Mana Meltdown

Posted on August 11, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Lazy Litch
Lazy Litches Loot
B/X
Level: 4? Maybe?

The Artificer is dead! The Hermit Queen has dispatched you on the royal dragonfly to seize his living arcane weapons before her enemies do.  Deep in the geometric desert, the Artificer’s tower is unraveling: traps are gaining sentience, micro dimensions are fusing, and a ticking mana reactor whispers on the brink of collapse.  The meltdown will soon sink the tower into churning cubic sands. If you fail, another kingdom will wield the weapons to rule for centuries.

This 43 page adventure is full of batshit crazy concepts, with associated opulent descriptive text. Stuffed full, it perhaps needs just a little more room to breathe, the rest of us not being able to handle as much opium AND run the game at the same time. But, man, this thing does channel a vibe! Which means if you think Elmore is the pinnacle of fantasy RPG then you might want to move on …

This is, from time to time, an rpg or adventure that tries to explore a kind of bio-mechanical vibe and/or a luxurious opulence in the setting. Byzantine in the art style, with an implied lore that is, it seems, is very deep. Several of the Monte Cook RPG’s, a few of those Psychedelic Fantasy adventures, Rifts: Atlantis. Heresy: Kingdom Come. They generally fall short of the expectations they set, coming off as bolted on paper mache. This adventure does not fall in to that trap and is one of the more successful translations of that byzantine and opulent deep lore biomechanical vision. But … that also has implications. If the cover were in full colour it would better communicate the vibe of whats inside. As it is that cover communicates a kind of lower-end adventure, as does the Mana Meltdown title. The artwork samples, though, on the DriveThru product page do a much better job of communicating what’s to come.

The Hermit Queen. The royal dragonfly. The geometric desert. Churning cubic sands. How does that fit in to your campaign? The Hermit Queen? “She paints the skies with painful sovereign static; folk flee underground, crawling into tunnel towns to escape the burning noise. A ruby reign: regal, regenerative, and repressive.” You down? You got room for that? Meaning that this is either a one-shot or you’ve gone all Living Room/Bottle City. This is not a trip through the local high fantasy dungeon or even a brief excursion to the coral reef undersea lair. We’re got a fully realized vision here, or at least it will appear that way to the players, and the ability for them to integrate in to the environment, and the loot found to continue during the game as the character return to their homeland, is something to consider. The default assumption is that you are doing this for the Hermit Queen, for some unnamed reason, and thus we’re gonna need to be in a position to have her make that request, at least through her advisors, to the characters. None of which is covered, so, yeah, Dungeon & Dragons Ride, I guess.

We start out with the flight to the prismatic field around the artificers tower. Looks like other factions want the shit inside also! Thus, you’re in a flying race to get there first. You can make some stat checks to do various things to speed up The Royal Dragonfly and/or hinder your opponents. This will determine the order the factions, and characters, arrive at the tower. Or, more specifically, where folks arrive in the timeline of progress that is given. Earlier is better, with the other factions having less time to meddle. 

Oh, yeah, the other factions. We’ve got The Royal Dragonfly “Powered by: Narcissism.” More praise means it flies faster. And its entomologist pilot is jealous of the Dragonfly. So, you know. It’s got a lantern hanging on it’s tail. In case of serious accident you are instructed to trace the run on it. Which immolates the captured fairy inside. And then you sprinkle the dust on the dragonflies body to get a featherfall effect. Jesus H …

Anyway, the other factions is where I was going. One of them is a living weapon. “She travels to the Geometric Desert on top of a vast flying jellyfish embedded with parasitic bone engines. Her presence is announced by chilling sensations in the fluid of characters’ spines.” Also “The jellyfish has a self destructive desire for a poetic end by flying into one of the sinkholes” Uh. The Telemetry Twins, servants of the Far Away god, travel on a “piece of ground where his apostle ascended now levitates and transports the faithful along a precisely calculated prayer path “ Armed with their Suture Cable and Mnemonic Blade. 

I could go on, but, I think you get the idea. I used to summarize my thinking here with “you want realism in a game in which elves shoot fireballs from their asses?” This is perhaps the best implementation of that meaning. AND YOU”RE NOT EVEN IN THE TOWER YET. Inside we to even more abstracted concepts, like The Trap Parliament – “Locked door [spiral steps descend into large circular room] Stone benches [razor thin, floating in concentric rings, some folded into sinister origami statues, others blank with scorch marks], Banners [torn sheets drift overhead, looping in silent orbit], Floor [central speaker’s sigil-podium emits broken voices debating in an unknown language, phrases linger like ghosts semi-visible in the air” Abstraction brought to life to a major theme in this adventure. Obviously. The language used is decent. Very complex ideas are attempting to be described. Razor thin stone benches? Ok. “The tower breaks the horizon, encased in a shimmering prism, held aloft by vast spider tendrils clawing from the cubic sand” Sure thing. What’s cubed sand? Fuck if I know. Let’s hope no one asks and they just bask in the description. And that’s both a strength and a weakness.

In terms of interactivity, we start with that race mini-game, which advances a timeline of events, and then you get to the dungeon proper. The other factions are running around inside, as well as the ghost of the Artificer. And, Death, who is not happy that dude has managed to avoid him and is meddling in the Artificers meddling. Decent fighting inside. A doorway inside of a bag of seeds held by a flesh construct gardener that leads to level one: The Flesh Garden. But to get there, proper, you need to first gain access to the tower. Which means making it through the prismatic field, doing fifteen points in one turn to collapse the field. And then: “two entrances: a light side door and a dark side door. One door leads out the other unless at least one person enters from both sides at the same time.” We can see the patterns here, these are not exactly the most original concepts, but I think they integrate well here. If you need to break through a field, or enter two doors simultaneously then this is the way you do it, not all of those other ways you’ve seen before. It fits, naturally. Some of the interactivity is complex, and none of it has a mural on the wall with a riddle written on it. 

There is a decent amount of support information in the form of reference tables for the DM to work from, random shit, reference material and so on. This is great and shows an understanding of what the DM needs when running the actual adventure. Also, there’s a nice little reference diagram of how the adventure fits together. This sort of framing context helps a lot, getting the DM oriented correctly before the flood of information starts.

I think this is a good adventure, and I’m going to Best it. But, also, I don’t think it’s going to be an EASY adventure to run. There are a lot of moving parts here. The rival factions. The timeline. The special effects in the dungeon. The ghost, and Death fucking with the ghost  And THEN the special On effects for a dungeon level. And then the room. Which is going to have some complex elements to work out in a dungeon full of abstracted concepts. They are, in the end, relatively simple to run, but interesting. But grasping a Memetic Blade and running it on the fly? Those are the things that are a tad more difficult. Magnificent adventuring facade wrapped around what are some interesting interactivity concepts … like a room where copies of the PC’s, each with a part of an object, run away from them in fear of being destroyed. Or, on the more difficult side of things: “Jealous Walls: The more it is used, the more hostile the corridor becomes. Envious of players’ functioning bodies, it begins to create gravitational anomalies in attempts to impale them on bone spikes so it can cannibalize them.” Run that. Oof. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is 25 pages. More than enough to get the lore, the style, to be influenced by the art, and see more than few rooms and specials. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530305/mana-meltdown?1892600

Posted in Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 22 Comments

Milk

Posted on August 9, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
by Vasili Kaliman
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 2-4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Reviews | 31 Comments

Turn It Off

Posted on August 6, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Sean Audet
Self Published
Knave 2e
Level 1

Drawn to the light of the St. Peter’s Rock Lighthouse, a vast and ancient eldritch abomination has awoken. One night, lightkeepers Alistair MacNeil and Dylan O’Connell witnessed the creature rising from the water. It only took a glimpse to drive the two men mad. With the last of their sanity, they destroyed the lantern and made a pact to keep the lighthouse dark, no matter the cost. Four months have passed since then. A perpetual storm now lingers above the isle of St. Peter’s Rock, and dozens of ships have been lost to its cliffs. Several people have gone to investigate and relight the lantern, but none have returned.

This sixteen page adventure describes a lighthouse with seven rooms. It has TOP NOTCH atmosphere, providing a foreboding and eerie environment. There is a level two and level three baddie to face, the former keepers, and then the world ends. So, you know, maybe some pacing issues in what is quite the atmospheric adventure.

There is a general rule of thumb that the room count as a ratio to the page count is a general indicator of what’s to come. Lopsided in either directions usually a warning sign. Thus, opening this adventure I girded my loins. But, a rule of thumb is not a law and this adventure defies that meme. It uses layout and an art style, as well as its design, to create a brooding atmosphere that pretty perfectly matches the vibe I think it was going for. Horror adventures generally cross genre boundaries well, and it would be quite easy to move this one to a different RPG/time period. Also, I’m totally reviewing this because the title reminds me of a Peaches mashup with the Doors.

The initial pages, as a spread, detail the map with notable features on it. Almost the very first words, on that summary map, describing the outside of the lighthouse are “Fierce storm growing more violent by the minute, ship in the distance, door to the Keeper’s Cottage, locked door to the Storehouse, hidden locked door to the Cellar, lantern lens broken into 3 pieces, crane and pulley, miscellaneous hardware and tools, shipwrecked fishing vessel.” I am enchanted by those first two clauses. A fierce storm growing more violent by the minute, a lighthouse without a light, and a ship in the distance. There is an impending consequence, the ship, that immediately adds to the tension and environment of the growing storm. I sometimes talk about framing what is to come, and, generally, I’m talking about this from the DMs perspective, to help orient the DM. This turns that a bit and instead provides this immediate air of tension to the gameplay. When we talk about Lareth issues it’s usually in the sense of giving this more visceral vibe to the villain early on. But, also, it tends to to a more remote of passive sort of thing, signs of their violence and so on. (Else we run in to the fleeing villain issue.) I’m not sure I’ve seen something so immediately tension setting before. You KNOW whats going to happen, you can see it. It’s a slow motion disaster. The ticking time bomb ever present without it being a hamhanded literal countdown. Further we get “Night is fast approaching. • The storm has taken a turn for the worse. • A distant ship grows closer by the minute. • The silhouette of a man is visible in the Lantern Room.” Again, this sense of foreboding. The night, the storm, the ship … pressure. And then the silhouette in the window. A call to action and perhaps a threat. 

The adventure is great at this, setting the mood. The Lighthouse was an explicit influence and this does a great job of capturing some of that atmosphere. It’s coming at things from a more neutral approach, a real world grounding that adds to the immersion. “Dylan O’Connell appears from the shadows,  wielding a rusted knife or a broken oar, muttering incomprehensibly” That’s one of our crazed lighthouse keepers, with a rusty knife. “An open, two-story room. It smells of spoiled meat, tobacco, and coal. Sparsely furnished” Smells of spoiled meat, stale tobacco. Coal. That is exactly the vibe I want from some abandoned lighthouse horror/suspense. 

This is a simple adventure. Search a few rooms, get this sense of unfolding drama, and what has happened in the past, not through a diary or exposition but from the condition of the rooms, what you find, what you see, what you experience. Ultimately, you’re facing a level to and level three fighter, in the crazed former keepers, so the combat here is few and far between and almost certainly happening in the climax of the adventure. But, the journey is the real adventure, through the unfolding tension, driving by a wanderer-like table that instead increases the event timeline or adds some strange atmosphere “The wind begins to tear shingles and pieces of the roof from the lighthouse. Debris crashes through the upper levels. “ or “A flash of lightning illuminates the sea. For a brief moment, one of the PCs sees a massive shape beneath the waves. It disappears, but an overwhelming sense of dread lingers.” 

There are a few things to do other then experience things. There’s a dude to find and rescue, and perhaps add complications to your efforts as you also have to deal with his decrepitude. And, of course, the need to explore to find some lamp oil, etc, to get the beacon working again before that ship arrives.

The layout is clean. The summary map is quite good, you could almost run it from it alone. Or, at least, it gives that emission, of something that can actually help you at the table. The increasing tension/wandering table is easy to follow, clear, and provides decent interactivity in terms of avoid those falling shingles and so on. Minor things, but nice tension spikes. The rooms, proper, rely on a line break style of organization with occasional bolding. They do tend to the more “column sized” size of the spectrum, and I suspect bullets instead of line breaks, along with a few more formatting insights could have assisted here, but it is also using a ? ? layout, with some notes in that ? that help keep things on track. There’s a decent amount of stuff in each room that I suspect it just crosses the line in to needing a bit more thought. 

I’m not the biggest fan of the hooks. They are the rather basic sort or being hired, etc, but do include a “raising the Stakes” line in each that mentions things like “Raise the stakes: the PCs have a personal investment in the latest shipment” or “Raise the stakes: the PCs have a personal connection to the survivor.” I can see a certain appeal there in a well crafted one. Solving a problem, like the shipping issue, for one of the parties schemes seems like fair game, while I always raise an eyebrow at including the parties personal connections; this is why PCs don’t create those, as fodder for a DM to leverage … ever the hobo. 

The ending here leaves me a little nonplussed. Your goal is to light the beacon to warn away the ship. The keepers and hunt for oil adds complications. But, in doing so, we find that the keepers were right to douse it … lighting it summons an abomination from under the waves, the reason WHY they doused the light. I’m not gonna die on this hill, it’s not the end of the world. But you know the American spirit. Finally, PC’s tend to be resourceful. I suspect the storm mitigates the “light a different “approach, and if the party can find a way past that issue then more power to them. There are, also, some alternatives presented as opportunities, a flare, a seized up foghorn, that could be used to find a better way to manage the outcome. A few words of advice in this area could have been appreciated. Remember kids, when setting out to do something, always bring all the apres you need with you to do the minimum job, just in case the former keepers have hidden/used everything.

An excellent adventure. Small and high quality, providing alternative options to the party if they are smart enough to take advantage. The designer has two other publications, both for Mouseritter. I’m not generally interested in that, but I may take the plunge to see if they match the quality and can perhaps be “translated’ on the fly for more general audiences.

This is Pay What You Want at itch.io, with a suggested price of $2. There’s no explicit preview, but there are a few screenshots that give you an art style and layout vibe if you squint. (Although I think they are a bit misleading in the wrong way; you get an “art first’ vibe from them that I don’t actually think is present.) And, I guess, as PWYW, the entire thing could be considered a preview.

https://cloud-press-publishing.itch.io/turn-it-off

Posted in Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 21 Comments

The Valleys

Posted on August 4, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Matthew Jennings
Missspire Publications
OSR
Levels 5-8

So, you have helped your brothers deliver your family’s hard cider all over these valleys and you’ve never even heard of Arcadia. When you asked the parents about helping Rigs out with a delivery, they dispar- aged the idea. Said it was “out past Broken Valley… straight up a mountain…in giant and barbarian territory … a bad idea”

This 129 page heartbreaker uses seventeen pages to describe a ruined village full of kobolds and a red dragon. Your level eights are helping a mary sue move and hew new house isn’t working out right. It is a classic heartbreaker, full of wall of text, extraneous detail, disorganized, and conversational. I’m not even sure how you run this. 

Ah, the heartbreaker. Let us wax poetic on the creations of a single designer with a vision of what they want, and falling far short of reaching it. I salute you, and your singular visions, even if I ant absolutely nothing to do with them. GenCon approaches, and I’ve always to have a booth where I just sell heartbreaks and my Worst list. There are many ways for me to not want to have anything to do with an adventure, and a heartbreaker is perhaps the saddest.

You’re old buddy RIgs wants you to help move Karen. You are levels five to eight, so, sure, why not? In this adventure your old buddy is a level 3 in like five different classes, Karen the Herbalist is a level seven magic user, and the old hag living on the mountainside is a Level eleven cleric and a level five illusionist. Which, maybe, makes sense because one of the towns has a golem factory where they make and export them. This is not my D&D style. It sets my teeth on edge and reminds me of the bad old days of adventures with Sphere of Annihilation garbage disposals. But, whatever you’re in to I guess.

This is a single column wall of text adventure and regional setting. I guess it describes “The Valleys” and then has a small adventure set in it. For level five through eights. Again, we can see that “delivering your families hard cider” and “levels five through eight” is clearly a sore point with me. Anyway, the first ninety or so pages describe, abstractly but in many words, the various locations in the valley. Then there’s the adventure of about twenty pages, and then a description of the various magic items and creatures. Is it a regional guide with an adventure in it? I don’t know, the product description makes it sounds an adventure.

I really can’t emphasize enough the mess of the text. Things are just dropped in to it without much thought. Your hooks, with your buddy RIggs, appears on page seventeen in the appropriate physical location where he might be found. And then seventy pages later comes the adventure. WHich then starts with “Karen will send the boychild that didn’t runaway on the porch off with a handful

of gold coins to fetch some lunch for her friends,” Uh. Ok. Sure. Time to refer back to page whatever earlier in the adventure to find Karens home, I guess. You’re gonna be doing a lot of flipping in this adventure.

So, the adventure. You show up, have a long and tedious lunch with Karen, who you are instructed to be as long-winded and rambling as possible, then you help Karen move in to her new home.  Which involves going through a trunk to the connected magic trunk, coming out in the ruined village, and fighting a bunch of kobolds and a 10HD red dragon. Oh, and Karen is with you the entire way. Invisible. And when you reach the dragon then “Karen ends the fight almost before it gets started with a lucky Polymorph Other, changing the dragon into a blood raven.” Groovy, I guess. That IS the role of a mary sue. Anyway, so you’re fighting kobolds. As level five through eights. A large group is the kobold common room with fifty in it. Fifteen males, 25 females and ten children. So, fifteen kobolds. Dump in a fireball, I guess? Anyway, the ruined town has about twelve locations, one being the clocktower with the dragon it. 

It is TEDIUM, beyond words, to wade through. Information is scattered everywhere. A section heading may be important or it may be just more background information. And, given the page count, it is almost always fluff. Unless of course you actually needed it. And the whole conversation tone of the long form paragraphs … There’s this thing that some event based adventures do. FIrst this happens and then this and then this and then this. This isn’t really scene based, in the way those are (and, I’m differentiating between scenes and the “first this then this” style) but the encounters, the various keys, many are in this format. And sometimes the format, the conversation, runs across rooms. And then there are just other things dropped in out of nowhere. “Karen will ask what the burned corpse smells like. If the answer is “cinnamon”, she’ll know there is a female red dragon involved” Uh. Ok. Does it, in fact, smell like cinnamon? I don’t know. I guess if I go wade through everything else I can see its a female red dragon somewhere in the adventure and then make the inference? It’s just bizarre, these random assumptions coming out of nowhere with no context to them. Second person read-aloud abounds “You pass an iron brazier upon entry that fills the room with the smell of sickly sweet herbs and incense but all you really notice is the idol of Naama on the far wall.” except it’s not really read-aloud, in the traditional sense? It’s not set apart and you really wouldn’t know its read-aloud except for the fact that there’s some second-person tenses to it. It’s all just a mass of text, with a running conversation throughout, changing tenses, changing tone, changing meaning and purpose, willy nilly. It’s a fucking stream of consciousness adventure. Which can be a fun way to write and deliver SOME sorts of entertainment information (like a review …) but is absolutely terrible in a piece of reference material. 

There’s not much here. It’s a regional setting, I guess. The actual adventure is a nightmare of finding information, scattered throughout the book seemingly at random. I know, I bitch about organization a lot, but this is just on a whole other level. Imagine I put half of the room one description on page 18 and the other half on page 86. The whole tone (which, I admit, is a matter of taste) is just off with the level 5-8 thing and the hard cider thing and the helping a chick move thing. The mary sue. The kobolds as enemies? Second person? I salute the hubris, but am horrified by the result. 

This is $4 at DriveThu. The preview is six pages, and is actually the first six pages of the actual adventure portion. So, decent job. Check it out. It really does a decent job of conveying in a nutshell the issues.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524001/the-valleys-a-grunions-and-flagons-mirrspire-module?1892600

EDIT: I take it back. It’s not a heartbreaker. Future Symbolism …

Posted in Reviews | 6 Comments

Echoes of Blackhollow

Posted on August 2, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Allan Bollinger
Black Dice Games
Cresthaven
Level 1

Something has awakened beneath Black Hollow, and the veil that once separated the world of men from deeper horrors is beginning to thin.

This twenty page adventure uses all twenty pages in a meaningless flaccid jerk off that never pays off in the end. Self-indulgent and purple prose with over explained situations that MEAN NOTHING. 

As I was going through this I had this great schtick I was going to use. I was going to quote various parts of te purple prose and then just say something like “I’m going to kill myself” after each section. And then I started to get worried. The page count kept creeping up. I suddenly only had two pages left and the adventure had not started. Ought oh. So, the designer has denied you, gentle reader, of my most excellent purple prose quoting and instead I get to do this.

FUCK YOU!

You know those fucking tick-toks that cut off the ending? All that edging and lead in and no pay off? Making you go watch part two (which is never fucking posted …) Fucking click bait piece of shits. Well guess what the fuck this adventure is? 

The adventure ends with instructions for the DM to conduct a survey! What fun!

  • “What was your favorite moment from this session, and why?”
    • The part where it ended. Also, the moments of column long read-aloud allowed me time to rant about Connections. I appreciated that.
  • “Was there anything that felt confusing or frustrating?
    • No. It was all pretty transparent. I mean, the whole Mayor Is An Imposter thing didn’t make sense at all, but that didn’t matter, so.
  • “Did any part of the story or world-building pique your curiosity?”
    • I liked the part where the focus was on me and my character and my interaction with the game world. Oh, wait, there was none of that. 
  • “On a scale of 1 to 10 …”
    • -9. Fuck you. Would rather sit through another six hours of simultaneous gallbladder and kidney stones.

A summary, I guess. Dude steps out of the shadows, is a prick, and tells you his boss wants to hire you. (He’s also a prick.) You maybe investigate a little, go to the village which is mostly abandoned, and only a day away, and question the four or five people left. To no actual end. You then go to the mine entrance and the adventure ends. It’s supposed to be horror themed. Building suspense and the like. It’s pretentious nonsense and fucking clickbait. 

THAT COSTS $20!!!!! I don’t like to mention price in reviews. It is what it is and I’ll pay a lot for a short adventure that is good. But, also, I resent the expensive adventures because I know they are gonna suck ass and spending $60/week on garbage kind of annoys me. I don’t have a good reason for this. It just feels wrong? But, also, This is 22 pages long, costs $20 and is not an actual adventure, in spite of what the naysayers will quote about lead in and roleplaying. I know how to do those fucking things. And I also know how to make an actual fucking adventure out of them. 

So, you gonna wander around your start village and ask some questions, maybe. Then you gonna go to the village in question and ask some questions. That’s the adventure. I guess there are some fire beetles you could disturb. And a Carrion Screecher Swarm, whatever that is. A little description might be nice. All we get is “As the party nears a ruined spiral-marked stone, a swarm bursts from the dead canopy.” Ok, sure, whatever. Just yell COMBAT and roll the dice, I guess. No creature description. No real encounter. Just getting attacked. Fun.

One of my favorite sections of the adventure is the “PURPOSE IN ADVENTURE STRUCTURE” notes that are pervasive in the text. Long, lengthy sections that tell us what the purpose of the encounter is. Which is inevitably build dread, foreshadow, offer subtle backstory. Over and over again the text takes, what, a quarter of a page each time, to explain what the fuck it is trying to do. Repetitiion is one thing, but fuck man, its repeated like a gazillion times in twenty different ways. I get it. Be creepy. Note, it’s not advice on HOW to be creepy, it just says the purpose is to be creepy. So, you know, worthless. “The Mayor’s House is a roleplaying-heavy location full of tension, contradictions, and concealed information.” Yup, just like every place in this adventure.

Column long read-aloud. Almost a page long in places. Purple prose. “The man is tall and pale, his features sharp as winter frost. His eyes are cloudy like river glass, and his black robes seem to drink in the fading light.” Ok, so, I know, I said write evocatively. There’s the “stick an adjective/adverb in front of each noun/verb” method of fucking that up, and then there’s the simile.metaphor method of fucking that up. There is so much of this that I was going to make it the entire review. “From the moment the characters leave Cresthaven, the sky above them hangs heavy and oppressive, a leaden gray promising no warmth” Jesus H Christ. “Only silence, and the growing sense that whatever lives here no longer remembers how to greet strangers.” I’m gonna kill myself. “The final pages are nothing but spirals. Something broke them. Something reached in and rewrote what they were.” If I had to sit through it then so do you. “A stern but sincere man, Father Harder warns against venturing into forgotten places. He’s begun leaving the chapel door unlocked at night, in case the light must Flee. “ In case the light must flee? 

Look, this is just a shit adventure. Or, as the initial observations noted, not an actual adventure at all. To put a cherry on top of it all, there are passages out of place in the text. As if there were a copy/paste error and chunks were just moved to other area. EASL I can forgive, but a final proof read? [Insert standard joke/comment here] I think not. Twenty fucking dollars for this. Twenty fucking dollars. For 22 pages of nothing.

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and shows you nothing but endless designer puffery.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/529970/echoes-of-black-hollow?1892600

I wonder if I’m still alive and out of surgery yet?

Posted in Reviews | 27 Comments

The Hunt for Grimmelbach

Posted on July 30, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By AB Andy
Adventure Bundles
OSE
Levels 3-4

A vengeful bear roams the woods. A desperate prayer awakens something older. Now the villagers vanish by moonlight.

This 53 page adventure presents a small village with about nine locations to investigate and then nineteen populated hexes to explore on a 6×5 grid, all in search of a rogue grizzly. It’s clearly going for those Old World vibes, but just falls JUST short on presenting the ancient-misty-forest-full-of-old-altars environment.

We’ve got this village right on the edge of the deep wood. There’s this ancient mama bear that lives in the deep wood, a kind of legend in the village. Oops, hunters accidentally kill her cub. She then starts killing hunters. And mushroom foragers. And wood collectors. And anyone else you ventures in to the forest. The village starts to suffer; lots of deaths and the resources are cut off. Some dumb ass wanders in to the woods in desperation and find an ancient stone altar and prays at it. Surprise! It’s the goddess of the hunt! And she sends a spectral huntsman and his hounds to kill the bear. Kind of. You see he hunts EVERYTHING. Including villagers. Oops. In comes the party. And to all of that we’re gonna add some other weird ass shit. It’s not quite an old world vibe, it’s not quite an appalachian vibe. There’s lot of antlers, stone altars ini the woods, and bone charms … along with one murderous hick family. I don’t know what vibe that is. It’s a decent starting point though.

The villager has about nine locations and is really just a place to gather some information. Frank saw signs of Y over at X. Mary thinks she saw something over at the fallen stump, and so on. The locations, proper, get a sentence or two and then the people there get, I don’t know, a quarter page or so, with their knowledge bulleted. This is all about right to me. A little bit of an evocative backdrop, but the emphasis is on the people AND It’s easy to locate what they know. I might have appreciate a little one-pager reference sheet on the NPC’s, to help run this section a little more dynamically (it’s easier to pull a rando name and fact out of a conversation ad-hoc that way) but I’m not gonna die/ It’s just gonna be a substandard experience. Oh, wait … Anyway, this is all supported by a Villager Stress table. This is, essentially, a random event generator, once a day, based on how tense things are. “A screaming match erupts between two families. One accuses the other of drawing the attention of demons. A knife is drawn” and that’s from the MEDIUM table. Yeesh. It’s a mix of fun little vignettes, as quoted above. Very little is outright supernatural, just hints and portents. The descriptions are also right at the line of what I would consider good. Certainly, that little scene I quoted can be built upon. It’s a good idea and I can run with a good idea. I don’t know, it’s slightly abstracted, maybe? Screaming match is good. Draws a knife is good. I think it’s the One accuses the other of drawing the attention of demons. That feels off. Abstracted. Non-specific. And I think this is a common issue in this adventure. It has some good ideas but it mixes them up with some abstraction which kind of drags the whole thing back.

After Ye Olde Village the party will take their information and set off in to the woods. Six mile hexes, about thirty of them, about half populated. Six hours to traverse a hex for the first time, or with a guide from the village. You’re looking at six hexes, minimum, if you somehow made a beeline for the bears new den. You gonna be in the woods a bit and/or returning to town. 

“An ancient corpse is nailed to a tree, throat torn. Its mouth is stuffed with wildflowers that do not wither. A charm made from deer teeth hangs from its hand” Well there we go then! How about “The air turns sweet. A woman?s humming can be heard from just beyond sight. If pursued, the sound grows into wailing. A banshee” That’s a nice banshee encounter, it fooled me. Decent wanderers in this. The hexes proper kind of mirror the village in their descriptions. A sentence or two and then some bulleted explanations below with some bolding here and there to emphasize words. It’s a clear and easy to use format. “Half-sunk into a moss-covered hillock, the old stone shrine to the hunting gods leans like a drunk. Burnt-out candles and rotted offerings litter its base. Wind always seems to blow here, even on still days.” We’re getting a little purple in places, in the leans like a drunk, but its not bad. There’s a faint whiff of the old in this. Freeing a soul, from a body nailed to a tree, results in “His eyes will then turn to polished pearls worth 500 gold each as the rest of the corpse withers away.” There’s an air of mystery to that. The unexplained. That wonder beyond your philosophy is what I want and the adventure delivers it. Oh, oh! The backwoods family. Purveyors of honey so good it heals! “They?ll wake up tied up in the hut, with the family about to murder them. As they sharpen rusty knives, they?ll mention that the forest must be left alone for the nature to balance itself out” Fucking druids man! Those nature folk are all the same. I hope you hit the overlook hex first, where you might see them dragging a body to a shallow grave … In fact, I love that overlook hex, giving clues to the hexes around it. It’s strikes me as everything D&D should be, taking advantage of whats around you and paying attention to the hints dropped. 

Before going on, I must mention the stat blocks: “6[13], 5, 22, 40?, 15[+4], 1 x bite (1d8), 2 x claw (1d4), known blood, frenzy, fleeing.” I’m a fan of terseness, but drop in the HD man, at a minimum. Yeah, I’m a smart guy and I can figure it, but I wish to spend all of my cognitive burden on the game at the table, not on the stat block.

Something feels off here, though. I have two theories. The first, and I’m willing to be told I’m wrong, is the somewhat slower pace of the hex crawl. The kind of slow, methodical plod feels a little unsupported. Hmmm, almost like it needs more per hex, or more random encounters or various types or something like that. I could be wrong about that. The second is the somewhat hit and miss nature of the descriptions. You can, every once in awhile, get the vibe that the designer is trying to lay down, the ancient forest, misty, old shrines, and so on. Or, perhaps, you can see that is what the designer is trying to do. The writing is just a little off though. It just doesn’t FEEL that way. Those little abstracted bits maybe? Not hitting it hard enough in line after line? I don’t know. I do know that this is one of the hardest parts of writing, so I’m not exactly mad. But, also, it just feels like the vibe is not pulled off. 

But, it’s easy to scan, the interactivity is there in a variety of encounters of various types. Souls to free. Corpses to talk to, and fight. Creepy shit in the woods. A murder family. A great mix of interactivity in the woods and in the two little mini-dungeons (the old bear lair and new bear lair) 

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. It’s a good mix of general pages, town pages, and a few lair pages. It’s a good preview and shows off the formatting, the style of village play, and what the bear lair is like. It’s a good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/526456/the-hunt-in-grimmelbach?1892600

Posted in Level 3, No Regerts, Reviews | 8 Comments

Battle for Neraka

Posted on July 28, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Simone Zambrunoi
Classic Dungeon Adventures
OSE
"Low to Mid Levels"

In Battle for Neraka, players assume the roles of the forces of good besieging the temple, aiming to free it from the clutches of wicked cultists.

This 21 page raid adventure uses about nine pages to describe tenish rooms in an evil fortress. You’ll be storming the backdoor and holding it for 20 rounds while the elf host streams in behind you. It’s warhammer, with some read-aloud.

Ok, so, I’ve played Warhammer, I think, once? And I’ve played a couple of other mini systems a handful of times. And, of course, there was 4e. This is OSR, so you’re not getting those tactical combat choices that 4e provides. My memory of the mini combat games was that it was just moving your dude somewhere and then rolling dice with a couple of modifiers. That sounds like this adventure. At least, if you toss in some bad read-aloud. 

The first thing you’re going to notice is the white text on a black background. I cannot say enough about what a terrible choice this is. It literally hurts my eyes to stare at it and try to read it. I took four tylenol this morning to try and combat it. And then toss in the italics used for read-aloud? Hrumph. There’s also some weird ass font that runs around the edge. I’m not sure what it says; it’s illegible. The first lesson in adventure design must be that a DM must actually be able to read the adventure. No, that’s not a binary decision. It’s just a garbage decision and I can’t imagine how anyone who looked at this would decide “Yup, that’s what I should do!”

Ok, let’s move on to the map. It’s absurd. There’s a moat, with a long bridge over it, and a fortress on the other side. I think you’re coming out of the forest on your side? Actually, I’m not sure of that. It’s never mentioned. And NONE of what I just said is on the map. The map shows two levels of a corner tower. Part of the second level is “the wall”, the battlements that the soldiers man. The adventure makes a big deal of evil reinforcements streaming in to the tower to repel the party.  But the battlements? They don’t connect to the rest of the fortress. It goes out of its way to note that there’s a tall wall between the battlements and the courtyard. And no mention of you crossing it, looking in to it, or anything like that. And that battlement does not go past the little tower. But wait, there’s more! Maybe they stream in to the lower level! No. There’s only one door, the one the party will coming in that leads to the bridge over the moat. This is literally cut off from the rest of the fortress. Seldom have I seen work so lazy. Even a fucking pointcrawl would indicate the fucking exits. 

Ok, so, you’re special forces in the elf army, among the best there is in the host. Your captain sends you on the mission. Fuck yeah man! Glorfindel wants ME to raid the place! Oh, wait, no, generic read-aloud and the most uninspiring command ever to raid the place. NOTHING about this thing is decent. At ALL.

Rooms have long read-aloud. It’s all in second-person. So, you know, hope you are not invisible or used some clever tactic to enter the room you’re in.  “As you prepare to cross the bridge, breathing as little as  possible and  shielded  from  sight by the poisonous mists, you hear a dull thud ahead of you. Moments later, a large shape begins to emerge from the fog. A monstrous bipedal figure materializes from the mist, seemingly unaffected by the toxic fumes.” Hey, a forced combat! That’s great! Doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you get attacked. 

The whole thing is obviously written for 5e even though it claims to be OSR and/or generic. “The large door is very sturdy, and breaking it requires a very difficult Strength check. It is tough to break down due to the considerable thickness of the wood, which grants the door many hit points and a moderate reduction in damage.” Again, just stat your fucking adventure. Just do it. No one cares. The pedants will complain, but they are going to complain anyway. No one is going to care that you put in 5e stats and then labeled OSR. Well, I mean, I will. But I’m a deeply unhappy person. 

Just garbage. No more Classic Dungeon Adventures for me.

This is $1 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Sucker!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/529565/battle-for-neraka?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Reviews | 3 Comments

Reality Unbound: Reclamation

Posted on July 26, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By R.A. Lopez
Hyperfantasy Handbooks
d20/3.5/PF
Levels 6-20

Your heart skips a beat as you realize something and time seems to stop. This being, this “God-Beast” was sent by this newworld. It could have just summoned a gate or spirited you away, like a babe in the night. Instead, it sent a God it here to rescueyouall

from death. You -are- precious. You are not just a lost soul with fate cut via the golden scissors that has no recourse but tofadeInto history- potential unfulfilled. Only you can delve deep and discover the depths of your psyche and what you can become! This is Not “The End”, but a New Beginning. A Life Eternal, A Promise Made, A Gift of The Land. What Will You Do WithIt?

This 242 page adventure is a literal nightmare. Whatever demons you face in life can not be as bad as this heartbreaker. It has no redeeming qualities. I’m not even sure how someone managed to type the 242 pages it took to make this. It is a TRUE fantasy heartbreaker. 

I have been trying, very hard, to make it through this. I know that longer adventures take more time to review, and thus typically work on one over the course of weeks. I don’t see how that is possible with this adventure. I can make it through, maybe, two pages? Then I have to put it down. It’s a nightmare. There’s almost no formatting. It’s absolutely a wall of text. The font is small and, while not “a funky font”, it is something that is not easy on the eyes … maybe the stroke weight? And that’s just the non-creative decisions! There is a literal DM in the game to guide the players. The read-aloud is mixed with mechanics information. It is … I don’t know man. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered something like this before? 

This is hard to review. My ire is generally reserved for those individuals trying to cash in via shovelware, AI slop, or Megacorps who have the resources but don’t care. (Which is all of them.) One person, making one thing, a man of singular vision … Objectivism is the western version of communist heroic sculptures: fucking awesome and inspiring and yet absolutely worthless once you reach age fourteen. But man, the mythic appeal! I don’t want to go full force on this dude. But, also, man, every decision this designer made was wrong. I don’t want anything to fucking do with this, and neither do you. But also, he did it!

So, you get transported to this new world, ala the Dungeons & Dragons ride. You can change your characters appearance over time. Such as: “Personal Evolution can be as simple as losing weight or a shift in hair color, to the growth of wings or horns or sometimes again or loss of more sensitive bits such as breasts or genitals.” It’s not FATAL, but my rule of thumb is that any time someone mentions something akin to sex, then it’s got those undertones that can’t then be unseen. The god-beast talks to you for a million paragraphs of read-aloud. I guess you’re level six now. Then you are released upon The Land to do what DungeonMaster tells you to do. Yeah, he’s in this. Different name, but same thing. You will visit various lands and solve abstracted set pieces. Here are six towers in a circle. Explore the sic levels of each and defeat everything/overcome everything in them and then a clock tower appears in the middle with a jeweled pegboard for you to move the pegs around, representing the towers, to solve the puzzle. How do you know what to do? Well, the first few pages of the book have a bunch of prose about the eighteen or so different aspects.

“There are Six Elements of Arcane Origin: Fire, Earth, Lightning, Ice, Water, and Wind. Earth is ruled by Constitution. Earth is powerful against and weak versus Wind. Earth is expressed as the color, Orange. The natural crystal of Earth is Topaz.” And that continues for each, and then covers device, arcane, ying, yang, dark and light aspects, rare, active, reactive …  THis then is your first real sign that something ‘special’ is going on with this adventure. 

Ok, so, you’re off exploring The Land, which basically means doing what DungeonMaster tells you to do and nothing else. Your first challenge is … fishing. There’s a river. You can fish. And of course you get the rules for making rainbow trout sushi. No, I’m not making this up. THEN you get to go to the tower puzzle/thing. Which, if I know my 3.5 right, is going to take about nine hundred sessions of play to complete, given the length of Pathfinder combats. 

I know, many of you are worried about the god-beast and it’s endless exposition. Or DungeonMaster and his endless instructions (much more than in the cartoon.) But, not worry. The read-aloud has you covered! “As your bloodline is wakened, you will take on the signature of it’s power, a visible sign, a Stitch. You may attempt to hide this feature, but trust me, if you do attempt this you will find luck is not on your side. There is a special kismet that guards our kind ensuring that we cannot hide from it. If you attempt to hide away from God, does God not forsake you? Regardless, when you hide your Stitch/es, you begin to lose health and energy over time. This is called [Masking]. It can be dangerous to do it often.” I’m not cherry picking. That’s fairly typical. A weird mixed tense or second person, DM voice, mechanics, some attempts at being evocative. That’s it, that’s the adventure. It’s pervasive and normal here.

Hey, remember that river I told you about? Here’s the encounter: “Everflowing River (Drinking) Restores Health and Energy to Maximum. Destroys All Epic (and Non Epic) Negative Effects. ‘Mortal Wound’ Effects are Destroyed! After Drinking Deeply, Status is Reset to Clear! It is almost like having a new body. Secondarily, drinking the equivalent of a small lake from the aquifer fed river is not only one of the most exhausting things you’ve ever done but also the most refreshing.” How the fuck do you run something like that?

The font is small. It’s something hard to read, but not obviously so, I think it’s the stroke weight. It is repetitive. I mean REALLY beating a dead horse. Even more so than I just did about the stroke weight. “On The Fourth Morning (After All 3 Days and Evenings Have Been Spent!)
Yes, that is generally the definition of the fourth morning. And the, the descriptive text is clearly meant to be a railroad “Breakfast’s remnants sit now on barren, cracked ground. In the distance, you spot a series of bleak towers. You notice a steadyglowbriefly appearing to outline the edges of all weapons and armor; they are all now enchanted with the barest of magics- onlyasimple+1 (Enhancement) imbues all starter equipment transforming from fine craftsmanship (masterwork) to true magic” Uh, no? I’m not camping next to some towers.

This adventure is set pieces. It’s a lot of exposition, mixed in tone and voice, and then set pieces. DUngeonMaster is there for you. He guides you, explicitly. Then you do a set piece. Which is itself full of other set pieces. And you go on to the next one as you visit multiple areas of The Land. 

This is %100 a heartbreaker. It is also, I think, unusable. I toss that word around a lot, but this is … completely legible but difficult to decipher? The best example yet of what a spellbook is like? You can read it … but it’s hard as hell. A month to get through this and I’m still not sure I can describe it.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The previs is six pages. It is perfect. No, that legalese does not go on for pages. That’s the adventure. Enjoy the elemental BS, and the god-beast exposition. You know EXACTLY what you are getting from this preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/529775/reality-unbound-reclamation-book-i-levels-6-20?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 296 Comments

The Mystery of the Moon-Haunted Spire

Posted on July 23, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Scott Craig
Cutter Mountain Simulations
B/X - Shadowdark
Levels 1-6 (?)

For hundreds of years, the Lunamancer conducted his magical research in the pinnacle of his tower, hidden by potent illusions. Whenever he needed rare components for his research, he relied on the Greater Crypt Thing in his tower’s lower labyrinth. This labyrinth was well known by adventurers far and wide, and they regularly entered its dark halls for loot. The best and brightest of these adventurers the Crypt Thing would set a geas upon to procure whatever the Lunamancer required. And so the years passed… Until one fateful night when the moon waxed full, and the Lunamancer made one small error in his calculations. Then something filtered down from the night sky to terrorize him in his very chambers, and his illusions suddenly faded…

This six page adventure uses two pages to describe six levels of an illusionist tower. Yes, six. Its heart is in the right place, if only it stopped stopping drinking a bottle of rumplemintz immediately upon entering surgery for its organ donation and then immediately passing out on the floor and vomiting all over itself. 

I’m a big fan of hubris here at Ten Foot. You go Icarus! Fuck the rest of those asshats! Try new things. Iconclast those safety regulations on the reactor! Build your truck campers bed frame out of aluminum and then put your 300 amp battery ¼” from the frame! And, of course, get criticized harshly for the foolish decision you’ve made! This is the way designers of singular vision advance the art. Or die trying.

 The six pages here reflect a title page, a fluff page full of “WHAT BOLD MEANS” and other dumbass boilerplate, a monster reference sheet (Huzzah!) with some general notes as well, A page of four maps for the six levels (one maze map being reused three times) and the two pages of keys. For six levels. I think that means something like 46 keys. Plus a decent number of portcullis, curtains, statues and other features. The maps here are at least interesting. If Scott is a mapmaker then he does a decent job with room descriptions and if he’s a designer then he does a decent job with his maps. Even a dumb-as repeating maze level gets a decent amount of interest on the map. We’re not talking talking rock-star, there’s a lot of symmetry here which is a cop out, but they are more than just a throw away basic effort.

This means we get descriptions like “ Strangely clean…” for a room. Or, perhaps “Entrance – Scattered Leaves and twigs, muddy footprints leading all directions.” Or, straight out of The Borderlands caves “2 ORCS laze about on a pile of smashed furniture and soiled rugs. One wears a GOLD TORQ (65gp).” There are a couple of longer rooms, “. Moon-Lens Turntable Machinery Room. 2 SERVANTS OF APOC’L’TH examine a forest of arcane tubes, gears, and pistons that actuate the forcefield projectors holding the MOONLENS atop the spire. The spiral staircase ascends to area 24.” But, I’d argue that, other than a couple of riddle rooms, these are actually just further examples of the ORC LOUNGING room. CREATURE verbs OBJECT. Room interactivity might be something like “Central Hall. A stone FOUNTAIN gushes clear, refreshing water. A marble STATUE of a robed philosopher stands with hand extended in friendship. If statue’s hand is touched, statue speaks loudly (once per adventure): “Harken! Behold, a river!” Secret door is opened by pushing statue’s arm downward.” At its heart that’s not bad. A little magical wonder, a classic pull the arm down.  But, also, marble statue of robed philosopher is not exactly the most evocative. But, also, to be fair, that strangely clean room is foreshadowing a Cube, so, fuck me and my criticisms. 

It’s an ok adventure. “The LUNAMANCER appears as friendly, ELDERLY WIZARD in moonlight. Otherwise appears as the lich he truly is.” That’s the kind of shit you want in your adventures. If every adventure I reviewed were at least as good as this one then I’d be bemoaning the blandness of the environment and lack of complexity. Most adventures are fucking train wrecks and this one isn’t though. But it IS a bit bland with some lack of complexity and depth. The core concepts are good but the dungeon size (six levels … of like eight rooms each) and the artificial constraint shows through. Dude has his thing and his thing is a six page adventure. Got it. But the artificial constraints imposed by that decision will mean that the chances of a Spawning Grounds, Hyquatious, or other classic adventure coming from a one-page dungeon, Stonehell (half marks for building depth over depth), or a six page dungeon are rather low. It is serviceable, but it’s hard to see it rising to greatness. Especially when squeezing in six levels, as this adventure does. I’m not going to say move to a longer format. Sure, I’d love to see something from this designer that had a map with room to breathe and descriptions and interactivity that had that room also. But he’s doing a six pager. Which means creating an adventure that can truly excel in those six pages. No, not a fucking lair dungeon. I’m gonna puke if I have to see another one of those five room shit holes. How do you create a six page adventure that can be magnificent? That, good gom-jabbars, I leave as an exercise for the designer. For I am The Watcher.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is interesting. It’s one image/photo, but it shows the map, the two keys pages and the general info/summary page. You can get a sense of the formatting, but zooming in makes it too blurry to read. I appreciate the attempt, but I suspect shoing a portion of the keys would have been better. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/528166/the-mystery-of-the-moon-haunted-spire-compatible-with-shadowdark?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 3 Comments

Knight of the Corpse Trials

Posted on July 21, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Odinson Games
Self Published
Cairn

Sir Zebadiah was once a war hero, celebrated for purging witches from the Wenderweald. Now he exhumes his subjects and puts their corpses on trial. His squire begs for intervention before her liege damns the barony entirely. You’re sent to capture Zebadiah alive—but the villagers want him dead, his loyalists stalk the woods, and the dead themselves rise for justice. Will you bring the heretic to justice or suffer his corpse trials?

This fourteen page adventure features about eighteen locations in a village/woods pointcrawl search for an errant and fanatical knight. It has a decent premise and detail in places, but it falls down severely when it comes to locations. Cutsy layout detracts from what otherwise could have been a decent adventure.

“You must arrest the false knight zebadiah and bring him to justice.” Well, actually, I think he IS a baron and knight, so, not really a false knight. Basically, dude burns witches. He got cursed and is now REALLY on a tear, digging up bodies, trying to find the last “real” witch he burned, his sister, who he thinks cursed him. The villagers get pissed and the dead are rising in revolt against having their graves molested. He runs off with his men in to the woods to look for more bodies. So we’ve got a village on edge with soldiers about, and a fanatic in the woods. In comes the party. 

I’m not super down with the hooks, they are all very honor, faith, justice oriented. I’m more down for some RealPolitik framings in situations like these. What was that runaway bridge adventure where the lord said something like “if you can do it without violence then I guess that’s ok also”, or “tie up the loose ends.” Essentially the hooks presented are all the same, with the party being of mine moral character, and I prefer to see some variety. Sure, a fine moral character hook. But also a RealPolitik one, or some other mood variety. Otherwise, it doesn’t really matter who hires the party, you’re just wasting hook space to describe essentially the same hook with different actors.

The general set up and specificity, especially around the village proper, are pretty good. We get some key NPC’s and a little villager generator with a two part name generator, trait, personality, and quirk. Excellent, although a page of these pre-gend would have perhaps been better. There’s also an escalating tension table which serves as a kind of event generator. You really feel the reality of the situation the villagers are in. “Grieving villagers claim their dead at the graves and squabble with tense guards.” or “Moreina doles silver to grieving widows outside the keep.” or “Jaanus leads a mournful family to collect their exhumed dead gibbeted in the square.” or “Edvin leads flagellants around the Temple, crying “Repent! Repent! Repent!”” Excellent window dressing to communicate mood and perhaps even spur some deeper play. “Several stockaded villagers beg for water beside it.” With guards about this could be fun. 

The dude is hiding out in the woods, running around digging up graves, and he’s got a short little three-day timeline associated with his actions, which ends with him razing the village after burning his niece alive. Ouch. 

The overall framework, the situation, the window dressing, this is all great. But things fall apart when we get to the keys. This is one of the, few, locations and typical for the location descriptions: “Rainrot Pit:  creek runoff drains into the cavernous hollow. Dappled light catches on gold down there. + A hex-smuggler stashed 300 gold pieces in a dry bag but the draw-rope was cut.” All of that fabulous situations and specificity , etc really don’t show up at all. So this is not a bad location description: “The Breedpool: mosquitoes cloud the reeds and algae films the still, black water. Helm-sized eggs float in the pool.” But then there’s nothing there. Yes, a monster has a 50% chance of being there, but that’s just a stabbing. The more interesting play just isn’t available. Dude has a timeline and he might be at one of these locations, but then the location is just which screen the Mortal Combat match has a backdrop, with it contributing little to nothing to the play.

And this is a shame. I suspect that there is MORE than enough room in the fourteen pages used to provide just a little more depth to the various keys.  Even if they are meant to be used as backdrop, they could be made in to more interesting backdrops. But it’s gotta use one of those modern hip edgy layouts. And it’s gotta use a fucked up font in place in order to make things hard to read. I just want more out of this. As presented it falls in to something like “a large social situation” adventure, which I can dig. But the way the material is presented doesn’t really help that too much. It seems like it is fighting against that. We need locales, people, timelines, situations, ad then a little bit on using them all together, as the DM, to put it all together. You’ve got this situation and the designer should be giving you the tool sections to help run that in the loosy goosy way that these things usually play out. And there is an attempt at that. You can see the village map and brief descriptions, the forest map and loose descriptions. The NPC section, the events section. But it just never gels to come together in the way I would want it to. It’s like, I don’t know, half a page of text is missing (in addition to the locales …) 

At the conclusion, you need to capture the dude to get the full payout. But, also, “The villagers will be enraged if they see Zebadiah captured and will demand his death, descending into a riot.” Noice. A couple fo extra sentences there would have been ice.

This is not a train wreck. But it also just misses the mark of what I consider decent enough to run.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. No preview, but it is Pay What You Want, so I guess the whole thing is a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527846/knight-of-the-corpse-trials?1892600

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