tenfootpole.org

By Vance Atkins
Leicester’s Rambles
OSR
Low Levels

Two generations ago, a tragedy befell a wedding night. The groom was killed on the way to the wedding, leaving his grief-stricken bride to live out her days in heartbreak. Even after her death, she haunts her family home, seeking some sort of solace. The adventurers have arrived on the anniversary of the tragic night, where terrible forces bring devastation to the surrounding lands. Can the heroes enter the house and find a way to put an end to this annual horror?

This ten page adventure in a haunted house is a mashup of a bluegrass ballad, about a wedding widow, and a old house plan for a manor. There are about sixteen rooms scattered through about five pages, with the rest being overhead, introductions, licenses, etc. It’s got a decent, slow, haunted vibe going on but it’s handicapped by a loosely organized structure and a lack of focus for the room descriptions. With about sixteen rooms and about four monsters, with maybe four or five “other” encounters, there’s a slow burn thing going on. IE: Creepy adventure is creepy. It’s less D&D and more horror, lacking fantastic beasts, etc. That’s not a negative, but more of a setting-style, for those of you looking for a lower-fantasy adventure.

The backstory is relatively short and inoffensive, mostly because of the single column layout and the inclusion, taking up most of a page, of the inspirational bluegrass ballad. The map is a found object, a historical floorplan of a manor. It’s interesting, but also handicaps the adventure a bit. The key matrix is a mix of room names and numbers, all from the original map. By keeping the map ‘untouched’ you have to live with the original notations for doors, which look enough like windows to cause a bit of struggle to find them on the map. Other features, like ruined stairs and so on, rely on the text in the adventure to come across instead of being noted on a map. I can understand the allure of a found map, but it’s gotta be usable.

The stairs, in particular, annoy me. One stairway is gone, burned in a fire, we’re told a couple of times in a couple of places. That kind of makes sense since it’s not listed as stairs on the map … The front hall stairs, though … those are unusable also. They are collapsed and you need a grapple or something to make it up to the second level. But the stairs, unnumbered, look normal on the map. And the details of the stairs are only found in the text that introduces the second level. The collapsed stair thing is a nice obstacle, but the limitations of the found map shine through here. Instead of cueing the DM with a number on the stairs we instead rely on the DM reading an introductory paragraph.

I mentioned the writing style is unfocused. The first room, the courtyard, is six paragraphs long. One describes the various entrances to the home … I guess because of the map issues. Two delve, to various degrees in to “explaining why.” Adventures seldom, if ever, need to explain the why of things. It clogs things up. “The body of a ranger WHO ATTEMPTED TO PENETRATE THE GARDEN lies dessicated at the foot of one of the vines. (emphasis mine, of course.) The ‘why’ of the ranger is superfluous, it adds nothing to the play of the game. Likewise, earlier up, is this paragraph: “The rose vines have become imbued with chaos energy of the sorrow within the house. The vines are competitive and evenly spaced through the courtyard. Opportunists, they normally prey on birds, small animals, and whatever other unfortunate creature entered the courtyard due to the diminished soils and undead energies of the house.” We’ve already been told about the many small dead animals, earlier up. This paragraph does nothing but justify the existence of the vines. It’s explaining. Don’t explain. At best, one or two that intimate their sorrowful origin, if need be as flavor text, but an entire paragraph? It gets in the way of finding the information you DO need to run the courtyard. The adventure engages in this “explaining” and generally unfocused descriptions in most of the rooms.

It also does several things well. It provides hints, the rooms, in several places. One room has several animals in silk cocoons, for the observant, hinting at a spider. The courtyard, as mentioned, has several dessicated small animal bodies in it, hinting at the vampire vines. In another room you can see a peeling plaster ceiling with water stains, hinting at the weakened floor above.

Both this and U1/Saltmarsh have a nice creepy old house vibe. This one, actually BEING haunted, gets to stretch its legs a bit more than Saltmarsh. There are a couple of curses, including some nice creepy paintings and cursed treasures that appear as wealth to the players but black tar lumps to others, an unusual curse different from the usual pure mechanical effects most resort to. The ghost, proper, and her “curse removal” also has a nice folklore vibe going on.

I’m fond of these slow burn adventures. Or, maybe, I WANT to like these sorts of adventures. The idea of exploring an old haunted house appeals to me. I like the creepiness and build up. I’m not sure, though, it matches my play style. The slower place, and lack of “fantastic beasts” is going to appeal to some DM’s/campaigns more than others. Hmmm this is coming off more negative than I mean it to be. It’s a decent little adventure that needs a highlighter or a second version to tighten it up.

The last couple of pages on the DriveThru preview show you a couple of rooms, and is a good indication of what you are buying. Check it out:https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/206724/The-Ballad-of-Sally-Anne?affiliate_id=1892600

By Benjamin Ball
North Wind Adventures
AS&SH
Level 6-9

For weeks the Comet has blazed in the sky above Hyperborea, inspiring widespread superstitious dread and fear of some star-borne contagion. Under the light of this harbinger from the Black Gulf, the PCs have come to Bogrest, following a magical treasure map that reveals great wealth buried in the Lonely Heath north of the village. Finding that treasure will be no simple matter, however, for Hyperborea is a weirder and deadlier place than ever beneath the Comet

This 48 page adventure details a small wilderness scrubland area ending with a thirteen room dungeon under a barrow mound. The dungeon reminds me of a more realistic version of White Plume Mountain. You explore, collect keys, and go face the final boss. The keyed encounters, both in the wilderness and dungeon, offer a nice variety of decent ideas. The AS&SH writing style, is, however, present and a major barrier to entry/use/enjoyment. Your mileage may vary.

The party has a magic treasure map, showing the way. Generally, to some ancient mound in a scrubland. There’s a village nearby. There are four encounter locations in the scrubland, along with the main mound proper. The village takes three pages (one of which is a map) to add nothing to the adventure except a small rumor table. With a two paragraph introduction that adds nothing to the table. I’m reminded of the rumor table in Gus L’s Prison of the Hated Pretender. It’s title bar was “What the scabrous yokels in that village of broken down huts are saying:” That does at least as good a job as the three pages spent in this adventure on the village. What, pray tell, is the appeal of the “what equipment is available” fetish? This adventure spends two paragraphs telling us what the party can and can’t buy. I don’t get the appeal. All those words don’t really add anything to the adventure. There IS a “villager quirk” table that is rather nice, quirks and/or strong personalities, something to remember them by, should be a required part of every social encounter.

As indicated in just about every other AS&SH review I’ve done, I’m NOT a fan of the writing style used. I don’t think this is personal preference, at least not in the way I use that phrase. In other words, there may be multiple ways to fulfill my review standards, some of which I may prefer over others. I don’t think this is a case of the AS&SH line using a different way to get to same goal, a way that I might not prefer (personal preferences.) I think I can make a case that the adventures obfuscate data for the DM and are not evocatively written. Which is a fancy way of saying that they almost always have great ideas, but you have to work hard to get at them.

Some wandering gargoyles have strange and unsettling necklaces. The DM is elsewhere offered the advice “If the PCs make some attempt to distract or deceive the super ape-men, the referee must determine the success of their endeavour.” And in another area “the party can wash the poison off with alcohol or some other like cleaning agent.” The later two examples are, I think, examples of being too prescriptive. Of course the DM has to determine success; the DM does that about at least a hundred times in every session of D&D. Likewise the cleaning off the poison. This is something that this adventure engages in time and time again. This sort of prescriptive text add very little to the game and I would argue it detracts far more than it adds, by making the text denser for no good reason, making it harder to use during play.

The gargoyle necklace is in a different category. “Strange and unsettling” are not good descriptions. Those words are conclusions. It’s an example of using a TELL word instead of a SHOW word … and you should always SHOW instead of tell. Use different words to show me the necklace, to describe it. Then, if you’ve done a good job, the party members will conclude “ooh, that’s strange and unsettling!” This adventure engages far too much in showing instead of telling and therefore the evocative nature doesn’t come through well.

I want to spend a little time talking about the wandering table in this adventure. There are two tables, once mundane and one more fantastic. If you roll a six on the mundane table you instead roll on the fantastic table. (Which means, BTW, that the Rust Monsters in encounter six will never show up. I’m sure that wasn’t intended.) The mundane wanderers attack immediately. That’s pretty boring, I prefer slightly more pretext be offered, but, whatever. The fantastic encounters are, almost all, window dressing encounters. You meet a ghost child. Be nice to it and maybe get a combat bonus. You meet a fortune teller. Be nice and maybe get a combat bonus. You meet an X, be nice and you’ll get a combat bonus. It’s a bit of a one-trick pony. Yeah, the window dressing stuff is kind of ok, but its detachment from the rest of the adventure leaves it FEELING like it’s detached. Some effort being made to tie these in to the main adventure text would have made them come off better, as well as varying the reward a bit more. The better ones are the ones that ARE attached to other encounters, like a driverless wagon and the ones that offer variety, like a new henchman/hireling. The others feel … too samey and too detached from whats going on. They don’t LEAD to anything.

The actual encounters are pretty decent. Several of the locations in the wilderness tie together and all of them are interesting. There are a lot of things to interact with, things to do. Crossing pits on edge ledges, dodging around on moving mosaics, a two-headed pterodactyl with the usual lying/truth problem, a dude straight out of folklore who you have to REALLY hack to death, a rival NPC party to mix things up, and a decent amount more. Essentially, you get about 20 interesting “rooms” for the party to interact. They do mostly fall in to the same category of a funhouse-ish light sort of challenge/puzzle, but it’s all interactive for the players to play with and figure out, rather than just simply riddles. Closer to chessboard challenges, but not as divorced from continuity as chessboard puzzles usually are. I really like them. Maybe a little more variety, but they are nice. Plus, the lich at the end has got a GREAT short little paragraph death scene that will really make the party think they’ve accomplished something.

It’s just too bad that those encounters are hidden behind all of that text. Up until this point I would have said that Talenian has a distinctive voice. But this being a different designer I now get to generalize to: AS&SH has a distinctive voice. And it’s one I really don’t like.

The dungeon storeroom begins: “The floor of this room is stacked with funerary offerings: decorative furniture, brightly dyed textiles, wicker baskets full of grain and fruit, myriad clay pots and bowls, small idols of forgotten Hyperborean gods, teak chests filled with parchment scrolls, and more. These mundane items are amazingly well preserved by the magic of this room, but they will crumble to dust if removed from it.” So, a funerary offering storeroom with stuff that crumbles? (It does then go on to have something interesting happen, but the distinctive writing style makes the room description take up a full page.)

The preview on DriveThru is pretty useless in telling you what you will get getting, although the “Authors Note” section on the last page hints at the tortured writing style to come:https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/156200/Beneath-the-Comet?term=beneath+the+comet?affiliate_id=1892600

By Jeffrey Talanian
North Wind Adventures
Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea
Level 2-4

Somewhere in the depths of Diamond Desert lie the skeletal remains of Ymir’s Serpent, a legendary Viking longship. In days of yore, Sigtrygg Forkbeard led his company upriver, piercing the desert’s hostile heart. There the Vikings unearthed a lost mine brimming with green diamonds, but the River Æolus desiccated as the Serpent prepared for launch, and the ship was swallowed by the dunes. Forkbeard and his company were never seen again, but tales of a shimmering Viking ghost ship gliding over the dunes persist to this day.

This sixty page adventure takes the party through a border-village on through the desert to an old mine. There’s a nice variety of encounters, but the final dungeon skews hard to the “linear” side of things, in spite of the more open-ended border village and desert. It’s all wrapped in text that carries Talanian’s distinctive voice; a dream to some and a nightmare to others. There’s a real adventure here, along with a lot of Harn-like detail. Your tolerance to wading through the prose will determine your ability to run it.

The hook here is pretty lame: you’re hired by a wizard (“a male witch” the text kindly tells us) to take him to a lost mine of green diamonds, a a gemstone that can be rare and dangerous. What saves it is the NPC, the wizard in question. He’s got a pegleg and a distinctive arrogant/asshole/disdainful personality to go with it. That slowly changes as he closer to the mine. And his eyes glow. Green. Greener as you get closer. Nice NPC!

Off you go. You can stop off at a village on the edge of the desert to gain a level, from 2-3, under the pretext following up on a green diamond rumor. From there you trek through the desert, with a couple of distinctive encounters, until you read the mine … which is really quite a linear dungeon. The titular ghost ship is a rumor, and maybe flies around the desert a little at night if the wandering table turns it up.

The adventure here is a good one with a nice variety of encounters. The initial village adventure is a nice little social wandering that is well supported by the NPC’s in the village, with decent color. It’s supported by a nice little summary as well as a note of the key locations. There’s a nice rumor table as well, to add some local intrigues to the mix. It centers around a local scandal, with shades of Smeagel, brothers, wise-women, and a wildman. The more the party looks in to things the more color comes out and the more hints they get about what they are up against. The wildman lairs in an old temple. The entire section, from the village to the temple, is a nice, and colorful, little open-ended bit of adventuring.

From there the party ends up in the desert trekking to the old mine. There are a handful of places detailed as well as an “advanced” wandering monster table. Let’s hope that the party keeps their ules around to maybe feed to any purple worms that show up. A handful of small, but colorful, adventure sites are included, although I doubt most parties will encounter more than two or so. Still, they are quite nicely done. An old gem mine, dead atlanteans with a flamethrower, ant hills, and a giant spider are featured in one small encounter. In another the NPC wizard meets an old friend, a hermit. And almost certainly ends up blasting a hole in the dudes chest. Man, that NPC wizards is THE. SHIT. from an ‘adventure color’ standpoint. The gem mine, at the end, is more than a little linear and the ghost ship may not even show up. But still. Pools of water. Vermin, like Black Centipedes, slimes, a giant ape. Ancient technology. Its got lots of nice encounters down there.

Let’s address the gorilla in the room: Talanian’s voice. Jeffrey Talanian is one of the few (only?) people writing RPG supplements who, if formatted the same, you could tell who wrote the thing without their name being attached. Dude has a seriously idiosyncratic writing style. Grammer. Vocabulary. Detail. They add up to something more than the usual “technical writing” style that most designers use. It’s an acquired taste that I haven’t acquired. I admire that he has a distinctive voice. I just wish he tempered it more. “This natural cavern was worked to a gradient to accommodate the mining operations that took place here.” He means, of course, “the cave slopes.” I find his writing style exhausting, having to work through it to figure out what he’s trying to say. It’s like your car’s manual was written in the style of WIlliam Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. On of the primary conceits of the tenfoopole is that the adventure is, first and foremost, a tool to be used for running a game at the table. It is, therefore, a piece of technical writing. A peculiar type in which artistic license MUST be taken with language in order to deliver terse and evocative bursts in to a DM’s brain. All perfectly organized. Dionysus and Apollo, together at last. Too often I feel like I’m fighting the text in this. His archaic style obfuscates rather than enables, and often to little evocative effect. “The dais is dominated by an eight-foot-tall, verdigris-encrusted bronze statue of a cobra set within a glyph-incised alcove.” I assert that description, in spite of the vocabulary and grammar choices, is boring. Boring in the way facts are boring. Yes, it tells us what’s there. But it doesn’t necessarily inspire us, the DM, to a great mental image.

Talanian also deals with ecology and this is where the Harn comparisons come in, or perhaps the MERP region supplements. The village the party stops at has a festival once a year, that’s fully detailed. Harvest times are detailed. One encounter in the desert, unlikely to happen, is with a field of cactus. Which have their flowering seasons detailed and the fauna attracted to them. “… and small bats pollinate the pink and white blossoms of the early Tempest [spring.]” Uh. Ok. The ecology here is rich, both in the desert encounters and in the others. But this isn’t a MERP regional module. It’s an adventure to be run at the table and EVERYTHING in the main text must contribute to that. There’s a place for extra detail. It’s called an appendix. Many designers could improve their products by putting the extra detail in an appendix and referring to the page in the text. The village, likewise, suffers from this ecology fetishment. The village lies down at the base of some hills/cliffs. Up top, scattered along the edge, are some totem poles. There is one off-hand remark about this mid-way through the village, in the description of one of the shopkeepers (ok, a monk sect.) Something along the lines of “they main the totems around the village.” You don’t really learn they are there until you go to the wilderness text, after the village. Sure would be nice if you knew about it immediately …so you could tell the party about it immediately. Instead it’s like you’re reading some weirdly laid out cultural reference tome of the village and have to be intimately familiar with everything before you can get the big picture. Not to appear to be harping, but the cactus field is an excellent short example.

I have one more general complaint that will make me sounds like a petty ass: the use of italics. I don’t know if it’s the font, the kerning, or what, but the italics in this makes my head hurt. All of the read-aloud, sometimes a couple of paragraphs worth at a time, and other special thing, like trease, are in this italics font. I LOATHE it. It’s almost like trying to read a small italics cursive font.I suspect it has something to do with the “main” font, and readability. Whatever it is, it drives me nutty.

You gotta dig out the information in this one. But if you do you’ll have a nice little adventure, with a decent amount of the human condition driving aspects of the secondary situations encounters. Which is both relatable and something not very many adventures do. The result is something that feels a little gamma world-ish. Several fantasy environments, from Tekumel to Blackmoor, have a kind of post-apoc vibe deep inside of them, even though they are fantasy games. This adventure fits that vibe.

The preview on DriveThru is worthless, showing you just the cover and title pages. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/156178/Ghost-Ship-of-the-Desert-Dunes?affiliate_id=1892600

By Dominique Crouzet
Dice of Might Publishing
Dark Albion/OSR
Level 1

There’s a spooky ghost on London Bridge! Can the party help?

This is a 28 page investigation/social adventure in a pseudo-historical/fantasy urban locale: london bridge. It’s presented in a more sandboxy manner than the usual linear plots-based dreck. It describes what’s going on, the people involved, and the locations on the bridge, and then leaves the party to figure out what they want to want to do. This is all adjudicated by the DM using the materials presented in the text to roll with the punches and determine what happens based on the backgrounds & data presented. You know, D&D. Thus the adventure groks the overall goal/vision but falls down in the execution: I don’t think it’s laid out in a manner that helps the DM run it.

The setting is Dark Albion, a kind of pseudo-historical europe that will be familiar to those experienced with the same sort of thing in Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It’s a decent setting for a gritty urban adventure … gritty urban being a favorite genre of mine. As an introductory adventure it creates a nice hook: the party is, each individually, on their way to a pilgrimage in Canterbury, which traditionally starts in a chapel on the bridge. With a few days to kill because of a delay, the party sees a terrified woman rush in to their inn and corner a priest with tales of a ghost. As the only other people in the inn, he seeks the parties help. There’s enough extra to make it more than the usual empty adventure pretext.

The text gives a brief summary of what’s going on and then expands on each of the various aspects. There’s a little bit of history and then a description of the various main people in the set up. A brief description of how the ghost appears and what people do, a brief description of the major adventure locates, a brief description of some shops for the bridge. The adventure comes from how the party chooses to approach the hook. Go looking in to places? Asking questions? Hanging out to catch a sight of the ghost? Nothing is programmed in the adventure as a plot and all of the descriptions must then be used by the DM as a resource to respond to what the characters are doing. This is a great way to organize a more social/investigative adventure. There may be better ways, but if there are they don’t immediately spring to mind. There are some good businesses for an urban environment that will provide some nice GAMEABLE content for the party to have fun with as well some good loose-ends on where to take the party after the main adventure completes. The text is trying to provide a framework, resources if you will, for the DM to take the inciting event and then respond to what the players do. That’s exactly what this sort of adventure SHOULD do.

But, notice I said “trying to provide.” The gets itself in to trouble. There’s too much, even in this short adventure, to hold in your head. That means you have to refer to the adventure during the adventure. And the adventure doesn’t make it very easy to run at the table. The font is small, the data is organized in long paragraphs. Data is spread out throughout the book. When you do find a logical section then the data you need/want isn’t present. In one core building everyone inside gets their name stated in their little romo description. Except for the main guy, who owns the building. His name is in the intro section. One woman, a wealth of information, owns a shop. What kind of shop? Not stated.These are minor nits issues but lend to the general theme of the … unsuitability? of the text at the table.

This marries two concepts: background exposition and stickiness. I usually rail about excessive background information and I usually rail about encounters that are not tersely written. Except when the encounter is sticky. And except when the background information is relevant to actual play. (And not in some bullshit sophistry like ‘it MIGHT come up in play!’) In both cases we appeal to the general use: it can’t get in the way of actually running the game at the table. Stickiness helps there. In reusing my favorite example, you see the name “Old Bay’s Cave” and you know generally what’s inside and how to run the room without reading more. Stickiness and exposition can be exploited, together, by proving some summarized information. A good example is Maze of Blue Medusa. Each room gets a decent-sized write up. Let’s assume you read the room once, sometime before you actually run the game. If you never look at that information again you will, when running the game at the table, remember some amount of information about the room. One option is that you could run then run the room, from memory, without really doing much more than glancing down at the text. You would have some degree of success in running the room by using the text as inspiration, both from what you remember from reading the text beforehand and whatever you see in the glance at the big paragraphs. What Maze of the Blue Medusa does is then provide your failing memory further cues. It says “hey, here’s this picture on the map which is related to the room” … and you remember something more of the encounter from that cue. But, and more key, it also provides a little one or two sentence summary of the room. It is from that summary that most of your memory cues stem from. It has found a way to provide exposition on the room AND make the room usable at a glance in play while losing very little of their key nature. That is what this adventure, and many other adventures with dense text, sorely need.

That’s why I like summary information. Read the adventure once and then refer to the summary sheet to prompt your memory, with occasional glances at the text. That’s what this adventure needs. It needs a little timeline. It needs the NPC’s summarized with personalities (a stats sheet for enemies IS provided, which is QUITE welcomes! As would one for people/personalities since this is primarily a social adventure …) A timeline, a social summary, a location summary, all on two or three pages, would have made all of the rest of the exposition fall in to line and give the DM the tools they need. Instead you get to buy a highlighter and invest time in highlighting and making notes on a pad of paper.

It’s an ok adventure, it’s just hard to use in play. A little more personality for the NPC’s, a little more timeline. Some summaries. That would have turned it in to a good adventure.

The preview, on DriveThru, will give you a good idea of what to expect. The last couple of pages, in particular, show you what kind of descriptions you get for the locations, as well as the general timeline of the action (in text/paragrapgh form, rather than timeline form.) What’s you don’t get to see are the supplemental businesses on the bridge, in the back part of the book, which should add quite a bit to the adventure.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/153587/DAA1—The-Ghost-of-Jack-Cade-on-London-Bridge?affiliate_id=1892600