tenfootpole.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is available on DriveThru.

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

by Alphonso Warden
for Brave Halfling
OSRIC
Levels 13-15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is available on DriveThru.

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

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

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