tenfootpole.org

By reddJack
Self Published
EZd6

A complete one-shot adventure for the EZD6 system that sees players exploring an abandoned mine that uncovers a sprawling underground tunnel system filled with goblins and an ancient colony of crystalline arachnids.

This nineteen page adventure details a trip in to some “Sapphire Mines”, that contain no Sapphires. It’s an exercise in random locations and experimental layout. Neither of which ends up being as effective as was intended. Onward, to die rolling!

Page eight of this adventure is the critical one. Before this page we get a little blurb on the mine entrance, and some pages describing the goblin tribes (and factions) and the Sapphire Spiders (bestiary) and some backstory. But page eight is where the adventure comes together. You see, their’s this little four section flowchat and six entry random table for “what room do you encounter next.” Antechamber, goblin warrens, the back entrance to the goblin warrens, crystal cavern, underground oasis, or the Spider Queen room. And the little four entry flowchart tells us to roll for the room layout (three types) and then for what “danger” there is in the current tunnel, and then for a tunnel encounter, and then roll for the next main room type. IE: random AND linear. Oh, also, don’t step on the sand/loose earth or you will summon a worm/spider. Zzzz….

So, the designer is looking to set up this thing where a couple of goblin factions live in a cave/mine, that is also inhabited by these mutant spiders. The spiders have a queen and also some elf dude is who is the spider ally/leader/something like that. So you’ve got this band of goblins allied to the elf/spiders and another that is “free” goblins, currently out of power and being repressed. And you roll on the table and randomly wander around until you get bored and go home. I guess. I don’t know. There’s not much point here. Oh, look, our first room was the queens chamber. Themes the breaks of randomness. And how can you have an expressive faction play environment with six rooms? You can’t. And thus all of that text on the factions is relatively meaningless. 

The magic items get some decent description an are sufficiently unique. The room descriptions, and even the monster descriptions, are sorely lacking though. Bland, when they do exist, “Wolf-sized spider covered in crystalline carapace that shines like a moonlit pool. Agile and venomous.” Meh. Hippo sized spider that swims through soft earth. Meh. There’s not much here.

The main feature of the adventure is the layout. We’re being interesting with it, to help make all of the information readily accessible. I’m a big proponent of the formatting lending itself to those concepts. Further, I think that you must ruthlessly violate your own formatting guidelines when appropriate. Every situation you are trying to get across is different, with different goals, and thus the formatting for everything should be specific to that. This is more than just using a different format for the social town vs the room/key dungeon. Does the tavern need a different format than the general store? If so, then we don’t try to pigeonhole one in to the other. But, also … we do not want to tall in to the trap of listing lighting, door, lock, walls, ceiling, floor, sound, tase and smell in every room description at the top of them. We note things when appropriate. What I’m saying here is that there should be a general formatting style that you use throughout your adventure. Some standards. And, then, as exceptions arise, you tailor your formatting for them to those exceptions. But there should generally be some common standards. If EVERYTHING is different on every page then you face some serious cognitive dissonance, as the DM, in trying to context shift to the new formatting. What am I supposed to pay attention to on THIS page? 

And this is going to a problem here. Every page has a wildly different format. Yes, even the room pages. You’ll get to dig through all of everything fresh and new each and every time. Good luck with that. Just as with the adventures that list the lighting, door, and floor and walls and smells and noises for each room, this adventure has taken a principal to an extreme. Yeah, sure, lighting in a room is good to know. But, also, maybe we can assume most rooms are dark if in fact 90% of the rooms are dark? A format used excessively. And, with this, perhaps not EVERYTHING in the adventure requires a totally new format? Is there so much variation thats the case? (And if so … why?)

Plus, you know, no sapphires.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. Which in this case is enough, if you know already that everything is going to be like that.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/464682/into-the-sapphire-mines-an-ezd6-one-shot-adventure?1892600

By Ben Gibson
Coldlight Press
Starfinder
Level 3 (ending at level 6)


> Why am I here? Where is here?

>Power core lost. They took it. They took my eyes.

>Agents to sleep. Batteries low, shutting down.

>Drifting now. Listen. Wait.

>Awake in the night sky I wait for those who will follow.

>I will be free.

This 24 page Space /SciFi adventure features the party tracking down information and then exploring a derelict ship now controlled by an emerging AI. It’s got that Ben Gibson WIDE scope, which also means it’s more of an abstracted outline than reveling in the specifics. 

We’ve got this ship that an ai has emerged on. Other ships shoot at it and abandon it, lifeless. An escape pod gets loose with a dude in it that is devoted to the AI, taken over by it. He lands on a planet. A hermit there find his pod, and him. He hides the pod, recognizing the AI threat, and turns the dude, a clone, over to his clone family that squats in a portion of a space station a couple of systems away. You’re hired to infiltrate the dock the clones are squatting in to find the location of the life pod, to track it back to the location of the derelict ship … to salvage it. Or let the AI free. Or bow up the ship. There are several people with agendas that you could get involved with. I think we can all see the three acts here: space station dock, life pod planet, and derelict ship. And it makes sense then, I guess, that you are popping from level three to level six at the end of the adventure.

SciFI is hard, I think. Everyone is running around with level 36 wizard abilities. ANything and everything could happen. And the worlds seldom feel “lived in.” Let’s add in to this the scope of a Ben Gibson adventure. He tends to write some rather sandboxy things, with general places and situations described and then the DM left to take the party through them, using the bits and pieces provided as some guidelines for the adventure. This leaves specifics in the lurch, for most parts of it other than major NPC’s/rivals and the final dungeoncrawl in the derelict ship … which gets a traditional room/key but isn’t going to win any awards for “Avoiding Abstracted & Generic SciFi Ship Descriptions.” 

The first act is the infiltration of an abandoned dicking pad section of a colossal space station. It’s controlled by The Eddies, a clone family that look and think like Eddy. Very nice detail there; scifi elements, a but of humor, a bit of advantage. Good Job. This might be similar to a typical raid mission in D&D. You try to find a way in. This is a little handwavey for me in this adventure. Several options are mentioned but I think I continue to butt up against the possibilities inherent in SciFi. Once inside you bribe people or avoid bots or fight them and the clones until you find the information you are looking for. Which could be from the compromised clone. You could also get hired by another clone to find/do something about the derelict ship. Descriptions are on the terse side and there’s some variety here. That’s going to be a theme throughout the adventure; good variety. People to talk to, competing agendas, and sometimes a green slime in a biohazard locked room or a mini black hole in the physics test lab. The third act is going to be a variation on the first one. Instead of a raid you are, possibly, exploring the derelict ship. More NPC”s inthe forms of frozen crew or androids, along with booths and hostile fungi. With a hostile AI always lurking, wanting to get back to your ship and out to the wider galaxy. A fact that you may not be aware of. Again, good variety of interactivity, with some “air gapped” ad “compromised” computers providing some puzzle-like things in order to get the ship back online, if you wish. And, again, a kind of cold scifi room description … which is less description and more “here whats going on in the room thats weird.” Note, again, how I summarized this as an outline lacking specificity? “A simple conference room, on the whiteboard was written “What is going on with them?” , erased, but still barely visible.”

The second act is full of factions, on a planet. You’re there looking for the clones life pod, hidden by a hermit. There are a couple of settlements and, like, six factions? All looking for the life pod. And some willing to gut you and some willing to be truthful with you. This is a VERY handwavey section, with the DM needing to improvise almost everything, from locations to possabilities. The factions make it fun, but, also, it’s VERY loose.

Ben does a pretty good job with writing tersely, when it comes to the actual play parts. You get some longer descriptions for things like factions, to explain motivations and how to play them. And there is almost no specifics.  A typical room descrciption might be: “Logistics Office: This tight office has a single dead man within; Jerl Knobbs, the chief bosun, was hiding from the fighting outside before the missile strikes and resultant vacuum breach. He suffocated to death, not before severing the office’s connections to the mainframe.” So, not much description and a focus on whats going on. Along with some wrong cross-references here and there, which are frustrating. 

It’s an abstracted SciFI adventure. Aren’t’ ALL scifi adventures abstracted? Is it possible to write one that is not? I shouldn’t review them until I figure out how to review them.

This is $4.60 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages, more than enough to get a sense of the general and room writing styles.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/359726/awake-in-the-night-sky?1892600

By Steve Bean
Shield of Faith Studios
DCC/Unamerican - and a major reskin at that
Level 0

WELCOME TO THE FANTAS-TI-PLEX! A lovely underground dystopian complex ruled by the ever beneficent Autocrat. Here all drones live in peace and prosperity, because the Autocrat says so. I mean, why would any of the drones doubt him, EVER. It is a perfect place to barely live and no one would EVER want to leave, right?

As I work through my wishlist you gotta take the bad lumps to get to the things you were hoping for …

This forty page adventure attempts to marry Paranoia to … Logans Run? Or MCC/DCC? Bureaucracy, a surveillance state, that Paranoia vibe, combined with some post-apoc vibes. It’s also VERY loosy goosy with what’s going on, to the extent that one might argue that there is NOT an adventure here, but rather a few ideas that the DM could use to string together to make an adventure. And that’s on purpose.

Logan’s Run! That’s my fav of all time! “There is no sanctuary!” is a mantra for all time! And Paranoia! That was a great game! And post-apoc! I love post apoc! And DCC is great! I’m gonna love this! Well … there’s not much, if any, Logan’s Run. I guess you’re inside and there are clones. But, that kind of describes Paranoia. And this is absolutely a reskinned Paranoia, with mutants, secret societies, and that Brazilesque bureaucracy. It’s an overseer now, instead of Friend Computer. But the chants, tone, and demeanor are all Paranoia. The system is DCC< with the clones taking the place instead of multiple level 0 funnel characters. And, once you break out of the complex that is definitely not Alpha, you get to a post-apoc world, all THX-1138 style, and thus you’re now in the Unamerican setting. I’m not going to cover much of the tone or the reskin. It’s the same tone as the early Paranoia adventures, or just a tad more to the Zany side of things.

The start is full of mountains of read-aloud in italics. A mighty disgorgement of information. That no sane player is going to sit through or pay attention to. But, that’s not the worst of things.

There are five locations here. Which means there are five scenes, of sorts  … including the traditional briefing room scene. But, more than that, those five scenes, which are actually locations, take place on about six pages of text. The rest of the forty pages is taken up with the Paranoia setting reskin, mutations, secret societies, etc. Those locations present a short scene. A set up/environment, if you will, for other things to take place. You are characters in a game show at one point. These little scenes … I hesitate to call them scenes. They are more Places Where Things Can Happen, serve as a backdrop. A few pages of the adventure contain Things That Can Happen, or, perhaps more accurately, Zany Robot and Friend Computer Things That Can Happen. They are some rough guidelines for how to use the various robot types, and such, to cause problems for the characters. Thus if you are in the SToreroom location then the DM can theme the Filebot to that location, and if you are in the Game SHow location then you can theme it to that location. Not much guidance on the theming aspect, by the way. This is how we get to, say, fifteen pages of “Adventure” in a forty page booklet that allows for about six pages of Location. 

So, you are almost exclusively doing improv. And, yes, there’s a bit of improv in every adventure. But as the main treat? With, of course, lots of advice to drop things in when there is a lull or stop when things get tiresome. This is an activity, not a game. And, as such, I deem thee Not An RPG Adventure. 

I will note that, in the first real location, you get some clones bound up with duct tape to chairs in front of monitors. One has a live grenade wedged in him. One is an annoying shit. One is competent, and one is an imposter robot. Cure little setup, and one of the most solid of the bunch.

I understand that I am working on razor thin definitions of Game, but, I leave unanswered the elephant: Can Paranoia be a game, and, thusly, do I judge harshly on criteria unbecoming? Nay, nay! I say! For even in an activity we can ground our scenes more and make them more use friendly. 

This is $4 at DriveThru. No preview. SUCK!

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/256922/slave-drones-of-the-fantas-ti-plex-dcc?1892600

Yo, I also picked up “Outlying Farms”, a supplement about farms you might encounter. Two pages. Twelve farms/families. They come in a very terse outline, which is exactly how they should come. I wouldn’t buy it; there’s just no content here that I would find useful.

Lerana Scissorfinger
(she, felter, 40 yrs old)
AC: 9, HP: 3, Dmg: 1d4
Possessions: scissors, felt, 2d5 hats, pouch, 36 cp
Traits: sassy, fashionable, disorganized, tired
Motivations: sell hats, “they are a sign of station!”
Backstory: never married, always wanted to move
to Illis but it seemed impossible, will pay for escort
Family: Grigin (dog 6) & Nord (dog 3)

By Thom Wilson
ThrowiGames
Gamma World 1e
Beginning Characters

A settlement built upon the ruins of a military installation has recently come under bombardment from space junk falling from the sky. Almost daily, giant chunks of twisted and broken metal and parts of large vessels fall from the sky near or onto the settlement! Many people have been injured or have died. The village  elders do not want to leave as they have finally established a productive farm near a drinkable water supply. What is even more strange, however, is that a large object on the roof of a plateau building nearby has begun moving recently, often several times a day. Are these two things related? Is the impenetrable plateau structure the source of the falling debris?

This thirty page adventure presents a five-ish level complex with about seventy rooms. A simple map and straightforward exploration combine with a play style I find a bit off putting. It’s perhaps most reminiscent of exploring all of those empty rooms in Barrier Peaks … even though most of the rooms are not empty.

Gamma World is my favorite. You thought I had strong opinions on D&D? Ha! MA, 1e, 2e, 3e … all great. A glorious glorious mess. You’ve been warned.

We’ve got a village at the base of a mesa. Up top is a ancient complex that no one has explored. A couple of weeks ago the big circle thing on its roof started moving and now junk from the sky keeps falling on the village. Go investigate and make it stop. There’s always a bit of metagaming in tech adventures, the party figuring out what something is is fun … up to a point. And metagaming to get ahead IS a tried and true part of RPG’s. So, you need to get inside and stop the sat dish from recalling broken spaceships back to the site. This means working your way up through the mesa, all five levels of it.

This thing has the Loot table that I love so much, a few pages of random shit for the party to find when searching. I swear to god, a Gamma World adventure without one of those is not a Gamma World adventure. It should be mandatory in every adventure, it adds so much fun to the thing.

The map, also, has a few interesting things about it. There are a couple of stairwells and an elevator shaft (although, sadly, no mention of climbing the shaft, an obvious miss there …) that are arranged in such a way that there are a couple of sub-basement levels that are not obvious unless you are in the right location. That sort of hidden space, and the verticality of it, is quite the nice little feature. There’s also a couple of quite obvious secret doors in to the mesa. “Heres a big blank wall in the mesa. I wonder what could be there?” It’s a little too mechanistic for me; no real description of HOW the doors are hidden, or rubble piles or anything Just a blank mesa wall with a secret door in it. Meh. I should note, also, while on the map, tha the adventure starts slow, with few creatures, and a good looting will turn up many weapons to help with the upper levels of the complex. So, some pacing there.

The rest of this, though, is not to my liking. 

The agreed-upon-conventions are not quit ein place, in terms of style. We’ve got mentions of manned laser turrets in the village. The guards all walk around with slug throwers, and they do a “serum test” with you to see if you are lying/good people or not. Meh. I like my base Gamma World a little more primitive. You might be ok with it, and that’s fine. But, also, the read-aloud refers to thing like dimmed emergency lighting and terminals. Again, not quite the vibe I’m going for, although I do acknowledge the balance between mystery and just getting on with things.

The read-aloud is in italics, which is never a good thing for extended reading. EVen though it’s also in a shaded box. Why both? Just pick the shaded box. And it over-reveals, noting things in the read-aloud that are best saved for the back and forth between DM and players as they investigate. That’s a core feature of RPG’s and read-alouds that over-reveal destory this key aspect of the game.

We also get pretty minimal description here. Things like “Four beds with adjoining desks are found within” or, on a good day “Rusty metal stairs end in a large, open space that is completely dark. The area is well below the surface and is fairly chilly and damp.” Kind of cold. And not in a good way, I’d assert. They lack that vibe that I’m going for. ANY vibe.

There’s also some misses in the descriptions, with several trapdoors in the floor, in the upper levels, leading to the lower levels, that you explored first probably … only those hatches are not mentioned in the lower levels. And, there are choices to be made that are not quite kosher. At one point you can cut the power to the base. And if you do so then all of the space junk then falls on the village. But that seems like a valid solution, yeah? Cutting power? But, no, you have to get to the top level man room and use the terminal there. There’s no indication that cutting the power will fuck you over. It’s just one of those hidden choices that seems random, or like a good thing, that has catastrophic consequences. And, sure, you can do that. But, also, informed decisions are the best decisions. It makes the players feel like they have a horse in the race.

And, the entire thing just feels … empty. Kind of like those endless rooms on the first level of Barrier Peaks. Now, I don’t mean that’s what is going on. But that’s what it FEELS like. You’ve got each level shaped like a square with rooms along the outside walls, and then a small “center square” of rooms also. And you just go from door to door and open it and search an empty room and get some loot. And maybe make a save vs poison. Or maybe fight a plant/amoeba. It doesn’t feel so much like an exploration. There are no factions. It just feels like monotony. Room after room after room. Open door. Search room. Next room. Now, I realize that IS the main loop of many RPG’s. But, also, there are other things in other games. Some exploration of the complex layout. Factions. Tricks, traps, puzzles and so on. But no here. Just room after room. And, yes, there’s some loot in some of them. And sometimes a monster. And it doesn’t really have much rhyme or reason to it. Just room after room after room. Imagine a long hallway in an office building. And scattered along it are office doors on the right and left side. And behind each is an office. Essentially the same, but with some minor variation. Let’s say there are a hundred doors in that hallway. And some of the rooms might have a little loot. And some might have a surprise plant monster also or a slime that suddenly drops from an otherwise normal looking ceiling. And start exploring those offices, room after room after room. How do you decide which door to open? You don’t, really. You just pick one. And that’s what the vibe going on here. The endlessness of the Severance complex, without the subtext.

This is $3.50 at DriveThru. The preview is sox pages. So you get to see a little of the village but not the complex. It should have shown some of the complex also.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/244906/ntx4-a-dish-that-serves-no-one?1892600