Dungeon Magazine 95

Posted on August 13, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d95
The Jackal’s Redemption
By Chad MacPhee & Greg Oppedisano
3e
Level 9

Fourteen mostly linear encounters in a wizards tower and caves in Gehenna. A wizards tower phases in & out of existance, which started right about the time four armed demons started aabducting townfolk. Really just an excuse to throw xill & a couple of devil-like folk at the party. LOTS of read-aloud … the second room has four paragrapghs of read-aloud, as do a few others. The adventure like to describe former uses and mundane thigns that are irrelevent to the adventure. A journal appears to relate the backstory, because someone, someone, somewhere once thought that was a good idea. It’s not. It’s an easy idea. Bits & pieces sometimes get good: an imp whispering to captive how much pain they’ll be in when the xill egg hatches, villagers who can’t believe the wizards disappearance had anything to do with the demon attacks. But it’s mostly just boring old combat. Here’s one of my favorite, useless, lines: “Total immesion in molten rock is potentially deadly, even for 9th level characters.” And then two more paragrapghs on magma. Or, how about “Ankle-deep Magma: 2d6/second+1d6 for 1d3 seconds after leaving.” Sorry, sorry, I should know better.

The WItch of Serpent’s Bridge
By Russell Brown
3e
Level 3

A workmanlike adventure, tracking down a mystery that leads to a lair that leads to a humanoid camp that culminates with an attack on the village. It’s not particularly imaginative but it’s not particularly loathsome either, being relatively terse by Dungeon standards.The adventure has a very generic feel to it, with not much village detail or even interesting things in the lair or camp. When it gets specific you get glimpses of interesting content. The village priest says he had a vision that if they built a temple then Kord would rid the woods of evil … which is kind of true since the party will rid the woods of the threat. There’s also a young lady, a dead trapper’s daughter, who is obsessed with finding/killing boars, since once killed her father. Both of these are presented with about the same level of detail as I just related … really just some facts. And both have this … potential to them that you can build upon if you glare hard and twist them a bit. The fervent young priest. The girl who emulates boars, dressing up like them, rooting around like them. They need just a little more to push them over the top and the rest of the encounters need this extra bit also … good things are few & far between in this. It does end with a mass attack on the village, which is a nice touch. Yet Another Journal shows up in this adventure, in order to explain the monster backstory. *sigh*

Lust
By Bradley Schell
3e
Level 4

*sigh* Side-trek. A page of background for three charmed knights fighting with each other, and the party … all charmed by a Satyr.

Porphyry House of Horrors
By James jacobs
3e
Level 10

There’s a boob in some artwork in this, which is why I guess it warranted the sealed nature of the adventure? Oh, no, it must be that the main location in this adventure is a brothel with many perversion rooms described, and “rape” being included in about half the NPC backstories. The main claim to fame in the brothel is that the yuan-ti running the place polymorph animals and monsters into human form and use them as their prostitutes. I don’t tend to be judgy of sex stuff, but I do tend to be judgy of crappy stuff, and just tossing in boobies, dildo’s, orgy rooms, and an orgy regisration form that asks for the applicant’s sexual history does seem a bit much. A wizard has sex with his imp all the time, a regenerating ogre is bound in a bar for all to torture … it’s all a bit simple and forced and prurient for the sake of being prurient, rather than an integral part of the adventure. Page long NPC/encounter descriptions don’t help much, nor does the fact that the brothel has a room dedicated to “Wand Storage” or the fact that when you free the raped polymorphed sex slave harpies … they attack you. There’s not really enough background information for the city to run it free form (although there IS a lot of text, a lot of it is not gameable.) and yet free form is how the place is supposed to be run, with sneaking around, almost like a caper or heist.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 1 Comment

Streets of Zobeck

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

zob
I own this because either I saw online it was a good adventure or I saw online that someone thought it was a good town supplement. Lies! Fucking Lies! The number of decent things in this book can be counted on one hand. Worth Stealing: Dragged Woman, “Adventure Ideas when you own a brothel” and the couple of things I mention below. Otherwise it’s generic, overly described mundanity. I’m pretty sure every single adventure has the hook “The PC”s have gained a reputation as …” From now on I BORROW this kind of shit from people when I want to review it.

Everyone Lies L1-3 – Ben McFarland
Garbage. Oh, it wants to be good, but some fuckwit thought a railroad was a good idea. The pretext is good: Someone steals the Maltese Falcon …errr, I mean a book. About five different factions are involved. Thieves, secret police, ghoul info brokers, corrupt guards … and one fuckwit thief and his in over her head girfriend. This is a DELICIOUS set up. That is then ruined by the ABSOLUTE RAILROAD that follows. I mean, we’re talking Eliminster Heel boy” railroad. You go from place to place encountering toughs who threaten you, tell you information to get you to the next location, and fight you if you don’t take their shit. And after they fight you they give you, anyway, the information they were going to give you. And you get healed. By them. By a third party, doesn’t matter. Heal. Look, I try to stay neutral in things. I know different people like different things. But FUCK PATHFINDER if this this is the way they write their shit? Also, “Masters of Small Matters” is a great name for a messenger company. Props for that little bit of specificity, of which there is too little in this adventure.

Rust L4-5 – Richard Pett
Well … it’s not a railroad. It’s also pretty straightforward. When it gets specific it’s good but that’s
far too infrequent. Mister Corpulent and Master Doldrum, two loathsome petty merchants, both independently contact the party, looking for them to untangle some murders … which are tied to a treasure they both want. The investigation is short & mostly abstract: either watch & follow a killer to its lair or look at a scene, find a sign, and go to a temple to figure out who once used it. I’m summarizing, but not by much … there may be about two more sentences about the temple/crime scene investigation. Most of the text concentrates on a slaughterhouse and a few things in it. The Corpulent/Doldrum setup thing is good, but that’s about it. The adventure lacks specifics. It deals with horrific crime scenes in the abstract. Doldrum refers to Corpulence misdeeds in the abstract, instead of the specific. It’s these lack of specifics, in the meeting, I the crime scenes, in the investigation, and in the workhouse, that leaves the adventure lacking. Understand, I’m not looking for mountains of read aloud. I’m not looking for railroad, or mountains of DM text. But SPECIFICITY is the soul of storytelling. Without it there is nothing to hang your hat on and you might as well have written “Clockwork machines in a slaughterhouse.” and claimed it was an adventure. And remember: Describing the mundane does nothing. There’s also the customary betrayal at the end of the adventure by whichever Merchant the party threw in with, with the other one showing up also. This is lame. Betrayals, a time honored trope, are completely misused in D&D and lead to the party never trusting anyone, ever.

The Fish and The Rose, L5 – Christina Stiles
This is nothing but a linear dungeon. The monsters do not break morale. They have no treasure. The only redeeming quality is a prisoner you pick up who you, presumably, have to drag with you the entire way. I seriously can’t think of a reason for this adventure to exist.

The First Lab, L7 – Mike Franke
Nothing but a little linear lair with almost nothing interesting going on. Find stolen diary, beat thieves to hidden lair. You catch up by meeting the dragged woman: lighting the bloody end of a rope and giving up a precious memory. That’s nice .. but then again she’s one the best things about the entire booklet, so, no duh. Otherwise it’s all “enter room. Fight. Enter Next room. Fight.” I try to avoid falling into Old Man-itis, but, Fuck, if this is mainstream adventure design then I Weep For The Future. Oh, and there’s a Rolle To Continue in the beginning. Joy.

Rebuilding a Good Man, L98, Matthew Stinson
Linear AND a mess?! This is it! Fight some thieves, steal a clockwork body, find the parts to transfer a soul into it. The son of a poor ferryman is CR10 because, of course, he has to be in order to make this POS adventure have a bad guy attack at the end.

Ripper, L10 – Mike Franke
A mob hanging a foreigner and the party stumbling in on it! What a great start! Of course, you can’t actually do anything. I mean, you can TRY, and roll some dice, but no matter how good you roll or what you do the guy still hangs. This is what passes for Player Agency, I guess. The guard shows up. A R4 and six F3’s. They threaten and bully your level 10 party in to looking into some killings, or things will go badly for you with the lynchings. How is this even a thing? You really couldn’t find ANY better approach for the corrupt captain than bullying a party two to three times his level? Generic investigation follows, and if you don’t make your DC 20 Gather Information check then it’s going to be an AWFULLY short adventure for you. Then a body drops out of the sky in front of you so you can have your required forced combat, followed by you arriving at the location that connects all the murders JUST in time to see it under attack. It’s got one thing going for it: it’s not those last three shitty ass adventures.

Flesh Fails L9-11, Christina Stiles
Easily one of the better adventures in this booklet, and deserving of analysis than the ranting the other earned. A noble disappears and you’re hired to find him. Along the way you get to impersonate him at a party, explore a BDSM club, visit the hallowed halls of of the magic college, and finally hit up a necromancer’s private workshop. The BDSM club is about as tasteful as you can want and still have a BDSM club, so no worries for the prudes in the audience. The party where the group impersonates the noble is more abstract than it should be. It’s really just a short paragraph and a timeline of (mundane) events. This really needed just a bit more to kick it up and provide an delightful evening of role-playing. There’s a section earlier in the book, in the generic town overview, which offers a page of ideas/seeds if the party run their own brothel. The party/impersonation section needs something like that. Just a half dozen or so bullet points for things to happen. Shit for the impersonator to roleplay through or for the rest of the party to deal with. Yeah, I can make it up. I can also not pay for this book and make up my own entire adventure. Its this kind of DM support that adventures need to provide, not explicit detail but nudges to the DMs imagination. The bookstore above the BDSM party is nice, and complete with store clerks who eavesdrop because they are bored; real life always provides the best motivations in an RPG. There’s another skill check to continue the adventure, DC 10 in this case, to find the entrance to the party. I’m sure there’s no problem for Level 10 party, which begs the question, why make it a skill check? The roll to continue the adventure checks are super lame and need to handled through a different mechanism. Something like just giving them the location and the skill check provides a boon or bane, rather than making the rest of the adventure contingent on making the check .. no matter how trivial. The magic college is abstracted and the DM told to make up traps and senties … again, that’s why I’m paying Paizo. SOmehow you’re supposed to figure out that the office at the college is not really being used and there’s another one, at the docks. The “not being used” is tenuous and “the docks” is not really discoverable that I can tell. Maybe I missed it, but I did read several times. The dockside necromancy workshop is quite nice, complete with pens of zombies and some crates full of preserved zombie parts, a head on a pedestal that talks to you and a nice new magic items “a bag of arms.” A tad more specificity with some of the idea seeds and this one could have been good.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/91298/Streets-of-Zobeck-PFRPG?1892600

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Eyes of the Stone Thief

Posted on August 8, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

eyesth
By Gareth Hanrahan
Pelgrane Press
13th Age
Levels 4-8

Can you kill the dungeon before it kills you? In 13th Age, living dungeons slither up through the underworld and invade the surface lands. The Stone Thief is the most ancient and cunning of its kind; a vast monster that preys on the cities and structures you love, swallows them, and remakes them into more deathtrap-filled levels inside itself. Now, it’s hunting YOU.

It’s GenCon next week (which will have passed by the time you read this), so I borrowed this from a friend to kill time until I burn through my wallet in the dealer hall. Stone Thief does something that I don’t believe any module has tried to do: build a campaign around a megadungeon. Sure, most megadungeons recommend you do that but Stone Thief provides the tools to help you do that. This is more than the city in ASE1, or the wilderness/bandits in Rappan. This is all of the surrounding goals and motivations. Mini-quests. Things that could happen. Major hook and plot line suggestions. Less detail, like the wilderness sections of Rappan, but more Larger Context. It’s like Hanrahan read all the advice possible about building a megadungeon and implemented 90% of it correctly … within the confines of the 13th Age system.

For those not in the know, 13th Age is what modern D&D has tried to be … and failed at. 3.5, Pathfinder, 4, and now 5 (or, at least RPGA 5e.) It’s the ultimate evolution of the set-piece combat and linear plot and balanced parties and so forth. And it’s not bad. If you want that kind of thing then 13th Age does it much better than any other modern version of D&D. Wha 13th Age does better than those other version is provide some grounding. Rather than pretend Anything Is Possible it instead provides an opportunity for the players to ground their characters with motivations and relationships to some “Icons”, things like the rules of known world, the lich king, the elf queen, or the orc lord. This grounding helps everything get in to things much faster, IMO. Needless to say, you’re gonna have to re-stat this thing for a non-13th Age game. That shouldn’t be hard for anyone who’s not a stickler.

This dungeon, like all in 13th Age, is alive and travels underground until it pops up and eats a town. This is the pretext used to both the plot and to justify the various heavily themed areas of the levels found in the dungeon. And I use the word “plot” loosely here. The back third of the adventure describes how to integrate the dungeon in to your game. It’s got a lot of suggestions, a lot of variations, and some major themes. It definitely has an idea of how things should go, but I would argue that the “plot” here is lighter, much lighter, than about 90% of the adventures I review. It comes across os tools and ideas.

I’m going to say some things that I generally refer to negatively, as I describe the actual dungeon: linear and set-pieces. Not only linear, but the DM is encouraged to throw in some little minor encounters along the way (which are outlined at the beginning of each level, in about ¾ of a page. Nice touch to spice things up.) and also to rearrange the rooms and levels as the players explore the dungeon and re-enter on other quests/adventures. Remember, the dungeon is alive and a thinking being so it can do this … or at least that’s the pretext. The encounters tend to be set-pieces. Good set pieces, generally. I’ll remind you that I’m a hypocrite and also liked many of the newer DCC adventures that are, essentially, linear and full of set pieces. The encounters here are interesting and not throw-aways. They remind me a lot of the encounters from Tower of Gygax or the DCC funnels at cons … with a far lower mortality rate. 🙂 It’s going to be hard for someone to argue that the room encounters here vary significantly from the types found in Maze of the Blue Medusa. Certainly less talking than Medusa, and certainly fewer “choices” than Medusa, but the varied rooms do have a “free form” nature to them, even if they really are just mostly combat. Combat in pipe rooms with goblins dragging bodies in to them. A giant octopus with swords in its tentacles. The thing is packed with stuff. Let’s say something like seventy or eighty different encounters in the dungeon, almost all of which can be ripped off.

13th Age does a good job with mysteries. Both the core book and this adventure have a kind of open ended writing style that alludes to things but doesn’t come right out and explain in, in all cases. This makes the DM think. Or, rather, it encourages them to think. It gets their mind going. You start to think of explanations and possibilities as your mind races to fill in the details. Which is exactly what should be happening when you prep something for running it. It does some other similar things. There’s a very clear entrance to the Mythic Underworld present, you KNOW you are going SOME. PLACE. ELSE. It also has some great advice for changing the dungeon when the party returns to the same areas, and other advice for dealing with certain situations, and a great index/glossary that helps summarize things in the dungeon. You know how much I like reference data!

This isn’t a perfect product by any definition. The faction play elements or the dungeon are talked up however they are not really present in any meaningful way. Sure, there’s different groups in the dungeon, and you can talk to a couple of them, but the interconnected nature is not really present. So it’s faction play at its most abstract in that one or two groups, out of a dozen or more, are not immediately hostile. It also uses the old “it kills something/someone you love” as a hook. The DM is encouraged to make the players want to take revenge on the dungeon. From an old school standpoint this is an overused crapfest of a trope that is almost ALWAYS used incorrectly … and thus puts me on edge every time I see it. In 13th Age … well, it has an element of story gaming to it as you create your character, so revenge and character arcs, set up in advance, are not exactly out of the question.

These are nits. The worst problem is, I think, the lack of focus in the room descriptions with the Hard To Run consequences that results in. The descriptions, proper, are not bad. The actual text used to describe things is evocative and interesting. It makes you want to push the big red button. It’s also surrounded by a more conversations style of prose that makes it harder than it should be to pick out the important bits. Asides, with no meaning. The first line of room 3 is “The [dungeon] greets intruders with this seemingly unremarkable chamber. Six huge black pillars support the ceiling, where the faded and peeling remains of a once beautiful mural can be seen.” That second sentence is good, and could almost be decent read-aloud. The first sentence though, is useless conversational garbage. It’s completely not needed and clogs up attempts to pull out the data that IS important. This happens time and time again in the adventure. You end up needing a highlighter to draw attention to what you need to run the room. The elements are present. The initial description helps focus attention to the ceiling and the pillars, and both get a little break out to describe them more if the players have their characters investigate … exactly the way Describe & Inquire adventuring is supposed to go. Except … it’s a mishmash. The rest of the first paragraph, after the part quoted above, described the mural. Then the second paragraph describes the giant gargoyle statue in the room that holds a silver key. And then, later on, in the fourth paragraph, comes a description of the pillars. The basic room concept is a good one, but you end up fighting the text to pull out what you need rather than the text moving logically from one part to the next. The gargoyle is decent. The pillar stuff is excellent (they are actually hollow specimen cases with black swirling vapor inside … Wraiths!)

If you’re looking for a classic exploration dungeon then this isn’t for you. If you‘re ok with set pieces then it is. If you want to see something deal with a megadungeon in the larger campaign context then this is for you. It’s loads more interesting than Worlds Largest Dungeon, or Temple of Elemental Evil. I’m going to find a copy for myself, it’s interesting enough to warrant that. For 13th Age fans this should be a no brainer. For OSR fans you’ll have to deal with your own feelings about linear set pieces.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/148623/13th-Age-Eyes-of-the-Stone-Thief?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #94

Posted on August 6, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d94
Bloodlines
By Luke Johnson
3e
Level 7

A simple dungeon-crawl with betrayal at the end. My life is a living fucking hell. MASSIVE read alouds. Almost seven full pages before room one. Irrelevant maps. A wall of force that can be raised or lowered at will so the baddie can monologue. The dude who hires you “watches your progress with magic” and then betrays you. Perhaps the definition of Wall of Text. Even though this has line breaks it has more Wall of Text than the people who don’t know what a line break is. Line after line of irrelevant detail clogging the thing up. Formatting to make a reader weep (which, in the designers defense, may be a Dungeon Magazine issue.) One room tells us there is a keyhole on both sides of the door. This is really nothing more than an expanded lair dungeon with nothing interesting going on in it. Just mundanity: Traps & combats, both boring.

Still reading? How about we have a contest and everyone tries to rewrite the following. I’ll give the winner some prize.
“The room is empty, but careful searching might benefit the PC’s. The far left corner of the room at one point has a wooden shelf; a successful Search check (DC 20) allows a character to find four holes bored into the stone in this location. The holes held pegs that supported the shelf and are arranged in a horizontal line, about a foot apart from each other and 5 feet off the ground. They are each a little wider than a thumb and extend into the wall almost a foot and a half. There is a secret compartment being what used to be the shelf. A successful Search check (DC 22) allows a character to discover the release mechanism: simultaneously pressing two small catches located in the two opposite holes. Two stone blocks slide apart, revealing a shallow alcove (1 foor deep, 1 foot high, and 2 feet long) Inside is the TREASURE.”

Note: the treasure is not the Hand of Vecna, but just three potions.

The Last Hunt
By James Wilbur
3e
Level 4

Escort an old knight in a forest for the last hunting trip of his life. Nine pages for five encounters: the soul of brevity. It’s just five scene based encounters. The only interesting one, in any way, is an encounter with a neighboring lord who accuses the knight of poaching. There’s just nothing here. A few set piece combats? Is that what THE FANTASTIC has come to?

The Excavation
By Michael T. Kuciak
3e
Level 3

A side-trek fighting a dretch and some ghouls in ruins.

Worms in the Exchequery
By Frank Brunner
3e
Level 15

The party is sent into the treasury to find some thieves inside. This is a stupid fucking adventure that is absolutely wonderful in the world it builds. Planescape, Vornheim, ASE1/Towers … “The Royal Halberdiers of the Reticulated Castellan” and “Attend, sors, the excises therein are for the public dikes and flood season draws nigh!” WONDERFUL! “You can’t just leave my husband trapped in there like common riffraff. What is a portal to the Hells has opened? The Hells are for commoners, not nobles!” Wonderful NPC rumors, all in the same vein as the above. There’s some bullshit around keeping divination magic from working. Otherwise, this is just a short six room adventure with a couple of combat, including the finale with some shadowdancer thieves. The beginning is definitely the best part, with the adventure proper being a major come down from there.

Spiral of Manzessine
By David Noonan
3e
Level 11

A joyless adventure putting the characters in the middle of an escape attempt at a prison for mind flayers. Forced combat after forced combat on a map that is almost completely linear. TO get the players to divert to the prison there’s a column of text explaining a cave-in and how each different way around (spells, mostly) will fail. Airtight doors. SIgils and magic tattoos every to ensure the mind flayers don’t escape. Bodak guards who avert their gaze for the prison staff. A door that summons a gelugon every time someone crosses the threshold. A double cross from a prisoner. (No double crosses! Fuck it’s tiresome! SOMEONE has to not double cross the party or the party will never trust ANYONE, and the roleplay with evil monsters allied is much more fun than Just Another Stinking Combat.) Set piece combats. Forced situations. It’s like adventure design has devolved into some weird exercise in which the DM uses the rules to nerf the party and build a monster via kits that can defeat them. The emperor has no clothes!

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 12 Comments

The Gnomes of Levnec

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

levnec
By Zzarchov Kowolski
Neoclassical Geek Revival

…There are older things in these forests too; the knights did not just battle the pagan kings of man but also the forest dwellers; the wodewose. Spend too long in any tavern or listen to a village alewife and you’ll hear stories of knights and wodewose duking it out in little patches of now cleared pastures. One of these little villages is the village of Levnec, a sad little town ruled by a self appointed lord banished from his seaside villa far to the south. His name is Lord Kristoph and he has been looking to hire some transient sell swords to solve his problem. Some of the townsfolk are (repeatedly) going missing and others are refusing to work, even after examples were beaten and hobbled by his men. Seeing as the townsfolk are blaming the local Gnomes, he would simply like these drifters to saunter in the wood, murder some Gnomes and bring them back to show the townsfolk there is nothing to fear (except him) and to get back to work.

I wonder how many of my reviews are tainted by first impressions? There’s a wilderness map in this. Most of the page is covered with trees. There are are a few places annotated: Coven Temple, Strange Meteor, Here Be Gnomes, Dragon’s Den. I have no idea why, but this map sold me without looking at another page of the adventure.

That little publisher’s blurb is from the intro and man does it ever set the scene. Except it doesn’t. This thing is even more wonderful than that bad-ass intro implies. This is a pretty lightweight outline of an adventure. I have no idea where the twenty pages come from. Everything seems simple and is VERY sticky. This is very much the kind of adventure that you can read once and then run the entire thing from memory. There’s a decent number of elements mixed in, each of which gets a very brief outline and then it’s up to the DM to do the rest. One more page, of specific ideas, would have put this thing over the top.

The intro does a good job of laying things out in a colorful but terse manner. The village gets two short paragraphs. There are five or six places people/places presented with description for the village. A blacksmith, church, the “manor”, a couple more. They all have something to do with The Thing that’s going on in the village, alluded to in that intro. At about a paragraph each. They do a good job of focusing on what’s important. For example, the empty church focuses on what the party can steal and what the villagers do to prevent that. For the most part it’s just a general impression and then a sentence or two on how it related to mystery. This gets back to the core purpose of a product: to be a play aid for the DM. The descriptions here focus on the substance of that and ignores trivia. Exactly how it should.

To the brutal lord and the core mystery we add: a dragon in the woods, a bunch of woodwose who love human flesh, the gnomes proper, a pagan cult, and, perhaps my favorite: Gargamel. Yes, Gargamel is in this adventure. And he’s WONDERFUL. His name is Mel. He lives with his cat in a collapsing tower. He’s an alchemist. He loves the taste of gnome. “He’ll show those fools in town who is crazy now!” Which leads us to the gnomes: they are the smurfs. A twisted version, but smurfs nonetheless. Except they LIKE it when people eat them. It’s how they reproduce.

This thing is the definition of a sandbox adventure. It gives you a few places, briefly described at a page or so each, and adds some motivations along with five or six different things going on. They all have some tangential relation to each other but whatever pretext the party is summoned for ends up not being what is actually going on. It’s a mystery in that the initial presentation of events is not what is actually going on and the party, poking their noses in to things, explores the environment and goings on.

There’s a decent amount of treasure, most in coin form with a few exceptions here and there. One, in particular, stands out: the mummy head. You can find a mummy head with it’s mouth sewn shut. If you cut open its mouth it whispers a spell to you. Fuck yeah! Fuck your boring old scroll! Further, the spell is Summon Dragon. Yeah, and it’s first level. A dragon flies to where you are, in real time. And you don’t control it. Straight outta Call of Cthulhu or LotFP! I love it!

There’s a pretty good random wandering table for exploring the forest. It uses a series of dice rolls to create some encounters. WHere do have the encounter. What to encounter. What’s special out it. Etc. It’s a nice way to present some variety in wanderers, and motivations, as I’ve harped on several times before. You meet hunters. There’s a pig on another table. Ah! You meet the hunters chasing the pig! It’s a good way to spark the DM’s imagination and it works well here.

If I had a complaint/ask it would be about a little more … specificity? In color for the locations and NPC’s. A very good and evocative general overview is provided but I think a little more local color would have added a lot more to the adventure. The village, for example, comes off as a little one-dimensional. I can imagine something like one additional page of content, a summary sheet, with a d6 “color” for each location or person. The village table might include something like “local rabble rousing against lord” or “guards putting the beatdown on a small child” or something like that. Likewise the gnome village. Fishing tourney in outhouse” or some other SMurf like thing. In other words, I think it needs just a little more to ground the adventure in the DM and party and/or maybe give a shove in certain in certain directions.

I’m a fan of this though. I will sometimes say a product is pretty close to my cutoff line, either pro or con. Not this one. This one is very clearly over the line in the “Keeper/Good” category and is one of the clearest examples of something that it clearly decent but could use just a bit more help to kick it into superstar territory.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110415/The-Gnomes-of-Levnec?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 2 Comments

The Lair of Drecallis

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

lld
By Rich Maffei
Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Levels 4-7

For a second year in a row, Drecallis has not appeared on the appointed day to collect her tribute from the people of Longridge. Is the terrible beast dead? Or has the great reptile departed for greener pastures? The elders are desperate to discover the truth, and if the dragon is indeed dead, a priceless hoard may be sitting in the dragon’s lair, unguarded. A call has been put out for brave souls willing to seek out the remote lair of Drecallis and investigate!

This is a thirty-ish room cave complex with a good variety of creatures crawling about. It has a vanilla slant to it, although a decent variety of vanilla with several touches of classic D&D. The text is long on words and short on interesting.

You might think of the complex map as a kind of star shape. Each of the legs has an entrance in it, with a common convergence areas/no-man’s land in the middle. Trogs in one arm, gnolls in another, vermin-ish stuff is another, and a behir in the last leg (the old dragon lair proper.) There’s conflict here between the three main groups, but not full on faction play. Everyone is hostile in spite of their problems, with on the behir willing to talk, at a low probability and only under certain circumstances. This is an opportunity lost for faction play, although the generally linear nature of the “legs” of the map make interesting faction play/exploration hard to pull off on a map like this.

It’s hard for me to find the words to describe the dungeon. I want to say “boring”, but I think instead the writing is quite flat. A spider in a hole, trogs torturing a gnoll, a crayfish attack … there’s a lof of classic and, in an academic sense, interesting potential to the encounters. But the writing style here just puts you to sleep. It takes a lot of text to get where it’s going. It’s almost as if the entire thing is written in an “aside” kind of style, but more of an academic footnote than a nudge nudge wink wink kind of aside. There are these descriptions about the hows and why of things, the motivations and in places irrelevant detail. None of it really adds to the encounter the DM will be running. “A box of assorted tubers.” Oh. Ok. Thanks. “Two tuns filled with rainwater.”

Everything here is a bit … crufty. The magic items and the other mundane treasures just don’t get much here. A +2 ring. +1 swords. The variety turns up a bit when you get to the hidden treasure of the dead dragon. Paragraphs on a lamia deception. Paragraphs on a doppleganger deception. But very little in the way of making it INTERESTING.

And that’s a shame. The variety here is well done. Very little in this adventure feels forced at all. Everything fits together without pushing it at all. There’s a lot of decent little set ups, like the skeleton in the water, or the spider in the hole. Or, even, the POTENTIAL for faction play. Dead NPC parties, and a banshee bitter from her abandonment. Harpies in their filth ridden lair. It should be great. Instead it’s flat.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/125858/Advanced-Adventures-31-The-Lost-Lair-of-Drecallis?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #93

Posted on July 30, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d93
Fun fact. I pulled the next Dungeon off the pile, looked at the cover and thought. “Fuck! Another Gith adventure?!!? And on a magic carpet?” Then I noticed I had a dup of issue 92. I would like to change my answer to “Fuck! Another adventure about melodramatic storm giants?!”

Vanity
By Bradley Schell
3e
Level 5

A pretty classic Dungeon Magazine: seven rooms in ten pages. It accomplishes this by spending a decent amount of time telling us what each room used to be used for, in detail. This, of course, adds nothing to the adventure. Several hooks are presented for this lair/tomb, one of which, a boring “you see reward posters” is expanded upon greatly. Two others are more action oriented, with the party either ambushed by four bugbears or seeing the end of a caravan ambushed. The track back leads to the complex, with a few rooms of bugbears and an ogre. A chimera (who never needs to eat .. sigh… ) guards a tomb room with a spectre. The concept of the tomb room add-on is nice, but I don’t think it really comes across as the add-on it should be. It comes off more of a paste-in than a natural part of the adventure. The entrance is a nice set piece defensive work to get past, and once that’s over the adventure one trick pony is done.

The Statue Gallery
By Johnathan M. Richards
3e
Level 9

Side-trek is a medusa gallery/cave in the underdark. The medusa wears a hat of disguise and an amulet that makes her look like a statue. She has a pert mimc, phasm, and vargouilles. I always throw up a little in my mouth when I see a hat of disguise in an adventure. It’s almost always paired with some mind-protecting magic item, so the statue amulet was a surprise.

Swamp Stomp
By Jeff Ward
3e
Level 4

Mill hook, dead relative
Doing it
“A woman named mother grundy owns this stall.”
Ok rumors

This is the usual “dragon is actually good and the princess is the bad guy” adventure. In this case the halfling mayor is the bad guy and the lizard men & naga are good. The hooks are mostly lame, including the horrendous “one of your loved ones is captured/killed” … which should never be used, ever, in any game, ever. It compensates for another hook in which one of the party members is deeded a mill, which is one of the better hook ideas. Giving the murder hobos ties to something, without punishing them for those ties, is a great way to encourage involvement. The read aloud has some truly horrid things to say, like “A woman named Mother Grundy owns this stall.” That’s a conclusion that can’t be reached by observation. Long descriptions of meaningless places, a boring swamp, a boring town … even a drifter camp is boring. How can a drifter camp be boring? AT least it’s got two halfling Coitius Companions interupted mid-haystack by lizard men. THAT’S good.

The Storm Lord’s Keep
By James Wyatt
3e
Level 21

Room after room after room after room after room after room of combat make this one of the saddest adventures pushed thus far in Dungeon. Big HP opponents. “All of the cloud giants drink fly potions before the combat.” Long read alouds. Magic walls with 720hp. This is all textbook how to not write a high level adventure. After slogging through about a million high-level fights the big bad sits down to talk to the characters. Zoinks! The only interesting thing AT ALL in this adventure is the first encounter. The players stumble upon a village preparing to be attacked. Almost everyone is level 1 or 0. Then a 5d6 hail shower starts, followed by lightning strikes, followed by cloud giants riding rocs/dragons. The overwhelming nature of the attack is quite nice, along with the challenge of the party defending them … if they choose to do so. It’s going to require quick thinking and a certain selflessness, but I think it’s an interesting challenge for a high level party … let them die? Try and save them?

Nice Polyhedron cover this issue!

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 1 Comment

Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine

Posted on July 27, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

fsw
By Logan Knight
Last Gasp Grimoire
LotFP
Level 1

Parasitic infections, stylishly cursed armour, amateur veterinary surgery, unreliable incendiary devices, edible mushrooms, spells unheard of, a wizard in need. Disgusting glory and lost limbs await you within the Sleeping Palace of the Feathered Swine

This is a cute little thirteen room cave adventure that manages to out-Lament most of the adventures published by Lamentations. A cave with excellent descriptions, gross stuff, interesting encounters, and enough of that Lamentations GRIM without going overboard in to cannibal corpse territory. Absolutely worth checking out.

The hook is, to quote “Find the wizard Felix Longworm cowering by stones and a mournful tree.” There’s another sentence that describes his former mission (removing cysts from the swine) , and then two short paragraphs that describe the process of removing the cysts. Given that the hook is one, maybe two sentences long, this is GREAT. In fact, I would suggest that the actual hook is only the first sentence and the second sentence the entirety of the “DM Background” crap that usually, in some overblown form, plagues adventures. It really doesn’t take much to get a party into an adventure in a good way and this is an excellent example. It piques their curiosity. They learn they can profit, in money or spells or equipment. Sold, AMERICAN!

The actual text of the room descriptions/encounters is divided into roughly three parts. First comes some initial impressions, followed by some DM text that elaborates on the impressions, and then there’s a small outline of the room at the bottom, showing the general shapes, entrances and exits, etc. This is an interesting format that has some similarities to that used in the more recent Maze of the Blue Medusa. These formats recognize something important that most adventures do not: it’s meant to be run by the DM. The layout/style/whatever is directly targeted at the DM, at providing them what they need to run the adventure. I’m not necessarily advocating with the particular choices made in this adventure (although I do like it) but rather lauding the choices made to aim the writing at the DM.

Adventures are technical writing with a very specific purpose. Aid the DM. Further, they’ve got a very hard problem: planting the encounters seed in the DM mind where it can grow. I mentioned above that the first part of the room descriptions are the initial impression. This is the seed pod portion of the encounter. “Dark entry cavern, rocks and shit and nothing too special. Sells of cold, stale air. Your eyes feel dusty.” It’s these feelings and impressions that are critically important to the DM. Important to lodge the room ideal in their head so they can expand and grow it, organically and on the fly, as the characters encounter and explore the room. Feather Swine does this well, keeping these impressions short and flavorful and evocative. The DM text that follows could use a little more formatting and editing to make it a bit clearer and easier to read, but that’s a pretty petty complaint.

Feathered swine presents interesting little situations. Press your luck situations. Curiosity situations. Lots of little things to get the players to risk their characters. In one room there are some holes in the walls. Crawling in to one of them gets you pulled in, all horror movie style, by the creature inside … unlike the first two holes with goodies.

Ooey ooky monsters well described. Horrific situations to encounter. Weird objects to bring back home. Easy to run by the DM. Imaginative, with a lot in common with the Weird Environments modules from Psychedelic Fantasies. Absolutely worth checking out.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/133404/Sleeping-Place-of-the-Feathered-Swine?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 9 Comments

AA #27 – Bitterroot Briar

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

brb
By Lang Waters
Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Level 2-4

The small village of Ipwich has been plagued by mystery for years. Why do some people, last seen decades ago, come stumbling out of the woods looking as young as the day they disappeared, raving mad? Why does the forest itself whisper in the blowing of the trees or the babbling of a brook, beckoning to its center? Local folklore holds that the answers to these questions lie on the other side of an immense wall of thorns in the heart of the forest, the Bitterroot Briar, as do the remains of a good number of would be riddle solvers.

This is a charming little set of encounters/adventure in a magical grove. The encounters have a nice social and faction element, and all have that folklore vibe that I enjoy. It may be a little weak in a couple of parts, particularly those related to lore … like how to get in and get out of the glade. It has a curious mix of very nice magic items and boring mundane ones. Even with those inconsistencies it’s a charming little thing.

The briar/glade is in a forest with a nearby village and the adventure starts there. There are four or five NPC’s presented, each in a paragraph or so, and they generally have strong enough personalities to add some value to the adventure. The rumor table is ok, with a really standout children’s nursery rhyme, and more verses available if the characters play with the children. That sort of integrated rumor is a very nice thing indeed, and, in fact, the entire vibe is nicely done. People wander out of the woods, lost in time, slightly mad … It’s pretty classic folklore set up. Most of the the hooks are the usual weak stuff, like generic “rumors of wealth” or “set here by your boss” kind of stuff, but a singing sword calling to you and … an Admiral Akbar round out the good ones. Yes, one of the hooks is that the evil grove is summoning adventurers to it as a trap … but it’s not a total throw away in this one. The sick mayors maid is in cahoots with an evil spellcasting snake that lives in the grove. Oh, oh! And get this! The snake just has spells he can cast! He doesn’t have levels or any bullshit like that! That’s awesome!

The wanderers in the forest are pretty decent, with most of them being unique-like encounters. Hunters afraid of their quary (an owlbear) and other various NPC’s and things to talk to. It’s all well done. As are the actual encounters once you reach the glade. A mean braggart troll, that in the end just doesn’t have much fight in him. Giant bees, spiders, crawfish, and ants that can all talk and all have some slightly different goals. It’s almost like the glade is a prison and each of the little gangs wants out, hates other people, and is looking for an edge. The usual asshat pixie, a fairy dragon, giants talking frogs. This is one of the best, if not THE best, talking animal adventures I’ve seen.

The magic items are a mix. One of the effects is that the rumors say the treasure is in the trees, and it is … you can find treasure in the dead trees. There are also these weird sympathetic magic things, like a skeleton with spider web over its eyes … that acts as a gem of seeing if you hold it up to peer through. I LOVE that kind of stuff! There’s also a flute that birds like. It doesn’t charm them. It’s doesn’t let you control them, but they tend to come around when you play it. That’s another great example of a magic item that is described by its effect rather than the rules around it. There’s also a decent number of +1 sword/+1 dagger hanging around, as well as more mundane books items. That’s too bad, those are the least interesting items in the adventure. (Although … I might make an exception for that iron flask … but then again the Misc Magic Items were always one of the best DMG sections.)

The text is a bit longer than it needs to be, with two sentences being expanded to a paragraph, but the nail sticking out to be hammered down is the … lore? This primarily impacts two areas: finding the glade in the forest and getting out of the glade (you’re trapped there once entering.) The glade has to “find you”, which is mentioned in one of the rumors, but it doesn’t really go in to much detail on what you need to do to make the glade find you. Basically, you get to wander around the forest, catching glimpses of the glade, until you commit wanton violence on the forest, stumble across a certain pixie encounter, or someone specifically listens to the wind/water for ten minutes. That’s a bit … tenuous, I think, but maybe the evil village NPC could drop some hints. The other area is escaping the grove … it’s not really obvious. The grove is clearly meant to be a bit of sandbox, but the lore on escaping has an issue: if everyone knew it then they’d all try to escape … and they all very much want to escape (with a couple of exceptions.)

Those aren’t exactly show stoppers, in any way shape or form, and they don’t detract from the adventure as a whole. A little more organization, or clarity, maybe, but otherwise I think this is a nice one, especially if you’re in to the more simplistic/folklore view of adventure.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/111704/Advanced-Adventures-27-Bitteroot-Briar?1892600

Posted in Level 2, No Regerts, Reviews | 3 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #92

Posted on July 23, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d92
So, here’s a poser: is Dungeon Magazine a poetry magazine or a house organ? By this, I mean does the magazine staff have a directive to preserve the author’s writing, no matter how bad, or do they have an obligation to publish something decent? Yes, I’m being hyperbolic. Either the staff didn’t know what a good adventure was, or they felt a need to preserve the author’s voice or they just didn’t get enough pages to fill the magazine and took anything.

Interlopers of Ruun-Khazai
By David Noonan
3e
Level 13

Thirty pages for an “empty rooms” adventure. Generic hooks send the party to a fortress/rock on the astral plane. Right after they arrive some githZ and githY show up. FIghts happens. Then the current owner of the fortress shows up and attacks everyone. This thing has almost nothing going for it. There’s nothing special about the fortress, and almost all of the rooms are empty, so it’s not really an exploration mission. There’s a timeline for the three factions, so it does have that to help things out, but the factions are all essentially mad dogs, except maybe for the Z’s who will at least talk. Otherwise it’s all “explore empty room and get attacked by a roving band of gith.” Long descriptions for empty rooms and trivia about Gith culture means Frustrated Author rather than Fun Adventure. Travel to the fortress/astral plane is glossed over, and the monsters take at least half a page each to describe. Wasn’t there an OSR adventure about a pass with crystals and factions in it and and old battlefield? Go get that instead. (dammit! I can’t find the name!)

The Swarm
By Tito Leati
3e
Level 1

The party tracks down some goblins in the mountains. While travelling in the mountains the party stumbles upon some bickering dwarves with a dwarf body from their recent goblin ambush. The party can return the body or find the dwarves taken prisoner. The mount is, essentially, a pointcrawl, since it’s hard to get from place to place except along the narrow paths/passes. It’s got decent wanderers with a lot of personality, and a very nice “old map” the party finds that goes along with the DM’s map. The encounters have some decent variety, although the suspension of disbelief is pushed at time. (“When the party passes they have no chance to spot the hidden paths the goblins use to ambush them.”) This isn’t a stellar adventure, but it the wordiness were resolved then it would be an ok adventure with decent variety and choices. Also, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. And this adventure ain’t Thomas Jefferson.

Return of the Blessed Damozel
By Frank Brunner
3e
Level 11

Side-trek. In a city park the party finds a woman berating a tough looking kid. Her dead daughter, his ex-lover, wants him to turn from his evil (Thug Life!) ways. The party can help convince him. Regardless, his friends (6 3rd level fights) show up to prevent him from leaving the gang. The rakshasa gang leader may show up also, which is why, I guess, this is level 11? Gang war in a park, all Sharks & Jets or Warriors style, woudl be cool, but that’s not really what it going on here. A mashup of this, the gith warfare adventure, and a good adventure would be cool. Rumble in the city park!

The Razing of Redshore
By James Jacobs
3d
Level 20

“Awakened sperm whale druid” wages war against assassins guild, destroying overly-described town. After four attack events the party meets the whale in event five, followed by exploring a five room underwater cave, the guild headquarters, and then a final assassination attempt on the party. The town portion is mostly meaningless, except for a couple of clues, and doesn’t justify the pages spent on it. The events are ok, I guess, if the party is using divination to explore the town for clues, as ways to introduce some life into the adventure. The caves feature a level 9 cleric gargantuan kraken and are not TOO bad. The guild fortress is an excuse to have a lot of assassins using their death abilities on the party. “Four assassins all do death strike on you, mr crappy saving throw. You die.” Good high level adventures/challenges have always been a problem for D&D.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments