tenfootpole.org

by John Turcotte
Distributed freely by Dragonsfoot
AD&D

This is an alternate dungeon to swap in to Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits. The DM replaces the spider ship in that module with the dungeon found in this module… The Demonweb Pits! It’s a pretty good emulation of the style at the time … iand it’s mostly a hack-fest, just like Q1 was.

The designer was unhappy with the spider-ship finale in Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits and set about creating a dungeon that he thought was much better fit to the tone presented in D3: Vault of Drow. Once the final set of bronze doors is navigated in the web levels then the party ends up here instead of at the spider-ship. Several of the rooms have the same themes and occupants that the spider-ship does although the environment is completely different. The influence of the ICE/MERP Cirith Ungol supplement shows through as well and the Demonweb Pits turns out to be a mashup of the encounters in Q1 with a map/setting inspired by and similar to the Cirith Ungol tunnels. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked that supplement over but the nostalgic memories I have of it are certainly well represented. It certainly feels a lot more like the lair of the Demon Queen of Spiders.

The Pits are some caves that appear to have been eaten out of the natural rock of their abysmal layer. They spiral and curve and vary in width and open on to natural caverns. And they are FULL of webs. Some are completely filled with them and others just have them in abundance. There are spiders EVERYWHERE of all sizes … but those, as well as the dead husks of creatures are just windows dressing creep out the players. There’s about a quarter-column or so of flavor text that describes the general vibe of the place and it does a pretty terrific job of setting the scene. There was just enough information to get my own imagination going in to overtime. I also appreciated the small section on ‘burning the webs’, as will anyone else who has read the actual play report of the same dungeon in the DMG. The map has a pretty decent variety of changes in elevation and the like even though it is essentially just one level with about 37 rooms. The wandering monsters are spiders, spiders, and spiders, with spider-like things thrown in and a couple of demons, trolls and ogres for good measure.

The yochlol greeter, matron, and handmaidens show up again, although in different settings since these are not the polished interiors of the spider-ship. Instead we get the scene described earlier: web filled rooms with spiders and dried-out husks everywhere. This then is both the charm and problem with the dungeon: it’s cribbing a lot from Q1. I grinned when I saw the matron and handmaiden encounters, but Q1’s encounters were generally uninspired, according to my vague recollections of it. Room after room of guards and creatures for the party t hack down. It reminded me, as does this adventure, of the Norkers in WG4: a pitched battle develops and everyone shows up to join in the fun. Lolth and the demons are smart and they are going to organize and hunt the party down, gating in as much help as is needed, until the party dies. The party in turn is going to have a terrible amount of hacking to do.They might be able to do it in something other than a pitched battle if they are good, but that just means the monsters die alone in their rooms instead of together with their buds in the next room. The rooms here are just not that interesting. Lolths throne room is described well enough since it will likely be the scene of a large battle, and there a nice little evil temple for the creature LOLTH prays to. I found that to be a pretty nice little encounter. Otherwise though the party is just facing trolls, ogres, spiders, demons, and more spiders in rooms have nothing interesting going on in them. One or two have some nice gruesome descriptions but that doesn’t excuse the fact that they are just a different setting to hack something in. There’s more than one “demon pretending to be a beautiful girl/boy” encounter. You know what I’d do in this situation? Kill em and let Pelor sort’em out. It’s the frigging Demonweb pits … I figure I get a pass from the big sun guy for kill the demon queen of spiders and patron of the Drow.

The mundane treasure has nice detail (copied from Q1? I wish I wasn’t on a plane right now.) to it but it’s still of the pretty standard gems/jewelry variety. The magic items are almost all book items, although some of the more unusual items appear, like an iron flask. Arachrist also makes an appearance, which I seem to recall originally being in Cirith Ungol.

This is an interesting adventure and a good replacement for those turned off by the spider-ship in Q1. It does a much better job of capturing the feel of the Demon Queen of Spiders even if it does suffer from ALSO being a hack-fest (GDQ a hack-fest?!?!?!! *gasp* Say it isn’t so!) I’m happy to say it avoids most of the gimps that high-level modules usual come up with. The restrictions from the planes are still there but otherwise just some stronger spider-venom shows up, and at pretty reasonable -2,-3 save vs. poison levels. It’s a cute mash-up of Q1 and Cirith Ungol and worth looking at if you’re familiar with both. I wouldn’t have a problem replacing the spider-ship with this … but G1 and D3 are really the only decent modules in that series anyway.

by Lorne Marshall
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
AD&D 2E
Levels 1-3
This is a 2E module. IE: two small encounters somehow turned in to 44 pages with “mood setting” read-aloud text, almost no treasure, and irrelevant backstories galore.
A) The Dragonsfoot guys did a great job on making this look like a professional product. B) This product describes a village and two small adventures and somehow comes in at 44 pages. How does it do this? By being a near perfect example of the style I strongly associate with 2E. Railroad hero nonsense before the unnecessary bits were boiled off to in subsequent editions. Fair Warning: I LOATHE this style.
It takes nine pages to get to the first relevant information, the village of Goblin’s Tooth. Cover page, title page, copyright page, table of contents, forward, prologue, and then two pages of DM background. The six dense paragraphs of Forward reads like standard boilerplate: tune it to your campaign, beginning players and DM’s, read-aloud text, how the encounters are marked on the map. Ug. The prologue, though, tops this. It takes three long paragraphs to frame a fourth paragraph of read-aloud text. The text in question? Flowery bullshit that describes an eclipse. This is supposed to be read aloud to the players before they reach the town. “[blah blah blah]The ribbons of light shed by the full moon caress the landscape with their inconstant arms, shrouding hill and tree and road first in deep blue, then silver, then velvet [blah blah blah].” Sorry, I couldn’t finish the quote; I threw up a little in my mouth. Fucking second edition bullshit. It has absolutely no purpose in the adventure. Yeah, the eclipse is referenced later but that’s just some pretext. That prologue, and the two-plus page DM’s background, which is full of the history of the area is too long and not necessary, leads me to believe that a certain someone is a frustrated author. There’s no place for this kind of stuff in an adventure. It gets in the way of someone actually trying to run the adventure. An adventure needs a few words of inspiration and then it should take off. It should provide just enough information to let a DM fill in the rest themselves. I need something that inspires me, not something that tramples on me. I fucking hate 2E.
The village has twenty-two places described in it and houses about 250 people. Yeah, the ratio of non-farmers to craftsmen is off but I don’t really care about that; I’m looking for fun and interesting, not realistic, in my home base villages. The various places get a decent amount of description. Generally there is five of six sentences that describes the business, appearance, and temperament of the people who live and/or work there. This is a little strange in some places, such as the three paragraphs it takes to describe the dairy. The village feels lifeless, especially given all of the background data and all of the descriptions. I think this is because the villagers don’t really interact much with each other. While some personality is given for many of them they don’t really have much going on in the village; they don’t interact with each other or hate each other or are in love with each other, or have rivalries, or anything like that. Ok, there are a couple of engagements listed but that doesn’t really go anywhere other than simply noting it. What brings a community to life is the relationships between the people and there’s just none of that here. Oh, hey, guess what else … the village has a dedicated guard of at least 20 and a militia of quite a bit more. Of course with all of those people they just can’t spare a single man to go handle the two problems/adventures … the Heroes get to do that. Yeah, you heard me right: Heroes. Not mercenaries. Not murder hobos. Heroes. You know what that means, right? I’ll tell you what: no fucking loot and bullshit story awards. FUCK YOU SECOND EDITION!
Adventure The First: The Bear.
Another two pages of background. Goblins are back and they’ve killed a farmer. The guard and militia mobilizes but can’t spare a man to go out to the farm where the attack occurred. Queue the chumps^H^H^H^H^H^Heroes. The farmhouse and dead farmer are not in the style the goblins usually leave people. If someone in the party makes a wisdom check then the adventure can continue otherwise you don’t find the trail and there is no other option for continuing. Oops. That’s not cool. No fucking skill checks or attribute checks if the players NEED the information. Ok, the players make the check and they find the goblins and they talk to them. If they don’t then they start the next iteration of The Goblin Wars. Oops. It’s pretty obvious that the goblins are friendly, but still, that’s bullshit. They got kicked out of their cave by a bear and for some reason are incapable of finding food on their own. Why does living in the cave mean they are well fed? Stop asking questions. That’s the problem with words: you stick too many in and I start poking holes in what I’m reading. You leave it fast and loose with a little inspiration then I can fill in the blanks and I don’t/can’t poke holes in the plausibility shroud. There are some wandering monsters in the forest but they mostly suck, even though they are long entires. They generally boil down to: the monster attacks. Oh, hey, there are, like, five places along the trail in the forest to discover. One of them has goblin bodies. If you bury the bodies you get XP as a story award. Isn’t that nice? I guess those of us who would take a dump on them don’t fit the designers vision of “Heroes” and don’t get anything. Otherwise, there’s an ettercap in forest, a couple of traps, and a cave with a 5HD bear in it for the players to kill. Oh, and the treasure! Mustn’t forget the 51gp! You want some XP? Then do what the designer wants you to do.
Adventure The Second: Wrath of the Hooded One.
Another three pages of extraneous background, this time detailing the meal choices and excretory habits of the villain, or something like that. The vast majority of irrelevant and anything that’s tangentially relevant is expounded on in great detail. Seriously, there’s an OCD amount of background here to tell us that a wizard has taken over a goblin tribe via a disguise. It’s like a fucking Russian novel, and not the good ones full of sex where chicks throw themselves in front of trains. Oh no, this is like one of those ones where you learn EVERYTHING about some tertiary character who the protagonist passes on the street on his speeding horse. Anyway, the goblins from the first adventure tell the town that a new giant goblin has shown up and taken over the tribe to the north and is planning on attacking the town and blah blah blah irrelevant motivation blah blah blah floating wagons blah blah blah wizard twice removed creates novel blah blah blah eclipse show of power. The Reeve is SUPER busy and just can’t be bothered to spare a fucking man to go find out about the horde so would the murder-hobos please go? Oh, you won’t put your life in danger out of the goodness of your heart? You want a reward? Ok, how about 100gp for going out to get yourselves killed? Not enough? Then he asks the characters to leave the town and there’s no adventure. Why not just have him shout “I’M A LAZY FUCK AND YOU’LL DO WHAT I TELL YOU TO OR FUCK YOU!!!” I believe I may have suspended my disbelief somewhere along the line. Anyway … GO THE WAY THE DESIGNER WANTS YOU TO OR DIE UNDER A HAIL OF A HUNDRED GOBLIN ARROWS A COMBAT ROUND FIRED FROM BEHIND SUPER COVER!!!!! Right, so the players get to go through the swamps because that’s what the designer wants them to do. How do we know this? Because he spends two pages describing the instal-kill death-trap goblin ambush that happens if they DON’T go through the swamps. Just run the four pre-prorgammed encounters and shut up. Blah blah blah, swamp, blah blah blah lost patrol blah blah blah. The encounters all take a page because of the crappy-ass flowery text and needless detail. Once in the goblin village the players find no goblins; they are all out at the death-trap ambush five hours away. The new leader is hole up in an old mine with three levels and twelve rooms. The party of ten kills four goblin guards, four more guards, and then an ogre and the fake goblin/wizard. That all happens in the first four rooms. They then get to pick up their meager loot (weeee! 164gp and some gems!) What if they explore the rest of the mine though!!! Giant rats! And then some piercers! Oh, and a goblin scout from the other tribe that can lead the party back to town faster. Don’t forget 400xp each for completing the mission! Yeah you! You are winner! Fuck you 2e! Fuck you for condoning this kind of bullshit in your modules TSR! I know it was fucking you! I remember the 2e crap you put out! FUCK! YOU!
Hey, I’m pretty sure there’s a second module in this series …

by Lucias Meyer
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
BECMI
Levels 1-3

… Even today, in the darkest times for the once great Empire, legends persist about the wealth of Dragonmount. Anyone who spends an evening in any tavern throughout the Province of Karathfen is sure to hear at least one exaggerated tale of the place. It calls to adventurers like the winter calls birds south.

This is a basic first level adventure in a ruined keep. Some treasure details, a new monster, and some named monsters elevate this adventure a bit but it’s still a rather generic first level adventure.

The adventure begins with about a page long description of a hill, as well as the fortress and keep located on the hill. It’s a longish description but would be a great introduction for a megadungeon. It has just enough mystery in it to pique someones interest and make the “like the winter calls birds south” line plausible. This isn’t a megadungeon though, it’s just a couple of levels of a ruined fort that sits on top of the hill. There’s no reason offered for the players to explore. Hurray! I HATE it when the characters are sent on missions. Actually, I find it generally off-putting and am much happier when the PLAYERS are engaged rather than the characters. PHAT L00T! is a great way to engage the players.

The fort has two levels with about thirteen rooms/encounters on the first floor and another six or so on the second. The maps are pretty symmetrical and I REALLY don’t like that. I think it removes a lot of the ‘exploring the unknown’ element in a game if you know what to expect. The designer notes that he dislikes symmetrical maps also, but justifies it because the adventure is for new players and they should get an easier dungeon. Plus, he says it makes sense for keeps to be designed that way. Maybe … but I’m not looking for realism in a game. I want to have fun and symmetrical doesn’t hit that. Besides, if you’re going to put in a symmetrical map then use that to your advantage: put in a secret door or something that rewards players who pay attention to the map. “Hmmm, there should be another room here …” The wandering monster table comes from the creatures in the for but is uninspired: rats, cockroaches, skeletons and Evil Monkeys.”

The encounters are not that bad but I don’t seem to be able to get excited about them. Maybe that’s a better description of the entire adventure: decent, but I’m not excited about running it. The rooms all seem to have a little something going on in them. I don’t mean just a monster, or a trap, but something more interesting. Graffiti on the walls, or a locked room whose door opens _just_ a little … enough to tantalize the players and frustrate them in their efforts to get in. Actually, that rooms a decent example. It’s a room whose door is held shut from the inside by an Immovable Rod. It’s a bit loose, so the door opens just a couple of inches .That is a GREAT room! Unfortunately it takes the designer two longish paragraphs to describe the room. That’s a total buzzkill. There are other great rooms also. One clearly has something locked inside of it. Another has a spellbook trapped in some green slime. The place is littered with dead adventurer bodies. All in all, most rooms have something quite interesting going on which gives the place a sense of life … which is then trampled by the excessive text.

The new monster, a monkey with a kind of scorpion tale, is nice. It drains DEX until you’re paralyzed. There’s also a decent good done on some of the mundane treasure. Fine wine, silk shirts, rings still on fingers and so on. In contrast. most of the magical treasure are just book items and not presented that interesting. The rare exception is a potion of poison which gets a nice little description. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for in monsters and treasure: something fantastic. Something with a little something going on so I can expand it further. “sword +1” is boring, but add a little flavor text and give it some unusual power and now I’ve got something my feeble imagination can run with. A couple of the creatures also have names. In my mind this implies that they can/will interact with the party in some way other than combat. I wish something a little more explicit had been done with them; as it stands they seem to just be there to be hacked down. The ghoul and bugbear could have offered up some interesting interactions. I’d note, also, that the climactic battle with the stinger monkeys fails to mention how many monkeys there are. Oops.

It’s a decent, if a bit generic little adventure module. It suffers from too much descriptive text but it’s not at the level of 3.x modules. It’s got some decent little rooms. A little bit of work on the magic treasure, names monsters, map, and some editing could turn this in a great module. It’s a cut above other freebies, but I’m not sure how much of a compliment that is.

by Mark O’Reilly
Freely distributed by Dragonsfoot
for AD&D
Levels 7-9

Being dropped into the middle of a strange and eerie island, your adventurers have to fight for their lives to escape the evil that inhabits this weird island.

This is yet another adventure in the “Night of the Living Dead/Zombie Assault” genre. You can check out my review of Dusk of the Dead for a similar adventure. This one is set in Ravenloft and covers most of the required horror bases. It’s not terrible but nor does it particularly stand out. There’s a set of additional higher quality maps available at Dragonsfoot for those who are interested in that sort of thing; I’d use them if I ran it.

This is a timeline based adventure. The players are transported to the island just just before dawn through some DM fiat mechanic. ‘The mists’ are suggested but I believe something like a reprobate sorcerers spell would be appropriate also, as would a curse or geas. Anyway, the players arrive on a beach that is the scene of bloody carnage. A large number of zombies with meathooks come shambling out of the ocean and engage the players, only to retreat back in to the ocean a few rounds later as the sun rises. This starts the countdown; it should be pretty obvious to even the most clueless players that the zombies are going to be back at nightfall.

Investigating the very small island reveals two key features: there’s a small boat with a gash in its side that could be repaired given enough time, and there’s a house further up in the island/hill. The house has boarded up windows, some smashed through. All of the doors are off their frames. The inside is full of spilled blood and scratch marks and appears to be the scene of many a last stand. Tick tock, tick tock, look at your watch now ….

The timeline covers the period from 6am to midnight and has two types of events on it. First there are the four zombie horde attacks. These happen from dusk through midnight and simply indicate which group of zombies attack and what their tactics are this time. The second set of events are all flavor-text. Screams from elsewhere in the house, blood oozing from walls, frost in the basement, and a mysterious bonfire lighting. An examination of the boat reveals it won’t be able to be seaworthy until 9pm or so, well after sunset. The players are clearly meant to make a stand in the house. Searching the house reveals some journals describing some history or the situation and a parts of a broken artifact and the spells required to make it work. There are also a couple of things to help fortify the house: planks and acid chiefly. That then is the adventure. Players are stuck, they search fortify the house, the zombies attack, the big bad appears/attacks at midnight with the last horde and then the players dismiss him with the artifact.

The sea zombies are pretty good. There’s a decent horrific description of them and their meat-hooks have a nice effect where they ‘hook’ a character and drag them off. Similarly the Big Bad has decent horrific description. There is almost no treasure at all though. A +1 dagger, a basic spellbook and a couple of coins. I know the module is going for a horror feel but this is AD&D; the players need treasure to get XP.

I’m not really sure about this one. The zombie assaults have 30, 45, 45, and 90 zombies, respectively. That’s quite a few. The players could potentially have some 9th level spellcasters which could make the boat repair much much faster. I know it’s supposed to be a slow build up but I’m not sure there’s enough to keep the players interested during the adventure. In addition, the breaking down of the boarded up windows and doors, as well as zombies climbing the walls, are a major part of the adventure; some guidelines on running that or some new mechanics would have been a good inclusion.

If I was forced to run a Night of the Living Dead adventure on a moments notice I would pick this one, but I’m not sure that’s high praise.

by Lawrence Mead & Edward Winter
Distributed freely on Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Level 10 characters?

A very basic kind of adventure, this has a couple of nice ideas however for the most part it seems like a mash-up of several disconnected elements. Things thrown together with tenuous ties and without much interesting content. There are a couple of interesting bits to steal though.

The characters are asked to go discover the fate of two local explorers who were sent off to find some of the healing relics at a temple that is now disused. The temple once used bee honey to make magic healing items but fell in to disuse and is now the base for an evil illusionist and his minions. I actually kind of like the set up on this one. The background, while a page long, isn’t too overwrought and the temple/bee honey/disuse thing makes enough sense to be a good pretext without drowning in detail. It does rely on the party being do-gooders AND the party is a little high in levels to be helping out lowly villagers, but I’m going to ignore that in favor of being a hypocrite. Err … I mean, “there’s no accounting for taste.” The temple is two weeks away through the wilderness (which I like, nice and remote without being absurd) however there’s no notes about the wilderness journey. The maps are nothing special. Both the upper floor of the temple and the catacombs beneath are a kind of branching hallway design: imagine a long hallway with side corridors and doors found along it for the catacombs while the upper floor is just a series of interconnected rooms. There’s a token wandering monster table made up of about two unique creatures found in the dungeon.

Most of the encounters are nothing too special. Empty rooms and rooms with some kind of generic book monster. Minotaur, Ogres, Mummy, Lamia, Medusa. A couple of the encounters do stand out. There’s a charmed treant who can cause sticks to snakes. The imagery of him causing the trees to drop dead branches and then snaking them is a good one. There’s also a poor apprentice who was the victim of a wand of wonder. He’s now 2 feet tall and looks like a bush and still wields the wand. Those are pretty good encounters; nice and imaginative and not just a monster from a book. There’s also a nice encounter with a room full of rats bursting through a door. Again, nice and evocative and gives me enough information to run with it. The others are … not so interesting. A medusa and her charmed minion. (I guess her lover never looks at her?) Lizard-men in ambush and Lamia just hanging out. The eighteen encounters/rooms just don’t have enough interesting going on to make this an adventure worth pursuing. And the lizard man thing just doesn’t make sense at all: they block the illusionist in the dungeon from his lover upstairs … and neither of them give a shit?

There is a flying rust monster bird that’s provided which is quite nasty. There is also a decent amount of variety in both the mundane and magical treasure. That’s not really enough though. Many of the monsters in the adventure have illusion powers and I’m sure that’s meant to kind of beef the place up, but that’s just not enough. There’s no real exploration element and most of the rooms have just-another-monster syndrome or are meaningless. It feels a little like the players are running the gauntlet, however in reality they just need to follow one long corridor to the end, open the door and kill the Big Bad. A Big Bad which has Lareth syndrome: there’s no build up to him at all. The players just run in to him and hack him down, not knowing that he’s the guy behind everything. There needs to be some build up to him and that’s just not present.

by Craig Pitt
Distributed free on Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 8-12

Can your group of trusty adventurers save a small village from a monstrous evil? For 6-10 characters of level 8-12.

Think hard: Have you ever actually _seen_ a Monty Haul adventure? Well, you have now. This thing has … issues.

The adventure starts with statement from the designer to the effect that limited-use magic items should be the norm in a campaign. Potions, scrolls, charges in a wand, etc. Things that get used up. I was happy to see that statement, it matches my own views. Unfortunately he then follows this statement with an adventure that contains a complete set of ioun stones, helm of telepathy, ring of mind shielding, gauntlets of ogre power, boots of striding/springing, crossbow of speed, collar of stiffness, rod of absorption, bag of holding, sword of dancing, amulet of 30% magic resistance, ring of x-ray vision, robe of the archmagi and a +1 dagger. And that doesn’t count the more standard limited use magic items like arrows of demon slaying, rods of cancellation, a ring of four wishes, a complete set of books (vile darkness, exalted deeds, understanding, quickness/action, clear thought, bodily health, etc) amulet of life protection, and javelins of lightning. And then there’s all of the portions and scrolls on top of that. Because, you know, most magic items should be consumable. Like the blaster rifles in Barrier Peaks.

The set up is painful. Monsters are attacking a village and the king has sent you to take care of it, his army being otherwise engaged on the border. He gives you 100gp each. Whatever happened to rumors of PHAT L00T and hot elf chicks? Anyway, the party will be exploring the complex of a dead archmage who was killed by a summoned demodand. The dungeon is full of the archmages minions. The demodand hasn’t killed them yet because he’s afraid of triggering some kind of containment trap that might be present.

The dungeon layout is simple, just a set of branching hallways that dead-end in rooms. There are 22 rooms/encounters (yeah, all those items are in just 22 rooms. And there’s more, I just got bored typing.) There’s only one wandering monster, a Penanggalan, that attacks at night if the players camp outside.

Every room has a monster and just about every room is stuffed full of treasure. Black puddings, white puddings, cyclopskin, achaierai, arcanadaemon, shadow mastiffs, thessalhydra, scarecrows, the penanggalan, an enveloper, protein polymorph, vision, stone golems, the demodand, ghost … all living together in perfect harmony, ignoring each other and just hanging out in their rooms. The hydra and shadow mastiffs are such good buds that they left the hydra wander through their room so he can get out and eat. Look, I don’t need realism. In fact, I HATE realism. I do however need more than a series of simple rooms on a map and list of random monsters tied together with “they all worked for the archmage.” There’s more to this dungeon than my vitriol would imply, however that’s not what it feels like and certainly lacks the … imagination? that I’m looking for in a product.

There’s a hallway cloaked in continual darkness with a brown pudding on the ceiling. The aranadaemon is trapped in the last 20′ of a corridor. At the end of a corridor is large ruby on a pedestal, which triggers a poison gas trap (a classic trop worth stealing.) Let’s see, there’s a green slime trap, a deva trapped in stasis, a nice obvious pit trap, a couple of fake traps and a “burning the spider webs triggers a Power Word Kill” trap. You now have experienced the module. There’s just not much exciting or interesting in this place. Text is wasted on history and explanations instead of evocative imagery or interesting things. The monsters are book monsters thrown together seemingly randomly. The magic items are too many, too powerful, and are all generic and boring book items, with a single exception (a Rod of the Rust Monster.) The map is simple, the rooms are boring, and text uninspired.

by Jon Thompson
Self-published
AD&D
Levels 1-4

A small farming community is plagued by thievery and the mayor is powerless to stop them! Who or what is behind these crimes? Brave and inquisitive adventurers are needed to solve the mystery and bring peace to the people of Bemuen.

A free adventure hosted on Dragonsfoot. Different standards for free adventures? Nahhhh…. The adventure is a mess but the DM can get the gist of what’s going on pretty easily. The details though, or rather, the flavor, are generally missing. It’s more of an adventure outline, even though it’s 35 pages long.

The idea is that there’s a small village (~150) being plagued by a dragon eating their livestock. The mayor hires the party to go look in to it. The players will poke around town, go up the mountain to confront a depressed dragon, and then come back to town to finish things up. There’s on fixed combat encounter on the way to the dragons lair as well as a single ‘team building’ challenge: crossing a chasm. The chasm encounter has a lot of details on various solutions the players might try and the combat encounter is just with goblins. Goblins with a shit-ton of magic items, but goblins nonetheless. There is a small wandering monster table. They are heavy on the Animal side, which I like, but do include goblins, ogres, and bugbears … a little scattershot.

While the module comes in at 35 pages it is frustrating in its lack of supporting text. The dragon is depressed because his lost love, a human woman, has gone missing. He’d like the party to give him some closure and let him know what has happened to her. There’s almost no data on her though. The innkeepers daughter looks a lot like her. And her dead body lies at the bottom of a chasm several hundred yards downstream. She’s just bones now with a locket. How the party figures out to look here is a mystery, as is any reason why she’s down at the bottom. I THINK it’s implied she took her own life, mostly because of this statement: “Crafty players will realize that Ashara chose her own fate long ago once it is revealed that the rope bridge was destroyed along with the mercenaries.” I have NO idea how that conclusion was arrived at; there’s nothing to support it.

Two thirds of the adventure revolves around the village but there’s really not much detail provided. The mayor, who’s an evil shit, hires the party to look in to a cover-up he’s got going on (dragon eating the livestock) but it’s not clear why he does this. Maybe he’s getting heat from the townspeople? He’s supposed to provide several people who have lost livestock to the dragon but only two are provided, a fake one and a real one. From this the party is supposed to figure out that the mayor is not on the up and up. Tenuous, at best. If the party believes the depressed dragon (his assertion that he’s not been eating livestock) then they must suspect the mayor. Somehow this justifies breaking in to his house and the town hall to look for evidence, poking around the village for more, and then summoning the town council to have the mayor fired. There’s a lot of implied social elements going on here and almost no text to support it. Most of the town locations are pretty generic, with a single fun exception I’m going to steal. There’s no real interaction among the villagers; they are just static locations who don’t really interact with each other or who have interesting personalities for the party to play off of. The village also only has a couple of locations detailed, maybe eight, with only a couple of people detailed. That’s not enough to support the social game that the module needs to revolve around.

Turning this in to a useful adventure is going to involve beefing up the village play quite a bit. The “evil dragon is really good” thing is a bit stale and I suspect the players will know something is up when you toss a dragon at them at first level. I’m not sure how you would drop the hints about the dragons lost Lenore. Sticking this in as a subplot to one of your existing villages might be interesting. That solves the ‘Living Breathing Village’ problem, and then maybe also you can throw in some clues ahead of time about the fate of Lenore.

by Jaap de Goede
for Sangreal
Dark Dungeon/OSR
Levels 1-4

On a summer eve with a near full moon, you, your friends and some family have gathered in a sacred forest grove to celebrate the coming harvest. Enjoying song, stories and dance, you are suddenly rudely interupted. Guttural voices, shouts and screams. A horde ofwolves pours out from between the trees. On their backs are gruesome little men, armed with spears and jagged swords.

This is the strangest thing I’ve ever reviewed. It’s a kind of story-based adventure, stat’d for both OSR games and Dark Dungeon. Don’t pre-judge this one: read the entire review, especially if you hate story games.

Some D&D adventures, such as DL1 and Ravenloft, added story elements to classic D&D module elements. In other words, they started out using a traditional D&D adventure thing and then added story elements. These eventually turned in to the more story and plot based adventures that replace traditional site-based adventurers. This product is similar but comes at things from the other side. It seems to be clearly based on the concepts of the modern indie storytelling game and then adds elements of traditional D&D. The indie game Shab-al-Hiri Roach has set scenes and the players create a story out of those scenes, but every game will always have the same settings for the scenes. A similar concept is at play in this module … I think. My heads spinning a bit from the very non-traditional style.

The story has four chapters, each with at least one scene and several options. I know! Like I said, it’s coming at this thing from the story games side of the world. Scene 1: the players are having a picnic in the sacred grove with some friends and family when goblin wolf-riders attack. Naturally the heroes are to overwhelmed by the enemy. That’s a direct quote. ‘Toss enough goblins at them to distract them enough so that their families can be kidnapped.’ If the players play very well as team, and roll very well then their relatives don’t get kidnapped! Yeah! But then you go to scene 2 and the characters village was attacked and burned own and people were captured there. Yeah? Oh wait, story game, so, choices don’t matter. Scene 3 has the players chasing the goblins through a forest “Traversing the forest in the dark is excellent for scary scenes, even with just an owl flying over their heads.” That’s pretty much scene 3. No advice on what those scary scenes might be. If the party moves fast or, if they move slow then there may be a party of sentries left at the old stone bridge. The bridge may be broken. The sentries on the other side may shoot their bows. Or the bridge may be in order. ARG! STORY GAME! STORY GAME! Those are pretty much direct quotes from the paragraph that composes Optional Scene 5. The adventure continues on and on like this. An optional Old Chapel. An optional ghoul back under the old chapel. Or maybe Ghoul tunnels underneath that link up with wererats.

Chapter two is about The Haunted Keep. It, and the lower caves that make up chapter three, are some of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. It’s like a bizarro dungeon crawl. There’s maps and the rooms/areas are numbered. But those are completely unaddressed in the adventure. Instead we’re given a whole slew of options. Option 9A: some rooms may be unused by the goblins for various reason. One might house a giant spider. Option 9B: another room may be unused because of scary faces on the walls. Option 9C: Maybe a room is unused because of horrible green moldy slime. So there’s not really much direction given other that the last scene/encounter in this part should be with hobgoblins that have ONE of the players captured relatives. Chapter three details the tunnels and caverns under the keep and is more of the bizarro same. Oh, and there’s a dragon in a chasm that a bridge crosses. That’s actually a pretty cool thing to steal, especially in such a low level adventure. The final chapter is with a deranged family that lives underground. They have a lot of secrets and are probably evil. ‘Probably’ because this is a story game and the DM goes with the flow. Mad scientists, cannibal banquets, etc. This is a very opened section is a very open ended adventure. Descriptions of the family are offered, as well as a set of motivations “or not” for each, and then some other general plot possibilities … “or not”. Things are supposed to end up with some portion of the party captured so the mad scientists can gloat over them. The core setup is a good one and I suspect I’ll steal it for one of my games. But without all of the railroady bits.

It’s almost like this is an adventure construction toolkit that you can use to make your own module… except it’s very clearly scene based. Almost kind of like B1 but approaching it from the story-game side of things. It does have a nice encounter here or there, like the dragon in the chasm under the bridge. It also has a nice little section at the end on continuing the adventure through several seeds founds in the plot and another good section on how to twist the adventure in some serious ways. This could be something like the family being vassals of the goblins and other pretty substantial changes to the situation. Being a story-game it also has an EXCELLENT section on magic items. I’s a section at the end and the DM is encouraged to pick and choose items to add as loot to the various encounters. The items though are pretty good and have nice fairy-tale feel to them, compete with a little description. A Dagger of Returning, a Potion of Transformations, a Sword of Wolfslaying, Blood of Curing, Stench of the Spider, Rags of the Shadow … These are the sorts of magic items that stand out in a campaign and that players will remember. These are exactly the sorts of magic items that I wish more designers would put in … items with character. The Stench comes in a small perfume dispenser and reeks sour … but using it will make spiders of all sorts ignore the person unless they attack first. That’s a good item. All of the other items have similar good descriptions and powers.

The adventure is an extreme railroad. The players don’t get to have their own experiences but instead they get experiences forced upon them because the designer or DM wants them to have it. “Getting captured is a classic element” or “Rescuing their relatives would be fun.” This is pretty anti-thetical to site-based adventurers. I prefer it when we’re all sitting around the table laughing and high-fiving because of something the players have done rather than yet another session of having experiences forced upon them. D&D should not be a spectator sport.

I hate this as an adventure but certain parts of it have some GREAT ideas. It could almost be used a mini-campaign kit, a kind of adventure seed toolkit all built around the same little sandbox area. The DM could take the ideas here and flesh them out and have a nice little starting area and beginning campaign area. The family part, especially, I find very intriguing, as well as the magic items. I don’t keep much of what I review, especially when it comes to PDF’s, but I’m going to keep this one just because it’s so bizarrely different. This thing is only $1.99 on rpgnow. Even if you hate plot and story you may want to check it out; I’m pretty sure it’s the strangest thing I’ve ever come across.

Oh, and if you’re playing one of those Indie/story dungeon games then this would be a MUST BUY.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/99830/Shadow-of-the-Haunted-Keep?affiliate_id=1892600

by Alphonso Warden
for Brave Halfling
OSRIC
Levels 13-15

Several centuries past, a shadowy sect sought to enslave the world in the name of their dark lord, Baalzebul, one of the arch devils of Hell. They carved out a massive subterranean temple. The clerics of Tyr were eventually able to raid the temple before their ambitions could be fully realized. Cut to the present: A company of clerics calling themselves the Order of the Black Lotus have journeyed to the evil fane with the intent of reviving the forgotten cult of Baalzebul. It is up to you to see that they don’t fully unite with the undead servants of Baalzebul, unleashing the arch devil’s horde upon an unsuspecting world.

An overly-complex, and not in a good way, dungeon full of deathtraps and monsters in stasis. A throw-back to jr. high dungeon design where the DM was antagonistic.

Sit down and really think about this: What’s your favorite Gygax module? Some people like T1; the village and dungeon are pretty good. I prefer G1 and S3, ranking them among the best adventures modules ever produced because of their maps and the nature of the encounters. Some people prefer Tomb of Horrors. I think those people are morons. It reminds me of the worst of the antagonistic DMs I ever played with. Recently at a gaming party someone invited me to his 3x game. He was looking for a group of players who worked well together “because no group has ever been able to beat me as a DM.” Uh … No. That’s not what D&D means to me. It means weird. It means strange. It means fun with friends. It’s not a competitive game with sides. I’m not even sure the old TSR tournament modules were that competitive; they didn’t seem like killer dungeons. Tomb is a killer dungeon. It seems a little competitive. This module is SUPER competitive, to the point it feels like the designer hates his players. It doesn’t feel tough it just feels … I don’t know… antagonistic? unfriendly?

There’s about five and a half pages of background and introduction at the start of this adventure. ‘Long introduction’ is one of the things that I’ve found generally means a product has problems. The designer feels the need to lay EVERYTHING out and explain the backgrounds of everyone. No exception here. We get the history of the temple, from the ancient past to the recent days, almost none of which is relevant to the party and their adventurers. The hooks are pretty poor i relation to the adventure. The suggestions are that the party is contacted by a cleric to look for his friends, lost in the temple dungeon, or an injured adventurer who wants the party to bring back the bodies of his fallen comrades in the dungeon. Those would be fine, if generic, hooks for a normal murder-hobo run but in this case they are disingenuous. The actual point here is for the party to SAVE THE WORLD. Yes, the party is meant to discover that somehow the mess in the dungeon is leading to the end of the world and they need to kill everything in sight in order to save it. But that’s not the frame of mind the party is going to be in. They are going to be in some other mode: find the clerics, find the bodies, or maybe find the big booty elf chicks and bags of gold. When all of the super-obscure clues start to pop up it’s very unlikely that the players going to be bothered working through the clues and riddles to figure out that the world is ending and what they need to do to save it. I did find one part of the intro interesting: there was once a giant demonic statue in the forest, in the middle of nowhere. It has recently disappeared, replaced by a large hole in the ground … That’s a nice dungeon entrance.

The dungeon has three levels and about 66 rooms. The final level is really just a throw away with four rooms in a straight line though, so that one doesn’t really count. Levels one and two have some very simplistic maps. They are really nothing more than a kind of branching star arrangement. Work your way all the way down one leg and then backtrack to work your way down the other leg. Repeat until your players get phone calls (their phones were on vibrate) from their waves summoning them home to [insert excuse.] This is a common occurrence with temple maps. They seem to have a kind of symmetrical nature built in for some reason. It’s pretty boring in play, I find. I’d prefer a map with some loops and so on so that the party can skip past encounters, or get ambushed by monsters or head ’em off at the pass, and so on. This sort of exploratory play helps develop a much deeper feeling of mystery and the unknown, in my opinion. When you know where a road goes the magic of where it MIGHT go is no longer present. There are no wandering monsters
and only one way down to the second levels and one way down to the third level. DO WHAT THE DESIGNER WANTS YOU SILLY PLAYERS!

The encounters and rooms are the real heart of my problems with this. First, the place is SUPER EVIL so clerics get a -6 to their turn rolls. If you have to gimp the players to challenge them then maybe you should rethink your encounters? Why not just make the undead special? Why force the party to kill the thing? The dungeon is full of explanations and other silly things. Continual light sconces, walls invulnerable to all but a wish spell, and so on. The rooms generally have some combination of obscure riddles, stasis monsters, and death traps in them. Iron golems, stone golems, illusion black puddings, stasis stone giants, stasis frost giants, and a few undead/demons/devils. This is combined with doors slamming shut when the party enters the room, symbols of death, etc. It’s not the death traps that are the issue but rather the relentless, arbitrary, and boring way in which they are presented. Die in a round. Die in 2 rounds. “The doors slam shut. If anyone so much as touches …” Touch the alter and get disintegrated. This is a hell of a place to be an apprentice! This is combined with inscriptions to relate (obscure) clues to the party. And it’s all combined with a meticulous descriptive style that includes lots of boxed text and lots of descriptions for the DM. What the rooms was used for. Was the room originally contained. What it contains now. Why the creature is here. What the creature had for lunch. This is way too much detail. It makes picking out the important parts of the room much more difficult. There is a particular style of D&D at play here (beyond the antagonistic nature) that I dislike: the ‘magical society’. Everything has to have a reason and everything has to obey the law. Light? Continual flame sconces. Acid trap? That’s a reason to go in to great detail on the how, why, and wherefore of the trap. Magic mouths explain things. Food gardens and fresh water sources. I don’t think I saw toilets or sphere of annihilation garbage disposals but I may have missed them. This sort of things wears on me to no end.

The module is an excuse to toss a bunch of death traps and monsters at a party. It doesn’t do it very well, repeating tropes from other works by the designer like negatives to turn, doors that slam shut, and monsters in stasis. I’m passing on this one.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/58543/The-Forgotten-Temple-of-Baalzebul?affiliate_id=1892600