The Dwarves of Copper Gulch

Posted on May 31, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Ian McGarty
Silver Bulette
Swords & Wizardry
Level 1-3

The Dwarves of Copper Gulch have returned! They seem to be a bit less industrious than before and you will have to figure out why.

This is an eleven page adventure in a small dwarven hold with around 28 rooms on two levels. It’s been taken over by goblins, who think they are dwarves. If I’m being generous, then the content is marginal. From layout to encounters to the core elements, there’s just not much thought.

Most of the adventure takes place in five pages, with two more for maps. You find a journal, or heard a rumor in a tavern, or find a map. All centering around hearing about an old dwarf hold that is rumored to be full of treasure if you can get past the traps and labyrinth of rooms. There is no labyrinth of rooms or even any traps. Instead there are goblins who think they are dwarves. Quick to anger, quick to laugh, and able to be reasoned with.

The formatting changes from one column to two. The rooms all run up against each other with no paragraph break between rooms, or bolding of their titles, making it difficult to pick out the individual rooms. The wandering monster table intro implies multiple creatures … but the table has one entry, labeled “1.” The front door is, evidently, locked with a puzzle lock. It’s not clear. There’s a handout with letters and numbers on it, but no indication of what the handout represents. There’s just this handout titled “Door Puzzle handout” that is a matrix of letters and numbers.

The treasure is all +1 axes and shields and so on, with no effort to describe or make unique. The final room has a silver statue of a bulette in it, with full stats. Does it do something? Does it come to life? Is it underneath the pit in the throne room? Absolutely no indication of any of it.

In summary: an “adventure” with no real efforts at hooks, no real efforts at formatting (Fuck man, just spend 15 minutes more on the layout to bold some room names and stick in some whitespace!) The “adventure” consists of, essentially, looting the place without getting caught by the “dwarves” …I guess? There’s just nothing here. A few monsters, some boring old room descriptions … nothing. It’s almost incoherent.

It’s Pay What You Want on DriveThru, with most of the adventure available in the preview. Page two shows the wandering monster table .. with one entry, while the bottom of the page shows the puzzle door with handout following. Page five is a GREAT example of the formatting. Whitespace on the previous page, none on this one and everything running together.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/210391/Dwarves-of-Copper-Gulch-a-Swords-and-Wizardry-Compatible-Adventure?affiliate_id=1892600

It’s 9:12am and I need a fucking drink after this.

Posted in Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 7 Comments

Broken God’s Pain

Posted on May 29, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By???
Unbalanced Dice Games
OSR

The Old God has awoken. He feels the pain of being broken and wants to be free again. He has cursed the party to find his body and make him whole again. They must venture into the caves and face foes who will thwart their every move. If the party has the wits and the will they will succeed. The Old God demands success!

This is a 64-page adventure in some caves with about sixty rooms in it. There is some pretext about an old god and a new god and worshippers, etc, but it’s really a funhouse dungeon with a large number of mini-areas with almost no relation to each other. Charming, a product of madness, youth, or a fantasy education that stopped at age twelve without any hint of Tolkien or D&D. Fantasy as written by Tom Sawyer. Overly written, no effort at layout, unrelated encounters … and the type of pure simple imagination that I’m not sure anyone is capable of once exposed to “mainstream” D&D. Troll? Art project? Youth? I have no idea.

There’s no layout to speak of. It’s all single column with a large font. Room names are bolded. Monster stats indented. A few pieces of art in a simple, charming/amateur style. The hook? You dream, and are transported at fantastic speed over the sea past seas monsters and ship to find yourself on a rocky shore next to a village with a voice having said “Come and find me.” The starter village is a mess, with events mixed in to keyed locations in a small eight keyed location that takes four or five pages to get through. They worship a sun god the priest knows nothing about, there are bat themed (The New God) hints all over the place and the people grow hostile when the Old God is mentioned. This is all crazy … except the village god setup IS a good one. The kids play “bat and mouse.” There’s an old bat mask in the church. People get angry at the talk of the old god. Eventually a girl leaders the party to the caves. Inside they get a vision/voice telling them to find the old gods eight parts and join them together. It’s completely obvious with no attempt really at a serious pretext. The old god/new god thing isn’t really going to come up again, except in the form of a few cultists you fight.

There’s nothing from the books in this. No treasure. No monsters. All fresh content. It reminds me, in a way, of the writing style of Tracia, Dungeon of the Bear, and of my favorite adventure The Upper Caves from Fight On! Magazine #2. Treasure? How about a cup that burns water like it’s a torch. A little doll the size of finger. Held in the palm of the hand, it does a little dance that heals 1d4 hp once a day. A green gauntlet that causes plants to wither. A stale loaf of bread whose crumb feed you for a day. A stick that turns in to a shovel and back when you will it. What the fuck? For real? A fake eye that glows red … if you stick it in an empty socket you get infravision. Almost all of them are non-mechanical; describing effects instead of the mechanics they produce. +1? That’s boring. I’ll take the fucking stick shovel ANY day over a +1 sword. It preserves a sense of wonder and mystery. There’s cursed armor in Upper Caves/Fight On #2 that shouts “Here I am! Here I am!” when you get close to undetected enemies. No mechanics. Just a description of what it does in plain english, just like in this adventure. The treasure is MAGNIFICENT!

The encounters proper, have little reason to them. Two or three rooms at a time might be related, like a trap that deposits you in to a room, or the three rooms related to shadows: in one you pass through a weird wall that mucks with your perceptions, in the second you fight some shadow monsters, in the third you’re offered the chance to rid yourself of your shadow. Or a vampire hunter which you meet in one room, see a group of slaughtered bodies in another one, and an empty vampire coffin in the third. The relationship between the rooms and the pretext, the old god and new one, isn’t clear at all … if it’s there at all. I get the feeling this is more a funhouse dungeon. Not with puzzle rooms, per se, but with a series of rooms that exist BECAUSE. Why is there a piece of the old god in a bird cage hanging from the ceiling? Because that’s cool. That room, the cage shocks you. If you break it to get at the part inside then you lay 1-2 normal chicken eggs every 12 hours for a week. When the hell was the last time you saw a curse like THAT in an adventure?

Here’s a section of text from the tempt in the caves. There are fourteen sentences in three paragraphs and these are the middle three sentences: “The men attack with their knives while the large manunbat shouts orders at them. When half the men have been killed it will reveal its true nature. The arms and legs will fall away and it will become man sized. It will remove its head to reveal that it is a plant skeleton that was wearing a costume.” They attack with knives. It shoults orders. It’s plant skeleton in a bat-beast costume. It’s a simple on-forced style of imagination that’s going on. And room after room after room delivers this style of imagination. A board/plank bridge that breaks under weight, of course! A crazy guy with one arm and leg that fires blow darts from a ledge and hits you with his crutch. A bald hermit sitting in a chair in a glass globe. Vignettes in a cave … it reminds me of one of those lost childhood adventures, with Pirates of the Caribbean and so on.

Based on my standards and continually harping on usability at the table, this is hard to recommend. Ignoring the hook/village, the encounters can be arbitrar at times, with a plank on the bridge breaking and the character left hanging. Or an earthquake sealing the party in. It’s text heavy, and the encounters CAN be inconsistent with many working better than others, but they ALL are imaginative.

It’s $4.50. The preview on DriveThru shows the table of content and the last page shows the “dream” hook. I wish it had also shown one of the encounters, so you’d know more of what you are getting in to with it.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/138421/Broken-Gods-Pain-A-Low-Level-OSR-Adventure?affiliate_id=1892600

Go buy it, if for no other reason that I have someone to talk about it with!

Posted in Reviews | 3 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #136

Posted on May 27, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


Hey, I’m on vacation in California! I finally get to go to Death Valley!

Tensions RIsing
By Ryan Smalley
Level 4

An airship has crashed in a hollow mesa and you’re sent to get some papers from it. The mesa entrance splits and goes three directions. There are two factions, and some random monsters, in the mesa caves with goals ranging from “kill the other guys” to “fuck up that airship.” The airship captain lives and refuses to leave, repairing his shit, you all take off and have one last encounter as the two factions launch an attack as the ship takes off. The map is kind of “trident linear” and does a good job privind a path/ways to engage with the three factions. One factions betrays the party while the other … doesn’t? It’s unclear, based on the finale encounter. There’s nineteen rooms and the adventure sometimes manages to put four on a single page, a singular accomplishment for Dungeon Magazine! A shit ton of text is taken up with prescribed tactics with some “Mr Bob had intended to use this room for X but instead Y and Z” nonsense. The basic setup with wounded factions trying to off each other is a nice one. You could probably have a nice adventure on one page, or one sheet.

And Madness Followed
By Greg A. Vaughan
Level 10

Iconic setup. Iconic location. Iconic situation. Shitty padded text making it all hard to run. I REALLY want to like this one. Raiders appear when big storms arise, according to the shitty hooks provided/dying man in the caravan. Tracking them back (100 miles … uh … that’s a bit long ..) has a massive temple appearing out of thin air at the end of a valley during a storm. That’s suitably classic! Inside are some monsters, intelligent foes, and the raiders. IE: MAYBE some factions. At some point while exploring the temple the storm ends, the raiders come back, and the place disappears from the material plane. Killing the raider leader breaks the curse/solves all problems. The map is excellent and reminds me a bit of the garden level of barrier peaks, with its mixed indoor/outdoor space, balconies, and so on, along with a shit ton of roof entrances to the temple. The switch from “exploring the temple” to “being hunted inside by the raiders” is a nice switcheroo also, changing the tone. It also includes an explicit section about who will talk to you … although starting everyone as hostile and those creatures being displacer beasts and chokers (when the fuck did D Beasts become intelligent? Talking chokers were some underdark nonsense, I think?) will both make things a little harder. Paragraph read alouds and long unfocused DM text sections detract from getting use out of it. “The other six hold only the barest bits of bone and shreds of cloth. This displacer beasts that occupy this room licked the lacquer from the corpses like giant candies before consuming the bodies.” Great. Does the adventure take place while they are doing this? No? And they’ve completely consumed the bodies? So everything in the LONG background paragraph is irrelevant to the adventure, as well as those sentences? Perfect. Glad you were able to pad out your Pay Per Word score. This needs a complete edit with a magic DELETE key, then you’d have a decent adventure.

Gates of Oblivion
By Alec Austin
Level 18

There’s nothing to this. Go to a shadow plane, visit three clearings and have a fight at each. Then you go inside a monolith and have a bunch more fights. Then you have a boss fight so you can save the world from darkness. It looks like it’s just an excuse to have a bunch of nightshades/nightwalkers in an adventure. It’s just mini’s combat.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 5 Comments

Dread Machine

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Gus L.
Self Published
Labyrinth Lord
Level 3-6

This 52 page adventure describes a cavern and the machine at the heart of it, that can resurrect the dead. Three’s a small region presented around it, with the cavern locale having about five encounter areas, each with about five more keys, and then the main area with about twenty-one keys. Gus has a very descriptive and evocative writing style, although it gets verbose. The maps are cramped, but the entire thing is imaginative and full of interesting rooms to get in to trouble. He does a great job on imagination but this could use a good trim to make scanning/use at the table easy.

I sometimes talk about hooks appealing to players, and this adventure is a good example of that. Anything can be a quest, but if you can integrate your adventure in to what the PLAYERS want then they’ll be a lot more motivated to not jack around and be involved in the adventure. At some point resurrecting the dead is going to come up, either because of some plot of the characters or because one of them died. That’s where this adventure comes in to play: it features a giant machine rumored to bring back the dead. And it does! Instead of it being a screw job the party can instead find a machine that uses souls to bring the dead back to life. The ‘souls’ thing is going to limit it’s power, but even that opens up more hooks for the players. This is more than the usual fetch quest or hired by blah blah blah to do something. There’s personal interest at stake.

Gus does a good job with creating evocative environments with his writing, interesting things in the room/areas to interact with, and encounters in which there is potential energy. Farmers, hunting the party for a perceived slight, led by Pops Bonder. Zombies lurching hungrily, trailing eviscerated innards. A black pueblo under a curving cliff wall. A room braced with massive tree trunks waxed to a high sheen. An artificial wall covered in a maze of gears, pistons and metal plates. Gus presents a situation and dares you to go forward, giving the players a choice in their doom. An obvious blade trap over a door invites you to climb the wall and try to disarm it. A room has a whirling vortex of blue energy. A catwalk is covered with a slick oil … with a tantalizing view at the other end. The encounters invite the players in to them, almost daring them, tempting them.

The entire place feels coherent, alive. The farmers in the surrounding barren yellow plains make sense. The caves around the Dread Machine fit in with the farmers and the machine. The rooms of the machine are tied back with theming that’s obvious and not buried. The place feels different but not in a gonzo manner … at least until the machine proper is reached. The treasure, both mundane and magical, get just enough description to make interesting and more than throw-away items. A destroyed staff of the magi with some power remaining (inside a blast crater in the mud), a lump of golden metal (formerly a delicate thaumaturgical calculator), a gold ceremonial shark mask inlaid with mother of pearl.

The writing, colorful and evocative as it is, is also verbose. We’re not talking Dungeon Magazine standards, but it’s not uncommon for there to be two encounters per page, each being about half a page. There’s a header/summary at the start of each, so it’s not quite as bad as I imply, but it is still quite lengthy. The Secret Shrine has four paragraphs of text to describe a shrine with a treasure hidden in an idol. Two paragraphs paint a rich picture of the room while two more describe the hiding place and the treasure. “If the totem’s head, a twenty pound hollow ovoid of iron plate with indistinct features, is placed on the altar, the altar’s secret compartment slides open with a hissing gush of steam” That’s a great description. Or “Above the altar is a rough metal totem cobbled together from plates of black iron, welded and joined with thumb sized rivets.” Again, another great description. Almost EVERY sentence is a great description. But there are too many. It makes it hard to scan the text and find what you need to describe NOW.

There’s an attempt to mitigate this with a header section for each room. It describes the rooms appearance, smell, lighting, traps, treasure, and inhabitants in a little offset section. In theory this would be great. In practice … not so much. The summary attempts/descriptions are not particularly strong. “A dusty shrine to evil gods. Racks of skulls line the walls around crude totem and alter. Secret door on East wall to #3.” Both the initial “dusty shine” sentence and the “secret door” sentence are redundant. Instead telling us it’s a “crude black iron welded crude humanoid totem” and an “chromed sacrificial altar with pipes”, or something similar, would have helped. The players just walked in. What do I need NOW? Then the summary can kick in. And while they debate I can then scan the main text, which can call out important features with bold, or underline, or reformat so the more important sections are near the front of the sentence. That there fancy font don’t contribute to readability either.

The maps are a bit of a pain also. They range from half-page to third page creations. “The Black Pueblo” gets a little half-page isometric thing, trying to show the interior and exteriors of a location with ceiling access on moth rooms. The shading used to do that makes it seem a little busy. The map of the main location, a traditional map, has four levels snugged in to about a third of a page. It’s readable, but just, and a squinty chore that doesn’t exactly contribute to ease of use.

This is grade A highlighter fodder. It’s evocative. It’s got loads of interesting encounters. But it’s too verbose, which tends to hide what is going on in the rooms. The writing needs more focus on the editing side. I LUV those painting with a lot going on in them, every time you look you see something new. This adventure is like those paintings. Wondrous to enjoy, but if I tried to give you directions using the painting you’d get lost.

It’s free at Dungeon of Signs blog. Take a look at page eight for a nice wandering monster table, full of color. Pages eleven and eighteen have good sample maps to illustrate my points. The Secret Shrine room is on page twenty. Take a look at the summary section and then revel in the descriptions underneath.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_4yfZaJH0e5Y2k5RzEtSURjUTA/view

Posted in Level 3, No Regerts, Reviews | 4 Comments

The Tall Witch

Posted on May 22, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By David Pigndolli
Daimon Games
OD&D
Level 1

It presents a classic adventure, with a mission assigned to the characters by the priest of a small village, and rumors of the coming awakening of the terrible Tall Witch.

This 26 page Pay What You Want “adventure” has five encounters, each with a witch, filling about twelves of its pages. The witches are interesting. The magic items are interesting. I just can’t get over the page count.This is wrong of me. It’s Pay WHat You Want.

Every 333 years a witch hatches fully grown from a giant egg near this certain village. The villagers then get terrorized. The time has come and the local priest has declared a big rock on the sea shore to be the egg. The party needs to go fuck it up. On the way there you either meet a young lady who’s mule is broken or a young lady drowning off the shore, if you approach by boat. You find the egg missing. On the way up the cliffs you meet three more young ladies, all witches.

The witches are fairly interesting. All dressed in strangely nice gowns … a tip off if ever there was one. The first pretending to be lost on the road, her mule having a broken leg nearby. SHe leads the party in to quicksand, the purple flower in her hair allowing her to walk on quicksand. The second pretends to be drowning near the shore, wearing a gown of sea algea. They come off as more sorceresses and have a fine OD&D feel; they’d fit in great in Isle of the Unknown with their weird powers and such. One, when she dies, leaves a pool of water that never dries up. Nice. Each witch encounter takes two to three pages to describe, with a generous margin, font, and random tables.

Treasure includes the aforementioned flower that lets you walk over quicksand, eggshell pieces that could allow you to teleport, and the bronze head of a child that talks to you and if you feed it blood can do more.

The location of the witches is the most confusing part. One on the road, one at the base of the cliff, and three more on the way up to the top of the cliff? This is more of a point-crawl/scene based adventure, but I found it impossible to visualize the witches in relation to each other. IN a 26 pages adventure you’d think that even a small ¼ page map could be included.

It’s hard to bitch too much about a PWYW. Yanking the witches and/or the village to dump in to something else would be nice; I do find the OD&D nature of the witches nice. Then again, this could easily be a 1-pager, or 1-page front & back, STILL be PWYW, and lose very little of its flavor

Is it your bag baby? Fuck it, It’s PWYW and I’ve paid a lot more for a lot less.
The preview on DriveThru is 26 pages long: the entire adventure. Page 7 has the “hook” with the village. Page 8 has the first witch and the first few paragraphs are worth looking over to get a feel for the “airiness” of the witches. The next page, none, gives a good example of the extra detail that bumps up the word count: tables for attack & disease.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/209714/The-Tall-Witch–OSR-adventure?affiliate_id=1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #135

Posted on May 20, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


I have a headache and I twisted my neck last night. This issue isn’t helping.

Funeral Procession
By Mark A. Hart
Level 1

This is one of the stooopidiest things I’ve ever seen. You’r guarding a funeral procession. There’s a diversion. The hearse is diverted. The body in the hearse is replaced. The original is shrunk. A raven familiar flies away with it. The town is in an uproar because of it toso the watch can’t search for the famous escaped serial killer. How much fucking crap are you going to engage in to push forward your crappy plotline ‘story’? It gets better. The hearse drive is paid off and there’s a thug in the back of the hearse. In spite of all of the dire warnings the party gets i the hooks, about worries of the body being stolen, etc, I guess the party didn’t ride the hearse, burn the body in advance, drive the hearse, or anything else. I guess that don’t jive with the ‘story.’ At there are columns of read-aloud, long NPC motivations and backstories, and and it’s event based … For some reason the party cares and gets lead by the nose to a slaughterhouse stuffed full of baddies. The … passivity that a party would have to engage in in to not derail the adventure … I can‘t imagine.

That gives me a good idea. I should start a ‘DERAIL” events at the gaming cons. Take a linear adventure and the META rule is to derail it, while the DM tries to keep it on track. Or the DM rolls with it. “On track” makes it a fun contest but, of course, the DM always wins.

Chains of Blackmaw
By Nicolas Logue
Level 10

A mess of a prison break adventure. You’re hired t go to jail and watch the back of a new prisoner. Event-based, with long room/key and even longer NPC stat blocks and motivations. It needs a table summarizing the NPC’s, about 60% less text with the room keys, a table showing events and timelines. I can’t imagine the tenth level party who says “Yes! Let’s get rid of all our gear and go to jail for little to no reward!” Ok, fess, up, who has waded through all the text in this adventure to run it? What do you have to do to? How many pages of notes?

Dawn of a New Age
By Tito Leati
Level 20
Oh god … Age of Worms adventure path. At least it’s the last one: Kyuss shows up. You’ve got the Hand of Vecna. You’ve got two parts of the Rod of Seven Parts. You’re given a Sphere of Annihilation. You’re given three opportunities to undertake quests to weaken Kyuss before he shows up. He’s AC 59 and has 660 HP … a 3e Level 20 creature in all it’s unwieldy glory. Note that nothing you’ve done thus far will prevent Kyuss from arriving. That’s impossible. All you can do is kill him. As an exercise for the reader: Rewrite the entire Age of Worms adventure path to be a sandbox/regional thing using only 20% of the words. Your reward is a Cease & Desist.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

Forgotten Fane of the Coiled Goddess

Posted on May 17, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Joseph D. Salvador
North Wind Adventures
AS&SH
Levels 5-7

More than a month ago, your party found itself in Port Zangerios, where you heard of an Esquimaux thief selling a treasure map. Low on wealth but high in courage, you sought him out. The man turned out to be a fearful ex-slave who had “acquired” the map from his Ixian master. The map is incomplete but shews the Isle of the Serpent in far-off Lemuria, where rests a fabulous treasure called the Feathered Crown of Nanasa (or so thought the Ixian). Pooling your money to purchase the unfinished map, you bought passage on an Amazonian trade ship. After passing through tempests and torrential rains that shimmered with auroral light, you have come to the great city of Jhaman Ket. Now you must seek out the location of the Isle of the Serpent.

This is a sixty page hexcrawl/lost temple adventure on a jungle island with dinosaurs. It has a short eight page section on Lemuria, ten pages of new monsters appendices, etc, and the main hex crawl and titular temple in thirty four pages. It follows an “expansive minimally keyed format”, falling in to some of the usual traps with expansive text. The snake temple map is interesting enough, looking like a “main hallway with room s off of it” design but offering multiple entrances and the “Conan hole” in the ceiling. It comes off as bland.

I won’t cover the Lemuria fluff. Fluff is fluff and you either like it or you don’t. It does an ok job describing the general region of Lemuria, politics, towns, etc. It tends to the historical and overly specific “Round shields of iron and bronze are both in use …” I like my fluff different, driving action and all full of mystery.

For the main adventure, comparisons to Isle of Dread are inevitable. Be they inspired by the same Appendix N texts or simply hitting on the same themes, Dread was the first hex crawl many saw, it was on a jungle island, and had a ruined temple. Combine those elements, as this adventure does, and Dread comparisons are inevitable. The island hex crawls are, essentially, the same. Dinos, jungle, etc. There’s no friendly villagers and the temple at the center of the island, on a plateau, is more organized and less abandoned. Otherwise, you hex crawl through the jungle, see dinos, and try to not die.

The wandering monsters are rolled once an hour on a d6, with a 1 indicating a monster. That’s four encounters a day, on average. Certainly not EVERYTHING is hostile, there are some herbivore dinos, for example, but the rate is high, it seems to me. The island IS only 3 miles across, with six hexes to the mile, so a party with their ass in gear should mitigate most of that. Camping is going to be a bitch though.

There are heat rules. I have an ancient enmity with environmental rules. They always sound great but they tend to be cumbersome in practice. In this, every two hours you need to make a CON text or be exhausted and rest an hour, if you are encumbered or wearing metal armor. That’s one way to get people out of their armor: tedium. I don’t disagree with the theming, just the tedium required to get to the end result. Which brings up an interesting point. Given the focus on the wanderers every hour, and the heat checks every two hours, it seems unusual that movement rates are not covered. Each hex being 275 yards, it seems natural that a movement rate chart would be included on, say, the island hex map. Movement, and what you can see from your hex, are key elements in a good hex crawl that are missing here.

I think we can all agree Dread was minimally keyed and tersely written, except perhaps for sections dealing the customs of the villagers. I think the adventure here is also minimally keyed, but in contrast to Dread it’s verbosely written. Common elements are expanded upon in at text style that emphasizes plain factual data. Some North Wind adventures have a very tortured writing style that feels forced. I’m a fan of esoteric words and larger vocabulary in adventures, but I’ve come to expect to see this implemented in a cumbersome way in the usual North Wind adventure. This one has the opposite problem. The descriptions are plain to the point of being a killjoy … but the text goes on forever. The wandering monster table is three and half pages long, each monster getting its own stat block and short description. “Weighing up to 500 pounds, these seven- foot-long chamæleonic amphibians catch prey with their sticky tongues and can swallow a full-grown man whole.” Uh huh. You mean exactly what’s included in the stat block below that description? Occasionally there is a bright point like “giant ticks drop from trees”, but it’s generally this kind of non-useful text. It doesn’t really drive the adventure anywhere.

Similarly, there is an emphasis, in places, on historic uses for rooms. “This room USED to be used for …” or “In antediluvian times there were runes here …” These don’t help. They instead obfuscate other words which MIGHT help run the adventure. Now. Right Now. What’s of use to a DM running a party in the room RIGHT. NOW. A room that says “Study: Sometimes Bob used to read books here.” is not useful. That’s what a study is, a place where you hang out and perform study-like activities. We know that from the room name.

The encounters can be LONG, to little effect. Room three of the temple is a normal guardroom. Nothing really special. Snake-man pictograms on the ceiling. The text is a column long. An intro paragraph telling us the room is 20×30 (which we know from the map) and it’s got a 15’ ceiling (irrelevant to the adventure and doesn’t really set a mood at all) and then three GIANT stat blocks that look like they came straight out of the bad old days of 3e and/or Pathfinder. It ends with another paragraph telling us where the exits lead to which, again, we already know from the map. A column of text. This sort of expansive use of text for “normal” things is perhaps the adventures greatest fault. The temple has interesting layout for what is, essentially, a linear hallway, but the emphasis is on the mundane instead of the unusual. There’s a giant jeweled idol in one area, the kind every adventurer dreams of prying the jeweled scales off of. We’re told that desecrating the idol should causes curses and misfortunes as the DM sees fit. But, THAT’S what the fuck we’re paying the designer for! We’re not paying to be told that a room is 30×20 feet. We can see that from the fucking map. We’re paying for the unusual, the interesting, the imaginative. A constructed world of interlocking parts. We’re not paying to be told to roll for our treasure or make out own snake-god themed curses. A cult village doesn’t need to have gonzo elements to be good. But it doesn’t need five pages, as this one does, if all you’re going to tell us is the mundane. Placing an emphasis on how the party will interact is where the effort should have been spent. Guards. Patrols. Things to thwart sneaking around. To get to the temple, and so on.

The preview, on DriveThru, is only four pages long. It doesn’t really show you anything of the text you’re likely to encounter in the adventure. That’s not a very effective preview. It does include the table of contents, which is helpful, such that it is.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/156193/Forgotten-Fane-of-the-Coiled-Goddess?affiliate_id=1892600

I’m disappointed with this adventure. Thus far, I’m pretty sure that the best AS&SH adventure I’ve seen has been the Crypts & Things adventure Blood of the Dragon. If you know of a better one then stick it in the comments. I don’t feel like anything I’ve seen so far lives up to the potential of AS&SH and I’d like to make sure I’m giving it a fair shake.

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments

The Forge of Ilmarinen

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Jeremy Reaban
Self Published
1E
Levels 5-7

Ilmarinen the Eternal Hammerer was once widely worshipped by primitive people, whom he taught how to work metal. But once they had his knowledge, his worship was largely forgotten and his temple declined and was of course overrun by monsters.

This sixteen page adventure in an old “smith god” complex has sixteen encounters spread out over four pages, with another for the map and the rest of the pages being appendix material in the rear: new monsters and magic items. It is mostly a hack with only a couple of exploratory items. Nice treasure and all new monsters make this smarter than your average bear. The text has a weird thing going on where it is both to the point and padded out … a seeming contradiction.

Too many magic swords? Come on down to Big Ilmarinen’s temple and we’ll take care of it for you! We’ll destroy two of your magic swords and channel the power in to a third! The +1 sword glut can be a common game problem for some. Combined with the lust over higher ‘pluses’, the existence of a place like this temple is almost a hook unto itself. It motivates the PLAYER rather than character … and those are the best hooks of all. The actual hooks are pretty shitty: stumble across it, hired to investigate, or hear a rumor about it. Ok, the second one isn’t that bad since its related to that quality of player power envy. Just dropping a rumor, or crafting some failed expedition or some such is a decent way of introducing the place. You’ll get little help from the adventure through; the entire introduction is a column. I love a terse introduction and this one has it. Three sentences on background, three on hooks, and a short section on general dungeon conditions before the adventure keys start at the top of the second column. Perfect for an adventure like this. I might have suggested tightening it up even more, cutting the lame hooks and hook intro paragraph, and using the space freed to add a bit of color to the “tavern rumor” hook. But, still, terse and doesn’t get in the way.

The encounters are almost all straightforward hacks. Enter a room. See a monster. It attacks. There’s a place for this, but the over reliance on it detracts from adventures. All but one of the non-trivial encounters is a hack. Had the rooms been layered a bit more it would have been much better. What I mean is having additional elements in a room. If the room has monster then maybe it also has trap. Or there’s something unrlated to the monster to investigate. Or the monster attacks WHEN you do something … like fucking with the hole its living in. There are skeletons on a table in this adventure. When you come in to the room the skeleton heads detach, flame on, and then attack. That sends the wrong message. If, instead, FUCKING with the skeletons caused their heads to fly off then you’re closer to room that works better. Better yet, if you put an obvious ruby in the skeletons mouth THEN you’ve got a great situation. The players want the ruby. EVERYONE knows what’s going to happen when they fuck with that ruby. They get to make the choice. A very tempting choice to push the shiny shiny red cherry button … Madcap plans are created. D&D happens.

The writing is also a bit weird. It’s pretty fact based, which is what I think I mean when I cite it as “straightforward.” But it’s also got a pretty loose writing style that I think detracts from the adventure. Room four notes that: (bolding mine)

“Along the eastern wall are a stack of twelve kegs, three rows of four each. The curious thing is that the kegs are made out of an unusual metal, not wood. Half of the kegs are empty. The others may be opened, and if so, out comes a very skunky beer, long past its prime.

Along the western wall are two crates, both made of wood. The southern crate is opened and inside is empty, save for some straw like material. The northern crate is unopened. If opened, it will reveal 8 smaller sealed cases, each containing 50 rolls of summer sausage (1 lb. each). Amazingly, it’s still edible.”

What this entry does is describe a typical storeroom. We all know what a typical storeroom looks like. There is no significance to the crates being on the western wall, or being made of wood. There is no significance to the southern crate being open. Looking at those first three sentences, if they were replaced with a different description, or did not exist at all, the adventure would be no different. I can make a halfway decent argument for the same being true of the first two sentences of the first paragraph. If the text were removed, and it has no impact on the adventure, then the text has no impact on the adventure and should not be there in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, there is ABSOLUTELY room for painting a vivid picture in the DM’s mind (in a terse way.) That’s a legit reason for text. But bare fact-based statements seldom accomplish that. I would argue that most of the room descriptions in the adventure fall in to that category.

I do want to note the treasure and monsters in this adventure. Both are excellent. Jeremy has created an all new slew of monsters, relying on nothing from the “normal” books. Long time readers will know I love this. I love it when a party encounters something that they have to struggle with. New monsters represent the unknown, mystery. The party doesn’t know what special attacks or defences they have. There is an element of fear. There’s a place for returning favorites, but almost nothing generates anxiety like meeting some beasty with unknown abilities. The treasure is also a cut above. Room one has a bag with a mitten, stained with blood, with a gold ring inside. A monocle with a crack in it. Green troll jerky wrapped in a dirty piece of cloth. These things tell a story; they make your mind tell a story. They make you want to know what happened. There’s an eye, ripped form a gnome, that you can use for true seeing. The amount of extra work to make something more interesting than “state: 100gp” or “sword+1” is pretty small and I wish more designers would add value that way.

There are a few other misses. Two statues grab people and go jump in to lava. Great encounter! But the text refers you to the magic pool room instead of the lava pit room. Not huge, but indicative of the need for a second read through.

It’s PWYW on DriveThru. The preview on DriveThru is a good one. You can see the treasure for room one at the top of page three. The storeroom text is on the same page. In fact, the entire adventure is available in the preview. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/209706/HS4-The-Forge-of-Ilmarinen?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #134

Posted on May 13, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


Home Under the Range
By Michael Kortes
Level 3

A linear “underdark” escort adventure with a farcical pretext. The party is charged with herding giant beetles through the underdark from one location to another. Five encounters later they reach their destination, currently the site of a pitched battle. Along the way you meet stone giants bowling, and three ambushes, all the while trying to keep the loses of the beetles low. I’s linear, and essentially a series of set pieces with the generally hated “escort mission” ltag attached to it. And yet … I have a fondness for the absurd, or, maybe, the ALMOST absurd. This is running right up close to the line. Generally I like my DM pretexts normal and my players to do the wacky shit, like come up with plans that say “I have the perfect plan! First we need forty giant beetles …” Too much from the DM and the games in danger of Paranoia ZAP territory. But this one? I don’t know. Something may have triggered my Personal Preference O’Meter, or I’m in a weird mood today.

It does get in and out in only about twelve pages, with half page art/maps on most that’s not a bad page count by Dungeon standards. It also has a hook I like. 3e-era players are looking for masterwork weapons at low levels. Sending the players to the dwarf hold and herding the beetles is a nicely little integrated response to the players wants/needs. THIS is the way plot os developed in D&D. Not by the DM but in response to what the players want. “We need/want this thing.” Well Mr and/or Ms Player, you can go get it here … Player driven action. (Even if it does fall in to the “then why don’t the dwarves herd them” sin of “can’t be bothered.”

And Madness Followed
By Kevin Carter
Level 9

And then there’s the wrong way to do things. Like this. It’s a King in Yellow/Yellow Sign themed adventures, with a group of travelling bards performing the play and turning villages in to aberration-monster zones. You visit a village and get attacked by monsters. You visit a town where the town center has gone to hell. You visit a city where the play is being performed in a playhouse. End. It relies on the party being do gooders. It has a one-page description of a NPC that somehow you are supposed to absorb and run, full of the usual nonsense that doesn’t need to be there because it has no impact on the adventure.

There are a couple of nice spots. The middle combat, the town, has the town barricading off the town center, keeping the madnes-creatures trapped there. The whole “town in chaos”, barricades, zombie apoc thing is an appealing concept, although they don’t really do much with it here beyond hearing things beyond the barricade. Too much tell and not enough show.

The first encounter, the village, has a manor home you can search. This is an abstracted manor home search. Roll your search check and the DM will give you a piece of information. I’m interested in methods other than “room/key” format for other types of actions. Room/Key works great for exploration. The whole Mind-Map thing works great for social environments, as does presenting things in tabular form. The question of “are there other formats for other adventure types” is one I find interesting. Is there a better way to present investigations? The method in this adventure, a search check with the DM then feeding information, seems too abstracted. It reduces an “Ah Ha!” moment to a simple die roll. Room/Key format may be cumbersome for this sort of thing, but just listing the “important” rooms and what someone can find in it would seem to be both better than the die roll and the room/key. It preserves the player agency, eliminates the “all D&D elements are die rolls” nonsense, and can be relatively dense/terse in presentation.

FInally, the hooks fall in to two types, both of which I find interesting. In one the players are almost inquisitors for the church of St Cuthbert. That takes care of the “do gooder” motivation. The other two are variations on the “Dying fan gets to watch Star Wars early” theme. Please go find the players, my favorite, I want to see one last time before I die, blah blah blah. It’s stupid, but I would TOTALLY ham this up, with pajamas, posters, drinking cups, etc.

Into the Worm Crawl Fissure
By James Jacobs
Level 19

Age of Worms adventure path, the second to last one. The party wander around three adventure locations, then “explore” a Kyuss shrine and fight the Kyuss herald: the dragolich. There is something going on in this adventure, but man is it a mess. There’s supposed to be a ghost, split in to three parts I think, that you can reunite to get help against the dracolich. I’m pretty sure there’s a vision the party has when they arrive at the site, which leads them to the first part, which leads to the other two. Those are the three adventure locales you can explore. It’s presented on a kind of small regional map with nine locations on them. But only a couple are actually detailed. For example, there’s the lair of a dragon from the last adventure, almost certainly dead now (because of the players.) That’s all you get. Why include it? If you’re not going to to do anything with it then what does it add to the adventure? This being Pathfinder, errr, 3.5, the state blocks frequently stretch to a full page, Combine that with all the background nonsense and the “used to” and “like to relax here” sorts of stuff that creates the text overload and you’ve got a mess. Better yet, the locations on the map don’t actually relate to locations presented in the adventure. So the map is labeled 1 through 9. The overview location page is labeled 1 through 9. The ACTUAL adventure locales are Part 1, Part 2, and so on, and you only know which witch is which by reading DEEP in to the text. This would have been so much better if 90% of the text were trimmed. Would it be good? I don’t know. Kyuss worms. Pools of slime, Hydras & chimeras, crazy lich, friendly ghost … it’s got the basic elements. A special callout to the dracolich treasures. A little overly described in places, but a scandalous dress, a nice violin, a large drinking horn emblazoned with runes and carvings of dead dragons.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

The Fall of Whitecliff

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Bryce Lynch


By Ben Gibson
Coldlight Press
Pathfinder/5e/OGL
Level 1

Awakening in the dark with splitting headache, you hear the curses of other tight-packed prisoners. No screaming. Must not be in the deep dungeons, not yet. Damned castellan-he’s as paranoid as he is venial. Apparently his keep is hard to crack even when he’s gone. But you’re inside now. He’ll regret this, if you can slip out of this cage…

Heads Up: This adventure went through my Critique Partner service. I ended up with five pages of notes and 20-ish messages back and forth.

This is a 22 page series of linked one-page adventure, about nine in all. It describes a “starting play” campaign arc, taking the players from level one to four, by presenting the adventure as a regional area/sandbox area along with how the areas relate to the inciting event and the goals of the villain. Otherwise the party is driving the action. It’s written for Pathfinder and does a good job managing the more … bloated aspects of that system. Colorful, terse, dense .. this adventure shows how a series of one-pagers can be linked together in a regional area, much in the way Stonehell did for dungeon play. It’s good.

Stonehell took the one page dungeon and showed that how, by linking them together and supplementing it with a few pages of text, you could create an interesting megadungeon experience with a DM reference, the one-page dungeon proper, that was actually useful at the table. This adventure is doing something similar, but for a regional/sandbox sort of campaign arc. What if you sketched out a small region on a single notebook page. It’s got this cruel baron, a couple of nearby towns, a thing the evil baron wants in some caves, someone that hates the baron, and so on. Now, you take one page, for each of those concepts, and jot down some notes about it. That thing the evil baron wants? Maybe map the caves it’s in and key it. Two or three sentences about the thing he wants and why. Another page has the hideout of some rebel scum on it, opposing the baron, and it’s under siege by the baron’s troops. Now you’ve got a little region detailed. Just sketches, rough ideas, and so on.

That’s what this adventure does … except it expands the rough ideas and sketches in to a more coherent whole. There are two types of pages in the adventure. The first are the one-pagers. These feature a map, either a dungeon or small region, that take up about half the page. That map is supplemented by about a paragraph of introduction/overview and then the keys proper. Monster stats appear on the map ,with arrows pointing to where they are. Special treasure, situations, etc also appear on map, as well as few other miscellaneous notes. The second type of page is the “text page.” These generally occur after the one-pager and offer guidance on “what’s next.” Not that you’ve done/visited/looted/escape from blah blah blah, here’s what the party may be wanting to do next, and how that relates to the rest of the support material. Where Stonehell used the supplemental pages to help explain the level, the supplemental pages here help explain the implications of what just happen, in relation to the other things going on, and offers advice to the DM in how to react to various party actions/needs/wants etc. For example, after the first one-pager, it notes that the party may flee to the sea, in which case Smugglers Isles or Village Bellrock would be places to end up. Or you could head to the nearby village of Turten Cot .. and how the people along the way are likely to interact and so on. Oh, so they go to the village? From the text: “Upon reaching Turten’s Cot, the party finds the village in turmoil, looking for heroes or mercenaries to aid them in their troubles. See page 8.” It helps both the DM and the players put the larger puzzle together to get a smooth and coherent game.

The adventure does a good job putting data at the DM’s hand. The actual regional map contains page references so you know where to turn to. The maps generally have personalities embedded in them. The opening map is, as the intro text implies, a scenario having the level 1’s imprisoned in the keep and they need to escape. A small table, on the map page, lists the keep personalities. Guard: just working the shift, bored, tired, irate, homesick, cheerful, nervous.” Or a servant: “fearful, despairing, resentful” or a (potentially) helpful smuggler: “cocky, sarcastic, mercenary” Everything you need on one page to run a delightful and color adventure. Doors are “stout”, locks are “brittle”, rooms smell “fishy”, guards “unmotivated”. It does a great ob of just using a word or two to jazz up the scene and bring it to life.

The maps and encounters are varied. The initial map is an escape from the barons keep. Then there is a small regional map showing a hideout of a bandit/rebel … and the enemy troops surrounding him. There’s a small smuggler city and dungeon pit for a different faction working against the baron. A hidden place, the castle dungeons, a dwarf tribe that mostly about negotiations and roleplaying … until the baron’s troops maybe invade at the end if HIS envoy detects things are not going his way. An old barrow with an ancient secret that impacts the baron, and a two-level cave map for the party to have a climactic battle with the baron. There’s no railroad here, just options. Roleplay, fight, explore, sneak … it’s great! And it’s all supplemented by a colorful wandering monster and treasure table. Amy the desperate pregnant runaway from the castle. Awakened raven with info, willing to trade for shiny stuff. Dwarven poachers with a slain deer. A snake oil salesman .. selling actual snake oil. A nice mix of specifics done in a terse format. Perfect.

There’s a certain density to one-page adventures, and that’s present here. Stone hell had a pretty minimal key/dungeon it’s one pager, but it expanded that by providing two (or three?) pages of additional material before the map, providing some context and additional information on the features of the map. Traditional one-pagers, and I would include this adventure in that category, try to make the one-pager self-contained. There are supplemental pages here, but they are more related to linking the one-pagers together rather than providing additional content for the one-pager proper. It’s this density and … rigor in vision? that makes this both a boon and a bane. On the one hand you’ve got EVERYTHING on one page that you can run from. The benefits of that immense. On the other, but limiting yourself to that format you are creating a dense set of text that can sometimes get in the way. I think this adventure has taken it about as far as you can, as close to the line as possible, in loading up the page while still being useful and readable. The Pathfinder stat blocks, notorious for being long, have been condensed well and the more complex/named NPC’s get pulled out to a separate page where their full stat block glory can be expressed. (although Ben still manages five to a page, an accomplishment for Pathfinder.)

I like this adventure, both in its content and in the form its forging ahead in. This little regional sandbox sort of thing, with a natural arc, feels a little like it sits somewhere between a good hex crawl and a more traditional regional/sandbox adventure. Tersely written, evocative, adventure sites with a relationship to each other and some advice/notes for the DM to link it all together. The one-page nature means you can pick it up and run it almost immediately after buying it.

It’s Pay What You Want on DriveThru … and is worth more than the $2.25 of it’s current average contribution. And it’s not showing up in search. And the preview isn’t working. The first map, Escape from Whitecliff on page four, is a good example of the one-pager. Personalities in the lower right corner. Stats on the map. A nice intro paragraph describing the set up that is short and full of flavor to use at the table. The key has bolded “interesting things”, like people and monsters. Take a look at entry A & C “stout door with a brittle lock” and “sister, weeping, with servants nursing bruises and welts.” There’s a lot implied in that text. It’s good.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/210944/The-Fall-of-Whitecliff?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 10 Comments