tenfootpole.org

By Ramsay McGregor
FantasyBound
D&D
Levels 2-3

The church in the village of Endmarsh have asked the adventurers to investigate dancing lights that flicker across the horizon of the sea. This phenomenon started at the same time as when fishermen had begun mysteriously disappearing, and the folk of Endmarsh started experiencing haunting dreams and whispering voices at night. The Graenician priests of the Endmarsh church will pay a handsome sum of 230 gold crowns to investigate and if possible, remove this supernatural incursion.

This six page adventure uses four pages to describe … six encounters? Long overwrought read-aloud, wall of text DM notes, plot, backstory, it’s got it all. The concept here should be, like, a quarter page in a larger dungeon.

Oh no! Lights on the horizon of the ocean! Missing fishermen! Strange dreams! Better have the church spend a bunch on some adventurers so they can take a rowboat out to investigate! Once out to see you hear some voices. You land on an island and see a puka chained to a cart. You go down some stairs in to a ruin and maybe fight some zombies. You go in to another room and maybe fight a revenant. And, a 50% chance, you might a 5hd witch. Then there’s three more boring rooms, one of which has a magic gate you can step through. Your weekly evening of torment is now over.

The read-alouds are long. People get bored listening to long read-aloud. Don’t put in long read-alouds. You get three, maybe four sentences tops. The first real adventure page of this is taken up by almost a column or so of read-aloud. The read-aloud is in italics. Don’t do that. Italics, or any weird ass font, is hard on the eyes. You lose your place. It’s a cognitive burden. You can use italics to highlight a word or two, but if you want to offset a decent chunk of text, like read-aloud, then use another method. Shade it. Use white space. Th read-aloud over reveals information. A core feature of an RPG is the back and forth between the players and the DM. How they ask questions and interact with the game world and then the DM responds to that. If your read-aloud over reveals information then you are working against that model. When you tell us, in the read-aloud, what the etching on the inside of the cauldon says then you prevent the players from walking over to the cauldon, the DM describing it. The players examining the cauldron and the DM describing it, and so on. Don’t over reveal in your read-aloud. The read-aloud is very second person focused. “You feel …” or “You find yourself …” This is a symptom of poor writing. The designer is trying to tell the party hat to think. Instead, a better practice is to describe what is going on in way that makes the party think “oh, i feel sad/angry/whatever.” Besides, it seldom takes in to account the fact that the party is invisible, dig through the top of the room with shovels, or some other, now destroyed, implicit assumption that the designer has made. 

The text of the adventure is overwrought. “You feel the sudden pressure of the ocean against this unnatural island as you continue downwards until at last, after a minute, you feel yourself touch the base of this underground ruin” You don’t need this. This focus on feeling. Calling it an unnatural island. Until at last. This is all text that tends to the purple side of prose. Again, we’re trying to make the players think “man, this island is unnatural!” not TELL them that the island is unnatural. You know, showing instead of telling. 

There’s also this tendency to dump in awkward wording. At the end of the zombie room encounter the text tells us “The witch has since placed a terrible spell on the bodies.” This is referring to, I’m 90% sure, the fact that the bodies are now zombies. And, yet, its … trivia? Padding? Or when the party arrives on the beach of the island the text eventually gets around to telling us “There is nothing of value on the coast besides a silver bracelet worth 60 silver crowns.” This is an awkward way of saying there’s a bracelet on the beach. It would have been far, far better to say its sticking out of the sand, or catching a glint of sun or something instead of saying There is nothing on the coast except.” And, then, the famous if/then statements appear. “IF the adventurers open the party.” Which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be IF the party opens the chest, but whatever. Samesies. No if/then statements in adventures. That’s padding. “If they do, the GM will read or show them the following …” 

There’s no real interactivity. The last room has a teleport gate with a book in a different room telling you how to operate it. You might fight some zombies or a revenant. The main baddie, the witch/necromancer, only has a 50% chance of actually showing up in the adventure. That might be fine for longer term play, I guess? But, also, I’m not sure anything takes place here. Talk to the pooka, I guess. Free some air spirits. I don’t know. “ 

There’s not really anything here of any interest.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. There’s no preview but it’s Pay What you Want, so, there/s that.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/496605/moss-stone-steel-the-whispering-lights?1892600

By Mr. Pilgrim Tomes
Self Published
OSE
Levels 2-3

The Malatir tribe has escaped the goblin hordes that invaded their home after a catastrophic defeat. They have since found refuge in a narrow canyon, occupying some ancient ruins. With them, they have brought six wyvern cubs, a holy creature to the Malatir. However, the canyon is not empty. On the opposite end of the canyon a group of snake-men have occupied an old dam where they conduct blood rituals and sacrifices to their ancient god, the Anathema. Now the Malatir are in dire straits, too weak to defend themselves and with the perfect sacrifice for the Anathema in their home. Without help the Malatir are destined to vanish in the throes of a gruesome ritual, their souls lost to an horrid god hunger.

This eleven page adventure uses four pages to describe eleven rooms in a small complex full of yuan-ti. Simplistic rooms with little interactivity beyond stabbing the snakeman in the room. The boring snakemen in the room.

Ohs Nos! The hunter gatherer tribe had three people kidnapped by the snakemen! If you go save them then they will give you a rope! I swear to fucking god. This is the most boring tribe ever. You get nothing. They are a gunter gatherer tribe and they have five little wyverns. That’s all you get to work with. And I’m not fucking around here, there is no other information to work with. Nothing. No chief. No matriarchal society. Nothing else. This has got to be one of the thinnest pretexts I’ve ever seen. Again, you don’t need a fucking hook, but when the point of the adventure is to save the fucking people then one might expect that you interact with the fucking people a bit and thusly there might be just the brest shed of information to help the DM bring that to life. But no.

The descriptions here are frustrating. We don’t get the steaming jungle motif frequent with snake men. Instead they are hold up in a dam. And that’s ok, we don’t have to trope it out. But, also, the dam descriptions don’t really work for me. We get occasional references to “machinery” in some of the rooms, but no real evocative descriptions of them. “A giant broken machine injected with bronze tubes lies motionless on the northern wall, a once powerful turbine, now useless.” And that’s a good one, relatively speaking. The descriptions repeat items from the map, sometimes incorrectly referring to the map features, and there is the occasional reference to room purpose that does nothing but pad out the description with no impact, such as “The room is used to extract information, screams and organs from the snakemen’s captives, a procedure done by their leader Ssilviss.” The prison tells us “This small room with barred doors houses

the snakemen’s prisoners awaiting the ritual. They are beaten up and cannot fight, but are still conscious” No real squalor or anything else that could be evocative. 

Interactivity is limited to stabbing snakemen and occasionally opening a valve to flood a room/complex. At one point we’ve got a lookout in the text, buried deep inside a description, that shold be able to se ethe party approaching the dam, but no real indication hes there WHEN the party is approaching, or any order of battle which would reflect the nakemen reacting to the party, in that case or any other. I might note, also, that the bestiary gives us the stats for “snakemen” and then in that description gives us a one liner that modifies them for purebloods … while there are no snakemen, just purebloods in the adventure. And no mention at all of the “thralls” that sometimes inhabit the rooms, either in stat, description or how they react. The dam, proper, with its turbines … does nothing? 

Simplistic descriptions that are not very evocative and basic interactivity. It’s a raid mission, not exploratory, so some of that is ok. But it just seems like there be so much more to support that type of adventure. Lookouts, reactions, some intrigue, maybe? A basic adventure that isn’t really making a lot of mistakes, but also isn’t really doing anything too interesting.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.46. The preview is four pages and the last page shows you two of the, quite basic, rooms. So, decent preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/495235/the-snake-s-nest?1892600

By Chris Bissette
Self Published
A Dungeon Game
Levels 1-3

Beneath a desolate moor lies an enigmatic maze, its twisted corridors teeming with treacherous traps and remnants of ill-fated adventurers who dared to tread its path. The Moss Mother guards her home against all intruders, but there are great rewards to be had for those who brave her hallways. Immerse yourself in a world of rot, rust, and rebirth, where the echoes of buried legends stalk your every move.

This 31 page adventure presents a maze with about thirty rooms in it. It leans heavily toward minimalism, in a bad way, with a few encounters that punch things up a bit. A slow affair, it feels like the tedium of a maze inflicted on the party.

Good Literature makes you feel something. Hence my rotting leg of lamb story. We empathize. Or, at least we should. But, what if the feelings we experience are unpleasant? What then? We can be excused for only reading Thieves World from then on, I suppose, being creatures of free will. And, what of an adventure? If I don’t have fun. If I am instead confronted simply with tedium. Am I allowed to say, forever and ever, that I don’t like D&D? The adventure, as a technical document. Meant to help the DM run the game. To facilitate the DM facilitating the players having fun. Inspiring the DM, but in a way that makes it easy for them. And providing the elements for the players to interact with so they can have fun. We ignore outside conditions, after all, a good DM could …

There are parts of this adventure that do a good job conveying the mood of a scene or providing an interesting environment. You can meet a formed adventurer, in town, missing an eye and both legs from the knee down. Ouchies! That’s fun! And, there is an occasional decent room description. “Long chains hang from the ceiling and trail across the ground, hundreds of them, so many that it’s impossible to make out details of the dimensions of the room or whether there are other exits.” or maybe “The gibbering head of a bearded man mounted on a barbed spear thrust into the iron floor with abominable force. His ribs rest on the floor, forming a cage around the base of the spear in which his lungs still flutter and his heart” These are, I think the best examples. And that last one a very good description. Gibberring. Bearded. Barbed. The rib cage on the floor, rotted away. That paints a magnificent picture of a scene. That’s exactly what a description should do! We get a real sense of the place. We feel something. And that allows th DM to then communicate that onward and riff on it to the players.

But alas, these are few and far between. Nothing reaches the heights of that spear scene. There are a couple of other rooms, maybe three others, with descriptions that, I would assert, actually exist. The rest of the room descriptions either do not exist or are so minimal so as to be little more than Empty Room. “Thick chains hang from hooks in the ceiling. They creak loudly if disturbed.”

And this is a problem. The rooms have little int he way of description. And little in the way of meaningful interactivity. We get traps in some of them, and, I think, four rooms with creature sin them? Although one of them has 1HD. So. You know. Does that count?  Other rooms are just … weird? A room with talking gargoyles that can’t otherwise move and taunt the players. A room with a dude hiding out on a platform, with no other use to him. It feels … hollow? Empty? Why is that encounter there? Certainly, not every encounter needs a reason, but some of them should make sense sense. Or fit in, perhaps? And I’m not sure that a lot of these contribute. 

The overall effect here is one of tedium. There’s just not much going on. Only, like, three or four rooms have creatures? And I’m not saying that hacking is the end all be all, but I’m looking for SOMETHING to interact with on a meaningful level. A few traps, sure. But you wander about the maze. And, eventually, the high HD dragon shows up and you need to RUN. (I note that I think FEAR/Running is a sure path to a TPK in a dungeon. Fleeing in to the unknown is a sure fire way to end up dead in an exploratory dungeon.) I get that there is supposed to be a stalked through the dungeon thing going on, but the speed of the dragon means that you have to run, not retreat, and running leads to death. The problem is that running, in this dungeon, is not a fail state. It’s just a quirk of the wanderer chart. That you can’t avoid BECAUSE ITS A MAZE.

I note two other points. That spear in that description? You can be killed by violence while wielding it. Holy shit! And, then, at the end, we get some advice that the magic lup of metal at the end of the adventure “if you intend to continue your campaign you may decide that

selling it requires finding a buyer. You may also wish to consider the ramifications on your campaign world of a sudden influx of highly toxic material into local economies, and how this might impact future sessions.” That’s not too bad, as advice goes. But a couple of specific examples would have been better. Specificity is always better. Not verbose, but specific. 

So, a couple of highlights but essentially tedium that has the deck stacked against you. 

This is 5 pounds at itch. You’ll be getting no preview, so SUCK IT L0SERS!

https://loottheroom.itch.io/moss-mother

By Eduardo Raffo Carozzi
Breeding Calamities
Generic/Universal

Year after year, the monks meditate and pray with the desire to get closer to enlightenment. They boast of having abandoned the desires of this material world, of being one with the Universe, however, no one is beyond temptation and many times the most devout are the first to be corrupted.

This thirty page outline is trying to convey the hunt for a demonic beast in a small village and with their growing anxiety and panic. It’s way too wordy for what it is with not nearly enough gameable assistance. Great NPC’s though.

On the first page the adventure tells us “This is just the sketch of the adventure …” Well, fuck me man. I guess if I knew that going in to this I MIGHT have still purchased it. I do have an academic interest in adventure sketches; enough information to get the thing going but far fewer pages than a traditional adventure. But, also, I thought I was buying an adventure. I’m not buying an adventure though, as I learned. That makes me sad. It makes me feel like I’ve been cheated. I did NOT want the clearcoat. I feel like going on a diatribe about this. I will save everyone the explicit insight and just say that the buyer should know what they are getting.

Ok, so, a monk is sick. The party comes up to the monastery to help and the dude implodes. Or escapes to the village and implodes. Either way, a monster now stalks the village at night killing people a night.The party gotta stop it. Errr…. Should stop it? Could stop it? 

There are two good parts to the adventure. The designer knows they are the good parts. They ARE what the adventure is. The core of it. The first is the list of village NPC’s. It’s a good list. An entry or so takes a full page. Others take columns. Others are a paragraph or two. So, yes, the writing is WAYYYYYYY too long. (In a small fucking font that looks like wall of fucking text. Jesus man, give a dude a break!) And the adventure is in DESPERATE need to a summary sheet for the NPC’s. The name, occupation, age, relationships, secrets. Somehting like that, so I can look at one page (NOT IN A SMALL FUCKING FONT!) and work them in the on-fly social interactions in the village as the game progresses. But man oh man oh man, the NPC’s are good. The dollmaker digs up a body every couple of years and has a basement full of zombies that he makes. He’s going to be a strong ally of the party in their hunt for The Beast. No, seriously. He is. He’s devoted to the village. The Reeve is cooking the books and has been sleeping with the local milkmaid. If she dies then he goes fucking nuts, in a small way, rounding up all of the young men and going on a vengeance hunt for the Beath, making a lot of mistakes in his hubris/anger. That’s fucking good. That’s real life. And the hits just keep coming and coming. Including a farmer with good yields, five kids, a young and beautiful wife who cooks well. “He is living his best life” the text tells us. Oh man, the ways I could use that! The NPCs work with the adventure their shit makes sense IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ADVENTURE. It’s not just random trivia, it’s things that can help enrich the adventure. 

The other nice part is a small, three event, section. There’s a mechanic called VIllage Hive Mind, or some such, which basically tracks the mood in the village. As people die their IMP score is subtracted from a starting total. More important, liked NPCs subtract more. When it reaches a certain level then people start a mass exodus from town. When it gets still lower then some people start to think they should worship the Beast,leading to a confrontation and death in the town square. The third and last event is The Rapture, where they kind of go buts. They start self sacrificing themselves to The Best, or “the people begin to voluntary surrender themselves to the Beast, worshiping it like some kind of god and letting the monster absorb them as it evolves into its Abyssal Phase.” Sweet! I fucking love it! Again, mirroring a kind of dark human nature in extreme pressure trope. Alas, these event section are quite short, just a couple of sentences each. 

That is, essentially, the adventure. There are no real maps of the monastery. Or the village. Or any events to speak of. No kills. And while there’s quite the focus on the ecology of the monster there is not a whole lot on how to use it during play. 

The designer recognizes, correctly, that the adventure they are building is a kind of paranoid monster hunt where the creature also stalks the villagers. That is a social adventure and the designer knows that. The NPCs would be the heart of that, the designer recognizes that and a substantial focus, via page count, is there. The second support, though, would be the events. And while there is that very basic outline, that could use a great deal of supplementing. More kills. More vignettes and so on. Somehting for the DM to riff more on. SHort, just a couple of sentences each, but there for the DM to sprinkle in. Do you need maps? Well, no, not really. Not very good ones anyway, like an exploratory map. But, also, having a map of the monastery and village, just a rough one, not really keyed much, would have helped a lot also. 

It’s very hard for me to get over the small font and extreme number of words that is taken to describe almost everything. Those three events, of just a couple of sentences each, that’s about the right size for what it is. You could get away with a few more sentences there, maybe. But, other than that, almost every entry in this just drones on and on and on, with the smaller font making it even harder to scan the text for the important details. The large page count here is almost entirely wasted. Yeah, there’s a hunt wandering monsters in the wilderness so you can craft minigame. And that’s ok also. But the main monster text focuses on the wrong things about the monster. Ponderous, I guess. The text is ponderous. The phrasings and vocabulary choices are off just a bit, which may be an EASL issue,  but that’s not really a problem. The ponderousness of the verbosity. That’s the issue.

Reference sheet for NPC’s. More events/kills/etc. A couple of throw-away maps. Bonus points if they have some features that enable some interesting play. Cut the word count drastically and pump up the font. 

I leave it as am exercise for the reader if generic/universal is appropriate or if you just stat shit for D&D and be donet with it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. No preview, but, with PWYW you can look at the entire thing. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/445024/killing-grounds?1892600

By Realm Diver
Self Published
BECMI
Levels 4-6

You opened the chest? You shouldn’t have opened the chest! You are magically transported to a ruined temple surrounded by vast desert. A dragon, driven mad by the slaying of her mate and brood, lies between you and a wish-granting treasure that could mean your salvation, or spell your doom…

This 24 page adventure uses about thirteen pages to describe a dungeon with about 35 rooms. It’s got a rather complex situation going on in it that seems inconsistent with its size and difficulty. I’m not a fan of the long-winded and writing to be slogged though, but, also, there’s something going on here. Just not enough for me to to deal with it.

I’m having a hard time with this one. I think I can tell that there is something going on here, but I’m so off-put by the presentation and writing that I want to throw up a little in my mouth. WHich does seem overly harsh. But, there it is. Anyway, I said there was a lot going on …

We’re going to ignore the premise. You find a treasure chest and open it and find a jewel buried in some sand and if you touch it then the sand swirls around you and you’re all transported to this place in the desert. There’s an abandoned campsite and a mesa with a couple of giant statues standing in front of a crack in the mesa wall. So, right, we’re ignoring that. Yes, treasure chest adventure, living room, blah blah blah, hook. Let’s instead focus on some on the weirdly high number of things going on here for a dungeon with 35 rooms. We’ve got the lizardmen-like tribe in this temple complex. Then we’ve got the EHP lizardman shaman, who is raising humanoids from the dead with her magic staff. We’ve got the former leader of the tribe, under house arrest and looking to regain power, pretty please Mr adventurer. Let’s see, we’ve got a thief raiding the temple. We’ve got the undead former high priest of the temple who really thinks the lesser evil here is getting the party to cleanse the temple of most of those folks. ANOTHER undead dude seems to be full of ennui. The Azure Guard, the undead dudes raised by the EHP, are bopping about. And then there’s the crazy dragon whose mate and hatchlings are dead, in the final room. Azure? Yup. Worshiped by the lizardman dudes? Yup. Stuck in that room? Yup.

While there is  bit of an order of battle for the evil lizardman faction, and the house-arrest queen has some deets, mostly the people with plans are just sitting in their rooms waiting. Including the dragon. This is kind of disappointing. In addition to everyone listed there are also a few other things going here, ghosts to talk to and so on, almost all of which give you some kind of clue as to SOMETHING in the adventure. What’s a little off putting here, though, is the relative size of the adventure. It’s only 35 rooms, and in a typical dungeon room format. And that’s A LOT of intrigue for 35 rooms. The tightness of space isn’t going to allow for a lot of room to sneak about, infiltrate and so on, I think. There IS a secondary entrance to the tomb, that takes you to quite a few of the lizardman people to interact with, so, maybe thats the “correct” way to play? It’s just hard. There are a lot of high HD enemies here and we’re playing BASIC. Like a bunch of 3HD lizardmen riding 5HD firebreathing (3d6) firedrakes. It’s just rough, in such a compressed area. I guess your going to have to really sneak about. 

Up until now, in the review, you might be thinking this is a relatively decent adventure. And it might actually be one. And then I touch on the writing. I hate it. It’s got a format its using and its own style and I fucking hate both of them. It’s probably just me. But I don’t know that I care; it was also my money. We’re going to ignore that the read-aoud is in some fucked up font that you can’t actually read. There’s only, like, two sections of read-aloud in the adventure anyway. Still, I hate it.

I’ve taken another long break. I still hate it and I still don’t really know. The writing style is not particularly evocative, at all. And I don’t think it’s trying to be, at all. I guess, it’s fact based? And I don’t like that? A typical description might read: “This room has a 5’ pit in it to house giant oil beetles the Sandscales farm for their oil and meat. The beetles are fed on whatever dead or rotting matter the Sandscales accumulate, and are quite content to stay in the pit. They will certainly see anything that enters the pit as fair game to eat, however. There is a 40% chance there is a Sandscale male in here on the raised floor, dumping slop into the pit.” That room description isn’t really saying anything. There’s a lot of explaining why things are the way they are, but it’s not really anything other tan a 5’ pit with beetles in it and maybe a lizardman. But it’s long, isn’t it? And that’s pretty typical. A lot of the rooms, most, I’d guess, run to half a column of text. It’s got this bullet point style and I think the first one is usually a general overview of the room with the rest following up on that. But, also, this means a lot of the rooms are four or more paragraphs. And padded out, wordy, verbose, mostly for no reason at all. It if could take a sentence then it takes three. I feel, continually, like I’m fighting the text to get something out of it. “Prison Cells: Whatever these rooms used to be, the Sandscales have repurposed them as a prison” Yup, that’s why the room name is Prison Cells.That first sentence does nothing but repeat that this is a prison. That’s the purpose of the room title, to frame what’s to come. And then you frame it again. I think we all know by now that I’m not looking for an ultra minimal room description, but, also, I fucking HATE the padded out shit. This isn’t an ethnographic exploration of the lizardman takeover of a desert temple. We’re playing fucking D&D tonight and I’m not using a highlighter to do the work that the editor should have done. Oh, wait, no editor. Not that the fucking copyeditor shit that passes for editing would have helped anyway. Man, I AM grumpy this morning. “This room has the appearance of a barracks.” No. Never. It IS a barracks or is not. That goes for the DM text and that goes for players text. You’re just padding the fucking thing out. 

There’s a 9HD undead philosopher in this. He summons four 1 HD blobs to defend himself. “He will not defend himself, but will cackle madly and disappear if destroyed.” A commentary on the futility of modernism since the death of God? I didn’t expect to see that in a BECMI adventure. 

I don’t like this. I accept that there could be an adventure in here. I think it needs a larger map and a reworking of the various areas in to something that might be more supportive of faction play. In terms of design, that’s the flaw here. But, also, this thing needs a complete reworking of the text. There is no evocative writing to cement the room for a DM to effectively riff from. And they are padded out to hell and back, making digging though the text a chore. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages and shows you mostly padding. The last two pages describe the outside of the temple complex and part f the first two rooms. Those last two are what you can expect from the text, especially that last one.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/494473/madness-of-the-azure-queen-becmi?1892600