbed. There’s supposed to be a back and forth between the DM and players. You don’t abstract things that contribute to play. That’s why this is ten pages and not a one sentence adventure: “You go the mound, trick an old knight, fight bandits and an undead guy and then retrieve the sword. 300xp each.”

The rooms also do weird things with the DM text. It takes three paragraphs to describe a tripwire crossbow trap. Seriously? Or, how about the single dire wolf you encounter … which then takes pains to tell us that dire wolfs get advantage if they fight in a pack. But that just means the designer copy/pasted some shit in. There’s only one wolf. Why the fuck would you include that? It all feels sloppy and not put together. AN order of battle for the bandits? No, they just wait in their rooms to get hacked down.

There’s not much interesting in this. The knight, maybe the leaders use of trap doors and mirrors and levers. That would make it just “the usual adventure” (meaning it would be better than 95% of the dreck published today.) But then it go forward with the italics, read-aloud, weird and lengthy text padding … It’s just not worth it to dig through to try and run it.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is only three pages long and the only one of ANY value is the last one. It’s a good example of the italics/small font and lengthy text, but it doesn’t really show you a room and the text here is less focused than the room/key encounters.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/243000/Dragontongue?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

The Caverns of Ugard

Posted on June 20, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Shane Ward
3 Toadstools
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-3 maybe?

The name Ugard is notorious with pain and fear! Thru-out the surrounding lands Ugard and his minions threaten, bully and extort money and lives. The vile Minotaur is holed up in some caves on the outskirts of town.

This ten page adventure describes a twelve room cave with goblins and a minotaur, as well as a completely separate adventure in a thief guild in the city sewers. The primary cave adventure takes up four pages with the map. It tends to the drab & dry side of the D&D adventure spectrum, but doesn’t drone on.

With twelve rooms, there’s not much room for things to go on. Some goblin guards, a wolf pen, spiders, some friendly dwarves, and the minotaur. The guard play dice, a prisoner is being held ransom, dwarves mine and want a pickaxe back. There’s a big underground lake to get past, full of piranha. (Shouldn’t ALL lakes be full of piranha in D&D? Hmmm, they will be in my next D&D campaign.)

The room text tends to be short, two or three longish sentences and its done. That makes it easy to scan. The text tends to be on the dry side, I think, but clearly an effort has been made to be evocative. Crumbling stone bridges, a strange idol on a pillar emanating a dark green light. A crude jail with sticks wedged in to holes in the ground.

It’s there. How effective it is is a subject of my nitpicking. Can a room be both utterly dark AND have an emanating green light in it? “At one time there was a stone bridge across the lake, but it has since crumbled.” Well, ok, but is there a better way to say that? “To the SE there is an exit. There is nothing in the room.” Well, yes, obviously, if there’s nothing in the text then there is nothing in the room.

The crumbling bridge is, I think, a good example. Yes, it does tell us that the remains of a bridge wareere in the room. But I think it uses a rather passive voice to get us there, with perhaps some inference required. There’s room for this in places in an adventure, but I think of it more of an aside, after the main description. “Crumbling remains of an majestic bridge litter the lakes surface.” That’s more direct, it tells us what is there now and hints at what was. I’m not the best at this, and second guessing word and sentence structure is not the point of the blog, but the avoidance of a passive voice and engaging in active voice descriptions are a much more effective way to communicate features, IMO.

I could quibble with other aspect also. Some rooms have obvious sounds, or smells, that should emanate from them. Chanting, laughter, animal sounds and latrine smells. It would have been nice to have an odor comment, for example, in adjoining rooms. Treasure also seems quite light. With just +1 weapons augmenting a few coppers and silver. There’s no level listed, so I guessed at 1-3. Most enemies are goblins, with the 6HD minotaur being the big bad. The goblins and minotaur don’t really have a response to their buddies being hacked to death.

What you’re seeing in this review is, I think, a response to an adequate dungeon that still doesn’t meet my (very) high standards. It’s basic, and there’s not much wrong with it. But there’s also not much in it that makes you excited to run it. Noth the romo text, or encounters, or anything else that would seem to fire your imagination. And thus it comes off as a bit dry & bland.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a current suggested price of $0. The preview doesn’t work. Me can has sad.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/128306/The-Caverns-Of-Ugard?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments

An Overwhelming Sense of Loss

Posted on June 18, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Roger E Burgess III
Red Flag
OSR
Levels 1-3

Or, The Occasion Of a Visit Into The Underworld By Way of The Grand Entrance To The Ancient Dwarven Fortress of Thrumi`Zud: SOMETHING brought down the mighty civilization. The sages say it was desperate invaders from below, escaping something even more horrible. Whatever it was, Thrumi`Zud was quickly overwhelmed and sealed, forgotten except in the stories of the old. The vast riches of the fabled Dwarves must surely be hidden within its depths. Perhaps you will be the one to rediscover them. Perhaps there are secrets better left unearthed. Horror lies within. You have been warned.

This FREE 39 page adventure describes the first level of a dungeon with 82 rooms, on about eighteen actual pages. The rest are maps, patrons, new monsters, etc. It has a twerse writing style that makes it easy to run the rooms, with an effort at evocative language use. There are some window dressing issues, but, otherwise, it’s a decent dungeon adventure.

There an introduction to this adventure, a kind of designers notes, placed up front. I like those; a one-pager or less on what the designer was thinking can provide some good insight that might otherwise slip away. This time around the designer notes that the dungeon is geared toward three OSR concepts that, he asserts, don’t get much love: Fantasy Fucking Vietnam, Henchmen, and Reaction Rolls. I must say, he nails all three concepts. He’s using Henchmen as a stand in for the geometric XP charts. If you die at level five then your new level one will reach level five again by the time your fellow level fives reach level six … not leaving you too far behind. This allows for a lethal game which encourages henchmen. Horror, isolation and loss in the dungeon are the hallmarks of FFV. There’s got to be survival tension. Reaction rolls mean that there’s a good chance you can talk to and interact with the dungeon creatures in a manner other than just hacking them down. Or, as I like to say, you can always resort to a bit of ultra-violence, why not interact some first to break up the d20 rolls?

Complementing these design philosophies are the formatting decisions made. The writing style is terse, one step beyond minimal keying, with a decent attempt made at being evocative. This allows the DM is quickly scan the room during play and embellish it fr the players. It’s full on trying to implant an image in the DM’s head and leveraging that to greater effect … EXACTLY what the fuck a room description should do. The room titles are descriptive, in and of themselves, which complements the entire affair. Thus a room might looks like:

Preparation room 2.
Barrel of rancid oil, torches, barricade of columns to the north. Moldering cloth lines the walls. Light, glowing softly blue, emanates from the West.”

Not the most evocative ever, but still WAY above average. It’s focusing on giving an impression and letting the DM fill the rest in, which is what a room should do. Another room has alcoves “guarded” by faded tapestries. That’s EXACTLY the way you are supposed to use language in describing a room. You can do ANY fucking thing you want as long as its clear and jabs the vibe of that room in to the DMs head.

Sometimes, though, the writing engages in window dressing. Weird for the sake of weird. This can be ok, but I generally think its better when the weird is targeted. The opening room has some column covered in glowing glyphs, sputtering like a bad CFL. That’s it. It could have been strong if it were a warning, or clue to something deeper in the dungeon, or even even just general “protection against great evil” stuff. IF the players investigate, and they will, what’s up with them? No, you don’t have to give away every secret, but it would have been great forshadowing.

I mentioned that the writing is decent, but could be more evocative. Clearly an effort was made and it shows and IS decently effective … but could have been better. I know, that’s shitty feedback. I wouldn’t say flat, but, maybe I’m picking it apart because I see so much potential here. Anyway, I was going to compare the evocative writing to the map. It’s a decent exploration map, with a couple of loops … but it also feels like a star formation with little clusters of rooms hanging of the central point. So, decent map, better than most, but not superstar quality.

The encounters, he meat, are generally pretty good. A decent mix, you can talk to things, and a lot of neutral elements to get in to trouble with or exploit. In one room there’s a group of demons (manes) trying to figure out how to loot a temple nearby. In another, a group of warriors has another group trapped in a rooms. There are things going on, thing happening. There are effects in the dungeon that are neutral, waiting for the party to fuck with them and then maybe exploit them in the future for their own gain.

This thing is EXACTLY what you are looking for in level one of an exploratory dungeon.

It’s not rock star, but it could have been. I think I tend to pick things apart, like the wanderers not doing things or the writing not as evocative as it could be, when things are close. But, anyway, this absolutly goes in my DM toolbox.

This is free at DriveThru. The seven page preview shows you the map and the designers notes section but, alas, no rooms. That’s too bad. Every preview should give you a look at the rooms so you know what to expect.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/127617/ZH01-An-Overwhelming-Sense-of-Loss?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 7 Comments

Svarog’s Anvil

Posted on June 16, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Thanasis Tsiakmakis
Geek Society
5e
Level 4

The long lost Dwarven Kindgom of Gleodemar holds a relic of the past, Svarogs’s Anvil, a magical artifact, that when used by a Dwarf it can help mass produce weapons, armor and ammunition. The Heroes are send to reclaim it, but the ancient fort is not empty and the new denizens have settled for good and seem to be also looking for some lost treasure. Will the Heroes manage to win them in a direct (and bloody) confrontation, or will the try to slip through the shadows to reach their goal? Maybe they will be captured and the “cavalry” will have to save them? In this adventure anything goes and it takes only one mistake to unravel the Heroes’ careful plans.

This fifty two page adventure (the appendices start on page 32) details a raid on a ruined keep to retrieve an ancient dwarf anvil. A decent basic premise is ruined by a lack of understanding of basic adventure structure/formatting. It’s ok, but too hard a slog to use at the table.

Conceptually, it’s a decent basic adventure. Journey to keep. Figure out how to get past monsters. Probe depths and loot quest item. Get chased on way back to town. There’s even a kind of basic sandboxy element as you see the keep from the outside and humanoid patrols and figure out a way to get inside. Force, sneaking, deception … all of which will result in The Best Layed Plans of the party … a classic part of D&D fun. There is no greater joy then a plan being devised and then the fun of watching it execute/go south. Elements of the journey to the keep, as well as being chased/followed by the humanoids you stole from, on the way home, give this a decent little third act, something most adventures miss.

There’s nothing really new or exciting about this. Or, maybe instead I should say, it seems to cover all of what you need for a decent adventure, which is in and of itself exciting since so few adventures, especially for the modern games, seem to hit these notes. Three are mercs to use/hire, and even a Casper to perhaps win over to your side and exploit. The mercs even have some personalities that are not expanded upon too much. There’s an order of battle for the humanoids responding. You could view this as a nice little sandboxy humanoid keep.

Except it’s executed like a NIGHTMARE.

MOUNTAINS of read-aloud and DM text. The writing is directed at the players. There’s no real map key or organization to the adventure. And, there’s enforced morality.

The last is first. At one point you kill an orc mother holding a an orc baby. The baby is crying. If you kill it your alignment shifts to either neutral (if good) or evil (if neutral.) This is not how alignment works and it is not fun. Yes, I know, many adventures do it. They are WRONG. This is an arbitrary DM ruling and those have not place in D&D. The ONLY way this works is if you tell the party “If you kill the baby your alignment shifts towards evil.” At that point they get to make an explicit decision: take the hit or not. That’s ok (in theory anyway.) I would still argue though that this is a bad thing. Do you really want to have a nature vs nurture discussion in your D&D game? Shall we all read some Peter Singer before or next game? Further, the proposed solution, leaving the orc baby in a crib you found in one of the rooms, is abandoning the baby to die … the same as if you’d cut its throat. Arbitrary DM’s are not fun. The trolly problem doesn’t have a solution. That’s the fucking point. It forces discussion no a hard topic. By saying it DOES have a solution (in a world in which evil gods come down and fart on you, no less) you are wrong..

There’s no map key to speak of, or creature annotations. Guards in the keep walls? It’s in the text not on the map, in spite of the map having a lot of other notes. The text is quite free form, not being in room/key format, and really just a conversation that flows. A kind of linear running text of how the adventure might go.

The read aloud contains text like “You stop to assess the situation.”

No doubt much of this was learned by copying other adventure. Other adventure suck ass. Seriously, the modern adventure is written terribly. The purpose of an adventure is to be used by the DM at the table to run a game. That means no lengthy sections of text. That means text that is easy to scan at the table, find you need, and improvise on. Do you really need the introduction? Could the NPC personality section be rewritten to make it easier to scan? This is technical writing, almost like a dictionary, more than it is a novel. Help me run the adventure. You don’t do that with mountains of text. ANd no, you don’t get to use “written for n00bs” as an excuse. A: don’t pander. B: that’s an excuse.

Too much of this seems like it was written “because you have to have to do it that way”, where the “have to” is learned from modern adventure styles. A REALLY strong edit, not a copy edit, is needed to get the designer to prune back the text to about a third of what’s offered, and formatted much much better,

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a current suggested price of $.5. The preview is eleven pages, and is decently representative. The last few pages, in particular, offer a good example of the mish mash conversational writing style and lack of structure/formatting. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/242922/Svarogs-Anvil-5e?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

Into the Trolls’ Den!!!

Posted on June 13, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By John Fredericks
Sharp Mountain Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-3

The party will enter a troll lair in search of magical weapons. But will they exit alive?

This 26 page linear adventure contains seven pages of actual adventure text, overpowered opponents, and has, the chief draw I assume, full color battle maps.

Some dude in a halfling village asks you to go check out a troll den a day away. Getting rid of the trolls does the halflings a favor and they are rumored to have treasure and magic swords. So wouldn’t you like to go do it? You follow a linear path to get there. At night you have a wandering monster encounter if the DM decides to have one. It’s suggested it be at dusk so spellcasters can still get a full eight hours of sleep in order to regain spells.

[As an aside, who here could actually be a spellcaster? I mean, do you get eight hours of sleep a night? I know, I know, “Rest”, but I’m using sleep. This is the only part of aging I will admit to.]

Ok, have some linear encounters. Get in to the cave. Have some more linear encounters. How about a treant at first level? It’s on the wanderers table. If it were a normal wanderers table I might be ok with that. A “force the party in to a fight/encounter” decision though is different. The same thing with the actual encounters in the wilderness and dungeon. At one point four wolves, each with four HD, attack the party. No chance to avoid. The dungeon proper has three five HD trolls and a four HD rust monster in the same room. At first level. Again, varied opponent challenges are a feature of old school play. You don’t know what you are encountering. But this goes hand in hand with non-linearity. You have to be able to allow the party to avoid, negotiate, etc with those overpowered challenges. “You are first level. You will die from poison in one hour. The ONLY antidote is in the cave. The cave has one room with a 23 HD dragon in it. He attacks immediately.” That’s not old school D&D AND it’s piss poor design to boot.

Your reward are some +1 items. +1 dagger. +1sword. +1 mace. The most generic of the generic. You also get 60gp in books and 507 in coins and gems. Oh boy. Abstracted treasure. My favorite. How about just saying “Treasure Parcel: 567 gp”? That would suck even more joy out of life. Plus, there’s not NEARLY enough treasure for a Gold=XP game. It’s absurd.

There IS some dust in a pouch that replicates a Knock spell. That’s nice. There’s also a scardy cat Druid in the forest that slams her door shut and locks it to hide form the party and only talks in whispers so as to not disturb the serenity of nature. Nice though that.

But, hey, you get full color battlemaps!

*sigh*

This is $2.50 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. Pages four and five show the druid, with the wolf encounter on page five also. The last page shows some of the dungeon encounters, proper. It’s a fair representation of the writing style throughout.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/243107/Into-the-Trolls-Den?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 11 Comments

The Last Candle

Posted on June 11, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Greg Christopher
Chubby Funster
1e
Level 1-3

The Prieuré de Chaurillon lies isolated in the upper valley of the Satrebonne river. The empire that once protected it has fallen. Barbarian hordes now roam the land. Once tamed borderlands have become infested with monsters and foul beasts. The monks of the Prieuré are all that remain of their ancient order. They stand alone against the darkness of the age; The Last Candle of their faith.

This 37 page adventure details a small home base (?), the surrounding region (?) and a 64 room dungeon (?.) This is the real deal. All three parts have very strong content with interesting encounters and NPC’s that directly relate to a parties adventures without having a “hey dummy. Here is the adventure” label on them. It’s also padded to all fuck and back with loose language and an informal style that makes finding information a total pain in the ass. Bolding, terser writing, etc would have gone a long way to making this MUCH more usable at the table. You’re gonna need a highlighter. It might be worth it.

The home base centers around an abbey. It’s got a secretive and plotting, but good, head along with a famous library and knights/soldiers patrolling around it, as befitting the last religious site in a rough borderlands region. This allows for a variety of NPC’s and subplots to be brought in to play. The library needs something, you need access to the library, the head monk wants something from you, the peasants are available as plots or hirelings. There are folk who want in the library who you can hire, etc. The place feels like a natural part of the environment and the people in it feel like they should be there. And it’s all oriented towards actual play. The people described are the ones the party will interact with or want to interact with, like field worker who also fights in bare knuckle matches. There’s a hireling for you! He wants to go get some leather armor from father-in-law first though … those are the details that bring an NPC to life and this first third is full of those. There’s an armed band camped out, with the leader wanting to see the prior about his promised wife to be … who the prior has sent away to see a mage on the edge of the territory in order to protect her from the fiance. Human Drama! It’s got a lot of REALLY nice subplots (which the adventure terms “hooks”) that allow for a whole host of things to be going on while the party is “in town” and yet still be quite relevant to a current or future Thing To Do.

The local region has a decently extensive wandering monster table, and enough regional variety of woods, lowlands, hills, etc to provide variety, with some decent little details also. Like “this area was once home to farms and a lot of abandoned orchards attract monsters.” The creatures are doing things and there’s also twenty or so more in depth encounters for the DM to toss in when a wanderer is called for. They remind me a bit of the Wilderlands hex entries, expanded in to two or three paragraphs each. Things are going on and happening. They are full of potential energy. You discover a man lying on the ground in tattered clothes, covered in blood. Dude has a secret … he’s a werewolf! There’s a lot here to take advantage of. [As an aside, the wanderers would be strong if they also included an adjective/adverb. “A FRIENDLY troll roasting a halfling on a spit.”]

The dungeon is great also. A little over sixty rooms, laid out in a roughly “square surrounding an inner bailey” format, with rooms and little mini-corridor complexes scattered around the edges. It’s got a good mix of traps and monsters, NPC’s and monsters you can talk to, and little in media res things. A group of darkelves with their leader gravely injured, trapped in a room by a monster outside. Clearly, there are opportunities here for roleplay. Those opportunities are repeated over and over again. Roleplaying in the dungeon, little almost vignette scenes, without them being full on set-pieces.

And yet this is a full on highlighter adventure. There is little to no bolding, bullets, or indents to make finding information easier. Those great village NPC’s are spread out over three pages and have two to three paragraphs each. They need a one sentence bolded summary up top that says “Hireling: crude bare-knuckle boxing field-hand. The regional presentation is likewise … lazily described. As are the wilderness encounters. As are the dungeon entries. What you are most likely to see in a dungeon room is not necessarily the first few words/sentences. Mixed throughout a couple of paragraphs are obvious sensory information. The entries are cluttered with verbose advice and explanations.

Entire paragraphs are devoted to tactics of DM advice. Verbose. “They want to avoid a fight and are hungry for food/horses” and “they pick up things and drop them a height.” is great. It’s terse. But an entire paragraph saying that on the first round they will perform diving attacks. And that they target the largest pack animals. And they knock players out of saddles. And that they flutter around the ground on the second round. And on the third round they fly in to the air with anything they have. Man. Look, I get it. You can get there with a word or two juicy unridden pack animals and destroyed equipment.

This happens over and over again in the adventure. It uses a sentence when a word will do, and comes off dry because of that.

Still, all in all, great encounters. Encounter after encounter. Great NPC’s/village/starting region. Just in need of a major MAJOR edit.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages long. The last page is probably the closest to representing the spirit of the writing in the product. You can see how the entries can tend to the longish side of the spectrum. This page still kind of falls in to the General Overview section, and so its harder to see the issues and/or for them to stand out.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/117345/The-Last-Candle?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 2 Comments

(PF) The Forest of Starving Spirits

Posted on June 9, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By … Jessica Redekop, Robert Gresham, Michael Whitney
Wayward Rogues Publishing
Pathfinder
Level 10

Explore the haunted remains of Endiel Forest, the forsaken kingdom of the gruesome ghastlord Mortalbane. Once a vibrant wildwood where the ancient elves lived in harmony with nature, what’s left of Endiel now is a shadow of its former glory, a rotten wilderness guarded jealously by an enigmatic horror known only as the Endiel Witch. Tread paths no mortal has walked in over a thousand years and uncover long-forgotten forgotten secrets in Forest of Starving Spirits, part four of the Ravenous Ruin adventure path.

This thirteen page adventure is a trip through a haunted forest. Part four of an adventure pah, it is barely coherent. Motivations, knowledge, challenges … they all have some of the most tenuous ties I’ve ever seen in an adventure. Another example of focusing on the style, artwork, layout, font, borders, instead of the substance of the text.

I like treading paths no one has walked for a thousand years … I am a failure as a father because my son now plays Pathfinder … because it’s what his friends play … and he said Oswalds adventure, while great, was something his friends could not handle. Fuck your system superiority complex; it’ all about market share.

Oops. I stumbled on to part 4 of an adventure path. Still … let’s judge the entire series by this one entry and also see if its useful as a standalone haunted forest.

The party wants the magic gobstopper and is told that The EVil One has it; you gotta go in to the haunted forest to find him and get it. The forest is 400 miles by 800 miles, with each square being 30 miles on the map. There’s some mountains on one side where The Evil One resides. I think. Well, I, the DM, know he’s there. It’s unclear if the party is supposed to know that before they go in. I guess not? I mean if they did, then why would they enter the forest at the far/opposite side, why not enter the forest at the square next to the mountains, keeping to the unhaunted grasslands AROUND the forest until then? So I guess the party doesn’t know he lives in the mountains? It’s VERY clear. Just like everything else in this adventure.

Remember that super big 400×800 mile forest? The one with the map? The map doesn’t have locations on it. The text of the adventure eventually tells us that the lost city is in I-4 and waterfall is in G-8, but that’s at the top of each entry, spread out through the entire adventure. So what the fucks the purpose of the map? I don’t know. The evil spirits in the forest get you lost and evli dryads lead you to danger … but the map doesn’t tell you where anything is.

The climax is in a ruined city. “Once the players reach the ruined city …” Really? Once they reach it? Were they trying to reach it? That’s not mentioned anywhere. In the ruined city (city!) are some crypts. Are you looking for crypts? It doesn’t say we’re looking for a crypt in a ruined city. There’s a total disconnect between what the players are trying to do and what the text is assuming. More on this later.

There’s a stinking cloud above the forest, it makes flying above it hard. (I Guess it reaches outer space?) So you’re footslogging 30 mile hexes in a tangled forest. What is that, 8 miles a day or something in a bramble filled haunted forest? For every hour spent in the forest there’s a chance the evil witch shows up to fuck with the party. What is the chance? We’re not told. Just “there’s a chance.” Wandering monsters? No, no list. At all. There’s a couple of entries: Winding Woods (you get lost) and an Unnerving Presence that makes you have a -2 to WIll saves. Oh ,it also says that you an encounter a poison pit tap, four shambling mounds, four lacedon trolls, and a ghoul treant. In as many words. That’s literally a quote from the adventure to describe the encounters on your trek. Nothing else. That’s it. I’m not making this fucking up.

There are knowledge checks. “The forest is wild and overgrown.” Ok. They are all just as useless. They tell you nothing of consequence. It’s just trivia. Why the fuck do they exist if they are just trivia?

Grief builds inside of you, silence is deafening, and the writing is hackneyed. More to the word, the formatting is terrible. Recall how a modern bullet point system works in a word processor. If you indent then the text is offset to the right and the style of bullet point changes. This denotes this is a sub-item to the item above it. This allows for easy visual groupings of data and relationships to be immediately obvious. Yeah, this adventure don’t do that. Everything is at the same level, and appears in the same style. Is this a new monster? Is this a part of a different encounter? Who knows, because the formatting makes everything confusing as fuck. You know those monstrous long Pathfinder stat blocks … imagine three of them all in a row with something else FORMATTED THE EXACT SAME WAY appearing between two of them. There’s no way to tell where one things ends and another begins. I wouldn’t quite call it wall of text, but “confusing mass of text” is a relative of it, to be sure.

Oh, oh, in the crypt in the ruined city (again, why the fiuck are the party drawn there?) you finally battle the evil witch that has been harassing you. This time she flees to an estate. Uh. She has fled in every encounter. Is the party still chasing her? Why are they following her? Killing the witch isn’t a part of the adventure, getting the gobstopper is. It makes no fucking sense AT ALL.

Back to that total disconnect I mentioned earlier? I think this adventure falls in to the “throw some shit at the party” category of product. Here’s some shit, throw it at the party until bored. Make them have this encounter, and then this one. Lead them to this one. Just put them in the ruined city and tell them they see a crypt. (Aside: Roll to find the crypt, to trigger the witch encounter? That’s a roll to continue. What if they DON’T succeed in their roll? Nothing happens, ever? No, the DM fudges it. So why the fuck is it in the adventure?)

This is a bad adventure. It fails on the most basic points. Great encounters might be a part of my review standards, as might evocative writing, terse writing, useful to the DM at the table. One of the most fundamental points though, that I never mention because it’s NEVER an issue, is a goal. I don’t mean a hook, or some such. But communicating to the players what they need to do. This adventure doesn’t do that. Sure, I think the read-aloud is hackneyed, I see that in a lot of adventures. Terse and evocative? Meh, again, lots of examples of that. Useful to the DM at the table? Again, lots of product fail at that point. But to be so incoherent that no one at the table understands what is going on in the adventure? That’s a new one. I think. I’ll have to go reread my review of Golanda.

Giving the designer(s) the benefit of the doubt, I have to question the editing of this. What the fuck is the purpose of editing these days? Copy editing? Fact checking? It’s certainly not “point out basic things wrong”, which is much more important than an orc having an ac of 13 vs 14.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is one of those mini things, so you can’t actually see what you are getting. Boo! I Boo I say! Still … on that last page? That’s two things you are looking at, nt one. See how everything is in “one line” green boxes? Yeah, no indent. Confusing as fuck. On the page before that, #3, that’s THREE things in that text on the left side column. Good fucking luck with that.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/242806/Forest-of-Starving-Spirits?affiliate_id=1892600

Oh, and one more thing. A Poison pit trap is CR13 in Pathfinder. Ouch.

Posted in Reviews | 14 Comments

The Wizard of Bald Mountain

Posted on June 6, 2018 by Bryce Lynch


By Ken Goudsward
Dimensionfold Games
Goldensword/Generic
Entry Level

Our adventurers are commissioned by the Jarl of Connaught to investigate strange weather phenomenon at Bald Mountain. The Jarl also sends his personal mage to accompany them.

I don’t even know where to start on this one.

This 24 page adventure details a short overland journey to a ruined keep on top of a mountain with a wizard in it. The keep has ten rooms and has two monsters: the wizard and his fighter buddy. Single column, sparse, and yet with 24 pages … there’s just nothing here. Condensing this to a one page dungeon would still leave ¾ of a page to spare.

The jarl charges you with getting to the bottom of the weird weather coming from the top of the mountain. He gives you a sword and some armor. He sends his mage with you. (Ug. NPC with the party means betrary by him and/or DM pet. And in this case it’s a party betrayal.) You wander up a mountain for a day, find a ruined keep that is mostly empty, and fight a wizard. Everything here is more than little off.

Take the overland. The mountain is eight hours away, walking. Each hour you have an encounter on the wandering animal table. “Woah!” I thought, way too much. Foolish me. The encounters involve flies, mosquitos, crows, grouse, rabbits, deer, geese, a falcon, etc. I was then surprised there was no wandering rock table.

Once again, the adventure should concentrate on player interactivity. The mundane has little place. Wanna set the mood, or foreshadow? Great, no problem. Roll on table 12 each hour to see what kind of gravel the road is made of that hour? No. This is a caricature of D&D and, much like the rest of this adventure, reminds me of fantasy heartbreakers. Someone’s got a bug up their ass about how things should be.

“The team will need to gain entry into the keep. The keep can be entered easily from the east, north, or west.” *sigh* And does the sun rise today also?

The keep, proper, has two levels and ten rooms. “R3: (Servants quarters) (dark-empty torch sconce) 3 beds, only 1 with blankets; 1 dresser with shabby clothes” Fucking wonderful. My life is now complete. I never knew what I was missing. This is adventure? This is value? This is supposed to help you run a good game for your players? Yeah, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it also doesn’t DO anything. Room after room is like this. Well, at least all ten rooms, that is.

The adventure ends on page ten, after starting on page four, with the Boss Fight. It’s labeled The Boss Fight. It’s one page long, with TOO much whitespace, and full of tactics for the evil bad guy wizard. The rest of the page count is monster stats, tables, etc. Any EVERYTHING is in single column “i wrote this in word and printed in PDF” format.

There’s just nothing here. It would make, at best, a quarter to half a page of a one page dungeon. I get “slow burn”, but this is a little silly.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a current suggested price of $3. The preview shows you the entire adventure. Enjoy, in particular, the boss fight on page ten. Or maybe the adventure design on pages two and three.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/242468/the-Wizard-of-Bald-Mountain?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 7 Comments