Under Ruined Onm

Posted on November 6, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Joseph A. Mohr
Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Levels 5-7

Nearly seventy five years ago the greatest bard ever known in the dry land of Zanzia disappeared. Anton Deangelo was a hero famous for some of the greatest songs in Zanzian history. In verse, countless dragons he slew, dozens of giants he felled, and hundreds of demons he put to the sword! Outside of the world of song, he and his band of adventurers gathered significant riches and looted many dungeons all over the land. Then suddenly…he was gone. The last time he was heard from he and his merry band were outfitting an expedition to explore the ruined city of Onm in search of the lost Mandolin of Duaree the Mad. The Onm ruins are on the edge of the Blood River and the Dragon Teeth Mountains and no other ruins fabled enough to attract Deangelo are known to be in that area.

This seventeen page adventure details a three-level dungeon with about fifty rooms in it. The maps are basic and the writing fact-based, but it is full of classic elements like rotating statues, fountains to drink from, and riddles. Workmanlike, is a good description.

Travel to the ruins is nine days by foot or six days by horse, we’re told. It’s abstracted, since there’s no region/wilderness map. Wandering checks should be “made times a day with a 1 in 12 chance.” Yes, it’s left out. Worry not though! There are FOUR PAGES of wandering monster encounters. During the day on the road. During the night on the road. During the day off the road. During the night off the road. Each gets a little description, but they are generally not worth it. The ogres are true brutes of their kind and fight to the death. Joy.

That is, in a nutshell, the issue with this adventure. It tends to go on about the mundane without really telling you anything. If the ogres had a captive, or bargained, or almost ANY extra detail then the additional words would be worth it. But they don’t, and the words are just filler telling us nothing. A plague upon the industry, it is.

The dungeon, proper, is three levels. The creatures appear to live next door to each other, but in isolation. No factions, no how they got in to a room behind three other monsters. Look, I’m not searching for a fully blown dungeon ecology with entrances/exists, water, food, etc, I hate that stuff. But SOME design seems like it could be good?

Room 2 is “a large room with a 20’ ceiling. A pack of volts recently discovered a way in to the dungeon and taken up residence.” Well, that’s certainly evocative. A “large” room. Oh boy. The imagery runs rampant!

Most of the rooms in the dungeon are a combination of that ogre description and the volt room. A VERY basic room description and a very basic/generic monster description. There is sometimes a riddle or trick, like a rotating statue, or a treasure under a loose stone. Even those, I dare say, are not described very well.

But there ARE classic ideas present. Rotate a statue to point to a secret door to unlock it. A fountain you can drink from and a ghost king who can give you a wish. Great ideas! Implemented in a manner that is completely straightforward.

This is $14 on DriveThru. The preview is six pages. Most of it is the wandering monster tables but you do get to see room one and part of room two on the last page of the preview. ROom two is pretty typical, but a preview that showed one of the tricks would have been nice also, to get a feel for how the workmanlike writing translates in one of those rooms.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/221988/Advanced-Adventures-37-Under-Ruined-Onm?affiliate_id=1892600

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The Lost Temple of Sharess

Posted on November 4, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Richard Reed
Self-published
5e
Level 1

Beneath the home of a wealthy merchant named Haroun, a floor suddenly collapses, revealing the entrance to a deep, dark cavern. But judging from the screams and laughter coming from below, this is more than a common cave. Will you conquer the long-forgotten horrors it holds? Will you discover fabulous treasures in its pitch-black passageways? And most importantly: will you learn the merchant’s own secrets before it’s too late?

This 32 pages adventure details a sixteen room ancient temple found underneath someone’s basement. Mountains of read-aloud and DM text, each room being a page or more long, hide a basic dungeon with tricks, traps, and classic features.

The intro is 8 pages, describing useless backstory that will never come up during play. The read-aloud for each room is about two paragraphs long, followed by reams and reams of DM text. For room two this is a page and a half of DM text. This is way WAY too much. Players hate read-aloud. They hate monologues. They hate not being able to PLAY. Wasn’t there an article by WOTC that players lose interest after three sentences? Which is three times shorter than the read-aloud in the rooms in this.

Then there’s the DM text. Almost everything feels like padding. “As the players enter, this is what they see [read-aloud.] Really? Did you really need that? “The beetles are giant fire beetles.” We know, you’ve told us twice so far. An aside tell us “It might be fun to make the party guess what the liquid is, but in fact, it’s just water–holy water.” A paragraph is used to tell us that writing at the bottom of a basin has the name of the Sharess, the temple goddess. This happens a bajillion times in the adventure and HAS NOT IMPACT. Who the temple belongs to is irrelevant, the information is never needed. And even if it were we don’t need to be told multiple times OR the explanation to take a paragraph.

More is not better. More gets in the way of the DM. The goal is to communicate information evocatively and effectively to a DM scanning the text as the players walk in to the room. Data like “once there was a statue here, but it was removed” is just useless trivia that makes things harder for the DM to run the adventure.

Which is too bad because it’s not altogether a terrible adventure. Each room has a little mini-map at the top. The basic guts have things like two NPC’s hiding from the monsters and who will join your group if you find them, or a holy water basin, or skeletons in a sarcophagus that will animate, with the sarcophagus in a alcove. Bodies in the bottom of a pit trap. There are A LOT of good elements present to work with … but it feels like the text is fighting you tooth and nail to figure out what’s going on, simply because of the wordiness.

This thing needs a HARD edit, getting rid of almost 2/3rd’s of the words. The remaining text would then be relevant to the adventure and easy to focus on, as the DM. Then you’d have a basic dungeon exploration.

This is PWYW on DriveThu, with the price currently at $4. The preview is about six pages long, and the last page shows you the first page of the 1.5 page long “room 2.” It’s a good representative example of the type of writing in the adventure.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222836/The-Lost-Temple-of-Sharess?affiliate_id=1892600

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Dungeon Full of Monsters

Posted on November 1, 2017 by Bryce Lynch

By Johnstone Metzger
Red Box Vancouver
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-

EDIT: The morning after writing this review I feel guilty. MAN, I’m a hard ass these days! The first 10% of this was a turn off and some of the rooms lack purpose. If you can deal with that, and the modular nonsense, then it’s a good dungeon.

This is a 352 digest-page modular megadungeon with five levels and 51 different little dungeon map areas to connect together. About 180 of those pages describe the dungeon with the first thirtyish being into data and the last ~140 or so describing all of the new monsters. Special attention has been paid to usability and art, especially for the monsters. The modularity doesn’t really add anything and a few too many rooms come off as “just throwing some rando shit at the wall.” Still, this is a great effort and is hovering around a C+/B-, and you could justify a purchase based on it being a monster manual alone if you were in to such things.

Most of the layout of this book is great. It uses a “facing pages” layout os the map is primarily on one page and the encounter keys are on the facing page. In addition to room numbers, red lines are sometimes drawn from the room description to the room on the map, or small little notes appear on the map. This is GREAT design, putting a lot of what a DM needs right in front of their face, and is a great alternative to the “map on the DM screen and encounter keys on the table” format. Note that both put the map right in front of the DM’s face as well as the encounter keys.

It has a couple of other tricks up its sleeves as well, when it comes to usability. Here’s the description of the second room:
2. Worship Hall
This hall is empty. A secret door at the bottom of the stairs is camouflaged by tiles.
• Black and white tiled floors and walls. • Defaced statues of forgotten gods.
• Doric columns. • Smells like dust. • Very high, fan vaulted ceiling.

Note the use of the bullets to communicate impressions of the room. It’s a fast and effective way to communicate a general vibe and let the DMs brain fill in the rest. I REALLY like this format of communicating information. Note also the focused and short DM text that appears above the bullets. It all gets in and out fast and is easy to scan and then summarize/communicate to the party. This is EXACTLY what a room description is supposed to do. The text also has cross-references to direct the DM to specific page numbers for more information, an invaluable addition to usability.

Not all of the rooms use this format and, frankly, I think the ones that don’t are missing out and come off as weaker descriptions. Further, that description for room two is a bit generic in places and could use a second pass. “Very” is a very bad word. 🙂 Towering, cyclopean, there are lots of replacements that could replace the generic “very high,” I’m not overly fond of the abstraction in “forgotten gods” either, but at least the gods are not “very forgotten.”

The text also uses bold to call attention to certain words. “A glow and be ceen from further inside the cave.” Another effective technique, although I could again quibble a bit on its use. The bolding overloaded a bit too much. Keywords and concepts as well as creatures are bolded. In a couple of room statues are bolded. “The two headed diva statue is against a …” This being D&D … that could be a monster. Is it a monster? You don’t actually know until you go check the back of the book for the monster list. By bolding both monsters and keywords you sometimes confuse. A different treatment for monsters, sticking a ‘*’ in front of monsters, some other technique, etc could have been used to help with the confusion.

Monsters are very good and treasure pretty decent also. Monsters get either a full digest page description with art on the facing page or a one page description with the art integrated to the page. “Savage beasts tearing limbs from their victims and blubbering like children as they go about their assaults”, so says the first line of the Blubbering Manglers. Note that the focus here, the very first line, is directly applicable to using the monster at the table. It’s not some generic background/history/origin shit, but rather something that the DM can use AT THE TABLE while running the creature. The art for the monsters has a certain Low Life/Andy Hopp vibe which I find quite evocative, it again doing a great job of lending impressions of monsters. The number of +1 swords is on the low side while the “200# rhinocorn statues” and gold chains decorated with tiny rhinocorns” are on the high side. A lot of the magic swords, in particular, have that OD&D “and they do something else” quality to them. +1/+5 vs dragons, and so on. The magic items could use a little more work to bring them up to the monsters & mundane treasure lequalityvels, but they are better than generic book items.

The encounters are hit and miss. The Ghost Pool is made up of the ghosts of people who died in a certain area. Pretty cool. Even cooler? There’s a little section on what happens when you take a drink! (Why the hell do you think there were so many wish items in the early versions? In case drinking from the ghost pool was a bad idea you could reverse it!) Those sorts of things are great, but for each of those that are present there’s at least another room that seems … random. A pool of blood randomly shows up in a room. A strange smell. There’s a bit too much emphasis on window dressing There was a platonic example of this in the Dwimmermount draft, a room with two ghost chess players. Just two ghost images playing chess. You couldn’t interact with them in any way and they contained no clues or mysteries to solve. You can get away with a little of that in a dungeon but too much and I think the players start to not care anymore. And there’s a non-trivial amount of that in this dungeon. There’s a statue and if you touch it then you see the statue out of the corner of your eye at random intervals over the next two days. That’s it. Nothing else.

This extends in to the wandering monsters. While most are just names of creatures there is also a “special” list. “A pair of resh severed hands.” Well, ok I guess. How does that advance play? There are some decent examples that can drive play, like a local child lost in the dungeon, but they are all rather weak.

In fact, I’d say the entire thirty-ish page lead up to the dungeon-proper is weak. How to read the stat blocks, the wanderers, how to use the modular nature, and some friends and foes to spice things up.

The friends and foes, a kind of combination of potential hooks and things to spice up the non-dungeon aspects, are a good example of what I’m now calling abstracted content. It’s not actually aimed at the players. The church of law is just a generic LG church without any specifics. Or Mary the lizard wants you to go get some thing, and if you look in to her then she’s actually been hired by (a random table.) The content isn’t actually aimed at play. The church is generic, Mary’s backgrounds CAN be used to expand play, if you put some work in to it, but it’s not directed, specifically, at play. They lack the specificity that would allow the DM to, on the fly, insert them in to the game.

The “modular” nature is the weird part. I have no idea why this is modular. All that does is confuse things; it doesn’t add anything at all. Some fine person should hack up a permanent version.

This is an not a bad megadungeon … it’s just not stellar. I’m not a fan of the supporting material in the first thirty pages, but fuck it, you can just ignore it. It feels like a generic add-on to the main content (the dungeon & monsters) anyway. The organization of this is top notch, are are the monsters. The encounters proper could use a little work, as could some of the descriptions. It could do a better job providing a summary of what’s going on in the dungeon, specifically. It’s REALLY large for an on-the-fly figuring out of stuff.) When the encounters are good they are really good, and the rest of the content, rando window dressing or not, isn’t too offensive. It WILL fit the needs of a lot of people, it’s just not best of the best. It’s one of those I-Wish-Everything-Were-At-Least-This-Good.

This is $15 for the PDF at DriveThru, with hard/soft available for ~$50. The preview is quite long and shows you the (not useful) background, several dungeon sections, and several monsters. Note the great use of color and notes on those maps and some of those great monster illustrations.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/221032/Dungeon-Full-of-Monsters?affiliate_id=1892600

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Fever Swamp

Posted on October 30, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Luke Gearing
Melsonian Arts Council
LotFP/All D&D
Level?

The air is moist. The moisture mixes with your sweat — the heat is relentless. The drone of insects gives you headaches, and the fever from the infected wounds has left you delirious. Your raft is damaged, and there are spirits in the trees. … You’ve only been here for three days.

This is a 32 page (half appendices) hex crawl in a swamp with about fourteen encounters. It’s evocative and creative and FEELS like a swamp adventure. Well organized and almost dream-like, it presents a weird vision of a swamp in which nearly every aspect feels right. A few encounters suffer from their brevity and a devotion to format, but otherwise this is full of stuff you can work with. It’s more like an actual “module”, a place that simply exists without plot that the DM can twist to their will.

The swamp is 8×12 hexes each 18 miles wide, with fourteen encounters and a robust wanderers table to keep things moving. The hooks are covered in one paragraph and are a little better than most. In particular, there’s someone in the swamp, a scholar, with a bounty on his head. Searching the swamp for him gets the party moving in and through it and discovering other objects. There’s also an oracle, which I’ve always found great for command words for wands, where’s the hand of vecna, etc.

The cover pretty accurately depicts the swamp. There’s an oracular succubus (more like an invisible nymph, I’d say) , a suicidal swamp witch, scumboggle hives, stilt walkers, candle thieves, and so on. This thing is hitting on all cylinders when it comes to interesting and evocative encounter names. The candlthieves are the spirits of lost children desperate for a light to lead them home, pacified with sweet treats. They steal lights and try not to fight. Sweet! The head of the Ghost Olm (?!) can be worn and used to lie once to any entity which will always believe the lie no matter the evidence. A) Nice thing to go looking for and B) Sweet ass magic item!) It does this over and over and over again. The swamp witch is kind of fused to a tree, and begs for death, guarded by demon familiars who want to keep her alive … but she knows everything about the swamp and will trade the info for death. These are all strong, strong ideas.

It can also be inconsistent in places. There’s an encounter with “Hunger, the Crocodile” that has had a spirit fused with it. It’s just a giant croc though, nothing special about the encounter at all. That feels out of place given the gameable extras that most encounters have. There’s also a few encounters that feel too short. There’s a small village, up on stilts, that is less than half a page (not counting NPC’s) and that’s digest pages at that. Likewise a fallen monastery is half a digest page … though there’s a huge fungus colony in the flooded catacombs. Both places are a little too large for the more … abstracted? encounter descriptions that they get. The format works great, except when too short or the encounter too ‘big’.

And the village … I don’t know. The NPC’s feel a little disconnected from it. More like disconnected pieces than a whole. The NPC motivations feel a bit more abstracted; making them more action oriented, toward the party, would have helped here a lot. This strengthens the theme of the larger, more complex areas being the weaker areas and/or being hampered by the half-page-ish encounter. (There’s a dungeon that spans several pages that doesn’t have this problem though. I suspect it’s because it spans several pages.)

Still, it does a good job. It cross-references the rumor table with the focus of the rumor, letting you fill in details. It’s easy to scan almost all of the encounters. It has a great short paragraph on describing the misery of the swamp. The swamp people are organized in to small tribes and it has a very evocative table on making them weird. Almost like shudder mountain for swamp … if a little weirder.

This is $8 on DriveThru. You can see good examples of cross-references in the text and rumor table on page two of the preview, with a great overview of swamp misery on pages three as well as those great wandering monster encounter names.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/224803/Fever-Swamp?affiliate_id=1892600

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5e – Death in the Cornfields

Posted on October 28, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


by Merric Blackman
5e
Level 4

A scarecrow in a field can be a little unnerving, but what if the scarecrow is actually a young man close to death? Why has he been left to die, and what dark secrets do the farmlands hold?

Now that Dungeon Magazine is over I’m moving over to Pathfinder and/or 5e on the day we make sacrificer to Saturn. And if you’re a purist who doesn’t like it then piss off; I deserve a reward for all the suffering I endured in Dungeon. Although … I’m not sure why reviewing 5e/Pathfinder is a reward. Can’t you get an Enduring Hardship reward in Tales of the Arabian Nights?

This is a four page horror adventure, with one page being the title page. It could be one page. There’s almost certainly not enough here for an evenings play, but this were a road encounter or a wandering monster event in another adventure then I’d be gushing over it.

The party finds a teen tied up like a scarecrow in a field, relating that his possessed parents did it after he came home from friends. Lookin in on the friends finds a bloody scene with them dragged from their beds and decapitated. The parents are grief stricken when confronted, eventually perhaps noting that their son and his friends had been bitten by a vampire. Then the kid turns in to a vampire at sunset and tries to kill everyone.

“We left our son to die with the sun and decapitated his friends” is absolutly horror. The situations and scenes speak of terrible things and the imagery supports it well. Bloody footprints trail off in to a muddy trail that leads through a wheat field to the parents home … wheat fields as far as the eye can see, reinforcing the isolation and desolation.

Merric’s writing is good, even most of his read-aloud. “The afternoon is cold, wet and drizzle.” I think we’ve all suffered through one of THOSE afternoons. In fact, here’s his opening read-aloud in toto: “The afternoon is cold, overcast and drizzly as you make your way along the road. Around you are fields of wheat, stretching as far as the eye can see. The clothes of an ill-made scarecrow flap in the cold breeze.” Short, evocative. It doesn’t tell the party they are miserable, it represents data which will then cause them to think they are miserable. It doesn’t tell them they are in a desolate land. It shows them endless fields of wheat and lets THEM draw the isolation and desolation conclusion. Tis is quite strong writing.

And then he goes and FUCKS IT UP. Here’s the second and last paragraph: “Suddenly, you become aware of a moan coming from the scarecrow. Looking more closely, you realise that it’s a young man tied to a stake. What do you do?” That’s the same old generic bullshit read-aloud that we’ve all come to know and loathe. The word “Suddenly” has never been used well in read-aloud. Never. Ever. Have I read everything? No, obviously not, but I can assure you it is the mark of an amateur. Likewise the “Way do you do?” nonsense. It reminds me of a Choose Your Own adventure book written at a third grade level. When the text addresses the players the read-aloud sucks balls. And I don’t mean that in a good way.In another read-aloud section there’s a hovel with the door standing open. The text ends “Has something happened here?” If the read-aloud were good the players would all be thinking and asking each other that. By telegraphing it you break that sense of player accomplishment of figuring out the tony mystery of the door being opening signifying something happened.

There’s some gimpy shit in the adventure. Kid is left out in thew sun to burn to death, but the sky is too overcast to impact him. Hrumph. The parents saw the signs of a vampire attack, but its all healed by the time the party see him strung up as a scarecrow. Hrumph. I’ll accept his bad memory of the evening before, especially if Merric had put a big lump on his head, but the overcast and healing are pushing the suspension of disbelief just a little too far.

It’s a grim adventure. Parents make a terrible choice and are heartbroken over it. The bloody scene at the friends house. Potentially killing a teen who has not yet turned, knowing that he WILL turn, or at least suspecting it. Your friend was just bit by a zombie. Do you let them turn or kill them now? A hard choice in every zombie movie. (Except Fear the Walking Dead, where they are all too stupid to live, and Walking Dead, where your friend dies of boredom first.)

I take exception with the length. This could easily be one page long and I’d pay the same price for it. It’s padded with that sixth grade D&D writing style iwhich assumes every DM is fucktard with no ability to add 1+1. Some more personality for the boy, the dead friends, the parents, all would have gone a long LONG way to adding some lives role-play to the adventure. In the Good Place tv show Janet the hologram pulls out a sonogram and say “I’m pregnant!” in order to keep someone from resetting her. That’s the kind of stuff that would have been nice as details for the parents or kid. They across as just generic commoners and that’s too bad; its a miss to add yet another emotional heart tug to the adventure.

Backstory about the family once being prosperous and thus they once had a large nice farm and now that they are smaller its in ill repair is useless. It adds nothing.

Nice imagery. Brings the horror. Needs to be written for a fucking adult instead of ESL sixth graders.

It’s $1 at DMsGuild. There’s no preview. No previews make me sad. 🙁
http://www.dmsguild.com/product/180108/Death-in-the-Cornfields

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The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia

Posted on October 25, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


by Greg “I wrote Barrowmaze” Gillespie
Labyrinth Lord
Level 1-

The lost city of Archaia – an ancient ruin sunken into the earth – lies deep in the badlands. In recent years, caravans from Eastdale have come under attack from orcs, goblins, and worse. Some say these blood-thirsty warbands have made lairs in the deep caves and ruins. Sill others say the ancient halls are filled with magnificent treasures left by the Archaians. Are you brave (or foolish) enough to delve The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia?

This is a 300 page megadungeon, in the form of a Caves of Chaos style ravine. There are about 150 pages of room keys spanning … 50 dungeon complexes? with about a one hundred page appendix detailing monsters, treasure, etc, and about a forty page introduction descripting the region, main town/villages, wanderers, etc. The closest comparison is B2/Caves of Chaos, if there were three times as many caves, the caves were each three times larger, and the evil temple guys were greatly expanded. Much like Stonehell and Barrowmaze, there are very strong maps supporting the exploratory play and a kind of “Generic D&D with just a little extra” vibe to the place. It’s strongest when being specific and breaking the B2 mold and weakest when it emulates the worst parts of B2 … like generic elements and rooms with only humanoid monsters.

I’m going to compare this adventure, repeatedly, to B2/Caves of Chaos. That’s unfair, because it’s more than that. The near universal familiarity with B2, and similarities to this adventure, will give most readers a firmer understanding of what to expect. These days I tend to concentrate on the good parts of an adventure and then detail the bad parts. In this case I’m going to cover things a little more linearly, as they appear in the adventure.

Which means the regional data and town/village data are the first thing I’m going to cover. There’s a little background data and summary data present, but I’m going to ignore that for now. The first forty pages or so are a combination of regional overview, town/village overview, factions and wandering monsters, and a brief word on hex crawl and some related general “dungeon” features. This part is, frankly, boring. It falls in to a kind of Bog Standard Fantasy description category. The towns, villages, and various regional features get about a paragraph each and nothing really stands out. “This village has fewer religious restrictions than the main town.” and “This village has fewer religious restrictions than than that other one.” A dwarf hold with a few dwarves in it. “Men and dwarves get along in this village in order to support each other.” Nearly all of it is generic almost to the abstract. It’s like the adventures that post food prices in their taverns … the detail that is presented is not engaging. “Bob can make quarrels but prefers not to.” Yes, you can use this. But “Bob is vocal about his loathing of crossbow users, although he serves them.” paints a different picture of the establishment that is easier to wrap your head around during play. There’s a new pantheon of deities presented, but they offer little solid quirks on which to hang your hat, mostly just being retheming of the usual suspects. “The Red Thicket” has a bunch of giant trees that live a long time, giant owls, rumors of treants … if you pause and think for a moment then you’ll get the idea. But the writing is so … bland? that it just doesn’t inspire you and make your mind leap and want to run it. It’s not that it’s bad, or that it’s too terribly long, but it’s just so inoffensive and unspecific that it lacks and evocative power without putting in some decent effort.

This sort of aggressive genericism is something I’ve seen before, particularly with regard to regional data and deities, as it is in this. It has a close step-sibling in the “generic room description” that is frequently found in adventure. The bedroom that tells you it has a bed, and a chest with four socks, two pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants and the bed has sheets and a pillow on it. IE: a normal bedroom. Or IE: a normal harvest god. Or IE: a normal medieval village. We’re not paying for that, but rather the new & noteworthy. Actionable, gameable content that drives play.

This is a good segway in to the content of the actual dungeons. There are a lot, around fifty, I’d say. And the maps are, almost always, quite excellent. Lot’s of variety, good terrain features on the maps, nice layouts that support exploration. There is, however, something missing. Content.

Generalizations are a hell of a thing, but my overall impression was not one of excitement. The first major dungeon is the kobold lair. A small sentry room with two kobolds. A small sentry room with four kobolds. A guardroom for the nearby stairwell (4 kobolds.) A small guard chamber (2 kobolds.) The kobolds have grown a shrieker. Another room is “two kobolds.” Each of those is the actual description of a real room, all from one of the room description pages. This is true minimal keying.

There are bits and pieces of actual content. “A large natural column has been modi ed to include a secret door with a small claustrophobic stairwell down to Level 2 (#11)” and “A human skeleton lay prone on the ground half buried in sand It points towards the northwest.” Those begin to show promise, but again are pretty minimal and, while it’s something to work with, could be much more evocative in the same amount of space.

Stonehell was minimal, but supported by the dungeon overviews, something Archaia notable doesn’t have. Stonehell also filled its rooms full of THINGS and interactivity where Archaia just lists monsters. Even the Castle of the Mad Archmage tried for little vignettes. This is closer to the Mad Demigod’s Castle, or B2 proper. I know there’s a market for this in some circles, but I find that style lacking. Just a little more tweaking and something more evocative could be obtained without really loosing the vibe of it being minimal keyed.

There are other things that tick me off, with some organization choices. The Gem shop has a crier that shouts “Gems for gold!” …but that’s not in the keyed description for the village. Instead that bit of info is found in a separate NPC description late on, for the owner of the business. That makes no sense, it’s counter-intuitive. Likewise in one cave a wyvern mommy comes to aid of her young … but you don’t know that by looking at the room description of the young which occurs before mom’s description. SO you encounter the young first, slaughter them, then you go to mom’s room and the DM reads the description and says “oh shit, I guess she’s not coming to their aid now.” It’s not written with play in mind. There’s a reference someplace else to a staff headpiece being needed … but no reference to where it is. As a player I get the staff, figure out I need the headpiece, go home and cast Legend Lore or find object or something, and then the DM fumbles with the 300-page book for an hour trying to find where the thing is.

It’s a lot more aggressively generic than I would like. Book treasure that could be straight out of B2, a weird long description of one orc tribe, meh NPC descriptions, town & regional & god descriptions, perfunctory hooks, lack of location names on the regional map, forcing double lookups.

But the map DOES have a “Forbidden Zone” on it, and a travel time matrix between location is provided. And there are over 100 great “special” entries on the wanderers table and there is at least some mention of tribal factions … even if I don’t think it’s really enough to generate the goal: gameable situations.

And, in spite of my bitching about cross-references, it DOES have good summaries. The book is summarized, the chapters are summarized … you generally know what something is about and what to expect in a section of text, a critical feat in a 300 page booklet.

I think I’m disappointed with what could have been. A hex crawl through a badland, with tribal lairs and lot of other dungeons is a GREAT idea. The maps are WONDERFUL. Portions of the adventure, like the special wanderers are good. The genericism of the supporting information and the very minimally keying of the encounters is disappointing. Sure, there are exceptions, and in particular the non-humanoid lair dungeons are much better.

It’s still an impressive work and I’m keeping it. I’ll even probably stick it on my list, since I’m fond of megadungeons. But it’s almost certainly on the wrong side of a line for me. Which begs the question why I’m not more down on it given my comments. I don’t know. The premise and maps are VERY good.

The PDF is $35 on DriveThru. I can’t find a preview; I wish there was one for, say, the kobold dungeon, along with the map.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/218157/The-Forbidden-Caverns-of-Archaia?affiliate_id=1892600

You might be able to poke around on the kickstarter page for more photos and description, but, again, there’s not much description. Although I do think the art piece is pretty indicative of the environment you are getting yourselves in to.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/843284272/barrowmaze-the-forbidden-caverns-of-the-archaia

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 18 Comments

Dance of the Medusa

Posted on October 23, 2017 by Bryce Lynch

medusa with poison snakes vector in eps10

by Joseph A Mohr
Old School Role Playing
OSRIC
Levels 4-7

In southern Zanzia chaos reigns as a new cult is growing stronger and threatening the powers that be. This cult worships a Snake Godess and her temple is believed to be in the swamps of southern Zanzia. Heros are needed to investigate this cult and temple and put a stop to this threat to the kingdom.

My apologies Joseph Mohr. I just sat in coach on a five hour flight to San Francisco and I feel like I’ve been hit hard lately with unfocused writing.

This temple raid is 31 pages long a describes an evil temple with seventeen rooms on two levels It’s almost entirely a pure hack, although there might be some imposter for at the start to get in. It appears to be boring, large, and uses a writing style that frustrates me to no end. It’s just yet another also-ran obfuscating any good material to come out.

There’s a wand, the description tells us that it appears to be made of stone. A bed appears to be comfortable. A statue appears to that of an adventurer in plate mail. Everything in this adventure Appears To Be. That writing style drives me nuts. It is or it isn’t. These are just weasel words used to pad out an adventure. Unfocused writing. It clogs up the text. It’s the difference between “There is a conformable bed” vs “There is a bed in the room and it appears to be comfortable.” These are miles apart in terms of providing a resource for the DM to use.

The wand “can only be used by magic-users.” Well, yes, that is the normal state of the world. “Listening at the door you hear no sound”. Again, which is what one would expect for an empty room. “There is a door to the west and a passage to the north” … exactly like the map shows. A dresser has normal clothes in it … exactly as one would expect. It has two shirts and one pair of pants and a pair of socks. This is weak writing. Instead of telling us what is new or special or interesting it concentrates on telling us what we would normally expect. Does a room description need to tell us that the sun will rise tomorrow? Does it need to tell us in every empty room that we will hear no sounds when listening at the doors? !!THERES. NO. FUCKING. REASON. FOR. ANY. OF. THIS!! We’re not paying for an adventure in order to be told about the sock & underwear content of drawers, or that there are no orcs, demons, devils, giant rats in the room.

Instead, I went out with a boy who died. Errr, I mean, Instead the descriptions need to concentrate on evocative writing that assist the DM in quickly scanning the text for details ACTUALLY NEEDED during play. You know what’s not evocative? The word “large.” One room, the main temple, has a large alter, a large fountain and a large idol in it. Wonderful. Are they large? Large is boring fucking word. A towering idol, a shadowy alter, a mist-filled fountain, these invoke feelings in the DM which they can then transfer to the players … the goal of evocative room descriptions. (Note, alters should not be vile. Vile is a conclusion. Tell us WHY. Don’t TELL us the alter vile, instead SHOW us why the alter is vile. Fresh babies impaled on candlesticks communicates vile much better than just telling us its vile.)

All of this results in a verbose and boring room text. The aforementioned alter room is one and a half pages long. There’s a column of text to describe a trap where a car falls from the ceiling. A paragraph of text on a needle trap.

“The desk has a drawer to it which is locked and trapped. Should anyone attempt to open the drawer without first unlocking it or removing the trap (or disarming it by pulling the handle and turning it three times clockwise) will be pricked by a poison needle. The person stuck by the needle will need to save versus poison or be paralyzed for ten rounds.”

Again, a long winded winded writing style. The desk is trapped with a poison needle. Save vs paralyzation. Lasts 10 rounds.” Tada!

There is also a room that falls in to a different writing trap. “There is also.” It lists treasure, one item per sentence, and starts each sentence with “there is also. There is a also a jeweled cup work 100gp. There is also a crown worth 10gp. There is also a ….Not to mention the repetition of longer sections of text. We’re told repeatedly that the guard patrols are expecting the king to send someone and thus are super duper alert. We’re told repeatedly (three times, I think) that the blood river is called the blood river because blah blah blah blah blah.

You get a feel for these things after awhile. A long page count with a small number of rooms doesn’t ALWAYS mean an adventure sucks … but it is makes one wary when they see it. The writing style is forgivable since it should improve with time, feedback, and stronger editing. Ideally, this would give the designer more time to concentrate on the actual encounters and constructing more interesting situations and environments.

It’s $3.50 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages but only shows you two pages of actual text, and even that’s general information. Notably, you get to see the first occurrence of the river of blood description, the temple guards, the lich, and what the temple is made of. You’ll get to read those descriptions several more times each before reaching the end.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222243/Dance-of-the-Medusa?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

Dungeon Magazine – Final Retrospective

Posted on October 21, 2017 by Bryce Lynch

This will be long. I beg your understanding for my verbosity hypocrisy; this is the product of four years work.

I have now reviewed every adventure in every print issue of Dungeon Magazine. I started in August of 2013, after spending several months locating issues. It was a herculean effort and, several times, it broke me. You have no idea what it’s like to wake up every day and “look forward” to another issue of Dungeon. Or maybe you do. It was hell.

I say “every adventure”, but there were exceptions. I didn’t review solo adventures or significant genre deviations, like Marvel Super Heroes. I did every fantasy adventure and most of the sci-fi ones. I generally reviewed them Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays, taking notes and then writing the review on Saturday for posting the next Saturday morning on my review website tenfootpole.org.

On my site I generally review OSR adventures, with a few 5e/Pathfinder and other deviations. I’m a fan of the new old school adventures and think the best are much better than the original adventures. I prefer a rules-light approach to D&D and have a fondness for things with folklore elements, fey, barrows, gonzo, and urban adventures … which I usually try to disclose. I’ve reviewed about 1400 D&D/fantasy adventures so far as of October 2017.

I have review standards and strong beliefs on what makes a good adventure. First and foremost it has to be useful to the DM at the table while they running it. This is the primary purpose of every adventure ever written, even if the designer didn’t understand that fact. You can use it as inspiration, steal parts from it, or use it as a doorstop if you want, but, judged as an adventure, it has to be useful at the table. My standards are VERY high.

A large part of being useful at the table is a writing style that allows the DM to scan the text quickly during play and locate information. The characters walk in to a room and the DM must quickly, in just seconds, locate the description, grok it, and relate it to the players. Then as they react the DM must continue scanning and absorbing to react to their actions as guided by the DM text for the room. This almost always means a terse and evocative writing style that’s well organized. After this, we come to creativity, interesting encounters, and all the rest. It can’t be boring. But first, it has to be useful to the DM at the table.

Dungeon Magazine is an abject failure in this regard. It is VERBOSE. Mountains of backstory, mountains of room text. All of it fights the DM running it at the table. If you are including something in the main text then it has to be directly useful for play. If it’s not then it needs to be removed or moved to an appendix where it can be ignored. Dungeon Magazine didn’t do this. It reveled in useless detail. A LONG room description that describes a trophy room, all of the trophies and accomplishments, and then ends “but it was long ago looted and now nothing remains but dust.” Backstory, history, detail that doesn’t apply to play, a verbose writing style … these were the hallmarks of most Dungeon Magazine adventures.

I’ve often pondered why they were so verbose. I’ve settled on the evils of Pay Per Word, that encouraging extra text. I’m not sure of the editing policies, but it would also seem valid to point to a weakness there in the quality of the published material. At some point I may follow up with the editors; I’m curious. I also empathize with their jobs, having to wade through garbage day after day. While my task was voluntary they had the extra pressure of mortgages and kids to raise.

As far as genres, the Oriental Adventures pieces were generally good, especially the earlier ones. They did a great job of capturing a high folklore environment that felt different than standard D&D. I can’t comment on their accuracy vs asian mythology and folklore, or their cultural issues, I don’t know enough. But as folklore-heavy adventure with talking animals and relatable situations then they score high.

The Adventure Paths in Dungeon Magazine were generally dreadful. The Mere of Deadmen series, a proto-adventure path, had a couple of decent ideas and adventures before becoming mired in boringness. The “real” adventure paths have two age-old problems that have yet to be solved: plot & high-levels. I generally found the first couple of adventures in the series interesting, and an occasional idea in later issues. The trek through the jungle after a shipwreck in Tides had some nice set pieces. There was also a great diplomacy idea with demon lords in the same series. D&D does a great job at low levels and high-level adventures have yet to be figured out. Too much gimping of the characters abilities to force them in to what is, essentially, a low level adventure design. Or, just as bad, resorting to defining high-level as “tougher monsters.” The need to drive players through the plot turns the things in to a railroad.

Ah, the linear adventure. Usually with set pieces. When it comes to Combat as War vs Combat as Sport, I’m very much in the War category. Linear adventures, rules mastery, balanced combats … these are not the D&D elements I enjoy. I don’t understand it. The long stat blocks and attempts to build reason in to a dungeon via rules … A magic mouth says a key word that dispels a contingency that holds a stasis that summons a monster. You’re the DM. You can do anything, the rules don’t apply. I can’t imagine how anyone prefers this style. TOlerates maybe, but prefer?

The early adventures tend to be more creative and have more elements to steal. As the issues count up, especially after issue 100, the designs become more linear and more focused on stat blocks. It’s also the case that some famous designers, like Baur, did great work in Dungeon … compared to their modern work.

The Best Dungeon Magazine Adventures
After going through all of the issues reviews I’ve come up with a list of adventures that I think don’t suck. Some are even good. In a stunning coincidence, it has come out to ten. It just turned out that way. Most of these have never shown up on a “best” list before, although a couple will have had a person or two reccomend them in the various “what adventures in Dungeon are good?” forum threads. Thelist will also show the depths of my hypocrisy. In no particular order …

The Spottle Parlor – Levels 2-4, Issue #12, Rick Swan
This is a whimsical little adventure with some strong NPC’s. As a result you get a very nice little evening of gaming driven by the interactions of the NPC’s. It’s really exactly the kind of whimsical feel with strong themes and strong classical archetypes that I groove on. A rich old crippled guy, a well known gambler, invites the group to gamble that evening. They arrive to find a fat cleric, a dumb kid, and a hissing lizard man all sitting around the table. What results is some prelude scene setting and then ten rounds of gaming. It’s characterized by the priest begging for donations for his temple … which he then generally gambles away. The dumb kid has to have EVERYTHING explained to him. The lizard man thinks someone is giving him the evil eye. And the gambler doesn’t seem to care that he’s losing. Then the hobgoblins show for the slaves they pressured the gambler in to. It’s got a long intro but the vibe here is really great and the writing communicates the feel of the NPC’s and the feel of the adventure VERY well. For example, the priest is very high strung and nervous, more so lately because he has only been able to solicit 9cp in a week of trying to raise funds, as charged by his superiors, for a new holy shrine. There’s 11 or 12 ’rounds’ of conversation given, which I all found delightful. There’s even a little section at the end on salvaging the adventure if the PC’s knock it off the rails. The designer is one of the PO’s responsible for one of, if not the, worst product of all time: WG7 Castle Greyhawk. With this adventure he slightly redeems himself.

The Ruins of Nol-Daer – Levels 5-8, Issue #13, Howard McClesky
It’s a three level abandoned/ruined keep now inhabited by a motley assortment of creatures that … and get this … all make sense together. I don’t mean they are fire giants with hell hounds or some such. There is a wide variety of creatures here and their reason for being here, working together or not, seems … realistic? There’s a page or so of bullshit introduction/background that is completely worthless but once past it you get a decently tight adventure, at least for the time it was written in. It’s got some great hooks that are short and yet integrate well in to the adventure. In fact, that’s a good summary. The adventure is full of things that are NOT throw away and fit in well. It has a certain internal logic. The ruined keep has impacted the countryside and there are a variety of places around it that have suffered. Missing livestock, a mining camp having trouble, bandits having trouble when making camp … these backgrounds, rumors, and real events all fit in very naturally. The adventure proper has a great map of a ruined keep and the encounters are full of real gamble material. A tumble down courtyard has a description that centers around the impact of it being tumble down. A monster hides in a room astral projecting … just go ahead and kill it. There’s a NICE magic ring that talks to the party and tries to get them to take it with them. Each of the encounters center around not just some bullshit victorian cataloging of the room contents but in how the players can interact with it or in how he DM can use it to interact with the players. Arrow slits might have things behind them, etc. that the DM can use to increase the players paranoia. That kind of practical advice to use in actually running the game is what sets this apart from the vast majority of dreck.

Ancient Blood – Levels 3-5, Issue #20, Dave Boucher
This one just barely squeeks in. This is an arctic overland expedition followed by the exploration of an old giant fortress. It’s got a strong norse feel to it. The players are hired to deliver a box of dried plants (herbal medicine) to a village about 200 miles away. Once there they see the headman/king get killed by a frost giant ghost. They then travel 300 more miles, hopefully, through arctic conditions to get to an old frost giant fortress to break the ghosts curse. There’s a whole “wilderness survival guide”/”torture the players with bookkeeping for rations, etc” thing going on that I don’t think adds any fun to the adventure at all. I can go to work if I want to find the crossover point to carrying rations/winter supplies to travel speeds. I’ve played Source of the Nile and it isn’t fun. The journey to the village has a nice little wandering monster table that adds some encounter notes/suggestions next to each entry. I like that sort of thing. it prompts the DM to riff off of it and loads their imagination up to run the adventure. Tribesmen are from one of the villages and may travel with the party back. Animals act like animals. These little notes add a lot to the adventure. The programmed encounters, two, are nice also. The party passes by a steaming crack in the ground … who wants to go look! Just that visual imagery of seeing that after a snow adventure is enough to sucker me in. There’s also a nice little encounter with a group of half-ogre trappers. It’s written more like a straight up combat, even though they each get names and some description that would imply there can be a social element. The social path would be much cooler and interesting. The village the group reaches has a nice little “get there in a blizzard and be ushered in to the great house to get stranger out of the storm” thing going on which, again, I think builds a lot of cool things up in my mind as I’m reading, which in turn allows me to communicate the scene and feel better to the party. There’s a page-long read-aloud in the longhouse that night that ends with a railroaded killing of the chief. That’s less cool, but I understand why its there. The group then travels to an old fortress and explores it. Both the journey, a shield-wall, and the fortress proper is full of GREAT imagery. Blood fountains, centuries old sacrifices hung out, and other great little staged scenes. It does have a very ‘desolate beauty’ thing going on, similar to the snowy cabin/forest in Legend, but much better done, with crunchy snow drifts, giants tables, and eerie silence everywhere. It’s got a kind of quiet horror thing going on that only an abandoned and silent place in the snow can deliver, combined with the weird proportions brought by giant sized tables and rooms. A nice nordic gothic feel, if there is such a thing. It’s a little slow for my tastes but beefing it up would ruin the slow burn. If someone can figure out how to solve that paradox then this would be worth running, if the “wilderness torture” game problem could also be solved.

Incident at Strathern Point – Levels 8-10, Issue #21, Matthew Maaske
This is an adventure at an abandoned river trading station, that turns out to have some demons in residence. It’s got a nice realistic looking map and a grim and gritty feel. The demons, four of them, are well described with lots of variation to their features. The layout of the station has lots of interesting features to get in to trouble with: a barrel ramp, rough cut steps outside, a couple of towers to fall of of, and a barge to end up on. I really like this, you can just imagine PC’s getting trapped in a tower, leaping off of it, being assaulted by barrels, and slipping on the rough stairs as they run. The variety of terrain and features in the map bring a nice little tactical feel to it while still feeling VERY realistic of a river trading station. More so than most of the adventures, this one feels real, hence the grim and gritty vibe. It deals with death, trauma, demons, domestic abuse, and revenge in a really good way. This FEELS like a demon-haunted adventure. It’s wordy and the treasure count seems low to me, but it delivers. It would work well in either Harn or 2E, which I think speaks well to its design. The best encounters kind of stick with you. You read them one, maybe twice, and they are completely internalized. You need not hardly refer to the encounters again during play, it’s like you wrote it yourself. This entire adventure is like that. Read it once, maybe twice, and just run it with the map and maybe some creature stats. That’s all you need.

Mightier than the Sword – Levels 1-4, Issue #29, Willie Walsh
This adventure is absurd, in every wonderful sense of that word. You know how good it is? I LOVED THE BACKSTORY! I HATE long backstories, but I LOVED this one. One of the things I like about D&D adventures is when the players come up with crazy ideas on how to do something and we get to watch the comedy/tragedy that unfolds as they implement their zany plan. In the same genre is the adventure where the characters are the straight men. There’s some kind of zaniness going on around the characters and the players are trying to wade through it all. This is, probably, one of the few ways to do humor in D&D, and I LOVE IT. Everything in this adventure is completely plausible and makes sense. And when you take it as a whole, as an outsider, you’ll be left saying: What the FUCK is going on here? Are you people INSANE?! This is a faction adventure. And therefore an adventure with NPC’s . These are very good things to have in an adventure. The players and their characters will always interact with the world around them, especially in a village adventure like this, and having strongly imagined NPC’s goes a VERY long way to brining an adventure to life.
[Pontification OFF]
In a small town one of the scribes has invented … a metal nib for the end of a quill. The guild of scribes now hates him. The ink makers love him. The Goose Breeders Association hates him. The paper manufacturers are in both camps. The druids hate him. Essentially, everyone in this small town has an opinion, entirely plausible. And then the scribe turns up dead. The council, divided in to the two camps, seeks an independent prosecutor to investigate. Oh, and there’s a Committee on Public Recriminations running around also. And in to this quite plausible and quite absurd set up the party is tossed. And it’s wonderful. There are mobs laying wreaths and jumping to conclusions, the competent, the incompetent, random wanderers … in fact, lets talk about the wanderers. There’s a small overland adventure to get to the village. The party is accompanied by the messenger who delivered to them the offer. Except there are two, one from each faction, and they hate each other and compete to see who’s better and yet won’t go so far as to kill each other. It’s brilliant! And then the wanderers come in to play. There are 8 or so of these and each has a little set up to riff off of. One is with a normal hedgehog. If asked, via a Speak spell, he comes down completely neutral on the issue of the quill nibs, as long as hedgehog quills are not in consideration. THIS IS BRILLIANT. EVERYONE should have an opinion! (Not all do, but as the DM I’ll sure as fuck riff on that one things and turn EVERYONE in to having an opinion!!!) This thing suffers a bit from ’the style at the time’ issues. A summary of NPC’s would have been useful and some of the text gets a bit long. But, the adventure is GOLD! If you need to suffer through one old adventure with too much text this year then THIS is the one. Walsh was a prolific contributor to Dungeon and, more often than not, his adventures had something decent in them.

Thiondar’s Legacy – Levels 8-12, Issue#30, Steven Kurtz
This thing could almost be a completely stand-along product. Look, I’m about to talk smack about this, because it deserves it, but at the core of this is Something Good. You need to decide if its worth salvaging. I think it is. In fact, I don’t even think the salvage job is that severe. I would suggest, however, that you work this adventure in. You need to start dropping hints LONG before the players hit this thing. The College, the legends, etc. This is going to work best when it’s NOT dropped in out of the blue.

The backstory here is LONG. I mean REALLY long. You know the Unseen University, in Discworld? There’s a magi college with that kind of vibe. There’s a kind of power struggle and one of the magi, to be a dick, exercises his Right of Inventory. One every hundred years he can force an Grand Inventory to be done, which everyone hates because it’s a pain in the ass. In it, they find a magic shield with something unusual about it, which leads then to hire adventurers. That’s backstory one. Backstory two is about the guy who owned the shield. Backstory three is about the guy who the guy that owned the shield was trying to find. Way WAY too much backstory … but … more than enough also for you to slip in to your campaign, and, overtime, build these three places/people up. It would be like Obama, Putin, and Thatcher showed up one day, told you the illuminati were real, they were in it, King Arthur was real (like, not some pict/roman dude, but like really real, all the legends are real!), as was excalibur, and, oh yeah, we think we know where he’s buried. Could you go check it out? Yeah, you can keep the sword. Holy Shit!

There’s a valley adventure that’s … Good! Giant sheep on the hillsides! A misty steamy valley with a river in it! Stone Giants … who are not dicks! They talk to you! Hey have a captured bard playing music for them! You move on, to the dungeon, on a raft. And then something really cool happens. There’s this concept in the OSR of the dungeon as the Mythic Underworld. An important part of this is that the entrance MUST be significant. Or, maybe, that it has to feel like crossing the threshold is significant. This does that. You’re poling your raft down this river, across a lake and discover … a large stone arch that the water flows through. This is it. This is the place you’re looking for. As is so often the case, my own words can’t describe the brilliant SIMPLE imagery that is conveyed. But it works. You are not in the realm of THE OTHER. You poke around, find some signs that others are here, and then get TOTALLY fucked over by the king of the mushrooms. Who isn’t. I usually don’t care about spoilers, but this time I’ll be nice. There’s a hole intelligent set up here when you meet the mushroom king that leads to some great roleplaying. It’s social, or can be. And I LOVE it. You move on to find an eternal warrior you can put to rest. And then on to a HUGE steamy jungle cavern. And then on to a tower. It’s like it never stops! And there’s are NPC’s hanging around! REAL people with real problems and real emotions and they are wonderful and they are dicks and are complex but you can grasp them easily and run them well.

You know Dungeon published a couple of adventures with that stupid red dragon, Scorch of whatever he was called. They were supposed to be EPIC and Mighty and Majestic. They tried too hard and they sucked. This one though, this one FEELS epic. You feel immersed in it and you feel like something awesome is going on and that you’re a part of it and most importantly that you are DOING things and making a difference. I can’t recall, just now, another adventure that has given me this EPIC level feel. Ever.

You’re gonna need to take a read-through this before you run it, but I don’t think you’ll need to do much more to run it. For all of it’s text and wordiness, as was the style at the time, the ideas cement themselves in to your head. Dave Bowman write a wordy encounter with an old hill giant who likes to eat crab legs. Old Bae. It was quite long, for Bowman. The core of what it is is still fresh in my mind as if I had just read it. This adventure is like that one encounter: it stays with you. I think that’s pretty much the definition of Well Written.

Dovedale – Levels 1-3, Issue #46, Ted James & Thomas Zuvich
Danger! Folklore! Danger! I Love this stuff to an unnatural degree! The village stream has run dry, causing the villagers crops to have issues. They want you to fix it. The cause of the problems is a small band of goblins who have captured the stream’s source, a nixie, in order for the chief to better catch a giant talking fish. You see, he’s an avid fisherman. One of the rumors says a local ran across him one afternoon and they chatted while both fished and shared a beer.

OMG! I LUV this shit. A talking fish, a talking owl, and a talking giant rat are a part of the adventure; the local ‘kings’ of the animals. The goblin chief being an avid fisherman is great … as is the STUNNING gold and ruby fly he is tying in his fly vice to help him catch the talking fish. The goblins are old style. Stinkfoot (who has stinky feet), Swoop (who rides a giant bat), fishbelly (who can swim) and so on. One of them resembles a local boy and likes to go into the village and play pranks, and the local boy gets in trouble instead of him. It’s laid out well (especially considering the year), has a decent number of NPC’s, and the text is relatively terse and evocative. It’s the OLD folklore goblins rather than the generic sword-bair goblins that D&D usually presents. This adventure gets a hearty Thumbs Up from me …. uh … I’m not sure … this may be the first one in Dungeon I’ve ever done that for, without reservations?

Anyway, you have no soul if you don’t like this. I’m just saying. You suck if you don’t like this. You don’t want to suck, do you?

Peer Amid the Waters – Levels 1-2, Issue #78, Johnathan Richards
WoW! This is a good adventure! And I don’t even mean it on the “by Dungeon Magazine standards” grading curve! It’s actually good! I’m serious! Ready? I’m totally serious here, it’s good EVEN CONSIDERING WHAT I AM ABOUT TO WRITE. First, keep in mind it’s for level 1’s. And has what feels like an endless and boring backstory. And a hook that feels like it’s about 10 pages long … all to keep the party from killing some asshat nixies. And then consider it’s underwater. And has two mummies. (got magic weapons?) And an undead leopard. (more magic weapons needed!) And all of the room descriptions are like half a page long and full of shit no one cares about. AND ITS GOOD! I know! Level 1? Underwater? Ha! A million loaned things for the arty, right? Right? No! Nixie kisses! It’s wonderful! All is right in the world, it fits perfectly! And an egyptian tomb to explore? (a teleport circle opened a portal underwater to the tomb.) Lame … except … it’s an alien environment,, and totally bizarre to find out of nowhere! Mystery! Wonder! And combined with the already alien environment of underwater, it works great! And the DM Torture Porn of Underwater Adventuring is toned down to be just the good parts that are fun and enhance the adventure! How is that? Light sources halved … so the descriptions play on that … shadows and chaos suddenly appearing in your (very) restrictive magic 10’ light circle! And not immediately attacking you! Lungs full of water and can’t cast? How about an air pocket under an overturned boat? Or a glob of air stuck to a diving beetle? Perfect! Mummies? That’s easy! The folks who you are in search of almost killed it AND it’s got a CLEARLY magic sword sticking out of its back while it’s engaged in a fight with the diving beetle! The undead kitty is torn between protecting the tomb and curling up n a ball every round, because it’s a cat in water! Treasure chamber problems? The party has enough time to grab some loot before the teleport circle starts to disappear! This things MASTERFUL in it’s design It exploits the FUN inherent in the situations. I LOVE it when I expect something to suck ass and it turns out wonderful! WAAAYYYYYYY too much text in this, but fuck it. Get a highlighter and go to town! All Hail Discordia!

Depths of Rage – Level 3, Issue #83, JD Walker
This was a favorite of mine when it was originally published. I think it has stood up.

A week ago the local DCC mob went all funnel up in the local goblin caves … and no one came out as first level … or came back at all. Full of old people, women, and children, the party is encouraged to take a shot … and lured by a magic sword the goblin leader has. This intro is pretty abstract in the adventure and could use just a bit more colour.

The caves are multi-level, with bridges, chasms, chimneys, multiple ledges, cramped corridors, short 5’ ceilings full of smoke from torches, and other cave features. And then suddenly some crazed goblins come screaming out the darkness! There’s some nonsense about how they are barbarians, but it’s TOTALLY that cave scene in 13th Warrior (and fuck you if you don’t like 13th warrior! It’s one of the two best D&D movies EVAR!) Primitive cannibal goblins, fetishes all over the place shoved in the cracks & crevices, war paint, howling goblins, tight and evocative setting. I fucking love this cave! And THEN the place changes. After killing the leader there’s an earthquake the caves change, with new challenges to overcome! There’s even some faction play thrown in, with the bitter shamen being discovered (maybe) early on, and he’s willing to sell out the chief, as well as an NPC ranger. The read-aloud, while not imaginative, is mercifully short. The DM text, while not terse by my standards, is not the usual completely over-prescriptive text usually found in Dungeon, except maybe in its description of the cave features, which goes on for two pages. The reaction section, to the parties intrusion, could also be beefed up a little. A gross shamen bowl full of blood that’s Bulls Strength? Sign me up! I WAS disappointed that the magic sword is only a +2 longsword. 🙁 LAME!

Shut-In – Level 2, Issue #128, F. Wesley Schneider & James L. Sutter
Danger: I LUV a good urban adventure. This is a DELIGHTFUL adventure! It’s a little mystery/guard mission in an old lady’s house and is about 20 times more Ravenloft than almost all of the Ravenloft adventures. The Swan Street Slicer has escaped! On the way to jail, the mute halfling’s jail wagon was in an accident and he’s escaped! The guard is frantic, as is the entire town! Extra guards are everywhere! The party (hired? Hastily deputized?) is given the task of guarding the house of an old lady, her family having been one of the last victims. This is a nice hook. Hysteria in the city is fun, and its a good pretext as to why the guardsmen aren’t doing the guarding. They ARE, but EVERYONE/PLACE needs guards. It’s all hands on deck! So the party is in the old lady’s house, guarding it/her and her daughter. The NPC’s in this are wonderful. A bitter old woman in a wheelchair. Her lovely daughter, no longer engaged since her fiance was murdered by the slicer. A halfing butler who is best described as ‘simple.’ Strong NPC personalities to interact with. Then there are the people who come to visit, PERFECTLY described. “Nina’s dim-witted but good-natured nephew.” or “a greasy but ambitious banker” and so on. In one fucking sentence for each NPC this adventure does what so many others can’t seem to do: focus on the NPC description on interactivity. Who the fuck cares what your special snowflakes eye color is? What we need to know is how to play them when the party comes to interact. There’s a great little table included for the old woman and her daugher on how the parties interactions with them will impact their attitudes/diplomacy checks. And, even better, the table notes WHERE YOU CAN FIND THINGS! Giving the daughter some letters from her dead fiance will give you some positive modifier, but the table also tells you that they are in room six! Oh the humanity! A writer who actually makes things easier for the DM! The NPC’s, the house, what’s actually going on, the window dressing, t all contributes to a wonderfully creepy vibe. As time passes the party will do that thing that brings joy to the hearts of players and DM’s. They’ll say something like “Ohhh! It’s her! I know it’s her! Ohhh! I know it!” This sort of build up, starting out slightly irregular and building until the party snap in to action, is wonderful. “Telegraphed” isn’t quite the right word, but the mix of horror, with the … levity? Anticipation? From the players is great. The maps are way too small, and you’re going to STILL need a highlighter for the rooms. They are shorter than usual for Dungeon, but still need a bit of help.

Other Decent Adventures
I wrote six articles, each covering 25 issues, summarizing the adventures I thought were decent or had something interesting about them. Frankly, I think they are far weaker than the good modern OSR adventures (a list of which I keep on tenfootpole.org) but, if you’re looking to explore Dungeon Magazine then these would be a good place to start. The summary lists an be found at:
https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?cat=5

Other Best Of Lists & Special Merit
Kingdom of Ghouls, Issue #70, is generally much loved. Ghouls is quite lengthy but presents a weird world that is fully realized and coherent. It’s quite good, but generally makes a lot of Best Of lists so I didn’t include it in mine. It’s part of how Baur made his reputation and stands in stark contrast to his more recent works. Ssscaly Thingsss, in the same issues, is pretty good also.

Mud Sorcerer’s Tomb, from Issue #37, is also a favorite of many folks. In the same category as “Tomb of Horrors” but MUCH less arbitrary. ToH spawned a thousand terrible imitators and taught many people the wrong way to design/run a dungeon. If they had instead imitated Mud Sorcorer then the sun would be shining a little brighter. AGain, it’s not on my list because it’s on EVERYONE’s list.

There’s a decent List of Lists at Nerdvore:
http://www.nerdovore.com/2016/12/the-best-dungeon-magazine-adventure.html

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 25 Comments

Call of the Werewolf

Posted on October 18, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Joseph A. Mohr
Self Published
OSRIC
Levels 4-7

Call of the Werewolf is a Free OSRIC adventure for characters of 4th to 7th level of experience. The adventurers arrive at a small village along the Blood River and discover that a Werewolf is terrorizing the locals. Brave adventurers are needed to solve the mystery of who the werewolf is and these adventurers must put a stop to this fiend once and for all.

This 43 page adventure, a light investigation and assault, details a small village and the manor home of a local lord. The village is suffering from attacks on its livestock. Clues lead back to the local lord, and werewolves. The investigation is quite simple, the text repetitive and unfocused. There’s some delight in the encounters, from mimics, to dazzling chandeliers, moving armor and paintings and the like. Those parts are charming and remind you of the reasons the classics are the classics. If you were desperate for an adventure this would be ok, and if the manor/dungeon were in Dungeon Magazine it would be Best Buy in that periodical. It’s got a decent classic vibe.

I HAVE to talk about the investigation first. I have to. It’s absurd. It’s so absurd that I luv Luv LUV it! When the players first walk up, at dusk, a few villagers are talking, having a heated discussion. They split up with one, the mayor, talking to you. Moments later there are sounds of someone being attacked by wolves. “IF the party helps then …” sez the text … but imagine for a moment if they DIDNT. They are trying to hold a conversation with a guy, who it turns out is the mahoy, while someone is being torn limb from limb by a pack of wolves just around the corner. Scream, maybe some viscera flying around the corner, all while the mayor looks on normally and tries to hold a conversation with some murder hobos … Classic D&D! A good DM troll and DM response to it. 🙂

Anyway, the entire investigation is like that. “Yes, our livestock is being attacked, No, we don’t know why/who …” with a wolf attack right next to it. Gee, think it might be wolves? “Our local lord? He lies in that big mansion over there. No, he doesn’t come out much.” Bad guy alert! Bad guy alert! The wolves all wear gold medallions with a big “M” on them … so do the local lords servants. And his name is Lord Medgar. And one of the wolves in the pack turns in to a werewolf to run away. Gee .. I wonder what is going on in this village? Now, players being players, they will miss the most obvious clues, but, geez man, this is so bad I’d play it comedically.

I already mentioned that the manor/dungeon has some classic elements. A nice mimic, a chandelier that dazzles. Animated armor. Fountains to drink from. I love that shit.

If this were well written then it would be a mildly interesting adventure with classic elements. But it’s not. It’s 43 pages of two-column for a small village, manor, and dungeon under it. That means unfocused writing.

I use that term a lot, lately anyway. I use it to describe a beginners/amateurs writing style. Someone has an idea and they put it down on paper without really understand how adventure writing should work. It could be formatting (which this adventure doesn’t have much of a problem with) or the lack of organization like summaries, overviews, and appendices, which this adventure could do better at, but isn’t terrible at, making an effort at some summaries. Frequently it comes from not understanding the purpose of the adventure and how the room keys, in particular, work toward that.

The purpose of the adventure is for the DM to run the game. It must help the DM run the game at the table. In the case of the room keys this means presenting information in such a way that it’s trivial for the DM to scan the text, describe the room, and respond as the party interacts with it. This is no trivial feat. You have to describe the room in such a way that it lodges in the DM’s head and they grok it, able to fill in details as needed. When they search the chest you need to make it easy for the DM to find that text and run the trap/treasure. Indents, bolding, bullets, italics, and a host of other techniques can be used to help with this, but evocative writing and editing can help even more. That room description has to be evocative. You get, maybe, two sentences to describe the room to the DM and lodge it in their head. “Large” and “Red” are not good descriptions, they are boring. But you can’t go on forever about the cavernous room with towering rust-colored banners. You can’t use a paragraph to describe a chest of drawers and the mundane items in it, or the mundane items in a kitchen or pantry. It’s not worth it. Focus on what makes this DIFFERENT than a normal pantry and gloss over the rest.

Here’s some text from a room:
The door to this room is unlocked. Anyone listening at the door to this room will hear nothing from inside. This room appears to be empty. It is also quite dusty and does not appear to have been cleaned in over a century. The dust here is thick. Awaiting the adventurers in this room is a particularly nasty and violent trap.

Six sentences to tell us it’s empty and dusty. In a well written room we know it’s empty. We know that you can’t hear anything because we know instantly at a glance that there is nothing to hear. We know there’s a trap because the trap is described. “Awaiting adventurers” and “nasty and violent” serve no purpose other than to clog up the room description.

In another location we’re told there’s a statue and that those statues usually have large gem eyes and ivory horns. Great! But then it says “Not this one.” Uh, so then what was the point? To bore the DM to death? It’s not a detail that’s needed and so thus it makes the DMs job harder. No, more is not better. It’s not better to have it and not need it. Put your shit in a god damn appendix if you insist.

While I’ve concentrated on room/key, I’d like to note that format is NOT appropriate for some things. The village in this adventure, for the investigation, is presented in room/key format. That’s TERRIBLE! This is a social environment, the personages are buried in their respective rooms with no reference. Their personalities and goals and what they know. You meet a guy on the street? Let me flip through the adventure and find the room key he’s in so I can figure out his personality and what he knows … is that how to run an adventure? Obviously not. A little table, with villagers names, the house they live in, and a fast personality and/or fact about them lets the DM run the adventure is a much smoother format.

This is free on DriveThru. The preview is six pages. Most of it is useless, but you do get to see the opening scene. I like the villagers discussion, even if I do think it could be written better/shorter. At least you get to see the whole gold medallion/wolf attack/werewolf thing. 🙂https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222818/Call-of-the-Werewolf?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

The Lost Colony

Posted on October 16, 2017 by Bryce Lynch

By Sean Liddle
Anti-Photon Publishing
System – Unknown
Level – Unknown

You and your friends are in deep trouble. Children of respected knights of the realm, you’ve been slacking away and causing trouble. Thankfully the King and his people respect your families and you haven’t been banished, or worse. Now you must travel down the southern coast to investigate a long standing rumor of a missing shipload of treasure from one hundred years past. You will visit hidden port towns, island enclaves and see sights you’d never see from your boring northern stone city. Pirates, sea monsters, a mystery to solve and wealth to retrieve for your king and country to help fund a coming war against the Drow. It’s time to search for the Lost Colony.

This 43 page adventure involves a sea voyage to various ports while looking for a lost treasure of old. It is linear and almost incoherent in its stream of consciousness style.

There are no stats. There are no credits. There is no game system mentioned. There is no introduction to speak of, other than a “this is the first in a line of adventures and we will expand some areas in others.” Everything is in a single column. A cursive font is used in places, making vast portions nearly unreadable. Other interesting font choices seem to fight the reader to be clear. All of these choices combine to make it VERY hard to read the adventure, let alone use it at the table.

The writing is mostly stream of consciousness. Linear, events, and encounters all mixed together in single paragraphs, without a traditional room/key format. It’s as if this is an outline, or you were sitting in a bar after three drinks and describing an adventure. The first 28 pages are the sea voyage and the various ports visited, rumor tables, and merchants to visit, along with a couple of encounters that the DM can use to “keep the adventurers on their toes.” Like giant Crabs coming out of the water and snagging a womans children. Multiple paragraph read-alouds, you visit three or four cities and then end up in a forest on page 28, ending on page 33 before the maps start. The main encounter, a dwarf vault, is on one page in paragraph/conversational form.

I don’t even know where to start with this. It is as incoherent as it can possible be and still be legible. This needs a formatting, bad, for readability purposes. Once that’s done then the conversational writing style could be addressed.

This is $1.75 at DriveThru. The preview is perfect, showing the first six pages. The cursive font. The long read alouds. The stream of consciousness writing on page five for the events. It’s quite representative for what you are getting. I encourage you to check it out.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/181092/Southern-Coast-Adventures-LC-1–The-Lost-Colony?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 8 Comments