tenfootpole.org

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.

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

By Lyndsey Stern
Loremasters
5e
Levels 1-3

Take your adventurers on a daunting quest through a dangerous, uncharted cave system to discover the mystery behind the missing city guards. Will they emerge victorious or become yet another group swallowed by the depths of the tunnels?

This fifteen page “adventure” contains one encounter. Perhaps a new low in Page count to encounter ratio?

A page and a half of read-aloud to get in to the adventure. The usual nonsense hook of THIS IS IMPORTANT BUT I DONT HAVE TIME.

I wish I could truly relate the map to you. It’s a battlemap of a 50 foot secret room with two orcs in it a two pits (containing oozes) in a hallway outside. Encounter the pit and then the orcs come out.

This is what passes for an adventure in 2018.

There’s an inn at the beginning with Mr I Cant Be Bothered in it. There are rumors to be had. All in fact based text for the DM. Why is it called the Troll Stew Inn? Not because “A bit of elf a bit of dwarf, a bit of human … just like a tasty troll stew.” No. “Troll Stew Tavern and Inn was humorously named for the fact that it caters to a large variety of different races all mixed together; much like a troll might make its stew.” In character adds flavor. It sets a tone. Sure, it can go too far and there’s a place for DM text, but in rumors? That should be dripping with Voice, not facts.

The text engages in explaining; justifying itself in a game in which elfs shoot fireballs. The pit is covered with a major illusion, etc. In fact, let’s examinejust one of the six paragraphs that take up three quarters of a page to describe the pit:

“Physical interaction with the major image spell effect reveals it to be an Illusion because things can pass through it. A PC that uses its action to examine the image can determine that it is an Illusion with a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check against a DC of 14. If a creature discerns the Illusion for what it is, the creature can see through the image, and its other sensory qualities become faint to the creature.”

It’s a pit covered by an illusion (DC14.)

Describe the pit paragraph. Inspect the floor paragraph. Viewing the pit paragraph. Fall paragraph. Ooze tactics paragraph. Escaping the pit paragraph.

There is no joy.

On the plus side the read-aloud is offset in a color box, making it easy to find and read, and the orcs try to drag unconscious bodies to the pits to toss them in … a nice orcish touch.

I was hoping for more with this. I’m always hoping for more. I’m hoping this is a new writer that just has no experience and has never seen any adventure other than the Adventurer League dreck.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages. The third page is the only one that shows you anything, and that’s just some inn text. It’s joyless.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/241634/Gravelbeards-Quest?affiliate_id=1892600

By Jared Nielsen
Illusionist Investment Group
Generic
Levels 1-3

At the entrance of the Below lies the remnants of an ancient keep which is still fortified despite all odds by abandoned remnants of Dwarven lineages called the Delverr.

This thirty page confusing mess describes a dwarf hold with 21 rooms. A combination of fluff piece on dwarves in this particular setting combined with a description of a keep combined with some kind of adventure. I think. After two read-throughs I’m still not quite sure.

Dwarves are in four factions. There’s a dwarf keep sitting on the only entrance to the underdark. It keeps the monsters inside out. The dwarves are unhappy because the four factions live so close to each other. They ask the party to go inside the underdark and break the magic curse that forces them to man the keep. (Morally, that is, not physically.) I THINK that’s what’s going on. Anyway, that’s the end. They escort you to the entrance to the underdark and the module ends. For ten fucking dollars.

At first I thought I had been ripped off and that this was fluff book. Fluff books are ok, I don’t hate them, but I don’t review them. Then, I figured out it IS an adventure. Barely?

This thing has two nice points going for it. First, it’s a nice capstone/entrance to an adventure locale (the underdark.) Journey in and out and you go through the dwarf keep. It’s that whole mythic underworld thing. Also, in encounter one, the desolate road leading to the keep, there’s a rhyme carved in to the stone walls that repeats over and over again with increasing frequency as you approach the keep. Again, nice mythic underworld touch. The entrance to the underworld (IE: dungeons) SHOULD feel special. The rules are all wrong and every perversion is justified, in the dungeon. The entrance to the underworld sets the mood and gets the party ready for that. That can’t be understated.

That’s it. Nothing else nice to say. Everything else is atrocious.

Massive long read-alouds. MASSIVE amounts of DM text. “As you trod along its path your gaze is drawn to the expansiveness of the desolation around you.” Nope. Read-aloud can’t tell players what their characters think and feel. It can relate an environment to the PLAYERS who will then have their characters react. That’s what good read-aloud does. It’s also short. Remember, people don’t pay attention after three sentences. The DM text is MASSIVE. Multiple paragraphs, endless words … almost one page per room in some places. There is no way in fucking hell you can look a this at the table and run it live during play without massive pauses and interrupts. And almost all of the words present are useless. “While it would be perilous to cross the metal gridwork, especially considering the narrow gaps between oil cauldrons and the heat that is emanating from them, a particularly agile person might be able to make it unscathed.” and “There are always ShieldBorne guards here, not just because it’s their assignment, but because over the centuries this is the place where more fun is to be had than anywhere else.” *sigh*

But, worse, the plot is embedded in the room descriptions. Walk the road in encounter one. Get boiling oil poured on you in encounter three. Wake up in jail in encounter 4a and have wounds tended to you. 4b sees you escorted elsewhere. 7a has a dwarf factions asking you to go on the quest. “Should the party agree to this quest, they will be se- creted out via Stone Phaze through the Western nook under the top landing of the South Parapet Stairs, and smuggled into the Trap door stairs leading down to area 21 – South Basement Runic Guildhall under the cover of darkness.” Why the fuck the rest of the encounters were keyed between this room (seven) and twenty one, I have no idea.

Oh, and it ends with a short story for the next module in the series. Joy

The secret revealed. Novelist.

The text of the adventure betrays that. I was thinking “this is a novelist”, and indeed, it was. They don’t seem to get that adventures are technical writing, not fiction. They fill the pages with words trying to paint a rich tapestry … that inevitable feels forced and keeps the DM form actually using the adventure at the table.

FYI: Generic adventure with QR codes to download stats for different game systems.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is a few pages and just shows you some of the endless background drivial that bears no relation on the “adventure.” That sylvan shit doesn’t even come in to to play ever? https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/242274/Delverrs-Keep?affiliate_id=1892600

By Randy Musseau
Roan Studio
1e
Levels 4-7

… word of adventure and gold has drawn the characters to Crow Gulch A Gnome by the name of Galemon has offered 50 gold pieces, in advance, to adventurers and sell-swords willing to explore the ruins of the ancient tower in search of a silver orb. He will pay another 500 gold upon success. Rumors and fireside tales speak of a growing terror that lies deep beneath the Haunt and the rocky crag upon which it rests, but this has not deterred those hungry for wealth and glory.

This 24 page adventure details a small town (first half) and a about twenty wilderness encounters followed by about ten dungeon encounters (second half.) Small fonts, lack of whitespace and bolding leads to some wall of text and SERIOUS highlighter fodder. The descriptions get long, even if there is a nice realism to them. Far too many negatives for me, but it’s altogether terrible.

You drudge up a cliffside, having wilderness encounters along the roadway, then get to the tower and explore the dungeons underneath. Along the way are a couple of expanded wilderness areas: a harpy lair and dragon crevisse, if you choose to go off path to chase down some fleeing monsters for their lairs. Inside the dungeon you find a sorceress … turns out the gnome hiring you was ruse and she uses him to find strong souls to sacrifice in order to summon a demon. So, while a test/challenge adventure, it doesn’t feel artificial like those usually do.

That is the great strength of this adventure. The encounters feel natural and things seem to fit as a part of the natural world. It’s not because the toilets and fresh water were provided for. Rather the text gives that natural feel and also a kind of ‘in the moment’ sort of vibe. You find prisoners almost dead, or raving madmen who rushing down a narrow cliffside trail … who slip and fall off the edge. Harpies and dragons feed, creatures are doing things. More than that though it has that natural feel that the best MRP products did.

That does, however, come at a steep price. The font is small. Whitespace is sparse and bolding/offsets/etc non-existent. This text is THICK and hard to wade through. This all combines to make the text something torturous and I can’t see how you can run this at a table easily. Highlighter? Sure.

It engages in repetition to pad things out, with the same details being repeated. It has motivations and background and history embedded in the text. It engages in … definitions! Roblins are playing dones(dice.) There is a jacinth (orange gemstone.) Folks, if you’re gonna use a two dollar word then don’t explain it. Give your readers some credit. Otherwise 7th grade me will never pronounce Chaos as if it rhymes with Taos.

One of the harpy lair rooms starts with “Large Cavern. The ceiling is a dome of sharp stalactites and filth covers the floor. A ledge along the right wall is covered in piles of twigs, rags, fur and clothing, each arranged in a nest-like fashion.” That’s not so bad. Relatively short. Not a paragon of evocativeness, but better than most. Then come harpy stats, inline, then comes the searching, inline, all in the same single paragraph, with comments. “Searching the nests (8 in total) will yield …” (four more sentences, including telling us what a jacinth is.)

It engages in this behaviour in a variety of ways, over and over again. At one point you encounter a will-o-the-wisp trying to lure a victim in . It has in it: “This is a trap. The boggart is trying to lure victims in” and then at the end of the encounter everything is justified. “The Boggart is an immature Will-o-wisp. It is building strength by feeding off the essence of its victims. It can appear in humanoid form or as small and bright hovering lights. The net is old and useless. The crackling was coming from the Boggart itself as it attempted to maintain its current form.)” Well, no shit to both.

But, the core of the encounter is great. A tony writhing and twisting figure trapped under a small net crackling with blue electricity. And if you watch long enough you can see it change to tiny hairy man, giving you a hint something is not right. It’s great little encounter.

Most of the encounters here are great. People slipping off cliffs. Harpies luring you off cliffs (cliffs are a feature of the wilderness part of the adventure.) They are great. They just get ruined by the fact I don’t want to slog through the text.

That’s all commentary on the back twelve pages or so of the adventure. The first half describes the region and town. In the same, if not more, detail. Lots of motivations for the butcher’s wife to stay in town, and so on. It feels more like a writers guide for a Tv series than it does something to use at the table.Way WAY too much detail, and a focus on things not needed.

It’s not a bad adventure, it’s just not good. Or, rather, it’s a pain to dig through. It feels like the setting should be pulled out for a fluff book, while the text proper needs to be pruned back a lot to remove all of the extraneous stuff, and then some whitespace and bolding, etc added for improved scanability. Also, I might buy a fluff book on the region, but it also needs to focus more on game ability rather than why the baker chooses to stay in town … unless there’s a hook in there.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview can give you a sense of the font size and density of the text, but not really the encounters, etc.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/152482/Crow-Gulch?affiliate_id=1892600

By Matt Franklin & Richard Thomas
Onyx Path Publishing
5e
Level 1

For centuries, titans bestrode the world, colossal heads and shoulders lost in the clouds, carelessly smashing and crushing all beneath. When the youngest of them had enough and declared war on their ancient parents, even the land itself suffered. These scars of the Divine War, which ended less than 200 years ago, have still not healed. One such scar is the Chasm of Flies, a rent in the earth created when the titan Spiragos the Ambusher was smote down by one of the young gods, Vangal the Ravager. Now, the Chasm is inhabited by spider-eye goblins and their spider allies, but it is also thought to be the resting place of powerful artifacts from that elder age.

This thing is a fucking mess.

This 45 page adventure is extremely linear, and, in the modern way, has so much text that it is impossible to follow and/or pick out the parts of the text that you need to run it. It’s got a good mythology behind it, and the dungeon setting is nice, but none of that justifies the excess for the actual content.

Forty five pages? Well, The actual “dungeon” doesn’t start until page twenty five, and the appendices with new monsters start at page thirty five, so you get a ten page dungeon. That contains maybe … eight encounters? Asides, advice, history, backstory, repetition … and it all works with a kind free-flow description style that bucks the room/key format … making the entire thing nigh incomprehensible.

The gimmick here is that, of the three magic items you are looking for, you are actually adventuring inside one of them. A titan’s hand, inside his gauntlet, is embedded in the earth and that’s the pit/chasm you descend down into. Nice setting, with metal cave walls, old bone columns, etc. It’s nice, as is the titan war backstory/setting.

But fuck me man. There’s A LOT of read aloud. And it’s all in a small italic font, making it a pain to read. The goal is to help the DM not make their eyes worse. If I have to hold it up to my nose, instead of laying it flat on the table, it wasn’t a good design decision.

The linearity is stupid. “Here are three optical encounters the party can have on the way to the pit.” They are all just combats, nothing more. And there’s a fourth provided, a kind of hit & run necromancer to dog the parties tails. Again, all optional. The actual dungeon is just more of the same. On the way down encounter this, then this, then this. And it’s all fucking combat. You might as well be playing Descent.

The worst part is the free form layout. It’s linear, but without an encounter/key format. It’s all “ then this and then this” and mixes advice, history and backstory in to the text. It’s IMPOSSIBLE to figure out which area is being described, transitions, etc. It’s one of the most stream of conscious styles I’ve ever seen.

I loathe modern design. “At your discretion this body may have any treasure you wish to give the party.” Well no fucking shit sherlock. How about you add some value and put something on that body? This whole “optical combat” and “freeform treasure” design style is loathsome. Provide some fucking value for christs sake.

This extends to the adventure format proper. There are no real maps and the adventure essentially relies on skill checks. Want to find a trapdoor down to the next level? Make a skill check to find one on your current level. Just roll the fucking dice and master the combat rules; that’s all there is to this adventure.

It does have a decent synopsys, which I wish more adventure had, and the new magic items are decent, leaning toward the low-powered artifact end of the scale. They don’t quite feel wonderous, but they are a cut above the normal slop and include notes on how to destroy them. That lends an air of mystery to them, which is what magic items SHOULD have.

This is free at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. They don’t really reveal what the adventure proper is like. At best you have to discern that it takes six pages to get to the hooks. That’s not good.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/171523/Gauntlet-of-Spiragos-free-5E-OGL-adventure?affiliate_id=1892600