tenfootpole.org

by Hereticwerks
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 1-3

An old plundered tomb where many a grave-robber got their start … now it’s your turn to spend the night.

This is an interesting little thing. It’s a three room cave. That’s 20 pages long. That’s usually the lead in to a Bryce Lynch monstrous ranting diatribe. Not in this case. This thing is like some academic treatise on how to add complications to an adventure. It seems like every possible avenue of additional complications has been added in .. and all in table format. The tabular format allows for quite a bit of additional use. This thing could almost stand in for every adventure ever written or to be written in the “small cave adventure” sub genre. It’s got a big font and doesn’t make the best use of its whitespace, but what it does have is A LOT of those little evocative things that I’m looking for. Those things that I believe are at the core of a good adventure, that a DM can riff off of for hours of content. It could use a bit of improvement in consistently providing those bits … or maybe I mean in consistently making them specific and actionable. The tabular data strays into “bizarre window dressing for the sake of window dressing” on more than one occasion. Those are the weakest parts of the adventure, but there is more than enough in the way of goodies to keep this fresh time and time again.

Three rooms. Each room has a loot table for things you may find. And who you might mind in the room when you arrive. And you might wander in while you there. And then usually something else like where does the crack go” or “what does the obelisk do.” In addition to the three rooms there’s also “the wilderness on the way to way to the caves”, which also tables for wanderers, bad weather, animal dens, and trail hazards. Finally there’s the section on town rumors and guides. Again, multiple tables for each. This is the primary way that the adventure fills those 20 pages and how it fills the role of several adventures in one. The adventure is almost completely table driven and, unlike almost every other adventure that is table driven, does it well.

The strength of the adventure is in the tables, or more precisely: specificity of the content in the tables. For example, there are six NPC guides offered. “Weird Willy. Seems normal enough.” or “That Blakely Boy. Not the brightest, probably not the best, but most folks figure he’s too dumb to lie.” Or Constance, the Harpy with a crippled wing that can’t climb or swim well. This is PERFECT. It’s just a sentence for each but it adds an enormous amount of potential energy to riff off of. This are all examples of the sorts of content I’m looking for. There’s this very small space between “too generic” and “too much information.” The examples I cited fall perfectly into that sweet spot. It’s the kick start the DM needs to get them going and add and build for the rest of the sessions. The tables go on and on this way. It’s wonderful. “Last trip out your guide was bit by a creature they were barely able to fight off. They aren’t sure if it was a lycanthrope or something else.” OMG! I can use that over and over again in an adventure to add life to the NPC. “A dead basilisk carcass, washed out of its burrow. If the lair was occupied then there is a viable egg in the nest …” Wonderful wonderful content.

Except when it’s not. A smaller percentage of the content is trivia. Content which is not actionable, which you can’t riff off of. Ok, I guess you can riff off of anything, but some content is better at this than other. Crystals are “warm to the touch and smooth”, “they appear to be … breathing?” Certainly interesting, especially the breathing one, but much more … high-level? and not quite as gameable.

I might mention that, similarly, the rumor table could use a bit of work. There IS one, which is great, and the core of the rumor content is pretty good also. And it all ends with “Any of these rumors might be true …” Well, now, that smacks of a “it was all just a dream” television episode. Cop. Out. Let me also say that while the rumors are quite good, as these things go, they could be quite a bit better. The last rumor is something like “This place makes a poor hide-out, as three separate bandit bands have learned to their great displeasure and loss.” Not bad. But SO much better if it were conveyed as something like “overheard in a bar: bertie’s boys didn’t come back from the cave last night. Yeah? Clint says Yanys got arrested but I heard they fled after half were mauled in the cave” or something like that. Just a bit more color.

Overall this is a great adventure toolkit. I’d be much happier paying money for this (it’s free, I believe) then I would a hundred other lengthier products.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131634/GL1-Taglars-Tomb-Revised?1892600

by Venger Satanis
Kort’thalis Publishing
Fantasy RPGs
Hex Crawl

People only travel to the purple islands infrequently. It is this lack of tourism that gives it mystery. After all, everyplace is a bit weird once you first lay eyes on it. Those seeking adventure will find it. Those brought to the islands against their will should have their hands full.
This is a slightly gonzo hex-crawl on a series of three islands that are close together. There are sword & sorcery elements, gonzo elements (spaceships, time travelers, etc) and lovecraftian elements. The book has several issues, like the map, but overall they don’t detract enough from the awesome to make me not keep this. Yes, this makes it one of the few: a Bryce keeper. More than that, while I usually only do hex-crawls in PDF format, this might make it to print form … meaning I’d run it almost as-is, as opposed to mining it for seeds, hooks, and ideas.

I should note going in to this review that I love gonzo … AND you could also use this in Gamma World. It’s not the gonzo that makes this a good adventure, that’s just the icing.

This thing has a SHIT TON going on. Some may criticize the throw-everything-at-the-wall approach Venger has taken but I rather enjoyed it. It lets you pick and choose what to keep. Besides, I LOVE having a lot going on for the players to pick from. A complex and interrelated environment gives a much more solid sense of reality than the simplistic environments usually presented. In these cases, more IS better. Ultimately the strength of this book is derived from both the large number of things going on and the action-oriented nature of the hex encounters.

Action-oriented might be the wrong word. Maybe gameable content is better. ANyway, I think I covered this for the first time when I compared The Wilderlands to Hex Crawl Chronicles to Isle of the Unknown. Wilderlands and HCC had many more encounters that were written in a way to encourage interactivity. Let’s call that style Noun-Verb. Isle was written in the much flatter Noun format. “There is a bird here.” or “There is a statue here.” Compare this to the noun-verb style of “There are three mermen here hunting a wild boar.” That’s the first hex description from this particular hex-crawl, Purple. It goes on for just a bit but you get the idea. Rather than “3 mermen” or “Wild boar” it gives us something to interact with. Help them? Hinder them? Help the boar? Helping them might open up lines of communication … And so it will go at your table. The description is written in a way to encourage game play and interactivity. At least a great many of them are. It devolves at times into Noun format and that it one of the points where the book is weak. “There is a spaceship here.” is the entirety of one hex description. That is clearly pretty open ended and a DM could do anything with that. And yet, if it were a noun-verb format then you’d have yet another seed/more gameable content AND still have the noun available for the DM. The second hex described falls in this noun category as well, describing a giant skeleton graveyard littered with small totems and fetishes, and a slightly dissolved purple statue. Very interesting … but much more interesting would be something going on at this location. Overall though there is more than enough Noun-Verb content to keep the place VERY interesting.
I would also note that, unlike many hex crawls, Venger gives you some seeds to get things kicked off. These are pretty nice, in theory, and help solve one of the big Hex Crawl dilemmas: why are we wandering around? “necromancer of mount crystal, Totas Mundi, is raising an army of undead to conquer the islands. His doom hawks and zombie hordes routinely scour the main island of Korus for succulent prey,” This is just one of ten seeds given (I’d use them all, at the same time) and you can see how it might drive play. It falls down though in providing just a bit more for the DM. Just two more sentences and it would be at super-star levels. “His base is in hex 0416 and he organically expands NE. The snake-people are natural allies while the dark cultists oppose on philosophical grounds.” What this has done is grounded the seed into the actual island environment. It give the DM a place to start and provides a few reactions for some of the many factions to be found on the island.

I might pick nits that the various factions also exist in a vacuum, with their relationships to each other determined randomly. This is probably the contention between a box of legos (determine relations randomly) and an actual adventure (Bob loves Mary who hates Carl.) Either are ok, but I would suggest that things like this are to be left to change then perhaps calling them in a more organized fashion (“Chapter 2. Determining the setup of the Islands.”) might have been a better way to organize it, along with perhaps some ideas on the various implications. But, Factions! Yeah!

Here and there are bits that could use a little grounding. A great example of this is the rumor table. The first entry is “There is a blue-skinned queen that rules over the island.” That’s certainly not terrible, and is wat I would call “the usual” when it comes to rumors. I like things a bit more specific though. “The island is ruled by the 4-armed blue-skinned queen Markuva, who collects teeth.” Even better would be something like “Watch out boy! That blue-skinned bitch Markuva comes in the night to steal your teeth to use for her army to rule the island with!” Same thing, but more colorful and specific. I find these spur the imagination of the DM more than the generic form of rumor found in most products.

Finally, there’s the issue of the map. It needs some work. It is, essentially, a map of an island with a few terrain features and a numbered hex-grid overlaid on it. What’s missing is data. The party is in hex 403. They befriend mermen after helping them catch a wild pig. “Where’s the nearest village?” the party asks. Uh … I don’t know. Let me check. 15 minutes later you’ve scanned all of the entries and found a village. Placing landmarks of import on the map would have helped A LOT. As is a DM is going to have to do that themselves. Small icons of tribes, villages, domains of control (“Overlord territory!”, “Domain of the Dark Cults!”) would have all helped the map become an integral tool of the DM and kept the DM from having do this themselves, or at least minimized the effort needed.

There’s a lot of content in this book. Besides the hexes there’s A LOT of house rules, great magic items and monsters, empty dungeon layouts, and about a jillion different things going on, from crystals, to magic rain, to radiation, to … it’s easy to lose track.

This is not only a great hex crawl, it’s also a great little campaign sourcebook. Certainly worth owning.

by Venger Satanis
Kort’thalis Publishing
Crimson Dragon Slayer
Level 1

Fruit of the Doom, let’s show those candy sons-of-bitches what for!

This is a parody adventure with fruit people and candy people. That’s not a reason to skip it. The reason to skip this is the relative weakness of the various encounters. As is all too common with these types of adventures, too much time is spent on the parody and not enough time is spent on the adventure.

Two pages of encounters and one page of maps in a fourteen page adventure. Even with a generous full page art allotment, that’s a bit too much for me. There’s a quarter page of additional encounters and a quarter page of new magic items, and a bit of background, but the overall effect is A LOT of white space. $3 for 14 pages is a good deal. $3 for 3 or pages is less of a good deal. I’m not sure why this is rubbing me wrong. I generally don’t care about money/price/cost but in this case I’m getting rubbed the wrong way because of the actual shortness.

The map is linear. Just one long shotgun shack of a hallway with rooms hanging off of it and occasionally one blocking the way. The one “Y” in the beginning doesn’t count. It’s linear. ANd boring. just room after room that’s 20×20 with nothing to break it up. Zzzz….. Elevation changes? No. Ledges? No. Straight & boring hallway with rooms hanging off of it? YES! If you walk straight you face three encounters before facing the candy king. Nothing interesting with the map.

The encounters are generally poor. While a great deal of creativity has gone into the actual creatures they are lost in the rooms they are put in. Ice Cream Men can cause brain freezes and donut-men can squeeze you in their holes. There’s a monster that’s a cross between a crab, squid, and winged monkey. Very nice effects. More than a little bland in their descriptions but nice in their special powers. Likewise with a few of the NPC’s you meet. A thinly applied veneer. A kiwi that speak with an aussie accent. A traitor. A homicidal marshmallow. This is the extent of the support you get for the eight NPC’s in the prison cells. Not quite the evocative flavor I’m usually looking for.

The rest of the rooms are generally barely there also. There’s really not much more than Tegal Manor of Palace of the Vampire Queen here. Just a room name (Yeah!) and a monster listing. There are brief divergences from this, but they are few and far between.

This is really the same quality as Tegal/Palace Vampire Queen. But while those also had very simple room/key encounters, they also had a large enough map and a complex enough environment to build something more through actual play. The very narrow focus of this adventure, combined with the lack of evocative writing, really limits the adventure.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/152215/Descent-into-the-Candy-Crypts?1892600

by Venger Satanis
Kort’thalis Publishing
1e/5e
Low Levels

Torth is a strange desert world. Always night, always deadly. A little bit sword & sorcery, a little bit science-fantasy, and just enough post apocalypse to keep things interesting.

This is a … book of adventure seeds? Maybe? I don’t know what this is. A very small part of this booklet is a description of a world. A very small part of this the description of a city on that world. A much larger part of the booklet are a series of events and/or adventure seeds, some of which are connected to each other. While it’s a mess organizationally it’s also got more soul in it than most of the products I’ve reviewed. This book is everything I wanted the XOth.Net adventures to be. It’s evocative and summons the imagery of Sword & Sorcery perfectly. Weird, bizarre, just slightly gonzo, Venger understands the core of Sword & Sorcery and brings it to the reader. Long time readers know that this is one of the key things I’m looking for; the ability of the writer to transfer their vision to the reader. In this respect it does what Deep Carbon Observatory did: provide little seeds and/or vignettes for the party to explore. Just not as well.

The first part of this booklet is more of an campaign setting. There’s a brief description of a world wracked by sorcery. There’s a brief description of the people in it, the various tribes, and then of some of the cults and secret societies. Weird costumes, food, and buildings round things out. This is all WONDERFUL. It does what I wish more supplements would: gives the area a distinct feel. “Remember that place where we ate baby sand squid sashimi?”, “Oh Yeah, where they walked around ‘covered in the blood of their enemies.’” There’s enough here to for a DM to work with. With it you can color to the various encounters the party has. It’s a very strong section. Just brief little sections, but they communicate the flavor of the place beautifully, and you end up wanting to run it, and start building scenarios in your head on how you would incorporate them.

The second section of the book is a loose collection of adventure seeds and/or events. Little brief vignettes, some of which lead to others. The strength of these is much the same as the strength of the first section. The imagery is quite strong and they make you want to run them. Your mind immediately starts building on what you read. They are generally very good little sceneses because of that. The overall arc is one of a killing in the streets and tracking down what happened. The king gets involved, there’s a demon idol, and a call for mercenaries. It’s all a little more coincidence based than character-driven. Still, quite imaginative/evocative and I’ll take that over Perfectly Organized.

The monsters and treasure mesh well into the Sword & Sorcery vibe going on. The magic treasure is distinct and not from any standard book I’ve ever seen. These are the sorts of things I’m looking for, something interesting and wonderful, rather than something that simply emulates and boosts a mechanical system from the game. The monsters fall into the this category as well, coming from the authors brain and having weird twists. Scorpion Squids, Giant Ooze Slug Brain with Spider Legs, Three-headed Sand Demon, Saber-Toothed Shadow Gator. This all places the adventure closer to the Psychedelic Fantasies/OD&D style than it does the mechanistic 2E/3E style … and that’s a very good thing.

It’s disorganized. It’s not obvious from the get go how the various events work together. Some of the events are stupid (like the sculptor who will destroy the world in an hour … and there’s no way to figure that out in advance.) It’s more of a collection of vignettes tied together with an OD&D Sword & Sorcery feel. This is right on the edge of me keeping it. I’m partial to city adventures, especially those cities with good factions/cults/etc, so I’m keeping it.

by Christopher Perkins, Adam Lee, Richard Whitters
WOTC
5E
Level 1

The Underdark is a subterranean wonderland, a vast and twisted labyrinth where fear reigns. It is the home of horrific monsters that have never seen the light of day. It is here that the dark elf Gromph Baenre, Archmage of Menzoberranzan, casts a foul spell meant to ignite a magical energy that suffuses the Underdark and tears open portals to the demonic Abyss. What steps through surprises even him, and from that moment on, the insanity that pervades the Underdark escalates and threatens to shake the Forgotten Realms to its foundations. Stop the madness before it consumes you!

This is a 250 page two-part adventure in the underdark that is, ostensibly, centered around demonlords. Some jackass drow cast a spell and now the demonlords have appeared in the underdark … but no one really knows that yet. The party starts off as prisoners, escapes, and makes their way out of the underdark, all in part one. In part two the party goes back into mess up the demonlords. It ends with a Royal Rumble, with each of the demonlords duking it out in a mass giant demonlord melee … that the party can determine the location of.

WOTC has given a couple of interviews in which they compare the underdark in this adventure to Alice in Wonderland. That is marketing nonsense; there is none/very little of that in this product. It is a serviceable adventure that will takes mountains of time to prep to play. It does a much better job than Hoard/Princes in presenting an adventuring environment, and even shines at times in some of the things it puts forward, especially with NPC’s and factions. It is quite weak in two ways: organization and what I’m calling, today, evocative specificity. In spite of this is manages to do an ok job presenting a sandboxy like environment with a plot. It’s light on railroads and heavy on needed DM prep … but maybe there is a way around that. As with all modern WOTC products, no one who has ever run a game at the table seems to have been involved in this product.

Let’s get the negative out of the way first and we’ll start with the organization of the product. There are roughly thirteen underdark locations descriptions, each in a separate chapter. There are also three of so “events” that get a separate chapter. Finally there are two chapters, one for the first “escape” half and one for the second “invade” half, that describe moving through the underdark. What there is not is an introduction or overview of the adventure to help you figure out what the F is going on. I’m a HUGE fan of plot coming out during play. Deep Carbon Observatory did this wonderfully. It was also much shorter and had no plot embedded in it. For a 250 page adventure with a plot there needs to be an overview that tells you how things work together.

The second part of the organizational problem lies with the chapters themselves, and more specifically with the locale chapters, which make up the majority of the book. They are laid out terribly. Each of these chapters is trying to do two things: describe the location and describe what happens at the location … to the party. This is the principal mechanism in which this sandbox has plot. You get to choose where you go, and what you do there, but there are events and motivations there as well, all related to the plot. The locale descriptions revolve around places, personalities, and factions … and it’s generally mixed in the plot portion. What you end up with a disconnected eventi-sh based description of the location. If the party doesn’t follow the script you’re left hunting the wumpus. Separating the two types of data would have been a much wiser decision, and allowed for better organization … which means better support for the DM. This is combined with ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE layout templates that WOTC is using for these. The headings, colors, size, break-outs, etc all run together. It is terrible from a “easy on the eyes/picking out what I need to” standpoint. I’m pretty sure Princes and Hoard used the same layout.

The end result of this is that the chapters are hard to read and understand. This is not an adventure you are going to be able to pick up, read through, and run at the table. There will be a lot of rereading, photocopying, note taking, reference sheet preparing, and so on. Combined with the sandbox nature, that MAY mean you need to do that for several locations at the same time in order to be able to deal with the party’s free will. Maybe. The one saving grace here is the “Travel in the underdark” chapters. The chapter locations are relatively far apart. Two to three weeks of travel to get between locations is not uncommon. This COULD mean that you could roll some random encounters in the Travelling chapter, etc, and that can serve as a breakpoint for the DM, giving them enough time to run content until the end of the evening and, presumably, a week off to prep the next location chapter. That’s not a valid excuse for the crap organization job of the chapters, but it is a decent workaround.

The second issue is a general lack of detail, or, perhaps, misplaced detail. The drow guards sleep on pallets. Gee, that’s exciting. Wouldn’t it be much cooler if they slept in spiderweb hammocks, or maybe cocoon pods? That would reinforce the Alice in Wonderland nature that WOTC claims to be present in the product. There are multiple examples of this all over the book. Choices are made to describe something in length and detail which is completely unjustified. Meanwhile, other things are left a little too open-ended for my tastes. For example, there’s an EXCELLENT wandering encounter with The Society of Brilliance. There are some “monsters”, each of which has an 18 int and is fluent in multiple languages. They are dedicated to solving the problems of the underdark. That’s about it. That’s a GREAT encounter, but with just a little more it would have been even better. Instead of paragraph after paragraph of detail that is meaningless, a sentence on the NPC’s personality and maybe the problem they are specializing in? That would have really brought these folks to life. There’s this fine line in providing inspiration to the DM. It’s easy to provide too little and, perhaps, claim it’s left to the DM. Frequently when something is TOO open-ended the mind can’t focus. By constraining things just a little the mind can then explode onward. Not a paragraph. Not “Doing the DMs job for them.” Not a bunch of read-aloud. Just a sentence more to narrow things down a bit. This adventure is much better than Hoard/Rise/Princes in this respect, but still pales in comparison to a well written adventure. Another nice example of this is the madness that is infecting the underdark as the demonlords influence grows. There was a great opportunity here to provide some bizarre examples in each locations of freaky stuff going on. Instead the madness manifests as “psychotic rampage” … over and over again. No OCD scenes. No random mandelbrots in blood, while blind. Nope, just Monster Screaming Demonlord Battlecry and Attacking. Seriously, just about every time they yell “For the faceless one!” and attack, or something similar. They didn’t even try and make it interesting. L>A>M>E The magic items are almost always just as lame. No Alice/demontainted stuff here. Generic book treasure. Yawn.

Obvious railroads are few, but jarring when you run into them. The locations are, otherwise a little formulaic. There’s this “random” cave in of the tunnel which blocks off your access, front and rear, but opens a side passage to a temple next door to the tunnel. Uh huh. Nice one there. [Aside: the temple is in the process of flooding. It could have been just a bit more obvious that you NEED to make it flood to get out.] There’s a second one also, AN EVENT, that clearly represents someone in a meeting saying “We really need a big finish for the first part of this adventure. What can you give me?” There’s this “the drow are chasing us” mechanic going on through the first half of the adventure. Choices the party makes will cause the drow to get closer or fall further behind. It’s GREAT … if only partially implemented. The location chapters have details on actions to cause the drow to advance/get lost, but they don’t have much in the way of how that manifests. As a result the party doesn’t really know they are being chased until the drow catch them. A small table at each location for how the various chase levels manifest would have been great. That’s that lack of detail thing again. Anyway, I digress. As the party are leaving he underdark they are attacked by the following drow who have caught up to them! That is a TERRIBLE thing to do. None of the parties choices have been meaningful. They’ve all been taken away in an instant because some jackass wanted a big combat scene as the party exit the underdark. That’s stupid and insulting. It stinks of the Hoard/Rise style instead of a more open-ended style from Phandelver and most of this adventure.

Things DO get a bit formulaic as well. Show up at a location. They try to capture you as slaves/arrest you/offer you a job. One factions, the leaders, want to suppress another faction …. invariably the one touched by the demonlords madness. It seriously happens every time in the first half. Capture you, offer you freedom if you kill the other faction. There ARE factions, sometimes more than two, and that’s GREAT. It offers wonderful opportunities. The lame captured/arrested/hired mission style of play IS one way to add plot to a sandbox … but it’s far too formulaic in this. The worse example is the dwarf city in which EVERYONE is trying to capture you as slaves or arrest you for any reason … so you can get offered your freedom in you go on a mission.

That’s a lot of negative, and I do tend to focus on the negative. On the positive side it IS a more open and less linear style of adventure and that’s very refreshing coming from WOTC. The presence of the factions EVERYWHERE is a great thing. There are memorable NPC’s, quite a few of which are willing to join your party. How about an intelligent gelatinous cube as a hireling? The first chapter, the prison break, starts you off in this regard with a HOST of fellow prisoners with different personalities, goals, and are quite memorable. [Too much of a good thing? The DM could get saddled with too many extras to run. Anything smelling remotely like “DM pet NPC” sets off a hair trigger for me.] The fungus level is a nice little place that is the closest to a “Bizarre/Alice” theme. The end of the adventure has each party member taking control of a demonlord for a titanic battle royale among the various demonlords. That alone is a nice end cap to a campaign. It DOES manage to marry plot to sandbox in at least a halfway decent manner that is NOT completely full of railroads. It does stretch its legs sometimes and get VERY good, such as with portions of the Society of Brilliance.

It’s worth noting as well that the adventure uses quite a few of “minor rules.” Madness, exhaustion, downtime activities … all are represented in the adventure. They’ve done a fairly good job integrating them in. Crossing an underground river? I bet someone wants to make a raft! Downtime activities. Similarly, the madness rules are used to help represent the incursion of chaos from the abyss and the impact it has on those nearby. These minor rules are presented well and integrated well into the adventure. They don’t feel like a tack on. Nor do they feel onerous as, say, the rules from Wilderness Survival Guide did. Instead they are abstracted to a degree that they are not a burden to play and, in fact, support it. Nicely done.

I would suggest that it’s the best adventure from WOTC since Phandelver. It’s going to take MAJOR work to prep the chapters/locations, but in the end you’d have something halfway decent to run. I just wish WOTC didn’t you work so hard to have fun. 🙁

This is available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Out-Abyss-D-Accessory/dp/0786965819/ref=sr_1_1?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=tenfootpole-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=119e03f84e594146a85750096bee3191&camp=1789&creative=9325