DCC #70 – Jewels of the Carnifex

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

ca

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 3

At the end of a forgotten back alley, in the weird and otherworldly marketplace of faiths known as the Bazaar of the Gods, stands the ruins of a forgotten chapel. Once the cult of the Carnifex was celebrated throughout the City of a Thousand Gates. But a band of holy warriors rose against the cult of executioners and torturers, casting down her signs and scattering her devotees to the winds. The fate of the cthonic goddess, and – more importantly – her fabled jewels remains a mystery…until this night.

This is a small eleven or twelve room crawl through an old temple complex. It’s got the usual ‘new’ DCC elements: very strong imagery, unique monsters, interesting encounters, weird effects, and decent magic items. It also has the usual cramped/linear/modern adventure map … although in the new DCC line there’s a decent number of limited offshoots which tend to mix things up MUCH better than the old DCC maps. It’s new DCC. I feel comfortable by now jst telling folks to go buy it without a review. Goodman, Stroh, and Curtis have things down by now and their new style is even better than these older/launch titles. They are not perfect, but they are CONSISTENTLY good.

The sprawling decadence of Punjar. Go read that intro again. “Forgotten back alley”, “otherworldly marketplace of faiths.” I have no idea how they do it but Goodman Games delivers the flavor. This adventure has one of the oldest hooks known to man … which is then described in a way that makes it seem new and fresh and full of awesome. It’s so simple it’s stupid. The players win a map in bar game. How many times have you seen that? And yet in this adventure … there is enough GOOD detail that a little throw-away hook seen a thousand times before instead comes alive. Won from Magmar the Lucky, a rogue of no small repute. Just that alone gets me going! The map, a few scribbled notes on the back of some wine-stained vellum … maybe it’s stolen from Magmar while he sleeps off an epic black lotus binge? COME ON! You’re soul has to be DEAD to not get worked up by that! I don’t do justice to the writing; it’s better than I intimate. It is, however, the core of what makes these DCC adventures good. They are able to communicate extremely strong imagery to the DM in a short amount of space. This is strong powerful flavor and is EXACTLY what a DM needs in order to run a game. THAT’S the purpose of the written adventure. [Hyperbole time!] It’s the purpose of EVERY written adventure. Once you can communicate the essence of something to the DM then they can fill in the extra detail. The writer has a vision and they need to communicate that vision to the DM in order for them to then be able to translate it to the players. Good adventures do that in a very evocative and strong manner. I don’t know if it’s the elements they choose, or the adjectives & adverbs, or what. However they do it, GG does a great job at it, with Harley possibly being the best of the three core writers they rotate between. Harley delivers consistently in the encounters in this adventure. Each one is strongly evocative of a place and happening.

A rushing waterfall over a narrow ledge that has to be passed to get to a door sealed with lead. A DOOR SEALED WITH LEAD!! Did you read that? To loot the place the characters are going to have to break in to something sealed with lead! I’ve seen lead sealed doors before. They suck. None of them stick out. They are generally some way to fuck the players over in some room in a dungeon. But in this adventure its how you get IN to the dungeon. It’s not a gimp, or a lame trap, but the front door. That’s cool. The adventure continues to deliver room after room of this sort of thing.

Uh … the temple has some guys in it, horribly disfigured. Ostensibly they are good guys guarding a great evil … in the form of a hot chick goddess OF EVIL! Who favors the party with bonuses! The whole thing probably culminates in a great big running battle between rooms. These are DCC rooms though, so there’s lots of stuff to interact with in the running room battle.

The room text could be tightened up. Many of the rooms have A LOT of text n them, very little of which adds to the room/encounter. The great mass of text distracts and confuses and obfuscates the good parts of the room that the DM needs when running the thing. This, more than anything else, is the nail sticking out in the new DCC line. They need to find a way to make the room descriptions smaller while retaining the strong imagery in them. Some of this may be simple editing “why are we telling them this is where he has his lab? Its the name of the room, maybe they’ve already figured that out.” or “perhaps this trivial background data form 3 eons prior isn’t relevant to running this room …” and some of it is going a bit lighter on the rules mechanics. 3e+ adventures, of which DCC falls in to, generally seem to beat rule mechanics to death. DCC is better than most but still spends A LOT of time explaining how things work. That’s not a good thing.

But the adventure is. Go buy it.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/104220/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-70-Jewels-of-the-Carnifex?1892600

Posted in Level 3, No Regerts, Reviews | Leave a comment

SNS2 – Castle Baldemar’s Dungeon

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

sns2

by Scott Casper
Fro God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 6-8

While in the small town of Corvusrook, the characters are accosted by the mage Framnagle. The irritated mage insists they undertake a quest for him, exacting revenge on his former apprentice Hymor – who now lives in the form of a Blue Dragon in the dungeons of the deserted Castle Baldemar.

This is a single dungeon level with 28 rooms that tends towards the funhouse side of things. The forward claims it is based on the first half of the Gen Con IX Dungeons from 1976, with expanded text. It’s tournament heritage shows, with the encounters being a lot more like set pieces than a typical dungeon and lots of things to district unwary players. It’s ok as far as tournament adventures go … better than most modern ones because it’s less linear.

You’ve been warned: this comes from a tournament adventure and has some leftover parts from that heritage. Things don’t always make sense and the hook is a completely unfair. While in a bar a wizard stumbles in to the party, takes offense at them, and then is belligerent until they “agree” to go on a quest for him. Causing a commotion will bring the Captain of the guard … who supports the wizard. Basically you go on the adventure or die, just like the preable to G1, except this adventure takes a lot more words to communicate the same thing … Thanks Lame Read Aloud text! Like I said, tournament adventure. What IS interesting about this introduction is the description of the town. It takes about half a page (one column) and does an EXCELLENT job of summarizing the town with enough detail to run it without beating things in to the ground. Some of this comes a dense paragraph listing the important inhabitants of the town. Comments like “mostly retired bandit and now head of the laborers guid” or “rake and secret leader of a band of poachers” give the NPC”s a bit of personality and get the DM’s mind going while still leaving enough room to improvise and elaborate. The rest of the town description does much of the same, sprinkling in little extra details all over the place that can be used to expand upon. It’s DENSE with ideas while not being verbose with the text. Nice!

And then there’s Muade … err … the adventure. It makes absolutely no sense as a whole and is just a collection of loosely tied together rooms. That’s not entirely true, it’s kind of charming in a way. The ruined castle above is abandoned. The first two levels of the dungeon, not described, are well looted and empty. The third, this adventure, is a bustling little place with a lot of disconnected shit going on. There are three minotaurs guards in the first three rooms who are part of a larger tribe (not detailed or mentioned further) who are on real guard duty. WTF?!!? Like I said, it harkens back to an earlier age and play style when that shit wasn’t important. The encounters are fun enough, they have a leader, they surrender when a certain one if dead, one is bored and throws shit in a well, one fights with two morning stars, and so on … lots of little details to help bring the encounters to life.

And that’s the adventure in microcosm. The rooms act more like 3e or 4e set pieces except without all the hype and overblown nonsense that typically comes along. Pre-1e set pieces. IE: Funhouse. There’s a couple of new monsters and a couple of magic items that are non-standard that add a little variety to the magical treasure front, but for the most part it’s +1 this and stone golem that. It all ends with a dragon encounter that’s not straight up combat, which is ALWAYS nice to see. I like to view the dungeon as a town three states over in the US. Some people are dicks but for the most parts they just want to get by. And sometimes they want to eat you or have orders that no one gets in to the club without paying the cover. And sometimes they have piles of PHAT L00T that the players very much want … That makes things a lot more interesting.

Worth it? I don’t know. It’s decent enough to be a nice contained one-shot for a con or a tourney. It’s a little implausible for a campaign, but DOES have a decent amount of that OD&D encounter charm that I like so much. There’s a fair amount better than this and A WHOLE LOT worse than this.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112792/Saturday-Night-Special-2-Castle-Baldemars-Dungeon–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?1892600

Posted in Level 6, No Regerts, Reviews | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #16

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d16
This issue is interesting because it has several location-based places to visit with strong social elements: a castle, and three different towns. The first has the strongest possibilities, I think, due to the limited scope of the castle, but the pirate town tries hard and the Dwarves have some good NPCs floating around. This is one of Dungeons stronger issues, thus far, if you are looking for things to lift and rework.

It’s interesting to see the designers struggle with the format. Everyone is clearly used to using the room key format from the many published adventures. It’s pretty clear though that the format fails in many of these. These are not rooms to be explored but rather NPC personalities with motivations and goals, factions and large expanses in towns that need general flavor, not room descriptions.

Palace in the Sky
John Szinger/Martin Szinger
AD&D
Levels 7-10

This is an adventure on a floating castle full of cloud giants. With only 400-ish review under my belt I can’t speak definitively of the genre, but it IS the best Floating Castle adventure I’ve seen yet. The usual cloud adventure elements are in here: some parts of the cloud can be sunk through, lots of flying creatures, raids on lands the cloud floats over, and so on. What IS interesting is that this isn’t a straight up hack. The giants have names and personalities and even a sentence or two about goals. There are several factions running around on the cloud island/castle, from several giant factions to humans to dragons. If you go in with a “the characters are foreign ambassadors trying to stop the raids on their homelands” then the adventure will make a lot more sense. Talk with people, get involved in the politics, maybe take care of a problem or two for one of the factions … you get the idea. Think of all those adventures where some monster is visiting another one (the cloud giants in G1 stand out, but there are many examples) and you get the idea. The characters could be here for awhile in that scenario, providing a nice change of pace without a plot being forced down their throats, although it could use a bit more in the ‘suggestions for further play’ category to give the players something to do while on their embassy. It suffers from the wordiness and lack of the fantastic, both of which seem to be style at the time. It doesn’t feel particularly like you are in a fantastic location and there’s a lot of text wrapped around the rooms in order to provide the uninteresting detail that does exist. A modern version might have less emphasis on the room key and more n the flavor of the place, while keeping the factions & NPC’s that are the key takeaway from this. They are not particularly clever factions or politics involved, but …. any port in a 1989 storm.

The Dwarves of Warka
Fran Hart
AD&D
Levels 3-6

This is a 14 page adventure describing a dwarf village/town and The Unexplored Caverns that are vexing them. The caves are only two pages long, and have very little going for them. The rest of the adventure details the dwarf village. The map seems a little small for all the activity implied. And there IS a lot of activity implied. There are random street encounters for day and night but they are all of the Flavor Text variety, describing everyday life, rather than the Murder-Hobo-Fun-on-D&D-Game-Night-Monday’s variety. The NPC’s have a couple of paragraphs each but they don’t really have any interactions with each other. This is a critical missing element. In the Cloud Giant adventure the way the various inhabitants of the castle interacted with each other is what made the adventure interesting. The NPCs here are more like static mannequins, stuck in their home/places of business, with no thoughts or motivations with anyone else. There’s a cute dwarf tavern encounter table, but then entire adventure, including the table, lacks anything new or interesting about dwarves. We get the usual Dwarf stoic/home/family/craft values and the tavern encounters are just things like “Someone shouts out “By my beard” and so on … not exactly an alien culture. The Darkness Beneath in Fight On! magazine has spoiled me on cave adventures. In comparison to those excellent ones, or even Stonesky Delve or Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom, this one is VERY mundane. There’s not much weird or interesting or even realistic, as in Stonesky.

Necropolis
Nigel D. Findley
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is quite a short adventure for Dungeon, only five pages. A thief is extorting a village by pretending to be an undead guy at the local barrow. The real undead guy shows up. The characters explore a village (not detailed) for clues, then go to the barrow and discover not the thief but the undead. The core of the adventure seems decent enough, with some good extortion efforts on the thief’s part and some decent clues for the party to follow up on (signs painted in blood, and a classic: mutilated livestock) to figure out its not really the famous general back from the dead suddenly demanding cash. The dead general actually has a modicum of a personality as well. This could be salvaged in to some decent background noise near the players home base, with the general maybe being a resource, or thorn, for the players for many a session. The village needs work and the entire adventure could fit on 1 page easily, so you have to dig through padding, but worth taking a look at.

Vesicant
Randal S. Doering
AD&D
Levels 4-6

This is a pirate town, with associated politics, and a dragon adventure at the end. Pirates are raiding shipping with the aid of a dragon. The characters are there to bring the place down … although the whole hook/mission part is really not dealt with at all. That’s fine in this adventure; the main attraction is the pirate town. The town has four sections: the leaders quarters and the quarter belonging to each of the three captains, roughly differentiated by race. Each section of town has its own encounter key and wandering table with enough variety to keep things interesting for a short while. There’s the usual “looking for a fight” gangs, as well as at least one organized street gang and several notable personalities from a 1/2 orc prostitute/assassin to a grumpy jailor, and spies of ever sort. Each section of town generally has a bar or two detailed as well as a notable or two, and then a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter like the orc barracks and ships stores and so on. There’s a lot of factions mentioned and more implied and that come to mind. At the end of the entire thing is the dragon in a decent lair. With work you take this one and turn it in to a little mini-campaign within your campaign by adding some subplots and beefing up the personalities of the various spies in town.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 3 Comments

SNS3 – Ice Tower of the Salka

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

salka

by James Boney
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 8-12

Sixty years ago, a mysterious flood of glacial ice utterly buried the tower stronghold of the Salka, a powerful and evil sorceress known throughout the land. Now, fissuring of the deep ice has revealed the rooftop of this lost tower. The secrets and treasurers of the Salka lie within, awaiting a band of powerful adventurers to explore the depths of her ice-entombed stronghold.

This is a four level wizards tower with about fifty five rooms in it. There is a hint of something interesting here but the encounters and adventure fail to deliver on the implicit promises made. “This will be cool!” is what the adventure and encounters promise … and instead vague generalities are delivered. Many adventures seem to fall in to this category: someone has a decent idea but fails to deliver on it. It’s a high-level adventure because of he high HD creatures and no other reason. That’s the most trivial, and useless, way to make an adventure high level. Boney needs to make a second attempt at this adventure and really work hard on it.

The Salka! Her tower has mysteriously engulfed in a glacier 60 years back and now no one but the old even remember how to get there. A party of hunters recently found a crack in the glacier with a mighty cavern inside, and a set of flat stones with a trapdoor set in to them. The tower has been rediscovered … and the one hunter who dared venture in did not return. The intro and background is short on this one and does a good job at evoking the mystery that all wizards towers should have. This extends even to the name; It’s not Bob the Wizard but rather … The Salka! It is at this point hat the adventure starts going downhill, sadly. What follows is some kind of exercise in generic, dull, and lifeless adventure descriptions with a modicum of interesting content thrown in. Interesting content that is generally devoid of the joie de vivre that gets one excited about running it.

Room 1. If you don’t say the password that no one knows anymore then walls of force slam down over the exits and fireballs start going off in the room two turns later. Did you catch the problem here? It’s not the password; the party is high level; they should have cast some spells and the non-asshole GM should have rewarded them for their legend-lore/etc. Twenty minutes after the walls go down the fireballs go off. Or did the designer mean rounds? Or segments? Good thing the editor caught it. Oh wait, they didn’t. Ug! Back to the central issue: the entire room description consist of “two intricately carved pillars.” Oh, there’s a lot of text on how the trap works and damage, and so on, but the only description of the room is what I mentioned: two intricately carved pillars. I’m not paying for rules. I’m paying for the fluff. Somehow, somewhere, D&D supplements became about rules and the actual goal of the product, providing interesting content, was lost. And no, the mechanics of te rules are not interesting content. I paid my $9.99 plus tax, how about ONE sentence about the pillars and maybe another about the room proper? Two red pillars intricately carved with baroque designs of thousands of dragon heads in a room whose walls are blackened, blasted, and cracked? I suck and have no imagination at all but my description is miles better. That’s what you’re paying for. That description. And we didn’t get one. Which means we were ripped off. As an optimistic midwesterner i REALLY don’t like feeling like I’ve been ripped off, which is why my reviews are always so bitter.

Lets me cite another example that is related but not identical. Two rooms on this level have a weird door. It’s a normal door that can’t be opened, period. There is detail beyond detail on the door, the room, and, ultimately, the demons that come through it. That’s the only reason for the door: for some demons to come through and attack te party WHILE THE PARTY IS IN A DIFFERENT ROOM. So, when the party is in a different room and can’t see the door some demons come through the door, go to the room the party is in, and attack them. It is impossible for the party to pass by the doors before the demons come through because of the map layout. What this means is that all of the text used to describe the doors and how the demons come through them and the rooms beyond is all completely useless with no point to it at all. How about “two demons get summoned” as text instead? Ta Da! All that text removed. The content is neither interesting OR game-able in this case. The content in an adventure MUST fit one of those categories, and hopefully both. Otherwise its just useless backstory and description that has no impact n the DM running the adventure. And, remember, that’s the point of the product, TO HELP THE DM RUN THE ADVENTURE.

The monsters are almost all straight out of the book. The treasure is almost all straight out of the book. The mundane treasure is boring. “4 gems worth 200gp”. What’s the point Boney? If you’re just going to appeal to some boring ass magic items in the DMG then why not just tell the DM to roll on the tables themselves? Or maybe we can just shortcut all of that and just tell the DM to make their own damn adventure and use their own imagination. Yeah, the imagery of an urn of ash & sand with a skeletal hand in it and magic rings is decent, one of the few decent things in the adventure. How about doing just a LITTLE bit more and actually putting a modicum of effort in to the treasure so it feels magical and wonderful and something the PLAYERS would want? Or, you could not try and just include shit from the DMG. You know, like you did.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112794/Saturday-Night-Special-3-Ice-Tower-of-the-Salka–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?1892600

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DCC #69 – The Emerald Enchanter

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

ee

by Joseph Goodman
Goodman Games
DCC Rpg
Level 2

Villagers have been disappearing—and some of them are your friends! A number of clues, various old superstitions, and a handful of vague omens point to the brooding citadel of the emerald enchanter. This silent monolith has sat undisturbed atop a windy ridge for centuries. Legends say that a green-skinned sorcerer dwells there, where he conducts strange experiments and builds enigmatic machinery. His emerald constructs patrol the grounds of his citadel, and he is seen only rarely when he ventures out on nefarious errands that end in horrid screams and strange lights coming from his citadel. Now you believe he is holding your friends captive. To rescue them—and potentially acquire some loot along the way—you set off to invade his inner sanctum …

This is an exploration of a wizards tower, with a skull, and emerald theming. It has all the usual charm of modern DCC adventures: unique monsters, a good homage to Appendix N encounters, and decent freaky shit. It falls short on the magic item front, resorting to (mostly) lame standard potions & scrolls. It’s got a decent map but suffers from from verbose text and the mundane bits seem out of place. Worth keeping.

The text in the publishers blurb is the only real background provided. There’s a short paragraph that could be called ‘a summary of the current situation inside the wizards fortress” but there’s no other backstory. Which is good. I hate backstory. I want to see text useful to me running the adventure not ancient history form 10,000 years ago that has no impact on the adventure. What WOULD be nice is a SLIGHTLY more detailed hook or locale. Two sentences about a couple of village NPC’s prisoners or three about a recent raid. That’s all; if done in the DCC style then there should be more than enough detail in those short descriptions to get the DM off and running with a good foundation to set the adventure in.

The encounters in the wizards fortress almost all harken back to those strong archetypes that somehow the hobby has moved away from. There is a weird portal table that things fly out of and that he party can leap through. What are those things? Why Emerald skulls with bat wings and red ruby eyes! Come on, how much more of an appeal to appendix N can you get? That is some great shit. It can be summarized quickly, provides great imagery in the DMs mind (which then should translate to them being able to create great imagery in the players minds as he translates and fills in the gaps) and has an instant “Oh Shit!’ coolness factor to anyone encountering it. What’s great about this adventure, and most of the modern crop of DCC product, is that manage to pull it off time and time again. A mural golem that pulls tiles from the walls. A chained demon in a salt pentagram. A mass of protoplasm with a great eye and pseudopods in a jail cell. Mummy’s heads and brains of ancient wizards who you can consult with. These encounters appeal to something ancient in me, almost like an ancestral memory of appendix N. All of those issues of Heavy Metal, Thieve’s World, and 60’s/70’s fantasy lit are still alive deep under all of my post-secondary analytical training, and these encounters appeal to them and dredge up those feelings … allowing me to instantly fill in the detail needed to bring the encounter to life.

The magic items in this adventure blow chunks. I’m used to seeing weird and unusual things from DCC, things that certainly did not come from any book. Instead we get potions of spider climbing and scrolls of light. Lame. As I type this, the spider potion could turn the characters limbs in to spider ones, which would be nice, or the light scroll could create a tiny star, also cool, but both of those would be better as one-time use objects WITH THAT ADDITIONAL FLAVOR TEXT instead of just another lame potion/scroll. Scrolls should be ancient magics (and there is an example of this in the adventure) while potions should have horrible flavor text associated with them … and NEITHER should in ANY way resemble ANYTHING EVER done for D&D. Ever. I paid my $9.99 (maybe plus tax, I got these at GenCon) and I want the extra detail of a non-book item dammit! I’m paying for YOUR imagination and for you to enable mine, not for a 1E DMG retread.

The text for the encounters is too long. There IS a lot going on in several of the rooms but still, too much text. I recall that Many Gates of the Gann had a lot going on as well but the rooms seemed much shorter. In this adventure Goodman falls in to the classic trap of starting a land war in Asia explaining things. Explanations suck. Explanations remove mystery. Explanations contribute to Wall of Text syndrome. The burning need to EXPLAIN things ruins D&D. If the toilet isn’t fun there shouldn’t be one. If the barracks are not fun then there should be one. It doesn’t matter “The Emerald Enchanter engages in many alchemical and magical experiments.” No shit Sherlock; that’s the basis of the entire adventure! That text adds NOTHING to the description of the laboratory room. If it were just one sentence it wouldn’t be bad but there’s multiple lines of what are essentially filler text about background, history, and the like. One day I’m going to learn something about the publishing business so I can call out the fuck with that doesn’t push back on this. Aeryn Rudel, the editor? Did YOU not push push back on Goodman? Was it your job to? Either way, the text ends up the adventure and there’s too much of it in the room, and the process repeats in the other rooms.

I wrote a lot of negative stuff up there but that shouldn’t dissuade you. While the adventure has its issues its overall good enough for me to keep … and that’s saying something because I have very high standards and keep only a VERY small percentage of what I review. Other publishers write better adventures but so far no other publisher has managed to consistently produce the high quality that the new DCC line is currently rolling out in they quantities they are doing. They are solidly producing B material are a fast rate, with some reaching A levels. B’s are no insult coming from me. Nice job Goodman Games!

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/103720/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-69-The-Emerald-Enchanter?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 2, Reviews, The Best | 1 Comment

Dungeon Magazine #15

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d15

The Wreck of the Shining Star
Richard W Emerich
AD&D
Levels 4-8

This is an empty little adventure on a ship wreck. Over three levels and about thirty rooms you encounter an octopus and an undead. The Rooms are devoid of anything interesting to play with and there’s hardly any interesting descriptive text. The adventure mostly consists of a list of what each room contains. Perhaps an adventure that actuaries might find interesting? There is one interesting thing in the adventure, a unique magic item, and it takes half a page to describe. Perhaps someone is trying too hard … and in the wrong ways?

In Pursuit of the Slayer
Carl Sargent
D&D
Levels 6-9

This is a case mystery. The party encounters the remains of a massacre and an obviously evil person. As they follow and chase him to bring him to justice they get information that the evil dude has been known as a good dude for a long time. It’s got a time based element so the longer the party dallies the harder the final fight is. It has some decent monsters from the Creature Catalog which mixes things up a bit … for a moment I thought there was some originality here. Bits of this are ok but it seems to telegraph its intentions well ahead of time.

The Dragon’s Gift
Thomas M. Kane
AD&D OA
Levels 2-7

I like a lot of the OA adventures in Dungeon, mostly because they have a strong fairy-tale like element. The Celestial Bureaucracy, talking animals and spirits that do more than just “Roll for init as they attack!” add the whimsical element that I am usually looking for. This is a bit of linear railroad, but a mostly enjoyable one with some great encounters. What do you do when you mean a giant along a narrow path, with no room for either to pass by? The “paperwork” trope which always seems so tiresome in most adventures with monster bureaucrats doesn’t seem out of place or forced. I suspect that you could mine Dungeon Magazine for OA encounters and sprinkle them throughout your own games and get a lot of the whimsical element that I look for. There’s a kind of enforced politeness in these because of the OA character classes/honor nonsense, but if you instead just see it as “you can talk to all the monsters” and VERY few things immediately attack, then you can see the attraction to adventures like this one. Maybe that’s because, even though it’s linear, the addition of the social elements provide the Choice critical to a good adventure. Oh, yeah, in this one you travel up a river to meet a water spirit who wants to give you some treasure. And he means it!

The Glass House
Wolfgang Baur
AD&D
Levels 4-6

I’m not sure what’s up with this one. It’s just a simple raid on a house that a giant inhabits. There’s a huge backstory with love, selkies, undead, and tragedy. None of which matters because the hacking is going to be short and sweet as the party cuts down the giant and his wolves. There’s are elements of the norse in this, with a frost man named Sigurd and a magic cauldron. With some good theming you might be able to salvage something here. MAYBE. If you set the guy up as some place the party had to go, complete with his lazy troll servants, and then added the tragic element to it later then the party would have a nice little quandary on their hands.

Roarwater Caves
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 1-4

A decent adventure! In Dungeon! Woo Hoo! It all starts with a good name: Roarwater Caves. It’s a dungeon crawl/raid. I swear I like things are NOT dungeon crawls, but not in this issue. There this guy in town that’s buying fish from Xvarts nearby for a fraction of their value and undercutting the local fishermen. Lately his shipments have stopped because the Xvarts have been taken over by bugbears. The xvarts want him to find someone to come kill the bugbears. That’s a pretty decent set up. Monsters that are not psychotically evil, some good human natures stuff in there as well. There’s also a good end-game chaos play where a large band of kobolds raid the Xvarts as the players enter The Big Fight. Then a bunch more Xvarts from another faction show up, creating even more chaos! AND there’s a bunch of shit in the dungeon that the players can use to make things even more Chaotic. Sweet little set up. It’s supplemented by a GREAT rumor table that applies to the adventure and is not overly simplistic, some good rooms in the dungeon that are not straightforward, a great map with lots of elevation changes and pallisades/barricades, and the dungeon getting cut off by high tide … and ALL of this has some clues dropped around to let the players know what’s going on ahead of time. It’s got some good flavor as well, like a container of pitch dyed yellow (which explains the old xvart adage “as yellow as pitch.” It’s that sort of thing I get really excited about. Nice job. Worth grabbing. Oh, there’s a bunch of crappy shit I left out, like the Xvarts double-crossing the players. That’s lame. The players need to learn to love again and reinforcing the Kill Em All attitude because of a double-cross is uncool. There is a cute section that has the xvarts detaining the players ‘for medical reasons.’ which is a nice jab.

The Elephants Graveyard
David Howery
AD&D
Levels 5-7

This is an isle of Dread clone, maybe mashed up with the old Source of Nile bookkeeping game. Go on a jungle adventure with pack animals, encounter hostile cannibals and natives, find the lost valley and collect loot, then explore the ruined temple with some Indian Jones traps thrown in. It seems mostly like an exercise in tedious bookkeeping as you manage your pack animals load, supplies for your porters, and the bullshit disease and heat rules from WSG which do NOTHING to add fun to the game.You might be able to lift the hook. Imagine lots of copies of a fake treasure map going around town, being sold to suckers. Except one sage KNOWS its not fake, or part of it isn’t anyway, and hires a group of Tomb Raiders. I like the hidden knowledge aspect of that as well as the ‘wagon train of idiots’ that could happen because of it, ala Gone Fishin’!

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 18 Comments

SNS4 – The Mires of Mourning

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Greg A. Vaughn & Kevin Wright
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level 6

Adventurers are needed for a simple job: escort a catatonic prisoner of value to the Crown to a sanitarium where he can be safely held for treatment. What could be easier? But the sanitarium lies at the heart of the Creeping Mire, and it’s the rainy season. No patrols or contacts have been able to get through in weeks. What dangers await along the Swamp Road, and why don’t they want the prisoner to reach the sanitarium? And why does the sanitarium staff want the adventurers to place the prisoner in their care and leave as quickly as possible? What secrets are held within the mute man’s head that some would kill for…or worse?

Oh boy, a Pathfinder conversion with a plot! And a bajillion word backstory! And lame ass treasure and NPC descriptions! I can’t wait!

Backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory backstory escort some dude to an asylum in a swamp. On the way you get attacked by some generic giant mosquitos and a small band of bugbears. Both of these, as well as the wandering monster table, are good illustrations of what is wrong with adventure writing. There is a great deal of text present in these two lead-in encounters on the way to the main adventure … but very little text to actually help the DM. The swamp teems with these blood-sucking brutes. They come in the rainy season. Not commonly know, they prefer to feed on the wild garbunzo, of which there are none in the nearest 500 parsec area. Most remain under dry branches during the rainy season and so many die of starvation. What the fuck? There’s NOTHING in that that helps me run the damn encounter. There’s no flavor, just bland history and ecology. Hey! You! With the face! THE PURPOSE OF YOUR WRITING THE FUCKING ADVENTURE IS TO HELP THE DM RUN IT! Not to illustrate why your great american novel can’t get any response from a publisher. Let me help you with that one. YOUR WRITING SUCKS! That doesn’t really matter here, because you’re not writing me a novel. Your writing a fucking adventure. Tailor your writing to its purpose!

The party gets to the asylum and drops the dude off. They are invited to stay the night, during which the place is attacked by a mixed band of bugbears and dragon, which free a bunch of deranged inmates, and a general chaos ensues. Danger Wil Robinson! Danger! PLOT PLOT PLOT! The point of this is to free the prisoner, kill the asylum keeper (but not before he can reveal the 99 page backstory to the players with his dying breath(s)) and give the players a trail to follow to the next lameness. Almost no one here has a personality. There’s a brief mention of the orderlies and servants, but just in brief with very little character to them. Perhaps the only good part is that the entire asylum room key is one one page. This is smart. The characters are only going to be here a short while and the purpose of the map is to run the NPC encounters (which don’t really exist in this adventure) and run the nighttime raid. It’s PERFECT for that. Short, terse, just enough detail (little more than room names and a sentence) to let the DM run the night raid. THAT’S what I mean when I say I want the writing and content targeted at the DM. THAT helps me run the damn thing at the table. It’s still lame. After all the build up the raid is little more than “a dragon and N bugbears attack and nuke the NW tower.” I’m used to seeing little vignettes in these things, where the party encounters something, etc. Some ideas to use and spring on the players would have been nice. After all, that’s what we’re paying for, the imagination. Instead it’s nothing more than “they attack and the dying curator vomits forth the length backstory.”

The characters are expected the follow the retreating monsters through the swamp to find the backstory inmate, and get access to the The Black Ward and the treasures within. This is total bullshit since the monsters combined lair really nothing more than a wide-spot in the swamps with a note that says “hey, go back to the asylum to find The Black Ward.” The Black Ward, with all its build-up, then consists of seven linear rooms. There is exactly one interesting thing in: The Brothers Shank, a pair of ghouls with a nice backstory that provide a great deal of inspiration on how to run ghoul encounters. Are they alive & depraved or just undead? The Where the Fallen Jarls Sleep and its sequels, the treatment of the undead as The Unknown rather than “its just a zombie” provides the sort of inspiration I AM looking for in an adventure.

The treasure here is almost the worst I have ever seen. The worst I’ve ever seen is “put in as much as you thin is appropriate” while this adventure frequently turns to “treasures worth 946gp, 7364SP and 2673CP.” Again, we’re paying YOU, the fucking moron who wrote this adventure, for the detail of the treasure. Fuck you and fuck the Story/Plot mentality that, inevitably, is used to justify this sort of fraud.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112796/Saturday-Night-Special-4-The-Mires-of-Mourning–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?1892600

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DCC #67 – Sailors on the Starless Sea

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC RPG
Level 0 Funnel

Since time immemorial you and your people have toiled in the shadow of the cyclopean ruins. Of mysterious origins and the source of many a superstition, they have always been considered a secret best left unknown by the folk of your hamlet. But now something stirs beneath the crumbling blocks. Beastmen howl in the night and your fellow villagers are snatched from their beds. With no heroes to defend you, who will rise to stand against the encircling darkness? The secrets of Chaos are yours to unearth, but at what cost to sanity or soul?

This may be the first or second adventure for the DCC RPG … and it shows. It has all of the elements that make a DCC adventure great but they are not yet fully formed. As a result we see an adventure that captures the spirit of DCC but doesn’t always present well.

While there’s background there’s not really a coherent introduction. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Anyway, there’s history but no real defining moment for the players to get involved. The back cover blurb may offer the best description with its “beastmen howl in the night and snatch villagers from their bed. With no heroes to defend you …” and you’re off! There is a nice little rumor table to go with things but mot much more than that which could be useful.

The ruined keep has several entrances and a couple of features to check out. That’s a great thing to include. There’s not just a front door, but places in the wall to break through, walls to climb, and so forth. Working with the DM to support these sort of non-railroady play style is one of the reason why I like these open-ended locations. [And yes, I feel that Far Cry 1 & Far Cry 3 are FAR superior to HL2 & D3 for this very reason. Fuck your story HL2! I want open world gameplay!] Things degenerate a bit as the ‘Starless Sea’ is reached as it moves in to a more linear design, but, like I said, it’s an early adventure. The DCC guys all seem to skew this way anyway, from Curtis & Stroh to Goodman. You can see it in the early, suck ass, old DCC line and you can see shades of it here.

I like the encounters. There’s a good variety of weird shit, creatures, and hazards to fill the time before you die. In particular I like the way Harley adds a bit of color to each one. This additional color does WONDERS to help invoke certain imagery in the DM, which in turn helps them communicate that feel to the players. There are ragged banners, and a section where the players must snap the fingers off of an icy corpse to free the ax it grips. As usual I feel my own writing does little to communicate that to my readers. That’s the case with many of the best designers so you’l have to trust me: the imagery Harley conjures is powerful stuff, cementing pictures in your mind. The creatures here are a mix of ‘Beastmen’ and a few others, like tar ooze and corpses on animated vines. What I love about this is that it is reminiscent of classic monsters, both fro D&D and from myth, but they have that OD&D weirdness factor to them. Monsters tend to be unique in DCC and that unique feel is captured in every encounter, up through a nice table of ‘random weird-ass and scary beastman attributes.” I like.

The encounters ARE a bit lengthy at times. My eyes glazed over more than once. While certainly features stand out (the awful act of breaking fingers to get a treasure ax) there is A LOT of text in many of the encounters. The key to successful writing for an adventure is for it to be short enough, with enough imagery, for the DM to refer to it instantly, or for it to be so memorable that you never have to read it again. (“Old Bay, the crab loving Hill Giant”, is all I need to remember.) This fails on both of those points in several places.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/102448/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-67-Sailors-on-the-Starless-Sea?1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #14

Posted on December 7, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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I missed my update last weekend. My wife & her friends were cosplaying My Little Pony at a local con and I was Discord. I know no one gives a shit but I’m bored after blowing out my gutters.
Masqueraider
Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 2-5

This is a small wilderness adventure followed by a short cave. It’s set up as a kind of mystery. Something weird is going on, and either a bear, owlbear, or giant spider is attacking locals. The party hunts it down to a cave system. The introduction and wilderness area has hints of nice things: a cute ranch theme, rival parties, soldiers and others to ump for rumors. These could use some more work but generally have a seed of something good, especially when taken as a whole. The wilderness encounters, while having too much text (which was the style at the time … did I mention this one also wears an onion on its belt?) are not that bad either. Flies on dead ponies, a horde of newly hatched giant ticks, and some herders, for example. These offer some pretty good variety. The cave lair has a similar problem/feature: LOTS of text with some decent nuggets buried inside. There’s a nice dead adventurer party scattered throughout, along with their banner. The banner is a good example of little bits that add substance and style. The adventure is not awesome but the extra little bits are nice. There may be enough to make this one worth checking out.
A Question of Balance
by Nigel D. Findley
AD&D
Levels 8-12

One Encounter Wonder. The party sees an earth insurance salesman getting burned at the stake and has to free him from the villagers and then go kill The Other Thing that came through the time vortex with him. Which is one fight. That’s not interesting. There’s some pretty lame expository text to communicate The Balance to the party.

 

Stranded on the Baron’s Island
by Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 4-6

Country House Murder, except its a theft and the party is shipwrecked. (No Murder Hobo would be caught dead sailing; the ships are always wrecking.) Lots of people with things to hide and quirky behavior, so lots of red herrings. Nice use of a mimic & doppleganger which is mostly wasted in this thing. The NPC’s are strong, but the formatting suffers: its arranged like a location based adventure instead of a social adventure. A HEAVY edit could save this. Which would be a lot of work.
Master of Puppets
by Carl Sargent
AD&D
Levels 6-8

Uh … dungeon crawl with a duel-class 11Monk/14MU running ahead of you launching set pieces. It’s hard to see this as a level 6-8 adventure, there are A LOT of tough encounters here for that level and the entire thing is mostly linear. Room 1 then room 2 then room 3 and so on. The bad guy starts running around in front of you, dumping attacks at you while jumping through the door to the next room. It’s got a cute spot where animals get dropped from a great height and go splat on the party, but that kind of fun is not representative of the adventure. it’s just a set up full of set pieces.
Phantasm Chasm
by Erik Kjerland
AD&D
Levels 5-7

Another one encounter wonder. Except one hit wonders were good. The party gets ambushed by bugbears and illusionists in a dead-end gully. Ooooo! They are disguised! By illusions! *BLEEEECH*

 

The Wererats of Relfren
by Grant Boucher & Kurt Wenz
D&D
Levels 3-6

A weird little village/town adventure that is mostly event based. The party wanders around, stuff happens, and hopefully the party investigates. It can end with a giant wererat attack during a village festival. There’s a very weird section where the party is arrested and jailed. Resisting turns the entire peasant population against the party and turns then in to outlaws. And then the party is rescued. All of this is done so the party can dress up in costumes for The Big Reveal: the big costume party in the village where the wererats rip off their masks to reveal themselves and attack! All that railroading. I hate that shit.

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Hall of Bones

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

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by Bill Webb
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level 1

Frog God Games is pleased to present a short handling of our rule set, game theory and a short adventure of the award winning SWORDS & WIZARDRY game. The game is similar to very old school editions of the game, dating back to 1974. This was the game that came in a small brown (and later white) box, when men were men and well, henchmen were cannon fodder. What you will find herein is a ready-to-play adventure that can be run with only a few minutes of preparation.

This is a very short and mostly linear introductory D&D adventure. The designer does a decent job presenting several classic monsters in some interesting situations well worth ripping off. I somehow have the impression that this adventure sells D&D short though and I can’t quite place my finger on why.

Let’s play a game How about … D&D! No, instead I choose to play “Second guess the successful publisher.” This adventure is 20 pages long, only four of which contain adventure content. Five if you count the dungeon map. The first nine pages contain a rules summary and the same self-congratulatory Primer on Old School that was included in the MCMLXXV introductory adventure. I thought that Primer was condescending and grog when I reviewed that product. Now that I’ve had some time to think on it and reread it in this I still think it’s insulting and preachy. I can understand trying to explain to 3tards and 4orons that they are about to play a fundamentally different game and they should NOT think of it as D&D … because that will cause them to bring in their 3e & 4e play styles. This is a pretty fundamental problem, I find, with people entrenched in 3e & 4e. Deaths runs rampant until they figure out they are not playing D&D. They are playing something else. Of course, telling them that this is the REAL D&D and they haven’t actually been playing D&D isn’t going to be productive and gets back to that preachy, insulting style that infects the advice section in this adventure. Including the basic rules for S&W is an interesting choice. It’s not really clear to me that there’s enough here to allow a beginner to play D&D. Smarter choices, like NOT including the bullshit short story about the hireling, who’s never mentioned again and instead including a play example, may have been wiser. Ahhh, armchair quarterbacking, much harder before the advent of the ARPANET.

The dungeon map is almost entirely linear. I’ve noticed that this is something that many of the big designers fall back to. Webb does this. Curtis falls back to this. I don’t like it. I’ve been playing D&D for quite some time and I STILL get freaked out when faced with The Unknown areas of a map. I vividly recall playing a D&D game recently in which I felt utterly and completely lost in the dungeon. We weren’t; we had a good map and were not in that far, but there were several passages and stairways we had passed by. There was this overwhelming feeling of the unknown that I felt surrounded by. That’s the sort of feeling that a non-linear map invokes. That’s the sort of feeling that I wish the map in this adventure did.

The encounters here are a strange mix of the mundane and the interesting. There’s a chapel room that just has some boring old giant rats in it. This is in contrast to a ghoul room, full of junk, that has a recently eaten pig carcass in it. That’s a lot more interesting, although it;s just window dressing. We can compare this to the spider cavern, an excellent room. The great cavern is full of giant spiders, at least 60. There’s an iron cage 20′ from the entrance. Entering it finds the floor made of bricks. Pull up the bricks discovers a tunnel to a similar cage on the other side of the room … a hidden tunnel to pass through the room. That’s the kind of encounter I’m looking for. The giant rats bring nothing. The ghouls bring a little flavor text. The spider room brings the noise. Overwhelming odds. A kind of puzzle to get through it … it’s the kind of encounter that causes characters to bring blankets, chickens, and bags of flour in to the dungeon. IE: Perfect.

The creatures here are mostly just book monsters although the boss is non-tradiitonal, and therefore good. I wish more adventures would use non-traditional monsters. One of the things that drives me nuts are skeletons that have some sort of turn resistance. “They wear amulets that give them a 1HD more for turn attempts” may be the original offender, but “the area is super evil” and “your gods can’t reach here” are other pretexts that I loathe. Instead of making up some nonsense why not instead make up a new monster? I know the difference seems small but there seems to be something important here in practice. The players are confronted with something new. They don’t know what to expect, what the special attacks or defenses of the creature are. Does it level drain? The PLAYERS are terrified. In contrast, when a traditional monster shows up and then acts in a different way this somehow seems unfair. The rules are being changed under the players. The treasure here suffers from a related problem. BOOK ITEMS are boring. “+1 hammer” is not a magic item that excites anyone to find. Contrast this to a cat statue that turns in to a cat that grants someone good luck. That’s interesting and delivers on the promise that published adventurers implicitly make: This is new & interesting and worth your time/money.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/117475/Hall-of-Bones?1892600

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