tenfootpole.org

By CS Barnhart
Mad Martian Games
OSR
Level 1

The Temple of Drawoh Rock is an adventure module for 1st level characters exploring the Ice Kingdoms. As warriors of Thane Ornulf the characters will sail the Atalac Sea, explore the Gate Isles, and raid the Monastery of Jove. But what starts out as a simple plan to rob some peaceful monks turns into a harrowing adventure as the adventurers cross paths with the machinations of a deadly sorcerer.

This is a sixteen page viking themed adventure about a raid on a monastery. The monastery is relatively small, at 11 rooms, but there is a sea voyage. It flirts with providing an evocative atmosphere, but ultimately fails to deliver on an evocative environment

This flirts with a viking theme. You’re all drafted to join your first raid , pretending to be a different viking group. There’s a sea voyage and then you end up at the island only to find the monastery empty, obviously having been raided recently. What follow is a slow forlorn explore with a slightly creepy vibe and a few monsters bursting out. There may be something like eleven rooms total and four or five monster encounters, mostly with ghoul-like monks.

The ship voyage has a nice wandering/events table with things like rocks with visible pearls … guarded by mermaids. Storm effects, and so on. The monastery text, while long-ish and unfocused, does present a kind of creepy ass vibe

You have to work for it though. The monastery isle is explained in the text, but a little simple overview map would have done wonders for it. There’s no shipmates presented, and only a throwaway reference, in about 3 words buried in text, of the leader of the expedition. But we do get a long paragraph describing the layout of the monastery … which is just describing what is on the map right above it. “At the far end is the alter (a) and to the north (b) and south (c) are two wings.” It goes on and on instead of concentrating on an evocative atmosphere. There’s a lot of art and large text … I’d estimate that only two or maybe three pages are the adventure proper.

This needs slightly more detail for the ship crew and leader, and a paring down of the text about the raid, the background, the boring minutia of the room descriptions. The treasure is generic. Religous artifacts, scraping away gold … there’s no specificity. I’m not looking for paragraphs, or even sentences, but SOMETHING is needed.

I’m being a little harsh on this. Most rooms are a paragraph or so, and it DOES provide a nice creepy vibe. It also feels overly sparse for the amount of text there is. One of the rooms is:
“
Much like the north wing, the south wing is a ten foot deep and twenty foot wide area that branches out from the nave. This area is the choir and has been built for acoustics. From this point, singing echoes throughout the nave and monastery as a whole.”

I think I’m turned off by the sparseness of the voyage/crew/island and the large amount of art … it feels like the things is SERIOUSLY padded out to make it to sixteen pages. That and the relatively abstracted treasure. But then it does things like say that if you scrape the gold off the altar then the potions and scrolls inside the temple don’t work for you … you’ve angered the god of the temple. That’s great stuff. And the bad guy sorcerer is nowhere to be seen,

This feels like a good adventure plagued by the need for a little more support in the crew and leader, and some better treasure. It also feels … incomplete. Anti-climactic, I guess. I’m not looking for a boss fight but it somehow feels unsatisfying. Maybe it’s the low treasure? I don’t know. It’s quiet, which is ok, but feels too sparse for what it is. I’m intrigued by it.

I don’t know. This review sucks.

It’s PWYW at DriveThru, currently at a suggested $1. The preview is seven pages and show you the wandering table, at the end, which I think it well done, as well as the long-ish intro. It does give a good viking vibe … but goes on and glosses over ship life too much.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/218033/Ice-Kingdoms-The-Temple-of-Drawoh-Rock?affiliate_id=1892600

By Thom Wilson
ThrowiGames
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 1-2

The monks of Esherten have always used trained spiders to protect their crops from the nearby giant fly hives. That was until several days ago, when the always obedient arachnids left the small settlement and disappeared into the Woeful Forest. The giant flies, attracted to the Flame Flower nectar grown in the village, have found the crop unprotected. Monks and villagers are growing weary from their constant battle with the insects. They need help! Who can help them bring back their trained guards?

This is a seventeen page adventure fighting giant flies and spiders. There is some fine imagery in this that really sparks the imagination. Then there’s the other 99.9% of the text which is unfocused and hides the evocative bits, turning a nine room adventure in to seventeen pages.

A village grows a rare flower and nearby monks raise giant spiders to protect the crops from giant flies that like to feed on/destroy them. But the spiders have recently disappeared, migrating to a nearby forest. The primary adventure is a four room cave with a giant evil spider in it. The secondary adventure is a giant fly lair with five rooms.

There great imagery in this. Massive tiny spider migrations, as the evil spider calls them to her, ala Harry potter. You notice, by sense and/or smell something foul and ancient within a cave. Tiny spiders swarm over the remains of a fallen dear. Hundreds of deformed egg sacks hang from the ceiling and cling to the wall of a chamber. Very nice! It implants a strong mental image in your head and allows your brain to fill in the blanks, exactly the sort of evocative writing we’re looking for. But that’s generally one sentence in a column of text. Otherwise the writing is long and generally unfocused … hence the column of text per room. It’s padded out with trivia and detail that is not likely to come up in the adventure.

Then it leaves out things. Room c2 has spiders in it. The text says they will will attack. Unless they are the spiders from the monastery in which case they won’t attack. Are they spiders from the monastery? Are they mixed? No idea. And then the treasure … most of the mundane treasure is just generic coins and the magic treasure is “Dagger of Sharpness, +1 damage.” Lacking detail where it needs it and full of detail where it doesn’t.

Sometimes I find no redeeming qualities in an adventure and, after a couple from the same publisher, write them off and avoid that stuff for a couple of years. This does not fall in to that category; the imagery in this is quite good in places. What it needs is A LOT more thought on the writing, a focus on the purpose of the writing and how it relates to the room. That’s a “second draft” topic in my mind, and fixable and more easily learned than other adventure issues.

This is $1.50 on DriveThru. There’s no preview.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/221048/The-Wicked-Woeful-Web?affiliate_id=1892600

By Christopher Clark
Inner City Game Design
Generic
Mid-levels

While you were away, things did not go according to plan. Someone ran up a whole bunch of debts in your name. Someone made a lot of promises and commitments on your behalf. Someone even signed you up for some sort of inn time-sharing scheme. Someone was not very nice; not nice at all. But they looked like you, sounded like you and got you into more than a lot of trouble. Perhaps you’ll show them the meaning of the word trouble, once you find them.

This 37 page adventure has three locales, two of which are likely to be visited. It is the very definition of ‘terrible generic stat’d adventure’, with all that implies, such as long ponderous text. There’s a Tunnels & Trolls kind of very simplistic thing going on where you go somewhere, like a health spa, kill “barbarians” in dressed in suits, and then move on. It’s not the humor, which I usually hate, it’s light enough here to be ignored. But the text, oh my god, the TEXT! I knew it! I know it! This is the same terrible style & formatting used in Eldritch Enterprises products! I knew I’d seen it before!

You’re in a forest and see Wanted signs with your faces on it. You’re wanted for a variety of crimes, like theft, etc. If you camp for the night you’re attacked by some barbarians. If you don’t camp and instead move on you’re attacked by the same barbarians. They are collecting on a bar tab you are accused of skipping out on. When you kill them you find a flyer that leads you to location two. This is the adventure in a nutshell. Some guys attack you, no matter what you do, with a little light farce attached, and you get a clue for the next location where the same thing happens again. Eventually you find a cave with some shape-changing fey that like to mimic people and cause trouble for them. You, of course, kill them.

Lots of read-aloud. Lots of DM text. All of the stats are in that cumbersome generic weirdo format that hasn’t been used since sue-happy T$R days. There’s no real orientation, leaving you wondering all the time what’s supposed to happening, or could happen. “Once any character announces he would like to try to catch a fish from the lake, The Count leads them there …” It’s ALL like that … you have to be INTIMATELY familiar with the byzantine structure to know where to go and what to do and what’s available.

I’ve seen a lot of bad adventures, so I’m not going to say this is the worse formatting/structure ever … but it is certainly in the same ballpark.

This is $15 on DriveThru. The preview shows you a few pages of the most comprehensible part of the adventure: the confrontation with the evil fey in their cave. It’s a paragon of virtue in layout and design compared to what’s come before.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222335/Nothing-To-See-Here?affiliate_id=1892600

By Bill Logan
DwD Studios
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-2

Townsfolk are disappearing from the surrounding countryside. Goblins are on the march once more. If that wasn’t enough, a terrible blighting disease has infected the waters and not even the curative magics of the Temple of the Winds can thwart it. This is indeed a very dark time for Brighton.

This 54 page adventure details a 21 room goblin lair in an old dwarven hall, along with town nearby. Nice motivations/background and DM advice lead to a journeyman effort with the encounters and the writing being LONG. Too long & focused for me.

The town patrol wandered too far and found a goblin lair. Some killed, some captured, some escaped, the survivors come back, and have brought a disease. A rescue patrol didn’t return at all. Riders have been sent out seeking help. The first group to respond were greedy and disruptable. Your party is the second. That’s the background, which is actually pretty good. It also sets up the action for an evil NPC party hanging around, their rumors, and eventually encountering them in addition to the goblin band in its hold.

The adventure has a a bit of “young adults/children” bend to it, with situations that are clear moral choices and allows kids to be the heroes they know from the tropes they’ve seen. I generally abhor the morality of adventures, but I can certainly see a place for it in adventures for certain audiences. Further, the adventure does a decent job of providing DM notes in sidebars, to explain what it’s doing things and how to modify the adventure … like making it less kid friendly. “The party might decline because the village has plague, if so you could try …” is good DM advice.

The village has some nice rumors and a number of small (VERY small) side quests, and there’s a short wandering table in the wilderness to get to the goblin lair. The rumors could be better, but they do deal with actual information in the adventure. The encounters in the lair fall in to the pretty standard territory. It’s more than “goblin guardroom with 4 goblins.” There’s an evil temple, a throne rooms, guard rooms, slave pens, torture chamber, and all that you would expect. There’s also just a LITTLE bit more. The goblin guards are bullying another goblin … whoc them helps you if you save him, telling you where some traps and treasure are. That’s a good example of both the moral bend (I’m sure the kid players would stand up to bullies) as well as providing more dynamism to the encounter and NPCs to interact with the dungeon, and this dungeon hits that multiple times. Good journeyman-level encounters.

Where it fails is in the wordsmithing. While the ideas are decent the communication style is LONG. And a little bland. The initial read-aloud is about a page long. The town building descriptions are full of trivia that clog up the descriptions without being directed toward actual play. History, descriptions, unfocused writing … they turn the town entries in to a wall of text in which nothing stands out and anything that DOES impact play is hidden. This continues in to the dungeon room descriptions, with long read-alouds that are not particularly evocative and then lots of DM text, turning each room in to almost a column of text.

Interesting, because it DOES do good things in places with formatting/style. That long intro text I mentioned? It’s followed by a couple of bullet points with the key facts for DM’s that want terse facts to run it THEIR way. PERFECT. It also does a great job of selecting a format for the monsters that makes it easy to see their stats. A little lengthy, but its clear that some attention was paid to that. The random DM advice note boxes that appear in the text are another example … someone thought about things and found a way to address it. But the MAIN text. The actual text, is unfocused and doesn’t appear to have the same attention paid to it. It’s hard to scan, it’s conversational, difficult to run at the table. You need to be able to scan the text quickly, requiring focused writing with evocative descriptions rather than trivia.

The encounters are ok, but the writing & formatting are not up to snuff. Bill’s work is not beyond hope if he improves his writing.

This is $13 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages long and is all “overview” and DM reference, not really a view in to the encounters or descriptions at all.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/95757/Dark-Times-in-Brighton?affiliate_id=1892600