tenfootpole.org

by Joseph Pallai
Freely Distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 12-14

It’s the Tomb of Horrors. Do you like the Tomb of Horrors? If you do then you’ll like this. If you think the Tomb is a pain in the ass and not much fun then you won’t like this. Oh, and the intro states that S1 is Gygax’s masterpiece. BZZZZ. Thanks for playing.

This Tomb is meant to be played prior to the real one. It has several clues to the location of the real Tomb of Horrors and some misleading encounters that will help the party get the full Tomb of Horrors experiences once they make it there. For example, there’s a green devil face whose mouth can be climbed in to and searched. This would tend to encourage players to do the same in the real Tomb, to predictable results. There are several encounters like this and several themes repeated, such as the hunt for triple keys to unlock things, etc. The triple entrance seems to be favorite of Tomb of Horrors clones and it makes an appearance once again here.

I find it super interesting that Acererak would leave real treasure in his false tomb, as well as clues to his real tomb. What’s the point of that buddy? A throne set with giant expensive rubies? What, are you just tossing those out, they aren’t worth putting in your main tomb? And why do you have that Mist of Miracles in your tomb? To give robbers wishes and experience levels? I think not. Weird.

As for the rest, you know the deal. Save or Die. Touch it and take damage. Demons materialize in. Die with no save. Go blind with no save. Generic treasure. Generic magic items Generic monsters. Yeah, it’s s super deadly tomb and the room entries are long, just like in S1. Yeah, there’s a lot set pieces and a lot of stuff that has to be used in just the right way and a lot of pixel-bitching traps and secrets and the like. It’s the Tomb. That’s what the Tomb is.

Want a Tomb of Horrors? Go get this. Or The Howling Hills. Or anything by Alphonso Warden. Those all think The Tomb is a Gygax masterpiece also. If you think the Tomb of Horrors did real damage to D&D by teaching the wrong lessons, like, say, “it’s Gygax’s masterpiece!” then this ain’t for you. Or me.

(Although … using Howling Hills and this adventure just before the actual Tomb could be cool. A kind of trail with some practice runs. If you and you players are masochists.)

by Brian Wells
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is a short little assault/infiltration of a bandit lair that it set in to a cliffside. Decent loot and an attempt at a decent location differentiate this one. The mini-note map formats at the end of the adventure are in an interesting format.

Caravan attacked, bandits, daughter taken hostage .. the usual crew starts this adventure off. It is distinguished by a couple of extra lines in the descriptions to help the DM kick things off. The caravan survivors gather around a wagon and prepare for attack when the party approaches. The bandits leave people behind at their turn-off to watch their rear. Those are among the sorts of little extra details that distinguish this adventure from many others that use these same elements. Those sorts of detail are not much and they tend to be buried in a lot of extra text, but the do provide that extra bit of zip for the DM to work with.

The bandit lair is more of the same, both good and bad.The lair sits on a edge on a cliff ledge with some ruined buildings that have been recent rebuilt and refortified. A corral full of horses and livestock sits outside. An outcropping of jade is nearby in the cliffside. The ‘fort’ has arrow slits. With 24 or so defenders this is going to be a tough nut for the party to crack. I like these sorts of set ups; just a fortification with guards and some brief guard descriptions and a kind of ‘mission impossible’ base assault type feel. That’s usually the type of thing that spawns crazy PC plans that always end with major amounts of fun.

The interior rooms, about nine or so, are nothing special. There’s a great deal of text, several long paragraphs in most cases, that describes the rooms. These are generally of not much use. Just detailed descriptions of the minutia that makes up the rooms, some geographic information and a little bit of “70% chance of 1d2 bandits during the daytime” type of information. There’s little in the room descriptions to assist a DM in running an exciting or interesting room, just the minutia of everyday life.

The treasure IS interesting through. I already mentioned the jade deposit in the cliffside. The reward from the merchant for his daughter is 200# of raw silver ore. Pearl earrings, animal pelts like beaver, min and fox, bolts of fine cloth, and other trade goods abound as treasure. The magic items are not stellar; while there is a Rod of Pass Without Trace the rest of the items are just book magic: +1 swords and bows and arrows and boring old potions. I wish as much effort had gone in to the magic items as went in to the mundane treasure; it would have added wonderfully to the adventure.

The maps are interesting. There are three at the end and they contain most of the key information for the adventure. The rough notes, the key monsters stats and the like. I’m not sure if this is the ‘original adventure’ that the more detailed write up was based off of or if it’s just a play aid. Either way it is a great way to summarize the adventure for the DM and is PROBABLY the only thing a decent DM needs to run the adventure. This sort of consideration for Actual Play is something I wish more adventures would do.

by Brian Wells
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 1-3

This is a short adventure through a small haunted roadside inn. It has a couple of decent elements but devolves in to “find and figure out the one clue we need to get the treasure.” It suffers from text bloat.

While traveling as caravan guards the party hears a story one night of a nearby inn that’s haunted, and rumored to be full of coin. They can pop over during the night and explore the inn, getting back in the morning to continue their service. While the read-aloud backstory is insufferable the whole concept is a good one. You’re caravan guards/travelers and each night the other guys tell stories and the like to pass the time. One night after a particularly gruesome story one of the guards says “Don’t take my road for it; there’s the road that leads to the inn” That’s a pretty decent little set up. It’ takes a page and half to get there but the seed of it is good because it’s a classic. Telling stories, daring your buddies, and taking a detour while at work? Great pretext.

The inn has two levels, a burned down smithy, a ruined stable that a tree has fallen on, and, inexplicably, a jailers cage out front. Herein lies the second cool feature of the adventure. The boney rags in the cage rise up to reveal an undead who pleads for freedom so it can avenge its death. Woah! That’s a different sort of undead. It doesn’t just kill the party? It’s not just a mindless automaton that exists to get slaughtered? It’s actually undead for a reason and asks the group for help?! That’s a nice touch and the group that helps it will find the inn adventure just a little easier since he summons the souls of the other dead inn ghosts, those that want to be avenged. Undead dude gathering unjustly killed other undead dudes to seek vengeance? Another classic and well worth a tip of the hap. This is the sort of thing I’d love to see more of in D&D. Not just something to hack down but creatures with a motivation that the party can take advantage of. It’s a puzzle! It’s a social encounter! It’s a monster! No, it’s all three! Yeah! ANd it’s SOOOOO much more interesting than just having the undead rise up and betray the party or attack them. Where are they going? Who are they avenging? Who screwed them over? Those are the kind of mysteries that fester in the back of the players mind, their unconscious minds working to build up imagery and stories to explain them away. Score!

The rest of the adventure is a bit of a let-down, but those two beginning things are hard to follow. Just some empty inn rooms with overly-long description, a couple of carrion crawlers and some giant bats. At best the party will find a clue to a secret treasure room. That’s good, it rewards careful play and players LOVE it when they can figure something out; like the clue to find the treasure room. There’s another good bit where the skeleton/bodies on the first floor animate and attack as the players enter the cellar, the party hearing them drag themselves across the floor on the first and approaching the stairs down. That’s a nice bit of build-up.

The mundane treasure is great; trade goods, spices, tools, etc. It’s bulky, hard to haul away, and obviously worth cash. That creates the kind of complications I like. What about your job on the caravan? How are you going to haul it all away to sell? Not so much a screw job as an interesting complication. The only magic item is a simple +1 dagger. Straight out of the book but at least it glows in the dark. There’s a decent little follow-up to the adventure where the party hears of a large group of undead that attacked a certain keep and killed it’s owner before collapsing in to dust … another great reminder that the parties actions have consequences. And, parties LOVE to hear their exploits. 🙂

The inn proper can be a bit boring, and perhaps needs some fast play to move through parts of it. It’s surrounded by a surprisingly decent amount of good material

by Thulsa
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 4-6

The shimmering shaft of the tower rose frostily in the stars. In the sunlight it shone so dazzlingly that few could bear its glare, and men said it was built of silver. It was round, a slim perfect cylinder, a hundred and fifty feet in height, and its rim glittered in the starlight with the great jewels which crusted it. The tower stood among the waving exotic trees of a garden raised high above the general level of the city. Robert E. Howard: “The Tower of the Elephant”

As the blurb suggests, this is an homage to a Conan story and involves a raid on a wizards tower. A bit wordy but it mimics the style of the Conan stories well: human guards, vile sorcerers, strange beasts, all wrapped up in a tower shell. It’s best when it emulates the source material and the worst when it tries to provide detail on things missing from the Howard. But that’s a guess based on not having read the Howard story behind the adventure.

The temple district of Arenjun, the notorious City of Thieves, houses a strange tower said to have erected overnight by sorcerer Yara. Three hundred years old and possessor of the fabled Heart of the Elephant jewel, no thief dares an attempt to steal it. If that sound cool it should. It’s from a Howard story and so forms the basis of our hobby; very close to the platonic forms of D&D. Therein is the strength and weakness of this adventure. When true to Howard it has some VERY inspiring language attached to it. When going beyond that it is lacking. Further, it’s not clear to me that the iconic imagery can be communicated to the players and bring them in to the fold.

There’s just a tower in a named city; the background here is very spartan. I suspect that reading the story would help some but you do get enough of a sense of the city: its every city in every Conan story you’ve ever seen ripped off, from the books to the movies to every Conan adventure and RPG. There’s a rumor table with seven entries that bring the Conan also: Even the king of Zamora fears Yara’s power. The king drinks heavily to dampen his fears. Together the rumors build up a fearsome reputation; I sincerely hope that any group of players in this adventure hang out A LOT in taverns. The rumors, taken as a whole, are just too good to leave sitting in the adventure.

The tower is surrounded by a double wall with human guards during the day and lions at night patrolling the grounds. SILENT lions at that. That’s pretty cool; I always dig human-centric adventurers and tossing in some lions only makes the Conan elements seem to spring to life more. The maps are just a a tower map, a couple of stairs on each level and a balcony that can be the target of a grappling hook are the extent of the clever mapping. The interior descriptions range from very good mimicry of Howard to poor padding. “The stairs lead down to 5-1” or “the stairs lead up to 3-2” is not inspiring text. Nor is a listing of the contents the mundane things in the armory. Bronze doors, floors of lapis and green forgotten doors of bronze do much better job of communicating the flavor.There’s a spider-god temple and a strange elephant man, the mad sorcerer and a blobish zombie to temper the mundane and weird it up. These elements al feel right at home; presumably because they were in the Howard story.

What’s not at home at the bullshit D&D elements. IE: Deviations from the Howard are weaker elements. Giving all the human guards +3 leather and magic swords helps the designer explain, mechanically, why they have a lower AC. It’s also a huge pain in the ass to deal with the consequences, hard to explain, and doesn’t fit with the Howard. How about … giving the guards a +1 to hit or 1 more HD or just giving them a lower AC? “But! Bt! But that’s not kosher with the rules for AD&D!” Fuck the rules. You’re the DM, you can do anything you want. It’s magic, you ain’t gotta explain shit. In fact, NOT explaining helps communicate a weird and wonderful setting better than explaining. There’s gotta be mystery for the players minds, and the DMs, to fill in. Wonder & Whimsy are not derived from 18 identical sets of +3 leather and +1 swords. FUCK. THE. RULES. This problem extends to the magic items. They are boring. Portion of healing. Potion of heroism. Necklace of prayer beads. Ring of protection. +3 dagger. B.O.R.I.N.G. Dude is supposed to be some kind of reprobate sorcerer, give him some reprobate sorcerer shit. not a bunch of book items. The mundane treasure is better, and from the Howard I’d guess. Gold from the mines of Ophir and file silks from far-off Kjitai mixed with Kothian silver … now that’s the kind of flavor-text loot I can dig!

 A journey through the most boring fantastic location ever described. Five lame rooms. A two page write-up of the last room that manages to communicate nothing. No, hang on, this is supposed to be the abstract. It’s an adventure through a cloud giants island and castle. It has boring treasure, boring magic, boring rooms and boring outcomes. It is not wondrous. It is boring and lame.

Every get the feeling you’ve been cheated? I do, all the time. Almost every day. I blame it on my midwestern naiveté. Everything is wondrous and new and full of whimsy and just absolutely dreamy! And then I read the adventure.

Evil cloud giant brothers are guiding their floating castle towards the lands of men. The party is set to stop it. The adventure says it’s a daring raid. I say it’s an uninteresting linear crapfest. Let’s see … walls and floor made up of grey, boring clouds. A room with winter wolves in it, waiting by the door to attack. A room with ice trolls in it, waiting by the door to attack. A room with a vulture lion in it (cool!) that attacks immediately. A room with two cloud giants in it, that attack immediately. This. Is. LAME.

Why rolling grey clouds? Why barren featureless rooms? Why not a byzantine vision of the future, or some kind of fusion between art deco and the caliphate? Cloud giants wearing turbans and majestic robes and great piles of cushions for the party to hide in and use in combat! The smells of exotic spices in the air and rare woods burned … to cover up the smells of the people they have artfully tortured and placed around their villa for decoration? THAT would be cool! THAT would be interesting. “The walls, floor, and ceiling are made up of grey clouds” is not interesting. It is boring. So are giant 2′ doors. Not interesting. It’s the floating cloud castle of a pair of super duper evil giant brothers. DO. SOMETHING. INTERESTING. Instead we get the lame and boring same-old same-old. Did the designer even try? Did they literally just put down the bare minimum of effort? No, obviously not. How can I tell? Because the fucking entries are about 90 gazillion paragraphs each. It’s almost a 3E supplement level of description. It’s a free product dude, so I’m guessing no one was paid by word, so … yeah …

Winter wolf room. The door is cold. The entire room description could have been replaced with “5 winter wolves” on the map. Instead we get four or five paragraphs. It tells us the room is 50’x100′. *sigh* As with most bad encounters the ‘guards’ of the fortress do not pursue. The ice troll room is 80’x80′, according to the room description, repeating quite nicely what the map tells us. Pad much? It has 20 ice trolls in it and is their barracks! They each get little apartments, presumably with beds and footlockers and the like. Ooo, and they have a frozen larder with body parts with signs of gnawing. That’s it. That’s the description for the larder. Come on, that IS the minimum. Where’s the magic in that description? And a standard barracks? Really? For ice trolls? In a cloud giants castle? Look, I want full on byzantium or caliphate ice troll guards or I want them to be like half frozen in to womb like things in the walls, floors and ceilings, some kind of alien nest thing. I don’t want yet another boring old barracks. LAME. The two cloud giant brothers? If the party doesn’t immediately head in to the torture chamber they flip the table they are feasting at and hunker down behind it. This. This is what malign evil intelligence has become. Two guys hiding behind a table waiting to die. If this was an emo art house film then it would make sense, especially given the vegetarian and oven connotations that the adventure has. But it’s not an art house film. It’s supposed to be fantastic. It is not. For example, the keep is said to have a large amount of non-magical and nonvaluable items in it. None described. In fact, the description for the giants living quarters are terse and boring, being just standard “they each have a bed and a trunk” kind of description. The treasure? Jade armband. Gold torque. Platinum circlet. 11 gems each worth less than 100gp. Two potions from the book. A wand from the book. A broadsword of dancing. A silver dinner service for two. These are contents of the floating castle that are worth mentioning. Nothing fantastic. Nothing wonderful. Nothing exotic or full of imagination. At least there’s a flying cloud castle, right? It can’t be controlled by the players. Not even if the giants are charmed or threatened with death. They will not guide it. L.A.M.E.

They could have just printed the Cloud Giant entry from the Monster Manuel and have been done with it.

 This is a short adventure with a couple of sites in a ruined city and a short little linear tomb with a couple of encounters. The theme here is something non-standard, or twisted a bit from standard fantasy. It does a good at this by using a kind of Oriental Adventures flavor that has been transported to standard D&D-land. Another decent little site for a hex crawl.

There’s not much of a useful background here. Just a page or so of vague background flavor. I believe it tries to evoke a kind of jungle-encroached asian city with it’s vine twisted ruins. In fact, if you keep that in mind while reading it helps make more sense. In this case a little art could have perhaps helped set the scene and flavor better. In any event there’s enough background here to place the ruins in play and sprinkle a few rumors about. The city ruins only have five or so locations with one of them expanded to a small linear tomb/vault dungeon with a few rooms in it. The focus of the above ground area is going to be avoiding the devil moth.

This is a wonderful little wandering monster/inhabitant of the ruins and the designer does a good job with it, although it takes nearly a page to describe. A giant moth flies around and it’s shadow does level drains. Oh, and it’s shadow can also detach and attack separately. There’s more to it but even that little should get you going. Playing running through the vine-crusted ruins screaming while trying to avoid the moths shadow … that’s fun But then them freaking out when the shadow detaches … that’s PRICELESS. This encounter alone is worth stealing.

The five other ruined city encounters are interesting and freaky enough to warrant taking a look at. Sunken and buried amphitheaters, and murky sinkholes covered with much hiding muddy ruins beneath … filled with yellow musk… Thee’s a kind of erie otherworldly feeling conveyed by the encounters. I’m sure this is exactly the sort of feeling that the designer was trying to convey. It’s rare enough that happens but to also have it be GOOD is a significant accomplishment. Turcotte is a decent designer, even in these earlier examples of his work. He does a VERY good job with his monsters and their descriptions, usually their nature tersely and very evocatively. His room descriptions drag out to quite some length, which I generally find hard to wade through to find pertinent information, but they DO convey a sense of the room much better than the massive blocks of generic text that make up most long descriptions. He does a decent job with the mundane treasures, such as ceremonial pipes inlaid with mother-of-pearl and coral. I like the extra detail provided and richness of the history conveyed. The magical items are a bit of a let down though. They tend to be just plain book items. The concept of the adventure is to convey a strange alien, yet human, culture and the magical items would have been a great way to do that. ‘The Ancestors’ are emphasized quite a few times in the adventure; that would have been an excellent opportunity to provide some new items.

One area of the city is expanded upon, a kind of lost treasure vault that is inspired y the terra cotta warriors. This is laid out as a simple seven room or so linear tomb. I suspect this is the actual focus of the adventure, but also the weakest part, IMHO. There’s a classic ball trap, and I’m a sucked for the classics, but with a single exception (inspired by Big Trouble in Little China?) the encounters don’t feel as … culturally different .. as the ones in the city ruins. There’s a whole lot of ‘if you touch it the ancestors get pissed and send guardians to mess you up’ kind of encounters. This is an alias for the far better known: monsters jump out of stasis and attack!  I have no doubt that statues and undead get boring at times and that monster encounters in tombs/abandoned places can therefore be hard to justify. Stasis/summonings are not the way to go. In fact, the BTiLC encounter with the tireless vizier is a good example of mixing things up. The monsters themselves could use a bit of his beefing up also; they are missing his usual magic for describing them. The weirdest part of this is the end, the terra cotta warriors. They are extensively described. EXTENSIVELY. And yet it’s clear that they can’t be activated. I guess this is to keep a major item out of the parties hands unless the DM wants them to have it … and to expand play to go get the magic item required to activate the army? But then why spend so much real estate describing the army in such detail? Maybe it’s a callback to the real terra cotta warriors? I don’t know, but it seems really out of place.

Anyway; the ruins are worth stealing for a hex crawl location, at a minimum.

by James M. Ward
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 1-6/Any

This is a short little adventure in an abandoned wizards tower. It has a slow feeling to it, or maybe its melancholy? Anyway, the adventure is full of stone artifacts and treasures that fit that theme. There’s not a lot of monsters, or action for that matter. A great many of the rooms could be classified as puzzles, but not in the ‘in your face’ puzzle sense. Maybe ‘obstacle’ is the better word. Something like: If you know two animated statues guard a door then how do you get through the door? This might make a fine little side-trek on a hex map.

This adventure has a little throw-away hook that is really quite meaningless. Something to effect of ‘Eliminster tells you to go check out an old wizard tower the city just sold. You can keep anything you find.’ It’s a throw-away and not needed. The tower is just a place that the party can go adventure in. They stumble across it and in they go looking for loot and trouble. The best kind of adventure. I can totally see villagers that the party stumble across relating the tales of the old abandoned black tower. Ward does a decent job in creating a memorable first site. A three story ebony tower with two giant statues flanking the door. Each with a mace. Each with blood on the mace head. And a bell hanging out of reach of the party, above the door. That’s a great little visual image, and Wards read-aloud does it better justice than I could. The adventure is full of read-aloud, but, strangely, I mind it less here than in other adventures. He generally keeps it short and in many cases doesn’t expand upon anything. For example, there’s a room with three sentences of read-aloud text, including a brief note about a pulley system on the ceiling for moving stones. There’s no further text; the next entry then starts. That’s all there is to the room. And that’s all that needed. It’s just on the edge of being too much read-aloud, and the left is left for the DM to fill in, exactly how bullshit read-aloud should be. There’s a lot of empty rooms. There’s a lot of read-aloud. The initial tower description portion of the read-aloud works better than the rest. It does a good setting the tone but the room read-alouds don’t really deliver and could have been left out.

The encounters are more obstacles than traditional (IE: sucky) adventure encounters. The groups success will hinge on recognizing what they should leave alone and in making friends. IE: the usual shit. This isn’t a Raggi-fest of ‘hahaha! the only way to win is to not play! hahaha!” but rather a series of things that the party should know better than to mess with. Hmmm, guardian columns outside of doors with bloody swords. Hmmmm, flowing sand, almost like it’s alive. Hmmm, vampire statues sucking blood. And then, recognizing an ally. When a statue talks to you and asks you to free it, do you? If you could command an army of slow-moving statues, how would you you use them to navigate the harder portions of the tower? Are you gonna make friends with the asshole statue in? Better, he has the 411 on the tower … And so the adventure is a lot of empty rooms that occasionally have statue-things that animate. Your success in the adventure will relate to how you use what you find to conquer the environment. *GASP* A D&D adventure! It’s either a deathtrap or an exercise in creative problem solving, depending on how it’s approached and the level of the characters.

There’s a map issue; the last room, the treasure room, doesn’t show up. While I would expect an Ebony Fly in an Ebony Tower, the rest of the treasure is mostly a little lack-luster. There’s a head turned to stone that the DM could come up with something for. There’s also some masonry tools that MIGHT be useful in another adventure. They chew though rock at a magical rate. They also make A LOT of noise. I LOVE magic items like that. “Do we REALLY want that? I know it’s cool, but …” Also, I wonder just how much trouble the party can get in to with two caged cockatrice? Now THAT’S a treasure worth having!

by John Turcotte
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Level 1

This is an adventure through a strictly linear trap dungeon with a religious theme. The idea here is that a misguided priest, now dead, secreted his church coffers in his old temple before it burned down. The old people remember, in particular, a jewel encrusted chalice. A dozen or so trapped/monster rooms later the group finds it … maybe. It’s linear, much in the way a tomb dungeon usually is, and the room descriptions are long for what the adventure is.

The background information here is a little longish, two pages or so. This is just about my limit for backgrounds but strangely I didn’t mind as much on this one. What makes things interesting here are some familiar elements used in a good way. An old-ish man who remembers seeing the chalice when he was only a boy. A clue on a stained-glass window fragment, now destroyed. A previous group who fled in terror: “Father Tomas is still burning!!” This is all mashed up with the story of the priest, a man who thought he was doing good when he was just getting rich off the taxes of the poor. These sorts of classic themes ad environments will be familiar to the players and will let them latch on to things in their minds, or should anyway, which is a very valuable way to help build a kind of shared immersive setting. It’s pretty rare, IMO, to be able to latch on to these very evocative environments. Turcotte has done a good job here, especially if you ignore most of what he’s written and instead work his themes in during the course of an evenings play. Old treasure hunters, rumors of ruins, and tales in the tavern could help build this up quite a bit. That’s the sign of a good adventure: when it gets you excited and starts your own mind working in how you can use it and expand on it. That’s the kind of adventure I want to see.

I don’t particularly like “tomb dungeons.” That’s what I call a mostly linear dungeon in which each room has some kind of set piece or trap or some other lengthy piece. They remind me of funhouse dungeons but with all of the fun removed. This fits that mold. I Has Sad. 🙁 There’s a decent idea or two in here, especially flavor-wise, but that’s not enough to overcome the core design. Essentially each room has a trap and/or puzzle to overcome. They are not bad, per-se, but the core”straight line tomb robbing” is my problem. There’s a nice little broken flooded room trap, terrifying phantasms, a classic pull-ring door trap, and several puzzles (with clues) straight out of an Indiana Jones or funhouse tournament module. The clue/hint map is a nice touch here and it’s hard to take offense at any individual element. Yes, the roos descriptions are a bit long at only two or so to page. They could use some serious boiling down to remove a lot of extraneous detail while keeping the core of the flavor.

Turcotte continues to do a good job with his monsters. They have an “english countryside” feel to them, or maybe they come from an earlier, gentler time. Recall he has put giant scarecrows with pumpkin heads in earlier adventures and he does a few similar things here. The Straw Golems have this flavor, and to a smaller extent even the burning priest phantasm. I now find it jarring when he DOESN’T include interesting monsters; the giant rats and zombie feels out of place after seeing how he’s treated undead in more recent works. There is a decent bit of treasure in the adventure, maybe enough for most party members to advance. For the most part its not very interesting although there is a hint or two of something more; such as the clerical vestments that radiate a spell of magical vestment.

by John A. Turcotte
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 4-6

This adventure is a commando raid on a watchtower full of hobgoblins/gnolls/etc. It’s pretty straightforward and vanilla. The interesting bits are few and far between and it’s going to take some effort to run well.
Iuz the uber-cool has amassed an army. The elves are ready to smash it but they need the watchtower taken out first. Maybe I’m in a good mood this morning, but this is a hook I can get in to. Hiring a bunch of mercenaries or commandoes to go take one one item to make an assault easier seems like a reasonable thing to do. “Mercenaries” are never mentioned. “A call goes to Brave Heroes … ” blah blah blah. If you totally ignore that and instead think of 4th-6th level characters are pretty famous mercenaries then things make A LOT more sense. I find that substituting “mercenaries” for “adventurers” or “heroes” can save a great many bullshit hooks. Yeah, yeah, I know: different strokes for different folks … but viewing the PC’s as mercenaries in the Hussite/Reformation wars, or something like that, turns the “heroes” thing around enough that any old group of hobo’s could meet it. The whole “war” thing is only lightly touched on however the pretext of taking the watchtower to make things easier on the army is a decent one also. The elves are going in one way or another and this raid just eases the burden. You could expand on the idea a bit more and steal from a couple of WW2 movies … maybe once the group takes the tower the evil forces start to assault it, kind of like Pegasus Bridge “Hold until Relieved” kind of thing. I wish more adventures would do a little follow-up or consequences section. Some ideas, real ideas, for integrating the adventure as something more than a stand-alone would be nice. No, I’m not looking to be spoon-fed. I AM looking for a Play Aid that is actually a Play Aid rather than the bare minimum that currently seems to pass a “a full fledged adventure supplement!”

The island is sparsely described; just enough detail in case the group skirts the tower. In reality most groups will attack a small camp nearby and then move on to the tower. The tower is a pretty simple affair with just a couple of smallish levels and maybe five or six encounters on each level. There are several stairs between levels and enough varied elevation elements (towers, roof, etc) that the group should be sufficiently engaged in “Oh Shit!” moments. The encounters are the rough part of this. Or rather, they are just standard encounters. A watch post with a few humanoids in it. A jail. A barracks. The EHP room, etc. These are almost all just generic little encounters with little interesting going on. It falls in to the same trap of many by listing a room name and then describing the mundane details of the room. The mess hall has tables piled with filthy plates and bowls and stinking remains of past meals. That doesn’t really do anything to help me run the adventure. The adventure is laid out a standard dungeon adventure with a map and numbered rooms that are then described. But that’s not what this adventure is. It’s an assault on a guardtower. The tower might in fact have an interesting layout for an assault, but the lack of emphasis on that just turns this in to something that looks like every other throw-away product. This lack of focus on the core element shows through and as a result it seems like a muddled site, not really doing anything very well at all. There are some notes here and there about the guards responding but nothing really unified for the DM to take advantage of. Even something as simple as noting on the map where the creatures are would help a lot.