tenfootpole.org

by Richard Graves
Self-Published
AD&D
1st Level

I’m probably soft-balling this one. Fuck off. I like big dungeons.

This is an introductory level to Castle of the Mad Archmage. Both of these products, I believe, are meant to emulate the experience of adventuring in the original Castle Greyhawk. Castle Greyhawk, of course, has never really seem the light of day so these products and some forty year old memories are the only thing we have to get a feel for what one of the original megadungeons was like. There’s no introduction and no background beyond the couple of sentences that convey what I just described. It launches right in to the dungeon.

This particular level has 122 keyed encounters on the map. A really, really nice map. It’s complex. It has multiple exits off of it to a variety of different levels. I’m a SUCKER for a well you can climb down. I LOVE classic elements and this has a well the players can climb down. Yeah! There are lots and lots of rooms and hallways and alternate routes weird room arrangements. This allows for the players to avoid encounters, get ambushed from behind and maneuver to get around other encounters. It fills four pages and, while cramped, doesn’t quite feel like a random map or a ‘hallways for the sake of hallways’ map that the famous ‘over the shoulder’ Gygax map seemed to indicate was the norm. It doesn’t have much in the way of unusual features, which is disappointing. Ledges, slopes, same-level stairs, chasms, etc are all missing, as are any secret doors. Those would have turned this in a stellar map. The wandering monsters are a bit random and ordinary. Skeletons, zombies, goblins, kobolds, and lots of vermin. Just a complete random assortment of level 1 monsters. I usually don’t like that, and I don’t like that here. My theory is that I’m paying for the designers imagination and copying a wandering monster table from the DMG isn’t an exemplary piece of imaginative work. It’s all book standard. I get that this is a minimally keyed dungeon, probably using the tables in the 1E DMG (I don’t know that for sure, but it seems like a good guess), and I’m now complaining that it does it well. If it’s actually performance art disguising itself as a dungeon then it should be up front about that. Otherwise people might get confused and think this is ‘correct.’ Let me be clear: it’s not.

The encounters are … well, I don’t know. Random, maybe? It looks like a completely random assortment of encounters that just thrown together, one per room, with some kind of random room contents generator thrown in for good measure. This results in a situation where the various rooms feel more like a wilderness hex crawl type of thing than a themed dungeon level. Each room feels like it’s own little environment completely disconnected from everything else around it. Mad Props for seeing that style through to the end and coming up 122 different rooms for people to adventure in. It is, however, probably a bit too random to sustain anything other than ‘Tower of Gygax’ type of play. They are imaginative enough, I guess, but they don’t really make any sense.The first dungeon room is of a statue/pool of frolicking girls. Drinking the water will cause uncontrollable laughing for 1d6 round. The water has a tarnished silver spoon in it. This is a good example of all of the other rooms. No rythm or reason as to why there’s a silver spoon there. No real reason for the laughing, other than the statues are laughing. It just IS. Room three is another good example. A wooden table and stool. On the table is a box with 89 nails. There’s a leather backpack with a dead mouse an an empty potions bottle in it that is under some wooden debris on the west wall. Like I said, it looks completely randomly generated with maybe a little DM power to put it together. “Eight Gobilns armed with clubs can be found here.” is a good example of a monster room. It’s not quite a minimal key but is close to it. And you know what? It’s at LEAST four times more interesting than Dwimmermount. Seriously, I know its rather gauche to do, but while reading this I kept coming back again and again to my thoughts about Dwimmermount. That dungeon tried to present itself as a unified whole with some reasoning behind it. And it failed miserably in its ‘expansive minimalist’ key that focused on boring details. This dungeon embraces that sentiment SO much that it ends up being interesting. It’s like a completely random assortment of stuff and that should be obvious to any group of players going through it. No wasting time trying to figure out what is going on … nothing is! In that sense it’s more out there than anything in ASE or WMLP. Grand over-arching theme with subtle plots and history intermixed? Norfolk & Way pal! This is just some random shit we threw together and spent 30 seconds per room cleaning up a bit.

I’m absolutely serious about his being used as a kind of hex crawl tool. I tend to plunder those products for cool ideas that I can then insert in to my game, either on the fly or as some kind of planned thing going on in the background. You could totally use this product the same way. A DM could flip to a page and pick almost any room and insert it in to a dungeon or get inspiration from it and build sections of their own dungeon from it. A kind of cure for writers bloch. (Get it?!?! Get it?!?! BLOCH!!! Get it?!?! Oh man … I’m the best guy I know!) You could take that “laughing ladies” statues/pool and build a section of your own dungeon it so that it made sense in context. Seem from that viewpoint then this is one of the strongest products ever produced in that genre (Dungeon seeds?) As an actual dungeon to play … well, you’d have to have the right group in the right frame of mind. If your players don’t need meaning and are willing to tackle rooms one thing at a time without a larger context then this is great.

by Jesse Muir
Freely Distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 4-6

This is a short adventure in to an old crypt system. It’s pretty plain, for the most part, and uninspiring. There’s no background, so it’s just a pure crawl small crawl to drop in.

There’s no background here; the adventure jumps right in to encounter one on the wilderness map. This is more than a little strange to see in an adventure module. Ultimately I don’t think it matters; most hooks suck and most dungeon backgrounds suck and it’s pretty common to replace the hook or the background with something else. Still … it very weird to just see the locale detailed in a background-free way. I’m not really sure I know what to what about it.

Outside of the crypt complex there are four encounters while there are four more in the graveyard before the group descends in to the crypts proper. Outside there’s just spiders, were-rats and ghouls. There’s also a druid that can be troublesome if the party desecrates the forest. Otherwise … nothing much going on outside. The druid encounter could be used as a kind of hit and run series of encounters if the party linger about and earn his anger but that really doesn’t seem likely given the length of the adventure. The other wilderness encounters are just … boring … with read-aloud text. The four or so cemetery encounters are well enough for token encounters for potential tomb robbers but there’s just not enough there to sustain an exploration of the many graves.

The maps are simple linear/branching affairs, with a couple of secret passages that are going to be VERY hard to find without magic. It’s a very simple lay out with a very simple set of wandering vermin to go along with it … mostly rats of one type or another. The rooms here are really not very interesting. There’s a blocked-up stair passage and set piece with a were-rat on a throne but otherwise it’s just monster boring room, monster boring room. The second level is more of the same but this time it’s undead instead of were-rats. Shadows, ghouls, vampires. There’s a single interesting room, with a basin in it that can perform a variety of healing. Otherwise it’s more of the same: see room, fight monster, loot room. I realize this is a boring-ass short review but there’s just nothing in this place to interact with. Yeah, you can loot some graves. And you can pry out some inlaid gemstones. That’s nice. But there’s just so much “enter room fight monster” stuff that’s it becomes repetitive … and the module is short!

There are a couple of examples of better magic items. A chalice that can make healing potions and a magic sword that boosts strength for a short period of time. The items could be fleshed out a little more but, still, it’s an attempt. Other than these it’s just standard boring old book magic items. I really wish designers would put in more of an effort here. The new monsters are both vampire derivatives; lesser vampires of varying degrees. As “you face generic undead” opponents they could be pretty good. The party wouldn’t know what kind of undead, or perhaps even creature, they face. I always like that in a module.

Too short, too simple, and too mundane for my tastes.

by Stuart Marshall
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
1st Levels

This module contains a small religious temple, well done, and a near by basic and tough two level dungeon. The shrine is quite nice but the dungeon too simple, although difficult. The shrine is worth lifting.

This adventure is eighteen pages long and the shrine portion of it is only about two and a half, with the rest of the module being devoted to a nearby dungeon. There’s not a lot of messing around with bullshit background in this one. There are just a couple of paragraphs of background information combined with some hooks to get the players moving to the shrine before the designer jumps right in to the shrine. I like this. I’ve always hated being bogged down in pages and pages of background information. I’m not reading a novel. I’m prepping for a game. The designer does a good job in providing some background that can link up with the previous modules or stand alone. For example, the temple leader is interested in the club-footed girl in the village from the last set of adventures, or she could be linked as a source of information for a vampire-like creature prowling around nearby. Anyway, it’s short, clear, plausible and interesting enough to provide the needed pretexts.

The shine proper has about eleven sites described. “Described” may be the wrong word to use. The eleven various sites all get a short one or two line description but, to borrow a word from the last paragraph, the sites are just a pretext for the real meat: the NPC’s. The site descriptions range from basic, like the guard barracks, to basic and strange. The Pen of the Holy Goat. The Omphalos carved with vaguely disturbing glyphs. The monoliths, supplicants cells, and naked bathing pools. The latrines. Wait! Wait! I know, latrines/lavatories in a module is usually a sign if a crappy module. They show some need to “explain” things. Not here. In this one they are a hook for an NPC. And in fact that’s what most of the eleven site descriptions are. Reading through then I found myself continually thinking of how they could be used by the NPC’s to interact with the characters and how the players would get themselves in to trouble at the sites. And that’s just EXACTLY what site descriptions in a NPC locale should do. They are not some frumpy Victorian catalog of an accurate depiction of village life. They are springboards to adventure. You just KNOW that someone is going to try and get a look at the naked priestesses bathing in the springs. Or mess with the goat. Or the holy rock. That’s why things get described, or should anyway: so the group can interact with them. Most of those eleven sites have something going on that can lead to a bit of fun without too much of a stretch. That’s not the best part of the shrine though. The best part are the NPC’s. The shrine is down to the last few priestesses, three in fact. A small frail leader who blinks nervously, a flighty and giggly 25 year old, and an overweight slightly bitter and older ‘junior sibyl.’ Those would be good descriptions to run with but there’s more. The leader has a reputation for being fabulously wealthy and a giant slayer. The flighty one is an act covering a calm and composed woman. The older junior is looking to shirk her menial duties. These NPC descriptions take place in a short quarter page or so, including stat blocks, and provide more than ample nuggets to get any DM’s creative juices flowing. Combined with the site descriptions you get a really nice little shrine description that could be dropped in to almost any game. Further, the head is high enough level to cast Raise Dead and other other spells the party might need, making the groups interest a natural. The Splinters of Faith series from Frog God tried to describe a bunch of temples of different faiths but they came off hokey and uninteresting, despite ratcheting up the fantasy elements. This shine, in contrast, comes off realistic enough to be plausible and interesting enough, with enough potential hooks implied, that I WANT to use it and throw it in. It really is the kind of the thing I like to lift to include in my own games.

The rest of the adventure is less than good. The priestess gives the party the mission of checking on another group that disappeared in a nearby dungeon. That’s a lame and uninteresting hook. There is a nice little wandering monsters table on the way to the dungeon. The forest is full of protective centaurs (playing the “we barely tolerate humans” game) and petrified goblins, as well a a few bandit and humanoid encounters. Each of the encounters gets a sentence or two to expand on them a bit. I like that extra detail; I think it really helps cement the “feel” of the environment a lot … in this case a pretty idyllic forest with a few invaders a sense of the past lurking underneath.

The dungeon is not very good in most respects. There is almost no background provided at all. “A group of adventurers went here and didn’t come back” is just about the extent of the background. No reasons at all for it to exist, just a simple note of “Room 1. Entrance Chamber” and off we go. It needs just a little background to help the DM fill in the missing details. Wizards lab? Old fortress? Former haunt of The Evil One? The map is quite disappointing also. It has two levels, with about 36 rooms on the first level and 25 or so on the second. Both tend to be a linear branching style of map. The first level, in particular, is divided in to three distinct sections with a single way to each section. Explore section one, then section two, which leads to section thee, which leads to the entrance to level two. The first section has a couple of very small “room loops” but the entire thing has a layout which really doesn’t support explorative play. IE: you can feel like you’ve cleared the dungeon, and tat’s not a good thing. The wandering monsters are mostly vermin without further explanation.

This place is ROUGH. 40 jermlaine in the first and second sections. 60 tribesmen in the third section. 120 tribesmen in the second level. And that’s in addition to the ‘normal’ room encounters with vermin, skeletons and the like. Ouch! Nothing wrong with that, some of my favorite modules have a shit-ton of enemies in them. I like it! It IS going to be a surprise for the 3e/4e players though. The rooms generally have something going on, but they feel disconnected from each other and lack … flavor? even though they each seem to have something. A dead gnoll female with tattoos and rot grubs. A locked bronze door (empty storeroom on the other side, how exciting!) A waterlogged chamber full of fungus. A poltergeist rooms. Rooms full of dead vermin (evidence of the last party) The writing is terse enough, with 7-8 rooms to the page, but there’s just not enough interesting going on in each room to support any kind of interactivity. The clues to the last groups location are nice, and work with that hook, but there’s not much beyond that. The lack of a good dungeon background makes the problem worse since it’s harder for the DM to fill in a coherent story. There’s a bad guy at the end of the dungeon but he suffers from Lareth the Beautiful syndrome. There’s build up to him so when he pops up he’s just another monster to kill. There’s sense of tension.

The treasure is truly disappointing. The mundane treasure is mostly in the form of boring old coinage and the magical items are almost entirely book items like “+1 swords” and their ilk. The previous modules from the designer used minor magical items extensively but only two show up in this adventure. That’s a serious disappointment. Magic and mundane treasure are a reward and should feel like it. They should feel special, the magic items in particular, and convey a sense of mystery and wonder. “Sword +1” doesn’t do that.

Steal the shrine and ditch the dungeon.

by Stuart Marshall
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
1st Level

This is a small ‘tactical’ adventure in which the group frees a small farm from goblin invaders. The setup is a bit free-form, with no presumptions about how the the party will resolve the situation. The magic items are interesting, as is the location (although it trends towards 2e silliness.) Otherwise it’s a pretty average adventure. Which makes it better than 95% of all adventurers ever written. But still, average.

The adventure takes place in and around a spider farm. There are maybe twenty buildings above ground and maybe fifteen or so locations below ground in the spider pits. The farmer raises spiders below ground and then harvests the spider silk, further processing the spider bodies when they die. It’s a cute little business description for a fantasy world, if you’re in to that kind of thing. I’m not really in to that kind of “magical society” environment, but I must admit this one is done well. It’s not the throw away description that usually accompanies a business description. As I mentioned, there are twenty or so building descriptions and a decent number of workers, 25 or so. Again, not something that you usually see in an adventure. Industry is usually skipped over.

The building descriptions, including the spider pits, are pretty mundane. Realistic and mundane. There’s just not much going on in them, except for the goblins. The buildings, post-invasion, show how many goblins are in each one. This is laid out pretty plainly. The net effect of these two conditions, the building descriptions and the goblin descriptions, as well as some comments about playing the goblins intelligently, give you a feel for how the adventure should run. You have a farm described. You have some goblins described. You have some advice for how to run the goblins and a hook to get the characters going. GO!

The adventures problem is two-fold. First, it’s hard. This is NOT an introductory adventure. Oh, it says first level all right, but any 3e or 4e or n00b group is going to get themselves killed off FAST by a 25+ strong, intelligent, goblin raiding band. There’s nothing wrong with its style, but it’s written for experienced PLAYERS with inexperienced CHARACTERS. Second is the environment proper, the farm. It’s a bit boring. There needs to be a little more going on. Maybe some scaffolding, or giant boiling caldrons, so something similar. There needs to be more for the players to work with and use in the environment over the course of the adventure. It’s a minimally described and realistic location … it needs more to sustain imaginative play.

The treasures are, once again, excellent. Stuart write a free downloadable book called something like ‘The Tome of Minor Magical Items.’ This adventure has several. From a mug that fills with ale (created by a group of ale gremlins in a extra-dimensional pocket … who don’t use enough hops) to items that give you an additional first level spell, or give the cleric the ability to roll twice for cure light, taking the best of the two rolls. They SEEM magical. I love that kind of feel. A lot of the mundane items are similar: the are objects rather than just raw coinage and have enough little flavor text descriptions behind them to make them nice.

I think the real issue here is that the adventure seems like something that an experienced DM came up with 15 minutes before the players showed up. Given a short description of “Spider farm with 25 workers gets invaded by a 20-member warband of smart goblins.” what would YOU come up with during actual play? The amount of additional exposition/flavor is rather small. The goblins worship Lolth and sacrifice 3 people a day to the spiders until the last of three days when they sacrifice everyone. The spider mother is gross and bloated and can’t move well. There’s an egg sac with 95 more in it. The spiders launch continual attacks. Webs don’t really burn well.

It’s a good set up but it’s missing a lot of imagination and environment that would turn it in to a really excellent adventure.

by Len Lakofka
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 3-5

In this module the party defends a small series of villages from various mass humanoid attacks and an assassination attempt. It’s confusing, with an insane level of detail. It has a LOT of overpowered villagers and a strange vibe I can’t put my finger on. High fantasy mixed with … idiosyncratic stuff? Bits of this adventure are highly imaginative but man, you have to work to get it out.

I tend to write my reviews in a very stream of consciousness style. This module reminds me a lot of my review-writing style. My reviews are four or five paragraphs long. This module is 137 pages long. I think you can see where I’m going here. This module is in DESPERATE need of a heavy edit. It was quite hard for me to figure out what was going on, when it was going on, where it was going on, and how it all fit together. It’s just like everything was all mashed up together … maybe in the order you might need it? It’s got a HUGE amount of detail, which is pretty obvious once you consider there are only four encounters in it. (I think? After two read-throughs I’m still not sure.) At some point in my life, I don’t recall when, I owned L1. I recall trying to read it several times and just being confused. Deja-vu.

I _think_ there is a timeline of events which involve humanoids attacking villages and the players moving from village to village to protect them, combined with an assassination attempt on a nobles wife. There’s also a dungeon straight of Tower of Gygax. How/why the dungeon fits in I’m not sure. There’s also a Sword of Evil and a Mace of Destruction floating around that appear to be involved somehow in the plot. I’m pretty sure all of the attacks are being masterminded by an evil noble and his son. I have NO clue how any of this fits together or how the party is supposed to figure out where to go.

Page 1 has an introduction and a sequence of events for the module. The introduction is three paragraphs long and says, essentially, that there’s a supplemental book that contain pre-gens and calendar information and please read the module carefully. No Shit! I take back all of my bitching and moaning about long introductions and backgrounds. This thing needs at least a page that describes how all the bits fit together. The sequence of events should help but its all but useless. There are six entires. Three are background. One is “the party arrives. There is snow on the rooftops and on the dock!” WTF?!? Is that important? Is it winter? Or the middle of summer? I never did figure out why the snow was mentioned or if it was important. The last two entries are eight days apart and start jut 1 day after the party arrives. The first is that a knight leaves his town with some troops. The second, and last date is “The attacks on the village of Tellar.” The eight days in between those two events make up the adventure. Those are the eight important days for an event summary, and yet nothing is mentioned.

All of that shit in one column on page one. The second column is, perhaps, even more bizarre. The DM is told that the new party should travel to Grest based on the information provided in the introduction and if they don’t then the module is useless. Uh … there wasn’t ANYTHING about the module in the introduction … There’s some read-aloud after this advice, and some details. Maybe it means that? Nope. A tavern-keeper has breakfast with the party and tells them 37 people died and 30 more were injured, along with some details, like the names of the people who were killed, if the party asks. There’s also a long list of other people killed and buildings burned down, which refers back to L1 and/or L2, I guess, but has no other bearing on the adventure? The detail here is SO strange. It’s like … watching the Attack on Foy battle scene in Band of Brothers. You see some action. You hear some names. Oh look, a haystack. Interesting and detailed … but not really relevant to timeline of WW2. And from this the party figures out they need to go to Grest?

The next section is a day heading: Patchwell the 10th. The party leaves for Grest. The barkeep gets ready to bury some friends. Uh .. didn’t they die like 8 days earlier? Wait, I’ve got an idea. Maybe the calendar isn’t numerical like we think. Maybe its, like, logarithmic? So there are not 8 days in between events. The barkeeps friends died yesterday! Ah Ha! The Copper Rise comes in to sight. What the hell is that? Is it relevant? Fuck, I feel like I’m watching a Fellini movie without subtitles. What the fuck is going on? Who is that? Is that important? They meet some copper miners on the road with a wagon, a man and a boy. The man is a fifth level fighter and the boy is a third level fighter. No, wait, there are three people now. The 19-year old is the third level fighter and the 8 year old … *whew*, he has no levels. WTF are the copper miners doing with 8 levels of fighter between them? Uh, you do get negative experience for killing them though? Ah ha! So the party is supposed to be hero’s and this is a railroad! Got it!

The party arrives at an inn where they are interviewed by the Knight of Grest, who is on his way to the village that was attacked, with a war party. After the knight and his troop leave the next day then the inn is attacked by a hobgoblin war band 30 strong. Uh … the innkeep is a fourth level fighter and his wife is a fifth level cleric. In fact, there’s a shit ton of high level people in the town. A 7th level dwarf, another 4th level cleric. Lots of second and third level fighters … I guess the party is supposed to help out? There’s a silly level of detail. Things like “the common room has six large octagonal tables with eight chairs around three of them and six around the other three (six of the chairs need to be repaired and in the kitchen against the back wall.)” Huh? Is that meaningful? Does that somehow represent some event in the directors childhood or relate to the priests sexual thoughts and his relationship with God?

The whole inn thing is only four pages long; terse in comparison to what’s to come. The next day the party gets to Grest. There’s an event in Grest the evening of the the 12th, but it makes no sense? The module then skips to events in Grest on the 14th, an attempted assassination in castle Grest of the knights wife. “It’s the last scheduled event in the introduction.” What? This was all introduction and not the adventure? Wait … when the fuck did this become a Chech film? There’s like, 28 pages of Grest, at least. And a dungeon under ruins nearby? Uh … I don’t know why the party goes to the dungeon? It has a cool maze. Oh wait, the module is describing Grest again? So that was just, like, a 12 page sidebar stuffed in at a random spot? The villages of Teller and Cobblethorp are also described. Teller gets attacked. Cobblethorp doesn’t, but has a bad guy in it? And then the wilderness around the three towns gets described? I think you get the idea. It’s a confusing mess stuffed with strange detail.

The vibe here is very strange. All of the people in the villages seem to be very high level. There’s two tailors who are both 5th level wizards! There’s also A LOT of powerful things running around. How about an 18th level Angel shape-changed in to a halfling apple seller? His donkey is a bronze dragon. And then there’s the little girl who’s actually a polymorphed silver dragon. She gets upset if the group steals some pearls. No one helps the party, or course. Oh, and there’s like a crazy number of gods running around with a decent chance that some show up. Usually to smite a party member who’s not on the straight and narrow. It’s bizarre! It’s like the players are the only ‘normal’ people in the entire place! I don’t groove on the whole “tailor and his wife are both 5th level wizards/doorman is a 7th level fighter” type thing. Nor do I get off on the whole “punish the party for stealing and looting the good temples” or “Hahaha! puny human, do what we dragons say or else!” thing.

But there’s a whimsical side of this that’s pretty cool also. The whole “Baphumet come to visit hi old paladin buddy” and the idea that anyone/everyone is actually someone else much more powerful … that might make a cool campaign, right before your players strange you. The situations are just sooo bizarre and there’s so many of them that it ends up being some kind of High Fantasy/0e mashup done first edition style. Len like his magic items also, but he does do some work to add variety. Potions of wood rotting, daggers of blood-letting, and so on. There’s a LOT of highly imaginative content in this … if you can wade through the rest. The module is worth downloading just to read the weird color-based teleportation maze on page (40 or 42.) Six confusing and wonderful pages!

Hey, what’s up with the editing Dragonsfoot? Did you even try?

by Todd Hughes
Freely Distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Level 6-8

The troubles in Rashtan have been caused by the mysterious Isensan, can the party discover his secrets and stop his wicked plans in time?

This is an adventure with two small dungeon crawls and a short wilderness adventures to get there. As the cover indicates, the finale is with a blue dragon. It handles the dragon in a somewhat intelligent manner (lots of minions serving him) and does a decent job with magical and mundane treasure. It ends up feeling a bit bland though, with not enough non-guard encounters.

The village is not covered at all this time around. Instead it’s been spawned off in to its own product, which is probably the right thing to do given its featured role in … five modules now? ANyway, our party of 6th-8th level adventurers are offered 2000gp to bring in a bandit leader, dead or alive. There’s a small bump for each pair of bugbear or hobgoblin ears brought back. The ear bounty is GREAT. I like that kind of color. I think I’m gonna steal it for tonight but have some evil demi-humans convince the humanoids to cut off their ears and go halfsies on the bounty. But at 6th-8th level? I think not. Probably better to just announce that the bandit leader is a dragon and rely on the parties greed to show through. There’s an 8-day wilderness adventure to get to the first dungeon, the one the group cleared out in the .. second module? The wilderness wandering monster tables are just simple things that could have come straight out of the 1E DMG.

The first dungeon is a small thirteen room affair with a simple branching design. It’s the same dungeon used in (HM2?) and is an example of a dungeon being repopulated. The rooms are full of skeletons of the creatures the party killed the first time around, as well as a series of new things that have moved in. Carrion Crawlers, Yellow Mold, Green Slime. There’s a small encounter with a group of bugbears, 14, that leads to the ‘clue’ the players are supposed to discover: a captured mage. He’s actually the leader of the bugbears but ties himself up when he hears the party killing them. The bugbears are so afraid of him that they won’t blab if captured. That sounds a little far-fetched. His only reason for being there is to clue the party in to the location of the dragons lair and pretend to be their friend so he can backstab them in his lair. DEEP in his lair. After the group has probably slaughtered about a bazillion of the dragons minions. It’s a pretty long stretch to get to that point, but whatever.

The Dragons Lair is another small 22 room branching design. There’s no Daphne in sight though. The design is so simple that you only need have one encounter before taking on the dragon. Just a simple branching design in some caves. The vast majority of the rooms just have guards in them: 34 gnolls, 8 trolls, 22 bugbears, 19 bugbears, etc. As I said before, the idea of the dragon having minions to do his bidding and help guard his lair is a good one. It’s just very poorly implemented here. The monsters don’t really react in an organized fashion. The module implies that they do, when guard horns are blown, but it’s organized in a poor fashion for a DM to coordinate the response. Each room lists who they respond to. This is cumbersome. It would have been better if the room in which the horn was blown listed which rooms responded. That sort of Order Of Battle helps make things run faster. Then again, it’s nothing that a read-through and pencil notes couldn’t solve.

Theres a decent encounter with some Abolteth that are co-lairing in one of the branches. They have some of the dragons minions as slaves, and are doing the whole illusion thing also. It’s a pretty standard Aboleth encounter, but it’s still nice to see. Other than that … Guard room with 22 bugbears. Guard room with 8 trolls. Etc.

Some of the magic items are nice though. That’s not too surprising since the guy write ‘The Tome of Minor Magic Items.’ A bow that can give you a little strength bonus. A ring of comprehend languages. Elven leather made out of leaves. They could use a little more description but the effects are certainly not book standard. There’s a whole series of staffs that are pretty lame. Essentially they allow the wielder to cast a single mega spell, like Ice Storm of or something similar. The dragons shaman guards, in his lair, are wielding a pair. IE: They each have a single one-shot hard hitting spell. I never understood this. Why not just say “He can cast ice storm once a day” instead of gimping the party with a single-use magic item.

by Todd Hughes
Freely Distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Level 1

A thief is loose in the town of Rashtan, can you stop them?

This is a small & short mystery/hunt in a small flavorless village. Hear a rumor, get a mission to find out what’s going on, conduct interviews, explore a small cave complex with rats and centipedes. IE: Clean out the windows attic.

Other adventures by this author include “The Goodly King is Actually an Evil Doppleganger” and “The Green Devil Face is a Sphere of Annihilation.” The cover picture and the title pretty much give away the entire adventure. Wally the farmer has gone missing. People are complaining about small valuables getting stolen. Someone else disappeared a few weeks back. The sheriff is offering a reward, cause spending the towns money is easier than doing his job. Clues are given at six of the 23 locations in town. None of the locations are described other than name and maybe a sentence or two in the clue. IE: The dive bar is run by Boris “one-ear”, a surely man who doesn’t like people snooping around his customers. I’ve been giving this series a lot of shit but it’s been getting better. The descriptions for the various clues are great at times. A dive bar run by a Surly/private Boris ‘one-ear’ is pretty much the exact level of detail I need to run a place. It’s short and it’s got some good imagery I can expand on myself during play. The other clue locations are similar. The city hall has a janitor that you can get a clue from. If I ignore the RenFaire 2E bullshit in the last statement then that’s ok also. As is the tavern owner who thinks the other tavern guy is behind things. Oh, and the guy is the head of the thieves guild and is worried that the thefts at his place will draw attention to his activities. He hires a guy to join up with the party as a hireling to spy on the group and feed information back to him about the thefts. Nothing nefarious, just report back. That’s a pretty good inn description without ever describing what was in the inn! The rest are not so good.

The dungeon/caves has five rooms and is located under the well in town. There are giant rats. There is a giant frog. There are giant centipedes. There is an Osquip. And there’s the 4HD Meazel. That’s a lot of nasties located in the center of the village! The cave system is described as having TONS of rats, which is a nice little bit, especially for use in the cramped hands & knees tunnel crawling part of the adventure. Should do a great job of freaking the players out. Each entry has read-aloud, which is a waster of time and space. Those sections add nothing to the locations. Not that the DM sections add anything either. The rooms down here have nothing interesting to offer.

The monsters are book monsters and boring, bringing none of the mystery or excitement a D&D game should have. The same for the treasure: a small number of coins, some gems, and a +1 dagger and golden Ring of Water Walking. The dagger is a serious disappointment. I wish more had been done to make it stand out. The ring is slightly better since I like these sorts of minor magical items. I think I fell in love with items of that sort when reading Bree & the Barrowdowns back in high school when it first came out. Maybe because they don’ SEEM like book items? The barrow treasure certainly wasn’t book, at least not the combs that kept tangles out of your hair. The +30 armor is a different story. 🙂

This is clearly supposed to be an introductory D&D adventure. In my mind your first adventure should be full of mystery and wonder, whimsy and The Fantastic. It should make you feel like you did the first time you ever met a monster in a D&D game or wondered what something was or what it did. “Dagger, +1” is just going through the motions of playing D&D.

by Todd Hughes
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 4-6

The ancient halls of a long lost wizardpriest of chaos Belzir have been rediscovered. Can the party discover this secrets and find his legendary amulet?

Behold, an adventure! This is a dungeoncrawl in the dungeon of a dead wizard to retrieve an artifact. It has flashes of good content and interesting things that are surrounded by poor content and boring things. It’s either the best bad adventure I’ve ever reviewed or the worst good adventure I’ve ever reviewed … I’m not sure which. It’s free, and worth a looksy if you time.

This module is frustrating. It has a decent amount of interesting things going on but it’s surrounded by things that make me cringe. Let’s take the hook as an example. There is a great four line conversation that the players will overhear in a tavern. Two old farmers gossiping and the line “Gold. Gold and lot;s of magic. That’s what he’s offering.” Woah! Perfect! As a PC I’m already interested! It continues “Yeah, Gold and magic and a fool’s quest. Everyone who’s gone has never returned.” Danger! Foreshadowing! Build up of tension! Ya Hoo! “Well, cept that first feller. He came back with that book.” Ooooo! The plot thickens! “Yeah, but just him. The other three didn’t come back did they?” O. M. G. As a player I would be absolutely DROOLING at this point. It’s short. It’s simple. There’s a lot of room to ad-lib and yet it provides enough for the DM to work with. An absolutely WONDERFUL hook for an adventure! Now, let’s fucking ruin it. “Mitner” the sage in town (ug) is offering a reward (ug) for people that go to an old dungeon and explore it for him (ug). The book was a diary “ug” and the sage wants you to fetch him an amulet in the dungeon so he can keep it safe cause it might be a danger (ug). He warns the characters not to suffer from temptation and take the amulet but hat he will reward them with a whole bunch of magic items if they return it to him. (ug) This is terrible! Absolutely terrible! Why not let the players make their own decisions? Why send them on this mission from a patron? Why not just drop hints of gold, magic, and a POWERFUL ARTIFACT. Cause that’s what the amulet is, an artifact-like magic item. That doesn’t come across at ALL until almost the last page of the adventure. The tavern hook, combined with rumors of the artifact and its powers, maybe combined with a STUPID low offer from the sage, would be enough to get the PLAYERS going. And that’s what a good hook does, motivate the players.

The village of Rashtan, where the previous two modules in this series have taken place, is almost usable as something more than a throw-away. A recent gold rush has caused the place to grow in the last couple of months. There’s not 23 locations, instead of 4, including a dive bar. There’s still not much going on and the descriptions are pretty lame. The guy that runs the Sink Hole, the dive bar, is named Boris One-Ear. It then notes that one of his ears has been torn off. Seriously? I need you to tell me that? That’s the kind of wonders you can expect in the town description. Actually, no, that’s a highlight of the town descriptions. A good town description concentrates on the RELATIONSHIPS between the people in town. Who hates who, who’s in love with who, and how the people in the town interact. That’s what brings a town to life and there’s none of that here. Unless … there’s a 20-entry rumor table. You could take this table, as well as a cross-section of the town, and work up some matrix, using the rumor table as a kind of “whats going on in town” table … which is probably what they should all represent anyway. Rumor 9 is that the new priests in town are all really devil worshipers. Let’s work with that … the laypeople of the old church in town are spreading that rumor without the knowledge of the old priests … in fact, it’s all been started by old Widow Harlock who is a bitter, shrew of a person. Or maybe she’s in league with one of the old priests? Ooooo … they are secret lovers! NOW you’ve got the start of some good town action. Go to the next rumor ands repeat. Thus you now have 20 subplots in an otherwise boring town. But you are going to have to invest time. Like I said, Frustrating.

The wilderness journey to the dungeon has one of the most boring wandering monster tables of all time. It looks just like it was copied verbatim from the 1E DMG wilderness tables. Just a random assortment of animals, humanoids, and vermin. It adds nothing. The journey also includes a couple of programmed encounters. The first has the group finding a wagon on the side of the road, tilting to one side because it’s busted a wheel, while some women look on and some men try in vain to shift the wagon to fix it. Meta-gaming time! Something is going to happen … either the group os going to get attacked by ogres or something or … Yes! the wagon people are actually a bandit group that’s out to waylay the party! It’s not a bad encounter but it takes up WAY too much space at almost a half column AND it has a 3rd level assassin assassinating the party MU. Ouch! I always hated the assassin class. The other encounter is also with bandits but it’s more of a “traditional pit trap in the wilderness with bandits attacking” sort of thing with nothing special. There’s also a bandit lair that has a second entrance to the wizards dungeon. Cool! Not only can the party track back/torture the monster lair out of the killed/captured bandits but they can also find another entrance to the dungeon! And … the bandit lair sucks. Simple layout and just boring old rooms with a couple of traps stuffed with bandits to hack. Orcs & human bandits. There is a brief note on how the bandits react to attack and who comes to the aid of others and rallies. I like these things in intelligent/humanoid lairs since cuts down on my searching through the module to see who responds when the inevitable Alarm Gong gets rung.

The main dungeon is two levels with maybe 21 room son the first level and another 10 or so on the second level. Kind of. It’s hard to count because of the Pocket Dimensions! Maybe I’m excited about pocket dimensions because of the whole Bottle City and Machine level thing I’ve been seeing lately online. Maybe not. They do FEEL different than the pocket dimensions I’ve seen in other products, even though they are all pretty simple affairs.

The dungeon starts with … a welcome mat. That’s my kind of humor. 🙂 The rooms have a kind of light/mild funhouse feel to them, which is probably why I like many of them. They have a certain OSR feel to them. A statue that animates. A pool of water that can bump stats, heal you, kill you, etc. There’s a statue who’s arms you can move to do things, and another room with levers that move GIANT blocks of stone to block off some hallways and open up others. There are a few more examples of things like that in the dungeon. I like that kind of interactivity in my dungeons. It gives the players something to do, dares them, tempts them, and gives then an environment that they can try to use to their advantage. Several of the rooms have some clumsy elements, like plaques on the walls that are the equivalent of ‘Eat Me’ messages. There’s also a decent number of very boring combats in boring rooms with boring treasure. This is VERY frustrating after the Change Pool, the State Arms, or the Block levers. The pocket dimensions are really not much more than a bunch of wandering monsters checks through a wilderness interspersed with a couple of set encounters and ending in some encounter where you get part of a key and get teleported back to the main dungeon.

There are a few decent non-standard magic items int he adventure. A ring that gives you bow proficiency, a nice intelligent sword, and THE AMULET, which is essentially an artifact. Otherwise it’s all book standard items and even the ring/sword don’t have very good descriptions associated with them. The mundane treasures are just piles of even numbered coin amounts and gems. There are a number of new monsters, and a lot of new undead to mix things up a bit for the players. New monsters mean the players don’t know what to expect and good treasure makes the game magical.