tenfootpole.org

by Bill Silvey
Freely distributed by the Delvers Dungeon
AD&D
Levels 5-8

Deeper into the Howling Hills! Your party of adventurers has found that there is more to the invasion of the Wolf Nomads’ sacred burial grounds than simple bands of humanoids – the burial chambers themselves are overrun with unspeakable undead beings! But can you overcome the creatures in the Tombs of the Howling Hills, or will you join them in undeath?

This is a small dungeoncrawl in a small tomb complex that is also occupied by an Evil High Priest. Undead and Black Orcs abound, as well as a bit of vermin and quite a few traps. The map errors are very frustrating. There’s an interesting bit or two but nothing really to distinguish it.

The cowardly Wolf Nomads, the guys who have kept Iuz at bay all these years, are too wimpy to protect their own hallowed dead. The party gets sent in to clean ’em out. On the plus side this description, errr … a slightly different take on it, is presented in only half a column of text before the adventure jumps right in to the meat. Yeah! I LOATHE long and drawn out introductions. It could be tighter still, and while clearly a mostly-linear tournament module it has no scoring system and so it’s on on to the hack! Although … for all the text there’s no real mention of what the goal is. Clean it out? Looking for clues? No idea. Not an issue for a free-standing module but I don’t see how it could serve as a tournament module with some kind of goal?

The map for the tomb is one of the most confusing things I’ve ever seen. No, let me correct that. The map and the descriptions of the rooms don’t seem to go together at all, which makes the entire thing confusing. This begins at the very first room. There’s read-aloud text that describes a room. The floor sags in the middle at the far apex lies a metal container. There’s a skeleton slumped in a niche with some vessels. If you come within 60′ of the skeleton it does something. So far so good, right? The read-aloud describes an obvious trap and if triggered the middle 20×30 section of the floor collapses in to a chasm below. Ok, no problem. Oh, and the room is 10×10 on the map. WTF!?!?! It makes non sense at all. Room two is described in the text as a Meeting Room with stout wooden doors on either end and chairs, crates barrels, etc in the room. That’s CLEARLY no the room on the map, with one door, an alter, and some weird fire symbols on the map. There’s a collapsed corridor that doesn’t look collapsed. There’s a room full of pillars with throned undead people in between each one. They rise from their six thrones to attack … but there are eight according to the map. The last room is some kind of chasm that’s nigh impassable. Not really an issue except when you factor in the first room has that skeleton that kills any evil creature that passes through. That means there’s no way in or out of the tomb complex for the people that live there. Pits and platforms are described that don’t seem to appear anywhere on the map, in spite of the map rooms having a lot of internal detail like columns, pentagrams, alters, and so on. I can’t figure it out. There’s no wandering monster chart.

The encounters are pretty standard. Undead in tombs bursting forth, and orcs guarding rooms, etc. A couple stand out as being more interesting. That very first room, for example. It has a haunt which possesses a character until they find the dead skeletons holy symbol and return it to their body. That’s kind of a nifty little thing to give a player a little more freedom and/or a change of pace for the evening. A little mini-quest with an (obvious) short duration and not a longer-term screw job. I’m a sucker for the classics and the dungeon has a good one: a pile of stuff around a corner with Magic Aura cast on it … and a blade trap for those going around the corner. That whole ‘bodies on thrones rising to attack’ is a nice little thing also; like I said I’m a sucker for some classic elements. Those are standouts because they differ from the usual “bodies rise and attack” routine that is otherwise present in the dungeon. The EHP, Zarkon, gets no build up and so he’s just another raving cleric summoning a demon when the party runs in to him. That’s too bad; a little more work to rearrange things and some hints of his presence could have been dropped and tension built up for the Big Bad. There’s also a really bizarre encounter at the end with a group of escaped slave: wererats and kobolds, who each want to kill the other. There are 8 3HD wererats and 5 1/2HD kobolds. And the rats can summon a nearby rat horde to help. But they are afraid of the kobolds because they have silvered their weapons. Uh … Like I said, a lot of the module just doesn’t make sense.

There’s no real coinage/gems/jewelry to speak of, which is fine in a tourny module but not really acceptable in a game system that requires coins to advance. The magic items are all book items. That’s quite disappointing. How much effort does it really take to give some flavor text to a book item? It adds so much.

by Bill Silvey
Freely Distributed by the Delvers Dungeon
AD&D
Levels 4-7

The fearsome Howling Hills lie before you! At the behest of the mighty Wolf Nomads, your brave group of adventurers has journeyed forth into the legendary peaks and crevasses that lie between the domain of the Weguir and the evil overlord, Iuz to uncover and root out the source of humanoid raids into the sacred lands of the already over-stretched Nomad forces. What dark secrets lie before you as you journey…INTO THE HOWLING HILLS?

This is a pretty simply linear hack through a bugbear lair with roots in a tournament module. It has a notable feature in that you can get on the dungeon GREEN line from either room one or room 26. Otherwise it’s just a straight-up hack that turns in to a mass combat as the bugbears strike gongs and summon help.

This adventure has a pretty brief introduction, a change from the designers earlier works. All of the background and notes are contained on a single page. Yeah! It’s still full of things like “you should have four fighters and two wizards” that I find ridiculous. Anyway, in this installment, the first of three, the Wold Nomads have sent the characters in to Iuz-landia to destroy some stockades. They are “too weak” to do it themselves. *GROAN* This, people, is what comes from Being A Hero. Boring nonsense crap. I *LOVE* the concept of Iuz. I love everything about him. Unfortunately there’s nothing cool about Iuz in this. Not even his mortal enemies, the Wolf Nomads. No instead they get turned in to a bunch of idiots who have to turn to outsiders to free their sacred burial grounds from humanoids. Uh huh.

The map is linear. It’s also missing things. At least two rooms in the dungeon are missing: 11 & 15. 11 has the guards for the treasure room and it’s not obvious at all where it should be. Likewise 15; no clue where it should go. Rooms one through five are also missing from the map. Those are above-ground though so I thought maybe they were missing on purpose … at first. But the text makes it seems like there should be a map. It can’t be that there is just a page missing: the missing dungeon rooms have no where to be placed and there’s no rooms ‘missing’ numbers where they could go. The adventure is probably still serviceable; it’s nowhere near as bad a fuck-up as the Hollow Mountain adventure from Frog God.

The adventure states several times that a frontal assault is a bad idea but it then goes ahead and numbers the encounters from the front. Strange. The 26 or so rooms (plus or minus the missing ones) are stuffed full of bugbears. All of the bugbears will sound an alarm when intruders are found, so it’s going to turn in to an all-out mass combat pretty quickly. The rooms are all pretty boring with a single exception. They generally are either empty or have bugbears in it that raise an alarm. There’s a hidden door now and again but nothing unusual and the hidden doors/secret are just to little cubbies that contain treasure. The single exception is the rear entrance. You have to crawl up the latrine holes (with the required Otyugh underneath) in order to get in to the main lair. You come up in the latrine in plain view of about 25 bugbears. Ouch! Talk about a one/two back door entrance punch! The players are gonna get a real fisting!

No new monsters and while there’s lots of magic items it’s all pretty much book items. One exception is an intelligent spear with unusual abilities. That’s pretty much the only thing in the module that feels special and interesting. I wish the other magic items were more exciting, they just come across as throw-away magic items. Same with the mundane treasure. “4 gems worth 1500 gp” is the usual fare with a single “platinum & gold bracelet” serving as an example of the best the module has to offer.

by Bill Silvey
Freely Distributed by The Delvers Dungeon
AD&D
Levels 7-10

Beneath the shifting sands of the Sea of Dust lies a fabled artifact of immense power! Your party has been commissioned to find the storied Golden Sphere of Xan Yae and return it to the Emirates of the far west. But beware! Vile creatures seek to thwart you in your efforts, for they too seek the power that is rumored to be bestowed upon he who possess the ‘sphere!

This is a small dungeoncrawl through a ruined temple. It has some roots in a tournament module although no scoring is present, and thus it’s more of a “Just Survive” module. It’s a very linear dungeon, as would be implied from it’s tournament history.

These are such weird little modules. They seem to try and follow TSR trade dress and yet they are clearly missing something. Content, maybe? This one is fourteen pages long and yet only three pages the core adventure. This would be fine if the other pages contained setting information, or sandbox, or some other style of content. It would be really terrible if those three pages were surrounded by trade dress bullshit boilerplate. Front cover, back cover, 2 pages of “maps”, two pages of pre-gens, a page of new monsters and magic. That’s nine of fourteen already. The other five are background, notes, a page of wilderness encounters, and a page of other area encounters.

The background and notes sections are the usual tedious stuff “read the module completely” and “you should have a cleric and thief in the party” kind of boilerplate. The hook is lame also “The Sultan hires you go bring back an artifact.” Too short, no flavor, and too vanilla. Zzzz…. The adventure is set in the Forgotten City in Greyhawk and there’s a special wandering monster chart for that hex. The encounters are not that bad. They each have a little backstory that doesn’t take up too much space, just a sentence or two, and provides a great dash of flavor-text to liven things up. You could probably take any one of them and build a complete adventure around them. At a minimum they do a decent job of building up a good picture of the area in which the adventure takes place. It just seems so out of place for an adventure with only three pages of dungeon as the main event. It would be different if this were kind of “setting”, or laid out like one, but it’s clearly not meant to be. It’s laid out like a standard dungeoncrawl “and here’s the wandering monster table for the area outside of the dungeon.” That’s a huge missed opportunity because the mythology around the wanderers is really good. A Dune Stalker who’s feared by all the other occupants. A Sandman who’s the ghost of a long-dead Suel mage. A Gambado nest. These are all great little encounters. There’s an attempt at a Red Dragon encounter that is only a little more than a throw-away, as well as a culture of firenewts that’s also done poorly and deserves to be expanded upon. The area around the city could have been done really well and I wish it had been.

The temple/dungeon proper is little linear bit. At the start you can go right or left. Left is a puzzle that gets you to the artifact. But you can only solve the puzzles by going right and, essentially, killing everything in sight. The encounters are little more than some read-aloud and a combat. There’s an attempt at a trap or two as well as a couple of tricks, but they are strong misses. The trick that comes to mind is the bricked-over alcove with a statue to the temple goddess in it. If you unbrick it, and are good, a feeling of well-being come over you. That’s it. Making an offering? Great! No effect. Steal the offering you just left? CURSE! Players should be rewarded for interacting with the environment, not be bored by it. There’s an encounter with Monster Zombies that’s a good example of what’s wrong with the encounters in this adventure. It’s a paragraph or so long and, after two sentences of “empty room with bars” read aloud it tell you why there are monster zombies in the room and stats them. That’s it. No description of them, no interesting things to do or see or interact with. Just four monster zombies. See Monster. Kill Monster. Next Room. That’s the mentality here. And it SUX. When I’m looking at an adventure I’m looking for ideas and text that inspire me as a DM. I wan something to trigger my own imagination so I can build on it and make it my own.

The new monsters are just 3 and 4HD humanoids. Nothing special there. They have moderately interesting backstories, but the lack of special abilities makes them pretty boring in anything other than a “full replacement” campaign setting. The new magic item is the artifact. It’s interesting enough, all all artifacts should be.

This adventure is little more than going through the motions.

by Bill Silvey
Delvers Dungeons
AD&D
One First Level Thief

This is a very short Breaking & Entering railroad thievery job for a single first level thief. The background is that the local tuffs catch you stealing and make you do an initiation, robbing the Lord Mayors home. It’s meant to teach someone how to play AD&D. It reminded me, in spite of my deep nostalgia, how bad AD&D is.

This is a super-short, with only about 10 keyed encounters over three pages. And they are not 1-page dungeon pages either; this precedes those ideas by quite a few years. The introduction is a bit railroady but I can live with that. It’s easy enough to change it and role play out the introduction in a less odious fashion than a couple of giant read-aloud chunks.

The home is a small house with walled in grounds and a small outbuilding out back. The idea is that the character will sneak around to it and find a secret door behind a bookcase, follow a tunnel to the root cellar, and then enter the house that way. There are no other options given; the house and grounds are not described enough to give the player free will over how they approach the problem. This stifling of player creativity, or rather writing the adventure in such a way, approaches criminal, especially when new players and DMs are concerned. These are not the lessons that n00b players and DMs should be learning. They should be learning sandboxes and creativity, exploration and imaginative play.

I don’t think the designer understands AD&D. He calls for numerous Move Silently rolls, one every round while sneaking around, or some guards will approach to investigate the noises. That’s like a 10% chance every round to Move Silently at first level, isn’t it? Oh, you can Hide in Shadows to avoid the guards if you blow the first roll. 15% isn’t it? Yeah … about being a thief … That happens all over the place in this adventure. It’s just setting the player up for failure and then coming down HARD when they do fail … the Lord Mayor is 7th level and the guards are numerous. Picking a lock? Better roll that Move Silently! Ug.

Then there are the monster encounters. The tunnel to house has 2 giant spiders with very weak poison, not so bad, but the garden house has something like seven giant rats in it, all of which are at least a powerful as the character. I’s a railroad, there’s only one way, and that one way has railroad fights full of monsters that the thief can’t possibly defeat. Sup with that?

There IS a nice treasure table for what the player finds in the parlor. Lots of unique little mundane treasure that the thief can pilfer. No way they are going to make it that far, but hey, nice treasure table none the less. I like mundane treasure that’s unusual and descriptive; it add a lot more flavor to the game than “jewelry, ring, 100gp.”

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.