Through the Cotillion of Hours

Posted on July 4, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

cot
By Daniel J. Bishop
Purple Duck Games
DCC
Any Level

In this adventure, sleeping characters are invited to the Cotillion of Somnos, the Dreaming God. If they can make their way past the entertainments at the Masked Ball, they can petition the Dreaming God to fulfill some request on their behalf.

This is an adventure in the house of the god of dreams that mostly involves making savings throws … on a mostly symmetrical fourteen room map. I don’t like dream adventures, or symmetrical maps, so be warned. Weirdly, I don’t like this one either.

The idea is that this is a drop-in adventure. When the party needs something, or goes looking for something then you can drop in this adventure. The official DCC line did something like this in … Blades Against Death? In that one you could drop it in when the party needed to bring someone back to life. In this one it’s just ‘Something.’ Need a question answered, a life restored, or some other boon? You can drop in the house of the god of dreams! In principal I really like this kind of idea. It slots in to an idea that you can cobble together something from a published adventure to fit in to your own campaign. Need an oracle? Ding! Need a village for your plot? Ding! This is a kind of “supplement as a play aid building block” kind of adventure design rather than “supplement comes bundled with plot.” Generically, I think the concept is good. And then there’s the implementation in THIS adventure …

The entire adventure is timed. There’s a kind of clock counting off time and after it chimes thirteen times the characters wake up. When you go in to a new room the chimes ring.

Boom, you’re in the dream realm, in front of the god of dreams home, where a grand masked ball is taking place. You wander around from room to room until you find the god of dreams. In each room you find something that you need to fuck with in order to do something. That something is usually “leave the room.” Make a DC14 will save. Make six DC 10 agility checks. Blah blah blah blah. Sometimes when you miss a save it causes the chimes to go off because you’re delayed, etc. There are a couple of ways to Turn Back Time, none of which involve aircraft carriers or fishnet, sadly. Make some saves, maybe pay attention to puzzle-like element. Go to Next Room.

As an example, there’s a room with “Fear Nothing” or some such over the door. Inside the room melts in to a giant maw of your enemy and you begin to get sucked in. Letting yourself get sucked in advances you (Fear Nothing, remember) and there are vines that multiply faster than you can kill them, etc. That’s the kind of encounter you can expect.

Is that your thing? It’s not my thing. I’m not heavy in to combat (and, to be fair, this adventure really only has a couple of POSSIBLE combats in it, and then only if the party provoke, hence it’s all levels designation.) but I’ve got this problem with one note adventures. Make saves in rooms. Figure out puzzles. These things become boring after awhile. There’s little for the players to do with their characters. Making a save, especially multiple saves, is not exciting. It’s not the player directing their character. It’s just rolling dice, without even the tension of combat.

There’s also a decent chance the party will become separated. The adventure even notes that. That’s boring. With no hint of hyperbole, I don’t think ANYONE has EVER had ANY fun being separated and sitting there, bored, waiting for someone else to finish their turn so they get one step closer to being able to do something. Beyond physical separation, there are several times when someone could be permanently taken out of the adventure, usually by doing what they are asked to do. I one room, you ask an oracle a question. If you actually do so then you get the asnwer, but then your sucke dout of the dream world and your adventure is over. The oracle endgame portion isn’t bad but it’s the player elimination that is. I’ve got no problems with this in a boardgame but in an RPG? Lame. SImilarly, if you make the wrong kind of request to the dreaming god then you die. At some meta level this makes sense, Gods Take No Shit. But the players can’t make a meaningful decision unless they know the consequences, and just tossing DOOM at the them, almost at random, is not cool.

It was the usual problems with descriptions. A couple of paragraphs of read aloud per room are provided, but the text is generic. Rooms are “Opulent.” This is a textbook example of Telling instead of Showing. The designer has told us the room is Opulent. He should have described the room in such a way that WE make the determination that it’s opulent.

Nice general concept, but poorly executed. Also, nice to see Purple Duck return to core DCC: fucking with gods.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/105707/AL3-Through-the-Cotillion-of-Hours-DCC?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine 89

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d89
Honor and Eta
By David Zenz
3e
Level 1

OA! I Used to love OA in Dungeon! Used to …

A seven scene linear adventure that pits level 1 characters against a were-tiger. This has some pretext about honor, but that doesn’t really come in to it. The first few scenes involve the Eta, the lowest caste, and the systemic prejudice against them. That seems like something fun to game right? Next issue has orc babies and an adventure involving the trans-atlantic slave trade! Oh Boy! Anyway, seven encounters, and maybe three combats, the last with a were-tiger.Hope your level-1’s all have silver! Perhaps the only good thing about this adventure is that the Eta village, maybe the third encounter, is the turning point where the adventure moves from reality to fantasy. After the village the encounters are all myth: tengu, were-tiger, goblins. That’s a good transition to The Mythic Underworld. The adventure also does a good job in making clear the miserable treatment of the Eta and the hyperbolic class-based system in OA. Fun!

Rivers of Blood
By Paul Leach
3e
Level 4

Dark Age Russia! Cool!
Wait, I meant to say “Event based Adventure! LAME!”
Just a railroad, with maybe two interesting encounters in it. “Defend” a village from horseman raiders. Defend the village from other Rus. Have a couple of encounters on the river. Visit a town where the Rus dude who attacked the village is selling them as slaves, and challenge him to combat. Maybe eight or nine encounters, all in a line, with far too much boring combat. When your adventure has the line “To keep player suspense alive, roll some dice to make it seem like they are having an effect on the battle” then you know you are a failure as an adventure writer. If the party doesn’t capture a boat, during the raid, then a villager offers them a boat. *sigh* So the parties actions have no effect. There is a nice talky ogre that will chat with you and not be a jerk, and even maybe be helpful, if you pay the toll. That’s refreshing. There’s also a hag/witch with a bridge of bones. Given my over of folklore in adventures it should be obvious I like that. The rest of the adventure is just boring and dull combats. With overwrought read-aloud. Joy.

Headless
By James Jacobs
3e
Level 12

Fifteen rooms in a derro undead/simulacra fortress. There’s this theory that says that deathtraps are ok in a high level adventure. The idea being that the party has access to a lot of magic, divination, and maybe even wishes and if they don’t take advantage of all their capabilities then Fuck Them. I won’t take a position on that, but I will note that this adventure relies heavily on the party using their abilities in … non-modern ways. They are going to need to scry/commune/etc just to find the adventure and even then it’s 26 days away walking .. by which time the evil plan will have been enacted. Better have divined that and/or used fly/mount/etc! So, expert players only. Once inside it’s full of boring combats in a mostly linear, and small dungeon. Undead. Simulacra of monsters. Lots of nonsense text telling backgrounds and motivations useless to the adventure. The final encounter, in particular, will be quite rough, unless you have expert players who can think non traditionally. Then Orcus shows up and steals a major magic item, his scythe. LAME! I don’t find the adventure interesting, because of its linear nature and focus on combat, except for the expert-player orientation of it.

Rage
By Bradley Schell
3e
Level 7

Enkidu-like barbarian is cursed with manners and the party needs to kill a troll priestess to free him. The barbarian with manners is a nice NPC, but the troll lair is only three rooms of mundane adventuring. IE: this is a five-page side-trek. Also, FYI: I have a brand on my left arm, in cuneiform, of Gilgamesh. Fuck you Doom of Man!

Wedding Bells
By Jonathan Tweet
3e
Level 4

This weird thing is almost like it was written to be the Included Beginning Adventure in a boxed set. It’s very “You could do this or you could do this and if the party does this then you could do this.” in the same way that many introductory adventures are written. But it’s level four? It’s primarily a social adventure, with only one real or maybe two real combats. It’s also one of the worst fucking adventures I’ve ever seen. I loathe almost every choice Tweet made in this adventure. I usually try and keep ideas and actions separate from people. What you say or what you do may be stupid, but that doesn’t mean that you are stupid. Generalizations are evil. But I’m also a hypocrite. If this adventure is any indication of Tweet’s DM’ing style then I’m willing to say he’s fucking shitty ass DM.

The party visits a town for a wedding. Someone is missing. Out of the kindness of their hearts the party goes looking and fights a harpy in a tree. The end. Oh, on the way to the town the party is attacked by gnolls that the designers fully admits are not really connected in any way to the adventure and only exists to have a fight at the start. Wonderful. Upon reaching the town the party eats shit. Seriously, they eat shit. Over and over again. A hobgoblin guard shows up at the gates and belittles the party and makes petty (and not so petty) demands of them. Give me your weapons. It’s all a test, to see what kind of people they are. I’ll tell you what kind of people _I_ am, the kind that doesn’t take shit from police state thugs. *stab stab stab* Police state? Oh my yes. You see, one of the dock workers (it’s a lake town) is a third level paladin and uses detect evil on the party, in order to inform the sheriff. There’s a couple of encounters like this, including the little thief. A thief breaks in to the partes rooms at night. If the party hurts them, or god forbid kills them, then the sheriff probably kicks them out of town and the DM is encouraged to force an alignment check. Oh, and sick an elven strike force on the party. Even if it’s accidental, like a shot fired in the dark. The townsfolk generally treat the party like crap and then expect them to help find the missing person.

I’m not sure what Tweet is going for here. Pushing the party, repeatedly, and then punishing them for the action you’ve encouraged is Not Cool. In RPG’s the big red button exists to be pushed, because that’s the fun thing to do. The enforced morality in this adventure, the DM pushing the party over and over again …. This is not the way to DM your game … unless you are in junior high. It’s this kind of shitty ass crap that gives D&D a bad name and it’s this kind of shitty ass adventure publishing that encourages people to be shitty-ass DM’s. “The due that write the game write the adventure and he clearly wants me to be a strict dick to the party.”

The adventure does have a brief NPC synopsis in the rear, but they have no personality. It has suggestions on wedding prep, but no complications to have fun with. It has a nice scene where the town folk to come to the party with petty requests, in a kind of hero worship/celebrity sort of thing … that’s not really taken advantage of at all.

Beyond this, it’s long for no reason. A page and a half for a gnoll ambush? It gets back to his Introductory Adventure advice and conversational style that the adventure has. It’s also organized in a weird way. In particular, the Harpy stats and tree she lives in is at one part of the adventure, in the locales portion, and how the harpy reacts and what she does, etc when the party shows up is at the rear of the adventure MANY pages away.

Fuck You Tweet. I reject.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 1 Comment

Howler

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

howl
By J.V. West
Random Order Creations
OSRIC/3.5
Level 1-3

The wind whips through the standing stones making the hill moan like something alive. Or perhaps something dead. You stand atop its barren crown. There is a whisper in the darkness. There is evil afoot…Whether you come to the hill for glory, riches, or by mere chance you might not walk away the same as when you came…if at all

This is a small six room tomb complex, with a seventh encounter outside. Inside are mostly spiders and and the big bad while outside is an aggressive wandering monster table. Those seven encounters take twenty-two pages to describe, so there’s clearly an issue with tercity in this product. It DOES do a decent job from time to time, a more old school flavor than most OGL stuff did, anyway. The primary drawback is the shortness, the verbosity, and the lack of treasure. (I thought I bought a OSRIC version but it’s clearly OGL. I don’t know, I probably fucked up.)

The adventure has at least one redeeming quality: it takes liberty with the rules. Wolves with cumulative fear effects. Spiders with new poison. Weird curses. It has no problem providing a new rule/ruling in order to handle an effect that is either outside of the rules or doesn’t use the rules for a crutch. Many adventures will try and explain everything through the existing rules. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen a monster released from a stasis field that is triggered by a contingency spell attached to a magic mouth spell. While I loathe statis field monsters, the whole “need to use the rules” things infuriates me more. Just make up a rule and move on with your life. This adventure does that and it’s refreshing to see. It also takes a paragraph where one sentence would do, and two paragraphs where two sentences would do, to explain the rule, but, well, let’s talk about that a bit.

I’m going to pick on this poor product to make a point that would probably be better illustrated in another, even more verbose, product. Sorry.

The text here is verbose. Very long. To little effect. Seven encounters over 22 pages is excessive. If we ignore all of the fluff, background, stats, etc, then we’re still looking at an average of almost one pager per encounter. Still too long. I need to make sure I’m clear here: I’m not complaining for the sake of complaining. I’m not looking for the ultra-tersity of Palace of the Vampire Queen. Those sorts of products have little place today. Nor am I looking to have everything explained to me. I’m looking for something on a different axis altogether: is this useful for the DM running the game? And even more hard-core: At the table?

In adventures, I assert that’s the definition of Well Written. Does it help the DM run it? At the table? Some abstract linkage, or friend of a friend idea doesn’t count. You can’t provide a six page backstory and assert that it’s useful to the DM because they might get an idea. I’m sure they might. But the primary purpose of the adventure is not as a bit of fluff to inspire. Sure, some folks might use it that way. I might use it to wipe my ass, but no matter how good it is as toilet paper that doesn’t reflect how good it is at helping the dm AT THE TABLE.

In this light you can start to see common themes in what I complain about. I like monster reference sheets because the DM can use them as reference at the table. I like a dense and overloaded map legend because it also acts as kind of reference at the table. (I’m not referring to the map complexity, but rather showing other information than room proximity on a map.) I like evocative writing because it can communicate a lot of information in a very small amount of space, leveraging the DM’s imagination through inspiration. And why is it important that it be terse? Because the DM needs to use the fucking thing AT THE TABLE. The party advances to room six. You look down at the book, at room six. You see eight paragraphs of information. How do you scan that and provide a fun experience for the players? You clearly can’t. We resort to highlighters, or taking notes, or annotating the maps, all to pull out the key information that the DM needs to know at a glance.

A well written product doesn’t do this. It’s focused. It communicates the key information quickly and evocatively. This is not a well written product. It uses A LOT of words when only a few would do, making it hard to parse and run.

It is, however, trying to communicate some interesting things. I already noted that it tries new effects out, which is great. Magic items get a “better than dull book” description, like a gold ring with a sapphire, and mundane items like an emerald encrusted silver dagger. (even though the treasure seems light for an gold=xp game, but, again, I think I’m looking at the OGL version not the OSRIC version.In my experience, the designers never update the treasure, but maybe I’m wrong this time …) A small ruling on the effects of sneezing on monster ambushing. A room of magic mushrooms that you can take with you. Foreshadowing the main monster through stuff the party finds is a great way to build tension, and it’s done here. The read-aloud mentioned scurrying creatures in the rooms with giants spiders.

There is a GREAT section on an NPC you find the dungeon. He’s wounded. If you save him, he’s still a bit delusional and he’s paralyzed from the waist down. One of his potential lines is “I … I have soiled myself and I’m sorry for the many things I did in life …” Great! Well, the exact wording could be better, but it gets the core idea across really well for that particular rant. The party might even get a hint off of him that a monster is about to attack, if they notice his suddenly maddening eyes.

This has something to say, it just has a hard time getting it across. A second giant spider attack is hidden in the body text, and unbolded, unlike all other monsters. It takes over a page to describe skeletons attacking when you dig up a grave. Yeah, there’s a curse and some foreshadowing, but, still, over a page?

Pay What You Want @ DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/125564/Howler-LL?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 5 Comments

Sepulcher of the Mountain God

Posted on June 27, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

smg
By Paul Wolfe
Purple Duck Games
DCC
Level 1

Braving the hidden tomb of an ancient tribal king, the adventurers become embroiled in a quest directly from Ira, the Mountain God – find the Skull of Vyache and his magic club, Alceon, that were stolen by Bashkim and the twisted minions of Gelihedres.

This is a 17-room mostly linear tomb/cave complex. It makes an effort, but ultimately provides lots of text to little effect and the linear nature of the adventure detracts. It turns into a slog, facing room after room, with little for the DM to get excited about.

I want to focus on the descriptions, which means the DM text and read-aloud. One of the themes I go back to time and again is the purpose of the text in an adventure. The purpose of the the text is to inspire the DM. This is, after all, a play aid. It’s meant to be a crutch for the GM to use in their game. The DM, or, rather, the DM’s imagination, is the single greatest ally the designer has in their attempt to provide value to the DM. To this end the designers text needs to be targeted to the DM, to inspire them, to plant a seed in head that can grow. The goal is, after the DM reads the entry, to have their mind racing. To have a fractal explosion of possibilities explode in their head. That’s the impact of a good description: the possibilities it generates excites and inspires.

If I was describing a room and wrote “The rooms is large” or even “the room is big” or “the room is huge” then a sort of very generic room idea seed is transferred from the writer to the DM. In this case the idea is rather abstract. I was very specific in my writing so the idea transferred is pretty boring. Is any of that appropriate for a Lovecraft adventure? Cyclopean, echoing, the top lost in shadows. In fact, I would suggest that both Cyclopean and Echoing are better than large, he top being lost in shadows is better than both. The best descriptions show, instead of telling. “Endless footfall echoes” shows. “The top lost in shadows” shows. “Large” tells. “Cyclopean” also tells, but it also conjures up more specific imagery than “large.” And what’s the key: specificity.

Let’s take a look at one of the descriptions in the adventure. This comes from room 1: “A larger, decorated corpse lies on a black stone bier at the back of the chamber.” Corpse isn’t the greatest choice, but my main beef here is “decorated.” It’s abstract. It’s a generalization. Decorated, but HOW? Garlands of fresh Luna blooms drape over the dessicated skin? I’m a suck ass writer but Garlands are better than “decorated.” What’s a luna blossom? Who cares (as far as the written text is concerned), the DM can make it up. The important part is planting the seed in the DM’s imagination.

There’s another very good (negative) example later on. The heads and shoulders of a foul giant are carved into a wall. Why is the giant foul? Is it leering? Misshapen? “Foul giant” is generic and abstract. The key is to be specific. Not overly so, not three sentences where a phrase or better word will do.

I’ve picked two examples out of the text but the general state is that genericism and lack of specificity. This is combined with overly long DM text. A decent college try is made with some item descriptions, but again they come off as long, full of things we don’t need to know, trivia. Similarly the hooks are quite nonspecific and little more than generic crap. Your god calls you, rumors of treasure, you’re related to someone who disappeared. That’s not really an effort at all. When all of this is combined with the rather linear map, there’s little to recommend here.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/104748/AL-2-Sepulcher-of-the-Mountain-God-DCC?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #88

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d88
The Door from Everywhere
By Roger E. Moore
3e
Level 6

A ruin with some doors that can teleport you to nine different locations/encounters throughout the forgotten realms, as well as a Zent jerk that shows up to fuck with the party while they “explore” the doors. Six pages of fucking background, read-aloud, and nonsense. Oh, for the glory days of Dungeon … and then a full page on the historical context of the ruins! A page and a half for a couple of orcs guarding a door! Page after page after page of meaningless descriptions and how things work and historical context. This is probably the stupidest fucking adventure I’ve ever seen in Dungeon. Teleport to a new area and have an encounter! This monstrosity takes 25 pages to describe ten encounters. Moore should be ashamed of writing it and Perkins should be ashamed of letting it through.

Thirds of Purloined Vellum
By Graham Robert Scott
3e
Level 1

This is a decent investigation and then assault, in a city. Run around chasing clues from place to place to discover a set of papers, and then assault the townhome where they are being kept. This isn’t terrible. The usual Too Much Information background, but it does provide a nice summary table of the clues to be found, as well as some overlapping of the clues and some other street-life encounters to mix things up a bit. Some advice on running interviews is welcome also. Somewhere someone said “Hmmm, going to be a lot of interviews in this one, as the party asks around. You know … since the adventure relies on that then let’s give the DM some advice on it!” Regardless of its actual value, they tried. If you could yank out the Slave to Formatting state blocks, etc, then you’d have a decent little adventure. Maybe a little light on color and flavor. Of course, it IS full of state blocks and other Slave To The Standards formatting. It does rely on the party being nice people, for the hook, and saving a merchant under attack. That’s akin to “this is the adventure I have for you tonight, save the guy if you want to play D&D.”

Make it Big
by Jeff Quick
3e
Level 9

This is a cute side-trek. Hill giants blackmail the party: work for us for we’ll flatten that nearby village. There’s a great line in this: “You look around, and maybe you think ‘these giants got good caves, plenty to eat, lots of people to steal from … a pretty good life.’” They want the party to make beds, pots, etc, so they can live the high life. They bully and harass the party, if they agree to craft for them, all with the threat of the village destruction hanging over their heads. I could only hope that the party would agree, then get disgusted, say “fuck this shit” and strike back. I think it’s set up in a way that is not forced and yet gets the party into a crafting situation where that can occur. The caves are not overly described (yeah!) but it could use a few more examples of bullying giants/flavor.

The Seventh Arm
By Tito Leati
3e
Level 7

Textbook Dungeon Magazine adventure exploring an old tower. A very long intro. Mostly linear. Choices have no impact. REALLY long encounter descriptions that describe little of value to the DM. The hook has the party saving someone because it’s the good thing to do. A parkour chase across roofs either ends with the bad guy getting away or, if the party make a zillion skill check, him falling to his death. IE: No impact on the adventure. This is a capital offense in Brycelandia. Exploring some ruins the party encounters bugbears. You can’t talk to them/question them … they fear their leader! How many fucking times do we have to read this bullshit justification? What surprise is going to be spoiled? Do you really need this crap? Isn’t’ it much better to reward the smart party, and take advantage of scheming plots and everything else that a social element adds? No? You say you’re a hitty DM and you run D&D like it’s a mini’s combat game? Oh, ok, as long as we’re all clear that you’re a tool …. Anyway, dungeon under a ruined tower that is mostly linear and uninteresting. There are four or so factions, but not really, you can’t really talk to them or exploit them or play with them, they are really just four different main groups of creatures.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 4 Comments

Slumbering Ursine Dunes

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

sud
By Chris Kutalik
Hydra Collective
Labyrinth Lord
(Mostly HD2-4 … except for the demigods. Mostly.]

This is a pointcrawl with 25 locations and two dungeon-like areas. It’s set in giant sand dunes with paths running along the bottom and has several factions and a decent amount of weirdness. It would make a decent wilderness setting if you were looking for someplace to locate a dungeon. IE: I think it works best as a locale that the characters visit repeatedly, more so than a separate location that is the target of the adventure. It’s the age-old hex-crawl problem: why are they crawling?

Easy stuff first. A pointcrawl is just like a hexcrawl of dungeon, except abstracted. The map is laid out with nodes, the adventure locations, connected by lines. You can ignore the lines, and climb the dunes to go a different direction, but it’s mostly like an old text adventure game. Exits in the wilderness are E, NE, or S. The dunes are made quite challenging to climb, but the explicit advice is to allow it, if the party really wants to.

While the product is 68 pages, the actually pointcrawl locations don’t take up much room at all, maybe six pages if the art were removed. Only a couple of the entries have much size to them, with most being one or two short paragraphs. Centaur tollkeeps, hermit in a zardoz head, antidiluvian lake of super-intelligent and civilized beavers and so on. Mixed in with the “normal” encounters are the two dungeon encounters, a golden barge buried in the sand and the tower of a local demi-god, who is at home. Also mixed in are some encounters with the various factions. Pirates in the service of a local were-shark, the demi-god and his centaur and bear-men followers, an old adventurer and his kin, and then the evil elves. Oh, the evil elves. These guys have quite strong melnibonean influences and are the best “haughty evil assholes” I’ve seen since, perhaps, the GURPS Fantasy 2/Madlands “Soulless” jerkwads. Oh, I love jerkwads. The “nice” one has a chair and table made of old peasants. That’s sweet.

The monsters and treasures are great, exactly what I would expect. Want a healing potion? No generic shit in this, you’ll instead be drinking the pure white soul of someone who has drowned in a pond. You can get them from a “dude” who lives in the pond. He likes it when the pirates drown people in the pond. What else? How about some undead? Drowned corpses with long hair hair resembling willow leaves swaying and singing eerily in the night as they hang from trees. Ouchies!

The factions add a pretty good social element to the dunes and almost everyone is willing to talk under some circumstance or another. It never feels like the adventure is forcing you into something. The monsters are great. I don’t know enough Slavic mythology to know which witch is which, but they feel fresh and interesting and that they make sense in the environment. The treasures are great, with enough interesting bits that the party will want to keep some and be tempted by others and be horrified by others still.

If there’s a problem it is, as I alluded to above, the problem that all hexcrawls have: Why? And you know, I should back off of that. It’s not a problem, it’s more expectation setting. Much like the old MERP products, this thing describes a place and provides PLENTY of opportunities to get into trouble. (All Hail Discordia!) But it provides no over-arching plot. The points and factions have goals and things that will happen and there is definitely some elements of plot, but no overarching structure. You need to bring the adventure. There’s nothing wrong with that. In that respect it’s more like a hexcrawl that you use as the players travel between City A and the B, or a wilderness that you use when they travel between town and dungeon, or a city supplement. This is a resource for running an adventure, not an adventure in and of itself. It’s a wilderness-type thing you can drop in as the party: need an oracle, need a curse removed, are looking for a dungeon/object.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/140450/Slumbering-Ursine-Dunes?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 2, Reviews, The Best | Leave a comment

England Upturn’d

Posted on June 20, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

By Barry Blatt
LotFP
LotFP

This sandboxy thing is set in historical England (Duh!) right before the civil war. It’s big, at 128 pages. It’s full of people and places and things to get into trouble with. It has three horrific possible endings. It’s hard for me to see how you can use this, effectively, in play without a couple of read throughs and MUCH notes taking.

You get a rough outline of what’s going on, a couple of pages each on the major NPC’s, a description of the area, in very general terms along with some potential complications in each area. You also get a description of the major adventure villages/locations, again with things to complicate the goings-on, a brief timeline, and a brief description of three possible endings as well as some historical context. All in about 128 pages.

I like my adventures with a strong social element. In dungeons I usually talk about faction play, with various groups wants different things, and perhaps even factions within the factions, to spice things up even more. In towns and villages I like it when the various folks have some sort of relationship with someone else. They hate betty, they want george’s leather apron, etc. This spices things up and provides motivation for the party and for the NPC’s. Besides, with A LOT of stuff going on then there’s the chance for more chaos, and I think D&D thrives on chaos. This sandbox does that. Just about every place you go and every person you meet has something going on. They hate Bill. They are secretly an X. You can find Y. On and on and on it goes. This is the primary strength of the adventure. Lots going on, lots to interact with.

That is also the weakness of the adventure. It’s not that there is too much but rather that it is organized rather poorly. This combines with a nudge, nudge, wink, wink writing style that is a bit too verbose for its own good. This is not a book for running a game at the table. In spite of the 128 pages there’s no real reference material for the DM that’s targeted at actually running the thing, except a map. There are timelines, hidden in various areas. There are random people on the road tables, or rumor tables, scattered about. The list of potential NPC’s is pretty long.

What this needs, badly, are two reference sheets. One needs to show the various timelines, expanded with the various NPC’s. Assuming the party didn’t just show up and fuck things up, the main plot would move along like this and the various little NPC’s subplots would move along like this, along with a cross-reference of where they would take place. Reference sheet two needs a list of various NPC’s. Their various personalities, in three or four words, where they are, and what they want and/or how they interact with the timeline.

It’s not that there’s too much content. It’s that the content is not organized enough for the amount that there is. Overlapping major NPC’s plotlines, all of the minor plotlines, the various NPC’s, and the scattered things of interest. In particular, there are some clues scattered about and the party is going to need to be poked in certain directions if this is going to be anything other than aimless wandering put to an end by Call The Stars. Bringing everything under control, dropping hints, channeling the party, and responding to their various wanderings, who they meet and what they see and how it relates to the larger plot, is what’s missing here.

What are your expectations for a 128 page adventure that takes place over a four or five days? Is this a fluff book, that you expect to rip apart, take copious notes, and get inspired from, or is this a resource to run, generally as written, at the table? If it’s the later, it needed to do a MUCH better job at saving the DM time and effort.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/183865/England-Upturnd?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #87

Posted on June 18, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d87
I think this issue had a CD in it? But my second-hand copy does not. 🙁 Nor does it have a cover.

The Raiders of Galath’s Roost
By Skip WIlliams
3e
Level 1

This is a rough one to review. It’s essentially an adventure in two parts: an investigation around a ruined keep and then an assault on a Zhent citadel. The first half is a pretty nice ruined keep, and environs around it. Just about everything you find is related to everything else, with lots of clues and one thing leading to another. This includes the wandering monster table, which is both useful for the overall mystery and in what’s in the ruins. Things to talk to, places to explore, a nice variety of environments, creatures, and types of encounters. Almost a picture perfect example of a nice small build-up area to a main adventure. This then transitions into THE WORST WALL OF TEXT I’VE EVER SEEN. The second half, a Zhent citadel, is nigh incomprehensible because of the wall of text issue. Two sentences, or less of room description gives way to a half page stat block, or more, with other “Requirements” providing lots of words and little usefulness. It does have a nice order of battle for the citadel which is always useful for an inhabited area. Both areas also have decent maps, with lots of ways to get between places that add much needed variety and tactical options. A couple of empty crypts in the ruined keep seem out of place, but one of the hooks is nice: one of the characters relatives was involved in the original siege of the keep and has left you a map. I like this adventure. I like the beginning a lot, especially, but the second half is essentially unusable as written.

The Cradle of Madness
By Rob Lee
3e
Level 6

A mediocre, at best, adventure with few to no redeeming qualities. It’s got a nice column long read-aloud, those are always fun, right? How about making the main enemies cultists who all have a suicide tooth that they use to kill themselves if captured. No? How about death traps everywhere in the dungeon. No, again? I know what’s fun! How about an arch with a high save disintegrate trap! And if you fail you also take a lot of damage! With a high spot check! You know … if only some of those cultists could have been captured,, I bet they could tell us all about those traps! Look, I ain’t got a problem with death traps, especially at high levels, but I do have a thing about stacking the deck against the party. It’s adversarial, and D&D ain’t adversarial. If your DM is adversarial then tell them to Piss Off and go get a new DM. It’s like, at high level, you had a no save death arch and put in a note “any augury/commune/legend lor, etc spells will show the arch to be friendly and giving a boon.” This is just some lame ass shotgun shack evil temple with lame theming, lame opponents, and little connection between the hook/plot (A damien-like Tharizdun pregnancy) and the actual environment.

Glacier Season
By David Eckelberry
3e
Level 15

Eeek! The title art, of a dragonborn, gives me horrible flashback memories of Hoard of the Dragon Queen! Man, Hoard sucked shit. This is a journey to, and then assault on, an ancient white dragons lair. The lead into the lair has about a zillion ice golems. Every time the party turns around there’s an ice golem attack. The journey to the lair is linear, boring, and the encounters mostly disconnected from the actual adventure, except for one or two. (IE: in contrast to the first adventure in this issue which did an excellent job of tying everything together.) “Bob wear a hat of disguise and has an undetectable alignment spell.” Ug. Lazy. The dragon’s lair has a nice entrance thing going on, but the inside just feels like room after room crammed full of high-level monsters. I’m not particularly fond of G2/Jarl, but it has A LOT more character than this place does. Has there ever been a good dragon adventure? There’s the Kramer one, but even that one did a better job on the environs than the lair, IIRC.

Valley of the Snails
By W. Jason Peck
3e
Level 1

You’re implored to go find a guys missing friend, and the signs lead to a valley. He’s deranged, because of some goblins running around the valley and their blowgun poison. It’s long. It’s not very interesting (especially compared to the first adventure in this issue, also a level 1) and it had the stats for a small wood box. Yes, that’s righ, a box … used in a fox trap. ‘Wood. 1” thick. hard=5, hp=10, dc=16’. A hidden valley, hidden ways down, weird things in it … it should be great … but it comes off as boring. Tediously long and boring.

The Shalm’s Dark Song
By Tito Leati
3e
Level 5

Uh, an ogre and a druid in a 4-room temple. I guess this is the 3e version of a side-trek? It’s too bad this is so simple, it’s got a nice little setup and (possible hook.) The origins of the temple are very folklorish “I’m throwing my hammer in the air, if it don’t fall back I’ll do it!” sort of thing. Related to that it’s written in a … plot-neutral manner that allows it to be slotted into a larger campaign. “When the party needs an oracle/question answered then drop this thing in.” It even can end with the “Saint” reappearing. That’s all nice. The cartoony bad guy and simplicity of things is a turn off though. Find a good temple and slot this hook/background into that.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 2 Comments

Fever-Dreaming Marlinko

Posted on June 15, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

marl
By Chris Kutalik
Hydra Cooperative

Visit Marlinko, a borderlands city where life takes a strange fever-dream cast …

I suck at describing good things. This thing is Goooooood!

At its core this is a city supplement. It describes a city. It describes a city in which EVERY. SINGLE. THING. Is something that the party can interact/have and adventure with. It is PACKED FULL of adventure seeds. Of quick hit text that strikes in a sentence or two and then moves on. It is one of the clearest examples of excellent writing that is appropriate and directly useful to the GM.

There are these things we know generically as “adventures.” Some of them are traditional plot based things. Some of them are more neutral locations that can be used in your own campaign arcs. Some of them are event based. Some of them are investigations, or mysteries. Some of them are hex crawls. This thing is …. Hmmmm. It’s some combination of a hex crawl and one of those neutral “module” (the old definition of module) locations. Except it’s in a city. And it’s one of the best city supplements every produced, if not the best. If you’ve seen Towers of Kryshal, or the city section of ASE1 then you’re on the right track. But this isn’t Kryshal or ASE1, it’s something different. It’s a all about the city. More, it’s all about DOING things in the city. Not static. Not a shopkeep with lanterns. It’s dynamic. Things are going on. I could be wrong, but I think EVERYTHING in this place can be interacted with, or, rather, has something going on that that can directly impact the characters. It’s not abstracted. It’s not mundane. It’s not interactivity like “you can buy a lantern” or “she’s a fortune teller.” That’s not interactivity, at least not in the way I use the word in these reviews. I use Interactivity in a way that means driving the fun forward. This product is ALL that definition.

I talk about this a lot in dungeons and other place descriptions. Inevitably there’s some a room description that goes something like “10. This is a bedroom. It has a bed. There is a wardrobe. It has clothes in it. There are sheets, blankets and pillows on the bed. There is a lantern on a side table next to the bed.” That is a shitty fucking description. (It’s also the soul of tercity compared to some of the descriptions I’ve seen.) It describes a normal bedroom. I know what a bedroom looks like. You know what a bedroom looks like. More to the point, the bedroom and its contents are irrelevant to the adventure. It is doing nothing to advance the adventure, or for the party to interact with or get into trouble with, or anything like that. Understand, I’m not complaining that’s there is, essentially, an empty room. That kind of shit can sometimes have a purpose. I’m complaining that the adventure was taken up with a bunch of useless text for the DM to wade through. If you’re going to write something then write something that advances the adventure, or the fun, in some way. Similarly, in a town supplement, the entries are full of inn descriptions, or shops, or other stuff that is boringly described. The price of food. Price lists. Boring normal fantasy stuff that is nothing more than window dressing in a B-Movie.

Not. This. Everything in this contributes to the fun. Everything is a hook. Everything is interactive. No boring old descriptions here. The town government building gets a two line description. Here’s the second sentence: “While technically sitting in Golden Swine territory, the structure is open and available to the bribery and graft needs of all citizens.” That pretty much tells you everything to know, in one sentence, and is focused on HOW the party, and/or adventure, will interact with the council. The plaza, outside, has a one sentence description. Here’s the second half: “[the plaza is] filled with clusters of citizens, eccentrics and grifters (though that may be a redundant set of distinctions).” Again, this immediately gives you the feel for the place. You now know, instinctively, how to run the place and what color to add. You mind flies with the possibilities. And it’s clear HOW they will interact with the party and how, possibly, the party will interact with them. Time after time, Place after place. NPC after NPC, this sort of thing takes place. The hiring hall, how they treat scab hirelings, and how they could picket/protest. Complications! Fun! There are a couple of townhome/dungeons provided for two of the major NPC’s/sites, but most of this is directly targeted at the sort of quick hit things that parties get into trouble with, or are looking for, in town. Buying a house? It’s in there! Temples & unguents? Lots of places to go! … with lots of creepiness and/or hooks!

I love cities like this. They directly enhance play, providing a diversion from the dungeons and wilderness with none of the dullness usually associated with Boringtown of BoringLand.

A perfect home base for your party.

This is available at DriveThru,https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/151165/FeverDreaming-Marlinko?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 11 Comments

Come To Daddy

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

c2d
By Anders Lager
Lazy Sod Press
OSR
Levels 4-6

“The battle with the barrow-draugr had taken the most of our energy, and we barely escaped with our lives. The gnome was sorely injured in the leg and everyone was frozen to the bone. The horses and most of our supplies were still left in the draugr cave, where we had to abandon it to save our hides. Times looked bleak and despair had set in for real when Halross shouted: “-Hey, I see a farm over there” A farm out here in the outback? Strange, but in our current situation the prospect of a warm fire and some hot soup seemed like a gift from heaven. Slowly, we started our descent alone the snow filled slopes towards the cosy farm.”

Do you like Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Do you want to play it as an adventure? This is decent. Not great, but certainly better than average. It’s also REALLY not my style. I’m suspicious about my review because of that.

This is a small “survive the night” type adventure set in a rural cabin/farm. It’s decent for what it is, and could be used in any horror type game, including CoC or even planetside. 86 pages for something this short means a loose description style and a lot of support material. It could use a little shoring up in the treasure department.

You’ve seen this sort of thing before, in numerous movies. There’s a cabin in the Woods, the hills have eyes as well as having chainsaws made in Texas. Cannibal murder family meets travellers. Mayhem ensues. This is good and bad. If you’ve ever seen one of these movies then you immediately have the vibe the designer is going for. There’s a line here, too close and you are emulating instead of leveraging. Too far away and you can’t leverage the source material to inspire the DM. This preys on those same sort of memories that my love of folklore in adventures does, this kind of appeal to some deeper psychology found in the soul. Both the DM and the players get to leverage this as they play. The DM is inspired and the players are preloaded with whatever (in this case fear of being hunted and dreamlike powerlessness?) and all of that leveraged for the adventure.

The end result of all of this, in this case, is that the adventure can very nearly be run with just the maps and maybe a monster stat block reference. There’s even some nice maps on the designer’s site for you to print out. Read the adventure once, print out the maps, make a couple of notations, write up a monster ref sheet (which the designers really should have done, considering all of the other reference data provided) and maybe chuck the trap and wandering tables on to it. You could then just about the run the thing without the book after a single read through. That’s … good and bad.Good because, as I mentioned above, the DM grks the adventure immediately. Bad because … well … where the value?

Oh sure … tentacle monsters, horrible aberrations, mutilated prisoners … the little touches of horror here and there build the tension well. Finding any one of them pretty much tips off the party and they are scattered around pretty thick. (More on this later.) But … +3 short sword. Silver necklace. Silver brooch. +1 battle axe. Wand of fear. The treasure is boring and very little of it is themed to the setting/adventure. That’s a pretty major miss.

The entire adventure pretty much relies on one thing: the party staying in the cabin with the family and not catching on till dark. Almost any poking around at all will reveal some kind of horror that will set off the alarm bells in the parties head. I have NO idea how to introduce this thing and make it work. Maybe just a “Sure, you find a little farmhouse and the family is willing to put you up for the night,” ANYTHING else and the party will know something is up. Maybe it’s just me and my courageous group of Murderhobos, but a DM that says ANYTHING is called into question fast. “You have a nice dinner …” ‘NO! No I don’t! I don’t eat ANYTHING! Or drink ANYTHING! I triple lock the door, we all sleep in the same room and post a double guard! Also, I start working on the floorboards and ceiling in case we need a fast escape!’ The adventure encourages you to get the party to trust the hick family. Not. Gonna. Happen.

There’s this taking the bait thing that happens at one shots, con games and sometimes in home games. Everyone knows it a setup but you take the bait anyway because that’s the adventure and you’re here for a good time. That seems out of place here. The odds are weighed against the party and playing this in a Take The Bait fashion seems unfair, because of the lopsided nature. But without taking the bait then the DM must rely on under describing … which again feels a bit … unfair? I just don’t see how to use this.

Once it gets going there’s another problem: why do they stay? Why not just run away? The obvious answer is because half the party is drugged/captured, etc from the meal served … which is also the official version of events. I’m not sure about this. Splitting the party, or asking half the group (or more) to sit out the game is not a recipe for success in the fun department. The only way I can see working is to have the party (or the undrugged character(s)) find the prisoners pretty quickly after the inciting events. This provides a motivation, beyond the party proper, to stick around.

It’s good at what it does. Twisted family. A ghost that could be friendly. Tunnels under the land with hidden entrances. Twisted science experiment creatures. Things from another realm. Scarecrows. Creepy dolls. The dumb brute family member. The knife family member. Pa. Ma. Little girl. Everything you want in a Texas Chainsaw adventure is here. It should be fairly easy to run (if they hook in and stick around.) You could use this in CoC, modern, 1920’s, D&D/Fantasy, and probably even Sci-Fi. The text is long, but you need almost none of it at the table once you do a single quick read-through, especially is you annotate the maps.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/160424/Come-to-Daddy-SW-version?1892600

Posted in Level 4, No Regerts, Reviews | 7 Comments