tenfootpole.org

By Jim Baney
KnightVision Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 2-3

Kobolds and Goblins living together? What has the world come to?

This is a very simple ten page/sixteen room cave complex with kobolds and goblins. The actual rooms are split over three pages, with the rest being maps, filler, etc. It has a very simple design. It seems disconnected in places, almost as if it were procedurally generated.

The party comes upon a smouldering farmhouse. Walking out is an asshole paladin with a shish kabobed kobold on his sword. The farmer and wife are missing. The party “track” them back to a cave, enter it, and kill everything. I’m not opposed to the smouldering farmsteam hook. In fact I prefer it to the more overly complicated shit and do-goodery that frequently shows up. Yeah, it’s tonights adventure and it’s obvious. At least you don’t have to put up halflings making a direct appeal to your kindness. But … would it be that much harder to add an obvious large chest, dug up, with gold (or even platinum!) coins trailing, and the paladin the tax collector here to check up on the guy? Lookit ma! Another motivation! It also adds another dimension to the “Asshole paladin” trope. You know, the one who can’t be bothered to rescue the captured farmer & wife because he wants to make sure the other farms are not attacked? But the local lord, out collecting taxes? He’d probably be willing to cut the party in on the take, a finders fee for getting him what he’s owed AND getting in better with the tenant farmers everywhere by looking out for the suckers. It’s not that fucking hard and adds/modifies maybe two or three sentences. On the plus side the whole intro is less just a couple of paragraphs, so no long lead-is, thanks god.

The dungeon proper then starts, with no real description of the journey to it or the entrance. Just rooms. The keyed encounters are … unusual. It’s pretty minimally keyed, think of B2. But the design is weird as fuck. Basically, each room has a kobold or goblin encounter. Here’s the description for the last room, sixteen: “Room 16 – Loose gravel is piled up along the walls. Part of the ceiling has collapsed. Goblin (1)” Weird, right? The description has little to do with the room shown on the map as well. It has stairs and a secret door. What’s the goblin doing in there? Who knows! What’s the purpose of the gravel & ceiling? Nothing! Here’s another example, from room six: “Room 6 – A putrid smell of rotting meat and urine permeates this room. A strange mist conceals the ceiling. Kobold (2)” The smell and mist are never mentioned. There’s no reason for it. It just is. Not mentioned is the chasm/bridge thing shown on the map that appears to span a large body of water. Other rooms are similar.

It looks like someone rolled on the random dungeon dressing table and just copied it in to the room descriptions. At the risk of telling you how to play D&D, I believe those tables are meant for inspiration, to help you build upon something, and not to be taken too literally. Because taken literally they add NOTHING.

I’ve already botched a bit about the descriptions not matching the map, but the lack of the pit trap is something I find interesting also. Room one has a pit trap. It goes on and on about the mechanics of it and how to run it. (Have I mentioned yet, ad nauseum, how I hate overly detailed mechanics? I hate overly detailed mechanics/rules in my adventures.) But … it’s not shown on the fucking map. The map shows bodies of water, and streams underground. It shows stairs. It shows secret doors (which never are mentioned in the text), it shows rubble piles. It has symbols for sinkholes. But it never puts a little “X” symbol on the map. Every fucking adventure from the beginning of time has marked pits on the map, but not this one. WTF? And the water/bridges, features are seldom mentioned in text. It’s like the map is divorced from the text.

The magic items present are decent. A pendant of invisibility you have to touch to activate. A hammer that teleports back to your hand after a hit. Those are ok. Not magnificent and weird but decent enough to show an effort was made. There’s also a nice tin can from ceiling sound trap. I love the classics. But then, there’s also this blue light bulb stuff on the ceilings in some places that is hardly mentioned. There’s no way in fucking hell the party ignores that. I don’t need an explanation spoon fed but “… comes from large bulb or sack-like structures hanging from the ceiling” is hardly supporting the DM. Just add “hacked insect abdomen” and I can go from there.

I don’t know why this exists. Was someone really “proud” to present it, as the publishers blurb states? No one is getting rich off of it, so presumably there was no time pressure to release it. Why was it published in its present form? Does it actually represent the vision the designer had in mind?

Now I want to start a freelance editing service. Not only do consumers deserve better, but so do designers. I suspect there is some attempt at copyediting and maybe even line editing from the big kids. But a real editor? I see a substantial gap there.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/189380/KVG002-Shadows-Grip?1892600

By Kieran Brannan
Point Pony
Basic D&D
Levels 1-3

Nobody else wanted to take on a job of helping out an orc, but if their gold is good then who cares … right? Black Orc Down puts the party on the trail of a missing orc chieftain. Can they rescue him from the dark mysteries of the Undercity beneath Forecastle? Can they uncover the vile plot which threatens to disrupt the power structure of The Shades? If they fail, will the death of one orc really matter that much?

This is twenty page adventure in the “undercity” on a linear map with seven locations in a high-fantasy setting. It hits, negatively, a large number of my review standards. It is not, however, incomprehensible, or hard to run, so at least it’s got that going for it.

There’s this generic fantasy city that’s been taken over by different pirate lords. Pretty standard stuff. It’s high fantasy though, so there’s orcs and goblins and so on, entire tribes, in the city. Bob the orc, leader of some minor blah blah blah orc clan, has fallen through a hole in the floor that gave way while he was on his throne. He’s now in the undercity, the ruins of the old city that the current one was built on top of. He was attacked by skeletons and ran off and his orc buddies tried to save him but were beaten back by the undead. They hire the party, for 100 gold, to go save their orc chief.

I hate high fantasy. Or, rather, I hate THIS sort of high fantasy. I get it, different strokes for different folks. Like what yhttps://crou want and all that jazz. But this just sucks. One of my points is that I like humans instead of humanoids as enemies, most of the time. Or maybe I mean “in certain situations.” A sidebar DOES encourage you to change the orcs (and later goblins) to humans if you’re not playing a high fantasy game, but I want to talk more about the use of humanoids in general. When you take an elf and make him a farmer, on of many in a human village, you generally destroy what it means to be an elf. Elf garbage collectors. Dwarf millers. You’ve just turned them in to humans with pointy ears or short humans. The same with the humanoids. These represent THE OTHER. They should be different. Scary. Maybe bestial. In this adventure the orcs advertise on the local job boards. When they greet you the read aloud says “Thank you so much for answering our request for aid.” Seriously? I get it it. High Fantasy. But … seriously? There’s NOTHING in this adventure that makes the orcs seem like orcs. Or makes the goblins (a tribe of which you meet later) seem like goblins. A society of overly polite orcs drinking tea with their pinkies out? I can get behind that. But generic humanoids? Nope. Sorry. Disbelief broken. Grimy humans? Ok. Human cannibals? Ok. Humans can do some fucked up shit and making humanoids humans instead can lead to some good revulsion. It’s more relatable. But generic orcs with a “thank you so much for answering our request for aid?” High fantasy or not, that sucks.

Twenty pages with seven encounters implies a high word count, and that’s present here. There’s a MASSIVE amount of read aloud. Paragraphs and paragraphs that add little to no value. The writing isn’t particularly evocative, although it is serviceable and clear, generally. It falls in to the trap of telling instead of showing. “The environment is an oppressive unwelcoming shroud …” Well, no. It’s not. When you TELL me its oppressive then its not oppressive. SHOW me. If you’re going to engage in this type of read-aloud then describe WHY. Let the players draw their own conclusions. There are reams and reams of advice on writing that tell you why showing is better than tellings. Go google it for more. Or don’t. Whatever.

There’s a table in this adventure I’d like to talk about. It’s a loot table, in case the party searches a random building in the undercity. A typical entry is “You manage to find a small cache of silverware worth 2d10sp.” BAD BAD BAD! It’s generic. Just “Silverware” It’s written in read-aloud mode. “You find …” Blech! “Elven filigree tarnished silver olive spoons, bent.” Instead we get “The jewellery is of simple design, being of a quality a merchant’s wife might wear.” Generic sucks ass. Specificity is the soul of storytelling. And do it in under fifteen words. Please.

And, to boot, there’s not a lot of treasure. At all. So little for Gold=XP that the adventure encourages a story award at the end for completing the quest. That’s NEVER good. It implies a right way and a wrong way to complete the adventure. I’d be more ok with just giving the party a flat 2000xp after every session, or something like that, instead of a “story” award. It removes free will from the players and forces them to complete an adventure in a certain way. If you squint, then Gold=XP does the same thing. Or, rather,?=XP generally results in the play style being optimized to get the XP, and thus the party will do whatever. I prefer a free will game.

There’s a part of this adventure that I can’t decide on. It goes beyond the generic encounters and dull descriptions of the various rooms. You track some goblins back to their lair/hideout. You come out in the “throne” room. There’s a door. Goblins come through the door. The DM is instructed to make variable number of goblins come through it, in order to heighten tension and give a moment of drama. It is absolutely undeniable that barricading a door, goblins smashing in to it, daggers poking through it, etc, would be a great moment of drama in a game. But FORCING that situation is lame as fuck, especially with a “just keep sending in goblins to heighten the tensions” advice statement. Uncool. If it happens, great. If you want to put 10 goblins outside in the guardroom and have them rush in, loudly, after three rounds that the players hear, great. But forcing the situation is un cool advice. D&D absolutely does NOT need more shitty DM advice.

Ultimately, this is just another generic D&D adventure. There’s little soul to it, even if you accept the high fantasy premise.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/188652/P1-Black-Orc-Down?1892600

By Dave Coulson
Cut To The Chase Games
Swords & Wizardry (and every other system under the sun)
Levels 3-5

A missing amulet sends the characters on the last caravan of the season bound for the frontier. Tracking the thieves turns into a dangerous journey through rough mountains, where predators and monsters lurk in the shadows of craggy peaks. Can a band of characters recover the missing treasure and return from the DEPTHS OF THE CROAKING GROTTO?

What makes the essence of a man?

This is a small hex crawl (eight locations) followed by an eight room cave, wrapped up in a nineteen page adventure. It’s wordy with a generic vibe that makes one wonder why this exists. Or, if I’m not being a dick today, “The author’s vision was not successfully communicated to the audience through the product.”

We start at the beginning of the middle part of the adventure. The party has already agreed to hire on to a caravan and find a missing amulet and they are already well in to the mountains. The designer assures us that this style of play is great. We should use a flashback to show how the party came to be hired. Not enough people do that, we’re assured. There’s a reason for this, sez I. It’s called Pretext of Free Will. What if the party doesn’t want to go on this shitty ass mission? What is the 50gp reward isn’t enough for them? What if they murder the dude in the flashback? Unless you’re running a con game. In which case feel free to hand wave past a few things. But flashbacks and In Medias Res is a dangerous proposition, fraught with peril. Unless you play one of those railroady version. Oh, wait …. More on that later.

You start at the scene of the ambush, at the caravan route in the mountains. A trail of stuff leads off. It leads SE. Each hex is 1 mile wide. Half the encounter hexes are NE. I don’t get it. This touches on some organizational issues as well. Some hexes have monsters that can see you in an adjacent hex, and swing by to attack. But this is noted in the hex with the monster in it. This means you get to check each hex nearby to see if there’s a monster that can see you. Maybe not a big deal when only 8 hexes have stuff in them. But you know what would have been better? SHADING THE FUCKING MAP. Hex 7 has a 1 hex alert distance? Shade the hexes around 7 so I know this from looking at the fucking map instead of having to dig through the fucking adventure looking to see what’s up. Fuck, maybe even embed the sight chances on the map. This is a prime example of how using the visual fucking aid can eliminate crap in the adventure and make life easier on the DM.

The encounters here are of the “monsters attack” variety, both in the cave and in the hexes. Manticores? They attack. It’s so boring. Sure, if you pause during the attack to offer a horse then they stop, but by that time I suspect the MU, with spikes in their ass, are not going to be in a talking mood. Inside the cave there’s a big pool of after in one of the rooms. After you enter a giant toad rises up and attacks. This is so shitty. Member Fellowship, and Mellon? Member how fucking with the water summoned the lake monster? Think how boring it would have been if it just started attacking. This happens over and over again.

There’s almost no real sense of exploration, mystery, or wonder. THe writing style is ponderous and wordy. The DM notes for room six indicate “The toad-men of this small tribe would bathe and be cleansed in the waters of this pool by Blundubba. Ultimately, the ceremony was nothing more than mummery and ancient phrases but it made the toad- men feel holy.” What the fuck is the point of that? DOes it contribute to the adventure? I’m not a fucking anthropologist. I’m a DM. You need to provide content that is SPECIFICALLY relevant to gaming at the table. None of this friend-of-a-friend you-might-be-inspired bullshit. It contributes or you make it contribute to YOU GET THE FUCK RID OF IT. The adventure does this over and over again with it’s conversational style. It’s exhausting and it hides anything of value.

Not that there is much. SOme frog men dancing on an island in torchlight, my description of which is about 10 times more interesting than the one found in this adventure. +1 long sword. +1 dagger. Hey hey now! I wonder how much effort and imagination that required to come up with! And there’s WAY too little loot for an adventure of this level for S&W. That’s because this adventure, even though it says it’s for S&W, is not a S&W adventure. It’s a conversion.

Your intuition tells you secrets, and then it tells you lies, sez my wife. While buying this I was presented with something like eight different choices of game systems. My spidey sense went off went off when I saw that. I’m not a believer in absolutes but I am a believer in hyperbole. Seeing an adventure for many game systems is a warning sign the size of a small moon. There’s some kind of correlation/causation/stereotyping caveat that goes in there, but ,it’s safe to say that this adventure fails to capture the spirit of any game system, being just a collection of generic words where insidious and repulsive toad creatures were called for.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/190763/TG0-Depths-of-the-Croaking-Grotto-SnW?1892600

By Jason Blalock
Dice Addict Games
Black Hack

About a day’s journey by loaded wagon from a good-sized trading city, at the edge of a small farming community, sits a moderately successful inn and tavern called The Merchant’s Rest. Due to an unlikely confluence of circumstances, four exceptional people with as many reasons to mistrust each other as they have to cooperate, are about to caught up in a tide of violence and dark sorcery which will threaten not only their own lives but those of the local populace.

This is a 21 page adventure hook. A one-shot, set in a tavern, provides a VERY strong initial set up position in a tavern … and then says “wing it” for the rest of the content.

There’s an inn/tavern on the edge of a village. Four pregens are there. The scholar (a MU) has rooms. He’s got a bit of a heretical past, but s tolerated by the authorities because of the help he provides. The stablehand/blacksmith is a former soldier (a Fighter) in the religious wars. The Pagen (the thief) is cousin to the stablehand/soldier and has gotten himself in to DEEP SHIT, because of a cult he joined and an artifact he stole for them. He’s come to the soldier for help, who wants to introduce him to the Scholar for help. The Inquisitor (cleric) shows up to see if the Scholar “yet remains a friend to the faith.” Very strong archtypes.Very strong backgrounds. Custom made to interact with each other and generate conflict. I can’t emphasize this enough. I have played in a shit ton of con games with pre-gens of every style and RPG imaginable. These may be the best four pre-gens I’ve ever seen. Usually you’re lucky to get MAYBE one in eight with a background this strong. They have a relationship with each other. There’s this simmering tension, massive loads of potential energy, buried in the relationships with each other. And yet probably no outright conflict. All done in one digest page each, with an OVERLY generous font size, line spacing, and margins. BAD. ASS.

The characters are at the inn or show up shortly. Then the shit starts. The cult leader shows up and wants the artifact back. “Young mean with taloned hands and the heads of antelope will appear as if they had been lurking in the shadows of the common room.” Combat!

That’s it. You get almost nothing more. A brief sentence or two about the inn and the proprietor. (2 sable boys. 9 rooms upstairs. The innkeep lives beside the inn.) A couple of notes about there being a church nearby with a holy silver maul and how to destroy the artifact.

I get it. Some people wing it.

This is one of those products that wounds my inner child and makes me feel ripped off. (Pay What You Want aside.) The setup is wonderful; one of the very best. Nice villain. Nice monsters. AND NOTHING ELSE. This approach to adventure products is antithetical to my foundational beliefs. The purpose of the published adventure is to help the DM run a game in which the players and DM have a good time. The DM has had a shitty day. In ze’s job as an assistant crack whore trainee ze’s had to take shit from their boss all day. The kids are being teens. Traffic sucked. Dinner was cold. And ze needs to run a game for their friends in 90 minutes. They go buy this. Does it help the DM enough? Are their (my) expectations crushed?

In this case, Yes, expectations were crushed. The set up is rock star quality. It’s just missing anything other than “dudes show up and start fighting.”

This needs just a little more. Just a page of single sentence set-ups. They come crashing through the roof. They set the kitchen on fire, or a few NPC’s to toss in to the inn for preamble fun or combat complications. They don’t needs stats. They don’t need to be complicated. Just enough to get the MD’s imagination going for livening things up a bit beyond a straight up “Roll for init!” callout. An unrelated conflict in the inn.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/185916/They-Met-In-A-Tavern?1892600

By Alessandro Dellamotta
Starlight Games
OSR
Levels 4-5

An ancient underground hideout, filled with weapons, magic and lore from a long-gone empire… And a terrible curse.

This is a seventeen-ish room dungeon spread over 21 pages … that’s been formatted to fit on four print pages in folio format. It’s an ancient complex with undead and vermin. There’s some decent non-standard magic items in places, and unusual magic items for the book items. There is also some decent imagery in places. In other places you have to work for it and in still others it’s a little fact-based for my taste-in-room-descriptions.

The pretext here is quite light, but strong enough to sustain it. It’s an abandoned complex of an ancient empire. You’ve got two possible pretexts presented. First, the party could be after some kind of magical research thingy and since there’s a magical lab inside you could find what you’re looking for there. Second, you could have found this magic sword, cursed, and you can lift it by exploring. This is a nice contrast to the usual plot-dreck. In other words, the dungeon is presented as a place for you to wrap your own characters story around rather than a place to have the designers shitty ass plot forced down your throat.

This suggests an interesting question: which is worse, a crappy exploration dungeon or a crappy plot based adventure/dungeon? Is the answer obvious?

The room descriptions are a mixed bag. There is a decent attempt, in some of them, to provide some nice imagery. A skeletal blacksmith has a hammer wreathed in flames, and a dim fire burns in other skeletons eye sockets. The blacksmith gestures for them to rise … It’s a little … direct? Inelegant? In its implementation. The noun/verb choice is pretty straightforward instead of a more esoteric usage to convey hidden imagery. Still, above average. Even during the pre-animation description of “A decayed skeleton wearing a blacksmith’s leather apron lies propped up on the wall next to the forge, hammer in hand. He still wears a golden key on a chain around his neck. Another dozen skeletons are scattered throughout the room.” It’s the specificity. An apron, propped, key around neck. Not the greatest ever but a decent image without getting too bogged down in useless garbage description.

There are a few other descriptions like that in the adventure. If you squint hard then you can see opportunities for others. The wanderer table has a few things on it that are ripe for this. “15 skeletons with sword & shield.” This was an old military installation. Well, they are obviously patrolling, all Red Square May Day style. Until they reach a room and then they enter it all Rainbow Six tactical style. “2 wights”, and they both happen to wear silver rings. Why not glowing with bright silvery light against the wights decaying background? I’m being, perhaps, a little too generous in my squinting. On the one hand the )brief) background gives rise to the inspiration that feeds this (Yeah!) on the other hand I don’t review fluff product because “I was inspired by it” is such an ambiguous measure. Objectively, a little more of “what they are doing” would have been nice for the wanderers. Subjectively, there was enough here to push me in to filling in the details … which is one the reasons I harp so much on the terse (easy to use by the DM) but evocative (captures the DMs imagination) description. The wanderers (and some of the other encounters) are overly terse AND lack the evocative nature … but I picked it up in the rest of the product.

But that doesn’t touch other areas. One of the weaker rooms ia an armory with a door “marked with a magical glyph” and “and ancient cracked amber golem in the shape of a tiger.” These are mere facts. “Ancient” is a conclusion, in this case, not a description. Showing, instead of telling us it is “ancient” would be better. And there are more than a few rooms like this.

The designer contacted me and asked for feedback, so I’m going to fall in to the pedantic now and play Editor. You may want to skip this paragraph. Taking one of the better rooms, “3. Forge” we immediately see a missed opportunity. “Forge” is boring. Why not embed a description? What’s the overall sense of the room you want to convey? A massacre, long passed? Or, I see the forge is still lit and the description says “casting a dim reddish glow on the room.” That’s a decent first impression. How can you update the room name to better convey that? “3. Shadowy glowing forge”? I’m terrible at this, but you get the idea. Second, I see that the first line of this room’s description, and most rooms description, are the dimensions. “This 9x15m room used to be a well equipped smithy.” Well, we know that. It was the room name, remember? Secondly, we know the room dimensions. It’s on the map. The map is a real map, and not some art school project, so you’ve got a grid. Don’t pad the room with useless words. The designer of Adventure Mos Fowl just commented, on my review, that “better to have it and not need it, right?” He’s missing the point. WHile that could be said, it’s also critically important that the words not get in the way of the DM running the room at the table, which is amazingly easy to do. SO watch your room descriptions. Focus. You go on to say that there’s an anvil up against the wall (duh, it’s a forge, does this add to the room, or the gameable nature? If the anvil was missing and was the key to getting to a secret door, maybe, but that’s not the case here) and that there’s a narrow air vent. Again, while wonderfully pedantically historically accurate, not necessarily applicable to running this room. You want to put a thin trail of smoke in the room description somewhere? Ok. But that’s an appeal to the evocative and is a visible effect of the air vent. The last line of the first paragraph(!), The shadowy room being lit but a dim reddish glow, is DYNAMITE, as is the second paragraph, describing the skeleton. You might get rid of the first paragraph and combine the two so the skeleton is lit, barely visible, by the dim reddish glow? The third paragraph, a list of mundane objects, is lame. Convey it terser and/or combine it somewhere else. The monster description is good, but the additional “he does not talk but he is no mindless undead. He is sentient and cunning” is padding. He’s cunning. Or he’s [insert a better adjective.] Finally, you’ve clearly made a very deliberate choice in dividing the room content in to different, labeled, sections. “Haunt”(nice!). Room. Monsters. Treasure. Feature. I’m not going to pass judgment on that, except to say that separating out the “Haunt” is a good idea. I would, however, leave you with a couple of things to think about, understanding I’m not necessarily telling you to change things. First, If the room is so wordy that you have to have separate headings for each little thing, then maybe the room is too wordy? Second, “Room” is obvious, and probably doesn’t need a heading. Its implied because … we’re reading about a room. Second, monsters are usually obvious in a room because of the stat block. In any event, a separate paragraph, with a stat block. Is usually enough, I find, to find the creature. Usually. Finally, the treasure/feature, located at the end of the room after the monster description, is probably adequate. Or, you could mix & match heading as needed to bring out important information. IE: don’t be slave to including the headings in EVERY room, but just use a heading where you think you need to call something out. I don’t assert your choices are wrong, I’m just giving you other things to think about.

The magical items are interesting and are a mix of non-standard and unusual standard. The forge is lit by a severed fire giant hand, that burns eternally. Nice! There’s a +1 dagger made of ice that also deals cold damage and can freeze liquids and put out fires with a touch. Nice! Magic silver platemail, which can deal damage when silver-vulnerable monsters touch it. The final monster, the warrior princess proper, can even be won over to your side and used as an ally and NPC in an ongoing campaign. REALLY nice touch there! Further … she’s got PHAT LOOT. Kill her and take the Loot=XP or keep her as an ally? Oh, the despair of choice! You know, there’s another room like this, a room with an ochre jelly. It doesn’t attack unless provoked. If you kill it it turns out that there’s treasure inside. I would have TOTALLY played that up in the description. Make it obvious it has treasure inside. Or imply heavily it does. Put the big red button in front of the party and dare them to press it. There’s another room, with normal spiders with human intelligence, that misses an opportunity. This roleplaying GOLD and could use a sentence or two more to expand on some personality, what they know, etc.

There are some visual aides in the back of the adventure, to show the players. Props are always nice. The concept of a “four print pages” format is pretty interesting as well. I remain a bit skeptical about it working out in practice … the font is a bit small already and printing two per page … my old eyes may protest. The formatting and wordiness detract quite a bit, IMO, from an otherwise generally decent adventure … that has several rooms that need some extra evocative help. I think it’s a first effort. If so, it’s an excellent first effort.

It’s $2 on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/199488/Arsenal-of-the-Warrior-Princess?1892600