tenfootpole.org

This is a short adventure. The intro/backstory is interesting however that’s not enough to overcome the brevity and plat nature of the adventure. Not by far.

Once upon a time there was a great bird who lived in the mountain, the Jub Jub bird, covered in golden treasue. One day it flew too close to the lake and a great fish leaped out and swallowed it. The fallen treasure is why is why the lake and fish sparkles. Or so goes the legends of the people who live by the lake. But now a great fish HAS surfaced, and has been swallowing fishermen! The villagers need help before they starve!

This is a very small adventure, about half plot based and half site based. The party will arrive in the village and speak to a retied adventurer (Ug! I HATE retired adventurers!) to get the low down. A giant fish is swallowing people and now a group of goblins are raiding it! A goblin raid then occurs, and the party hopefully tracks them back to their camp. A brief role-play later they find out about some caves the goblins were kicked out of, and have a six room adventure. That’s it.

Jub village isn’t really described. It only exists as a place to have a problem and for the old man to relay six of seven points to the characters. The goblin attack, by six wolf-riders, serves only as a plot point so the party can question one of them and track them back to their camp.There’s a nice little wilderness map, but no wandering monster charts. The goblin camp could be combat oriented or role-playing, but it really is just a place for the party to leave about the caves they need to go investigate, that the goblins were kicked out of by some dwarves.

The cave is a ‘star’ nap. One chamber with five others surrounding it. There’s not really much to it. Just some dwarves to kill, a giant spider, and that’s it. There are some prisoners, the captured fishermen, in a room near the Submarine/fish that captured them . Yes, a submarine fish. Yes, gnomes are involved. This touches on two more themes i don’t in modules: tinkers and tech. I loathe the whole ‘gnomes make clockwork/steam things’ meme in D&D. It was never interesting to begin with and now it’s completely overused, a crutch. The tech thing is absurd. Why make a submarine look like a fish, or even be a submarine? It could be  magic cloud, or a potato sack. Both of those are more interesting than D&D-world things that directly mimic technology. Interestingly, I don’t have a problem with the technology in Barrier Peaks, or ASE1, maybe because they are not trying to imitate something else. They own their background. Submarines do not, they imitate. Badly. I’ll take whimsy over tech any day of the week. Flying carpets? Cool. Riding giant wasps? Cooler. Flying machine that looks like a helicopter? LAME.

This is a VERY basic adventure without much imagination behind it. It essentially amounts to a map with a list of devil-themed monsters, set in a house that is not described.

Out in the wilderness sits a large house. It has no windows, but is otherwise unremarkable, except for it’s larger than normal size. It’s scores of leagues from the nearest settlement. What lies within?

A rather simple high-level adventure, that’s what. This is a simple site-based adventure. The house is described, however there is no real hook provided. The author has a couple of throw-away lines about there being rumors of artifacts present, or about a missing girl with a 10,000 gp reward, however those are not real hooks. It’s a place you can drop in to your own campaign world, without any lead up or wilderness component. The house proper is mildly extra-dimensional. Cleric spells above 2nd level can’t be recovered. The front door locks behind the party, and passwall/teleport don’t work. Further, all magic make a save vs disintegrate upon entering the house, and for EACH hour they spend in the house, or loose a plus/charge/be destroyed. This is going to be a rough one kids.

Oh, and the house is CHOCKED FULL of devils and the like. Spined devils, spiked devils, screaming devils, barbed deviled, bearded devils, Abishai, Pit Fiends, and Erynyes. Not to mention large number of hell hounds, shadows, hags, a lich, crypt thing, eye of fear & flame … I think you get the picture. Just about everyone from the Monster Manual, The MM2, and the Fiend Folio makes an appearance.  There are only 40 keyed rooms and the map, especially the frontal portions, is very linear. This means that the party is going to be meeting and greeting almost every monster the product as almost none of the rooms are empty. The rooms have no description, just a monster description and, invariably, no treasure. A brief section at the beginning has a list of possible room types and a list of possible room furnishings. The final encounter is with the daughter of THE Devil, and she has the Codex of Infinite Spells. That’s it. Most of the keyed descriptions describe the monster and “refer to the FF for more information” type statements. A couple of rooms have more information, however the vast majority are just a room description.

It almost feels like two different products. A few of the initial rooms have more details. One has an animal skin that provides AC3 and protects from poison. Yeah! That’s what I like to see! Nary a DMG magic item reference in sight! Unique! And also an exception. This soon peters out and all we’re left with is monster descriptions. “#15. Large Room. 4 Bearded Devils. [Monsters Stats]” Come on! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a product with as little flavor text. I must be missing something because this is NOT the kind of quality I expect from this author.

This is a hex-crawl, on a much smaller scale, through an ancient forest with a small temple at the end. Most of the encounters have some sort of twist. It’s going to require some significant prep work prior to play, and lacks a bit in atmosphere, even though the encounters are all nicely done.

Long ago a woodland faun was corrupted. Defeated, he lay dormant until a certain adventurer removed the object that bound the faun. Now the party has been commissioned by the adventurer to return the object, a dagger, to the forest clearing where it was found, in order to remove the corruptive taint that follows the dagger.

This is primarily a wilderness adventure through a forest with a small temple at the end. The adventure map is about 25 hexes deep and 100 hexes long, each hex being 2 miles wide. The players have a blank player map and the DM has his map, which shows the various trails through the forest, encounter areas, and the density of the vegetation. The trails come in four type, primary, secondary, hidden and abandoned. Each type of trail has an associated value which determines how hard it is to find and to follow. The forest type, or density of the tree growth, determines the canopy, the visibility range, and the amount of daylight that penetrates the canopy. In addition each section of the forest has it’s own wandering monster chart. These are heavy on the Fey and fey-like creatures, as well as ‘normal’ animals, and quite a few come out of the Monster Manual 2. That book, plus the Wilderness adventure book, should come in handy. There’s a small chart, in “inches” to determine movement on a trail and through the forest; you’ll have to do the conversion on the fly since the map is in miles. That bugs the hell out of me, so much so that I put a chart on my homebrew DM screen. Pick one and use it. Yes, I know that’s the way it is in the books. I don’t care. Given the difficulty in find and staying on the trails the party is going to have a hard time making decent travel distances each day. This will be compounded by a couple of extra rules for  wizards recovering spells, as well as certain spells not working. This is a Flavor Text gimp, rather than a mechanical gimp, so I’m more ok with it. Essentially, the forest spirit is evil and corrupt and certain animal spells, sleep, and illusion spells won’t work. That’s not really much of a gimp and does not not seem to be put in place to force the party to walk/encounter things.

The forest does not have set encounters. Each section has six potential encounter areas and three encounters for each section, so 50% of the encounter areas in a section will be empty. The various encounters are all … non-standard? We get Pixies and other fey troublemakers, as well as things like giant enraged porcupines and nymphs so beautiful that people can fall over dead looking at them. Giant catfish, forest guardians, and fungus freaks. Every single encounter seems to have some twist on it. This is a very very good thing indeed. The party will have NO idea what to expect and will be faced with some pretty interesting challenges to overcome. The temple in the middle of the forest has ten rooms in it, and a few encounters areas outside. Again, the vast majority of these have something interesting. Poison daggers, wizards, non-standard creatures, etc. It also has a ghost, magic jar, and other high-level challenges.

This is an interesting concept, essentially a hex crawl on a much smaller scale. It does seem to … lack a little focus? My guess is that most parties are going to crawl through the forest very slowly, because of the trail finding rules. This would mean a lot of wandering monster checks, and thus I would have expected more emphasis on the wanderers. I like to see my wanderers doing something, hunting, sleeping, etc, and this could have been added to punch this section up a bit. It’s going to take some prep work as well. The author notes, correctly, that wandering encounters should be planned out by the DM before the adventure is started so he’s prepared, especially since you need a MM2 and the stats are not included for the creatures. The text is not quite as terse as I prefer, but that’s probably because almost every single encounter has some kind of twist to it. Despite that, there’s not quite enough in the weird category for me. The magical item spread has a focus on infrequently used items, however they are still book items rather than unique ones. My primary worry in this one is that the party will get off trail, which seems easy to do, and get stuck in the forest, requiring a lot more of the blander wandering checks and few/little in the way of the planned encounters.

This is mid-sized dungeoncrawl is a tribute to B1. It’s really a raid on the fortress home of two adventurers. The maps are a little more complex than a lair dungeon and there’s a decent number of tricks to keep players jumping.

Two NPC mercenaries live in a fortress they’ve made for themselves. They spend their time hiring out, raiding, and generally being jerks. You know, typical adventurer behavior. Recently a group of vagrants showed up in a nearby town claiming to have been enslaved by the dynamic duo. It seems Zeglin and Rogar have some real Neutral Evil stuff going on in their fortress of QUAZKYTON. The captain of the watch suggests the party go check it out … and there’s an elf in town who’s looking for a certain statue rumored to be in the area, in the case the party runs across it …

The backstory is short, which I prefer, comprising only about half a page. The two hooks provided are a bit longer, mostly because of a nice rumor table that the escaped slaves can fill the party in on. The slave hook is the more interesting, while the statue hook is the more rewarding. By using both the DM should be able to provide some good role-playing opportunities with both groups and the watch captain. The town isn’t really described at all however there are a couple of handouts for the players, including a map drawn by the slaves. This introductory section is short, easy to read, and relatively terse. There follows a one-page description of the wilderness portion of the adventure, really nothing more than a small area map, maybe 10×14 miles, a small wandering table with “Wolves” and “The Ogre” on it, and a set encounter with a group of bandits on their way to the fortress. I usually like a wandering table with a little more … gusto in it, however this time around the table is fine. The ogre encounter is a good one, and he maybe shows up in again in the fixed encounter. The wolves make sense because of the close proximity to town and the fortress. The fixed encounter, with bandits, should be a nice little role-playing exercise that could lead to fun things, wherein ‘fun’ is defined as ‘gleeful cackling by the DM.’ Hey, The Man has to get his jollies also!

The fortress consists of two parts. The Upper/ground level is a worked stone fortress that generally houses the pair of adventurers and their minions, with about 29 keyed locations. The core design of the maps is ok although no where near the scale of the original B1. Essentially there’s a core group of central common rooms with some corridors surrounding them, and a couple of ‘room suites’ at the end of the corridors. If a large fight develops while the party is near the central rooms complex then they are going to have a rough time of it as creatures start to show up from most sides … which is exactly how a dungeon/fortress like this should be. There are some guard-posts scattered around, and the wandering table consist of slaves, guards, and off-duty bandits (human and humanoid.) I don’t like really prefer to see humanoids in modules … although it kind of fits in this one. [Recall that the first solution to the Tomb of Horrors involved Orc minions of an evil-ish PC.] The humanoids here evoke that same kind of feeling. What is REALLY nice is that there is a table right up front of all the intelligent combatants on this level. If the alarm gets sounded and reinforcements show up then you have a great count right up front of how many people are going to be showing up. This sort of detail should be present in EVERY adventure that involves intelligent creatures. There are plenty of role-playing opportunities on this level; the players have a chance to bluff their way in and a decent number of creatures may not be immediately hostile. While there are no faction present, this element goes a long way to make up for that. A group of smart people, intent on looting the fortress while the duo and most of their forces are away, could make out like .. well, bandits! There are a decent number of tricks and traps also, some of which are clearly a homage to a few areas in B1. Statues, teleporters, bubbling cauldrons to play with, and more traditional traps are all sprinkled about in a decent density. I enjoy these elements since they reinforce a sense of mystery, exploration, and wonder as the party travels through. It’s not just sneaking and fighting, but exploration and experimentation also.

The second level is a small unworked cavern complex under the first level. The map is a straight forward affair, mostly linear with some branches to other rooms, with about 12 encounters. This section has some scary undead (Level Drain!), shriekers, stirge, and other cave-type monsters in it. There are a couple of things down here to play with, but the small size really limits what goes on down here. It almost feels like a ‘wilderness tack on.’ That may not be a bad thing, and it does tie in with the second hook. It could use a lot more ‘natural’ cave elements though, in my opinion.

This could be a nice little introductory dungeoncrawl. The village needs beefed up for real play, but then again almost all villages need that. The complex is small and has a lot of old school elements in it. There’s sure to be a pitched battle at some point, unless the party is very good indeed. There’s also a decent amount of loot, normal and magical, for a smart party to cart off.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/79254/The-Hidden-Serpent?affiliate_id=1892600

This is a non-traditional adventure that focuses around the salvage of cargo from a sunken ship. It’s a very open-concept type of exploration that probably has more in common with a hex crawl than a traditional dungeoncrawl of wilderness adventure. There’s a great deal of options and freedom for the players to take advantage of.

A wizard is building a new tower and has commissioned a group of dwarves to create a massive stone statue for it, destined for stone golem-hood. The dwarves have finished it and are shipping it by sea. The ship is late and the wizard wants his statue. He hires the party to go find it. Just one catch: there’s a time limit. The more time the party spends screwing around the less they going to receive in payment. The introduction is short, which I prefer, and the time limit adds some motivation for the party to Get Things Done in an environment which could otherwise be laid-back.

The adventure will essentially center around two locations. The first is a small village by the name of Wrack. I have a special place in my heart for moronic villagers. My heart grew three sizes when reviewing the village: they are truly pitiful idiots. It’s a small fishing village with an inn, small store, and a temple. The inn smells of stale beer, old fish, smokey peat, wet wool and cooked cabbage. Whoa boy! The people are pretty universally described as poor and shiftless. I LOVED the village. The adventure probably begins in earnest with the players talking to the various people in and around it. The village is sparsely described however the people detailed are all pretty memorable. There’s a pretty nice rumor table and several of the other villagers have some interesting things to say if the party can track them down. It’s an investigation, however it’s mostly an exercise in gathering more information and trying to push the odds more in the players favor. The information, and a few specialized supplies in the village, will make success more likely.

The second part of the adventure is the search for and salvage of the wrecked ship including the raising for several statue pieces, each weight a couple of thousand pounds. This is a very open portion of the adventure. It reminds me a lot of the pearl beds in Isle of Dread. In that encounter there’s goodies on the bottom of the ocean and sea snakes that mess with the players if they try to collect them. In this adventure there is essentially only a wandering monster chart for the ocean (1 in 6 per hour) and otherwise it’s up to the players to locate and recover the massive statue parts. This is going to be an exercise in ingenuity for the players. How can they locate the wreck? How can they manage the cold water and requirement to breathe? There are several other related issues as well. A great deal of information is presented, in a clear and easy to follow format, on how the various challenges the players may encounter in exploring the shoals and in recovering the statue. Tides, sunrise, sunset, and so on. Essentially the authors have provided a framework that you can turn the party loose in, along with the specialized information the DM may need to call upon.

This sort of adventure concept is one of my favorites. You give the players an objective, have a set up, and turn them loose. We used to do this all the time in high school when we played Danger International. The adventure always ended with an assault on the Evil Bad Guy Lair. Nothing fixed by the DM, just a base with it’s various buildings, guards, NPC’s and schedules. How the players assaulted or infiltrated was up to them. That sort of player agency, along with a prepared DM, is what can truly result in a stellar adventure. Adding in the twist, an island that appears during mists, makes this an excellent little adventure. It IS a little adventure, but it’s a very nice one and should provide for an excellent evening of play.

Oh, and one more thing. These sorts of adventures typically throw in some magic items to help the players get by and survive underwater. This one doesn’t really do that. Figuring out how to deal with the water is a major part of the adventure. I like that. It also has no Sahuagin in it. I loathe Sahuagin. They are COMPLETELY overused in water adventures. I’m glad to see a water based adventure that doesn’t involve pirates or smugglers or Sahuagin. This is a refreshing little romp.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/82053/Wrack–Rune?affiliate_id=1892600

This is a non-traditional adventure that focuses around the salvage of cargo from a sunken ship. It’s a very open-concept type of exploration that probably has more in common with a hex crawl than a traditional dungeoncrawl of wilderness adventure. There’s a great deal of options and freedom for the players to take advantage of.

A wizard is building a new tower and has commissioned a group of dwarves to create a massive stone statue for it, destined for stone golem-hood. The dwarves have finished it and are shipping it by sea. The ship is late and the wizard wants his statue. He hires the party to go find it. Just one catch: there’s a time limit. The more time the party spends screwing around the less they going to receive in payment. The introduction is short, which I prefer, and the time limit adds some motivation for the party to Get Things Done in an environment which could otherwise be laid-back.

The adventure will essentially center around two locations. The first is a small village by the name of Wrack. I have a special place in my heart for moronic villagers. My heart grew three sizes when reviewing the village: they are truly pitiful idiots. It’s a small fishing village with an inn, small store, and a temple. The inn smells of stale beer, old fish, smokey peat, wet wool and cooked cabbage. Whoa boy! The people are pretty universally described as poor and shiftless. I LOVED the village. The adventure probably begins in earnest with the players talking to the various people in and around it. The village is sparsely described however the people detailed are all pretty memorable. There’s a pretty nice rumor table and several of the other villagers have some interesting things to say if the party can track them down. It’s an investigation, however it’s mostly an exercise in gathering more information and trying to push the odds more in the players favor. The information, and a few specialized supplies in the village, will make success more likely.

The second part of the adventure is the search for and salvage of the wrecked ship including the raising for several statue pieces, each weight a couple of thousand pounds. This is a very open portion of the adventure. It reminds me a lot of the pearl beds in Isle of Dread. In that encounter there’s goodies on the bottom of the ocean and sea snakes that mess with the players if they try to collect them. In this adventure there is essentially only a wandering monster chart for the ocean (1 in 6 per hour) and otherwise it’s up to the players to locate and recover the massive statue parts. This is going to be an exercise in ingenuity for the players. How can they locate the wreck? How can they manage the cold water and requirement to breathe? There are several other related issues as well. A great deal of information is presented, in a clear and easy to follow format, on how the various challenges the players may encounter in exploring the shoals and in recovering the statue. Tides, sunrise, sunset, and so on. Essentially the authors have provided a framework that you can turn the party loose in, along with the specialized information the DM may need to call upon.

This sort of adventure concept is one of my favorites. You give the players an objective, have a set up, and turn them loose. We used to do this all the time in high school when we played Danger International. The adventure always ended with an assault on the Evil Bad Guy Lair. Nothing fixed by the DM, just a base with it’s various buildings, guards, NPC’s and schedules. How the players assaulted or infiltrated was up to them. That sort of player agency, along with a prepared DM, is what can truly result in a stellar adventure. Adding in the twist, an island that appears during mists, makes this an excellent little adventure. It IS a little adventure, but it’s a very nice one and should provide for an excellent evening of play.

Oh, and one more thing. These sorts of adventures typically throw in some magic items to help the players get by and survive underwater. This one doesn’t really do that. Figuring out how to deal with the water is a major part of the adventure. I like that. It also has no Sahuagin in it. I loathe Sahuagin. They are COMPLETELY overused in water adventures. I’m glad to see a water based adventure that doesn’t involve pirates or smugglers or Sahuagin. This is a refreshing little romp.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/82053/Wrack–Rune?affiliate_id=1892600

This is a solo module. It can be very tough in places. It has some editing problems. I have also played it more times than any other module I own, with the exception of Keep & Steading.

You are a lowly second level character. While traveling down the road you are ambushed by bandits! Waking up in an inn you find you have been looted. Oh the humanity! You are provided some sparse starting equipment and set off to bring justice to the bandits. The adventure is laid out in a format very similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure. The map is divided in to grids from A to GG. Each section is further divided numerically, A1, A2, A3 and so on.

The booklet has some issues with editing. Several of the paragraphs, especially in the later parts of the adventure, all refer to “paragraph X.” While normally this would be a Game Over condition for a Choose Your Own Adventure booklet, it’s not the case in this one. It’s pretty obvious form the map where the trail/path leads next so you just need to turn to that section. There was only the briefest of slight delay encountered during live play when this first popped up.

The adventure is a tough one. There’s a Shadow, encounters with multiple 1HD bandits, a double dose of killer frogs (they killed my kids, how … Moat House) a trio of zombies, and a 6th level wizard. These are going to be some very rough encounters for a 2nd level character flying solo. There are generally a nice variety of challenges presented: ranger tracking, thief sneaking and so forth. Some of the character classes and abilities will require a bit of on the fly adjudicating, none of which should be too tough. The adventure proper is a nice mix of elements. There’s a barrow mound, a crazed lizard man, ruined towers, bandit camps, mysterious fogs and so forth; just about every classic outdoor element is touched upon. I enjoyed it. My wife enjoyed it. My kids enjoyed it (although they complained about using Holmes instead of 4E. Philistines!) I eventually won, without cheating, using the mightiest character class of them all: Wizard. My 2 Hp self conquered where none others could … by Sleeping with extreme prejudice. We’ve played this AT LEAST 20 times.

And therein lies this modules special power: you can pick it up and play it. No prep work. No goofing around. Just pick it up and play it. I combined this with my Holmes “3d6 down the line, d6 weapons” rules for a <1 minute character roll-up. It takes more time to prep for Solitaire than it does this module! I would pull this out, we’d sit down and play. Just play. I don’t think I’ve been able to do that in 25 years, since high school or jr high. I’d DM and she’d play, or she’d DM and I’d play, the DM rolling for the monsters and reading the text. Same with the kids, I just doubled the number of monsters in each encounter. It was simple, it was IMMEDIATELY accessible, and therefore we’ve played the crap out of this thing.

There is a significant business opportunity being missed here. While we were hot & heavy in to this, right after GenCon, two friends came over. They game. While they were here I was struck with a thought: Why don’t we play D&D in these cases? We have 3 players and a DM, why not play? I’ll tell you why, because it’s a chore. Haul out the gear, prep/read the module, make characters, pick equipment, BLEEECH! The threshold is too high. It seems like it always easier to play something else. An adventure module like this one needs to be packaged in a small box with some pre-gens in it. Friends come over? Pull out the box and play D&D. No character prep time. No module prep time because it’s either CYOA or something very similar to that. You could toss in a very simple rules pamphlet, like MicroLite 74 or something, but that’s not the key. The key is the pre-gens and an adventure you don’t need to prep. Instant one shot fun!

Boxed text doesn’t have to be bad. This module uses it and has done more to get me playing more D&D than any other product  other than my first one ever: Holmes. I would LOVE to see more products like this. Being a solo module, this has a lot of lengthy text, however a DM version could have quite a bit less. If some serious thought went in to it then you could have a zero entry-barrier module with BRIEF but good boxed text and a couple of follow-up bullet points

“This is a moldy bedroom in disrepair.”

– Trap door under bed leads to D3.

– Green slime in pillows. AC12, HD:2 HP:4. 1d6 dam

– Locked safe behind picture on wall. Contains bag of coins. 100gp.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/263907/I1-Grave-of-the-Green-Flame?affiliate_id=1892600