The Greydeep Marches

Posted on May 8, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Peter Schweighofer
Griffon Publishing Studio
Generic/Universal

Three hundred years ago adventurers from the Vilburg Kingdom forayed into the untamed border region and quickly drove away isolated, unorganized bands of humanoids. Many settled here under the watchful eye of the Sentinel Knights and have prospered in their enterprises. But dark powers left from a wicked empire 2,000 years earlier still lurk in dark forests, forlorn ruins, and subterranean labyrinths…and a growing threat in the Ostmaur Peaks to the east threatens to overrun the apparent peace and prosperity in the Greydeep Marches.

This 34 page regional guide has three adventures in it. It’s quite wordy, full of things that don’t matter, and has nothing interesting in it. I don’t understand what the value here is.

This is a regional setting. That can mean one of two things: either it’s a fluff piece with some mini-adventures or it’s a sandboxy area. I tend to avoid fluff and love sandboxy things, which leaves me in a pickle when it comes to those that pop up in my potential review list. This one turned out to be of the mostly fluff variety.

And what fluff it is! Oh, no, I mean, not in a good way. It’s long and boring and drawn out. What, a page I think, on the Hammer & Tun, a tavern. A page that regals the mighty oak beams and jovial atmosphere … without actually saying anything of use to run the adventure or, I would assert, even creating an evocative environment. WHich is interesting. It’s clear that the designer is trying to invoke an evocative atmosphere in the inn, but it’s so generic and so long-winded that I just didn’t care. It was completely ineffective in what it was trying to do. And this happens time and time again in the fluff portions of the adventure, the descriptions of the regions, the places and the people. It’s long-winded and boring, even through its clearly trying to evoke imagery. But, man, it’s all the same shit, time and time again in these things. It’s generic fantasy land with generic fantasy taverns. We’ve got monsters with an evil forced behind them making incursions from the mountains. Duke McDickhead is collecting artifacts and some Sentinel Knights run around bumbling. These are the divergences from typical fantasy world. And this is what twenty pages of overwrought text tells us … the description of the typical fantasy place without those brain spikes that make them memorable. 

This is supplemented by a wandering table that is mostly nonsense. A dude sitting in a tree warns you about the forest. Great. Bob is in the woods taking a leak. This doesn’t fulfill the purpose of a wandering table. The purpose of a wandering table is to make the party GO FORWARD and take Foy. Cause if you don’t then something is coming out to get you. So move your fucking asses. 

And this lack of understanding extends to many other places. There are three mini adventures in the supplement, and in one the reward you are offered from the villager is determined by rolling a d6. This is not the point of randomness in an adventure. Rather than a table, the space could have been used to really work that portion and come up with a couple of sentences to really bring it alive for the DM, and thus the party.

The adventures are unremarkable little things, with two being small six room complexes and one being just slightly longer. Inside you’re mostly going to find hacking. I must say, though, that there are times in which the writing really does get better. “Water drips down the moist walls of this dank cave into a small pool, eventually running out the cave entrance into the puddle beyond” That’s not too shabby. I like it, for evoking the imagery that a designer should be trying to imbue in to a place.  It’s terse, and really gives you a sense of the place. Now, I can quibble that the pool of water being outside the cave, really should have come before, but the overall effect is still there. Likewise there’s a monster description that goes “Something lurking in the far shadows breathes heavily, then emits a growling croak. A large toad – three feet tall with green on top and a speckled red underbelly” Lurking. Heavy breathing. Growling croak. Green and speckled. Not the greatest of all time but certainly far far better than is usually seen. 

And then we get a long backstory for a common pig that is the inciting event for the adventure. ARGGGGGG!!!!!!!!

The region setting is unremarkable and the mini dungeons not great. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. You should be able to get the gist of whats going on, in tone, with it, in the region.


https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/242741/the-greydeep-marches?1892600

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Heart of the Sunken Lands

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Rudy Kraft
Midkemia Press
Generic/Universal

About six hundred and fifty years ago, invaders from the Empire of Tsuranuanni, on the planet Kelewan, used powerful magic to open a “rift” through space and time to Midkemia. The invaders were repulsed but only after a long, hard and bloody nine-year struggle (the First Rift War). One of the more significant disruptions of that war was the wholesale retreat of the Moredhel, called the Brotherhood of the Dark Path, from their long time homelands in the Grey Towers mountains and the great forest called The Green Heart, as they were driven before the invading Tsurani. Almost all the surviving Moredhel fled to the Northlands, to join with their brethren in safety behind the great mountain ranges to the north of the Kingdom.

This 182 page adventure, originally published in 1983, contains the rules for resource extraction from a jungle-like area known as The Sunken Lands. If you want a resource extraction game, and over a hundred pages of movement and encounter tables then this one is for you!

This is an adventure from 1983 that has been retyped for 2023. You’ve got this giant giant GIANT sunken area of land, the titular Sunken Lands, filled with a jungle, swamps, and a mountain range. A kind of Lost Valley without the dinosaurs. There’s a hex map of the valley that spans a couple of pages. (This is one of the very few (only?) parts that does not seem to have been updated, but rather scanned in from the original product. This was a massive mistake as the entire thing is blurry. You COULD run from it, but also you’re going to be bitching the entire time.) And then there’s the random encounter table. This is similar to the one in the back of the 1e DMG: percentages rolled on a terrain type. The encounters are things like “animal” or “”insects” or “humans” or “gems/minerals” or “water feature.” Then you roll on a subtable, or three to determine the nature of the water feature, the gems, or the animal type. Something like “crocodiles” or “insects” or something like that. And then the descriptions have the monster status and maybe a description/ecology. As per the early days, you’ll be doing the rest yourself.

Let us examine, if you will, a big hexcrawl map with terrain on it. Just like WIlderlands. With a random encounter table but WITHOUT the special hex descriptions. Take that …  and where does the interactivity come from? I don’t really think there is any in that  very basic model of terrain type and random encounter table. Widerlands, and most hex crawls, resolve this by having those special hex  descriptions … what most people would imagine a hex crawl is. This, though, posits another type of play: Resource Extraction.

Some of the encounter types on the encounter table are with trees or gems. And by trees lets think Ebony or other tree types. Wander in to the woods looking for Ebony trees and diamonds in those Arkansas mud fields. When you find them, harvest them and bring them back for ca$h. That is, I’m about 98% sure, the core loop of this adventure. But how to do you know where the uranium is? You can hire some guides/experts who have skills in geology, botany, and so on, and, working with the random tables, they get a percentage, when you find a potential resource hex, to say “hey, we should dig here.” Without those experts the chances are MUCH slimmer that you stumble upon a diamond on the surface, for example. So, we’re in a loop to dig up shit from the ground and find ebony trees and the like. (Not exactly what you can harvest, but close enough for this review without going in to the entire regional backstory.)

There are to locations in the region that are special, two different religious cults. One of them is a safe haven in the wilderness … with a secret. The other gives off hippy commune vibes (I think so anyway, it’s darker in the text) except they have headless slaves and worship a god that lives in a pit in the center of the village. Mostly chill, if you can get past the bizarro shit they do. Which the party will not be able to. Which is fortunate because the “dungeon” under their village (the only dungeon in the adventure) has the largest quantity of static wealth in the adventure. Like, you meet from very friendly people who turn out to be cannibals, but it’s all chill … unless you’re a redhead. You’re not a redhead are you?

So we’ve got a resource extraction scenario. But the supporting material for that is a bit week. Mining timelines, logistics, moving gear and resources. And, more importantly, the complications. If you look beyond the simple “wanderers” for any hex you’ve got to have more. You need rivals and other things going on that will add some spice to the game. There’s an attempt here to do that. We’ve a couple of rival “houses” that extract gems, for one, and wood, for another. (There are also a variety of interesting NPC”s for the party to hire, but we’re not looking at that.) What we need, here, are for those houses to meddle. For the supply base at the edge of the Sunken lands to have some intrigue. For some events and perhaps rough timelines present to help the DM initiate complications for the party to overcome. 

Otherwise we’ve got a simple extraction game with some tables for finding it and little for extraction. And it’s all regulated by a three page bullet list of things to roll for and check for for each day and hex that the party travel/explore/etc. That’s quite the system, even if you do roll a lot in advance.

This reminds me of … oh, what’s the board game … Magic Realm? A complex seriee of tables and rules for exploring and playing D&D by yourself, straight out of the 70’s. The time before computers. Magic Realm was really a computer RPG in boardgame form, much like many of the wargames in that time would have benefited from being computer games, due to their intense rules and tables and flows to follow. As a simulation of some exploration focused on resource extraction it would work better that way.

This is interesting in that it’s an early hex crawl that doesn’t have the features of a hex crawl and that it focuses on another element: people  looking to exploit natural resources. But, other than that it’s hard to look at it as a playable game, in the same way that a traditional hex crawl moves forward and drives gameplay. In spite of this the exploitation minigame and the hex movement elements are interesting on their own, as systems to steal from for a hex inspired game.

Oh, and the magic has a certain early T&T charm. “A scroll which contains a spell that will render the person invisible” and or a leather satchel with a wide mouth that you can store 10,000 coins in but will weigh only as much as one. Nice job there.

This is $6 at DriveThru. There i no preview 🙁


https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/464567/heart-of-the-sunken-lands?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 4 Comments

Doctrine of Ghul

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Bruce Cordell
Monte Cook Games
Cypher/5e
Levels 4-5

Ghul. The creator of Goth Gulgamel, the fortress halfway up the Spire. Self-proclaimed offspring of Eslathagos Malkith—who himself created the wicked citadel at the top of the Spire, one of the most innately evil sites in the world. Lately, talk has been swirling around Delver’s Square—talk of a newly uncovered ancient manuscript scribed by the Half God himself. ome seek the manuscript to ensure it is destroyed. A few want it to glorify Ghul. And some believe it holds the key to powerful magics they hope to harness for themselves. The motives are varied, but one thing is certain: the race to find it is on! Does the manuscript even exist? And if it does, what does its unearthing portend?

This 31 page adventure has the party doing three mini dungeons with different themes. It’s overly wordy and is doing its best to befuddle anyone running it. But, the dungeons do have some interesting concepts behind them, poorly executed. Monte COok Games is a brand with people hired to produce content for it, and it feels like it.

For [pretext] to hunt down an ancient manuscript at this chicks house in the city. Oh no! Now you’re cursed! You have to go “underground” to find three shrines and visit each to undo the curse, and you’ve got seven days to do it. After visiting the three  mini-dungeons you are NOT turned in to an evil demi-god so the dude that created the manuscript, Lareth the Beautiful, teleports in to try and kill you. What’s actually going on is that Vruce Cordell has three ideas for dungeon effects and his pal Monty slapped his name on it as publishers and no one gave a shit as they shoveled it out the door. I’m going to hope that Ray Vallese’s name, associated with this as editor, just meant he was looking for misspelled words and we can blame the layout and managing editor people for not knowing how to run an adventure. [Ray is the only person who has ever published anything remotely resembling good advice for an adventure writer. Well, him and Guy Fullerton, who has a lot of good tips.]

The three mini dungeons have some decent little ideas behind them. I wouldn’t say that, given the size of the dungeons, at sixish rooms each, that the ideas are given the best environment to grow in. There’s just not enough depth provided by six rooms to allow anything to grow well. But, you can see where things are going. I’m going to focus on the second of the mini-dungeons, a kind of ooze themed area. The characters can get sick in here, and get the sniffles. Which can cause them to cough up grey good. Oh, also, getting seriously hurt with a slashing/piercing weapons, spilling their blood, then the stuff congeals in to an ooze that attacks them. Insult to injury, man oh man! That’s a decent idea! Sniffling, building up to coughing up shit, to your own blood attacking? And that gets about a little less than a column to explain, never becomes relevant again, and doesn’t really build at all, at least not through the designer. The other two dungeons also have some distinct theming (yeah!) and some kind of interesting effect going on. 

Everything else is shit.

The hooks are pretextual. Yes, all hooks are, in a sense. But if you’re going to include content then you must make an effort at that content. The party is hired, the party is interested in it themselves … these are not hooks worth mentioning. The job of the designer is to breathe enough life in to these so that the DM can take the hook and run with it, inspired. Something to hang your hat on. Leave them out if you’re not going to make an effort.

The initial investigation involves the party tracking down a copy of the manuscript, in a chicks house. There’s no way given to connect the dots. This is not an investigation. It jumps from some rather loose rumors directly to the house, with nothing in between about finding the house. There is NO investigation, no way of getting from the rumors to the house.

But, the rumors, the only thing you have, are behind some DC skill checks. And if we don’t succeed on those? Yes, the DM can fudge it. Then why put it behind a skill check at all? Just as the rest of the adventure is behind a skill check in the house. Just as finding the door to the first dungeon is behind a skill check. TWO skill checks, in fact. Do we not want to play D&D tonight? This is not the way skill checks are used in an adventure. 

The path to the mini-dungeons is linear. The DM is given advice to “If you wish, sprinkle a couple of the following encounters into the PCs’ path as they make their way between the three shrines, or include an encounter of your own creation.” This is not design. There is no progression. This is time wasting. Just throwing shit in because you think the adventure MUST have that element, and yet putting no effort at all in to it.

The first dungeon a kind of tomb, has such exciting entries as “Sarcophagus B: “Yurik Leor.” When opened, an ice-cold revenant lurches out. Still worn on its finger is a gold ring set with bloodstones worth 200 gp.” There should be horror elements here. No real description of the tomb. No description of the revenant. Just here, here is a monster. Attack! THis is fucking boring. It does NOTHING to assist the DM. 

And the page count here is not trivial. 31 pages. For about 24 rooms? There was plenty of room to concentrate and focus effort on those dungeons and their entries. There is text, a lot of it. Long read-aloud that over-reveals and yet still produces environments that are not inspiring. Mountains and mountains of DM text that do nothing to add to the adventure. 

Wasted words. Long background on who write the manuscript. That is totally irrelevant, because he just teleports in, a random dude teleporting in at the end of the adventure to attack the party? This is Lareth at his worst, the secret force behind everything, with nothing to go on or develop.

Everyone involved here should have known better. It should have been trivial to look at the thing and say that the layout is busy, that the adventure text focuses on the wrong things, that it is uninspiring and a chore to use. 

But no one did.

This is $6 at DriveThru. There’s no preview at all to help you make a purchasing decision before buying. 

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/377652/doctrine-of-ghul?1892600

Posted in 5e, Reviews | 11 Comments

The Fenworthy Inheritance

Posted on May 1, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Simon Todd
Montidots
BRP/CoC/Gore

When David Farrington decided to drag his sister, Jinx, away from the hedonistic vortex of London’s Bright Young Things for a peaceful walking holiday he little envisioned that they would soon be entangled in a web of murder, sinister cults and a festering thirst for revenge that has been festering for over sixty years.

This 75 page Call of Cthulhu-type adventure uses about forty pages to describe a revenge/occult situation in a manor home. It’s VERY wordy, and while not entirely focused on being scene based, I don’t understand how you could run it any other way … and thus linear. 

Ok, so, kids mom was a witch, running a coven out of their manor, kills her husband and gets arrested and executed. Kid grows up and now wants revenge on everyone in the village that he thinks was responsible, etc. Also, the witches body is in some kiddy doll. Also, there’s a cthulhu monster under the ground that is granting some power. The party arrives, car broken down by a pothole, finds a body (probably) and is present for the ritual that happens in a couple of days time. Not stopping it is a bad idea, with the usual ramifications. 

I love a good manor mystery/situation. It’s one of my favorite genres of mysteries/movies. You have a list of characters, a timeline, situations that happen. It’s a great genre! But, also, I think mysteries are more of a social adventure than an exploratory one, and thus the method of presenting it to the DM has to change. There’s a lot to keep track of, and the DM will need to be able to use the people, places, and situations to adjust what happens on the fly to adapt to the players … and the designer needs to create something that is focused on helping the DM do that. And that can be quite hard.

What we’re looking at here is roughly 25 events that happen over three days. You check out of the inn. You see a torn down signpost. You hit the pothole and find a farmer. You find a body. You hit the inn. You go to various places. These are ROUGHLY linear. The ones I just described could be the kick off/hook. Then you get this long list of locations and/or events. Like The Burnt Out Croft or The Inspector Calls (to look in to the dead body.) So, a mix of locations and events, culminating Monday with the summoning at the ancient stone circle. But,, also, peoples descriptions and motivations tend to be mixed in to the places in a linear order. So, if you go to the Grange then the read-aloud has you seeing the gamekeeper, which then has a short description of the gamekeeper and whats hes done, etc. And then it moves on to the location proper. WIth other people mixed in. Since this is ann estate & village and there’s a lot of people and places and normal events and occult events and timed events and untimed things … well, that’s a lot to run. It’s just not organized in a fashion to make it a reference document. You could go through it, place after place and event after event (for  the most part) and run it that way. But, there’s no overall NPC register or anything like that, and the timelines (there are multiple) tend to be scattered through the text. 

This is all compounded by the length of text. There’s a decent amount of read-aloud, some of it stretching in to a point where it’s hard to pay attention to it. And then there is A LOT of DM text. Sometimes we get bullets, especially when an NPPC knows multiple things. THis is a GREAT help. But, also, there’s STILL a lot of text not in an easy to grok format, and its also padded out with things like “if the  party chooses to investigate the bicycle then they find …”  and then it breaks in to the bike stuff.

Things are lost in all of this. The giant bug that goes around causing trouble. The pooka-thing causing trouble. It’s just a rough one. You can see what the designer was going for. There is a lot going on and a lot of places to look at. And quite the short timeline: you get there on Saturday and the ritual pops off Monday at 8pm … with a few events prior to that. Of course, one need not explore all of the sites, after all the ritual is popping off no matter what. But we want the party o have a sporting go at it, What What? I have some regrets, it seems. It’s just so rich in content … roughly fifty pages of it, and it feels likeit needs just a bit more time to really stretch its legs and go. 

But, also, it’s such a jumbled mess. Jumbled isn’t quite the right word … you can see WHY the decision son formatting were made, but, it’s just so alien to me in how one might want to organize things in to run an adventure like this. Substantially more reference data/summaries. Condensed timelines. Massive cross-references, and locations really focused to themselves rather then mixing in timelines, events, locations and NPC’s.

This is 5.50 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. AT best you get the table of contents. That’s not really enough to make a judgement call on purchasing the adventure, so, No Bueno preview.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/192842/the-fenworthy-inheritance?1892600

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Dungeon of the Unknown

Posted on April 29, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Geoffrey McKinney
lotFP
lotFP
Level 1

Located near the coast of hex 2214 of the Isle of the Unknown, this dungeon enshrines the mysteries of the Isle’s lost Minoan past. 

This 38 page booklet including two dungeon level maps and some random things, generated randomly, that you could populate in to them. Sometimes weird in a good way and more times just random and disconnected. Not a fucking adventure. 

“Can be used immediatly” says the marketing …. pfffft!

There are two old school style dungeon maps. In blue even! With the thin little lines for walls, so, using every square on the paper for the map, just like that famous Gygax “behind the screen” photo. The “key” for the dungeon is included on the same page as the map. The Yellow Temple. The Fiery Room. The Monolith of Dripping Fangs. The Shaking Sands. Just a room name. And each one is named just like that, like it’s the set piece room of all set piece rooms for the dungeon. Nothing is mundane and everything is grandiose. Well, the names are. All of them. There are no keys. What there is is a little notation. “W3” or “T2”. Some are entirely blank. That’s all there is. That’s all you’re getting.

The other pages of the booklet describe what W4 and T2 are. There are twelve of those special rooms, for the seventy or so rooms on the key. Things like “reroll one set of your stats”, which you can use as many times as you want. They have no relation to the room names. The monsters here are Goops. And Gloops. And Gobs. No description. Roll on a table for the random ability of each. You do get some random humans to toss in also. “These Brigands are accomplished robbers and murderers. Their leader (the individual of highest level amongst them) is called the Brigand Lord.” There are other monsters with the names of C1, C2, C3, C4 and so on, the Geofrey special of a random chimeric creature. 

That’s the “Adventure.” That’s all it is. Nothing more. I’m not being facetious. That random reroll room? “Six ever-burning wax candles float 6’ high in a 5’ diameter circle. Anyone extinguishing a candle will fall unconscious. One minute later the candle will relight and the person will awake. He must re-roll on 3d6 a randomly-determined attribute (no saving throw).”

Everything in the adventure is like this. It’s not an adventure. It’s just a fucking collection of ideas. And, I’d argue, a collection that can’t be used in the manner in which the designer intends. Nothing present really wors together. The theme is just “a bunch  of rando bizarre shit.” Random monsters. Rooms you place yourself with no hint of working together. It’s trying to out B1 the B1 adventure. But that had some theming. This doesn’t. 

And it’s all that weird abstracted language. Afraid to say anything specific. 

There’s an interesting weird thing here and there, I guess. But, seriously, just go to the Dungeon Dozen and use it. Or any of those other rando dungeon design books. These are too specific to be used as tools and not related enough to be used in the same space. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. Sucker. No preview, double sucka!

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/114330/dungeon-of-the-unknown?1892600

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Tar Pits of the Bone Toilers

Posted on April 27, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Malrex
The Merciless merchants
OSR
Levels 5-8

A new trade route is being sought through the Dalgarian Canyonlands, pass the friendly Kharazan, Village of Plenty. But the last two expeditions have never returned and the merchants are getting anxious for the new route, causing bags of gold to exchange hands. Meanwhile, the ancient portal, the Maw of Ghormaug, has opened once more and invaders, ‘bone men’, are beginning to take over territory. No one is safe. Left unchecked, these lands are destined for horror and ruin, unless a brave party steps up to the challenge.

This thirty page adventure presents a small jungle canyon, full of trees and swamp, with various encounters orbiting around a cult of neanderthals with a bone/skull motif. The overall vibe of the valley is there, with things fitting together well, but the individual encounters seem off. Weaker descriptions and encounters that feel less like situations. 

We’ve got this jungle canyon. Merchant dudes want to chart a course through it to open up a new trade path. Off you go to figure out why the last expedition didn’t return. Inaside we find a host of little mythic like encounters, strong on player cultural memory. And the bone toilers. These are primitive men that like to dress in boine armor, etc. And sometimes their taller leaders ride animated skeletons of dinosaurs and shit like that. So, lots of bone monsters and bone motifs and skulls hanging around. Turns out they are from another dimension, the gate is in the bottom of their cave lair in their fort, and there’s a … bone devil inside! So, not too bad in the It All Makes Sense Now Of Course school of player thought.

Malrex does a decent job here, as I mentioned, of putting in some iconic encounters. We’ve got a mad hermit in a hut who knows just about everything. We’ve got a hooded woman living in a cave, wary at first but also having information to trade for magic items. Also, hey, don’t piss her off maybe … what are all of those statues in the nearby jungle about? And then theres the … spirit? We likes walking out of a copse of trees in his spotlessly white robe and pointing, ominously, to a better path for the party to take. A Duskwalker … enemy of the bone toilers! Also, this one is missing his heart. A village, the former inhabitants of the valley, now massacred. Undead wander, a pyramid of corpses in the center. And, of course, The Looters. Not adventurers. Not bandits. Looters. Great word choice. They are in over their heads and want to get out. And some of them are missing. And their little band is about to be torn apart by some internal strife. Really kind of iconic little things. Oracular medusa? Sign me up!

Maps are not the greatest. We’ve gt a small wilderness area map. The scale is 10 feet, but that can’t be right. That would put most of the encounters within about sixty feet of another one. That just doesn’t make sense for the vibe of the text, which implies a large canyon with jungle and swampy water. The wilderness has several small “dungeons” hanging off ot it. A ruined village, a couple of cave complexes, and the main bone-dudes fort and the caves/hellmouth underneath. This sort of wilderness with smaller dungeons is intriguing and I like the concept a lot, just not at the scale presented here. And the maps, of the dungeons, are not the greatest. A little blurry and not the most complex things ever, but still better than square rooms connected by lines.

The descriptive text can be maddening. Overall, i think it’s not great. Not, perhaps the weakest, but it tends to avoid the evocative text that some of the Malrex product produces. Things are a bit better with the dungeon entrances. Here’s “Sheeting water and mist drench everything at the bottom of the roaring waterfall. Two rivulets enter a cave mouth, making a set of eroded stairs slippery as they lead to darkness.” That’s one of the entrances and it’s not too bad as a forbidding entrance to something. But they fall off from there. 

The dungeon rooms, in particular, tend to the hack side, especially in the bone fortress caves. It’s stuffed full and a raid/stealth/assault is going to the word of the day, even for characters of this level. “1d6 bone dwellers join the fray every 1d4 rounds.” Ouch! And those dudes are 4HD. A tough fight to get out. And the designer recognizes this aspect of th adventure and provides a rough timetable of events, for the day, for the fortress, to assist the DM in players planning an assault. 

Good magic items here, and some really good descriptions, in places, as well as challenges. “Corpses cover the stairs leading up to the 6’ high platform. The corpses create a ‘ramp’ surrounding the entire temple, so characters need to climb over the corpses to reach the top” That’s a nice little thing.Or “Characters who touch the orb have their eyes roll up, showing only the whites of the eyes.” That’s a great little effect to help the DM out. 

But then, in other places, things fall flat. And that is the overall effect, I think. Not to say that it’s BAD, but just that so many opportunities are missed. In one case you’ve got a room with some beetles eating an alligator corpse. But, also, not mentioned till the end are three skeletons of a dead party lying in a heap on the north wall. THis could go two ways. Take a chance to kill the beetles .. for no reason? On the hope that there’s treasure? Or lure the party in by hinting at the bodies, giving them a reason to push their luck? I think those sorts of things are delicious so I’m readily in the second camp.

I want to also mention an art piece, of a ghast. Of a child. It’s well done and communicates the horror, I think. But the descriptions of the monsters don’t follow through, in most cases. We do get some pot-bellied ghasts at one point, but even that description falls a little flat, and it’s one of the rare examples. 

Don’t think I’m too down on this. It’s doing some nice things. But it doesn’t hit as hard as some of the other Malrex adventures. The concept is good and the overall vibe of the setting is good also. And some of the descriptions and encounters and situations. But It just doesn’t reach those heights that we all know Malrex is capable of.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, more than enough to get a sense of the place and the writing style and the encounter style.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/253868/tar-pits-of-the-bone-toilers?1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 11 Comments

Standoff at Sandfell Sea Fort

Posted on April 24, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Malrex
The Merciless Merchants
OSR/1e/2e
Levels 4-7

Eerie lights? Strange noises? Ships are sailing blind into the rough shores of the Bay of Saurvorn. Why is the light out at Lokrom’s Beacon? Will the party find clues to a murderer? Or is there something more sinister at stake.

This 24 page adventure presents a small cove/bay. About twenty miles square, with a number of things going on. It’s got a decent mix of encounter for a small regional area, and the three “dungeon” have some interesting enough things going on that mix well with the denizens of the area. A solid adventure for Shit To Go Down. 

I like an adventure with a decent number of things going on. It creates a kind of potential energy for the party to take advantage of, and fuck up, that I think creates those situations that good RPG sessions come from. And this has something going on. So, the light in the lighthouse went out a week ago. A rescue party to relight it hasn’t returned. Also, a ship went ashore, not that the lighthouse is out. Also, when you find them you’ll discover that some of them have been taken captive. Also, turns out that they’re pirates. Also, there’s some seal-people hanging out on a big kelp island, you can see the eerie green lights of their village. Also, the nearby fort has been taken over evil seahorse people. Also, a raiding party of the seal-people went missing when they raided the fort. I don’t know what the fuck else, something, I’m sure. And this all kind of leads naturally from one area to the next. It develops deeper and richer over time. 

This is all supported by some detail, some specificity, that helps the DM bring the adventure to life. A rumor telling us “Calos swears he saw the biggest crab he has ever seen along the coast to the east. He yapped at me sayin he would use the shell for a hut or some such nonsense. Hmm, funny thing, I haven’t seen him around lately.” Dude yapped. He had a dumb idea about a house. It’s in voice, or at least character, for a run down dude in a run down dive bar. You can work with that. Likewise the wanderers are all doing something, like crabs fighting over the drowned dead sailor corpse for lunch. You can immediately conjure that up in your head. And that allows you to add and twist it much more easily to bring the encounter to life, riffing on it for the players benefit. Or, even, a kind of throw away line in the Seal People village, of an old woman giving a spellcaster a robe made of lacquered shells. That’s fucking touching, man! 

And our descriptions, of the rooms and places, are pretty decent. One of the rooms has “This room smells of sea stench and dead animals. Several corpses of sea horse creatures lay flayed open and scattered about the room. A hoarse and raspy breathing, rag tag group …” That’s the missing raiding party of the seal people, taking a breather, kind of trapped in the seahorse people fort. Raspy breathing. Hoarse. Sea stench. Great use of descriptive words to help bring the are solidly in to the DM imagination. And the adventure does this more often than it does not. It’s not consistently hitting, room after room, but then again this is an earlier work by the bad king. 

I’m not sure how I would really describe the setting here. Not quite a regional setting. And the dungeons, while there is a lighthouse, a ship/cave and the fort (by far the largest at about 21 rooms) are not entirely the main focus … although they are? I mean that in a good way. What you’ve got here is a small area of wilderness with a lot going on, anchored by some people who want things (the town, the seal people, the shipwrecked survivors) and the three closer-to-traditional dungeons that are more exploration/raiding oriented. This FEELS like a little place where you back and forth between areas. I don’t actually think it is; I suspect that there is a natural order to the encounters in the area which leads to others, which leads to others. But it FEELS that way. And that’s what should ne happening in these things. You should feel like you are in control of what you are doing. You CaN do things but are not FORCED to do things. I know, amazing concept. 

In particular, I want to c all out the final dungeon, the largest one by far, at about 21 rooms. It’s supported by a grat map, with varied terrain, flooded chambers, same-level stairs and the like. It is much more complex and interesting than I think most maps of this size would be. And that’s supported by what’s going on INSIDE the caves/dungeon. It’s not just a flooded complex. It’s not just creatures to hack. You’ve got a few interesting details, and the seal people raiders, and so much more. It feels more like a traditional exploration dungeon in many places. And I think that’s an amazon accomplishment given its size.

THis is quite a solid work. It’s not gonzo, or epic, just a REALLY solid little cove region with a decent amount going on and lots of opportunities for the party to interact, with the people, with the dungeons, whatever. The town has just enough information to get it going well, as do the rumours, wanderers, and various “outdoor” encounters. Just enough, specific. It does SO much with what it has. Even if I do think the treasure situation is a little sparse … unless maybe the party is clearing out everything.

This is $5 at DriveThru.The preview is fourteen pages, more than enough to get an idea of what you are buying. Although, I’m not sure the entire impact of the adventure is made apparent. 

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/252951/standoff-at-sandfell-sea-fort?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 9 Comments

Desperation of Ivy

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Lance Hawvermale
Frog God Games
S&W
Levels 3-5

They say the god of nature never forgets. This deity, known today as Oon, birthed himself from nothingness by planting his own seed among the stars. His first memory was of his roots sinking deep into the cosmos, stealing secrets from the place before Time began. Millennia later, one of his clerics would try in turn to steal from Oon, and the god punished the man by transforming him into a deathless creature, forced to live in misery for eternity. Yet in his wisdom, Oon did not permit his fallen priest to roam the countryside freely and write terror in the hearts of the undeserving peasants. Instead, the very plants were commanded to imprison the undead forever.

This 24 page adventure presents a two level manor, with smalls additional basement, with about 35 rooms in it. It’s plant themed, with the place being completely overrun by ivy, and every plant monster in the books. It is, generally, just a hack with a plant theme. If this were any other publisher I’d be unhappy, but by the standards the Frogs set? Well, they put the right cover on it and write a two sentence marketing blurb. So they are improving?

It’s a manor home overgrown with plants. There’s also a small nearby village of a half dozen or so places that also have killer plants. The yardstick for success here, at least in terms of descriptions, is how much I get an Annihilation vibe from the text. That is ,I think, one of the best visual depictions of the Overgrown By Plants trope. And, surprisingly, in this adventure, Lance, the designer, does a halfway decent job of invoking that sort of life and decay and oppressiveness. A grand veranda on the verge of collapse, the floor buckled under the weight of thick vegetation, long green runners hanging down from the dropping ceiling, bees and insects in the sunflowers and thistle growing there. As it would say, a property overgrown with rampant foliage, you must wade through knee high weeks and prickly bushes to even reach the home. There are hints, here and there, like a flowerchild growing in a sunny bedroom, or a room with birds that fly out of it, the interior covered in droppings. I think what Lance does, better than most, is capture the living nature of the area. The birds, the flowerchild and the sun, the sunflowers and bees. It’s alive. Verdant, both literally and figuratively. And capturing that is no small feat, successfully communicating the vibe is a major challenge in any adventure, and Lance kind of pulls it off. 

And, well, everything else is not quite a mess, but it’s not very well done either.

Those descriptions, for example. They tend to be LOOOONG. And read-aloud tends to be long, when it appears (which is fine, it doesn’t need to be consistent) but it does lapse in purple at times, with those bees on the porch “delighting” in those sunflowers. It never goes completely overboard, but the eyes  rolled a decent amount during this. And there’s seems to be this compulsion to mention the previous states of the rooms. Not quite in a “room backstory” way, but in a weird passive way. “Long ago, guests hung their garments here, but now the ivy has woven itself through the hooks and shelves and tied them up in knots” Or that the plants have made a once-spacious room now all but impassable. Throw offs, consistently appearing. 

And there is, I think, a kind of lack of cohesion in the entire thing. This shows up in the room descriptions, in which some sentences don’t seem to know that others exist.  “This room is full of pegs and hooks for hanging clothes”, the closet tells us, and and then it inserts that “long ago guests hung their garments” line in it, and then goes on. Like the first sentence doesn’t know the others are coming. A perfect example of a sentence that could be trimmed. 

And then this extends to the rest of the adventure, in concept. The  facts, of which there are about four, don’t really feel like factions. And don’t seem integrated in to the complex very well, hanging out in their rooms and nowhere else. 

Enter a room, it’s full of plants life and vines, kill a plant monster, move on to the next room. You’re not going to get much more in the way of interactivity than that. You can talk to some mushroom men. Yeah. But, it’s just not possible to do much more, I guess, in a house full of plants?

And formatting is non-existent. Not even much in the way of bolding. It’s just wall of massive text with even few line breaks. That’s rough. 

I want to end this review with this little section of text, describing an undead dude in one of the last rooms. It’s a good example of what’s going on here. Skip the first sentence. And don’t fucking mention it’s an undead dude, fuck man, writing 101. But the rest of the description is not too shabby! A little long, maybe, but  it’s a good description! And this is the story with this adventure, too long, needs a good editor to trim a lot, and needs a lot more interactivity, but has some decent imagery in it.

“A ghastly figure confronts you. This undead wears tattered red clothing, but that is the only vestige of its humanity that remains. Its head is a skull that crawls with worms, with red motes in eye sockets that are otherwise as black as voids. The spidery hair atop its head floats around its head. Tiny insects have picked its bones clean, and no muscle mass remains, yet still it mana”ges to stand, fists clenched, empty ribcage heaving up and down in a ghastly imitation of life.

This is $8 at DriveThru.The preview is four pages. Pretty worthless, but on the last page, in the second column, you can start to get a little of the descriptive text that I think shows a lot of promise.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/235127/quests-of-doom-4-desperation-of-ivy-swords-and-wizardry?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 3 Comments

The Brigands of Bristleback Burrow

Posted on April 20, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Brynjar Mar Palsson
Self Published
Shadowdark
Levels 1-3

No amount of coin is worth crossing paths with the Bristlebacks; they’ll rob you of more than your gold.” – Myrtle Salesbury of Salesbury & Sons Caravansary.

This eight page adventure uses three pages to describe twelve rooms. It’s trying hard, and does a decent little job of descriptions and scenes. Situations and interactivity, though, is lacking. Still, a better job than 90% of Shadowdark adventures, at a minimum!

What we’re going for here is a small dungeon with mostly goblins and their minions that has some faction play, again mostly between goblins. Most of the other things you expect from an adventure are at a bare minimum, at best. No hooks. No real marketing. It’s just a dungeon that you’re going in to for some reason. And that’s chill. You know what I like to say, concentrate on the important thing, the dungeon. Everything else is fluff. And that’s what’s going on here. There’s a short (and unremarkable) rumour table and that’s about it. Background is one paragraph of three sentences. Right on man! Then we get a half column on factions and what they do when all hell hell breaks out. Four factions. About half a column. With direction. That’s pretty good from a terseness standpoint. A craven goblin boss with a penchant for cruel punishment. Also, there’s an ambitious and patient doppleganger. Hoy boy! This is how you write an NPC description. Not a fucking paragraph. A few words that inspire and make sense in the context. 

I’m generally satisfied with all of this. Or, would be. They are, I think, a little too eager to recruit any PC they meet to their cause. Basically any goblin who sees the party is going to be all on board. And I’m not sure that’s how this should be handled. The map is small, only twelve rooms, so there’s not much room to breath here. And while the map notes creatures on it, it doesn’t necessarily note factions or numbers. So, what are we doing? Is this an exploratory adventure with subtle faction play? It’s not really large enough and everyone is eager to see you. Is it more of a mass combat/raid thing once you make contact? But the map doesn’t really support that, or the notes. 

And this is, I think, an issue with e adventure. It feels like a kind of 4e/5e mashup. The 4e aspect of combat centric with some “less tactical” 5e stuff. But it doesn’t feel interactive beyond that. And I’m not even sure I’d include NPC discussions with the monsters as an element. It seems like including Talking To The Shopkeeper would be appropriate here. It’s lacking that verve of contestation in the verbal arena, or even much in the way of interactivity beyond just stabbing shit. There are interesting things here, but they are more of an integrated backstory thing (well done) rather than things the party will be directly interacting with in a game way.

But, hey, I’m being an asshole before I’m being nice. There is some really chill stuff in this in terms of scenes and descriptions and the like. Like I said, monsters are noted on the map for reaction purposes. There’s a great monster reference sheet. And the magic? Oh man. The Pact Slate of Beherit: “A broken and chipped stone tablet with infernal writing and streaks of dried blood.” Go ahead, stamp your fingerprint in blood on it! That fucking shit is gold. FUCKING GOLD! Sign me up mom!

And, as the description for the pact-stone might imply, the descriptions in general, and the scenes that they build up, are well done. “Cramped and muddy vermin– infested hallways with the lingering stench of urine and body odor. Goblin voices echo from the gloom as flickering torchlight emanates from intermittent wall sconces.” That’s the general Always On description of the main part of the dungeon and it does a great job of communicating a vibe in a small amount of space. Or. Pillars, strung with 1-3 bodies, each with a sign stating “thief” or “trespasser”, etc. I might go a little harder there, but ok. The terse and colorful NPC description, combined with terse little scenes in the rooms help to do a lot to give the rooms a little life to them. Even if they do end up in combat. 

Formatting it pretty good also. Or, lets say, well thought out. There’s a sentence ot so describing the main thing in the room. What you might notice first. And then a few bolded section headings of other main things, and then some bullets and bolding, with indents, to note other important things. No, dickheads, it’s not the ultra-terse OSE style that you love to bitch about. It’s more verbose than that, with essentially something close to full sentences, if not full sentences. And it does a decent job. 

The rooms, however, tend to be on the more complex side of things. Four or five bolded section headings/bullets, at about a minimum. This contributes to a density of about four rooms a page or so. We’re moving toward set piece room length here, or Main Room vibes. In something something this short it’s not really going to be a problem.

But, the short size of the adventure, is, I assert, a problem. There is no room to breathe here. There’s no room for the faction play to develop in to something meaningful. There’s no room for that interactivity that is the soul of Dungeons and Dragons. Todo those things you need to get to something longer/larger, and THEN we have to look at page after page of four rooms per page. Can you do it? Absolutely. But it’s not gonna be fun. The challenge here is to take that format and really work it. How do you keep the vibrancy of the room, the scene, or situation, while also keeping each and every one of them from running to a quarter page? Errr … I guess that’s my challenge. You can also have a quarter page room. 🙂  

More seriously, the challenge here is the lack of interactivity beyond a lot of combat. Yes, there are factions, but this is a rather simplistic implementation of them. A full dungeon, but this designer, would be an interesting thing to see.

This is free at DriveThru:

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/446454/Shadowdark-The-Brigands-of-Bristleback-Burrow?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 15 Comments

The Lost Universe

Posted on April 17, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Christina Mitchell
NASA
Generic/Universal/Fantasy
Levels 7-10?

A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth’s timeline. Only an ambitious crew of adventurers can uncover what was lost. Are you up to the challenge?

This 44 page free adventure from NASA details the hunt for a missing team of researchers. It rivals a Bloodymage adventure for lack of comprehension. Yes, it’s THAT bad.

I try to start reviews by saying something good about an adventure. No matter how slight, they usually have something that stands out. An encounter. A nice NPC. Something. Not this one. There is nothing here. Well, ok, there are some appendices on vacuum energy and red/blue shifts that you could  read instead of a wikipedia article. Other than that …

The framing here is that you are people at Goddard, and make D&D characters, and are then transported in to those characters in a fantasy world. “It’s the Dungeons & Dragons ride!” Once in your new fantasy world city, you find out some people are missing. And get escorted by the town guard to their boss who wants you to find them. You then do the usual things or asking around, getting in a bar fight, and going to some ruins to follow an elf .. who turns out to be a green dragon. Yeah, you found the researchers! Do you want to stay in the new world or go back home?

The issues here are tha the designers don’t know anything about designing a D&D adventure. I’m not even talking about the “design” of the adventure, the plot, and how the dungeon foreshadows and such. I think I’m pretty fucking generous in those regards You’re not gonna make it in to The Best with a generic adventure, but I’m not going to hate my fucking life. This thing, though … oh boy. The basic design mistakes, formatting an adventure and what to include and why, the lack of knowledge here is, I assert, with our dear departed mage of blood. And, even when this adventure puts critical blocking elements behind skill checks, I’m not going to bitch about that. Should you do it? No. Does it show a fundamental lack of knowledge? Yes. But the DM makes the show go on. No, we’re gonna ignore ALL of those, and every other bad design decision like that. Fuck the interactivity. Fuck the evocative text. No, we’re giving this an adventure a pass on ALL of those. Yeah, none of them are present, but let’s ignore all of that.

You know what? I’m even going to ignore the NPC descriptions. Their long backstories. The trivialities that don’t matter. Their blandness. The mountains of text used to describe them. No. Let’s instead focus on one thing and one thing only in this one: wall of text.

This thing is absolutely ABSURD when it comes to wall of text. You know even the bible, in that whole begatting section, it has breaks. Some genius in the 1500’s stuck in chapters and verse to break up the text. But this thing? Yeeesh ..

Yes, it has some paragraph breaks. And some offset boxes. But, man, a single page may have, like four paragraphs on it. And those paragraphs ARE the adventure. They are full of “if the players do this then this happens” and long sections of skill checks and combats, with little to no bolding or other ways to break up the text and draw the DMs attention to things. 

Now, you’re gonna go download this and look at it and say “Brycy boy, this doesn’t look so bad!” and you’d be right. It doesn’t LOOK bad. But I would assert that the worst formatting CoC or Vampire adventure is more comprehensible than the text in this thing. I find it hard to believe ANYONE ran this adventure from this text. Took the booklet, without having written it or worked it in layout for two weeks, and sat down to read it to try and run a game from it. And I’m not talking on the fly. Just, read it to eventually run a game from it. I can’t believe that ANYONE did that. Look man, I know the OSR is on the forefront of this shit, but this is, I don’t know, a throwback doesn’t even come in to play. It’s SOmekind of throwback formatting/wall of text combined with layout that doesn’t know what its purpose it combined with the style and substance (or lack thereof) that tends to be in the forefront of modern playstyles. 

And no maps. Oh no. Instead we get things like this “The staircase, if your players choose to descend, goes down to a tunnel below that is far more easily passable than the area they just came through. As they reach the base of the stairs there is a landing with two arches, one is covered with a wall of blue flame and the other a wall of red flame.” Obviously a red shift/blue shift puzzle. But I swear to god, no map and attempting to describe the shit in text? “If they choose to descend.” No, they sit the fuck around with their thumbs up their asses. “If the characters choose to breathe.” might as well be the text. 

I understand that certain things have to be done. I assume we’re targeting new people, and such, and thus we can allow some of that “go to section B” stuff. But the rest? Absolutely not. When people bitch that adventures are hard to run they are talking about shit like this. The purpose of an adventure is to be run and if people look at this and don’t even try then it is failing to enable its primary purpose. 

It’s free, from NASA:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/multimedia/online-activities/the-lost-universe/

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Reviews | 14 Comments