tenfootpole.org

by Patrick Wetmore
Henchman Abuse
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 2-4

The Anomalous Subsurface Environment is more than just robots and lasers — its clowns and dinosaurs, too! Levels 2 and 3 of the critically ignored gonzo megadungeon are finally available — with more classes, more tables, and more cruel and unusual ways to die deep beneath the surface of the post-apocalyptic Earth!

An overall fine product with a lot of gonzo elements. It sometimes crosses the line from ‘goofy gonzo’ to ‘jokey joke’, and those are the lower points of the levels. That’s not too hard to fix though and if you’ve enjoyed ASE1 then you’ll want this also.

Continuing where ASE1 left off, this massive 144 page booklet covers the next two dungeon levels. Each level has about 130 rooms on it, and there’s a sublevel with another dozen or so rooms, and several large portions of the dungeon levels numbered with sub-parts. For the money you are getting A LOT of content here. There’s an absurd number of new monsters, at least 40, as well as new spells, new magic items, new tech items, new wizards, new NPC parties, and even a couple of new gonzo classes, like robot, insect man, or moktar. Patrick brings the content.

The level design here is as good or better than ASE1. The levels are large with lots of sub-areas and lots of corridors connecting them. This allows for a freedom of movement and exploration that most products can’t deliver because of their small/cramped map style. A decent effort is made to connect levels via multiple methods and non-standard paths. Slides, open areas water features, these are all used to connect levels. There’s also a decent amount of same-level stairs. The map does get a bit dry in places and some additional terrain and room features would be nice to see. If nothing else these do a good job add variety to combat. The map isn’t in Thracia/Benoist territory yet but it’s far FAR better than the maps in most products. It also does a good job describing some features of levels not yet explored/seen as well as having alternate entrances to the dungeon.

The dungeon levels have factions. This is a good thing. A VERY good thing. This isn’t just ‘lair’ factions but also includes ‘named’ individuals like The Bonelord or the Dr. Giggles. The various group operating within the ASE, along with the map complexity, should allow the party to approach their problem with varied methods. It doesn’t have to be a pure hack-fest. You can get new hirelings, maybe get some healing or stay the night. Team up with one group against the other, or go get some help to obtain the Amulet of Power, or whatever. This changes the dynamic of the adventure. Not only is the dungeon a dark and ominous place full of things that will kill you, now you have to be on your toes and on the lookout for potential allies and double-crosses. This makes the play far more varied and interesting. Me, I like to make sure the parties allies visibly and ostentatiously display their wealth. Nothing like turning the murder hobos in to murder hobo’s … now who’s doing the double cross Black Dougal? The second level has The Painted Men squaring off against the Necromatic Midgets and the Trogs. These three groups each know some information about the dungeon. What these groups DON’T have, and need are some immediate goals/problems for the party to participate in. They all want bodies, to eat, and that’s about it. Their rivalry for the level, and bodies, is mostly static. It’s referenced but not shown much. COmpare this to Level 1 of the Darkness Beneath where various encounters are with groups of trogs and crab-men fighting, or of trogs just finishing up a fight, or of an older battleground littered with broken weapons and body parts, etc. That kind of thing give you a sense of what’s going on in the dungeon. It makes it seem like the dungeon is alive and that the groups really ARE at each others throats. Level three has cod-men, goblins, a hinge-man expedition and an incursion by the moktars through a new entrance to the ASE. Again, the various groups know things they could share with the explorers but again, they don’t really have many/any goals past “kill the other guys.” If would have been interesting to have a couple of teasers about their plans to accomplish their dominion. “If only we could take the Birthing Pools!” or “We assault the northern corridors tomorrow.” Just a nudge towards some events.

The encounters are good. Laser attacks. A room that replaces your head with a different one. Giant lakes and caverns full of weird stuff. A door with heads nailed to it. An obvious trap with obvious bait (a cod-man egg.) Turning to any page and picking just about any random room will result in you finding SOMETHING interesting to interact with. I like dungeons having things to play with and explore. I like factions that allow you interact with monsters. I like a dungeon with a decent amount of variety and yet enough consistency to allow the players to ground their characters actions in certain sections. ASE2-3 does all that and it does it well. There’s so much stuff going on in this place that it’s hard to focus on individual elements to describe. Beyond the factions there are others in the dungeon. The Sewage Prophet: an otyugh so old and well-fed that he’s prophetic. The Man From Below is some stranger in a cavern wearing trog hides. Tranitaxin the Bone Lord is running around. And the there’s all of the traps rooms and all of the rooms with freaky-deaky stuff for the party to mess with. The depth and variety here is really impressive. There’s a wide variety of things for the players to have their characters explore with the DM. There should be a very healthy back and forth between the players and the DM as their explore black plates on the walls, globes of glass containing screams, and any of the seemingly ENDLESS wonders of the ASE.

And then there are the clowns and the circus. At some point messing around and having fun and being gonzo turns in to a joke dungeon ala Castle Greyhawk. Not Dungeonland-like but “Gamma World powered by 4e” bullshit. I’m pretty tolerant to this kind of stuff in actual play and I’m not opposed to seeing it in a product … in moderation. When a product TRIES to do this consistently then the problems starts to show up. Or, rather, my problem with a product starts to show. Humor as a byproduct is different than encoded humor which is different than a humorous setting. One of the first areas in 2-3 is a circus with clown-people, a big top tent, circus acts, carnies, and booth games. This is my redline that separates goofy post-apoc gonzo fun from jokey. It’s not too hard to tone down, even while running on the fly, I’d suspect, but it does leave a bad taste in my mouth. Getting ripped off by Castle Greyhawk when I was 18 probably has something to do with this, but, whatever.

I do, however, have a pretty decent tolerance for new items, spells, and monsters. I’ve got no problem with a toilet monster, or a Beard of Bees, or any of the other MARVELOUS new items or monsters. They are well done, fit the theme of the dungeon/setting, and are supplemented by a lot of non-traditional treasure, like silver wiring and the like. This sort of the thing isn’t done enough in adventures. Players are TERRIFIED of new monsters. They never know what they can, what they are immune to, if it level drains or eats their eyes or whatever. There’s a new kind of trapper, this one resembling a curtain … or maybe “sewn together skin parts that are being used as a curtain.” Ouch! Likewise the Sword of Unlife, or a solid silver skeleton contained in a red dehydrated gelatinous cube are the kinds of interesting treasure I’d expect to see in an adventure … and generally don’t. Why would anyone ever put in a “+1 sword” when you could put in “Aidru, Slayer of Men. Continually slowly drips blood because of all the people it’s killed.” THEN you can give it a power. Even “+1”. I’ll take the Sword of Unlife and Aidru, Slayer of Men over a hundred +1 swords. Players get attached to unusual and unique magic items, be it their powers or their descriptions. They have their characters hang on to them long after they are useful. That’s the kind of thing you want to have happen in your RPG.

It’s not clear to me that this COULD be better than ASE1. The first ASE was a decent departure from the bog-standard D&D world and contained so much interesting setting information that it seemed like a bolt from the blue bringing gonzo mana from heaven. ASE2-3 CAN’T have the same impact ASE1 had. It does, however, build well on ASE1 and provide another couple of marvelous levels to the complex. I’m a tough reviewer. Don’t let my nit-picking get you down. If you you have ASE1 then you should go get this also. And if you don’t have ASE1 then you are a tool and need to go buy this AND ASE1.

Seriously though, why haven’t you picked up ASE1? It’s one of the best things ever put out by the OSR. Oh, I’m sorry, are you too busy genuflecting to a 30 year old TSR adventure? Look man, I like S3 and G1 also but they are THIRTY YEARS OLD. Expand your world-view a bit. I’ll tell you what: You go get a _good_ OSR product and we’ll consider it an apology for you never buying a Judge’s Guild product back in the day. Cool?

by Benton Wilson
Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Levels 3-5 (or 1-3, the cover and fist page differ. I suspect 1-3)
The capital of the Venirian Empire has been re-located back to Venir, and a thriving city has been built above the swallowed ruins of the old city. Various connections to the old city can be found in the sewers, cellars, and other underground portions of the rebuilt city of Venir, and adventurers frequently plumb these depths in search of the secrets and treasures of the empire’s glory days. What lurks beneath the Heart of Empire?

Sewers. There’s an attempt at flavor but its sabotaged by a cramped map and the lack of inspiring text. And it’s in the sewers. Has there EVER been a good adventure that took place in the sewers? Ultimately I think the product is confused about it’s trying to be. It’s presented in typical dungeoncrawl format but would be better served, I think, formatted as a kind of setting book for the sewers, or as a more open-ended sort of adventure.

This adventure is quite terse, at only eight pages long. It details a section of sewer under a city as well as a section of the old ruined city that lies under the sewers. There end up being four distinct areas of exploration, each with a hook associated with it. There’s a kidnapper/slaver, a renegade necromancer, a kobold lair, and the old ruin of a small gladiator arena. Each of these has some sort of hook associated with it: kobolds have been spotted, a contract on the necromancer, someones relative has been captured, etc. This leads to the map problem: all of these guys lair within 200 feet of each other, and usually much closer. The map is small. Quite small; at about a quarter of one page. This leaves the whole thing feeling strangely disconnected from each other. A larger complex map could have been much more interesting. Then the players have a reason to talk to the kobolds, or make an alliance with the slaver, or something else that would turn this adventure away from a single lame crawl to a more involved focus point and place of interest in their travels. By opening it up and providing a little more motivation for the groups then you’d have a kind of faction play available. This could lead to continuing relations with the various groups and a real opening up of the play in the undercity. Instead this looks like a typical crawl.

It tries. There’s thugs in the sewers, and skeletons risen up from the ruins of the old city. There’s disgraced gladiators trying to regain their glory wandering around and there are escaped slaves begging for help. There’s a monkey-ghoul and a weird undead guy with flaming blue hands and a door decorated with an animated skeleton. There are peasants set up as watchmen by the city and weird skeleton with strange powers. But these are the exceptions. The 47 or so encounters in the sewers tend to be of the Boring Room with Boring Contents variety. The rooms have very little going on in them and what there is described in a mundane and uninspiring way. What I’m looking for in a room description is something short but evocative that can communicate the room to me and let fill in the details myself. I’m not looking for an exhaustive list of the rooms contents. If it doesn’t inspire then it should generally be cut out. The kobold lair is a good example of this. There are eight or nine rooms taking up a page or so that describe the kobold lair/rooms. Almost none of the text adds anything to the room title. “Half-built tunnel” is fairly good, as is “Kobold Chokepoint” The additional text, a paragraph or so, does little to add to the rooms beyond the description that I could not. Inspire or Edit! In contrast the treasure is not bad. “a gold comb”. “an amulet with a glass bead on the end.” Not quite the level of detail I appreciate but at least an attempt was made. What if the comb had a dolphin on one end in a lewd pose and the amulet was black and white painted silver in a kind of ‘locket’ format with the bead inside? The magic items are of the “+1 sword” variety, and this do nothing to add to the flavor. Listen kids, if it’s in the core books then why am I paying you for the trouble of copying the text back to me?

Expanded on to a larger map with more motivations for the various groups and a longer adventure could turn this in to an interesting adventure. But by that time you might as well rewrite the entire thing. The Jakallen Underworld still does this sort of thing best.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/104141/Advanced-Adventures-25-The-Heart-of-Empire?affiliate_id=1892600

by Paul J. Fini
IndieOnly Comics
OSR D&D
Levels 1-3

An ancient outpost, abandoned centuries ago by a empire in decline, sits atop a lonely hill overlooking a bleak wilderness. Why was it deserted and left unattended all those years? Surely treasures that once littered the courtyard must have been claimed long ago. But still… vague murmurings of a hidden cellar have been overheard as well as visions of long dead veterans still haunting the battlements. Surely tales told in the evening in front of a fire to frighten gullible travelers. Perhaps there is something more here than meets the eye?

This is a small four level dungeon with around seventy rooms in it. It uses a lot of fairly common tropes: orcs, goblins, kobold slaves, a forgotten tomb, etc. There is not much in the way of originality. It’s large enough to get your EXPLORE on and doesn’t offend enough to make me loathe it. It reminds me a lot of a ‘normal’ adventure.

I’m having a hard time with this one. It’s easy for me to rant about things I loathe, like the OCD crowd on BGG. It’s easy for me to be incoherent with excitement and praise when I find something I like. The middle is where I have a hard time. This thing lies in the middle. Since most adventures seem to suck it also means that this adventure is better than most. “Sucks less than most” is not exactly praise. Put another way, I’d be happy if this level of quality was the baseline by which adventures were measured, instead of 90% of the stock being crappy.

The two pages of introduction can mostly be skipped. The background is short but there’s a decent amount of notes and introduction type material. Perhaps the only really good advice is “the ruin was built by a foreign power. Consistently describe its features as being foreign feeling.” THe four levels of the ruin consist of the ground level ruins, the basement of the ruins, the dungeon below the basement, and the “Caves of Peril and Tomb of the Forgotten.” Man, that’s a level name right out of Holmes/Moldvay! The surface ruins are generally nothing special. They essentially serve as a warm-up and teaser for the lower levels. Some of it is done well and some of it isn’t. There’s a rooftop for the group to climb up on and look down in to things. That’s good. The concept of varying elevations and an environment that allows players to better utilize their surroundings, like climbing up, is something more adventures should allow for. The wandering monsters also contribute to the kind of build-up of tension on this level. Wolves howling in the distance, strange sounds, ominous ravens … this, combined with the “mundane” nature of the well-looted ground level is going to leave the party guessing what is actually going on in the adventure. Some clues in the form of weakened ladders, and perhaps some pets left behind, should also raise tension a decent amount. SOMETHING is present, but the group won’t really know what. Three trapdoors to the roof, it’s open nature, and three stairs down to the basement allow for a non-typical number of ways between levels.

Time for the exciting reveal in the basement! Well, not quite. The basement begins to introduce more creatures, notably undead, with more clues that something larger is going on here. Finally the players will reach the Lower Level and things fall apart. The map here is large, relatively interesting in its non-linear nature, and is stuffed with orcs, goblins, kobolds, and ogres. Room after room. For the most part the rooms are not interesting at all. Their descriptions tend to be longish and end up amounting to “nothing interesting except a couple of humanoids.” For example, the toilets have an orc in them, but it takes a decently sized paragraph to explain that. This is not an uncommon example but rather the norm. For a fully developed humanoid lair like this I like to see an Order of Battle; a list of which monsters will respond to alarms and how they react, etc. This keeps me from having to dig through room after room looking for numbers, stats, etc. While it’s suggested the humanoids react realistically there’s nothing more given. This means more prep time for me and, after all, I’m getting the adventure so I don’t have to worry about prep time. The Caves of Peril and Tomb of the Forgotten are a major let down. Just four or five cave rooms and two tomb rooms. Shriekers, pools of water, grey ooze, wights … nothing really special or interesting here. The treasure is mostly monetary with a few tapestries and the like to pilfer. Enough to keep it a bit interesting. The magical loot is boring book items with not much detail, description or flavor behind them. The only real exception if a Cleaver of Culinary Arts wielded by an ogre chef.

I suspect this adventure plays fine. It you wanted a vanilla adventure and were allergic to D&D’s weirder (and, IMO, fun) parts then this would be a good choice for you.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/89988/The-Outpost-On-The-Edge-Of-The-Far-Reaches?affiliate_id=1892600

by R. Lawrence Blake
Prime Requisite Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-3

The legend of an ancient crypt outside the ghost town of Iron City tells of a powerful curse and those who venture there will surely meet their doom. A group of bloodthirsty brigands moved into the city, using its rotted dwellings as a base for their terrible raids on local travelers. When the thieves suddenly vanish, fears and questions arise about where they went and what was left behind. Can your party survive the traps and puzzles that surely lie within the crypt in hopes of finding the brigands’ abandoned treasure?

This is a simple thirteen room linear tomb with a brief outdoor encounter outside the tomb. It’s full of undead, puzzles, and a fabulous treasure horde that challenges the definition of the word ‘hoard.’

Evil Bob and Evil Ted were brothers. Evil brothers. They rules the land, evilly, from their mighty Iron City of evil. They had themselves buried in their evil tomb and cursed the land, as evil is wont to do. People shunned the area around their tomb, thinking it was evil. Except for some evil bandits who moved in a few years back. The bandits haven’t been heard from in awhile now, three years or so. Could some evil fate have befallen them?

Trust me: my background is better, and it has the added benefit of being terse. The IRON CITY actually consists of about a dozen dilapidated one-story wooden buildings, not described. The “city” has exactly one interesting feature. It’s not the temple. That’s just there to provide a magical teleportation spot for the various “keys” that the party will need in the tomb. You pick them up at the temple and deposit them in the tomb where they teleport back to the temple again for the next bunch of suckers. It’s not even really the mad lunatic that hangs out in the ruins, although he’s kind of related. There’s a magic floating eyeball that roams around the ruins, summoning monsters, firing eye bolts, and generally being a pain. THAT’S interesting. The lunatic knows about it and rants about it, which is how he’s involved. Unfortunately the adventure isn’t really long enough for the magic eye to have its full impact. At best the group may have only a single evening to have to deal with it. They’ll probably just kill it and go on about their way. But imagine if it were not 1 HD, but several, let’s say 6 or 7. And let’s imagine that the tomb was actually a multi-level dungeon that couldn’t be cleared in a single session. Then you’d have the party ducking and dodging around the eye, avoiding it, plotting against it, and it would take on the role of a kind of recurring villain. That would be cool. So there’s at least one idea worth stealing in this adventure.

The tomb is a tomb. It’s linear. You have goofy keys you have to use and collect and use. There are goofy puzzles to solve and goofy things to play with. Oh, wait, no THERE’S NONE OF THAT. Well, except for the key bit. Enter a room. Fight some monsters. Maybe use a key. Next room. The dungeon is linear so it’s just a matter of following the hallway/door. Several of the 13 rooms are essentially empty. Several more just have a monster. A couple more have something “interesting”, and I use that term lightly. There are a couple of crypts to poke at and a couple of arrow traps to set off. The best bit, by far, is a statue you have to reach your arm in to to grab/deposit stones. I like statues and I like reaching in, it’s a classic effect, but this one is just so blandly presented that it’s hard to get excited about at all. The end of the adventure has a medusa fight and the “horde” of the evil dudes: 2000gp and too many magic items. Joy. Boring mundane treasure that adds nothing to the game. Boring book item magic items that add nothing interesting to the game.

by R. Lawrence Blake
Prime Requisite Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-3

Gerald Red held evil and blasphemous battle games for the public within the confines of his courtyard. When the local officials came to put a stop to the bloodshed, Red vanished, leaving behind a terrible legacy of horror and death that surrounds his courtyard to this very day. Can your characters conquer Red’s construct and put the surrounding communities of Irllendom at ease?

This is a simple eighteen room exploration of an old villa and linear caverns underneath. It tries hard, but fails in execution, with confusing maps, too much text, and not enough things to play with. The nice parts end up lost and it comes across as just another ruin stuffed with some monsters.

This is a two level ruin with about 10 rooms on the upper ruin of a villa and eight or so more in the caverns underneath. Sorry, “labyrinth” underneath. Where “labyrinth” is defined as “a straight hallway with a couple of rooms hanging off of it that then dispenses with even this variety and turn straight linear.” This may be a good example of the entire adventure. It tries, or thinks it does anyway, but fails in its execution. Consider the maps. Level one is, I believe, supposed to to be the upper ruins of a kind of gladiatorial villa, like something out of Boobs & Blood Spartacus. None of that is conveyed through the map though. It’s got a totally black background that the outline of the villa is drawn on. This conveys none of the “ruined” nature of the villa, or the fact that it exists in the wilderness, or the the ability to ‘come in the backdoor’ or through the roofs or anything similar. There is supposed to be, I think, a sense of elevation on the map. Iron barred windows. A gladiatorial pit. A viewing box above it, and so on. The second level has some water features that are clearly supposed to be of varying depths but its not clear at all how deep the water is at various points. To be clear, I’m not just pixel bitching about typos and the like; I have a very high tolerance for that sort of thing. This is different. The choices made in the map design don’t convey the 3-dimensional nature of the features. Hmmm, that does sound like pixel bitching. Anyway, some extra effort in this area would have both cleared up the confusion and added some much-needed imagination, at least to the upper ruins. Some detail about the environs around the main villa would have been nice also. Trees nearby? Outbuildings? A terrific opportunity was lost.

The upper ruins are a curious mishmash of neato and boring. The central feature is the courtyard where two animated skeletons fight, all Ray Harryhausen style. There’s a kitchen with stirges in the stovepipe. And …. that’s about it for interesting features. Sure, there’s the generic three orcs and five kobolds that seem almost required for every adventure of this type that comes along, but that are presented is a horribly bland way. Oh, the adventure tries to conjure something up. The orcs send their wolves in before hiding. The kobolds are starving and want food. But rather than expand these in to something interesting they just peter out in to “they get angry if questioned” or “they attack.” The writing style tends to be verbose while offering little in the way of interesting things for the party to interact with in a meaningful way. Likewise the descriptive style doesn’t really convey much useful information for a DM looking to make the adventure more interesting. It comes across as one boring and bland room full of useless text after another. The second level is more of the same. I love fungi but the Shrieker cavern downstairs has to be one of the most examples I’ve ever encountered. The big encounters down here are some giant fish that attack while the party is wading and some trogs that throw rocks down on the party. Both of these set-piece like battles suffer from the map/elevation/feature issues I mentioned before. That could be much more exciting and evocative if the map conveyed the environment the (poorly) described rooms are trying to convey.

The place is stuffed FULL of treasure, especially magic items. The linear nature means that most if not all of it is going to be found. It’s all just standard book items. Shield +1, +1 war hammer. goblet 100gp. Gem 100gp. Maybe the only exceptions are the full array of undead-fighting tools, like garlic, holy symbols, wooden stakes, etc, and a set of engraved rings from the former owner of the complex. These don’t add much of interest but they do try, which is better than the generic magic items and generic treasure that inevitably leads to generic adventure.

by John Stater
Self-published
Blood & Treasure
Levels 1-3

What secrets lie beneath the ancient gatehouse of the infamous Black Baron? Only the bravest dare find out. A Blood & Treasure adventure for characters levels 1 to 2. Compatible with most old school fantasy games.

A pretty average little dungeoncrawl. The page count is misleading since only 8 of the 22 pages are the adventure, the rest being pre-gens. The dungeon has a decent, and short, backstory and a couple of interesting rooms. Mostly though it comes across as mundane, with rooms of kobolds & hobgoblins and nothing interesting.

John Stater does a LOT of hex crawls. I like those hex crawls. He generally manages to convey a goodly amount of whimsy and weird in the his short descriptions of the various hexes. As far as I know, the Tumbled Towers is his only published adventure that is not a hex crawl. It’s a disappointment, conveying little of the wonder and whimsy present in his hex-crawls. It starts off well. The backstory is only a paragraph or so long with maybe another paragraph before the dungeon starts. That first paragraph managed to introduce some great elements to fire the imagination: The Black Baron. The Trim Tumbled Towers. This is the kind of content I expect to see in a Stater work. The kind of brief statements that get your mind racing about the possibilities. Then reality sets in.

Kobold guard post. Kobold nursery. Kobold barracks. Kobold lair. Kobold rubble pile. Kobolds Kobolds Kobolds. These are not interesting encounters. These are rooms stuffed full of monsters and an excess of mundane detail. Oh, they have a brazier that they burn bits of wood, charcoal and dried fungus? How does that detail help me? Yes, a big flaming pile of a brazier can make combat more fun but knowing what they burn in it does not. I don’t recall the length of the entries of the kobold lair in B2/Keep but it didn’t seem like an entire boring paragraph each. This then is the central problem of the adventure: boring rooms with too many boring/extraneous details. Content needs to add to the adventure, not be something trivial to waded through. Slavish devotion to stat blocks doesn’t help much either and recalls the bad old days of 3e stat blocks. The rooms here, full of kobolds, hobgobglins, necromancers and the undead, seem static. There’s not much in the way of interaction between the various groups. Signs of a battle, or some slaves, are the extent of the faction here play. That’s too bad, it would seem to be an environment tailor-made to run other interesting things in. Bugbear leaders and vile witches and cowardly toady’s … all just fodder for the sword with all of their promise lost.

There are some high points here and there. A submerged door. Jewels in the wall that sprout water when pried loose. There are more that almost good. A mad druid with giant bat buddy or a ghoul hiding behind an ornamental wall sigil, waiting to be freed by grave robbers. Ramping back of the boring bullshit descriptions and maybe offering a little more in the ‘exciting’ category would have turned these in to something cool. Maybe the mad druid rides around on his giant bat overhead throwing piles of shit at the party. Or the party can CLEARLY hear AND smell the ghoul behind the solid silver seal … how to get the loot without getting eaten? Short little sentences that convey action or the promise of, instead of endless descriptions of trivial detail.

This is a decent enough dungeoncrawl, with 31 or so rooms in it and a good-enough map. If I was desperate for content I’d gladly turn to this instead of the vast majority of the muck I review. What it’s NOT is a good representation of the type of content Stater is known for (or maybe “that I’ve built him up to be in my own mind.”) I’m gonna give it a solid AVERAGE grade … which means it’s better than 90% of the crap published but not good enough for me to hang on to or be excited about running.

by Keane Peterson
Design Mechanism
Runequest 6

This is the free sample/introductory adventure from the the Book of Quests. It has the characters acting as caravan guards. It’s clearly padded beyond all reasonableness and commits the original sin: being boring. Especially vile in this case since it’s meant to get people excited about the product AND serve as the kick-off for the other adventures in the Book of Quests.

I understand that Runequest is not D&D. That does not excuse this adventure. In it’s 24 pages only about six contain the meat of the adventure and about two and a hal or those are maps or illustrations. The first 13 or so pages of this are all background and bullshit exposition text that details, extensively, some of the most boring encounters ever published. Skill check to see a deer crossing the road! Locale check to spot tasty herbs for the dinner pot that night! Perception check … to see that there NO bandits on the road. Seriously? Oh no! A rockslide! Better roll the dice a meaningless number of times to clear the road for the wagons! Come one. Seriously? And four or five paragraphs for that shit? Over a third of a page? Another half page for wolves at night … that never attack. They just hang around. This nonsense goes on and on and on. Bullshit skill rolls and MOUNTAINS and MOUNTAINS of text surrounding them. It’s not that all of the encounters are bad, it’s just that FAR too much space is devoted to lame ones. There ARE a couple of decent encounters scattered about. A bitchy soothsayer that a small village is mildly afraid of. A drunken pig hefting contest. A young girl that wants to run away from her fiancé. Those are all decent little items. Which, once again, take up FAR too much space in the product. None of these deserve more than a paragraph but instead they get at least a half page each.

The real adventure takes place in a village the caravan passes through. Everyone in it has been slaughtered. Bloodily. What SHOULD follow is a tense night with a killer creature stalking through town. And then its barbarian handlers stalking through town, trying to collect the creature. And then a showdown with the barbarians at the Old Stone Bridge or at their camp. But there’s almost not detail or advice given for this section of the adventure. The caravan people are not detailed, so they don’t have personalities, so the players don’t care about them and they have no good reasons to wander off (to get killed) or react to the barbarians. There is a good paragraph or two that does a great job conveying the carnage of the village. But the village proper has almost no detail at all and it’s supposed to be the site of the main action. Everything is VERY loose, except when meaningless detail is endlessly described. And yet this is supposed to be an Alien-like portion, at night, with a killer stalking the caravan folk and characters. It seems all very story-gamer/scene based to me, rather than being a sandbox environment for having an adventure. In fact, it’s not clear to me at all why the characters would follow the barbarians back to their camp for the big showdown, especially with SO many barbarians present.

The NPC’s here are not developed enough, the village and it’s environs are not detailed enough. The whole barbarian thing is a mess, although it looks like it’s a lead in to the next adventure. I can’t imagine why anyone thought it was good idea for this to be the free sample.

Clearly, paid by the word.

by Clint Elliott
Black Wyvern Press
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-3

The borderland has for over a thousand years marked the northernmost progress of human civilization. The border is not a line marked on a map but a tide advancing and receding. The Borderland is the tidal plane between high and low tide claimed by both wilderness and civilization but held for long by neither.

A goblin lair in a small region that also includes numerous bandits, an evil temple, and werewolves, nagas, and other beasties. It starts strong but peters out as it reaches the main area: the goblins. There are large numbers of enemies, which I generally like, but the main lair is too simplistic and the subplots too few for a sustainable regional adventure.

The Borderlands! A place full of adventure and fortune! And bandits. LOTS of bandits. This module describes a small outpost and the a few locales around the outpost, along with a couple of events. The events are quite loose and the best part. Things start off with the group witnessing the end of a bandit attack on a wagon train. This is followed up with a patrol in the woods, a bandit camp with 35 or so guys in it, and a hostage selling expedition. All of this happens in just a single page. Great! As the page count implies, this section is really loose. That’s not a bad thing, in fact I prefer that to ten pages of text about it. What it could use though is just a little more detail. A rough map of the camp, or perhaps a couple of sentences about personalities and factions in the camp would have done wonders for this section. I LOVE seeing large numbers of bandits. The entire situation can be like a puzzle that the party has to figure out. How do we get in to camp? What are we looking for? Can be bribe someone? Can we join? Those are the moments that role-playing was built for. The set-up here emphasizes fighting and shadowing a little too much, as is to be expected with the lack of detail.

From here the adventure may lead to an old temple with evil priests. This place is cRa CrA! Death trap in the first hallway, Spirit Naga, 4 HD priests, potions of human control … This is CLEARLY at the upper end of of “Levels 1-3” scale. What’s interesting here is that there’s nothing interesting here. 🙂 “The priests robes are trimmed in red.” Uh … ok. “The chests are full of clothes and odds & ends.” The rooms are full of mundane descriptions of things that don’t really add anything to the adventure. Further, they act to disguise the parts that ARE interesting. Doors covered in liquid darkness. “The entry to this room is a sturdy iron valve heavily corroded.” Those are great details! A room echoing with the screams of sacrifice victims. Skeletons hanging from the ceiling in chains who break their bonds to attack. All very nice! But it’s buried in the mundane and there’s not enough of it. It’s also not really presented in any way other than a slaughter-fest. It’s assumed the party has followed bandits here and then attacks. But the EHP here should have motivations and goals and sub-plots of his own. None of that is really present and thus a great opportunity is lost.

This style continues through the outpost description. There’s an emphasis on the trivial rather than the interactions, goals, and sub-plots of the people at the outpost. The various buildings and people end up just looking like another monster key instead of a living place that exists outside of the characters. That’s too bad, and it blunts the effectiveness of the central point of the outpost: to be raided by monsters. You see, the outpost and it’s outlying farms are raided by a large group of goblinoids. There is some expectation that the party will help, but they don’t really have any reason to go running out in to the night. Ok, they do. It’s “This is the D&D adventure we’re playing tonight. Do it or we don’t play D&D.” That’s a pretty crappy reason. If the party gave a shit about the townsfolk or farmers that are getting raided then things might turn out different … and I’m using a pretty loose definition of “gave a shit.” There’s just not much in the way of interaction or DM direction for running the central hook of the module, the humanoid raid. The token room descriptions just don’t help at all and theres no advice. Contrast this to the similar situation in the C&C ‘I’ series or the Ironwood Gorge module. These provide advice and a general outline for a raid and how the humanoids and townsfolk may react, and give many more reasons for the party to interact with the townfolk.

The final dungeon is even more disappointing. It’s supposed to be an old complex but instead it’s tailor made for the occupants. It’s just a star-type design with the hallways holding rooms that hold goblins. There must be five of six of these hallways, each with four or so rooms attached, each room holding goblins of a certain war band. There’s the jail, and the kitchen/great hall and the bad guys rooms and that’s it. The rooms descriptions are essentially a waste since they all have the same things in them and add nothing to the adventure. “This barracks room appears to be the same as the others. The goblins are lounging.” Joy. Page after page after page of the same goblin stats, repeated, and room after room of goblin. There must be a couple of hundred in here, which is nice, but man there needs to be some variety in the encounters, or some advice on how the goblins react to intruders. The most interesting encounter here is the jail cell with the dead body with rot grubs … this is not a collection of whimsy and the fantastic, it’s a grind.

by R. Lawrence Blake
Prime Requisite Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 5-7

An evil warlord, facing betrayal from his own family, swore revenge with his dying breath. Ten years later, his vengeance has come to pass with the murder of one and the promise of more death to follow. Has the warlord raised from a decade of unrest to fulfill his bloodthirsty oath? Can the characters stop him before more fall prey to his vengeance?

This is a small fourteen room tomb adventure, meaning that it’s fairly linear with a lot of “set up” puzzle-like situations. I suppose it’s fair to drop something like this in a hex crawl, but even saying that makes my soul cry. No, that’s not fair. Let me change it to: This makes my soul cry.

While looking this adventure over I was thinking about another adventure and comparing this one to that. This adventure is eighteen pages long. It has fourteen rooms. Spawning Grounds of the Crab-Men is twelve pages long with 53 rooms. Spawning Grounds has multiple areas, a very non-linear design, several factions, and is stuffed full of weird ass non-traditional/non-book creatures and items. This adventure is mostly linear and full of book creatures/items and has a “correct” way to finish it. I especially don’t like that last part. “Go fetch the X and put it in to the Y and then teleport to the Z but only if you first explored every room in the tomb.” Contrast that with a wide open area in which the party can use their powers and abilities to approach the “problem” in any way they choose. One is a snooze fest that emphasizes combat and not going off the rails while the other emphasizes creative play and engagement by the players. It doesn’t help that this is a tomb adventure and those almost ALWAYS come across to me as adversarial.

Bad die died ten ago, cursing his nephew with his final breath. Good nephew dies with a note left saying “Now my curse is almost fulfilled.” Townsfolk freak and send the players on a mission to see if the bad guy is actually dead. Bad guys tomb is just outside of town but in spite of its proximity and the rumors of the treasure horde within, it was never been looted. or Even attempted to be looted. Whatever. It’s lame. Know what’s lamer? There’s a petty thief in town WHO’S SEVENTH LEVEL who set the whole thing up so he could steal the parties loot. He’s armed with boots of stealth and a ring of invisibility and a potion of gaseous form. Why even put this shit in? Why not just state “he steals the party blind at the end of the adventure”? If you’re going to throw in some implausible shit then just go for it. It’s easier to suspend disbelief. “He’s got a medallion of blocking thoughts and non-detect alignment and fuck the players over and blah blah blah” How many times does this come up in published adventures? It’s usually some sign that the designer is a tool who can’t come up with a better reason for the bad guy or is trying to force some outcome. If you have to resort to this shit then there’s a problem with your adventure. Fix the problem and not the symptom.

Ok, on to the tomb. The illustrations makes it seem like it’s above ground. I’m on a ‘burn it down’ kick lately, so why not just burn the tomb down and then sift through the ashes? Seems easier. Or maybe just tear down the walls? “Uh, sure, I could walk through the trapped door of certain death … or we could use those horses to pull down the wall.” The rooms all generally have a trap and monster in them and sometimes some McGuffin you need to advance to the next part of the tomb. The red stone. The two keys. The black raven that crows at midnight. Whatever. It’s a pretty generic tomb with uninteresting room descriptions. The creatures range from oozes to fire salamanders to bone golems and animated statues. The usual mix of stuff that this is crammed in to a tomb that’s supposed to be abandoned and uninhabited. As a special treat the room dimensions are repeated in each room. Joy. It’s hard for to even get excited about things I SHOULD like, such as a giant corpse blocking a hallway that’s full of rot grubs. Or the OBVIOUS trapped rope in a different room. It’s interesting that the two things I like the most are the most non-generic of the encounters. The rest are lame. A room full of fire with a fire salamander. Oooohhh!!!! A Mirror of Cloning/Opposition. Wow, someone thought to put one of those in a tomb. Cool.

I should be more objective. The adventure does do something consistently that more adventures should do: it telegraphs what is about to happen. In most of the rooms you KNOW what is going to happen to you. That builds a certain type of anticipation in the players and that’s a very good thing. One of the rooms has a stairway going down with a door at the end. At the top of the stairs is a giant boulder floating above the stairs. It’s obvious what’s about to happen here. In fact, the boulder probably makes it MORE likely that the party will attempt the door. Which is more fun. Another example is the front door to the tomb. As you raise a portcullis a state inside turns a quarter turn with a loud *CLICK* the end. Or a room with a desk in it and a dead guy sitting at it, gesturing to you. This will ALL cause the party to hurriedly conspire on what to do and create one of those bizarre PC plans that generally ends in hilarity. What’s more fun, a pit trap that open under you for 1d6 or a pit trap that can be seen and forces to party to screw around for a bit trying to get over it?

Not a man of this adventure. Not a fan of these sorts of adventures even though I like the way the rooms were obvious. I do want to mention one other neato-thing though: the Rope of Spiders. It’s cursed, when you climb it the bottom begins to transform in to hundreds of little spiders that climb the rope after you. Ewwwww!! Nice one!