tenfootpole.org

by R. Lawrence Blake
Prime Requisite Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 4-6

An open sinkhole under a sacred temple has revealed a catacomb of twisted dark caverns. Vicious creatures from below raided the temple of its most precious possessions, the magical Staves of Maurath.

Now the staves must be found, and an open call has been issued for a group of powerful adventurers to explore the caverns and find the Lost Staves of Maurath. However, it is believed that the caverns may echo the deadly secret of an ancient and evil burial chamber.

This is a mundane little adventure through a small temple and the caverns underneath. It’s set up to a fetch quest, combatting humanoids, undead, and clerics. It has little to recommend it, being a small bland affair.

Good temple built on evil burial grounds. Two artifact-level staves placed in temple. Temple overrun by evil dudes. Suckers recruited to recover staves and temple treasury. Why would I do this? Why would I, as a PC, not just take the staves and the treasury? “If I return the treasury you’ll give me a small reward and if I don’t return the treasury I get to keep all of the cash? Hmmmm … decisions, decisions. And If I don’t return the treasury I might as well keep the Staff/artifact … well .. that decides it then! I mean, what are the townsfolk and temple followers going to do? They couldn’t get their shit back in the first place and that’s from the gang we just killed!” These types of adventures ALWAYS end up sounding better if I replace “adventurer” with “mercenary.” Go watch “The Last Valley” and tell me that’s not a MUCH better relationship with the town!

Area one is the temple. This is a boring old affair stuffed full of goblins, bugbears and an ogre. Perhaps the only interesting thing here is the giant hole in the sanctuary floor and the fact that the temple is boarded up from the outside in order to keep the monsters in. Pulling off those boards will alert the humanoids, of course, and so the major bright spot in the adventure is: how do we get in without alerting everyone? Or, you could just burn it down. If it’s good enough for Nosnra then it’s good enough for these louts. In all there are about a dozen rooms in the temple, most of which just have a monster in them, although they do try and coordinate attacks.

The second area is the caverns down below. It has maybe twelve rooms in a simple branching design. Downstairs are… alerted guards! A big deal is made of undead but there’s only room with some in it, although killing humanoids in some of the rooms might cause them to reanimate. That’s an interesting little feature and might be cool if the humanoids rooms consisted of something other than “4 bugbear guards.” or “4 goblins with a dire wolf.” That’s a problem with the adventure in many places: the encounter is the monster and nothing more. The rooms descriptions are “4 bugbears” or something like that. That’s not interesting. In any way. That’s some kind of bullshit filler. No one is digging through this adventure thinking “gee, I hope its full of bullshit filler! I could really use some of that in my game.” There may be a place for this kind of stuff in a D&D adventure but not in a published adventure, and especially not in one this small. I’m looking at a supplement because I want something to inspire me and help me run a good game. Not for a room that says “4 bugbears.”

There’s just not much here to be interesting. There are a group of friendly evil clerics who would like you to go get their black jewel back for them (its the thing reanimating people in the dungeon.) That could be kind of neat. But then the adventure spoils it by having them attack once the jewel is returned. That’s boring. It would be much cool if they were just friendly evil death clerics and the party could interact with them over and over n the campaign, until maybe a LONG time away when the PARTY is motivated to kill them and the clerics act betrayed by the PC”s. That would be cool. The whole standard “help me then I betray you” thing is boring and is EXACTLY the reason PC’s never fall for it: it ALWAYS happens. B O R I N G.

There are three interesting magic items in the adventure and a whole host of boring treasure and magic items. The artifact staff heals the shit out of everyone when its not curing everything in the book. It has no downside and no backstory to go with it, unlike the artifacts in the DMG 1E. It is lame and overpowered. The Black Jewel is more interesting since it can raise and/or control a limited number of undead at once. That could make for some cool roleplaying. There’s also an evil holy symbol, in the form of a severed and decorated hand, that can help turn undead by clerics and non-clerics alike. That also is a pretty nifty item to find in the dungeon and bling out your PC with.

Return this shit, and all the treasure, to the town? Yeahhhh, right! Good one Wayne!

by Gabor Lux
Freely Distributed by … Judges Guild?
d20 or Castles & Crusades
Levels 6-9

This is an adventure is a secluded valley. It presents a place for the party to wander around in, along with a kind of villain that serves as a kind of “boss fight” to entire valley setting. It’s got a great weird vibe with a lot of the ‘unusual’ mechanics and features that I love so much. ‘The Garden’ proper is lacking a bit in actually being a garden, but man the bad guy who lives there is well done in his villainy and has some nice guardians/creatures in his garden.

I apologize in advance for the crappy review. Real life has me in a slump but the only way to get out is to start back up again. I’m gonna use an older Melan thing to get back in the groove again. Gabor Lux deserves more exposure, it’s just too bad it has to be by me today. One day I need to do a compendium review of his Islands from the various mags he’s published in. Hmm, let me go put that on my list.

The adventure setting starts with about a page of background. I can’t fault that much in a 44-page adventure but what struck me about it was that it was mostly meaningless. It did very little to add to the story of the valley or help me, as a DM, run it. In contrast, the hooks and rumors, taking up about another full page, do an excellent job. There’s a great variety in both the hooks and rumors, which I love to see. Rival groups, merchants wanting to plunder the garden, and Ye Old Disappearing Mentor make up the hooks. There’s a kind of non-generic continuity thing suggested by the first two, especially the rival parties thing, which any decent DM should be able to grab on to and expand to a whole lot of fun. The rumors, twelve or so, are a decent bunch of crazy ass shit with some decent detail/imagery to them. There’s enough to work with in the descriptions to easily work them in well to a local area or a PC encounters.

The garden only makes up one part of the valley it resides in and a decent amount of the adventure is devoted to the valley setting. Rather, to the encounters in the valley. There are a number of sites scattered about, 20 or so, with the chief threat being some degenerate ape-men. There are a couple of beasts and plants to worry about, as well as a tribe of sprites. The other major foe in the non-garden section is an ogre-mage. This section of the adventure has a decent variety and some interesting encounters. There are ruins and caves and lost towers and foul beasts in ancient temples. The imagery here is pretty decent but I had frequent problems in two areas. The first is petty: the large font a larger margins combined with the long text blocks make everything run together. This make digging through the adventure more like a chore than discovery of wonder. That’s too bad because there IS a great deal of wonderful things to discover, buried in there. Secondly, the various groups within the valley don’t really seem to interact much. Except for the Ogre and the Sprites they seem to exist in a vacuum. That’s really too bad. I don’t really expect the apes and deep ones to ally with the party, but examples of internecine warfare or predator/prey stuff could have been interesting, as could EVERYONE in the valley being terrified of big al-As. In fact, that’s really a third criticism. al-As is one of the best bat-shit crazy villains I’ve seen. Everyone talks about reprobates and insane spellcasters but this guy actually lives up to his rep. What rep? you ask? Well, that’s a good point: he ain’t got a rep yet. Here we have a great mad sorcorer-type dude who has done some fuck-ed up things to people, but there’s very little to no build-up to him. If there had been some in the valley akin to what’s in the Garden then the players would be quaking tin their boots on their way to visit him. The designer has really come up with some great ‘punishments’ for the previous parties he’s caught, punishments that are safe for work, but the group will only experience them once they hit the garden proper. The garden also lacks a certain ‘garden’ quality. There are a lot of these weird gardens in modules and I’ve seen very few done well. The garden level of S3 did it ok, and the color map of Plantmaster did a decent job of conveying the garden, but otherwise gardens usually don’t end up being that cool. I just didn’t get the garden feel in this one. Gabor does a GREAT job of filling the garden with great creatures, plants and Peacoctrices and the like, but it just doesn’t ‘feel’ like a garden to me. Hmmm, maybe because my first garden was S3 and that’s the only thing I recognize now? I don’t know.

I spent a lot of time bitching above, more than I should have probably. This is a good adventure with a lot of potential. A little more work could turn it in to a GREAT adventure. I seldom do a very good jorb (Strong Bad reference!) communicating the good parts of an adventure and I don’t think I’m doing a good job here either. The valley set up is a good one with a lot of interesting features sticking out to entice players to them. Ruined temple on a hill? Murder Hobo’s …. HO! The encounters, while somewhat lengthy, have some good details and imagery in them. Locked door? Get a smith to make a new key. Pentagrams to depress, fruit to eat, and just a ton of weird shit to mess with. Weird metal rods? Let’s forge them in to magic weapons! Gabor does a decent job imbuing old-school in to something stat’d out with 3.5. Unique monsters that didn’t get come out of some book, and weird unique powers/abilities tacked on to things. Way back when I started reviewing I went through a LARGE batch of products that were clearly written for 3.5 and ten converted to an older system by simply swapping out stats, etc. None of the charm of the older products was present and thus the conversions missed the point of older play styles. This is almost the opposite. It’s like he’s taken one of the old school sandboxes from Judges Guild and restated it for 3.5, expanding the terseness of the JG original. He’s included a few good unique magic items, like the a ring of rainbow bridges (cool!) but there’s also a lot of the boring old +1 plate, +2 bastard sword stuff. Bad Hungarian! As punishment you must spend 10 years pondering this adventure and how it could be improved!

Don’t let me turn you off to this with my bitching above. It’s worth having, expanding on, and using.

Finally, I come to the real reason for this review. When you have your life-long and greatest dream crushed, get kittens. Introducing: Prince Voltan and Prince Barin! They LUV sinking their claws in to the italian sofa.

by John M. Stater
Knockspell Magazine
Swords 7 Wizardry
Level … 4?

This is a small “dungeoncrawl” through the catacombs under a major city. There are 14 or so encounters and a dozen or so unkeyed empty rooms. There’s an eclectic mix of encounter types that are not so much gonzo as their “weird fiction” of the Swords & Sorcery type. It’s a decent little crawl, though short.

There’s no real explanation or goal provided in the adventure background, a refreshingly small two paragraphs. I’m generally fine with that. Most backgrounds tend to be some overwrought nonsense full of crap that players have to strain to give a shit about. Someplace like this removes all of that and just presents the place as it is. I can drop in rumors of the seven sacred rings of Venduzulla or put it behind the trapdoor in the bars cellar. The designer doesn’t have to come up with some BS pretext and I don’t have to sigh when reading it. It’s a WIN-WIN.

Wandering monsters come from your book of choice and the map is … I don’t know. It LOOKS like the map is moderately complex but I’m not sure that’s the case. The complexity of map design that allows for more interesting play, varied terrain, interesting loops, etc, just doesn’t seem to be there. There’s also one of those “secret doors in the middle of nowhere” that I find frustrating. They may be cool at higher levels of play, where spells impact them, but at lower levels they might as well not exist; the party will never search the random 10′ section of wall in an otherwise meaningless corridor.

The encounters are an almost random assortment of weird things one might find in a dungeon. There’s “The Eye of Moloch”, a weak laser beam. There are trapped tombs with weird things in them and smugglers with scary traps to frighten off people. The smugglers have a captive girl. She’s “terribly bright and brave.” She also carries typhus. Oh, Stater! You’re a man after my heart! Oh, how about a swarm of emerald eyes behind a swirling maroon & black curtain of murky light! They swarm people and and can do level drains! ‘killing’ them causes them to fall to the ground as spherical emeralds! Cool! How about a a monster that actually a humanoid shaped hole in reality, complete with stars and galaxies displayed? If you kill him and reach inside you get an ioun stone. Cool! That’s the kind of game I want. One with wonder and whimsy and freaky deaky shit . The mundane treasure is great: silver ingots, a golden heart, soapstone figurines and the like. The magical treasure is lamer. +1 sling stones, an ioun stone and a wand of detect magic are not the droids I was looking for.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/94955/Knockspell-6?affiliate_id=1892600

by Jason Sholtis
Knockspell Magazine
Swords & Wizardry
Level 1

This is an adventure by Jason Sholtis. That’s all you need to know. End of Review.

What? You want more?! Geeezzz… I already said it was by Mr. Dungeon Dozen, my FAVORITE blog on the net. Hmmm, it occurs to me that my Favorites generally get ignored on my review blog. That’s too bad. People like Sham, Melan, and Jason have a shit-ton of talent and I should review more of their stuff. Anyway, back to this one by Jason.

The very first two words of this adventure are “Gonzo Alert!”, and gonzo it is indeed, although somewhat less than ASE1 and more weird than ASE1. It’s an adventure in a small section of the Mythic Underworld featuring super-deadly monsters, rival parties, and a metric ton of weird and unique stuff. Exactly what you would expect from the guy who writes Dungeon Dozen.

There’s a page and a half of background material presented. Wonderful background material full of things like The Null-Rod and The Worm Sultan. It boils down to the Prince stealing a McGuffin and the party being after it/him. The usual issues with a plotline like this are addressed: the Captain was sent after him with a sizable warband. Which attracted too much attention and were slaughtered, according to the one half-insane survivor right “before rescinding his citizenship and disappearing in to the night.” Now THAT’S something to work with! It provides an excellent picture of the survivors state AND does a great job communicating the danger of the mission to the party. The adventure is meant to be a one-shot so we can ignore the usual list of issues I have with parties being sent on missions. It’s also possible that the story has slipped out and the party hears of it in a tavern and seek the riches on their own … which is a great way to introduce this without the straightjacket of the mission. There is a GREAT selection of NPC hirelings offered. They have exactly one line of flavor text each and that one line does wonders for a DM wanting to run them and give them character. Chuthok (another ex-Zao warrior, mystified by much in the world outside of the scope of his tribal culture): Phlonx (son of a local settler, nervous and likely to bolt under duress): Q’tang (a steady bowman currently dedicated to staying drunk when off duty): Oothu (brave and loyal expatriate warrior of the Zao people, a tribe of hill barbarians): That is a GREAT batch of guys to take on an adventure. There’s more enough in those four sentences to perk up any lull time in the dungeon. That is the perfect amount and type of detail needed.

What follows this introduction is a bit strange. Seven and a half pages of text describing the environment of the dungeon and other referee notes. The first page or so is the actually background information. Some of it is advice, some of it is an explanation of the Mythic Underworld, some details about the McGuffin, some advice about character deaths and so on. It’s full of good advice but much of it feels extraneous to me. Perhaps as an introductory adventure to S&W style it’s appropriate. There’s more good stuff here, a variety of petty gods in Sholtis S&W style. The invisible giant that eats soldiers and evidentially poops out undead is a nice touch, as is the floating glowing giant ball of snakes. This ain’t 2E Dorothy. The dungeon entrance proper is in a cavern at the base of a tall cliff, with a hole in the ground and an iron ladder descending 1000 feet. This is common in Mythic Underworld settings. The barrier to be crossed from the real world to the dungeon is a clear one, there’s no mistaking it at all and every PLAYER knows adventure is RIGHT THERE.

The rest of the background is devoted to random encounters, random events, and competing adventuring parties. Sudden blackouts, weird whirlwinds, seismic gas, cave lightning and the Procession of Skulls compete to freak out the players. This, alone, makes the adventure. Again, THIS IS A DIFFERENT PLACE is clearly communicated. These are all great encounters, especially the skulls. But wait, that’s not all! There’s also the competing parties! How about Professor Zabon Gormontine, the Robot Master? He’s got a death ray and a couple of terminator-like robots with him. And is from 3000 years in the future. And his goal is the total destruction of all organic life. Uh … I said Gonzo, right? There’s also Dr. Thontorius, the bear man. He’s also from the future. He was the professors office-mate. And then there’s Solgum the Resplendent, an arch-mage sorcerer on the rise, along with his newt-men. Oh, and the snake-thingy petty-god, Thrantrix the Ineffable, who may recruit the party to it’s cause. That’s a lot. But that’s not even the wandering monsters! Mind-bats, fibre-bomb beetles, flaming hounds, martian ape, Hrrk and Krrg, Twin Princes of the Magmen! Psychotic Cyclops, Chaos flies hauling carrion! Did you go buy Knockspell #5 yet? No? You’re an idiot. This is one is GREAT and I haven’t even gotten to the encounters yet!

How about some of those encounters, eh? How about the googolpede, a seemingly endless giant centipede coming out of a hole in one wall and going in to another across the tunnel. Gotta jump it to get by! Or maybe you’d be interested in the trail of dead underworld horrors left by the Prince and the Captains warband? You SHOULD be following those. I especially like the maggots crawling the skin and the inrush of giant centipedes to feed on them if the adventurers free the maggots from one of the corpses. Sweet! Anyone want to tranport to the future and deal with the paparazzi in the broom closet of the office the Professor and Dr left from? Or explore a space ship? Or maybe have a friendly chat with two fungus-men gossiping with their Mantis-Devil buddy? With only 15 encounters this place is packed FULL of stuff to mess with and explore. It’s insane how much is packed in to here. The actual adventure shouldn’t be too hard as long as the party remembers what they are in the dungeon for. There’s a LOT of 20 HD dudes running around … messing with them is a 1-way ticket to the Procession of Skulls. But they are really just a big red button/trap. Everyone knows you shouldn’t mess with that stuff and since they aren’t immediately hostile they are more like traps than combat encounters.

The monsters are, as previously described, almost all unique. Those guys that memorize the monster manual are going to have their heads explore. I LOVE new monsters, especially in a setting like this, since they do a great job further communicating the unknown and bizarre nature of the environment the party is in. The magic items, and the place is thick with them, are a great disappointment. +2 battleaxe. +1 chainmail. +2 shield. Ug. This is one of the few areas in which the adventure could be improved. Tossing in normal magic items after all the group has seen is SUCH a let down. I’m not sure what happened here … it’s almost like they were thrown in as an afterthought.

This is available on DriveThru. AND there’s another, standalone version as well, that augments and expands what’s presented in the Knockspell version.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/88793/Knockspell-5?affiliate_id=1892600

by Bill Silvey
Knockspell Magazine
0/1e, S&W
Levels 7-9

This seems like ‘just another lair assault’ adventure but has some interesting possibilities if work were put in to it. And if you can ignore the bizarre way the lair was populated.Uh … so … if you can take the core concept and work up a different implementation then you could have something decent to play.

The local village priests have converted to a new god that hangs out in a temple ruin nearby. The new god demands tribute and human sacrifices (but the priests are’t evil … uh, yeah, right …) Most of the villagers are ok with this, such is the price of freedom! What the FUCK is wrong with villagers these days? They don’t move? No, far fucking better to hand over your kids as human sacrifices than run? There’s some throw-away text about the town militia ejecting meddlers from the town. Here lies the central issue with the adventure. The town is actually a decent little set up but it needs to be expanded on. Converted priests, dejected villagers, villagers who have hired the mercenaries, people hiding their kids, abandoning town, this is all great stuff, it just needs to be expanded on with some personalities and more descriptive faction write up. Without it then the DM has ALL of the work to create it. That’s not exactly what I’m looking for in an adventure.

The actual adventure is … I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like someone took a random map off of the internet and took an adventure and put it on the map. The map is just a branching corridor design. Rooms and hallways branch off of other hallways and rooms. That means there is only one way to get to the Mountain God. And it’s behind a concealed door. WHich has a room with Doppleganger invaders. Beyond which are three submerged rooms full of green slime. Behind which is a guard room with four giants. There’s a secret door in that room that they use to get to their sleeping chambers. Past which is the Mountain King, another giant. That seems like a pretty rough gauntlet to run, even for giants. That’s the bizarre part and the seemingly random part. Other places are kind of like that also. The temple has a pet owl bear, but to get to it to feed the guards have to go past a mean troll not aligned with the temple. Huh? Guards and guys live behind very secret doors … it just makes no sense in many places.

The ideas behind some of the encounters are not that bad. You’ve got human bandits who are now guards. You’ve got orc guards. You’ve got ogres. You’ve got guard captains. You’ve got minor priests and major priests. Most of them some some comment about them. The former bandits are there for loot. Some of the ogres don’t like it here. Some of them do. The whole place is just screaming out for a little more details and some factions. Expand the personalities JUST a bit and expand the storyline just a bit as well: set them up as raiders and slowly taing over a couple of villagers and throw in a raid or two for the party to experience and get a taste of the factions and some foreshadowing of the main villains. That would all be pretty cool. But it ain’t here. Parts of the complex have some decent encounters. A statue that kills/gives wishes is nice, as is the sunken temple area. But there’s not enough weird stuff to save it and the treasure, both mundane and magic, is pretty boring standard affairs. “3 gems worth 1500go each” and the like.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/88793/Knockspell-5?affiliate_id=1892600

by Jeffrey P. Talanian
Knockspell Magazine
AS&S
Levels 1-3

Fair Warning: Talanian has a writing & DM style that annoys the hell out of me. He also let me out of my Kickstarter pledge for AS&S, so this is more a case of clashing style preferences than “he’s a jerk.” (Besides, it should be obvious by now that _I’M_ the jerk in any pairing that includes me.) I should also mention that I played this adventure at GaryCon and left halfway through because I way having a miserable time. (See Above.)

Oh boy, we get to clean the basemen out of giant rats! How exciting! Maybe there’s a way to make this cool. Maybe this adventure does it. Either way “giant rats in the basement” is an impossibly hard sell. This one has slightly more background data than the others. You can go investigate the widow’s err … taverns, upper floor and first floor. There you’ll find … giant rats! Oh, there’s holes in the walls, and there’s a bloody crib, there’s a crate of silverware worth 100gp and there’s a whole lot of nothing that is wrapped in Talanian text. Yes, it’s only about 3/4 of a page of text, but for some reason it annoys me. It’s detail added for the sake of detail without any game impact. Thanks, but I can do that. I’m looking for inspiration to help me add that detail. These descriptions relate former uses of rooms and descriptions of the past that SERIOUSLY make me think someone would rather be a published author. I feel like I’m having a thesaurus shoved down my throat for no good reason. I feel cheated.

The basement has … Giant Rats! It also has a big fucking No-No. There’s a secret door in the basement behind which the adventure is. There’s no clue. There’s just a secret door. There’s no reason it should be there. There are no hints. It’s well hidden. Without finding it the adventure is over.

Past that secret door are … more rats! Oh, and 6 skeletons. And a 5HD rat. And wonderful flavor text like telling me that the skeletons wear capes made of homespun cloth. It’s almost like every single description has to have several modifiers in front of every noun and verb in the hopes that some of it will stick and be cool. There are two decent encounters in the basement: a demon rat and a demon skeleton. Those are nice classic endings to a giant rat adventure in the basement. Redeemed! Well, maybe not. Most of the adventure is a lame slog except for those two images.

The treasure is a weird mix of good and bad. All of that extraneous adjective/adverb insertion does an ok job with the mundane treasure at points. A golden statue of Cthulhu, or a book of sacrificial rites or a set of gowns inlaid with jewels in a constellation pattern. Not bad. The magic items though almost certainly suffer. +1 silver dagger. +1 halbred. Hey, how about some descriptive language there? There’s great non-standard effects that happen with statues and curses but that doesn’t get extended to the magic items at all; they are all book. That’s quite disappointing.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/93700/Knockspell-4?affiliate_id=1892600

by Matt Finch
Knockspell Magazine
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 2-4

Knockspell #3 is quite the little guy. Three great adventures AND a city from Gabor Lux. Sweet Issue!

I apologize in advance; I’m back from a three martini lunch. This is an adventure in a two-level wizards tower. There’s lots of weird wizard stuff to play with in the rooms. It’s not one of the designers strongest, but a sucky Ai Weiwei is still an Ai Weiwei.

Ought oh! There’s been no activity at the wizards tower for a week, since that weird earthquake … Time to loot it! Woo Hoo!

Hmmm, what to say, what to say … this little work-a-day adventure is sprinkled with two or three types of rooms. As the characters explore they will encounter rooms with weird wizard stuff and rooms with clues as to what happened in the tower. The clues are really necessary to playing the adventure, they probably just assist a bit in the finale room and provide the players ‘stuff to figure out.’ That’s not a bad thing, at all. Players LUV to figure out what is going on. They love to feel like they are getting one over on the DM and that they’ve figured out the internal logic of the adventure. Any decent party is going to come out of this adventure with a pretty good idea of what happened in the tower, and why, as well as figuring out, maybe, a way to use the tower to their advantage. This is often interwoven with the weird wizard stuff rooms and, in at least one case, an open-ended puzzle. You see, the tower is actually four level but the upper two levels are full of corrosive gas. If the players can clear it out they can explore it, or maybe take it over as their home base. Except it’s in the middle of town and clearing it out probably means flooding parts of the town with corrosive poison gas. Just the kind of stuff that encourages players to come up with crazy schemes and leads to other adventure ideas in town, from tax issues to poison gas fallout. Locating this tower in town open ALL sorts of possibilities for further play and I love to see that. It’s not just “ye old corridor that leads to the DM’s own dungeon” but the whole host of town possibilities and the fun fun fun social work that goes along with it. Levels 2-4 may be a little low to give the players a home base, but it also gives them a reason to keep looking for loot.

The weird wizard stuff is nice & weird, although sometimes … inconsistent? There are spider bots in one room with mechanical legs and bodies made up of glass globes with sloshing greenish liquid. That’s a GREAT monster, very evocative. It instantly communicates DANGER, in much the way big fangs dripping with ichor does, but somehow in more terrifying way (to me anyway.) When the adventure is doing things like that then it’s wonderful. Half stone raving lunatics with independent sides are another example of a great monster that brings to pain. Goofy lab rats with weird mutations work well also. Up against this the more mundane monsters, stone dogs and stirges, seem tame by comparison. There are pipes and gasses to play with, broken traps to scare the shit out of the layers, and a giant tentacle beast with a name right out of Iron Maiden: Gorthorog. There are alchemical vats with potions in them, and weird magical sediment., and spell books galore. There’s a nice samovar to loot, mundane good to take home, lab gear to sell, and a statue to pluck the jeweled eyes out of.

You could easily insert this in the way Death Love Doom worked its hook, but without all of the shock-value viscera of that adventure.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/88794/Knockspell-Magazine-3?affiliate_id=1892600

 

by R. Lawrence Blake
Knockspell Magazine
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 3-5

A decent little romp through a pyramid ‘labyrinth’ dungeon, complete with minotaurs. It’s got a heavy trick/trap ratio, shit that don’t make sense, and is a wonderful little place to adventure for an evening or two. It’s doesn’t have a weird or OD&D vibe but it does bring the BASIC nostalgia.

Bullshit backstory bullshit backstory bullshit backstory bullshit backstory bullshit backstory bullshit backstory bullshit backstory. There’s a giant pyramid in the wilderness with a set of stairs going up the side. Who wants to check it out? That’s all you really know about the place. The bullshit talks about wizards, keys, hybrids, blah blah blah blah. There’s a fricking giant pyramid in the wilderness with a set of stairs going up one side. THAT’S a hook. Tarvin, no self-respecting murder hobo could avoid climbing those stairs and going inside after stumbling across it while out and about. MYSTERY! IMPLIED PHAT L00T! What ho my jolly fellows; Forward! To Adventure!

The map is sufficiently complex to screw with the players. Generally two exits from rooms, dead end hallways, branching hallways, teleporters, etc. The map LOOKS like a labyrinth without looking like a FORCED labyrinth map, if that makes sense. I have no idea how that translates in to play but I’d guess it’s reasonable to assume that the players will get the labyrinth vibe. There’s a small amount of other features on the map also. Mini-pyramids, giant pits, small pits, statues, rubble, cobwebs … it helps break up the monotony of a map. I mentioned above that there are things that don’t make sense. I’m going to complain about that exactly once and then let it go. The inhabitants are a pain in the ass. Minotaur guards, dopplegangers, and shadows. WTF are they all doing living in harmony down there? How do the minotaurs get in a& out and why do the undead not kill them? Makes no sense. Ok, bitching complete. I shall now ignore it and/or place it in the ‘nostalgic charm’ category. Still, with wanderers showing up every hour with a 60% chance, there are a lot of the bastards running around the place.

The encounters are pretty much all some derivation of the classics. A giant bronze ball rolling back and forth in a hallway. A room with a sunken floor covered by fire and a small ledge around the pit, with a statue at the far end. A pit with a jeweled scepter in it; pulling it causes a stone block to drop in to the pit. A room with a well in it and skeletons manacled up to a wall. CLASSICS. I LUV the classics. At nine or ten encounters to the page they provide a decent amount of detail without going totally overboard on descriptive text, which is just about how I like it. I’m not sure how to describe the feel of the place. It’s almost like a funhouse dungeon but it doesn’t go over the top the way, say, Inverness does. But there’s still a lot of strange shit all thrown together down here just because it would be fun to play through. Oh, and it’s got a torch in a sconce that, once removed, opens a secret door. BAD ASS. It’s not a joke dungeon and the actual rooms don’t feel all that forced.

The treasure is mostly plain old stuff: ring of regeneration, 10 pieces of jewelry worth 100gp each, wand of cold, etc. All book, all boring, all generic. I like my treasure with more descriptions and more non-standard. This is the most disappointing part of the adventure for me. Instead of boring old coinage there could have been small bull-headed idols made of ivory and gold, or maybe even some kind of … Golden Calf? That would have been good for a laugh. If I found a golden calf in D&D I’d mount it on top of my house and place guards around it to show it off. Now THAT would have been cool treasure. Mosaics of jewels on the walls, or maybe silver plate to salvage, all of that would have been cool. Similarly, portions that grow minotaur horns, or horns of minotaur summoning, or iffy-phalus idols, those could have been cool magic items. Instead we get “1 gem worth 150gp” and “wand of cold.” SAD FACE

I like the encounters here. Maybe it’s just nostalgia or charm, but this seems like a great little thing to pull out and just play D&D.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/88794/Knockspell-Magazine-3?affiliate_id=1892600