F1 – The Fane of Poisoned Prophecies

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is available on DriveThru.

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

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

GenCon 2012 Report

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Bryce Lynch

I’m soliciting feedback on a few things in this longish report, so get busy replying and telling me what a huge jerk I am, or how I’m wrong!

It’s not clear ow long I’m going to leave this article up. I don’t like to clog up the reviews with pontifications.
Wednesday afternoon
I did some chauffeur work for some of the staff and then I checked in to the JW ad walked over to Will Call. I stopped by the lockers on the way but was out of change. This would hurt. Will Call just barely spilled out of the pipe & rope at 3:30pm and the line was moving fast. It looks like they switched over this year from ‘split in to multiple lines based on your last name’ to just a single line. I believe I recently read a paper that proved this queue mechanism moved faster and indeed it did. A much-needed improvement. Anyway, I was only picking up 3 last minute tickets for events Thursday and Friday so I was happy I didn’t have a long wait. I picked up the kids from the bus and we headed to Scotty’s for dinner before going home so they could do their homework. Scotty’s wasn’t yet stooopid crowded but they did have the con menu, had the banners up, and were playing fantasy movies on the Tv’s not showing sports. The menu was … difficult. I had a hard time figuring out what food item was what for several of the items and finally restored to asking the server if there was a burger on the menu. Little Girl and I split that while PokeBoy had a grilled cheese and we started off with pickle chips. The Pretty Girl then showed from her drive down form work and had a salad before dashing off to True Dungeon for the volunteer orientation. Our pickle chips never arrived. It was the servers first night. Hell of a weekend to start off your new serving job. I’m local so I get to try these places out when it’s not GenCon. The Ram sometimes has decent appetizers but entrees are not very good and the place stinks. Scotty’s food is just plain not good. I tok the kids so they could get some pre-con mindset going but next year I need to find something that doesn’t suck. It must be popular because they let people camp and play games?

Thursday morning
I dropped the kids off at school and hit the valet at the JW about 9:10am, just as the Big Rock Candy Mountain came on my phone. No Finer Song for a gonzo OSR guy! I’d be humming about the birds & the bees and the cigarette trees for the rest of the con. My intent was to hit the dealers hall when they opened and kill time till my 1pm game. While walking past True Dungeon, in the convention center this year, I saw V, The Pretty Girls best friend, working the door so I stopped to talk. She was on Badge Check duty which, as I just recalled, was the only ‘big’ room that didn’t have convention center staff at the doors checking badges. The entryway of the dungeon looked great, the best they’ve done yet. They had a bubble machine up high blowing ‘snow’ and totally revamped how they collect tickets/armbands. More on the ‘mechanics’ of TD later; I helped V at he door for a bit and tried, for the fourth time this year, to volunteer. They didn’t have any sign-up sheets. ARG! I played TD the first year it was at GC Indy. I volunteered just about every year since. I met my now-wife at TD while we volunteered. I built the beholder prop in my garage for TD. The lack of organization behind the scenes is why I stopped volunteering. I suppose it’s some entitlement issue on my part but I can’t stand the lack of organization. I could have just showed up and I’m sure they would have eventually found something for me, but I prefer to know my schedule so I can plan other things around it. One of the best times m wife & I have had is working a room together as a mimic and DM while we were dating. We tried to volunteer together last year but got split up. I’m sure they prefer full time staff instead of my ‘I can only work Thur & Fri’ stuff, and a part of me feels bad for volunteering ‘on my own terms.’ The TD people are VERY nice and I want to help them out but maybe I should just accept that I’m not a good fit. Comments?

I hit the hall as it opened and made my way to the OSR booth. I try and keep a low profile but Bill Barsh is an observant fellow; he saw through my secret identity immediately and outed me. There was a wide selection of product: Bills Pacesetter products, XRP’s AA line, LotFP and Frog God were all very represented, with ASE1, Black Blade, Chaotic Henchmen, Eldritch Enterprises and ACK all having a smaller presence … and maybe one or two that I have forgotten. I bought everything I didn’t already have. Bill was working by himself so I didn’t want to chat much, but he does promise some boxed sets in the future. I ran in to Bill Sunday morning on his way to his booth before the hall opened, while with my son. I wanted to tell him about my sons impression of The Thing in the Valley but he was gone by the time we remembered. (He loved it, and got the ring from the old woman because he was the true hero.) 🙁 I bought three items from Troll Lord that I didn’t have, and then bought two interesting Hackmaster modules from Kenzer. These appear to be mostly straight modules and are saddle-stapled and a bit smaller than their jokey modules. I made a quick pass through the rest of the hall but didn’t see anything else of interest to the OSR gamer … or very interesting in general. Time flies and din’t seem a minute since the Tyrolian spa had the OSR boys in it, so I hit champs for lunch. I wanted soup. They didn’t have soup. WTF?!??! No soup or chili??! Seriously? I had half a buffalo salad and 22oz of beer before heading over to the Marriott for …

Thursday 1pm – Tunnels & Trolls with Ken St. Andre (Tunnels & Trolls)
I want to like T&T. I’ve tried in the past to read the rules but I don’t think I ever fully grokked them, especially combat. I initially left my R & F open so I could volunteer for TD, but when I didn’t hear back I picked some filler games for R & F and this was one of them. What better way to learn the game than with the creator! Most games have a certain feel to them and playing with someone that really knows and gets that feel is the best way to pick it up. Someone who cares about the game system is always better than someone just putting in time to pick up a free con badge. There were seven or so of us and when we picked characters I ended up as A MOTHER FUCKING SORCERER… er, I mean wizard. I was, perhaps, influenced by snidermans Thundar game going on at the next table. Anyway, we were given a choice of games and played Dungeon of the Bear. Much fun was had will slippery slopes, rolling balls, were-badger gems, and roving bears. I looted the body of a fellow wizard during combat, drank a healing potion because I was sweating a bit, received a ‘gift’ of 50′ of silk rope from a fellow party member, and kept a magic badger-gem in a sock that I used as a weapon. Oh, and I made an Uruk SPARKLE!!!! You can get away with a lot when your the parties last wizard, er, I mean a MOTHER FUCKING SORCERER!!!!It was a good game with a decent amount of good-natured horsing around, as my actions indicate. The game helped solidify one of my core beliefs further: the dungeon is just a pre-text to get some people around and have fun; the party will create their own fun and their own adventure given the pre-text. I liked the bizarre nature of the dungeon and thought it suffered most when it was normal: orcs in rooms and so on.

The Pretty Girl came down from work. She had a game over at Union Station and I wanted to play with her so I blew off my 8pm Frag tournament. I put on the tux and she put on a frumpy business dress and we took a cab. This was necessary because the JW and US are as far apart as you can get and I had on my opera pumps. After all, we were part of …

Thursday 7pm – The First Film Crew on Mars (LARP)
I don’t care if it does say LARP; keep reading and learn something. She had a ticket and I had generics and this was the first night of three interrelated LARPs. She was a reporter and I was the films producer in a steampunkish/pump setting. The ship had crashed after an encounter with a giant space whale and while the atmosphere was breathable, it was still rough going. I was trying to get my film made and I played the guy very overblown. I started to hit on the reporter, hard, and then changed my tactics after getting my camera confiscated. I decided that we were not going to get rescued and started hoarding/hiding supplies and trying to build a harem. Eventually I got caught by the ships nurse, and I wasn’t having much luck converting the ships guards to my way of thinking. Things did not go well for me after that. The game had some problems. A good con LARP needs to give you a brief background, some thoughts on the other characters, some goals for you to accomplish, and have no NPC’s. It also needs to be written with character circles. The first three get you started in the game and give you some things for you to work on and get you interacting with the other players. The presence of NPCs means the LARP is a railroad and Something Is Supposed To Happen. That’s not fun in an RPG or in a LARP. Character circles are important because of size. LARPs are generally written for a lot of people and if not a lot show up then you’ve got problems because people you’re supposed to interact with are not present. You solve this by writing circles of characters of various sizes and factions with a few hangers on to fill on the gaps. You pull out the circle that most closely matches the number of players present. This LARP didn’t really have any goals for us or any preset relationships on the sheets., just some motivations for us. Something like: you don’t trust people to do their jobs, etc. This made it hard to find something to do and motivations for interactions. Most of my crew wasn’t present so I couldn’t really even try to work on the film, hence the switch weasel survivalist mode. The Pretty Girl and I had to leave about 10pm and cab’d it back to the JW. Fing opera pumps! It’s not easy being pretty …

Friday morning the The Pretty Girl and I had breakfast at the JW restaurant. We try to have breakfast together at the hotel at least once at a con, usually on Sunday. The coffee tasted burnt. The agave yogurt teaser (looked like and had the consistency of ice cream) was different but not great. The jelly selection was the usual strawberry, grape, and orange. My chicken hash with hollandaise was very delicate … meaning severely under-seasoned. Srirache fixed that though. She went off to Pilates and Needlefelt while I …

Friday 9am – Escape from the Mucus Mines (Sixcess system)
I signed up for this based on the name. It’s a ‘new’ system, I think? based on d6’s, skills, attributes, and is a furry RPG in an arabian setting. Hmmm, I should read more then the titles next time, perhaps. Older crowd, 40ish, until three 20’s guys showed up, friends, just wandering trying to find a game. “I knew we’d find a game open in one of these rooms!” My type of crowd! Standard pre-gens and 40 minutes of explanation of the game world and races by the GM … not a strong start. Imagine someone tried to explain Jorune to you so you could play the game ‘right’ … The characters were standard pregens … who immediately were stripped of all gear in the opening monologue as we were dumped in to the Mucus Mines. It’s a kind of Chronicles of Riddick prison with a giant mucus lake in it. We started with flips-flops, a ragged tunic, and a cup. We used the cup to move mucus form the lake to barrels, and also for our water and food. My academic goes over to the lake, fills his cup, and tastes it. It’s essentially battery acid. The big trustee in the mines comes over and one of the other players starts mouthing off to him. Hmmmm … my character concept solidifies. While the other PC is poking the bigger trustee in the chest and starting a fight, I thrown the mucus in the trustees eyes and then start shivving him in the throat with my (blunt) cup in a very murderous and very calculated way. Meanwhile another PC is turning his cup, tin, in to a real shiv. This is about 3 minutes after we were allowed to start playing our characters, about 30 seconds after we were lowered in to the mines. Good Crew, my kind of people! This is all in stark contrast to the deeply historical accurate view of arabia on the characters sheets. Thus started the railroad. We should have killed the trustee and/or blocked his way about a dozen times … but it was clear we were being railroaded in a chase and in to a climax. Skill checks to climb, jump, open doors, fight, etc. Not my type of game system. Not my type of setting, although I can now mark ‘Furry RPG’ off my bucket list. The game dragged, a lot, and the GM had to check with someone else several times on rules questions. On the plus side the NSDM game was across the hall and I got to look at their stuff a lot.

I went off to the dealer hall, skipping lunch after the big breakfast, when I got a txt from the ex-wife. The school bus drivers are on strike! I was going to take a cab to their bus stop, pick them up, and then drop them off at their 5pm events with about 10 minutes to spare. A strike means they wouldn’t get home till 6:30 or so. Ought oh! I jumped in a cab and yanked them out of school early, getting back around 3:30pm. They got to have dinner and I dropped Little Girl off at Teddybear Chainmailing and PokeBoy at the Yu-gi-oh room for this sealed deck tournament while I went back to the JW to get ready for my next game. Turns out the Yu-gi-oh room was not crowded and they didn’t get 8 players until almost an hour later. He lost in the first round but was still VERY late for his next game, Wiz-War. We played on a 3d board last year and he really liked it. He then lost his Oh Gnome You Don’t ticket while trying to find the table, and went back to the room. Little Girl made it her Werewolf seminar but they were oversold and she didn’t push the fact that she had a real ticket rather than a generic. She made it to her 10pm game, Helix & Helix: The Fix. This is a boffer LARP, with zombies, I’m pretty sure. She LOVED it. It was one of her favorite things at the con. I’ve seen them at Union Station in previous years but they were at the Hyatt this year. I give my kids cash, show them around, schedule something with them each day, give them cells so they can txt me when they move around the con, but otherwise let them do their own things. They are good kids, well behaved and straight A’s at the best school in the state, but they are still 12 and 13. I know I hate unsupervised kids and playing with kids in games and I don’t want to inflict them on others the same way. In reality though most kids are well-behaved and not problems. We just tend to remember the wild ones which poisons our view of the world. Comments?

 

I was getting ready for:

Friday 7pm – One Night in Bangkok (LARP)
Based on Chess, the Musical. Oh yeah baby! The city don’t know what the city is getting! Look, I get the LARP hatred. _I_ hate LARPS. LARPs mean boffer weapons, people screaming “QUAD! QUAD! QUAD!” and Vampire players acting emo. Some games are different though, and this is one of them. These are social games and I LOVE social games. I love being gleefully evil, screwing people over, and having fun Fun FUN! That’s the definition of winning in my book, not something based on VP’s. This is based on the musical, whatever that is, and that Murray Head song! BADDDD!!! ASSSS!!! I contacted the organizers early and got the ‘black’ player Anatoly. He’s the center of the story, essentially. I swapped out my white tux shirt with a black banded collar and wore the tux again. Anatoly is kind of a sad person except when he’s playing chess; he loves the game. I tried to watch the musical tuesday night but could NOT make it through it. My Fair lady, A funny Thing Happened, and Paint your Wagon are the only good musicals in my book. Fortunately the wikipedia article is EXHAUSTIVE! Anatoly leaves beats the ‘white’/american champion Freddy (based on Bobby Fischer) and then defects to the west after leaving his wife & kids in Russia and stealing Freddies girlfriend. One year later the next title match is in Bangkok and the LARP is at a party before the game. The KGB guy is there, making veiled threats to me about my kids/wife, my wife is there causing a scene, the media is all over me, and the Russian champ is a machine. My goals are to stay calm before the match, take care of my loved ones, and win. The Pretty Girl comes in a bit late and plays Freddies mother. (Either The Pretty Girl and I are allied in a game or e have nothing to do with each other. Games in which we are at odds end with me selling her in to slavery for a can of peaches … I can be ruthless in my petty evil.) The guy playing Freddy is in all white, just like the musical, and I’m in all black, just like the musical. Everyone recognizes him as Freddy. No one recognizes me as Anatoly. DAMN YOU FREDDY! This is all very close to the way the musical played out where Freddy was brash and Anatoly subdued. Once the game started I quickly learned that the wife and KGB (undercover) guy were trying to cause a scene and upset me. I decided to trust Freddies ex, my new GF, implicitly, and arranged a live Tv interview … very un-Anatoly on the surface of things. All while keeping a very somber, straight face. This makes the media people VERY happy. During the interview I take my wife’s hand, introduce her to the world, and tell everyone how the undercover KGB guy is really KGB and is threatening to have my wife and kids and relatives killed. I then excuse myself. This protects my wife and kids, in my mind, since the KGB can now do nothing to them without loosing face, which is all the chess match is really about in their minds. It also takes care of the media since there is NO WAY they are going to put me on camera again, for fear of what I might do. 30 minutes in and I’ve now protected all of my loved ones AND removed the major sources of excitement/interruptions from my mind. No worries for me! I spend the next couple of hours taunting the KGB guy, playing with the girl who played The Arbiter (got her to sing the history of chess song from the musical, which she had memorized) and getting digs in at Leonid, the Russian champ. I had decided that Anatoly had learned a thing or two form the brash Freddy and was trying to get under the skin of the Russian Machine. “I’m going to use the Indian defense!” or “How about I open with a fools mate?” or “lets play using the original rules of the game!” I was being gleeful, since this involved chess and it was the only thing Anatoly loved. Freddy was brash and a media whore. Leonid was just a chess machine. The Arbiter loved the game in a mechanical way. Anatoly was the only one with a true deep romantic love of the game. I also mixed in a little of that crazy Kaissa champ, what I remembered, from one of those Gor books. At the end I went to the restroom and while coming back to the game room was confronted by the KGB guy just outside the door. He had a knife. He was totally defeated and humiliated by my actions earlier. I thought he was going to stab me. Instead, he stabs himself, falls in to me to get me bloody, and then collapses in to the room declaring, with his dying breath, that I had stabbed him. I was stunned! I looked over at Freddy and said ” Quite an excellent move. Quite good indeed. He does not play at any ordinary level.” The police are called and I get the Arbiter to start the final match. I’m calm, cool, and collected, knowing my loved ones are safe. I’m turning over cards with a quiet, casual confidence, as I lean back in chair. (We were playing the card game war to simulate the match.) The russian, Leonid, is hunkered down, concentrating hard, really trying to win War. He had no idea I was the 2009 World Rock Paper Scissors champion … the real one, not that stupid Spring Break rip off. I win easily, 5 to 2. Game over. GREAT game over. Leonids understudy elopes with my (now) ex-wife (divorce papers were on the KGB agents body) and they defect to the west. Gamblers make and loose money. Freddy re-enters the chess world, preparing to enter next years tournament. A fun time was had by all! I LOVED hearing Freddy yell out “leave me alone MOM!” or something similar during the night. When The Pretty Girl is on then she is ON. Back to the hotel where I worried about Little Girl making it to the room, but she did. Moto GP is in town and LOUD and I don’t sleep well anyway. I get about 3 hours before Saturday morning.
I have to skip my 8am Boot Hill game because I registered for it before the BGG Math Trade meetup was organized. I did show up and give away my ticket to the GM, in case someone with generics showed up. They all had on cowboy hats. 🙁 I respectfully asked that if they gave away my ticket that they ask the new player to kill some schoolchildren and burn down a few houses in my name. Little Girl is playing the 4E D&D adventure Good Little Children Never Grow up, by Sneak Attack Press. She really enjoyed it and now wants to run it for the rest of us. It didn’t sound very 4e so I’ll pick up a copy. PokeBoy is in the Mayfair room playing giant size The Fall of Pompeii. Who doesn’t like throwing people int he volcano and burning people in lava? He also played Cosmic Encounter, Incan Gold, and Pokemon Rumble and the Zombie Ninja boardgame. He came back that night with a desire to get all of the Mayfair ribbons. Little Girl couldn’t find her ‘Build a Foam Weapon’ workshop and spent her time in the dealer hall. She bought an animal backpack and some Hetalia stuff. (She was cosplaying as South Italy all day Saturday.) I walked The Pretty Girl down to True Dungeon where was volunteering all day. She had been running around the day before organizing and buying dress-up clothes, and was going to be one hot elf Sorceresses. Instead they tried to make her an ugly spectre. She resisted and proceeded to give the parties a mission, every 6 minutes, for the next 8 hours, while fending off the advances of a desirous bluehand behind the scenes. Sometimes she’s too polite; she should have had him moved someplace else. I hit the BGG math trade, which I decided I won. You see, I traded away Outdoor Survival, Wizard’s Quest, Warhammer Quest, and about 80 OSR modules magazine for Duel in the Dark, M44: Tigers in the Snow, Cash & Guns: Live, Axis & Allies, Gammarauders, and Frag. I like M44 and C&G and Frag. I needed a wargame, hence the A&A. Gammarauders looks BAD ASS and Duel in the Dark is a backup game for when The pretty Girl and I get sick of trying to understand the rules to Downtown: The Air War over Hanoi. That was at 10am in hall E. I thought for sure they would get shut down because they were in the aisles. There were about 6 convention center security staff (yellow shirts) continually moving people form the aisle to the side, trying to keep the walkway clear. My last trade was late, finally getting there about 10:30. Un. Cool. I ditched the goodies in the room and then hit the Omni for some corn chowder and beer before going to the best game of the con for me …

Saturday Noon – Star Trek: The Trouble with Time Lords (Call of Cthulhu)
oooooooo… . droooollllll! Look at that game title ye mighty, and despair! CoC is one of those games you have to register for the very SECOND registration opens, and you still might not get a ticket. There is a good reason for this. THEY ROCK! This wasn’t really a mythos game. Me and two other people were red shirts while other players were Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and McCoy. The red shirts switched over 15 minutes in though when our real characters showed up with The Doctor in his Tardis. River Song, Data, and GARY 7!!!!! I got handed Data and the guy next to me (dutch or german, i think) got Gary 7, but we switched in the hallway since he didn’t know who Gary 7 was and I TOTALLY did! In this timeline Mudd was the HR officer of the Enterprise and my mission (turns out G7 was a timelord!) was to make sure the crew of a certain spaceship were delivered to a certain planet alive. The ship? The SS BOTANY BAY!!!!!! OMG! I’m such a fan boi!!!! I get Kirk to turn the ship around (lazy, apathetic, incompetent Kirk. That guy was great!) and we find the Botany Bay. Mostly empty, just four bodies left. In short order the survivors are beamed over to the enterprise and start reading technical manuals while the historian NPC is pushing for more access for them. The dead bodies are beamed over the cargo hold where they reanimate. Zombies!!!! An energy being is eating our dilithium crystals, and the Reliant is having some trouble with the REAL Kahn!!!! We kill the zombies, capture the energy being (I figured out, just from the laugh, that it was The Master!!!! Player skill, baby! A MOTHER FUCKING SORCERER!) We eventually defeat kahn by beaming the master over to the Reliant and then go tie up the loose ends. Oh, and Spock mind-melded with The Doctor, got a view of the time vortex, and went crazy, loosing a d50 in SAN. Like all great games it went fast and is just a jumble of AWESOMENESS in my mind. I played Gary 7 as being frustrated by the crews of the enterprise and their idiotic decisions, while stroking Isis. In the end I was going apoplectic trying not to scream at Kirk. It was great! I ‘won’ and got a prize pick. This happens a lot and I always decline. I have enough stuff at home; I don’t need more.

We all met for pizza at 5pm. Little Girl even made it on time, which surprised me … especially since SHE HADN’T BEEN TXTing ME!!!! Turns out her phone died and she could prove it (continuos reboot cycle.) We had pizza and a hotdog from the stand next to the Battletech pods and then went over to True Dungeon for …

Saturday 6:20pm – True Dungeon Draco-lich Undone (Combat)
I’ve hit TD every year and volunteered most years, even at SoCal when it was running. This year they moved to the convention center and added Sunday sessions. The entrance was GREAT, once of the most evocative ever. It was simple, a small hallway, until you rounded the corner and say the big player areas before it. It seemed to go on forever, with hang out tables and a snack bar that served booze after 6. There was one check-in room per game (they were running three main games and several smaller ones.) In previous years you had checked in outside, in the lights, and given your ticket and gotten your wristband and tokens. This year it was all inside and specific to the game you were playing. It seemed to run A LOT smoother and wasn’t nearly as hectic. Of course, we also got there earlier than we usually do. I got the fighter, PokeBoy was Wizard (Surprise!) Little Girl was Ranger and The Pretty Girl was Druid. Our other players eventually showed up and we went in to the coaching room. They had placemats this year for you to place your tokens on so they could calculate AC, saves, and bonuses. It went much smoother. Then it was off to the training room where the combat types slid things, the druid memorized her leaves and the wizard memorized his energy planes chart. They both did GREAT, never missing one leaf or plane chart quiz! PokeBoy, in particular, did a great job, memorizing the positions of about 24 different energy planes on a blank chart. In to the dungeon! But not before the training room guy read us the intro instead of a hot elf sorceress. 🙁 First room we had to stack blocks up to make an arched entry way. We couldn’t get the order right and failed. Second room we met and fought a spectre, third room we fought a molten thing like a water weird (it was some clock based puzzle.) Hmm, we solved a puzzle dealing with anvils, fought a VERY realistic looking stone statue who did a good job standing still, failed a puzzle dealing with dwarven ancestors, and then fought the draco-lich. It killed everyone except for two people, starting with PokeBoy. Eventually the cleric and barbarian killed it and we left, getting two treasure draws each. Oh yeah, I dumped a whole bag full of hundreds of token out on the floor in one room, looking like an idiot. I don’t collect/get in to the token thing, but I had a bag from over the years and the kids like it so I was carrying the spares around when I tried to untangle one token that got caught in the handle. Oops! The DM was like “Sucks to be you Sir.” heh. It’s a good thing they hold no value for me. 🙂

The Pretty Girl went to a bachelorette party for a girl who met her fiancé in our meetup. They went to the Libertine, which has great food but is small and a decent walk, and then she met her old gaming group, The Indy Cool Gamers, at the Red Garter before they went to the Claddaugh. At the RG they met a stripper who had won a prize in the costume contest earlier that day and who knew a cosplay friend of ours. She mentioned how her friend was always trying to get her to go to a certain wild ass pool party thrown by a certain organization, at which point one of the group pointed at The pretty Girl and said “Its held at HER house!” A MOTHER FUCKING SORCERER! PokeBoy went off to play Mayfair games to get his ribbons, but couldn’t find anyone to play with him. He was down and went back to the room. Little Girl and I went over to Untion Station for …

Saturday 10pm – Shelter in Place (LARP)
Little Girl and I had a disagreement. She thought this was a LARP. I had seen the book in the Indie RPG booth and thought it was one of THOSE games. We were both right, in a way. The tagline is ‘How would you do in an Zombie Apocalypse.” Like all good modern americans I have a decent zombie defense plan so I was ready for this. I wasn’t ready for a room full of kids and a game of tag, which is what this was. Oh, and the mommies. Moms seem to like to out-mom each other when they are in groups, real or virtual, and a lot of it seems to center around being overprotective. Dads seem to be getting in on it now also. I saw a 10 year old at the state fair who father helped him zip up his pants. The moms were in full on over-protective mode while I pretended to sleep rather than be the snarky ass I wanted to be. I’m surprised they didn’t chew their kids food for them. Anyway, the game was tag. The zombie team shuffled while the survivors could run and had a shelter to hide in that we could not get in to. You tagged someone arms and said “1 2 3 Combat”. Humans as a CV of 2 and zombies a 1 in the first round. Highest CV won. There were some objects hidden by the zombies around the con room area to motivate the survivors to leave their shelter. Eventually they found a radio and parts to make a transmitter, as well as a shotgun, baseball bat, etc. Then the CV’s changed to Human=1 and zombies=2 and the zombies would get in to the shelter. Zombies, my team, won the first game and then we switched sides, with the zombies also winning the second game. The best part was probably watching the pre-teen boys on my team checking out the ass of a cosplay girl that walked by in the hallway. Not subtle at all. Live & learn boys, live and learn. The other team had mostly pre-teen/early-teen girls. Little Girl doesn’t get along well with the girl crowd yet and was happy to leave at 11:45pm and not stay for another round.

Little Girl slept in on Sunday morning, as did The Pretty Girl since she got back to the room at 3am. PokeBoy had an 8am game of Giant Ablaze so I got cleaned up and we walked down, stopping for drinks along the way. In the Mayfair room he was the only player for Giant Ablaze but there were several guys eyeing the Empire Builder game. He needed an ore ribbon, which you get by playing a train game. I HATE those games, but he wanted the ribbon, so he finally listened to the wisdom of age and played it with the other guys. (Long game, hard to get players, etc.) I went off and had breakfast at Padachu: bacon, toast, and a bloody mary. I came back and he was done with his game so we played Giant Ablaze together so he could get his wood ribbon. It’s like Carcasonne with more blocking. We then met Little Girl for …

Sunday 10am – Artemis
We could only get three tickets for this so The Pretty Girl had our luggage taken to the car at the JW while Little Girl and PokeBoy and I played this. It turns out our fellow crew were people The Pretty Girl and I knew. The kids blind0bought his for me for my birthday this year (and it sat unplayed) and The Pretty Girl and I saw it and then drooled over it till we played it at Origins this year. It’s a social 6 player Starship Bridge Simulator computer game. One machine runs the server and it hooked up to a projector, as the main view screen. Each of five players has a computer in front of them that is one of the bridge stations: helm, tactical, engineering, science, and communications. One player stands around as Captain. The other players feed him information and he gives orders to the others. it is SOOOOOOOOOOO cool! Little Girl was Tactical Officer, Mr Raccoon Hat. PokeBoy was helmsman PokeBoy. We also has Mr Scotchy at engineering, Mr Hawaian Shirt on Coms, Fearless Leader at Science and me, as The Captain. The Pretty Girl showed up during our briefing so she got to sit on the captains lap as Yeoman The Pretty Girl. We defeated everyone in the first game and then, to reward our boisterous behavior (we were all having a lot of fu and hamming it up) the organizers upped the ante on us. We tangled with a space monster, blew up several enemy fleets, hit an asteroid while Mr PokeBoy was looking for a black hole to fly us in to, and finally got killed EXACTLY as our tie was up. Great Fun! It’s only like $40 and you get 6 licenses for it. We played on awesome touch screens, but it runs on almost any PC. You should TOTALLY check it out. We had to hustle to make it to …

 

Sunday 11am – D&D Next Playtest
The Pretty Girl and I had been to DDXP in Fort Wayne so we had been among the first to publicly play-test 5E. I’d run it for her and the kids at home but the kids didn’t really get in to it. In one of my great shames, they seem to prefer 4e, although they like being murder-hobos. Go Figure. Anyway, this was supposed to be our big together event at the con so of course it didn’t go off. Bladman, maybe, was telling people they were oversold and could seat no generics. “No problem, we have real tickets.” I say. Yeah, the system sold too many, we can’t seat you. Sorry. I can give you some promo dice or I can give you a refund. Uh … Wizards and the RPGA is such a joke. What he meant to say was that all of their judges are off playing/running Pathfinder and they are a disorganized group of fuckwits, but he mispronounced it as “oversold.” I just got mail from the The Indy Cool Gamers guys and they claim to be disgusted with their RPGA experiences also (they play and judge both.) Bad judges and bad organization.

We had lunch at Harry & Izzy’s (expensive, which is ok if it’s good. It’s not worth it though.) and then all went back to the dealer hall and split up. PokeBoy went off to get more ribbons. He ended up as a Knight of Catan and a Defender of Catan, getting all 10 or 11 ribbons. He also bought a snail pewter mini and a purple dragon mini sculpture, as well as getting a lot of Yu-Gi-oh cards for free for beating The Masters, including one personalized Token card with his picture on it. The Pretty Girl split off, shipped some, and went home at 2 to sleep till 7pm that night. Little Girl and I shopped all the aisles and she bought an anime mystery bag for $40 tat she was NOT happy with. I bought a cool little picture and a copy of Jungle Speed Raving Rabbids edition!!! I LOVE jungle Speed and i LOVE the Raving Rabbids. I was screaming like a rabbid since I got the second to last copy (for $10! score!) The Asmodee people seemed to get a kick out of it. We met up with PokeBoy at 4:10 and left for home, a whole 2.5 miles away. 🙂
Mutton chops seem to be making a comeback for guys. Daisy Duke/short-shorts seem to be making a comeback for women. The traditional hipster/poser indie rpg look seems to be on the outs. There was an awesome balloon dragon constructed in the hallways and an ad-hoc game of zombies vs humans taking place in the hallways also. Headbands vs armbands tag.

The con was super busy all four days. I’d be surprised if they didn’t smash attendance records. Nothing stood out for me in the dealer hall. RPGs seem lightly represented, with boardgames resurgent. The indie RPG scene, in the dealer hall, seems down. Disappointed to not see Greg Porter at The Other Indie RPG Booth … since the booth wasn’t there this year. I wanted one of those modular DM screens that I saw last year, but they weren’t there. OMG/Axe in the Head had a booth. I gave a spiel to The Little Girl describing the game that so good they gave me some free swag from under the table. Computer scene seemed less represented, both in games and in utilities. Lots and lots of great T-shirt booths this year, more than usual and several smaller ones with cute stuff on them. The cosplay clothing booths are well represented but not overly so, IMO. Mostly steampunkish but the pink frilly maid stuff is now making an appearance in a couple of booths. A scattering of anime items, including adult mystery bags. Tome of Adventure Design and Black Monastery were on sale at the Paizo booth. Mongoose was selling Sex, Dice and Gamer Chicks, which surprised me. Smirk and Dagger was showing off their Fresh Meat expansion for Cutthroat Caverns. It’s in a big box and can hold all of the games at once. It looks good. I picked up Moon Base Clavius (russians with nuclear mortars on the moon!), Valkenburg Castle (red dragons! nazis!) and Cyborg (the best cover OF ALL TIME!!!!!) from Zocchi’s booth. He claimed that he had never sold another of Cyborg at a convention but I know he’s wrong; I bought one about 7 years ago. 🙂 Nothing gives you geek cred like a Zocchi purchase. I got numerous compliments the rest of the con from vendors in the dealer hall who saw Clavius and Valkenburg. A MOTHER FUCKING SORCERER!

Oh yeah, I hit the art show looking for 70’s style fantasy art of MOTHER FUCKING SORCERERS, but didn’t find any. I’d appreciate any pointers to some. Trippy 70’s fantasy pointers are also appreciated.

Hmmm … anything else you guys wants to know about?
From the $5 booth:
RPGA #2 (Cool cover!)
Dungeoneer Compendium 1-6
Ready Ref Sheets
A Challenge to Arms (Chris CLark)
Dark Druids (Kuntz)
Garden of the Plantmaster (Kuntz)
Prisoners of the Maze (Kuntz)
Dimensions of Flight (Kuntz)
Talons of the Horned King (Spaceship & Fantasy!)
Blackmoor (d20)
Blackmoor (4e)

From FBI:
Catacombs of the Bear Cult (Dungeon of the Bear not available)

From KenzerCo:
In the Realm of the Elm King
Dusk of the Dead

From Troll Lord:
Dwellers in Darkness – Ulgakur
The Black Librum of Nartarus
Goblins of Mount Shadow

From the OSR Booth:
F1 – The Fane of Poisoned Prophecies
The Final Chapter
Beyond the Black Wall
Beyond the Wailing Mountains
The Death Curse of Sven Oakenfist
Many Gates of Gann
The Mouth of the Shadowvein
Down the Shadowvein
Stonepick Crossing
The Palace of the Vampire Queen
The Things in the Forest
The Secret of Redscar
Scorned
It Lurks Below

From Lou Zocchi:
Valkenburg Castle
Moon Base Clavius
Cyborg

From the Math Trade:
Frag
A&A (*2)
Gammarauders
C&G: Live
Tigers in the Snow
Duel in the Dark

Other Buys:
Jungle Speed (Ravin Rabbids)
hellowithcheese print
Battlemaps, wilderness and dungeon 2fer from 9.

 

You can check out older reviews of NSDM, Indie RPGS, LARPs, etc, over at FAT.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

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

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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

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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

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