tenfootpole.org

By Steve Willett
Polyhedron Games
OSRIC
Levels 9-11

Golanda, the Kingdom of Hope, devoted to the good of its people and all people. It’s knights travel Ropa looking for service in just causes. Its priests roam the continent healing the sick and injured with no regard to race, faith or morality. But something smells in Eddiston and it’s the stink of corruption.

Oh, where to start … this is a linear adventure with light content, a pure railroad from start to end. There’s not really a plot shield here, there’s not enough content for that. There might be … five combats? There’s a couple of word pages, printed as a PDF that describe some convoluted backstory with named right out of the goofball unmemorable Forgotten Realms names. Go to the damned (as in ‘Hell-Damned’) town. Question someone. Have a combat. Question someone. Have a combat. Question someone. Have a combat. Meet a dude. Have a combat. Have the finale combat with an EHP and a demon. That’s it.

The entire thing is presented in a very conversational form. It’s as if you were sitting down, having a beer with someone, and they described their last game to you. It’s not quite incoherent, but it’s also not quite all there. It’s full of anecdotal events. That’s good! They ground the detail and provide something to hang your hat on. But it’s bad in the conversational form it’s presented in.

Out of nowhere there’s a table presented on what you see if you climb up to the city walls. It’s not bad: a demon scurrying across a street, a zombie bumping into a wall, a panicked dog, people cowering in a corner. This is decent content. Maybe a little generic, but it’s trying. There are plenty of example like this in the adventure (well, at least five anyway.) A daft old woman, zombies feeding on bodies, and so on. That’s the sort of decent, specific, content that many adventures don’t bother to describe. “12 zombies” or maybe “12 zombies attacking some villagers” is the usual fair. It could be even more specific, but what’s here IS decent … when it tries. This leads into the monsters actually DOING things. They argue. They feed, and so on. Again, somehow this sort of content has been lost in many modern adventures.

Make no mistake: this is terrible. It’s linear. It’s conversational. It is, at best, just a framework. Stat blocks take up fifty percent of a page. It’s not so much organized as it is a story narrative, told linearly. It reminds me of some of the poorer Adventurers League stuff, like The Seer, but organized in a far worse fashion. Devoid of much content. What there is is linear. There are brief bright sports with the encounter descriptions, but its hard for me to even call them encounter descriptions.

If you sat down, right now, and typed up, in Word, describing the last adventure you ran, in as if you were talking to your buddy, then you’d have this adventure.

Also: the intro notes there’s corruption present. Wellllll…. as in “overrun by demons?” Yes.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/102124/The-Stink-in-Golanda?1892600

By Dave Olson
Cut to the Chase Games
5e
Level 1

The town of Cresthill enjoys a favorable location along the winding Graywand River. Trade is good, and the prominent gnomes of House Kelver run most of the businesses to the prosperity of the people. Now, however, a dangerous lunatic—a kobold from the nearby Talon Hills—has decided the gnomes of House Kelver need to be a taught a fiery lesson, and only a band of heroes can stop his plot.

There are about six different versions of this, each for a different system. I somehow managed to end up with the 5e version instead of the S&W version. This is a magic ren-faire adventure, in a gnome city with an alchemist kobold constructing bombs of flour and fire beetle. It’s mostly linear, with a brief free-range element in the middle, and a lot of contrivances to make up a plot. It’s also quite lengthy, and I’d say boring/uninspiring, for the amount of content.

Only about six of the twenty pages are the core content of the adventure. There’s quite a few pre-amble pages with instructions and backgrounds, and quite a few pages in the rear for NPC stats and personalities, maps, and so on. I’m not sure when this “lots of useless shit and not much adventure content” began, but I suspect it has something to do with the Pay Per Word scene. If I can provide the same content three different ways then I only have to be original once. For some definition of original that I may not agree with.

This verbosity-to-little-effect continues in the adventure proper. The key NPC’s get little offset boxes with their personalities and motivations noted. That’s great, in theory. It helps you find the content during the adventure. In practice, these sections are a couple of paragraphs long and drone on and on, using a maximal number of words to convey simple concepts. The guard captain is a family man, dedicated, and dislike his corrupt boss. The adventure takes two paragraphs to tell us those three things. The added words do nothing. In fact, they detract from the adventure because now the DM has to read the lengthy ass paragraphs when running the adventure instead of just scanning one sentence that says: family-man, dedicated, hates lazy corrupt boss. My language isn’t that good. It’s too fact based and doesn’t take advantage of the wealth the english dictionary provides. My language is also AT LEAST ten times better than the two paragraphs provided, because my language is usable to run the game.

There is a paragrapgh or so in the beginning that tells us all about kobolds. Their history in D&D, that these kobold sin this adventure are a different common brown type, and so on. It goes on and on, adding nothing useful to the adventure … until finally it says: And don’t forget, they ‘Yip!’” Once decent thing to help the DM bring the adventure to life. They Yip, in a paragraph of text. And I should say that that kind of direct game-enhancing content (such as, They Yip) is few and far between in this adventure. When there’s read it’s lengthy. The DM sections are lengthy. The NPC descriptions are lengthy. Seldom do they contain useful things and seldom still do they provide content like: They Yip.

There’s a … railroad? Or maybe it’s just very linear and full of contrivances to advance the plot. Hmmm. I think that means railroad. Anyway, the inciting event is an explosion. It’s assumed the characters help out, I guess out of the kindness of their hearts? If they ask around the milling crowd they get a description of someone seen entering several weeks ago. Giving this to the guard captain causes him to recognize the dude. You go find the dude in a bar, only to be attacked by some thug buddies. The dude conveniently falls unconscious so you can question him. You run around town, in the “free play” portion, finding the other bombs. It’s assumed that somewhere along the route you meet the mad kobold bomber and find out there’s a fifth bomb.

I think it’s fair to say that this is pretty typical adventure schlock.First you ask around, then run around, then finally fight the baddie. It’s boring, lame, and not very interesting, providing the barest of ties to try and connect things. You have to question the crowd. Twice. You have to then talk to the captain. You have to not kill the corrupt guard and not kill him. You have to accidentally run into the kobold while going from place to place in town. Why is the town gnomish? For no particular reason, and it doesn’t really feel like a gnome town at all. Why is the bad guy a kobold? For no particular reason. It’s this sense of the generic that comes from applying fantastic tags to the mundane that rubs me such the wrong way with these magical ren-faire settings.

There’s also this weird vibe around defusing the ‘bombs.’ The players are encouraged to be creative, by the text, and then it goes to great trouble to say what WON’T work. The bombs have a fire beetle in them. But if you kill the beetle then the reagent still goes off and the thing explode. This means that there ARE right answers. On the one hand limitations should be fine. On the other, making them arbitrary seems counterproductive to encouraging the party to think freely.

The amount of DM fiat to make the thing work right, the linearity, verbosity, and dullness of the general text make this a skip for me. The addition to gnomes and kobolds, for no particular reason, and the magical ren-faire alchemist stuff is just a turn off. I wish the adventure had not tried to explain things. It’s a magic bomb. It’s doesn’t need a flour/fire beetle explanation. Exploding skulls, yellow with flaming eyes that cackle manically as they get close to *BOOM* time? That I could accept without question.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/153213/WK0-Night-of-the-Mad-Kobold-5E?1892600

By Dylan Held
Pick Up & Go Games
Crypts & Creatures
Levels 1-2

Welcome to Smugglers Run. An adventure designed for four to five players from levels one to two. Smuggler’s Run, once considered the primary pipeline for Corinthean contraband in the great City of Jor-Carmin, has been dormant for quite some time now. Officially claimed by Corinthea nearly 20 years ago when a toll was placed on the road; the farmhands and settlers along the old route have enjoyed peace and fair trade since, albeit heavily taxed. The humble villagers of Hamilton, who once would have to sneak their goods throughout the kingdom, now are simple farmers, traders, and craftsmen who are happy to play by the rules. Still, the dangers along Smuggler’s Run have not entirely vanished. The players in this adventure are hired to investigate a lost caravan. What seems a simple task that any farmhand could do turns into something much more intriguing. The path to becoming a hero starts somewhere. The mysteries of Smuggler’s Run may be more than just urban legends and are filled with more questions than answers, but will the players have the guile to investigate it’s shady past? If they make it through to the end, it will be up to them to decide.

This is a railroad of an adventure, but it’s also nicely done. The personality of the NPC’s involved really comes through and most of the situations seem quite a bit more relatable than most adventures. People act like people do. It also does a decent job of making it SEEM like actions have consequences, even though almost everything is pre programmed, right down to the last minute escape of the evil villain.

One of the many nice things about DCC is the funnel. Take a bunch of commoners and shove them through some danger. The outraged village mob is a trobe that very much appeals to me, as is their slaughter and their couple of standouts. This adventure uses that for a hook. Willy the hops farmer has a wagonload that has gone missing, right during the harvest and gets a group of fieldhands, etc to go look for it. Willy speaks in authentic western gibberish and both the first and a great example of the characterization given to the NPC’s. Almost every NPC has a personality that comes through in their (generally brief) read-alouds. They have strong personalities, from WIlly the yokel, to the highwaymen, to the bar room brawlers, to the barman to the barmaids. Not only do they have a memorable presence, but it’s done in a terse style AND their motivations are relatable. During the big finale battle one of the bar maids grabs anything valuable and tries to flee. Nice! The NPC’s are also all summarized on a single page at the end of the adventure, something I appreciate as a DM. There’s not an overwhelming amount, but it still keeps you from having to jot down notes.

The adventure also does a decent job with callbacks. Bandits met once are met again, and remember the party and react. As does WIlly. As does an NPC hireling. As do the bar maids. As does the bartender. NPC’s show up more than once and by doing so they give a sense of connectedness to the locations. Not just random places with random people but concrete locations with real people in them. This is all VERY nice

On the downside, this is a completely linear adventure. Go do X, then Y, then Z. The text single column, in a large font, and is full of “if the party does A then B” kinds of very specific DM advice. This all leads to a wall of text kind of thing when encounters run into each other. More than any other adventure I’ve seen recently, this one has problems. It’s like line breaks and section breaks have not been invented. It’s more than wall of text, it’s combined with this lack of … clearly delineated sections? That makes this a hard one to find things in and follow. It IS pretty simple, all in all, but still …

It also engages in two activities twice that I take exception to. The first is the wagon driver the party rescue. Regardless of the parties healing magic, potions they carry, or anything else they do, he collapses. I believe the text goes something like “regardless of if they are successful or not …” I get it. You want the party to rescue the dude. But there’s no reason. The dud being alive or dead does nothing to add to the adventure. But by FORCING the dude to be not responsive to the party you take away the player’s agency. Why heal someone, ever, if DM fiat is always at issue? The guy just should have been dead. Period. (If he talks to the party then might find out a wolf attacked him, which is evidently hidden information. I’m not sure why, since knowing its a wolf doesn’t really do anything one way or another.)

Secondly, the barkeep double crosses the party AND he’s given a plot shield escape. Bad form old chap. He’s the local bad guy representative, hance the doublecross, but, still, making the adventure/arc less transparently good vs. evil and more “Choose Your Own Adventure” would have been nicer to see. And giving the dude a plot shield, that he only uses when at 0 or less than 0, is SUPER lame. Fuck you. You’re the designer. Find a way to make your villain “cool” without taking complete control away from the players. That’s your job. Or, and here’s some free advice: Don’t. Let’em fucking kill the dude. You know, like they EARNED.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/180533/Crypts–Creatures-Campaign-Adventure-Smugglers-Run?1892600

By Vincent Howard
Second Thought Games
Generic/Universal
Levels 7-9

The players have come into possession of a magical circlet. Its powers are tied to a long-dead Wizard, who calls to the possessor of the circlet from Beyond. A search for the Wizard’s hidden resting place is in order! Will the party sever the circlet’s link, or cement it? The Wizard’s Tomb is a stand-alone adventure for 4-6 players of 7th-9th level. A detailed history of the Wizard, the magic circlet, his tomb, as well as full descriptions for 20 traps and the guardian who maintains them is included.

This is Yet Another Tomb of Horrors Knock-off. Wizard’s tomb. Full of traps. Lengthy read-aloud. Long room descriptions. It’s got a little bit of nice up-front, but that’s all. Do you want another Tomb of Horrors? To go with the 6,000 that already exist? Great. This is one. Enjoy.

The room keys start on page seven, so there’s a lengthy preamble. Most of it is interesting and unneeded backstory. There is a nice little half a page section on sage/research results. I like this kind of thing, for a prepared group it makes a lot of sense to find out all you can. There’s another column or so on an artifact, presumed to already be in the parties possession, which is the hook for the adventure. It had an evil presence and now you feel compelled to go to a place, the tomb.

The map is pretty simple and linear and FULL of hallway traps. In fact, there are twenty different types of hallway presented over two pages. I am NOT the biggest fan of hallway traps. As soon as a hallway trap triggers the game slows to a grind. As soon as you spring a door trap then the game grinds to a halt. I’ll accept the Indian Jones Idol trap, IE, a trick that everyone recognizes, but most traps suck. The best way I’ve found is to give hints in your descriptions, like dead bodies, charred walls, and so on, and let the players take it from there. Random traps in random hallways do nothing. There are seventeen hallway traps in this adventure, in addition to a few other types.

The read aloud is LONG. It has to be in these torture-porn things in order to describe the trapped/puzzle room fully to the party. But NO ONE listens to long read-aloud. It’s boring. The DM room descriptions then round out the entire keyed room to about a full column.
All for abstracted treasure. “The evil wizard’s treasure, as determined by the GM …” ug! So, a mummy a wizard, and a bunch of traps.

There’s just almost nothing to this adventure.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/182581/The-Wizards-Tomb?affiliate_id=1892600

By Dave Tackett
Quasar Dragon Games
OSR
Levels 10-12

A wave of pain and death sweeps over the town of Sligo during a festive faire and
market, causing fear and panic. As the characters investigate this horror, they find that is just part of an ongoing, multifaceted plot to drive away all humans and their allies. With giants, demons, hags, undead, and more lined up against them, the characters will have their work cut out for them.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm in the OSR community. That’s not always matched by focus and sometimes a vision doesn’t get translated on to paper well. Our 10-12th level characters experience the impact of an evil energy wave and, presumably, set out to find the cause out of the goodness of their cold cold murderhobo hearts. There are several smaller encounters that lead up to the big bad, and programmed ending. The adventure has A LOT of text, which is almost uniformly unfocused, meandering and verbose. It also has a couple of nice encounters and generally handles the monsters more as NPC’s, which is very nice to see. The writing needs to be more focused and there needs to be more ADVENTURE and less mundane.

The adventure is verbose, and more than that it’s verbose in describing the mundane. Lengthy descriptions of the mundane, lengthy read-aloud that add little to no value, lengthy descriptions of actions taken by NPC’s and monsters. None of this is interesting. None of this adds anything of real value. Here’s a read-aloud that, at least, is short: “Bare stairs lead downward. On one wall is a tapestry showing a traditional brewery.“ This is the soul of tercity compared to several f the other read-alouds, and the read-aloud is then augmented by lengthy DM paragraphs. Needed information gets lost in the text. The read-aloud assumes. That you have torches. That you did X. That you woke the orcs when you came in. Not good. And a textbook reason why read-aloud is generally bad, especially in higher level adventures. This lengthy text, the filler information, is the primary reason that the adventure is 62 pages long. Well, the last 22 or so pages are just appendices for magic and monsters and maps, but, still, seven or so mini-dungeons in 40 pages is not a tight adventure. And it long for no reason. One underground area is little more than a single long hallway with jail cells off to each side, packed in. Skeletons in one, wraiths in another, more skeletons, vrocks, etc. Original it is not.

It does do several things right. The rumor table is exactly the sort I like to see to see in adventures. It’s specific. It’s bits of overheard conversation. “There’s no invisible pig, Ealga. It’s a friendly joke played on outsiders and children.” or “I swear I seen it, a giant cockroach the size of my daughters pony! Up fast the monk house!” These add color, they are specific, they aren’t’ just boring fact communication. It’s that idiosyncratic nature, the specificity, that makes an adventure worth running for the DM as a play aid.

Likewise it does a great job in the way it treats the monsters. No fighting to the death here, mostly. You can bribe monsters, they will plead, even the bosses! In particularly there’s a nice lich, one of the bigger bads in the plot, who doesn’t really give a shit to die. That’s quite nice, as is the devil you can rescue you will then pledge to serve you .. and follow through! OMG! A monster that doesn’t backstab you!

Every once in awhile there’s a small nugget of a nice scene. The inciting event is the evil wave of energy that kills the old and infirm and turns them into zombies … including babies and toddlers. That’s a nice little bit, as are a couple of the flowing-red-eyes zombies.

Mostly though, this feel unnaturally long. And weirdly non-OSR. Lot’s of low-level undead. MAYBE a little light on the treasure front, and most of it is book magic items. There’s none of those “conversion mistakes” like long rests and DC checks that would give this away as a conversion. It’s more like … mundane?

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/181178/PO2-Goblin-Market?affiliate_id=1892600

By L. Kevin Watson
Dark Naga Adventures
5e & OSR
Levels 4-6

The small town of Boldon, and its surrounding villages are afraid. Dozens of people are missing, some speculate lost to some nefarious purpose. A broken drunkard tells fantastic tales of an evil temple and the horrible things within. The rare few who know the legends and history of the region are beginning to think the dark times have returned; not seen since the fall of the rst age of man. People are beginning to feel the icy fingers of fear closing in. The party becomes aware of these events, and is inspired to investigate. This leads them to a broken man who tells them a story of a lost temple. Has it been rediscovered by men seduced by its forgotten evil? The drunkard’s tale leads to others who might help the party discover more before they face The Lost Temple of Forgotten Evil.

This is short evil temple “crawl” that is preceded by a bit of an investigation in order to find the temple. From a 10,000 foot view the adventure is a little interesting and relatively well organized. Unfortunately I found the execution of that vision terribly flawed almost in every way. It reeks of being overly verbose and providing trivia in place of gameable content in encounters. And then it goes and provides gameable content in a kid of “continuing the adventure” section after each encounter. It’s quite frustrating. I’m going to pick this one apart. But only because I care.

The first eight pages are garbage and can be ripped out and forgotten. Regional background that will never come into play. “Over 1,400 years of history and lore” … which provide little to no value in terms of gameable content. A summary overview that provides no summary. “Two encounters are combat and two encounters are role-playing.” Joy. When you see something like that you just know. You just know the designer doesn’t get it. They are following some bullshit “rules of writing an adventure” nonsense. Anyway, i don’t dink adventures any more because they provide this bullshit background information, unless it contains information needed to run the adventure. This, thankfully, does not. It’s just filler fluff that obfuscates the fact that it’s not actually a 36 page adventure, it’s actually a 28 page adventure and one quarter is just filler.

I might also note that that this first eight pages contain the crappiest, or maybe greatest, example of hooks ever. Every single hook ever that lacks inspiration is detailed. In a sentence. “They were asked by a patron or other contact to investigate.” My, that’s original. Another one has a reward. Another one says they are from the region. Another one says they are from outside the region. And let’s be clear, it’s not like I’m abstracting these, they are already abstract. “The players could be from another part of the kingdom and sent to [town] to help.” Seriously? That’s a hook? What’s next? Caravan guard? Oh, why yes, there is a caravan guard hook! “The players could be guarding a caravan that is bringing ore to [town] and decide to look into the trouble.” This shit is absurd. It is abstract and non-specific. It’s like some weird story-based adventure I reviewed: “You may decide to have the players encounter a monster.” Really genius? Thanks. Thanks for the trouble. You know, I was really having trouble but now that you’ve suggest they encounter a monster/be caravan guards, get hired to look into thing I’m now fully inspired. This sort of generic dreck of writing is the bane of adventure. Let’s be clear, I’m not looking for two paragraphs per hook. Nor am I even looking for two sentences of detail. I’m looking for SPECIFICITY. Specificity is the soul of storytelling. By being specific you take advantage of the single greatest resource a designer has: the DM. It needs to be JUST enough to inspire the DM. “They might be caravan guards.” is not inspiring. It’s the opposite. BE. FUCKING. SPECIFIC. Not Wordy. Not Verbose. SPECIFIC.

The idea is that people are disappearing and eventually you find a drunk, who’s central to the first half of the adventure. There’s an interesting bit here. The drunk has a tale and you can follow up with him to find more details about the dungeon/temple. The more legwork you do the more details you get, up to a certain point. This sort of “try and find out where the rumored dungeon is” and “do some research on the dungeon before you get there” are both appealing. They reward the prepared and thoughtful players and add some interesting roleplaying to the encounters. Find a dungeon map, find a regional map, get the secret of a door from a sage. Neato mosquito.

And the concept is mostly where it stops being neato (mostly.) The drunk is possessed by Hastur who tells them the tale to “lure them into the temple.” Fucking wonderful. Haven’t seen that one eight thousand times before. Worse, it adds nothing to the adventure. It’s just meaningless detail that goes nowhere.

Then there’s the monologue. It’s a page long. A. Full. Page. In red/beige text. On a beige background. In italics. If I tried to read a page of text my players would leave the house. Seriously. They would get up and go to the corner for a pack of cigs and I’d be lucky if they came back. Seriously? A page? There was that famous informal WOTC GenCon observation where they noted you got two sentences, MAYBE three, before the players lost interest and stopped paying attention. The section is actually titled “Monologue.” I’m lost … is there a parallel universe in which “Monologue” doesn’t mean “complete crap?” It’s like titling your section “Generic Content that I didn’t try” Why would you do that? The ONLY saving grace here is that there’s half a page of bullet points, before the page long monologue, that details the key points of the monologue. If could be slightly better, but seeing as how the monologue is about the twelfth time the adventure relates the drunks tale to the DM, the summary is appreciated. It’s the kind of organization that the adventure should be providing (and does in several cases.) Again, it could be more specific, but at least you don’t have to wade through the morass of that crap-ass read-aloud.

One of the nics things the adventure does is, after each major section, it provides a “What Happens Next” summary. In bullet form, it provides some ideas. The cultists will sacrifice 4 people a day for a month. The Town guard will look into the beatings, the characters will be shunned. It’s a very nice little section and adds a lot to the adventure in terms of DM tools. It is, essentially, a short outline or other logical consequences and it provides the DM with JUST enough generic information to help the DM add some more local color and events so It’s not a straight “A then B then C” adventure. It’ does this after each of the seven major sections in the first half (the investigation) portion of the adventure and it’s a good addition. A little lengthy and verbose, but great idea and it EXACTLY the sort of resource that an adventure SHOULD be providing to a DM.

Similarly the encounters have a nice little section which provides the motivations. “Beat up people in celebration of the coming horrors.” Hey, that’s great content. I can now run the encounter with 4 cultists in town without ANY more information at all! Or, maybe “Jopha wants to ensure he gets a reward for his map.” Again, great! The adventure does this almost every time, and it does it in a great way. I might quibble with one encounter, in which townies beat up an old man, for burying the townie motivation in the text. But, in general, you now pretty much know know to run this encounter. Maybe one more sentence on any character quirks, maybe one bullet point on “local color” for the setting, and then on with the show!

But that’s not what happens. What follows is not a bullet point but rather several paragraphs of information that do little to add any value to adventure beyond that motivations. Two or three or four paragraphs that add very little. Focusing this, trimming it WAY down, and keeping just the core would have been far far better and far easier to run at the table. Again, the goal is to provide terse specificity to inspire the DM, not endless words that the DM has to fight against in order to find the adventure/key points.

I would note that one of the encounters has same lameness to it. The sage has a shit-ton of at-will powers, can cast any spell, etc. I like my wizards weird and I like it when they don’t follow the players rules, but this is a little far for me. It smacks of a DM plot shield, even though he has no purpose in the plot. For no reason you encounter someone inexplicably powerful … but who can’t be bothered to do something himself. DM Fiat is not a compliment.

The dungeon section is terser and manages about five rooms per page for a sixteen page dungeon/temple. There’s some pretext on why no one comes to anyone else’s help (heavy curtains!) The wall of text element is always present, making it difficult to find the good stuff. It’s a good thing that there is little good stuff then. It’s mostly just normal rooms with dudes in it, overly described with meaningless detail. I know what a bedroom looks like and don’t need it explained to me that there are four incense burners, unless they have some impact on the adventure. And they don’t. There is an effort to provide a little detail on what the cultists are doing in their rooms, but invariably it is just “praying” or “sleeping.” Once again, some gameable specificity would have been nice.

A couple of game system notes as well: A DC25 check is kind of high in 5th edition, I believe? There’s one note on OSR specific details, which seems a bit unusual. I’m not complaining, I don’t think conversion notes are generally needed, but it seems weird that ONE would be provided. Forced combats are weird in OSR adventures, since combat isn’t the focus. Likewise, the treasure is very light for a gold-for-xp OSR game.It’s clear this is a 5e adventure converted over. It’s also interesting to see both the OSR stats and the 5e stats side by side. 5e stats are SO much longer, because of the slavery to the form that is seemingly required. It’s also interesting to see the creature difference; it’s almost like the designer is afraid to give the OSR versions anything other than bare bones attacks. Shapechanging, special resistance, etc, all seem off the table for the OSR stats where they are listed for the 5e version.

There’s a comment, regarding the evil alter room, that there are 40 cultists present twice a day and it would be suicide to attack during those ceremonies. Au contraire! A couple of barrels of oil rolled into the room, a couple of fireballs, fighters in the single entrance corridor choke point, maybe dump in a couple of enraged bulls right after the inferno! I think it’s the BEST way to approach the combats!

The adventure is organized well. The follow-up sections and motivations are quite good. It’s got too much generic useless text and most of the temple is boring and uninteresting.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/181154/DNH1–The-Lost-Temple-of-Forgotten-Evil-5e–OSR?affiliate_id=1892600