tenfootpole.org

By Laurent B
De Architecturart
Generic
Level 1-3

You will find with “The Sinister Tunnels of GREENFIELDS” a sorcerer, terrible rituals, forgotten dungeons …. and a little more than that.

This seventeen page “adventure” in a village is more of an adventure outline. Pretty maps abound, but it feels more like the outline for a short story then it does anything usable at the table. The keyed encounters are not actually keyed encounters, but merely mentioned in a long paragraph, while the NPCs and backgrounds get too much text. The hook and villain are, at least, more fresh than usual. I WANTED to run this adventure … but I don’t want to devote the mental effort to do so. I think this is French, translated to english.

There was a plague in a small village about fifteen years ago, followed by a famine since no one was there to work the fields. A merchant moved in and built a spinning mill, providing food & jobs ad place for the orphans in the village, and region, to work. I’m sure you can work out the major thrusts of the rest on your own. He’s evil, caused the plague, and has nefarious purposes. In this case he’s a (relatively) low-level evil wizard who is using the kids to remain young. (A classic! I love the classics!) He only hangs about for fifteen years and his self-imposed time limit in this village is almost up. Two of the three hooks are a bit fresh: you’re guard for a merchant going to visit him for normal spinning-wheel business. This is a decent pretext to put the party in the middle of the village while shit unfolds around them. The second is a lord who lost his entire family 30 years ago due to an epidemic identical to the one in this village, and hires the party to go look in to things. The idea of an ancient dying lord, hunting down with vengeance his family’s murders, but too old not to pursue it, is another trope I like because I think it appeals to players. The wizards low level nature, the classic theme of eternal youth, and his benefactor status in the village all VERY strongly appeal to me. These are things that a DM can work with pretty easily, I think.

In support of the DM there are some column-long descriptions of the village’s mayor (loyal to the villages benefactor), his loyal manservant, and an orphan-finder who roams the countryside seeking out new workers. All three are well done, but their descriptions go on much longer than they need to. A couple of sentences, or maybe a short paragraph is all that should be needed. More than this requires notes & highlighters.

You also get maps of the village (Harn-like … my favorite sort of village-area map) and three maps of underground areas/tunnels. The maps are beautiful, as one would expect from a French illustrator. Top notch (isometric?) cutaways of the areas showing a decent amount of detail. The maps are much more vertical than most, and have nice elevation elements present. There are multiple entrances, through various wells and so on. It is, essentially I think, a linear design with a couple of room hanging off of it. The vertical elements save it, and while it’s not an exploration dungeon-map it IS quite a bit better, quite a bit, than the usual plot-maps. Winches. Wooden platforms, ropes, tunnels in to the dark, ladders stairs, ruins, the maps do a great job of being evocative and providing the chaotic sort of environment that I think a good exploration map provides. Here’s a link to one of them:
https://plus.google.com/photos/photo/106785353548003542653/6383193990268215122?icm=false&sqid=114959286898953661246&ssid=17497f00-1ba8-4ab0-94b0-967209d2c64b

There are some things going on to spice things up. He’s getting to ready to move. He’s about to/will sacrifice several children. That also creates ground tremors when he does it. There’s a monster under the water that appears when he sacrifices kids. There are goblins ready to invade the town. The mayor is a die-hard supporter. There is at least one visiting “merchant.” I’m not sure if any of this is faction-like, but it is enough going on to create the sort of chaos I like to see in an adventure … without it FEELING like it’s manufactured chaos (as it is in so many Dungeon Magazine adventures.)

Alas, I am now out of kind things to say. The adventure is only an outline. A seventeen page outline, but an outline nonetheless. No orphans presented (but for one “a mute girl”), no villagers presented but for the mayor. No encounter keys presented. WHAT?!?1 Yes, the entirety of the undergrounds 21 rooms are covered in about three paragraphs of free-text. Imagine if you will, at the end of a paragraph … “Several rooms dug around are used to store weapons and equipment to gear up a small troop of mercenaries and to accommodate it if necessary (16, 17, 20 and 21).” That is the extent of four room descriptions. All of the others are like that. Roughly in order, but skipping around abit, with text mixed freely.

Imagine you came upon a map and numbered it and minimally keyed it. “Storeroom”, “merc bedchambers” and so on. You also scrawled “kindly wizard disguised as merchant who actually sacrifices kids to stay young” along the top of the page. You would have this adventure. And you will again since you’re going to have to print out those map pages and take notes on it.

I’ve been accused of having a rather strict taxonomy on what an adventure is, and it’s because of product this like one. If you sent your husband out to the store to buy an adventure and he came home with this, for your game tonight, you’d probably sigh and pronounce it worthless. It’s not an adventure that one expects to get.

But I don’t think the product is bad if you accept that it’s not an adventure. If it were advertised as an adventure planner, or outline, or something like that then I think it’s an interesting product. As a reviewer you’re faced with a lot of the same and so products like this stand out. I can imagine something similar, for example, as a kind of outline for Scourge of the Demon Wolf. “Here’s the framework for an adventure. Go add the details.” Not an adventure. A framework that you need to work on to add to. Kind of a more expanded “Adventure Seeds” that clog up DriveThru/RPGNow. Something for which to inspire. In that vein, a few more villager details and intrigues, as well as orphans, would be called for, as least in outline.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/201589/The-sinister-tunnels-of-GREENFIELDS?1892600

By Gerald D. Seypura PhD
Southerwood Publishing
Champions of ZED
Low Levels

This thing goes by Mines of Wexham and also by Mines of Wexcham. The adventure says Wexcham while most of the marketing/references not in the adventure refer to it as Wexham. I believe the designer has passed away since publishing, and I think I tend to grade on a curve when details like that pop up. Be Warned.

This is a nineteen page adventure in some old caves/mines with small wilderness portion. It has some of the charm and all of the problems that one would expect from an pre-1975 adventure. Minimal keyed in places, weird formatting & layout that do NOT contribute to usability, and, in places, the idiosyncratic encounters of imagination before rules. I’m not sure what the history of this is; it looks like a kickstarter add-on, but I THINK it’s a new adventure, not a find from pre-75.

You get a map that shows the supposed location of a legendary lost mine from an ancient empire. It’s three days by foot or a day and half by ship. EITHER you’re playing the pre-gens provided OR they are a rival NPC party (or, more specifically, YOU’RE the rival party to them!) Anyway, off to the mines you go. The mines are presented on three maps: the ground level, an old troll cave, and the underground mine map proper. The maps are basic but well done, by which I mean they provide the complexity required to run an exploration adventure. Loops, with all three maps connecting, and multiple entrances/exits from the maps lead to an element of mystery, with about 34 locations total across the three maps.

The encounters fall in to three types. First you have the traditional minimal keys. “6 giants rats” with stats, is the total of the encounter description. Two trolls. Four spiders. You get the idea. The second type is that of the “old room.” The old room has something old in it. Duh. 🙂 Some old bones. Some bits of leather. And then when you touch something it disintegrates due to age. These almost always have some sort of clue or minor treasure associated with it. Finally, there are the Type III demons. These are the core rooms with something nontrivial in them. There’s really only one or two of these, and the clues and several minor treasures relate to it. There are ghostly soldiers in the mine (but … not actually undead that can be turned …) They attack those not associated with their old empire. You can find some objects, like armor with insignia, that let you pretend to be old empire soldiers also. Eventually you find a banner which will allow you to command them. The clear presumption is that you will use them to attack … the room with seventy orc warriors in it … Yeah. The last couple of rooms have masses of orcs in them.

The wilderness adventure is laid out on a day by day basis. One day one roll for wandering monsters twice. On day two rolls to hear a howl in the distance. On day three … and so on. If you instead choose to go by ship something similar ensues, except the DM gets to roll every other TURN for monsters … and if you roll a 6 you see a pack of sharks in the water … This is all mixed in with what I presume to be read-aloud, not set apart from the text, and the phrase “How do you wish to proceed.” It all a colossal mess. You can decipher it, but it’s VERY stream of consciousness. The “Wish to proceed”, being used as a section break, tapers off through the adventure, disappearing halfway through the mine room descriptions. To be fair, the nonsense settles down by the time you reach the mapped/keyed encounters with only the introductory pages and wilderness adventure being victim to the issues.

There’s a certain nostalgic charm to this adventure, that kind that comes from the early days. A clumsiness of format/layout combined with the sorts of minimal keying with the sort of embedded-adventure that one would find in B2/Borderlands. The kind that fights you all the way. A good DM can take this and run the hell out of it. But then again a good DM can do that with anything. It’s hard to suggest this, even to the nostalgic crowd. Other older products, like Dungeon of the Bear, conjure much of the same vibe.

It’s on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/180519/The-Mines-of-Wexham?1892600

By Davide Pignedoli
DaimonGames
OSR/Crying Blades
Level 1

The…village is abandoned, and within one hour walks from the tomb. There is not much left: the wooden houses have rotten and collapsed, and only a few stone buildings still sort of stand. There’s nothing to loot, there’s no food, no tools, no riches. Centuries have passed since when the village was abandoned, and anything value has been already taken by others.

This is a sixteen room twenty-eight page tomb of a barbarian. It is, generally, a tomb full of traps with a couple of undead or statue encounters,and leans heavily to the “quiet exploration” side of the D&D adventure spectrum. It’s overly verbose writing style combined with a conversational organization style leads to difficulty in finding information.

There are lots of pages in this but the actual content is a bit light for a sixteen room tomb. A rumor table, a random villager table, and a brief wilderness monster table make up the first twelve pages, interspersed with a generous amount of public domain art. The rumor table is nothing special, and the random NPC table seems a bit out of place. The wilderness monster table has a few entries and each one has a bit more to it, by way of an extra sentence, than a pure listing of monster stats. The vampire tree holds the corpse of a old victim. The fairy demands gold coins and favors one PC. The lone wolf is lonely and scrawny. These extra little bits help, I think, a DM create a nice little scene around the monster with minimal effort. There’s also a ruined village provided, on a page, with no map. It’s basically a ruined tower next to a graveyard and some random dead show up at night. It’s long for what it is but it’s still a nice little encounter.

The tomb is based on a real map and is almost entirely of the trap/trick variety. There are a variety of classic tropes, including a balanced scale trick, the old spikes from the ceiling, creatures that follow you out of the tomb (if you loot) for revenge, and an exit tunnel that collapses if you loot the main tomb, forcing you to dig out. I like the encounters. Many are pretty classic tropes and those are always winners. In addition, it includes little map snippets on most pages to help orient the DM to nearby rooms/encounters. That’s nice … but probably a little unneeded for a dungeon this small … IE: the whole map fits on one page and is easy to follow.

The whole thing has a very slow feel to it. Imagine a slow and careful “real life” exploration of a tomb filled with traps and the like. That’s the vibe this adventure puts out, probably because of the lack of any pressure. There are not really any creatures around to pressure decisions or a slow careful exploration.

The dungeon has two key issues that make it hard to recommend. They are both related to the actual writing. It’s long. Quite long. There is quite a bit of conversation DM advice integrated in to the text. In addition, there’s a lot of very specific descriptions about how the traps and effects are meant to work. The “spikes from the ceiling” trap gets over a column of text to describe it. Triggering it, the pressure plate, and multiple technical facts about the trap. There are not enough spikes to prevent passage. The spikes don’t go all the way to the walls. One person walking slowly won’t trigger it. The spikes don’t return to the roof as long as there is pressure. Except the description provided is MUCH longer than my summary. The writing is, in effect, ONE dm’s description of how they interpreted a ‘spikes from the ceiling’ trap. Rather than giving a few guidelines and letting the running DM handle the details the details are instead spelled out. This significantly lengthens the text and, I think, makes it harder for a DM to run it since they must dig through all of the text. I’m not saying that the text should be “Spikes come from the ceiling” and nothing more. I’m instead saying that it is the role of the designer to provide JUST enough detail to get the flavor of the trap across to the DM … who can then fill in the rest. This sort of thing is not isolated and happens a lot.

Secondly, the conversational style of the adventure leads to a weird organization style. The details of each room tend to be spread out over multiple paragraphs. What do you see when you enter the room? I don’t know, let me dig through the next five paragraphs and find out … It likes the effects were placed before the cause. In one room the treasure chest and mural on the wall, the fact that they exist, is placed after two paragraphs of text that detail how to dig through the coins in the chest and how the coins get in to the chest. Not ideal for finding information as you run the game.

It’s a slow adventure. You could hire a team of villagers and just dig the place out from the roof (it’s a barrow type place under a small hill) and get all of the secrets, avoid most of the traps, and PROFIT!

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/203444/Tukrams-Tomb–OSR-dungeon?1892600

By Anthony Huso
Self Published
AD&D
All Levels

Once, a designer told me: “More is better, right? I mean, better to have it and not need it!” Not, I reply, when it makes the design difficult to actually use.

It is an Inn, a tavern, and a universe unto itself—a place of powerful dweomers, secret doors, lost gods, hidden dimensions and dangerous artifacts. Behind the sand box experience is a back story & a mystery. Players never need solve this mystery, but it is the glue that holds the experience together.

You are warned: This is a difficult review of a difficult product.

This 190 page supplement, found on Lulu, describes an interdimensional inn. It can serve as a kind of “home base” for a party. Over time, as the inn reveals its secrets, it becomes both a tool for generating adventure seeds and, ultimately, maybe, the outline of a TRUE high-level AD&D adventure. One of the few, ever. And I don’t mean “Q1” hight level, I mean REALLY high level.

The inn is extra-dimensional and the entrances/exits are in several locations at once. Further, there are multiple exits to other planes. The rooms, both common and private, number about a hundred, and include about a twenty “other plane” areas, similar to what’s found behind the doors in Q1, but expanded a bit more. The rooms range from about a half page to around a page each and take up about a hundred pages of text, the rest being monsters, backgrounds, NPC’s, and explanations.

The inn can serve as a home base for adventurers, ven across campaigns from one to another. It’s a nice adventurers locale and place to take your hat off and engage in that carousing table, perhaps. But, it also is exotic enough to serve as a location to pick up hooks from other patrons in the inn. An overheard snippet of conversation, and so forth. But … it can also serve up hooks more explicitly. You can join the inns adventuring guild, which obligates you to performing some services for the inn. Why are you going on the adventure? Because it’s time for your two weeks a year of obligation, that’s why! In this way the inn is a decent home base for adventurers. The various rooms have enough quirks to keep the players a little interested, in a kind of Disney Adventurers Club kind of way. The rocking chairs on the porch continue to rock. The cigar box never empties, and so on. Of all of the extra-dimensional inns and home bases that I’ve seen/reviewed this is probably the best. (And I only say probably because I can’t remember them all!) It reminds me a bit of that Dave Bowman tavern/inn in the Darkness Beneath. The Deep Caves, maybe, was the level? But wait! There’s more!

And it’s the “more” that really sets this one apart from the est of the field. There’s this concept of Hidden Depth in dungeons/adventures. Theming of levels may be the most superficial hidden depth. After that might come slightly more complex hidden depth, in the form of a puzzle or some such to a different area. The NE corner has a statue that gives a clue to how to open a secret door in the SE corner of the dungeon, for example. At a step up form there is the infamous Kuntz hidden depth, which is how the term is usually used. A rose in one room has a dungeon on each of its petals that can only be accessed through some complex ritual, and so forth. And then, there’s something like happens in this adventure.

Paying attention pays rewards. As the characters use the inn they will inevitably discover more and more of its secrets. They will, perhaps, be drawn to the noise they hear coming from upstairs over the veranda and one day investigate. Or sneak in to the obviously open secret door behind the bar. There’s a LOT. Almost every single room has some sort of secret, and most have several. Some are simple. Some are clues to other areas. Some are devilishly complex. There is A LOT to explore … and a lot to get in to trouble with. The inn can kill, easily, even a high level character. Ultimately the most complex and in-depth of the secrets are related to the inns creation and its owner “The Master.” He’s lost something and most of the inn contains clues to finding it. Thus the ENTIRE thing is almost like an adventure outline. Various things within the inn may lead to other adventures. This entire section if both an outline and highlight specific. What you need to achieve is highly specific, particularly as it relates to things WITHIN the inn, but parts outside of the inn are more of a sketched outline of goals and objectives. And it can all be pursued, or not, pretty much at the leisure of the players. Thus the diversions and interesting little bits of the inn, a place to goof off between adventures, can become the main focus after a while … if the party is inclined to do so. As an inn, this is great. The party will visit time as again, as their home base, giving the various aspects the ability to stretch their legs over time and be integrated in to the game.

There is a lot of mystery and wonder to be found in the inn, both important to a location like this. Various aspects of it, the imagination behind it, feel very OD&D. That sense of the unknown and the non-standard is to be found in abundance in this. Wall panels that turn in to seven thousand vipers. A secret room that turns you in to a skeleton for a thousand years … which only a day for the other party members. The designer makes the imagination and the non-standard. It is this idiosyncratic nature that gives the inn a vibe of both a real place and a place thar the adventurers will want to return to.

And yet …

This is HOPELESSLY an AD&D adventure. While it does have that sense of imagination and wonder that is hallmark, I think, of the early OD&D days it also is quite purposefully presenting it as an AD&D adventure. Mechanically. The impacts and results and details are all VERY mechanically dense, in the 1E sense rather than the 3.5e sense. Mechanics are described. In detail. This is supplemented by a verbose writing style and a use of whitespace that I think sometimes works against readability. All of these, together, are the reason for the half page to full page room descriptions in the adventure. The third room, the coatroom, is 10×20 feet. It takes over a page to describe. This isn’t because of he read-aloud but rather because of the (loose) writing style and need to describe the rooms mechanics to the DM. This is, I think, because of the authorial vision. Not just a need to describe the mechanics but to get the intent of the author across. I get this. I think it’s interesting to know what the author intends. I also think that the verbosity that incurs from this makes the product hard to use.

The read-aloud is also a bit of a let down. For the aforementioned coatroom we get: “A dim hall set with two doors and an open archway has been fitted with numerous racks and hooks for coats, scarves and the like. There are two taxidermy umbrella stands made of elephant feet. They appear ghastly in the faint rays streaming from a small rose window in the south wall.” This is all very fact based. It’s also very straightforward without invoking the sense of wonder and awe that exist in many of these rooms. We know what a coat room looks like. The umbrella stands come off a bit flat. It’s not that it’s bad, but rather that it’s not very inspiring to the DM … for a location, the inn, that is very much mysterious and inspiring.

This is the sort of book that you need to use as a reference at the table, that you can mark up. Making notes in it, adventure after adventure, on what has happened and what the party has done inside. This is one of those products that you dream of finding. While at a con, digging through old boxes of adventures for $5 each, you come across this thing and know instantly you have found something special. A work of madness and genius. It just desperately needs a second edit pass. Given that major edit you would have something quite interesting indeed, from both content and usability. It’s maddening. It’s frustrating. It needs more NPC’s wandering through to dump in on return visits. I will also never give this adventure/supplement up. It can be the cornerstone and foundation of your game for years and years to come, providing your players something familiar and stable .. and yet filled with mystery … if you can exhume it form the density of words.

Also: Nice cover!

By Eldrad
Self-Published
Back to the Dungeon RPG

Labeled “mature”, this third installment of the Black Stairs megadungeon comes in at 28 pages for 128(!) rooms. It’s an art project, or madness, or some combination of the two that produces something greater than the whole. Linear. Minimally keyed. It relies more on concepts than anything else. And that works. Sometimes. There’s something charming about the high concept rooms mixed together to form this very classic feeling dungeon environment. Until you reach the drow city. Then it falls apart.

Thirs is the third installment in this series, and I’ve GOT to stop coming in during the middle of these series. “The Black Stairs” sounds familiar, but I don’t think I’ve reviewed either the first or second level. Anyway, this is all single column with a stark typeface and a writing style I KNOW I’ve seen before.

The adventure has some great room ideas. Ideas are presented starkly and left to the DM. One line from room six reads “The hallway ends with a Stone Face with Huge Jasper Jeweled Eyes worth …” and then the pit trap when the face is touched. A different room presents “A gigantic ruined gate blocks off the other side of the cavern. Glowing lichens on the ceiling above give a dim eerie light. It’s architecture and style is unknown and it is VERY OLD.” and then goes on detail two columns full of rats nests. All three of those are great brief concepts for things to build a room around. And everything is left for the DM, for better or worse. “The door is ornate and evil looking.” Well … ok. I would normally make a “show, don’t tell” statement about that. It’s all very stark and there’s something VERY charming about the randomness of finding a gate with glowing lichen in the middle of a cave room, deep underground. It FEELS mysterious and wondrous, because there is so much for the mind to fill in.

I can deal with the minimalism, for the most part, because of the high hit rate on concepts. But then it breaks down. Bad. The drow city, once reached through the caves (the city is about 35 rooms, I’d guess) is full on D3 mode. House Demon has 10 male drow and 13 female drow and a female drow cleric leading them. [treasure list] The iconic rooms stop and it devolves in to just facts without charm.

The treasure is quite weird. Long lists that look randomly rolled that go on forever. “… Statuette-10 gp, Necklace-300 gp, Anklet-50 gp, Ring-200 gp, Orb-1800 gp, Bracelet-40 gp, Brooch-900 gp, Chain-300 gp …” That’s about 10% of the treasure in one room listing. Generic and nonsensical. But then, early on, you get a Ring of Three Wishes, with details on recharging it and who wants it and complications and so on. It’s great!

And then there’s the map. While there are holes with ropes and different ways up and down on the maps to create a decently diverse dimensionality, they are, essentially, linear. Leave one room, go down a short hall, enter another room. The maps, handdrawn, are also quite difficult to read at times. I’m looking at you keys 2&3 and 9&10 on map 3a! Further, sometimes the numbers don’t actually appear in rooms. This is an issue in “corridor mazes” when you’re trying to figure out just what is a passage and what is a wall.

This is a stark vision. When it’s good then it’s terse and wonderful. And when it’s bad it’s very bad. In one product you can find both the best and the worst aspects of minimal design. I would steal like a mofo from it and stick it in to a better map.

By Travis Legge
Aegis Studios
5e
Level 1-3

In this adventure, the characters venture forth from the safety of the Isle of Hope, seeking to bring order to the Plains of Marrow. The adventure offers options for the characters to begin in various areas on the Isle of Hope, but regardless of the path taken, the party eventually makes their way to the haunted lands of the Plains of Marrow. After crossing the harrowing and chaotic lands (and fighting off some of the dark denizens) of the Plains of Marrow, the characters come across a small wooded area. A small stone fort with a lone watchtower stands in a clearing among the trees. Within this camp, the characters will find adventure, drama, and their first dharmachackra!

Another 24 page adventure that should be a page. Whatever vision was trying to be communicated didn’t make it. Sixteen pages of introduction and wandering monster tables, supplemented by six pages of appendix filler leaves us with two pages for the adventure proper. Which is one encounter. I like the cover, but for some reason it reminds me of FATAL.

This is an adventure for some new setting, Choe Pho, so I’m going to assume that the base setting book has the details that are missing from the adventure. You’re in this city and you’re travelling to the Plains of Marrow … “to bring order to it.” You can go North to get there, through the mountains, or south through the forests, east through the grasslands or west through the desert. And there you find a dharmachackra. None of that is described in this adventure and, frankly, I’m a little curious how you can go any direction and get the same place. At least I assume it’s a world feature and not a crutch. We’ll assume it’s all in the setting book.

The adventure consist of a wandering monster table for each of the cardinal directions. The direction descriptions are essentially all the same, with desert adjectives replaced with mountain or forest adjectives. Settlements, tribespeople. All generic. There’s a paragraph or two for each entry on the four wandering tables, which all reduce to “it’s a creature.” There’s not really anything interesting in any of them. The Plains of Marrow are covered in fog and all of the monsters on the table are undead. If you roll a certain encounter then you find the watchtower. Or, if two days pass you also find it. So … no maps in this one. Just an abstracted “encounter wandering monsters until you find the tower after a set time period.”

The watchtower is populated by a couple of furry goblinoid creatures. They are getting attacked by undead every two minutes. The chief wears a necklace that’s attracting the undead. There are little to no details on the titular watchtower.

There’s nothing in this adventure. Some wandering monster tables and an abstracted watchtower. Nothing remotely evocative or interesting to be found.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/202902/The-Watchtower-in-the-Wood?1892600