tenfootpole.org

by Richard LeBlanc jr
New Big Dragon Games Unlimited
D&D
Levels 4-6

Azeneth believed the life of the high priest (or priestess) should be as comfortable as that of the kings and the gods. She spoke her contempt for her father’s “weakness” loudly and publicly, almost from the time she learned to talk. As she neared her teens, she made it known her plan was to supplant her father and become high priestess of the temple, sometimes claiming it was her place as the incarnation of the goddess Nekhbet. Many say Azeneth has the power to command serpents, and it was she who sent the asp that killed her father Kemosiri. Regardless, she seized her position as high priestess of the temple and set about her accumulation of power and wealth. Recently, children from the villages around the temple have begun to disappear. Rumors abound that Azeneth is sacrificing them and cannibalizing them because she believes this will make her wealthier, more powerful, and more divine. The people of the villages have begun to refer to Azeneth as the “ogress of Anubis”—believing it was Anubis himself that made this woman mad, and commanded her to consume the children she sacrifices. Someone must end this reign of fear and terror, and try to return the children alive—if it is in the will of the gods.

This is an egyptian themed adventure. It’s a raid on a temple compound to find some missing children. It’s more historically accurate than it is interesting. Or at least it looks historically accurate … since I don’t know nothing about Egypt. It’s interesting to review this so close to Valley of the Five Fires. The differences (dare I say improvement?) are quite interesting. It hits some of my pet peeves, and ultimately the goodies are few enough to make it uninteresting to me. Never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn …

The adventure does a few things very right. It presents the area around the temple, including the villages. Each village gets a sentence or two to let the DM build on. Pretty good. Better would be that there was also something interesting in each village. Maybe you can fix this by taking some of the “continue the adventure” hooks at the end of the adventure and working them in. The temple compound area is pretty nice also. Priests, guards, support staff and pilgrims will around. It’s very much presented as a locale that exists outside of the party … and then the party gets to dream up how they will get in. That’s very nice. It harkens back to the scene in 13th Warrior where they see the camp outside of the cave lair and talk about getting in. I wish more adventures would do this sort of thing. It’s always memorable when the designer doesn’t railroad you into something. There’s other little bits and pieces that also make this nice, like the parents of the missing children insisting on going with you (Fucking finally! You’d think no one in D&D-landia loved their children they way all =seem to usually avoid trying to help you rescue their kin.)

There’s A LOT of mundane magic items in this adventure. It seems like every guard has a +1 sword, a +1 bow and a +1 dagger. And it’s all boring. “they each have a +1 dagger.” Oh, my, that’s exciting. If the need is to give them a +1 to hit then just give them a +1 to hit. “They all pump iron, bro-style, every day. +1 hit & damage.” Don’t kill the mystery and wonder of the magical by making it mundane. In fact, the mundane treasures are are a lot better. Alabaster objects, gold blood bowls, and so on. Very nicely described.

The temple proper is pretty linear and, I suspect, very historically accurate. Historically Accurate does not mean fun. Some of the setups in it are nice, like cages full of screaming children, a sacrifice in progress, and reed baskets with skeleton children in them. The adventure needs more of that … although … even that seems to be missing some … joy? It’s all presented VERY fact based. I like things organized but the text must also inspire the DM and mundane facts are generally not the way to do it. I’m not talking gonzo, or explosion-sounds, but rather a dynamic writing style to bring the descriptions to life.

This isn’t a bad adventure so much as it’s not really a good one. I guess it’s serviceable, but mostly uninspiring.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/116272/TM1-The-Ogress-of-Anubis?1892600

by Stuart Robertson
D&D
Levels 1-3

The Citadel casts a dark shadow from it’s mountain. Can you find a path to the top and rescue your kinfolk?

This is, I think, a one page, that I’m not sure how I ended up with. There’s a certain amount of performance art that goes along with one-page dungeons. “See what you can do in just one page!” You can certainly do a lot in one page, this adventure proves that. And you can do a lot more in two pages. This is, in essence, an artificial constraint on the review. For what this is, a one page dungeon, it is quite good.

It’s in four parts: a cave complex level, a crypt level, a small basement dungeon, and a couple of rooms for a the castle. Twenty nine rooms and four maps is a pretty record for one page, especially given the amount of text for each room. It’s quite the accomplishment and points out just how much bloat there is in most adventures. The jerk-faced jerks who think I want everything spoon-fed to me should instead take a look at this. Focus is what this adventure brings. Classic tropes. I want to point out that the dungeon rooms do what they should. This is HUGE. I think I first time I remember seeing this was in some Raggi thing, although the classic “if you clean up the defiled shrine then you are rewarded” thing is a relative. For example, if you light a candle in the deserted shrine then you are rewarded. Players LUV it when logic works in the dungeon. They get a sense of accomplishment. Of figuring things out. And that’s a Martha Stewart Good Thing.

The first room is “Entrance cave – Illuminating this large natural cave is the lantern from two gnomes looking for their lost companion.” That’s pretty minimal. It’s also pretty evocative. A cave. Shadowy lantern light making strange shapes on the walls. Whispering in the darkness. Two weirdo’s on a mission. Tentative? Combined with desperation? So much is implied, inspired, by the description given. This is the power of the minimal, but evocative, description. It’s not 3 paragraphs long with reactions for everything under the sun. It sets the scene and gives the DM’s imagination a good SHOVE in the right direction. Similarly, room 3 is “Pool Room – This room is lit by a dim red glow from 3 fire beetles on the walls. A Blessing pool contains 12 coins.” Again, focus. Inspiring. Adjectives, adverbs, effects without exposition. And it works the way you think it should. A pool? With coins in it? Well you should throw a coin in it of course … especially in a Level One adventure.

As a basic adventure I think this succeeds quite well. It reminds me a bit of the best parts of the Caves of Chaos. Minimal room descriptions, but with some interesting content.

And because I am a dick, I’ll offer some advice for improvement. This is going to be more nit-picky than I would usually be, but not, I think, uncalled for in a one-pager. It is, in some places redundant. In only one page that can be a missed opportunity. For example, room 5 is: “5. Yellow Mist – a thick yellow mist clings to the ground here. Characters have a 2 in 6 chance of falling in hidden pit.” That’s twice we’re told there’s a yellow mist. Naming the room something else would allow even more imagination. “5. Guano Filled – a thick yellow mist clings to the ground here. Characters have a 2 in 6 chance of falling in hidden pit.” Now we know an additional fact about the room. I’m not suggesting that guano-filled is the way to go, but I would assert that SOMETHING else is the way to go.

There’s also a room or two that is … wasted? “Antechamber – This room is magically silent. These doors are heavy and require an Open Doors check.” Antechamber is not very descriptive. The room being magically silent is wasted because it plays no part. There’s no impact to it being silent. Because of this it’s more window dressing, and thus wasted. Nothing nearby that the silence impacts, noting in the room that the silence impacts. Maybe something like “Unearthly Silence – Highly vaulted. These doors are heavy and require and open doors check.”

Finally, in just one page you’re not getting much in the way of great monster, magic, or mundane treasure descriptions. Thems the breaks … and points out the limitations of the one page format.

This is a classic adventure. I like the classics. If everything published were at least this good I’d be a happy man. All in one page. Reading this, and then going back to look at one of the new 5e WOTC adventures really points out the difference in styles. The bloat present in the WOTC products that adds little to the adventure becomes glaring.

Print this and stick it in your B copy of B/X and you’re ready to go.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/108268/Citadel-of-Evil?1892600

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 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.