By Kuba Skurzy?ski Nerd Sirens OSR Levels: Low to Mind
[…] To protect St. Honegund’s holy site, stone wall and tower were built. Tower became inhabited by owls over one, full-moon night. From that date onward, the full moon was a special moment for the inhabitants of the fortress, as during these nights the foundations of the so-called Moon Tower would light up with a blue glow, as a sign of the divine providence over the castle. Imperial guards still repeat a frightful prophecy to each other, that when no more owls will be nesting here, the whole Karpaki shall be flooded by the infernal heat of the Eastern Sun. So far, legend has never been verified, as despite many sieges of the castle, the Moon Tower has not fallen to ruin, and owls have always been around.
This 44 page thing is not a adventure. Maybe a setting? A castle description? It’s Wall of Text, that’s for sure, with many issues that stem, perhaps, fro a lack of understanding of what the thing they were writing IS and thus how to write for it.
It’s a castle in some pseudo-historical-like central european setting. Gunpowder, Kaiser-moustauches and so on, mixed in with fairies and medieval markets. But, it’s not really an adventure. It’s like you included the Keep portion of Keep on the Borderlands but not the Chaos Caves, but then padded out to many more pages the keep. There are castle rumors. “The tower will fall when the owls leave the roosting!” Hmm, sounds familiar. Anyway, shit like that. Some rumors about the castle, some rumors from servants in the castle, a random guard generator as well as a random prisoner generator. And, a nice little section on the guards. Their hour, rotations, how they respond, and a note that they can also be lazy, corrupt, and don’t necessarily dislike the prisoners so they can be lax and give special favours at times. That’s a nice bit of realism and a nice little appeal to the party interacting with both groups, both to exploit or make friends with. There’s also a decent little wandering table, with things like a soldier or servent trying to witness something suspicious/illegal and wanting to report it to their patron. Decent. A situation, which is what things in adventures should be. Something for the party to exploit and a nice appeal to richer interactivity inside the castle.
I’m assuming that this is an EASL adventure and it shows through in a place or two in some awkwardness in the language. “The old well was drilled for sieges – on a daily basis it’s secured by brass plate and the castle crew does not draw water from it.” I’m not quite sure what is being communicated here. It IS or IS NOT ever unlocked? The phrases seem to contradict itself. These DO tend to be the things I care more for, I’m chill with some awkwardness but when I can’t figure out what’s going on in it then problems arise. And there were a lot of people associated with this in production. Weird
That’s it for the first floor description …
But, really, the core issue with this “adventure” is that it lacks a purpose. And that the way the adventure is formatted/laid out/described can’t then match the purpose/objective of that part of the booklet/adventure/whatever. We know, for example, that a map/key format is great for a kind of exploratory dungeon. And that other types of adventures, like investigations, or social adventures have other formats that work better for them. But this booklet doesn’t really know what it is so it can’t really match its formatting to it.
It is supposed to be, I think, a castle setting? This is the local major castle in the area. These are the people who live there. These are various general parts of the castle. And, then, for each part of the castle, these are some Things Going On. So, bandits hiding in one area, caves underneath with more. The blacksmith and carpentry shop.
There’s no real thrust to any of this. In this way it is very similar to the Keep. You could, if you were so inclined, do something with the various parts. If the part is visiting then you could drop in part of it, or, rather, use some part of it to spice up their visit. But there are a couple of issues. Unlike The Keep, there’s no real reason to visit. In B2 it’s natural to visit the Keep as a home base, and, even, some of the rulers and such have a reason to eventually interact with the party. That larger framing is absent here, so it really is just a place for you tp drop in and use. But, also, it’s not on the borderlands; it’s a fairly major place. So we’re looking more at civilized play/intrigue. And then the various areas inside are not really set up for intrigue. Theres prisoners, in the jail underneath, but no one and nothing to hook you in as a small todo or such. IF you wanted to include a prisoner for your own game then you could insert them and create some play from it, but this is all just a general framing. Do you want to explore the included Moon Tower part of the keep? Why? Well, there’s not much here. Yo uCOuLD place the McGuffin there, or give the party some need to go there and thus do it. Or create your own intrigues in the political realm and thus give the party a reason to hobnob. But, again, with little purpose to it from the product proper.
So, we get the various parts of the castle explained in a very general way. There’s specificity here but no interactivity to speak of. Its missing things to get something going, but provides a setting if you want to add your own. And, thusly, not an adventure but rather a setting. And, given the lack of interactivity in the product, a kind of weaker one at that.
And, given this focus, or lack thereof, the formatting it off. General descriptions, with some specificity. Lots of overviews and bullets, to the point that I think it becomes kind of a wall of text in places. They are used as paragraph break rather than calling attention to important things and summaries of them.
The closest I can get here, I think, in comparison is the fortress supplements from MERP. Here’s a place. You could do something here but we’re not really going to provide an incitement to do so.
This is $10.50 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Sucker.
Hubert the Halfling was a successful adventurer before settling down and beginning a Shire of his own. After building a home to humble many among even the big folk, Hubert invited his clan to live with him in the hopes of starting a vineyard. Little has been heard in the last week or so, however, and passersby say the place looks ransacked. A group of Expert adventurers could potentially find answers, as well as loot from Hubert’s many adventures within.
This 26 page adventure uses ten pages to describe about sixty rooms over about three levels in a hobbit hole complex now overrun. It’s got some interesting specificity here and there that really grounds it as a halfling adventure, but in general it comes off as a hack with a few traps in a bland environment.
How do you have an elf adventure FEEL like an elf adventure? How do you make a dwarf adventure FEEL like a dwarf adventure? Well, the designer here managed, in spots to really make this adventure FEEL like a halfling home. At least in places. I don’t think that’s a small feat. The number of generic elf tree forts and dour and bland drawf homes that I’ve seen is seemingly beyond number. We have resorted, a great to edal, to treating them like humans with points ears or short humans with beards and calling it a day. Oh, and stick in a few trees or a rock or two, depending. They have never felt alien, or even that different than humans. Even, accepting that they don’t really need to, they’ve never felt that interesting to me in tha vast. Vast majority of adventures. This adventure, however, does a decent job, in some laces, or really bringing in that halfling vibe.
I want to highlight just three halfling related phrases from the adventure; “Lobelia Tumbleberry”, “A breathless halfling named Fredegar Hardbuckle (second cousin, once removed to Hubert)”, and “Jar O’ Pennies sits forgotten in a southeast corner.”
I frequently talk about the power of language and its ability to reference more than the written word say. The very best in evocative language lets you learn things about the world by implication. More than the written word, the implication of what was written has meaning and lets you springboard off of it. It summons up from the dark recesses everything you have ever known about halflings, large families, and that pseudo-english small village vibes that Tolkien channeled. Sackville-Banningeses! If you can’t channel the personality of each and every one of thirty halflings from that one throw-away-like “second cousin, once removed to Hubert” then I don’t know man, I can’t help you. Anyway, there are some very nice little halfling vibes, at places, in this. Not a lot, and generally in to the preamble rather than the adventure keys proper, but there are some good examples here.
It does a few other things well. “The stench of trolls in room 11 is strong”, tells us one room. I love a good light/smell/sound warning, or, at least, and adventure that thinks about the environment as a whole to assist the DM. The descriptions are … let us politely say. Focused. “Mess of long-since pillaged crates and boxes. Gnawed animal bones spread about floor, primarily near hall east. Old Jewelry Box lies in a broken crate. 30’ x 65’” I like the GNAWED animal bones, and the east hall gives us a hint of what’s to come. Both are nice touches. But, also, let’s look at a general layout/description:
There’s a room name. That’s good. I might stick in an adjective, but, we’re starting off well with a framing of the information to come. I’m not the biggest fan of room dimensions in a description. I think that most cases it’s repetition from information on a map, but, also, I know some people, the salt of the earth, like it. But, then there’s the Occupants and Loot section. I am less than thrilled at these. We can generally intuit if there’s no loot in a room by the description not mentioning loot. The same for creatures, if none is listed in the main textual description then there must not be one present, eh? I get, perhaps, that the Occupants section might just be another way of listing creatures, instead of say, bolding or some such. But I think it’s a poorer choice. The creatures come late in the description and, in most cases, they should probably be up front, or at least near the top,of a description when they are obvious. No sticking in a “oh, yeah, ancient read dragon” after a five minute room description. They also, I believe, fit in a little better. They feel more at home when they are in the room description rather than listed at the bottom of the description like this. A little more, naturalism? They generally feel more like they belong and are doing something there.
The actual descriptions tend to be quite light. There’s nothing wrong wit being short, but they also feel more than a little hollow. An almost minimalism element present. That description of the backdoor is great. Narrow hallway, dirty shoes, clothes piled haphazardly. And the weasel nest fits PERFECTLY in to that. I’m reminded of an adventure centered around three singing witches. Which actually turned out to be harpies, not withes. Doh! Oh course! I love it when the party is told exactly what something else and then doesn’t see it. Masterful stroke, doing that. The room one guest room is a little meh, but, also, it could be the entrance (and, to the adventures credit, windows are listed on the rooms, and their state, so you can break in. Yeah!) I think the descriptions are a little too workmanlike for me, a little too fact based to really communicate the vibe of the room. Taking that room five description, the wide table is a nice nod, as is the bones and rotting flesh, a clue as to whats nearby. But its just a little too … staid? And the room numbers could stand out just a little more.
The encounters feel a little … plain? The doppelgangers in the barn from the screenshot are a good example. There’s a little note elsewhere about them, but the encounter is just a little off. It needs a little vignette, or situation. The weasels are a high point, I guess and the others feel a little like “also, there’s a monster in this room.” Not integrated in, or lacking activity. There’s also little in the way of alerts, for monsters reacting to things or to intrusions. It feels like everyone is just in their room, as a kind of afterthought. There are a few “survivors” hiding in rooms, and those feel a little more integrated, but not as much as I would like either. As if the room occupants were divorced from their surrounding and/or environment. There’s just a little too much DM sauce needed. I think I’m looking for something to springboard a more dynamic environment, as a DM. I don’t need to be spoon fed but just a little more to get the a more dynamic play style going.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first eight pages, with no rooms shown. Traditional room/key adventures should show you at least a few of the rooms in a preview.
By Martin A Cubas Weird Adventures by Martin A Cubas Castles & Crusades Level 1
Willowdell was once a quiet halfling village hidden deep in the forest. Now, a blood pact with a vengeful spirit has transformed its people into fiendish predators, and the land itself twists with corruption. The characters must navigate the village’s haunted streets, face warped townsfolk, and uncover the truth before the horror spreads beyond the trees.
This 54 page adventure uses about 22 pages to describe twelve locations in a ruined halfling village full of crazed halfling-fiends. It’s padded out, and tries so hard to explain things that it comes full circle and is now HARDER to understand. It’s just a basic hack.
The local halfling villages have appealed to the human castle for help. It seems they think there’s gonna be “a humanoid invasion.” Rather than respond with the army, some scouts and mercenaries are sent in to look around and see what is actually going on. You make your rounds and when reaching one particularly isolated village you see a bunch of bodies on the road. Gnolls and halflings, with most of the village razed. Rather than just go home and say “yeah. You lost a village, better send in the army!” the dogooders poke around, find some crazed halflings as well as a survivor or two that tell you about the local “sacrifice a child for a great harvest and safety” tradition. Looks like it went wrong. At the site of the sacrifice a local specter fills you in via an exposition dump and points you to a small buried token. Taking the token to the town hall, you confront the evil forest spirit on the other end of the bargain, destroy the token, kill the spirit, and free the crazed townsfolk. Yeah!
This is all a REALLY basic adventure. There are really only a couple of locations of note. The tavern with a survivors locked inside. The mayors house with the same, and some clues. The center of the cornfield where the sacrifice took place, and the town hall that contains the possessed mayor. The other eight or so locations add a little color but not much else to the way of the plot. There’s the required “oh no, what has happened here!” location when you first enter the village, and then the single crazed halfling that was partially lobotomized they transformed, so now he’s just banging his head against the wall. Literally. You’ve seen enough zombie movies to know what the score is. Err, I mean crazed halfling-fiend movies.
There’s an art pack that comes with this adventure that is rather better than most. I’m a little confused why it’s stand-along pieces and they don’t appear in the text. Maybe to use as handouts? Anyway, it gives a pretty nice rural halfling creepy vibe. Only when you hear the wind blowing through dry corn stalks, or the liminal nature of farm fields and orchards can you truly understand the kind of … hollowness that the art communicated well. Anyway, it does a good job and it should have been included in the adventure proper. There’s no real art nin the adventure, just some full collor textured battle maps. I fucking hate that trend. They are confused and hard to read. I dare say that its not the fact that they are full coloror textured, just that the full color and textures are badly done., in the same way a hand drawn map could be clear or illegible.
I’m rather fond of the hook here. It’s rare for an adventure to offer a pretext as to WHY the adventurers are doing the work instead of the local lord, but in this case it does make a little sense. Or, maybe, I just read Pillars of the Earth. Anyway, the locals think they are going to be invaded “by humanoids” and so instead of committing the troops the local lord send out someone to see if he needs to send in the troops. “The castellan is now recruiting mercenaries and adventurers to scout for signs of hostile activity before committing regular troops.” And, then, when you reach the main halfling village, “The adventurers are received in Greeneye with every courtesy and comfort the humble village can muster.” Well, there’s a pleasant change. You’re treated like you’re there to help and that they’ve asked for your help. It’s a nice start. I am pleasantly surprised and looking forward to more.
But, of course, it’s gonna suck. And it does.
Two pages of backstory. A lot of appendices, as the page count would suggest. The wanderers take a page to describe even though it’s just “you might run on to a roving band of halflings while going from one location to the next. (Which is a 33% chance every five minutes …) This is an insane amount of text for something so simple. And the only color here is a suggestion that the DM might make them come from a nearby house or something, in almost those exact words. There is no specificity. There’s epilogue, which I’m usually glad to see, except in this case there’s nothing much going on. You won! Yeah! The mayors wife is the new mayor. And if you lose? Nothing much happens, in terms of specific outcomes. “Epilogue – The conclusion of this adventure will depend on the characters’ actions and decisions. While there are multiple possible outcomes, these are the primary scenarios, which you can adapt to t your campaign:” Yup, that’s what an epilogue is and how you got there. I’m surprised, a bit, that each word used is not defined.
But the major problem here, beyond the simplicity of the thing, just hacking, is that it is wordy and padded out to a pretty extreme degree. 22 pages to describe twelve locations gives us an average of two pages per location. And some are much longer, with the majors house being five pages long. And that’s not a bunch of room s being described. How do we get here? “CK Notes. This is the village mayor’s residence.” Yup, that’s what “Mayors house” usually implies. We get a bunch of backstory in it. And we get a SHIT TON of backstory and exposition. Everything is padded out. Every “room”, every creature, everything that you could come across. And every entry n the adventure is like this. Single column everywhere. The presence of bullets doesn’t really help, with information being spread out over so many pages. The effort to make it more approachable has resulted in it being infinitely more confusing. For a relatively simple hack adventure. And it comes off as rather generic. While there’s backstory and explanations on the hows and whys there is little in the way of speciality to ground the adventure.
It’s a simple adventure, padded out to an extreme degree.
This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, and you get to see a bit of the first couple of locations, so it’s an ok preview.
Joshua Bassler Jitur Games Generic/Universal Level: Ha!
Smoke rises from the hills, and in the shadow of a colossal skull, the Gnawbone goblins prepare their blood-soaked feast.
This twenty page adventure uses about eight pages to describe five rooms in a goblin lair. Proving, once again, that Generic/Universal is the kiss of death, it fails to present an adventure and instead presents ‘possabilities.’ Thus in spite of more than few decent ideas it trudges blindly down the failed path of the Five Room Adventure.
What is the ratio of good to shit that you will put up with? Like, if i stick in ONE room in a 150 page adventure will you call it good? Worth playing? If it’s ten percent? Fifty percent? And how torturous can I make those good ideas? Can I surround it with so much bullshit that it makes you roll your eyes and vomit?
Dude can write some read-aloud. “Smoke drifts into the night sky. A rough barricade of sharpened logs blocks the canyon path ahead, its timbers hung with bone charms that clatter in the breeze. Goblins cluster near a fire, their laughter sharp and cruel. A mangy wolf pulls at its chain, teeth bared as it scents the air. Beyond the wall, firelight flickers — and in the distance, looming above the tents, the shadow of a massive skull rises against the night.” It’s drifting heavily towards purple. And it tells us there are goblins instead of describing them. But, also, massive skull, looking above, mangy wolf. Sharp and cruel laughs. Bone charms that clatter. Quick, Robin! To the thesaurus-mobile! A little too much in places but the designer has the right idea and I’ll take this over a thousand other worse examples. It does feel forced, or perhaps a little ‘novelized’ in places, but he’s on the right path for sure in using the power of language to paint a picture.
There’s also some decent foreshadowing going on in places. There’s that hint of a giant skull in the read-aloud above, and that shows up in a couple of the rooms. Then there’s also some pretty explicit foreshadowing: “Foreshadowing: A sickly prisoner mutters about a ritual “in the skull’s brain, ” planting dread for Area 4.” So… uh, ok. Yeah, the foreshadowing is good. I’m not sure we need it hammered in three times, by listing it as Foreshadowing, by doing the foreshadowing proper, and then by explaining what foreshadowing is, but, again, dude tried.
The designed also included some explicit conclusions to the adventure if you fail then then the goblins ravage the and there are rumors of a goblin warband. I’d like a little more specificity in what was mentioned; refugees on the road speaking of atrocities or some such, but, again, at least he tried. The victory conditions are much less interesting or specific than even the loss ones. At best some prisoners (GENERIC unnamed ‘prisoners’ might stay with the party and offer their services. If would be funny if there were, like, a thousand of these, but only like five or so around at any one time for one reason or another. It’s like a wand of five magic missiles; how can be best use these five before they are used up and the wand recharges tomorrow?
So, the designer has tried, more so than most. That read-aloud is from the entrance room and it gives you options for sneaking in through a garbage pit under a barricade. And you can meet a goblin deserter, maybe. The designer has tried to paint a decent picture of an environment, from the read-aloud to the potential for interactivity through stabbing, sneakin, and talking.
But, also, this is a five room dungeon. It looks like the entire series, Delves, are going to be five room dungeons. As is so painstakingly, and repeatedly, explained to us in the introduction pages, that means an entrance, a puzzle/roleplay room. A setback, a climax, and a treasure/reveal. Hark! The enemy at the gates! Five room fucking dungeon. This is one of the worst trends to ever grace the RPG industry. Fucking pay per word blog/magazine crap. Sure, you want to five room up your home game? Have at thee! I still think it sucks but I can at least understand how it might be useful. But, as a paid product? Jesus Christ. It’s absurd. It’s like going to a Michelin starred restaurant and getting a generic brand Kraft Mac & Cheeses from a box. I think you misunderstood the assignment. This is a place for shit you can’t do at home. Something with some depth to it? Something more? Adding value? No? *sigh* Formulaic. That’s what I want to pay for. Formulaic.
This is a five room dungeon. The entire purchase is twenty pages. The five rooms take up about nine of those pages. And how can this be? No worm juice here, just the usual crap. “Grashnak Bone-Eye, Shaman of the Gnawbone Tribe. Grashnak was born small, even for a goblin. His tribe — the Gnawbones — had always been weak and fractured …” and on and on and on the background information goes Irrelevant. Padding. Not useful at the table. “But Bryce, I like …” I don’t care that you like shit. It’s shit. T’s fucking padding. It distracts. It distracts both the DM at the table who is trying to run the fucking adventure, making it harder for them to locate what they need to run the fucking thing. And it distracted the fucking designer. They concentrated on that kind of shit instead of concentrating on making their fucking adventure better. Hey, here’s a fucking idea. How about making the actual five fucking rooms better?
YOU COULD START WITH INCLUDING A FUCKING MAP.
Yeah, yeah. Not everything needs a map. It’s not clear that one is absolutely required here. But, you know, the relationship to the entrance, the garbage pit, the canyon, the crawly hole to bypass the entrance and so on would have been MUCH clearer. It would have added an extra element of play.
You know what we get instead?
Twenty fucking pages and the designer can’t be bothered to put in a battlemap? That kind of shit is how you get twenty pages. That kind of shit is how you get almost two pages per room for the most simple of encounters. What happens is all goes according to plan is a section that tells you … how each room works. In a five room dungeon. Then there’s a “Planned Path” outcomes. Which is kind of like the same thing. Fuck me man. Maybe a good rule of thumb is to consider what you’d put in the adventure if it were fifty or a hundred rooms? Would you describe each and every room to us three times? As is, there’s ALSO an intro to each room for the DM, that’s not read-aloud, that sounds a lot like read-aloud, but THEN the read-aloud follows. It explains the room. “The Gnawbone tribe has thrown up a rough barricade across the canyon path leading to their camp. It’s a ramshackle palisade of sharp- ened logs, lashed together with rope and hide. Bone charms dangle from the gate — crude runes carved into skull fragments and tied with sinew. A watch fire burns in front of the barri- cade, where goblin sentries lounge.” That’s the section for the entrance room, with the read-aloud I threw up in the review earlier. It says the same thing! I think that’s four times now that essentially the same thing has been said? Sometimes you just wonder what the fuck s going on in peoples heads. Work the fucking room!
And it’s Generic/Universal, so you know it sucks. I wish I didn’t have to say that. I wish that a generic/Universal adventure could be good. I believe, deep down in my heart, that they COULD be good. But in practice they never are. Why? Because for some fucking reason when someone writes one up they seem incapable of putting anything concrete down on the page. The fact that something is generic/universal seems to mean that the adventure must be one full of ideas instead of one that puts something in front of a DM to help them. Here’s an optional reward. Here’s something that could happen. Here’s something else that could happen. Come on man, do something concrete with the fucking adventure. And use that concrete thing to springboard to something else. You’re the designer. Design. That’s what the fuck we’re paying you for.
It’s clear, I guess, that they want that sweet sweet lucre from both Pathfinder and 5e. Just do a separate version. People do it all the fucking time. I think it’s a filthy money grab, but, also, that’s why you made it generic/universal in the first place.
Let’s see … goblins are always running to raise the alarm, but there’s no guidance on what happens then. Who comes? How do they react? Nothing. The entire place is in a canyon. Narrow enough, as that battlemap screencap tells us, for the party to feel penned in. Nothing about the top of the canyon though. If the fucking idiots walk straight in then they deserve their deaths. Get on top, divert the river, sort it out later. Who the fuck camps in bottom of a ravine? I’m mystified why, given all of the words, there’s nothing about being on top. Or reactions. Oh, no, I’m not. Because it’s not imagined. Or played. Because, in spite of the page count, word count, etc, not much actual worthwhile effort was put in to it. *sigh*
This is $3 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Just fork over the money and prais ethe fact you were allowed to consume.
As you enter the town, you notice the hurried movement and averted eyes of the people passing you on the street, as if they are anxious to get away from something. When you turn into the main village square you see that a man is approaching anyone that passes him, pleading with them about something you are too far away to hear the details of. The other townspeople avoid his gaze and shrug him off with apologetic gestures, leaving him to sink to his knees, completely alone in the light drizzling rain except for a singular magpie which watches him from their perch on the town sign. As you watch, you see this man turn and notice you all. With a sudden sense of purpose he picks himself up and hurries towards you, clasping his hands together as if in prayer. himself up and hurries towards you, clasping his hands together as if in prayer. “Please, you have to help me. He’s not come home and the woods aren’t safe.” This man is Jay Andre.
This 125 page adventure uses about forty pages to present a linear plot over four sessions. It falls down in almost every way possible, including the standard “two encounters per session” trap. The list of what is wrong here is endless. All the handouts in the world, which this is heavy on, won’t save you if the adventure is an exercise in illogic and tedium.
And we can start with the fucking level range. It’s not on the cover. It’s not on the back. It’s not on the product description. It’s buried on page twelve. Page twelve. How the fuck do you handle something like this? Just throw money against the wall and hope you are buying the level range you need? It’s like people have never bought an adventure before. And that level range? It’s in two paragraphs of text that takes up about a third of a page. For a fucking level range! The padding and exposition is strong with this one!
But I should back up a bit. You wander in to town and there’s a dude in the streets that needs help. You wander in to the forest and find his partners dead body after two fights. Then you’re sent in to burn down a tree that is the source of the towns evil. Then the friendly druid tells you what is going on in session three. Session four has you fighting some townfolk for some reason and then going to mutant lake to stop the big bad, returning to town a hero. It turns out that AI, yes, that AI, was behind it the entire time.. You’re gonna have the standard two encounters in sessions.
Noice!
Hang on, hang on. I know I’m all over the place in this review, but, check out this art piece! I like it! It’s in the marketing and I like it so much that I bought this garbage adventure based off of it. I think it does a great job of complimenting the adventure, helping to communicate the vibe and tone. The Horror of a hybrid creature made up of woodland animals. It’s also, by far, the only art piece in the adventure that does this. So I guess the lesson is to have one good art piece and put it in the marketing! “Starring Bruce Willis!”
You have to wade through a lot of text until you get to adventure synopsis. Nothing on the front cover, nothing on the back cover, nothing in the marketing. Again, it starts on page twelve. (And, just for the record, there are not eleven blank pages in front of it. The first SEVEN pages are are total blank page, content, credit nonsense, with the “Words to a DM” on page eight. Then you’ve got four pages of garbage advice to DM on how to DM crap, and, then, on page twelve, you finally get a level range and an adventure summary. And, then, the Synopsys is really just a preamble, followed by a brief summary of the four “episodes.” These are column long summaries which essentially say “have to combats.” There’s a challenge for you: condense this adventure down in to three pages, with each episode being a column long. Ha!
You like italics? You like fucked up fonts? You’re in luck! Page or page and a haf long text blocks in some fucked up italics like font. Did you even TRY to read the text you put in your own adventure? Did you hand it to someone else and watch them struggle? And yet you STILL put it in the adventure? Mind you, this isn’t players handouts. I’m all for burning the tea-soaked italics note before we bandit to the players. But not the DM. The DM is running the fucking adventure. We make things easy for the DM. And i want to be clear, I’m just, to this point, bitching about the absurd decision to use italics for this. I have not yet begun to bitch about the fact that these can be a page long , or a page and a half long. A fuckign exposition dump. Nobody wants to listen to your fucking exposition dump. They want to play D&D. No, D&D does not mean excitement every moment. But what it does mean is an interaction, a back and for the between the players and the DM and each other. And listening to the DM drone on and on, even if they could readthe fucking font, for a page and a half is not the definition of back and forth interactivity. Time to wordle! Then you’ve lost me; I’m moving on to the Bee after that. And not stopping till I queen. It’s better than being bored to death. Oh, wait, the game has restarted because the read aloud is finally done? Oh, another one? People are not on their phones at the fucking table because the adventure is engaging.
We start with the party rolling in to a small village in a clearing in the woods. There’s a distraught person in the streets begging for help. Their husband has gone missing. People walk by and ignore them. The local militia is no help. They are busy serving and protecting. This is not the way people operate. You help your neighbors. Even in the big city. Even the homeless in the abandoned house next door are gonna look out for you. Yeh, some petty shit happen, but nothing serious. And those are transients. This is the local grain merchant that the adventure tells us is trusted, respected, and a pillar of the community. No shit, words to that effect. And they are being ignored by the people passing them in the street while they break down in the middle of it. It doesn’t matter that you wrote a page about it. It’s unrealistic. A page for a handwave pretext or a sentence for a handwave pretext, it’s still a shitty pretext. At least if it’s a sentence we don’t have to wade through it. There’s another situation with a tree in the forest that needs to be burnt down. There’s a bunch of kindling already stacked around it ready to light. A huge amount. But the militia, who did it, heard a sound and got scared and didn’t light it. Seriously? If you don’t light the bonfire then the militia captain sends out a squad to light it. Yup. It’s pointless. It turns out that the militia MAY be up to something, but, still, it begs the question why, with good motives or bad, they spent so much time collecting wood. It’s absurd. And the grain merchant, the person breaking down in the street, they didn’t even try to go looking for their husband? None of these people deserve the fucking parties help. The best adventures treat people like real people, with real feelings and real flaws. This is nothing more than a long drawn out basic and formulaic hack job of a pretext.
Or, we can just kill everyone and burn the place down. Murder Hobos are born from such adventures
And then there are the audio logs. Yes, audio logs. Yes, this is fantasy. There are “recording stones.” This smacks of sphere of annihilation garbage disposals. It’s the only appeal to this garbage magical society bs. Anyway, diaries are the worst form of exposition. I don’t care if you get to listen to an included mp3. It’s lazy shit. It means that you could not convey the information another way and you had to diary/audio log it. The fucking recording stones are just laying around, waiting for the party to listen to the backstory. “On any roll, the players find a recording stone lying on the floor by the foot of the work bench, as if dropped in a hurry. This stone is Trevor Andre’s Audio Log 1.” Fun. What if you don’t take the hook and help the person in the street? “This magpie will fly overhead and drop a recording stone in front of the players, which contains Trevor Andre’s Audio Log 1” So, sure, the party has to want to play D&D tonight, so they need to bite. But, also, perhaps we can be a little less hamhanded about it? Integrate diary contents in to an adventure, through actions and environment, don’t fucking exposition dump, be it in read-aloud, diaries, audio logs, or any other mechanism. “The party wakes to a magpie tapping on the window, holding an audio log in its beak.” I hate my life.
Did I mention the read-aloud is all second person and leans towards the purple side? “… he farmland and as you near the damp, cool woods you feel the bite of insects as they try and make a meal of your blood.” Joy.This isn’t good writing. Good writing makes the players feel a certain way, tha they are being feased upon. Good writing doesn’t use second person. These are both absolute sins when it comes to read-aloud. Keep it short, no more than a few sentences. Communicate a vibe, but don’t TELL the party what they are feeling or doing. And make it fucking legible!
Useful info to bookmark/have open: – Kermit Krimes Character (p.70) – Sigrid Ironspirit Character (p.67) – Sergeant Percival Bevis Ironforger Character (p.72) – Captain Jossur Character (p.74)
My initial thought, when seeing this, was to complain that the characters were not right next to each other. You know, put all of the relevant NPC’s right next to each other in the text so you don’t have to go flipping back and forth. It’s not that you have to flip, it’s tat you have other characters in the middle of these. But I was wrong. They are next to each other. It’s just that each NPC is three fucking pages long. I swear. This fucking shit. You don’t need a three page long NPC. We don’t need to know trivia about them, involved backstories that have nothing to do with the adventure. We just need to know the shit necessary to run the adventure. A vibe, a quirk or to, a want or need or motivation. Then move the fuck on. More isn’t better. More is worse. It makes it impossible to locate what you DO need. “Rich, detailed NPC’s” is HUGE
Red flag when it comes to adventures. You’ve got a fucking DM to lean on. Give the DM what they need to understand the NPC and let them riff on it. Fuck me, the DM is going to anyway. Maybe, if the effort was put in to the adventure proper instead of rich, detailed NPCs then the adventure proper would be better?
The sergeant of the militia mocks the party to the point that the party should really burn the entire place down. The enigmatic druid the party meets early returns and explains the plot to everyone; she knew what was going on the entire time. Where did the missing husband enter the woods, so the party can track them down? No clue. The woods are huge. Which way did he go? Meh, not important to the “story.”
Why even bother? Why even bother running a fucking game if you’re just going to handwave every part of the adventure that he party might interact with? “Ah, the party might hae to make a decision here! I shouldn’t let them …” The entire fucking point, even in a plot adventure, is for the party to interact with people and environment around them. Abstracting “where did the missing plot hook go?”, the INITIAL fucking hook, is just a totally bizarre decision. What could possibly be going on here?
Irony is not lost on me. The OSR, older D&D styles. The very soul of the meme of killing the monsters and taking their stuff. A Game, that you can win, by living to the next level. Let me tell you what is going on here: This is a shitty formulaic combat adventure. Oh, it’s gussied up with a lot of words and multimedia shit, but that’s what it is. The standard two combats. A pretext of a hook that the party barely interacts with. A plot that you don’t need to really interact with. COMBAT! Or maybe a ROLL FOR INITIATIVE! Is embedded in the fucking read-aloud! If you go someplace new then there a read aloud that assumes its just a straight up fight. Like you knocked on the door and out came the monster. Wanna use your wits? This is combat as sport bucko. This is, rather transparently, nothing more than a fancy way to roll some dice to stab things. There is no interactivity, aside from the combats. Nothing special is here. It’s fucking garbage. Shallow garbage. And, lest you think that combat will interrupt things … “If the fight is going badly for the party and characters are dying, there is a deus ex machina that can be used to end the fight.” A bunch of magpies show up and kill themselves divebombing the monster. No escape, even in sweet sweet death. This truly is a hellish experience.
Roll for init! You’re fighting no matter what
“Additionally, this is where the players find the Boarskin Cloak item. See page 96 in the appendix for full details. If you are running a more rules light or streamlined game, perhaps this item pops into existence fully formed, or if your game is more gritty/realistic, perhaps the players would have to harvest some boarskin and craft* the item during a short rest*” Uh huh. Pop in t existence. Or, craft is during a short rest! Uh huh. For a magic item. In an hour. I guess its better than the fucking thing popping in to existence. There is no pretext here.
“If asked why he didn’t look into the missing man, he’ll say it’s a manpower issue, that his man, he’ll say it’s a manpower issue, that his hands are full just patrolling the town and hands are full just patrolling the town and keeping the monsters* at bay. *Used under the Open Gaming License v1.0a and/or System Reference Document 5.1” Yup, they footnoted a use of the term “monster” and referred back to the OGL license for it. Perfection personified.
Remember all that padding? How about an Optional Encounter? “Optional Encounter: This section is optional, and not required to progress the main questline. It is intended as world-building and to add depth to the town of Thornborough. As such, while we recommend you include it, the players do not have to interact with it if uninterested, and nor does this situation need to be resolved by the players.” Yup. You managed to type Optional Encounter and then define what an optional encounter is. Good job!
At the start of the last act, the party comes back to town. The inn is on fire. The missing husband person, the initial session one hook? They stand accused of starting it, there’s a mob, and the militia is gonna hang’em right then and there. Ok, so, it turns out the milita is bad and the militia guard captain is the source of all evil or something like that. But why burn the inn? Why accuse the grain merchant and hang them? I don’t get it. And I don’t get A LOT of what happens in this adventure, including caring.
Oh, hey, ai is behind everything. Yeah. There’s some kind of machine god under the mountain or something. At some point you fight robots. And the animal hybrids are somehow the result of this god. I don’t get it. Spare parts or something? Mutants? All of those are mentioned. They are all organic hybrids though and the machines now want organic parts, I guess? It’s not clear. And the magpies are the agents of the nature god, in opposition. Again, it’s all just pretextual. Yeah yeah, nature good and science bad. Got it. I assume the designers are English; this seems like their ingrained nostalgia for agrarian misery. Science and technology are the new Evil Cultists eh? The magpie thing is interesting, as the agent for a god, but everything else about the entire religious/robot angle is just trash.
A lot of words, a nice layout and many multimedia handouts do not an adventure make. This doesn’t even get to the Colored lights standard. It’s just the usual formulaic shit. Prefectural and padded out beyond belief. Gussied up with some multimedia shit. First, write a decent adventure. THEN you can apply the lipstick.
This is $20 at DriveThru. Preview? FUCK YOU! Just fork your twenty fucking dollars over to the designers. They deserve it, they dumped in the soundtrack and audio logs. Why should you get a chance to see what you’re buying before they claim their tax? “Perfect for GM’s and players seeking deep immersion.” Yeah. No.
But a few scant leagues from the walls of the bustling town of Greyheim lay the crumbling ruins known as the Castle of the Mad Archmage, Jophob Schlech, long shunned by the local townsfolk. Decades ago, a series of vast treasure hoards were discovered in the twisting mazes beneath the castle proper, along with hungry beasts and deadly traps aplenty. Legends were made in that time; the names of those early explorers will live on for centuries. Eventually, though, the dungeons lost their luster as the treasures became smaller and harder to win, the traps were dismantled, and the monsters slain; eventually only the desperate or jaded dared enter the dungeons beneath the castle. Recently, however, reports have surfaced of renewed stockpiles of wealth in the dank passages and chambers beneath the hillock upon which the stillruined castle rests. Regions once deemed devoid of monstrous habitation have been reported to teem with renewed activity. Traps both magical and mundane have once more brought explorers to their doom. Changes both subtle and gross have been noted in the very layout of the passages and chambers, rendering old maps and knowledge dangerously unreliable if not outright useless. Something is definitely afoot, and most honest folk in the nearby city find the prospect an unnerving one indeed. To the bold and daring, however, only one message needs to be heard. The castle and its dungeons are once more ripe for exploration, and new legends are ready to be made beneath The Castle of the Mad Archmage!
This 322 page adventure presents a megadungeon with about fourteen levels and at least a thousand rooms. A true example of the genre, it does a decent job mimicking what a classic era megadungeon may have looked like, combining large extensive level maps with a writing style and encounter mix that feels like it’s out 79-81. It’s also vaguely disconnected from itself, feeling more like a series of random rooms, in spite of having factions and zones and level themes.
Bloch and BRW is interesting. I have, up to this point, not reviewed any of the various of Mad Archmage available. What I know Bloch from is some EXCELLENT marketing which seems to draw me in time and again to his products via the covers and the DriveThru pages. And then crushing disappointment as I see yet another what appears to be a low effort offering that makes little sense. The Castle of the Mad Archmage though is a little different. This version, I assume, is the one that hit kickstarter for something like $50k. The maps are exactly what one expect if you said large Gygaxian megadungeon level, perhaps without the “lines for walls” from the famous snippet. But, several hundred rooms per level and a complexity to them that is absolutely present. And encounters straight out of the classic era Gygax, without, though, the guiding vision of a level that results in these feeling disconnected from themselves and perhaps a little staid and/or generic. It’s a colossal effort, just not one that I would ever feel the desire to run because of the … aimlessness?
The adventure has a lot of elements straight out of early play. You will recall, in the G series, a brief sentence in the intro noting that if the party looks around they can find a cave, etc to home base out of, a camp to rest and rover in as they raid the dungeon. We can see in this one a small appeal to that as well. There are several small farmsteads in the area that the party could base out of. (This is in addition to several other areas in the surrounding lands, a fairy forest, etc, to add some play options as the party mucks about in the region through the extended and repeated forays in to the dungeon that a megadungeon would imply.) I note, as well, that these have something going on also, or at least something colorful to add. After all, if you’re going to base out of Farmer Browns farm then having a little bit to spice up play there, during your repeated visits, is a great addition. One farm houses two brothers and their families … who hate each other and will get angry if the party interact with the other half of the family. Ongoing fun! And then another has an old patriarch … and a son who just wishes the old man would die already so he can take over. “Paulus’s eldest son is Doran, who resents his father’s seemingly stubborn refusal to depart this world.” That’s a pretty simple sentence that is overloaded with opportunities for play. This is exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for in a homebase description: just a line, almost a throwaway, that can be used to riff off of. You get the idea immediately and can leverage the situation to spice some things up while the party rests.
There are also a decent number of bandits and “caretakers” present in the dungeon and the environs. They will charge you to go in and down the stairs to the next levels. Or, others will hiit you on the way out, looking for easy marks loaded down with treasure, wounded and unable to dump fireballs at them. These are, again, classic examples from older play that have been included and bring in that more dynamic element of play. We so often see the journey to the dungeon, or back home, just hand waved, but these appeals to the older play add an extra elements to help bring alive what could be routine in a megadungeon: getting in and going out again.
Other classic elements are present as well. Notably, we see a large number of levels, fourteen. And a decent number of them sport those large and complex maps that we get glimpses of in Barrier Peaks or Mordenkainen. A hundred, a hundred and fifty rooms to a level Loops, complex mapping, small zones and interconnections. We get a side view of the entire dungeon and a diagram showing the various connections to the surface. (Although, I note that WHERE on the surface is not noted, a serious lapse.) This is all quite excellent and something seldom seen in dungeons. There is room to breathe here. The denizens can have zones or control, and there can be buffer zones between them. This is exactly what you want in large expansive dungeon levels.
And it comes replete with The Greyhawk Construction Company. Err, the Greyheim Construction Company, I mean. Orcs and ogres in safety vests building the dungeon in a kind of pocket dimension. Orange cones. Blueprints. This was another classic element of play, a meta way for the DM to say “hey, that part of the dungeon? I haven’t finished mapping and stating it yet. Maybe ring again later?” Not quite a funhouse element, you’re not really interacting with them, ala “trap reset kobolds”, but more of a eta reference and acknowledgement to how the game, and its dungeons, developed. Although, I think two pages are devoted to it here … In any event, there are a lot of classical elements here that were oft present in earlier games and, in particular, megadungeon games.
The various encounters could have been written and/or pulled from some of the earliest published adventures. They range from the minimal to the slightly more than minimal. There’s a mix of combat and what we might call Specials. The Fountain of Snakes stands out as one of thoseSpecial type encounters: “FOUNTAIN OF SNAKES. A fountain with a shallow basin dominates the middle of this room. A small, barred window looks into area #128, where two orc guards are always posted. The fountain itself is shaped like four intertwining snakes. Every round that someone is in this room, a snake will issue forth from this enchanted fountain, with snakes coming out of a different mouth of the statue:” That’s a decent little special, and as a bonus it includes that small barred window. This sort of “see something from somewhere else” is something that Thracia did to great effect. Specials are one of the favorite things, when handled right. You need not too many of them and they need to written in a rather neutral way, a thing in the dungeon that the party could be impacted by or could leverage to their own ends if managed correctly.
44. LAUGHING SKULL. If this room is entered, a human skull rises from the floor laughing hysterically for 1 minute. It then floats gently to the floor. The room is otherwise empty. The skull will lose its enchantment if removed from this room.
45. EMPTY ROOM. Table and 4 chairs.
46. SPIDER! A huge spider (AC(D) 6; AC(A) 14; MV 180’/min.; HD 2+2; 11 h.p. each; #AT 1; DAM 1-6; SA poison, leap 30’) dwells here, in the corpse of an unlucky elf from whence it will leap to attack. The elf’s corpse has 85 g.p.
That little run of rooms stood out to me. We see there as special, in the skull, an empty room, and then a creature encounter. This little selection stood out to me because I think it exemplifies the kind of things you’ll find in this megadungeon. The “special” there is nothing much, just something bizarre in the dungeon. And if we’re going to criticize the Dwimmermount chess players then this gets criticized as well. There are a fair number of these sorts of “empty specials” in the Mad Archmage. It’s just something weird pulled out and put in the dungeon. I suppose there’s the possibility of the party using it, but it’s just there and doesn’t seem t contribute much. There’s an entry in the ruins aboveground of a ghostly echo of horse hooves in the stable. To no end, but, you can exorcise it to get rid of it, the text tells us. But it’s nothing. It doesn’t really set a mood. It doesn’t have an impact on the party, It just feels too … disconnected from the rest of the adventure. Just as most of the specials do here.
The empty room here is fine. Especially in a larger work you need some space. A buffer zone for monsters. A place for the party to spin their wheels or rest in. Every room stuffed full just doesn’t make sense in some of the larger dungeons.
And the creature encounter here stands out. The spider is IN the corpse. I think perhaps I would have liked a bloated elf body or some such, something to add color to the description, but placing the creature in the body, and a spider at that, elevates this from a boring old “there’s a spider on the ceiling encounter.” Again, I think this little run of rooms is a good example of what you can find here, both good and bad. A little bland in the descriptions, overall terse, a little random and aimless, and perhaps the selected format could have been done a little differently given the way the spiders stat block, fully inline, detracts from the overall comprehension of the room when scanning it.
And then there are the more straightforward funhouse rooms. “DUCK! There is a large (4’ tall at the head) bright yellow statue of a duck in the middle of this room. 1 minute after the room is entered, buzz saw blades will slice through the place at a height of 4’ 2”.” Or, perhaps the honeytrap room where a bunch of honey falls on someone. This is all classic funhouse dungeon. Something weird, meta, out of time, showing up in the dungeon. An explicit acknowledgement that we are all playing a game and the designer and DM can and will include anything. Tonally out of place in a more classic adventuring environment, but, we’re talking megadungeon here. You gonna need some things in there to mix things up. You’ve been in this dungeon for 196 gaming sessions and little fun in that environment is probably ok. And it makes more sense to me than, say, the isolated laughing skull or the horse hoof exorcism.
I have compared this si the older adventures but there is something missing. It just doesn’t feel connected to itself the way older adventures do. G1 felt like a unified whole. The dinner party. The sleeping guards, the lothario, the orc servants both loyal and in revolt. There was this overall theme that ran through it. Even in something MUCH larger, like S3, it all felt connected to itself. You could follow along. Things in one place meant something somewhere else. And it just doesn’t FEEL that way here. Yes, there are some factions on each level, and they have a zone of control, and there’s some space and some conflict. And levels have some overall theming. The barracks levels. The storage level. The arena level. But there’s not LIFE to much, if any, of it. I don’t mean creatures, there are plenty. Or weird shit going on. There’s that also. It just doesn’t feel like there’s a hiding hand here. Not quite random, but also not working together to paint a broader picture of the dungeon. I don’t really know how to describe this. It has something to do, perhaps, with a combination of the tone and the vibe? Let us assume we were turning an Ikea in to a dungeon. Each of the little vignettes is their own room. (Rooms within rooms within rooms!) So, the theme here is Ikea rooms, and each of the rooms makes a direct appeal to that. But one is empty. And another is a fairy tea party. And another that ghastly abomination known as Tuscan Kitchen. Space aliens are in a room with kindergarten chairs and some suburban mom is picking out a plant in another, unaware of anything. They are all rooms, what are you complaining about? Is there some overriding theme that runs throughout? Ultimately, the theme is that the mad archmage, a stand in for the DM, is on the bottom level and jokes with you, gives you gifts, and then sends you to the other side off world. Why, the party asks, is this all here? ? “Well, how else would I have met you folks?! [the party]” I know that the adventure path and plot thing have scared us all, but this opposite effect is a little too meta for me. There is no theme. There is no interconnection. There is nothing going on that binds the adventure, or the levels together. There is barely very much to tie the levels to themselves, as standalones. Ultimately this is just a big funhouse dungeon. The Duck encounter, with a tad more theming than, say, a bunch of isolated rooms floating in a void, each with a wildly different genre going on. Stonehell, with its level interconnections, level summaries, and interconnections was, for all of its minimalism, a hundred times better when it came to giving the things life and in making it feel like each component was a part of a whole. And, for all the funhouse nature of the rooms, there just doesn’t seem to be any joy present in the adventure. It feels quite a bit more like drudgery than joy or wonder. If we took the spirit of Grimtooth, without the sly winks, then perhaps that? I’m not suggesting there are deathtraps or rube goldbergs or anything like that. But a certain isolation combined with a routine … blandness and smallmindedness?
I can, also, mention the padding present. This is Bloch special. There is the long section at the start that tells you how to read a block and that AC means Armor Class, among other how to roleplay introductory text. I wonder what the set is of people who purchased this and don’t know what an RPG is? And then of course the entries are padded out. “Home to the Rory family, a pair of brothers and their families, with a total of eight people living here. Adam (human F0; 7 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL NG) and his wife Melissa (human F0; 4 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL NG) and their twin teenage boys, Paulus and Renulf (human F0; 6 h.p. each; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL NG) live in one of the farmhouses on the land. John (human F0; 6 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL CG) and his wife Regina (human F0; 4 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL CG) live in the other house with their widowed daughter Trudy (human F0; 3 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL LG) and her infant son Rex.” Not only do the inline stat blocks make the entry hard to read, they are all just zero level AC10 humans with nothing special going on. This calls to mind the trap of layout/publishing guidelines. They exist to add clarity, not to be followed rigidly in to the abyss. If the guidelines say to bold monster names, and you do so and it looks like that is MORE confusing, then don’t do that. Most of the padding comes up front, in the region and the text before the dungeon starts, so at least the keys are relatively free of that,
“BLACKSMITH’S SHOP. This sagging cottage, built against the sturdy stone of the inner keep, was once the blacksmith’s shop. The long-disused forge is evident, but where the anvil and tools would be expected are only rusty stains (a rust monster had found the place years ago and gorged itself). The thatched roof is mostly intact.
ARMORY. This smallish room was used to store arrows for the use of archers who might use the balistraria in the adjacent hallway. The spiral staircase behind the secret door leads to area #108 on Level 1 Core: The Storage Rooms, while the secret passage leading through the wall ends in a one-way secret door that can only be opened from the inside. Its existence was one of the castle’s most closely guarded secrets. Today it holds empty barrels which contain a few broken arrows or forgotten arrowheads.”
Those two entries are excellent examples of how to not write entries. The Blacksmiths “was once’ and we get the rust monster backstory, that isn’t going to ever come up in play. The armory smacks of that Dungeon room, the worst one ever written. After a paragraph or two describing it ended with something like “but today the room is empty.” Focus your writing on the now, focus it on the party interacting with the room. Sure, you can throw in a random line of backstory or something to punch up the writing. Who doesn’t like those snide little DM aside comments that designers sometimes throw in? But, mostly, focus the writing on the interactivity you are enabling in the room for the party to explore, not a booklet from a small county historical society museum on the various uses of the living room in John Holmes palm beach home between 1962 and 1983.
There are other rando bits. A decent number of weird saves, 8HD level monsters on level 2, which is kindof nice, A disturbing number of rooms fall in to the format “XNUMBER MONSTERTYPE are here.” Meh. it is what it is, I guess.
It is hard to regard this as more than a curiosity. The dedication to the early encounter style is interesting, but not so much that the lack of a feeling of interconnectedness, (or purpose?) … the aimlessness of the levels, even though there are factions and themes. It feels like a hollow effort to explore
This is $25 at DriveThru. There is no preview. SUCKER!
By Christopher Wilson Self Published OSE Levels 9-12
During the War of the Heavens, it is said that an acrchangel of Janu deseneded from the skies like a great meteor, striking the known world with a sacred war hammer, laying the devils and demons low. The very earth trembled at the blow, cracking the surface and pushing up the mountains. The land of Stygina was created, as the continent was shattered and the Frostholm Sea was formed. And it is said that this mighty weapon is still buried in the ice in the frozen north..
This 198 page booklet presents The Frozen North, full of generic vikings (with one cultural exception) and uses about sixteen pages to describe a dungeon with 24 rooms containing an angels warhammer. And angel. Its entries are full of padded backstory explaining the why and histories of everything, and ultimately the various encounters are just stabbing of the generic variety. Imagine writing 198 pages of generic padding and then including “Roll on table H for the dragons hoard.”
I know I’m supposed to be taking more time with these longer adventures, but this booklet has the vast majority of its space taken up by generic cultural shit and generic viking encampments that lack any color. The whole purpose here seems to be going to get a magic warhammer, part of a longer/larger campaign arc with this adventure just being the latest in the series. But the warhammer thing only takes up the last bit of the book, thirty pages with the main attraction, the dungeon, being about sixteen or so? It’s hard to evaluate 130 pages of generic viking stuff. And I don’t mean Harn levels of culture; it’s just boring old stuff that any old DM could come up with if I just said “Vikings in the north.”
I frequently call this The Kitchen issue, although it should be renamed the Fantasy Inn issue given the frequency of it making an appearance there. E all know what a kitchen looks like. I’m sure that we could all even describe a fantasy kitchen, or, perhaps, a medieval kitchen in a manor. Including Mrs Patmore. It’s been burned the fuck in to you by every piece of media you have ever consumed. Cartoons, books, tv, movies, everything ever produced by the BBC. Every telenueve. You, and everyone else on the fucking planet, knows what that damn kitchen looks like in the manor house. So why the fuck did the designer just spend two paragraphs telling you what a medeivel kitchen looks like? Oh, look, two more paragraphs on what a little roadside inn looks like with another two on the jolly little rotund barkeep. Fireplace,soft light through the windows, smoke from the chimney, a murmur from outside, maybe a jaunty tune here and there, farmers a couple of merchants. Simple but hearty fare. Blah blah blah. Got it. The Prancing Pony. Just like every other of the 10,000 fantasy inn descriptions i’ve read, watched, and consumed over my life.
The designer needs to communicate The Prancing Pony very succinctly and then proceed to tell us how THIS Prancing Pony differs from every other Prancing Pony. Cozy Inn. Seedy Inn. Serves slop. Maybe, instead of describing the inn, you could instead tell us about the smuggling ring that hangs out there? How the innkeeps family is weirdly leaning in to in to the Church of the New God? It doesn’t have to be bizarre, but including a subplot here is much better than wasting our time with Just Another Inn. If you have to have one then just tell us it’s a normal old inn called The Prancing Pony, or The Green Dragon, or whatever. A quirk or two is great.
Likewise, the viking realm in this adventure. These are just vikings. Not Harn vikings, or realistic one, just plain old fantasy vikings. There is nothing special going on here. Nothing about the inns or settlements that makes them special. (Well, except for that mass human sacrifice thing …) And yet the adventure goes on and on about viking land. And not the vikings riding mastodons SO METAL of the only fantasy map you’ll ever need. Just generic vikings. No Grondusmoots and other local customs that might come up in the adventure or be central to a certain point. Just gener-o-vikings. It’s a fantasy village. But everyone is dressed like a viking,.A hundred and some pages of this. Even, for a gazetteer, this is a bit much for the local color, or lack thereof, that you get. The closest you get is a small wandering event table to spice up your short stay in the city. With an example below …
There is an exception to the generic stuff. The vikings up here have a ritual. Well, a holiday like festival. “In the past, as many as 10,000 slaves, prisoners, and various livestock have been sacrificed during the weeklong Festival of Aesa.” Hmmm. In the past, right? Well, no. They are still doing it and the party arrives during it. It’s part of the adventure. While you’re watching the head priestess slaughter slaves and prisoners, ritually, she reads the parties minds and that’s how we kick off an audience with the king. Lest you think you can escape with some abstraction here, there are a few random city encounters that bring it home. A slave child finds you and tells you that her owner is about to have her brother sacrificed and begs for you to do something.
Look man, I’ve had a shitty day at work. I’m here for the beer and pretzels and friends and a few laughs maybe. I do NOT fucking need a slave child. I don’t her pleading with me to do something. And I especially don’t need the ritual murder of a bunch of people in with the group that I’m supposed to be interacting with as if they were any other generic villager.
“The only words that can describe it is barbaric evil. But this is a gross misunderstanding of the Styginian belief system, as a whole. The Styginians are not evil as, for instance, the orcs of the Rok-Skull tribes. Orcs are inherently evil. The Styginian people are simply honoring their Gods in the manner that their Gods demand.” Big big fan of alignment being cosmically evil. It lets us hand wave a lot of things. But, dude, this is some Zone of Interest shit. Tht’s fucking evil, not a cultural quirk. This is supposed to be fun? I don’t see any need to collaborate to get a warhammer to stop an archdevil. We’ll find another way. Let’s skip this adventure. I don’t know what the fuck people are thinking including shit like this. That one with the halfling plantation owners. The one with the baddies all being obviously mentally ill. Yeah yeah, midwesterner. Whatever. This is not fun. I’m pretty sure I would launch an attack, get killed, leave, and then have a talk with the DM about what “fun” means. The fucking game is not a simulation of the barbarity of history. It’s a fucking game for christs sake. I’m not the biggest fan of trigger warnings, but including this kind of shit deserves it. I take it back, if you reach MY level of trigger warning then maybe DONT PUT THE FUCKING SHIT IN THE GAME!! Its not even fucking necessary for the adventure. There’s no call back. There’s no weight to it or significance. It’s basically just local color, like, they all wear tweed hats or some shit. Except its here and the designer has decided to spring it on the party as the hook/lead in to the hunt for the warhammer. You know what we do? We make the people mass sacrificing children EVIL, and we use them as the bad guys and we don’t force the party to collaborate with them. And we especially don’t make them participate, implicitly or explicitly. I D3 were on our way to kill their god and it’s all abstracted; THAT seems like a worthy reason for passing through. Yeah, we want to know our baddies are evil. But these people are not the baddies in the adventure and are just presented like a cultural norm. I’m really not happy about this. I’m going to continue the review of this garbage only because you can leave EVERYTHING out about it and still do the adventure with your plain old mercantile, murderous, raiding vikings.
“For the Styginian people, this is mostly considered true, though they will not openly state such a thing. Only by immersing one’s self in the Styginian culture will one find this to be an overall truth. The Gods of both pantheons play an everyday role in Styginian society and every person, giant or Styginian, is devoutly religious. Every man, woman, and child, giant or otherwise, wears a token of a God that is believed to have some forbearance on that individual’s life. Gifts are given to the Gods on their holy days and sacrifices are made during the midsummer solstice, in the capital of Olafsvellir.” Speaking of gazeteer, the vast majority of this reads like an early travelogue. It’s in a rather dry style which is only exacerbated by the genericism of the content.
And everybody and everything has a backstory. It’s everywhere. And it’s integrated in to the descriptions. “Large two story manor: Originally built by some of Arnvid’s generals after the sack of Miraslava, these two large manor houses were later added on to, becoming what is today known as the Capsizer Inn. Wood sign over the door: While the sign does not name the inn as such, every regular to Miraslava knows the carved relief of a longship tipping to the side in a large wave. The sign is stained in a deep burgundy that many claim is from the blood that was spilled when Arnvid came to power. These are most likely nothing more than tall tales.” There’s nothing to any of that. It’s just preamble to a fucking inn. Hey, you know one of those Black Demon Knight things? Lord Soth? There’s one of those in the adventure, in some room in the dungeon. He gets a backstory also. And when you walk in he immediately attacks and does nothing but fight. So, what’s the point of the backstory? I guess if you just want to read the adventure and imagine all of the games you’ll run then it’s great. But running the adventure? All of this nonsense padding just gets in the way of the DM locating the information they DO need in order to run the room. You have to wade through the dross in order to find what interactivity you need to respond to the party. And, it pisses me off. Because the effort spent on this backstory nonsense, this justifying and explaining the whys and wherefore, is effort that should have spent on the actual adventure, the interactivity, the shit that WILL matter at the table. That’s what the fuck the adventure is for, running it at the table.
The adventure, proper, is just a hack with a few traps. Sail on a ship. Fight a giant squid (with backstory.) Walk across some snow. Fight some frost giants. Go in a cave. Three levels, about eight rooms per level. Fight some ice trolls. Fight some other shit. Fall in a pit. Fight a bunch of 12HD druids. Yeah, it’s putin the middle of nowhere but there are all of these 12HD druid hanging around, protecting the place. I don’t need toilets and a mess hall, but SOME allowance for them as something other than a generic stat block would be nice. No names, just a bunch of 12 HD druids. There are a couple of groups of them. One group just fought some frost giants. The giants got past them so they are just standing there in the same room, not giving chase or anything. Joy. Injured? Missing spells? Nope. It’s just a stat block to stab.
And what stat blocks! It’s not unusual to see a full column of them! This is right out of 4e, with all of their special abilities present. Trolls? Why they are known to set traps, so we gotta include that in the stat block! It doesn’t matter that they just wandered in and have had no time, it’s in the creature stat block so it gets included. I don’t need Ready Ref one liners here, but, man, use some common sense. Don’t be beholding to your style guide. Include what’s needed and lave out what’s not. A trivial creature encounter takes up LOADS of space here. (It’s OSE, so none of that only four 12HD druids in the world shit. Although, I still find that rather romantic …)
Then there’s what’s NOT included. In a dragons lair, with dragon: “Glittering piles of treasure: Piles of coins litter the floor of this chamber. Sparkling gems are interspersed through these pile, marking a near incalculable wealth at first glance.” And the treasure? “Treasure: In addition to Izyntainth’s hoard, there is an additional 100pp, 5,000gp, 1,000ep, 2,000sp, 6,000cp, and 100 gems worth 10gp each.” BUT THERES NO HOARD DESCRIPTION! Jesus christ man, that’s what you SHOULD be including! How about a more differenter dragon? “Treasure: The entirety of Rirglazic’s hoard, from Treasure Table H, can be found here.” This is my life. This is what I signed up to do. Where’s that other entry? Oh, here. The Dangerous Shark. An inn in town. Like, eight pages to describe it. A fairly typical seaside bar/inn. But everyone looks like a viking. It includes a description, taking most of a column, of the owners bedroom. There’s nothing special about the bedroom. Just a normal simple innkeeper one. There’s nothing special about the inn. No hidden cults or anything like that which would make the innkeeper’s room interesting. But you know what we do get? This, in the OSE style: “Heavy door (this heavy wood door is good at blocking noise; locked).” And then, cause we gotta follow up, “Heavy door: Kalf installed a thick wood door on the master bedroom that deadens the sound from within and without. “When we’re in here, I don’t want to hear or know what you girls are doing out there, and I don’t want you to hear or know what we’re doing in here!” The door is locked. Both Kalf and Gudny have skeleton keys to all the locks on the second floor.” Is there a point here? Is the designer implying that the daughters are fucking and the parents know? I mean, that must be it?! BECAUSE WHY ELSE WOULD THAT BE IN THE ADVENTURE? This is the kind of trivial bullcrap that gets included. But, the dragons treasure trove? Nope. In what POSSIBLE frame of mind do you have to be to include that shit about the door, or all the other minutia in the descriptions of the bullshit parts of the adventure, and then NT include the treasure in a dragons hoard? That was your fucking decition that you made here?
Oh, shit, I was bitching about the dungeon. Anyway, lots of stabbing. Nothing really makes sense or “clicks.” It’s just stuffing in some monsters in a lot of rooms for you to stab and finding a pretext for them to be herein their backstories. Nothing special about the stabbing. A few traps, nothing really special about them, not in a “specials” kind of way. Everything is very straightforward. It makes no sense, but its straightforward.
It’s done in a kind of OSE style, with the descriptions. I know people have strong opinions about that. I think its effective when done well. Guess what? It’s not done well here . Emphasis on the wrong things, too long in its keywords, not very evocative. Blech.
But, that’s not the major problem here. I am hesitant to review fluff. I don’t know what makes fluff good, or, perhaps, there is less, from a technical writing viewpoint, about to critique in a fluff sourcebook. And most of this is just a regional guide to the land of Stygia, full of vikings. But it doesn’t approach it from a historical viewpoint. And it doesn’t approach it from a Metal standpoint. It’s just mostly a typical fantasy setting, with people dressed up as vikings. I have a hard time believing this is what folks want from a regional guide. After all, you know what a kitchen looks like. The focus on the mundane and trivial doesn’t hit what IM looking for in a regional guide, but maybe its for you? I don’t know, like I said, I don’t know fluff.
Can you read this map and make out the detail or the text?
On the adventuring side of things though, there are several problems that drag this down. The emphasis on stabbing and “normal” traps. There’s not much special here. Certainly there’s a place for a raid, but this just seems like a level noe dungeon scaled up to levels 9-12, and not a very interesting level one dungeon at that. Nothing fits together well. The depth is quite shallow and there’s little to learn or figure out. The added emphasis on the DM coming up with their own content for, say, the dragons hoards, is just icing on that little cake. I find the inclusion of the human sacrifice thing very distasteful. It doesn’t meet the moral compass test of either making them the baddies OR even raising interesting questions of complicity. (That would be a much harder line to walk and I’m not suggesting that anyone SHOULD walk it in a D&D game, but it’s the available out if you are going to do something like this. Gaeta during the Cylon occupation comes to mind. But, then, how much of this is appropriate for a fun game?) I can’t see much in the value here.
This is $4 at DriveThru. The review is eight genero-background pages on culture, etc. You have to squint some, but the entire booklet is like that, to certain degrees. A few encounter pages would have been good to include. Not a great preview, although, it does tell you what to expect …
The Shrike is a world of decay – rusted iron, crumbling stone, saltwater, blood, and fog – surrounded by a roiling ocean, a lifeless archipelago, pewter-hued clouds, seabirds, and pitiless stars. In this infernal Galapagos, players will encounter masked Devils, blood which gives life to things which should not have it, stones which give life to people who do not want it, terrible and stranded monsters, perilous locations, and wonderous treasures from across the planes.
This 169 page sandbox provides for about seventy locations in five zones in one of the better representations of a dante-like hell. It riffs on suffering without becoming grecian about it, presenting a picture of many desperate people trying to survive with hopes of either escape or despair. It does try to do everything to everyone, presenting several options for the direction of the goals the party might chase/factions they support/ends they want to obtain, and suffers somewhat for it. Lots of situations, with a lot of people who want something.
Welcome to Hell! Literally! Well, a part of Hell, anyway. Well, a part of Hell that is no longer a part of Hell. It’s a G I A N T chunk of ragged metal surrounded by ocean and it has a god impaled on top of it, dying for all of eternity. You know, just like your morning commute feels. Anway, Hell being what it is, sometimes shit happens and chunks break away, detaching from Hell proper. And that’s happened here. You’ve got some sinners here, serving out their normal old sin of divine punishment, as well as some devils (five factions worth) overseeing things, a few other beings of power, and then some inanimate objects that have been turned in to people by the dying gods blood. Hmmm, something sounds familiar … Anyway, if the sinners die they get reborn the next day; death isn’t the end of things for them. Oh, and nearly everyone is starving. As the booklet says, play them like they are one meal away from starving to death. So, almost everyone is a cannibal. Sure hope you’re not a player character who ends up here; that create food and water spell is looking pretty good about right now! This part of hell is laid out like a pointcrawl, in about five zones with maybe fifteen areas per done, and maybe a dungeon per zone with about another rooms.
One of the highlights of the adventure, and the reason I think it does such a good job modeling a kind of hell from Dante, is the focus on the normal every day old sinners. Sure, the place exists because of the dying god impaled on top, his blood animating things, but it’s the normal people that bring the grimness and false hope to life.
First, everyone IS starving to death and almost everyone is a cannibal. You’ve got your friendly folk in caves playing their violins, who turn out to be cannibals. You’ve got your villages, who have a ritualized combat every night where the loser gets eaten. You’ve got your run of the mill cannibal gangs. There’s a line in this about the people living near the shore being able to eat fish, but that’ not what is going on here. There is no food for almost everyone. Everyone is a cannibal. But, it’s more the false hopes and resignments that I mean when I say it strikes well on the Hell front. In one encounter “Another hour’s walk and one comes across a great grove of silver trees, deep-rooted within the coastal stone, each branch holding countless sputtering candles. Careful observation reveals the candles are slowly going out, extinguished by harsh winds and drizzling rain.” You’ve got these two sinners, an old man and a young teen, huddled, living in a cave nearby, scared of the party. But they have to keep the candles lit. For if they can do that then they will be saved! “He believes Pin to be his daughter and the Candle Grove to be their penance. Each tree must remain lit, to demonstrate their faith in salvation.” She wants to journey to an island nearby, where she sees a green flame, believing it stays alight forever and they can use it to light all of the candles and win their salvation. If the party does not agree then she slips away in the night to do it. (Only to end up a thrall to it, but that’s another locale.) And, the party being the party, what if they manage to help out and light every candle?!?! “When they are not immediately freed from their suffering, Herot loses hope completely, becoming a Husk (p.148) within days. Pin will follow the PCs from this point on, whether they invite her to or not.” Well now, that’s depressing. Crushed expectations and disillusionment abound. People believe in things, they give themselves hope and are sustained by it. We must follow the devils orders explicitly to be saved. We must defy them at every turn to be saved from this place. At one point you see a MASSIVE chain coming out of the sky. Following it up leads to a floating ship inhabited by people who think it will leave and take them away. A wizard is trapped here and constructs a bathosphere to escape through what he thinks is a hole to the abyss at the bottom of the ocean. These things sustain them through eternity. And invariably they want the parties help. And … some of them ARE true, Which do you think? And who is going to be devastated when you, the party, bring the crushing truth of reality in to what they have been clinging to for hope to sustain them through eternity? It is this, the hope and futility, that really shines here. Gonna harden your heart? Gonna swallow your tears? Do you become like The Ghoul? Do you give them hope? Help them? Shit on them? How do you decide which ones MIGHT be on to something? Eternity is a long time to figure things out.
Take, for example, the dead god. Forgotten name. No one knows his crime, blah blah blah. He’s got an avatar, created using his last strength. The devils would sorely like to capture and destroy it. It’s only a disembodied voice. And its working to free the god. Shall you help? Get the heads of the five devil houses to show up at the top of the spire in the Garden Incomparable and have them all five vote to free him. Which will free him. His avatar doesn’t tell you that doing so will destroy the Shrike and everyone in it, immortal or not. So, you know, I hope you pick the right people to cozy up with.
We come then to the sandbox nature of the adventure. The party ends up here somehow. The motivations for doing so are loose, but the mechanisms are the more interesting part. Beyond thepbvious “you died” and a journey by sea, we are presented with a false burial, in an iron coffin, replete with someone giving a false eulogy listing all of your sins and lapses. Buried in sand as the tide rolls in, you end up on a beach in an iron coffin as the tide rolls out, in the Shrike. There’s some local color for you! Or, perhaps, you would travel by traitor goat? “When a goat has performed this duty for seven years, it is slain by impalement, and its blood daubed upon a door made from iron, bone, silver, stone, and gold.” I think there are like two sentences to this, but which provide oh so much color. Great specificity and a good example of what TO color.
The adventure keys and locations provide little in way of goals. For that, and perhaps in your reason for coming to the Shrike, we rely on another page in the front of the book. Escape and general exploration are covered, but then also working to free the nameless god or agents for the infernal court, working for unity, or against, to sow discord amongst them. It is one of these that is suggested as a goal for the arty, with the keys and locations proper remaining rather neutral in their orientation. There are some clunky rules for GOLD=XP, dumping them in to the mouths of idols to Mammon or offering them to one of the five devil leaders as tribute. Both seem clunky to me, as stand ins for “spending it in town”, since there are no towns, but, you can always ignore the “spend” part. Once in the mix most of the folks want something that the party could do. That bathosphere wizard needs a bunch of parts obtained for the construction. Him being level one makes it difficult for him (A great example of the consequences of a teleportation accident!) “The Abyss is pitch-black. We must have supernatural radiance to guide our path.” And then it’s up to you to find something, somewhere to help with that. There IS something provided, in the DM notes, but it’s also left openended as a problem to solve any way the party can. Continual Light isn’t mentioned, but hey, you’re the DM. And thus with a giant iron vessel to ride in (the kettles in one locations?) or something else the party comes up with. Looking at the Candle Tree situation, that’s open ended as well, as are most of the problems to be solved. They do, mostly, feel disconnected from each other. Vignettes, with the occasional “I’d really like a X”, or “I hope Y suffers.” In one of the devil courts you can interact with some random imps: “Have you all seen the light over in the Lantern Isle? Loads of stupid Sinners dance around it. We should go up there and steal that light from them.’ Two Imps of Salt will accompany you to the Lantern Isle (p.53) to steal the Wormwood Lantern.” Colorful, fun, and fits in with the imps. And a little quest-givery. This is the problem with an open-ended sandbox. You can do what you want and join any side but then also most things are written to be quite neutral and disconnected from each other with only tenuous ties. That’s not my favorite, I prefer something open ended and yet with a clear direction it is going, but I see how the framework can be appealing to some.
The maps for the five zones are all pointcrawl, with notes in each location about the various exits. “If you walk along the beach ,,,’ There is a small dungeon in each zone of, say, twelve rooms? The layout is not going be award winning. It’s better than a lair dungeon but not by much.
There are parts of this that are quite quite good. “A tablet of stone containing the spell: The Storm Speaks Through Me (Lightning Bolt)” That’s the kind of thing I like, color. It evokes a vibe of thunderstorms and holding your arms outstretched and grey beards. Or was that Moses? Anyway, good local color. But, that doesn’t carry through the work. It lacks, I don’t know, cohesion? Falls apart at the devils? Some combination of the two?
The devils in this here part of hell are not exactly what you might call Go Getters. The locations of the devils courts and the devils proper tend to be rather static. There is some weirdness about, and some minor devilry, like those imps wanting to steal the sinners green party light, but the Grand Game is off. There is no VIBE of devilry here. The leaders of the devil courts are suitably weirdos, and most are willing to talk to you if you’re not immediately hostile. But it really just feels like a facade. There’s no life to them or their courts. And, no, this isn’t Marie NDiaye, this is an RPG adventure, it’s not on purpose.
That is a pretty serious disconnect here. While the sinner, proper, including the forgotten god, feel suitable mythic and sisyphean without being too much in your face about it, the devils themselves, just about everything about them, lack that mythic nature. Or, pretty much any nature at all. They seem almost completely disconnected from the rest of the locales. You will recall I noted the lack of an overall thrust to this adventure. This is, I think, one of the ways a sandbox can fall down. Yes, we want an open environment, but, also, there should be a few things to hang your hat on. 80% of games will go like this … well, then lets write for that 80% while not explicitly excluding the other 20%. I might make an analogy to the Generic/Universal adventures. They are so afraid of doing anything specific that they come off as bland. Pick a path and go with it and then throw in a few extra words here and there on alternatives. Aimlessness is not a virtue. The locales have some wants, but they generally seem just that, local. La Grande Campagne does not exist here, or even a mini version of it.
It does an absolutely excellent job of creating those little mini encounters, mini locales, mini situations. Everyone seems to have a want or need. (Maybe too many sometimes. Now what the fuck does THIS guy want?) But those connections between sites are weak and shallow. Local Troubles, as they say, if even that. More like uncles lightbulb is out.
I seldom bitch about money. I’m willing to pay a lot for a good adventure, no matter the page count. I am not thrilled to be paying $30 for a PDF for encounters that are mostly isolated. Accepting its flaws, it’s a decent enough little thing for what it is. But that doesn’t correlate to $30 to me. It’s missing purpose. It’s missing a vitality, at least in the devils.
This is $29 at DriveThru. The preview is 37 pages. You get to the overview of the devil courts, the various background information, hooks, endings, and so on. But, you don’t get to see any of the encounters or locales. That’s too bad. Those ARE the strength of the booklet.
By Morgan Finley, Jack Cæsar, Chris Cæsar Caesar Ink Doomsong.
THE FIRST SEAL IS BROKEN AND PESTILENCE SPILLS FORTH.
THE KINGDOM OF LETHE FALLS BEFORE ITS FOETID LORD,
… but the Gravediggers’ Guild does not kneel to heretic gods.
Half a lifetime ago, the border kingdom of Lethe vanished in the blink of an eye. Its fate has long been a source of fear and resentment for the Church of the Divine Corpse — the disappearance of an entire kingdom implies a power far beyond what the Ecclesiarchy likes to contemplate…
This 347 page adventure uses about 180 pages to describe … fifty? Locations in a semi-realistic medeivel setting that has been overcome by plague. In some ways a better Barovia than Browvia, it has quite the large scope while consistently providing the framework for eeriness and a general unease grounded in reality. It also feels like the world is not populated, has a bunch of editing issues, and can be capricious. You can undertake an epic quest! And you can fail. I think it’s interesting, and like a lot of things I think are interesting I’m going to spend too much time talking about its faults and do a terrible job on its strengths.
There’s a vibe going on here, and for me to get anywhere near to talking about it then you’re going to need an overview. We’ve got some kind of mudcore setting. Medieval, lots of grit in the vibe. One LARGE region of the land disappeared awhile back. Your group of Gravediggers (literally) is travelling when they are pulled in to this disappeared land: The plaguescape. We’ve got a map, maybe six squares by eight, of the the region, it taking a day to travel one square and there being about one setting location per square. Would you like to go home? There are a couple of questgiver locations to move people along, including the Gravediggers Guildhall.
It’s in the OSR section and for some system called Doomsong. I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t immediately recognize the reskin, if that’s what it is. I guess ‘OSR” is the ‘Misc’ category now in DriveThru? Anyway, I’m ignoring the whole rule system shit. You’re gonna need to stat it.
There is an epic, oh, sandbox quest? present in this. You’ve got Plague, THE Plague, who has shown up awhile back and is responsible for yanking the land away in to this pocket dimension like place, separate from the rest of the characters reality. He’s present. He’s also got a chief follower, the daughter of the local lord, who is now a minor power also running around causing trouble. Beyond this we have a number of major supernatural entities of Plague, and a few others, as well as a few people working against Plague, some locals, or who would be if they weren’t currently in trouble … like a lordling addicted to bug juice/excretions straight out of a greek myth. There are objects of power that can help defeat plague that you can go get, and there are shrines to Plague that you can disrupt. The shrines are ,perhaps, the most pronounced example of the game. Each contains a token, a tongue, the left hand of someone, a sewn up stomach stuffed with dates and oats. If you destroy the token then you weaken Plague. (There are, if I recall correctly, seven of the shrines.) There is a cryptic message at each shrine. For the one in which you find the stomach we get “‘He stole my last meal, meagre morsel to share with truest love.’” From this we deduce ….? Well, one day you MIGHT find dungeons underneath the local lords castle. And therein find a dude locked in a cag who is ravenously hungry. Feeding him the stomach contents destroys this token. Yeah! It is not guaranteed you’ll visit the castle Or find the dungeon. And it’s not unlikely that you will kill the dude first. And then you’re gonna have to put two and two together that this is the true love in question. Other tokens have other ambiguous references: graves, bells … could be lots of those, yeah? Which witch is which? I’m not complaining, I’m pointing out a strength here: you can fail. Accidentally or on purpose, it is not guaranteed you will find a bit of information or put things together, or not fuck something up in a way that you can’t come back from. But these are all, in a way, side quests towards getting home and/or killing Plague. The key point being there are things you can do to weaken him/his allies. Strengthen yourself. Help your allies. But the plot, such that there is (going home/killing Plague) doesn’t rely on the success of any of them. Nicely done. A sandbox to run around in, ala a video game, in which the side-quests don’t FEEL like side-quests. (That’s, what, only the second time I’ve ever made a positive video game comparison? Vista Overviews in Fallout) And, I hope from the summary I’ve given its obvious that it is NOT obvious what you are supposed to be doing. There’s a line or two about someone carrying a token being given certain dreams and portents, but thats with a kindly DM feeding you the right dream. You gonna have to figure shit out along the way. Noice!
[ED: Tell everyone it’s a mudcore adventure. At least in vibe if not practice. That it’s this kind of, idk, romanticized low medieval period. Maybe a church belltower and manor but lots of hovels. Except, that’s not ACTUALLY what’s going on, what with an orphanage being present and so on. But that’s the vibe, the feeling of the place. Make sure and mention that this is, no doubt, achieved by leaning on several good bits of imagery and side references. “Hundreds of bird corpses dangle from the treetops, strung up with red woollen cords.” Well now, that’s given this thing a kind of grounded earthy vibe to things, yes? Use that as an example. This imagery that kind of tugs on a shared cultural myth and story. Too much Blair Witch or too much Turnip Princess? Or, this kind of an appeal to old school witchery “For each of them, she has made a poppet dolly (lh:332) in his or her image; the orphans carry their doll with them wherever they go. These items put them under the control of Granny Redwork. To free them, a character must cut the child’s hair out of the doll’s scalp and burn it.” And to be clear, Point out that Weapons came out after this. Oh, and make sure and mention Spoilers before you say that. And then finish by saying something like Tomorrowland is the future that never was. Nevernever land is the childhood we all remember, and this setting channels all of D&D Europe before the scientific method ruined everything. People eat that shit up]
You are all members of the gravediggers guild which is, I take it, the gimmick of the system, Doomsong. You’re a part of a guild and that’s a part of the game here. Once you find the local gravediggers guild (there’s a slight problem with a dead member of the signmakers guild …) then they give you a map of the region, with all locations already on it. The local guildmaster also has a series of tasks for the party to undertake, to get things moving. And then there’s also a little minigame of rebuilding the guild. You can take on roles like florist or chaplain or scribe, and you can expand the guildhall. Want to cut down the old hanging tree to use its wood to hasten construction! Great! You speed up by a week … and unleash a ghost. Oops. It’s kind of an interesting base idea, brining in ideas from the higher levels of D&D and maybe melding the a bit with base construction in modern video games. You know, build the granite carver studio and get XXX bonus. Most of it doesn’t feel videogamey at all though. It integrates pretty well, and is also not forced down your throat so you don’t have to engage in that aspect if you don’t want to. Then again, you gain the BOLSTERED condition if you plan your next outing at the Guildmasters planning table … The inclusion of a small down time mechanism is a nice addition. For a lot of games, the realism and immersion of the game is enhanced when the innkeeper has a name and, more importantly, is having an affair with the millers wife, which the party gets to watch unfold in real time in weeks as the campaign progresses. I don’t need a lot here, but if the players are plopping their asses down on a map that takes a week to cross, and which they will need to criss-cross several times, then we better have a little more to go on to help out for those moments of NOT sheer terror. I don’t need a fully developed town, that’s a waste. But these little idles add a lot in a longer game. (Which this is; see again, the map size.)
The Guildhall thing is interesting on several fronts. It also reveals more than little about some flaws in this booklet. Essentially, everything (wrong?) with Lord Have Mercy Upon Us can be seen in the Guildhall. I would specifically note the depopulated feeling (and not in a good way), the disconnected between various elements in the text, literally, and a kind of abstraction of detail that is particularly interesting given that this is 350 page adventure.
Abstracted text is something I touch on frequently in reviews. Specificity is the soul of a narrative. It provides the color of the world, often a key to evocative writing. I quoted a section above about the dead birds hanging from the trees with red woolen cords. And yet you don’t want to drone on and on and on. We know what a kitchen looks like and what should be in a kitchen. A solid vibe for the forest is nice, to cement it, if needed, but we don’t need to drone on about it and not every forest needs more unless, perhaps, its a core part of the encounter, environment, or vibe you want to set. Too few is minimalism and too many is padding. We want to target something solid that gives that vibe and that the DM can then riff on well. This needs to be balanced against the degree of detail needed and the purpose of the description. The most basic example is the typical room/key format. A standard, for good reason, and yet not appropriate for all seasons. I most frequently cite the example of a village where the purpose is not going room to have an encounter. The village is used for a different purpose, so even though it might USE a room/key format it is clear that other things are important here. Likewise, there is a type of adventuring environment that doesn’t really need full blown descriptions. A dinner party at a mansion, or a ship that is not being explored can get away with some more basic and general descriptions, much closer to minimalism, because of this. It’s serving as a framework in which other things are going on, social or otherwise.
Which brings us to how this is described. Caste Lethe is one of the sites in the adventure, the home of the lord. What we can see from this a framework. Not a traditional room/key, although its laid out like that. And, yet, it almost certainly iS a traditional room/key exploration. No one is home. The party will be exploring this unknown environment just like any other dungeon they have invaded. But the descriptions are pretty utilitarian. Like I might expect if this castle were hosting a murder mystery or the ship the party is travelling on. The specificity is lacking in these. There is little here. Two entries, the Scarred Cook and Mouldering Bodies, get a little paragraph follow up, and you get some “Echoes”, ghostly vignettes, to toss in. (A diary, in essence, showing you what has happened and perhaps helping you understand that stomach lovers last meal, or, at least, might in some circumstances let you eventually jump to that conclusion.) But beyond that there is little here to base an adventuring locale on. And I’m not talking about the standard loot, monster, traps, and specials framing. We can acknowledge that an empty ghostly castle, forlorn, with ghostly vignettes and a catatonic cook can be a thing. But there’s nothing to sell that vibe. We have almost, if not totally, generic descriptions. There is almost nothing n the way of help to the DM to sell that forlorn vibe. This is hard, as a designer, to communicate your vision to a page in such a way that the a DM can pick it up and run it the way you envision. And, yet, that IS the goal of the designer. And this just doesn’t do that. It comes off as generic. Abstracted. And the adventure in play will suffer for it. You must inspire the DM with the environment. And that is not happening here. Evocative writing and specificity sells the adventuring locale. And this is the manner in which it feels like the majority of the locations are described in this. It is not the one-pager that has failed but the context in which the one pager is presented, along with the actual descriptions of the environments.
It felt empty, yes? And that is the way this entire game world feels. This is an entire fiefdom, ripped from normal reality. Eight days to cross on foot in one direction and six days in the other. Lots of locations to visit. A gracediggers guild, with people in it, implying therefore that there are MORE people than are in the Gravediggers guild. And, yet, no one is home. But only the lords manor and a single village seem to be what we normally expect to find, and then only the village has a few people. Tavern, mayor, church, and … Dentist. Is it bustling? No idea. Full of disease? No idea. It indicates that there are hovels and the like, but the movements of peoples is strangely absent with almost no indication that they exist. Either in the village OR in the greater region. We shall ignore tha the plague doesn’t kill everyone, after all maybe THE plague does, but, still … bodies? None. Signs of the plague? None. People? Almost none. The entirety of this place is devoid of life. I guess that’s ok? I just find it a strange decision. Except, I don’t think it was a decision because of that village. I applaud spending your word budget on the bits that are important and dirt farmers are not important, but, still, you need to set the vibe of a place. Bodies in the streets? Paranoia? Cult vibes? People drinking bleach? Just a sentence or two and it would have been fixed.
This extends somewhat to the actual encounters. I don’t know anything about Doomsong, the system, so it culd be that it takes a more … studied approach than Ye Normal D&D. But the encounters here are few and far between, and the chances for combat perhaps even less so. There might be one hostile per location, This isnt quite a Shadow of the Colossus situation, but it is a slower pace than most would be accustomed to, making Stargazer look like a hackfest. This doesn’t have to be bad, but, again, I think it doesn’t quite work here. If you’re going to have these slow build ups to these tension relieving moments, the combats, then you are going to actually have to have these slow tension build ups. And the adventure here, as I’ve stated time and again to the point of nausea, just doesn’t have the chops to support this. It’s almost minimalistic in its descriptive style. It is NOT supporting the DM in carrying these eerie, plague, tension filled build ups. Which just seems to be madness for a 350 page adventure.
There is a lot wrong, mechanically, as well. The Castle Lethe tv show, which is just a stand in for a diary. “The magpies (lh:266) nest in great numbers here. The Tithe Barn contains all property that has ever been stolen by this kind of bird” ala Hoard of the Dragon Queen, you will enjoy the lack of anything meaningful behind that statement. “The sound of bells reverberate for miles, audible as far as Castle Lethe when the wind is blowing northward. Their cacophony is constant, originating from the top of a stone tower in No-Fly Forest.” better to be told about this BEFORE I reach the belltower, yes? So the DM can add the build up? No? Not gonna happen? And there are a disturbing number of high death situations that come with no warning. High death is cool. But if it is seemingly random then the players that that there is no point. No amount of play will save them. And thus we lose buy in to life. (Hmmm … sounds too familiar?) You can’t just do a save or die party wide effect out of the blue. (At least not at this level. We can discuss the impact of divination on lowering the combat effectiveness of wizards by draining off their spell slots) It’s arbitrary, and arbitrary is not a good thing.
Just two quick notes about formatting, beyond the whole “one pager” thing. I’m looking at the PDF version and it switches between spreads and single page. I fucking hate this. Zoom in, zoom out, fuck with the scroll bars. Not cool man. Pick a poison and go with it, nothing here dictates the need for a spread. And, then, there’s a fucking index. Thank fucking god! Designer of the year just for including that!
Again, a larger adventure with an interestingly large, and open-ended, scope. The pace here could be slower, with a mundane world suddenly punctuated by madness. In each. square. moved. But, also, not a whole lot to riff on well and sell the vibe. It intricate, and openended. And it relies a little too much on quest givers. The scale and the sparseness also works against it in way, as implemented. Plague, for instance, goes on rampages, as one dies, when the party destroys his tokens/shrines. Will you ever hear about the destroyed village thats a long way away? Consequences should generally be seen to be impactful to the game, just as decision points of importance should be clear. I think, perhaps, this is one of those cases where it might play better … the slow burn. But, also, in spite of the page count the resources for the DM to support a meaningful game world in a slow burn environment are generally not present.
This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is one page, showing the map that the players eventually get. Maybe more in the video? I don’t watch videos.
By Christopher Willett Agamemnon Press OSE Level 1?
Prepare your trembling synapses to enter the Painted Wastelands, the ENnie award winning tabletop roleplaying adventure designed for Old School Essentials. Dive headfirst into a strange hexcrawl set in a bizarre world teeming with desert weirdos, ravenous ghouls, and teeth-stealing dream-beasts. The land is a vibrant kaleidoscope of rainbow-colored sand and crumbling ruins.Wander from place to place, skipping across reality like a stone tossed along the surface of a pool of ectoplasm. You’ll encounter the unspeakable entities of the desert, sweaty pilgrims desperate for absolution, and strange sorcerers meditating in a haze of ectoplasmic smoke. You’ll plumb the depths of ruins forgotten by untold millenia and hopefully survive the wrath of vengeful nightmares given life.
This 152 page adventure uses about 88 pages to describe 36 hexes in a gonzo land. It answers the question of what happens when you mash up Jorune, Tekumel, and non-laser rifle gamma world and then turns up the tentacle-faced cigar smoking crap-shooting wizards to eleven. Beyond the setting, though, it feels like it’s weird for the sake of being weird, with page long hexes not providing a few connected experience that one would expect.
At first glance there is a lot to like here. And we can start with that Tim Molly art style. It’s got a Moebius vibe going on that I just totally dig. I don’t know, I’m not an art dude. The color pa;ette, the style, the imagery of a weird land with some slight anachronisms. It does a pretty decent job of just GOING THERE and does what art in an adventure should do: get you in the mood for it and add more than to the written word. Rebecca Curran has done the layout and, aside from a raised eyebrow about the choice of purple/magenta for section headings, it’s clean and clear. There’s adequate use of whitespace and section headings and various bolding, etc, to help things stand out and call attention during play. It does start to fall down a bit when the text runs on for, say, three paragraphs that fill most of a column, but for a work this large I guess we can expect things to fall down occasionally. It’s generally Good Enough.
I can be an ass about page count, as a ratio to encounters/situations. This being a more in-depth hex crawl in a weird new world, I can acknowledge that providing a lot of new monsters, environmental shit and so on for a new land is going to take some space. The core hexes, though, are about two pages here, give or take. This raises the question of what a hex crawl is and, in particular, what a hex crawl is in the context of page or two page long hexes.
The traditional standard for a hex crawl was set some time ago back in the olden days. I’m not married to it, but it does provide a baseline for expectations and how those might change. Wilderlands being the classic example, a large hex map with certain of the hexes having a description, maybe a paragraph or a couple of sentences, describing what is going on in the hex. In a perfect world its something like a situation. A halfling village under the heel of the barbarian lod ragnar the wicked. There is not much in the way of plot, although a few hexes may be directly connected in some way. The party wanders around, exploiting what they can and getting in to trouble, interacting with whats around. Let’s get those giant beavers we helped a few days ago to bust up that dam in that one hex and flood those orc caves in that hex over there! There’s no real purpose to the exploration and adventuring, other than what builds organically through play. Another type of hex based adventure is the wilderness journey. You want to get to The Hidden Fortress but you don’t know exactly where it is, so you wander around the hexes looking it, for clues, and having adventures along the way. There is more of a purpose, built in to the hexes/adventure, by the designer. If you squint a little then Dread is an early example, with its secret volcano lair.
This, though, is something different. The framing is that you’re tossed in to this world somehow. Drunked bender, etc. I’m not sure I need a framing for SOMEPLACE ELSE, but there you are. And there are no real connections between the hexss. You’re not trying to go somewhere, the secret volcano lair, or anything like that. And yet, at a page or two per hex, this isn’t the quick hit ‘expanded by the DM’ free-ranging scope of the Wilderlands standard. It IS aimless, as Wilderlands is, in that it doesn’t tell you to do anything. (Well, except perhaps for a thread of a Void cult that reappears in several places. But that seems like just some background noise.) We have long hexes, meaning that they are essentially standalone things.
This is where the Weird for the sake of Weird comes in to play. The hexes themselves seem … useless? Not in the way that the Carcosa -like hexes were. “There is a giant bird here with red legs.” It’s more that they are are individual little encounters where nothing much happens. Do you smoke weed with the weirdo? “A group of gutter wizards hide behind an outcropping. They’ve noticed you. They wave you over to join them. They try to shush you and speak in hushed whispers. Danger is close. They are hunting sky jellies so that they can pickle them and sell them at the Sorcerer’s Marketplace.” Ok. Sure. Kill the giant sky jelly and harvest its meat and maybe eat it. Or the lair of some Albino Bat Demons? That’s a page. (Well a column, with the other being art.) It’s just some monsters to kill and loot. It’s just all so disconnected. Or, I’m shallow and am not falling in love with the anachronisms as a contrivance for adventuring.
The forgotten king nailed to a cross. If you will kill him he will tell you of his secret treasure room, off of his abandoned throne room, that contains his greatest treasure. Going there you find a bunch of music tapes. Oh, and he had a jam band. Again and again and again and again this hits. And it’s just too much for me. Having said that, I know a lot of people who run a casual pick up game now and again who would just eat this shit up. But that’s not what I’m doing and I can’t use this. It’s like saying that the party found some kjdfdhfg and now they get to use their imaginations to find a way for the oiweru people to use the kjdfdhfg. Yeah, I recognize the form. “But Bryce, this is a hidden gem!” No, it’s not. It’s just random stoner stuff. (Hmmm, now that I think of it, those people I know running those pick up games …)
My notes say “Nonsense goals and how you leverage them.” And this is true. You see the pattern, yes? It’s ALL D&D in the end. Elves farting fireballs and you leveraging that to your characters own end. How is that different than The Gamma World stopsigns for shields? How is that different from the Skyrealms or Subways in the undercity? How is that different from the forgotten kings 8-track collection for this jam band? All I know is that Gamma World can go too far, and it sucks when played for laughs. Perhaps there is no gravitas? Not quite the fiat of deus ex, but a parallel view where nothing REALLY matters. If you can leverage dhgfjhsdgf to sell to the kjsdhfdk, then you can also a handful of pebbles to a passing farmer. Somehow I’m yanked out of the game when I can see behind the curtain; I have to buy in. This was my issue with Lacuna/Blue City. If anything can happen then I’ve no buy in. If a death star and gallactus show up, then the fucking game had better sell me on it. And i just don’t see how that’s possible in a series of disconnected hexes. I’m not slamming Algol. But the continuity seems off here. I know, I know, I’m all over the place here. But at least its’ something new to talk about.
There is an art to writing a sentence for a game world. A way of writing a sentence that implies more than is on the written page. I usually use this when refer to evocative writing and using cultural subtexts to conjure and leverage imagery. But there’s another way it’s used. Rarely, but sometimes. Something where the writing implies things about the game world. I think it came up last in the discussion about cubic sand. Back in the Mana Meltdown review? I wish I knew how to describe this more. “You’re stranded upon the ragged edge of the infinite worlds of dreaming.”, “The various denizens of the Lower Ethereal speak Dreamtongue, also known as “The Language of the Dead” by certain gutter wizards. It is a complex language based on telepathic thoughts and metaphors.” There are things implied here, things that cannot be articulated. I think it shifts the DMin to a certain mindset, helping them to riff on situations that arise. This is, I think, related to the principal of Not Explaining. There should be mystery. The imagination thrives on that, on the unknown, as the brain races and tries to fill in the gaps. We’re not talking about who killed Mrs McGivens, or even “No one knows who built these ancient monoliths”, although that gets closer to the subject. When its done badly it’s clumsy and obvious and when done well it melds in effortlessly to the sentence and the background. When this adventure is at its very best it’s doing things like that, although its very inconsistent.
You’re much more likely to get “The albino bat demon leaves behind a plastic toy shaped like a golden baby worth 125 ectos. It is a restaurant promotional tie-in for Legend of thenGolden Child.” or “Swarm of Imago Sprites: Self-Loathing Gaze: Anyone meeting an imago sprite’s gaze must save vs spells or take 1d4 CHA damage as they succumb to self-loathing and imposter syndrome. The character realizes they are garbage and no one will ever love them. Love is worthless anyway.” This is so reminiscent of the worst of 4e character abilities. “Absolute Annihilation Curse of the World Devourer. Take 1d2 damage.”
It’s disconnected. It drags you out of gameplay and immersion. Im not saying I’m looking for some kind of Joyce shit here, but I need a pretext to hang on to. I’ve go to have a little buy in for what I’m doing or I just don’t give a fuck. It becomes an activity instead of a game, and I’m looking for a game.
Oh, that zany skull Mort shows up in the starting hex and offers little asides in a lot of places as you carry him with you. Yeah. I can’t decide if this is meant to be real or just a framing for DM notes. I guess we can all tell I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with DM pets in the past.
We can take a look at one of the more standard hex encounters that has few of the gonzo hallmarks. This is a full page encounter, although half of it is taken up by artwork. At its core it’s just a ghoul attack with maybe someone going berserk … all for 250gp … and all as the central feature of a hex. I think we can all determine, from the page, what the designer is trying to go for here. Creepy dig vibes. Maybe a little horror, the stumbling zombie, an eerie skeleton. “Quartermass! What’s going on in the subway!” There is a disconnect though. The vibe that I think we can recognize is not really supported by the text. There’s little there to actually help you run a creep encounter. Some tension is necessary … and that’s not supported. And, of course, it IS just a simple encounter padded out to a page/column. Delicious bone marrow. The Mort shit. Even the “Ghoula can camouflage themselves” paragraph. Great. Is THIS one camouflaging itself? Because it looks to me, from the text, like the intent is that it just stumbles up. It is the worst of 3e habits, printing long stat block shit. I get MAYBE the immune to crits/disease/poison shit. That seems relevant. But the camo/rest/eat/drink stuff is dumb to include. Fuck me, I think maybe the Ready Refs just aid “undead immunity” or something like that. I don’t know, what do YOU the actual fucking DM, think should happen when you poison a skeleton/ Maybe make that Ruling instead of relying on Rule? (sorry, my OD&D is showing again.) I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s just a ghoul attack. It’s not like something complicated is going on. I guess it annoys me because something more in depth COULD be going on. The wasted space COULD be used to add some tension. Expectations and possibilities as dream killers, I guess. The death of all possible futures when this one is realized. The Mort bit and the self-referential comic are the only hints of the wackiness inherent in the adventure.
The Capsule Machine, another example. A full page. Note the “let’s Smash It!” paragraph. Almost all padding. From the Smash it title, to the “Players will obviously …” clauses, it’s just padding. You can absolutely bring some liveliness to your writing. You can add asides. You can insert from designer-to-dm snark and commentary. But when it becomes the norm, when it overtakes the actual adventure writing, this is where things go wrong. The fucking adventure is the main thing. I know, it seems obvious. And yet, it also seems a very high barrier, to actual concentrate ones efforts on the situation and the characters role in it. Everything else in the hex? Again, taking up too much space for what it is. But, man, it sure does look pretty … (To be clear, there are multi-location hexes as well, with several subareas to a hex.)
Look, I’m clearly not happy with the tone here. I think a major part of the project was to connect an adventure to existing artwork, or at least the vibe of it. And that influences the tone, so much of my ranting is a bit unfair. Well, at least the tone is disclosed so you can gravitate that way or not, depending on your predilections, needs and wants. But the more serious criticism is the disconnection from a hex crawl, the purplessness of it all, the disconnection of the “Forge your own way” hexcrawl gameplay and the “hex as wilderness to an end” gameplay. The disconnection of the hexes from each other, combined with the length of the hexes. This, I think, leaves the adventure firmly in the realm of the casual/pick up game. The Mork Borgs of the world, with weed games in the basement and no real opportunities, other than the fever dreams of a hopeful DM, of continuing a game past a few sessions, if that. I just don’t see how this is conducive to a longer gameplay mode. I can recognize that people play this way, and wish them well, but I am fundamentally tied in to more of a longer running GAME. I don’t want to sound mean by this statement, because I don’t think there was ill intent here, but if you take a minimally keyed adventure, expand the encounters to a page each, change the monsters to something new, with appendices, and do some top notch art and layout. But, in the end, it’s still a minimally keyed zany adventure, with little beyond what is right in front of you, with all that implies. Focus on the adventure.
This is $35 at DriveThru. The preview is the first thirteen pages. There’s a “Strange Encounters” table that, I think, embodies the hollowness. You really need to see a standalone hex to understand, though.
The link to the product in this review is probably an affiliate link. If you follow the link and buy the product, I make some money. Just thought you should know.
