Dungeon Magazine #42

Posted on May 16, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

d42

Whistledown’s Mantrap
by Bradley Schell
AD&D
Levels 3-4

From the Oxford Unabridged:
Dungeon Magazine Side-Treks – Using two pages to describe an encounter that should take 4 sentences. See also: Dungeon Magazine in general.

A dryad with a mantrap plant has a charmed male companion. That’s the entire content of the two pages. Nothing else interesting.

The Lady of the Mists
by Peter Aberg
AD&D
Levels 6-8

Most D&D backttory, especially in Dungeon, is crap. This one isn’t. Oh, it’s long and a pain in the ass and not relevent to running the adventure, but it DOES touch on some larger, weighty issues. I like the way this starts, with the party essentially in the middle of a city during a minor coup as the secret police are beaten and, I imagine, the citizens at the barricades are working with the rulers to dismantle the giant propaganda posters of the past. Images of the Arab Spring, with the people in the midst of the jubilance that only the hope of change can bring. The read-aloud for the village the party journeys to is actually GOOD, and the various elements/advice (buried in the surrounding verbosity) are good. “The sails are useless when you near the isle; the winds never blow there.” and “Beware the lake monster”, which doesn’t actually exist. The picture painted in the back story, and at the village, is one of melancholy, that is then juxtapositioned with the euphoria of the revolution. It’s the vibe that Ravenloft tries for and so often fails at. There’s also some bits & pieces of good imagery, such as the winds/sailing thing, and a skeleton in armor with bits of rotting flesh poking out. I do a terrible job transcribing these vibes, but the adventure does a good job … when it does it. This is NOT a terrible adventure. A slow, melancholy feel, but not terrible. It IS verbose, which was the style at the time, but it does a lot right, like telegraphing that a flesh-to-stone monster is coming, and adding small flavorful details in fast bursts.

In the end, there is a story going on in this adventure. The party get to witness parts of it. It’s not a railroad though. There are not a sequence of events that MUST happen in order for something else to happen and the party just happens to bear witness. This is a major sin and is something that so many 90’s, 00’, and modern adventures are guilty of. “Witness to history”, so to speak. No, in this adventure the action is over. The party is chasing something else, tangential, and stumbles upon the story, discovering it as they go along. In this way I might compare it to something like Tegal or Shadowbrook: a kind of house/manor environment you wander through discovering weird things, except in this one you also looking for someone, driving your exploration, and you discover bits of what has happened.

This is worth reading, and maybe worth salvaging.

Izek’s Slumber
by Gary Lai
AD&D
Levels 12-14

Another 2 1/2 pages to describe a single encounter. How the fuck they got away with this I know not, but evidentially it was one of their most features, according to the letter column. A MU14 and his 7 zombies are confused & disoriented, looking for someone who does not exist and reacting negatively to uncooperative witnesses. Fight or Negotiate?

Ransom
by David Howrey
D&D
Levels 3-5

Deliver some ransom money. This has a decent back story/setup (and at one page is the sole of terseness, by Dungeon standards.) Border fief, questionable births, and an evil advisor all make for a decent set up … that will never see the light of day because the dude is just going to pay the party to deliver cash to the kidnappers. The kidnappers have decent flavor & personalities … which will never see the light of day and they exist to say about 4 sentences, total, and then get cut down. And of course, the ransom is in a chest that can’t be opened, at all, by anyone but the target, otherwise the adventure twist would be ruined.

IF you have this issue then you might read one for some inspiration i both the back story and kidnappers. You could build something decent using those two points as foundations. But I wouldn’t go out of my way unless you have some morbid curiosity with things that only MOSTLY suck in Dungeon Magazine.

Legacy of the Liosalfar
by Chris Hind
AD&D
Level 1

Fairy Tale Alert! The party are poor village bumpkins sent to find the miller, who has disappeared with the coinage needed to buy seed for the crops. What ensues is a series of faerie adventures, in the older sense of the word. Ravens that speak in a squakish common, mud-people taking exception to being trodden upon, sprites with sleep arrows, a talking spider, a riddler gnome, and the Feast … always a feast.This is a pretty straightforward adventure with not a lot of detail. The encounters are all classic faerie encounters and ould be plucked out and/or used if you added s a bit more detail. Only one or two of the talking creatures you meet have any personality. This is a TRAVESTY; they should all have some pit of personality. The mystical element of the faeire could also be played up a bit more. Combined with the lack of personality for the players village … this is just a generic encounter-fest with a low-level faerie theme. And while I’marracted to fairy tale stories I’m not THAT attracted to them. Still … it does have faeries …

The Price of Revenge
by Steve Kurtz
Ravenloft
Levels 4-7

A fairly normal Ravenloft adventure. Mists take you somewhere new, freaky little kid, small town investigation, curse, kill the vampires. The predictability here is the worst part. The freaky little girl is nice & freaky. The town portion is just a pretext to meet the vampires-in-disguise and get the gypsy mission. Then you kill the vampires. The basics of this are classic, and therefore not bad in and of itself, but the whole thing is so … telegraphed? Mists! Watch our for vampires & werewolves! White Death? Must be vampires. Look, the only two people who have any detail ar the mayor and his wife the doctor, that’s weird, eh? The pseudo-slavic post-renaissance town vibe is done well, but the DREAD isn’t very present. It all feels like an homage to the original Ravenloft adventure. If you were in to a straightforward-ish classic Ravenloft railroad with no particular interesting detail or dread, then this is the adventure for you!

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

DCC #82.5 Dragora's Dungeon

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

825
by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 1

Eons past the fabled sorcerer-kings of Parhok perished in a rain of eldritch fire. But legends hold that one tribe survived the apocalypse, fleeing with their slaves to a hidden city, where the greatest enchanters of all time could sleep away the centuries, and awaken in a future age as rulers of a ruined land. Now once more the forbidden spells of the Parhok threaten the good folk of the Known Realms. A kingdom lies ensorcelled, a royal family ensnared by the forgotten dweomers of a long-dead race. When the best attempts of seers and diviners have failed, it falls to the heroes to save the kingdom. Have the sorcerer-kings risen to reclaim their bejeweled thrones? Or has a more sinister power bent their ancient magics to its sinister will? Only the most courageous and cunning of heroes will emerge victorious from Dragora’s Dungeon.

This is weird. This doesn’t seem like a DCC RPG adventure. It’s written more like one of the older DCC 3.5 adventures. The cover even looks nonstandard, showing some heavy metal cheesecake instead of the usual appendix N gonzo. The back-end is stronger than the front. It’s worth skipping.

Uh, the royal family is under a sleep spell and you chase an ape-man for four days, in to a portal. It takes ou to a steaming jungle with an ape-man city. You have a fie time, ala D3 – Vault of Drow, and kill the bad guys. Uh, the HEAD bad-guys.

This is one weird adventure. And I don’t mean weird in a good way. It’s completely unlike any of the newer DCC RPG adventures and resembles something closer to the suck-fest that was the old DCC 3.5 line. It makes me wonder if DCC is taking the line in a different direction? As if Goodman suddenly said “Hey, all those awesome adventures we’ve been doing? Let’s do some suck-ass ones instead!” I mean, the departure is really strange. The number of elements it shares with the recent batch is almost zero. There’s an interesting magic item or two, and the city portion has some decent random encounters, but it’s otherwise a fairly normal adventure with none of the joie de vivre in the adventure, the locales, the descriptions, or almost anything else.

A couple of things about the beginning stand out … as bad. After the initial ‘hook’ the party has to chase a single ape-man through the countryside for four days until you get to something interesting. That seems … excessive? given the weakness of the hook. The inn you are in falls under a slumber spell, the party stops an assassin ape-man who takes off on a run, escaping, and learns from the others at the inn that the royal family is under a similar sleep spell. Which is evidentially enough to get you to chase a guy for four days?
When you finally get somewhere you face … a roadblock. At the end of the small dungeon/temple complex is a room with an altar. The altar needs a key to open a portal to take you to next location. There’s no indication of this … just if you search you see a small indentation in the altar. The key is at the VERY beginning of the dungeon complex, under some ruble that you have to explicitly search and make a non-trivial check (DC:15) to find. See?!?! It’s bizarre. It’s like Stroh has forgotten everything that makes a sucky adventure a sucky adventure. Then there’s this weird ziggurat room that has a bunch of hokey rube goldberg set-piece stuff. A net, with a globe, full of ‘dragonstings’, triggered by an imp, who’s invisible. It doesn’t make sense! Why is he doing this? When did Harley start hating freedom/beating his wife?

The descriptions are generally shitty. Green serpents. Seriously? You have ape-men and snakes and a bazillion years of fiction with leering idols and damsels in distress and all you can come up with a green coiled serpent? Uh … derp? The city of the ape-men is eventually found, and it has some Vault of Drow stuff going on. A couple of factions, some interesting ‘what do you find when you are running around/hiding’ tables. The entries are a mixture of good stuff and not so good stuff. I like Mad Wraiths who whisper insane secrets to you, shrines weeping oil that enchants weapons, and the sacrificial square with the KINGMAKER spear in the stone in the middle (I’m a sucker for the classics.) The whole section is a little light on details, and in particular how the two big baddies interact. There’s a general vibe of two factions who are loyal and one which is not, but a few details about how the rulers interact, and a few more personalities. The magic items, good though they are, don’t make up for the logistical mess in the inside. Added to this are the questionable choices about … balance. I don’t usually mention this, but there are several parts in the adventure where the party appears to be forced in to certain actions to face overwhelming odds … at first level. And then, of course, there’s the dragon the cheesecake from the cover tucked in to the last pages of the adventure.

This entire thing is just bizarre. It doesn’t seem like DCC AT ALL. It’s completely different in flavor and tone and quality. there might be a decent adventure in this, but you’re gonna have to tear AT LEAST the city part completely apart and rebuild it, adding A LOT of additional work to get it to make sense and be in a position where you can run it.

Is it worth it? Well… there’s something there in the city part, and in the overall plot. But man, I gotta think there are easier ways to get there.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/134983/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-825-Dragoras-Dungeon?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments

DCC #80 – Intrigue at the Court of Chaos

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

80

by Michael Curtis
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 1

At the mercy of Chaos! Abducted by the Court of Chaos, the adventurers face hard choices if they want to return home. The Host of Chaos desires a legendary artifact held by the Scions of Law and need patsies to retrieve it. Faced with an eternity of servitude, the party must sneak into the Plane of Law and steal the Yokeless Egg from under its guardians’ watch. But not all is what it appears when the Court of Chaos is concerned and serving the Host may destroy the party from within. Can they survive the Intrigue At the Court of Chaos?

This adventure tackles some hard gameplay subjects and does so well-enough that I consider it a keeper. Intra-party conflict is hard, but it’s pulled off well here. The party treats with powerful forces; again done well-enough. It has a kind of “proving grounds” dungeon behind it … usually something I loathe but it fits in ok here. Finally. it also deals with planer adventure to the “good” locales, which it misses the mark with. It’s wordy, especially with read-aloud, and the freakishness usually present in DCC is not to the degree I’d like to see it. Then again, I don’t ANYONE has ever done a good adventure on the planes of Law.

Your level-1 party is summoned to the Courts of Chaos. They have a mission for you: grab a spark of chaos from where it’s being held on the planes of Law. After some intrigue in the Court of Chaos you go to the Planes of Law, solve a few puzzle rooms, and head back to the Courts with the fallout of deals made, or not made, earlier.

The Court of Chaos is done pretty well. The Lords of Chaos are sufficiently freaky, but the bystanders in the court could use a little more work to communicate their freaky nature. Chaos & Misshapen are generally as well as the descriptions go for the “commoners” of the Court. It was a pretty good opportunity to throw in some delegations ala Flash Gordon Ming Throne Room. After the party gets the mission described the fun begins. They have to decide if they’ll go on the mission, and get a private suite to do so in. During this time one of the Lords of Chaos appears to each party member and offers them special rewards if, when they come back, they give the egg/chaos to THEM instead of the entire Court. There’s a whole section on advice for the various Lords and how to run this. It includes the class “take each player out of the room separately” DM technique, as well as the advice that you should take the LEAST trustworthy player out and just have a talk with them; don’t offer them anything. The way the players interact with each other after they have all been out should be DELICIOUS, especially for the poor untrustworthy player. “No, really, no one offered me anything!” Thus the seeds of mistrust are sown for the rest of the adventure. This is the best kind of motivation; it motivates and manipulates the PLAYERS as well as the characters. Intra-party conflict is usually a terrible thing. It’s one of those few things that most DM’s come down HARD on. It’s taken head-on in this adventure, and I think it’s done very well. You’re just level-1, so there’s not as much investure. Further, it’s the Courts of Chaos; OF COURSE it’s going to happen. It’s in your face, and yet … the betrayal, if it comes, probably doesn’t happen till the very end. The potential betrayal is right in EVERYONES face, right at the start, not a sudden knife-turn out of nowhere with no particular motivations beyond “I’m evil.” or the dreaded worst phrase in RPGing “thats what my character would do.” As the adventure points out: everyone has the entire adventure to both fret and to prepare.

The ability of DCC to confront these tropes in fresh ways os one of the best aspects of its published adventures. At level-1 you’re treating with the Lords of Chaos. That’s not something other systems tend to take on. (Again, this is pointed out explicitly in the introduction, but I, being far wiser than your average bear, have noticed it previously.) At the end you get a boon from the Lords of Chaos. How cool is that? These are the things that make your character stand out and that make campaigns memorable.

The adventure is one of those “proving grounds” things. You do room 1, then 2, then 3. I hate those. Yes, it makes sense sometimes, and it does here as well, so I’m giving it a SLIGHT pass … but it feels so … I don’t know. Lazy & railroady are not the right words. Maybe Done to Death? Each room in the main location on the Planes of Law is a little puzzle-thing. Prove you’re a servant of Law by X, then Y, then Z. Sometimes you get to combat if you fail. This is where the wordiness of the adventure gets to you. The text in the adventure up to this point, while long, isn’t really needed during play. You get the idea of what’s going on and the tone and how to run it and you don’t really need to refer to it during play. But the “test” rooms are things you need to reference during play. The real-aloud tends to be longish and the rooms are puzzle-things, so there’s a decent amount of text. This could use some work.

They are not particularly evocative rooms either. Adventures on the planes of Law iis something that I don’t think anyone has mastered yet in an adventure. Celestial Ox, crystal humanoids, angles and blinding light. None of it is very interesting. I guess our fertile imaginations dwell much more in the nether regions while the good remains unknowable in our psyche?

It’s all generally straight-forward. The puzzle-room aspect is something I like, but I generally like it when it’s NOT an explicit puzzle-room adventure. The descriptions and so on are generally just ok. A cut-above the usually but no to the usually DCC level. The core premise though is WONDERFUL. The intrigue and the Court of Chaos start strong and the impact resonates through the erst of the adventure, touching everything. THAT’S what makes this a GREAT adventure. Treating with Chaos gods at level-1, and the fun that ensues …

Intra-party conflict may not be your thing. It’s not my thing. But this adventure is the exception to the rule.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/125537/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-80-Intrigue-at-the-Court-of-Chaos?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 5 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #41

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

d41
Remember folks: I’m partial to fairy tales, so read the last review with that in mind.

Deadly Treasure
Cody Hedberg
AD&D
Levels 10+

Elaborate Funhouse. A wizard has built himself a tomb, buried himself in it, died, and then invited you to explore/plunder it. This contains one of my favorite design elements ever: the tomb builder cast multiple wishes so detection spells and teleport-ish spells would not work. Maybe … youdidn’t mean to write a level 10+ adventure? Maybe you meant to write a level 5 adventure, before adventurers get those abilities in quantity? Maybe? No? You’re just a sucky DM who imposes rules arbitrarily on the players in order to force them to suffer through your ‘adventure?’ Ok, just clearing that up. Longtime readers may recall my frequent references to the Technocracy in the Mage rpg, or also my use of the lyric “I touch roses.” An attempt to explain a mystery, by definition, destroys the mystery. Imagination & wonder resist definition by their very nature. But that didn’t stop Cody. He’s desgined a tomb under the assumption that the only valid way to do something in D&D is what is published in the rules. The first room is an elaborate trap that sprinkles some beans, from a bag of beans, with water. This include soil in the room, the buried beans, and a giant cauldron with holes in it to act as a watering can, and the adventurers dumping water i to it when they open the manhole cover at the bottom of a well. That’s some serious Rube Goldberging just to get some magical shit to happen in the room. I’m gonna confess: this is the first dungeon EVER that I could not get through. I could only read about half of it before I just couldn’t take it anymore.

The Well of Lord Barcus
Roger Baker
AD&D
Levels 2-5

I don’t usually review side-treks, but this one has a decent idea. There’s a wishing well that grants ill-luck to those who loot it. A thief did, and died nearby after a comedic accident. His ghost wants you to return the stolen loot to the well so his soul can be freed. That’s it. Nice premise, but there’s no climax/payoff. “Uh, ok. *plop plop plop*. Done!” I REALLY like the idea of the setup but it needs some kind of zany complication, or any complication for that matter.

A Way With Words
Tim Beach & Teeuwynn Woodruff
D&D
Levels 1-3

Uh, fight some kobolds for a book? I actually went back to look at the cover and editors introduction to make sure tat this issue wasn’t the April 1st edition. Meet a gnome who’s writing a book about the divergence of dwarfish & gnomish poetry. He’s gnome-like (IE: odious) Meet the bard/woman who stole the book the gnome needs to complete his own book. She’s weepy. Get fucked over by vampire moss and cross in a river, then fight some kobolds who shout love poetry from the book, thinking they are magic spells, and throw sand packets at the party ala LARPing. “Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!” except it’s “Feel my wrath like a scalding bath!” or Homicide?! Foul brutish beast!.” IE: it’s a comedy adventure. Those are hard to pull off. I find the gnome shit odious, in general, and surprisingly enough I find it odious in this adventure. The weepy bard girl is kind could be fun, just like the Romantic tavern-wench in issue #40 was. Kobolds shouting love poetry seems like something for a level-5 party encountering a kobold band. I hold a special loathing in my heart for the crocodile encounter. They look like logs and the party is encouraged to cross the river by jumping on them. If they party is not morons and look at the logs the DM’s instrctions imply that he should say “its really a log”, because the first of the three “logs” IS , actually, a log, with the other two being crocs. That BS. That’s killer asshole DM shit. If the party asks you tell them. You don’t play 20 questions. You don’t make them guess the EXACTLY correct words to use to get the right answer. That sends a bad message, not only about play style but about the dickishness and adversarial nature of the DM. Bullshit I Say! Bullshit.

Mammoth Problems
Lawrence M. Kapture
Spelljammer
Levels 8-10

Exploring a derelict Spelljammer ship. (Are ALL Spelljammer adventures exploring a derelict ship?) This adventure is only 9 pages long for 21-ish encounter descriptions, which makes it one of the tersest Dungeon adventures ever published, especially after the endless backstory is ignored. You explore the derelict ship, get some hit & run undead tactics from some spectre-like undead, and fight some skeletons they’ve animated. It’s not a particularly good adventure, but then again it’s not particularly poorly written either. I’d give it a solid C-, with little to recommend it … which will in turn place it on the short list of “Best Dungeon Adventures Ever.” Seriously, it’s not AWESOME, and my standard is AWESOME, but if you just wanted a nice little thing to insert in a Spelljammer game then I’d reccomend this to you. It doesn’t activly offend, it’s just not very interesting.

Hopeful Dawn
Gary Lai
AD&D
Levels 3-6

A good idea poorly executed. The local temple has folks in town stirred up and on Halloween the local thieves guild takes advantage by dressing up as demons and openly ransacking people’s homes. The party track them back to their headquarters and deals with them. I’ve been partial to the Raiders in Town trope for awhile now, and it picked up during Hoard of the Dragon Queen. This one is done OK, but its pretty clear that the raiders are NOT demons, almost immediately. The clues are also pretty blatant as to what is going on and where the headquarters are. Finally, there’s a group of paladins running around chasing them. Pompous, of course, and they don’t seem to realize that they are thieves and not actually demons. This thing also comes in at 20-ish pages long, FAR longer than it needs to be. The thieves all have multi-paragraphdescriptions, almost none of which will never come up in play. You now know enough about their adventure to run your own better than the one written in the magazine.

Old Man Katan and the Mushroom Band
Ted James & Thomas Zuvich
AD&D
Levels 1-6

This is presented as a joke adventure, but I would instead say that it’s charming … or portions of it are anyway. An old swamp hermit is being annoyed by singing mushrooms. They are actually saving his life from giant mosquitoes but he doesn’t know that. The mosquitoes are being controlled by a child-like bog monster deep in the swamps. The hermit offers the use of his boat to explore/figure out whats going on … but the boat is actually a tame mimic, unknown to everyone. The singing mushrooms and the boat/mimic (which essentially just means the boat can act a bit on its own to liven things up and freak the players out) are the jokey parts. I guess the hermit falls in to this category also, as he talks about assassins/hitmen, etc. Anyway, most of the adventure is straightforward. The problem with this is that it did’t go far enough. The WIll o’ Wisp should have been written as a very spooky encounter, and the other encounters tending toward the kind of charming fairy tale feel. They tend to be a bit mundane, unfortunately. There’s certainly some room for run & interesting play with the mushrooms, the hermit, his giant cat, and the boat … but the rest of the adventure feels much more mundane and of a different tone than these first four elements. That’s unfortunate.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 11 Comments

The Devil's Spine

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

ds
by Monte Cook
Monte Cook Games
Numenera
First Tier

It begins simply enough. Doesn’t it always? A nobleman’s estate needs tending in his absence. But what secrets lurk in its shadows? What deals has this man made with whispered voices in that darkness? And once such a discovery is made, can it be undone?
Mechanistic and dull, this adventure is overly specific in areas that will only slightly impact the gameplay and far far too minimal in actual game-able contact. The result is a ham-handed set up with mountains of text about things are that are only slightly relevant with game-able content almost an after-thought. There are actually four adventures/episodes in this booklet. Adventure 1 is the get infected/hook. Adventure 2 is “wipe out giant virus hive mind”. Adventure 3 is “loot the trapped tomb” and adventure 4 is “under the sea castle explore.”

I LUV Gamma World and want to have millions & millions of its babies. I have only slightly less love for every other post-apoc game every written, up to and including Morrow Project. It will always be my first love. And just like Erica, from high school 30 hears ago, it shall remain unfulfilled. The trappings are here in the art, and in the various found objects and the environments. Most of it, though, lacks soul. It’s presented without the love that a dreamer would have. Short, punchy descriptions that fire your imagination … are seldom found. Instead we get history and backstory and details layered on detail of things that won’t matter. Assumptions have been made by the writer but not communicated, although you can kind of see them sideways in the implicit choices made in what do describe and how. Sure, the party doesn’t HAVE to do X, but all of the writing is focused that way. But the up front doesn’t present it in that manner. There are 3 main interstates between Indy & DC. Let me explain in detail the third and most non-obvious one …. but you see, it’s not explicitly presented that way. Maddenning and frustrating.
Baron von Butthump finds a horrid creature under his house and makes an obscene deal with it. Then he goes away with his trusted servants and hires some strangers (the party) to look after his house. Uh … ok “Hey, don’t go in the basement; my secret alter to Mamon and doomsday device I’m planning on taking over the world with is down there. Back in a month! Have fun in the pool … and don’t forget to water the plants!” Improbable setup leads to the party finding the secret basement and … getting infected with spine parasites that will kill them in 3 months! Yeah you! Mommy parasite will remove them for you, but you need to go on three quests for her to do it. Two to get the surgery tools and one strictly for her. The whole “if you bring me the tools then I’ll do it for you, and in return I want you to do Y” is pretty ok with me. What’s not ok is the transparent set up. If my DM pulled this shit on me I’m sure I would not come back, unless it were a friend and even then I can’t see anyone I game with not groaning. “Ok, ok, you want us to go on the fucking adventure. I got it. And you ‘persuaded” us by infecting us with a lethal disease. How about our characters just die and we start new ones?” The BEST hooks motivate the PLAYERS, not the characters. 5 minutes after character creation you have a disease that will kill you in three months? Ok, I roll up a new character, Traveller style.

This reminds me of another major major flaw: the railroading. Not in the traditional sense of do A, then B, then C. There’s some of that in this adventure but I’m instead referring to how the NPC’s interact with the party. EVERYONE has motivation which is mighty convenient. The naga thing has a bunch of eggs and the party gets infected with them. She’s super-worried about them, and thus struck the deal with Baron von Butthump to feed people to her/them. Super protective. But also doesn’t give a shit about the them and is willing to remove the parasites, her children, form the characters. This is explicitly said in the adventure. Her motivations are exactly what they need to be to force the adventure a certain way. Likewise there’s a lot of “they always attack everyone until dead” motivations, and super-powerful creatures who love talking to the players. The entire thing is just one big set-up, a play within a play for the benefit of manipulating the characters in to the adventure the writer THINKS they should have.

The writing is dull and uninspired. There’s no verve or zest in the descriptions. Mechanistic and going through the motions. It stands in great contract to the imagery invoked in Manor of the Black Manse. Short, punchy, vivid. Instead there’s lots of repeat text. The entire thing strikes me as some cross between the Similarion and “let me tell you about the adventure I ran last week …” It’s conversational. It’s full of dull things. It’s not focused on the one thing it NEEDS to be: a tool to help the DM run a game. It meanders. That kind of nonsense is prefect for a fluff book. It’s perfect for the fluff in the main rules/setting guide. The adventure is a tool for the DM to help them run a game for his players.

This makes you work, hard, to do that. This isn’t about leading the DM around by the nose, and it’s not about spelling out everything for the DM or the fact that a good DM could salvage it. This is about your buddy online talking to you about the game he ran last week vs. a product that helps YOU run a game for YOUR players. This product is not focused like a laser on doing that.

It’s not worth it. I love the objects, the artifacts, the art. But it’s not worth it.
(Oh, and those virus creates are stupid dull. It’s a fucking virus creature and you make it looks like a generic featureless humanoid green blob?)

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/120025/The-Devils-Spine?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 6 Comments

DCC #82 – Bride of the Black Manse

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

dcc82

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 3

Centuries past, Lady Ilse ascended to scion of House Liis by trading the archdevil Mammon what he wanted most: her immortal soul – and a diabolical betrothal. The triumph proved hollow, for every year on the eve of her fell covenant, she was beset by visions of Mammon and her foul promise. Seeking to save herself, she was buried alive, swaddled in the holy symbols of a dozen divergent faiths. This desperate ploy held Mammon at bay for centuries…but a devil can afford to wait a very long time.

After hundreds of years, the last of the holy wards has fallen. The devil has come to collect his due. Tonight a storm crashes against the ancient manor house and forgotten spirits rise from the muck and mire. The fallen belfry tolls once more, announcing the hellish fete. As the adventurers arrive to explore the Black Manse, Mammon calls for his winsome bride. He will leave with a soul at the end of the night. The only question is: whose?

Uh … Wow. EASILY one of the best adventures I’ve seen. It’s also got aspects of a horror adventure and a mystery adventure … both very hard genres to pull off, but done well in this. Old manor home to be explored, compelled characters, a time limit, changing environment, weird encounters … I don’t know how else to summarize. The depth in this, along with some of the typeface choice, make things a little during play. Finding what you want, etc. But the thing is TIGHT also. It’s just PACKED. It’s all that “hidden depth” that you read about but never see done well. Well it’s done well here.

I’m not a very good writer. I tend to fail when it comes to the REALLY good product … like this one. They tend to have so much depth and complexity and so many good things going on, hitting on everything, that I’m either over-awed or just don’t know where to start. I guess I’ll go through it linearly? It starts with a GREAT summary of what’s going on. A nicely boxed Key Plot Points and the timeline laid out in way that’s easy to find and helped the DM understand what is going on/needs to happen. Essentially, you have four hours to complete the adventure, realtime, with the bell in the ghostly bell tower ringing each hour. Nice sense of foreboding there. I LOVE it when there’s a well-done timer in an adventure. Watching the party freak out, argue, and loose it over something as simple as a bell tolling is a pleasure in life that everyone should experience. There also a couple of hooks. You can get the manor home given to you as a reward (kind of lame … but at least the characters ARE getting rewarded with something), or you can get a note from a distant relative, addressed to the PC, dated 500 years prior. Not the strongest hooks ever, but not “Caravan Guard” level either. And then there’s the BIG one: when some PC dies in a different adventure, they awaken before a dark throne, covered in flames. A towering figure leans down and whispers “Not Yet, you are promised to another,” GAHHHH!!!!!!!! You wake up with 1hp and a pentagram on your forehead. GAHHHHH!!!!!! You’re dreams are haunted from that moment forward … and your journey takes you inevitably toward the high moors …. GAHHHH!!!!! One time at band camp I gave a PC a pig tail and cloven feet and the girl playing the PC was so freaked out that she had her character quit and started a new one. I can’t imagine what she would do if THAT hook happened to her!

There might be sixteenish locations in this adventure, over three levels. We’re not talking majorly complex map here … but then again this isn’t a dungeon crawl. It’s … I don’t know … theater? No, that’s not right either. Nor is set-pieces. It’s essentially a small manor home in which each area is a kind of … puzzle? Not really … but I guess that’s close? It’s all so TIGHT, but deep also, and works together so well … In one LARGE basement room there’s a lot of water, up to you ankles or knees. Hundreds of skeletons rise up out of it, well described in a way that gives you a GREAT visual image of the scene. Not generic “skeletons” but the actual bits of detail that cements a scene of horror in your mind. They stand and stare at the party, kind of encouraging them (dread as a motivational technique?) to a certain area to put their souls at rest. The room in question, next door, has a clever pentagram puzzle, with some nice clues but an open-ended kind of solution. Similarly there’s an “arm chopper” that can make a Hand of Glory … and you might find it right before you encounter a macabre & ghostly scene in which you could REALLY use a hand of glory. It’s not telegraphed; it’s presented in such a way that the party can figure things out for themselves. And I’m sure they WILL. The lightbulbs WILL go on. Usually writers THINK they’ve laid good clues, but they have not. In this case the clues are there and OBVIOUS in retrospect. That’s exacty the way a D&D adventure should be. As soon as the situation is sprung the party should IMMEDIATLY realize they walked right by what they needed for it. They think more. This adventure does that. A Lot. And if the party thinks, even a little, then they will be prepared and they will be proud of themselves and feel like they have accomplished something and gotten one over on you. Which is exactly how they SHOULD feel.

I don’t know what else to say; my head is swimming and I’m sure I’m letting folks down. I’m not doing a good job telling you why this thing is good. It’s imagery is VIVID. It presents WONDERFUL situations. Not the generic set-piece bullshit but more “everyman confronted with horror” that LotFP sometimes tries to do … but SO much better than the early LotFP product.

If I had a complaint it would be the format. It looks like DCC is using their standard layout. I’m not sure if that’s the best choice here. The text is large, the real-aloud is italics, two-column … but these rooms are DENSE … half a page or so. It’s not exactly wall of text, and it’s not superfluous stuff and it’s it’s not Kuntz buying something in there that no one will ever find … this is all GREAT … it’s just right on the edge of needing a highlighter Maybe some indenting, section breaks, more bolding? IDK.

This is available at DriveThru

.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/128791/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-82-Bride-of-the-Black-Manse?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 7 Comments

Dungeon Magazine #40

Posted on May 2, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

d40

Song of the Fens
by J. Bradley Schell
AD&D
Levels 1-3

This is an adventure in a swamp to find a tavern-girls anonymous singing love interest. I must have gotten soft during my vacation; the core idea doesn’t suck. While passing a tavern near a fen a girl leans out of a second-story window with the damsel in distress/wont’t anyone help me routine. She’s promised to another but enchanted (not literally) with the singing of a voice in the fen across the road. The party goes in to the fen to find the voice. There they find mud pits, ghouls, zombies and the weird troll that skiffs the swamp at night, only eats fish & veg, and has an AMAZING singing voice. He’s a friendly guy who doesn’t speak much common, is smitten with the prospect of the maidens love, and has some baggage from his youth that causes him to fly in to a murderous rage when he perceives a slight/insult/teasing/mocking. Bringing him back to the inn causes the maiden to freak out, the troll to get insulted, and a fight to emerge.

The whole idea is a cute one. Young tavern-wench brought up on too much Tv … errr, I mean minstrel tales. She doesn’t want to marry the boring knights-son/bro obsessed with being a hero/jousting. Instead she’s fallen in love with the sweet voice in the fen. The sweet voice is a non-traditional troll, but with some baggage. It’s wrapped up in too many words. The rewards are not worth it. The fen is FAR too large to explore effectively, especially for first level party. Eight ghouls and a troll, after a lot of wandering monsters and environment hazards? That’s a bit too much for me.

The bar wenches have names and a 1 sentence personality, which is a GREAT addition. The ghouls in here are nice. They are portrayed more as cannibal humans rather than undead. I kind of like that. The fact they live under a tree in a dirt hollow underground is not really consistent with “human” and is instead more inline with “undead”, but I still assert that the non-traditional undead are the BEST undead. Except skeletons. Basic skeletons should always be Harryhousen skeletons. 🙂

Khamsa’s Folly
by J. Mark Bickering
AD&D
Levels 4-6

Five pages of text before the adventure starts. Oh Dungeon, I can’t quit you! There’s an Egyptian temple. The party is conned in to going there to get two artifacts, and followed by the evil con-artist, who ambushes you at the end. In the fifteen room temple you fight a couple of snakes and then a medusa. The medusa battle is one of those big fight setups with several creatures of different types working together to screw the party. Eighteen pages for a short overland and fifteen room. My. Life. Is. A. Living. Hell. There’s a cute environment feature, the Sea of Glass, and the entrance to the temple is through the upper windows … which are now ground level because of the sand. That imagery was communicated well, as was a couple of the sand hazards in the temple. Other than the buried temple imagery, this thing has nothing to offer/recommend it.

Aerie Borne
Ralphe Rea & Greg Rick
AD&D
Levels 4-6

At a rural inn, the party is hired to retrieve some stolen giant eagle eggs. If the party questions the inn-folk then they can avoid most of the adventure encounters. If they instead go to the eagles nest then they chase the thieves through the forest and end up in the same place they would have anyway. Weird. The inn has the same problem that most older adventures have: it’s described fully. It’s almost like the writers are stuck in the old “dungeon map key” style of play. Instead of abstracting the inn map and describing the people IN the inn, instead the inn if fully described, along with the people in it, in the rooms they are found in. Only the inn employees are described and not the other travelers. That’s a mistake. Even if they know nothing a couple of words describing 10 or so people would have gone a long way. A simple table telling us what the employees job is, where they are found, a personality word, and what they know would have saved several pages of text. The rest of the encounters are pretty straightforward. Not much treasure. A couple of ogres, some spiders, etc. Even the climax is just a wizard in a ruin with some charmed soldiers. This is just a normally adventure. If the inn were shortened/tightened-up, and the encounters beefed up (say, with stuff like that Nymph encounter in Fey Sisters Fate …) you’d have a good adventure. But that’s essentially a rewrite.

The Draven Deep’s Menace
by Jeff Fairbourn
Dragonlance
Levels 3-9

This adventure will either be linear or it will be boring; your party’s choice. If they do what they are supposed to do then they will explore a linear underwater cave system, meet some sea elves, and then explore another linear underwater cave system. If they don’t play by the rules then they’ll shortcut things, be bored, finally find the main adventure location, and go home after nuking it. (They have scroll with a nuke spell on it and are supposed to nuke an underwater hobgoblin lair.)

3D adventures don’t work. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, has written a decent one. But in general they don’t work. I’m no historian but I suspect that the underwater and flying rules were meant for players to solve problems in the 2D world. Swim a river in a cave, or fly up to a new location to explore. extended adventures underwater or in the air just don’t fit in the groove well. The DM/adventure has to give the party a bunch of stuff to allow them to fly/breathe, and then everyone gets to have fun with the new movement & encumbrance and environmental rules. Yeah! Bookkeeping!

It’s no different here. I can’t see how one of these 3D adventures would work unless it’s location/objective based with a strong social aspect. The ocean/air is big, you need talky things to interact with to lead you in the right direction and a reason to go to a location that you could/would otherwise swim/fly around. It’s “solved” in this adventure by using an underwater tunnel. A dungeon corridor filled with water. Yeah? I would assert that’s not an underwater adventure. An underwater adventure is not under the water, requiring water-breathing. It should be a 3D adventure with unique aspects of the underwater ecology/lifestyle present. I don’t know what that is. If I did I’d cashed in on my riches by now. All $1.98 of them.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 1 Comment

DCC #81 – The One Who Watches From Below

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

dcc81
by Jobe Bittman
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 1

The rumors are true! The secret cave of the mystics holds a hoard of treasure vast enough to buy the kingdom seven times over. Gold coins piled as high as snow banks! Gleaming swords and jewel-encrusted wands crackling with arcane energy! Precious gems as large as your fist! The only thing standing between your present circumstances and a life of fabulous wealth is a pesky, slumbering elder god with a penchant for consuming entire worlds, an endless army of vat-grown hybrid monstrosities, a veritable tidal wave of disembodied eyes with awesome powers, giant acid worms, and a curse with the power to rip the still-living eyes from your skull. Do you have the mettle to stare down a god or will your eyes forever adorn the vault of The One Who Watches From Below?

Uh … I usually do an intro here, summarizing the adventure. Go read the publishers blurb again. It’s pretty accurate. AND AWESOME! All the more so because it’s a level-1 adventure.

What’s the line from Anna Karenina? All good DCC adventures are alike, while all bad ones are bad in their own way? Freaky-deaky monsters. Great treasure. Nice environments. Gonzo Appendix N Numberwang. Charm great enough to choke a pig 1,000 times more charming than that pig Arnold from Green Acres. The good DCC adventures are impossible to review because the reviews all sound the same. This is a good DCC adventure.

I’ve been offline for 7 months and have seen a grand total of FOUR 5e adventures. With that wealth of experience I’m going to make the baseless assertion, with confidence, that the best 5E adventures being published have the label “DCC” on them. The power levels appear to be close enough and unless you’re an idiot you can adapt on the fly. Besides, does YOUR 5e adventure have Eye slime? A two-headed cockatrice? Disembodied eyeballs floating around? Laser Harpies? No, your suck-ass 5E adventure does not have Laser Harpies? LAZZZER HARPIES! How the fuck can a “normal” 5e adventure compete with one that has laser harpies?!!?! Oh, you think they can? Did I forget to mention that the LAZER HARPIES have the faces of little girls? Suck it 5e, you got nothing on DCC.

[As an aside, at what point will Goodman/DCC run out of ideas to do with eyeballs? When will they decide that disembodied eyes have been done to death and switch things up to earlobes, or uvula’s?]

Oracle temple. Rumors of gold. Your first level party hits the place. Inside you find freaky stuff, freaky creatures, and a treasure horde the size of 20 huge ancient red dragon hordes guarded by an ancient bloodthirsty titan and a wall with 100000000000000000000 active beholder eyes. Uh …. brief interlude here. This TYPE of play-style is something I really like. You see this in some of the early LotFP adventures, like Stargazer. You also see in a couple of Greenwood adventures: A level-1 group can succeed while a level-20 group could fail. A general environment is presented, ALMOST without regard to challenge level. It’s up to the party to negotiate it. The Brave Little Tailor can succeed while the char-opts will fail. This requires the adventure to be more open ended. The maps must be more complex. A straight-line means you MUST face the challenge directly, usually by combat, and therefore the challenge rating must be appropriate. But with a complex map and an environment that is more fluid then the party has options. That’s what makes this type of “hard” adventure possible: options. Those options are also what make D&D fun. Those are the whacky character plans and the stories told forever on Bills birthday.

The monsters are great DCC monster, unique and freaky. The treasure is good DCC treasure, unique and interesting. The environments are wonderful DCC environments, full of tentacle columns, giants eyeballs, disembodies eyeballs, creatures without eyes, warped and misshapen halfling in jaw-stye robes, cutout illustrations to show the players, a decent enough map, and, of course, the curse and the main treasure vault.

The curse is a fun gimmick. Greedy folk can get cursed, causing their eyeballs to fly out of their head and their body to fall in to a coma. The player then gets to wear a face shield with eye cutouts. They get to control their eyeballs, but they can only communicate with the rest of party through te movement of their eyes. Very cute. I’m a sucker for a fun gimmick and this is a fun gimmick. There are also amble opportunities for the eyeballs to contribute to the party by exploring hard to reach places, taking over/dominating creatures, etc.

The main treasure vault is quite fun also. You come down some stairs. Below you you can see another set of stairs, and at the bottom a big room with a big old pit in the middle. Treasure is piled up around the pit. A LOT of treasure. Like the size of 20 dragons hordes worth of treasure. The closer you get to the pit the more treasure there is … PERFECT fucking setup. EVERYONE knows what is going to happen: something is going to come out of that pit. Much hilarity will inevitably ensue as the tension is ramped up to epic proportions while the party plan & plot and try to execute … all before the primordial bloodthirsty titan emerges from the pit the instant the treasure is touched. Oh, and then all of the eyes on the walls open and start shooting eyebeams at the characters. 🙂

One more shout-out: you can find large glass jars full of tiny, awake, monstrous fetuses. Drinking the fluid promotes healthy hair & nail growth. Nice! It’s the little touches, the little throw away one-liners that can add so much to an adventure.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/127406/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-81-The-One-Who-Watches-From-Below?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 4 Comments

Glitterdoom

Posted on April 27, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

gdoom
by Michael Curtis
Goodman Games
5E
Level 3

Centuries ago, the glitterdoom came to the dwarves of Steelhand Clan! This divine curse transformed the dwarves into hellish forms with an insatiable greed for gold. Now, a chance encounter breaks open long-sealed gates to unleash the glitterdoom again. Can your adventurers delve into the forgotten halls to confront the subterranean menace?

This is an unremarkable adventure, fairly typical of the printer adventure module market. The formula is a simple branching map, a simple storyline, and a couple of goodies: spells, races, feats, etc. It’s serviceable as long as you’re not looking for anything interesting. Recall that demotivator poster: Perhaps the Purpose of Your Life is to Serve as an Example to Others? Let’s do that here. I noticed one MASSIVE missed opportunity, that I’m going to discuss at length, and one more one, that I will discuss first.

First, let’s get the boilerplate out of the way. Too much backstory reveals a dwarfhold overcome by greed, an ensuing curse, and the hold lost to time. Random dwarf dude hires the party to help him search it for clues to a DIFFERENT lost dwarhold. All he knows is that there are undead inside. Ok, done.

Point Of Interest Number The First: Rewarding Players.
At one point in the adventure the party stumble over a trapped hallway. The ceiling of the hallway has collapsed and it’s evident that there are a number of skeletons underneath … one bony hand stinking out of the rubble. If the party take the time to search then they find nothing. This. Is. Lame If your group dives to the bottom of the upside-down waterfall, then there should be a treasure. If they go out of their way to swim the underground river then there should be a treasure. If they climb to the top, or bottom, of a gorge/chasm then there should be a treasure. If they dig out the bodies of a bunch of dwarves so overcome by greed that they were cursed … then there should be a treasure. When should there not be a treasure? Sitting on the middle of table in an empty room that you have to pass through. The idea here is that the common, the mundane, the easy have all been snapped up. A thinking party, going out of their way, should be rewarded for thinking. That ENCOURAGES them to think. Stonesky Delve did this. A couple of DCC adventures have done this. (I’m thinking specifically of the one with the island under the castle, and there’s a flowstone formation going up, with a treasure at the top if you follow it.) Frequently there will be a magic sword, etc, at the bottom of a chasm in the dungeon … usually with a beastie nearby. If your adventure has someplace weird/hard to get to/hard to explore in it, or that’s non-obvious, then put in a treasure. A clever party, searching the rubble and finding nothing, will give up on being clever because it’s not worth it. This was perfect opportunity to put some gold in the skeletal stomachs of the dead bodies, or in their mouths … so overcome with gold fever they ate it to protect THEIR gold from the other dwarves! Freaky! Helps tell the story of the place! Rewards level/inquisitive players! But instead … the adventure has nothing to be found under the rubble and I get to say that this is more similar to 3E shovel-ware. Not-terrible shovel-ware, but, still …

The Core Issue: Suspension of Disbelief/Theming.
I don’t know what to call this. I’m a plebe from a public school so I’m going to compare it to the suspension of disbelief issue in Science Fiction literature. Basically, you can get anyway with any major deviation form now, but the rest of the story must flow from that new fact. I might back comparisons to theming. If you are writing a horror book it PROBABALLY shouldn’t be full of AHNOLD-style action. Your theming should be consistent. That’s not the case here.

I’m going to focus in on one line in the adventure. Just one. It may be the best idea, by far, presented int he adventure. At one point the party is inside a giant mining bucket, using a winch inside to descend in to the darkness. Then they hear a number of ominous whispering voices saying “Come down and play with us.” Holy Fucking Shit! Are you kidding me? If I was faced with that my PC would shit their pants and I’d start winching the thing back up, regardless of the feelings of the others. That’s a GREAT line. That line could have set the tone for the ENTIRE adventure. Imagine the entire thing … you’d have something like The Inn of Lost Heroes, one of the best published adventures. Instead, nothing else in the adventure is consistent with that line. It’s a generic monster slugfest. Enter room. Kill monster. Next room. It doesn’t matter that the main enemy is undead dwarves. They are just treated like Yet Another Thing to Kill. They get treated a bit like zombies, who can move through rock like ghosts, and who can drain stamina like a shit-your-pants stat-draining undead of old. Instead, they get boring old descriptions and are treated like a orc who can move through rock walls. Joy. At one point they fire at the party with their crossbows through a portcullis. Uh … Undead using crossbows? Not quite the cold murderous rage of the intelligent undead or the mindless death-dealing of the skeleton/zombie class. There’s nothing SCARY about them. There’s nothing scary about the environment. What’s that Dragonsfoot series? Where the Fallen Jarls Sleep? That series had good undead. (and devils, for that matter.) It gave great advice for making the undead scary and real.

Look, I’m not saying Curtis should have written a horror adventure. What I AM saying is that he’s got a TERRIFIC line in this adventure. On a second draft I wish he would have recognized that line and gone back and started over, building off of that line. Consistent theming. Building tension. Freaking the fucking players out and making them really, really REALLY want to find a vault full of gold in order to continue on with the horror. Not unfair combat. Not overpowered monsters. Fear. Dread. Apprehension. Fear of the Unknown. Just exactly what IS in the black hole in ground? Treasure, for sure, we know that. But at what cost?

Instead, a generic hack.

I got some backlog to review with DCC & 5E, and then on to the more recent OSR adventures.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/132657/Fifth-Edition-Fantasy-1-Glitterdoom?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

The Fey Sisters Fate

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Bryce Lynch

fsf

Chris Doyle
Goodman Games
5e
Level 1

The cries of battle echo in the rustic wilderness, as a pair of fey sisters defend the ancient Briarwood against invaders. When the town of Bur Hollow sends militia men to support their fey allies, they disappear without a trace. The adventurers must enter the Briarwood and save them!

Chris Doyle, the designer, shows a shred of promise. There are some very bright parts to this adventure. Unfortunately, they are the window dressing, and the core remains mundane. It is, however, more than you usually see in an adventure. If this were his first adventure that he’s written I’d say he showing some serious promise but needs an editor and needs to jump in with both feet. It’s his 25th-ish adventure though, and I’ve not seen the other 24 so … . This is one of the most conflicted reviews I’ve written in the last seven months.

This is a simple linear journey up river and through several set pieces until you defeat the bullywugs … err.. frog folk. The adventure quite verbose, perhaps because it was one of the first 5E products. It’s also pretty simple, being a linear track. It has some good monster and treasure descriptions, which, at least seven months ago, tended to be few and far between in published adventures. There’s some morality embedded in the adventure which I always hate to see but is easily enough ignored. There is at least one encounter worth stealing.

There’s a page of so of backstory here which details how two dryads have been harassed by some bullwugs, and how they’ve responded by manipulating goblins and townsfolk. The end-all is that the town send you to find some missing guardsmen, which leads you to a dryad and another “quest”, which leads to the captured guards and another “quest”. You fight a bunch of bullywugs. It’s all quite linear. Go to A, then B, then C. The writer acknowledges that. I’m not sure that makes it ok, but they do at least tell you that they didn’t try when writing it.

The adventure proper … is …. I don’t know. Not good … with a single exception. Linear. There are only a few forced fights in it and they tend to be at the beginning and end. Most of the rest of the encounters can be approached with creative thinking. IE: it’s still linear and you’re still going to have to face the encounter, but it’s not that 4E nonsense of REQUIRING you to fight. Instead you could sneak around or light some fire or let loose your bag of possums or whatever. Two of the big encounters are on multi-level platforms in a tree and along/around a crude beaver-type dam. They are not very good. I get that the writer is TRYING to set up an interesting environment, but I don’t think it works. An interesting environment must communicate a picture to the DM. It’s hard to be specific here. The DM must grasp the environment well enough in their mind that when the players say “is there a chandelier I can swing on?” that the DM can Yes, even if the text doesn’t say there’s a chandelier. You must have enough of a picture to have the ogre grab a muddy decayed tree root from th beaver dam to throw at the players. No encounter description can ever provide the degree of detail needed to support this type of play. What it CAN do though is paint a picture of a scene that the DM’s mind fills in. Sound murky? I didn’t say it was easy. This adventure, and most adventures, generally fail in this area. They don’t inspire.

But Generally Fail doesn’t mean Complete Fail. This adventure hits one VERY high spot and almost succeeds in another place. There’s an earthen “dungeon” of a few rooms under a tree. Mostly it’s mechanical text. Thrown in the middle is some description of tree roots hanging down. That INSTANTLY brings to mind the witch scene in The 13th Warrior. Perfect! I grasp the whole thing instantly and can fill in as needed. In the by-far-the-best-encounter, the writer not only creates an interesting encounter but he also manages to paint the picture. I’m going to try, but I’ll fail: There’s a pretty, short, naked girl on a rock in the middle of a small drying pond. The landscape is full of dried up marsh type stuff; almost no water of any size to speak of, but enough mud, dried & wet, to make life a pain for the party. The nymph has crossed dry land from a nearby drying-up pool and is exhausted form the trip. Eventually she tells the party her sisters are there and need help; they can’t make the journey and there’s a mean bear trying to eat them and their pool is drying up, etc. The writer, unlike me, paints a good picture of environment. The encounter is a good one: not a straight up fight, magical creatures who are not being straight-up dicks, and a PROBLEM to solve. Sure, you can beat on the bear, but you could also lure it away, etc. The nymph at the other pool need some help. The lone one gets a name, but the other five don’t get names or personalities, and should have. Just something like “Marydale; flirty. Lillysun; bold”, etc, would have helped a lot. There’s always a nit to pick, but this encounter is GOOD, and worth stealing. More writers need to do more things like this. Brave Little Tailor, HO!!!!!!

The monster descriptions have some nice bright spots. The mosquitoes have delicate gossamer wings twice their body size, and black coloring with a foot long proboscis and a pair of bulbous multi-facated eyes. The dryad looks like a delicate elf maiden with brown-red hair, and ashen skin etched with wrinkles, with dress covering the curves of her body. There are a couple of other examples. These are pretty good. I’m always looking for a decent monster description. Not just “its a goblin”, but rather a description of the goblin. It’s doesn’t have to be long, as these examples illustrate, but they do need to have some adjectives & adverbs in there. You can see that in a curvy body or gossamer wings or multi-facated eyes. It may sound hokey, but just a little of this can go a LONG way to cementing a kind of platonic ideal of the creator in the DM’s head. Then the DM can take it from there. To be sure, some of the descriptions suck, like the ogre description which is quite bland. And other creatures don’t have a description and could use one. For example, there’s a bear with no description. But it’s clear from the text he’s wounded. A flap of raw skin exposed, or his skeleton showing through his leg, or a stinking gangrenous wound would go a LONG way to helping out. I would note that I misread the Bullywug … errr.. Frog Folk Taskmaster entry and thought that he could remove his tongue and use it as a whip. That would be pretty cool! Who wouldn’t want to use a giant bullywug tongue in combat!

Similarly, the treasure descriptions tend to be above average. There’s an ivory box decorated with a coiled dragon, housing an electrum hourglass filled with powered emerald sand. Who the fuck in their right mind wouldn’t want THAT hourglass for the inn back home? This is SOOOO much better than “trease parcel worth 250gp” and it requires almost no more effort. It fires the imagination. It leads to questions. It inspires. It treats you as if you are playing a game of imagination and wonder, instead of yet-another-resource-collection-game-“you find 4 yellow cubes that you can spend with your 6 red cubes to make a black cube that give you +1 on attack …” The magic items have that little bit extra also. Parmalae is a magic rapier. Thin & delicate, gilded in pure silver, when you swing it blue runes appear on the flat, with an electrum hilt in the shape in the design of ivy. Once per day, on a hit, the target can be gilded by a glittery fey lining. THAT’s a fucking magic item! It SCREAMS fey origin. What’s it’s history?! Who Knows?!? Who gives a shit it’s a +1 weapon, that’s the kind of magic item someone will keep LONG after they find a boring old +2. (And if your group has someone who would keep the +2 then you kick the asshat out of our group. Why play with the soulless?) There are other examples as well.

The writing style is verbose and it’s readability is further marred by by an overly large font and the use of italics for large blocks of read-aloud text. All of these, together, make the adventure difficult to read. Guy Fullerton wrote an entire series on adventure layout. If you’re an amateur, go read it. If you’re a professional, go hire James Kramer. I hate bitching about this kind of stuff. It seems petty. It’s not content. It’s gotta be pretty bad before I complain, and I’m complaining here. Readability is pretty poor.

Finally, the writer embeds morality in to the adventure. Fuck. You. Chris. Doyle. If you fight to subdue some dazed guardsmen you get an XP bonus. If you turn down a reward you get an XP bonus. Don’t tell me how to play/run D&D. That shit belongs in a DMG, not an adventure, under “alternate/sucky-ass play styles.”

Is this thing worth $10? I don’t know. How much is a gallon of milk in 2015? $10 is 2 beers, or also, less than the cost of one top-shelf/mixology drink. Its it worth that much? Yeah, I think it is. Would I run it? Hmmm, no. I have impossible high standards. You might like it though, especially is you think most published adventures are ok.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/132658/Fifth-Edition-Fantasy-2-The-Fey-Sisters-Fate?1892600

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