tenfootpole.org

By Todd Leback
Third Kingdom Games
OSE
Level ?

The world of Absalom is one of constant change, where Law and Chaos are more than abstract philo sophical ideas but are instead metaphysical realities that shape the very world itself. Absalom is dominated by Cycles, each lasting between two to four hundred years. Each Cycle is divided into an Apex – when Law holds sway – and a Nadir – when Chaos sweeps over the lands, driving back the light of Civilization Cycles are marked in the beginning by the Apex and ascent of Law, and the end by the Nadir. During each Apex the civilizations of Man do their best to expand their domains and bring law to the land; these civilizations often shrink, or even crumble, during the Nadirs as barbarians, beastmen, and worse fall upon the kingdoms of Man

This 52 page adventure presents four hexes in the land of Faery. As in old school/Narnia-ish faery. I get where dude wants to go, but, I ain’t on board for this entry in to his hex crawl series.

Dude has a series of hex crawls, it looks like. Maybe two regions out and a magazine/zine with some more in it? Looks like, in the existing crawls, there are two locations that can teleport you to Faery, so this thing details that: The Pallid Fields. You have to think of a kind Narnia, including the snow. So, folklore fey. 

I’m not sure this was the correct first thing from this dude for me to review. It being a pocket dimension sort of thing, it might, perhaps, not represent the bulk of his work. But, it’s what I’ve got, so let’s use this to generalize the fuck out of everything else instead of merely checking it out!

The designer does a couple of interesting things for a hex crawl. First, he explicitly notes which features in the hex (6 mile hex) can be seen from a distance. Not bad. As I’ve mentioned many times before, seeing something far away gives the players a goal to work towards. “Whats the glowing red in the distance at night?” It’s accomplished here by a second, players, map. I’m not sure I’m down with all that, but, at least letting the DM know what you can see is a good idea. Secondly, he lists resources in a hex. “(Rare woods, 1) and (ore, 2)” A little flavourless, but, I get the intent in a hex crawl game as you dig around for resources. 

And that’s about it for the good. 

There’s an overall lack of cross-reference in this. Folks names and interactions in hexes are tossed around pretty freely, but the DM is left to themselves to find the person to get more information about them/the situation. Not cool. I’m down with a living breathing world with lots of interactions away from their homes, but that needs to be supported. And, then, in an opposite way, things that can show up everywhere are noted … in their own hex. The chief example is the wise owl. At the end of his description, in his own hex entry, it notes that there is a 1-2 chance that the owl comes to visit you, no matter the hex you are in, if you are a newcomer. Absolutely not! We put that shit on the wanderer table, or as a note or something. We dont’ fucking bury information about other hexes in some rando hex. Let us imagine a megadungeon. A thousand rooms. Room 876 has a minotaur in it. The description notes that if anyone enters room one of the dungeon then the minotaur teleports there immediately. Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know that while running room one?

There’s other things. You can run in to lots of random fey, knights, or nibbles. There’s an in-depth generator but no real handy list to run to. The wanderer table is frustratingly confusing. “12 guards.” Uh … more info please? What the fuck is a guard? 

But, by far, the main attraction for a hexcrawl, and main issue, are the hexes proper. They kind of suck balls. And not in a good way. If you like a bitter acrid taste, then they are sweet and lavender. Make up your own description of sucking balls that you don’t like. Go with that.

I covered this in depth in my Wilderlands/Isle of the Unknown review. You need a situation in a hex. You need to describe that well, in such a way that the DM can riff on it. More than any other type of writing, the hex crawl description MUST be riffable well. You can’t describe an entire hex, an entire situation, in one short paragraph. That’s what adventures, proper, are trying to do. But, in a hex crawl, you are essentially describing (potentially) dozens and dozens of adventures. Little summaries of the,, anyway. SO, you need to give the DM enough information so they can spin something up from the description. Something that the players are gonna get involved in (or, that is going to get involved with the characters) and also something that inspires the DM to expand it. And, maybe, links in to other hexes, potentially. And you need to do that over and over again. 

This don’t do that. One hex has a tree. You can use the wood to create better magic wands. Yeah. Here’s a hot springs. Sometimes people show up to camp there. Here’s the stone circle you teleported in to. Here’s the salt lick that elk sometimes hang out at. Here’s a spring. If you drink from it you might lose your memory. 

These are not situations. At best, these are little diversions. There’s no real interactivity here, and you can almost entirely count of cross-hex situations or possabilities. One hex has te owl, who has a berry that lets you in to the fey dukes palace and another has an ent that has the fey dukes heart hidden in a box. 

There are really no situations to speak of in this. And, thus, no adventure to speak of.

This is $7 at DriveThru. You get no preview, Bill. Use your Standard Oil money on that!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/422121/The-Pallid-Fields-Hexcrawl-Second-Edition?1892600

By Stuart Robertson
Robertson Games
OSE
Levels 1-2

An expedition to the ruins of an old monastery uncovers hidden mysteries and monstrous peril. 

This 36 page digest adventure uses 24 pages to describe forty rooms. And ok map and occasional evocative phrase stick out in what is otherwise just another rando first level dungeon.

“… a massive bipedal frog looms out of the darkness at the far end of this large column-lined chamber.” So, “looms out of the darkness” is a pretty good description. And, there’s almost an interesting encounter or two. A room with a water-filled floor/sinkhole/collapse, zome zombies come out to attack. And in some kitchen you meet Seth, who is looking for food and will join the party. Turns out he’s a cultist out foraging in the dungeon. There’s a few other phrases of bits of encounters that are ok.And the map is, thankfully, non-linear with some features on it. Thank Nergal for small blessings. 

But everything else? Meh. At best.

The first six pages of this adventure tell you nothing. A meaningless generic background in a column. A section on how to roll up a character. How to start the adventure. Nothing interesting. Nothing evocative. Just the usual blandness found in most generic adventure settings. Oh no, trade wagons have gone missing. No expectant mothers with children looking longingly in to the distance. *yawn*

And then, Forward to Adventure! The adventure proper is more of the same. Descriptions that generally take a column or so. Multiple paragraphs. Nothing of interest. No real descriptions that are meaningful. A kitchen is a kitchen is a kitchen. 

Even the better things, that I mentioned above as some prime examples, are lacking. Those zombies? How much better to have them grab people and pull them under, rather than them lumbering out of the water to attack? A dead face staring up at you from under the water, all Dead Marshes style? THEN they can lumber out. Seth? Seth is a fuckwit. He does the usual attack the party, run away, lead them to danger thing. Just a bland cultist cutout. How much more interesting if we made Seth a real person? Yeah, he’s a cultist, but he’s fucking hungry. Give him some food, let him be ravenous about it. Maybe both wary and gleeful, eating like a ghoul cross legged on the floor, wide grin. Stick him in the fucking the fucking with some questionable morals. But, maybe also, some contacts and shit. That’s such a better encounter. Seth as a real fucking person. You know, in another room there are some bandits. They are looking for loot and interested in knowing more about the dungeon. You know what that makes them? Fellow Murder Hobos, that’s what. Treat them like that. I don’t know. Nergal forbid anyone go beyond the surface level tropes of D&D. 

“Large chamber.” That’s great. Large. Maybe a Big room next? Stick in some better words. “As the door opens you see …” We don’t do this. I mean, it’s not read-aloud anyway, so I’m not sure why we’re using second person. 

Further, the dungeon lacks coherence. It’s more of a random assort of monsters. Goblins. Bugbears. Bandits. Cultists. Dwarves. Zombies. Skeletons. Giant Bees. It’s like you took every level one monster and chucked them in. Each in one room. No real zones. No real story behind the current state of the dungeon. And I don’t mean an actual story, but, rather, the dungeon as a place that kind of makes sense. Not in a realism or simulationist way, but in a way that is meaningful to the adventure. The bandits have explored blah, blah, and blah, lost a dude in a trap room, hes on the floor there, and so on. Instead we get lots of monsters living in their own little rooms. Meh.

“Ruined tapestries and broken furniture litter this dark and decaying room.” I asked Ray Weidner once what this kind of sentence was and he didn’t have a strong answer. So, let’s call it “cumbersome and not effective.” I’m not sure what’s going on here. Well, I do, but, I mean, motivation wise when writing it. There seems to be an tendency in this to write … I don’t know, like a novelist? But it results in these sentences that are trying to be thematic and evocative instead just coming off as cumbersome. It’s … putting the modifier as the primary thing in the sentence (which, I think, is similar in concept to passive writing. A big nono) And, what it’s modifying, dark and decaying, isn’t really any description at all. They’re all fucking dark. 

I should note that this room description (thats the leading sentence) goes on for three paragraphs. To describe a room with six goblins in it searching it. I get what you want. Dank and wet, heaps of moldy tapestries hanging from the walls and on the floors, rotted couches and broken plush chairs turned over, with goblins poking through the piles and digging in to them. But that doesn’t come through in the column long description. 

Just as the room intent, the interactivity and the evocative setting, doesn’t really come through in any of the rooms. This was a one pager, expanded to 36. It’s not a terrible job at expanding, but, also, it’s not a good one either. Half the page count would have been better, at least.

This is $10 at DriveThru. No full size preview, just the mini quick preview. I has sadz. 🙁 Also, I paid $10 for this?!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/429427/Advanced-Ancient-Academy?1892600

By Olle Skogren
Self Published
ACKS
Level 6

The Cloud Leopard Tribe lays siege to a mysterious mountain fortress – to claim The Cup of Wonder! Will the players aid in the defense of the relic, or steal it for themselves? Infiltrate the barbarian siege camp to assassinate their officers, recruit an army of disaffected mercenaries and break the siege, or break into the well guarded Temple of the Cup!

This fifteen page adventure details the siege of a holy site by a barbarian army. Flavour abounds in this Mass Battle potential adventure, but, could use a little more in the way of … event triggers? Things To Do In Denver While You Raise The Siege.

Ok, so, Frank steals the Cup of Wonders from the Cloud Leopards, like, twenty years ago. He settles on a hill in a valley and starts a holy site thing. Seems genuine. Pilgrims show up, and a small town pops up. The barbarians, though, did not forget. They have an army and are marching on the site to give siege and get their cup back. Enter The Hobos! Help the holy site, help the barbarians, or grab the cup for yourselves. And, let me say, the cup is indeed worth grabbing. Not quite artifact level, per the DMG, but a VERY powerful item that also fits well in the domain level play that should be popping off right about level six. Well worth the effort by the party.

I’m not the most familiar with the ACKS mass battle stuff, but from what I remember, it looks like you’ve got what you need to run a mass battle between the two sides, from a documentation standpoint. In addition, both sides camps/fortresses are lightly described to aid in negotiations or infiltration missions. A little light layout, some major NPC’s, some light wanderer shit for people coming up to the party, etc. The basics are all here. An outline.

And, it’s got some decent flavour in it. The barbarians, recruiting in a nearby town as a hook, are “Seeking heroes & villains to perform a mighty deed for a handsome reward!” Sweet. Another hook, some flower children on the way to the holy site … with 75 children in tow  … are stated out and noted that they have 2500gp in household goods. Take whatever side you want, man! The town is full of people that “In any crowd you see glowing halos and people who nearly float when they stride.” Yup! This is a fucking adventure for sixes man! No mudhole here! The dyadic sorcerers in the barbarian camp get this description “Twins? Lovers? This sinister and sharp featured pair are bound together by a strange pact. The woman Leits’ face glows with an inner light, shadows drip from the man Riqizeins’ face.” while the rank and file barbarians get “All dressed in their finest yellow and jade, this war is the most important event of their lives.” This is shit you can run. The detail is specific and oriented toward actually being run by a DM at he table. Detail the DM can use to riff on. Most of the wanderers in the two camps are the same, meaning they are interesting little things to take advantage of. Perhaps a little … implicit? 2d4 heavy infantry admiring some freshly repaired chainmail. That’s what you get. We can add some “whats your opinion friend?” or “Lets test it out on that dude!” kind of shit. 

This, then, is going to be my primary complaint. And, I note, I’m considering this a Substantial Adventure and not something that’s over in two hours. 

There’s a lot of latitude in an adventure like this for how a party approaches things. Especially level sixes. And that’s hard to deal with. You can’t spoon feed a DM because you can’t account for every situation. I’m cool with that. And yet … there are, I think, some common situations that can come up. And, for those situations, a sentence or two, especially given the designers penchant for flavour, is in order. There are SOME included. 

For example, the guru might, if they trust the party, send them off with some gold to hire an army to help raise the siege. The designer, rightly, includes a few details about this. The nearby kingdom, whats going on in there in the realm of “mercenary army”, with the flavour and NPC’s that are a strong point with this adventure. And, at times, we get some lighter content like fucking with the barbarians war flags to lower morale. Just a “guarded by two dudes and -1 to loyalty checks”, but, you get where its going.

Given that the timeline (and, there IS a good timeline) is about ninety days in total, I think I’m looking for a little more. What does the guru trusting the party mean? FOr that matter, how about the barbarian warlords trust? A sentence or two about a mission and difficulties in it would seem appropriate. Likewise, there’s a note about the difficulty in smuggling a large amount of loot (to hire the army) out of the siege. A few words about that would seem to be in order as well. And, perhaps some camp and holy site intrigues as well? Its a long timeline and I’d like to get up to some shit. And, on this point, let’s talk about Opportunities For Fun.

I’m not bitching at Olle about this, just pointing out something. If you’ve got a bunch of named NPC’s, with personalities, and stuff to do in camp, then, we want to make the camp an adventuring site. What I mean by this is that we  want to make sure the party can get in to it effectively so they can experience the fun. If it’s too hard to get in, via disguise, sneaking, whatever, then you don’t get to have the fun the camp offers. Which is a major part of the adventure, I think. This is akin to a Roll To Continue … putting the entire adventure behind a secret door or a tracking check.If you fail that check then you don’t get to go on the adventure. 

I’m not saying Olle fails here. But, there are a lot of things to throw a party off … and I don’t think in necessarily a fun role-playing way. The fails, on infiltration or disguise, feel more like a Complete Fail then they do A Complication That Could Be Fun. And don’t go all fucking nutso on me, absolutely you can have a complete fail. But we want the fun also, right?

So, a little more in the way of situations and vignettes. A little more intrigue, maybe. Perhaps a one page summary of the timelines and Things To Do for the DM. This is VERY open ended, as it should be for something like this, and if you’re open ended then you need a little more reference for the DM to riff on and cross-reference. 

It’s certainly not BAD, I don’t think … although I’m not certain there are enough mass battle scenarios to to understand yet what bad and good are. 

Did I mention how handsome and intelligent Olle is? And how he’s a member of the Tenfootpole Adventure Design Forum? 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. Pay what you want, and the entire thing is in the preview. So, no excises for not checking it out. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/430322/Sudden-Siege-for-the-Cup-of-Wonder?1892600

By Rodney Nedlose
Self Published
Shadowdark
Level 1

The Village of Wealton is a peaceful hamlet in the northernmost reaches of the Green Valley.  It enjoys natural terrain to isolate them with a swamp to the north, mountains to the east, and an enchanted dark forest to the west. Now strange things have been happening in town, and the farmers and peaceful folk need help!  Some think it’s the doing of the local witch-woman, who lives in the swamp.  But is there more to this picture than immediately meets the eye?

This 21 page digest describes a fifteen room tower with about four levels. There’s basically nothing going on here. At least nothing that couldn’t be done in a single page. A single digest page. It’s just a padded out almost-empty tower.

As of this writing, Kelsey’s kickstarter is closing in on $1mil. So, a) Congratulations! And b) I’m so jealous! To mollify my feelings I’m reviewing some third party stuff for Shadowdark. It don’t matter how good your game is, someone with more enthusiasm than talent will show up to publish something for it.

So, small idyllic village. Been that way for a long time, even though Evil Undead Kingdom is to the north, separated by a menacing swamp, where the Swamp Witch lives. Some evil shit goes on in the village. Youget sent to the swamp witch. You find her tower. It’s made of obsidian and its been damaged. Inside you fight a couple of shadow-things on some stairs, before fighting a couple more in front of a locked door where the witch is holed up. Also, there’s a wight on the roof. Witch needs her tower repaired to recharge the spell that keeps evil away from everyone. Thus the end of the adventure is the hook for the next part. That’s it. You can now run the adventure.
But, Bryce, there are a lot more pages here?! And rooms! You said fifteen rooms! Yeah, man, but, there not adding anything. The rooms take five pages and are full of exciting descriptions like “Hallway from east to west. Foul smell fills the enclosed space” and “The door from the lavatory opes into a hallway” “There is a broken door to the east and a closed door to th west, which is locked” Ok, yeah, so there’s more. But, this, the boring mundanity of life, is AT LEAST 50% of the adventure text. Text explains the mundane. Text repeats. The “really” clean lavatory smells of lilacs and elderberries. Nothing more. We’re told where doors exit to. The witch is withered, 85#, and impossibly old … we’re told several times. Padded out. No real interactivity at all. Just stab a couple of things and break down a door.

There is, I think, a good monster description in the monster stat appendix. For the Hexling: “A whispering, writing shadow that coils and snaps like a whip.” Not bad! The others, though, tell us things like “Shades created by the ritual Mirena performed to ward the southern lands against the Bonecrusher’s hordes.” Great. A backstory but no description to use when the party encounters them. 

Just use the four sentence description I provided if you need to. There’s nothing else here. All if bleak. Not dark. That would be scary. Just bleak. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. Ain’t no preview. That sucks balls.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/429890/Mirenas-Tower?1892600

By Joseph Mohr
Old School Role Playing
S&W
Level 1

For as long as anyone can remember the ruins stood at the top of the hill overlooking the valley below. They had stood there longer even than the village at the base of the hill. A band of warriors stood in battle there long ago fighting off the Orc invaders who swept through from the wild lands to the east. It was said to have been an epic battle: A last stand of a small group of men against a massive group of invaders. It was the stuff of legends. But that was ages ago. No one now even remembers their names or why they chose to fight when so many others ran before the invading hordes. Now all anyone remembers is that the walls are crumbling and are dangerous. A few children have climbed up to the top of the hill and found themselves trapped in the falling stone walls. Parents in the village are careful now to keep the children away from this dangerous place. What mysteries might be found there? What forgotten treasures might still be left? Brave young adventurers might cut their teeth exploring ruins like these.

This twelve page single-column adventure uses three pages to describe six rooms. It’s the reason I started reviewing. It has the distinction of having a one star rating on DriveThru, Something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

Mohr just keeps cranking them out. Old School Role Playing! Starter Adventure! Free! All the right words to suck in a new person to the hobby and crush their dreams. When I came back to the oSR< all of the forum people were listing all of these great adventures. Best Ever, they’d say. You get excited. Dreams of all of the great times you’ll have. Laying awake at night. You go grab a few, and then a few more. Paying money for some. Others are free. You take a look at them and you think Is That It? This Is Good? But, everyone is saying how great they are. You shake your head a little. You adjust your expectations a bit, maybe. This must be what a good adventure is? But, of course it’s not. Not even close to being good. It’s just fanboys. And forum friends being supportive of each other. And reviewers softballing shit so they don’t make anyone mad at them. 

Note that in the publishers blurb there’s nothing about level ranges. Or on the front cover. Or in the title page. Eventually we get to something buried in the text that says “starter adventure” and “low level characters.” Perfect. We’re starting strong out of the the gate.

There’s a village at the bottom of a hill. On top of the hill is a ruined castle. Like, 100 feet away? No details on the village, which is explicitly called out in the text. Great. Nothing but the village ruin. Got it. And two crocs, with 3HD each, live, like 50 feet from the village. Sure thing. Absolutely. 

Up the hill and in to the ruin. Which has three rooms. Fight two goblin lookouts. Then fight like 2d4+2 goblins inside the room they are guarding. There’s also a giant spider in a ruined tower. Which you already know if you’ve ever played D&D before. There is ALWAYS a giant spiderman the ruined tower. Let’s see, you get a magic battle axe, a magic ring, like four magic potions and about 500gp in loot. Off to your next adventure1

“Bryce, you always swear off Mohr” I know, I know. Dude has some kind of genius level marketing skills. Between covers and marketing descriptions. 

This is just junk. A quick write up that no doubt took an hour, seemingly, and he pushed out. It’s 

This is free at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, which lets you see like four of the encounters. Good luck with those.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/430208/The-Stonehill-Ruins?1892600

By Luiz Eduardo Ricon
Hexplore Publishing
OSE
Levels 2-3

Everybody knows Brumeer, the dwarf, a locally renowned merchant. When a farmer named Arcbold failed to meet him at the market square, he hires the PCs to find out what has happened to his friend. The answer might not be pleasant, or safe…

This eighteen page digest adventure has a couple of encounters in a farm overrun with vermin. It’s got some ok sentences here and there, describing things, but it’s also just a straight forward plot adventure with little going on. 

I play about twice a week, some times a little more if I  join an online game. And, you know, I’ve REALLY  been wanting to take my games to the next level. So, imagine my delight when this thing popped up, promising just that: to take my games to the next level!

Ok, so, Genero the Dwarf hires the party to go kind Archie the farmer. He bought a bunch of vegetables from him and he hasn’t delivered. He’s giving you 10 GP to go do it. 

So, lets pause the fuck a moment here. TEN GP! Fuck yeah I’ll go do it! The little orphan scamp will do it for 1. Fuck man, the widow Merry will do it for half that! Ten fucking GP! How the fuck much is a carrott going for? Remember the early days of panic buying when they announced the shutdowns and the milk, eggs, and meat sold out? Maybe this is some kind of reverse thing? All the veg has sold out and rough greenery is now 10gp a bundle? Or, is this like a Chinese peaches thing where rutabagas keep the black death away? Fuck man, let’s all become farmers! Fucking WAYYYYY better than going down in to a dark hole in the ground with a fucking torch. Have you heard about what goes on down there? No fucking way I’m getting my brain sucked out! Who has cabbage seeds? Or, hey, maybe it’s something else? Maybe this is a drug deal? LIke, it’s actually meth and not veg, but Genero cant really hire you to go get his meth, right? That makes sense. 10gp. Fuck, man…

Good things first. Dude can write up a scene when he wants to. “Covered in cobwebs and hay, his skin turned gray and his hollow eyes and gaping mouth producing a cascade of tiny spiders crawling over his body or tangling up and down in silk threads.” This, my friends, is a ghoul. What a delight! Good description and good job taking a creature that you create and then just saying yeah, stats as a ghoul. I mean, it is a ghoul, not stats as a ghoul, but still, you know what I mean. This is going to be a freaky ass encounter for the party. VERY nice job. Likewise, the farmers house is covered in webs inside with hundreds of spiders of all shapes and sizes crawling over the walls. You had to be there. It’s good in the descriptions. The entire adventure is full of small vermin as window dressing, and its not always handled well. It frequently isn’t. But when he tries he does a great job. In addition, dude telegraphs a future encounter. Outside you find a goat in a giant spider cocoon. It’s still barely alive. WHich telegraphs that someone inside, in the spider webs, might still be alive also. Brings it to the front of the parties minds so they don’t just burn the place down. Good design there.

Let’s see … hooks … “Your former patron referred you to this town.” Who, exactly, is that written for? The DM? Then why use ‘your?’ It’s so aggressively generic. Abstracted to a point of uselessness. One of the wanderers is “A bard offers news of the road.” Well? What fucking news of the road is he offering? Nothing. At the end you need to return a magic rock to the place where the farmer found it, in the swamp … two hours away. With no directions. And nothing to go on except MAYBE a word that “Archie found it in the swamp.” But the adventure is written like you walk right there. It makes no sense. And, sometimes, the descriptions go a little overboard. Cocoons “hang like dreadful ornaments.” Oh come on mman. That’s just purple prose. We don’t say htat to players and if aimed at the DM there are much more effective ways to communicate the vibe.

So, show up and kill some orcs. Then kill some giant rats. Then some more rats. And then a ghoul. And then a giant spider. IDK, maybe I forgot another round of giant rats in there somewhere. There’s your adventure, in eighteen pages. 

If this were paired WAY down, and the descriptions beefed up, and it was in a magazine as a side-trek then it might be ok. That’s a lot of if’s. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages. You get to see the intro/hooks, wanderers, and orc encounter at the farm. Then entire adventure is like this, so, good preview from that sense. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/416373/The-Curse-of-the-Dreadstone–The-ideal-SECOND-adventure-for-starting-players?1892600

By John Cavalcante
Self Published
OSE
Level 1

In the borderlands of a dying empire, in the Duchy of Gauvadan, the village of Braildorn now cowers in fear. This is the birthplace of the Blood Treatment: a miraculous Panacea created by the arcane scholars of Liardnia University with otherworldly influence. However, the days of prosperity and miracles would end soon. With the mysterious fall of the University, came a curse: The surrounding forest, once blessed by the fey, was transfigured into a cursed and dangerous swamp. People now are disappearing in the dead of night, and the noble house is the prime suspect to be behind everything, arousing anti-empire separatist sentiment. In these dangerous times, only one question remains: What will you do?

This 48 page adventure (riffing on Bloodborne) uses around eleven pages to describe about fifty rooms in a three level mansion in a “gothic with some firearms” setting. The writing is terse and well formatted. It does not make me hate my life. It also brings me no joy, lacking interactivity and evocative descriptions and scenarios.

Ok, so, I feel like maybe I need a new category: “Obviously, you tried.” Because dude tried. There is a certain “spirit of the OSR” present in this adventure, a kind of kit-bashing that was prevalent in the early OSR days. Dude has grabbed some house rules from other OSR products, and, perhaps, even some room ideas. The map is easy to read and there are AT LEAST four ways from the first floor to the second in the mansion. The keys start with a bolded room name “Living Room” and are followed by a short description and then some bullets for things going on in the room. The mansion tropes are here. Body in the chimney. Dude tried. 

There are a couple of things that are pulling this adventure down. Well, more than a couple, but two major ones. There need to be more cross-references in the text to make locations data, especially named NPCs, easier. The rumors are pretty generic, like “The house is now haunted because a wizard did it.” and so on. And the layout, the size of the map, is relatively small, at twenty rooms for each of the main levels. It’s just hard to get a really good environment going with that without some really good situations. The major issues, however, are interactivity and descriptions. 

The descriptions here are terse … and minimal. Nothing wrong with terse, that’s what they should be. But, also, they are minimal. We don’t really get the flavour of the room. The pantry says that it has naked walls with shelves full of rotten ingredients, and also kitchen and dining tools. Sure. That’s a pantry in a haunted house. We’re starting off pretty well with “naked walls”, but then it drags to just a standard description of a pantry. Peeling wallpaper. A jumble of collapsed shelves. The smell of old cinnamon. . A jumble of beaten up pots? We’re really looking to bring this room alive, and it’s just not going there. The kitchen next doors has “A central cooking table with a mutilated corpse in it, and 5 Ghouls in chef’s garb using rusty tools to prepare the meat and hurl it into a boiling suspicious soup.” So, the same kitchen in just about every haunted house adventure. A boiling soup can be great, but suspicious is a conclusion rather than a description. Mutilated is a little abstract for the horror that the kitchen scene is supposed to be conveying, and our ghoul friends are rather perfunctory with no description to speak of at all. The place abounds in “religious frescoes” with little more to go on. And by “little” I mean “nothing”. The rest of the adventure is more of the same. A degree of writing that is is trying, but the words choice, or the ability to convey the imagined room via the written room, in order to convey it to the DM, just isn’t getting there at all.

Interactivity is about the same. We’ve seen the ghouls in the kitchen. The rest of the rooms pretty much fall in to this same category. You can stab things, of course. And there are, to it’s credit, a decent number of things to talk to, especially among the servants. The interactivity, though, is fairly lacking. You get a body in a carpet of smoothing, the kitchen ghouls, a poltergeist playing a piano to summon specters (at level one!) and so on. Thus, our interactivity is somewhat related to combat, and generally to how combat starts. That’s not bad, in and of itself, but it’s lack of interactivity beyond this that drags the place down. We want things to investigate, leverage, figure out, discover, and so on. A challenge beyond merely what’s on the character sheet. 

This is, at its heart, a pretty standard haunted mansion adventure. We’ve got the undead running around, a couple of barely functioning servants, a ghost butler, dead-ish family members, and so on. Shadowbrook and Xyntillian remain the gold standard in this genre, towering above everything else. This is an also ran, but a good first effort for the designer!

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is 24 pages … more than enough to get a sense of the product and the the rooms. So, good

preview.https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/428210/Curse-of-the-Blood-Moon-A-Bloodborne-Inspired-Module?1892600