Quondam Fount

Posted on September 23, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

qf

by Frank Mentzer
Eldritch Enterprises
Generic
Levels 3-5

The farmer’s son had found an oddity indeed… a rare Ice Gem, of mysterious origin. It came from the old well on the farm, the Quondam Fount. Something might be Down There. And since you’re famous adventurers, he wants you to check it out.

This is a small adventure in the bottom of an old well full of freezing conditions and other planar creatures. Twenty-eight pages about thirteen encounters with a lot of repeat information. Its gonna be a hard slog for the DM. The core idea is decent.

A farmer has found big jewel and tells the party where to find more if they agree to give him a split. That’s a decent enough hook as is the dungeon location: at the bottom of an old well behind some loose stones. The core element of the adventure is a journey through ice tunnels. The tunnels and rooms are all completely sealed off and the party needs to break through the walls to move from hallway to hallway and room to room while dealing with very cold conditions. This is complimented by the Ice Trolls; a race of water elemental creatures who can liquify and invade an orifice. You now have the vast majority of the interesting portions of the adventure. A stream here, a “roof tunnel” there and a rotating ice block and you have the rest.

The rest of the pages are mostly very long drawn-out examples and expository text and multiple read-alouds that depend on the actions the characters take. The information about ice diamonds and ice trolls must be repeated at least three times each. The adventure is so very frustrating because interesting things are buried inside of the terrible formatting. There’s a very good exploratory/caving vibe going on. Breaking through walls, avoiding ice streams, tunnels high up on walls/ceilings, mining for ice diamond treasure. The core monster(s) are also nice; with multiple forms and combinations.

This reminds me of the very early days of modules: you knew there was something cool in there but had to struggle mightily to try and tease it out.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/108387/Quondam-Fount?affiliate_id=1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #3

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d3

Hey! I found issue #3 tucked inside a different issues cover! Yeah me! I think this is a pretty strong issue, overall. Many of the adventures seem to tie in to the Wilderness Survival Guide through the use of bullshit environmental rules for desert, sea, and snow. The last adventure is amusing to me because of its clear illustration of the Asshole DM problem. Players are’nt the only ones who try to win D&D!

I got a joke!
Baby seal runs in to a club!

Falcon’s Peak
by David Howery
Levels 1-3

This is the adventure that several others in the OSR wish they were. It’s a fairly ‘realistic’ exploration of a small bandit fortress thought to be abandoned and rumored to have an undiscovered treasure horde in it. It’s been occupied by a new group of bandits, does have a treasure horde in it, and while small is fairly well done. It feels more like a tactical assault on a real place. Here’s the keep, here’s the patrols, here’s the watches, and here’s an obvious hole in the bad guys plan. It ALMOST keeps to that formula but doesn’t beat the thing to death (unlike the points I make in reviews.) There are several good uses of elevation in the adventure: the keep is n a hill, entry is up a cleared slope with boulders on the top, there’s a cave system with a portion you have to “boost up” to access the rest, and a parapet with guards patrolling. The ‘hidden’ part of the fortress, with the old treasure, has a good reason for being hidden AND for the presence of other dead adventurers. It does all of this with a scarcity of words (for this era anyway) and without droning on and on. The mundane treasure is well described and interesting and there’s enough loot/coinage to make it seem like someone for once actually read the XP tables & level charts in the PHB. The wilderness component is small but compliments the main adventure, with the group maybe stumbling upon a patrol of bandits they can pump for information. There’s also a ‘consequences’ section where it points out some of the bandits/etc are not in the fortress and will arrive back in a few days time. This is a pretty good ‘gritty’ adventure. I tend to like my D&D a little more weird but Sp’pc Ops’ D&D can be fun also. With some more personalized magic items I’d say this would rate VERY highly in my book.

Blood on the Snow
by Thomas M Kane
Levels 3-7

Art by Jaquay and maps by Diesel! This is an arctic/sub-artic mystery adventure. The characters are hired to go on a seal hunt and find out who the traitor is. Mystery adventures don’t work in D&D. The characters cast a spell and the mystery is over in short order. This one tries though. The adventure is long, in game time. Training takes a month and the seal hunt is two weeks long. There’s a good timeline of events that will happen if the party doesn’t derail things. It’s mentioned that the party CAN derail things and that the DM will need to go with the flow once that happens. More advice in that arena would have been helpful. As is the adventure is going to take a LONG time to prep. The wilderness/frontier town is well detailed, the timeline is extensive but not pedantic, and the NPC’s/hunters on the hunt are well detailed with decent personalities and motivations. Overall this would be great adventure if it were not set in a land with Detect Alignment, Detect Lies, Augury, Commune, etc. It’s going to take time to prep it. A LOT of time. It’s unclear if the payoff/treasure is worth going on the adventure. Another strong viking adventure if you were doing DOgs of War/Northlands Saga type gaming and put the prep in.

The Deadly Sea
by Carol & Robert Pasnak
Levels 4-7

This is really a two-part adventure. The first part has the group assaulting a small thirty room keep. Bandits took it over and now the party is trying to take it back and find the people who once lived there. It starts with a HARD slog up a cliffside and an almost certain pitched-battle at the front of the keep. There are fewer options for the assault than the Falcon’s Peak adventure and fewer three dimensional notes, although, again, the first battle is up a cliffside path. Then again, the party is higher level and perhaps has access to invisibility and fly. The interior is not all that exciting and is further toned-down by a pseudo-dragon that tells the party where to go and what to do once they gain the entrance hall. Part two has the former family asking the group to to attack/explore an undersea triton lair to find the guys captured sea-elf wife. This part is slightly more interesting, as long as you take the view that the tritons are something like an 19th century english manorial estate. Except under the sea. There is little to no ‘sea’ feel from this, except maybe as window dressing. So as an adventure adventure for a more civilized time it’s interesting but as for having an undersea feel … not so much. I keep imaging that final scene with the mermaid king from the The Smashing Pumpkins video ‘Tonight.’ Except this adventure has a lot less flavor … but a weird civilized vibe that I kind of dig.

The Book With No End
by Richard W. Emerich
Levels 8-12

This was written by an asshole GM who thinks players have access to too many magic items. It starts with your 12th level character being offered 1,000 gp to go an adventure and fetch an artifact. Uh huh. Blah blah blah bullshit backstory. Oh hey, I forgot, you get a potion of Sweet Water if you the mission! The whole thing is full of advice on how to gimp the players. Don’t give the players an even break. Don’t let them use their divination magic. Don’t let them have fun. Blah Blah Blah. It seems that the gods don’t like talking to your 12th level clerics. Oh Well. Or, rather, maybe I god hasn’t figured out yet that his stats are in Deities & Demigods and I can shiv him the throat as easily as I can a kender NPC? The adventure map is a good one but the rooms are full of death traps, players gimping, and a whole lot of other junior high type adventure design. This includes a giant disembodied magical voice chiding the characters with things like “Naughty Naughty! Don’t ruin my fun!” Ooooo, a chess board puzzle! How original! There is also an excruciating amount of detail in certain rooms like the dining room and kitchen, for example, that has absolutely no effect on game play. Perhaps the only decent part of the adventure are the detailed notes at the end detailing the information that the characters can find in the various books in libraries prior to their journey. It reminds me of the stereotypical Call Of Cthulhu adventure where you go to the towns library, newspaper office, and historical society. The whole “heres what your research find. You need to put it together to find the dungeon.” is something that a lot of D&D adventures just assume and don’t show.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 5 Comments

GG2 – Palace of Shadows

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

gg2

by Chris Rutkowsky
for Goodman Games
Castles & Crusades
Levels 4-6

The Prince has hired you to find his father, gone these past twenty years, his soul trapped in a gem atop a tower. You must venture across a vast swamp, find your way into the tower, and retrieve the gem from the Palace of Shadows. But a twisted menagerie of fell beasts and foul magics await you inside….

This is a longish fun-house type adventure in a wizards tower. You adventure through demi-plane room/areas until you collect the five keys and can then enter the tower proper. There’s a decent mix of puzzle, trap, and creature encounters with no everything being hostile. It’s one of the better fun-house/fetch-quest style adventures that contains little to no silliness.

There is some kind of weirdly long backstory to the adventure. There’s a king, evil wizard, pretty pretty princess, brother princes, a wizards curse of darkness, civil wars and captured kings. What is absolutely astounding to me is that it’s relevant to the adventure. You could totally work this backstory in your campaign at low-level play, reveal it to the players little by little as the drama unfolds, maybe have the hard-working groom-now-king become a patron, and then spring a little surprise on the party when the evil prince in hiding summons them to do a job for him.You’d have an excellent opportunity for follow-up play also, as the patron switches to the prince and hooks aplenty pop out of the woodwork. In short: Evil wizard wants to marry princess, king says no, wizards curses kingdom to have no sun, wizard captures king, princes rules kingdom, princes engage in civil war. good wizard shows up and saves the day and marries princess, wizard manages to remove darkness curse, princess runs away to traitorous prince brother, brother hires party to go get old king from wizards tower. That’s good stuff: no epic in scope but realistic and approachable and would be very cool if the group watched the events as they unfolded during their rise from levels one to six, maybe with some of the actors mixing with the characters from time to time. Making the princess kindly and the prince a snively little shit should add to the fun also. Anyway, you get some good opportunities for a The Long Game and for introducing an evil wizard as a major villain for the game.

The adventure proper is a tough one. There are 43 or so encounters and the adventure kicks off with a 12HD dragon. This thing is pretty relentless in throwing enemies at the party and it’s not real clear to me that retreat and rest are options that are available. The adventure probably could have use a little more guidance in that area. The thing isn’t necessarily linear so it’s not like the party will be facing all 44 encounters, but the setup doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a repeated forays mindset. It’s also not the case that everyone is an enemy. Some encounters are with neutral or friendly creatures and some of the ones with evil creatures don’t have to result in combat … maybe. There is certainly a decent amount of variety. That mostly stems from the demi-plane nature of the adventure There are five extra-dimensional spaces to explore with a key to win/discover in each. Only by getting them all do you get to enter the tower proper and then go find the king. Don’t worry friends: the required Garden and Water levels are here! The “levels” proper have a decent number and variety of encounter available and many of them are quite clever without being gimmicky. One that comes to mind is a maze in the garden. There’s a terrible stink … coming from a dead minotaur with a glowing red battleaxe stuck in his forehead. I shan’t ruin the rest but there are other fun little things like this scattered throughout the adventure. Three IS a decent amount of combat … a more than decent amount. There are a lot of “they attack immediately encounters and a lot of words to the effect of “they automatically surprise the party” in many of the encounters. The magic items are generally top notch though! Glass slippers, a spinning wheel, a picnic basket … that axe of human detection (DUH! That’s why its glowing red when the group finds it!) There’s a decent amount of ‘normal’ magic items as well … I wish the designer had kept up the unique stuff.

I’m not sure what to call an adventure like this; I’m using the words “fun house.” It’s longer than those, and more involved and generally better and more ‘realistic’ than I think of with funhouses. But there is still the “i hid the keys” nonsense and the wizard building a gauntlet stuff … maybe that’s it … a gauntlet/challenge. It’s a decent one. If I were looking for a gauntlet I would turn to this one.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/12222/Castles–Crusades-Palace-of-Shadows?affiliate_id=1892600

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GC2 – They Lurk Below

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

gc2

by Bill Barsh
Pacesetter Games & Simulation
AD&D
Level 2

A young mother begs for help. Her daughter has been kidnapped by a group of foul men who have fled into the sewers. One of the kidnappers scowled as he fled, “This one is the perfect sacrifice!”

This is an adventure through an old Trog temple to rescue a kidnapped little girl. It mentions sewers a lot but that’s not really a part of the adventure. The basic premise is not bad but the entire thing needs more evocative text and flavor to bring it to life.

I think I must have a soft spot for rescuing kids. The adventure starts with the party witnessing the kidnapping of a little girl. I really, really don’t like ‘be a HERO’ adventures, but this sort of hook strikes me as being different for some reason. In both this adventure and Johnny Rook Watchtower on the Hill adventure, which I also liked, there are children that go missing and the party is involved in a hasty rescue. In Watchtower the party is drinking when someone bursts in to the bar to tell everyone about little Timmy falling in to the well. In this one The party is drinking when they hear the screams of the girls mother as the kidnapping is going down and perhaps hear one of the kidnappers say something about human sacrifice. Both of these scenarios seem much more natural, realistic, and more accessible than Saving the World or Saving our Village sorts of hero adventures. There’s a time element and an immediacy that I think bring this hook home. It also plays a bit with the whole mob mentality. The party is frequently on the other end of it but in these two adventures they get to BE the mob and I think that in the back of the players mind that kind of civic responsibility play out. Subconsciously they are in a position to do something NOW. This is the kind of element I love seeing incorporated in to play; elements that the players can immediately relate to on an almost subconscious level because they are integrated in to their upbringing or cultural heritage.

Next comes the part I feel could be better: the actual adventure. The adventure starts in a chase through the sewers but that’s not really important. It’s short and the sewers don’t really impact the game much other than there being an encounter with sewer crocs. The adventure immediately transitions to exploring an old trog temple. This is where things get interesting. Wait, did I say interesting? I meant ‘Generic’. This is where things get generic. This is a trog temple from the ancient past. It should FEEL like a trog temple temple from the ancient past, This sort of evocative description style is not easy but I think it’s absolutely critical to a my definition of a successful product. I’m looking for something to spark me and to fire my imagination. Something that quickly communicates the flavor of an area to me and inspires so I can then pass that off to the players. I want it terse and I want it evocative. I’m drawing comparisons in my mind between this adventure and David Bowman’s/Sham’s Spawning Grounds of the Crab-Men in issue #3 of Fight On! magazine. That adventure delivers on an environment that FEELS like it’s a crab-god place. The descriptions are terse and they communicate the feel of the rooms in a very visceral way. This adventure in contrast feels like a bunch of empty rooms with maybe a trog statue in a couple of them. The trog god is not even named. ‘The trog gods name is carved at the base of the statue’ or ‘saying the name of the trog god bypasses the room traps.’ Well, what’s the trog gods name? What sort of alien ancient subhuman trog stuff is present? Some trogs have come out stasis in this adventure. I don’t like stasis in general, but lets run with that. Instead of generic trog descriptions they could have been enhanced by making them emaciated or weakened, since they were trapped in the temple a long time before being put in to stasis. These little trow-away details are important to built up a bigger picture collectively of an interesting environment. Another example may be the temple condition proper. This is supposed to be the ruins of an ancient city that collapsed and now a newer city has been built on top of it. But not much of that at all, if any, comes through in the rooms or the environment. I’m reminded of that great ruined city in DL1 and how the map even helped communicate the environment you were in. I want THAT, not just another generic, and long, room description.

This is available on DriveThru, as a part of a bundle.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/167997/GC12-From-Below?affiliate_id=1892600

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Dungeon Magazine #4

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d4

Nice Horne cover.

This is the first truly useless issue. The adventures have little to no redeeming qualities: nothing of academic interest, little to steal, and uninvolved. And all of this AFTER you read from the editor how tough it is to choose from all the great submissions. I’m still feeling my way in these older product reviews; I’m not quite sure what to focus on.This week it’s: some kind of synopsis surrounded by bile.
Kingdom in the Swamp
by John Nephew
Levels 6-9

A little shit halfling thief/borrower wants the parties help in going back to a castle with a vampire in the swamps. His friends we’re presumably captured when he fled the scene while the vampire attacked. There’s a small swamp adventure followed by the worlds smallest & lamest ten room castle for a vampire to hang out in. The vampire is cursed by Orcus and can never leave the small island in the swamp that his castle sits on. The wandering monsters ‘are up to the DMs discretion based on party strength’ and the swamp encounters are mostly lame. There’s a statue of Orcus that the vamp can see from his castle that would be cool if it played some role in the adventure: IE if there was a social element/break the curse/etc. The swamp does contain the one interesting encounter: an evocative little description about shallow graves full of rotting corpses … zombies! It’s a decent non-D&D-traditional zombies more in-line with how we traditionally think of them, in real life. The castle is small and uninteresting. But that doesn’t stop it from being described in endless useless detail. 5 pages of triple-column text for ten rooms. Ouch! The treasure here is very light. 1E is gold=XP, right? There needs to be more build up, a spookier castle, a social element … just SOMETHING to bring this thing to life. I’d stab the halfing in town and THEN go on the adventure so I didn’t have to put up with his cute little thieving ‘aw shucks, me?’ attitude.

 

Escape from the Tower of Midnight
by Paul Kane
Levels 2-4 Thieves

This is a tournament module and it shows. Your ‘all thief’ party starts captured and is executed in 2 days if you can’t escape. Getting out of your cell is easy, then you make your way through a 10 level tower. It’s supposed to have a strong ‘sneak by patrolling guards’ element, but that’s not well documented, or illustrated. It’s just described and because of that you’re going to have to put in a lot of work to run it. You get points for knocking people out instead of killing them, even though they are going to put you to death in two days and they’ve killed all of your friends AND they will your families if you ever tell them your name. It does have one of the few things ideas stealing. There’s a running joke that they stole blind the palace of the King of Sark. There’s treasure scattered all over the tower from the palace and I found the running joke/content amusing. It’s a good reminder that continuity of that sort is a good addition to window dressing.

 

Fluffly Goes to Heck
by Rick Reid
Levels 3-5

A completely linear joke adventure ala Castle Greyhawk. I’m still bitter about having purchased that thing when it came out, so I’m bitter about this adventure. Recall the silliest Paranoia adventures ever written? Same thing.

 

Trouble at Grog’s
by Grant & David Boucher
Level 1

A ‘solve the mystery’ adventure in a small village featuring ham-handed diversity lessons about 1/2 orcs and 1/2 ogres. The village is described in verbose detail that manages to convey nothing much of interest. The interactions between the villagers is almost exclusively limited to ‘hate 1/2 breeds.’ They are not even characitures, that would mean they had a personality. Way too much text and not enough interesting content. Like all mysteries it gimps the characters: if you capture someone hired to beat you up then Charm Person doesn’t reveal who hired them … because they are too scared. Uh huh. Why don’t you just say ‘I wrote a weak adventure.’ There’s other interesting choices as well: can’t find the tracks? A friendly ranger helps you out! Can’t find X? A friendly Deus Ex helps you out! I can’t find a decent adventure. Who’s gonna help me out? There’s something like 23 pages of content here. There might be something like four pages of useful content. A half-ogre bar could be fun. Too bad they sucked the life out of it with the lesson they are teaching. What was that half-orc bar? Krom’s Throat? Now THAT’s an ethnic bar!

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 8 Comments

Colossus, Arise!

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

ca

by Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 8

Giants stalk the shifting sands as the lost city of Stylos awakens from its deathless slumber. The Fourth Age of Man is at hand! All that stands between the gigantic hordes of Stylos and their conquest of the world is your band of adventurers. Sinister traps, implacable foes, and the crushing tread of the dread Colossus all lurk within these pages, eager to test the courage and cunning of even the most accomplished adventurers.

This is a hard adventure to grok. The first time I read it I thought it held promise but ultimately sucked. The second time I read it I studied the map first and then things clicked for me. It’s also going to be a hard adventure to use in campaign play. To use it best you’re going to need to digest the background pages long in advance of running it and integrate the mythology in to your game. If you do that you’re going to have a KICK ASS adventure for your players. They will be simultaneously drooling and messing themselves in anticipation of what’s to come. It’s a lot better than the ‘old’ DCC adventure line.

So, the worlds ending. Nothing we haven’t seem A BAJILLION times before, right? It’s one of the worst tropes in adventure design. If you’re going to use that as your plot/motivation then you better bring the noise. Harley brings the noise. In one page of big fat old man font Harley lays out a mythology for the end of the world. it’s tight. It has shades of the greek classics. It seems plausible and he doesn’t beat the horse after its dead. There are four ages of man, we’re in the third age, and the fourth is nigh upon us. Pretty standard bullshit stuff. But Harley makes it real through his writing. This, and the hooks to follow, are the key to the adventure working, I think. If you can integrate the mythology in to your campaign then when the hooks show up the players are going to slowly come to realization of what is going on and then GO NUTS once it hits them fully. There’s mystery here and there’s wonder, and that leaves room for the DM to fill things in. About a third of a page is devoted to working the mythology and hooks in to the motivations of the various character classes. Patrons & Divine are pretty straightforward, and, I’d say, overall the weakest. But just mentioning them gets your mind racing on what YOU could do to get things moving with the patrons & divines in your game. The other classes are more straight-forward: loot. By dropping hints and rumors and myths about the treasures and wonders, and the specific magic items/artifacts in the module, over time in your campaign then the players will be drooling when the opportunity arises. And the best hooks are the ones where the PLAYERS want to go on the adventure. Then come the triggering hooks events. Three options are given. The characters lords request an audience and demand they do something about invading armies. Or a giant statue shows up outside the city gates and throws a a necklace of “two score heads” at the group, declaring the end of days has come and on the new moon the city will be razed and all killed or taken by slaves. Or there is a section of dire portents and omens to experience. Seventh son of a seventh son with a birthmark, etc. This shit gets your mind RACING. Think of what you could by combining these events and slowly working them in to you campaign over a four or more game sessions! Omens appear as off-hand comments from the DM. Rumors of war and marauding bands, wildly varying, while the group is doing other things. The lords appear and demand action .. and then the statue appears. That sort of natural continuity is GOLD. The triggers and mythology really got me thinking about longer-term integration in to campaigns and the payoffs thereof. That’s good. That’s the reason I’m paying my filthy lucre to some game company. I want something that fires my imagination and gets me thinking. Something I can riff off of and gets me excited to run it. Harley brings the noise.

Then the adventure actually shows up and … and the review gets more complicated. The monsters here are top notch. There’s finally a good reason for fighting those LG titans from AD&D land. There are vile monstrosities. There’s a giant brain monster. The language used to describe these creatures is tight, and evocative. You really get a sense of them and that helps you then communicate that sense to the players. The treasures are top notch as well, as one would expect from a DCC RPG module. The magic items are unique, there are ‘mundane’ items to exploit, and the standard treasures are well described and interesting. The map is small but not necessarily bad. If the players are focused and know what they are doing then there’s only a few encounters they have to have. The rest of the maps is laid out in such a way that the rooms can serve as a diversion or distraction for the party. It’s not really an exploration as much as it is managing your party resources If you go exploring places you don’t need to then you’re going to probably have more trouble at the end game because you are weaker. Or you get some kick-ass magic items to help with the end game. And now the complicated part …

This adventure channels Kuntz in many places. That means ‘Hidden Depth.’ This is mostly constrained to the optional rooms on the map. How you feel about hidden depth, and crazy long room descriptions/details, is your own business. Suffice it to say that, just like the 8 Kings and Halls of the Mage-King, there is A LOT going on in many of the rooms. These are not the tight and terse rooms that I so much enjoy. Some of this is the hidden depth and some of this is the verbosity in describing that depth. When Harley is hitting all of the notes you get great evocative descriptions. And when he’s not your eyes are glazing over and you just want the fucking thing to be over and why the hell is he telling me that and so on. The rooms are more verbose than evocative.

I want to call out three encounters specifically for special comments. The first is the ruined city in which the temple/adventuring site lies. The exploration of this and the parties interactions with it are mostly abstracted. I like this, and perhaps could have used a little more. The group is 8th level. Abstracting the travel through a ruined city, and perhaps the exploration of it, seems like the right thing to do. I may have included a few more “you’re attacked by a hydra but quickly dispatch it” story-like elements in it, but then again that may be my personal taste, It feels right though, given the mythic elements of the adventure. The second is the first numbered encounter in the adventure. A large army lies before the entrance to the temple. This is handled in a very sandbox style. Several suggestions are given in how to adjudicate several common actions like sneaking or distractions. I like this sort of sandboxy encounter since it leaves a lot of room for players to come up with those wacky plans that make D&D fun. Finally there the final encounter. It’s more puzzle than combat … and the players success will depend on them figuring that out before it destroys the entire world. It can certainly feel epic and a campaign-topper if the DM expands the encounter a bit and let’s the creature run wild through cities, laying waste, and the like, while the party tries to stop it.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/115606/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-76-Colossus-Arise?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 8, No Regerts, Reviews | Leave a comment

Grimmsgate

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

gg

by Matt Finch
Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 1-3

Deep in the wooded wilderness, the village of Grimmsgate is an outpost town on a seldom-traveled trail, right at the edge of nowhere. The village’s half-ruined temple of Law, dilapidated inn, drunken blacksmith, exiled trader and a few fur-trappers are enough to keep the bloody-minded denizens of the dark forest at bay, but nobody really expects the village to still be there in another ten years. The woods have become too dangerous for the trappers who once caught animals for fur, and merchants no longer travel the poorly-maintained road. What great evil and what fabulous treasures are to be found in these lands? A brave band of adventurers might make their fortunes here. Or perhaps they might never return…

This is meant to be an introductory adventure. It has a starting home-base, a brief wilderness around it, and an adventure in an old temple to get the characters going. It’s sprinkled throughout with “helpful” advice. The introductory village is not terrible, and the wilderness not bad, though small. The ancient temple is … I don’t know, bland? It’s got it’s high points, for sure, but it’s not what I’ve come to expect from Finch. I’d call it an average effort (meaning it’s better than 90% of the crap produced) but I’ve got no time, space, or energy for average. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy nut, but this thing is so far removed from the ‘voice’ in other Finch works that I actually googled to see if it was ghostwritten. The writing is a lot closer in style to Rappan Athuk than it is Tomb of the Iron God.

The village of Grimmsgate, on the borderlands, is on the decline and has been for some time now. Trade no longer comes through, trappers and farmers disappear in the forest enough that they no longer try their luck and have moved on elsewhere. No lord wants to claim the land because of the dangers in patrolling it (Ha! Land is power to a lord, no way no one would claim it. Maybe not give a shit about it, but they’d claim it.) The players somehow end up there. Some lame hooks are offered. The Priests of Law charge you with a holy quest to investigate … sorry, brb. Ok, back, had to go throw up. No? How about ‘You inherit a dilapidated house in the village? Lame also?Ok, how about ‘Baron Somebody sends you look in to things for him to see if adventurers can succeed where a host of knights failed.’ No look, my fucking standards are not actually that high but they ARE higher than “crap laying in the curb.” That last one might actually be nice if you changed it A LOT. Maybe the players are a new knight or free farmers and are sent to the village … it becomes their holding in liege to their lord. That doesn’t suck nearly as much and would also seem to get the players MUCH more interested in the fate of the village. Might make a neato campaign. A mini-hex crawl.

The village is not terrible. There are maybe 11 or so buildings on top of a hill. The bases are all covered: inn, smith, store, cleric too old to go adventuring but who has some good scrolls to use like raise dead. Several of the other people are also covered as well, meaning farmers. The village is plagued by read-aloud text that seems forced. “This is a well-tended stone building with a roof of wooden shingles. The sign over the door says The Hilltop Emporium.” In fact, that entry serves as a good example for this entire section. As the sign implies, the shopkeeper has delusion of grandeur. All of the little NPC’s running around have some nice personality to make them memorable without being over the top. The descriptions of the people are very well done, communicating themselves strongly in just a sentence or two. But then it’s wrapped inside of shit. I LOVE foreshadowing, and there’s a bit of that at the beginning which serves as another good example. As the characters approach the village there’s a big block of read-aloud. It talks about their journey over the last several days and ends with “Do you head toward the village?” Totally fucking lame. Better to play out a little journey, not taking too long in it, and present the information in the read-aloud naturally. Because the information is GOOD. The characters pass weird shit on the road on the way. Bones in a circle around a human skull. A small red-stained wicker basket abandoned by the side of the road. A shallow unmarked grave. Some REALLY good creepy shit to sprinkle in an adventure to Pigstye. Ruined by being wrapped in a block of text.

The “Wilderness” map is small. It has four places of note on it. A 6HD black dragon lair, an ogre who’s taken over a ford, a (small) group of bandits, and a hill with some statues on top. None of these encounters are fleshed out much at all, just a sentence or three. This leaves them pretty open to interpretation by the DM to flesh out for additional adventure. So, not really something appropriate to the adventure at hand. The ancient temple complex is … oh … a pain to review. It’s arrayed around a hill with multiple entrances, ala the Caves of Chaos. That’s great! It’s a thoughtful feature, especially the hidden entrance in the woods. The majority of the temple though, under the hill, is one LONG hallway with smaller hallways and rooms hanging off of it. It immediately smacks of ‘linear’ but is slightly more thoughtful than that … but not by much. The main temple is on top of the hill and the rest reminds me of the basement/workrooms at Monticello: long hallway ending outside.

Lots of lame read-aloud text in the encounters, but not a lot of interesting things. There are a decent number of ‘flashback’ ghostly images showing the temples past. This ranks just slightly higher than ‘diary entries’ in my ‘things I loathe’ list. They are not doing anything more than showing the history of the temple; a history that is not useful in the adventure. There are a couple of interesting choices scattered about. A secret door revealed by leaves on the floor. Leaches (normal) in a pool of water. A ghostly spirit who’s not just there to be killed. That encounter, in particular, is one of the better ones, although longish. The spirit can reveal information to the players and reward them with grave goods, etc. Taken in that context the flashbacks are not AS bad, since it means the players may go ‘Ah Ha!”, but the game effect is still meaningless.

I’ll single out the monsters here for special mention. The adventure has manes, mutated cannibals, and mole-man hybrid cannibals. The art, which I seldom mention in reviews, does a great job at conveying the flavor of the cannibal-type monsters: gaunt, tall, horrific. The main villain is well atmosphered as well, with clouds of ash about his person, etc. Centipedes are described as bright green and shiny. Very nice imagery on the monsters. Well, SOME of the monsters. It’s inconsistent. Not all centipedes get that description, and the manes demons get none at all. The treasure is a great disappointment. The gems are just “4 gems worth 100gp each” and the magic items are just generic “mace +1” or “sword +1.” After reading an aside in the module about you can add flavor by creating your own monsters (the mole-men cannibals) to then encounter this blandness in magic items is a real shame.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112616/Swords-and-Wizardry-Grimmsgate-Introductory-Module?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, No Regerts, Reviews | Leave a comment

Dungeon Magazine #2

Posted on September 7, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

d2

Uh … nice thong?

This seems to be a stronger issue than #1, although half of the adventures are … unusual. It’s important to remember that Dungeon Magazine is still in 1e land, 2e not having appeared yet. A cursory search shows that the only other set of review of Dungeon magazine are on rpg.net, and the poster only made it to issue #17 in two years of writing. My views seem to vary significantly from his. The Dungeon Index, a summary of all adventures, appears to currently be down.

The Titan’s Dream
by W. Todo Todorsky
Levels 5-9

This is an adventure through a Titan’s dream. It’s a weird and confused, or maybe disjointed?, affair. Of all the dream adventures I’ve seen it tends to be one of the better ones. Which still means it’s total bullshit, but it tries harder than the others. An incredibly long and useless backstory and introduction lays out the situation: there are three dreams, each with five acts in them. The players randomly wander about from act to act and dream to dream in no particular order until they do the right thing in an act. That act is then unavailable. Once they complete everything then the titan wakes up, they are released, and they can proceed with the bullshit hook from the backstory.

I’m being a bit too hard on the backstory. The titan here is a classical greek titan sitting in a classic greek temple. He’s an oracle and the party is sent to him to solve a dilemma for The King. The Titan eventually answers in a riddle. That’s actually a pretty appealing scenario once you yank out all of the specifics. Yanking this adventure and providing the titan as an oracle for the party to go visit to find out how to do X could be pretty interesting. It’s the kind of classic adventure trope that I can really get in to.

The dreaming … not so much. Same old issues … no real threat and no real consequences. Fake XP awards and fake treasures. Yeah, sure, the party can die. Dream adventures always do that. But somehow these always seem like ‘kp duty’ adventures; they feel like punishment and no one cares about the outcomes.

Each act has a brief description, two paragraphs or so (Yeah! Terse!) and then some suggested tasks that the party can complete to ‘win’ the act. Generally if the party does some kind of good or heroic act then they pass and if they don’t then they get to repeat the act at some later stage. For example. Merchant Bob didn’t sacrifice to Poseidon so he stole Bobs fiancé. Act 1 has the party arriving outside Bobs house in the midst of a crowd just after Bob has learned the news. The party can pray to a god to intercede on Bobs behalf, volunteer to go on a quest to recover his fiancé, or restore order in the somewhat rowdy crowd. All of those are examples of a pass condition. Very classical. Most of the potential combat situations have a couple of suggested tasks that don’t involve combat. There’s no magic items available in the adventure, they all dissolve when you return from the dream, but some coinage, 2,000-5,000 per character is suggested as being allowed to bring out. That’s not too bad at the lower end of the adventure scale (level 5) but at the upper end (9) it may be more worthwhile to kill the titan and loot his ass.

As an early type of story game driven by the D&D engine it’s kind of interesting, as is it’s reliance on the Greek Classics. Maybe a good Mazes & Minotaurs adventure? I want to like this adventure but it may be that my ‘hate dream adventures’ conditioning is too strong.

WTF is up with the lack of treasure/XP in these things?

In The Dwarven King’s Court
by Willie Walsh
Levels 3-5

The characters get to investigate some thefts in the court of a dwarf King. Let me get this out of the way: mysteries don’t work in D&D, or most RPG’s. The players have access to just too many ways to get information. At this level we have Augury, Detect Charm, Know Alignment, Speak with Animals and maybe Speak with Dead and Locate Object. And that’s just the clerics list. Druids and Wizards will have their own allotment. The only way past this problem is with a bizarre assortment of customer tailored magic items just to fuck with the players and deny them the powers their characters have earned. So, the adventure sucks.

A decent attempt is made at a character-driven story by giving some decent details of a dozen or so key NPC’s, their personalities and how they act and react. It’s like a Poirot mystery: everyone has something to hide. This is ten ruined by providing overly long and uselessly detailed room descriptions in order that they make up the majority of the page count. It would have been REALLY helpful to have had all of the NPC’s detailed on one summary page for the DM to refer to during play. Of course, detecting one secret door virtually ends the adventure before is starts, through the use of a ghost and his ring of wishes. The hook is lame: the characters get visions telling them to go the dwarf kingdom. How about you don’t even make an effort next time?

There’s a lot of stuff to explore with the NPC’s and with the environment/rooms (incriminating evidence and red herrings) and if you put some hard work in to prep’ing it you could get a decent murder mystery to run. But then the party will ruin it in 5 minutes by casting a spell.

But, hey, you get 500gp at the end of the adventure! Talk about a rip off …

Caermor
by Nigel D. Findley
Levels 2-4

A devil worshipper cult in a remote village. This is a pretty tight little adventure. It’s got a good low-magic/peasants feel to it and a couple of strong NPC’s. It’s got the “too many words” problem and could use a lot more village color: more locales and NPC’s to interact with. Some local ‘petty evil’ types have summoned a devil … and it worked! They are now in over their heads and don’t realize it. The villagers blame someone else for their troubles (ripper apart sheep, etc), and can be stirred by the evil doers. There’s a decent little ‘insular mob’ vibe that goes well with the ‘inbred morons’ vibe. It really conveys the spirit of some of those elements from the Lovecraft stories. There’s another group of adventurers in the village but almost nothing is done with them. There’s an attempt at giving them personality but not much in the way of a timeline for them. If you fleshed this out a bit while summarizing a lot of the content in the adventure then it would make a decent low-level game.

The Keep at Koralgesh
by Robert Giacomozzi & Jonathan Simmons
Levels 1-3

This is a decently-sized four-level dungeon. It’s a BASIC adventure and so we have to sit through the usual condescending crap, like “don’t tell players they just found a +1 sword” and so on. Only a page and a half of backstory/introduction, only half of which is read-aloud, so this one wins the “briefest introduction” award. There’s a slightly generic feel to this combined with some random specific content. It reminds me a lot of the Palace of the Silver Princess or Castle Amber or maybe even the Lost City … the way their content was bit generic and then they would have something specific. Really a kind of disconnected set of encounters, I guess.

There’s a very nice rumor table included as well as some creepy-ish wilderness wandering monster entries in order to highten the tension prior to reaching the dungeon. The first level is my favorite: caves with lava pits, fissures, and a couple of puzzle type rooms. The second level has a totally generic looking map (hints of symmetry. Ug!), with levels three and four having more interesting “keep interior” maps.

It’s quite an extensive adventure with a decent number of things to discover. It’s just the generic magic items, generic monsters, generic rooms, etc that I’m having a problem with. I’m probably being too hard on this … it’s not weird and I like weird & unique but it DOES have that same strong vibe that Silver Princess, Castle Amber, and Lost City have. Those are not terrible adventures (as I recall them, anyway …) and neither is this one. It just needs a lot of work, IMHO, to beef up the creatures and magic items.

Posted in Dungeon Magazine, Reviews | 2 Comments

Curse of the Weaver Queen

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

cwq

by Tim Kask
Eldritch Enterprises
Generic
Moderate Level

The lunar goddess Arianhrod presides over the great wheel of life. But centuries ago, some saw the Wheel as a Web: a spider’s web. And so began the Cult, and so it has festered, hidden, malignant… waiting. Now they come scuttling out of the dunes at night, silent and deadly. Only a very lucky few have survived the ravaging horde. The bugs. The huge spiders. The Gatherers, taking what is man’s and returning to their lair. That area of the dunes is strange. You’ll see. You can find it easily. And with luck, you may live to tell the tale.

This is an adventure in an old temple dedicated to a spider goddess. This may be the worst organized adventure I’ve ever seen. Somewhere buried in the mess are a series of fine little things for the party to figure out and play with, as well as unique magic items. It would be a decent adventure if Chris & Frank, the supposed editors, had had the balls to tell Kask he was fucking the thing up.

Ten pages. It takes the designer ten pages to get to room one of the adventure. Of those about 25% of one page describes the temple exterior. About 50% of one page describes a new way to adjudicate swarm attacks. The rest of it is all garbage background, and introductions, and bullshit nonsense, and grognard nonsense and, this being an EE adventure, a page describing their generic adventure format. Of this entire pile of words there may be two interesting things of note. First, swarms of vermin erupt from the temple from time to time. Nice imagery. Secondly, the overly long backstory has a nice little section about recent events: a sheep disappears, then a cow, then a couple of infants etc. Instead of taking a page it could have been boiled down to little more than that, but then you wouldn’t get as much value, would you? I don’t know why designers insist on doing this kind of stuff. Why do they feel the need to explain EVERY SINGLE THING in the adventure. Great, it’s a spider cult temple. Wonderful. I described in six of seven words. You took a couple of pages. Mine is as good as yours because you are not introducing ANYTHING new or interesting in your description.

There seems to be some weird fetish with monster stats in the adventure. They are everywhere. In the introduction text. Inline with the room descriptions. Included in the bestiary in the back. Included in the appendix in the back. Is it padding or just bad organization? I have NO idea. Most of it just looks like a copy/paste job. While I’m on the topic of “crappy layout and organization” let me mention a couple of other things. Recall, I don’t usually give a shit about this kind of stuff; it has to be REALLY bad for me to comment. It’s really bad. Besides the monster stats pasted in to every nook and cranny there’s also this weird thing the designer does where he splits up important information. He puts critical information in the bestiary, or the appendix, or the introductions, or in a different room. This is crazy maddening. After reading the adventure three times I STILL can’t figure out where the hell the books, mentioned in an appendix, are or what role they play in the adventure. The room encounters themselves are some stream of consciousness thing where the designer inter-spreads key information in to the room description in a kind of parenthetical way. It’s also most like he dictated this in to a tape recorder and then types it up later without organizing it … and then his two buddies, the editors, didn’t tell him what a mess it was. I get trying new things. I do. I appreciate it. This doesn’t work and your editors should have told you as much. If they did, then you should have listened to them. The whole mess is then further obfuscated by the use of the Eldritch Enterprises generic stats for things. I don’t know if they are still terrified of T$S legal, or are bound by contracts, or are under the impression that someone NOT playing D&D will buy this … but it sucks. It sucks hard. It ESPECIALLY sucks hard given the mess of the rest of the adventure. He makes things even MORE obfuscated by refusing to describe some of the treasure in straight-up terms. “It’s worth as much as a whore for two nights or a wagonload of turnips.” No, that would be interesingt. He actually says “the crown is worth as much as a set of plate armor” or some such thing. Jesus man, just put a price on it. Especially since you’re not even consistent about it in your own adventure: there’s coinage all over the place.

The spider temple has three levels. It does not have the most interesting layout but it does have, potentially, a layout which will encourage returning to various parts of the temple later in the adventure. There may be rooms that the party bypasses early on and then figures out they need to return to, or figures out what to do in a room. This is a good thing. The whole layout works together to provide a kind of mini-puzzle for the party to figure out. Or not. You can also just the hack the place and kill it with fire. This sort of double engagement is interesting to see and makes me wish the adventure was more coherent. Going to the scriptorium can provide clues to other rooms and together those rooms can provide more background about what’s going on. That’s neat and rewards players who are in to that kind of stuff. Or you can just dump in some boil and the hack the boss down.

I want to call out two encounters in particular. We’ll cal them Agony and Ecstasy, since I’m in a Hellblazer mood. Agony is a lich astride a devil horse in a room that the players are bound to enter. He’s level 22 and kills the party, since they will be MUCH lower level. If the party does manage to kill him then his magic bullshit crown and magic bullshit mace and magic bullshit robes, all of which he uses to great effect in the combat, shatter. So, fuck the party over and then gimp them out of the treasure. Nice job Kask It comes out of nowhere and doesn’t fit the rest of the temple at all. It’s out of place and weird, and not weird in a good “OD&D” way. Ecstasy is the first first set of encounters in the adventure. A giant talking stone face with gemstones in its forehead and weird little demon create that is some combination of fruit bat and lizard. Those are some pretty cool and weird encounters. And that time I DO mean weird in an OD&D way, which is a very good thing.

The upper level of the temple is by far the most interesting, with the lower levels being mostly just vermin rooms. Kind of nice from a creepy standpoint but less so from the “weird D&D” standpoint. The boss is insane and either attacks or talks to the party, and switches it up a lot. There’s a way to win WITHOUT killing it, but it’s made hard by the whole “randomly attacks people” thing and the fact that there’s really no reward for NOT killing it. Oh Well … *HACK*.

The monsters and treasure range from decent to good. Most of the monsters are unique to this adventure and strange enough to give you nightmares … I’m remembering that scene with the bugs in the newer King Kong movies. The magical treasure is also unique. Amulets that make spiders ignore you. Staves that shoot fire. Weird magic ropes … it’s good stuff.

There might be a decent adventure hiding in here, in the upper C, lower B range, but you have to work to find it.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110744/Curse-of-the-Weaver-Queen?affiliate_id=1892600

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Night of the Black Swords

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Bryce Lynch

nbs
by Allen Hammack
Die Cast Games
AD&D
Levels 10-12

This is a tournament-style 10 encounter adventure for evil characters through the depths of hell. It’s ok for what it is but has limited use outside of its tournament context.

The evil party belongs to an evil secret society known as The Black Swords. They get tasked by a shadowy figure to go to hell and rescue some evil guy who usually pretends to be good but is in danger of being exposed as evil by baddies who are positioning themselves to take down the shadowy figures boss. IE: It’s a plot by one faction of arch-devils to weaken a different faction of arch-devils. That’s more of a pretext than a hook though. You’re going on this adventure because you’re at a con and it’s a tournament. The evil aspects of the party are not really emphasized other than one brief encounter with a seductress, and I guess even that is handled in a tasteful fashion. Being evil is just a reason to rescue some other evil guy and not be attacked by a subset of hells denizens.

There are ten encounters in hell for the party to navigate their way through. Some are combat and others are role-play encounters and more typical tournament “that’s not our goal, ignore it” encounters. While I’m not a fan of the linear tournament style, I did think that the encounters were interesting enough, at least interesting enough to steal some ideas from. In particular there’s the good encounter with some Rakshasas who are pretending to be someone else. It’s nice to see a classic monster being presented in a classic fashion: trickster spirits tricking people. It reinforces a great way to present these monsters in your own game. The actual details of the encounter are not that interesting, just the fact that the creatures are using their ESP and shape-change ability to lure the party pretending to be someone else. It’s a nice bit.

Along a similar vein there are devil gate guards that the party need to get by. It’s the usual BS city guards at the gate encounter that I use all the time, except this one is in hell and the guards are devils. I was disappointed to not have the ‘hell’ aspects played up more. In fact, that could be a common complaint of the entire module: it doesn’t feel particularly like hell. Then again I guess there’s a line to walk before crossing over in to the prurient. The only thing remotely hell-like is an arch-devils girlfriend putting the moves on one of the party members … and the party getting points for going for it.

The end of the adventure has a fight with an arch-devil in his palace. It’s also possible to avoid most of the fight, I suspect. Most of the adventure is just figuring out how to avoid the encounter in front of you by using your high-level abilities and magic items. That’s not bad, but it’s not particularly interesting in terms of ‘content I am paying for’ either. There’s not much new and interesting in this adventure, if anything at all. STandard magic items, standard monsters, flavorless but verbose encounters …

Theres not much to recommend here, unless you just want a straight-forward tournament module.

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