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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Trenton Howard
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 1-3

Dickhead elves, mixed humanoids in a small cave complex and too many undead combine to create a bland adventure full of certain death for the PC’s. At least it hits all the low points of adventure design.

Oh’s No’s! The mighty elven city of Kyrimi is having trouble with goblin raids! Trade is super duper important to them and the goblin raids are making that impossible. Please please would the party go stop the goblins? FUCKING HUMAN ASSHOLE SCUM! It would be great if you would do that for us YOU WORTHLESS HUMAN TOILET RAGS! We are but elves with 30-50 guards on patrol at the city limits at all times. Guards who we pay to, well, guard us. Yeah, about those goblins that are stopping the super important trading we do … Get your asses moving, m’kay? Yes, the elves want your help. Yes, the elves are assholes. Yes, they treat you like shit. Yes, trade is SUPER important to them. No, the specifics are not mentioned. Yes, they call themselves a city. Yes, they have shit tons of guards. No, they don’t take care of the problem themselves. Look man, I’m not asking for a lot here but how about you spend just five fucking minutes on the pretext. Just five. Why the fuck doesn’t good asshole King Winselsaus send his fucking guards after the goblins? Hey, how about all those shops in the city, eh? You know, all SEVEN of them? Well, unfair, two are house, one the barracks, one the captains barracks and one the palace. So two. That the DM is advised to stop the party from entering until they meet the king. The workshop is, perhaps, the best. They are not supposed to be allowed to enter until after the meet with the king. It is nothing special. Just a dude working at a table. ARG!!!!!!!!!! So, the elves are assholes, the pretext is worthless, and the advice given in the adventure to the DM worthless. Great. Another stellar Footprints product. Seriously guys, how about editorial intervention? You do have standards don’t you? Footprints looks fine and it has the trade dress so how about you follow-through with some editorial chops? “I’m sorry, no, your adventure needs more work before we can publish it.”

Wander through the forest following an easily marked trail to get to the goblin caves. Have a couple of forced encounters. Do not go to the undead caves. “If the party tries to go here first then prevent them, with some thick underbrush or something else.” Why the fuck would you do this? What is the point? Are you trying to build tension? Hide the vil boss in the undead caves? To do that there has to be hints that there IS an evil undead boss in another location. That NEVER happens. All the advice is doing to giving crappy DM’s crappy advice and enabling their crappiness. That sweet little lake on the map? A lake in an elven forest? Completely ignored. ARG!

Goblin Caves. 10 rooms. essentially linear with a couple of rooms hanging off a straight line corridor. Goblins. Hobgoblins. Gnolls (with fucking Bardiches, inside caves.) The room descriptions are uninspiring. “This room contains various instruments of torture. Past victims lie on the floor” There is nothing of value here.” Yeah, a good DM will put in an iron maiden to throw someone in to. A good adventure writer will, however, include other ideas as well. That’s the purpose of the published adventure. It’s not to put some goblins in some caves and stat them out. It’s to come up with a couple of interesting things to spark the DM’s imagination. It’s crazy that people don’t get this. It’s like they are just going through the motions of an adventure and it drives me nuts. What value was added here? A crappy little map? Stat’ing monsters to put in rooms? Seriously? Was this seriously your best effort at an adventure? The undead caves may be worse. Eight rooms and you have to visit all of them in order to pull the levers to open the last rooms. Let’s see here … 10 skeletons, 8 ghouls, 10 zombies, 3rd MU, 6 skeletons, wight, EHP & 5 ghouls at the same time. For a first level party? Seriously? It’s gonna be a slaughter! Yeah! It’s over! We can go watch the game, or masturbate, or cry softly to ourselves! Yeah! No linkages between the first cave and the second. Nothing.

Why something like this exists in Footprints escapes me.

by Nicole Massey
Freely distributed by & Magazine
AD&D
Levels 3-7

What horror from the depths is leaving ships adrift, cargo untouched, stealing the crews for some unspeakable purpose?

I haven’t read the adventure yet. I’d guess Sahuguin. Ok, I was wrong. It’s Sirens. And Psionics. Dirty hippy sirens with psionics. 2e nonsense. Err, i mean: This is a 2e style investigation of some ships that have disappeared. It ends up with something happening down in some siren caves. Hopefully it’s a slaughter-fest down there so I don’t have to listen to this bullshit hippy whale-friendly environmentalism message. Errr, I mean, it’s got a lot of extraneous detail in the descriptions and is PROBABLY meant to be a role-play heavy adventure.

There is some magic hippy land where elves, dwarves, humans, and halfling live in harmony. They live under streetlamps with continual light in them and with good and justly kings and wizard guilds that are not full of reprobates and blah blah blah blah blah. Look, I know some of you like this shit but I can’t for the life of me understand why. Anyway, in some bullshit land like this the king summons/bullies you to attend an audience. Some bullshit 6th level knight/fighter in full plate shows up and intimates that you need to come see the king, or else. Hey0Sir Dickcheese, how about asking nicely? Nah, it’s always gotta be veiled threats in these things and the players never to get to call their bluffs ’cause then the DM gets their underwear twisted and 31st level orphan protectors show up and blah blah blah blah blah Screw you Mr PC for not putting up with the DM’s version of a power fantasy. You know what happens when a fucking NPC tries to bully one of my characters because the DM is a tool? I shiv the fucker in the throat with my holy symbol and fuck the character and the campaign, I’ll make a new one. Uh, I shiv the NPC, not the DM. But I think the DM gets the message. Perhaps I should find a better way of communicating my displeasure with the railroading than shooting cops in the face with shotguns? Whoops, wrong campaign/game.

Anyway, Kingy wants you to go look in to why some ships have been found adrift with no sailors on them. Blah blah blah blah blah critical grin shipment blah blah blah blah blah famine down south blah blah blah blah blah. He’s offering the wonderful reward of 3000gp each. It’s not clear to me tat many people who write AD&D adventures have actually ever played the game. Do you know how much XP it takes to go from level 5 to 6? 3000gp isn’t going to be a drop in the bucket, and it probably doesn’t count for XP anyway. But, if we stab you in … nope nope. SUre, we’d like to play D&D tonight.

Off to the latest ship to investigate. There’s a halfling sheriff on board with his men who are in charge. There’s blood on the deck that somehow everyone knows looks like dolphin blood. [I thought dolphin blood looked like human blood looked like all mammal blood? Am I an idiot/wrong?] The party is given leave to investigate the ship, which actually means that the sheriff prevents them from searching most of the ship. WTF?! It turns out that the party can make a cursory inspection but can’t actually do anything like search a sea chest or something like that. Sheriffs already done that. He won’t let it be done again. Uh … I think there’s an NCAA game on. I hate basketball but it sounds like loads more fun than this. After all, we all know what’s going to happen if we put Mr Fussy-bottom in his place. The group manages to find a spear on deck and some of the crews sea chests say “Nantucket” on them. Why the chests stand out I don’t know. Actually, I do know. It’s a poorly written adventure and Nantucket is the next clue. The rooms on the ship are full of lengthy descriptions. None of them matter. NONE OF THEM MATTER. Four pages of ship room descriptions none of which matter. Blood, spear, Nantucket chests, dickhead Sheriff begging for an execution that can’t be delivered because this is 2e and he’s actually a level 999 protector of the realm wand best friends with Tiamat and Baphumet.

Transition to the two and half page description of the se sage shop. Two and a half pages of meaningless description. Anything you can learn about the spear is in a table in the appendix. The pages here are just a description of the shop and the asshole halfling owner. For the Nantucket clue the group has to go a sailors bar. One is provided. It’s another four pages. It’s only about half meaningless and useless drivel text description. The useful half is some local color and flavor tables about events in the bar, some crew information about the Nantucket, and a rumor table. A decent little bit of tables for spicing up a sailor bar. Not so bad and maybe even worth stealing for for own town. Ok, time for the party to go sign on to a ship, in secret, that the last remaining Nantucket crew are on. You see, it was a whaling ship and after taking a big Sei whale it caught fire in port. The crew went their ways. Most have disappeared on the disappeared ships. The rest are on one other ship about to leave port and looking for crew … ANother FAR too long meaningless description of a ship follows. With magic glow globes in the cabins … ug. There’s a decent little table for some encounters on the way. Ship attacked by sperm whale. Giant squid attack. Pirates. Shipwreck. Watching warships shell a town. Not so bad.

Either the crew, and party will be captured by the Sirens or they will find their caves on a nearby island. On the worlds most boring sea cave map the party will escape, negotiate, or hack their way through the sirens. My guess is die. There’s like 10 Sirens with psionics and they all have dominate, hypnosis, usually mass domination or something like that. Kudos for psionics. Ain’t no way the group is going to stand up to 10 mass dominates round after round. The dirty hippy sirens are pissed their Sei whale brother was killed. They are gonna sacrifice all of the Nantucket sailors (all of the sailors are still alive in the sea caves) and then do a mercy killing on the rest of the sailors. Uh huh. Dirty hippies indeed. Clearly there’s some sort of negotiated settlement that’s supposed to happen here. The sirens want the sailors killed or imprisoned for a long time. Uh huh. That’s gonna fucking happen. I’m sure that’s gonna work out real well for the king. What’s next, dyrads pissed about rat killings in town?

Treasure sucks and there’s not enough of it. If you hack your way through you might get a chest with 25k gp in it. THAT THE FUCKING ADVENTURE THEN SUGGESTS YOU LIMIT SO YOU DON”T FLOOD THE GAME WITH GOLD. How the fuck do you expect the group to level? 25k ain’t shit and you don’t even want to give THAT out?

Various Authors
Freely Distributed by & Magazine
AD&D
Levels 4-7

Dare you to enter The Valley of Eternal Rest, where the tombs of the ancients are guarded by unspeakable monsters and an unbreakable curse?

This is an adventure compilation featuring tombs in a burial valley. Their quality varies, as is to be expected from a compilation product. Three of the twelve encounters stand out for various reasons with the rest being just simple little tombs. One good inn encounter, one good weird encounter, and one good “roleplay” encounter.

Compilation things are hard to review. They typically vary wildly in style and quality and that generally makes it hard to recommend one. This one helps solve that particular problem by being free. So, need some standard D&D tombs with traps and undead? This is your go to product for “normal” D&D tombs. Each one consists of just a few rooms, three or four being typical. There will be a few traps and a few undead encounters and some generic loot and then you’re off. Scatter them in a hex crawl or place them in ‘The Valley of Eternal Rest.’ You’re going to have to work to fill them in enough to make them interesting. That doesn’t have to be bad … maybe that’s the way you like to operate. I like a little more … fluff? on my encounters. An idea seed or some such that can help me be inspired to turn the words on the page in to something more than the sum of their parts. Most of the tombs here fail in that regard. Speaking of tombs in general, they can be hard. They are linear, they generally only have undead or constructs and traps. Not much going on in them. They usually feel more like a contest between a devilish DM and the players, and that’s uncool. I suspect it’s not on purpose but rather just the nature of trying to use logic to build a tomb. Interesting intelligent undead or a more cohesive sandboxy location (Fallen Jarls) can help mitigate the issues, as can decent fluff in the tombs and interesting non-standard and magic items. That’s generally not found here. The writing is pretty uninspiring.

Except for a few.

One of the tombs is The Mother of All Worms. It’s full of worms. Tens of thousands of little green worms with little mouths. They die in the light and are thus confined to the cave. Annnnnndddd….. GO! I like this kind of set up. It doesn’t seem like it’s the DM verses the players but rather that there’s a kind of natural environment thing going on here that the DM is adjudicating. Fireballs kills 1000 at a time. Torches kill 10d10 per round. I wonder what’s in the cave? More worms. 🙂 A REALLY bad pit trap, since the worms fall down on top of you. Ouch! Probably one of the best traps I’ve seen and an excellent example of how to re-use a classic trap. There’s a giant worm in the cave giving birth to the little worms. Killing it will cause another little worm to turn in to a Mother worm. This is a classic D&D set up and is exactly the sort of thing I like to see in an adventure. It’s weird, it has little to no explanation, makes a certain twisted kind of sense, and is just a place for the players to overcome. The treasure sucks and is plain jane ordinary, and there’s not enough of it, but the encounter proposer is excellent. A little lengthy for what it is, but a great idea. Sons of Kyuss now make sense! This is the only encounter by ‘Varl’ in the compilation. Too bad.

There’s another tomb described that has a rival party near by. Just a group of lay-about lazy ex-soldiers looking to be left alone so they can make a buck looting a tomb. The tomb is not interesting but I like the rival party, especially since they are all essentially 0-level men-at-arms. They have some tactics they use to scare people away. They have a general ‘group’ personality that controls how they react to things. Things like this are what can turn a boring collection of old musty tombs in to a dynamic location with challenges day and night. Yeah, there’s wandering monsters in the valley but those have no heart and no inspiration. These guys, by their very existence and brief write up, are TEEMING with possibilities. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Things I can use as springboards to make the characters lives more interesting and the players night more fun. Sure, the individual guys have no personality but the groups tactics, lengthy though they be, cab provide some real fun. It can help provide a kind of seamless environment where the adventure doesn’t stop once you come out of the tomb. Day and night there’s something to tie events together.

The last interesting bit is an inn, although that may be personal preference. I have no idea what it’s here. It serves as a kind of introduction where the players can find a map to the valley but it otherwise completely out of place. It’s cool, but not as a part of a whole. Essentially, a roadside inn has been taken over by a couple of devils. They hang out in the basement and have turned everyone in the inn in to undead, ghouls primarily. Not too obvious on the surface, but clear after awhile. I LOVE a bold lie. “I never drink wine!” OMG!OMG!OMG!OMG! You KNOW thee’s something bad about to go down with a bold lie. Sometimes the players play along. Sometimes they execute every last one of the folks. With enough misdirection in the campaign you can keep people on their toes and make the bold lie more fun. I do this a lot in my games so when something like this inn pops up the players are usually trying to decide if they should look in to things more, ignore it, burn the place down, or just kill everyone. Choices & Options. Choices & Options. So, weird stuff going down at the inn. Zombies in the barn. Ghouls as some of the staff. Other staff charmed. And a couple of lard-ass cowardly demons in the basement living off the inn ‘profits.’ It’s a sweet little set up. Again, a location that the party can explore and don’t just have to hack their way through. I’m not even sure what to call this. Open play? Sandbox? SOunds like it’s time for a forum thread.