tenfootpole.org

by Bill Barsh
for Pacesetter Games & Simulations
AD&D
3rd-5th Level

Jeg vill vaere den förste module!

Holy crap! It’s the Palace of theVampire Queen! Yes, THE Palace of the Vampire Queen! The very first module ever published! (Nah, Frog don’t count.) Wowsers! This version is listed as the eighth print. It contains a forward from the original author, Peter Kerestan, as well as from Bill Barsh, the publisher/augmenter in this printing. This version has all five levels of maps but it also has two keys for each level. Included are the original keys from the earlier publications and also a set of re-imagined keys from Bill Barsh. He updates most of the encounters, attempts to scale things better than the original module did, and provide slightly more logic than the original.

There’s a single page of introduction that lays out the background: There’s a Vampire Queen! She lives in a palace! She’s taken the kings daughter! It’s laid out with some much more interesting flavor text that paints quite the mythic scene. It’s the barest of pretexts and it’s AWESOME! Jeff ‘Padasha Emporer of D&D’ Rients posted it on his blog. Check it out! http://jrients.blogspot.com/2007/02/fragments-from-palace-of-vampire-queen.html

Pretty bad ass! The rest of the pre-module text is really just a map key, a marketing blurb and like four sentences of advice. “Do your own wandering monsters” “DM, use your imagination to add extra detail” and “Read the module ahead of time”. Wooooo doggies! Why can’t all modules be this great? The five levels of maps are great also, especially level one. It’s one of those ‘fill the who page’ maps with something like 50 rooms on it. Lots of hallways, lottsof rooms, lots of doors and secret doors. There’s really only two things on the first level map that betrays its age. First, there’s a certain maze quality to one section in particular. I noticed this in Lich Dungeon also; there seemed to be a trend to have a certain maze layout in sections of the map. A spiral section of corridor that goes nowhere, for example. Second, the map is A W E S O M E!!!! Too many modern ‘dungeons’ have a linear map or just a hallway with a couple of rooms branching off of it. This doesn’t support explorative play in any way. The unknown is known, there no possibility of something coming from down that unexplored hallway. No ambushing and getting ambushed, or sneaking around. Level two through five All have complex maps as well but they seem a little more forced than level one. More like someone drew geometric shapes and then filled it in with rooms. Still, it gets the job done.

How ’bout them encounters, eh? SWEET ass encounters! I have to start making some distinctions here between the glorious mess in the original module and the refinements that Barsh has put on things. The Original keys take up two pages per level. For those of you counting that’s THREE pages per level total: one for the map and two for the keys. The keys come in chart form; one room per line, three columns per line. Monsters name, hits to kill in the middle, and a couple of notes about the room in the third column. Quite a bit of the dungeon rooms are empty. About 32 have no monster and about the same number have no contents for the room. But O M G when there are contents they are bizarre. “15 house cats” or “10 house cats and 1 madman” or 1 wounded warrior, CG.” The monsters combine with the notes “Madman will not fight. Cats will attack if madman is attacked. If left alone he will tell of secret door from level 3 to 4” or “Warrior is prisoner. If asked will warn of rust monster in room 8. If healed will join party.” That is some terse ass writing right there. in the one-page dungeon style. And it woks as well here as it does in the one-pages. A room description just needs enough to it to let the DM fill in the rest. This module does that pretty well. There’s just enough detail in the room contents section to get your brain going. WTF is up with the bandits? Why is there a frigging Balrog in that room?. (YEs, there’s a fucking BALROG in one of the rooms. Note a Type 6, a BALROG. holy shit!) “Table is set for dinner with 5 drained Bandit bodies.” What’s going on with that? This is where Barsh comes in.

Immediately after the original keys there are three or so pages of keys written by Barsh as an alternative keying. It would be best to say that these encounters are inspired by the original encounters but are scaled a bit better. Everyone who sees the first keys and attempts to run the module is going to make up some stories about why the creatures are where they are. Barsh has written down his interpretation and provided it to us. For example, the fighter is no longer a prisoner but is now a wounded guy hiding and he still joins the party if healed. Giant rat rooms are now full of debris and are the dump for the complex. Goblins are now the sometimes menial servants. That Balrog is now a Vrock visiting the vampires, and so forth. Barsh brings some logic and scaling but keeps a lot of the idiosyncratic encounters, like the two wizards, good and evil, who are hunting each other. Sadly, the madman and housecats are gone.

The original module is insanely hard. Recall that Balrog? Well there’s about a gazillion vampires down there also. The module difficulty ramps up seriously around the third level. Barsh mitigates a lot of this in his rekey, especially by introducing the Lesser Vampire to allow his to retain the large number of ‘Vampires’ but not make the adventure absurdly difficult for the players. Both adventures have a distinct lack of ‘tricks’, or things to mess around with in the dungeon but both also have a decent amount of interaction between rooms and groups. The extra text Barsh provides does a decent job putting the various groups in to context. The two versions are both great, perhaps only missing some names for the various rooms (“Bedroom”, “Study”, etc) and maybe some more interesting magical items. If any product could support weird-ass magic items then it would be this one.

A cool historical artifact and a great module.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/264077/V5-Palace-of-the-Vampire-Queen-Castle-Blood?affiliate_id=1892600

by Mark Morrison
for Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

The tiny town of Stonepick Crossing sits on top of an old dwarven dam holding built some 500 years ago to end a long war. Recognizing the futility of direct assault, the dwarves built the dam to flood the goblin caves, flushing the foul creatures out of their caves and into the slaughter of honest combat. Now 500 years later, the dwarves have moved on and a small thorp has sprung up. Mystery surrounds the protected town and rumors abound: locals disappearing in the middle of the night, strange noises from underneath the dam and even rumors of a monster in the lake percolate through the community. Which rumors are true and which are the ale-addled ramblings of old men fearful of their own shadows?

A village supplement! And a High Fantasy village at that! Zzzz…..

Stonepick Crossing is a small village located atop an old dwarven dam. 53 rooms are detailed within the village and another twenty or so are located underneath the dam in two old mini-dungeons. The idea here is that this is a sort of home base village, with the usual intrigues, and a couple of subplots can lead to the the two mini-dungeons located in the dam, each of which has about seven rooms.

The village is the sort of multicultural wonderland that I loathe. Halflings, humans, dwarves, gnomes and elves all living in harmony together. And they all have precious names also! Susie Honeyblosso, April the Wise, Dirk Nightblade and the like. *BARF* The village is also quite small for the community it supports. There’s a thieves guild market with four different stalls in it, including forgeries, poisons, weapons, etc. That seems a bit of a reach for a village built on top of a dam with 53 rooms in it. The watch is on the take, there’s a slaver stealing visitors AND residents off of the streets … gonna run out victims stealing two townspeople a week … Quite the exciting little place!

There’s a lot of people in the village who are not zero level. A LOT. Fourth level fighters, second level thieves, third level illusionists, fifth level clerics and so on. Going hand in hand with this is that the place is crawling with magic items. Magic swords, armor, potions, scrolls, wands and rings are all in much abundance. You will recall that there is a certain school of thought which believes that module B2, The Caves of Chaos, is generally played wrong. There is far more treasure in the keep than in the caves and smart players will loot the keep rather than the caves. Stonepick has the same problem. As a high fantasy village it should be relatively easy for the party to murder the various rosy-cheeked hobbit, humans, and others to loot their corpses and TREASURE BATH.

This is certainly meant to be a kind of home base for the party with the various antics in the village providing a kind of back-drop to their other adventures. It certainly does meet those minimal requirements but it’s lacking in a couple of areas I consider crucial for a village. First, the places are numbered in a strange way. The entire complex is numbered like a traditional dungeon. The numbering starts at one and continues to room number seventy deep in the areas below the dam. The smith is room one and the back room of the smithy is room 2. Room five is the leather store and room six is the back room of the leather store. This layout is strange for a village and doesn’t really help you find things. You’re going to have to annotate the map heavily to get it in to a usable form for the adventurers walking around town.

Secondly there are some strange decision made. A couple of houses are empty or abandoned. Some homes inexplicably get the names of their (mundane) occupants detailed and a couple of noted about them while others, more crucial to the village, get none of that detail. Some vendors have detailed, but short, lists of items for sale. The tailor has seven wool blankets for sale, in addition to four bedrolls, 2 sets of traveling clothes, 4 cloaks, and a blue silk coat. It’s like there’s several different village and town sizes all mashed up and mixed together. A handful of businesses. Most of them not supportable in the population listed. A bait shop and a black market with four stalls, but the only soft goods shop only have five different items for sale?! I strongly believe that the quality of a village/town/city is based on the social interactions between the occupants and that is very much missing from this village. Most of the people seem to live in isolated bubbles and at best provide a rumor about what they say X doing last night, where X is a bad guy. There are two exceptions to this. The wife of missing merchant has a bitter tongue and tells the characters she thinks her husband is off cavorting with a different townsperson, a woman. Secondly the jeweler is attacked by crabmen from a secret door when the party enters his store for the first time. That’s it for the townspeople interactions. Oh, the bait shop salesman(!) will tell you a tall tale, or the beggar man will tell you a couple of things, but neither are really related to village life. This needs a lot more of that to help make the village come to life. As it is the three subplots presented (slavers, hag/crabs, and corrupt town guard/thieves guild) are not really developed very well.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/99009/Advanced-Adventures-22-Stonepick-Crossing?affiliate_id=1892600

by Lou Agresta & Nicolas Logue

for Frog God Games
Swords & Wizardry
5th level

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

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

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

Ya think?

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

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

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

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

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

This is available on DriveThru.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The depths of the underearth weigh heavily upon the party as they delve deeper into the cold, hard stone. Every river has an end, even those that never see the light of day. Many adventures behind, the party continues to find the mouth of the Shadowvein. What lies ahead is surely dangerous, but the lure of the deeps is strong with gold and magic.

This modules continues from where AA#23 left off, with an underground hex crawl an five more hexes detailed. Tis is part two of the great D1 cloning, except at FAR lower levels of experience. The party travels through a map much like that in D1 and has some random encounters on the way. Several hexes along their way, which is a great underground river, are detailed and the map shows several other paths with undefined hex encounters located along these other more numerous, but small, pathways. A very rudimentary random encounter table is provided. You’re looking at about 6 days travel upriver, and with the chance of an encounter only 1 in 12, the party is unlikely to encounter anything random, interesting or not. Much of the introductory text looks to be just a copy/paste job from AA23. “1-2 ogres” is not ground shattering territory.

The first hex details an obstruction in the river that can be bypassed through some caves that immediately cause everyone to go insane and are inhabited by 12 wraiths and a lich. Zowie! That certainly a starting things off with a bang! The lich runs a portage service in which he has skeletons escort people through the caves of insanity to the other side of the obstruction. If the party keeps cool then this is just a little flavor text diversion. If not then they have 50 skeletons, 12 wraiths, and a 20th level lich to contend with. Other than the intriguing possibility of the party interacting with the undead in a a non-violent way there’s one other interesting thing in here. The lich can send the party on a quest if they are bad kids. That may provide the motivation needed to get the party moving toward the end of the river. It’s too bad that this may not show up if the party doesn’t get themselves in to trouble in the lich’s caves.

The next two encounters are quite brief. The second encounter is just with a large group of grimlocks in a wide spot in the corridor. The party can bluster past them if they are strong enough. Or, of course, you could just ignore the entire thing since the map indicates that the wide sport is no near the river and the party is, of course, making their way up the river in boats. If they are not then this is going to a ROUGH encounter for 3rd-5th level characters. There are about 50 of the creatures on a small 60×60 or so room with a 20′ wide hallway leading in and out. A single fireball may soften the dudes up A LOT, so lets hope your MU has it. The third encounter is with a friendly deep gnome mining camp.

The last two encounters are the real meat of this series. Te first is a great open cavern, 2 miles x3 miles, former home to a drow city and now overrun with mold, fungus, and other strange stuff. Mold, algoids, atomies, mites and pesties, mutated shrimp, gambados and … FLUMPHS! And the flumphs make sense! These are less encounters and more broadly outlined environs, as you might find in a Judges Guild or Stater hex crawl. You can also compare this to some of the keyed locations in D3 – Vault of Drow, except with fungus and other things instead of a drow outpost. These are very brief set ups for further adventure. A ruined castle littered with mite and pestie traps, pits, and barbs. Or A solitary monk stone giant interested only in meditation. These locales might get a paragraph or two each, just enough to outline what’s going on, while the rest will need to be expanded upon by the DM. It’s an interesting little environment but devoid of motivations. By that I mean that there’s no reason to get off the boat. Just float on down the river. I really like the various mix of encounters in this room. There is a lot of variety and most are suitably bizarre to be make the players imagine that they really are in a different environment. IE: underground life & civilizations. There’s just not much reason to go poking around and almost no treasure present at all. 250gp at one site and 4000gp at another. I should note that there are no less than four different wandering monster tables for this cavern and that they are chock FULL of interesting and cool encounters. All of the monsters are DOING something. There’s a great flumph migration, returning hunting parties, thieving beasties, nests of hissing giant hissing cockroaches (IE: shriekers) and more! This is EXACTLY what I want to see in a wandering table. A wide variety of encounters and the monsters actually engaged in some activity. This is the kind of stuff that does wonders to jump start my imagination and is one of the best parts of the module in that respect. It’s very easy to do, just a few words tacked on to the end of each description. “scatter before the oncoming party” or “decides they’re what’s for dinner” or “returning from a successful centipede hunt.” I really wish more designers did this and I wish more of that type of detail was in this module.

The last area is the actual great inland sea. The Mouth of the Shadowvein. The goal. An anticlimax? This is the largest location detailed in the undersea and has but a column of text describing what’s going on, followed by a brief description of a ship in the location. The wandering charts for this section are back to the same-old stuff: “2-12 barracuda” or ” “1-4 giant crabs.” The main area of exploration is a ship and it’s almost certainly going to involve a pitched battle. The party will be fighting wave after wave of mutated brine shrimp men as they protect their temple/ship. A nice order of battle is presented in text form to help the DM run the battle. After this battle the rest of the ship is going to be a let down. Several rooms are described but they are all empty and/or non-working. Then why waste time describing them? Or, better yet, put something in them that the party can play with and potentially get in to trouble with or get a boon. Instead it turns out to be a pretty boring place to explore without only one nice thing to play with, some locks. At this point the adventure ends. That’s it. No more. Because there was no end goal it feels like a let down. The entire point of the two modules was to explore/follow the river and now that it’s over … well, what’s next? A few more notes about where to go from here would have been nice.

The main humanoid monster is a bit interesting but is really only just a multi-hd orc out of water. There’s a new dragon that’s not really interesting and a couple of robots that are the best of the new monsters. Robots are cool, just like a fez. There’s a handful of new magic items also. These are VERY good. The bulk of the magical items in the module are just normal old book items but the few new ones are very good. Ok, no, two of the new ones are very good. An amulet of undead control is filed with a bit of the negative material place and glows with a dark purple light when in use. Cool! And it even has negative effects! The Rod of Undead Resurrection is formed from the congealed blood of the corpse of a dead god … the party gets to break it off to loot it! That’s a pretty bad ass origin story. The rod is uber-poerful in it’s present form … as a rod it gets unlimited usage, yes? It basically destroys undead by bringing them back to life … with no save unless it’s been dead for over 200 years. Ouchies! That’s gonna need some charges and/or negative effects there … But still .. VERY COOL!

The module suffers a bit from a a couple of things. FIrst, there’s a need to explain everything. For example there’s a lick who turns invisible and wear boots of elvenkind. I don’t think there’s any need to explain things. He’s a lich. If you want him to walk through walls then just say “he can walk through walls.” The need to explain things removes a lot of the wonder and magic from things. There’s also a bit of a gap in the text. There’s a lot of it, but it doesn’t quite reach the level of evocative very well. I should be drooling all over myself at the great fungus cavern, given my love for such things, but somehow it never really came to life in the text. I don’t think I know how to describe this … too mechanical? I don’t know … Maybe it was just the overall lack of motivation in the adventure. The party is exploring and going down the river just for the sake of doing it and thus has no reason to stop at any location except to explore and loot for XP. I’m ok with that, in fact I prefer it, but perhaps a McGuffin or two in the caverns would have helped get the party off the boat and exploring more things with a glint in their eye.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/101407/Advanced-Adventures-24-The-Mouth-of-the-Shadowvein?affiliate_id=1892600

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