Skull Mountain – The Zherovain Highlands

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Paul Wolfe
Mystic Bull Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

The evil sorceress Evia Alyn lies dead. Those who know of her dark legacy have begun to gather in REDSTOWE VILLAGE, perched on the edge of the ZHEROVAIN HIGHLANDS. All seek the same prize: SKULL MOUNTAIN, her fabled fortress deep in the RAVENYR MOUNTAINS. For generations, she held the WESTERN SLOPES in her iron grip. Now, tales of POWERFUL ARTIFACTS left within her fortress draw a strange parade to these windswept plains: WIZARDS bent and twisted with their ambition, THIEVES with sharp eyes and sharper blades, PRIESTS mumbling and sacrificing to varied gods and WARRIORS dreaming of glory.

This 68 page adventure presents a hex crawl in a small region, along with about eight sites to explore/delve. It’s a full work with some decent puzzles and a fully realized environment to adventure in. For some definition of “fully realized” … meaning it tends to the minimalistic side of things. 

This is the first part of a larger campaign that is eventually, according to designers notes, end up in the Skull Mountain ten level dungeon of the witch queen. But, first, you’re level ones and need to FIND skull mountain. So you hit the local town looking for rumors and begin to explore sites related to her. That’s this adventure, a hex crawl and some adventuring sites related to the witch queen. It has everything you’d want for something like this, but, just perhaps not to the extent you might want it. Conceptually, think of the support system (not the adventuring sites) as being on paragraph and then a twenty entry random table to support it. It’s easy to think of as adventuring regions. The Pine Forests get a short description and then a wanderer table to support it. Or the town gets a paragraph and then a twenty entry table to support it. That’s not quite true, but it gets you in to the correct frame of mind for the review.

The town, which adventurers are flooding in to, has an inn that gets a VERY basic description, as does the town. We’re told that there are market days and sometimes the steep nomads show up, or the Bone Charmers (although, no description of either entity) and then a little events table to help support play. This can range from a monster attack to a heavy fog to an actual market day, and so on. Including a bad batch of ale at the inn, save vs poison or be at -4 CON for a few days. Just a few little things to spice up the town and keep it a bit dynamic. There’s a brief section on the town growing and money flooding i, which is a great touch, although a little short. And, there’s not much, at all, of the other adventuring parties flooding in, or trouble caused by them. This is going to be a theme. The adventure touches on little aspects but then doesn’t really provide much at all about them. I’m not asking for an appendix here, but a couple of sentences more would have been in each of the various areas. There is a relatively decent little rumors table. The Silver Queen’s fortress lies at confluence of the Rhoest and the Whisper rivers.” or “ Restless dead roam battlefields found across the steppe, crags, and thickets.” This is a good way to get the party going to locales, so they are relevant and help drive the adventure forward, although perhaps I could use some in-voice for them.

Magic items are great. The Salt Lords Sceptre. Staff, +1. Carved from a single crystal of salt with the head of a bull. Casts hold person(!) once day. On one subject. Nice little items, mostly book with a little more and a decent little few word description like that. Really nice sweet spot in describing magic items and giving them just a little uniqueness so not everything is just a generic +1.

The locations vary in size, but range from a few rooms to, of, say, twelve to sixteen. They are interesting environments, interlinked with objectives to unlock each other and greater mysteries. The first is quite mirror-forward, as they say. (I had a condo once owned by the Saran Wrap heir that was very mirror forward … or was it the Reynolds Wrap heir?) So, we’re looking at frescoes, grabbing mirrors, putting mirrors up. Looking at reflection, and using magic light from mirrors to do things in the dungeon. Things are not really being telegraphed, at least not in an obvious way, but you can figure things out if you pay attention and do some things that should be obvious. 

The room descriptions though, are pretty minimal. We’re looking at mostly fact based descriptions, and terse ones at that. “Mirror Hall. Mirrors (3’x5′) east wall. Worn tapestry west wall. Tarnished censers hang from chains (center)” So, a room title which is good. Then we get an indented and bolded bullet for Cracked Mirrors, Tapestry, and Censor. “Tapestry. Queen gazes over shoulder in hand mirror at supplicants. Hides pristine mirror (3’x5′). See area 4.” A nice little bit of cross-reference there. I would have liked a few more words here, not many, but some adjectives and adverbs. Gazes sternly or something other than “worn” for the tapestry, a couple of more words per items to cement them a little better. The facts and just the facts. 

This makes the entire adventure read more like a framework, and while, yes, all adventures are frameworks, some are more so than others. I wanted just a bit more in town. The other parties, a little more intrigue. Just a little more for the various rooms to bring them to life. And, perhaps most of all, a little more in a summary of how the adventure should work. You are clearly finding things at one site for another and aligning things between sites and so on. That’s all great, but the adventure is just too “long” for a DM to really put that together all by their lonesomes. And, besides, you know the deal, if the DM has to do it then the adventure designer should be helping out. 

I’m not angry at this. It’s well constructed in parts and clearly thought has gone in to it. I can’t see myself ever running it. But, buying it, putting some effort in to prep, and then running it could be an option for folks that tend to the minimalism side of things. Well, no, I consider myself a minimalist, but this goes a bit far even for me, without ever actually reaching those Vampire Queen levels that I find so annoying. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is one page, a hex page in the region. So, poor preview. It needed to show a few dungeon entries so a DM can know what to expect.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524703/witch-lords-of-skull-mountain-the-zherovain-highlands-old-school-essentials-edition?1892600

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The Snake Temple Ruins

Posted on June 21, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Olly Tyler
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-2

The local town of Penderham has been beset by raids for a year by a bandit gang that they cannot track down. The bandits are led by a battle hardened and wily orc called Nurgal who has assembled a group of orcs, goblins and two harpies. Before terrorising the local trade routes and villagers his band found themselves a perfect hidden and fortified base inside the dungeon of an ancient ruined temple.

This 37 page adventure uses about seventeen pages to describe about 32 rooms in a two level dungeon complex. It has some interesting room concepts but the length of eac room combined with an incoherence in the writing makes this one of the more opaque offerings I’ve seen. 

I’m not sure which way to go at the start with this review. The adventure borders on being incoherent. But, also, it has some decently interesting room concepts at times. Room concepts that can hang with some of the best designers if they were done right. This is a non-trivial accomplishment. It’s hard to say just how many adventures I’ve seen where Stabbin is the only interactivity. Or, perhaps, some simplistic traps. But there’s something else going on here. I’m not sure if it’s AI or if it’s just an EASL issue. 

Ok, on to the good stuff. There are a few really interesting room concepts here. They combine a kind of mashup (future symbolism …) of ideas that are familiar yet new. In one room we’ve got one entrance and a waterfall in a corner … and a snake inlay wall design  on the far wall … with jeweled eyes. Fucking withthe eyes causes the entrance to close and the room to being to fill with water … there is a rusty iron ring in the silted over pool under the waterfall. Pull it up to unstopper the place and open the secret door that is behind the waterwall. Rusty iron ring, under the silt. Secret door behind the waterfall, snake inlay with jewel eyes … this is all just classic stuff. Classic in its components, anyway. That’s a good OSR room. Other rooms have nude bodies on slabs covered in point delicate crystals (open wounds? Breathing in the dust? Oops …) A multi-level moonlit harpy room. Nice rooms. Nice room concepts. Good interactivity in them. 

But man, this things rough. Those nice concepts are hidden behind some really rough stuff. That waterfall room, that fill up? The door that shuts? It’s a portcullis. How does a room fill with water if its a portcullis? Does the LLM not know that or was this an EASL issue? That same room, the map. It’s a normal dungeon room, somewhat smallish, square, with a waterfall in the corner. The hallways near there have some water features. The map water gives the indication that the waterfall is a leak, something that should not be there, with the soggy hallways and nearby rooms now having damp floors and ankle high water in places in the rooms. But the secret door behind the waterfall, the whole door trap, the iron ring to unplug the room … this implies that dungeon is built that way. 

Something stinks here. There’s a room near the entrance. It has a door to a small 10×10 cupboard. It has old sacks and cloaks hanging on hooks and laying onthe on the floor. Got it? Oh, right, also, there’s a skeleton in it that attacks you when you open the door. Got it? Inside it is a secret door. It leads to a FORGE … with NO. OTHER. ENTRANCES. . Like a real forge, 50×60, columns down the center, coal and wood to stock the forge, sheets and rods of steel. AND MULTIPLE HUMANOID SMITHS WORKING. Everything gets dragged through that cupboard? No signs of it in the cupboard? A fucking skeleton attacking when you approach it?! Come on now. No way a real person wrote this. Or,maybe they did. That 10×10 room with ancient red dragon in it was a thing at one point in time. 

There’s more than a little to not like here. The read-aloud is in second person form, with all of you see and you feel shit in it. Things “appear to be” all over the place, “You enter what looks like a wood paneled armory.”. The read-aloud over-reveals the room contents destroying the back and forth between players and DM. The room contents read like Victorian laundry lists of objects found in the rooms. This makes room descriptions long in places, with a column or even a page not being unusual. The RA tells us that there are lumpy sacks on the floor, but not what they contain.

Did I mention the healing font? It never runs out. Well, it does, but refills once a month. Sounds like a business opportunity to me! Gotta get that side hustle on! 

I’ve mentioned incoherent a couple of times now. It’s not really in relation to things like that waterfall room which just don’t make sense. It’s incoherent in that the organizational structure of the paragraphs seem out of order. It’s like you write a five paragraph essay, in the classic style, and then Put a detail paragraph first and second and then the conclusion paragraph, then the last detail paragraph and then the introductory paragraph, if that kind of makes sense. The details and the summaries just seem to to appear in the text without any sense of where they should be. This is most notable in the town sections, which also serve as the backstory and hook, in which the information the party finds out, and from who and where, just appears kind of willy nilly interspersed with summaries. You find out information from various NPC’s and then the adventure tells us we can go to those NPCs to get the story of what’s going on … but those are only real NPC’s and we just read about the details of what is going on … which was still confusing as hell. It tells us that there are raids happening. There’s a survivor reporting goblins and orcs. There is evidence of that. And yet the adventure then acts like who is raiding is a mystery. What?! 

I’m not sure what is going on here. I know, with the ai art in the piece, folks are going to lean that direction for the letter drops, the weird incoherence order of the information and the disconnect in logic in rooms. In my naivete I am not as quick to jump to that conclusion. Either way, the work is a confusing mess, difficult to dig through, with the high points not being high enough to justify looking at this.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. The preview is fifteen pages (beyond being PWYW) and shows you the entire intro and about ten dungeon rooms, so, good preview, AI overlords!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524972/the-snake-temple-ruins?1892600

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Perilous Path of the Cursed Camel

Posted on June 18, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
by Joseph R Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
OSE, Cairn, Shadowdark
Levels 2-3

What do you say when a bizarre camel appears and says you’re doomed to have your soul eaten by witches… unless you can steal as many ancient Relics as possible from all over the world in the next few hours? Hopefully, you say: Let’s go!

This 25 page adventure features thirteen situations using a “teleport you to the next situation” gimmick. There’s a real-time element to this that, while core to the gimmick, I think really detracts from the overall adventure, as presented via the text. 

Bad day! The Evil Witches have randomly selected you to eat your souls! Or so says the weird camel that just showed up and told you that. You start doing the Sliders thing and every thirty minutes (of real time) jumping to a new reality, being dragged toward them. Rough one man! But, hey, if you can find some relics on the way then you can give them to the witches and they won’t eat YOUR soul! Good thing there are some relics that just happen to be hidden in every reality/situation you slide in to!

The parts that Lewis does well continue to be the parts that are done well. Formatting is top notch. Magic items are great and the evocative nature of things works well. There is a little callback to things that you recognize. Here’s the treasure list for the main encounter at the end, with the witches ” Under a rock in a dark corner is a dirty little cigar box. Relics: coffin nail (stab any creature to kill it instantly), piece of straw (place on a creature’s back to break their spine), copper penny (give to someone to learn everything they know), gray stone (throw to instantly kill the two nearest birds), severed green thumb (bury to grow a vast forest).” Folklorish indeed! I’m a big fan of these and how they are handled without droning on about mechanics and so on. These are the things that Twelve in One Blow are made of.

The environments that you slide in are the trope ones. The snowy one. The sea one. The Maze. The inside of a dragon haven been swallowed, it seems. But, also, Lewis does not lean in to the trope in a hard way. So, yes, it’s a snowy place. But there is a small hut with a hunters family. Mom and dad are suffering from the plague. Little Timmy is gonna need to be adopted. Perhaps by you? Lewis has a knack for bringing interesting elements to situations. In the Fey realm, a group of dungeoneers are looting. Not your usual fey encounters. And fey goblins lurk under the water ready to drown you. Noice! In the desert, a caravan is being attacked by giant scorpions with a mighty sandstorm on the horizon. Pretty topy. Oh, also, the caravan is full of vampires. Yikes! He takes the trope as a setting but then adds a twist or some such to it to make it much more than the trope; the trope is just the setting to navigate while working the other issues. He’s very good at it and they all stand out well 

Each site gets a page. And now we begin to see some cracks forming in this adventure. The giant scorpion/sandstorm thing is a lot. And then we toss in vampires. In thirty minutes of real time. Also, you’re looking for those relics, yeah? This can lead, I suspect in play, to a kind of madcap situation in which There’s this giant battle with scorpions, vampires about, severely injured and bleeding people crawling across the sand in desperation … and then the party shows up and starts madly searching the caravan. Or tossing the cabin of the hunter/plague couple while a mastodon trundles by and some snow raptors descend the place in to chaos. No time for all that! Let’s yoink everything out of that cabin to search it! As lLewis points out, you can’t really combat in 30 minutes very well (and he suggests not to, until the witch show down at the end.) The page count also constrains things a bit. You need a page, but also you’ve got multiple things going on. Certain things, such as the dungeon party. Each of the five get a two words description (beautiful, maniac) and then the party goal of robbing the PC’s, noting not necessarily killing them. 

I think the way this works is as a madcap sort of thing .You hit the first couple, discover you can’t really ‘explore’ before sliding away, and then begin to increasingly ignore the plight of others while you rip things apart looking for “relics.” (Which is a stand in for magic items like the ones I quoted.) With this in mind, I suspect it works well as that. Which probably works for Cairn and maybe Shadowdark? I am not as sure in an OSE/OSR context, giving the pacing one expects from fragility of body.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is twelve pages and does a good job of showing you what to expect, as always from Lewis.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/523835/perilous-pat?1892600

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The God Towers of the Elophant

Posted on June 16, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
by GMaia
Knight of the Lake Games
OSR
Levels 7-9

In the murky night of the past, none now can recall the dire events that led to the demise of Elophant and the onset of the epoch of incivility, wherein wisdom, wellbeing, and happiness were supplanted by fear, hatred, and ignorance. The few survivors who witnessed the impious assassination managed to erect a sanctuary, that Elophant might not fade into oblivion, nor the virtues it embodied be forgotten. In such an underground sanctuary, a balance has long existed that allowed coexistence between two incompatible social groups. The place provided both groups with the resources to survive without conflicts. Recently, this balance has been weakening due to the natural consequence of areas with limited resources: one of the two groups has increasingly fewer means of subsistence, bringing the situation to a critical level.

This seventeen page adventure uses three pages to describe about ten rooms on … a megadungeon level? It’s got a decent setup and a couple of nice general ideas, but it squanders it by not actually doing much with the setup in question.


Or the surrounding areas. Or the room descriptions. Or almost anything else in the adventure. Well, except the monster summary sheet. There is one of those and I appreciate that. But the adventure proper, yes? Or, at least the setup.


There is a level on a megadungeon. In the middle is a large lake. Over on one side of the lake are the caves of the Starry Eyed Cavemen. Degenerate humans, they are the descendants and guards off the sacred god towers of the elephant. It’s tusks. They been here a couple of millennia and are chill with it. Interestingly, they have some mental powers (hence the starry eyes) that focus on a lot of communication. It’s random, from a table, but most of the entries are like Read Emotions, or Understand language (but not speak it), or Transmit one word telepathically. You can see how this would play out when the party first meet them, with the random distribution of powers and the chance to misunderstand intent and so on. Nice! Ok, back to the lake. On the other side are some other caves, these inhabited by the Lime Trolls. They lick limestone as a food source. They are chill also. Well, they were chill, now they are not. They are running out of limestone formations to lick. But you know who has some? The Starry Eyed Cavemen.


This is a classic set up for a great level. I wanna lick your god towers and you don’t want me to. Some of the best dungeons ever designed have this sort of thing going on. Toss in a decent map so things can breathe and fill in some minor players and maybe a few hidden rooms and get those factions moving against each other! Get those party fireworks working in the gas factory!
But that doesn’t happen here. This most excellent of premices is squandered. There is no expansive dungeon map. A few caves for the trolls which amount to “the six troll families live in these caves.” Much the same for the cavemen caves, except you also get The Three Trials. Test your strength, purity, blah blah blah. That’s it. No other encounters. No other oom for things to happen. No causing trouble or getting help from others or anything like that. So, maybe, you can go all Yojimbo on it? Nope. There’s not really any personalities to key off of either, or any subplots by the subleader or shamen. It is what you see in the most obvious way. This is a great, great shame.


Sometimes the trolls attack the cavemen. There is a system to resolve that. 1d4+1 trolls attack. If they lose then “the GM must count 10% of the losing group as losses in terms of lives.” I have no fucking idea man. Also, on the other side, in one of the two ways the trolls can attack is “the entire village.” So, 10% of “the entire village I guess. This kind of weirdness is prevalent all throughout. I am somewhat curious if this is a case of EASL, but, also, EASL doesn’t cause the 10% thing. And, tere is someones name attached to this for revisions, so, … did they revise?
Some of the rooms are columns long. Some of them are, like, two sentences. In most cases they are not evocative descriptions AT ALL. The best is the soft white glow of the god towers in the dark; the elephant tusks. Oh! oh! The treasure room! “The GM can consider a type G treasure stored in this place.” Thanks the fuck a lot man! I am inspired!


I’ve been running across these weird adventures lately. They are bad in such interesting new ways! I know people want to blame other systems or some such, but I think it has to be the influence of other media, maybe? You have to have had SOMETHING that you’ve seen before that you subconsciously emulate. I don’t want to be a dick here, but, also, before you Jabberwocky maybe you should learn to spell?


This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is four mostly useless pages. The last one has a small Background section that gets to the decent framing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524058/the-god-towers-of-the-elophant?1892600

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The Peasants are Revolting

Posted on June 14, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
by Peter Gray
Self Published
OSRIC
Level ... 3?

There is something rotten going on in the backwater Barony of Near-Marsh and the region’s noble, The Countess DeWitt has sent the heroes to investigate.  Green hooded outlaws, maniacal heirs, a village razed to the ground and a lonely tower far out in the marshes all have their parts to play.

This ten page adventure uses four pages to loosely outline a peasant revolt. I have no idea why it takes five pages to describe what it does.

Ready? Got your pencils out? I’m going ti write an adventure for you. Here we go: “Clueless Baron has an evil son and the survivors one HIS villages that he razed are now bandits gathering evidence against him while he tries to find them and kill them.” Git it? Ok, now you owe me $35 a month from my Patreon or something.

That’s it. that’s all you’re getting. From me or this adventure. There are almost no specifics or details beyond what I’ve just typed. Oh, sure, people get names as do places, but nothing more. Quirks? No. Timeline? No. Actions? No. There is NOTHING on those five pages to add to what I’ve just typed. And the last five pages are state blocks. In spite of the adventure having a Role Play not Roll Play section. 

Ok, so, I guess I lied, there are a few specifics. If you ask too many questions when you arrive then evil son sends some henchmen disguised as rebels to attack the party. And in, like, seven days he sends two henchemen in to the swamps to map a way to the rebel hideout, a spy he planted having paid off, with an attack planned by him four days later.

Now, seriously, that IS it. There is nothing more to be gained by grabbing this adventure. I am so disappointed. You see, there I was suffering under the yoke of the adventures backstory, when I came upon this: “Thirteen months ago, Edric was out hunting with his friends and some loyal guards. Drinking during the day and making an early camp they rapidly became drunk and looking for female company, they decided to take some maidens from the nearby village of Lock Lea. Understandably the villagers, already unhappy at the increasing taxes resisted. After a heated battle several of Edric’s men were killed or injured, the village was put to the torch by the remainder, and the villagers fled. Painting the incident to his father as an unprovoked attack by the locals, the surviving villagers have been declared outlaws.” Hey hey! Not bad! If that was the ONLY backstory then we’d have a winner of an introduction. It’s not. You have to suffer a lot to get there, And there’s nothing else in the adventure that even comes close to comparing to it.

Man, you gotta actually DO something when writing an adventure. Right now this isn’t even the outline of an adventure, it’s just an idea. Other than just saying “evil henchmen disguised as rebels attack the party”, you need to do more. Other scenes .her incitements to action. There are not even any NPC personalities. Jesuso Christo, you want the party to go talking to NPCs and gathering information and then you present ABSOLUTELY ZERO in the way of NPCs to talk to or information to gather. I mean, ZERO. I know, I can be hyperbolic at times, but in this case it truly is ZERO. 

I can understand an outline of an adventure. Let’s say you publish a book and each page, or facing pages, is the rough outline of an adventure with high points and such. Not my cup of tea, but I can understan how it can fit in. I can even understand an adventure idea product. One of those “101 encounter to have the road” or something like that. That makes sense to me. Again, not what I would consider an adventure, but I can understand it. What I can’t understand is an idea that takes ten pages to describe … and coming away with nothing more than what a short paragraph might say.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is all ten pages, so, good preview at least.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/523940/the-peasants-are-revolting?1892600

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Ashes of Rhu

Posted on June 11, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Christopher Capone
Wicked Cool Games
OSR
Levels 2-3

Long Ago, the folk of Rhu made an agreement with a witch to save their tree-thorp from destruction.  She honored the agreement, but the folk broke their promise.  Soon the village was razed.  Now, years later, the adventurers must delve into Rhu to find a lost friend and deal with the evil still lurking within the ruins.

This 34 page adventure uses about four pages to describe a burned down village with ten locations. It wants a creepy horror vibe, but the lack of much evocative content lends itself to more of an abstracted vibe. Too bad because it’s got a nice premise. 

Ah, a tale as old as time: the town didn’t pay their dealer. Specifically, they bargain with a witch to save the town from attack, she keeps up her end and then they don’t give her the baby teeth that they agreed to. They didn’t even have to yank em out! She was content with them falling out naturally. The kids go missing and when they come back, with amnesia, they are carrying these little sack dolls. And then one night the dolls murder everyone and burn the town down. Oops. We’ve got a witch, murderous little sack dolls with knives that turn you to dirt if they kill you, baby teeth … good stuff! But the adventure doesn’t really know what to do with it all. This kind of excellent horror/folklore vibe just doesn’t come through. The burned down town doesn’t feel like a burned down town at all. The creepy little dolls get a “giggle when they run away” thing, but thats it. The entire horror vibe, along with a ghost child or two, just isn’t creepy. 

It’s hard, I gotcha, to write some evocative text and transfer the vibe, the intent in your head, on to the written page in such a way that the DM on the other side can pick it up and run with it. But, also, that’s a decent chunk of what folks are paying for in an adventure … to get the vibe that the designer is putting down. 

That’s not what we get here though. There is a lot of lead in. A starting village with people to talk to … which doesn’t really lead anywhere. There’s no real mystery to solve. There’s no amulet to burn or anything. You’re there for [pretext] and the entire framing, the entire backstory, is just there to explain the presence of the little sack monsters. Thus all o the NPC interactions in town are for nought. The wilderness encounters as well. Those don’t have to lead to something, but, also, they don’t So all of those pages, all of that text, is for nothing. What if, instead of all of the useless town material, and the description of a forest that the party will never enter, instead that effort was put in to the burned down village? To bring it alive? To give the party something to do in the village except stab little sack monsters. There is a dead dude trapped in a soul gem, but he’s just there to explicitly provide monologue and explanations, to bring out the backstory. Likewise the little ghost child, there’s nothing to really be done with him. He wants Bloody Tear, his sack doll, back, but if you do so then … he just goes away.

Nothing here contributes to anything other than the backstory of why the monsters are here. There is no real tragedy to bring forth and no triumph to be had, the witch is not present and you can’t really accomplish anything. It’s as if you wrote LotR as a backstory and the adventure was “pick a flower from Mt Doom” and there are a couple of orcs there. Ok, sure, I understand why the orcs and Mt Doom are there, but nothing contributes to the NOW of the adventure. 

“Apple barn: Processing & storage area for apples & mead. Slight sweet & rotting smell. Many overturned barrels and crates with a mushroom-infested sludge.” This would be a typical description of one of the areas in the adventure. There is more, but it mostly consists of sack dolls dropping from a ceiling and stabbing you before they run away giggling. There’s just not much to work with in that description. The sweet and rotting smell is a highlight of this description, and of the adventure. There’s just not enough of that. The burned down town. The tragedy of the parents being little piles of dirt (Ala On the Beach) … the children themselves. There is just not enough of the horror element here, not enough of descriptions that ground the place. 

The witch, the teeth, th children, the ever present mist … not really used in any way, not leaned in to. It’s not that it’s BAD, it just ends up being a whole of backstory for an adventure that amounts to little other than stabbing little sack monsters and an ant-lion  ala sarlacc pit. 

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. I got excited with the NPC summary, but nothing goes anywhere. It needs a better preview, of the actual encounter keys, to give a better feel of the core of the adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/522590/ashes-of-rhu?1892600

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Ferric Resonance

Posted on June 9, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Petras Vaznelis
Archon Games
Generic/Universal
Level 0?

Though the omens chime of certain doom, there are those that seek these nodes for their own gain. Cults of all sizes rise and rally around the confluence of arcana found in these treasures, locations, and abominations. Heralds to the onset of Armageddon, the conclaves muster and channel arcane power from beyond the veil. All the while, the reach of the fabled ‘Dark One’ lengthens across the Accursed Realm.

This 56 page adventure is a great steaming pile of shit with no redeeming qualities. It is a narrative railroad consisting of the third read aloud and one third backstory. 

How the fuck something like this can exists in 2025 is fucking beyond me. I’m not sure if I am abhored by the ignorance or impressed by the bravado of publishing something like this. Remember my fucking pad thai analogy? You know, you’ve never had pad thai. People tell you its good. You have some and its pretty good. Then, one day, you have actual GOOD pad thai and your mind is fucking blown. Yes, you can see how all that crap you ate before called its self pad thai, but, also, fuck that shit because you just had mind shatteringly good pad thai. The real deal. There are people walking around in the world today who think that his is a D&D adventure. That the form here, and the play it generates, are what fucking D&D is. Yeah yeah yeah, we’re all on our fucking journey. Whatever, Look man, I know the score. Life has no meaning, it’s the search of meaning, blah blah blah. But FUCK. Sometimes the shit is a little too real and your face is just ground in to the reality of life and its too fucking much. I am genuinely baffled. THIS is what D&D means to you? Ok, sure, I guess so.

Blah blah blah, yet another apocalypse is happening. Evil cultists getting killed by an over zealous inquisition. And the party are some zero level peasants that are out at the villages work camp harvesting bog iron fro mthe mire. Which means wandering through it with a long pole looking for solid stuff to pull out hoping it is boog iron. We know all of this because of the read-aloud. 

The read-aloud, I am … man. Ok, so, there’s two types of text in this adventure, there is read-aloud and there is DM text. The read-aloud consist of about two thirds of the pages in the adventure. Yes, Two thirds of the pages. At a minimum, I’d guess And, yes, this IS a 56 page adventure. And it’s all in second person. You’re tired. You’re hungry. All of the sins of writing read-aloud are on full display here, except for italics. Thankfully, there’s no italics. But everything else. Telling the players what their characters think and feel and what they do. I don’t know that I’ve EVER seen an adventure with this much read-aloud before. EVAR. The sheer audacity of it. Just absolutely going for it. I’m not ever sure it’s physically POSSIBLE to read this much text out loud to people. I mean, do you strain your larynx? Do they all just walk out?

Did I mention it’s purple? Oh, sorry. It’s purple. “As winter yields to the slow thaw of spring, the Mire’s southern shore falls beneath the righteous intent of the burgeoning Inquisition.” or “Time crawls onward during the sluggish hike to your destination.” You enjoy that, ya hear?

The DM text is no better. It is just a mountain of backstory, explaining motivations and history. It has almost NOTHING to do with actual play at the table. 

There’s nothing else. I’m serious. You can have read-aloud or you can have Storyteller Notes backstory. That’s it. It’s fucking wiilllld!

The adventure? You wander around. Read aloud is read. ,The entire first half is being bored to death by mundane things like breakfast and the entire second half is read-aloud telling you where you go and what you do as people chase you. I guess you get to fight at the end. Oh, oh. That’s good. If you get in to a fight before the last encounter then you die. The text tells us that, that a single soldier can and will kill everyone. Then, at the end, there are six of them AND a giant fungus monster. But, you’re supposed to fight. You gotta be consistent with your own framings! But, I guess I’m worrying for nothing. The read-aloud tells us what were doing.

(As a personal aside, the giant fungus monster is immune to fire. I disagree, it has ont seen yet how motivated I am to set it alight.)

The audacity. The ignoring of every good piece of advice. Having lived a life in which, seemingly, the designer has never seen another adventure and yet has produced an adventure of their own. It is like discovering a people who have not yet made contact with the rest of the world and have their own culture with some bizarre rules of normalcy, like, eating newborns is a good act. How did you get here, you wonder? 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. The fourth page, page eight, has what I think is the start of the adventure. From here on is read-aloud and background.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/523715/ferric-resonance?1892600

Posted in Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 15 Comments

Fog Valley Retreat

Posted on June 7, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ben Gibson
Coldlight Press
1e
Levels 5-7

Deep within the valley, where the high keening voices sound in the heavy air and ivy shifts against the wind, an elegant edifice looms out of the fog, cloaked in whispered rumor. They say it is a refuge for all wicked highborn, most recently the villainous one who owes you his head…

This eight page adventure uses two pages to describe about twenty rooms in a religious refuge for baddies. Ben does a good job putting multiple interesting things in a room to interact with and maintaining a tone that while challenging is not adversarial. It’s almost certain to end with a gods avatar getting pissed and hunting you down inside, ala DCO. Terse, evocative, designed. Make mine Coldlight!

Oh, Bryce is a meanie! He hates everything! No, I’m not a meanie. I don’t actually think it’s that hard to snag a best from me. It’s just that most people don’t try. You know who did try? Ben. And bens gonna get a Best for it. This is not the most revolutionary adventure ever written. But it, though, a solid little adventure. It’s based around an adventure need. Oh No! The baddie your party has confronted has gotten away! Where di they go? They went here, to the refuge/sanctuary described in this adventure. It’s a small temple and, as a fleeing despot, if you swear an oath to their god then they protect you … such as it is. It’s a nice little concept, filling a niche need that does seem to pop up in every campaign. And, if you don’t want to use it like that, then Fingol the Vile is inside, having fled some someone.

Ok, so, we’ve got some undead in this place. Let’s do basic check one: can we automatically destroy them with our cleric? Heavens! No! It looks like Ben may have actually played his adventure! Next basic check, treasure. Let’s see … “ A pair of acolytes pray at the golden altar (500lbs, worth 18,500gp)” Ope! Looks like Ben is a son-of-a-bitch! Wonderful! The party can drag that out, as well as a delicate elf crystal gran chandelier, an entire library of books, and some cumbersome tapestries. All those tithes go to waste as gems and jewelry after all 🙂 There’s some coin and gems and jewelry, and also a decent chunk of the overall total is in that more cumbersome “furnishings” os various sorts. It’ doesn’t get rediculaous, but, also, you’ll want to send some wagons back. 

That’s gonna be an issue, though. If you kill ol Fingol, or the high piest, then you get a clash of titans scene. Room 2: “This chilly octagonal chamber is dominated by a flawless 15ft-high statue of a beautiful winged and haloed woman, the Angel of Refuge” there you go! Oh, wait, I didn’t finish. “ (actually the Guide’s Avatar waiting in a stony shell)” If you kill the chief baddies then “the stone cracks off of her and her light bathes halls while she calls out “WHO VIOLATES MY HOSPITALITY?” in a clarion voice and roams.” Oops. That’s thirteen HD of avatar trouble hunting you through the halls before you can get that golden alter out. This is the ol “collapsing dungeon” thing at the end of an adventure, except done well. And there’s really not too many more words to it, except perhaps a note about it not being able to make it down 5’ wide hallways. 

Related, to that, is the skill Ben as in overloading a room. In a decent room you’ll want a couple of things going on. Room two, that angel room, for example, has several things going on. Tapestries on the wall that you can hide behind. The statue proper. A gallery above that the tapestries hang from, giving some verticality to explore. It’s a good room and, it’s handled in, I don’t know, one eighth or one tenth of a page? Well written, I’d argue evocative enough, mutliple things going on, and terse. Creatures bolded and state blocks shaded when the monster first appears. It’s a delight. A page of intro, with rumors and wanderers. A map. Two pages of keys, and a page of consequences that it shares with 5e stat blocks. A fucking wonder this!You can fucking run it!

Oh, those rumors? “THE CULT OF “SAINT” LELIT IS ANATHEMA TO THE GODS OF LAW, BURN HER WICKED SHRINE” Yeah man, that’s how you get a mission from the god/priessts of Law. Anathema. Burn it. I don’t need to be told twice! It’s just fits in so perfeclty, so effortlessly communicating the vibe along with the rumor. Oh, and good map. Decently complex. Some vertaicity, some passages running over others, some features, like said curtains on the map. Pretty good job.

Hey man, it’s a room wth a decent number of cables in it. “the candles begin flickering on one-by one”. Did you fucking run? No? “and a minute later a fireball (10d6) ignites” Dude told you it was coming! 

Ben does this over and over and over again. Effortless looking rooms, easy to grok, with something to do and interact with. This is a solid fucking adventure. Greatest thing ever? No. But a solid solid adventure. And those get a Best around here. And I’ve not even covered the fog effects in the rooms! Solid.

This is Pay What You Want on DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. So, you know, the whole thing is free to look at. But, also, drop a couple on him for it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/522331/fog-valley-retreat?1892600

Posted in Level 6, Reviews, The Best | 5 Comments

The Quiet Shrine

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Dougal Cochrane
Self Published
Shadowdark
Level 4

A Lost Ruin – The Quiet Shrine lies half-buried and half-broken. Its holy places are desecrated, its defenses cracked, its silence disturbed not by reverence, but by the echoing burrow of chitin claws. Yet the dwarven wards endure in part, and within the hidden tomb, Ord’s sacred charge still sleeps undisturbed… …until now.

This sixteen page adventure describes a dwarf temple with twelve rooms. It has some simplistic mini-quests in it that are combined with a “which puzzle does this fresco solve” instruction set. I’m not angry, there’s just little reason to go with this. Sometimes it’s just hard to summon enthusiasm for an adventure, positive or negative, and this is one of those. 

Each room starts with an italics read-aloud, a few sentences long. As per the usual complaint italics is bad to use in long sections of text because it’s harder to read. The text then gets purple and, in fact, the very first read-aloud of the adventure is “Framed by roots and the bones of the mountain” … and .. end with “The world holds its breath. No birds sing here.” Don’t go purple in your descriptions. And, you also want to avoid things like “the world holds its breath.” A good description will make the PLAYERS the impression that the world holds its breathe, be it in anticipation or in melancholy, but you want to avoid outright TELLING the characters what they feel. I will note, however, that the “No birds sing here” line is pretty good. Better, I think, to use it in the description of the doorway, as a carving or runes for the players to read. The text goes on, roof after room, trying hard to give this impression of a massive emptiness and the silence (hence the title) but it comes off purple in most cases. The writing of a terse but evocative description IS the hardest part of an adventure, I think and thus I am somewhat sympathetic at clumsy attempts to evoke a vibe. But, purple is purple.

The text then goes on, the read-aloud, to over-reveal in many cases. “Cold air hangs heavy in this tiled chamber, where black and white stones alternate beneath your feet. Ancient murals adorn the walls. The silence is broken only by the whisper of dust and the faint scent of rust. Two goblin skeletons lie slumped near the far wall, riddled with iron darts.” The goblin bodies is an iver-reveal. The iron darts are an over-reveal. I would suggest that perhaps even the black and white stones are an over-reveal. There is the concept in RPG’s, the core cycle between the DM providing information and then the players taking that an asking follow ups questions/interacting with the environment. Thet core cycle is CRUCIAL for rpgs/ When the rea-dlaoud text over-reveals this then that cycle is broken. You don’t need to investigate the bodies to see what they are. Or to see the iron darts. The black and white floor tiles here, are indicative of a trap, along with the darts, of course, giving some warning to players who pay attention. But its being obviously telegraphed. You want to hint at things, and then let the inquisitive players follow up. You’re cutting to just the end of the room by over=revealing the information. 

A different room tells us, through read-aloud that there is large creature in the water. Ok, sure, but then it has a section of text called “Clue” that reads “A slow, rhythmic chufng sound is heard—the matriarch’s breath as she drinks. Deep gouges and claw marks line the walls.” Well, sure, I can see the fucking thing in the water man! This sort of sloppiness in editing, in the core concepts of the rooms, is evident throughout. Am I figuring out theres a creature in the room or am I seeing that there’s a large creature in the room? Both are valid encounters in D&D, figuring something out or avoiding something obvious that you cannot, perhaps, take on directly. But you have to pick one in your editing. 

This is a meh adventure. It’s a basic map layout, with rooms and a few caverns. It’s got a few simple puzzles, that almost all revolve around “look, that fresco has a dude dropping a gemstone in to a well and THIS room has a well!” I’m not angry that those puzzles, but they are so very basic as implemented. Kill some umber hulks, move on with your life. 

This is Pay What You Want on DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The preview is five pages, mostly intro, with one room shown. Not a very good preview

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/521855/the-quiet-shrine?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 5 Comments

Sharky

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
Idle Cartulary
Self Published
OSE
Level ... 2?

A young man dragged into the sea. Cattle slaughtered and half-devoured. Villagers scared to leave their homes.  Something terrible and massive roams the seaside village of Conchi at night.  Can you help them?

This 56 page digest adventure presents a small investigation  in a fishing village along with a three level thirtish room sea cave dungeon. Interconnections abound, with a delightful grouping of entanglements throughout. Combined with a penchant for verisimilitude, we have something that turns out to be interesting enough.

I know, I know. It’s from itch. But this one is different, I promise.

I don’t know where to start with this one. I guess the relatability of this, of the situations and people in it, that marry both real life and the myths that we had absorbed as real-life. I’m going to touch on a couple of minor things and then hit the big one. First, let’s look at this overview description of an NPC: “Anesidora, a villager. Foolishly exchanged her laughter for vengeance after Gaston rejected her. She regrets her actions, of course. She weeps perpetually, now.” That’s pretty good. She’s exchanged her laughter for vengeance to a sea witch. Foolishly exchanged. Vengeance. Rejected. Weeps perpetually. Very good word choices. I think we can all get a great vibe for how to run her and what motivates her. Or, maybe, lets look at a couple of the hooks: “… offers 500 crowns to deal with the beast of Conchi, whatever it may be; double that if there is indeed a beast that needs slaying.” Ever wanted to be a Pinkerton keeping the workers working? Well there you go!  Or, how about this one? “Thirty years ago, an ever-bright star indicated the birth of a god. Three aged magi have finally divined its’ location: They have sent you to recover the god from Conchi and will reward you each with a magical gift.” The allusions here are obvious. These are really some decent hooks that go beyond the simplistic formulas that plague most adventures with hooks. A rumor you say? “A ship — the Incorrigible — wrecked out in the bay a few months agone. Only survivor is a peacock of a man staying at the Harp & Harpoon” A peachcock of a man. The rumor is relatively in voice. Not bad! There’s a relatability as well as ord choice which really brings the people and situations home. This is what I mean when I reference the written word evoking more than just the words on the page, and the ability of a description to spark a GMs imagination and let them run with an idea effectively. 

I think, in order to illustrate the adventures interconnections, that I’m going to try and do it through the relatively small town section. We’ve got Gastons house (No one turns in to a were-shark like Gaston!) broken up inside and full of flood … with slaughtered cattle in the farm field nearby. (Along with mom … with a black eye and scabbed over scars on her arms, hoeing her beans, bitching that a THING tried to kill her and took her son.) The inn, with Navigators Tea … which is turns out is secretly made from creatures caught out in the bay. INTELLIGENT creatures. And that strutting peacock of a man who has a secret … the rotting corpse of one of his former shipmates came to visit him and told him not to go too far away lest he die. (And the innkeep, a scrawny old woman, not to be found in the inn, but out working her fields during the day.) I can go on and on and on about the town. Essentially, each place is there FOR A REASON. Isn’t that refreshing? Places that contribute to the adventure? And, as it turns out, WILL BE IMPACTED by what he adventurers do, as a kind of epilogue. It ALL contributes to the actual play of the adventure. The trivia, what there is (that I am relating badly) just adds a little local color. (At one point we learn that the local lighthouse keeper is also a were-shark. ‘He’s a were-shark, too. The sea-witch lacks imagination in her curses.’ That’s the kind of aside I can get behind. 🙂 It’s fucking great, and so refreshing to see the things on the page ACTUALLY MATTER. 

There’s a little bit of a build up with an ever, a shark attack scene, involving the chick that caused all the trouble, the now crying one. It’s fucking great! “you hear screams from outside in the street.[…]. Algernon Cavendish is lying in the street, his hands up to protect his face. Anesidora is standing nearby, screaming.”

Moving on, how about the play Mrs Lincoln? “ Mossy, barnacled rocks around a darkened cove. Two identical wave-worn statues flank the entrance: A beautiful woman, but her form is twisted, subtly, as if she was made of kelp? – Squelch, squelch of saturated sand. The roaring of rushing water. As your eyes adapt: a crudely painted wooden sign, dripping with weed: Keep out! – Inside, a corpse half-buried in the sand.” Pretty good descriptions. Squelch. Barnacled. Darkened. Wave-worn. Crudely painted. The descriptions are evocative enough and do a decent job of setting the scene. Maybe not rock-star, but more than enough. And the room descriptions are generally hitting like this, to one degree or another, consistently. “High ceilings. Deep drifts of silt and sand, washed here by the tide, but never away. Nonsense writing is carved into the walls here, visible as bright moss, grown into the carvings. The scrawl on the wall says “Gur gernfher vf ohevrq urer!””  I can work with things like that. Deep drifts. Silt and sand. This is easy to visualize, and therefore riff on.

Room interactivity is good. Secret doors, silted over, hidden by a giant anemone. ‘People’ to talk to. Different factions with different wants and needs that are not slap you in the face. Great sets oof tricks and room specials, not overwhelming the room like a set piece but adding to it.

My only complaints here would be minor. The locals didn’t loot the shipwreck offshore, which is not what locals do, but, I guess it is a D&D adventure. And that the curses of the sea witch, in one room begging to be undone, is ALSO begging for a table for weird shit to happen if you just go in cutting everything, undoing every curse and wish shes given. 

Quite the nice job on this.

This is $20 on itch. You get to see three pages. A hook page is ok, and you can se ethe town overview on the facing page. The random encounters page is nothing special. The last page of the preview shows two rooms, which are relatively reflective of the other rooms as a whole, if a bit on the plainer side. Good previews.

https://idlecartulary.itch.io/sharky

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 11 Comments