The Goblin Market

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

gobmar
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

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The Lost Temple of Forgotten Evil

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

ltfe
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

Posted in Reviews | 9 Comments

The Sunday Stellar – DDAL4-04 – The Marionette

Posted on May 8, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

mar

Yeah, that’s right, it’s not the Sunday Suck anymore … again.

By Robert Alaniz
WOTC
5E
Levels 1-4

A Vistani fortuneteller has called you out by name during the Burgomaster’s private reading. She raved of an army of the dead, a delicate powderbox, and a beautiful yet dangerous woman. Now the Burgomaster wants to know why you’re more important than he is…

This four-hour adventure is in four parts. The party starts by being asked/hired to look into a missing wagon, bringing an injured person back to town. This is followed by a well done seance in part two, and then a zombie/undead attack on the town in part three. Part four is a dungeon/exploring an old manor home with some undead inside. I’m going to complain a lot upfront, but this is an ok adventure.

The first part of the adventure is mostly disconnected from the rest, providing only the introduction of a couple of NPC’s, one of which provides motivation for rescue in part four and one of which is the villain in part four. Hmmm, I may have been too harsh; the introduction of the characters prior to meeting them again IS good design, but the particular implementation in this adventure is not very strong. The “rescue” is really nonexistent and then the NPC’s are in the hospice. A little more advice/forewarning for the DM, in order to orient the NPC’s the proper way, would have been a nice addition. There’s also a bit of confusion with monsters. Harpies are mentioned in the adventure overview, and again in the appendix, but I don’t believe they are actually introduced anywhere in the encounter. The loss of a token combat hurts nothing though.

The seance sequence in part two is quite well done. The read-aloud is actually god, the mood setting for the DM is good, and the encounters, again, provide forewarning of what’s to be experienced later in the part four dungeon/manor. The part three undead attack is laid out more like a zombie movie than a typical D&D monster fight, which is a very good thing. Zombies ripping out throats of villagers and so on. The manor home is more of a slow burn, with a decent number of lead-you-by-the-nose hints, a few monster attacks, and then the big bad. There’s a decent number of tricks and traps in the home, with at least a token nod to tipping the players off beforehand. For example, the entrance hall has a glass roof that the read-aloud notes is leaking badly. Smart players will ask more questions, which may save them from the water-rotten collapsing floor. This happens FAR less often in adventures then I would like to see and I’m happy to see the designer here taking advantage of it.

There’s a plot shield here, and piece of shit plot shields (Ooops, redundant!) always piss me off. IE: “If the party killed Bob in the last adventure then the Dark powers have saw fit to restore him for their own unfathomable reasons.” No, I know the reason. It’s because of crap ass design, that’s why. Either you don’t put the dude in harms way or you don’t bring him back to life/make him critical for the further adventure.How about a big, fat, FUCK YOU. Why the hell even play the game if the player’s actions have no impact? So they can experience “The Story”? Fuck you and fuck your story. Write something that doesn’t take the god damn player agency away from them. The preceding diatribe has been a service of Fuck You Crappy Design Monitoring service.

While I’m on the subject of “bad design”, let me point out a few more issues before I get to the better parts. The rumors here are lame fact based boringness. Compare “Shadows have been seen near the graveyard” with FAR FAR better statements made by a little ghost girl later in the adventure: “She doesn’t know about her affliction, but says ‘it must be very bad because it makes Mommy very sad and Daddy very angry.’” That’s fucking great. The little ghost girls gets some wonderfully evocative lines to supplement the facts relayed. The rumors should have been done in the same manner.

The choices made are lazy in some places. In the first part you’re sent to go find Vasilly “and his friend.” “And his friend” is mentioned several times. When you find the body its “his friends body.” The poor SOB never gets a name. This is generic, abstracted detail and D&D adventures are seldom good when they rely on that sort of abstracted detail. Specificity. That’s the key to being evocative. Hmmm, lame/weak “you’re in a bar” hook. Not lame because its in a bar but lame because it’s boring and uninteresting done.

Some of the NPC’s get a nice little “roleplaying Bob” tip section. These are a little long for my tastes but their inclusion IS helpful. In particular, the last line, a quote from the NPC, conveys more information than the rest of the tip combined. Recall tha the little girl quotes were quite well done as well, and there is a great scene with a town crier that, again, uses direct quotes and it nicely done. “Oyez, Oyez, Oyez! The following is a decree from the most
distinguished and generous Burgomaster Randovich, to which we are all indebted…in one form or another.” and then also “Let it also be known that… Oleg, it is your turn to light the village lamps tonight.” A single, disembodied groan rises from the back of the crowd, oozing with disappointment. “That is all!” That’s good shit. It’s specific. It’s Olegs turn. He’s unhappy. That’s what players will remember and that the sort of thing that helps the DM out. Not a railroad. Not detailing everything, but instead providing a hard, impactful flavor burst.

I’m going to skip more commentary on part 2, a very excellent seance, and part four, the pretty decent manor crawl, and instead make some comments about part three, an undead attack on the town.

The idea is that straight out of the (non-combat) seance you are confronted by an undead attack on the town. You see four things going on at the same time and need to decide what you will do. Folks will recall that Deep Carbon did this is GREAT impact, and those leading sections were one of the reason is got labeled Grim/Dark: If you did option A then the people in Option B died, usually in front of you and in a very sad way. This being 5e it’s not QUITE as bad, and a splitting up party is assumed/advice is given.

This kind of thing works best when the players know the choices they are making. They have to KNOW that by letting Bob die they will instead save Carl who can do Y for them. This section is strongest when it illustrates those choices. The mayor yells “The food stocks are in there! We’ll die this winter!” when you see the burning building. The players know the consequences; it’s not just a burning building with crates in them. One undead seemingly directs the attack. It’s pretty obvious that if you kill him then you can cut off the head, so to speak. These are good choices presented to the players.

Two other choices are less well done. Zombies have some people cornered in an ally, in one, and in the other a man in a burning jail cell says he’ll reward the players. In both cases the reward is less obvious and more abstract “doing good.” Both have real rewards, one of the future zombie victims knows some of the map layout in the part 4 dungeon. The prisoner does have a nice reward. Instead, having the prisoner SHOW his potion and the set of magic keys he has, that would instead provide a concrete choice for the players. Likewise, putting the map-NPC in servant’s livery, or somehow communicating the reward he has, makes the choice more meaningful for the players.

Another comment here, specifically about the zombie scene/choice. The read-aloud telegraphs the “correct solution” and that’s never good. The second sentence reads “You may be able to distract and lure the monsters near a stack of heavy timbers that can be released upon them, pinning and restraining them, but you will have to offer a convincing distraction.” Instead, a map of the scene, showing a stack of precarious timbers, a pulley hook to swing on, or some other things, typical to a village, would have allowed some DCC-style creative solutions. There’s nothing wrong with providing the logs, but providing a map showing an interesting environment, with lots of stuff WITHOUT THINKING HOW THEY WILL BE USED allows for the creative and interesting solutions that good D&D thrives upon. I love seeing the party come up with a stupid plan. The read-aloud telegraphs the solution. It’s too bad that Organized Play is in such a state that this needs to be done. EVERY encounter is an opportunity to not roll to hit but instead creatively solve the problem.

Shit, I lied. I will comment on the manor. The little ghost girl is friendly, but is directed to provide some scares. A general suggestion, with her dead pet goose, is given at the start, but I think many of the rooms would have been stronger with a suggestion of what she may do here. The ghost goose on the dining room table, and so on. Finally, this section has A LOT of callbacks to the seance earlier. This sort of “first you get a hint then you get to use the hint if youwere fucking paying attention” is something I wish more adventures would do. The seance is excellent, in part two, and part four is made much stronger through the use of callbacks. And some of those callbacks are VERY creepy. Puppet people are not uncommon in adventures, but the marionette’d village rin this one is very well done indeed.

This is a pretty decent adventure, and stellar by Adventurer’s League standards. With a little work, a strong edit and clean up, a little more focus, this could really be a top tier adventure.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/178795/DDAL0404-The-Marionette-5e?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Adventurers League, Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #81

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d81
This is the last issue with 2E adventures in it. What fresh hell awaits us, gentle readers?

Here’s a letter from this issue:
“Recently there have two modules in which kenku NPC’s talk. According to the Monstrous Manual, kenku don’t speak by communicate with each other telepathically. Has there been a rule change that I am unaware of, or are we just throwing away the rules with ‘artistic license.’”
-Royce Williams, via email.

The response is not calling Royce a little bitch. Instead they offer a solution of gesturing and promise to catch such mistakes in the future. Were I editor I would have taken the opportunity to publicly shame ROyce, noting that his viewpoint is everything wrong with D&D, instead of pandering to him and enforcing the view that Royce’s viewpoint has any merit.

A Race Against Time
By Kent Ertman
AD&D
Levels 1-3

What’s in the box? WHAT’S IN THE BOX! I want to not like this; I tend to not like convoluted set ups. I fail. In a city at random, the party gets a scroll delivered by winged snake. It has a scroll of seven riddles and a delayed blast fireball. You have three hours to find all seven additional fireballs before they explode. The clues are decent, there’s help in the form of the guard captain and 100 guards, and the various fireballs are hidden in fun ways. In the middle of coals in a forge, in the bottom of a privy and so on. There is sometimes a complication, like a group of angry brewers at the mayor’s office whose mob don’t want you cutting in front of their angry mobbing. There’s a little section at each end regarding who dies if the party doesn’t find that fireball. It all ends with a prison break, since the guards are dispersed. The text is not overly long or meandering … at least by Dungeon Magazine standards. It’s a little silly and full of chaos .. which is probably why I like it. I think, perhaps, a few more words on managing time and/or an abstracted system for managing it would have been order. It’s also generally well organized, although the city map could have been numbered in a better manner to make finding location easier.

Divisions of the Mind
By Charles C. Reed
AD&D
Levels 8-12

Another one of those giant unwieldy Dungeon adventures. Fifty rooms, spread between some beholder tunnels and a floating illithid lair. Makes use of ideas from the Illithiad Supplement. The sixteen/seventeen room beholder part is essentially all hook, the beholder wanting to hire you to investigate the weird floating crystal castle he’s found. It’s full of anti-magic/anti-scrying stuff, which is never a pleasure to see. All of the encounters are full of lengthy text and overly described rooms. This is a textbook case of the unwieldy nature of large adventures that pay no attention to organization. “Next to the pots of stew are ceramic water jugs.” Well now, That’s an Adventure to remember!

The Doors to Darkness
By James Wyatt
AD&D
Levels 1-3, 4-6, 7-9

Robe of Blending. Ring of Invisibility. Absurdly prepared villain. It tries, such as providing a (boring) summary of the NPC’s who work the inn the adventure takes places in. A few little things triggered in the rooms. Go in room one and trigger an event in room two. Make a noise and trigger a merchant screaming at you. All I could think of was one of those light gun games, like Crossbow. It’s not really long/large enough to breathe, and if it were then the set up (with the prepared villain) would be even more absurd. Inn of Lost Heroes this is not.

Ashtar’s Temple
By DeAnna Ferguson
AD&D
Level 1

A thirty-five room abandoned temple that you’re hired to clean out … including the orc bandits who just moved in. It’s got a decent map for it’s two levels, interesting layout, nonlinear for the part. The orcs are summarized (boring, but summarized) on one page and their tactics/reactions on another, both plusses. The room descriptions note the history of the room and things which WERE instead of concentrating on things that ARE. If you accept the length of the room description then it’s not a bad dungeon/adventure with enough bits of variety to make things interesting after the initial orc assault. A little rough for 1st level though, I think.

Khazefryn
By Felix Douglas
AD&D
Levels 9-14

I’ve been accused before of having too tight a definition for “adventure”, and I’m sure I’ll get burned again on this one. This isn’t an adventure. It’s a locale in the underdark, a kind of “free village” or “free town” ruled by a couple of dragons and housing four or five factions of creatures in a loose alliance held together by the dragons. And some of those factions have another sub-faction, or at least something else interesting going on, in order to make them more interesting. Infiltration by doppleganger? Sure! Scheming drow? Sure! The setting is at its best when detailing those sorts of things, since they can lead to interesting outcomes and play, and at its worst when it is just describing More Things To Kill. As it stands it is neither an adventure or a Locale With Lots Going On. The concept is good, but it fails in its execution of Providing Shit/Motivations To Interact With. More NPC’s. Most goals and motivations for the NPC’s More weird stuff going on. more. More. MORE. This is what brings a locale, like a city, alive. Props for including a summary sheet with all the monster stats on it.

Skulking Below
By Darren Dane
AD&D
Levels 1-2

Fucking god dammit! Sewers! Skulks and ghouls in the sewers. Lots of read-aloud, lots of DM’s text, not much interesting.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 5 Comments

AA#33 – The Halls of Lidless Shabbath

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

lidless

By Joseph Browning, Stuart Marshall
Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Levels 12-15

Rolled into a yard-tall, ivory scroll tube, the worn charcoal rubbing of a giant map etched into an ancient monolith hints that travel between worlds was once easy. More enticingly, the map pinpoints the entrance to the eldritch pathway. The crude rubbing shows nothing but the location of the ancient and legendary dungeon known as the Halls of Lidless Shabbath!
The Halls are the home of the evil sorceress Shabbath. She was famed for having researched many new spells and created many unique magic items, as well as possessing fantastic treasures of gold and jewels, and the caves are also suspected to be a nexus of the planes. Little about the contents of the Halls themselves is known, save that Shabbath is rumored still to be alive, the Halls are reputedly haunted by demons, and a large warband or small army of trolls has been seen thereabouts.

This is a large dungeon with around 110 rooms scattered across four or so levels. It’s a frustrating mix of interesting ideas and repetitive generic text. It’s a little one note for my tastes, trending towards generic monster encounters with little to inspire and motivate the DM. It’s at it’s best when it’s providing those little bits of idiosyncratic detail. High level adventures are rare. Decent high level adventurers are rarer still, and I’m still not sure there IS a good high level adventure. This is better than most.

There’s no real hook here. It’s an infamous place with an infamous inhabitant and lots of rumored trease and a gate to other places. It’s left to the DM to hook one of those things in to appeal to the players. The background and introduction are mercifully short, at only about a page, before the keyed encounters start. You know what that means? No gimping! That’s right! This is one of the very few high level adventures that does NOT gimp the PC’s! Want to teleport, passwall, dig, dimension door? Have at thee! Finally, an adventure that can let a party stretch their legs and pursue their full tactical and strategic arsenal! Stuart and Joseph are to be applauded for this. In return they add HORDES of monsters. On the first level alone the monster roster tells us there are 45 giant trolls, 30 minotaurs, 55 ettins, and 200 trolls, in addition to the other creatures. Ouch! You’re gonna need those spells Mr Wizard; pains a coming!

Anyway, there’s a largish 88 room level 1/level 2 and then a smaller eighteen room sublevel that is separate from a large insect-filled caverns levels and then the eight room “home” level of the titular baddie. The cavern main map, of levels one and two, are large and basically consist of a ring corridor around the outside with a couple of side passages to make up three of four smaller loops. It’s not necessarily the most interesting map design but it is serviceable. I think maybe I was hoping to see a little more variety in it, similar to Many Gates of the Gann. Essentially, the maps are the bare minimum required to support a decent adventure.

What bugs me about this adventure is the aggressive blandness of most the rooms. “34. TROLLS: There will always be 2d6 trolls from the roster in this room if any remain. They have no treasure.” There’s really nothing to that room. This happens over and over again. The name of the room is the name of the monster and then just simple stats. One step above this is a series of lengthier room description that still manage to convey little interesting information. There’s a room with two chimeras in it, Shabbaths favorite pets. They have a taste for halfling. It’s just another another room on the map with a smattering of text that doesn’t really take advantage of what’s actually being described in the room. Pet chimeras with a taste for halfling could have been the basis for any of a dozen different room features that could have been highlighted, but instead it’s just this bland text that lends a kind of generic feel. It does manage to fit in about twenty rooms per page, a nice feat of terseness, but without the sparks of creativity I would have licked to see. I’m relatively certain that if different choices were made then twenty rooms of decent content could have been included per page. One room has four large bronze statues. “They appear to be of giantesses, hags, anisses or creatures like that.” Why? Why be generic? Why be nonspecific in the description? What are the four statues of?

But there ARE good little bits mixed in and what’s very frustrating. One levels continually drips blood from the ceiling and the walls and floor bleed when cut. Another has ancient writing which, if read, provides a possibility of a benefit … and likely something bad. In one room trolls spitroast a dwarf (dead, skinned, gutted and shaved) over a fire. Another nearby room has a vampire hanging out in mist form in the bottom of a pit, following the party to attack … but cowardly fleeing at the first sign of a stake. A room that is the inside of a geode, with magical spells inscribed on the walls, like a spellbook. But there’s not enough of it, not nearly enough. An enchanted water fountain with a greenish tint, colored by a gem … that’s actually a soul jar. More of this and less “2d6 trolls are present. They have no treasure.”

I seem to say this alot. What actually are you paying for when you buy an adventure? A room called “26: Trolls. 2d6 trolls are present in this room.”? Really? Is that content that’s worth $15 in PDF form?

I don’t think so. I think what you are paying for, as a DM, is inspiration. It’s the DM’s job to run a good game for the players and it’s the products job to give the DM the tools they need to do that. One of those tools is providing evocative, interesting, and creative content that the DM could not have come up on their own. This adventure avoids the usual low spots that many fall into but it fails in providing high spots that makes one excited, that makes you WANT to run the adventure. Your mind doesn’t get excited.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/180956/Advanced-Adventures-33-The-Halls-of-Lidless-Shabbath?affiliate_id=1892600

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Dungeons of Fel’Valashar

Posted on May 2, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

felv
By Steve Gilman
Sundered Blade Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 3-4

Written in celebration of Swords and Wizardry Appreciation Day 2016, Dungeons of Fel’Valashar is a collection of mini dungeon adventures with a small region called Fel’Valashar that they take place within. Each of these adventures is written in such a way that they don’t have any ties to each other or to Fel’Valashar. This means you can easily drop them into your own world with no fuss.

This is a very basic set of three mini-dungeons, with about eight rooms each, located in a small little region. It’s all quite bland and provides few details that could not have come from a random generator, either for monsters or dungeon trappings. It begs the question: what are you actually paying for? I think you’re paying for the designers imagination, and alas there’s little here.

The first clue is probably the wandering monster table. Owlbear. Goblin. Orcs. Bandits. Ogres. Nothing more than stats. The value add here consists of copying the monster stats out of the Monster Manual and on to the page in abbreviated format. No one is doing anything, there’s no content that adds any value at all. Soooooo…. Why is it there? Because it’s supposed to be? Because it’s required to be? It’s the accepted form of adventures with a wilderness component to include a wandering monster table? If it’s going to be generic then it probably shouldn’t be included.

There are four mini-dungeons, in various forms, from partial caves, to an abandoned village. There’s an earth temple. As soon as I read “Earth Temple” I knew it was going to be some symmetrical dungeon design. I was not disappointed. The first map, an old cave system is one of the more interesting, with a ledge or two, some statues, a big pond, and other cave features mixed into a transition to dungeon chambers. The problems with the rest of the dungeons are fully in view in just this first one. The hooks are obvious: “unnaturally large dogs have been seen in the area” or “local wildlife has been found dead in the area, drained of all blood.” I would suggest these are not hooks at all. They are simply facts. They lack anything interesting or fun that the DM can leverage to get the characters involved. The actual dungeon has room descriptions like “Main Hall. The large hall was used for entertaining guests […]” or “Servant Quarters. Rows of dusty beds line the walls of what was once living quarter for the staff.” Yes. We know they were living quarters for the staff. You told us that in name of the room, Servant Quarters. We also know what is in it. You told us that also IN THE NAME OF THE ROOM. “Dining Hall.

This room was once the dining hall for the inhabitants of the complex.” This is nothing but filler. It’s not needed. It clogs up the adventure text. It adds nothing to the adventure. The designer must either add value OR OMIT THE TEXT. The text here almost ALWAYS fails in both of those basic tasks. Each dungeon does typically have one bit, maybe two, that is not completely generic. “4 zombies are bent over the blood-drained corpse of an adventurer, feasting upon it, while 4 others shuffle around hungirly.” There’s another room, a cave, that has a two statues in it that you can loot. That has potential. Two statues, a cave room with a pond in it … it’s begging for something else, but nothing comes of it.

There’s a village with a harpy in it, almost completely empty except for generic adventurers wandering about as random monster encounters. “ Human Warrior” or “Human Magic-User” … that adds NOTHING. “Farm. Crops were once grown at this fenced in farm.” *sigh*. Again, “the rotted remains of pigs that were left here …” is one of nicer bits of text in the the town, as is the very concept of a spiraling pit mine in another of the mini-dungeons. But it’s just not enough. One idea per mini-dungeon is not enough to sustain play or justify an eighteen page booklet with four dungeons.

The product is only offensive because of it’s lack of value. You’re not going to be bombarded with volumes of text ,but I’d assert that you’re not going to get anything here that 5 minutes with a pencil and paper wouldn’t get you. It’s safely generic, and I’ve no place in my life for that.

It’s Pay What You Want at DriveThu, but you have to want it first.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/180802/Dungeons-of-FelValashar-Swords-and-Wizardry?affiliate_id=1892600

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The Sunday Suck #3 – DDAL4-03 – The Executioner

Posted on May 1, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

ddal403

I lied. I’m back to using The Sunday Suck. This is in honor of this adventure, one of the worse I’ve seen.

By Jerry LeNeave
WOTC
D&D 5E
Level 3

The locals are spreading rumors of the emergence of an age-old relic in a remote farming village. Surely you won’t be the only one to seek it, but can you afford to not be successful in this mission? And why haven’t they claimed it for themselves?

You know the drill. 31 pages, the first nine of which are (mostly) garbage and the last eleven are reference, leaving about eleven pages for two hours of adventure. Suck it you Adventurer’s League fools! Beg to pay for your weekly abuse from WOTC! Bwahahahahahahahaha!

Hmmm, a little harsh. There is a nice little adventure overview section and an NPC reference in the back reference material. Five of the Seven NPC’s presented are not present in the adventure, which means several of the NPC’s that ARE present in the adventure are not mentioned. The hook is either “you’re already in the village” (from the last adventure) or “mists transport you.” The first is fine while the second continues the long tradition of Not Even Trying. It’s ok, the summary looks like a railroad and the baddie, a wight, is running around town wearing a hat of disguise. Why? Please dear god, why? A wight in a hat of disguise. Why not just make him the archdevil asmodeus in a hat of disguise, or an atrophal or a black pudding in a hat of disguise? What do you want for $3? Spend $2 more and get Maze of the Blue Medusa? Ha! Not official WOTC!

The adventure is in three parts. Part one is to sit in the tavern and listen to rumors. The important points are in bullet form and generally summarized nicely, while the non-bullet information is generally useless and adds little to the adventure. One important point, a way to get the party out in tot he town, IS buried in the main text, and the rumors are not particularly interested. “Bob’s has been selling shit to Lazlo” is the form they are in. IE: all fact based. A little colour never hurt no one and a nice little colorful sentence could have replaced the fact, conveyed the same message, and been far more interesting. In the end the entire point of the adventure, the motivating force for he party, doesn’t actually come through. At all. There’s no real motivation provided.

Part two is to roam over town. Long and boring descriptions are the rule of the day, although to its credit at least one of the encounters allows for a nice bribe to avoid a combat. Oh, the wight in the hat, doing his shopping for the day. If attacked/defeated he gets to make a plot shield escape. “A patch of mist glides in and when it fades then he is gone.” That is a crap ass idea. Plot shields are crap ass to begin with but that one is worse than usual. Wait! Wait! It’s better! Check this shit out! “If at any point the characters begin spending too much time outside without taking direction, or they progressed quicker than anticipated feel free to roll on the random encounters table.” Ha! Just monster attack after monster attack there!

Part three is getting attacked by some undead: two zombies and two ghouls. It wants it to be a big torches & pitchforks and fire mob scene, with undead coming out of a burning house and forest to attack the mob and the party and wounded villagers paying about and so on. It fails miserably at this. There’s not much in this to inspire the DM to run a decent adventure … and four undead hardly match what text there is is trying to convey. Oh, then the mayor shows up and demands a strip search of the party and attacks them. Yeah. Great Adventure.

So, just to be clear: nothing in part one ties the adventure to part two. Nothing in part two leads to any other location in part two. Nothing in part two leads to part three and/or the mob. Nothing is strong, but the ties here are VERY tenuous. Basically, the DM MUST feed the party the adventure and lead them around by the nose, cause there ain’t no clues forthcoming and the adventure is not in a form in which the DM could run it in a looser manner.

It’s trying, especially with the bullet points and reference material. But the text is dull and not evocative and the reference material misses the point most of the time. Combine it all with the railroad nature and the UTTER lack of coherence when it comes to providing the DM information, so he can run it for the players, this wins one of my coveted Worst Adventures Of ALL Time awards.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/178794/DDAL0403-The-Executioner-5e?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Adventurers League, Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 4 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #80

Posted on April 30, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

d80

Fortune Favors the Dead
By Lance Hawvermale
AD&D
Levels 5-7

A search for pirate treasure map (and the treasure!) in a spanish/ren type setting. This reminds me a lot of Hoard of the Dragon Queen/Rise, in terms of writing style. There’s this aggressive “overview” and appeal to genericism. Lods and lods of text on history and backstory and little to help the DM run the actual game. Tons of bandits and ½ orc bandits and orc bandits, and a lot of “Pirate Ghost” encounters for the big bads. Most of this is searching for the map and doing quests to get the pieces with the actual treasure locale being mostly glossed over. It’s as if you took a long and rambling and not very good 18th century novel and added stats. Oh. In trying to see if Lance had an ties to Hoard/Rise I see he’s an english professor …

The Frothing Miscreant
By Robert A. Van Buskirk
AD&D
Levels 2-4

Tinker gnomes. The core of this one isn’t bad, but it suffers from the implementation. Evil gnome cleric animats bird skeletons, sticks some fire traps on them, and sends them off to attack ships from his pirate ship. The hook is a fisherman finding the body of one and figuring it out, then contacting the party for a cut of the loot. The investigation is handled in bullet points, which is fairly terse … and nice. What follows is an assault on the gnomes estate. It’s mostly in standard room/key format, which is not the best for something like this. There’s the potential for a large pitched battle, which could be nice, but it’s quite disorganized in how it presents things in and around the estate.

Challenge of Champions III
By Johnathan M. Richards
AD&D
Any Level

This popular series presents a series of puzzle challenges. It’s very theater of the mind: no magic items or spells for your casters, everything is provided for you in scrolls, etc. Each room is more puzzle than anything else, as you try to figure out how to get past it; that’s how it can be for any level. I’m not a fan of these. I like the concept of open-ended rooms and rooms without traditional encounters/fights/etc, but I prefer a more natural set up instead of the general “room built for one solution” format that the Challenge of Champions series has. I know the series was very popular though, and was one of the few times, I think, that creative thinking was actvly encouraged.

Sarfion’s Collection
By Felix Douglas
AD&D
Levels 7-10

Side-trek … with a maggot golem! Not much to this, a MU in a magic store is helping a brain collector collect brains. A couple of NPC’s to interact with, nice … horror? Set up, I guess. The core concept is worth stealing, but I suspect most of us have already stolen a “backroom of evil” for many shops.

A Head for Business
By J.D. Walker
Alternity Dark*Matter
Level 3

Scene based planes train and automobiles, with sandmen showing up and killing folk and the PC’s investigating “tracking them down” on the figurative and literal railroad. Lots of forced combats, which is never a good sign.

The Trouble with Trillochs
By Peter R. Hopkins
AD&D
Levels 6-9

Side-Trek. This packs three encounter areas, several hooks, and an eleven room necromancer lair in to a few pages. The hooks are solid, and one is generally unrelated to the adventure except as a pretext to get the party into the area. It’s got some decent detail, like a stuffed basilisk and a instructions to turn yourself into a shadow demon! That there’s some nice looking loot! I wouldn’t call this a Go To adventure, but it’s better than the usual stuff in Dungeon.
The lair and environs feel a bit more alien than most, thanks to pech, galeb-dur, and a xag-yi. Not great, but better than the usual fare.

The Scar
By Ray Winninger
AD&D
Level 1

This adventure was built from the Dungeoncraft articles in Dragon magazine. The results are mixed. It’s meant as a beginning campaign adventure. The characters start as prisoners of orcs who force them to dig in a temple. The temple has 45 or so rooms. The map is excellent, showing rubble, light sources, and where there are orc guards (and how many) during the day and night. Combined with this is both a daily timeline of how the orcs gaul the slaves around to dig, and then a longer timeline showing what happens, event wise, over eleven days. There’s also a nice little table of random events that can happen each day. The overall design here is pretty good, and open ended, but it has the usual issues with lengthy text clogging up what the DM needs to run the adventure. Beyond this (and the usual genericism of AD&D) I could also quibble with some important “escape” details being mixed into the adventure text. The orcs with a gambling problem, for example. It probably would have been better to summarize the escape means built in, briefly, in a paragraph around the same place the timelines are enumerated.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 1 Comment

Peaks and Valleys: Among the Dwarves

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

pv
By Olivier O’Brien
Grinning Gargoyle Games
OSR
Levels 1-5

Far to the north, in the Okhan mountains, a great dwarven lord has put out a call for mercenaries from all corners of the world. Are there any who can bring the goblins of the mountains to heel and find the lost vault of legend?

This is an interesting little mountain sandbox that should take characters from level 1 to 5. 155 pages with largish text and a hex crawl with 34 locations makes for an encounter/location about once every three 6-mile wide hex. There’s a decent mix of encounters, several settlements, several sub-plots to get mixed up in and creatures that don’t always attack on sight. It’s little mundane in its use of standard monsters and standard magic items and has a few problems here and there with organization leading to a lack of clarity. Individually I wouldn’t call the encounters too imaginative, but there is a zoomed out campaign thread here that makes no assumptions about how the players will tackle it. It’s a pretty good first effort.

There’s a dwarf hold in a mountain region. It’s relatively new and there’s a human settlement nearby that helps feed the hold. There are a couple of outlying holds. There’s a lot of ancient ruins. There’s a lot of intrigue. The idea is that the dwarf king has spread some rumors about an old mythical treasure vault in order to lure mercenaries and adventurers to the region, figuring they will help take care of some of the monster issues. I think this falls squarely into “Be Careful What You Wish For” territory, knowing the behaviour of the typical murder hobo.There’s a few pages of overview information and wanderers and then the 34 hex encounter begin at about one location per page, with some being several pages if they describe a mini-dungeon.

All politics is local, so goes the saying, and this adventure feels a lot like local politics. The dwarves have a couple of factions. The humans have a couple of factions. There’s an elf faction. There is an evil witch and the kobolds who oppose her as former slaves. There’s bandits in league with some people, monsters and human. There is a monster ‘town’ in addition to several monster lairs. So, lots of factions. And everyone has an opinion about at least one other faction. This is great. It’s a way to generate adventure, spread rumors, get the party into trouble with one group of another … or, rather, let the party get themselves into trouble. At behind and woven into it all is the mystery of rumored treasure vault. The rumors and faction play and little jobs that some of the people have serves to get the party moving and mix up the batch off nitro just waiting for it to reach temperature and explode. The last couple of pages has a decent overview of that explosion. What can happen as you strengthen the dwarf king. What can happen if you strengthen a different dwarf faction. What can happen if the monsters in monstertown get strengthened, and so on. It’s a nice way to provide some context and a future timeline based on the parties general actions.

And yes, you can help the monsters! There are certainly more than a few encounters in which the humanoids are hostile, but there are others in which they don’t immediately attack, or will parley. I love this. There’s no presumed morality or Good Guys in the adventure. The party gets to do what they want. By letting them talk to the monsters you open up a whole new avenue of roleplaying and possibilities. One of the things this adventure does, which I also LUV, is to make the non-hostile monsters targets of the party. Make them non-hostile and set up a situation where the party lusts after something they have. There is more than one encounter like that in this adventure. I’m thinking specifically of a great lizard man lair. Inside it’s an idyllic place … with an OBVIOUS elf tomb in the hatchery and another interesting door in the place where their giant crayfish god lives. They also have some interesting loot displayed prominently. Who wants to level?!?!? You know Gold = XP … This is wonderful. It gives the party an interesting choice that has consequences either way. And there’s not a wrong choice, or a choice where they are punished, but rather just natural consequences to decisions.

It’s got pretty good treasure descriptions. About half the magic items have a description and more than a few mundane objects get an interesting description, like giant python fangs in a trophy case or a silver salt cellar in the shape of a maiden. The treasure descriptions fall a little flat, I think maybe because they are just for mundane book magic items. +1 swords and +2 shields. The added description is a nice touch but a little something more than a mechanical bonus from the book would have been preferred over a nice description. One of the more interesting things found is a journal from a dead wandering person. It can help you decipher which rumors you hear are true or false. That’s a great way to add colour and information to a game in a way that doesn’t just rely on boring old “you find a diary” nonsense.

Some of the encounters presented are quite nice. The lizard men, for example, have a dude outside in a double fur coat. Inside they roll about in the sand and bask in hot springs with their trained giant macaques. The entire lizard man lair is a great example of adding just a little more and getting something more interesting than “3 lizardmen in the room.” The rest of the content and encounters kind of falls of from there. Hmmm, how to say this … the factions and intrigue are great and nicely done, but the encounters are not necessarily the most evocative. They tend toward the generic side of things with the personalities and factions then punching it up to the next level weight class. Without that, and the interconnected nature of the various encounters, this would be far less interesting.

I guess the wandering monster table may be another good example of this. It’s just monsters on a table, and there’s nothing much interesting about it. But then there’s the ‘special’ table. It has great things like wandering elves, abandoned camps with tracks leading away to the nearest encounter hex, and things like that. Not all that good, but generally much better than “2d4 goblins.”

There’s a nice little Blood in the Snow horror encounter which, while interesting, could use some editing for more flavor and organization. It’s not exactly clear which of the three inter-connected mining camps you find first, second, or third, which is important, I think, to the mystery. That’s probably the most obvious example but there are other little organization issues here and there.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru. It’s got a good basic outline and the interrelated groups and encounters are something that you don’t usually find in adventure, even in a hex crawl. This isn’t a home run, by any means, but it is a great first effort. A little editing, a little better word choice for more evocative encounters/loot and it would be solidly in my B range. I think this falls into my “If all adventures were this good I wouldn’t have to review adventures to weed out the crap.”

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/180303/Peaks-And-Valleys-Among-the-Dwarves?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | 6 Comments

The Tomb of Rakoss the Undying

Posted on April 25, 2016 by Bryce Lynch

rakoss
By Bob Pennington
Mischief Inc
OSR
Levels 4-6

Rakoss was a great wizard of ages past who served the Emperor of Maere. Tales tell of his prowess as a military strategist, but they also tell of his fall. It is said that although he won campaign after campaign for his emperor, just one failure earned the wrath of his master. The Emperor had Rakoss, his generals, strategists and personal guard sealed in a tomb somewhere in the Ganlaw Mountains, and cursed them. Who knows what treasure was buried with Rakoss and his retinue, or what horrors remain to test any who might enter the tomb. Certainly only a brave few would dare seek out the final resting place of Rakoss, and even fewer can survive the terrors of The Tomb of Rakoss the Undying!

This is a generic dungeon crawl in a sixteen room dungeon that takes eighteen pages to describe. It begins generic hook #23: “hired by sage fetch quest.” That takes one directly to the dungeon and then bores both the party and DM with generic encounters, descriptions, and read-aloud. There’s a bright spot or two, but I’d chalk this one up as “slightly better than the average dreck.”

The dungeon keys start on page seven. That means five or pages of backstory, advice to the DM, hooks, and general conversational material that goes nowhere and adds little to the adventure. Half a page is spent describing state blocks. “Hit dice will be listed as number and type, such as 3d8.” The new Bryce, now with fewer crushed expectations, notes that it’s pretty easy to just skip over the first seven pages and get to something halfway decent. He would recommend just ripping them out and never reading them at all. The bitter old Bryce would note that this lengthy and irrelevant intro is a portent of things to come. It telegraphs a lack of focus in the writing, of not understanding and concentrating on what’s important in an adventure.

About ¾ of a page is spent on the default hook, the sage fetch quest. There’s nothing unusual in it. Sage hires party, gives them map, he wants the books they bring back. A) that’s boring. B) it takes ¾ of a page of boringness to get to the end of the boring. The alternate hooks are “you find a map” and “someone hires you to go there in exchange for something from the tomb.” IE: the exact same hook as the ¾ page hook. One of the most interesting things in the book are the two sentences devoted to the third hook. “A band of undead spontaneously comes to life in a nearby town as a result of unstable negative energy that emanates from the tomb. A local lord hires the characters to investigate.” The previous hooks are simple tasks. Jobs. But this third one is full of potential energy. Random attacks in the night. Weight effects in the countryside. Scared villagers. A local lord disappointed with his men and in fear of losing control. All of that is implied in those simple two sentences. That’s what good writing does. It inspires the DM to greatness. It makes their mind race to come up with possibilities to use. If the adventures had instead spent ¾ of a page focusing on an OUTLINE of that hook, instead of ¾ of a page of boring read aloud for Generic Hook #23: Sage Fetch, then you’d have a couple of hours of hook for the party to get into and get the context. Alas, this is not to be. A full page wilderness map is complemented by ¼ page describing an uneventful trip through the wilderness (then you wasted the map …) that ends with a forced combat with a band of Ogres. Preprogrammed combat encounters are not fucking content. They are boring and they take away decisions from the players.

This all ends in a paragraph of overwrought read-aloud about the tomb entrance. “Although the noonday sun is hot on your face …” oh, sorry, I threw up a little in my mouth. Anyway, the illustration showing the entrance is a great one. A nice semicircle opening, runes above the door, cold air mists coming out, icicles inside with trees and little hollock. Really top notch in bringing a mood to the DM. About 20 times better than the generic fact based boring overwrought text.

This brings us to the part of the review I like to call “The terrible design places a lot of terrible restrictions on the party because the designer can’t be bothered to design a level appropriate adventure.” IE: blah blah blah justification. Blah blah blah you can’t use passwall, teleport, blink, dimension door, etc. Blah blah blah undead are a lot harder to turn. Blah blah blah everything inside gets +2 AC and +2 to saves. This is lame. The characters earned those abilities, why cheese them out of it? So what if they passwall? Good for them! An adventure can be played many different way. By limiting the party you are telling them and the DM, that they will play it EXACTLY the way you described it. I should only aspire to that degree of conceit. “It might be too easy!!” Good. Smart/Creative players are SUPPOSED to have an easier time. Unconventional thinking is what makes the game fun.

The room keys try to pay homage to classic design elements but are hampered by generic boring read-aloud. A big stone statue of a knight that comes to life. A wizard’s lab. An evil shrine. All the classic room types but hampered by boring read aloud. “You open a large wood door to reveal a moderately sized rectangular room.” Boring read aloud. BORING! “At the south end is a twenty foot tall large stone statue of a fiendish knight carrying a dire flair and a tower shield.” It tells. It should show. Why is it fiendish? Describe it and let the players imaginations run wild and draw their own conclusions. It doesn’t help that almost every read-aloud ends with “and then the monsters attack!” I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what old school gaming is, or even what FUN gaming is. This is not an exploration adventure, it’s a combat adventure. Room after room of it. Remember the forced ogre combat in the wilderness? Np sandbox environment here. Just forced combats. And remember, no cheat spells so you can’t avoid them.

The monster descriptions are boring also. Instead of exciting content we instead get a list of things, ala 3e/4e/5e/ that the undead are immune to. “Undead: Immune to mind influencing effects, poison, sleep, paralysis, stunning, and disease. Not subject to critical hits, subdual damage, ability damage, energy drain, or death from massive damage.” *whew* Good thing I was told that! It sure did add a lot of enjoyment to the adventure for both me, the DM as WELL as the players!

The treasure is lame and boring books treasure, with the exception of one item. The monetary treasure is not appropriate to the level of the adventure and is pretty boring as well, except for maybe a demon tapestry and a tiger skin rug. It is telling that one of the items is described as a Masterwork Greatsword. This whole things feels like a conversion.

The map triess. It shows lots of details on it, from furniture to some rubble to traps. That’s good; it uses the map to help enhance the adventure text. It’s a little small and “light” in the lines, making it hard to read/use, but they clearly tried. Likewise there’s an element or two of good things: destroying the statue reveals a giant ruby inside (Yeah! Not explaining!)

The classic elements and tropes are present, but not used well. They come off as boring instead of exciting or imaginative. Fundamentally I think this is because of a lack of focus. The read-aloud and DM text do not enhance the rooms. The text just ends up being useless. This could easily be a one-page and lose nothing, because there’s nothing to lose. That’s a shame.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/119267/F1-The-Tomb-of-Rakoss-the-Undying?affiliate_id=1892600

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