tenfootpole.org

by Lance Hawvermale and Rob Mason
for Necromancer Games
d20
Levels 12-14

The Bonegarden is a small nation ruled by the dead, a circular cemetery 1 mile in diameter, surrounded by a magical containment field that keeps its denizens from spilling into the innocent world beyond. Within the gate lies one of the true blights of the Domain of Hawkmoon, an immense graveyard that serves as the prison for the doomed spirits of thousands of history’s most awful criminals. Those inside are determined to escape, and one of them may have found a way…

I wonder if there are any 3e adventurers that don’t suffer from verbal diarrhea? This adventure/setting is set in a giant graveyard and is full of factions, adventure seeds, and GREAT set ups. Unfortunately the adventure is buried under TONS of text.

Graveyard. One mile in diameter. Giant invisible one-way force field around it; you can get it but nothing inside can get out. It’s chock full of undead. Who come back to life each night if slain during the day. Just about everybody inside, living and dead, wants to get out and has a different plan for doing so. In most cases this puts them in contention with others inside the graveyard. Fun ensues. This more closely resembles a setting than it does an adventure. But it’s not generic or unimaginative the way many are. It instead is a kind of graveyard sandbox in which you can place something the players are seeking.

The graveyard has about seventeen locations scattered throughout. These can be roughly divided in to two categories: factions headquarters and weird stuff. The weird stuff is, essentially, a non-faction encounter area. The Windmill of Woe or the Hangman’s Tree or the Plague Bog … these are all nice little evocative locations. The Plague Bog is a low point in the graveyard where all of the blood, ooze, effluent, and other horrid substances collect. Quite a nice little fetid image there. Floating in it you can see a log with one arm hanging on to it, the rest under ‘water.’ Valley of Bones. Mass Graves. Revenge Lane. The Unquiet Garden. Just the names alone get my mind going and my creative juices flowing. (In to the plague bog, no doubt.) That’s EXACTLY what I’m looking for in an adventure. I need it to provide me just enough evocative information to get my mind going so I can do the rest. This product, however, does not do that. It goes completely overboard in the descriptions is provides. The locations all seem to take up at least a page each. What is was used for. Who lived thee. Who used it. What they did there. What happened to them. What’s happening now. The price of tea in china. The descriptions are just WAY too long. What ends up happening is that you can’t find the information you need/want in order to run it. Taking a shit ton of time and a highlighter to the text is going to be an absolute requirement. And then, of course, that’s combined with the absurd 3e stat blocks that take up even more room. What’s a shame is that the encounters are great and that greatness is communicated in just a couple of sentences in each. A skeleton warrior and a ghost are locked in eternal combat, each night the loser is resurrected to do battle once again the following night … these are great encounters!

The encounters are great but the factions are better. Without the factions you’d have some nice and interesting little encounters. With the factions you have a real place with people in it with their own goals and motivations … that are frequently at odds with each other. In to this volatile environment the party arrives. Human Drama Ensues. Errr… and Undead Drama. You’ve got various groups of human survivors holed up in a couple of locations; the remnants of other adventuring parties or expeditions. They just don’t want to die and want to get out of the graveyard. Then you’ve also got several factions of the intelligent undead. These range from undead thieves to lovers triangle to a lich. Each has their own supporters and agents and their own headquarters in the graveyard. They all want out and are all pursuing different methods to make it happen. They generally have at least one grudge against a different group. And then there’s the underground village/town. It has some people in it, miners, as well as a shit ton of underground types, like deep gnomes, drow, and the like. Besides the normal guys just trying to get by there are two factions trying to take over the town and a powerful do-gooder getting in everyones way. Everyones got agents and allies working for them, generally with THEIR own agendas. And it seems like everyone also has a boat load of prisoners each with THEIR own agendas and adventure seeds. I can’t emphasize it enough. I’m a very strong believer that the social element, the goals, motivations and interactions among the people, is what makes a good urban supplement. This place is like one of the best the best town supplements ever written.The party can hack, talk, negotiate, connive, plot, cross, double-cross and, most of all, try to survive in the face of the hordes of the unintelligent undead. I mean, if you can make it through the verbosity.

The maps are nearly throw away. They tend to be small and linear and don’t really provide much in the way of interest. It’s almost like they were an afterthought, or someone felt compelled to add them. It’s not clear to me how much value ANY map would add since the social aspects tend to not need as many detailed maps. Still, better and more interesting maps could have replace all the verbose dreck and allowed for some really interesting exploration elements which would have aded even more excitement to the adventure. It does have a decent number of new monsters (Undead, surprise, surprise, surprise!) and new magic items. These are both something I look for in an adventure. I like new monsters because they keep the party on its toes … they don’t know what to expect from a new creature. The ones in this module are pretty well done, playing on some nice horror tropes. The new magic items are nearly all new wondrous items, which again I prefer. I want magic to be mysterious and fresh. “Sword +1” doesn’t do that but weird mass miscellaneous magic items do have that impact. I approve.

I’m really impressed by the number of adventure seeds and the degree of potential interaction among the creatures in this. I’d be hard pressed to name a supplement which does things better than this, and this isn’t even an supplement but an adventure module! This is a great little place to insert in to a campaign world, if very VERY deadly. It’s going to sound silly, but the only thing I found lacking, besides the verbosity, was the LACK of adventure seeds in the underground village. There are supposed to be some ‘normal’ people down there and some more information on them and their plight, with some seeds, would have been nice. It feels strange to say that in a module with so much in the way of adventure seeds. Perhaps the lack of seeds for the townspeople felt out of place because of the vast number contained in other places? In any event, if you can wade through the “paid by the word” nonsense then you would have a great higher-level supplement. A kind of Sigil for the undead.

This is available at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/745/Bonegarden??affiliate_id=1892600

Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 1-20
[The new Kickstarter version]

It’s really big. It’s really tough. It’s got a TON of interesting encounters and levels. It’s also maddeningly confusing in places and shows a 3e heritage. It’s WELL worth having and playing.

Uh … yeah … so this thing is BIG. Something like 55 levels, plus the ground level, plus the wilderness areas … and THEN they are going to release more levels for it in the future. The book is about 500 pages long and the text to describe just the dungeon levels is about 325 pages long, not counting the ground levels and the wilderness areas. And thats for the Swords & Wizardry version; I shudder to think how long the Pathfinder version is! [Hmmm, rpggeek.com says 673. Not bad for stat bloat!] I spent two weeks reading and read all of the wilderness and dungeon levels twice, thumbing through the appendices and the supplemental books. With some restocking rules in play I’m pretty sure you could run this module forever.

The way the levels are interconnected in the adventure is second to none. There are AT LEAST seventeen different entrances to the dungeon from the surface. Levels are interconnected with stairs, slides, pits, tunnels, streams, and teleporters. Levels and sublevels connect horizontally and vertically. Some interconnections skip many levels, and in one case that’s “9 levels deeper.” Level 1B (EL 4) can drop you to level 10B (EL9.) Depth underground as an indicator for toughness? Level 3B is EL 17+, although admittedly it’s impossible to get to without being close to that experience level and having explore a massive part of Rappan Athuk. This is absolutely WONDERFUL. The depth underground, hidden levels, and bypassing areas only to return later recall the very best of the level design from Thracia. It is wonderful to see and appears to flow much more organically than the interconnects in Stonehell.

The various levels have a lot of individuality to them. This has a great del to do with the level design and the encounters on the levels. Many, if not most, of the rooms with encounters feel more like set pieces than Just Another Encounter. I don’t mean a railroad encounter but rather an encounter with some crazy and unusual shit going on. In addition the encounters and rooms cover just about every classic element possible. A vampire & succubus lover, with the succubus used better than I’ve ever seen another. Sucking mud, poison air and Will-o-Wisps. A basilisk? No. A cavern FULL of basilisks. Goblin cities. Jungle levels. A level with multiple mazes that are used very, very well. There’s just so much here that it’s actually hard to pick something out. Let’s pick one completely at random. A room full of rubble from a collapsed ceiling. Move is halved. Running requires a saving throw or you fall and take a bit of damage. There’s a narrow passage near the ceiling that you can find with a locate secret doors check. Wandering monsters like to hang out at this point on the other side. That is a great room on many levels. Best of all it shows how the simple mechanics of 0e D&D can be used to great effect. Let’s pick another: a room full of statues that must be rotated to cause a secret door to open. And another: a room full of hot quicksand with an arched bridge of it and the ceiling full of hot sulfuric gasses. Not every room is this way … but it sure as hell seems that way … AND I LIKE IT! It reminds me a lot of the Tower of Gygax. It’s not. As I said there are many rooms that are empty or trivial. But it reminds me of it and that’s certainly the impression I got after reading the thing. The kind of slow deliberate exploration with many puzzle-like (but no riddle) elements in each room makes each place seem dangerous and mysterious. That’s just the kind of feeling I’m looking to invoke in my players.

I’d like to cover a few things that are … problems? with Rappan Athuk. First, the one thing that really pissed me off: There are monsters pulled from other books that don’t have full entries in the bestiary section. A decent number, 60 to be exact, are pulled from Tomb of Horrors Complete. Uncool guys. The mini-stat block is included at the rooms entry where they are found but all of the creatures special abilities, etc, are not. Uncool. Yeah, I know I had to have Fiend Folio or MM2 if those monsters were referenced by T$R in a product. That was bullshit also. UN. COOL.

The book is also unwieldy because the dungeon is so large. The book proper, is going to be fun to manage at the game table with it’s whole 500 pages, but I’m more speaking of the lack of a useful introduction/overview. The book does have an introduction and it does have an overview and each level has a little section that it essentially an overview of that level, noting special effects, rules, and a little background on the level. The introduction and overview for the entire dungeon, though, is not useful. Essentially we learn that the followers of Orcus live there and adventurers like to go there. There is a side-view map provided that shows all of the levels and their interconnections, along with the room number of the interconnection that helps a little but it’s not enough. Maybe some color-coding on the side-view to show areas of influence and some notations of equivalent dungeon level? And perhaps a slightly longer dungeon overview that notes the various factions in the dungeon and how the various levels fit together. That’s the root of the problem: with a product this big it’s very hard to get the big picture view from reading through the module levels. After two read throughs I’m still not sure how all of levels fit together. There’s also a decent amount of foreshadowing missing. Many of the levels and encounters would be better if the party learned about them ahead of time. Fearful mumblings of prisoners or some such. There IS a decent rumor table but I think the levels could have worked out better if there was some knowledge of things to come. Certainly a DM can insert this themselves, however the general obfuscation-due-to-size thing comes in to play here as well.

This extends to the wilderness area above. There IS a wilderness area provided along with suggestions on how to use them in play. (Ambushes as you come out of the dungeon, anyone?) It’s got an extensive number of encounters, numerous groups of bandits, and a robust and diverse description of the various environments in the area. What it doesn’t have is a decent key or layout. Just a map with some numbers on it. There’s a road on the map … but the only settlement mentioned is WAY off the road. Like, 40 miles off the road. A riverboat stop.??? It SEEMS like there should be another settlement closer. I get that feeling from a lot of the text in the module, but there doesn’t appear to be any. It’s gonna be a long hike back from the dungeon. 1/2″ =10miles and the map fills an entire 8.5×11 page, with the main/killer dungeon entrance roughly in the center. That’s gonna be roughly 100 mile hike down the coast road to a settlement IF it’s right on the edge of the map. It feels wrong, as if I’ve missed something. It seems like there should be more in the way of how the surface works together and the logistics of exploring the dungeon.

Factions are an issue as well. I’m STILL not sure if there are any factions in this thing. There are a couple of NPC’s who are noted as not being intent on immediate murder. A handful more are described ambiguously enough that you could insert some role-playing. (IE: The guy is not described as attacking on sight.) The single exception may be the goblin city, in which there is a faction-like thing going on that clearly recognizable. This is a bit relentless for my tastes, especially for such a large dungeon.

The encounters do tend to be more verbose than I’d prefer. It’s not quite at 3e “pay per cent” levels but it does clearly have a mild case of the verbosity sickness. WAY too many words are used to describe many rooms which impairs the DM’s ability to quickly look at the room description and figure out what’s going on. Some serious editing could have been used to pare things down. Again, it’s not quite at 3e levels, there are still ten or so encounters to a page, but it’s pretty damn close.

Finally, most levels are smaller than I think many folks first imagine. The vast majority of the levels look like something out of the 3e era. Maybe 16 or so rooms per level and a loop or two. NOT linear, but not quite the ‘fill the page’ type design either. This is mitigated to a certain extent by the NUMEROUS interconnections between most levels, allowing the vertical to come in to play as well, but the individual levels still seems weird and feels small.

The battle maps are stupid and not worth having. They are just some almost generic thing. Same for the pre-gens. You’re getting nothing special there.

None of that, though, is a deal breaker. What it means is that the DM is going to have to put some time in to understand the module, crib it with notes in places, and develop a logistics plans around the entry/exits.

You can get this on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112605/Rappan-Athuk–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

by James Edward Raggi, IV
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
LotFP

Up on a mountain sits a house by a cemetery, haunted by the memories of atrocities past. People remember that horrible things happened up on that mountain, but not exactly what those things were. Still, they stay well away, and live long and prosperous lives for their wisdom. But rumors of abandoned treasure and magic always bring those wishing to recover it. Brave, skilled men need not fear that which terrifies the common folk. The cult on the mountain is long gone, yet the music of weirdling death carries on the wind. The mountain is cold. So very cold. And the greedy and the foolish will march bravely up the mountain for gold and glory. Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Their Souls.

This is probably the defining product for the publisher, the Lamentations RPG, and the designer. It has a near perfect antechamber/lead-in, lots of unguarded loot, tons of weird shit, is very deadly, and can totally change and/or wreck a campaign. It’s a perfect pick-up-and-play adventure and for cons. Running this in a home campaign is akin to throwing Tomb of Horrors at your players unannounced.

The lead-in on this adventure is very, very good. It consists of two or three parts: an old man, a graveyard, and maybe a cabin. I say maybe because at some point there a transition from the lead-in to the actual adventure. The point of a good lead-in is to transition the players from the real world of villages, towns, farmers and merchants in to the world of the fantastic. This serves a couple of purposes. It does a wonderful job of setting a mood and getting the players attitudes transitioned away from works, wives, and the IRS and in to a different mode. It also serves to note that the game world rules have just changed. The characters have entered the realm of the strange, full of deadly traps and creatures. The intro in this adventure involves a peaceful meeting with an old mountain-man. His self-given job is to make headstones for all the people sacrificed by the cult that used to live in the dungeon. He’s a disgusting old man but completely friendly. He has two good lines, beyond relating the dungeons backstory. If attacked he states “I know what happens to the souls of men who slay men. Do you?” with astonishing clarity. He also tries to physically restrain people going up the mountain, and after failing he yells at them “Your doomed. All Doomed!” This is a WONDERFUL preamble. It immediately sets the stage for whats to follow. More tension and atmosphere is added by the small area surrounding the cabin: a graveyard. The mountain man has put up hundreds of tombstones and statues. There’s a hanging tree, eerie music, scraggily dead trees, a snow covering everything, an old well, and a fresh corpse in the snow. Oh, and the souls of thousands of murdered people lurking just below the surface of reality, waiting for a Speak with Dead to be cast. By this time the party should be both quaking in their boots and terrified. This primes them for the cabin encounters, which may actually be the start of the dungeon. It’s shabby and run-down with sagging roof, and every bot of its surface covered in intricate minute calligraphy. Has the party run away yet? No? Ok. The cabin is the final room of the antechamber. It’s got some classic spooky elements. A clock that impacts time. A freaky painting. A giant book full of the names of murdered people … and a chained-up trapdoor that leads to a black pit under the earth … The party should now be completely freaked out and they haven’t even got in to the dungeon yet.

The dungeon underneath has about 31 keyed encounters and maybe 50 rooms. The map design is branching hallways with rooms hanging off of them. Not the most complex of designs. But then again, there are no wandering monsters and not really any monsters at all (for certain definitions of ‘any’) so the exploration elements of a loops map aren’t really ready to be taken advantage of anyway. The dungeon has three parts. The second portion leads to the third and both the second and third are going to require some … uh .. hard decisions to get in to. This is a good example of ramping things up in the dungeon. For example, getting in to the second part requires someone to pluck out a tooth. Getting in to the third part will require something else. There’s a great deal of unguarded treasure in the dungeon. There are also a great many ways to die and/or get SERIOUSLY maimed. It’s also pretty obvious when you are going to do something that will screw your character, so I’ve no issues with that … with a single exception we’ll cover later. The place is freaky and very atmospheric. It utilizes a lot non-standard mechanics and there are only a VERY small number of monsters, one of which offers EXCELLENT roleplaying opportunities. Oh, and the players could cause the campaign to end in two different ways. They could awaken a giant so large his fingers are hundreds of feet long. They could also cause about 12,000 undead (zombies and ghouls, mostly) to reanimate, kill them, and then proceed to devastate the known world. It’s not too difficult to make either of those outcomes come to pass … and therein lies the problem with the adventure.

The adventure is very very good. It’s also a bit slow and, tossing this at your normal campaign players, out of the blue, will almost certainly end your campaign. The designers message is that messing with things, especially those you don’t understand, will get you killed. And he’s serious about it. There’s sooooo many good things about the adventure, from the curses and other shit you can play with to the weird magic items to the reclamation of the Bless spell. And then your game probably ends. The roleplaying encounter is a GREAT one. It can also be used to keep your players alive when the dead come back to life. Soo … everyone is alive but you’ve release TWO great evils on the world. Hmmm…

It’s a VERY good adventure. It’s atmospheric. Good things to play with. Great roleplaying and tension. Maybe a little slow. And then your game probably ends. The problem with it is that the ‘game ending’ scenarios are baited traps … at least one them is for sure. It’s less making a choice and more ‘HAHAHAHA! You caused the game to end!’ I’m not cool with that, or rather, I’m not cool with the total picture. The roleplay encounter can save the party, but they have to do something they know will cause problems later. And to get to the roleplay encounter they have to find a secret door. While the world is ending. Making that secret door more obvious is probably the key to turning this from an unfun disaster to a fun ‘actions have consequences’ plot hook.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/63592/Death-Frost-Doom?affiliate_id=1892600

by James Edwar Raggi, IV
for Lamentations of the FLame Princess
LotFP/D&D
Introductory characters

Legends tell of a wizard so arrogant that he felt the entire sky was naught but a lens for him to view the stars. So great was the hubris and defiance of this man that the gods smote him with the power of storm and fire. Oh did the wizard laugh at such a pathetic gesture. He did not fear the gods, for he drew his knowledge from something greater. Something darker The legend of this wizard grew, first whispered by men in fear, and later in awe. The wizard, they said, attacked the gods just as they had attacked him. And his joy only grew as the land around him died. But then there was no more news. No more talk. Something had finally brought the wizard low, for though the sky still blazed down on him and his abode, he no longer blazed back. And now you’re going to walk right through this wizard’s front door.

Stargazer is very good and can be very deadly, in spite of the low creature count. It’s one of my favorite modules to run at cons. Unlike most of what I review, I HAVE run this. About 20 times.

The module is in digest format and sometimes manages to squeeze three entries to page. Raggi does like to fill a room with words, ad there’s a little bit of this that goes on in the module. Unlike many 3.x modules though it doesn’t feel TOO excessive. Many 3.x modules feel like they are being padded in order to exploit a ‘cents per word’ payment rate by the publisher. In this product though it feels lie it’s genuine excitement over the room and setting. The module is also meant to be a kind of introductory work and thus there are some extensive notes in certain areas. These are a kind of combination designers notes and advice to the DM; advice both on how to run the room and the design behind it, in order to guide a new DM and help them run better games in the future. I LOVE designers notes and don’t really have too much of a problem with them being integrated in to the main text. The advice also does a decent job of conveying the feel the designer is going for. Most games are shooting for a certain feel and it can frequently be difficult to figure out what that feel is. This helps.

Stargazer only has about 26 rooms, spread out over the seven levels of a wizards tower. Each level only has three of four encounters in it however it manages to deliver a good Exploration feeling, the kind that’s very rare in a setting with so few rooms. It does this primarily through two mechanisms. First, it’s the tower of a reprobate wizard, and thus there are many strange, bizarre, and weird things in it. This does an excellent job of setting the mood of the various rooms. Secondly, there are multiple ways around many of the levels. Three of the levels are only accessible through a levitating platform, and two of the levels are NOT accessible through that platform. Three levels also have no stair access while two levels only have stair access and two levels are connected by multiple ‘stairs’ and have areas not accessible by the other stairway. This map complexity to some decent Exploration elements in the tower, which, combined with the atmosphere, leads to the players not quite knowing what’s around the next corner, even when it’s obvious there is no next corner. Eventually though this leads to “find the missing room” syndrome, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The players get to experience both the mystery of the tower AND have a mostly-satisified feeling of having explored everything.

This being Raggi-land, the module is short on opponents and full on weird and death-traps. There is not, though, a feeling that the traps are arbitrary or unfair. Carry a ten-foot pole though a lightning field and take your chances. Go through the eighteen steps required to use the telescope and suffer the consequences. Perhaps the only borderline example is the front-door, but even then it can serve as a good example of how old-school play proceeds and it certainly sets the stage for what is to follow. I don’t have problem with it since I use this frequently in con games with a boat-load of pre-gens available as replacement characters.

There is a SHIT-ton of stuff to play with in this adventure. Lots of stuff to drink, or to open, or to mess with. Some good, some bad, and almost all of it weird. I LOVE this kind of stuff and this is what OD&D means to me. It’s the weird and strange and its use to invoke a sense of mystery in the players. There’s absolutely no telling what some of this stuff will do. This instills a kind of apprehension in the players and keeps them off balance. It’s terribly hard to min-max things through the rules when encountering the weird and non-standard. Almost every room has something interesting in it. I particularly like the crate room, the anatomy room and the wizards room. The wizards room, in particular, provides an enormous amount of fun in running, both for the players and the DM, in my experiences. The players generally think they are getting one over on the DM and the wizard is A LOT of fun to role-play. I only recall there being five monsters in the module, two which are NICELY bizarre and two of which are classics. It’s not a combat-heavy affair.

The only criticism I have is that it can sometimes be a bit slow. Most of the combat encounters are clustered in the same area. This can lead the rest of the tower to feel a little slow.

I like this module a lot. I keep it in my “quick-start” kit, along with Death Frost Doom, Tomb of the Iron God, and Shadowbrook manor. Those four choices, along with a pad of graph paper, a big stack of 1st-level pre-gens, the magenta D&D basic book, and dice-pencils make for a PERFECT “zero effort” D&D kit. This module, along with that kit, makes it possible to play D&D IMMEDIATELY. Anything that lets you play more D&D is a good thing.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/82999/Tower-of-the-Stargazer?affiliate_id=1892600