tenfootpole.org

Archie Fields III, Matthew C. Funk
Witch Pleas Publishing
5e
Level 1

Set in the richly detailed settlement of Greenspires, a town nestled among the elven ruins of the Hinterwoods of Witch Pleas’ Legends of Lohre setting, this tale begins at the cozy Drunken Dragon Inn and escalates quickly. A goblins raid becomes an epidemic of the un-dead, with a zombified child stalking his cellar and a grieving father wielding dark magics. Old John Stuart’s Mill is more than a dungeon crawl. It’s a reckoning of morality, justice and consequence.

Before you go bitching, think a bit about my direct and indirect illocutionary force. 

This 28 page adventure is a rather simple and linear affair full of terrible choices when viewed through an OSR lens. Beyond the normal D&D stuff, two of the encounters provide an explicit challenge to the characters to solve, one simplistic and one more difficult, that involve morality in a more nuanced standpoint than it is generally covered in D&D. The more interesting one is worthy of inclusion in a game, perhaps, and fits in well to my People of Pembrocktonshire villager vibe.

This is a 5e adventure, but they stuck it in the OSR section of DriveThru. Normally I’d pass that by, but then they called it “John Stuart’s Mill.” Ever the sucker for marketing, I eagerly dove in. Who’s that Australian philosopher, you know, the one who posited that every time you drank something other than tap water you were making a decision to kill a child somewhere who doesn’t have access to clean water, because you could have spent that cash to help them/donate?

Just as we saw with the NASA adventure, our crossover friends may be perfectly competent in their own fields but have not been born with the innate ability to present an adventure in a useful way. This results in an effort that has a rather higher bar to run it than what I would prefer, or, even, when compared to other adventures from the more mainstream designers. These sorts of adventures, attempting to crossover to other audiences (in this case, classes and the like, using D&D to help ground philosophical concepts) face the added barrier of audiences new to the game, and thus needing that rigor that comes from good deign principles across the Bryce pillars. There are The Old Wounds: long sections of italic read-alouds. It has been known for quite some time that long sections of read-aloud causes players attention to drift. Phones come out. Limiting this to two to four sentences and making it interactive instead of exposition dump is the better choice. And, of course, there are studies showing the increased cognitive burden of long sections of italics. But, every adventure does it and thus the pattern repeats as new designers learn their mistakes from old mistakes. And the fucking font is small. Grrr…

But then the other issues: Eight linear encounters. We must agree to disagree on the modern trend of giving the players no agency in their lives. I recognize that this is the reality of the modern game, and yet I must insist that a game with agency is a more rewarding game. Decisions are, after all, the conceit of game theory, yes? (Ha! You see?! You see?! It a fucking activity and not a game!) 

Lest you think it’s all fun and games down this linear path of encounters, you will also get to enjoy a mary sue. I thought we had left this far, far behind us, but I do seem to be seeing a resurgence as of late? The sheriff is clearly a werewolf and, at one point, a giant wolf charges out to scare off some goblins attacking the party, reducing the number the party has to fight. Conan becomes king by his own hand. No, this is not a power gaming fantasy. This is design in which the players, running the characters at the table, get to be in control of the game with the DM as judge, not some Storyteller bullshit. Players in charge. And don’t go misinterpreting that statement in to Storygamer territory. My scorn here is somewhat lessened because the wolf attacks when the goblins are throwing their first firebombs, disrupting their attack. Telegraphing whats to come, for smart players paying attention, is generally good design. As presented here its rather a bit blatant, with no player skill required to figure out whats going on. Meh.

I can go on. Purple prose from novel writing instead of evocative descriptions from technical writing: “ Greenspires’ humble buildings huddle in the chill of the night, the brave little lights in their windows pressed against encroaching darkness, flickering faintly upon the antediluvian emerald spires of the elven ruins.” or “The scent of cedars, pine and oak permeates the night with a heavy impression of the Hinterwoods’ age.” At the mill there are various sounds; a hobgoblin butchering an animal that is screaming very loudly. Goblins arguing in the next room. These appear, though, in the rooms in question and NOT in the room in which you hear them. I can beat a dead horse here explaining ad nausea why this is  bad, just as I could spend time describing why the opening “run in to the bar to get help help” scene is unrealistic, bread immersion,  and ineffective in creating the emotional response that the designer is going for, or the backstory exposition that muddies up the DM notes sections of encounters making it harder for a DM to locate for what is the absolute most important thing in adventure design: running the adventure at the table. But, instead …

Let’s talk orc babies, in which my perfect knowledge of adventure design that can never be questioned instead turns in to shaky opinion. 

We gotta go in to this with a couple of statements. First, at some point things changed from Nature to Nurture in the role of Evil in a humanoids alignment. When there is a god of evil and you are born evil then many of our moral arguments fall apart.Slaughter thy orc babies as ye may, Old time is a-flying. You do have a soul, there is an afterlife, and you WILL be spending eternity being happy or punished up in Olympia or the Seven Heavens or wherever. Maybe figure out what Eru Lluvatar thinks the meaning of good is? I don’t care if you like the official changes WOTC made to humanoids and their relationship to evil, that assumption is where we have to start our discussion in the modern game. If it help you live with yourself, go look up the appropriate Aurelius quote about the othering and generalization of people in order to justify doing things to them you otherwise could not. While you suck him off. The moral question is more interesting in 5e than our pre-Nietzian OSR versions. 

Alignment, used in the way its used here, does NOT make the game fun. I don’t care what version the game is and I don’t care what your decision was in killing the orc babies, a DM that modifies the game based on morality is a bad DM. This adventure makes one damning statement in it: “Don’t decide who is ‘right’ among the players. Instead, let the world you craft respond to the players, ideally with deeply meaningful consequences to their actions.” Absolutely the fuck not. There is no place for morality in D&D. It’s supposed to fucking fun. Go story game activity if you want to trauma bond and moralize. I’m drinking beer and eating pretzels. I sucked diseased cocks all fucking day, eating literal shit, dealth with my commute, got bitched at at home by everyone on earth for not taking out the garbage, and, then, to relax, some fuckwit DM is gonna moralize at me? I think not. Do NOT do this in your game. Can there be consequences? Sure. Orcs don’t trust you. They sing songs about you. Whatever. But you must divorce it from moral decisions. Fortunately, the adventure doesn’t do this, in spite of that bullshit statement.

The philosophy portion appears twice, explicitly (although I believe you can see some shadows in other areas) in the adventure. The first is with two goblins attacking you. That have clearly been beat up. That are clearly incompetent. That are clearly going to, at a minimum, rob you. Except they don’t. What do you do with them? The adventure explicitly notes that it is designed around utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, and thus this encounter makes sense in that context. I mean, the entire goal of the adventure is to bring to life philosophical problems for discussion and debate, so, you know. It does that. This is the weaker of the two problems presented in the adventure. It’s rather straightforward and, I think, hamfisted. Designed, bluntly, for one reason, that stated debate.

And then there’s encounter two. John Stewart has braved the goblin attack, abandoning his wife and children, to run back in to his mill, under attack by the goblins. You find him in his basement, next to a boy. A boy with ashen skin, kneeling next to a goblin, still twitching in his death throes, tearing at it with his hands and teeth. ““Please…please don’t hurt my boy.” The man is John Stuart, and the zombified boy is his son, Emmett. Emmett is temporarily distracted from the PCs by feasting on the goblin’s corpse, so they have some time to talk to John.”

Jesu Christo! Nice touch there with the goblin still twitching and this being Ye Olde Flesh Eating Zombie. I mean, the gobbo was going to kill them, right? None of that ham fisted morality here, abstracted away in to academia. Dude is RIGHT in front of you. He loves his son and brought him back. Is it permissible for the chronically underfunded state school for orphans to have a pet tarrasque? What could possibly go wrong? The real world is messy as will be a discussion about what to do here. There are no right choices, only wrong ones. 

As a teaching adventure spur debate in a classroom, the two explicit philosophical situations do what they need to do. The overall packaging of those two is rather poor. It is going to be a hard adventure to pick up and run at a table,  accessible to those not overly familiar with D&D. As a teaching aid, this aspect needs to be approved substantially. Font, exposition, organization, you don’t have to go OSE style here here but you do need to make it much easier on someone WANTING to use it. As is the barrier to entry is rather large, which means a focus on trying to run the adventure instead of the adventure itself. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. Stick in a fucking preview and help a prole out so I can make an existential choice on if its worth buying or not! 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530608/old-john-stuart-s-mill-1st-level-d-d-5e-adventure?1892600

Ganz Vargle—(Neutral Evil, he/him) a human man in his early 50s with gray starting to set in his dark brown hair and beard. He tends to dress fairly well, reflecting fashions from more populous cities closer to the coast, though he’s not ostentatious. Ganz is friendly and outgoing, but he hides a dark past: in his adventuring days, he sought to summon a demon with whom he could bargain for power, power he could use to change the world for the better. He found the witch of the wood, Moldred, who furnished him with the forbidden knowledge and materials necessary to call the foul spirit. The demon demanded a terrible sacrifice: the lives of Ganz’s adventuring companions. Though Ganz cared for his companions, he believed their sacrifice would be worth the good that he might ultimately accomplish with his magical might. Ganz slaughtered them all in their sleep in a profane ritual, but the demon was as deceitful as he was cruel: after the deed was done, he told Ganz that the best thing that a blackguard who’d sacrifice his friends for power could do for the world was to die. The demon afflicted Ganz with a terrible curse that would gradually weaken his heart and lungs until they cease functioning, and Ganz has been trying ever since to find ways to alleviate and remove the curse. The powerful talisman possessed by the witch Moldred can remove his curse, but when he approached the witch for help, she told him that he’d doomed himself by his own wicked hand and that his end is well-deserved. He swore on that day that her talisman would be his— that if she wouldn’t give it to him, he’d return and take it by force.

https://www.lukesurl.com/archives/comic/281-auto-whats

I fucking love Kant in this. “Because the Monster Manual says so! Don’t pretend you don’t know what evil is!

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/23

By Michael J. Bojdys
GrantWerk
OSE
Level 1

You wake in a locked cellar, heads pounding, contract signed in spilled ale. A dagger’s gone missing. A debt must be paid. And something in the dark wants more than gold.

This 32 page adventure uses three pages to describe six rooms in an underground smugglers den. I guess it’s inoffensive. There’s a compliment for you. How does “meh. whatever” sound as a puff quote to list on the back cover?

I can’t stand what my life has become. Someone, somewhere, thought this was a good idea. An adventure that uses three pages out of 32. Or, perhaps, if we are generous with the page count, seven pages out of 32? But, certainly, only six rooms and only three pages to describe those six rooms. Pre gens, house rules, appendices, backstory, game world, all thrown in. I do this page count to room key comparison for one specific reason: to show what a farce these types of adventures are. It’s hard to argue that this ratio is inherently wrong, (or that anything is or is not wrong or right) but it’s certainly clear that MANY an adventure would have benefited by a much strong focus on the ACTUAL adventure and less docs on the supporting material. When these page counts get to fucking lopsided its clear that the designer doesn’t know wat they are doing and didn’t really want to write an adventure; they wanted to write their house rules and setting. 

But on to this particular set of trouble. So, yeah, you wake up in the dungeon. I guess you signed a contract drunk in a bar last night and agreed to go get a dagger in this smugglers lair. While I’m not a fan of these sorts of forced scenarios in which you have no agency, they are slightly less odious when they are very first adventure for a campaign. Setting up things to come, don’t you know. I still fucking hate them and wish different paths were chosen for the framing. Forcing the players in to, say, a desert island with limited water heat stroke rules for wearing armor feels more abusive to me then the agreed lie that this is what we are doing tonight to play D&D and outfitting out party for an expedition to the very same locale with the same issues. But, whatever, minor issue.

Ok, the dungeon has a zombie in it. Got it? That’s the only keyed encounter with a creature. It also has a ghost that wanders around and attacks you. Every turn there is a 50% chance that the ghost moves one room closer to the party from its random starting location. 2HD so we’re looking at a 9 to turn it. And you’re gonna need a magic weapon to hurt it. And there’s one magic weapon in the adventure, the +1 Dagger you were sent to get. I wonder if this adventure was playtested?

The background information for the DM is a mess. It’s a combination of intro for the players and their characters and a lot of backstory that is irrelevant to the game at the table. So you need to dig out things to tell the party from the larger info dump of useless trivia. Not the strongest start.

Rooms are … ok? Not ok? I mean, I’m gonna bitch. They aren’t done right. But, you can run them. Basically, each room is going to take up about a column. You’ll get quite the short description of the room before it moves on to a longer section telling us information that the map tells us: where the exist go. I’m glad to see that this important duplicative information takes up more column space than the room description. Then, running on from the exist information we will get some follow up on things in the room the party might examine, the contents of a chest or something. This is likely to take up half the column. You can follow it well, except for the contents kind of running on from the exits. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. 

The descriptions are fine. Not awfully inspiring but more than just facts. The designer has clearly tried to spice them up with adjectives and adverbs, and sometimes this runs in to being purple. “The air hangs cold.” Uh huh. I get what the designer is trying to do, and their heart is in the right place, there are just better ways. Like showing instead of telling. You can see your breathe. There’s a stillness. … Oh, wow, the air hangs cold, eek!

There’s not much in the way of interactivity. Search for a secret door. Stab the zombie and ghost. Jump over some sewage. It’s six fucking rooms. 

I’m annoyed that it took 32 pages to present these six rooms. This is just a throw away adventure attached to the rest of the campaign content, sold as an adventure. That annoys me. The actual adventure is nothing special. Id’ say it’s a typical six room lair, which means no room for anything to happen. It is written just slightly better than most of those, but that’s still the bottom of the adventure heap. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you the confused intro and the ghost. No rooms. Then again, if it showed you a room page then you’d see half the actual adventure … poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527981/signed-in-ale-sealed-in-wax?1892600

By Tim Edmonson
Ghost Ape Games
2e
Levels 1-2

He was never meant to be a necromancer. He just had the grades for it. When the players stumble across the talking corpse of a failed wizard named Bob, things spiral fast. One page of an ancient entropy-powered grimoire is already inside him. Another waits on a savage island ruled by saurian warlords, wild elves, and ghost apes that don’t sleep. What begins as a weird jungle crawl becomes a siege defense, a dungeon delve, a psychedelic fever dream, and possibly the start of a reality-hopping campaign. Or they could just go home. If Bob lets them.

This 82 page single-column adventure details an episodic journey centering around a level-4 lich who thinks he’s a fun guy. I don’t really know what to say here. It is what it is? It’s an amateurish effort, but that’s ok. The tone, adventure-path nature, and basic mistakes in information delivery are really offputting, but only the information delivery issues are actual valid criticism?

In D&D’s long history there have been some shifts in how the game is played. These are communicated through the official rules, or through the published material like adventures, or through the way most people are actually engaging with the game, or with the visibility being communicated in online social platforms. There will be ad-nauseum arguments about the official play, the actual home play and so on, but for better or worse there are memes about the style of certain editions or eras. 2e is solidly in the plot & story area meme, and this adventure unabashedly follows that, noting it explicitly. You can’t really criticize a man for doing an episodic adventure when you buy a “story drive adventure”, or for the comedic elements when it’s communicated up front. I know the 2e crowd is fierce, so we’re going to talk a bit about this just to ensure there’s fair warning, and then I’m going to cover some of the more issues with the adventure that lead to a “but is it a GOOD story based adventure with comedy elements?”

You’re gonna start in a village of cat-people. When you reach the lich, Bob (yes, that’s his name) he’s gonna cast hold person on your group and then do some magic tricks for you before running away and escaping. He’ll later keep up a constant banter with you as you drag his dismembered body around the rest of the adventure. He throws in comments and so on. This is 100% a railroad, errr, episodic adventure adventure path. It is solidly High 2e. Are you chill with that? I’m not, but I bought it anyway and can’t really criticize a man for doing what he said he was gonna do in the sales pitch.

But Bryce’s pillars stand apart from that. This is a rather amateurish affair, and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s a single column effort, which remains difficult to read and comprehend. I know that the point seems trivial, but the eye travel study on comprehension is real, as is the anecdotal data for anyone who has had to use single-column. It’s just going to be a little more difficult to comprehend the adventure and use it. 

And then there are the asides. There are a lot of these. This one, early in the adventure, is a good representative example of what I’m talking about: “This episode is meant to open in media res—no meeting in a tavern, they start to learn how to be a team and how to play the game immediately. Characters either begin here in their home village or are here on personal business.” It explains what is about to happen. Is there a need to explain what is about to happen? I don’t think so. I’m a big fan of the designer framing what’s to come, in terms of how it works, but this isn’t that. It’s not explaining how the different areas work together or the tone, it’s instead just repeating everything that’s to come in a different tone of voice. And that’s just padding that is of no use and just gets in the way of running the adventure.

And then text grows overwrought and purple in places. “You find a patch of earth that hasn’t been claimed by vines. The river gurgles behind you, dark and sluggish. The trees here lean in, like they’re watching. The air smells like burnt grass and rotting fish. You can make camp. You can rest. But you are not welcome.” This isn’t consistent, but, also, it’s clearly trying for this epic adventure vibe (it says so explicitly) and I’m guessing that this is a part of that. The purple prose is not great. At all.

But it’s also not doing an altogether terrible job with the descriptions. If we take that purple section above, it’s not too bad. A gurgling river. A patch of earth not claimed by vines may be on the edge of purple, but the air smelling like burnt grass and rotting fish isn’t bad. In other places we get a decent description of mudmen attacking the village that ranges from te usual to very good. “A child screams. You hear the splash before you see the thing—humanoid, muddy, crawling on malformed limbs. It twitches like it’s listening to the ground. Someone yells, “It’s in the ground!” and you see dark veins stretching out from the water, moving in the soil, like the river itself is leaking something alive. As you watch, another mud creature forms before your eyes, first pseudopods made of stinking, corrupted soil, then something resembling a humanoid figure with arms and a large torso” I hate the pseudopod thing, in general, and corrupted soil is a conclusion that should be a show don’t tell thing. But, hey, not bad. We’re not saying “three mudmen attack”, it’s instead trying to describe them, something the adventure tries to do consistently, and that’s a good thing. I’m going to go out on a limb and make an assumption from this that dude is an ok dungeon master, just not a great adventure writer.

If we follow through with the mudmen encounter, this is the next thing that happens once they are defeated “When the last Mudman collapses into a puddle of inert sludge, the village is in shock. Farmers report rot in the irrigation ditches. The elders whisper about the water. Something is poisoning the land.“ This is a crude and amateurish attempt to have, I believe, a chaotic battle aftermath scene in the village. People all over the place, side conversations, helpful and unhelpful injections from by standers and so on. I think I am not alone in reading that in to the description provided? And, yet, that’s not a strong description of it or how to run it or anything close to it. And I’m sure we all know what I what I think about supporting the DM. 

In other places there’s a certain degree of disorganization of the text that requires you to be completely familiar with it in order to run it effectively. This comes to pass time to time; the designer has lived and breathed their adventure for months while any of us who have simply bought it to run and read and re-read it can never know it as well as the designer can. Thus, after entering the dungeon we get notes about a second entry point to the dungeon. I think, perhaps, it should be obvious to everyone that “Entering the Dungeon” comes after “Outside the Dungeon”, but not in the kind of stream of consciousness layout from a designer that knows the material inside and out. Likewise, somewhat later in the adventure we’ll get notes buried in a paragraph about how the second entry point is in this particular room being described right now. Perfect if you know the adventure inside and out and less perfect if that’s not the case; it just looks like throwing information in wherever … or almost a subcase of  room 54 reacting to the inclusion in room 1 … in the description of room 54. 

This is hardcore story mode 2e. It’s got a slapstick comedic element that, on going, that proves that the Mork Borg call is coming from the inside the house the entire time. But, beyond these tonal baselines, it’s also not the easiest to follow and run with as a DM. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is five pages. You get to see the mudman attack. This is enough to show the conversational tone, asides, and sometimes decent imagery and sometimes purple imagery that is conveyed. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530935/son-of-a-lich?1892600

By A. Umbral
Cthonic Creations
OSR
Level 1

Beneath the shadowed walls of Crow’s Keep, treason festers in whispered secrets and quiet deals. The war-weary King Uldred fights to hold his crumbling throne, while unseen forces conspire in the dark corners of noble halls. The city’s watchful Reeve has sent word to a handful of expendable operatives—those desperate enough to gamble their fate on a mission veiled in secrecy. Their charge? To infiltrate an uncharted cave deep in the foothills, where a bandit faction has taken root. But steel alone will not be enough. Beneath the carved ruins of forgotten empires, something far older stirs. A hidden temple lies buried under the earth, its walls heavy with serpentine scripture, its chambers thick with the weight of ancient curses. Lady Rinwolde’s network has already reached this place, her spies clawing at long-lost relics of unfathomable power. Blood will spill in the darkness. Trust will be tested in the fires of ambition. And in the ruins where mortal and monster meet, the truth is as sharp as the blades that gleam in the dying torchlight. Will you uncover the mystery before Crow’s Keep collapses into war? Or will you vanish beneath the earth, another forgotten name swallowed by history?

This thirty page adventure uses about four pages to describe about 45 rooms across two levels of a bandit lair/snakeman temple. Abstracted and minimalistic in the dungeon, while trying its best to hit all of the marks of a good adventure. I am generally left confused on the choices made for an adventure outline.

Communicating the vibe of something is hard. I generally push in to hyperbole, trusting that my intelligent, good looking, and humble readers can follow along. In this case, what if you had a Vampire Queen dungeon of 45 rooms over a few pages, that really aggressive minimalism that showed up there. And, then, as preamble I stuck in a modern intro and hex crawl and then in the appendix included a massive rumor table and monster stats and lore and so on. There would be this massive disconnect, right, between the amount of detail that The Main Event has vs the supporting information. It’s not that the dungeon MUST be the main event; it could be a village social thing or it could be a hex crawl thing, with the goal being a small dungeon or some such with The Thing in it you want to get. In these cases it would make more sense for more effort to be spent on the hex crawl or the social village elements or some such. But, if the dungeoncrawl IS the adventure then I must point out the obvious disconnect. COULD you write a five page dungeon that is great inside of thirty pages? Sure. Does this? No.

Ok, you’re level ones and the default hook is that the local reeve is sending you to check out some bandit caves. Seems you’re convicts and you get a pardon if you do well, whatever that is. You’re sent to spy, learn information, and so on. Absolutely nothing in the adventure is going to help you do that, that’s unsupported in every way, but that’s the pretext. You’re taken by a ferryman (with some decent read-aloud, all in italics, alas, but nicely done) across the water to your start point. You’ve got three days of iron rations and he’s coming back for you in five days, no more no less, and not waiting around for you. You’ve got a two day “hex crawl” in front of you till you reach the bandit lair. This is all looking a little rough for level ones … a strict timeline doesn’t really mesh well with the hit and run away vibe of squishy characters. It’s a very structured “hex crawl” in that the DM is essentially rolling for wanderers at the appropriate time but everything else is very controlled. Roll on the weather table. Heal a HP if the night was chill, you enter a mountain hex, etc. The wandering monster table for the dungeon is also a bit more than I expected. “1 Escaped Prisoner – caught by bandits. Could be adventurers, possibly allies.” or “Standing Water in Passage – water pit, 5 feet deep. Slows characters. “ These are both ok things. I’m in a pretty pleasant mood at this point and looking forward to the dungeon.

Then comes the dungeon map. This is a half page thing, full color, mage in Dungeongrapher or some such. Lots of textures and tables and shit on the map. It’s a disaster. Too small, too much detail and overlapping textures. There’s no real complexity to the map, but, also, it’s barely legible, which is a problem.

Next up comes a summary of the various rooms in the dungeon. This is something I sometimes come across. I understand the goal, but I think it seldom works out the way the designer wants. In this case, it’s presented in two column table format. The first table column has a room name and maybe a couple of details why the second table column has a few notes about the room. “Entrance Tunnel” and then “Narrow stone passage littered with old bones of animals. A makeshift barricade with a single guard.” So, sure, that’s fine. Sometimes the first column has a few more details, things that might be obvious to be seen and so on. 

Oh. 

Wait.

That’s not a summary.

That’s the actual dungeon.

Mind you, room two, which I’m about to quote, is INSIDE a cave: “Guard Watchpost – each tower has a Bandit Guard “ That’s the first column. Then column two of the table says “Elevated overlook where scouts track movement. Two small wooden towers.” Repetition. Minimalism. Abstraction. Sometimes monsters (bandits) show up in column one. Sometimes in column two. There are never more than a sentence or so of words. “12 Hall of Murals “ and “Bandits have partially uncovered ancient serpentfolk murals-some have begun whispering in their sleep. “ These are ideas, not encounters. You’re stabbing folks. There’s no infiltration here, there are not supporting notes for that of any type. Stab Stab Stab! Sure that’s fine, I guess. Sometimes. 

How about an EXTENSIVE rumor table! “Whispers from the Past” – “Superstition” “True (Cave Wraiths whisper in lost languages, and some bandits are driven to madness)” Uh. What? What’s the purpose of the rumor title? Am I missing something? There’s two fucking pages of these. I don’t know, forty, fifty of them? Like I said, a minimalism dungeon supported by everything you would want in a lot of detail. But, in a weird fucking way. I’m not sure I know how to use that rumor table. It’s like the heading title is supposed to have more information or something? But it doesn’t? I don’t know.

One of the rooms has a trap. “Door Locked with a simple trap.” That’s it. You want to know what the trap is? Do the work yourself I guess. No order of battle. No infiltration notes. No real tricks or traps, given a definition of what a trick or trap would generally be agreed to. 

Unless you REALLY know what you’re doing, pay attention to the main adventure. That’s where your effort should go. I’m at a loss as to how that can be a mystery, but, there you go.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see the intro, hex crawl, and the first seven rooms. No, that’s not a summary. That’s roughly 20% of the dungeons rooms. Good preview?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530730/cursed-blood-and-cold-steel?1892600

by Vasili Kaliman
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 2-4

IN THE CAVERNOUS DEPTHS of a mountain lies a lake of pure milk, inhabited by a tribe of peaceful merfolk. Their king and queen, aided by dwarf servants, use the milk to manufacture the most exquisite chocolate truffles in existence. The truffles are said to be so delicious as to soften even the most hardened of hearts. People from all over the world visit the lake to buy these irresistible creations. Recently, truffle production has mysteriously ceased, the dwarves have disappeared, and in nearby cities, scores of disreputable merchants have begun hawking

This sixteen page adventure features seventeen rooms in a merfolk chocolate factory where candy and chocolate golems are made by dwarves. That has been taken over by Willy Wonka. And her skeleton servants and apprentices. A simple stabby adventure, easy to run, with an odious premise. 

I guess I start with the Castle Greyhawk warning. I hate Castle Greyhawk. It is, perhaps, the first real betrayal in my life. Anything resembling Castle Greyhawk is going to not be met favorably by me. Independent of that, I don’t think comedy works in D&D. Or, perhaps, if you write for comedy its going to come off badly, while certain situations can get a pass. The comedy inherent in the way, say Gamma World 1/2e was run vs the way Gamma World 4e was presented. Front and Center doesn’t work. 

Merfolk live in a mountain that produces milk. They use the milk to make delicious chocolate truffles. With the aid of their dwarf friends, which have “Orange skin, green hair, and white eyebrows.” Not the only time there will be an appeal to Wonka in this adventure. Augustus Gloop shows up and takes the place over, there are chocolate golems and her apprentices and her skeletons who sing and dance and, most of all, now the chocolate is bad. (And by bad I’m sure the designer means that while they are cost optimized for a certain quality level and yet the pricing does not reflect this. Otherwise is to suggest that only the rich and powerful get access to chocolate, except, perhaps, when the merfolk dole out a bit to the general populace on the charity day they use to assuage their consciousness to tell themselves they are good people? A McDonald’s Cheeseburger is good at $.59 and bad at $6.) So, it’s a Willy Wonka adventure with merfolk, oompa-loompa dwarves, singing and dancing skeletons, and that kind of shit. I find this tone enormously offputting, but, I know (and have suffered through) many a local game in which the DM/friends loved it. Easier to play off a bad game as ‘just for fun!’, is my theory. 

Map is fine. The monsters are on it. The formatting is clear. It’s not the standard OSE ultra-terse keyword style, so, haters of that format will need to find something else to hate. “Library: A humid and stuffy cave with a 20? ceiling hung with long, jagged stalactites. Bookcases line much of the western wall. A hefty tome sits on a polished wooden lectern near the doorway.” A room name to start to frame whats to come, a decent but short description (which I wish were more evocative, but, it’s fine) and then some bolded keywords that are followed up in sections below. Good format. Appropriate bolding to highlight things. It doesn’t look at all like a rigorous railroad format, but that what needs to be done in the moment is done to bring clarity … in a generally consistent way. Which is perhaps the highest praise one can give with regard to formatting and layout and organization. ‘I follow some standards but I break them when it doesn’t make sense. Monsters all get descriptions right up front, instead of backstory and ecology and shit. This is how it should be. If I’m running the fuckign adventure I need to know what the things looks like RIGHT NOW. “Human magic-users clad in purple robes embroidered with a symbol of the Chocolatier’s trading house. Carry lanterns for light.” We’re not winning awards here, but, also, you don’t need to win an award with your evocative writing it just needs to be good enough. 

The adventure is mostly fighting. The first five rooms are “public” and you can nose your way through them. Then we switch to “you’re not supposed to be here!” with some occasional freeing of prisoners or talking to the merfolk king or freeing the merfolk queen. A couple of traps, maybe you eat some magic chocolate, but, mostly, you are fighting things. “Lit by chocolate candles in iron candelabras, flickering with a warm glow. 5 skeletons are engaged in a musical performance, merrily singing and playing instruments around an 8? solid chocolate mermaid statue.” So, stab some skeletons, stab some dwarves, stab some apprentices, stab some golems, stab Wonka. It’s a lair adventure except it has seventeen rooms. 

I’m not enthused about this one. Yeah, the tone is a turn off for me, so, maybe thats coloring my opinion too much. But the thing is a little too straight forward for me. The writing just not decent enough, the situations (if anything could be called a situation …) not interesting enough. No real order of battle for the apprentices. Yeah, formatting is great, but, in 2025, I’m gonna need just a little bit more. So, it gets a 6.99999999999999. It’s fine, and if you’re ok with the tone and just want stabbing then it doesn’t offend. Bleh. It’s bland. Bland with, perhaps, a veneer of trying to hard. 

.This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages. It shows you the intro and about eight dungeon rooms. More than enough to make a judgement call on the adventure, so, great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530085/quick-delve-1-milk?1892600