tenfootpole.org

The Oakhearst Chainsaw Massacre

by John Bennett
Raging Swan
Pathfinder
Level 5

The Lonely Coast’s most remote village, Oakhurst broods under the dark boughs of the Tangled Woods. Rumours of incest, murder and vile rites during the black of night surround its insular citizens. It is a place most wise people avoid as the very air seems inhospitable to strangers. Yet in the rumours is a grain of truth, for something dark does indeed stir in the shadow haunted trees and hunched homes of Oakhurst. An ancient evil, hungry with the thirst for blood, awakens from its eons long sleep. As disappearances mount and the Lonely Coast can no longer turn a blind eye to the blight that is Oakhurst, heroes are called upon to investigate the foul rumours and mysteries that plague the village. As the search for the truth intensifies, they may find themselves the next victims of a rising, bloodthirsty evil. Can they survive Against the Cult of the Bat God?

Pathfinder?!?! Yes, Pathfinder. Don’t be an ass. Every version of D&D is essentially the same. If you can’t run a Pathfinder adventure OSR, or an OSR in Pathfinder, then, well, I’m sorry to have to say this to you: you’re an idiot. This probably goes for Warhammer, The One Ring, MERP, Harn, and every other traditional fantasy RPG. They are all close enough to run. Let’s get the Pathfinder crap out of the way up front. It’s got some magical ren faire shit, like some magic stuff for sale. It’s also got stat blocks for monsters that are a column large, per monster. It’s also got some hideous room/key style that insists on putting break stats next to everything possible, and describing every window, door, and ceiling height, for every room, on a separate line. Pathfinder sells, I get it. But man, the number of trees that died … Do the Pathfinder gamers really not buy stuff if it’s not in this excessively verbose format?

I don’t know where I heard of Raging Swan. I sometimes look at “What’s the best adventure …?” threads on various forums, so I suspect it came up in that. For whatever reason, I’ve got a review box full of the stuff, mixed in with free adventures, con promos and whatever. So you’re gonna get a couple of Raging Swan reviews. Because some idiot somewhere on the internets said they were good. I don’t know what I trusted that idiot over the ones that said some other stuff was good, but I did. So here we are.

This is a good adventure. The better parts of it remind me of Deep Carbon Observatory. DCO presented little scenes, vignettes, inspiration that the DM could then leverage for party fun time. The better parts of this adventure, specifically the village part, remind me a bit of that style. There’s also a little bit of the Steve Jobs “just one more thing …” going on also. One of the hooks has a nobleman approaching the party. His daughter ran away with her fiance to the adventure village and took she absconded with the family jewels … no doubt to pawn. Could you go fetch her back? That’s a pretty standard hook. Just one more thing … you get the feeling he’s more interested in getting his jewels back than his daughter. BLAMO! Just what you need to add a WHOLE lot of life to this interaction with the party. No longer a faceless droid, the nobleman now has something for the DM to work with. There’s a lot of this “little big extra” going on in this adventure. The second hook, by the way, is missing this. The local lord’s steward contacts the party, asking them to look into the village for the lord. What’s missing is that little bit extra: “because he doesn’t trust the reeve he appointed. Don’t contact him.” That turns boring into a spy mission, with additional distrust to play with. Not everything in the adventure is good, as that example shows, but it is at least generally decent, with no railroads.

The adventure centers around a remote forest village. Decrepit and decaying, straight out a Lovecraft story. There are half a dozen notable villagers detailed. There are a handful of events detailed. There is a full percentile table full of “village backdrop” to add character to the village. There’s a handful of businesses presented. There’s a timeline presented for what happens. It’s just about perfect as the centerpoint for a village investigation locale. Try this on for size: Cats hiss at one another, fighting over a piece of rotten meat before howling and running off. A decrepit old man swoops in to grab it and begins to stuff it into his mouth. This is exactly the sort of stuff to bring a place to life. It sets the atmosphere, for both the DM and player, perfectly.

The party is hooked into the remote village. They poke around a bit and eventually get attacked that first evening. Which leads to an investigation of an old manor, which leads to another ambush, and then to a ritual in a dark cave the next day. Poke around, shit happens, do some B&E to get some more information, suffer some consequences, confront the baddie. Pretty standard. And very well executed. Werebats, the creepy village, the creepy manor (“a small sack filled with hundreds of human teeth spills over”), this is a classic example of a well-executed “showing instead of telling” adventure. Telling the party Bob is evil is a “meh” situation. The party discovering a bag of bloody humanoid teeth shows the party that Bob is evil … a much more successful way of making an impact during the adventure. This adventure does that very well. I fucking LOVE the tables in this adventure that are used to add some of that showing. The adventure proper does a decent job and it’s taken over the top by those tables.

I already touched on the verbosity a bit, but let me give another example. It illustrates perfectly the agony/ecstasy of the area descriptions in this adventure. Area M2 is the Animal Pens. “The Wearnes kept an assortment of chickens and rabbits to drink their blood.” Then there’s a little two-sence read-aloud that has a nice little bit about flies buzzing angrily around the pens. Then there’s a little bit about the family neglected the animals kept in here and they starved to death, the stench of rotting bodies hanging in the air. PERFECT. EXCELLENT! Mood set! DM Energized! Then the animal coop is described on a separate line, adding nothing of import. Then the fence is described (along with the require fucking break DC), adding nothing. Then the pen yard is described, adding nothing. All of that is at least as long as the first, good part, and maybe ever a bit longer. Going through the required (Pathfinder?) forms detracts insteads of adds.

Some of the treasure is very nice. A +1 dagger that is shaped like a scalpel with a metal handle. Some kick ass books, which double as spellbooks. Exactly what spellbooks should be. A short collection of profane poems to evil gods acts as a scroll of augury. Cool! The Necrotic Codex of Evern Holstam is bound in tanned human skin with a spine fashioned by a leg bone. It’s a treatise on the undead, and contains all L1 and L2 necrotic spells. Sweet! This is treasure! The party will shit themselves AND covet them! Awesome!

The monsters here are almost all new. While original, and well illustrated, they could use a little bit more descriptive text to communicate the flavor to the DM. But, bonus points for non-book monsters. Or at least using monsters that I don’t recognize.

There’s a miss or two also. There’s a journal present that describes the evil plan. Journals, a staple of Lovecraft and CoC, are a cop out. Find a different way to communicate things. Prisoners or something. The village feels smaller, described, than what’s portrayed on the text. The random village trappings help with this a bit, but it’s still feels a bit … empty and unsupported? I don’t know … I might be wrong about this. The trappings table is VERY strong. The main baddie, a werebat, also uses a Wand of Wounding type thing. That’s fucking lame. Make the werebat do werebat things. A werebat using a wand smacks of DM fiat. let him shoot green rays from his glowing green eyes if you want him to have a ranged attack. But using a monster using a wand is lame. The werebats have already been tweaked. They worship a dark bat god. Why not leverage that instead of jerking us out of the werebat mindset?

This is solid. It’s organization is not perfect, but it does a decent job of laying things out for you so it’s to run during actual play. The tables and information is easy to find, even if they are not reproduced in the back or on a tear sheet.

The PDF is $9 on rpgnow, with the print being $14. If you have any interest in what I’ve described then I would encourage you to look into this. I’ve bought adventures for a lot more that were a lot less good.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/128936/Against-the-Cult-of-the-Bat-God?1892600

by Anders Lager
Lazy Sod Press
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 3-4

Somewhere in Frostreave… “Ever since we left that so-called town at the edge of the land of eternal ice, I’ve been freezing my butts off! And no trace of that were-whatever-thing we’re supposed to hunt down. Our best scout, Halross, says she’s been passing here, into this valley, but I get a bad feeling from all this silence, frost and snow. It’s empty here. No animals. No tracks. No nothing, but ice and snow. It’s not natural… And now we’re stuck in this cave. The blizzard has lasted two days now, and our supplies are almost gone. Hell, I’d give a sack of gold for a cold ale and a hot wench in my lap right now. I can smell the fear of the others – die of starvation or disgust here, or freeze to death out there. And some other not so pleasant smells too… Some choice, huh? Maybe we can roast that gnome’s pony? Would have been nice with some food now… Or, we just roast the gnome… Everyone’s on the edge. No sign of the blizzard waning either. I reckon someone will snap soon… Well, not me. Guess it’s time we get moving…”
This is a short fifteen room tomb complex, mostly linear, in the frozen north. It’s got some decently unique monsters and magic, but it resembles some cross between Tomb of Horrors and Grimtooth more than a dungeon adventure. The adversarial vibe from Tomb of Horrors is present here as well, and it’s something I’ve always had a hard time getting into.

It starts off well enough: “General feel: Dark, cold. Everything is covered in a thin layer of frost. Not disturbed for ages. Faint smell of decay in the stale air. All areas are either cut out of the bedrock or natural caves. The doors are made of hard wood and locked or barred. All scribblings are in an archaic form of Old Elvish.“ That’s some pretty good inspirational text. It sets mood in a very good way. You can build off of that, getting into the right frame of mind to expand the room descriptions. Then it immediately drops off at the first room. About a half page of text to describe a cave with a body in it and a secret door in the back wall. And it’s not good description either. It has advice like “(easy perception roll)” and “Close to the corpse there’s a small triangular opening in the stone wall, leading into the depths of the rock. (average perception roll)” It goes on. A lot. This is a really great example of an unfocused writing style. It’s very conversational. It’s trying to provide atmosphere, and rules, and facts, and inspiration, but it’s not really doing much of any of that very well. Spurious text like “close to the corpse” doesn’t really give us anything to work with, it’s more like a boring fact. “Embedded in its bloody hand” does a much better job, if it is even required. The description is more like a stream of consciousness outpouring from the writer. It’s a decent start, for a first draft, but needs a polish to focus the writing, to dig into what’s important and improve it and drop the rest. Most of the rooms in the adventure are like that.

The grimtooth/Tomb of Horrors vibe turns me off also. It’s a pretty strong reaction from me, and I’m sure I’m prejudiced against this sort of dungeon. A pool of water in a natural cave that’s actually acid, or a sodium ball that drops into a pool of water to explode. Lots of levers to pull to make certain things happen. I like all of these elements, separately, but when put together in a “Challenge” style tomb I start to react badly. I think it’s the whole “the dungeon builder/wizard wants to test you” thing that I loathe, and this resembles that if you squint enough.

The dungeon is pretty linear. The map looks like a Logos-style map, but is’ pretty linear with a couple of offshoot corridors with more empty rooms and “challenges.” It’s not really large enough to stretch your legs in or to get that feeling of dread from not knowing what’s down the road not taken.

It does a decent job with the monsters and the treasure. It’s new monsters and treasure, which is always nice to see. The descriptions are a bit wanting though. “As normal skeletons, but armed with norse weapons.” Not exactly inspiring. Spectral skeletons dripping with ectoplasm (a different monster) is a bit better.

The ending has the undead king arise, 10 turns later, and begin to summon an army of the dead. The beginning has the party find a cross that is used as a kind of key to open some of the doors/traps in the complex. Both of those elements are pretty decent. It’s the middle that suffers a lot. The conversational style leads to the lack of focus in the descriptions, resulting in boring instead of inspiring.

$1.99
This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/158772/No-Country-for-Weak-Men-SW-version?1892600

by Dyson Logos
ZERO/Barrier Productions
Labyrinth Lord
Level 4

This is actually a review of issues four and five of Dyson’s Dodecahedron, and more specifically, of the Erdea Manor dungeon that is spread out between the two issues. The dungeon has four levels with about ninety rooms total. It’s an inconsistent effort, with the upper levels being more interesting and better than the lower levels. It reminds me a lot of my favorite dungeon, Level 1 of The Darkness Beneath, without the “effortlessly interesting rooms” that TDB has.

The ruins of an old manor sit on a hillside. And inside are four chaotic levels of factions and six different groups that feels much more static then the implies it should. Dwarves are hanging around, trying to wait out a siege of ogres that have recently moved in. The ogres have a rogue member who is out for himself. The old members of the family that owned the manor are hanging around in the basements, with, maybe, four different factions. There are vermin galore and a few other humanoids that have wandered in. And yet … it feels more static than that would imply. The dwarves are locked in a room and have no interest in leaving. There’s a bit of a Monty Python/French Knights thing you could do with this, but it’s not really interactive. Likewise the ogres … the intra-ogre conflict is not really a highlight or enabled very well. The three or four factions of the family in the lower levels are also not really … interesting? People, fish-people, and bull-people are presented as branches (As well as undead) but no real reference to their interactions, cooperation, or how they react to the parties intrusions.

The details for the monsters, and for many of the rooms, come off instead as window dressing, or maybe fondant. It looks nice but it doesn’t really contribute very well to core mission. Rather than enabling creative play it comes off mostly as trivia. The springboard to adventure is lost. Individually some of the rooms are quite nice. Gnolls displaced by cave bears who is eating one of their comrades in the next room. Goats hanging on hooks on the walls, or an ogre making dwarf-bone bread. There’s something missing here. Some kind of potential energy, a wound spring waiting to be released.

The treasure is mostly a miss on the hit and miss scale. Highlights are a pair of ceremonial platinum axes and a golden beard-clasp. That’s quite nice. But most of the treasure ends up in the “silver necklace” or “+1 spear” category of treasure.

The maps are what you would expect. They have a lot of nice features, stairs up & down, multiple ways into and out of the dungeon, a good mix of dungeon features. They remind me a lot of the Rappan Athuk levels; individually they can be a bit small but if viewed as a cross-section they get much more interesting.

There’s a good example of the room types in an old meeting room. On the wall is a portrait, almost completely faded. If you raise a toast to the person in the portrait then something happens. But there’s no clue that this is an option. As presented it’s just trivia. If it were a dinner party, with the figure prominent and everyone around him raising a toast to him? Sure, then there’s a clue. The room as written needs just a bit more to give it a push. To turn it from trivia to potential energy.

Erde Manor needs a good polish edit.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/117545/Dysons-Dodecahedron–Vol-1-Issue-4?1892600

by Dyson Logos
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 4-5

“That unholy wailing must be stopped. I sense a great evil lurking in the dark depths of Jedder’s Hole. I can lead you down along the secret paths, but if we falter, the price may be our immortal souls.” – Brother Helmad the Bold

This is a short five page adventure with twelve rooms, in a dungeon/former prison under a (reformed) temple of justice. It’s got some great imagery in it and is well worth whatever I ended up paying (PWYW.)

I’ve always had a hard time with Logos adventures. They are based around his maps and his maps tend to be a little small for my tastes. They are usually pretty well done, with some decent features and good use of elevation, but small. I’m more of a “family size bag of cheesy poofs” kind of adventure guy. But going into it knowing that it’s small helps a bit.

The conceit is this: Suddenly wailing has starts coming from a hole in the Temple of Justice. Bad King Dickhead used to chuck prisoners down there over a hundred years ago. The entire intro section is really well done, with some great advice for the hook. Introduce the temple over several sessions, and then, while visiting one day, the wailing starts up. Maybe in the middle of a ceremony the party is participating in. A wedding perhaps? The wailing, and hole in the floor it comes from, can cause those who really fail their saves to look down into it in horror and then, over 2-10 minutes, throw themselves in … That’s EXCELLENT. A wedding party interrupted, people transfixed in horror … and then the first one throws themselves in, just tipping over the edge! A mad scramble to prevent the others! That’s a good hook, a good set up, and a good effect that allows for great play opportunities.

The imagery in the adventure is well done. Skeletons of former prisoners on the other side of the only door in, having died trying to claw their way through the door. The sounds of bodies being ripped and rended and munched upon, coming from the distance and dark in front of the party as they descend into the hole … Most of the adventure provides these sorts of little bits of imagery that really work well to bring a scene to life in your mind, thereby leveraging the DMs imagination more effectively.

There are a smattering of potential allies in the hole, or enemies for the trigger happy. The magic treasure is quite nicely done. An Amulet of Blood with weird special effects, or a transformed skull that is now a CRystal Ball skull. That’s cool! More adventure should do that sort of thing.

This is a short review for a short adventure. While short is does have a decent amount of stuff going on, with more than enough stuff for the party to juggle in only twelve rooms.

The print version of the magazine is $4. The PDF version if Pay What You Want.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/116433/Brave-the-Labyrinth–Issue-1-PDF?1892600

The Undertemple of Arkon
by Richard LeBlanc Jr.
D&D
Levels 1-3

[This is a periodical, and is my custom I’m only reviewing the adventure therein.]

“A recent report tells of a group of cultists disappearing into the ground where the temple once stood. Perhaps the cult is re-forming in some sort of underground lair. If this is true, then the gods help us.“

This is an underground temple to a panther god (ala Petty Gods.) It’s got about 44 rooms and is keyed in a VERY minimalist format, taking up about six pages of leisurely formatted text. Too minimal/Tegal for my tastes. There’s a highlight or two, all at the beginning, but not enough to avoid the “just another room with a monster” syndrome.

There’s a page of backstory (again, leisurely formatted, so only a couple of paragraphs) that tells of a mysterious giant panther, and the cult that formed around it. It was destroyed by wary villagers, and now rumors are circulating again that the cult is back. AKA, the usual. Attached on this page also is the wandering monster table … which makes little sense to me. Acolytes? Sure. Beetle, cube, undead? Sure. Bugbears and goblins? I don’t get it. The dungeon/undertemple has some captured bugbears, and a dead goblin, but they don’t seem to have any special relation to the temple. Monsters? Rescue party? Escapees? Just a couple of more words would have wonders here. “Escaped Bugbears” or “Bugbear rescue party.” The map is decent; large and lots of loops, a few secrets. It could, perhaps, use more features. Pools, circles, rubble, web, etc.

The encounters are a weird mix of decent and minimalist. The first half dozen or so are fairly decent, but then it drops down in quality quite a bit. Here’s a good example, from room 2:
This room smells sweet, with hints of pine and basil. The columns framing the doorway to the south are smeared with blood and spotted toward their bases with small bloody handprints. The fingers of the hands that left the prints are long and slender–otherwise, it might appear they were left by children.

A little verbose, but quite nice. Compare to this room, later in the dungeon:
Facing the door, armed and at the ready (cannot be surprised), are 2 skeletons with swords and shields

In the first eight rooms there are four or so that are quite interesting. Magical figurines, a slave pit … but then things drop off to “skeleton room” quality. There might be one more later on, with cultists pushing a bugbear at a panther in a cage, trying to make it eat.

The magic items are all +1 sword and +1 shield. The mundane treasure is “gold necklace” or “big sapphire.” This is not the kind of text that inspires a DM. The bloody handprint room? Great! +1 sword? Boring.

Too minimal for me; I’d quite disappointed that the rest of the adventure doesn’t follow the path blazed by those first few rooms.

by Josh Graboff
2e/Gold & Glory

This is a short murder investigation that leads to an evil cult. It’s got several things going for it: multiple factions, people who act like people, random complications, and a presentation style that is “place and timeline” rather than event or scene based. It also lacks a bit of focus, which can be seen in its thirty(!) page length. Overall it’s a pretty good example of how to present an adventure. If it could be tightened up a bit and focused more on gameable content then it would be a sure winner. As is … it’s hard to recommend given my obscenely high standards.

Let’s cover the presentation style first. There’s a timeline presented very early in the adventure. Given no interruptions by the party, this is what the evil cult do when. This is a great start. The cult exists outside of the party. Plans are in motion. Things will happen. Complimenting this is a list of NPC’s the party will/could encounter in the city. Again, very good. You can run into the major NPC’s almost anywhere so grouping them together in the beginning makes sense. Finally there are a list of places. Here’s the old house on the hill, what goes on there, and how the cult uses it. Here’s the whore house, who is there, and what they know. Here is the bar, who is there, and what they know. The sum total of this is that the DM is presented with tools to use to build the adventure around. There’s no need for a railroad, the DM now has the power to determine the whats and wherefores of the actions the party takes. It’s a breathe of fresh air after some of the railroad crap I’ve seen lately. This is how you present an adventure with a plot. Or, rather, how a plot adventure can be transformed into something in which the party has free will. I’m pretty sure Justin Alexander just wrote something to this effect recently. Don’t prep plots, prep situations. Give the DM the tools they need. This adventure does that. Well, mostly.

One of the other nice things is that the NPC’s and minions are not completely one dimensional. They are at least 1.9 dimensional, and sometimes two. They act like real people. If you’re about to slit their throat they surrender, or talk. How many times have we seen slobbering maniacs who don’t surrender and fight to the death? There’s a place for that, sometimes. But there’s an even larger place for people (and monsters) with a fucking hint of self-preservation. When every thing the party meets just attacks until death then the party will no longer try to talk, or parlay, or capture. It’s just a hack-fest. The game is SO much more interesting when the monsters/opponents talk.

This leads into the faction play. There are at least two factions to the evil bad guys, and maybe more if you squint a bit. A is getting too big for their britches and thinks they no longer need B. B is just about fed up with A’s attitude. That’s great! In addition to this there are a group of monsters who might revolt as well as … ready? A TOTALLY UNCONNECTED MAJOR EVENT GOING ON. That’s GREAT! Zombie movies are not about the zombies. It’s about what people do when confronted with pressure. Similarly, the major event in this adventure adds complications to what the party’s already doing. It puts pressure on them and adds all new avenues of events. It’s great!

The adventure does a couple of other nice things, like having large groups of enemies (2d8 guards …) and giving some explicit advice to the DM about how to warn the party that at least one of the Evil Bad Guys is quite powerful. Fair’s fair. A 23rd level orc that looks like a normal orc is not fair. The party needs fair warning that he’s a 23rd level anti-paladin … then there’s no guilt when they charge in and you kill them.

There are two significant improvements I think would have turned this adventure into something really specials. First, a reference sheet. All of the NPC’s on one page in a table, where they are, a couple of words on personalities and maybe what they know. This is the kind of basic DM assistance that every adventure should provide the DM with.

Second, the descriptions are too wordy. They are full of trivia not useful to the adventure. This is usually what I’m referring to when I say something like “the adventure lacks focus.” If it’s not relevant to the adventure then it should almost always be trimmed. The usual sins are “history” and “NPC backstory” (which I guess could be called history also.) The trivia presented is only relevant if it directly impacts the adventure. Then we wouldn’t call it trivia. The adventure does this a lot, in just about every description of a place or NPC.

A good example is the whorehouse. We learn who founded it, and why. But it then goes on to say that the current operators have been running it for 30 years and no one remembers the former owners and only know the cruelty of the current management. Then what’s the point of the history? STOP EXPLAINING! I loathe explanations in D&D adventures. I don’t care where the fucking toilet empties unless the party can explore it. I don’t care about the history of the whorehouse unless it’s relevant to the adventure. The same goes for NPC’s. I don’t care about their twin sister unless it somehow impacts the adventure. It’s irrelevant. Focus! Focus on the adventure!

Unlike most adventures which lack focus, this one does provide some good content. After the backstory/history generally comes a sentence or two of descriptive text or attitude that helps you bring the NPC to life. This is a bit hit & miss. The whores get some decent personality/quirks but many of the other NPC’s could use a bit more … life? They need a quirk, something to remember them by, something to bring them to life. The tavern, where the adventure starts is a good example of this. The NPC’s there come off a bit flat, as does the tavern proper. It/they need something else to bring it all to life and really solidify itself in the DMs head.

Again, while not a good adventure it’s not really a bad one either. Hopefully we’ll see more, and better, in the future.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/105052/Sordid-Stories-from-the-Mother-City?1892600