Dungeon Magazine #146

Posted on August 5, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


Escape from Meenlock Prison
By Tim Connors & Eileen Connors
Level 1

It’s rare I find a morally repugnant adventure. (And maybe interesting what I put in that category …)

A hot fucking mess of an adventure with one redeeming quality that’s not enough to save it. You are hired to go to a black prison and transfer two “disappeared” people to a different prison. I like to play NE and even _I_ have a problem with that! It’s hard to see the party agreeing. Anyway, the prison has been taken over by imposters, escaped prisoners. They get the party to go in and free their two buddies from some meenlocks, through deception. This causes the party to travel down a linear jail corridor, encountering prisoners on both sides, on their way to the “correct” cells. Thus each prisoner has a backstory, personality, and sometimes an interaction with another prisoner. Anyway, you fight some meenlocks and then go to the surface where the first set of imposters attack you. It’s linear and the highlight, the various prisoners, are not really given an opportunity to shine, given the constrained & linear nature of the adventure. It’ back loaded with the meenlocks and combat and really goes out of its way wit be convoluted, up to and including the “lets attack the heavily armed party when we see them again” logic of the prisoners. I like the having to put up k00ks in the dungeon idea, I just don’t think its implemented well here at all. And a black jail? Jeez. It’s like some Carcosa “we need to bloodily sacrifice 12 children to cast healing on you Bob. I’ve got there here, got at it and bathe in their blood once you slit their throats.”

Spawn of Sehan
A shit-ton of authors
Level 9

Part two of a three part series. I think it was the winner of the “design the shittiest series” contest? Sixteen room linear dungeon with nothing going on. The highlight is a succubus feigning damsel in distress. Sorry baby, we kill all prisoners and hostages on sight; it’s safer that way. Walk in a room, get attacked. Open an urn, trigger a trap. There’s nothing to this. Again. There’s no adventure, just encounters. I find this design style disgusting.

Serpents of Scuttlecove
By Richard Pett
Level 15

Part eight of the twelve part Savage Tide adventure path. Chick who hired you has been kidnapped by her (now) undead brother, since none of your party’s actions can be truly meaningful. Also, you seem to care that the pirates have some shadowpearls. The backstory setup takes about a million pages so you can be bored to tears by things that won’t matter. Where the fuck did these people get the idea this was a good thing? You go to piratetown to track people down, only to find your contact kidnapped, ambushes (CR11, you’re level 15. The adventure correctly notes the party could just kill everyone in town, but doesn’t deal with it well. IE: it’s a shittly designed adventre for level 15’s, unless they agree to play along.) It would be more fun as a direct assault, letting the players flex their might, instead of the linear shit-fest with forced encounters and the overreliance on conspiracies that high level adventures always seem to hang their flag on. A Death Slaad guard … oh how the mighty have fallen.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 4 Comments

House of Flowers

Posted on August 2, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Christopher Audette
Five Cataclysms
Five Cataclysms
“Mid-level”

In a warm place sits a mansion made entirely of many-hued flowers, their vines forming the unnatural architecture of mankind. The house grew around two entities, the Heart of Eternity, and the Heart of Chaos. The Heart of Chaos mutated all life around it, changing it beyond recognition, and the Heart of Eternity gave the new life the order necessary to survive. The Hearts arrived long before mankind existed, and they have been locked in a perpetual struggle ever since. A proxy war is fought between the two, using flowers mutated into ambulatory forms as pawns. The battles are fought entirely inside the house, because while immensely powerful, the influence of the Hearts cannot extend outside. The structure around which the house grew, the Chapel of the Void, is the reason the Hearts cannot leave. Only dreams they create are dreamt beyond the house. Locals in the area know well enough to avoid the house, as all who have entered were either killed or scarred horrendously, but they all receive the dreams. Those who sleep in the area often dream of entering the house, fighting through the rooms, kidnapping one of the Hearts, and sacrificing it on the altar inside the Chapel of the Void. They dream this will bring them great wealth and power. The dreams lie.

This is a 78 page adventure in a weird flower structure with 64 rooms in it. It has about ten pages of introduction, then 22 pages of room descriptions, and then the rest being supplemental information and tables. It ABSOLUTELY has that weird non-standard vibe going on, a hallmark of some of the great OD&D adventures. It’s got a lot of interesting ideas, and a great concept, magic items, creatures, and the rest. GREAT content. It’s also got a vision in presentation and a descriptive style that, while it should work in theory, makes my brain hurt trying to decipher the text. I can let some formatting sins pass in exchange for good content, but, man, this one is hard to justify.

Oh, so a vaguely house-like structure made up of flowers. Inside are two enemies: In one wing is the Heart of Chaos and in another the Heart of Eternity (with rules for shoving one into someone’s chest, Vecna-stylet! Yes!) Their plant-creature minions contest with each other in a third section. They send dreams to people outside the house to get them inside and to kill the other heart. And in the immortal words of a cartoon person “Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here.”

Vines with flower bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Crystals glowing with sunlight with rotting bodies under the soil tended by flower-people. Non-hostile flower people. A deep chasm with 5000 skeletons in it, some wearing obvious treasure, with flower-people keeping you from fucking with it. A room FULL of multi-colored webs crawling with tiny spiders. Six creatures encased in multi-colored amber. Room after room this goes on. Enter a room, be tempted, or face a situation … most all with a kind of theming going on. It’s similar, in that way, to Blue Medusa and other dungeons with strong room visions … perhaps combined with a bit of the fab Dreams of the Lurid Sac. These bizarre and … unearthly? encounters. They force the players to engage or ignore, to tempt fate or use them to their advantage. I don’t think Funhouse is appropriate term for these. ‘OD&D’ seems closer. I don’t know what to call it, but it’s pretty exciting to see.

Likewise, the magic items. There’s a big table of a hundred at the back and the adventure is worth having just for that table alone. A snow globe that when you shake it causes a blizzard to spring up within 50’. A crown of thorns that allows the players to grant 1st level cleric spells. A vial of boiling blood .., that is actually a creature. A monocle that lets you see in to a strange dreamland. An oar that, affixed to a ship/boat, surrounds it with mist and allow you passage to one of the lands of the dead. EFFECTS. It concentrates on EFFECTS. There’s some mechanics attached, usually, but never more than about a sentence or less. But the effects. I’ve overjoyed to see magic items that are mysterious and wondrous!

It is also an OH. MY. GOD. nightmare to dig through the rooms. It’s got a decent idea for formatting. Each notable thing in the room is bolded as the first sentence of a paragraph, with the paragraph adding detail. Thus room 1 has two paragraphs, the first starting with the bolded “Vines with flower bulbs hanging from the ceiling” and the second starting with the bolded “Even soil” The meat of the paragraphs follow the bolded sentence, the details to reveal upon further explanation. Thus the DM can quickly give an overview of the room, using the bolded portions that scan quickly, and then follow up as the party inquires. Why uneven soil? There are drag marks? What type? They look like body marks, and go through the east doorway. I like this format. I DO think it helps you scan quickly. My more-than-a-quibble comes with the specific implementation in this adventure. The bolded portions are a little weak, being facts and lacking strong imagery in them. I’m looking for “bulbous flower bulbs” or “oozing flower bulbs” or something like that. Further, the “mundane” text is not really organized well, which becomes a pain in the ass when the room is non-trivial. Room seven is the Vibrating Lotus Pond. Murky pond water covering the floor. Lotus flower of many colors floating on the pond. Multicolored glittering beneath the pond. The middle paragraph is long. LOOOOONG. There’s beetles in them, and, while not a lot going on, I’d argue, there is a lot of text. It’s good, but I don’t think it’s organized effectively. IDK, bullet points, or some other technique? As with the Fungi Chemist I think the strict devotion to the vision hampers the presentation. I’m in favor of a strong vision, but as we move it out of the realm of the platonic and it hits the road we need to mangle it if it conflicts with higher values … like ‘understanding.’ IN an attempt to be MORE understandable it is less. Pulling out the “beetle combat” for example, to another paragraph, and/or pulling out the treasure (present in the last two paragraphs) to a separate one would have allowed the upper paragraphs to focus on the environment while the combat/treasure focused on the actions.

I would also take exception to the random monsters. Flower people, and maybe angels and demons, could show up. There are tables for each that you can use to randomly determine them. Nice in theory. I would have also liked to have seen a table of pregen ones. Just one sheet full of stats for each of them, perhaps in addition to the random rules. Then I have the option of doing more but I’m not forced to slow down play by rolling. Yes, I could do it myself ahead of time. Or … the fuckign designer could have done it for me to help me out. There’s a few other things, like having to roll saving throws every 20 minutes in two wings of the dungeon. I’ve not sure how I feel about that. I like the “time pressure” aspect but dislike the tedium of the mechanic. Meh. But, on the plus side, it does something Death Frost Doom did, using spells in “appropriate ways.” Protection from Evil, or something similar, will prevent the save from having to be made. How about Bless? Sure, I’d say, if the player makes a good argument. This use of the “utility” nature of spells is something I favor.

I note it also has another Death Frost Doom callback … both skeletons, angels and/or demons could be let loose upon the world, if folks fuck the place up. There’s some cosmic shit going on inside with things in balance for a LONG time. Fucking with it will mean consequences.

If you are a fan of OD&D weirdness, Lamentations, Lurid Sac, or want some new magic items then this thing is for you. I think it’s non-trivial to run at the table, mostly because of the organization of the detail in the paragraphs. It that were addressed, or the bolded portions were much more evocative, then I may be able to look past my misgivings. Fantastic content, but hard to make my A-Team list.

This is PWYW on DriveThru. The preview is broken.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/212613/House-of-Flowers?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 5, No Regerts, Reviews | Leave a comment

The Oracle of Stone and Flame

Posted on July 31, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Jayson “Rocky” Gardner & Nathaniel Brown
Silver Bullette Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level 5-9

This is an eleven page eleven-ish room dungeon with an oracle at the end. It has a couple of good ideas for encounters, but implements them in clumsy “they attack!” manner. When combined with bad read-aloud and unfocused writing it falls far short. The room concepts need to be yanked out and reworked.

Let’s talk the good first, no matter how limited it might be. The core of this thing is that there’s a massively ancient dragon guarding an oracle. That’s mythic. As Miracleman/Marvelman will attest, it’s never easy getting the answers you want, they always sit atop Mt Olympus. And OF COURSE there’s a massively ancient dragon guarding it. That’s how this stuff works. I think it’s great; a classic trope that is telegraphed from the hook: go bargain with the dragon to ask the oracle a question. Everyone knows that at the end there’s a dragon to get past. This foreshadowing/telegraphing is a great technique for building anticipation. Oracles are great hooks. It all combines to be a great concept.

Likewise, one of the entrances is in The Undead Sands in the swampland. While walking along you find a huge fallen tree carved to look like a pathway. And skeletal hands reach to grab you and pull you under. That’s the entrance. The entrance to the mythic underworld was a big theme in the OSR community a couple of years ago, and I must say, this is nicely themed doorway in. There’s also a room with kobolds in it. They dance around with their spears and sing “more meat for the queen, we have meat for the queen.”

But it’s just a combat encounter. As are the skeletons. As is the dragon (probably.) And that’s the problem, the adventure doesn’t know what to do the rooms. There are these decent room ideas that are all just “they attack.” Skeletons attack. Kobolds attack. Annoyed cult leader attacks. Two skeleton sit up in coffins in you enter the room and turn their heads to look at you. They attack. Grells hide behind the door and attack. When you finally met the dragon, who will bargain, it stats it has a clear goal: get more loot. The dragons chamber has no treasure.

Well, the read-aloud says it is sitting on a massive pile, but “massive pile” is the last we hear about it. The read aloud tells us we’re tired of gnats and flies in the swamp. The read-aloud tells us the room dimensions. The read-aloud tells us “they attack!” or “as you finish the last of creatures off …” Where the read-aloud is not being too explicit the DM text takes up the slack, describing to us what is going on in the map: “Following the passage will lead to a small room, 15 feet square.” or telling us how many doors are in the room, just like the OTHER Dm text, the map, does. But then the REAL heart of the rooms gets almost nothing and what there is is bland. “Laying across the path is a huge tree carved to look like a pathway.” Uh … what? This is the entrance. This is IT. The main main. The real deal. And yet the description is both vague and not evocative. Disappointing, to say the least.

Speaking of treasure, the how does 12 bracelets, each worth 50gp and a couple thou from some gemstone eyes strike you? How’s that for PHAT L00T that you can use to level? The kobolds have 1d6 gold each! “They set of silver is worth 100gp to a collector.” How much XP does it take to level at level 8? A bajallion? There’s no thought, no design, just like with the room “they attack!” nonsense.

When I was in fourth grade I wrote a short short about the adventures of me & a friend in a haunted house. All I can remember now is that we kept getting knocked out … and that’s how my tiny brain made room transitions. In this thing you suddenly find yourself in the dragons chamber at the end of room four (in the swamp entrance, which is not connected to the other.) At least I think you do. The adventure just says “please turn to the dragon and the oracle to continue the adventure”, with no transition at all. And the room before that? “The sound grows louder and louder until the party passes out from over-stimulation.” I cast silence. I cast deafness on myself. We tunnel out. Teleport. How many fucking ways does the party have to deal with this DM fiat? Also a bajillion? When it’s not doing this then there’s a cave in block the passage back. Done asking a question of the oracle. You are teleported back to town. *sigh*

And the monsters? A dozen skeletons? A dozen kobolds? These are not challenges. Look, I’m not the most strident when it comes to that “appropriate challenge rating” shit, but, fuck, a dozen skeletons? Seriously? Normal book skeletons that auto-turn?

It’s on DriveThru as PWYW. The preview is five pages. Page two, the first text page, tells you everything you need to know. The skeleton hands pulling you down. Treasure. Cave ins to block the path in room 2, bad read-aloud, bad DM text. Enjoy.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/216056/The-Oracle-of-Stone-and-Flame?affiliate_id=1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #145

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


Five more fucking issues. I grow weary of tolerating this shit.

The Distraction
By Tim Hitchcock
Level 3

This is an excellent example of shitty-ass modern D&D adventure design … uh, where ‘modern’ is defined as ‘2007.’ A wilderness outpost is about to be attacked by a gnoll army. The party is tasked with getting behind them and disrupting their cattle to delay them until reinforcements arrive. When I read the synopsis I thought ‘Great! Cool sandbox!’ and then I recalled it was Dungeon and surmised it was probably a linear adventure full of set-piece encounters. Just follow the line of set pieces and arrive at the inevitable destination. The DM tells a story, “and then, and then, there’s this ettercap that stalks the trails and he’s wiped out a fortress and then and then …” I loathe this. The story belongs to the players. It’s too bad, because outposts in the badlands, heading em off at the pass, a haunted forest ala Blair Witch … it’s got great theme ideas that just get crushed by linear shit-fest. WHich is then combined with MONSTROUS amounts of text. We get a paragraph describing a tattoo on the back of the hands of some of the soldiers WHICH HAS NO IMPACT ON THE ADVENTURE. The map uses a cursive font, ensuring it’s fucking hard to read. I mean, you don’t need it, it’s just a linear adventure after all. The haunted forest actually has twig blights in it. “Up ahead, a dark shape resolves into the gutted body of a gnoll, crucified within the thorny branches of a large tree, its cocked head leers down with empty eye sockets.” That’s the entirety of our haunted forest. It’s not a great description AND its not enough to do a haunted forest justice. This alone could be expanded upon to create a fab adventure. In fact, the entire idea needs to be harvested and reworked in to a longer sandbox. The concept here is good … if you can stomach the linearity and have a highlighter and are willing to work hard to run someone else’s adventure.

Vile Addiction
By (five fucking different authors? Seriously?)
Level 8

Part one of a three part adventure path “Seeds of Seehan.” Spriggan drug dealers, says the introduction. Fucking Eberron, sez me. But no, it’s Greyhawk, I think. And it has sewers. I can’t do it. I can’t review another sewer adventure. Oh world, I have failed thee. My only charge and I have failed. I just can’t. Pretext to get you in to the sewers and then SEWER DUNGEON. The map does appear to have pools and bridges, so at least there are some tactical options. In the sewers. Spriggan drug dealers in greyhawk sewers. Tonally, D&D is dead.

City of Broken Idols
By Tito Leati
Level 13

Part whatever of the Savage Tide adventure path.Six pages. It takes SIX. FUCKING. PAGES. To describe a friendly village with nothing going on in it except some disguised monsters attack. SIX. FUCKING. PAGES. An empty village with some couatl’s vomiting exposition only takes a single page, for Tarvinsts sake. I’m not even sure why anyone bothers, the fucking island in the middle of the lake is going to be where everyones attention is, for good reason. It has the 40 room near-linear crawl that has you fighting demogorgon at the end.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 17 Comments

+1 – The Fortress of the Fungi Chemist

Posted on July 28, 2017 by Bryce Lynch

10’+1

A belated review today from that ENTJ to my INTJ, The Pretty Girl.
As a reminder, I thought it was pretty good. Let us learn, today, what The Pretty Girl consider mortal sin …

Review A – The Pretty Girl

Hello Friend,
Come and sit with me a moment and let me tell you a tale of me. 30 years of rolling dice and 10 years living explicitly in the service of the WOTC have found me.. not the gourmand that Bryce is. Where he delights in the innovative, in the Apollonian or Dionysian dreams and realities.. I’m further on the Hephaestus/ Hades spectrum looking intently to structure, foundation, and brooding over the final outcomes. What I’m driving at is, “Is this a tool a DM can use to make it easier to run a game people will like?”

I look at a module for what value it would provide to a DM. Maintaining an agnostic stance in terms of what kind of adventure ~I~ like or what I might find delightful to read. I see modules as tools. My ratings system is more around if someone wanted to know if a module would work for them.. without that person needing to overlap my personal tastes in any way.

When I built my rating scale I took into consideration one of my favorite modules for content, that conversely ran me ragged trying to get it all tidied up enough to actually run it, vs. a starter set series of encounters that were so clean and simple I made them into the foundation of what I ran for every group of new players I encountered for years and years.

By Michael Raston
Lizard Man Diaries blog
Black Hack
Level 1
Total Score: 3 (out of 22)

A logistical mess of cross purpose(less) tables. And oh my, the tables.. let’s talk math (I like math.. if you have wondered why my scores are non-sequential it’s because they are weighted.. I’m into this kinda thing.)

So if you have about 30 doors to walk through.. how absurd is it going to sound if 25% of the time you are going to find a, “Soggy and rotten locked wooden door. Brass key to lock on waist of nearest Jungle Dwarf” Like, really? Cause if the door is soggy and rotten my players have a shovel, and a crow bar, and a barbarian, and a fighter, and some spells but you are going to FOR SERIOUS suggest that I tell everyone to go look for a hapless dwarf who likes to keep the key to a crappy door. And that door is not the door that, “Heavy and ornate stone door, requires STR test to push open.” So the creator either didn’t think about the fact they were dictating how the players should resolve each door or they thought that the GM would be dim enough to need help coming up with non-interesting doors.
Also, did you really make me just made me flip through a bunch of pages and roll a die to see if the door is locked or not locked? Cause it breaks down to 50/50.. You have just created work for the DM.

 

Optimal Applications

GM Prisoner or some other person trapped without alternative options.
Players Hostages? Stuffed Animals?

 

Rating Breakdown
GM Complexity 0
Player Amusement 0
Graphics 0
Language 1
Maps 2

What do the numbers mean?

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Giant’s Perch

Posted on July 26, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By John Fredericks
Sharp Mountain Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 3-6

The elven alchemist Corlue needs brave adventurers to help him locate a rare plant in the northern woods. This plant can help him locate an ancient undead king who seeks to return to life and conquer the world. Who will aid him in his quest?

This is a 28 page adventure, with about fourteen pages of actual adventure, primarily inside a small twelve room temple ruin. I seem to recall not being completely offended by the last thing from Sharp Mountain I reviewed (a witch adventure?) This one has a high point or two but is generally not interesting, with the usual long text and lack of detail that plagues most adventures. When its SPECIFIC it can be good, but that’s all too rare and invariably is hidden inside a long text block.

The party is hired to escort an alchemist the last three miles in to town and, sure enough, he’s being attacked when you reach him. In town you learn he’s looking for a rare flower to stop The Evil One’s return. Poking about turns up an ent in the forest who knows where everything is. Looking for the ent has you finding a young ent set on fire by bandits. This leads to the evil temple ruin where he’s held captive.

The adventure has octobats! They aren’t used enough, just in the final encounter room, which is a shame. Putting them in more often/earlier would have the party freaked out the entire time looking for them. The thing is chucked full of advice. When the advice is specific, which usually appears in the “How to roleplay this encounter” section, it can be a decent add on. The bullywugs, for example, end each sentence with a *croak*. That’s good advice. A little silly, maybe, but it really anchors the encounter and provides for something fun & memorable. Likewise, they were paid off in juicy rare beetles and are truly amazed/astonished if the party is not impressed them as a rare delicacy. That’s good shit right there.

Unfortunately, this kind of solid specific advice is both rare AND buried in text blocks full of meaningless trivia. We’re told that the local inn has solid furniture and hunting trophies on the walls. Great, just like every other fantasy fucking inn that has ever appeared. Instead of concentrating the text on being evocative and focusing the interesting, what’s special about THIS inn, instead we get tedious descriptions (and reaction descriptions, and scene descriptions, and …) that focus of the trivia and the mundane. “Leave me be!” shouts the alchemist, as he is under attack in the first scene. Wow. Great. Perfect. How was this creative masterpiece ever arrived at? The point, of course, being that it does nothing to inspire or add to the encounter. It’s like telling us, in a room description, that a bedroom has a bed in it. Of course it fucking does, it’s the bedroom. It’s only notable if it DOESN’T have a bed in it, or the bed is pristine clean in a dusty room, or the design has the answer to a puzzle, or the indent in it show the princess is a fairy. It has to ADD something. The text in this adventure adds very little.
I could have some minor quibbles with providing skeletons as enemies to level 3-6 parties (don’t they auto-turn at that level?) but it’s really the DM advice I take exception to.

The advice to the DM punishes the party for good play. If the party sneak around then the DM is encouraged to move combat encounters they would have missed to instead be in front of them … so they encounter them. Not. Cool. This punishes players for smart play and is almost the textbook definition of Courtneys Quantum Ogre. Instead, one could show the players the patrolling skeletons at the entrance that their smart play so cleverly bypassed, in essence rewarding them and saying “you people were smrt.”

The adventure IS full of other helpful advice to the DM also. “DM’s, if you are using your own base town instead of this one then change the names, etc to the ones in your town.” Dear god. Or, how about “Feel free to change the name and gender of the young ent to suite your needs.”

Recently I tried to get in to a building at work that I seldom access. They had just remodeled the building and they had just switched over to a new card access system. My card didn’t work. I called support. After relating these facts they told me to hold my card vertical up against the card reader. In spite of the fucking fact that I use my card a dozen times a day at card readers. They then explained to me what ‘vertical’ means. That’s what this adventure is doing with its advice. “Remember to breathe after speaking so you don’t suffocate.” Again, clogging up the adventure with useless advice. And don’t feed me any fucking line about n00bs. I’m reminded of the “If Quake was done today” youtube video. “Tip: you can shoot enemies to kill them!” “Hint: This is the wrong way!” What the hell happened, indeed.

This needs a BIG edit, removing almost all of the text, and beefing up the descriptions to be more evocative.

It’s $2.50 on DriveThru. The preview is five pages. The last page of the preview shows the first page of the first encounter, with the alchemist outside of town. You get to see the *croak* as well as the “I have no quarrel with thee!” trivia. The second page of this encounter is still more monster stats, taking up the entire second page.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/151798/Giants-Perch–An-Adventure-for-OldSchool-Games-and-Labyrinth-LordTM?affiliate_id=1892600

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The Fortress of the Fungi Chemist

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Bryce Lynch

By Michael Raston
Lizard Man Diaries blog
Black Hack
Level 1

Lightless, vine-covered and rotting-stone, top level of abandoned dwarf fortress. Beneath vines is ever impressive carved stone, crumbling with damp and vegetation. Barracuda men mostly inhabit flooded western half, jungle dwarfs the east. As highest level of fortress allows views of jungle and of interior cavern.

This is an eight page adventure detailing the first level of a dungeon with thirty six rooms. It’s the first level, a demo level, or a project that is supposed to provide more levels. It’s got A LOT of terse evocative descriptions and is channeling a pseudo-one page dungeon, with one page for the map, one for the “core” room descriptions, two for monster descriptions and one for generic dungeon dressing. There’s a little bit of the “construct your own” of B1 in this. It’s nice, but has some “design in isolation” vibe in it.

Format first. The designer has a vision that is riding the format. ALL of the room descriptions, all 36, fit on one triple-column page, with a little room to spare. This is supported by a page with five or six random tables on it. Random treasure. Random magic items. Random corridor descriptions. Random trap effect. When you need one you roll and that supplements the room description. Likewise, the monster stats all appear on two pages at the end, two monsters to a page. Embedded in them, besides the normal descriptions/stats, are both a reaction table and an Emanations table … signs that the creature was here recently. What this amounts to is five reference sheets. I like reference sheets. I harp on the need for them all the time. This thing has, more than anything I’ve seen including Stonehell, a “reference sheet” mentality. They don’t LOOK like reference sheets, but that’s what they are. It’s a nifty concept. Tape the map to your DM screen and then have two double-sided sheets in front of you, one with the monsters and one with the dungeon. It’s an interesting vision and I think the format works well to enable the DM to easily run the adventure.

The room descriptions, again all 36 fitting on one page, are quite evocative. Just a sentence or two jabbing you like an icepick in the brain to implant a seed. Room one, the stairs in, are: “Great cracked and worn stone stairs, vine and damp covered. A dark maw of an arch, darkness beyond. Stench of corpse wafts.” Or how about this one “Black puddles swarming with larva. Piles of shed barracuda men skins in corners.” Impressions, these are both representative of the writing for the vast majority of the rooms. The designer leverages the DM to take the impression they’ve provided and let their DM brain fill in rest for the players to encounter. It’s exactly the sort of evocative description I’m looking for. A terse quick hit that implants an idea that IMMEDIATELY blossoms in my head and lets me fill in the rest of the details and interactions myself. It’s a good design principle when the writing is evocative, as it is here.

But … I think there’s a problem. The descriptions are terse. They are well written and evocative. But they don’t GO anywhere. They feel isolated from each other. I mean this in a specific way, but I don’t think I know the words to express it. It’s not theming. Certain parts of the dungeon are themed to barracuda men or jungle dwarves or so on. To that extent the rooms, such as the larvae pool example, contribute to the theming of that area. But they don’t seem to work together, or even in isolation, beyond that aspect. The number of rooms where there’s something TO DO is quite small. It feels a little like you’re browsing the World Showcase at Epcot. You can look around, maybe interact with the locals, but there’s not much more beyond that. The interactivity and the relationship of that interactivity between different rooms is missing. I question my thinking on this subject in only one way: this is the first level of a dungeon and I think there’s more room for ‘tourism’ and disconnected stuff in the first level of a dungeon.

This is, I would assert, where the designers formatting vision has let them down. Curtis solved this problem in Stonehell by providing three of pages of additional text to describe how the level and features worked. This allowed him to stick all of the monsters and map on one page and just say “Great Stone Face” … referencing the paragraphs on earlier pages that described how the face worked. I’m just not sure there’s any room to HAVE that interactivity, or relation, between the rooms in the “one page description” format used here. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I just can’t imagine how it would be done. I imagine the same dungeon, but this time instead of the room descriptions being one page they are one sheet, front and back. That would allow for “DM text” that expanded on the interactivity and relationships.

The “general table” page has a table for doors, to describe them, and one for trease and traps. There’s barely enough doors to justify a four-entry door table being separate, and there don’t seem to be more than four traps, making the four-entry trap table superfluous. The mundane treasure and magic item tables are excellent, but again it doesn’t seem like there’s enough of either to justify their existence … unless you are trying to get your entire dungeon listing on to one page.

Speaking of that magic treasure, it’s GREAT. A bronze ring that always sheds ash, you get advantage when testing fire resistance/handling. Removing it in the presence of flames cause sthe flames to whoosh towards it. All of them are light this. A terse description that has something weird/magical, an effect and then also a slight disadvantage. I love them and they are great example of how a magical item can retain its wonder while still providing mechanical effects.

Monsters are all new, with a little portrait, a name, some aliases, a short description that includes temperament, stats, and then the reaction table and the Emanations table. For barracuda men you might find an animal corpse quivering, claw wounds pulsating with fish eggs. Nice! Or one of three other signs that the barracuda men were here recently. That’s a good technique for foreshadowing the monsters and giving the players a nice build up. Good horror never shows the monster straight on, you always get hints first. The reaction tables are different for each monster, with the jungle dwarves being less likely to attack and more likely to talk/interact. Again, a nice way to differentiate the creature with the selected effects, like “Walks slowly backwards to the nearest body of water and submerges, hissing the entire time.” for one of the barracuda men entries. All that’s really missing is a little faction play; how they view their neighbors and so on.

This packs a mighty punch in just eight pages. There’s some mix between tourism and interactivity that works well. You need both. Too much interactivity feels like set-pieceville and too much tourism turns it in to an Ed Greenwood adventure; interesting to look at but going nowhere. I’m open to being wrong, because of the “first level of the megadungeon” issue, but it still feels light to me, constricted by the choices made for formatting.

You can pick it up on blogs webpage. Page four has the room descriptions and page six and seven the monsters.
https://lizardmandiaries.blogspot.com/2017/06/fortress-of-fungi-chemist-level-1.html

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #144

Posted on July 22, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


The Muster of Morach Tor
By Russell Brown
Level 4

I have no idea. Simple? Overly-complex? Bob, the right-hand man of a towns leader, went to go review an outlying post in the swamp, guarded by friendly lizardmen. He didn’t come back and you’re sent to find him. The outpost says he showed up but headed back via the long road. From this one is supposed to deduce the lizardmen did him in. A gnome leads the party to another outpost (oh no! Evil lizardmen?!?!) ess where they find the guy, and he tells him of a huge troll army attack. The village defends itself. It’s … a mess? On the way to the first encounter you meet “an abandoned village with a wounded troll in it.” WTF kind of encounter is that? The lizardmen thing is weird also. Allied tribe, but somehow your supposed to figure out they are evil and find the gnome. It’s simple and convoluted at the same time, and not in a good way. It feels like a linear 4e adventure, with a heavy combat/tactical focus, without the adventure explicitly leading you around by the nose … but still being linear.

The Lightless Depths
By F. Wesley Schneider & James L. Sutter
Level 11

Savage Tide part six. Asked to bribe a dragon turtle, the party ends up in the underdark in an attempt to keep powerful magic items from being created. This is a non-traditional underdark, more koprah and aboleth themed, and does a much better job of being “underdarky” than Out of the Abyss. (No, I haven’t seen Veins yet. Because deep down inside I’m a bad person.) It’s a vision of mongrelmen, plague, and tube worms, gooey icky insects vats and the like. But … it’s linear. And it is LONG. LONG. There’s mountains and mountains and mountains of text for EVERYTHING. There’s backstory embedded and expanded upon to explain EVERYTHING. What’s that, an aboleth in an isolated chamber? Eight hundred paragraphs later we learn why, up to and including the use of a decanter of endless water. Someone, somewhere, thinks this extra detail is great. That person is a fucking moron. You have to dig through mountains of data. Your reward are some slightly freaky linear encounters. The vision of the underdark is a decent one, if you ignore 95% of the text.

Diplomacy
By Christopher Wissel
Level 18

Oh my. This point out the 3.5 problem, as well as how far adventure design fell. This is an attempt to create a high-level adventure that does not feature combat. Given that Dungeon Magazine seems to think that “high level” means “linear combat shit fest”, this is a quite welcome goal. Unfortunately, the design is incompetent. The party are representatives of Elysium in some negotiations to win the right to a planer diamond mine. There are representatives from other planes: an arcanoloth, a modron, a king of the xorns, and so on. The idea is that the party engages in formal debates with the other parties, advancing round to round, with the Jinn owners as judges. There’s an attempt at combat, and a couple of VERY briefly mentioned pretexts for other “spy” actions, to ferret out arguments ahead of time, but the core of the adventure is “make a diplomacy check.” At the welcoming dinner you have to succeed on two DC50 checks or the adventure ends right there; you’re kicked out. In other debates the party has if they fail their checks (DC 61!) then they lose. They are free to stay and watch the movie play out. Joy. During the debates, if the party responds to an argument with one of two specific lines of debate then they get a bonus to their diplomacy check. Reducing a night of gaming to a die roll is never a good thing. The lack of options after “failing” means the adventure is badly written. It’s roleplaying, not making a point in craps. The SUPER high DC checks are related to the attribute check bloat in 3.5. Either you pumped points in to Diplomacy and make the check or you didn’t and don’t. Finally, the “spy” portions are written like afterthoughts. Literally a line that says “the arcanoloth has a bag on his belt that has blood on it”, a hint he’s going to dump junn heads out of it during his debate, to intimidate the jinn judges. But there’s no ADVENTURE around it, just a die roll. No support for the DM to run a investigation, bribe, or whatever. And, if you do ferret the plot out ahead of time, it doesn’t change anything. You did a fetch quest for someone and get payment, bt there’s no real outcome. The adventure had good intentions but suffers from the lack of complete understanding in how an adventure should be designed.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

Eternal Knight

Posted on July 19, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Louis Kahn
Starry Knight Press
OSRIC
Levels 6-8

Long ago the brave knight Inara Marteen, Paladin of the Light, sacrificed herself to save this world. She lost her life leading her holy order’s charge against an invading horde of demons from the Planes of Hell. Inara fell in combat, where she single-handedly defeated the demon lord known as Soul Eater, driving it and its infernal minions back through their demon gate. There in the fires of Hell, banished for 100 years, Soul Eater sat and stewed on its defeat at the hands of the warrior maiden. A century has passed since that fateful battle and now, free from the bonds of banishment, Soul Eater has returned to this plane to exact its vengeance, first upon Inara and then upon this realm! Finding her tomb, the demon and its minions set about to defile it and destroy her rest, and her legacy. Upon waking from her well deserved eternal rest, Inara’s spirit is angry, defiant and seeking vengeance of its own! Sensing a party of goodly adventurers near her barrow mound, her spirit has reached out to you, worthy adventurers. Can you save this realm from demon invasion and help a noble knight to rest in peace? Will you answer the Eternal Knight’s call?

Heroes are down the hall. No worries, common mistake; we’re the murder hobo division.

This is a fifteen page dungeon adventure with eight rooms on a linear map, only two pages of which actually describe the dungeon. A ghost begs you to clean out the demons in her tomb. It has a page long read-aloud, the rooms descriptions concentrate on physical descriptions and “trivia porn”, the monsters are just thrown in as an afterthought. One might, euphemistically, say that the DM did not successfully translate their vision to print. AKA: it’s a prime example of shovelware crap.

You come to expect things, for better or worse. You try to not be controlled by them and keep an open mind, but, seeing certain things over and over again … things like “eight rooms in fifteen pages.” Short encounter count with a long page count could mean it’s a non-traditional adventure, or has a lot of supplemental information. Or it could mean its crap. It turns out, it’s usually crap. You see a page long read-aloud. It could mean … well, no, a page long read-aloud is always bad. I guess, theoretically, you could have one attached to a magnificent adventure, maybe because the designer was trolling, but it’s the case that people who write page long read-alouds don’t really understand what published D&D adventures ARE. What they are supposed to be. This adventure has a page long read-aloud. It has things like “you find you can’t move” in the read-aloud, all so the party can’t nuke the ghost delivering the read-aloud. Which doesn’t matter because you can’t hurt the ghost anyway.

Looking at the room descriptions things become clearer. Go back and read that first paragraph again, the publisher’s blurb. Here’s the description for room three of the dungeon:

“The western door from Area 1, above, opens onto a 65’ long corridor leading to a 5’ wide metal door opening onto a 20’ square chamber. The room’s walls are covered in faded murals depicting Inara’s trials and triumphs. They show her childhood on a farm, her joining the guard of a local priesthood, and her rise from a squire to a full-fledged knight. The final scene is of her kneeling before a priest who places a tabard over her head. The tabard bears the symbol of their order: a longsword with a pommel and winged cross guards of gold, and a blade wreathed in holy fire.”

First we notice the thing begins by telling us what’s on the map. Which room leads to here and the hall/room dimensions. Again, seeing that is never a good sign. The designer doesn’t know what the text is for, what its purpose is. But then notice the description or the murals. In depth. Detailed. And serving ABSOLUTELY NO PURPOSE IN THE ADVENTURE. It’s fetishism for a creation, just as the publishers blurb is, just as the ghost read-aloud is, just as the room descriptions (murals, more murals, oh boy …) in other rooms are. Someone loves their creation a little too much. There’s clearly a backstory here that the designer likes/loves. I dream about things also, like announcing I’m quarterback for the New York Jets when I’m inevitably captured by aliens and forced to fight to the death in their gladiatorial games. (FUCK polo!) The danger, that this designer has fallen to, is that your backstory is the emphasis. It’s all trivia. No one cares. There are no hints of puzzles yet to come, or interactivity, it’s just useless trivia.

Speaking of, the monsters are a masterpiece. There are things like “this room is occupied by 2 class A demons.” or “in this room are 4 dretch.” What passes for a masterpiece is “this room is being ransacked by a lone babau.” Not cool. They are demons. They are presented as static things, like a vase. “In this room are 4 dretch.” What the fuck is that about? Creative? No. It adds nothing. No smell, no ransacked room, they aren’t doing anything.

The high point of the adventure is a silver tea service and a platinum snuff box, both of which are decent mundane treasure. The magic stuff is boring though, and it takes a paragraph to communicate that a “wand of acid arrows” shoots acid arrows.

I always want to believe the best of people, but I find product like this very disheartening. I think it’s great that the designer put it down on paper and managed to publish it. That alone is a significant accomplishment. But, giving them the benefit of the doubt, whatever vision they had didn’t make it to the page and it’s just another product clogging up the bowels of the RPG adventure market.

It’s $5 on DriveThru. The preview is four pages that don’t really show you anything except the linear map and the first half of the ghosts page long read-aloud, on the last page.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/214866/SO1-Eternal-Knight?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 8 Comments

10’+1 – Halls of the Dwarf Lord

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Bryce Lynch

Another double shot this Monday morning. We’re trying to figure out how to make this work.

 

Review 1 – Bryce Lynch

By Stephen Grodzicki
$1 Adventure Frameworks
Low Fantasy Gaming
Mid/high Levels (8?)3d6 7hd cyclops, 5hd boss

This is a ten-ish page adventure with a short overland and one level dwarf hold with about fifteen rooms. It touts itself as a framework to run a sandbox, and is a freebie from a Patreon site. The adventure tries hard and does several things very well, just missing the mark in several areas. With a little more focus this could be that rarest of things: a series that is good.

Woodcutters are seeing small woodland creature skeletons walking about in a cursed wood and want you to check it out. There’s a short overland adventure with a great wandering table that gets you to a small abandoned fortress on a cliff. Inside you find some cyclops and a crazed wight.

This is a good place to talk about the wanderers, both in the dungeon and the wilderness. Everyone is DOING something, and I can’t tell you how happy I am to see this. It’s not just a garbage encounter table copied from a book, but just a little more is added. Just about one sentence more. Just one, and it adds so much. Skeletons “looking for humans to kill and return to their master for animating.” Or cyclops “returning from a raid carrying sheep and children in heavy nets, for eating.” Giants rates “biting a chunk out of a person and then fleeing in to the undergrowth.” These are great. They ARE little frameworks that can be built upon, exactly what a good published wanderer encounter should be. It turns “skeletons” in to something much more, likewise rats and cyclops. THAT’S show you write an encounter. They are dynamic, doing something. It’s not loaded up with text. There’s not much useless detail. It’s focused. It knows what it’s doing. It’s stabbing the DM with an icepick of an idea in the brain where it can flower. As soon as I read the cyclops entry I’m thinking “the cyclops are singing and joking, happy, while the sheep bleet and kids cry and scream and the cyclops smack them.” That’s what you want, JUST enough from the designer to get your brain kicked in to gear and expanding it. Evocative and terse. More IS less, it hides the evocative and forces the DM to dig for the encounter.

The dungeon, proper, is at its best when its following this formula and at its worst when it is padding things out and dwelling on trivia. “This hallway is 20 ft wide and 30 ft long. Corridors branch off to the east and west. A 10 ft wide corridor runs about 100 ft east … “ and so on. This is garbage detail. It’s trivia, duplicating what’s shown on the map and does nothing but clog things up. Likewise a room telling us that a small dias “is where dwarven guards once stood guard.” Well, are the fucking dwarves standing guard there now? No? It’s a cyclops common room? Then why the fuck are you telling me about what USED to be in this room? Look, it’s great if, as the designer, you’ve built this backstory, but you don’t need to vomit it up to the poor DM. I’m desperately scanning text trying to run the room

But, the adventure has some great things in it. Once room has a pit covered by an iron grate and a winch. Brain Eating ZOmbies are inside, moaning, climbing each other to reach through the bars, thumping their fists and biting the bars. PERFECT! You know what it adds? “Releasing the zombies could be an extraordinary bad idea for any nearby humans (or cyclops.)” GREAT! It’s a thing, it’s interactive, it’s evocative. That’s kind of fucking shit you want in your dungeon. I don’t need to know the wight uses this chamber as a holding pen. It’s obvious. I don’t need the fucking room dimensions. The entire five paragraph description should be shortened to three (one being monster stats) and it would be a lean, mean Dungeons and fucking Dragons Machine!

But, for every one of those there’s something that doesn’t quite work as well. The cyclops common room has one abused & bitter one that could be a turncoat …but that’s not really likely in a big cyclops common room, is it? The thing isn’t designed for that detail to be useful. Likewise there are two encounters outside, near the entrance to the keep, on a bridge or in a stream/ravine that feel forced. “Griffins attack when you cross the bridge” and a river monster attacks when you cross the stream. These feel less natural than either the wanderers or the creatures in the keep. More of a “now is the time when you fight a monster” than a “there is a monster living here.” There’s also a section where there’s some ancient writing. It you don’t make you check to decode it/speak the language, then you still get the gist of the message. That’s fucking bullshit. Why fucking bother rolling then? Likewise the mundane treasure is boring abstraction like “trinkets”, while the magic treasure is boring potions or full of bullshit mechanics. Fuck the “advantage in all checks to resist fatigue and may invoke a Thunderweave effect once every 1d4 days.” boring Boring BORING. “The bearer never tires in combat and, once charged with static electricity (every 1d4 days) releases (whatever the thunderweave effect is.) Magic should be wonderful, not reduced to mechanics. I touch roses.

The map has nice details on it, even if it is a bit cramped. The challenge level is all over the place, with a room full of 7HD cyclops and a boss monster that’s 5 HD, zombies, skeletons, and a 10HD river monster … I’m just guessing at level 8.

It’s a decent effort and I think the designer is close. More focus, more evocative, more creativity (no, not every fucking room needs to be a set piece) and this could be a really nice series.

This is currently free, as an example of the designers work on their Patreon page. Check out those wanderer description on page three, or the zombie room (5) on page seven. Or, the absurd amount of text for room one on page five.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1xtqfss1mfuc5r4/%2818%29%20Halls%20of%20the%20Dwarf%20Lord%20%28Parchment%29.pdf?dl=0

Review A – The Pretty Girl

Halls of the Dwarf Lord
By Stephen Grodzicki
$1 Adventure Frameworks
Low Fantasy Gaming
Mid/high Levels (8?)3d6 7hd cyclops, 5hd boss
Total Score: 15 (out of 22)

A bread and butter campaign written in the style of a late 2.0 Forgotten Realms Module.. I hope all those references and proper nouns show up in other modules.. otherwise it’s a bit silly to behave as if ~made up person~ has significance either within the module itself or outside. If I am expected to care that the famed hammer likes to be called Sally.. I better get the chance to meet her.

 

Optimal Applications

Novice GM Good structure and low complexity for someone still developing a personal style and learning rules.
Novice Players Straight forward situations and combat

 

Rating Breakdown
GM Complexity 5
Player Amusement 2
Graphics 4
Language 2
Maps 2

What do the numbers mean?

Posted in Reviews | 20 Comments