tenfootpole.org

By Stephen Smith
Mister Smith Design
OSE
Levels 2-4

Exaggerated tales of the mammoth ship have spread like wildfire. But now, the truth is undeniable. The wreckage looms—larger than any ship has the right to be. A virtual leviathan of wood and steel, even in its half submerged condition. Its origin is a mystery—but no matter where it came from, it’s here now and ripe for picking. A colossal siren’s call for those brave or foolish enough to salvage its secrets—before it is lost to the waves forever.

This forty page adventure details a shipwreck and its environs, with about sixty locations in all. Layout and formatting are admirable, and as a standard dungeon it would be ok. It tries the faction thing but that doesn’t come off well, nor does the fantastical nature, from the use of plain language?

This thing start out great. IN the local seafaring bar there’s an old cristy dude telling others of the shipwreck he just saw. A HUGE ship, at least three times the size of a normal large ship, washed up and broken on a nearby atoll. A CURSED stol I tell ye’s! This is about a column of read-aloud, in italics, but it’s also fantastic. It reeks of crusty sea dude and bar folk. There are some nice in voice rumors to go with this. This is the old The Wizard is Dead We Better Get To The Tower First To Loot It thing. There’s a nice little bit about getting to the wreck, handled in about five bullet points. Perfect to spur a DM on with ideas for running this portion. It’s augmented by a decent little NPC description for four or so of the townies that you might majorly interact with to guide you, buy a bat, etc. “Speaks in a low rasp, never removes his salt-crusted

oilskin coat. Grizzled loudmouth cuss when drunk. Claims salvage rights (unjustified).” Just enough there to get things going for the DM, and thus the party. The old salt who claims salvage right, the young dude obsessed with the wreck, the widow in possession of a boat to rent who bargains shrewdly. The town doesn’t go on and on, in fact there’s nothing to it except that read-aloud, the NPC decisions, rumors, and five little bullet points with some ideas for the DM to run this section. Fucking focused man!

We move on to the atoll, with five locations and again a few general notes in bullet form for getting aboard the ship and the island. Perfect. There’s also a small section of sea caves on the atoll, with another ten or so locations, and then the GIANT ship, broken up, also, with about forty more. The caves and ship do NOT get these little notes, to the detriment of these sections, although there is a good little “what you see”section, bodies hanging from yardarms and the like. 

The descriopns of the rooms are inconsistent. In one play we get “The chamber is dim and musty, with several old stacked crates and barrels. Faded scrawlings mark the containers. A mob of aged, pus-swollen cadavers are scattered around the area—along with one body that looks freshly torn apart (the curious pirate).” Nice summary, pus-swollen cadavers is always a good sign in a room description. Nicely evocative. And then in another place “Broken shelves held the shattered jars and bottles now decorating the floor. An alembic, soggy parchment, and other alchemical tools rest on a wooden desk.”  A little more facts based and less interesting in the word choice. Some of the descriptions mention who is in the room and some do not, just listing below the description something like “5 pirates.” This is maddening, the inconsistent nature. Some are terse and easy to follow and some go to great lengths to describe the trivia of the room. There is, after the text description, a nice little bullet point list of special/interesting things/facts/DM notes, which provides a nice summary for the DM. 

And then, the factions. This was a pirate ship, magic thing happened, ship got big. So we’re dealing with things on a larger than normal scale, 2-3 times or so, but that never really comes across in the text. The ship has a few monsters in it, and the helmsman is hiding out in it in fear of being hung by the crew because of the accident. But, more importantly, there gnoll pirates are now in charge and have the human pirates locked away below decks. A group of pirates were also taken away during a raid by deep ones (being now hidden away in the sea caves), except these are good guy deep ones, who are trying to save the pirates and atone for the sins of their relatives. Except they are alien minded deep ones, the pirates are scared and the caves are dangerous. 

And NONE of this really comes through in the text. Oh, you get essentially what I just told you in not many more words than I just used. But the encounter descriptions, the set ups, the guiding text, it’s just not present anywhere. And, there is NOTHING here that makes anyone seem like a pirate. Or even a seafarer, other than like two of the townfolk. They don’t act like them, they are not described like them. There’s just nothing in the way of specificity in looks or actions that there. “Pirate”. Great. It’s just maddening. The ship is complex, with hatches and the like, but that is downplayed as well. 

I like the set up here. The townfolks are great, the consequences are fucking great. Rescue the pirates? They tear up the town in celebration. “Tension is in the air. Stalls stand half-empty. Merchants are wary. A woman sobs quietly beside an overturned cart. Blood darkens the cobblestones. “They are out of control, some- thing needs to be done!” There are five or so of these and they provide excellent springboards for some consequences. The core of this, though, feels weak. Maybe because it really is just looting? But, then, why play up the factions if they don’t really exist, or do anything, if I can even call “this is a faction” playing up a faction. Didn’t need a lot here, but those five bullets for the town and atoll really worked wonders, The caves, ship, and factions could have used those also. Maybe that, instead of the pages dedicated to nine mens morris?

This is $6 at DriveThru. The review is fifteen pages. You can see from it how one might get excited. But then the ship, which is where the preview lets off, is where things are going downhill fast. Hinted at, I think, by the sea caves

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/541667/the-wake-of-the-brawny-witch?1892600

By Stephen Smith
Mr Smith Design
B/X
Levels 1-3

The farms and fields around Turnip Hill are being plundered. Desperate locals need heroes to investigate—and stop whatever’s threatening their livelihoods. A straight-forward job—but things have a way of getting complicated.

This four page adventure features a fourteen room dugout cave/dungeon/warren under a hill. Nicely evocative but it’s just a hack and doesn’t really lean in to the Bone Tomahawk aesthetic. 

Fuck you. It’s my blog and I’m clearly intrigued by the possibilities that a shorter page count could imply. We all know it’s not going to fulfill all of my hopes and dreams (well, I don’t …) but we must carry on anyway, the search for meaning in a word cruelly devoid of it. I mean, how many fucking pages do you need to stab shit if you’ve got a dozen rooms and are getting eight or so to a page? Maybe six, I’ve decided. If we accept six to eight to page, with a page of monster stats and shit, then a couple of pages of Village Investigation and/or Overland Travel. Hmmm, no, I should think more about the perfect ratio of leadin/support and appendices to encounters. 

“We’re at our wit’s end. For the past few weeks something’s been making off with livestock and supplies. No tracks, no broken fences—just gone. Folks around here say they’ve seen shadows in the fields after dusk—the unnatural kind. I don’t know if I believe all that, but if we lose much more, our families won’t make it through the season” So we’re framing this as Heroes rather than adventurers, but, whatever. This isn’t bad at all, but that’s all that there is. No one to talk to, and no guidance on investigation in order to eventually find an entrance to a warren. Well, there’s a wanderer table for above ground which will lead you there, but each of the four entries literally leads you there. “You hear wind whistling from the entrance” or “You see a druid observing a hole.” And why the fuck doesn’t this fucking druid do something? Oh, because he’s a druid. Fucking neutrals. Anyway, it’s clear that I’m a little disappointed in the above ground portion. It feels like there was a page available so something was tossed in to fill it. Which means I feel like this was a stunt dungeon: majesty revealed in four pages! Look, use the page count you need to bring the work alive, just don’t fucking pad it out. That seems simple enough. 

The map here is above average for being so small. A little isometric, it gives a nice “warren under the hill” vibe via the map/art style used. There’s a great number of ramps, same level stairs, columns and such on it. It also fails somewhat in being a map, with some of the room exist not being shown in the best way, as well as a lack of walls (doors imply walls, I guess) that would get in the way of the visual impact. How close to a Rothko can you get before your patron starts to question if you’re doing a portrait of their spouse? This one is probably ok if you dig through the rooms first to better marks exits, Yeah, I do like the map even though its simple.

There’s some decent descriptions inside. The rooms all have these tree roots and things growing through the ceiling. “The air is damp, musty, and smells of soil. Footing is uncertain—shifting between eroded flagstones, soft patches of earth, and scattered debris.” or “The floor of this wide corridor is extremely broken and low-hanging roots require frequent ducking. Loose stones make the uneven stairs somewhat precarious..” That’s not terrible. “Wide” isnt great, but we’ve got low-hanging roots and loose stones on a set of stairs. It’s the modern style of presenting something that COULD be called read-aloud but isn’t labeled as such so could be DM notes. It does, in places, lead to over-reveal if used as read-aloud. “Then don’t use it as rad-aloud.” Ok. Another point toward that is the lack of creatures in the faux-read-aloud. These come later. So, in essence, this kind of room overview up top, then a little listing like “3 Giant Centipedes drop from the ceiling” and then a mechanics note or two like “-1 hit from swinging weapons” or a list of treasure to be found or something else. It’s not a bad format. The weakness, in all formats, being that they ARE formats and the designer always needs to keep a little willingness around to deviate from it in order to achieve the needs of the room/encounter/adventure/whatever. 

This is a hack. Monsters in the room attack. Not much in the way of interactivity beyond that. D&D has a long history of hacks, but the more interesting play expands upon that a bit. The hack as a fail condition is also a meme, but something closer to that. Things to explore and play with and so on. Something to discover, if only a hidden treasure behind a waterfall. 

But is it a GOOD hack? Well, there’s little in the way of an order of battle. Which means essentially no order of battle. And while the adventure makes a point of the lack of lack in this place the monsters also don’t seem to recoil to respond or get warned by light and react appropriately. Circle the wagons, do the defensive thing, use the halls to get behind people … nothing of any of that. Well, there is this: “If Chieftain loses 3 or more HP, he sends up an alarm-whistle. Any remaining Grimlings will add to the fray in 3d6 rounds.” There’s the extent. 

This thing is certainly moving in the right direction, much more than most of the endless line of adventures coming out. It’s tight, the writing tries to be evocative, the map is nicely evocative and things are least themed to a non-generic degree with the burrow/tree root/dugout thing going on. Slave to the format, be it the encounter format or the page count, means having to focus more on form over function, to the detriment of the adventure. Also, loot feels lite for B/X.

This is $2 at DriveThru. There is no preview. I don’t care if it’s $2 and four pages, I still want a decent preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548444/trouble-at-turnip-hill?1892600

By Scott Myers, Daymon Mills
Shadow Drifter Games
OSR
Levels 1-2

Being hired to accompany a noble on a bear hunt was supposed to be an easy way to make some gold during winter. But when a frost dragon chases the group into a mysterious cavern, survival and escape become the goal. Not to mention keeping the nobles alive to prevent them from becoming wanted men.

This 31 page adventure uses about thirteen pages t present thirteen rooms in a little cave/dungeon complex. Mostly linear maps, and an escort mission, with a whiny aristo, what more could you dream of? You stab things in underdescribed but over-explained situations. Is this the Tree of Woe?

I’m not the biggest fan of these “inciting event” adventures, but I know they have their place. As a First Adventure, this is how the arty gets together, and you bond over all becoming outlaws because you let someone die or you bond over your hero status because you saved him, and thus the rest of the campaign is launched and you all know each other. This is general handwavery stuff for me in my games, but I know some people want a little pretext, hence a starter adventure like one.

You’re hired by a dipshit heir for a bear hunting expedition. He’s a whiney shit, has a loyal bodyguard, a tracker, and four or so men at arms besides the party. On day two you find a bear, and then a dragon swoops down, kills the bear, and corners your little group in a cave. Oops. But, hey, bodyguard dude thinks he saw a door in the rear of the cave, it must lead out, right? So you snake through a small, mostly linear, dungeon until you pop out the other side. Whiny aristo heir will be dead, in which you get a bounty on your head by dad, or not dead, in which case maybe you get some cash or maybe you get some hero status from a grateful dad. The escort mission, with the whiny brat, is just the campaign kickoff. If the campaign is on a deserted island then you gotta wreck on the island first, so we can allow a little more leeway. Besides, there’s no real moral judgement here, just dad doing what dad does, using his power, if the party are shits. IE: there’s a balance to tormenting the PLAYERS, and this handles it fine.

The actual adventure, though, is painful. We can place this squarely in the “just another linear hack” category. And, straight. I might have gone a little farcical with it “oh, whats this big red button do?” and so on. But that’s not to be found here. Just a room with some skeletons to kill. Or some goblins to kill. Or some giant spiders to kill. Excitement abounds. Stabbing is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. 

There is a trap. An arrow trap specifically. It takes a page to describe. Classic trap and door porn where there’s a fixation on it. An unwarranted fixation on activation, reset, deactivation and so on. With diagrams. At least its not the kitchen room that “appears” to be the kitchen. *sigh*

Let us look at the first real chamber you encounter: “This large, cold room has only one prominent feature, an intricately carved fountain. The stonework fountain is covered in carvings of manta rays, sharks, and other powerful sea creatures. Filled with fresh but frozen water, the fountain has a mechanism beneath it that used to cause it to flow; it stopped working long ago. This room is filled with skeletons waiting for the door to open after hearing the group in Area 3 moving stones. These skeletons have only the barest tatters of clothing and armor left on them (both styles are a few generations old)” The mechanism stopped working long ago. Great. The fountain does nothing, its window dressing. Nothing here really does anything. It’s just a long description of nothing important. Just like: “The ring is a ring of invisibility. Studying the skeletal remains with a successful and appropriate INT Check would determine that the skeleton is of a male elf, and the bones in the area of the sternum and ribs have several deep cut marks, most likely caused by bladed weapons. Anyone rolling an 18 or higher on the roll would determine the skeleton has been dead for less than twenty years, and minor gnaw marks indicate the flesh was eaten by small creatures (rats).” Nothing here, beyond the ring, is important. The dead body, the slashes, the aging, the gnawing. None of it matters. It’s just padded out detail for the sake of being padded out. 

So, suffer through some long and meaningless descriptions that lead to nothing but hack after hack. Bumbling aristo, overprotective bodyguard, terrified men at arms, solo guide … none of it really comes in to play in the various rooms. The men at arms don’t even get names or personalities.Dude needed to be 3 days and a wake or something, with another one Hicks and so on, They were there, use them, don’t just hand wave them. 

This is Pay What you Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The View of the Pre is three pages and shows you absolutely nothing but the credits and the chapter page. The purpose of the preview is to give a potential buyer a chance to check out what you’ve written, say, by showing an encounter page or something. SHowing the title page and chapter page doesn’t do that. At All.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548491/the-caves-of-cold-death?1892600

by Wayne Peacock, Dee McKinney
Kismet Games
OSR
Levels 1-3

A ragged sailor speaks of an island no chart has ever shown—one he claims rose straight from the sea, crowned by a bone-colored lighthouse that casts shifting, multihued light across the waves. His tale might be madness… if not for the opalescent, fist-sized pearl he carries as proof. When both sailor and pearl end up in the possession of Gokleve’s notorious twins Valde and Valada, the pair hires you to voyage to this impossible island and return with whatever pearls you can pry from its shores. Are the pearls the true prize… or just the bait?

This 28 page adventure uses six pages to present seven rooms in some sea caves that have you fighting. Right out of the 4e era, you’ll be stabbin and everything else is a pretext. Or maybe it’s the 3.5 era since there’s not much terrain. Whatever. 

This is weird. The sea caves, the actual adventure locale, are just a few pages long, six if I recall. The lighthouse, the one that features so prominently on the cover and in all of the adventure lead-in? Not covered. Or, rather, it is essentially a rock formation on the island. It gets about three quarters of a page description which amounts to “The lighthouse which pierces the island is a magical device, not a building.” There are a few odds and ends, like seaweed covering it, but that’s the description. Which I guess means you can’t go inside? Which is why I’m calling it a rock formation. It’s got that beam of light, rotating, at the top, which is clearly magical. But there’s no notes about fucking with it. About climbing the tower, flying up, or painting the lenses with tar or anything else. When you make your entire adventure about the fucking lighthouse then you’d better do something with the lighthouse, or have some way of communicating to the players “Hey, its not about the lighthouse” once they reach the lighthouse. Yes, you can see a cave mouth, which is where the party will end up, so, good on yeah matey. 

Ket’s mention the quantum blind dude. He’s on the top of a mast of a wrecked ship. Unless the party doesn’t go to the wrecked ship in which case he’s in a wrecked lifeboat at the cave mouth. Its actually called “QUANTUM [Dudes Name]” Why? He’s not crucial to the adventure, so why the focus on making ABSOLUTELY sure the party meets him? And, during that HUGE leads in to the adventure we get LONG sections about V&V, the crime lords who hire the party to go the lighthouse. Like, pages of this shit. (Clearly, we have a hard on for V&V the crime lords. And for the quantum dude, for some reason. Search me. But I can tell when someone is a mary sue DM pet.) With some nice fucking LONG  read-aloud. In Italics. In a fancy fucking font in italics, and long. Look, I promised not to do the screencap thing anymore, but come on man, this shit is falling closer to the illegible end of the scale than the legible. Weird flourishes at the ends of e’s. I guess its supposed to be nautical-ish? BUT ITS FOR THE FUCKING DM. The DM has to be able to read the fucking shit and communicate yor long ass soliloquy to the players. I’m all for tormenting the players with handouts that nigh illegible, but not the DM. The DM needs information presented in a way that they can absorb it and transfer it to the players in an efficient and effective manner. Also, the island “appears to have a working lighthouse.” There’s a giveaway if I ever saw one. No. It has a working lighthouse. There’s a tower with a light spinning at the top. As far as anyone else knows its a fucking lighthouse. Nobody needs to know it’s not actually a lighthouse. (Although, isn’t it? Is it form or is it function? It’s tall with a rotating light you can see. It’s a lighthouse. The purpose of the light is to attract ship … so its function is not that of a lighthouse?) 

Oh, what am I bitching about here … the interactivity is just stabbing shit. Go in to a room, stab the monster, go in to the next room, stab the monster, go in to the next room. Repeat. There’s a person or two (See Also: Quantum Dude) who are like “we shipwrecked!” and are now have facehugger ova in them. They get, maybe, one sentence. Actually, most things get one sentence. Stab stab stab. Stab stab stab. I’m gonna call this a 3.5 adventure since there’s stabbing without the terrain effects needed to make it a 4e adventure. 

Room two of this exciting sea cave adventure: “2. Nest. The nest is home to the tenders.” Are you not eNtErTaInEd?! There’s a couple of bullet points for the DM to embellish upon, but the core room dynamic is more than a little lacking here. And, it’s just stabbing after all, so any description is just wasted. I guess this genre is for people who want to play mini’s but, I don’t know, want more? Roguelike D&D where combat is the main thing but you can level up and the graphics are raytraced?

And that’s all too bad because there is some imagery here and there that is decent.  “Bodies lie about the wreck, some wedged into the rocks where golden crabs feed upon them.” Noice! Always great when the crabs have some steamed human legs. And eyes. Nothing like a good rotten crab feeding frenzy to conjure the nausea, or, there’s this water elemental you can meet. It looks like an eel, its totem creature. That’s a great idea. Its tormenting a fisherman: “darting under to menace the trapped fisherman. The fisherman was harvesting eels, the elemental’s totem species, which pissed it off. It now plans on drowning its victim, Lars. The more prolonged the terror, the better.” That’s great! I mean, it’s all useless here since you’re just gonna stab it. But the potential man … and lets make lars desperate, so even though he KNOWS there’s this eel creature, there are also a lot of eels, and his families hungary, or he owes a lot or something. And maybe tie that in to the crime lords? Who have hired you. Great! Or, we could just put in some backstory for no reason and then just make the encounter a combat. *sigh*

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is the first four pages, which is useless. Title pages, credits, one page of background. The purpose of the preview is to show us enough so that we can make an informed purchasing decision. Like, show us an encounter so we can understand your style of D&D.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548411/the-cresting-pearl-light?1892600

By Connor McCloskey
Black Gambeson
Knave
"12HD worth of characters"

TWO MONTHS AGO: The hedge-wizard Inatuy hired a troop of dwarven miners to excavate a sensitive area, beneath which he believes he has discovered the location of a potent magical artifact, The Key of the Condemned, rumored to allow a dying man to entrap his executioner at the moment of death, and live on. The dwarves made swift progress, and the hedge-wizard was impressed until two weeks ago when they failed to report their status. After a second failed report, he has hired a contingent of adventurers to investigate.

This eight page adventure presents about eighteen linear rooms in a dwarf mine. It’s Aliens, but with ankheg. Decent descriptions some nice horror elements. I am unfairly turned off by the directness of the appeal to Aliens rather than In The Spirit Of. 

I hate comedy adventures. Just to be clear, this isn’t one, I’m just saying that I LOATHE them. Some humor in an adventure is fine, but I don’t like joke adventures. D&D doesn’t have to be serious, but when humor comes in it works better than when it is forced in. But, let’s say I come across the greatest comedy adventure ever. It’s perfect in every single way. Except it’s a joke adventure. All Mordenkainen Movie Studios and shit. There is no reason for me to hate it. ID STILL FUCKING HATE IT. 

This is Aliens. Some wizard gets some dwarves to go find the key of blah blah blah and they excavate a mineshaft to do it. Wizzo doesn’t hear from them for two weeks so he sends you see what they are up to. You find the place looks deserted, somewhat wrecked, and signs/body horror slowly reveals itself. So far I’m down and loving this. A nice ‘inspired by’ idea, but this time with an ankheg next. I’m down with taking a monster from the game and trying to craft a slow burn/build up horror adventure out encountering it. 

“You arrived at the mouth of a broken dwarven mine lift shaft in a small natural cave, chains dangling down into darkness with no sign of the lift itself. Small natural rivulets of water leak from the surrounding cave, and the sound of clinking chains & dripping water echo somberly up from the dark.” Hey, so that’s not bad! Chains DANGLING downRivluts LEAKING from wall, The sound of CLINKING chains. Somberly is a little purple, but whatever, it’s a decent description. And, as the entrance to The Mythic Underworld it’s not bad either! In that hole adventure awaits! How you getting down? Or, how about “Smell of vomit near unbearable. Once a cozy set of stables, the straw and dirt here are slick with the pulpy remains of three emulsified mules. Two large puddles of some sort of caustic biological waste burn the nose and block the path ahead.” The room title here is “Grisley Stable”, so the “once a zo stable” portion might be redundant, but it’s also not droning on, so we’ll let it slide. Otherwise, smell of vomit, caustic puddles, burning the nose, PULPY remains? Sounds great! This is all a part of the build up. Getting the party on edge. Really earning that first ankheg warrior attack. That attack, mot likely coming as a wandering encounter, will be earned and SO much more than just an attack thanks to the build up these early rooms provide. Nicely done.

Th dwarves had a pet badger, Jonesey, who is happy to see you, and gets visibly nervous when there are hidden monsters near. Ok. Sure. Lizard the little dwarf girl is hiding in a hole, the last survivor. Uh. Ok. There’s a sensor crystal to track incoming hostiles. Come on man. This isn’t an homage anymore. There’s a clay colum called Wehlun, or whatever that name is, who is a little sketchy, or can be. Dwarf chick is trapped in wall, half live. Uh huh. And, of course, there’s: “DWARVEN BURROWER (RM. 15 / 12): Large walking dwarven mining machine mech suit” 

You lost me man.

I was pretty much down for a horror thing with ankheg, and taking some vibes from Alien/Aliens. But this is on the edge of farce territory, or at least a direct retheming. Sensor crystals. Recording crystals. Nah, I’m out.

Should you be out? Meh. It’s essentially a linear map. So you’re having “ an experience” rather than doing an osr rpg. Which maybe you’re cool with. The descriptions are fine, the build up is chill. The body horror has elements of The Thing without leaning too heavy there, The elements are all here. I just can’t run something this linear or something that is this close of a emulation of a movie. 

Perhaps, though, there’s something original by the same designer?

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548230/ankheg?1892600