tenfootpole.org

by Creighton Broadhurst
Raging Swan Press
Pathfinder
Level 1

A ruined monument to folly and ego, the Shadowed Keep stands atop an isolated bluff deep in a mist-wreathed forest. Sacked by marauding goblins decades ago the place was thought abandoned, but shadows now creep among the forest’s great boles and footprints have appeared on the single, overgrown track leading to the keep. Travellers now disappear with alarming regularity from the nearby road and the local folk fear some slumbering evil has claimed the ruin as its own.

An adventure only an actuarial could love. A 96 page Raging Swan release means probably about 20 pages of content. Let’s see … eight pages of filler before the content actually starts … always a good sign. The last 25 pages are full of pre-gens and illustrations already seen elsewhere in the adventure? Oh expectations, you cause so many problems in my life, but also provide so many answers.

Bandits in a tower, goblins on one dungeon level and undead in another. One page per room and maybe thirty rooms total. This thing is a poster-child for bad modern design. The set up is a classic one. I love the classics. Classics can be great. This one offers very little new or great. It’s bland and completely over the top in its faux-organization. An empty room is four paragraphs. There’s lots of “This room was once used as BLAH but is now unrecognizable blah blah blah.” This is useless. It adds nothing to help you run the game. Worse, it helps to obfuscate the parts of the room description that you DO need to run the game. It becomes a wall of text that causes your eyes to glaze over.

96 pages and four lame ass hooks of one sentence each that rank right up there with “caravan guard” … *sigh*. “You’ve heard rumors of wealth”, “Bandits live there.” Those are not hooks. That’s not supporting the DM. “Rogers boys just hit Niko’s grain wagons” is a fucking hook. The intro DOES list one bit of good advice: a rival party of murder hobo’s can be used to put pressure on the party to get their asses in gear and generate some time pressure. A DC20 rumor check tells you the former owner of the keep was a famous adventurer and rumored to be very wealthy. Those are certainly words worth the electronic paper they are printed on. I guess the designer just gave up? The rumors are uninspired, raw and boring facts that every DM has seen a thousand times before. The wilderness wanderers have a little life, with wolf packs hitting small party members, and the like. But then no attention is paid to the dungeon wanderers; they are just stat blocks.

This thing is devoid of life. It’s devoid of color. The rooms, lengthy and taking up a page each, are boring. It’s all the usual things described in a boring way. There’s almost nothing in the adventure that inspires the DM and makes you want to run it, or gets you excited about running it. Why would you buy this? The highlight, by far, is a stone demon mouth you can stick your hand in.

It DOES do two or three good things, but that does NOT save it from being a boring shit-fest. The bandits have some decent personalities and there’s at least a small opportunity to interact with them. There’s a great timeline provided which supports the bandits in the tower skirmishing with the goblins in the dungeon. THAT’S supporting the DM. It provides opportunities for embellishment. Springboards for more interesting things to happen.

The surly half-orc cook hurls insults during combat. In spite of the kitchen having nothing much of note in it, besides a hot stew pot, and in spite of the room description being a page long, we get no insults to hurl at the players.

The rote following of form never trumps imagination.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/100663/Shadowed-Keep-on-the-Borderlands?1892600

by Mark Shipley & Scott Stabbert
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level 7

… But the Black Monastery was not gone forever. Over nearly two centuries since its destruction, the Black Monastery has returned from time to time to haunt the Hill of Mornay. Impossible as it seems, there have been at least five incidents in which witnesses have reported finding the Hill of Mornay once again crowned with black walls and slate-roofed towers. In every case, the manifestation of this revenant of the Black Monastery has been accompanied by widespread reports of madness, crime and social unrest in the kingdom. Sometimes, the monastery has appeared only for a night. The last two times, the monastery reappeared atop the hill for as long as three months…each appearance longer than the first.

This is a very classic take on an old school dungeon, marred by some issues with the verboseness of the descriptions. I’m quite enamored with the very earliest examples of dungeons. The period before everything became standardized and before mechanics began their serious encroachment on imagination. This dungeon does a pretty good job of being representative of that period and style. Effects are described rather than slavishly relying on mechanics. The adventure is best when it is being imaginative and ignoring mechanics and the worse when it is describing things from The Standard Books. Yes, AD&D killed D&D. Fuck You AD&D.

The idea is that there’s this monastery once used by evil dudes that kind of winks in and out of existence. Every once in awhile it returns to the same location. What you get is a couple of hundred rooms on a packed old school map with towers and dungeons in addition to the core monastery. Each room is well described. TOO well described. One style of bad adventure writing focuses on an exhaustive description of what’s in the room. How many socks are in the sock drawer, when the socks and sock drawer have nothing to do with the adventure. This isn’t that. This exhibits a more forgivable sin: a conversational style. Just about any room of any significance gets about four paragraphs of text with a couple of sentences, at least, in each one. The core of the room is described in a very … loose? way. The descriptions are good, but the core of the room hides within the text. This results in … long pauses at the table and lots of notes for the DM to make. The rooms all need a very strong edit to remove the conversational style while retaining the wonderfully imaginative things they describe. A talking door is great! Four paragraphs on a talking door? Not so great. Actually, that’s a bad example. The door is easy to run. It’s a talking door. All of the other rooms get the same treatment though and in THOSE there are effects and impacts that are more complicated than “a door that talks.”

Near the talking door there’s a room with a white mist in it. The mist drains/absorbs magic. The door and the mist are great examples of this kind of non-standard/pre-AD&D style of “weird things going on in the dungeon.” But then comes two more paragraphs describing the white mist. How it absorbs magic. What happens if the party does X, and then what happens if Y happens, and what happens if Z occurs. It’s all bullshit. It’s unneeded. Instead of 1/6th of a page in three paragraphs, just describe the basic effect. The lengthy description is not bad, other than the fact it’s lengthy and harder to use at the table.

The core is generally good though. It’s random. It’s got some disconnected stuff in it, like some orcs and goblins and gnolls that are somehow in the place. There’s a mini-cyclops guarding some headis on silver plates. Why? Because Dungeon, that’s why. A hag dead in a hallway? Sure, why not? There’s a ghostly green monk that comes up through the floor and offers dental advice. None of that is the main flavor. The main flavor is ghostly weirdness. It reminds me a lot of Shadowbrook Manor, another adventure I liked. Weird stuff, effects described instead of mechanics listed.

A special note about the magic items. They suck. Mostly. +1 swords. +3 plate mail. Sometimes they get to something more interesting, like a rigor mortis effect on a sword or some such. This is what I mean when I complain about book standardization. Pulling monster stats or magic items out of a book is easy. Too easy. It’s the imagination and creativity that we want, that we are paying for. That’s what’s important, along with a little organization so you can run the thing. The rooms are a great example of creative and imaginative encounters, in need or organization/editing.

This needs a second edition. It needs a good edit that keeps the evocative and imaginative nature while making the rooms easier to run/ave less text. It needs more on integration … there are great sections on an increase in lycanthropy when the monastery appears, or how some people are turning into ghous, slowly, for example. There’s a great deal here to expand upon and build on, and a good second edition could fulfill all of that.

by Chad Brouillard
Penumbra
d20
Levels 1-3

There’s a tale you might hear in a tavern by the docks if you catch an old sea dog on a dark night laden with rum. He’ll tell you of an all but forgotten sea god with a hatred for the living and their ships that so brazenly cross his waters without offering the blood sacrifice he demanded in the days of yore. The god’s powers have been waning, as brave sailors of all the races bravely cast off in search of far horizons and treasures to fill their holds, but on the darkest of days his might returns. The grizzled sailor may have known someone who set sail on the Sea Maiden, just before such a day three decades ago, and never returned. Others may tell you that the crew of the Sea Maiden was restless, and mutiny was in the air; the crew no doubt ended up hanged as pirates in a distant port. But your storyteller assures you he knows better: the dark god of the sea had his vengeance — and he will have it again one day soon.

This is an encounter with a ghost ship while on sea voyage, and was a pleasant surprise. It supports well the social aspect of the adventure and doesn’t go into great verbosity about either the ghost ship or the player’s ship. Instead it (correctly) concentrates on the people and the activities. This supports the DM in running the adventure. The adventure knows what it and it stays focused on it: it’s a zombie movie.

The Zombie Movie, like Science Fiction, has some underlying themes with the zombies (or zapper guns) just being a backdrop and/or pressure. They have a message, and it’s usually something social. This adventure sets the players up on a ship and then puts pressure on the social environment, both positively and negatively. An abrupt captain. A mistress that the superstitious crew don’t like. A card cheat. A naive cabin boy. A criminal is lockup. A surly cook. The list goes on. Each is a decent trope, and thus easy to remember. The social situation boils during the adventure, up to the point the captain is found dead. Things are then set in motion with the various people forming cliques … all while becalmed in fog. An abandoned ship appears and is then dealt with. It then returns to launch a couple of zombie attacks. That’s the critical moment in which all of the players actions in the adventure come to a head. Did they foster the cliques, treat the sailors like shit, or try to work for unity? How the zombie attack completes is based on what the players did up to that point. ((Not formally, there’s no table or anything, just some advice.) The adventure SUPPORTS the DM in running it, not by exhaustively providing stats or DC checks, but by providing opportunities and consequences and advice. It’s a sandbox social adventure, on a ship.

The player’s ship is described in about two pages. The descriptions concentrate on how the characters will interact with the rooms, not their mundane contents. They crew play darts here. The poker game is here. Bob hangs out here most of the time. People & Activities. This isn’t an exploration adventure, it’s a social adventure, and the author knows it and stays true to the material supporting the social and paying little attention to the exploration, as he should.

Let me cite an example or the setups provided. At the start someone is brought on board by the shore patrol that looks unconscious. The captain orders him put in the brig. A drunk sailor? Something else? The players later learn he’s a criminal being taken somewhere to be turned over to another country/city. If they talk to him he claims to be innocent/persecuted because of who e is. He’s sharp. The players probably figure that out. He works his way in with the crew, especially the marginalized ones. In the end he figures out what is going on before everyone. Now imagine this guy in a cell, up against the bars, screaming about a curse and ghosts and all that. You KNOW he’s a liar and a cheat and will do anything to get out of that cell. What to do, what to do … It’s WONDERFUL. There are a lot of situations like that. There are a lot of little details that bring the place to life, but are easy to remember and run. But it doesn’t go overboard.

I have no problem saying this is one of the better adventures of the d20 era and while not perfect it does a much better job of setting up and supporting a social adventure than almost anything else I’ve seen. Like all/most good social adventures, it could be used in almost any time/setting/genre, as long as you’re willing to throw in a few zombies. It needs a social cheat sheet to go along with the combat one, and maybe a summary of the ship/events also. Otherwise, it’s very good at what it does.

It’s $5 at rpgnow.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/145694/Maiden-Voyage?1892600

by Creighton Broadhurst
Raging Swan Press
Pathfinder
3rd Level

Centuries ago, the Tuath were a mighty folk who strove against the goblins of the Tangled Wood for dominion over that ancient place. Defeated by treachery and their feral, warlike enemies the Tuath’s civilisation was thrown down, their settlements were sacked, their places of strength broken open and their holy places despoiled. The few survivors melted away into the trackless gloom of the deep forest leaving behind nothing but remnants of their once?great culture. The Road of the Dead, a ceremonial pathway representing a soul’s journey to the underworld, is one such fragment that yet lingers in the Tangled Wood awaiting the brave or the foolhardy. A cunningly designed death?trap, it hides the forgotten treasures and legends of a fallen people.

I don’t like reviewing this one, for some reason. Maybe because I’m so disappointed. Most of the review can be summed up by looking at some numbers: 50 pages. 7-10 encounters. Maybe 14-16 pages of actual encounter description. There is some GREAT imagery in this, extremely evocative. It’s also fragmented and disconnected and so verbose that the excitement that comes from the evocative imagery is dulled by the slog through the text.

There’s a sinkhole. It leads to the Path of the Dead, an ancient underground path/area that an old culture had funerary/symbolic meaning. It’s got seven rooms/encounters, a couple with a few parts, a few extra add ons for after the adventure. Each room generally has several features that is described in what I like to call “4.0 style.” A little section detailing lighting, sound, doors, ceilings, etc. One for each. Each cool little thing gets it’s own paragraph. That’s the problem.

Inside a barrow, water dripping from the ceiling. Large menhirs. A sinkhole, dark. The sound of churning water from below. Maybe a light mist. Part of the way down the sinkhole are three leering stone demon faces, covered in light mold/fungus/etc. That’s GREAT! OMG! I’d love to run that room! But it’s all spread out over two pages. The adventure has to describe EVERYTHING. The DC for this, the DC for that, the (irrelevent) history of things, things that are meaningless to the room or adventure, or the plot. The joy is sucked out of it by the explaining. Yes, guidelines for the DM are good. Explaining EVERYTHING is bad. It all gets in the way. “Overly Organized” might be the right description.

I’m not sure what’s going on. Is the length supposed to be a feature? Are Pathfinder DM’s morons? (I doubt it?) Is that the expected behaviour of Pathfinder adventures? I really don’t get it.

This thing could easily be trimmed to be a 1-page adventure, or maybe two. There’s clearly some very good imaginative stuff going on in this, especially the environments. I’d gladly pay $5 for this if it were 1 or 2 pages of the good stuff. $5 for the 50 page monstrosity that it exists as? No. It distracts and takes too much to run. I’ll forgive the linear nature, the challenge/test thing that I hate. The Imagery is REALLY good and works well together as a cohesive whole to present a compelling journey to the afterlife. Well, if it’s edited down.

I really like the imagery. I just can’t stomach the way its presented.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/127517/Road-of-the-Dead-Collectors-Edition?1892600

by Zzarchov Kowolski
LotFP
LotFP

Dunnsmouth is diseased and rotten to the core. Beset by malefactors supernatural and mundane, Dunnsmouth slowly dies in the swamp. But within the rot are mysteries to be solved, evil to be fought, and the Weird to be encountered.

Scenic Dunnsmouth is good. Scenic Dunnsmouth is not an adventure. Here’s the blurb from the LotFP store: “Scenic Dunnsmouth is an adventure for characters of levels 2-5 for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and other traditional role-playing games.”

Yes, sometimes I can be a petty ass and this is one of those times. Scenic is a village. It’s got lots of strange shit going on in it and a lot of weirdos to interact with. I love it. Scenic is not an adventure. It’s a backdrop. It’s a terrific backdrop full of everything Bryce loves. But it’s not an adventure.

I’m not sure why this shit sets me off the way it does. I’ve clearly got some deep wounds to my inner child that this sort of stuff sets off. Probably because of Castle Greyhawk. Everything bad in the world can be traced back to Castle Greyhawk.

I review adventures. I buy adventures to review. People don’t give me things. They try. I politely decline. If I buy an apple and you give me an orange I’m going to be pissed. If I wanted an orange I’d buy an orange.

This is a good supplement. A good village. I’ll almost certainly use it as a backdrop for some other adventure I’m running. But it’s not an adventure and I’ll always feel a little cheated when I look at it. 🙁

[Aso, this is why Zak’s stuff doesn’t get reviewed. He writes great stuff, but they generally don’t fall into the “adventure” category.]

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/127039/Scenic-Dunnsmouth?1892600

by John Tynes
Penumbra
d20
Levels 1-3

Deeptown lies in the shadows of mountains, a town where anything is for sale if you can only meet the price. But in the wild surrounding valleys of the Deeps, it’s the bandits who make the darkest deals–and their ambition comes at a cost far greater than the contents of any wayward caravan. You and your team have just been handed a new job: disrupt a meeting between a bandit lord and his mysterious new allies. At a remote mountain villa, you will strike hard and fast and leave terror in your wake. They give you the tools. You provide the talent. Survive, and you’ll be well rewarded. Fail, and you’ll pay the price. You’ve got three days to raise some hell.

Sometimes I read forum threads where various folks say “Blah blah blah adventure is great!” I jot down the names and grab them when I stumble across them in a garage sale. Such is the case for Three Days to Kill. I can see why folks like this. In the land of generic genericism this adventure has some colour. The colour is scattered and not consistent. Portions of the adventure left me wanting to know more, in a good way. Excited about what I was reading. The main portion of the adventure is a raid on a ruined manor. That portion is relatively short compared to the page count in the rest of the adventure. This adventure covers all of the bases. It doesn’t treat the introduction or the starting village as a second-class part of the adventure. This recognition that the fun takes places EVERYWHERE in D&D is an important one. The journey is the Destination, and all of that jazz. I just wish it were a little more consistent in it’s color, in a bad way, and wish there was A LOT more, in a very good way.

The party is hired, in mysterious circumstances, to go raid a manor where an important meeting is taking place, disrupting the potential alliance being formed. Pretty simple, even though that particular task is not one that is usually seen. There’s this underlying sense of the unsavory that appeals to me. Everything about the adventure, from the village to the hook to the raid, is just a LITTLE bit not kosher. After experiencing adventure after adventure where the goal is to Save the World or Stop Evil, it’s refreshing to see an adventure in which things are a little more mercenary. There’s this sense that something’s not on the up and up … and yet nothing you can point your finger at to say “this is wrong!” It’s pretty skillfully done; no big complex setups, just relatable motivations.

There’s a trade pass through the mountains with a small town in the middle. Bandits abound in the mountains on both sides. The town in the center is a bit unsavory … perhaps a bit … libertarian? As the adventure notes, can you call it bribery and corruption when it’s an integrated way of life and just the way things work here? The town lives in the shadow of the mountains, literally and figuratively. Even this appeals to me. The sort of integrated whole of the environment leaves me wanting to know more about the place. It’s interesting. It’s simple. It’s described in the way that makes your mind race and want to run a game or campaign there. The town backgrounds descriptions are short and punchy yet the page count is rather high. This is because large sections are taken up with supporting sidebars. An NPC stats, or a map, or something like that. Interesting descriptions with easy to find information … that’s a plus.

The first section of the book has these little background snippets on the area, the town, the bandits lords, and the temples in town. Maybe three of four paragraphs on each with some generic sidebar information. (I said the sidebar/supporting information was easy to find, I didn’t say it added much content. 🙂 It’s very strong of 10,000 flavor and atmosphere.

The second portion of the adventure focuses in on a specific event: the Festival of Plenty going on when the party arrives. Again, portions of this are very colorful. An effluent pit and a nice little passion play are the highlights. They are both very well done and are great things to build off of. And then there are the other suggested events. “A drunk ½ orc picks a fight with a PC elf or halfling.” My my my. I wonder how long it took to come up with THAT idea? A dwarf wrestles all comers with a 1gp purse.” Again, not too much there. This kind of boring and uninteresting dreck is jarring in comparison to the better parts. Consistently the 10,000 foot stuff is very good, communicating colour and flavor perfectly. And consistently the specific portions, while organized quite well, are boring as hell. The NPC motivations are done well. The adventure doesn’t waste space on nonsense descriptions. But the specifics are just not interesting at all. The play and the drinking game are standout exceptions. “Ill kill you!” is a Baron Munchausen like drinking game that should delight the players.

After getting hired by some shady guys in masks the party goes on to raid the manor house. In high school I used to play Danger International. Every adventure ended with a raid on the bad guys base. We’d plan our assault, come up with some goofy idea, and then execute it. That’s what’s going on here. There are a wide variety of magic items to assist in the planning and execution that range from the cool to the lame. “Flare Pebbles” are lame little flash bangs. A devil eye floating in a glass jar that always looks towards the nearest/strongest presence of evil is pretty cool. There’s also a glass orb you can look through,kind of like binoculars. Glass orbs are boring, but that’s trivial to change to an eyeball also. Bryce Pro Tip: Organic magic items are always cooler. 🙂 The description of the manor is PERFECT. This isn’t an exploration mission. The room descriptions are about two sentences each and focus on what’s important. An oil lamp, or who hangs out there. The room descriptions match the purpose of the adventure. This section is quite short, and it really doesn’t need to be long. It may be missing an order of battle; what the various groups inside do when attacked. Other than that it recognizes what it needs to do and it does it. Good Job.

Let me note that the adventure then becomes SPECTACULAR. Chaos. Pure Chaos. While the party is attacking one faction turns on a magic mirror. And things start coming through. Who end up not allying with anyone. This makes faction number four (alliance side a, alliance side b, the party, the mirror) and THEN some orcs show up. Chaos! Wonderful wonderful chaos! The adventure is, though, missing a callback.. The presence of orcs in the area should have been a rumor, or maybe some bodies with missing ears or something. Something to trigger the party into saying “Oh shit! the orcs we forgot about!” (Also, the rumor table sucks.) Anyway, this is a great tactic to up the ante. Instead of dictating some nonsense set piece bullshit the adventure instead provides the elements to up tension. This is a great way to make things memorable without the usual set piece nonsense that modern adventures seem to rely upon. (WOTC: You suk.)

The PDF is $5 at rpgnow. I really like the background in this. I’d LUV to know more about the region/town/temples. If every adventure were at least this good I’d be a happy man and probably not running tenfootpole. It’s a long way from perfect, especially as it gets to the specifics, but it is VERY inspirational. It’s the kind of thing you WANT to run. And those are few and far between.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/145648/Three-Days-to-Kill?1892600