Winds of the Ice Forest

Posted on February 6, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By James V. West
Random Order Creations
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-3

You enter the dreaded Ice Forest where the ancient path leading through can change with the wind. What perils will you face before nding the way to the other side?

This 24 page “adventure” is a series of random encounters that a party has in a snowy forest … that acts as a labyrinth. Some ok magic items and eerie dead bodies can’t save a glorified wandering monster table.

The icy forest is cursed and people get lost in it. You need to make the correct path choice 13 times to get out .. which means making a 50/50 dice roll at each path split. There’s no map, this is all abstracted. Each time you go down a path there’s a chance to encounter one of the fourteen table entries. There’s also a chance that you’ll encounter an ice igloo that serves as a safe house to rest in … and keep evil creatures 20’ away. The combination of game-ist safe igloos and “just roll the dice until you succeed 13 times” is just too much for me. It all feels like a waste of time. Inexplicably, you can’t leave the paths. Recall, there’s no map, it’s all abstracted, but there is a mechanism for punishing players with being crushed by moving trees if they leave the path. This makes no sense. Who cares if they leave the path, it’s not like doing so will shorten their 13 choices?

The hooks involve going in to find a treasure, escorting a box through the forest, and taking a short-cut to deliver medicine. There are two common elements to each: why am I going in the cursed forest and then Here’s A Thing To Help Make The Right Path Choice. The “going in” reasons are generally pretty weak. Having to go in and find an object is an ok reason, and the need for a speedy short-cut to deliver medicine is a pretty good one. The others just offer no motivation at all for going through the wood instead of around it. That entire section could use a rethink. The Path Chooser objects, specific to each hook, are generally ok, ranging from a bag of path-picking frogs to a magic lantern. I would probably mix & match to find a hook that I think would appeal to MY party, with a bag of frogs for path-picking from a different hook.

The real problem is the encounters. They feel, for the most part, like generic wandering monster encounters. Monsters show up and attack. Joy. There’s not really even much of a “frozen forest” vibe going on, at least not one that comes through with the writing. The encounters that DO spark the imagination are the ones that play well on the ice forest theme. These ALL involve frozen dead bodies. Wherever ter is a frozen body the text handles it well. Without a frozen body in the encounter it just comes across as Yet Another Wandering Monster. That’s quite disappointing. Alas, the titular “Winds” are not to be found.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/134855/Winds-of-the-Ice-Forest-LL?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #120

Posted on February 4, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


RELIGION IS EVIL! At least according to this issue of Dungeon, featuring evil cults in every adventure.

The Obsidian Eye
By Nicholas Logue & Brendan Victorson
Level 4

I can be hyperbolic. I know it. But Jesus Christ this adventure makes pervious Dungeon adventures look like they are minimally keyed in comparison. Two NPC’s each get a page to describe them. The opening encounter, with three jackelweres, take FOUR PAGES to describe. Every. Single. Detail. is spelled out. The hooks are “bad dreams, better save humanity!” or “go rescue my relative please!” or the ever popular archeology expedition. It’s like they are not even trying at all. Our jackelweres get backstory and complex feelings, all to say “they kill people.” It’s crazy. Things get slightly better after the party tracks them back to an obelisk in the desert. Freed slaves will join your cause en masse (Yeah!) and you can bribe some thri-kreen mercenaries (Yeah!) and there’s a mouth you can reach in to in order to get the magical gizmo the adventure is centered around. Still too many words, all boring, but there are some decent concepts. A fountain floods the room in one area and you can disdev it to stop it … I imagine stuffing cloaks in to it to clog it. That kind of thing, putting concepts before mechanics, is what more adventures should do.

The Forsaken Arch
By Timothy J. Haener
Level 7

Villagers want you to look in to their missing pearl shipments. A long, and not very interesting, village description leads to an ambush by 10 CR1 monsters, and then a linear lair/caves built in to a giant sea arch. I find the lair strangely compelling, even though it is a COMPLETELY linear map. You could do a great job with the core concept or land, cliffs, sea, top of the pillar, interior of the pillar, as a kind of big bandit lair. That’s what this TRIES to do, without doing it very interesting. Kenku bandits. Eagles on top. Sea cats in the water. Ogre mage and an EHP inside along with some “vermin” type monsters in the garbage room, etc. For a “cleaning out the bandits lair” I guess it’s not too bad, if you’re willing to accept the linear nature and exposition.

The Lost Temple of Demogorgon
By Sean K. Reynolds
Level 14

Oh man, this is a rough one. Some kingdom has seen ogres near and want the party to look in to it. And all of the introduction and background and wilderness (all of which is actually pretty short) is just perfunctory in order to present a LINEAR dungeon map. I’m am not shitting. A straight line with a couple of rooms hanging off of it. About 800,000 of those rooms hanging off are little 1000 year old latrines that have been sealed off with walls of stone. WHy the fuck are they being shown on the map? What are they adding? Padding? For it’s bullshit linearity, it DOES manage to embed some nonstandard stuff on the map. Traps are shows. ABout 30 glyphs of wrding are shown. Light sources are shown. (Yeah!) AFter fighting their way through a bunch of apes & trogs the party find a death knight who is using the trog priests to cure his condition. You can fight him, or not. End. THe amount of backstory for the rooms (“this room was once”) doesn’t reach epic level but it is certainly at heroic levels, adding nothing to otherwise bland rooms in which combat with apes take place. There is no joy in this adventure. Mighty Reynolds has struck out.

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The Curse of Ravenmere

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By SImon Forster
theskyfullofdust
Adventurer Conquerer King
Low level

Ravenmere is a small village situated between the market towns of Appleby and Cricklewood, and once supplied both with cattle and the odd sheep. Today the village has been isolated by the local lord, for a plague has come to Ravenmere and all of its villagers are dead by their own hands. What will bold aventurers discover in the isolated village?

This twelve page and twelve location adventure locale that describe a village full of dead bodies … and little else. The background is terse, the imagery is evocative, and it’s missing almost any sort of action. Maybe a locale to put your own plot in to.

The background here is short, a page maybe two of the old-man-eyes font. From it you get exactly what you need: a terse telling of what happened and why. There’s this spear, it belonged to some tribal chief who, along with people, got killed when the current kingdom moved in to the area. It’s JUST enough to handle any exposition the DM may need to create during the game. If the party asks an old man, or goes to some church to find information then the background has provided a short little context that allows the DM to make shit up. PERFECT! This adventure does a magnificent job of leveraging the DM for this aspect. You don’t need to tell the story. You need to provide the DM just enough for THEM to tell the story. The DM is your friend. Take advantage of them. The hooks make sense in the context, even if they are the slightest of pretexts. Someone hid something in the village and can’t get it now because of the quarantine. Someone wants the gizmo that the villagers found. Someone’s husband went to the village to buy sheep and never returned. These are all recognizable but because of the introduction and background/context they have just that little extra gravitas.

The imagery of the twelve encounters is relentless. “A young boy, his head caved in by a hammer and his bare arms scarred with burns, lies sprawled on the floor; his decaying body is riddled with maggots and a swarm of flies lifts off when anyone approaches.” No? How about “Three farmers lie facedown in the pond, two drowned and the other with his head smashed in. The few fish in the water have been nibbling at them.” It does an excellent job on the corpses in each location. The descriptions are short and the impactful, allowing the DM to communicate the scene effectively to the players.

It IS a little relentless. All of the locations have these mutilated bodies in them, victims of the 28-days-later like murder rage. Go to a place. See the murder scene. The issue is compounded, I think, by the slow pacing. There are some of the lord’s men, as guards, at the front gate, preventing entry. Once inside the village palisade there is one murder-rage person left alive to encounter. There are also some ravens that attack as a horde/swarm. Other than that there’s not much going on. Cursed spear in the church. A hole in the ground, undescribed, in the pond, perhaps suitable for putting a dungeon underneath. The relentlessness of the crime scenes along with the slower pacing don’t work well together, I think. I’m sure it’s certainly very moody in play, but you’re left looking for a conclusion. An ending. Or, at least, something to DO … besides look at bodies.

You could certainly use this as a mini-regional feature to enhance some other thing you are doing. Imagine if there was a dungeon under the pond, a big one, and this village the entry point and weirdo’s show up from time to time, ala Rappan Athuk. It needs something ELSE, it’s just a part of a whole and the rest of the whole is missing, be it on purpose or not.

Two more notations. This adventure is twelve pages long. The front cover is one. The license in back is four. The Intro is two. The actual adventure, describing the keys, is three pages. The license length made it notable here, but most adventures do something similar. It feels somehow disingenuous for me to announce this is twelve pages long when it is, for some definition of content, much shorter. I’m not sure it’s fair to point this out for this particular adventure, since a lot do it, but I find it curious that only about 50% of less of the page count of these things is actual adventure … with a liberal definition of “Adventure.”

Finally this adventure provides an excellent opportunity to talk about small wilderness/location maps. I’m fond of the village map for this adventure but it IS missing something: Bodies. I think I noted a similar issue in my review of Out of Blackest Earth. In both cases there is a keyed map detailing a small outdoor area. The outdoor encounter locations kind of merge in to each other. Imagine you are on your front suburban lawn. You can look right, left, and across the street, at a minimum, and see what is lying on those people’s lawns. In those situations it just doesn’t make sense to ignore what the party can see. But how do you convey that? Do you force the DM to look at the map and then go look at all the keys nearby to see if there’s anything there that the party can see? The answer, I think, is the map. If notable features are on the map then it becomes trivial to describe what is going on and what the party can see. In this case, it’s bodies. Simply putting obvious bodies on the map would help the DM relate that information to the party. There’s a similar problem with hex crawls. How far can you see? Can you see the next hex? Can you see the village/town/Mount Doom in the next hex?

Anyway, this the imagery of this ruined village is decent. It’s just lacking ACTION. You need some reason, something more than those provided I think, to add an active element to this location. You could certainly add your own.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/142328/The-Curse-of-Ravenmere?1892600

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A Bakers Denizen

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Howard Befeiff
Goblin Stomper Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 3-5

In the heart of Elbion, the city of Mages & Sages, a new bakery is spreading joy and icing to the local residents. The long-time baker Horthron Delb thinks something smells rotten in Ystala Tremain’s ovens, but the people of Elbion just keep going back for the Sticky Icky Buns and the Sugared Orc Ears. The old baker is willing to pay cold, hard cash for someone to end her reign as the new Queen of Quick Bread.

This thirteen page baking-themed adventure describes four dungeon rooms and a small two-room bakery above them. Poorly. Nice mundane treasure can’t make up for the long room descriptions of mundane objects and seemingly nonsensical choices on what to include … and what not to include.

Baker Bob comes across the party while making deliveries to their inn. He asks that they look in to a new bakery that’s stealing his business. He offers our third through fifth level character 500XP, I mean GP, to do it. The adventure is supposed to be a drop in kind of thing, for parties in a city, but then it goes and offers details on a default city of the designers campaign world. Perfunctory details. Three names of inns to stay at. A paragraph of a city description. Some throw off words on why the party is in the city. Four nonsensical rumors that have nothing to do with the adventure. None of it is really needed. The point is a drop in adventure in a city. By neither concentrating on that (IE: the designer has offered details of the city) or by enhancing the city (the details offered are of the most trivial available) then you don’t really strike on either side of the spectrum. The whole “meeting you while making a delivery” is a great little thing, but the reward of 500gp is a little low for a motivation.

The bakery in question has a purple glow coming from stairs in back … so no real investigation. Just walk in , see it, and watch the baker-woman (a witch) run away down the stairs … as several Dark Creeper/Stalkers come out. The whole purple glow and dark C/S stuff makes no sense to me. It looks like it’s just thrown in to have an encounter.

The encounter descriptions spend a long time descripting the mundane, like how there’s a table and chairs and flour on the table and so on. Or how there’s a dildo in the witches bedroom. I’m not a prude, but, who the fuck cares if there’s a dildo in her bedroom? Does it somehow enhance the game play? No? Then why’s it there? This is a recurring theme in this adventure. Long descriptions about nothing and then … almost noting on the good stuff.

There’s some real missed opportunities. There’s a marlith in the shape of a cat, who would REALLY like the witch dead so she can roam freely. There’s some gilded cages with captured imps in them … that’s really just have a throw off one-liner and nothing is done with them except having monster stats provided. Room are missing key features, things as little as “(200gp)” next to treasure descriptions for things. Two people get four paragraphs of descriptions, each, to describe nothing interesting or really gameable. There’s some mundane treasure descriptions, mostly magical spell components, that are decent, and likewise a new magic item that’s not too terrible (although focused a little too much on mechanics for my taste) but the emphasis on noting “2 candles on the table” and such is really puzzling.

This should be a one-page dungeon, not thirteen.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/201911/A-Bakers-Denizen?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #119

Posted on January 28, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


Dungeon Magazine has conditioned me to throw up in my mouth a little every time I read “the party must race to …” Also, that phrase actually means “linear plot” instead of what I believe to be the more common read of “time pressure.”

Unfamiliar Ground
By Christopher West
Level 3

A linear dungeoncrawl, but not terrible if you accept that limitation. A small section of caves, with goblins, is attached to the basement of a mostly destroyed necromancer tower. An old familiar, and imp, must obey the goblin chief, and he doesn’t want to. So we tries to get the party to attack the lair and kill the chief. It is assumed, I guess, that the parties curiosity leads them deeper in, to the old tower. The read-alouds are long-ish, and I didn’t find them particularly effective, concentrating as they did on the concrete and facts about the rooms like exits, dimensions and so on. The DM text is better, and generally short and to the point, much more so than the usual Dungeon fare. The goblins have an order of battle to respond to the party and there are nice elements, like a refuse pit and weird stuff in the tower basement to play with. It is, though, essentially a linear map and the hooks are meta-gamed to appeal to the party so they will follow the imp. This would probably work mostly fine as is, but you could rip it off, with a slightly larger and non-linear map, to great effect.

Wrath of the Abyss
By Greg A. Vaughan
Level 12

The third and final part of the adventure path. Ok, cities infected with a madness, only this giant cleric knows how to fix it, and they’ve been captured by the drow. The extraneous text is off the hook in this one, even by Dungeon standards. It is, essentially, a set of linear encounters with demons & drow underground, and then a big set-piece battle in the town that reminds me for all the world of those stupid video game battles where you destroy one boss only to have it morph in to another boss. Anyway, you kill a bunch of of the last remnants of House Eilserves, from D3, along with the drow vampire succubus pair, returned from the dead form THAT D-series encounter. It’s just a bunch of encounter, 1-2 pages long each, for the tactics pervs to masturbate over. You get to the last dude and HE’S willing to talk to you. Great. You question the giant cleric and return to town for the boss fight. The underdark cave map is multiple levels, with a chasm, which is nice, and the boss fight at the end DOES feel like a Dr Who/Video game end-game battle … which would be nice after enduring all the bullshit from these last two instalments.

Tomb of Aknar Ratalla
By Jack Flynn
Level 14

A small cave & dungeon/tomb complex full of ogres, undead, and traps. When you reach the end the tomb gets invaded by a baddie who wants the evil sword the last room contains. The party then gets to use the tombs traps, layout (several chasms) and maybe even monsters to beat back the incursion of the gnoll/yugoloth invaders. The map is relatively simple and probably doesn’t support the kind of hit & run & guerilla tactics that might be wonderful to see in a Dungeon Defender type adventure. It’s got some issues with things missing, like numbers and illusion walls and the like. There’s a room that collapses when weight heavier than human stands on it … right next to a large group of ogres. There’s shit tons of useless background about what each room was once used for and so on. On the plus side, you could/can keep the evil sword if you want, since it’s just an unholy weapon. Yeah! The defender concept is not a bad idea, and the dungeon has potential for that, for an adventure but I think it’s needlessly complex with the addition of all of the 3e demons and gnolls-with-classes combined with 3e stats/abilities.

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Out of Blackest Earth

Posted on January 25, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Mattias Narva, Terje Nordin
Svard & Svartkonst
OD&D
Level 1?

Residents of the small town of Uriah are concerned. The grave site at St. Athanasius Church has lain derelict for a generation. But even if the ground is covered in dead leaves, and some graves are so weathered that the bones are visible, townspeople have nevertheless continued to visit their family grave sites. Recently, however, ghostly apparitions have been reported…

This is a nine page single-column graveyard/catacombs with 22 areas described in a minimal, but functional, manner. It is supported by a decent map and magic items and room descriptions/details that are just lacking … but just a little. Overall it’s a decent set up and dungeon and if it were a bit more evocative I could see it being a solid adventure. But … that’s with my ridiculously high standards. You may indeed find it fine the way it is. As “mini-dungeons” go, I wish they were all at this level of quality.

This thing only has nine pages … and three of those are maps and one more the cover. With a page of background that leaves four more for the keyed encounters … one of which is 50% blank and one of which takes up 50% of the page with a spell description. Using a single-column format, this thing is TIGHT. I wouldn’t call it “minimal”, but it’s about as close as you can get to that word and still be a fully functional adventure.

The background is all in one paragraph at the beginning of the document, supplemented a bt by a little rumor table. The villagers have seen ghosts in the local abandoned graveyard and are offering a reward to put the dead to rest again. The local graveyards are the real culprits, but they’ve awakened a spectre in the catacombs. Folks looking for terseness need look no further than this intro. It does a great job setting the scene and providing an overview of what’s going on. It, along with the rumor table, do a pretty decent job of supporting the DM’s efforts to run the hook while being almost bare bones. I might quibble some the place deserves another paragraph for a tavern with some major quirk to kind of anchor things. The tavern may be a trope, but if you provided a strong/evocative/creative one then the rumors would flow more naturally and you’d have that little bit more …because you know the DM is going to have to do it anyway.

From here the adventure launches straight in to the graveyard keys, of which there are seven, before continuing with the remainder of the 22 keys for the catacombs below. There’s a decent players copy of the graveyard map, which makes sense since the party can see the entire thing, but I wish there was just a little bit more provided here. It is natural for the players to look at the graveyard from outside of it and say “What do we see?” At this point the DM can throw out the players map. You’ve got two choices then. You can describe each of the keyed areas or wait for the players to wander about and describe them … which I think is a bit cumbersome. It would have been better to have a quick overview description of the entire graveyard. A little scene setter. Closely related, there are a couple of creatures in one of the sections, disguised graverobbers, who come out to scare folks. But if you don’t remember that fact then the characters could walk right by and you’d be left waiting until you got to that particular keyed entry. Noting that encounter on the map, or in the overview, would have a nice little assist to the DM.

The maps are, otherwise, great. The graveyard proper is a free roam wilderness-type area, albeit small, while the catacombs map is a decent layout with caves and catacombs, a few loops, a river, lots of detail on the map, and about five different entrances to get from the surface map to the under area. Very nice. The map isn’t just a key to the adventure but adds evocative details and creative play opportunities … at least more so than the usual dungeon maps do.

The encounters are pretty minimal in their descriptions. Focused. Encounter 4 is “Dry Well: A hatch to #12 is concealed in the bottom clay. There are scuff marks from a grappling hook on the edge of the well.” This level of description is, in general, pretty close to the minimum I think you can get away with and still have a chance of having a somewhat decent encounter description. It’s a dry well, we get that from the title. Clay on the bottom … scuff marks, and a note of where it links up to the lower level. If you will follow along with me for a moment and accept that this is a baseline, then we can judge the rest of the encounters by this one. ANother one is “Tombstones. 2 graverobbers are hiding amongst the tombstones disguised as undead. They try to scare away intruders.” Again, very focused, but I will note a major difference that sticks out because of the minimalism: the room title. “Dry Well” tells us something about the well that we can use to convey a feeling to the players. “Tombstones” gives us nothing but the noun. Adding “Weedy” or “crumbling” or even “faded” would evoke some kind of additional vibe in the DM. Likewise, room one is “Funeral Home”, but there is nothing much more provided except it has a stone bench to put a coffin on (I thought coffins were for vampires and caskets were for the recently departed?) and a carved stone skull on the wall. Adding one word to the title could be “Ruined Funeral Home” or “Bright lit Funeral Home” or “Collapsed Funeral Home” All of these give us just a little bit more … and that little bit more is what the preponderance of the adventure descriptions are lacking. It needs just a little more. Minimalism is an art. There are NO extraneous words in this adventure … but it has, I think, crossed the line and left out a few words.

The creatures are vermin & men, for the most part, which I like. In particular one of the beetles has the following little bit about the poison they spit: “the opponent su ers extreme pain, chemical burns, blisters and a –2 penalty to hit rolls for 1 day, or until the spell cure light wounds is used.” Yes, there’s the mechanical effect, but I really liked the additional little bit about blisters and burns and pain. It’s fucking obvious, of course, if you think about it. But the writers have put just that extra little touch in to help the DM add a little more flavor to their game … without going overboard. That’s a GREAT touch and it left me wanting more.

There’s some nice magic items, like a religious relic skull that helps you out with turning, nice mundane treasure in the form of things like a silver death mask, a ring that stops aging, and a new spell. In particular, the magic items mechanics are not exhaustively described. The ring stops aging and if you take it off the years catch up with you. The end. The skull allows for turning undead once an encounter. Nothing more. I understand some people want more in the way of mechanics but I think the game has turned too much in that direction and a little more wonder, mystery, and ambiguity is in order. I would note, as well, that there’s an orb that, if broken, animates all of the dead in the graveyard and they go to town to wreak havoc … ala Death Frost Doom?

Besides the (missing) descriptive words there are a few other things that could be better. The graverobber gang could use a few more words, maybe on negotiations or deals or reactions or organized defenses, etc. Likewise the adventure abstracts things at times. “Plundered grave goods worth 1,800gp.” Another two sentences for this would have both provided some little bits (hopefully more than “rings, lockets, necklaces”) and perhaps some hooks both to follow up on for more adventures or complications that come from fencing family grave goods.

Anyway, pretty decent adventure. Inoffensive with some good ideas. I’m keeping it. Apologies again, to the designers, for mutilating their “umlaut” names. Sorry, I’m an ignorant american who can’t remember the magic keystrokes. On the strength of this adventure I’m motivated to look and see what else they’ve done.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/187596/Out-of-Blackest-Earth?1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 2 Comments

Ghosts of Graygrim

Posted on January 23, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Matt Kline
Creations Edge
Swords & Wizardry
Level 8-10

The ruins of Graygrim Manor sat silent for years. Now sounds drift from the ruins at night that suggest they may be haunted. And travelers to the sleepy town of Shadywood have begun to go missing. Again…

This is a 26 room manor-basement dungeon spread out over eighteen pages. Creations Edge does a lot of these short projects and, thus far, they’ve all been of a similar vein. A little stodgy, vanilla, and straightforward, it does a decent job with treasure and with a couple of “complications” that arise during the adventure. The set up is inoffensive, but otherwise the descriptions are flat with a sameness and … genericism? to it. The map is pretty bad, being just three hallways, each with doorways hanging off of it.

The hook is a 2000gp reward or, even worse, “hired to look in to a disappearance.” These are the usual hooks that show up in almost every adventure ever published. There’s nothing to them, especially for a level 8-10 character group. It devolves to metagaming: “this is the adventure we’re playing tonight. Just accept the mission.” That’s kind of inherent in all D&D, but hooks which go a little beyond that deserve special praise. This ain’t that.

Anyway, the village is suffering attacks. The smith was abducted. Please go up to the old haunted ruins and check it out. The whole setup is ok, in concept, but falls down in execution. There you find a secret door leading to a dungeon with a werewolf, a vampire, and a bunch of 6HD goblin-based baddies. There are two little interesting bits in the lead up to the dungeon. First, while half the village hails the party as saviors, seeing as they are suffering raids by the “ghosts”, the other half abuses them for not coming sooner. Especially those villagers who have lost loved ones. Ouch. That’s some good stuff right there. It’s not really expanded on in any way beyond what I’ve described, but even that little bit is pretty decent. The mayor calms things down, but you should be able to get some great roleplay out of that. There’s also a small boy who can relate some info to the party and guide them to the secret door; he shouldn’t be playing up there and found it but offers it up to the party in private. He also hangs around the ruins. And later follows them in. It’s suggested that the vampire capture him in the final room, but I think that’s pretty hackneyed. But having him follow the party in, get in to trouble, be escorted out, go in again and have the vampire grab him DURING the combat? That, also, is a bit of a classic, but I like the dynamic nature of it.

The treasure is above average as well. A black opal attached to a silver necklace … covered in bits of flesh. A black onyx ring in silver engraved with a vine pattern. A glass globe with a faint hint of a tiny ghost figure inside and a silver ring surrounded by a shimmering blue flame hint at the magic items. Nice little touches although they turn out to be a bit mechanical in their uses, summoning a stalker and doing 1d4-1 fire damage to attacks. But, still, nice effects and descriptions.

There are, I think, three major issues: the descriptions, the monsters, and the map.

Terse isn’t exactly correct. “This room holds four large treasure chests.” Ok …. “This room contains excess material for crafting weapons in the forge.” Ok …. Those are the descriptions for two of the more mundane rooms. For the fantastic, how about “This large rectangular room holds a sunken pool. The pool seems to be filled with blood.” It’s not overly long, to be sure, but nor does it add … anything? to the adventure. This gives the rooms the generic/vanilla vibe I mentioned in the introduction. You can, to be sure, do something with this. But you’re also bringing a lot of your own to the party to do this and one of my core philosophies is that it’s the job o f the adventure writer to bring those evocative, effective impressions to the DM party. This doesn’t do that. Room after room, it doesn’t do that. A room or two has something interesting in it, like a bookshelf or prisoners, but for the most part the actual rooms are little more exciting than the read-aloud descriptions.

The map is VERY simple. You come down the stairs in to a square room. Three other exist, one in each wall. Each one has a corridor with doors hanging off it, with rooms behind the doors. That’s not too good. It doesn’t really provide much playability from the map. No real ambushes, bypassing things, or fear from the unknown. Additionally, one hallway, with doors on both sides, has both prisoners, locked doors, and goblin monsters in them. The map would have been an excellent way to show which of these rooms has monsters, which doors are locked, and so on. That would have been a great reference aid for the DM so they could then go look up rooms if the baddies start pouring out of the doors. But, alas, no. It does show secrets, and room features, so it’s a bit of a poser why locked doors also weren’t shown.

The goblin/vampires are the last issue. There’s a lot of them. They are all 6HD, serving the vampire. I can deal with that, I guess, by thinking of them as vampire spawn like creatures. But them come off, with their numbers, and HD, as just generic goblins. “2 goblins live in this room.” “4 goblins live in this room.” Well, shit, that’s pretty shitty even if they WERE just goblins. But as goblin/vampire-like hybrids its a little lame. “This cell serves as the living space for two stirglins. They will be here asleep under moldy blankets.” If you are going to treat them like humans (not even goblins …) then why not just make them humans? Degenerates or something? I HATE it when my abominations live like human guards in the dungeon, with bends and playing cards and the like. Bleech. No flavor. Which is too bad because little degenerate blood-sucking goblins would be kind of cool. Their quantity also makes the dungeon a little hack-festy, which if generally a no-no for S&W, I think.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/184814/Ghosts-of-Graygrim-A-Swords–Wizardry-MiniDungeon?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #118

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


Box of Flumph
By Tim Hitchcock
Level 1

The usual sort of Dungeon dreck. It’s event based, has a small “investigation” that leads the characters around by the nose with a plot element and LOTS of advice on to keep people on the tracks. It all ends with the usual big combat and has lots and lots of backstory and history that are meaningless to actual play the adventure but clog it up.

The town guard want to keep an eye on a known criminal but are just too busy, so they hire the party from a job board. Asking around they find out the guy was seen in a tavern on the pier. Making a DC40 check (at level one …) lets the party know the guy has a room at the tavern. OR, if the party just leaves then there’s a scream from upstairs. A thief with a paid hit contract on the guy has entered his room and found a flumph in a crate. Combat ensues. If the flumph lives it sends them to a ship to save its family. If the flumph dies then someone outside sells the party the location of the ship, and the bad guy. On the ship his buddies stick up for him and are rewarded by him sinking the ship, bringing some sea ghouls in to the combat also.

The investigation is nothing more than the token stuff, a simple excuse for events & plot. And no real chance of failure. It’s just a sad sad adventure with nothing at risk and no real reward. The family unit of Flumphs is weird also. It sounds like a Leave it to Beaver family unit. More monsters without character. *sigh*

Shadows of the Abyss
By Greg A. Vaughn
Level 11

Part two of a three part arc that started last issue. And another of the usual Dungeon do-nothing hack-fests. The sage from the last adventure is missing. His staff thinks its all normal and are not worried. A day later the party gets a note telling them to meet up or the sage dies. From there the path leads to an abandoned fort with giants in it. Hacking through it you find that the giant that knows about the evil god in your city has been taken to the underdark. Sorry Mario, your princess is in another castle. Because I’m a lazy designer. The usual “nondetection” crap is at play, so you can’t skip shit. There is, weirdly, a few location (three) in the region that are given an overview. All of the overviews are pretty decent, with nice little hooks to hang your hat on … but there’s no real reason for them to come in to play, and they are VERY location specific. One room has some treasure stuffed inside a dead orc head. Nice touch that. Otherwise, it’s a pretty forgettable adventure.

Throne of Iuz
By John Simcoe
Level 14

IUZ! My Boy!
All that bullshit backstory from D&D about Iuz is lame. I will always think of him as an adventurer that became a demigod. All his shit continually reminds me of player character scheming. A murderhobo made good! Anyway, the adventure … in which Iuz doesn’t appear …

There this elf forest. Inside of it is a 80 mile long by 50 mile wide blighted area. The elves don’t know about it. Some orcs have made it a home. They recently ventured outside of it and took over and defiled an elven burial ground. They are building a “throne” for Iuz underneath it … which really doesn’t do much except kill plant line all around it, so not really an Iuz throne after all. Anyway, the elves are clueless and all of the orcs, all 105 of them, are LEAST cr9, with quite a few being in the 14-16 range. Cause, you know, the adventure is written for level 14 characters. Anyway, some generic hooks are thrown out. Does your CR14 character want to investigate a caravan disappearing? No? Go on a fetch quest for a poor half-elf noble? No? Two strikes on the Boring-O meter. The third hook send the party after the orcs to unlock hidden powers in some weapon/item they’ve recently gained, which is better. The whole thing is just one area, a burial mound, with all those CR9-15 orcs, and 15 chimeras they’ve trained to fly around on. Their leader, under the mound, is a giant CR16 frog. There’s invisibility purge items in the camp and mounds and mounds (get it! Get it?!) of backstory for items, people, and locations which will absolutely NOT come in to play in any way.

Most of the sins of bad high level adventures are present. Lame-o hooks that assume the party are still level 1 scroungers. Magic items that work against you but you can’t use. (So what if the party takes the giant inviso purge geodes? They’re level 14, who cares?) No digging/teleport gimping, but the inviso purge area stands out, in order to ruin a stealthy assault. And there’s the CR9 orcs riding a flock of tamed chimera.

Most of this could be solved by making this a lower level adventure. Level 5 or something. Then the orcs are still mundane and still a real threat. The giant frog as their king would be cool. Maybe a chimera as a pet or something. And, most importantly, it would introduce a major villain, Iuz, through one of his minor dudes, the giant frog, thus foreshadowing a major villain to come: Iuz.

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Sloven Hills

Posted on January 18, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Eldrad Wolfsbane
Self Published
Back To The Dungeon
Level 3-5/5-7

At last! Details of who and WHAT the Witch Queen Mauug is! Can the brave adventurers defeat the Witch Queen Mauug and her Army of Monsters? Will the players foolishly try and take her on while she is in her own home territory?

Warning: I like failed towns/villages, and the one in this adds a lot.

This twelve pager, two of which are empty/useless, is labeled an adventure but I’d probably instead refer to it as a small region setting. It does a nice job of invoking a kind of forlorn atmospheric setting. Hand drawn pencil-sketch maps keep things simple to supplement the adventure, but it has an absolute dearth of treasure. None, in fact, magic or mundane. It’s for the “Back to the Dungeon” rpg, so maybe that’s ok in that system … but it’s still kind of boring. This would be a kind of cool little (desolate, despondent) region in which to locate some other adventure, allowing the party to experience the town, the rumors, and the machinations of the monsters.

The region is staked to three major areas: the town, the old manor lands, and the ruined watchtower. All three, together, have fifteen locations defined. The town is full of grumpy old Knights & Knaves Alehouse people. The old manor complex has four encounters, each with a different creature(s), while the Devil’s Watchtower has the remainder.

The locations all have this somber feeling of dread, or maybe despair, that comes through. Here’s a section from the introduction to the manor ruins: “Always dark in Sloven Bog as the trees evilly block out much of the light. The place is lonely during the day. It’s decaying ruins cry out to be lived in once again, but like all sad tales it shall never be.” There’s a group of giant scorpions in the abandoned family temple. “If left alone they will not attack as they have just fed on an entire family of unicorns.” All of the encounters, and descriptions, have this same sort of … I don’t know. Dread? Despair? The orphanage (of course there’s an orphanage in town!) has “over a hundred sickly pale children.” A regional patriarch runs it. She’s mean. She’s helped by her six grossly fat sons who scream at and beat the children. It goes on and on. I AM particularly fond on failed villages, and there’s really not an overabundance of detail here, but man I do love this. All of the locations have this appeal to a kind of iconic or archetypical element and I can really groove on that.

Having said all that … it could do a better job with language. It engages in telling instead of showing in places, like “This is a really scary area.” Hmmm, ok, but why? Likewise there’s a hag with a decent description “A Death Hag is a hag of great evil that haunt dark forest and swamps. Looks like a hairy rotten old woman 10′ tall.” Yes, that counts as a decent description. I like the rotten old woman, ten feet tall, shadowy, in a dark forest … but she lives there, in a bog. A little hag house description, just a sentence or two, would have been nice. That goes for many of the areas. There’s a forest, one of the few locations with no creatures, that could really use some “mist & sunlight rays” added to the description to bring it all home. Just a little bit more in a few areas could have really brought this home.

Anyway, this is a REALLY bare bones, single column affair. I think something like only two people have names, and the town is really nothing more than a tavern, a couple of places to get in to trouble, and some descriptions of how surely the people are. As a kind of idea kickstarter I like it, and may incorporate it as the “surrounding lands” outside one of my dungeons.

It’s $1.20 at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/195240/AW2-Sloven-Hills?1892600

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The Globe

Posted on January 16, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By John Battle
Self-Published
Swords & Wizardry?
Level 4?

Among the snow globes that sit gathering dust there is one quite unlike the others. One is full of sand and an ancient library. Shake it and you’re transported to the dungeon.

This is a free 27 room ziggurat inside of a snow globe. It’s a nice journeyman effort, doing nothing spectacularly but also not really failing in any area and hitting on a consistent above-average level with periodic GREAT content. It does a pretty good job of toeing the line being fast, loose, and evocative. It looks like it’s some kind of introduction to the OSR style for folks from the 5E/Pathfinder world. I don’t know about that, but I do know it does a pretty decent job of invoking a kind of OSR style. It certainly has room for improvement, quite a bit so in the “editing” category since there are lots of places where little bits are missing/overlooked. But that’s a pretty minor quibble, especially if we consider this a first draft effort.

The set up is exactly what the intro says. There’s almost nothing more to it but what’s in the introduction. And you really don’t need much more. The front cover, above, gives you a pretty good idea what the party sees: some ancient stone ruins covered in sand. Other than this there’s a very short background section and then a short description of the four major factions in the dungeon.

What’s great is that almost everything is focused on the players. How the players interact, how they interact. There might be a sentence or two of background, but most of the history and NPC sections are devoted to the actual play. How the DM can use the data.Where the monsters wander. How to use them. This is a theme over and over again in the dungeon. The dross is cut out and what’s left is play focused. Short, punchy descriptions with stickiness to them that remind me a lot of the best the OSR has produced. And it’s all got this slightly weird vibe to it.

The map has several levels, with several staircases and features to it. Same-level stairs, an outdoor element to get to some spires, ramps, sand choked hallways and stairwells. It’s a Logos map and it’s one of his better efforts. Sometimes his maps can feel small or linear. Not this time. Multiple entrances to the complex, light vertical/three dimensional elements, and a nice isometric sort of overview map to show how all of the levels and elements work together.

I mentioned factions. There are probably at least four. First you’ve got these weird “mummy” things that are some kind of cross between sandmen, mummies, and zombies. They beg for help, crawl, wail, and … Wait, here’s the quote: “They don’t understand what has happened to them, that they have already died and walk as undead. So they crawl, limp, and stumble towards anything that lives while they beg for help.” That’s pretty nice. It’s one of the better monster descriptions, and reminds me a bit of those great undead descriptions in the better Dragonsfoot adventures.

Beyond the zombies we’ve got a sphinx looking for answers to a riddle, an NPC party running around, and a “twisted lich” who’s only goal is to steal teeth. More than enough to work with. And some of them have random starts, clues that they’ve been in certain rooms, and or move around the dungeon.

It’s got four pages of maps and around four pages of keyed rooms and about four pages of monster/faction descriptions, background, etc. This is all done with a good font, wide margins and easy to read formatting. I approve. I don’t think it was probably anything more than a standard Word template, two column (the headings look like a familiar Word section heading font/colo.)

The room descriptions, as I mentioned earlier, are quite focused. Here’s an example from room three: “Door chained from the outside. A Mummy wriggles its arm between the door and frame. The chain is new.” Mummy arm wriggling is a great classic image. The chain being new tells the party things … someone else is here. That kind of simple and classic encounter type is present over and over again. The language isn’t exactly flowery or overly obtuse, more straightforward. But the focus present there in that description is great. One step more than minimally keyed. The adventure does this sort of thing over and over again. Broken furniture piled in front of doors, skeletal corpses piled on the floor, reaching out, as if trying to escape. The traps gives clues to their existence sometimes, like “pulverized stone and a flattened decaying body”. It even has just a slight touch of silly in places with the sphinx treasure being focused on “headgear/hats” and the library having a “Fanfic” section.

And now for the negatives. The mummies shows up as wandering monsters, mostly, and have a 33% chance every turn. That’s a pretty high chance/lots of mummies, even if they are capped at 30. They also range from one to four HD. I would probably vary the descriptions of them, in play, to give some clue as to their differences … then again I hate 8HD orcs. Silently changing the rules CAN be used nicely in games … but it seldom is.

The adventure also has some typos in places. “NPC sits in the magic circle.” … that sounds like a fill and replace mistake, and there are a couple of other examples of that sort of thing as well … hence the “first draft” comments above. In addition there are little errors of omission … at least I think they are omissions. A few monsters stats are left out here and there. In addition there are little bits that I think could have used just a FEW more words. One romo has some Draught in it … gin made from coffin wood. That’s just begging for one more sentence noting drunk effects and bonuses to death saves, or some such. There are a few other examples of little things like that. The treasure is not generic/terrible, being one step above with descriptions like “scarab earrings” and “amber ring”, and in some cases they are REALLY nice. But they could, in general use a few better words to bring them to life a bit more. It’s also not clear to me that there’s enough loot in the dungeon. It’s somewhere around level three, I’d guess?, and there doesn’t seem to be more then about a level one amount of treasure present, for XP=GP games. Finally, the writing, while serviceable, is a little straightforward.

This is one of the better free adventure I’ve seen. Buffed up a bit it could be a solid nine on a ten point scale.

This is free at:
http://insidethegiantseye.blogspot.com/2017/01/dungeon-crawl-globe.html

Posted in Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 2 Comments