tenfootpole.org

by Rob Kuntz
for Creations Unlimited
AD&D
Levels 8-12

The assassins have become the pursued and the intended victim is now the victimizer. The characters have failed to assassinate King Ovar. They now flee for their lives, for four keys, for their only future in the world of the sane. Through desert climes, up mountain peaks not of the world, to a land with blue and black snow, and onto a not so happy Happy Hunting Grounds — they flee, and fight!

This is part two of the Maze of Zayene series. In part one the characters tried to kill the king and were transported to the court wizards strange and wacky dungeon maze. They were faced with a door that needed four keys and must travel to four different pocket dimensions to get the keys. Let the fetch quests begin!

Three of the four pocket dimensions are very similar in feel. The party must travel through four hexes along a linear path, experiencing three encounters along the way before reaching the main encounter. The main encounter will have a small and simple dungeon attached to it. The party will get the key in the dungeon and then move on to the next pocket dimension. Two of the areas start out with a mass combat. Fifty orcs, four ogres and two stone giants or one hundred nomads. The outdoor encounters are generally nothing special although they do tend to be a bit better than the throwaway encounters found in many of the newer products. But that’s not saying much.

The mini-dungeons are a different matter. They around thirteen encounter areas each but this is a little misleading since many have sub-areas or other features, such as lots and lots of statues. Statues with terrified looks, weird witches, and bizarre experiments are the specials here. There’s a nice library encounter with the required “lots of books that each do something different” thing that Kuntz likes to put in and that I like to see in modules. I love putting the big red button in front of players and I love the idiosyncratic rules that tend to be encountered in these situations. The worst of these mini-dungeons is the last, which doesn’t really have a dungeon attached anyway. Basically the characters encounter a powerful entity who tells them they each get a boon. They need to not do this and ask for the key otherwise they are doomed to be stranded in this ice realm forever. That seems more than a little dickish to me. Essentially two of these three places are just throw-aways while the middle one, Baal’s Realm, offers quite a bit of interesting encounters.

The last of the pocket realms is also interesting, although in a different way. The party end up in the Happy Hunting Grounds and quickly find a small village/inn. The guests are jolly but standoffish. During the night the party are warned that THEY will be the prey during tomorrows hunt! This should lead in to a kind of chase through this dimension with the party fleeing and the hunting group following. There are several encounters, a friendly werebear, demonic stags, evil knights out of Monty Python, and finally a demonic fox who has the key. Only … he wants to trade for it. The mage’s sight, the fighter’s sword arm, the paladin’s right leg or the priest’s tongue. Refuse? Then no key for you … forever! Again, quite a dickish thing to do to the party especially since they are in the middle of a module series with no real opportunities for extended rests. I hear tell that wishes flow freely in some games and are saved up for events like this … but it still seems like a shitty thing to do to the party. Letting the party get in to a bad situation by themselves that they have to Wish the consequences away seems quite a bit different than purposefully putting them in a situation meant to drain a Wish. The chase scene is also a little uninspired. There could have been some mini-mechanics presented or some additional ideas on how to run the chase/hunt. As written it’s pretty uninspiring.

The best parts of this module are a couple of the mini-dungeons. I suspect that’s the designers strong suit. While the Happy Hunting Ground has potential it turns out that the main event is less than inspiring. The linear wilderness encounters in three of the dimensions and the dickish DM moves in two of them leave a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

by Rob Kuntz
for Creations Unlimited
AD&D
Levels 8-12

Four characters are a number complete — complete with a mission so insane, so daring, that terming it an assassination hardly satisfies the imagination. Are the four volunteers who would lay low King Ovar assassins? Or are they heroes? If they are the former, how are they better than the madman they are assigned to kill? And if they are the latter, will their heroism be enough to overcome the trials of…

When Goodman says something has a first-edition feel I tend to think of modules like this one. A silly set up and a mix of combat and puzzles in an environment that makes little sense. This module delivers that old school feel, which is not surprising since it’s written by Kuntz and was published in 1987.

The party is sent to kill the king and just as they are about to do so they are teleported to the kings prison maze/dungeon. Thus they don’t have their usual assortment of exploring goodies but are armed and ready for trouble n the funhouse before them. Funhouse? Well, mostly a funhouse. It’s hard to justify the existence of anything else in the dungeon unless you call it a funhouse and the hook/introduction is a pretty standard ‘stuck in the funhouse’ type hook. These are fairly common in tournament stye adventures and have a long tradition. Of course, this module is part one of four and thus is NOT a tournament module …

The map for this thing is … well I don’t know what it is. At first glance it looks like one of those authentic old school maps where every square inch of the paper is covered in rooms and corridors. The mere glimpse of one of those things, after days and days and days of the sparse maps/linear maps in newer products, can send ones heart all aflutter. Looking more closely though the map is not all that great. It’s a fairly linear affair with a couple of branching corridors … until you factor in the secret doors. There must be 15 or so of them. Some are at dead ends and others are just spaced in a random wall section in a corridor. An experienced group of old school players should be ready for the doors and get some decent enjoyment out of it. The wanderers are a motley bunch: xorns, beholders, grells, gorgons, giant rat hordes, red slime, 4-40 gnolls, bubbles, red slime a couple of NPC’s and a friendly ghost! In all there are about 14 different encounters to be had with at least 2-4 of them having some good role-play elements to them.

The encounters are a combination of puzzles and set-piece combats. Lots of levers to pull, lots of statues to interact with, lots of freaky stuff to play with and lots of hidden goodies. The spikes at the bottom of a pit trap can be used to open a secret door … or searched to find one hollow with hidden loot. There’s an entire art gallery room with a CRAP LOAD of pictures, like 39, to interact with and a number of sculptures beyond that. It’s a trap! Run away! Or, go ahead and push the big red shiny shiny button … there’s lots of them to push … go ahead. Push One. What could it hurt? Bet you’ll get some loot … And in fact you CAN get some loot, and some decent stuff at that. Or you can die in fire and and summoned creatures … exactly the way these sorts of things are supposed to work! The creature encounters involve caged animal keeps who release their wards, a bas relief full of different types of oozes and jellies, animating statues, (Duh!), animated stuffed monsters, a doppleganger in a mirror, and a mock jury trial with skeletons, wraiths, death knights and an insane judge. In other words, none of this shit makes any sense at all while at the same time being wonderfully old school. This is all supplemented by a decent variety of new creatures and new magic items, both of which Kuntz has a talent for. The price paid for all this is more than a little extra text for each room description. It’s not uncommon for each room to take up at least a third of a page if not more.

This adventure is not crap; it’s full of interesting and inventive ideas. I just have absolutely no idea how to run this thing outside of a tournament environment. The ‘Mad Kings Maze’ thing combined with a mock jury and hidden treasures, etc, make this a real hard adventure module to rationalize in to a game world.

by Rob Kuntz
for Creations Unlimited
AD&D
Levels 6-12

On an alien world there is a city. Dead. And in that city is a Garden, qiute alive. In that garden is its former architect, the Plantmaster, now a captive of the garden’s new master, Lamash, the Demon of Wood. The Plantmaster, like all the garden inhabitants, is mutated; and it is only a matter of time before he finally relents and gives his tormentor the key words for unlocking the garden’s doors, which prevent Lamash from entering… YOUR WORLD!

I hope you like Kuntz adventurers because I picked up something like six of them from the 5 buck chuck booth at GenCon. Garden of the Plantmaster is a frigging deathtrap! It’s also a VERY cool little environment to send your players that makes little sense. It’s heavy on the combat but has enough other items to make it worth keeping, especially at $5. It could also be held up as an example on how to design a module for higher level play.

The hook here is pretty terrible. The party gets a vision while traveling, a mental call for help. Following the way they find a waterfall that flows UP! Ok, so the whole mental call for help thing is a little trite but I LOVE the water fall flowing up! More adventures need things like this; some way of clearly delineating that Things Have Changed and that insert whimsy and wonder in to the adventure. The hook is lame but it’s also short enough to be pretty inoffensive. backwards waterfalls could be inserted almost anywhere in any campaign, or even appear like the Dungeons & Dragons roller coaster in an amusement park.

The map for this adventure is one of the worst I have ever seen. In fact it may actually be the worst map every produced for any adventure module, ever. It has some kind of crude symbol like things on it and appears to have been created in some 1987-ish computer graphics product. It’s not completely unusable but it might as well be. Attempts to follow the map led me to hate it, and probably the module by association. A bit of searching though turned up a color version on Robs blog which does a great job of communicating the environment, is much more readable, and fires the imagination. It turns an awful experience in to the exact opposite and got me excited about keeping and running the module. A day-glo WONDERLAND! This place is an overgrown garden with very dense vegetation off the garden path. The path has a lot of nooks, crannies, and dead ends and more than a few hidden areas. It’s probably best imagined as a cave system map with some wall and fields you may be able o walk through to get to new areas … if you leave the path. There are a wide variety of wandering monsters to compliment the adventure, organized in to flyers, rivers, and path/land. It’s not going to win any awards in that category but by modern standards its an absolute home run.

The encounters are … somewhat disappointing? Dense? Interesting? All of the above? Density first. One of the first encounters will probably be with some spiders in a clearing. Fifty feet past that on the path is a killer tree and slyph. Sixty feet after that on the path are some giant snakes. And then something else, and something else, and something else. It’s all packed in VERY tightly and seems a bit relentless. The place is certainly teeming with life! Life that invariably jumps out and attacks.

There’s a huge variety of new monsters included by the designer which all seem to have new and interesting way to kill the party. I love this kind of stuff; new monsters keep the party on its feet and idiosyncratic rules that accompany them add a lot of flavor to combats. Enveloping trees, plant spores, vines that grab, there’s just a massive amount and variety of, generally, plant based mayhem to confront the party.

Unfortunately there’s not a whole lot to supplement the amazing monsters and their relentless attacks. At best there’s some elf-like people who live in the garden who provide some places to rest, role-play, and who present some faction play. Some of them are nice guys, some don’t care about the party, and some want to kill the party. Some have goals to pursue and rivalries with other tribes in the garden and some have other NPC’s attached to them that make them little more than minions. This was all a pretty welcome relief from the relentless combats that the rest of the garden provided for. The tricks, traps, and magic items found in the garden are all going to be of the plant-based variety. That’s nice … and not. Leaves that give you Storm Giant Strength when munched on are great … but how do you know to pull them off and eat them? The same with seed pods … the whole garden is full of leaves and seed pods, what makes these special enough to investigate further?

There’s quite a bit of supplemental material in the module to help you run it, or other plant based adventures. Generating random, and usually aggressive, flowers. Vine types. Bird types, Insects, fruits, spices, fungi, uses of plants, different types of trees and shrubs properties of various plant life … the list goes on and on. There is a HUGE variety of additional resources to help the DM get in the right mindset and increase their vocabulary and get their brain working overtime in order to provide interesting detail to the players.

No single encounter is likely to be a problem for the party. That means that fireball and lightning bolts are not going to be of much use. Cure Disease, Cure Poison, and other spells of that type are going to be the go to ones for this adventure. The relentless attack of the lower HD creatures combined with their special attacks is going to have even a 12th level party having to watch themselves and their resources and how they play. Nothing earth-shattering is going to End the World, but the characters do have to use their skills in a pretty alien environment … which should be challenging when the umpteenthtype of plant poison/toxin/infections/fungus impacts them.

by Rob Kuntz
for Troll Lord Games
d20
Levels 9-12

Beware the Misbegotten

In Fang Forest dwell a fanatical sect of druids bent on the ruin of the innocent. Under shadowy caves they command dark forces of nature and magic never before seen in the lands. With the fall of another human settlement to the druids’ evil, the good priestdoms call for their destruction

Gather Ye Heroes!
Somewhere in this 3e mess of text is a decent adventure. Trying to tease it out if going to require some hard work.

What is it with 3e adventures? Why do most of them feel so padded with endless text all glommed together? Then you combine it with the lengthy stat blocks and you get something that takes a pick to get through. I gather this methodology first appeared in the late 1E era and then became prevalent in the 2E era, which I totally missed. Maybe the fact that I never look at 2E product means I have a insufficient understanding of the history. In any event, this thing is VERY hard to read and understand. I had hoped for more in this since Kuntz did one of the next levels I’ve seen: the first level of WG5.

Four pages of background and introduction lay out the situation: Evil druids want to take over the world and kill everyone. That’s too brief so so it’s expanded on the next four pages. “Your group of adventurers are called before a meeting of the good religions in this region.” That’s an actual quote from the module. Ok, I’m being too rough. The intro text has a nice two-headed dog in that eats children, so that’s cool. Otherwise it’s just a lot of text that tells the party to go save the world. I HATE saving the world. Maybe you do though. Good Luck…

The wilderness journey to get to the dark druids fortress has a potential for six encounters. Essentially the party is traveling through a forest twisted by the druids. Three of the encounters involve combat. The monsters are interesting enough, evil ents, a ‘Thresher Demon’ and an evil grove with torture trees in it. The flavor text does a decent job in communicating the twisted nature of … well, nature, and the monsters are decently done. They are interesting combats and monsters. They also deserve more than to be buried in mountains of 3e stat block text. Demons who live under the ground and symbiotic demon bushes are all very nifty little things. There are a few clues scattered about also that indicate what’s going on with the druids.

The party ends up in crudely dugout dungeon of dirt and loose rock. This section has about seventeen encounter, none or so of which are in dug out rooms and nine of so of which take place in a great cavern with fungus gardens and weird tree/nature stuff. Large fonts and a combination of bold and normal text, parenthetical notes, game stats and stat blocks all combine to turning this in to a hard to follow mess. Wicked riddles of the ‘guess what what the designer wanted you to d’ variety abound. There’s also a strong dependance on illusions both in this section and throughout the module. There’s all sorts of bizarre things present. Trees surround by clear goo, scabby mushrooms, weird plants to play with, spirits to talk toAgain, there are clues here to what is going on with the druids. The puzzles are tough and not generally of the type I enjoy. There ARE a lot of things to play with, investigate, and poke though and really only two or maybe three creature encounters. If you can wade through the confusing text, which is far worse in the puzzle rooms, then you’d find a neato little environment to explore.

The main part of the fortress/dungeon has about six rooms on the first level and about fourteen on the second. The plot thickens chickens! Well, not really. It seems that the two factions within the dark druids are not engaged in an open battle trying to kill each other. This means about a dozen high level druids are now going at it for all their worth. Factions! Well, no, not really. Factions give players someone to interact with, a base to rest at, and some interesting roleplay opportunity. The best the party can hope for here is that one side kills the other before they turn their attention to the party. It’s really just more flavor text. This section is basically just a large number of set piece battles with pairs of casters and a couple of puzzle areas in order to stop the summoning of a demon. The rooms generally contain SOMETHING interesting, like a key in a barrel or a room full of choking red dust or a body to speak with dead on.

Kuntz does a decent job with new monsters and new items. A tarrasque spine and a Sword of Tentacles are both good examples, as well as several other wondrous items. It’s just so hard to wade through the text to pick out the good parts. A terser version of this module would be most welcome, although it is a rather adventure and thus an expanded druid fortress or wilderness section could add a lot to it also.It ends up being nearly as bad as A Challenge of Arm’s, but less gimmicky.

by Christopher Clark
for Inner City Games
Generic Fantasy
Levels 2-5

Abandoned gold lies outside a bordertown at the entrance to a peninsula known only as the Finger of Death. Strange forces are at work within the town, and the true power lies not with the guardian militia posted there. A strange smugglers guild known as the Hand serves a one-armed man with no name. Will you answer his challenge?

Too many words mar a tournament module in the classic C1/C2 style. Too bad it’s not supposed to be a linear tournament module …

I picked this up at the 5 buck chuck booth at GenCon. The cover spoke to me. “Old”, “Idiosyncratic” “Chris Clark”. I recognized Clarks name as one of the guys in Eldritch Ent and I had played a game he GM’d at GaryCon this year. Face paced DM with the capability to handle a LARGE group. I picked on Matt Finch by locating one of his early works, The Goblin Fair, so I thought this early work by Chris should be fair game also. Only today, after looking the thing a few gazillion times, did I finally notice that Gygax was involved in the module also. My version has him listed as a creative consultant and design editor although an earlier version has “Developed with the assistance of GARY GYGAX” boldly listed on the front cover so it stands out. Hang on, gotta take my hypertension medicine.

Yeah, I know, I just started it like four days ago. I can’t believe it. As if Krystal, Beluga, cigars and slovenly lifestyle could do it to you. Or maybe it’s the reviews? Nah, it’s probably all the BULLSHIT at work associated with running 10% of the Internet, or rather the morons that go along with it. What’s worse, people who will never make a decision or people who bitch and moan and throw out ideas because of VERY nice corner cases?Anyway I don’t want to seem like one of those old coots who hang out on forums and blogs and bitch and moan about everything and have “grognard” or “curmudgeon” in their names and hate new ideas, younger gamer …

ARG!! I can’t do it! I can’t write like this! Jesu Christo! Even TRYING to pad things out I can’t pad the shit out enough. How the hell did Clark every write this thing? It’s page after page after page after page of words Words WORDS. Every single detail of this module has about nineteen gazillion words associated with it. I know, I know, I’m sometimes prone to hyperbole, but oh man, that paragraph above is just ONE paragraph. Now tack on two or three more and you’ll understand the size, density, and detail of even the most common of keyed entries in this module. The most common! I can’t handle it! My eyes glaze over. I just don’t care anymore after awhile; I want the current room description to end. I’ll do anything to make it end (well, except stop reading … ) The module has about 80 pages, three more of dedicated maps, and like 18 more just for illustrations to show players. That should be your clue that something puzzle this way comes. Wait, hang on, here’s the best part: the adventure has 17 rooms in it! Yup, 80pages for 17 rooms. Ok, that’s unfair, there’s also a town with 47 buildings described. But that doesn’t matter because it’s just flavor text. A million pages of flavor text but still just flavor text. That’s unrealistic. And never ends. Yes, unrealistic. I like fungus men and white dragons that shoot leaser beams form their eyes in spaceships and _I’M_ calling out something as unrealistic.

The first thirteen pages of this adventure are background information. Wait, no, the first four pages are a short story (what’s that withering sigh sound that Sideshow Bob makes? Maybe it’s called ‘Withering Sigh’?) that is then followed by only NINE pages of background information. I’m gonna be real honest with you here: I didn’t read it all. I skipped the short story. Look man, I’m generally willing to fall on the grenade for you people and buy these things, read them, and review them but I am NOT going to read a bunch of short fiction. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care! I’m happy for you that you wrote something fictiony. You’re better than me. But I prefer Analog & Asimov and don’t want to have to wade through amateur fantasy. Ok, I mean, I didn’t. I skipped over it. And then ranted about skipping over it. But I don’t want to read your fiction and I don’t want to read none pages of background material for a module with 17 rooms in it. I shall rewrite it, hang on. “The town has a thieves guild that operates under the tactic approval of the king. The leader is called The Arm and the guildmembers are called The Hand.”Hmmm … less than nine pages I think. Yeah, I’m being an ass here, but seriously man this is just WAY too much background. Verbosity is seldom an effective communication technique.

We can now begin the adventure. The teaser encounter is a page long. The players find some dead bodies on the road. That’s it. One page for all that. But wait, there’s more! Each encounter had three separate description. THREE! The first is when you just look around, the second is when you look more closely and the third is for when the players look closer still. Then there’s the italic text. All of the DM text (of course there are large amount of read-aloud text. Silly you!) is in italics. Not the read-aloud, but the FAR more numerous DM text. It’s VERY hard to read and to pick out things in it. Masses and masses of text in italics interspersed with normal text that it meant to be read aloud. A whole page. Devoted to finding ten dead bodies. A whole page.

Encounter one is one page long. Encounter two is fifty or so pages long. Hmmm, I do not think that word means what you think it means. The first part of this section details the small town which is the fluff for the adventure. The town has about 50 or so buildings, about 45 of which have a keyed entry associated with it. There are also roughly 200 thieves in the town who report to the guildmaster. The town takes up sixteen pages. Everyone is either in the service of the guild or paid off by the guild, with just a few exceptions. Most of the exceptions know of the guild and approve of it. The others are nobodies. The townspeople are boring, don’t interact with each other, and most of them report back immediately to the guildmaster. The town exists for one reason: to drug the party and make then unconscious. Note that I said the party, not the players. Seriously, the entire point of the place is to knock out the party. Once Ko’d they get taken to the secret lair of the guildmaster. There he questions them and sends them to his Training Grounds. Wait, WHAT?!?! Yup, it’s a fucking training grounds adventure. The most lazy of all adventure types. “I don’t care, I just want to put in some cool rooms.” Yeah? Guess who else doesn’t care.

Ok, time for the adventure. The party is sent in to the thieves guild training ground that’s under the town. Yes, I know the town only has 50 buildings. Shut up, we’re finally at the adventure. The party will now take an absolutely positively linear path from their start to the end room while TEETH GRITTED TEETH GRITTED ‘proving themselves.’ TEETH GRITTED TEETH GRITTED. I will now transition this review. Let’s pretend that the first 42 pages did not happen and you’ve just been handed a tournament module for a game you’re running. ‘Good King Despot’ was sold out so you had to grab this one. It’s a decent tourny module. Well, there’s still WAYYYYYY too many words, and the whole italics thing is hard as hell, but there are a large number (17 or so …) or puzzle rooms for a party to work their way through. You;re gonna love this. “You descend the stairs and see a 30×30 room in front of you. Packed in to it are 50 unarmed men, the greediest men in the world.” Yes, it’s stupid, but in a fun goofy kind of way that one-shots SHOULD be. There are a couple of traditional riddle rooms, a couple of goofy rooms like the one above, and quite a few more subdued puzzle rooms. Rooms with a monster and some kind of obstacle or gimmick that lets you get by the monster. There’s one additional problem in this section; the NPC. ‘Brain Fry’, a trusted associate of the The Arm, is sent along with the party to observe them. You know those DM’s that have a favorite NPC, or worse, their own player character, join a party and favors them? Something similar goes on here. He darts ahead. He begs the party not to kill certain people/monsters. He helps up defeated monsters and tell them “don’t worry buddy, help is on the way.”

So, rip ouf the illustration section of the book, recopy the 17 room encounters in to a format that’s terser and easier to read, and kill off the NPC and you’d a decent tourny module for your next local con! Good luck!

by Christopher Clark
for Inner City Games
Generic Fantasy
Levels 2-5

Abandoned gold lies outside a bordertown at the entrance to a peninsula known only as the Finger of Death. Strange forces are at work within the town, and the true power lies not with the guardian militia posted there. A strange smugglers guild known as the Hand serves a one-armed man with no name. Will you answer his challenge?

Too many words mar a tournament module in the classic C1/C2 style. Too bad it’s not supposed to be a linear tournament module …

I picked this up at the 5 buck chuck booth at GenCon. The cover spoke to me. “Old”, “Idiosyncratic” “Chris Clark”. I recognized Clarks name as one of the guys in Eldritch Ent and I had played a game he GM’d at GaryCon this year. Face paced DM with the capability to handle a LARGE group. I picked on Matt Finch by locating one of his early works, The Goblin Fair, so I thought this early work by Chris should be fair game also. Only today, after looking the thing a few gazillion times, did I finally notice that Gygax was involved in the module also. My version has him listed as a creative consultant and design editor although an earlier version has “Developed with the assistance of GARY GYGAX” boldly listed on the front cover so it stands out. Hang on, gotta take my hypertension medicine. Yeah, I know, I just started it like four days ago. I can’t believe it. As if Krystal, Beluga, cigars and slovenly lifestyle could do it to you. Or maybe it’s the reviews? Nah, it’s probably all the BULLSHIT at work associated with running 10% of the Internet, or rather the morons that go along with it. What’s worse, people who will never make a decision or people who bitch and moan and throw out ideas because of VERY nice corner cases?Anyway I don’t want to seem like one of those old coots who hang out on forums and blogs and bitch and moan about everything and have “grognard” or “curmudgeon” in their names and hate new ideas, younger gamer …

ARG!! I can’t do it! I can’t write like this! Jesu Christo! Even TRYING to pad things out I can’t pad the shit out enough. How the hell did Clark every write this thing? It’s page after page after page after page of words Words WORDS. Every single detail of this module has about nineteen gazillion words associated with it. I know, I know, I’m sometimes prone to hyperbole, but oh man, that paragraph above is just ONE paragraph. Now tack on two or three more and you’ll understand the size, density, and detail of even the most common of keyed entries in this module. The most common! I can’t handle it! My eyes glaze over. I just don’t care anymore after awhile; I want the current room description to end. I’ll do anything to make it end (well, except stop reading … ) The module has about 80 pages, three more of dedicated maps, and like 18 more just for illustrations to show players. That should be your clue that something puzzle this way comes. Wait, hang on, here’s the best part: the adventure has 17 rooms in it! Yup, 80pages for 17 rooms. Ok, that’s unfair, there’s also a town with 47 buildings described. But that doesn’t matter because it’s just flavor text. A million pages of flavor text but still just flavor text. That’s unrealistic. And never ends. Yes, unrealistic. I like fungus men and white dragons that shoot leaser beams form their eyes in spaceships and _I’M_ calling out something as unrealistic.

The first thirteen pages of this adventure are background information. Wait, no, the first four pages are a short story (what’s that withering sigh sound that Sideshow Bob makes? Maybe it’s called ‘Withering Sigh’?) that is then followed by only NINE pages of background information. I’m gonna be real honest with you here: I didn’t read it all. I skipped the short story. Look man, I’m generally willing to fall on the grenade for you people and buy these things, read them, and review them but I am NOT going to read a bunch of short fiction. I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care! I’m happy for you that you wrote something fictiony. You’re better than me. But I prefer Analog & Asimov and don’t want to have to wade through amateur fantasy. Ok, I mean, I didn’t. I skipped over it. And then ranted about skipping over it. But I don’t want to read your fiction and I don’t want to read none pages of background material for a module with 17 rooms in it. I shall rewrite it, hang on. “The town has a thieves guild that operates under the tactic approval of the king. The leader is called The Arm and the guildmembers are called The Hand.”Hmmm … less than nine pages I think. Yeah, I’m being an ass here, but seriously man this is just WAY too much background. Verbosity is seldom an effective communication technique.

We can now begin the adventure. The teaser encounter is a page long. The players find some dead bodies on the road. That’s it. One page for all that. But wait, there’s more! Each encounter had three separate description. THREE! The first is when you just look around, the second is when you look more closely and the third is for when the players look closer still. Then there’s the italic text. All of the DM text (of course there are large amount of read-aloud text. Silly you!) is in italics. Not the read-aloud, but the FAR more numerous DM text. It’s VERY hard to read and to pick out things in it. Masses and masses of text in italics interspersed with normal text that it meant to be read aloud. A whole page. Devoted to finding ten dead bodies. A whole page.

Encounter one is one page long. Encounter two is fifty or so pages long. Hmmm, I do not think that word means what you think it means. The first part of this section details the small town which is the fluff for the adventure. The town has about 50 or so buildings, about 45 of which have a keyed entry associated with it. There are also roughly 200 thieves in the town who report to the guildmaster. The town takes up sixteen pages. Everyone is either in the service of the guild or paid off by the guild, with just a few exceptions. Most of the exceptions know of the guild and approve of it. The others are nobodies. The townspeople are boring, don’t interact with each other, and most of them report back immediately to the guildmaster. The town exists for one reason: to drug the party and make then unconscious. Note that I said the party, not the players. Seriously, the entire point of the place is to knock out the party. Once Ko’d they get taken to the secret lair of the guildmaster. There he questions them and sends them to his Training Grounds. Wait, WHAT?!?! Yup, it’s a fucking training grounds adventure. The most lazy of all adventure types. “I don’t care, I just want to put in some cool rooms.” Yeah? Guess who else doesn’t care.

Ok, time for the adventure. The party is sent in to the thieves guild training ground that’s under the town. Yes, I know the town only has 50 buildings. Shut up, we’re finally at the adventure. The party will now take an absolutely positively linear path from their start to the end room while TEETH GRITTED TEETH GRITTED ‘proving themselves.’ TEETH GRITTED TEETH GRITTED. I will now transition this review. Let’s pretend that the first 42 pages did not happen and you’ve just been handed a tournament module for a game you’re running. ‘Good King Despot’ was sold out so you had to grab this one. It’s a decent tourny module. Well, there’s still WAYYYYYY too many words, and the whole italics thing is hard as hell, but there are a large number (17 or so …) or puzzle rooms for a party to work their way through. You;re gonna love this. “You descend the stairs and see a 30×30 room in front of you. Packed in to it are 50 unarmed men, the greediest men in the world.” Yes, it’s stupid, but in a fun goofy kind of way that one-shots SHOULD be. There are a couple of traditional riddle rooms, a couple of goofy rooms like the one above, and quite a few more subdued puzzle rooms. Rooms with a monster and some kind of obstacle or gimmick that lets you get by the monster. There’s one additional problem in this section; the NPC. ‘Brain Fry’, a trusted associate of the The Arm, is sent along with the party to observe them. You know those DM’s that have a favorite NPC, or worse, their own player character, join a party and favors them? Something similar goes on here. He darts ahead. He begs the party not to kill certain people/monsters. He helps up defeated monsters and tell them “don’t worry buddy, help is on the way.”

So, rip ouf the illustration section of the book, recopy the 17 room encounters in to a format that’s terser and easier to read, and kill off the NPC and you’d a decent tourny module for your next local con! Good luck!

by Mike Ferguson
for Goodman Games
d20
Levels 3-5

Traveling through the frozen wastelands of the north, the heroes arrive in a town in turmoil. A nobleman has disappeared, and the town is danger of being attacked by nomadic creatures called kra-dhan. To help the town, the heroes travel through narrow, icy ravines to a druidic circle of stone known as the Talons of the Horned King, which is believed to be the source of the town’s problems. There they discover a sinister tribe of kra-dhan – and the ruins of a spaceship buried beneath the Talons!

Check out that cover man! There’s a frigging dragon shooting laser beams out of its head at two adventurers and everyone is obviously in a spaceship! I wouldn’t normally review a DCC module but that is SOOOOO COOOOL!!!! It’s too bad the module SUX … 🙁 There’s a reason I wouldn’t normally review a DCC module and that’s because they suck. Other than some older art styles, technically anyway, they don’t tend to have an Old School vibe. ANd yet I continue to get suckered in. At least the marketing side of Goodman knows what sells. There’s enough of them that one or two must not suck; maybe one day I’ll discover them.

Back on target. The idea here is that there’s great face buried in the snow and ice with metallic towers jutting out over it that resemble a crown and a clawed hand. Hence the name, Talons of the Horned King. A meteor flew overhead recently and since then the gentle snow apes have gone berserk and are killing folk. In addition some noble kid took his flying machine (Really? A flying machine? 2e/tinker gnome nonsense.) in that direction and disappeared. It’s not too bad up to the flying machine nonsense. Comets and berserk snow apes could be cool, as long as there’s Saving the World involved. But of course, it turns out that IS involved. Thus begins the players journey in a straight line to their goal.

I’m not kidding, it’s a straight line. The adventure starts with the party going through a canyon. They can’t fly there. They can’t climb the walls. They just trudge along in the ice and cold having encounter after encounter until they reach the open spot where the face/ship is. I’m pretty sure this is the absolute minimum effort required to write an adventure; anything less and you’d have to call it a setting or sandbox. Straight line. First fight some Snow Orcs that jump out in ambush. These are just like regular orcs but they have the word ‘arctic’ in their name. Kill a second group of orcs. Navigate a bridge the orcs trapped. Fight a polar bear. Climb over an obstacle. Kill some snow apes. Then, finally, something interesting happens. There’s a tree house with a decrepit hag in it that can provide some Oracle-type visions for the party. I always think of that scene in Conan, or Hawk, then things like this show up in an adventure. It’s pretty cool, but it’s also WAYYYYYY too long; an entire page of text is devoted to it. DC’s of hut walls, DC’s of metal chests, a quarter column of stat block text for her and her cat familiar. This is the style of 3E, and it sucks. It’s impossible to find anything in the text. Instead you get mired in all of this useless trivia. Anyway, after the witch there’s another unavoidable ambush before the party gets to the adventure site.

The site around the face has nine keyed encounters. Snow apes, orcs and snow drift men make up three. Nothing interesting in those, just hack jobs. Theres an encounter with a frost giant skeleton that is described well and an Iron Spider that hints of things to come. The spider in particular is an interesting enemy and the area around the face cal some cool/weird visual fluff going on that add a little to otherwise vanilla nature of the encounters.

Inside the ship there are nineteen encounter areas. The map is essentially a long central corridor with a few rooms and side corridors off of it. Nothing too interesting there. There’s a few loops but they seem cosmetic and out of place. There’s a 10% chance of a wandering monster every 30 minutes unless the party triggers the security alarm, in which the rapid reaction of the inhabitants change the percentage to 20%. Huh? Perhaps there’s a good reason they are loosing their inter-planer war …

There are some prisoners that can freed in the ship but for the most part it’s pretty uninteresting and nothing like joy to be found in Barrier Peaks. Enter a room, kill the monster, move on. There’s a decent airlock/trap encounter and a nice illusion encounter and a garden for the party to mess with, but otherwise noting interesting to interact with in the rooms. There are a couple of interesting monsters: a snow worm with a mini-missile launcher grafted on it and a dragon that can shoot laser beams … those are both pretty cute. There’s also a WIDE variety of futuristic weapons, armor, and gear to loot, probably too much. More accurately, there are too many batteries for the weapons and gear. There are about 55 batteries for the weapons and like 35 grenades. Barrier Peaks had a decent number but it was A LOT larger.

The whole thing is mired in boring encounter and rooms with EXTREMELY length descriptions that do very little to add to the ambiance. Sad Face.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/83215/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-36-Talons-of-the-Horned-King-1E-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

by Bill Barsh
for Pacesetter Games & Simulations
AD&D
3rd-5th Level

Jeg vill vaere den förste module!

Holy crap! It’s the Palace of theVampire Queen! Yes, THE Palace of the Vampire Queen! The very first module ever published! (Nah, Frog don’t count.) Wowsers! This version is listed as the eighth print. It contains a forward from the original author, Peter Kerestan, as well as from Bill Barsh, the publisher/augmenter in this printing. This version has all five levels of maps but it also has two keys for each level. Included are the original keys from the earlier publications and also a set of re-imagined keys from Bill Barsh. He updates most of the encounters, attempts to scale things better than the original module did, and provide slightly more logic than the original.

There’s a single page of introduction that lays out the background: There’s a Vampire Queen! She lives in a palace! She’s taken the kings daughter! It’s laid out with some much more interesting flavor text that paints quite the mythic scene. It’s the barest of pretexts and it’s AWESOME! Jeff ‘Padasha Emporer of D&D’ Rients posted it on his blog. Check it out! http://jrients.blogspot.com/2007/02/fragments-from-palace-of-vampire-queen.html

Pretty bad ass! The rest of the pre-module text is really just a map key, a marketing blurb and like four sentences of advice. “Do your own wandering monsters” “DM, use your imagination to add extra detail” and “Read the module ahead of time”. Wooooo doggies! Why can’t all modules be this great? The five levels of maps are great also, especially level one. It’s one of those ‘fill the who page’ maps with something like 50 rooms on it. Lots of hallways, lottsof rooms, lots of doors and secret doors. There’s really only two things on the first level map that betrays its age. First, there’s a certain maze quality to one section in particular. I noticed this in Lich Dungeon also; there seemed to be a trend to have a certain maze layout in sections of the map. A spiral section of corridor that goes nowhere, for example. Second, the map is A W E S O M E!!!! Too many modern ‘dungeons’ have a linear map or just a hallway with a couple of rooms branching off of it. This doesn’t support explorative play in any way. The unknown is known, there no possibility of something coming from down that unexplored hallway. No ambushing and getting ambushed, or sneaking around. Level two through five All have complex maps as well but they seem a little more forced than level one. More like someone drew geometric shapes and then filled it in with rooms. Still, it gets the job done.

How ’bout them encounters, eh? SWEET ass encounters! I have to start making some distinctions here between the glorious mess in the original module and the refinements that Barsh has put on things. The Original keys take up two pages per level. For those of you counting that’s THREE pages per level total: one for the map and two for the keys. The keys come in chart form; one room per line, three columns per line. Monsters name, hits to kill in the middle, and a couple of notes about the room in the third column. Quite a bit of the dungeon rooms are empty. About 32 have no monster and about the same number have no contents for the room. But O M G when there are contents they are bizarre. “15 house cats” or “10 house cats and 1 madman” or 1 wounded warrior, CG.” The monsters combine with the notes “Madman will not fight. Cats will attack if madman is attacked. If left alone he will tell of secret door from level 3 to 4” or “Warrior is prisoner. If asked will warn of rust monster in room 8. If healed will join party.” That is some terse ass writing right there. in the one-page dungeon style. And it woks as well here as it does in the one-pages. A room description just needs enough to it to let the DM fill in the rest. This module does that pretty well. There’s just enough detail in the room contents section to get your brain going. WTF is up with the bandits? Why is there a frigging Balrog in that room?. (YEs, there’s a fucking BALROG in one of the rooms. Note a Type 6, a BALROG. holy shit!) “Table is set for dinner with 5 drained Bandit bodies.” What’s going on with that? This is where Barsh comes in.

Immediately after the original keys there are three or so pages of keys written by Barsh as an alternative keying. It would be best to say that these encounters are inspired by the original encounters but are scaled a bit better. Everyone who sees the first keys and attempts to run the module is going to make up some stories about why the creatures are where they are. Barsh has written down his interpretation and provided it to us. For example, the fighter is no longer a prisoner but is now a wounded guy hiding and he still joins the party if healed. Giant rat rooms are now full of debris and are the dump for the complex. Goblins are now the sometimes menial servants. That Balrog is now a Vrock visiting the vampires, and so forth. Barsh brings some logic and scaling but keeps a lot of the idiosyncratic encounters, like the two wizards, good and evil, who are hunting each other. Sadly, the madman and housecats are gone.

The original module is insanely hard. Recall that Balrog? Well there’s about a gazillion vampires down there also. The module difficulty ramps up seriously around the third level. Barsh mitigates a lot of this in his rekey, especially by introducing the Lesser Vampire to allow his to retain the large number of ‘Vampires’ but not make the adventure absurdly difficult for the players. Both adventures have a distinct lack of ‘tricks’, or things to mess around with in the dungeon but both also have a decent amount of interaction between rooms and groups. The extra text Barsh provides does a decent job putting the various groups in to context. The two versions are both great, perhaps only missing some names for the various rooms (“Bedroom”, “Study”, etc) and maybe some more interesting magical items. If any product could support weird-ass magic items then it would be this one.

A cool historical artifact and a great module.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/264077/V5-Palace-of-the-Vampire-Queen-Castle-Blood?affiliate_id=1892600

by Mark Morrison
for Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

The tiny town of Stonepick Crossing sits on top of an old dwarven dam holding built some 500 years ago to end a long war. Recognizing the futility of direct assault, the dwarves built the dam to flood the goblin caves, flushing the foul creatures out of their caves and into the slaughter of honest combat. Now 500 years later, the dwarves have moved on and a small thorp has sprung up. Mystery surrounds the protected town and rumors abound: locals disappearing in the middle of the night, strange noises from underneath the dam and even rumors of a monster in the lake percolate through the community. Which rumors are true and which are the ale-addled ramblings of old men fearful of their own shadows?

A village supplement! And a High Fantasy village at that! Zzzz…..

Stonepick Crossing is a small village located atop an old dwarven dam. 53 rooms are detailed within the village and another twenty or so are located underneath the dam in two old mini-dungeons. The idea here is that this is a sort of home base village, with the usual intrigues, and a couple of subplots can lead to the the two mini-dungeons located in the dam, each of which has about seven rooms.

The village is the sort of multicultural wonderland that I loathe. Halflings, humans, dwarves, gnomes and elves all living in harmony together. And they all have precious names also! Susie Honeyblosso, April the Wise, Dirk Nightblade and the like. *BARF* The village is also quite small for the community it supports. There’s a thieves guild market with four different stalls in it, including forgeries, poisons, weapons, etc. That seems a bit of a reach for a village built on top of a dam with 53 rooms in it. The watch is on the take, there’s a slaver stealing visitors AND residents off of the streets … gonna run out victims stealing two townspeople a week … Quite the exciting little place!

There’s a lot of people in the village who are not zero level. A LOT. Fourth level fighters, second level thieves, third level illusionists, fifth level clerics and so on. Going hand in hand with this is that the place is crawling with magic items. Magic swords, armor, potions, scrolls, wands and rings are all in much abundance. You will recall that there is a certain school of thought which believes that module B2, The Caves of Chaos, is generally played wrong. There is far more treasure in the keep than in the caves and smart players will loot the keep rather than the caves. Stonepick has the same problem. As a high fantasy village it should be relatively easy for the party to murder the various rosy-cheeked hobbit, humans, and others to loot their corpses and TREASURE BATH.

This is certainly meant to be a kind of home base for the party with the various antics in the village providing a kind of back-drop to their other adventures. It certainly does meet those minimal requirements but it’s lacking in a couple of areas I consider crucial for a village. First, the places are numbered in a strange way. The entire complex is numbered like a traditional dungeon. The numbering starts at one and continues to room number seventy deep in the areas below the dam. The smith is room one and the back room of the smithy is room 2. Room five is the leather store and room six is the back room of the leather store. This layout is strange for a village and doesn’t really help you find things. You’re going to have to annotate the map heavily to get it in to a usable form for the adventurers walking around town.

Secondly there are some strange decision made. A couple of houses are empty or abandoned. Some homes inexplicably get the names of their (mundane) occupants detailed and a couple of noted about them while others, more crucial to the village, get none of that detail. Some vendors have detailed, but short, lists of items for sale. The tailor has seven wool blankets for sale, in addition to four bedrolls, 2 sets of traveling clothes, 4 cloaks, and a blue silk coat. It’s like there’s several different village and town sizes all mashed up and mixed together. A handful of businesses. Most of them not supportable in the population listed. A bait shop and a black market with four stalls, but the only soft goods shop only have five different items for sale?! I strongly believe that the quality of a village/town/city is based on the social interactions between the occupants and that is very much missing from this village. Most of the people seem to live in isolated bubbles and at best provide a rumor about what they say X doing last night, where X is a bad guy. There are two exceptions to this. The wife of missing merchant has a bitter tongue and tells the characters she thinks her husband is off cavorting with a different townsperson, a woman. Secondly the jeweler is attacked by crabmen from a secret door when the party enters his store for the first time. That’s it for the townspeople interactions. Oh, the bait shop salesman(!) will tell you a tall tale, or the beggar man will tell you a couple of things, but neither are really related to village life. This needs a lot more of that to help make the village come to life. As it is the three subplots presented (slavers, hag/crabs, and corrupt town guard/thieves guild) are not really developed very well.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/99009/Advanced-Adventures-22-Stonepick-Crossing?affiliate_id=1892600