tenfootpole.org

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

by Creighton Broadhurst
Raging Swan Press
Pathfinder
Level 3

Months ago, the necromancer Dunstan Wymer was gored by a wereboar and infected with lycanthropy. Almost driven insane by the realisation of what he had become after awaking amid the gore and viscera of his companions’ eviscerated corpses, he has since shunned civilisation instead seeking only solitude and the company of his undead servants. Terrified of the savage, bloody deeds he performs when the full moon shines down upon the world he now lurks within the remote hermitage at Clear Pool. In a desperate attempt to control his terrible, atavistic urges he has taken to stealing cattle from a nearby village to assuage his bestial lust for fresh, bloody flesh. The unknowing villagers, however, are angry at the continued theft of their livestock and the arrival of a passing band of adventurers gives them the perfect tools to bring the culprit to justice…

There’s at least three adventures with this title. A normal version, an expanded Collector’s Edition, and then some Living Forgotten Realms adventure that I’m pretty sure is not related. If you’re going to pick up a copy of this mediocre werewolf adventure then make sure and get the right one.

As with a lot of adventures, this one doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. Because of that you get some great stuff mixed in with a lot of half efforts … or less. Ostensibly about a sad wereboar, it tries to mix in some village politics and village life and some modern morality. The party either investigates some missing cattle in the village or gets hired to go to the lair, proper, to pick up some old hermit bones for a relative. The effort to put into these is minimal and they rank just above “Look, we’re playing this adventure tonight.” Lots of words, lots of detail. None of it very interesting. If you’re going to put in words then put in words that are NOT obvious. In both cases they are introduced to the village, it’s problem of the missing cattle, and then end up at the old caves to meet the new hermit. He’s a not-so-evil necromancer who has a bad case of wereboarism. You get extra XP for curing him or getting him to pay the villagers for the cattle he stole. I hate that kind of shit. Hmmm, do I? I hate XP for “correct” morality choices. The inconsistency of the system is lame. XP for overcoming monsters? Sure. Treasure recovery? Ok, if that’s your deal. For being goody-goody? Well… did you tell the players that they are in a goody-goody game and get their XP from being goody-goody? Expectations.

The NPC descriptions for the village provide more fodder for my opinions. “Fierce advocate for a pastoral way of life” is a nice NPC description. So is “eternally nosy self-appointed sheriff.” These are things you can work with and are short enough to not get in the way. “Angered by recent thefts” or “proponent of greater trade & industry” are not as good. In these cases we get more facts than personality, and the NPC descriptions suffer because of it. This is a continuing theme in this adventure. Brief hits with a lot of misses in between. Another good example of this would be the read-aloud in the first room of the cave system: “Dried gore and blood cover the walls and floor. The ceiling bears sprays of dried arterial blood. Ripped, torn and partially eaten animal corpses are scattered about the chamber. “ Short and to the point while still being evocative. But then the kitchen read-aloud describes a typical kitchen. WTF? Text that describes “normal” things is wasted text. This goes for the village description, the read-aloud everywhere, and the cave/wilderness sections. We don’t need a kitchen described to us. We need the unusual described to us. We need the area cemented in our heads and we already have that with most normal areas.

The village presented is supposed to have some conflict going on The pastoral villagers vs. the industrious dwarves. The fey running around in the village. But neither of these is really expanded upon in any way. Just throw away lines in a rumor table or the villagers not really sitting with each other. Instead of the village being a focus, which it should be, instead it’s just barely interesting in any useful way. Oh, there’s lots of text, but it’s unfocused, describing the mundane instead of the potential conflict. There is a great table for events happening in the village. I think there’s like six possibilities. Rather than rolling I’d suggest running all six at once, along with all the dwarf/villager tension, the missing cattle, the hermit bones, and everything else. Adventures are a pretext for the party to get into trouble and more stuff means more trouble, and thus more fun and memories.

The cave system only have about 5 keyed rooms, and only a couple with stuff in them. There’s a nice little random “what you find in an empty room” table, but again it’s a little out of place. Most of it seems to be geared towards a running battle; slick floors and the like. But there’s not really much opportunity of that kind of thing to happen. And why make it a random table? What does that add? Just put the stuff in the empty rooms and gear it toward something in the adventure.

Focus. Focus on the adventure. Don’t focus on the mundane. Don’t focus on the forms. Don’t focus on the stat blocks. Focus on the adventure. Focus on the wonder. Focus on the unusual. Sadly, this adventure doesn’t do that. When the adventure does that it’s great. The read-aloud I quoted is a good example. There’s an NPC described, a captured thief adventurer. WHen you free him he retires to become a fence … and thus a contact for the party. That’s a GREAT thing. None of this “and they send you a reward later” stuff. It’s gameable. It introduces long-term changes to your game, things you can leverage easily in the future. Gameable. Interesting. And then the adventure gives us this, for the main villain: “Socially ill at ease and awkward in crowds he reacts by erecting emotional barriers and keeping social interactions as superficial as possible. He secretly harbours a desire to be a painter, but lacks the skills and materials.“ And that’s just one part of the ten or eleven paragraphs used to describe him and advice on how to play him. Do we really expect he painter shit to come up? Is it interesting? Is it gameable? Does it have direct long-term impact like the fence stuff does?

It’s sad that this is a mediocre also-ran. It could been great. It coulda been a contender.

This is on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/145589/Gibbous-Moon-Collectors-Edition?1892600

by James Raggi
LotFP
LotFP

Animals and children have gone missing from the village of Schwarzton. Locals suspect that an old Satanic coven has re-established itself! Can your intrepid heroes survive dread dungeons and bizarre monsters and save the day?

META

Well, it’s not as bad as some of the other Raggi adventures. As the publishers blurb says, some kids have gone missing and there was once a satanic cult around. The adventure comes in three parts. The closer you get to the actual cause for the disappearances the shorter the details. The first part is where the party is generally directed and makes up the bulk of the text of the adventure proper. It’s a red herring. The second part, usually triggered after the party gets back from the dungeon in the first part, takes up quite a bit less space and it, still, essentially, unrelated to the actual cause of the disappearances. The third part, the actual cause, is a couple of paragraphs long. A random bear has wandered in nearby and ate the kids. Random chance each day the party stumbles on to the bear. Everything is pretext. Everything is unrelated. It’s just an excuse for the party to stumble around until the bear shows up.

The adventure gets off on the meta. The summary above should clearly illustrate one aspect of the meta. In another part, right outside the dungeon, the party finds a note for them that clearly indicates that the dungeon has nothing to do with the missing children and they should not go in it. In another part the DM is instructed to make their next adventure very easy because one aspect of the adventure has cursed them, the referee. Clearly Jim has fun breaking the fourth wall. All of that nonsense is just performance art. Or, worse, it breaks the contract with the players of the DM being a neutral third party.

The DM has absolute power. The players put themselves at the DMs mercy. There is a contract here. The DM will be neutral and not be a dick and the players will play. When that is broken we get to Killer DM territory; the junior high DM would views the game as adversarial. “I’m too good, You can’t beat me!” one potential DM once told me. I wisely did not play in that game. When the DM goes meta there’s a problem. I’m not saying this adventure does that. Or maybe I am. I’m not exactly sure where the line is. I do know this adventure walks VERY close to that line. One of the most delightful parts is the note addressed to the party. It tells them not to go in. The DM is clearly fucking with the party by putting it in. Is a META note like this FAIRLY fucking with the party? I don’t know. Like I said, it’s close to the line. I like fucking with the party. I like tempting the party. Putting in a deathtrap dungeon, having all of the PC’s say the solution to the quest is in the deathtrap dungeon, putting a sign outside the deathtrap dungeon saying “Nope, the missing kids are not in here.” … I don’t know. It’s too close for me. Maybe it’s a mean-spirited”fucking with the party.” I don’t know.

The satanic cult aspect is quite nice, with a misunderstood alien space penis. It’s a cute little section and it’s too bad that the only you can find it, probably, is after exploring the deathtrap dungeon. That smacks of linearity. It’s a great section where everything makes sense and the party gets one up on the local dirt-farmers with a fellow buddy. A little silly, but in that way all D&D adventures tend to get when they are the most fun, and not much sense of the entire situation being forced (except in getting there in the first place.)

The village is non-existent. There is a lot of padding at the beginning with designer exposition (not much/any useful) and a couple of pages of a long example of play. Instead of this nonsense Raggi could have included some nice NPC’s for the village. The play example is quite colorful but meaningless to the adventure. A page of Pembrooktonshite NPC’s for the village, or the two NPC’s in the play example condensed down to three sentences each and augmented with a dozen more … any of this would have supported the village play. As written the adventure does next to nothing to support this major portion of the adventure. Not good enough! You’re meant to fuck around the village for a long while. And there’s nothing. Well, almost nothing. There’s a pretty good rumor table.

The dungeon is decent and more good than bad. “Bad” in this sense is “Jim Raggi Random Deathtrap.” Again, it’s important for the players to know the consequences of the decisions they make. When very bad things happen to them out of the blue, or seemingly out of the blue, it can seem random. When they KNOW they are making a decision it’s so much more wonderful. Putting a nice treasure on an obvious pressure plate? DELICIOUS. Putting a death trap around the corner at the bottom of a long staircase with no warning? Uncool. This type of nonsense encourages game-slowing behaviour. The kid where the party searches every ten foot section of the dungeon corridor. The kind where it takes 15 minutes of real time to open every door because the hinges, direction of the door swing, construction, etc must all be examined and dealt with. There are a couple of these things in the dungeon. There’s SOME room for this stuff at much higher levels when augury/etc come into play for the characters, but I don’t get the sense that this is a high-level adventure. But there’s other stuff, more of it, that is good. There IS an obvious pressure plate. There’s a room with levers that do things. The stairway deathtrap DOES have a good effect, both in the trap and in the solution and in the color.

Treasure is good, nice and unique. Monsters are good, as they always are in LotFP adventures. New creatures, well described, unique abilities tailored to the environment/creature/theme.

Jim goes on a diatribe/monologue in the beginning about how he gets bored and the quantity of adventures on the market. How he’s not inspired and thus this is how the Meta aspects of Fuck for Satan. I would assume, he’s justifying his other adventures as well … at least the gimmickry/gimpy ones. It’s too bad he feels like he has to do something with a silly gimpy gimmick for it to be interesting.

The village needs an overhaul. The dungeon is nice, if meta and little unfair. The cult is great as an ending. The parts just don’t work together well because it’s meant to be a screw job. Is it fun playing a game you know will be a screw job? (Jim directly advises the DM to not let on it’s a LotFP adventure/screwjob.) Adversarial D&D is not my thing. Maybe Jim should write Fiasco playsets?

by Creighton Broadhurst
Raging Swan Press
Pathfinder
Level 5

Lurking in the watery depths of a fallen orc tribe’s sacred burial cairn amid the bleached, broken bones of savage warriors, honoured champions and mighty warlords the forest drakes Arduthal and Ingeirmaugh have made themselves a comfortable, safe home. Periodically emerging to ravage the surrounding countryside their depredations have reached such a level that Baron Liofa Othen begs the PCs to slay the foul beasts. The cairn’s remote location, inundated, bone?choked passageways and the vengeful, possessive ghost of the orc champion Gork Shattershield, not to mention the drakes’ mistaken identity as green dragons, all stand in the way of the PCs’ victory.

We all have these internal stereotypes about things. A frequent stereotype of modern adventures is that they are verbose, linear, and more encounter based. I try very hard to not fall into those prejudged traps … and then something like this comes along: Verbose, linear, and encounter based Pathfinder adventure. There are some decent parts to this but the slavish devotion to form results in a 21 page adventure with five rooms. And they are not very good rooms.

The adventure proper doesn’t start until page ten. The rest of the beginning is introduction, background, explanation of how to do an appraise check for item value, or how to identify magic items. There’s a room underwater so the adventure also has three pages of filler at the end that includes two pages of underwater rules. For those keeping count we’re now at eight pages for five rooms. TO be fair, the constipation is at the beginning and end, and thus easily ignored, but that still means that we’re averaging 1.5 pages per room for the rest. I’m a softy, so explaining the idiosyncratic rules at the beginning and end is ok with me. The room keys, though, are sacred. And the room keys in this stink.

Long keys. Descriptions on separate lines in each room for illumination, ceiling, and features. Creature descriptions that are half a page long, at least. Each room has three or four features and each one needs a full couple of lines of description.
Bones: Bones cover much of the floor.
Shallow bone piles add 2 to the DC of Acrobatics checks.

That’s about the 900th time time that we’ve been told in the adventure that shallow bone piles add 2 to acrobatics checks. I can’t remember my kids age but I sure as hell now remember the modifier to acrobatics checks for shallow bone piles. The pain in the ass part is that this garbage nonsense is mixed in with some decent stuff. The author says, somewhere in the first 10 filler pages, that they like to present interesting environments to provide tactical options for the players. I might quibble with the reasoning but the outcome is one I agree with. Large piles of bones ARE interesting. So are escarpments, muddy and slick banks into pools of water, and many of the other features presented. It’s just SO verbose and repeated SO many times that it reads more like a 4.0 encounter than it does a environment to adventure in. Does the muddy bank exist because you needed a feature in the room to provide tactical options, or does it exist because it’s a pool of water that, of course, has a muddy bank? For the most part I don’t think it matters, as I mentioned previously, the outcome is the same. But it does come off as lame encounter-based.

The linear nature of the environment doesn’t help. Five rooms, essentially all in a row. A meh background of orcs bodies tossed in a cave and two dragons who moved in. A boring rumor table presented in a fact-based format instead of adding color. It’s all just … boring. Slavish devotion to form. Slavish devotion to the standard fantasy tropes.

What’s frustrating is that there are bits and pieces that are quite good. One NPC is “impressively chauvinistic.” That’s a great description! There’s a great hook for a ½ orc character that involves a vision from an orc god, along with some nice modifiers and a good conclusion. That’s a great little bit to spice things up for the ½ orc. (Everyone likes to feel special sometimes.) A holy vision, with +2 morale modifiers to hit and saves because of the bloodlust/motivation with cleansing the defiled site. Great! And it comes with a reward of turning the bloodlust ability from ½ orc limitation to full orc limitations. AGain, perfect! Non-standard but specific to the character. Likewise the treasure is great. A sword with a dripping blood motif hilt. Scale mail that have the scales looking like severed ears. Those are great! Those are the types of items that tempt the players into keeping them when more powerful, but boring, items show up. The muddy stream, a steep escarpment … all great.

Linear. Verbose. Too much form. Too much filler.

This is available from DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/107461/Dwellers-Amid-Bones?1892600

by Simon Carryer
LOTFP
LOTFP
Low Levels

Xaxus is a creature of pure thought. Manakata is a being of raw power. On an island at the edge of the world, they transform human proxies to act on their behalf. And they war Now it’s you on this island, caught in this battle. Will you remain who you are? Can you?

This is a little sandbox/module in the best/old sense of the word. It describes an environment on an island, and then offers some opportunities to get the party on to the island. It’s not a one-trick pony; it’s more like an eight-trick pony … but one of those tricks is very VERY good. Or appealing. Or something.

What is presented is an island. On the island are two great towers, linked up high by a rope bridge. There’s a number of other minor locations, but those are the centerpieces. The island has a god, in the form of a stone idol. He gifts his followers increased strength and con, at when they fail him their INT and WIS is lowered. They end up looking like some roid-rage blob. Recently a thing from space has crashed. It’s name is Xaxus. It’s an idea. Nothing more, just an idea. He’s a nice guy. And very convincing. Like, 25 CHR convincing. Nothing magical, nothing coerced, just really convincing and likeable. When you freely join him you become a part of a hive mind. But you do it of your own free will, and you can leave again at any time, or your own will. Finally, there was recently a shipwreck, which most likely brings the party to the island in order to find the survivors. With all of this in mind, go read the intro blurb again. Make more sense now? This thing has potential energy written all over the cover in giant red crayon.

This thing has quite a few neat things going on in it, but by far the most interesting is the concept of the Idea of Space, proper. It smacks a bit of Stranger in a Strange Land territory. The groupthink hive mind trope is not too uncommon, but the voluntary nature of this one is what makes it stand out. This, and to a lesser extent the Manakata Bro culture, are both voluntary. This plays on one of my favorite game concepts: temptation. I wonder what happens when the big red button is pushed? Yes, the friendly ogre with jeweled crown has his back turned to you. Hand and Eye of Vecna, sitting right there … This is choice. It’s real choice. No tricks. Both choices are valid. Both choices are both wonderful AND leave you wondering about the road not taken. There’s gotta be some german compound word for this sort of thing. Anyway, it’s an appeal to the PLAYERS rather than the characters. Those tend to be the more effective techniques, and I think it’s really effective here.

Beyond this it’s got a lot of other nice and interesting bits in it. The Xaxus folks can shoot a beam ray when they team up and hold hands. Great Scott! That’s AWESOME! Hive mind cultists joining hands in praise to the larger entity and shooting eyebeams as a result … wonderful! Treasure is on the lighter side and runs a bit into “creative looting”, such as “how much can we get for the glass statue” or “how much for the weird ropes holding up the bridge.” There’s a decent amount of other treasure, generally decently described. On the magic side there’s a ring that stands out. It’s one of those “magic doesn’t impact you” rings … either good or bad magic. And you can’t take it off. And you find it on a severed finger, burnt, in a fireplace. Nice touch. There are not a great many new monsters, but what there is are both described well and illustrated well. I like a good monster description, one that is more evocative than fact based, and the big monster description in this fills that well. The Bro’s are also described nicely.

Touching again on the Temptation theme: both groups on the island are, generally, friendly, or at least neutral. This sets things up well. You get to learn about their problems. You get to learn how they view The Others. You get introduced to the power that will tempt the players. Eventually, the players probably hatch a zany plan and things will end up in some kind of running hackfest, as they always tend to do when players are involved. This module sets that up perfectly.

There are a ton of other neato things in this as well, mostly in the two towers. They range from freaky skeletons (mysteries for the DM to expand upon) to freaky deaky plants, to room puzzles that feel integrated into the complex rather than “puzzle in a room.”

This is nice. It doesn’t have any of the DM torture porn aspects that LotFP have drifted into in the recent years, but it does have all of the non-mechanics interesting content that LotFP tends to feature. Probably because there’s a different designer here.

You can pick it up at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/141036/The-Idea-from-Space?1892600