tenfootpole.org

by Ken Spencer
for Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
Levels 5-7

The story begun in Vengeance of the Long Serpent continues. The heroes have defeated the Children of Althunak, but the fell god’s evil fane survives. Strange beasts, dark magics, and unholy cold await in the lands Beyond the Wailing Mountains.

I have a healthy respect for low-magic, historical, and horror based games. In the role of everyman you get to react to things as a normal person, push the red button, go in to the basement and all of the other fun things that wisdom and character survival dictate that you should not engage in. These are all one-shots, especially at cons, and I seldom have more fun; chaos & character death, HO! I’ve never been able to pull off a historical or mundane game at any other type. It’s just too boring and mired in too much realism. This adventure tries to pull it off. If you’re in to historical settings and/or horror then you should probably check it out.

For background, you’re the crew of a viking longship and stumble upon a strange eskimo cult while out clubbing/skinning seals and rendering blubber. The cult is in all the native villages except one, and in the first module you put down the cult and destroy the secondary temple being constructed … Which implies a primary temple. In this module you take a break from your clubbing baby seals and trading with the locals to travel weeks over tundra, mountains, and ice in order to destroy that primary temple. Do you like dealing with environmental conditions like the cold, and like keeping track of food stores? Navigating dangerous terrain? Then do I have an adventure for you.

The adventure comes in five sections although only one of them has any significant amount of meat to it. It starts with the players meeting with the village elders during their evening feast in their honor and the village getting raided by hordes of Yeti and a Snow Bride. This is probably meant to bring the danger home to the party and provide some continuity from the last module; the cult is punishing the players and village for their actions in the last module. It comes off weakly though. The players just end up fighting a few groups of yeti, 3 or so to a group, while the village warriors battle their own groups. The Death in the Treklant series from Troll Lord had a similar viking-like setting, in the forests instead of the frozen north, and pulled off these sorts of large battles much better, I believe. They were frigging hard, probably a pain to run, and certainly things that the players would remember for years to come. The yeti battle just comes off as a couple of railroady encounters with yeti with some flavor text about other nearby battles surrounding it.

The next three sections of the adventure are essentially the same. The players travel 2-3 weeks over the tundra to reach the mountains. The players travel 2-3 weeks through some mountains. Then the players travel a week or so across the ice fields to an ancient abandoned city. You get a random encounter roll each day, with about a 60% chance something will happen. This could be normal animals on the tundra, or some sort of environmental issue like a blizzard or crevice, or it could be some creatures in the cults service. This probably lasts a little too long. With a decent level cleric the rations situation shouldn’t be a problem and encountering Yet Another Crevice amounts to tedium, not adventure. Some of the flavor text in the encounters is pretty nice but it’s DM text, not players. For example there’s some sleet on the table. This is actually the frozen tears of sorrow of the sacrifices to the primordial god involved. Pretty cool, eh? Now how do you communicate that feeling to the players? There is a decent variety in the encounters and the creature encounters are not all straight up hack jobs; some trickery can work wonders in places.

The lost city with the temple is the climax. It’s very sparsely populated. Most of the encounters should be ok for a group this high to hack through except for the two groups that each contains three 8HD ice demons. THOSE are gonna be tough. The temple in the city is a short little seven encounter linear affair. The high priest has an EXCELLENT little backstory … that is going to be lost on the players as they hack him down. Too bad, it’s really cool, especially the part where his new god forces him to eat all of his own flesh. Ewwwwww! There’s a nice little section at the end on how the evil god, on the down low, messes with the party after they defeat his minions. They are great suggestions for giving a feel of continuity to your game and implying there are consequences for a characters actions.

There’s TOTALLY a Lovecraft feel to this and I suspect you could lift the entire series for a Cthulhu game or some other more modern setting, especially in and around the 20’s era. Many of the monsters have some decent backgrounds as well; for example the Snow Brides are actually ice trolls … except they were once human an have been transformed in to their condition through their marriage to the EHP. There’s a lot of this sort of detail in the adventure even if there’s not much in the way of the traditional D&D weird that I groove on so much. Using this module as a framework and putting in a lot of work to expand certain areas and foreshadow much of the cooler flavor text could turn this in to one rocking pseudo-historical type setting. If you’re willing to put in the work.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/97422/The-Northland-Saga-Part-2–Beyond-the-Wailing-Mountains-Swords-and-Wizardry–Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

by Joseph Browning
for Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Levels 3-5

You carefully load your canoes and launch into the fast-moving waters of the underground river named Shadowvein. The Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shroom behind you, the veracity of the map that is to be your guide into the dark unknown will soon be tested. Hopefully what is written is accurate, but if it is not, your wits, wile, and brawn should serve you well as you journey down the Shadowvein!

Gygax, thy influence runs deep.

This is a Descent in to the Depths of the Earth type underground wilderness adventure, complete with a partial players version of the DMs map that looks like it could have come straight out of D1. Primary, Secondary and tertiary passages, a river running through it, detailed locations along the primary path and a number of blank adventure locations for the DM to expand upon. There are five encounters provided as well as extensive wandering monster tables. The first two encounter areas are with monsters while the second two are with potential allies. The module finishes things up with a small linear funhouse dungeon. There is a wandering monster table for the primary, secondary, and tertiary passages but not for the river proper, which is noted as being very safe. This is probably a mistake. As written this would mean that the party simply encounters the five described areas with perhaps some flavor text by the DM about how they sleep and eat. That’s not really what I think of when I think of a hex crawl. The wandering monsters should be an integral part of an adventure like this, especially when it’s supposed to be set on a major underground trade artery. The river does follow a primary passage at points, so you could fudge a bit over the six-ish days of travel that a boat trip will take. The wandering encounters themselves are not very interesting either. Again, if wanderers are supposed to be a major part of the adventure then they should be spiced up. A 20-entry table with skeletons, zombies, shriekers, grimlocks, etc, is just about the minimum that could be done. Some extra detail for each encounter would have been fabulous, or even just a small random table telling us what the wanderers are doing wandering. The first option could have turned a ho-hum table in to a major interesting bit of content; “Wagon Train to the Fungas Lakes!”

The first encounter area is with a group of goblins in the middle of a power struggle. There are two factions and the party is going to be encouraged to join one of them and wipe out the other. There could be a bit of novelty here in negotiating and visiting with non-hostile goblins, but otherwise this is going to be a straight-up hack down a set of linear corridors while the party wipes out one or both factions. The idea of factions is a good one but the design of the goblin halls, a line, doesn’t leave enough room to reap the rewards. Rather than the goblins being a home base and interacting with them and dealing with whatever petty help or hinderance they could be we instead only have the option of moving straight forward and hacking down great numbers of goblins in small corridors.

The second encounter area is a tad more interesting. A former monstrous humanoid lair is now marked with The Plague Sign … which the party probably knows nothing about and thus blunders in anyway. The eleven or so rooms/caves are all essentially empty except for the main one. That cavern has a VERY nice encounter with a couple of mutated beasties right out of ‘ol HP Lovecraft or LotFP on a good day. A definite scene of horror that must have been inspired by The Thing. Nice evocative scenery in this room to go with the monsters, but thats it. Two 4HD monsters to not an adventure make. These caves are otherwise devoid of coolness.

Encounters three and four are with ‘good’ humanoid bases and are adjacent on the linear river path, being separated by six mile or so of river. Both have fully detailed interior sections which their text goes on and on about the party never being bale to reach/see because so groups are so paranoid. They both have public guests rooms for river travelers but NO ONE gets inside their homes. Then why describe them? And why put them adjacent to each other on the map? Are we meat to slaughter them? There are 300 dwarves in one, a far far cry from the two 4 HD monsters in the previous encounter. One of these areas has a cute statue encounter that the party will probably never get to interact with. Some other visitors or some intrigue in these areas would have livened up these two areas.

The final encounter area is a linear dungeon. There’s some backstory about an inter-dimensional trickster mage, but it’s really just an excuse to put a funhouse dungeon on the map. Hmmm, funhouse may be the wrong word. Grimtooth is closer to it. Ten rooms/encounters, in a line, each with some kind of deadly trap. I don’t have a problem with this in principal, it just that generally in execution it tends to come off poorly. It’s better here than in most I’ve seen. In fact I can’t recall any that do it better, but it’s VERY out of place. The party needs a MUCH different mindset to tackle this area than the ones previous. It’s kind of like sticking Tomb of Horrors as a side corridor in The Steading. It’s out of place and a completely different stye. A few more warnings/bodies may be called for to indicate that a context switch is required. The dungeon finished with a completely barren room except for a treasure chest with a white dragon curled around it. This must be some kind of in-joke from the designer.

A D1 for lower levels is a good summary of this module. Unfortunately it suffers a bit from the thing D1 does. If you can take D1 and turn it in to an evocative fun-filled romp through the underworld then you probably don’t need D1. If you can’t do that then it’s just a rather generic and boring crawl through the underearth. While the Plague rooms have some personality the module is otherwise lacking.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/100773/Advanced-Adventures-23-Down-the-Shadowvein?affiliate_id=1892600

by Bill Barsh
for Pacesetter Games & Simulations
AD&D
Level 1 characters

A mournful girl has begged you for aid. Her father, keeper of the city’s vast sewer system, has disappeared. The city guard will do nothing and she suspects foul play or possibly something even more sinister. An adventure is at hand and only one thing is certain, It Lurks Below!

Problems in the cities sewers?!?! What!? Say it isn’t so! In the modern world you pay your tax dollars and you are protected from dysentery. In the fantasy world you pay your tax dollars to be protected from dysentery AND you still take the risk of some nameless horror festering down below. I do declare, it’s enough to turn a man toward wanting dysentery …

This is a pretty basic adventure in the cities sewers with a few goodies tossed in to elevate it. The players are sent in by the daughter of a worker in order to find her father. The sewers have four parts: the sewers proper, the basement of an old house, a small cave system, and a tomb complex. The maps have a very basic branching layout without loops. The numbers and types of monsters, and lack of wanderers, makes that fact pretty irrelevant though. The house basement map is very small and it’s hard to make out where the doors between the rooms are. I believe the sewers are meant to link up to the caves, basement, and tomb, but the basement is the only area that I can figure out. The other two areas must connect somehow but it’s not clear to me at all how they do.

In a refreshingly change of pace, the sewers are essentially empty. Only some crocodiles are hanging about. They just serve as a passage to connect the caves to the basement to the tomb. There are a couple of rooms, including a locked door, but they just serve to hold the sewer workers tools. The basement is essentially a red herring while the caves provide the first clue to the old mans location … the tombs. These areas are essentially devoid of any interesting encounters. The temple is where things get Old School. Murals to study. Statue arches to pass under and freak out about. Swords that fly off the wall and attack. Alters that bless things. Animating heads and a ghostly oracle. More! I want more! I LOVE this kind of stuff. That’s what D&D is to me. Anyone can put some giant rats in a room make some goblins attack a caravan. That’s just some mechanical dross. It’s the wonder and the whimsey that make D&D special to me and I’m thrilled to see some of that OD&D spirit in this product.

The magic items are a little too mundane for my tastes: +1 maces and +2 shields and the like. I like to see the weird and unusual show up in magical items. Things like all of those effects for artifacts in the 1E DMG, or the Misc magic items in the same supplement. Those sorts of things will keep the party on its toes! The monsters are, for the most part, standard as well although there are a couple of more interesting ones. There’s a skeletal imp and some baby gelatinous cubes that should keep things interesting for the party. There are several multi-hd skeletons in the tombs also, but they suffer the fate of all 1st level undead: turning. The designer takes care of this by gimping the party cleric: no turning in the tombs areas. Gygax did something similar in the Caves of Chaos with those amulets the undead wear. With no limit to the amount of undead you can turn, or the number of attempts, 1 HD skeletons always seem to be throw away monsters. For such a classic monster type its a shame that they can never be used as written. But that’s a bigger problem with D&D, not with the module.

This could fit in well with a long-running city game. The daughter, who isn’t who she claims to be, has a lot of potential as a recurring character and the backstory could provide for a decent amount of adventuring before the characters even hit the sewers, if the DM were so inclined. That’s a nice inclusion.

This is available from DriveThru, as a bundle.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/167997/GC12-From-Below?affiliate_id=1892600

by Brian Young
for Troll Lord Games
Castles & Crusades
Levels 1-5

Many long years ago the denizens of Mount Yr Wyddfa crawled beneath the earth; foul minded fey, goblins and others of that ilk; they fled for reasons unknown to any but themselves. The terraced slopes, the valleys, ravines and forested highlands settled in peace, farms spread along the greens, people settled and prospered. But the world unfolds, for ever turning, mirroring the past. It began with nightmares, followed by haunts hounding farmers in their fields, terrorizing them on the roads, chasing them to their sanctuaries. And then the goblins came a-hunting. Not seen in many years now they waylay travelers, despoil them of their belongs or worse, killing them on the road. And to all this the terror only adds, spreading even to hearth and home; young women have begun to disappear, kidnapped from their homes. Rumors speak of a new power, called the Grey King, which settled in the mountain. It is he that stirs up the creatures and has brought the goblins to life. Drawn by a string of random attacks on the locals, vandalism and sightings of eerie beings about the mist shrouded mountain, the characters must band together to discover the cause. To save the local villages from further devastation, the characters will need to hunt down the goblins and find the source of their rise to power.

WARNING: I like fey.

I’m conflicted on this module. It’s not my style and yet I can recognize that it has something interesting going on.It is a mess. A glorious glorious mess. Can you compose and present some kind of a grand campaign in only 17 pages of text? That’s what this thing tries to do. Oh, it masks itself as a normal adventure but there is no way in hell this thing can be ran in anything that resembles the form in which it’s presented. If instead you take this thing as inspiration and build off of what’s in it then you’d have one hell of a game. But then it would be a setting rather than an adventure. It may resemble more one of those old MERP supplements that presented a land and its environs, some castle plans, and then suggested some adventure ideas. And that’s a distant cousin. I would suggest a reading of the module that treats it like a short story in order to get inspired and then go in and rip out the various salvageable portions and fill in between them to get a GREAT campaign setting and adventure.

The setting is a kind of mythic celtic England with what appears to be a heavy Welsh influence, sometime around the 8th or 9th century would be my guess. There’s no sign of the Romans but instead we get a VERY strong fey flavor. There are large numbers of goblins, hobgoblins, spriggans, hags, kobolds, and others populating the environment. And they are all out to kill the players. Well, ok, not directly. The Grey King has show up and now the fey are flocking to him and he’s waging a murderous war on the human lands. The goblins and hobgoblins are of the fey variety rather than the ‘monster manual’ variety. I don’t usually mention art, but the cover to this book does not set the right tone at all. While it has some nice celts the goblin does not inspire you to think ‘fey.’ Back to the background. The Grey King arrives out of nowhere, sets up shop in a mountain, and start gathering evil fey to him who terrorize the countryside.

The module is organized around three Acts and there are plenty of warnings about such and such needing to survive and how the players can’t kill X or Y. Those are usually danger signs but in this case they can all be safely ignored. The kind of things warned about are extremely unlikely to occur if the module is run as written and if you use this as a campaign inspiration then you’re changing it all anyway. There are VERY brief descriptions of about a half dozen destroyed villages in the area. This are usually just a couple of paragraphs and are FULL of nice descriptive flavor without providing anything in the way of adventure. Eventually the players arrive in a non-destroyed village and listen to a page of monologue from a druid. This tells the players a bit about the Grey King and a magic item they can create to help them see the invisible fey. Cool! Every better, it involves the party questing to a wormwood grove and distilling it in to eyedrops! Pretty cool inclusion of the Green Fairy! Somehow the players stumble on to the environs at he base of the mountain. There are they are harassed by the dark fey that pour out of the mountain every night to terrorize the lands and also meet a couple of NPC’s that the DM can use to spice up the adventure later. They are both on quests to kill he Grey King and it’s pretty clear that neither will succeed, leaving a few opportunities for the DM to include the results of that in the mountain as the party explores.

The mountain lair is very cool and a TOTAL mess. There’s five levels! But only 23 rooms. 🙁 The map way be one of the best bad where ‘many ways between levels’ is involved. But you’re never gonna figure out that out from the crappy maps and the the levels are too small/simple to support any benefits from this type of play. The text mentions six ways in to the complex but I could only find two of them on the map. A careful examination of the text revealed one more, and one more beyond that which was not included in the six mentioned above. Most levels have two or three exits, at least, but where they end up is not noted very well on the actual maps. The text in the module and the maps disagree frequently. One room text mentions four tunnels out to other levels, only three are shown on the actual map, only two of those are labeled and those don’t indicate where they come up on that level. It’s crazy! Other rooms mentions shafts that come in to them or winding stairs that stop at different levels, but that’s all in the module text and not the map and it’s impossible to figure out where the things go. But … if the maps WERE accurate and you had a decent sized levels then you’d have a GREAT fortress complex for the party to explore with many many ways between levels.

There are HORDES of fey creatures in here. Most of them have special powers and most have more than 1HD. There is NO WAY a 1st level party can survive in here, and I doubt even that a fifth level party could survive. The rooms are too close together and there are WAY too many fey around. Any fight is going to pull from adjacent rooms and soon put the entire fortress on alert and the levels just are not designed in such a way that the party could sneak around; they are just too small and cramped. Oh, and the fey have ‘hellhounds’ which sniff out intruders and those are all over the place. The rooms are a strange combination of text which create a very evocative general environment to explore and yet have no interesting things at all. One room notes that the bottom of an undine pool is full of treasure from people they’ve killed. That’s it, no other indication of said treasure might be. Another mentions that there are 2d10 fey guards in the rooms and leaves it up to the DM to figure out which type, from a more general list earlier in the module, and what they have for loot. Somehow the things still manages to create an evocative atmosphere, at least in general. The corridors are full of rubbish, rotting heaps of maggoty garbage, larders of humans aging and so on. The vast majority of rooms have nothing special about them all, just holding some fey to kill and generic text. The single exception if a dark temple where accidentally spilling blood on the alter can curse the party. To top it off the place collapses around/after the party after they kill the Grey King AND the party meats an asshole elf outside who the DM is instructed MUST be kept alive in order for the next adventure in the series to take place. It’s CrAzY!!!!

You could ABSOLUTELY build an entire campaign around just this module, using it for inspiration and pulling out concepts and ideas. It’s a cool little bit of work that is almost certainly unusable as written.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/105123/Castles–Crusades-The-Goblins-of-Mount-Shadow?affiliate_id=1892600

by Bill Barsh
for Pacesetter Games & Simulations
AD&D
1st level, or one Level 3 Fighter

The orcs threw themselves in against the wall of the small woodland keep in a berserk rage. The small contingent of soldiers fought with equal ferocity and in the end, not a single orc remained. Years later, a dwarf entrepreneur bought the old fort and converted it into an inn and tavern, the now famous Green Grizzly. Your long trek through the woods has brought you to the inn but something is clearly wrong as not a soul can be found!

Pacesetters Q line is their quick-play series, meant to be finished in a single evening. This, their latest, is the most interesting of the line so far. It is set up so that the party stumbles across it just as the hook events have finished. Thus the party finds things in a very unusual state with some things going on around them … or not.

The idea here is that someone in the inn has found an old broken efreet lamp that was hidden in the inn. The efreet comes out, severely weakened, and then makes its way to the main room. Upon seeing an efreet everyone there does the sensible thing and flees. The efreet leaves to find some jewels needed to repair its lamp then the party shows up, less than 30 minutes after the inn is abandoned. I love this kind of In Media Res thing and this is not a bad set up. A recently abandoned inn with only a few signs of violence is going to be quite the puzzle for the party. I could have used more of this, with events unfolding around the party as they stumble from place to place, but then again this is a quick-play adventure. There’s really only two other events that take place: the efreets return to the inn and his death curse, neither of which really count towards the In media Res feel. Anyway, the party will find some clues in the inn. A geni lamp in the basement next to a dug up floor tile. An old diary. A new diary. A very good map of the forest the inn sits in. From these the party will learn the history of the lamp and what’s wrong with it. Three jewels from the lamp were hidden and three areas of interest are mentioned on the map and in the journals. Exploring them will eventually turn up the three jewels, which the party then needs to destroy to destroy the efreet.

There are a handful of encounters provided. Former guards return to try and loot the inn while the party is investigating. There’s a skeletal THING at a mass grave site. Mushroom men now inhabit the small cave where the orcs once laired. There’s a fair amount of text provided for these encounters and yet its going to take a decent amount of on-the-fly DMing to pump these up. The thugs will need to posture and negotiate and threaten and maybe ambush in order for their character to be revealed. The skeletal thing will need some good flavor texting from the DM to convey the actuality of what is happening, and the fungoid men will need some weirdness added to them to help convey the strangeness of the cave they inhabit. Despite the length of text on the bare bones of these encounters are provided. There’s nothing wrong with that … I think I’m more commenting on the length of the surrounding text and yet the lack of specifics. There’s a definite nugget of OD&D in here. The thugs are just humans looking to make a buck. The skeletal THING is a kind of non-standard skeleton monster. The Mycanoids, well, they are a little unusual to encounter in adventures and mushrooms always bring that OD&D groove. Likewise the magic items are not just book items. Well, they are and they are not. A sword of humanoid slaying, a javelin of piercing and a ring of shooting stars are present. Book items but not “Sword, +1” book items. I like the extra flavor that these sorts of non-standard things bring to a game. While they are no Oracular Skull they are very cool things that players would probably treasure.

Not quite as gonzo, weird and whimsical as I prefer but it does a decent job for what it is, a one night module, while providing a flash of that OD&D feel.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/263912/Q14-The-Screaming-Temple-and-other-Deaths?affiliate_id=1892600

by David Kenzer
for Kenzer Co
Hackmaster
Levels 5-7

The long hours on the road have left you yearning for a good night’s rest at your favorite way station. Decent food, a clean bed and live entertainment have never sounded so good – especially so with those storm clouds looming on the horizon, mounting winds and periodic raindrops heralding some fouler weather to come. The warm glow of a fire and a hot meal will be welcome, but where is the wait staff?

This is the second of two Hackmaster modules I picked up at GenCon. They didn’t seem as jokey as their initial releases and I knew Hackmaster was trying to go legit so I thought I would pick it up and see how it compared. This is the better of the two.

If the Caves of Chaos scaled up to a higher level and the evil temple was a major force in the campaign world then the two page backstory in this module would fit perfectly. Some Evil High Priest is destabilizing the region. He killed a bunch of humanoids, blamed it on the keep to rile up the humanoids, destroyed an isolated inn, diverted the keeps patrols, etc. Nice Going EHP! This adventure deals with one part of that plan; the party stumbles upon an inn they’ve visited before only this time it’s full of bodies. This works best if the party has visited the place before, maybe on their way back and forth to the caves. It also raises one of the central problems with the murder hobo lifestyle: forming attachments is not a good thing. Getting married? You can expect problems with your wife. Buying a house in town? Expect it to be burnt down. Like the village? There’s an orc raid coming. There’s degree of continuity and a feeling of consistency in the game world when these sorts of character/environment relationships are established, which is a great thing. And then the DM takes a ham-handed approach to making the players/characters care about the latest bad guy. Why form an attachment when you know that the DM is just going to kidnap/kill them? Why, it’s enough to make someone turn to murder hobo’ing!

The players walk right in to the inn, as they usually do, and are confronted by a scene of chaos. Soon hordes of zombies start lumbering in to the main room and the adventure begins. The inn is built in to a fort type structure with small outbuildings living the edge of the fort walls. It’s actually not a bad little set up for an inn/way-station, and it’s a good little pace to be surrounded by undead. The adventure is a combination zombie & mystery so atmosphere is important. It’s dusk/night, rain is falling and getting heavier. The players are most probably outnumbered/gunned by the zombies. They are scratching at the doors and windows trying to get in. Most rooms have scenes of gore/struggle in them, some quite grizzly. There are lots of rooms/areas with zombies locked in. Sounds of combat attract zombies from nearby areas (an order of battle! Yeah Kenzer!) It’s still not quite clear to me that it’s enough. It feels like there’s some atmosphere missing. Maybe what I’m looking for is a few more tips on how to keep the pacing going and keep the atmosphere strong. Horror requires a good DM.

The encounters are pretty good. These range from the initial set piece attack on the common room when the characters first enter the inn to barricaded stairways and a PTSD survivor who nags and annoys until she gets what she wants and then goes catatonic. Most of the encounters provide some additional details when searched, or even a clue to where some treasure is. Drag marks on the ground actually lead to something. The designer also seems to know how skills work. Searching generally finds something without a skill check: a dropped club, or a blood-soaked pouch. There’s lots for the players to do, search, and find as they explore the devastated way-station, almost all of which relate to details of the attack.

There’s a nice one page section at the end dealing with consequences. What would happen if the players flee, or what happens if they loot X or turn in Y or burn down the inn, etc. I appreciate this sort of detail. It helps beginning DMs get in to the campaign mindset and helps turns episodic adventures in to the kind of longer ‘story of the characters’ that I think makes a good campaign. It also helps reinforce that the world exists outside of the actions of the players AND that their actions have consequences.

So, no new monsters. No new magic items. Real aloud text. LONG room entires. Nothing weird. But then again, this is not that sort of adventure. The zombies here are much more screen zombies than the standard D&D zombie which is a great thing. We get i to ruts, I think. “12 zombies attack” instead of the flesh-eating gore that’s common to all zombie media. Making monsters monstrous is a very good thing indeed.

We’re having a Halloween meetup this year. I think I’ll convert this to D&D and run it for the event.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/95661/Dusk-of-the-Dead?affiliate_id=1892600

by Jerimy Cafenstein
for Kenzer & Co
Hackmaster Basic
1st-2nd levels

Though decorated for a festival, the village atmosphere seems ominously muted. Vendors relax in the shade but seem preoccupied with inner thoughts, showing little interest in you or the coins you might spend on their wares. You see no dancing and hear no song, and small groups of people only mutter as you pass, staring back at you with sad, deadened or suspicious eyes. You wonder what recent troubles hang heavy over this place…

I wouldn’t normally review a Hackmaster module but a couple of things came together to change my mind. I know Hackmaster is trying to go legit, especially with their Basic book, and at first glance this module didn’t appear to be a joke product. I was right, it wasn’t a joke product; it just isn’t very good and few redeeming qualities. Or maybe I’m missing the joke and you’re supposed to LARP the adventure.

After wading through WAY too much backstory and introductions, five pages worth, the adventure finally shows up. It is a travesty. Make a Current Affairs skill check to find out that a young girl has gone missing. Make a second check to learn that she was not the first child to go missing. Role-playing? What’s that? I wonder what happens if the party fails the check? There’s no adventure? Oh, no, wait, there IS an adventure if they fail their check. They get to go clean out the giant spiders from the cellar of an old lady. I am TOTALLY not shitting you. An actual ‘clean out windows basement’ quest. Someone didn’t try very hard did they? There is one interesting thing associated with this: if the party claims the spiders were the cause of the kids disappearances then there will be a big celebration. And then another kid will go missing and the villagers will be bitter and resentful of the party. That’s a nice little bit of added flavor, and something that also shows up in … Blood Moon RIsing, I believe. Anyway, the DM relents and allows the party to go on the adventure. This means wandering around the countryside and having some random encounters. Well “random” would be a better way to mention it. There is no wandering monster table but rather six encounters that “the DM can throw at the party.” Only two of these are at all interesting. The first is a wandering group of farmers on the road that are waylaying people as they search for the kids. That’s a nice bit to include, although it feels a bit isolated from the context given in the village. The second is a dead goblin that fell off a cliff and broke his neck. Again, a nice bit of flavor. Anyway, the party wanders around the woods being bored until they find some clue to ‘the Elm King.’ Going back to the village exclamation point/quest giver reveals that there was a guy named the Elm King around these parts awhile back. The old woman that lives nearby may know more. A quick hike to her home and some role play lets the party discover that her son is the Elm King and he hangs out near The Red Spur. A half day journey back to the village to find the location of The Red Spur. The party then has to make 18 wandering monster checks on the day and half trek to the Red Spur. Well, not checks. Essentially the party rolls to see which monster they encounter every 2 hours on their journey. They WILL encounter a monster, you’re just rolling to see which one. A table is provided, and we’re instructed that no duplicates should be used, so if a duplicate is rolled then just re-roll. Fine. The table has six entires. A half day in the party will have fought all six encounters on the table and then have nothing for the next day. The best of the encounters is probably the butchered body of a bear. I like these kinds of clues and the like that indicate that something is around and that the party is not alone in the world. It gives a good sense of time. Next up is a seven room encounter at Red Spur Gorge. There are some caves and passages here but none of it is really relevant. It’s just an opportunity o hack down 24 kobolds before killing The Elm King, a bugbear. It’s boring.

The old woman is throughly evil and could make a good addition to any game on an ongoing basis, but the village is boring with not much going on. The mundane treasure is nice enough: a bear paw, an upside down dwarf skull holding coins, wine, linen tableclothes, etc. The magic treasure is lame though and is just normal book stuff. The adventure would have been a bit cooler/creepier if the Elm Kings forces had been bandits instead of kobolds and they KNEW their leader was a fearsome bugbear and that he and his mate ate children live to jump start their fertility. Those are my kind of bandits! But alas, it is not. The adventure is really VERY basic. It has a couple of nice things to lift but otherwise ranges from Boring to Bad.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/78132/In-the-Realm-of-the-Elm-King?affiliate_id=1892600

by Guy Fullerton
for Chaotic Henchmen Productions
AD&D
Levels 4-6

For years, lords and warriors have delivered riches to the remote Sun Temple in exchange for prophecies from the mysterious oracle who dwells within. But of late, the oracle’s advice has soured. Some say the oracle has gone mad and lost her powers. Others believe she has forsaken her allegiances and seeks to collapse the kingdom. Rogues whisper of enormous piles of gold and jewelry within the Sun Temple–perhaps no longer guarded. Wealth, power, and surprising secrets await those who dare explore the Sun Temple and beyond!

This adventure has quite a few great ideas. It’s a little verbose in places which is a distraction as you try to figure out what is being described. The module feels a lot like a transition module between OD&D and AD&D, or maybe a bit like the old Judges Guild modules except quite a bit more coherent. A mashup between The Fantastic of OD&D and the more hardcore realism that I associate with AD&D.

It takes about two and half pages to get past all of the introductory text and in to the adventure. This is pushing my tolerances for what I’m willing to sit through. To be sure, it’s not all backstory. Introduction, Notes for the DM, player character levels, scaling, hooks, normal temple operations before the ‘issues’, a section on the invaders and the finally a section on pseudo-magical things to be found in the adventure. It’s not the usual masturbatory fan-fic type background information but it’s more that the entire section could be tightened up a bit. It IS a pretty sweet set-up though: There’s a magical stairway to the moon! That, in and of itself, is a pretty cool thing to set your adventure around. It has that kind of fairy tale element that I’m so fond of (or maybe it’s a folk tale element I’m fond of? I should figure that out one day.) I’m going to ignore logic here and say that it’s an appeal to elements of our shared past and that when some of those elements show up in a game, especially at the beginning, it does a fantastic job of setting the mood and getting players in right mind-set. Anyway, silvery magical stairways to the moon are BAD ASS … and then the bad guys enter. I normally don’t care about spoilers but this time I’m going to keep the secret: it’s not spoiled on the cover pic or in the front/rear text so I’ll not spoil it here. The bad guys in question are just a normal old D&D MM monster and yet they make TOTAL sense coming from the moon AND they contribute to that fairy tale feel by coming from the moon. How cool is that? Some generic old D&D monster gets new life in a totally non-canon way that make perfect canon sense and appeals to the folk/fairy stuff that I love. Nice job Mr. Fullerton! One more thing: I gained some insight to dungeon motivations in this adventure. Why do dungeons exist? Why do people go in to them to adventure? None of it makes any sense and most modules have some token throw-away reason or explanation which we all accept so we can have fun. I got a new idea from this one though, a Classical idea. There’s an oracle in this dungeon, and a somewhat accurate one at that. That’s a REAL good reason for people to enter a dungeon. Lots of people, from kings to beggars, want answers and the oracle can provide them. That’s why people go in. That’s why treasure exists (offerings) and that’s why the dungeon still exists. Very Greek. There’s no relation between this module and that statement, other than they both have oracles, but I think you build an entire megadungeon around there being an accurate oracle in the bottom of one. Need I remind you the value of a module that inspires you and gets you excited?
Moving on, there are honest to goodness places to explore BEFORE you go the main adventure site. I count eight different sites around the main Sun Temple, most of which have seven or so different areas to explore or interact with. These sites are full of clues to some of the puzzles, and the bad guys, in the main temple. They do a great job of foreshadowing the main enemy. Thee are allies and enemies, things to be avoided and tasks to accomplish. This FEELS like a real place that had something unfortunate happen to it. One of the best parts of Stonehell is the outside area, level 0 so to speak. These sorts of ante-chambers to the main dungeon do a fabulous job of setting the party up for what’s to come. The main dungeon has 32 keyed encounters. The map has a decent amount of detail and could almost be a section pulled from a real megadungeon map. There are some loops, and it has a nice 3-dimensional feel to it because of steep stairways. There are a decent number of statues, pillars, and intelligent secret doors on the map, as well as multiple ways in to the main complex, two of which should be immediacy obvious. I REALLY like the multiple entrance thing in dungeons because of the variety of play it supports. A solid effort well above average. The wandering monsters tables for the dungeon and the countryside are small but they utilize the monsters found in the adventure. For example, giant flies encountered are the ones from the giant fly encounter in the module. Bad Guy encounters are from those in nearby rooms, and so on.

The actual encounters are a mix between puzzle, social, and combat. I’m pretty certain that a combination of social skills and attention to detail could allow an experienced party to negotiate most of the temple complex without having to get in to very many serious combats. The social elements is mostly with the invaders of the temple, the ‘Bad Guys.’ They are a lazy good for nothing lot and are willing to negotiate with the party. Thus not only can the hero parties just lay in to them but murder hobo parties can talk to them and work out a deal or two for fun & profit. The magical temple guardians are where the puzzles mostly come in to play. A smart group that pays attention should be able to avoid or bypass the guardians and get quite a bit of loot in the process. I’ll point out one of the interesting encounters in the wilderness. There’s an old winery, abandoned because of the troubles, with two hill giants camped out in it. They are slowly working their way through the wine supply and thus are often drunk. They also scattered some caltrops outside their main room/lair! Once again we see the appeal to the fairy/folk tale, this time with drunk giants and wine. That’s combined with a decent bit of intelligent monster actions in the form of the caltrops. Given time these guys will probably wander away when the wine runs out. That sense of time passing and the world moving around the party isn’t as present as I would prefer but there are some references to it. Former temple workers, the drunk giants, and the wandering monsters form nearby rooms, for example. The exploration of unusual items tends to be rewarded as well: there IS treasure in the bottom of wells and sticking your hand in a mouth DOES get you something. There actually COULD be a secret door at the bottom of that cistern, etc. I really appreciate these intelligent inclusions of the classics, all of which have some twist to keep them fresh.

The module does rely too heavily on book magic items and monsters. I like to see new magic items and new monsters because they bring a freshness to the game. The players don’t know what to expect when they encounter a new monster and that communicates the feelings of fear and apprehension that they SHOULD be feeling in a dungeon. Likewise magical items have to be new & fresh in order for magic to seem mysterious and fresh. Sadly, there are no new magical items or monsters in this adventure, although creatures from the Fiend Folio do make appearances. There’s also that verbosity and attention to detail which detracts form the main adventure and cause my eyes to glaze over. “Rooms walls are only 10 fete tall, and ceilings gently dome to 15 feet high at the apex. Hallways are only 8 feet wide, with 7 foot high walls, and arched ceilings that are 8 feet high at the center. Doors are 6 1/2 feet high, 3 feet wide, and 3 inches thick.” etc etc etc. There are several text blocks of this type located throughout the keyed encounters. It amounts to a great deal of detail and explanation to pick through to find what you want. Tastes differ here but I prefer a more terse format with less detailed data. I think a bit of this is an attempt to explain the ‘why’ behind certain things. IE: “X radiates dim magic thanks to a Nystul’s magic aura but it has no magical function.” or the details of how a certain secret door works. Something like “at the bottom of one of the indentations is a button that when depressed will emit a click and open the secret door on the north wall.” I’m used to seeing this abstracted away or handled in a less verbose fashion.

I don’t keep most of what I review but I think this one has enough merit to stay on my shelf.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/105974/The-Fane-of-Poisoned-Prophecies?affiliate_id=1892600