tenfootpole.org

by Cristopher Clark
Fail Squad Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-3

A few years ago human settlers discovered a marsh-covered valley that they knew would provide fertile cropland if only the marsh could be drained. The deflected water flooded a goblin lair, ousting the ornery creatures and reaping their undying hatred. Now, the goblins seek deadly revenge!

This 38 page adventure details an eleven page dungeon and/or mine. goblins are digging a complex under a human dam in order to blow it up and reflood their valley. It’s got some interesting encounters and non-standard magic effects that have that very BASIC and OD&D vibe that I enjoy. It’s also eleven rooms in thirty eight pages … meaning it’s hard to wade through. Long read-aloud, weird read-aloud, directions & dimensions in the text, and conversational commentary to the DM are all in play. It’s serious hi lighter fodder, if you want to go there. I don’t have time in my life for that; thats what I pay someone else for. Or, hope to anyway.

The heart of this is a little eleven room and three level dungeon dig out by the goblins. It’s supported by a couple of wilderness encounters and a little bit of town information that is, essentially, clues and hooks to what’s going on The idea is that the DM takes this clue information and when the party shows up he drops hints form the townsfolk, which gets the party involved. It’s presented in bullet point form another are eight or so various things to find out. I like the format. It is, essentially, just a summary of the town information, rather than detailed room/key format for a generic village. The format should provide enough to let he DM run with them. Unfortunately, the data here is a bit generic. Eight townsfolk have gone missing in the last month. Well … ok. Like rumors, a little bit more local color would have been nice. A drunk who stays out and his nagging wife, that sort of thing. I’m not talking a book, or much more in the way of ward count than is already here. But instead of generic writing “8 people are disappeared” a little more specificity. Something for the DM to run with and expand upon. “Write anything you want!” is a much harder assignment than “write a theme on why Walden Pond sucked.” Yes, I understand tastes vary. There is some line and I just don’t think there’s much room at all for the generic in what is supposed to be a play aid for running a game at the table/ Just how much prep work should you be expected to do?

There are more than a few nice encounters in this, and that’s it strong point. Goblins have torches … with some mini-mechanics for setting huaraches alight. Nice! Or giant cockroaches who can still fight for up to ten rounds after their heads are chopped off. it’s that kind of idiosyncratic stuff that I think a good D&D game lives and dies on. It’s fun. Others are more … interesting. At one point there’s a cart full of dead and bloated animal bodies. What happens to adventurers that dig through such things? That’s right … rot grubs! A perfect application of sticking your nose in. I love it. The adventure is at its best when it’s dealing with these little things. There’s a great little albino outcast goblin, barely cognitive, and ways the party can encounter him. He’s not really an enemy, more of an NPC that could be mistaken for something else. In fact, he’s really just window dressing since he doesn’t really have a part of play in the adventure except as a “would ya look at that!”, ut it still shows the strength of the imagination behind the writing.

But … not the writing proper. It’s terrible. Long.

The usual suspect are at play. First is the read-aloud, which concentrates on the obvious. “There are three exits in the north, south and east” or “the room is 40 x 60.” Yes, these are the things the map tells us. Other times the read aloud is weirdly short and in response to specific character actions. “You open the door to see a dark room.” I’ve seen this before; some designers have their weird obsession with providing read-aloud for every situation. As if those are the only words the DM can ever utter.

The kitchen gets three paragraphs of DM text, to describe to us what is in a kitchen. I know what a kitchen looks like. The extra writing adds nothing to that. What it DOES do is distract the DM by hiding the important fucking information behind stupid shit like “there’s a table up against the wall.” Unless it’s fucking pertinent to the adventure we don’t need to fucking know that.

My favorite example of bad writing in the entire adventure is “once that doo is opened a strange sight awaits your intrepid players.”

This, gentle readers, is SIN. Not just minor sin. Not just bad writing. But SIN, in a major way. The designer is having a conversation with the DM in a bar, telling them about their character. Not. Cool. That’s not the fucking purpose of the writing. This is supposed to be a play aid. This sort of conversational dreck has absolutely no place stuck in a room key. It represents all that is bad and wrong and no fun about this writing style. Evil, pure and simple, from the eigth dimension!

Seriously. Eleven rooms in 38 pages. This is what D&D has become.

This is $6 at DriveThru.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/235859/Those-Dam-Goblins-Revised?affiliate_id=1892600

Sidequests
5e
Level 1

The Kobolds have grown strong – surely strong enough to overthrow the local abbey that they’ve been eyeing! This SideQuest begins as word has spread about the Kobold army that is planning to lay siege and take control of a humble monastery. The only thing that stands in the Kobolds’ way is, of course, your group of brave adventurers. This is a perfect introductory campaign to the world of D&D; it is designed to give your first-level players their first taste of combat and dungeon-crawling!

This seventeen page adventure details a small abbey that kobolds have taken over, holding the poor people inside hostage. It could easily be a 1-pager and has A LOT of filler text and overly dramatic read-aloud. Some ok magic items don’t forgive the lack of monster specificity, with only general guidelines offered.

Long lame throw-away hooks, like “missing caravan” and “deliver my letters” have the party ending up outside the walls of the abbey, facing the closed doors. This is the perfect introductory campaign to the world of roleplaying games, designed to give my first-level players their first taste of combat, stealth, and dungeon-crawling! (I know because the marketing garbage mixed in to the text tells me so) so I was quite surprised with the crappiness of the hooks. I mean, I went in to it expecting crappy hooks that the designer put in because they just didn’t care, but then that marketing blurb in the text got me all worked up only to deflate me again with the “missing caravan” pile of crap. Either don’t stick the fucking hook in or put some actual fucking thought in to it. No, that does not mean you need to write a paragraph on it, as you did there. It means you need to turn it in to something that will interest and intrigue the party and a pretext saying “this is the adventure I’m running tonight, bite it or we don’t play D&D” ain’t it.

Hmmm, I get the sense I’m coming off as harsh. If this adventure were one page and 99 cents it would be an ok adventure. But it’s not; it’s seventeen pages and $5, both of which make promises the adventure doesn’t deliver.

Ok, ok, nice stuff first.

There’s a few decent magic items. A magic arrow that always flies towards creatures with an evil heart. In practice, this is just advantage on demons and monsters, but it’s a nice idea. I like the effect, it’s just ruined a bit by the mechanics. A chalice that always fills with water is nice also. Magic items described as effects instead of through mechanics … who woulda thunk it! For the uninitiated, when you name a thing it loses its power. Mechanics bring magic items down the realm of the rule books. “Always seems an evil heart” is open to interpretation, and thus wondrous and mysterious. This is what magic items should be … magical! The boring ass +1 longsword is less wonderous and lame.

The gates to the abbey are locked so there’s a brief section on getting in that outlines some methods the party might use and gives advice to the DM. Great. I love this. You are making the DM’s life easier. The advice is WAY too long, but it DOES also include befriending the gate guard, a kobold. That’s not something you see everyday!

And on the bad front … just about everything else.

The tone is childish. It replicates the “new” tone for kobolds where they are simpleton children who worship dragons and talk like dumb 20’s henchmen. I know tone preferences are subjective, but OVERT humor in games is a turn off for me. I love spontaneous silliness, both in D&D & Gamma World, but when embedded in the rules (newer editions of Gamma World) or the adventures then its a turn off. It’s trying to force the spontaneity and that always comes off as obvious … and therefore bad.

The read-aloud is he usual overly dramatic crap one comes to expect from read-aloud. “You get the feeling that this Abbey has been through some dark times, yet has always managed to find light and redemption in the end.” reads the last sentence of the initial “see the abbey” read aloud. That’s not the sense I get. I get the sense that the designer is a failed novelist and/or trying to hard. It’s critically important that players NOT be told what to think. It’s the job of the designer to communicate a vibe that lets them draw their own conclusions. Your job is to write something that makes the DM communicate it to the players so they get the sense it’s gone through rough times and things turn out ok. Telling them what to think is bad writing.

The DM text contains such gems as “Read this outloud:” right before offset and text-boxed read-aloud. Advice to the DM is “The boss may or may not notice the party entering depending on how they enter.” These examples are not in isolation; in fact the actual useful text might be the exception rather than the rules there is so much padding. The text is being padded for word count for the DM. Not cool. It detracts from the DM’s ability to find the important stuff at the table. Remember, during the game the DM is scanning the text. If you’re writing for a DM sitting down on their sofa reading it then you’re writing for the wrong audience. Other examples include the usual “tell me where the doors go in the text”, duplicating information the map provides.

There’s no real order of battle, so monsters wait in their rooms to die. Well, when the adventure tells you where there are monsters. “You may want to have your party encounter a kobold here” is not adventure design. The walls are supposed to be crawling with kobolds, but there are non listed. Dozens of footprints, but not dozens in the adventure. This basic keying data is fudged. I understand there may be a role for that sometimes, but not as a general purpose in a basic adventure!

While I haven’t touched on it in awhile, this is a good example of why I like humans instead of humanoids. The kobolds add nothing to this adventure. They are just 1d3 hp bipedals to be killed. Why kobolds then? What makes this special? I would argue that it, in fact, makes the entre world LESS special. When monsters are the norm they lose their appeal. Human bandits would have worked better.

As a one-pager this would be a servivable first level adventure. But not as written. No way. Just more dreck.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and is worthless.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/240540/SideQuests-Insurrection-At-The-Abbey?affiliate_id=1892600

By WR Beatty
Rosethrone Publishing
S&W

The faithful will sometimes make a pilgrimage to pray at the Shrine of the Fallen Angels. Legends tell of angelic visitations and miracles. Certainly there is more to this shrine than simply a place for pilgrims to pay homage to a long forgotten saint.

This nineteen page adventure details a 20-ish room shrine/tomb of a local saint. It’s got a great OD&D vibe but suffers from formatting issues that lead to a wall of text. It could also be a disaster for the party, scale-wise. The content is ok, but I expect more from formatting/usability in 2018.

I dig an OD&D vibe. By that, I mean a style of encounter that doesn’t seem a derigour as conventional encounters. It’s not that the encounters are all that different, deep down, but they seem more natural. Each encounter must, eventually, debase itself in to providing mechanics, but it seems like OD&D-style encounters tend to do that much later in the designers thought process, and with less devotion to standard mechanics. It’s as if someone sat down and thought about what a hermit pilgrim, for example, might be and imagined it in their head and then wrote it down. Then, at some point, with almost no preconceived notions, noted mechanics for it.

There is a freshness that comes from these, and they seem effortlessly natural to the location than a lot of other writing styles have.

The wandering table is a great one, for example, because of this. Note this one: “A grave digger carrying the ashes of the Lord of the Valley. He is supposed to bury them at the shrine, but he is worried about his sick wife at home.” There’s so much embedded in that description. Most notably, it gives the grave digger some reason to interact with the party and to drive some potential action. And such it is with almost all of the wandering encounters. They contain a kind of potential energy,

But, it is also these wandering monsters that the first hints of issues are encountered. Some of them can be quite long. FUll of flavor? Absolutly. An owlbear with maximum hit points referred to by the locals as The Grey Bear with a hideously deformed left paw … which causes him to not hug and fall over if he hits of max damage? A minor demon (his patron) and a ghost show up on the encounter tables if you kill him? That’s some serious fucking chrome right there. It’s not just all in the owlbears favor, with a hit bonus, but has a natural vibe with the no hugs and falling over. It also takes a lot of text to get there.

That text journey is the adventures major problem. It’s long. There’s not much formatting with whitespace or even bolding. THis lends to a wall of text property that is quite hard to dig through during play at the table. Details are hidden in the middle of paragraphs that you would want to know or call out during play. It’s almost feels like a stream of consciousness writing style with no pauses to take a breath. There is a lot of richness and depth, but it can be conveyed better with a little bolding and whitespace.

Old school can design without an appeal to scaling and that’s done here … perhaps too much. Some creatures have 1d3 HP and others are 10hd or 60hp. Further, defiling the tomb has some SERIOUSLY bad consequences and it’s not clear to me that any warning of that is present. Looting abandoned places is what parties do … but in this case it can EASILY trigger a massive retaliation that even higher level parties would be hard pressed to live through.

So while the adventure has a very natural vibe to it, and is rich in gameable detail, it also hides that in a way that better editing could have solved. The disproportionate response to defiling is a little out of place also.. It may be a personal style thing; if you know your DM runs games like that then its ok. But if you’ve been defiling places with little godly consequences and then out of nowhere get TPK’d, well, the party might justly note a bait and switch.

This is interesting the way MERP products are interesting. But I’m seriously not convinced of its usability.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview shows you some of the great wandering encounters near the beginning. The last page shows you some of the location writing style, and gets in to some of the writing style positives and negatives.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/237736/The-Shrine-of-the-Fallen-Angels?affiliate_id=1892600

By Benoit de Bernardy, Richard Jansen-Parks, JVC Parry
LoreSmyth
5e
Level 4

After enjoying many long decades of peace, the small port town of Sestone has found itself at the heart of a mystery that threatens the entire region – if not the very fabric of the mortal plane. In hopes of learning more about the growing danger, the adventurers are tasked to seek out a secretive druid circle. But the heroes are not the only ones looking for the druids.

Thirty four pages of linear encounters. Joy. With too much read-aloud. Joy. And read-aloud that tells you what you think and feel. Joy. Lots and lots of meaningless text. Joy. Why people put up with this dreck is beyond me. Do they just not know that there is better available? Yeah, yeah, “we had fun.” Whatever. I choose Camus. THis is just more of the usual 5th edition garbage.

Baron Cant-Be-Bothered asks you to go find some druids who might know how to shut down a mutation rift nearby. He gives you the name of a woman in a nearby town who may know where the druids are. She is dying on the floow when the party finds her. The druids in the forest are being attacked by pirates. You follow the pirates and kill them. There’s some other minor shit. It’s linear.

The maps are small and the key numbers on them are hard to read. Strike One.

The adventure opens with Baron I-dont-care and some villagers memorializing some dead people. No details given. Specificity is the soul of narrative. “Bob had 18 sons and never caught a fish though he loved fishing.” There. One sentence. The DM can now build on that for the eulogy’s that are supposed to take up the intro/hook. Nope. Can’t be bothered. This is bad fucking writing. It’ abstracts the parts of the adventure that the DM needs to run the encounter.

To add insult to injury it them expands useless background detail. This kind of crap reminds me of style guides for a Tv series. We gotta know the minor characters backstory for episode 89 … but there ain’t no episode 89 in D&D. It’s all just garbage and detracts from the information the DM needs to run the adventure RIGHT NOW … well, if that information were in the adventure to begin with.

You find your contact in town dying on the floor. The read-aloud is long. I guarantee that before the DM finishes reading the shitty text that someone will have cast cure light. But, no, no provision for that. The plot calls for a death and so their contact dies. It’s fucking lame. Don’t want to have the contact tell them something? THEN MAKE THEM DEAD. Yanking the fucking parties chain, teasing them with possibilities that you will DM fiat away, is no fucking way to run a D&D game. And if you think it is then you’re a fucking idiot.

Shitty long DM text abounds. Here’s the FIRST paragraph for an NPC found in a inn: “For many years, the Tomund siblings paid little attention to the town where they lived, but after his brother Guthber was found to be the cause of the missing townsfolk, Heleste has been making an effort to get to know the locals. Many still look on him with suspicion, but Ared at least appreciates the effort.”

What the fuck is the point of that? Does any of that fucking shit matter when the party strides up to him? Bad fucking writing.

“You see a winged monstrosity gliding …” Yeah, ok, failed novelist. That’s a fucking conclusion. Tell the fucking party what they see if you are going to make us suffer through read-aloud. Better yet, write one sentence of DM text that inspires the DM with a great description, the way good adventures do.

There’s three paragraphs devoted to a geographical feature, darkstone pass, which is completely irrelevant. The next encounter is the manticore , err, “”winged monstrosity”. The pass text adds nothing but to the page count.

“Weary from your long walk, you’re glad to see the walls of Moonstone draw closer.” No. Just, No. Conclusions. Telling the party what they see and think. Just fucking textbook bad read-aloud.

And none of that even touches on the linear nature.

You know, I really wish DriveThru/Now offered no questions asked refunds. Yeah, yeah, piracy, blah blah blah. People don’t deserve this kind of crap.

This is $7 at DriveThru.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/212028/Whispers-from-the-Void-5e-adventure?affiliate_id=1892600

RPGpundit
Precis Intermedia
Dark Albion
Mid-Level

Taking control of the Debateable Lands, the Midnight Duke and his followers spread darkness and Chaos. Whether sent to investigate claims of dark powers by the Clerical Order or ordered to stop the threat at all costs by a rival lord, the PCs are sure to meet trouble in this open-ended scenario.

Well fuck me. 0 for 2 this week.

This seventeen page “adventure” details a couple of evil NPC’s and lightly outlines a situation. In a lawless border region an evil dude has taken over while everyone else is busy in a civil war. There’s some nobleman who might hire the party to go kill the dude. The dude has three followers and a duke of hell lives in his keep. The local villagers don’t really support him, but are beaten down.

It takes Pundit seventeen pages to outline this. Lots of history and background, if you are bored and can’t sleep.

NOT.
A.
FUCKING.
ADVENTURE.

There’s a crowd that says something like “it’s art if the creator says its art,”

Maybe.

Unless I pay fucking money for it. Then I’ve been ripped off. And I’m bitter.

The gang is coming over in a few hours and you go to DriveThru to buy an adventure to run. That’s my bar. “There are some evil dudes on the border and a demon” don’t cut it.

This is $3 at DriveThru. It has a four page quick preview that shows you nothing.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/239948/RPGPundit-Presents-28-The-Midnight-Duke?affiliate_id=1892600

By Remley Farr
INS INK
5e
Levels 2-3

A medical shipment to the swampy town of Strade’s Gallows takes a turn for the eccentric when the party happens across enigmatic shrimp-men who begin to worship them as gods. Can the party solve the mystery of Strade’s Gallows’ ailment, or will their new disciples botch it all up?

This 55 page adventure (most of which is actual adventure and not index) details the goings-on in a small village, and a ruined fort nearby. The first chunk is very social and sandboxy, as the party explores the village and gets involved in some small intrigues. It leads to the sunken ruins of an old fort and the forces behind what’s really going on. It’s got way too much text and needs edited and formatted WAY better for comprehension. Still, it’s nice to see a 5e sandbox.

It starts with the party killing a Kua-Toa god, and its worshippers switching faith to the party. And someone in the party then slowly mutating over several days in to a new god. This is mostly farce, with the Kua-toa treated like simpletons and doesn’t really impact the adventure except as Yet Another Thing Going On.

I’m a fan of a lot going on, but the worship/mutation raises some interesting theological D&D questions that are, perhaps, best unasked. Visions of characters recruiting cults to mutate themselves come to mind. In any event, the entire worshipper thing is mostly ignored, and really could have used some more words to guide the DM … especially around the ability to control followers, etc.

The adventure has, essentially, two parts:town & dungeon. The parts in town are very social. There are several subplots going on, that could be confused for false leads. These are covered in one page each, which is GREAT presentation style. Everything on one page and easy to find. The idea being that the party nose around town, learn about the subplots and get confused in the main plot and so on. It’s all very social and I like the concept a lot.

The second part, the dungeon, is more linear. Taking place in the ruins of a sunken fort, it has little “adventure areas”, clusters of rooms, connected by a hallway from the last area and another to the new area. Not exactly sterling design but at least its not completely linear.

Both section, town and dungeon, suffer GREATLY from the editing and formatting. The writing is not particularly evocative, but the bulk of the text is irrelevant and gets in the way. Multiple paragraphs of DMs text per room make figuring out what is going on, on the fly at the table, hard to hand/scan. Better use of bolding, whitespace, and indenting would have helped a lot. Or, better yet, removing about?’s of the words. There’s just way way way too much writing for each room. Short, punchy, let the DM fill in the rest.
There is, of course, mountains of backstory mucking things up also. In spite of a magic item called “Gerald the Hatestick”, a sentient staff, it’s mostly flavorless. I find the simpleton kua-toa thing weird also … have they full on turned in to farcical creatures in 5e?

One day the 5e designers will learn to edit and things will improve. One day. This feels like the designer got bogged down in putting things in they thought they needed instead of concentrating on what they had. “I have to have read aloud” or “i need lots of explanation/backstory.” Instead the effort should have been on flavor and the ability to scan at the table.

This is $6 at Dmsguid. The preview is four pages. In spite of that, the writing style is full of display. Just imagine all that writing for each room.
http://www.dmsguild.com/product/171229/Fishing-for-Gods-in-Strades-Gallows

By Mark L. Chance
Spes Magna Games
S&W
Levels 2-4

Old-timers still speak of Narvon the Charmer, albeit in hushed tones, as if the long-dead cleric might hear his name as an invitation of some sort. This is, of course, absurd, but also gives eloquent testimony to how feared Narvon was in life. Long ago, Narvon established a strange cult in chambers carved within stony Stolkoya. For a time, the cult flourished, but after only a year, during a night full of strange lights and bizarre lightning, the cult came to its end. Intrepid investigators found almost all of the cult’s members atop Stolkoya, mutilated and charred. The few survivors proved irrevocably mad, gibbering about “frogs from the sky” and “wings that never flap”. As for Narvon, all that remained was his head affixed to a spike. Investigators reported that Narvon’s face in death bore an expression of purest joy. Since then, no one has dared climb Narvon’s Sinister Stair.

This sixteen page adventure details a simple three level dungeon with sixteen rooms. Long and lame read-alouds with a focus on murals and other trivia detract from interesting vignettes and monsters. There’s a clear nugget of some interesting undead & demon monsters, but the rest of the adventure is nothing special.

There’s no plot here, the adventure is presented as ‘a Dangerous Place for 2nd-4th level adventurers.’ The hooks are the usual bunch of “something weird is going on over at the old cult compound”, except there’s also a nice Son of Sam thing with a vagrant explaining the voice of the dead cult leader told him to kill.

It’s got a couple of nice things going for it. First is the whole “told me to kill” thing. The cult leader was a charming guy, so while in the dungeon any PC making a suggestion to another PC or NPC will force a save or they have to do it, ala the Suggestion spell. And if they do it on purpose then they get a little tik mark next to their name on the DM’s notes. Get enough tik marks and its saving throw time to prevent your corruption. That’s a fun little mechanic; those kind of “this IS a weird place!” things always bring a smile to me, especially when they are so clearly a Push Your Luck mechanic.

It’s also got some decent little imagery in places, especially around monsters. A semi-liquified zombie comes to mind, as well a two cultists who died terrified in each others arms … and now form a weird hybrid skeleton creature. Like the “well zombie” in Walking Dead, these bring a nice little bit of extra to the generic Skeleton and Zombie creatures. That’s probably also why I like marching skeleton guard formations so much (in general, that is.) That extra little bit sometimes extends to rooms or treasures, like a mold-choked rotted desk containing a treasure. Oh, wanna search the desk, eh? I did mention it’s mold-choked & rotting, right? Not that it’s yellow mold, or anything, but its a good example of layering of effects (to tempt and put the players in to a tense decision) and nice imagery. There are a couple of other nice features as well, such as same-level stairs.

But, the text is generally not very good. Long read-alouds full of things like “the romo is 20×30 and there are two doors” dominate the descriptions. There’s background information like what the room was once used for and how the cultists used to come in a procession. There’s conclusion words in the read-aloud like “murals show a terrifying religious process” and, in fact, a great deal of emphasis placed on mural descriptions, to little impact on the adventure proper.
IN some cases the read-aloud spoils the fun. A good back-and-forth dm-player style encourages interaction. “There are levers on te wall” invites the players to ask how many and in what position, but that tends to be spoiled by the read-aloud. “There are three levers in u-down-up formation.” LAME!

Further, some things are missing entirely. For example, once read-aloud concentrates on the mural, completing not mentioning the Manes cavorting and gibbering in the room. The cavorting and gibberring are the FIRST thing the party will notice and should take central stage, if you’re going to use read-aloud.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages long, which shows you the first nine rooms. Room five, on the sixth page of the [review, is a good example of the read-aloud.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/239629/DP-3-Narvons-Sinister-Stair?affiliate_id=1892600

By Thom Wilson
ThrowiGames
S&W
Levels 3-5

Dwarves from the village of Whundarn have a serious problem: they have been unable to produce female children for several years. An ancient and strange affliction has returned to the remote mining town after several dozen generations. The town’s Keeper of the Lore has recently discovered the solution to the fertility dilemma, but townsfolk are unable to obtain the necessary ingredients to make the needed elixir. They need champions to attempt the dangerous mission on their behalf, but who will answer the call in time?

This 32 page adventure describes a magical island in a state of winter. CHaracters navigate an evergreen maze and tunnels inside a mountain at its center in order to pick berries from a tree at the top. Page long room descriptions are supplemented by “kill the monster and move on” challenges. It’s also not clear to me at all that the adventure can be completed successfully due to time constraints.

The dwarves, mentioned in the intro, have found a clue in a book. They need three berries that grow on a magic island that appears in the bay once a year for twelve days before disappearing again. That’s all they know. The island appears in three days time. Once on the island the party is met by various winter-themed foes. The main features are an evergreen maze that surrounds a mountain at its center, a mountain full of tunnels/rooms that leads to the summit where the tree is found.

I got a lot of issues with this. Dude that lives on the island automatically knows when you arrive and sends his creatures after you. This is, IMO, a symptom of “D&D is combat. Every encounter should be combat.” I’m sure we’ve all encountered people who think like this. That’s not the D&D I know and love.

The characters are also gimped bu fly, hover, levitate, ad float like spells not working. Because you have to complete the adventure the way the designer wants you to, not through creativity. If you could fly then you’d just zoom to the top and get the berries, cutting out everything in between. This is a sign of a poorly written adventure. Generally, the level is too high is you’re worried about that kind of stuff; write it for a lower level party or change the adventure. Gimping the party is almost never the answer.

I think, though, the biggest issue is the difficulty. You go to the island only knowing about needing the berries. Time on the island is accelerated, meaning that one day on the island is twelve outside of it, leaving the party one day to complete the adventure … and they don’t know that. That’s bad. Without knowing that the party will fail. I mean, they will make decisions that they would NOT make if they knew the actual consequences. Oh, you camp to regain spells? Fail. Without knowing the rules they can’t make meaningful decisions and without meaningful decisions they can’t decide to push their luck and/or fun ensues.

Beyond this, they can’t just pick the berries. If they do then the berries will wither and die. They need special gloves to pick them with. But they don’t know that. And if they do get the gloves then the berries will still rot because they need a special bag to transport them in, that they don’t know about. And they can’t even get in to the mountain without a special key, that they don’t know exists. And they have a day. And the place if stuffed full of monsters. Essentially the party is going to have to COMPLETELY explore the evergreen maze and the tunnels to get everything, which means encountering nearly every creature. In S&W. In one day.

There ARE some rumors that could be learned in dwarf town, and there’s a fairy that might be friendly, in the maze, but its not certain AT ALL that these will be paths that generate the info the party needs. Certainly not the rumors.

Oh, and the dwarf village is inaccessible in winter, but the island appears in mid-winter. Then how do you get to the village to pick up the adventure? And I haven’t even touched on the page long location descriptions.

It does have a nice non-standard magic item or two, with very OD&D vibes to them. And it does have an encounter or two that are nice, like the battle scene between giant squirrels and evil trees. But that’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

This is $2.50 at DriveThru. The preview is only three pages long and shows you nothing of meaning to help you make a purchasing decision.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/239051/Twelve-Days-of-DadiVan–SW2250?affiliate_id=1892600