Beneath the Ruins

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Alex Fotinakes
for Phychedelic Fantasies
OSR D&D
Third level?

Each adventure module in the Psychedelic Fantasies line revels in unconstrained imagination. Every monster, every magic power, and every magic spell is a unique and never-before-seen creation of the author. No orcs, fireballs, or +1 swords will be found within. Leave the familiar behind to explore hitherto undreamed of wonders…

Oh, D&D, how I love you!

See what I did there? I subtly mentioned OD&D. I LUV OD&D. Not the game system; that sucks. It’s the attitude that OD&D brings. It’s the first time you experienced a pit trap. It’s the first time you experienced rot grubs, green slime, or a cube. It’s finding some weird ass magical item that you have NO clue what it does “… a helmet studded with sparkling jewels? What’s THAT do?!” OD&D embodies the magic, mystery, whimsy, and wonder of fantasy RPG’s. I don’t give a crap about the system. It’s the FEEL I love. It just so happens that this feel is most closely associated with OD&D in my mind, and in the mind of many other I believe. This adventure brings the OD&D.

There are three columns of introductory text before the adventure kicks off. A brief intro, a history, getting to the dungeon, brief descriptions of the dungeon and some detail on the two different factions that call the dungeon home. It’s not as odious as most introductions and it does provide a good overview of the situation. It also tries a bit too hard at times. There’s a whole OSR philosophy about the mythic underworld and how entering it should be special. This module hits those points and even uses the words ‘mythic underworld.’ That’s a little too much for me; by naming he thing you destroy its power. Up to that point though its AWESOME. At the center of a ruined city stands a large edifice crafted of black stone and untouched by the ages. A large iron gate fronts the facade, mostly closed it is sometimes open. Those who have passed through return changed men; mute, shaking, sometimes wounded, sometimes fabulously wealth, often not at all … A long winding steep stair leads down, near the bottom so narrow you have to turn sideways to fit. AT the bottom a large a underground lake, with a boatman who can take you to the other side. On the edge of the sandy beach is a steep stair leading down in to a cliffside … That’s BAD ASS man! It conjures up all of that cyclopian imagery from years of 70’s fantasy & Lovecraft, and a mish-mash of everything else! The players are gonna be freaking before they even step foot in the dungeon!

The dungeon has about 55 encounter areas in it. The main level has about 39 with two small sub-levels having about 7 each. The sub-level each have a small loop while the main level has about three separate areas, each with their own feel and loops. This is not a super-complex map but it does have enough variety to support some decent explorative play. The players and opponents should be able to bypass encounters and ambush their opponents and get ambushed themselves. That’s the sort of thing I want a map to do; be an actual part of the adventure rather than just a straight line or boring old encounter key. As an extra bonus, at least one secret room can be found by not-so-careful mapping by the players! Score one for attentive payers! There are two wandering monster tables, one for the constructed rooms and one for the natural caverns part of the map. Earwigs, Wall Creeps, Year Puddles, Pholcidae … none of these guys, or any other creature in this module, are going to be found in any monster manual! This does a great job of bringing the atmosphere. Vermin, tribesmen, fungus/yeast things, those are some monsters I can really get in to and should go a long way to really freaking the party out. They’ll have NO idea how powerful it is, what its special attacks are, what its vulnerable to, or anything else. I LOVE that!

The dungeon is in three sections. Two warring tribes take up two sections while the third is considered too dangerous by them to venture in to. The rooms are a good mixture of empty, monster, treasure, and just plain weird. Trip wires trigger stones from the ceiling, cultists held in a stasis bubble, worms bursting through walls to implant their egg sacks in to characters, invisible treasure pots with curses, real curse!, inscribed on them … so much to do, so much to see, so what’s wrong with taking the backstreets, you’ll never know if you don’t go, you’ll never shine if you don’t glow …

And glow you will! There’s a gonzo/technology element at play in parts of this module so there’s a ritual chamber full of The Glow! Hey Kids! Who wants to grow an extra arm! The module also does an ok job of trying to be dynamic: some rooms can change over time, the party can meep corpses of others, and of course there are the factions mentioned earlier. I LOVE factions! They keep the dungeon interesting and help provide a kind of motivation, all with a built in R&R stop for the players. Meet strange new cultures and kill them , or their enemies, or both sides, or play them off against each other while trying to score a lot of treasure for minimal risk … that’s what D&D adventures are made of.

I get a strong nostalgia feel from this module, brining back memories of Dungeoneer and Arduin supplements. That kind of strangeness that filled those pages, but without the mess of their layout and editing. The print version of this is dirt cheep. There’s no art and it’s printed ‘pamphlet style’ on sheets of letter sized paper that then folded lengthwise, making a 11″x4.5″ format. It works perfectly, and presumably it very inexpensive to produce. This is a GREAT first module in this series and I hope to see more. The RPG world deserves to see more OD&D-like content.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/121630/Beneath-the-Ruins-Psychedelic-Fantasies-1?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 4 Comments

Nod magazine

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by John Stater

In this first issue of NOD, you can explore the Wyvern Coast, a sandbox hexcrawl with over 190 encounters. There are six new classes, three new races, a random village generator, a dozen new deities, new monsters, and more! Compatible with most Old School game systems.

I’m still working my way through odds & ends, biding my time till GenCon later this week. Nod is a bimonthly magazine put out by John Stater. John is a very busy man with a blog, Nod magazine, His Hex Crawls from Frog God, his Blood & Treasure game, and seemingly about twelve other major projects. He puts out a large amount of content and his hex crawls are top notch. And you’ll find A LOT of hex crawls in Nod magazine.

Let’s use the first issue as an example. The magazine is about 85 pages long and about 59 pages of that is the hex crawl. The rest of the magazine is devoted to odds & ends that seemingly support the hex crawl. There might be a small article on the gods of Nod, or another one that expands on the races of centaurs and mechanical men, both found in the hex crawl. Issue one has a random village generator and a bestiary unrelated to the main hex crawl. You might also find a new character class or two or a supporting NPC character class. Warrior-men with sub-classes or Wise Women NPC classes make an appearance in issue one.

The hex crawl is the main attraction here. I count 192 hexes detailed from two 8.5×11 maps that are roughly 40 hexes by 25 hexes, one of which is mostly water. This is an INSANE amount of content. The hexes range from a paragraph to several columns. Lionweres, hydrothermal smithies, undersea domes, structures on reefs, villages, palaces … there’s so much here that’s it’s hard to get a grasp on it. The Green Maiden resides in a crumbling castle, cursed to immortality by her cruel father who haunts the forest around the castle. SHe will offer anything to a handsome adventurer to help her break the curse. Of course she’s a kelpie who’s actually luring people to their doom … AWESOME! Classic fairy tale AND killer D&D encounter! The standard treasure is pretty mundane and boring but the magical items are pretty cool. Found atop a stone cairn is a crystalized skull. Holding it fills your mind with dazzling imagery and wondrous song, the holder feels more confident and gets the benefit of a Bless spell. They also find it impossible to concentrate, find hidden things, or cast spells. ATTENTION READERS: THIS IS A GOOD MAGIC ITEM. It’s got a history (cursed Don Juan-ish bard), it’s effects are described, it’s strange and wondrous and has drawbacks. That magic item goes to 11!

Every issue is like this. It’s like getting a terrific sandbox area, or adventure plot generator, along with supplemental material and unrelated material, all for something like $9.50, in print, or $3.00, PDF. This is a crazy good value. If there’s a problem then it’s with the print version and the maps. They don’t reproduce well and I suspect the full PDF has a full color version that comes out much better. Both version would benefit from a DOT or other object in the hexes that have more detail.

Nod is very very good. If you’re a DM with a half a brain for improvising then you should be able to find more than enough in even one issue to keep your gaming going for months if not YEARS at a time. It may be the best value in fantasy gaming and is consistently of very high quality … which I’ll define as whimsical, imaginative, and inventive.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/213991/NOD-BUNDLE?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 2 Comments

Lesserton & Mor

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Bryce Lynch


By Jeff & Joel Sparks
for Faster Monkey Games
Labyrinth Lord

Once, the vast city of Great Mor stood as mankind’s proudest achievement, civilization’s farthest outpost, impregnable to any invasion… or so the Dukes of Morland believed. But when the mighty Half-Orc Lord unified all the barbaric humans and humanoids of Eastern Valnwall into a single giant army, and the Wood Elf King abandoned the humans to their doom, Great Mor fell. Something more than warfare tore through the city, destroying invader and defender alike, laying waste for miles around. The survivors clung to a bit of rock in the swamp and slowly built up the town of Lesserton: home base for any who dare enter the Ruins of Mor and hope to return with treasure and their lives.

I don’t usually review non-adventure supplements. I’m also near the bottom of my pile of purchases and it’s getting close to my GenCon pile refresh, so I’m filling in a bit with related products until I get my GenCon purchases in. Thus we get a review of Lesserton & Mor, which kind of fits my reviewing profile and kind of doesn’t.

Mor is an old ruined city full of adventure and Lesserton is the refugee camp that grew from its downfall and now makes its living thriving off of people going to Mor to adventure. A classic dungeon/home base set up. Only this time the dungeon is a very generic hex crawl in a ruined city and the home base fills the vast majority of content. There are three booklets provided: a players guide for characters who grew up in the region, a DM’s guide to Mor, containing the tables to create a hex crawl and a few other tidbits about the ruined city, and the DM’s guide to Lesserton, the largest of the books, describing the little town that’s always happy to fleece an adventurer.

Mor is a DM created Hex Crawl inside the walls of a ruined city. It’s about 26 hexes wide and about 20 hexes high, with each hex being about 120 yards. The referees book describes the basic layout, the various ways to get inside the walls, and the five or so main clans of Orkin/mutants that live in and near the city. These clans all have a totem and something special associated with it: fermenting honey in to drugs, poison spears, and so forth. They are also not immediately hostile and are willing to trade with parties, and also have inter-clan rivalries and hatreds. This is a great way to introduce role-playing and factions in to what could have otherwise been a straight-up hack. The rest of the book is divided in to two section. The first has various nested/chained tables that can be used to populate the various hexes in the city; terrain, occupants, intact buildings, weird stuff, monsters, etc.

It’s quite extensive and quite varied as well. There’s an excellent example at the end of this section that details how a series of four randomly generated hexes can be linked together to tell a story for the area. It’s a great example of how the DM can create a real environment by using the random table rolls for inspiration. The last section details the remaining Hate Elementals (IE: the force that animates skeletons, gargoyles and the like. Very Nice!) and the Petromorph Queen. She’s the mother of all trappers, mimics, etc. Both are cute little details that give a nice bit of strangeness to this setting. All in all, not so much an adventure as a setting generator with the DM randomly creating the hexes for a crawl.

The Lesserton booklet is about 2.5 times thicker than the Mor booklet. It does a pretty good job of detailing the history and feel of the town. Included in the first 26 page section are various tables and data to help you run the city. Generating random adventuring parties, the intolerance of various neighborhoods and peoples. Cost of living, haggling, gambling, drinking, bribery, hirelings, rumors, etc. This part also has little four page section on getting experience points from spending cash in town. Similar themes date back to the “Orgies Inc” article in an early Dragon and Jeff Rients infamous Carousing rules. This first section of the booklet is 26 pages long and does a job job of giving the DM a feel for the city and how it actually work. The tables and so on are just supplemental to this feel. Once you have it you could probably run the town without ever looking at the book again. The second section consist of 40 or so pages and details 70 or places of interest and business in town. Most of these are fairly typical and not very noteworthy but a few gems stand out. There is, for example, a talented and poor woodcarver who hates his wealthy rival and gets charity jobs from a nearby business, which he feels is beneath him. These sorts of interrelated personalities and businesses are the exception though. Most of the entries either have a normal business or some unusual character in them, perhaps with an adventure hook. Still, there’s more then enough of the unusual to keep the town hopping but not enough to turn it in to a farce. There are a couple of magic shops, but they are designed to be easily removed. There’s a small included adventure in the back that I would probably ignore. There’s one major cross-business organization detailed in the book, a kind of mob-like organization, and the adventure destroys that organization and its leader.

I suspect its best if that happen naturally during play rather than being introduced as an explicit adventure, especially since it can add so much color to the town as an ongoing home base. It should be fairly easy to lift the entire place and place it next to Stonehell of The Darkness Beneath if you’d like a more extensive town for the players in those settings. I’m likely to steal the ‘feel’ of the town and many of the businesses and personalities for inclusion in my own town. From that angle, it’s a great supplement.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/88764/Lesserton–Mor?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

DCC50 – Vault of the Iron Overlord

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Monte Cook
for Goodman Games
d20/3.5
Levels 7-9

Chaos reigns in the kingdom as the king and queen have died, leaving no heirs. The heroes are commissioned to go into the king’s vault to retrieve the scepter of succession, a magical relic that legends claim to be able to determine who should be the rightful ruler of the kingdom. The king kept his treasures in no ordinary vault, however. The so-called Vault of Rings was designed to not only keep out thieves but to train his heir, who would be unable to access the kingdom’s wealth until he or she could overcome the trials and obstacles found within the vault…

I’m a sucker for a gimmick and this babies got one. First, the gimmick, which is the ONLY reason I bought this. The titular vault is circular and is made up of four concentric rings. The inside three rings all rotate independently of each other. It’s very similar to a combat wheel or the Faster Money Turn Tracker. The rings rotate and the characters have to line up the doors to make their way from the outer ring to the inner one. LOVE IT!

Unfortunately just about every thing else in this adventure is a big stinking pile of the usual 3/3.5 design mashed up with a 1st edition tournament module … a funhouse one at that. Linear design, monsters attacking on sight, giant lengthy stat blocks, absurdly forced explanations; it’s all present. King & Queen Dipshit spent a fortune on a proving and testing ground for the heir to the kingdom and then died without children. And therein, gentle readers to find the original sin: a testing & proving ground. IE: Lazy Designer Syndrome. “I want to throw together a bunch of shit that doesn’t make sense and a bunch of absurd situations … I got it! It’s a test for the heir!”

You get three hooks. #1: The party is hired by a potential heir to get a McGuffin the center of the vault. #2: The party does the right thing and tracks down the royals killer, which is in the center of the vault. #3: The party are greedy and want the cash from the kingdoms treasury, in the center of the vault. #3 is clearly the most old school of them, especially if the the Kingdom just up & decided to become a democracy so they wouldn’t have to deal with nutso kings anymore.

Most rooms have a trap, a monster, and/or an activator which moves the rings a number of steps clockwise or counter-clockwise. The party has to activate the correct buttons/levels in order to get the doors to the next ring to line up. There are some clues scattered around but that doesn’t really matter since the party is just going to kill everything anyway … because that’s the way the module is set up. The first ring is completely linear; the party works their way around the ring encountering monsters and traps. Eventually everything will be dead/avoided and the party can experiment with the buttons. There’s a token wandering monster table of derro, a unique Xorn, and the Iron Overlord to keep the party moving, but that’s mostly ineffective. The rooms are a combination of Grimtooth and Jr High design. The first monster is a Gorgon that is trained to stand perfectly still on a pedestal until someone enters the room. I am not amused. All of the creature encounters fall in to that same category. Something captured by the Iron Overlord and now living in the dungeon, fed by the derro and Xorn, which, while hating their servitude, attack immediately on sight. This is all exacerbated by the fact that the dungeon has recently been invaded by two other adventuring parties with one person still alive. Somehow these other parties have avoided the traps and monsters. Well, that and the fact that the derro and Xorn have reset all of the traps, cleaned up the bodies and restocked many of the monsters. We should also not forget that the party is forced to visit almost all of the rooms because of the linear nature of the place. Creative thinking is not encouraged: the interior rings have poison gas in them that is magically negated by solving the locking puzzle of the ring you are on and the walls between the rings are full of lead and iron walls to negate spells. Look, I know you want the party to experience the magnificence of your adventure EXACTLY the way you planned for them to, but if you can’t think of another way to handle things then maybe you write the thing for lower level characters?

And then there are the skill checks. An overly large number of things in the adventure rely on skill checks by the party … especially knowledge checks. Didn’t make your DC20 Knowledge(Nobility) check? Tough luck kiddo. Time to trek out of the dungeon and find a local expert to help you out. Hiring help is a time honored D&D tradition, although it usually takes the form of men-at-arms. Getting the Sage to go IN to the dungeon with you will be an entirely different kind of hiring process. Make you knowledge check or make your search check or be prevented from advancing. This is NOT the way to use skills. If the characters must succeed in a check in order to complete the adventure then you’ve written the adventure incorrectly. Blocking on a failed search check is a problem, especially since you can’t prove a negative and thus can never be sure you were actually SUPPOSED to search or if you rolled high enough. Or any of a dozen different examples. It’s a tax system. Did you spend enough points in Know(Nobility)? No? Then no further adventure for you. In the next adventure it might be swimming, or some other bullshit thing. It’s poor design.

The treasure sucks. The magic items are all generic book items and the mundane treasure is too little and too far between. The royal treasury in the middle has about 5000gp. There are a couple of gold leaf and gem inlay things that can be scrapped off and looted by they are only worth about 10gp or so. This is not a reward for a creative play, it’s a punishment.

The main villain, the Iron Overlord, is a bit interesting. The party is going to fight and kill him three times in the adventure. He’s a body within a shell within a shell. Kill the outer shell in the first ring and the second shell pops out and teleports away. Kill the second shell in the second ring and the third body pops out and teleports away. It’s gimmicky but it DOES at least foreshadow the villain and set the party up actually hate and fear him. It’s also a pretty lame way of taking away a parties kill.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/50782/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-50-Vault-of-the-Iron-Overlord?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

S1 – The Goblin Fair

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Matt Finch and James Hazeltine
for Airweaver Games
d20/3e
4th-6th levels

By the dark of the gibbous moon, the fantastical folk of the fey realms gather for one day ay the Goblin Fair: to bargain with merchants of the unique, rare, and the bizarre; to duel with centuries-old enemies by starlight; to dally with faerie maidens by moonlight; to trade and quarrel, feud, parlay, revel and frivol. Ogres and dryads, hags and giants, elves and goblins, centaurs and hedge fey, they gather under the darkling green boughs of the Oldainhan Forest. The wizard Brandon Mistcloak has been trapped by his enemies in his manse Sparrowspell. The key to his rescue is the enchanted book, Taig Tell. He offers mysterious and wonderful rewards for the return of the Book. WIll the party enter the Oldainhan on the trail of the enchanted book to win the wizard’s reward> A trail leads to … The Goblin Fair.
While browsing the 3e/d20 wholesale booth at Origins, looking for 3e Judges Guild conversions, I stuck my hand in to a steaming pile of d20 and out came this little guy. Low and behold, it was authored by Matt Finch! A bit of casual research appears to indicate that it’s the first item published with his name on it, a full four years or so before the OSRIC monsters book and Dungeon Hazards were released. It looks like the publisher, Airweaver, printed just this one supplement and then disappeared, along with everyone else involved in the booklet, except for Finch. There was a lot of crap put out in the d20/3e era … but this is one of the examples of the good ideas leaking through. It’s got some great content surrounded by an iffy adventure.
First, a disclaimer. I like fairies, at least as long as they are being bizarre. They fall in to the same irrational pot as barrows, slimes, molds, and fungi, and old world fairy tales. For whatever reason I really dig the kind of capricious and bizarre behavior that they can bring. Perhaps because they were the last remnant of otherworldly behavior in a game that turned almost all humanoid monsters and demi-humans in to just another example of ‘humans with points ears?’ Don’t know … but you’ve been warned.

This puppy is about 45 pages long. The first eight pages are composed of boring ass introduction and flavor text. The last eight pages are appendices with monster stats, etc. There are fives pages near the end that have ‘the adventure’ … recovering a book. The huge section in the middle, about 35 pages, detail the Goblin Fair. That’s the best part of the book and should be easy to lift in to whatever game you’re running.

The adventure here is just a throw-away in order for the players to experience the fair. There’s a jerk of a wizard trapped in his house and he needs the party to retrieve a book so he can get out. The party goes to the fair to find the ogre mage with the book, only to finally discover he sold it to a cloud giant. Going to the giants castle revels the book was stolen by some wererats. The party kills the rats, gets the book, and goes back to the wizard. Even this portion has a certain charm to it. Sparrows pesters the characters until they talk to the wizard. Polite bugbears invite the characters to dinner. Dobbin the idiot hill giant at the castle gates reads his instructions to the party exactly as written down. The cloud giant is not home but his pretty human wife is, giving the party 30 minutes to get the book from the rats … while she flirts with them. Finally, the mouse hole in the kitchen is 2 feet wide and 3 feet tall! These are all excellent little touches which give the adventure that fairy tale and fey feel that I enjoy so much. They are also surrounded by MOUNTAINS of text. Mountains of read-aloud text. Mountains of DM text. Mountains of text Text TEXT. So much so that it makes it hard to pick out the details needed to run the adventure. While it’s strongly implied that the bugbears, hill giant, and rats all attack the party it never actually SAYS that in the adventure. For example, the hill giant picks up his club and prepares to attack, and so on. So, it’s not a railroad in that sense, which I’m very happy to see coming from Finch.

The Goblin Fair portion makes up the largest section of the book. There are three encounters on the road through the forest to the fair, 27 booths detailed at the fair, and 23 random encounters the party can have. That’s quite a bit; there are village and town supplements which don’t have as many encounters in them. They almost all have that whimsical quality which separates PH elves from the fairies of old. There’s a bridge on the road to the fair with a goblin next to it in bright red pants and yellow boots who claims to own it and charges a fee for using it. If the party gives him a hard time he calls to his buddies/renters, Mort and Tom Crawlmeat, the trolls who live under the bridge. OF COURSE there are trolls under the bridge and OF COURSE the trolls are named Mort and Tom! More perfect bridge troll names I have never heard! In other encounters a hideous spider wants a kiss, and two elves (REAL fucking elves, mind you!) are skeet shooting goblins with a catapult and their bows. I know I bitch a lot about read-aloud text, but the text in this section is priceless, full of a dry wit. One of the encounters at the fair is an Elven Knight on a White Warpig. The entire fair portion is full of this kind of content. Booths for the party to explore and whimsical encounters for the party to interact with, angry chickens, talking stags, hags, drunk ents, peacocks, slavers … it’s all great fun.

This is full of imagination, if not terseness.

Posted in Level 4, No Regerts, Reviews | 1 Comment

The Purple Worm Graveyard

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Tony Dowler

for Planet Thirteen

Labyrinth Lord

Levels 1-3

It is said that when the largest and most ancient of purple worms know that the time of their death is near, they make their way through rock, earth, and water to the legendary Purple Worm Graveyard. The graveyard is said to lie somewhere in the barren Rockspyre mountains, but its exact location is unknown. Now and then an adventuring expedition sets out on a hunch or clue seeking the graveyard. Most return empty-handed and dispirited. Some never return. But a few, just enough to keep the legend alive really, come back with whispered tales of subterranean fields littered with a fortune in purple ivory, unguarded and ripe for the take.

This module, while short, is illustrative of many of the aspects that make up a good module. That’s not too much of a surprise since The Dungeon Alphabet is noted as a portion of the inspiration for the adventure. The setting, a place where purple worms go to die, is mythic without being absurd or overly heroic. The motivation is one of the best: GREED. All that purple worm ivory is worth a fortune. 🙂

The dungeon is has only about fifteen encounters while the map is has only one loop. While the map is visually interesting the small size and simplicity of it makes it hard to support the full type of exploratory play that I typically enjoy. I’m sure many people will run this as a short one-off. I do quite a lot of those for my wife’s meet-up and I typically prefer something that the players can’t fully explore in one session as a one-shot. Shadowbrook Manor, or Tegal for example. I like the air of mystery that these larger environments provide when they can’t be fully explored in a single session. It gives that feeling of the unknown and of things going on around the players that I think they really enjoy.

Most of the complex is composed of a ‘temple’ to the worm god, while only a couple deal with the large cavern that serves as the graveyard. The very first encounter, with a magic mouth at a T intersection, immediately brings to mind that illustration in the … Players Handbook? of the party that meets the magic mouth in the hallway. Ah, nostalgia, you are a powerful force! It’s also a great way to start an adventure, as the graffiti in both Stonehell and Rients megadungeons prove out. There are a couple of trap rooms which seem to have come straight out of a less deadly but still Goldberg-esque version of Grimtooth. The rest of the dungeon is full of the strange little things that I equate D&D with: paintings you can crawl through, puddles which are ooze, topless maggot nagas, strange statues, weird pools of water, mushroom gardens, and the ‘Dungeon Moves.’ Evidentially these little 3-effect charts were popularized in the Apocalypse World book. Old time D&D players will recognize them as slightly standardized versions of Tricks. The player interacts with something in the dungeon and then rolls 2d6 plus a stat bonus/penalty. Good rolls get you something positive, low rolls get you some penalty. These little subsystems were a common part of older D&D games and it’s nice to see them make a return.

The graveyard proper is a push your luck contest with the party. The more ivory they gather the more money they’ll get and the greater the chance that a purple worm will show up … a career-ending purple worm in all probability. There are three magic items of interest and all have that extra detail that I enjoy. For example, Beebart’s Dagger gets a little one sentence physical description, and a one sentence flavor text description of its effect: +2 to hit but not damage. The other two magic items are just as good, especially a very large gem that has to be destroyed to be used … tough decision there.  In a move that Gygax could have learned from, there is a brief 1-page listing of all the monster stats on the last page of the adventure. This shows an understanding of what is useful in actual play. It’s a pain to look things up and flipping to the last page/back cover is much simpler. These sorts of GM aids are what show to me that the module was playtested before it showed up in its final form.

This is an interesting little product and well worth picking up, if just to learn from.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/93562/The-Purple-Worm-Graveyard?affiliate_id=1892600

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 1 Comment

FLA01 – The Secrets of the Summoning Chamber

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Delmar Watkins
Fifty Latches
OSRIC
Levels 3-5

An ancient wizards lair now holds more than just the remnants of failed experiments. It is up to the brave adventurers to end threat to the nearby town and plunder the Wizard’s summoning room.

This is a short little adventure consisting of eight encounters. Yes, encounters. The layout of the adventure emulates the fourth edition style. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just usually bad in practice. You know, stat blocks, battle maps, terse room descriptions. Those could all be used to create a great old style adventure. It’s just usually surrounded by a bad adventure. And it’s bad here.

There was a wizard and he had a dungeon he used for his experiments. Something went wrong and he died in it. A thousand years pass. Some ghouls take up residence. Then some bugbears move in and wall up the ghouls and the older wizard portion of the dungeon. Then the party shows up.

Unfortunately the encounters are right on top of each other. It seems likely that the designer intended for the encounters to be separate and distinct, while in an older style adventure the monsters would pull from their allies in the next room. For example, encounter one has four bugbears and six dire wolves. Encounter two has five more bugbears behind a door on the encounter one room. Encounter three has six bugbears and two giants rats behind the door on the other side of the encounter one room. And so it goes. At best the encounters have tactical advice for the DM. The rooms themselves offer very little beyond the monsters in them and the tactical elements they use. The magic items are all book related and just listed at the end of the encounter key. The room descriptions are done in a terse format that somehow pads out the adventure.

Light: none.
Smells: None.
Entrance: Door to the east, locked.
Ambient: A chill fills the air.
Inhabitants: One banshee.
Room Contents:
Straw in NE corner
Skeleton in NW corner
Mold in SW corner
Quick Descriptors: pulverized, mangled, destroyed, decimated, crushed, splintered.

It’s all very … I don’t know. Dry? I get what the designer is trying to do but somehow the impact is lost, probably because there’s nothing to it other than dry flavor text. This is then further padded out by having a stat block for each creature, including all of their saves and THAC0.

I m at a loss in figuring out how to describe of review this more. Several of the layout ideas are interesting. Certainly noting lighting and sounds is useful, but perhaps would be better if somehow noted on the map instead. The inclusion of elements to be used in combat, a well or a pit to get thrown in to, are certainly welcome as well.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/64298/The-Secrets-of-the-Summoning-Chamber?affiliate_id=1892600

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The Sanctuary Ruin

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Eric Jones
for Ludibrium Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 1-3

The Bleak Tower, seat of the Margrave, liege of the border province of Blackmarch—the stage is set for a classic dungeon delve, unexpected villains, and a place for adventurers to rest and recuperate not without its own mysteries.

This is the third adventure, of three, that I’ve reviewed from Lubidrium Games. The first two, Ironwood Gorge and Kingmaker, were quite excellent. This one is a more basic but VERY well done for what it is; you can see many flashes of the designers talent in it even though the adventure is more mundane. If you don’t like mushroom men and gonzo and instead prefer orcs and goblins then I certainly recommend this adventure.

It’s set in and around the Ironwood Forest near the Bleak Tower. The tower, and it’s inn, is meant to be a home base for the party while they explore the environment. The home base is quite confined, consisting of the front door of the tower, which the party are not going to get past, and the small inn. The inn has four characters described: the innkeeper, his wife, the smith who lives out back, and a provisioner who hangs out in the common room. These re not in depth description, just a sentence or so in most cases, but they do convey a great deal of information and I found they really helped me get a good picture of the NPC in my mind. This is invaluable in playing them in a game and the ability to do this in just a couple of words or sentences is a rare talent … the designer is to be lauded.

The adventure is in four parts. There’s an initial encounter on the road before the party gets to the tower. There’s a wilderness journey to some ruins, with a single programmed encounter in the forest and lots of opportunity for wanderers. There’s the ruins themselves and then finally there’s the power behind it all.

The initial encounter has the party stumbling across some goblins on the road who have ambushed a wagon and killed most everyone. It’s actually hard for me to think of something much more basic than this in an adventure. And yet … the designer does a great job describing what’s going on. They goblins are having a jolly old time roasting the flank of a donkey on the road while a dead dwarf peppered with arrows lays nearby. The leader has himself set up on a big old chest and I can just see his pot belly hanging out while he smacks on something, his face and hands greasy with meat, while the halfing in the chest underneath him squirms to get out. That’s some GREAT imagery, done with a bare minimum amount of words, that really helps my imagination when running this encounter. This encounter leads in to the inn at the tower, with its included rumor table, that will lead the players to try and find the Ruined Sanctuary.

Part the Second is the wilderness adventure to the ruins. Following an old dirt track takes the players through the Ironwood Forest for 35 miles. At a movement rate of 30 miles per day and a wandering monster check of 1 in 6 once per hour, that means roughly 6 random wilderness encounters before the party reaches the ruins. This would mean encountering 2 2hd toads, 10 goblins, 1.3 3HD giant spiders and 1 5HD cockatrice, long with one of those encounters repeated. Ouch! And thats in addition to the one static encounter at some mini-ruins on a hill with 8 goblins and a MU. (Which, again, has a great but short description associated with it. One day I’m going to deconstruct how he gets such good results from such short text.) Anyway, the wanderers feel a little heavy to me. Normally I’m ok with some heavy hitters on the table but I also like a good variety and a four entry table loaded down with heavy encounters seems a little rough to me.

The ruins have some stairs going down … along with a secondary entrance i the party searches well. I LOVE dungeons is a second entrance; it gives the party a chance to sneak around and try and be quiet before going all hack and slash and variety keeps the dungeon and interesting. The map has 20 encounter areas and is a mix between worked stone and natural caverns. The map has five or six loops in it and is quite well done for being such a small one. There’s a natural underground river, a bridge over it, tunnels that go over and under others, collapsed tunnels that the DM can expand with their own content, pools, chasms, obstructions, mini-stairs … I’m quite pleased with it. I like the extra detail provided by the multi-level terrain features and rubble; these help me run interesting combats and also break up the monotony of Just Another Dungeon Corridor. The loops help the party avoid combats or come at rooms from a different direction, as well as allowing the party and the monsters to ambush and be ambushed … and in this dungeon, flee for their lives. The goblins have the front door locked, which is going to to be the first challenge for the party. Beyond this there are A LOT of goblins present, and in several rooms the goblins are going to have the upper hand, tactically, if the party just hacks in. There is a crazed NPC in the dungeon, as well as hidden rooms you have to swim/wade through to get to, and great rot grub encounter. (I LUV rot grubs!) At some point in the adventure the dungeon is going to be raided by orcs also! This kind of stuff is BAD ASS. It makes it feel like this is a real place in the real world …. things happen outside of the actions of the party. Another example is how the goblins react to the party. If the party makes a decent incursion and then leaves then the goblins gather some poison mushrooms and poison the inns well, making everyone sick. What?!!? Monsters counter-attacking the parties base!?! Unheard of! And absolutely wonderful! Further, the orcs are smart ad tough and they use fire well. It is suggested that they be introduced by a flaming goblin that comes screaming at the party in the direction of the entrance … another example of great imagery introduced through terse writing.

The fourth act is taking care of the powers behind things. It’s short, deadly, and can catch an unprepared party with its pants down, to murderous ends. The treasure seems a bit light for a gold=xp game, and while there is a bronze cup and/or gold necklace thrown in, there not a great deal of variety in the mundane treasure. What little magic there is mostly book items, with a single new items thrown in. I do like my magic items to be more wondrous than book, as I feel it adds more mystery and wonder to the game.

The adventure feels more 1E than 0E, what with its goblins, orcs, and the like. This makes it very hard for me to get excited about it. I read another review of this module which indicated something to the effect of this module getting a lot right, unfortunately a lot of first level modules before this one also get a lot right. Well, that guys wrong. Not a lot of modules get things right. Most are garbage, even most of the TSR stuff. This module absolutely gets it right. I wouldn’t hesitate keeping it around, even in a 0E game. The ruins/inn would make a great location in a sandbox game, and might replace the goblins/orcs with bandits/raiders in order to emphasize the weird more.

It is seldom the case that I like everything a publisher puts out once they’ve got multiple modules for sale. Ludibrium is the exception. I can heartily recommend picking up all three of their modules. They are PDF, so they are inexpensive as well.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/83877/The-Sanctuary-Ruin?affiliate_id=1892600

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CLA4 – The Ruins of Ramat

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by John Adams
Brave Halfling Publishing
Labyrinth Lord
1st Level Characters

A little girl comes running and crying into the center of the village. When questioned, she sobs that she and her dog were playing just outside of town by that old stone building on Witch’s Hill, when a giant, clawed creature came up out of the ground and took her dog. The girl is obviously completely terrified and her dog, which never normally leaves her side, is nowhere to be seen. You and your companions volunteer to look into the matter. After all, local legends say that vast amounts of treasure lay under the darkness of Witch’s Hill. The village elders agree to let you and your party investigate the incident; indeed they almost seem relieved to do so.

This is a very basic and very traditional first level adventure. The dungeon is pretty small, just 17 rooms or so, and is laid out in a giant square corridor with rooms intersecting it or branching off of it. It’s a pretty basic design that is augmented by a pretty basic wandering monster table: normal rats, giant centipedes, giant bats, and skeletons. That’s some pretty basic monsters … probably too basic. I generally like my wanderers to be doing a little something when they are met. Gnawing on a body, pooping on the parties head … SOMETHING. The dungeon entrance is a slick and moss covered rubble stair that enters in to a rubble chamber with sunlight filtering through the hole in the ceiling and a giant spider in the room. That’s one of the most interesting room in the dungeon. The place is full of vermin, spiders mostly, and undead. And by “full of” I mean 9 skeletons, a shadow, a huecuva, some bats, and two tentacle monsters awaiting some japa^H^H^H^H PC’s.

I find it extremely difficult to write reviews for products like this one. I gush incoherently about great adventures and I tear in to the ones that set my teeth on edge, but these sorts of “generic dungeon crawl” adventures are the hardest to write about. I don’t consider myself a very imaginative person anymore but even _I_ could come up with this adventure on the fly. It’s just not a avery interesting place to explore. The environment is not evocative at all, giving the DM very little to work with in order to fill it out with detail. It feels like …drudgery, I think … some kind of 9 to 5 in a job you don’t particularly like dungeon. I want a friday night adult pool party dungeon, full of liquor and loose women. I want something that makes you fantasize and gets your imagination going. Something that the party gets excited about adventuring and makes then scream or dare each other to ‘Sit in the chair! Sit in the chair!’. [I knew damn well I was gonna sit on that throne at Rients’ GaryCon game.]

This module tries sometimes. The entrance is evocative, although a bit wordy. The hentai monsters are new and would probably freak the party out … but they are not really meant to be fought. The idea is that the party finds a certain artifact in the dungeon, fails a save, and is then compelled to go to the main temple to place the artifact on the main alter, which magically destroys all of the undead and the hentai monsters. To do this the party has to find some non-obvious secret doors and solve a puzzle. I find it hard to believe very many parties will find the doors. Normally this wouldn’t be such a big deal, and perhaps even be a good design issue … leaving something for the party to return to at a later date. This time though the hentai monster room specifically states that the party has to be very skilled and very lucky to defeat the tentacle monsters without the spear. In a megadungeon would be ok but in a small one like this I think it may be pushing things a bit. Maybe you could weave this in to a sandbox setting and have the party come back level after level trying to figure out whats up … but as a one-shot and/or isolated fire and forget dungeon it’s more than

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/65697/The-Ruins-of-Ramat-CC?affiliate_id=1892600

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AW2 – The People of the Pit

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

by Alphonso Warden
Brave Halfling Publishing
OSRIC
Levels 5-7

Several millennia back, the peoples of the mighty Kingdom of Merritt entered into all-out war with their long-time nemesis, the People of the Pit, a nefarious race of slug-like creatures hailing from a vast subterranean city lying on their northern border. Though the battle was hard fought, with both sides initially incurring heavy losses, the Merrittians in due course gained the upper hand, almost wholly exterminating their foe. Even the very god of the People of Pit was banished to the lower planes by a cabal of Merrittian magic-users and clerics, or so they thought. Recently, the evil within the city of the People of the Pit has surged yet again, and it is up to you to see that it doesn’t spill out into the surrounding lands.

This is more of a setting than an adventure and it falls wholly in the the Weird Fantasy category. A crazed old man stumbles in to a bar and relates a story to the party of strange creatures and fabulous treasures in a ruined city underground that is nearby. The party finds a huge cavern full of weird alien buildings. During the day it’s full of vermin and slave warriors while at night the strange slug-like People of the Pit materialize in and perform their weird rituals. That’s about the extent of the adventure. The party is expected to raid the city, I guess, killing and looting. I’m not really complaining about the whole ethics of the situation but rather the motivation for it. As the DM you’re going to have to put in some not so small amount of work to motivate the players to explore the city and more to add detail to otherwise generic weird fantasy locations. It reminds me quite a bit of the open and somewhat generic portion of the Vault of Drow.

The cavern is roughly circular with a 3600 foot diameter. About 1/5’s if full of a lake with a temple on it. The rest of the cavern has several small ponds in it, some strange forests and maybe 50 or so other structures. The other structures are either homes, armories, warehouses, or libraries. Within the type of building each building will have the same floorplan and the same description. There is a slight amount of localization in the residences depending on it being occupied by slaves of Pit People and the class of the occupants. For example, IF there is a chest, and the resident is a wizard, it will be wizard locked and fireballed. Otherwise if it mechanically locked and Glyphed. The contents come off of several 10-entry or 20-entry tables at the end. Most of it is 1000gp treasure or some minor magical item, like a _2 mace or scroll of cure light, although the occasional Ring of Regen or Necklace of Missiles shows up. The Armories are much the same, except you might (50%) find a +2 weapon instead of a +1. The random lakes are ALL full of giant crayfish and water weirds. The forests are all full of Pit Tree monsters. It is this kind of repetitive description/encounters that waters down the settings more bizarre and imaginative elements. What’s left is random scenic tidbits of bizarre and weird fantasy surrounded by repetitive generic elements.

An additional map is provided for the High Temple of the Pit. It has 21 room on two levels and has a long corridor with other dead-end corridors and rooms branching off of. The temple has a lot of save or die traps, and worse. There are five in the first five rooms, including the old ‘doorway is actually a sphere of annihilation’ trap. Each room appears to have some kind of major trap or another, with a couple having some major magic items also, like a staff of the magic or mace of disruption. There’s A LOT of magic in this adventure and A LOT of high level items in the temple. One or two rooms have something interesting, like the rooms that rains normals slugs on the party, but for the most part the encounters are a bit uninspiring. Everything is presented is of such a dry mechanical nature that its hard to wade through it all.

I spite of this place being a strange and bizarre land, all of the magic items are mundane. +1 swords. Scrolls of cure light, staff of striking, etc. Everything comes out of the book. A real opportunity was lost in not providing more unique items. You’ve got slug-like creatures from the damn of time and … + 1 swords. Almost every creature the party meets will be 7th level or so and many come in groups and thus I find it hard to believe that the level 5-7 range is accurate. The entire adventure seems to have a mis-placed sense of trying to create horror. It thinks horror is death trap or a group of 16HD monsters who attack your party immediately. That’s not horror, that’s just bad design. Inn of Lost Heroes is horror. s written this module will kill parties that are close to twice its recommended level. Sending long-running characters on a death mission like this make you the worse kind of DM possible.

A 10-th level party playing a one-shot might find some fun in this, especially if the DM puts in a lot of work to help augment the excellent atmosphere with encounters that match. It could also be mined for the atmosphere and the few encounters which are actually interesting, such as the slug rain.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/61385/The-People-of-the-Pit?affiliate_id=1892600

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