The Monastery of the Order of Crimson Monks

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by a Dragonfsfoot Consortium
Dragonsfoot
AD&D
Levels 5-9

This is a free module from Dragonsfoot. It was a community project to fill out the sample dungeon from the 1E DMG. They’ve done a good job of filling the map with encounters that are interesting and fun.

This sample dungeon appears a couple of times in the 1E DMG. The first three rooms get a description (the skeleton in the stream with the scroll tube, etc) and then there’s spiders that drops down and gets stamped on by a boot in the play example. A group on Dragonsfoot has kept the map and first three rooms and filled in the rest of the encounters in a community project. They did a great job.

There is, essentially, no introduction at all. Just a brief four sentence explanation that it’s a community project and a couple of small “please don’t sue us for using the map and first three rooms” statements. The product then launches in to the wandering monster tables and the first three rooms, as they appeared in the DMG. The entire story of this place is told through the encounters and it works GREAT. I was a bit taken aback at having no introduction/background at all but you seriously don’t need one. Either the guys doing the rooms did an amazing job or Vlark, the compiler/editor, should get an award for putting it together … or maybe there was just some monkeys @ typewriters thing going on and it just happened. An example? Ok. One of the wandering monster tables has goblins on it. “Ug” I say to myself upon seeing this. I hate humanoids and they appear to be seriously out of place in this dungeon. My feeling just gets worse as I read through: “Why did the goblins leave the dead guys treasure there? Why is that? Doesn’t make sense!” IE: the kind of nit-picky stuff that you think about when something gets caught in your head. And then I ran in to a brief paragraph way down deeper in the dungeon: “Since then, the dungeon has been mostly inhabited by various goblinoids every now and then. They barely avoid the many undead residing in it, yet stay here as the undead dissuade other monsters to invade the place.” It makes perfect sense and easily explains the goblins on the table: they are explorers, maybe looking for their kin or just having heard this was an ok place to set up camp. Two great things have happened there. First, a bunch of extra nonsense background/introduction section was avoided and the story of the dungeon told naturally through the encounters. Second, the module gave me enough information to get my own imagination working, letting me fill in the details of the adventure, without burdening me with a lot of extra bullshit detail. Those both hit my targets almost exactly for what I’m looking for in a product.

The maps a pretty good with multiple loops and several ways down to deeper levels. There may be five or six different way on to or off of the level … and that’s in a only forty or so encounters on a level that does NOT fill the page completely. Lots of weird room shapes, good secret placement, concealed doors, multiple ways in and out of place. I heartily approve. There are LOTS of options for the players as they explore the map. Good map complexity allows for complications, exploration, and mystery. No linearity here! It should be noted that the map has two distinct sections, with only one way, a tough secret door, between them. I was worried about when looking through this, only to have my worry addressed: there’s a good clue in the accessible half that the door is there.

The encounters in this are generally pretty good. The rooms have a decent amount going on in them and they provide some good ideas for the DM to flesh out. I particularly liked the underground tunnel filled with water. Yeah, I know it’s not that uncommon. I don’t know, it struck me as pretty cool the way it was presented. Several of the encounters are triggered, which I appreciated as well. On one room there’s a goblin body nailed to a door. Looking closely at it reveals two small red lights burning in its eyesockets. Ought oh! Touching it draws a wraith out of the skull! That’s the kind of encounter I can really groove on. It’s a pretty good bit of flavor text, short and evocative. It also rewards observant play and should almost CERTAINLY freak the players out before they trigger it. I LOVE it when the players get freaked out! There are a couple of other similar encounters as well. Almost every room has some little effect or something to explore or poke at. I approve. There are also a couple of little vignettes present in rooms. These are little scenes that give the impression that the dungeon is a real, breathing place. Two priests having an argument. A group of dead adventurers who have crawled in to a corner to die, along with the evidence that they were there. I love these sorts of things and I think they help a lot in turning static words on a page in to a place that seems real without unnecessary and burdensome realism getting in the way. There are also some great curses: pains in the ass without being crippling. This is combined with several other interesting effects the party can trigger in the dungeon. I love that sort of thing; I really find it brings the mystery and wonder to a game without being arbitrary.

This dungeon seems FULL of things to talk to. I don’t think it actually is, but it seems like it is. That’s probably a good thing. There’s an NPC party, a demon and a Crypt Thing, all of whom can offer some opportunities to break up the exploration & hacking. The monsters are the unusual suspects of skeletons, vermin, ghouls, wraiths, EHP, etc. It’s a good classic mix and they don’t feel stale at all. There’s three of four new magic items detailed that I was happy to see had proper backgrounds, etc. There’s also a couple of examples of things like “3/4 full yellow-green potion of invisibility” and so on. A little more variety in this area with the other book items would have been appreciated.

There is a bit too much detail in some places. We’re not talking 3e or 2e levels, but there _is_ an issue with verbosity. ROoms sometimes have three paragraphs or so describing them, which makes it possible to only fit three or four to page. Combined with the generous margins, line spacing, and font size it means it’s hard to get a good handle on the room quickly in many cases. A little tighter editing would have been in order, although I suspect there’s a fine line there especially in a community product. It does feel a little generic, or maybe I mean “not themed”, I’m not sure. The rooms have a lot going on but it feels like Just Another Dungeon Crawl. Hmmm, maybe I mean it wears the trappings of Just Another Dungeon Crawl. We’ve all seen a hundred of those poorly done generic dungeon crawls that all seem to look alike and run together in your mind. This adventure looks a bit like that on the surface and so perhaps that’s where the feeling comes from. But it’s not. It’s full of great encounters.

I’m pretty happy with this one. It’s not going to win any awards but it is a solid product and better than the vast majority of product, free or otherwise.

Posted in Level 5, Reviews, The Best | 8 Comments

J1 – The Beast of Geshtein

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

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.

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Shadow of the Haunted Keep

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

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

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The Forgotten Temple of Baalzebul

Posted on November 24, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

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

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Knowledge Illuminates

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Tim Shorts
for Gothridge Manor Games
Swords & Wizardry
Level 1

This is a short little adventure meant to completed in one night. It has a small wilderness area and a small eleven room dungeon. It has some decent encounters but feels bland. It doesn’t suck, there’s just not enough to it.

The idea is that there’s an old wizards workshop out in the wilderness. The players will wander around the wilderness having adventure until they find the workshop. Unfortunately, in order to get there we have to suffer through three pages of introductory text. Descriptions of Gods, descriptions of some kind of secret do-gooder society, descriptions of demons, the history of the wizard and his workshop. There is way, way too much of this stuff. Highly detailed backgrounds and exposition are nearly always wasted space in an adventure and this is no exception. Almost none of the information is needed to run the adventure; it’s just fluff, feels like padding, and gets in the way. The worst part of this is the hooks. They suck. You can track a strange creature you see. You can investigate the disappearance of a tinker. You can go on a mission for the Do-Gooder society. You can hunt bandits for villagers. You can learn of the lab from older mages who remember it. These are piss poor hooks that do nothing to get the players excited about going on the adventure. The hook needs to motivate and these do not. They amount to fantasy rationalizations, and I hate the rational in my Fantasy RPG’s.

The wilderness crawl takes place on a map that’s maybe 10 hexes by 10 hexes, each hex being a 1/4 mile. Road, stream, forests, and a couple of hills contain seven locations to discover. The encounters are pretty good ones. An ankheg living in a giant skull with the remains of victims in it. A hangmans tree. Bandits with some personality, etc. All of these have some little detail to make the encounter more interesting. The writing style is very conversational and that makes all of these encounters take up more space then they should. There’s s a statue encounter that takes up three paragraphs because we have to be told all about it … gamewise there’s a silver clasp hidden in the base. I was a bit surprised to not see a wandering monster chart. Having the players wander all over the map looking for the wizards lair is going to take some time and that time is traditionally filled with wandering monsters.

The wizards lab is a short little eleven room affair. It’s very very linear. Rooms 4-11 are all in a row: come in one door and go out the other. Further, there are no real creature encounters past room six, leaving the second half of the lab a little anti-climactic. There are a couple of traps, pits and poison gas, and a couple of decent little encounters. Ghouls who gnawed their arms off to escape from manacles. A ghostly shadow next to his body in a magic pond. Two creatures arguing over an item. There are occasional bursts of good imagery. For example, skeletal bodies still grasp the handles of the chest they were carrying when they died. Otherwise … lots of bits of disparate and, IMHO, irrelevant, information, especially in the rooms in the back half of the lab.

There are a few standouts in the adventure. Arrows of Fireball are a new magic item. I like these sorts of twists on standard magic items. Err, or maybe I should say that standard magic items are boring and should never be used, especially in an adventure module where I’m paying for creativity. There’s also some flowers that can bump up the effectiveness of healing potions. This is a nice little way to get the players carting around ingredients and getting them more interested in the non-traditional and i like it. A portion of the adventure revolves around Viz, little magical pellets that a wizard can use to cast spells without using a slot. There’s A LOT of viz in this adventure. In fact, there’s a pool that it can be harvested from. I like the idea, it sort of acts like a scroll for a spell you’ve already got memorized, but there’s WAY too much in this adventure. That’s pretty easily remedied though.

So, it’s linear, missing a few things, and a bit bland in places. It’s meant to be an introductory adventure but I’d rather have a really kick-ass introductory to get the players genuinely excited about the game, and I don’t see that happening with this. Still, it’s better than most published adventures.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/87982/Knowledge-Illuminates?affiliate_id=1892600

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H1 – The Bonegarden

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

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

Posted in Level 12, Reviews, The Best | 6 Comments

NS3 – The Death Curse of Sven Oakenfist

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Ken Spencer
for Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 7-9

In the Northlands the laws of hospitality are absolute, to violate them is to seek dishonor or even death. What then must our heroes do when their host asks them to fulfill his dying wish, to face down the wight of the legendary viking Sven Oakenfist and convince him to lift a curse laid with his own last breath?

A pseudo-historical viking adventure, except with some D&D monsters thrown in. It has an EPIC feel. Not the 4e kind but rather of the Greek/Homer kind. I’m unnaturally attracted to these sorts of things, so be warned. It’s a pretty open concept wilderness adventure.

Sven Oakenfist is an asshole. Seriously, he is. Err… was. Err … is? Yeah, so, he’s out one day with the boys raping and pillaging a dirt-poor village full of women and children when some kid pig-herder stabs him in the back and kills him. Sven, jerk that he is, uses his last breath to curse the kid with a lifetime of good fortune … until he comes back from the grave to kill him. Come on Sven … uncool dude. Almost certainly totally in character for you since you were pretty much a dick your entire life, but still, uncool. The swineherd grows up to be a great Jarl. The party is feasting in his hall one night when the front doors crash open and the spectre of Sven appears, all ghost like and shit, and tell the Jarl that his days are numbered and he’ll be back at the spring feast to kill the Jarl, everyone in his hall, burn the place down, and kick his goldfish … and then disappears in to mists. Rought Roh Raggy! Whoever will save the Jarl?!?!!

The adventure proper is not very long. Except … it is. There are three people, the daughters of the Norns, that the party can visit, and then they can go visit ol poopy-head Sven in his barrow and kill the shit. The Norn visits are optional. Kind of. Unknown to the party, the more of them you visit the weaker Undead Sven will be when the party goes a-hacking. If they charge right off then he’s 18HD and will swallow their souls. He can be weakened to 7, 4, or 3 HD. The party can also learn, through those same Norn visits, that recreating his murder will help defeat him. As in ‘using the same spear that killed him the first time.’ This goes as far as ‘having the Jarl use the spear to stab him in the back’, which auto-kills the Big Bad. The barrow has only a couple of chambers in it, 3 or 4, and the Norm visits have only a couple of sub-tasks in them, so not a super-long adventure. Except, while the barrow is only 10 miles from the Jarls longhouse the Norms are a couple of weeks ship travel apart. This then is the meat of the adventure. Each day there’s a wandering monster check. These are contained on two-pages in the back of the book and are really well done. The designer has chosen monsters well and has given them a kind of scandinavian bend to some of them. I suspect, though, that there is not enough variety in the sea encounters. A storm and 3 monsters is going to make for a lot of giant octopi attacks..

The adventurer has a couple of problems. First, it’s very strongly mythic and scandinavian. A lower-magic or human-centric game would have no trouble substituting the vikings for someone else but it’s going to take some effort to come up with the classic travel/environments presented: they are strongly scandinavian. Human-centric and low-magic games appeal to me, maybe because of the more epic feel and classic elements like norns, witches, hags and the like.

My second issue is with the start of the adventure. The module wants each party member to make up to six stat checks in INT, WIS, and CHR. If someone succeeds in four INT checks then the party will get the information they need to find one of the Norn daughters. That’s absolutely critical. If the party charges off to the barrow then the wight is 18HD and the party is going to die. The whole thing is set up so that they will visit the Norns but this relies on that INT check being made at least four times by someone in the group. Spreading some cash around and talking the elders will get you a reroll of a check. That’s not enough. The adventure relies on the party discovering the norns exist and where they are located. I don’t mind killing people but this seems more like a bait and kill and/or ‘guess what the designer wants us to do’ syndrome. Not quite a plot but very close to it. The solution is to ignore it and let feed the party the information through roleplaying. Most importantly they need to figure out the wight is a creature of power and they are doomed if they simply confront it. That should get Norns talk going with the community. (Which isn’t really described, but there is enough BRIEF information about the Jarls house to get a good feel of things and get the DM going on some people to talk to.)

So, VERY Nordic. Very Mythic. Fixable. Strong wilderness elements that may need a little extra help. Nice if you’re in to this sort of thing.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/97420/The-Northland-Saga-Part-3–The-Death-Curse-of-Swen-Oakenfist-Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

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Death Love Doom

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by James Edward Raggi IV
for Lamentations of the Flame Princess
LotFP
1st level fans of Hostel Movies

Love inspired the gift. The gift kills. Death by love.

This thing has a lot of VERY graphic imagery in it. It’s more appropriate for a horror campaign … as opposed to sitting around with your pals drinking, laughing and killing shit. Then again, maybe you like to sit around and drink and laugh while exploring emo Forge crap.

Things start out well enough: The players overhear some people talking. Rumor has it that a wealthy estate just outside town has been abandoned. A gang of thieves is organizing to hit it tomorrow night … That is a GREAT hook. There’s loot and we need it before someone else does! It’s relatable and should motivate the players well to get their asses going TONIGHT in order to hit the place. This is combined with a great little rumor table section. There’s only about twelve entries but it’s very well done.

The adventure takes place on an estate. Besides the grounds and the main house there are also a couple of outbuildings. There might be just over 30 locations in total, with 23 or so being in the main house. The room descriptions could be laid out a bit better. There’s generally some combination of a normal description, treasure, the occupant, and the freaky shit in it. It’s presented as a text block but could be laid out a bit better to make referencing the room better during play.

As with most Raggi adventures the goal is to get in, grab as much treasure as possible, and not die. To that point: there are four main enemies and a possible horde of undead. The four enemies are mobile and there’s a chart to determine which part of the estate they start in, although no real direction on how/when they move about. I’d probably just let the dice fall where they may and leave them in their location until they potentially chase the party. That’s pretty much the adventure. Avoid/fight the four baddies while trying to find as much loot as possible in a four story townhouse. Oh, and the grounds and house are filled with gore and abominations.

Yes, we can’t forget to mention that; it’s the main point of the adventure. As the party explores they are going to be witness to some scenes of unbelievable mutilation and gore. If the party explores the grounds first, maybe casing the house, then there will be a slow build up. Lots of blood, mutilated bodies, etc, all appearing kind of out of nowhere. By this I mean, for example, that everything appears normal UNTIL you stumble over the body/gore/etc. It’s a juxtaposition, see? The gore gets more bizarre and more graphic in the main house. One of the enemies is a naked man that shoots black goo from his cock. Another is a naked old woman who has replaced her nipples with her eyes and keeps her weapons in her vagina. Oh, and then there’s the naked woman who’s miscarried/undead fetus drags her around by the umbilical cord. Besides these wonders there are also a nice assortment of dead bodies mutilated in interesting ways and a couple of people who are still alive but horribly mutilated … usually with their intestines hanging out.

Raggi claims he put the most whacked out shit he could in the module as a kind of statement. What kind of person are you, Mr PC, that endures witnessing/encountering all of this stuff just in order to get a little cash? He also offers advice to the DM: keep everything bland and normal with your descriptions of the gore, etc. Until a living victim is met, and then really play up the agony, etc. Keep a straight face, don’t show emotion. EVen if the players are joking around then maintain a somber mood in order to bring them down. Wonderful; a module as performance art.

Once upon a time I used the CoC adventure “Loves Children Lost” from The Stars are Right for a Lacuna game. It’s a Call of Cthulhu adventure that deals with drug abuse, incest, child abuse, porn, and a whole bunch of other fun shit. It worked great, almost unchanged, as an adventure set in humanities shared subconscious. Death Love Doom would work well for that also, or any horror type game. It’s very graphic and explores the very nature of what it means to be a murder-hobo. You go somewhere to rob people, and perhaps kill them, and in return you’re willing to put up with all of the horrible things in this adventure in order to profit. As subtle as a hammer to the head. Of course, I don’t play fucking emo Forge games. I’m not particularly interested in exploring the nature of mans inhumanity to man or the depths to which a person will go in order to liberate a few coppers for power/XP. I could see lifting some bits of this for a fantasy game: the hook, the monsters, etc, but taken as a whole product this just isn’t D&D. It’s Forge or maybe hardcore modern CoC.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/104807/Death-Love-Doom?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

The Tomb of Sigyfel

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Daniel Proctor
for Goblinoid Games
Labyrinth Lord
1st Level Characters

Legends of the dark-hearted sorcerer Sigydel around in the local town, despite the fact that he has been dead for centuries. His evil exploits are the topic for many late night fireside stories, and to this day the townspeople often paint a red eye above their doors to ward off Sigyfel’s evil spirit …

Different standards for free products?! BAH! This is a small tomb with 10 rooms that just about fits the profile of a one-page dungeon .. except it’s three including cover page and OGL.

A dead body has turned up on the road, it’s face frozen in terror, and the party is expected to investigate on their own, or get hired by the mayor for 300gp to investigate. That’s a pretty bland hook for what, I assume, is a product intended to get people excited about Labyrinth Lord. I generally find that motivating the PLAYERS rather the CHARACTERS is the key to getting things off to a good start. Sometimes you can do this with a decent bit of fire & torture on the villains part and sometimes you can do it by dropping some !!SERIOUS L00T!! rumors in town. I recall one group following a drunk farmer out of the tavern, confronting him, and then chasing him when he ran off. They shot him in the leg with a crossbow and *ahem* applied pressure, in order to learn more about the !!SERIOUS L00T!! he implied was nearby. Now THAT’S a group of motivated players!

The only wandering table is for the countryside on the way to the tomb. Wanderers only show up in the wilderness. And at night. And you only roll once. And they only show up on a roll of ‘1’ on a d6. Uh … it strikes me that the inclusion of a wandering table may not have been warranted. The dungeon has ten rooms. There’s an entry hallway that divides in to three corridors. The dungeon has two traps, neither of which is likely to be avoided, and three monster encounters. Skeletons, Orcs & an evil cleric, and a ghoul. Each room has a 2-3 sentence description which is just about as generic as the hook. There’s absolutely nothing here of interest. It’s just about an unimaginative of an adventure as you can possible generate. “The doors to this room are locked and it’s full of wooden debris.” or maybe “the room has rotted silks and tapestries and a table with a box on it.” I like a terse description but I DO expect the text to provide a bit of inspiration. There’s nothing inspiring here at all. It’s a static place with generic monsters just sitting around in their generic rooms waiting for the party to kill them. At least there’s no plot.

This is meant to be a kind of introductory product. Giant stone ape heads shooting red disintegration beams out of their eyes, and brains in jars that grow tentacles, and reprobate wizards … that’s the kind of stuff that make D&D a game of legends and stories. Not an empty dusty room.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/57863/The-Tomb-of-Sigyfel?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

Rappan Athuk

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

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

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 8 Comments