tenfootpole.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Keane Peterson
Design Mechanism
Runequest 6

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

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

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

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

Clearly, paid by the word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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