tenfootpole.org

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

by Lou Agresta & Nicolas Logue

for Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
5th level

The PCs arrive in the bustling town of Whiterush and are hired to help solve protect a caravan from bandits. However, there is much more going on in the town than meets the eye and the PCs are in deeper than they originally thought.

Are you a fan of the noble and misunderstood orc or did you cleanse the earth of the women & children in the Caves of Chaos? How your players react to that issues will probably dictate how you all receive this adventure. It’s event based. It’s short and probably linear. And it has honorable orcs.

The party is hired by a merchant to go stop some marauding orcs. They’ll hide out in his wagons with some of his men and when the orcs attack the party can get to work. The other mercenaries are assholes of the highest order. When the orcs attack the party gets to see them use blunted arrow, bolas, and subdue tactics. They also call off their attack when there’s a chance some wagon rider might get killed. The merchants other guards hack down the caravans own drivers, apply poison to their blades, and all sorts of other EVIL things. Oh, and the orc leader is a 1/2 orc woman who’s pregnant. Oh, and the merchants reinforcements that arrive later include a snide bat-humanoid. Hmmm… maybe all those rumors in town about the merchant being a jerk and mysterious and the sudden marriage of his daughter to the local lords son and his thuggish troops on every street corner, taken with this behavior by his men, mean he’s EVIL and we should help the orcs!

Ya think?

The party is meant to join forces with the orcs and retreat back in to the woods to their lair. Or they can track the orcs to their lair at which point the orcs will negotiate with the party and try to get them to join their side. If so, then the next day the orc camp is attacked by the merchants men and fight #2 begins. From this the party can learn of the impending wedding ceremony and the plans to run the wedding party boat over a waterfall, killing almost all of the guests and immediately leaving the merchant and his evil daughter the new rulers of the land. Bonus Points there for Classic Villainy. That’s it, three encounters. Caravan ambush, orc lair attack, and riverboat battle.

The module tries to insert ome orc culture and role-play in to the parties visit to their camp. Cooking orc falls in love with someone who compliments her. They make jokes at the parties expense. They pretend to be offended and all laugh, etc. They also live in a giant tree top village over an idyllic lake. It’s got a bit too much cultural relativism for my tastes. You can explore gender issues, sexuality, and cultural identity all you want in your game. I want to burn down the orc village and hear the lamentations of their women … well, before I slit their throats.

In contrast the bad guys the merchant hires are a nice crude bunch of jerks. They get too drunk. They fart and make crude jokes about the party doing it. They scowl. They obviously use poison. They hack down innocents. Those are my kind of guys! How come I can never find NPC guards like that when my guy is hiring in town? The town proper is a bit too refined. A nice eatery, but only two inns. A craft store. Real, a craft store run by a halfling. I shit you not. In a two inn town! With a paddleboat riverboat for the wedding ceremony! A bit too much for me. The NPCs are really well done, as long as they are not orcs. The townspeople come alive, as do the real villains and their men.

The worse sin is probably the event based nature of things. After the party get to certain part of the boat then the roof will be torn off X rounds later. X rounds after the defeat of the last bad guy then the boat will go over the falls. I understand wanting to heighten tension but this is all a little too much. I would have preferred a timeline and general locations rather than a railroad counted in minutes.

Somewhere in here is the basis of a great adventure. A REALLY evil merchant, toughs who run the town, crude and barbarous orcs with an alien and offensive culture, and needing to ally with them for some reason. You could pick that stuff out and have a pretty good time in vegas with it!

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112788/One-Night-Stands–Scorned–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

by Bill Barsh
for Pacesetter Games & Simulations
AD&D
Levels 4-6

The Barbarian Lord and his army emerged from the Darken Wood and swarmed across the land. Eventually his army failed and the greed-driven lord retreated back to the wild lands of the north. He was never seen again. Many years later, a dark and horrific creature fell upon a peaceful valley many miles from the Darken Wood. Through the mystery of fate, these two events are directly linked. Now is the time to find and destroy The Things in the Forest!

T1 – The Thing the Valley, was one of my favorite module finds. This one has a couple of good things going for it but mostly misses the mark. T1 appealed to that folk tale groove that I get in to, rather than the OD&D feel that I generally prefer. The best parts of this module have that same folk tale feel.

In T1 the party found some things that belonged to the former owner of a mansion, along with notes on where the family moved should the master of the house return. This module follows on by assuming that the party has journeyed to that city and found the family in order to return word of the masters demise. This leads the party to discover a map to where the former lord went on his last adventure, which presumably turned him in to the undead creature discovered in T1. This is not a bad set up and is a decent follow on thread from T1. Unfortunately it takes place over almost four pages of text. That is quite a bit of exposition for me. Eventually the party take a long boat trip and end up at the edge of a barbarian filled forest. There’s a decent bit of text to get there, about two more pages, and in the end it just ends up being a combat with some were’s. I think there’s something hidden here though. There was a lot of talk awhile back about making the parties journey to the ‘mythic underworld’ memorable; that there be a hard transition from the mundane world to the fantastic world. I did this once years ago before blog-learning smartened me up and added a label to it. The world was full of mud & filth villages but when the party left the road they crossed over in to an area that was more green than it should be, and in which the shadows were deeper. A world of mist-filled grottos, etc. You could do a lot with that here. The cross-over point from the mundane to the fantastic is the HUGE forest that the party is on the edge of. The were’s have breached the edge. With a decent bit of flavor texting the DM could set the stage for some pretty serious Mirkwooding.

The journey through the forest is devoid of wandering monsters. And only has three set encounters. There’s a small part where the party finds a ransacked hunting camp. There’s another where the party finds some pillars … but they only do something at midnight under a full moon. Uh … given the perk they provide and coolness of the effect I can’t imagine not using it. Basically the party members are given the choice of loosing a stat point in order to get an amulet that protects them from undead. I’m pretty sure that your stats should be going up & down regularly in a good game, so the choice isn’t as clear-cut (“No”) as it would normally be. The last encounter is with an evil NPC party that has been following the party. As written this is kind of lame. They just show up and attack, get their ass kicked, and retreat. It would be MUCH cooler if they had hired on to the boat, taken it over once the party left, and then did some hit & runs on the party before the main dungeon, or just waited till the party was out of the dungeon and hit them hard then. Both of those allow for a decent bit of role-play and some foreshadowing of the villains before the party fights them and that add SO much more to the encounters.

The main dungeon has 31 room, has no wandering monsters, and is full of undead. FULL of undead. Because they are special undead there is no turning allowed and there are about 90 of them in the complex. A very large number of them are likely to be encountered by the party and combats and noise in rooms will pull undead from most nearby locations. There’s not a whole lot going on inside other than monstrous/undead encounters. There’s a decent trap/obstacle at the beginning and a couple of lakes to maneuver around, but otherwise it’s just a monster hack. T1 did a great job of setting up a foreboding atmosphere but that is lost in this module by the sheer numbers of undead. Further, the undead are a little too mundane; there’s not really a sense of danger or decay in the surrounding environment. Many of them have footlockers! That’s not the type of undead I’m fond of. I want mine to be dark creatures of evil with very little logical behavior behind them … or perhaps set patterns behind them. This reduces them to just another creature to hack through in a dungeon that not very evocative. The last room has a nice description but it’s wasted by no follow-up. It he skulls and body parts had coalesced in to the creatures you fight, with a little horror/gore thrown in, then its impact would have been much greater.

The environment and setting in T1 meshed with the creatures to creature a nice little folk tale like feel with a horror element. That sort of vibe is almost completely lacking from this module.

This is available on Dragonsfoot, in a bundle with T1.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/167998/T12-The-Thing-in-the-Valley?affiliate_id=1892600