tenfootpole.org

By J Watkins
JSG Press
Shadowdark/"OSR"
Level: "Low levels"

Sailors and villagers are vanishing from Seaton, and the only clue is the chilling sound of screaming coming from a nearby flooded cove. The village council hired you to investigate the “cursed” grotto. But beware: The tide is coming in, and the secrets the villagers are hiding may be as deadly as the monster at the bottom of the water. Trust no one.

This nineteen page adventure uses nine pages to describe nine rooms in a basic sea save with a hag. It makes an attempt at coming off able to reference and run, but also loaded with (avoidable by the DM) long and purple read-aloud and, in the end, is just just a basic nine room adventure with stuff to stab … with a sea theme. 

There is a VERY loose hook here about a village with missing people in it, and them hiring you to go check out the caves where they think the problem is. They go to you because they are actually shipwreckers, and thusly are afraid to appeal to the local worthies. That’s all addressed in about the same number of words I’ve used here. The whole Shipwreckers thing is a nice idea, and solves the issue of by the local rulers are not involved, but it doesn’t really get any attention at all except to suggest that maybe they attack the party when they return. A few more notes here would have been nice, like some specificity about a missing group that went to the caves themselves to solve it or some such. A delta or two, them anxious, a lean to tower with a lamp that can be erected, something to hint at the possibilities and expand, just a touch, on the village would have been much appreciated. As is it’s dumped in passing on the DM. And that’s not how you support a DM during play.

“Unknown to them, an evil twisted Sea Hag has taken up residence in a sea cave in the cove. It is an evil and base creature.” I wonder if the hag is evil?

That’s the first actual room and can serve admirably to raise numbers issues about the adventure. Every room is like this, one per page, with a short summary up front and then a very long section of read-aloud. This is supported by a color map done in one of those arty/tile things, it looks like, for vtt use, and a more traditional map for the DM to consult with, which is better done.

On the positive side of things, the read-aloud it at the end and relatively easily avoided. It’s not at the beginning, getting in the way. I think this is meaningful, cognitively. It’s not vying for your attention before you get to the room, proper. And then, of course, the summary information is using a keyword style. Tide coming in. Sharks lurking. Smell of the ocean. Crash of the waves. That’s not bad. More evocative than not and lodges firmly the environment in the DM. We know the vibe. And then, of course, a few little mechanics things to help guide the DM. The torches, the tide timer (timers having been covered in the preamble to the keys), the creature. Frankly, works that basic vibe/elements format in to a longer adventure would be an interesting project., if only as an exercise to boiling a room down to its essence.

But, of course, the read-aloud is far too long. More than three or four sentences and the players attention goes elsewhere. The font is not the best for the DM to focus on. It turns purple in several place “eyes cold and black with predatory hunger” and “a blur of muscle and razor-sharp teeth.” In other places the read-aloud over-reveals (even here, with regard to the shark) and thus destroys that interactivity loop between the party and the DM that is at the heart of every RPG. You want the cue the party and then have them follow up. And I always wonder, when seeing this misplaced effort, and then supported pages in the preamble and appendices, what might have been if the effort spent on that were instead spent on the keys, or by enhancing the village/hook/shipwrecking just a tad.

The overall effect here is the highly proscribed nature that one thinks of in 4e adventure. The read-aloud is a preamble to what’s import: the mechanistic action of the party members. The focus on mechanics and the environment to “spice up” the combats. “Ahh, yes, but in THIS fight with the kobolds there are areas of quicksand on the floor and gusts of wind to extinguish torches! And a big red button the wall behind the kobolds that turns everything off.” It this tendency toward the encounter as set-piece, constructed, rather a more naturalistic bend in which play naturally evolves. It’s not quite in this territory, but it is leaning in that direction with the perfunctory read aloud. And, I think, without it, a more naturalistic manner of play.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is the first fourteen pages, enough to show you the setup and a few rooms. Good preview; you can make a purchasing decision from it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/542164/the-screaming-grotto?1892600

By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-3

The Armlaws Guild is the true power in the city of Lenden, accepting protection money and extorting nearly every citizen. It is said that they even have contacts inside of the court of King Wulfwin. It is somewhat surprising then that any outsider would attempt to contest the most powerful criminal organization in the Border Lands. When the characters witness a peculiar and seemingly random murder during a heist, they become embroiled in the underground politics of the largest city in the Kingdom of Cassex. They may even live long enough to uncover an even darker secret of the Armlaws and the local nobility…

This eighty page adventure has the party investigating the death of a wererat. It puts most of the adventure behind die rolls, hides massive parts of it, embraces trivia and backstory, and is full of lots of high HD creatures that can’t be damaged by the mundane weapons of your level ones. There is little to indicate the designer knows what a published adventure is.

This is a rough one, so hang in there. You’re visiting the wizards guild. You all enter a room, for various reasons, and see a wererat exit the window having stolen an ever full purse. Chasing him, you find him disemboweled in a nearby alley. There are potential tracks to the sewers, a lead to a graveyard, and a couple of others. Turns out there MIGHTT be a turf war going on, led by a werewolf. Thieves guild in the sewers, and others, lead you to a nearby manor home of a couple who have just lost their son, hunting a beast. Following up on that leads to another manor where THAT couple leads to a cave to ambush you, they being werewolves and having captured, not killed, the son of the first manor couple, trying to turn him. “It takes 27 days” From there you find the hideout with the main werewolf and his thieves guild, who are the ones who gutted the initial thief. Got it? A lot of people telling you outright where to go next. It’s plagued by the mundane, overwriting, putting information behind skill checks, and a lack of decent organization for its many threads.

Let’s look a bit at the overwriting, which plagues this. Time and time again things are defined or extrapolated on that add little to no value to the adventure. This is an entry from the city wandering table: “2d6 Sailors from a Foreign Kingdom: At any given time there can be between forty and fifty ships docked in Lenden’s Port District. Most of the crews of these ships will be found in the Port District, though they can be encountered in other locations, as well (the Mercantile District, for example).” Yes, that IS the definition of “2d6 foreign sailors.” The text adds nothing to the adventure, it’s not an encounter it’s just a definition of what 2d6 foreign sailors mean. They do nothing, they add no color. Or, this random keyed entry for the FULLY keyed inn the party is staying at in which nothing takes place: “4. Staircase to Upper Floors: This simple staircase creaks with every footstep and seems to sway a bit, but is sound.” It’s like describing a cobblestone. To what end is this needed?

A full description, including background, for the chapel. Which is meaningless to the adventures, with little formatting to help a DM focus on important aspects of it. There’s no point to any of this. It’s eighty pages long because of all of this. You have to dig and dig to find information about the threads that ARE important, dodging and fighting your way through the trivia.

Travelogue entries for a random bridge that has no bearing on the adventure. This can work if we’re home basing. It can work as as trivia for s short stop. But not this way.

Following up on the thief leads you to the alley where the disemboweled thief lies. And then “The citizens that sent up the hue and cry for the city watch will immediately begin pointing and shouting at the first group of characters on the scene, making the incorrect assumption that they had something to do with the murder.” And thusly another group of murder hobos is born. Sure, color and complications, but also it needs to be done in a way that it doesn’t discourage the party. Why take initiative if they arbitrarily punished for it? Never be the first to walk through the door.

Lizardfolk and grig villages. Wererats. Werewolves. High HD. Not damaged by mundane weapons. This is a deathtrap masquerading as an adventure. We run away in an OSR game. In an OSR game that is DESIGNED for exploration. In a plot based game, in which the enemies need to be dispatched in order to advance the plot that they are blocking then balance becomes more important. You might as well put the mcguffin in a circle of 100 hungry Type 6 demons spoiling for a fight. At level one. At one point you climb down a ladder in to a room with wererats in it. Ain’t no way levels one to threes are surviving that.

Information is spread out everywhere. Events mixed in with leys. Information repeated in multiple places, with details spread across them. Old Captain Nedev has four or more places where the initial meeting has details spread throughout. Trap porn is prevalent. And we can see from the entries above that every contingency is covered “unless blocked by a wall or closed door.” And this all happens over and over and over again. You have to fight everything here to follow what is supposed to be going on and run it.

Yet another of the numerous inn entries. NO HOT BATH! Whatever shall I do not knowing about that? Take cold baths, I guess. Fall apart at the table?

The stuttering priest is in bad taste. Did I mention the long read-alouds? How about the long one in a funky font, reproducing the character handout. I’m all for torturing the players with funky handwriting fonts but not the DM. Information needs to transferred efficiently and effectively to the DM.

And then there are the MASSIVE number of threads that are blocked by a skill check or plot device. It is entirely possible that of the five leads presented at the murder scene that all of them will be failed or not apply, except for the guard captain telling you “he’s part of the thieves guild.” Later in the adventure we get this “On a success, Captain Nedev believes the characters and agrees to release them. If the characters have already investigated the Armlaws Guild in the sewers and tell Nedev that they suspect that there is a mole in the Guild of Labor, he will admit that he already knows:” Well, what if we fail? No plot thread for you! Over and over again the adventure hides the rest of it behind skill checks. At level one. Just like with the high HD enemies that can’t be damaged by mundane weapons, this means the entire adventure is fudged. There is no real agency for he players and their characters in this. The various threads and plots have chapters devoted to them, with long page counts, which will most likely be skipped over even if you do make your checks, that entire chapter not being applicable for the thread you are following up on.

I can kind of get what the adventure is going for. But the set up is strained, the plot execution is confused, the enemies overwhelming, and the text padded out.

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. It could have used some key entries, but you do kind of get to see the VERY basics of the backstory, which helps a lot with understanding what is going on.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/546611/werewolves-of-lenden-ose-edition?1892600

By Hephaistos Fnord
Canvas Quest
Some D&D Clone
Levels 1-3

The Pale Keep was built by the Crown of Albion in 3421 to fortify the bordermarch of the Pale against the Eire barbarians and their fey allies. The keep sits on a tall cliff overlooking the Barrow river to the south; the entirety of the island across the Barrow is referred to as “beyond the Pale” by the March’s inhabitants. The entire keep is hallowed ground, kept consecrated regularly by the abbey’s priests.

This 42 page adventure is a Keep on the Borderlands clone for some homebrew 5e system that thinks armor should reduce damage instead of making you harder to hit. It’s the Keep & Caves and a whole lot of shit ass formatting and large stat blocks. I loathe it.

It is the Keep on the Borderlands. The Pale Keep is the Keep and the caves/ravine in it are the caves/ravine from B2. There’s a lair of the lizard people (kobolds this time) and a crazed hermit with a big cat (an elven druid.) The minotaur is a demon this time and we’ve got a lot of types of “Beast Men” in that ravine.  Including a couple of tribes of rival “cousin/’ monsters/factions who war with each other. IE: the orcs. And an ogre boss-man. And the secret door stuff. And a map that shows the entire ravine AND all of the caves hanging off of it. Ok, the spiders are ettercaps. We’re got boar0men and shit like that. But this is VERY close to B2. Like, Basic Fantasy close. It takes every element of B2 and then uses it. Not (Ironwood Gorge?) sort of reimagining, but this is B2 cloned by someone with watercolors instead of acrylics. Complete with a running number system for encounters that persists throughout the caves in the ravine. If it happened in B2 then it happens here. It’s for their home system which seems a lot like 5e except armor reduces damage. Whatever. Arms Law did it first. (Hmmm, I wonder what the best version of Rolemaster is? Concise but full?) 

Man, I really fucking hate having to pretend like this shit is ok. B2 was ok I guess. The most special thing about it was that literally every D&D player before 1988 has played it, most likely multiple times. This has led to  a shared experience and the special kind of nostalgia where everyone remembers the same one toy they had, the only toy that anyone had that year. It’s raid after raid in a monster zoo, played straight. With some squinting there’s some more going on, especially in the Meta. But this is not a masterpiece. But, people have fond memories and so here we are again. Yeah. A B2 clone. For a D&D clone. Certainly a step from from, say, Vampire Queen. Some rivalries. The mercenary ogre. A bit of nudge & wink humor tossed in. Creatures sometimes doing things. Intrigue possibilities at the keep. Or, loot the fucking place. And, wrapped up in a terse writing style. But this makes it a historical object of interest. “Look! The cave paintings of people have faces now!”

So, what about this homage to B2?

Fuck you. No one deserved this. What kid of fucked up design/formatting decision is this? What the fuck motivated the decision to make this a … I don’t even know what to call it. Normal paragraph with some numbers embedded in it? Hey, I get it, room/key isn’t the best formatting for all adventures, or, even, for all parts of all adventure. More than anyone else I feel I’m a proponent of Do What Works. Some days I can even see where someone who has failed was trying to go and what they were trying to accomplish. This is how we move ahead. But we most certainly to NOT move ahead with this shit. What the fuck. You think that’s east to read? You think it’s easy to find information in it? Again, I think that room/key isn’t the best for a town but fuck man it is MILES better than just writing a page of text with some numbers in it. I guess maybe you were thinking you’d lead with an (unhighlighted) business name and then a number to locate it on the map? For my own sanity and faith in humanity I’m going to go with that. I get that, I’m looking for a blacksmith. In which case maybe you highlight the business type? Whatever. Let’s move on to the Caves of Chaos Crom-Cruach.

Oh, fuck, sorry, no. That’s one of the wilderness sites on the map. You know giant spiders, lizard men, hermit. “Wolf Pucca Champions in this case.” Hang on, I threw up a little there, gotta clean it up. (Yes, this IS subjective . While I try to keep my own particular genre tastes out of things for the most part I do have some things I LOATHE and this is one of them.) Anyway, the Caves of Chaos …

It’s the same format. That kind of conversational style that sticks a room number in it. What the fuck?! Also, you gotta have full stat blocks because the giant rats might need to make an Int save, I guess, so you need to know they have a -4/17+/. The veil torn asunder! Another min/max combat heavy D&D-mine. Arms Law indeed!

Ok, Ok, the rooms proper. I do like the Black Plague reference. I think it plays on relatability, the kind of ingrained cultural aversion we all have to the Black Plague that “The Infernal pox” doesn’t have. “You got scabies.” hits harder. The very clearly human/elven is nice. The rest of this is little more than “3 kobolds” padded out. Look man, the net trap is there, and the pit. It’s B2.

A lot of text for not much content beyond some minimal keying. I do enjoy some of the grounding in more relatable things. I thin those portions hit quite well. Then there’s this, for the Ogre …

And then this part in the Keep proper …

The Castellan has an elevator to his secret lair where he has an 18 foot tall Battlemech he can sit in. And your mage can also. Do battle the ogre and demon. Seriously. This is the only hint of this shit, besides those wolf pucca champions. Which makes me think that a D&D campaign where you are peasants adventuring and then eventually find out you are in Battletech and the ruling class just keeps you ignorant could be a cool idea.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages. Enough to see the Keep and a few wilderness encounters, and figure out the fucked up formatting style.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/546367/the-pale-keep?1892600

By Ethan Dunning
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-4

[Error! No Marketing blurb! Error!]

This eighteen page adventure features fourteen rooms across two levels in a classic fairytale-like giants cottage. Experience being small and looking at big things. And not doing much else. Classic elements, to no end. 

Man, I don’t know. There’s so little to work  with here, even though there are fifteen rooms and almost twenty pages. This is one of those “We’re small and the  world around us is big” adventures, the classic set up being “we’re in a giant’s house!” And, this is the classic one. It’s a cottage that a giant lives in. It’s four times your size. The giant is asleep in his bed. Pretty classic. There are giant ants crawling through his window to the table to grab chunks of bread and cheese. Pretty classic. The giant will capture you if you wake him and put you inmason jars in hte basement. That’s pretty charming. The giant rats have a queen who is wearing a cursed magic item that makes your intelligence five. Which isn’t much of a curse if you’re a giant rat, so Penny is now queen, naming herself after the Penny Grain Company sack she sleeps on. I mean, this is all straight out of children’s books and fairy tales. Get in to a fight with the ants? A giant preying mantis jumps down from the rafters so you can escape all StopMotion Dinosaur Movie style. 

The environment, though, is rather static. The giant is asleep. The ants don’t attack unless you fuck with them. The black widow under the bed isn’t at home initially. The rat queen wants to talk. It’s all pretty passive. The giant makes sense; you’re not fighting an 8HD t level one, and his stick you in a jar or on a meat hook also makes sense, he’s a puzzle/a special and not a fight. But the rest … the place is missing an element of risk. You just wander around.

There are some captured people and some of the hooks tie in to that; find the missing goblins or find the missing priest. There’s also a locked chest. The queen will tell you where the key is, but she wants the cheese. The cheese is on the table with the ants, so I guess you will be disturbing them, if you go that route. But these are clearly a preplanned path and not … oh, the encounters as independent agents living in their own world.

I’m not even sure this works well if you place your own quest object in it. It would still have the same problem: a rather confined location with rather passive encounters in them. There’s not much dynamic going on. There is a table of random events, like the giant gets up to go get water from the well briefly, or goes to the basement to get something and the like. But this all seems like more of a “quick! Everyone hide!” element then it is providing opportunities or some push to move the adventure along further. And I can get behind a Quick! Hide! Thing, but it’s hard when the entire adventure seems to be that. 

The adventure is one big long puzzle and trap adventure, in essence. Make your way through, figuring out the Giant Land thing while you are small. Avoid touching the metal rails and getting shocked. We can imagine room after room of Grimthooth rooms as a blunt analogy. Figure out how to pass and get the cash at the other end. This IS a valid type of adventure, and it certainly has many charming elements. It does, in fact, have a bunch of encounters which communicate that kind of Giant Cottage vibe. The Wee Willy giant adventure from Dungeon, though, from my memory, felt like a more dynamic environment. This doesn’t feel like you’re trapped, or after something. I’m not even sure it feels like you’re robbing the place or on a journey to free prisoners. There just are not obstacles to actively engage in, for the most part. Sure, the mason jars are in a cellar with brown mold, but I think that’s a rare example in this of challenge to actively overcome instead of just Not Fucking With Shit. Thusly, mostly a museum adventure where NOT interacting gets you more than interacting. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. I am not amused by that. You gotta put in a substantive preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/546423/the-giant-s-cottage?1892600

By Giuliano Gianfriglia, La Tavola Rotonda APS
La Tavola Rotonda
OSE
Level 1

A SIMPLE CONTRACT. A SILENT WRECK. A SECRET THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN AWAKENED. In the sprawling Citadel of Aurion, an offer too good to refuse puts you on the trail of the Stella Cadente (the Falling Star), a transport ship that vanished under mysterious circumstances. What begins as a simple recovery mission for an ambitious merchant soon turns into a desperate fight for survival on an isolated asteroid. Something lurks within the twisted wreckage, and it has no intention of giving up its new “treasure”.

This 52 page sci-fi waste of space adventure has a giant bird in it. And, like, I don’t know, maybe six locations, if I’m being VERY generous and count the hook/tavern and the Jungle Cruise boat ride. 

I am a hypocrite. I know I’m a hypocrite. This means I am not an asshole. Since the only way to survive in the world is to be a hypocrite, everyone is a hypocrite and that means that if you think you are not a hypocrite then you are an asshole. I do not go up to homeless people and go on and on about how much money I have, disposable that I’m going to waste, and and how I am not going to give it to them. That would make me an asshole. [Exceptions to the above being made for BradleyDragon, of course.] I cannot imagine staring someone in the face and just flaunting things right in front of them. Fucking avert your eyes in an embarrassed manner and move on like everyone else, or maybe drop a few bucks because it’s the holidays. But, again, don’t just stand there looking at them and telling them, for a long amount of time, how rich you are and how you are not going to give them any money.

Naivete? The old Paranoia chutzpah? Why would you even put this in? “I like to masturbate to pictures of anal warts.” Uh, sure thing. We all do. But the rest of us have the decency to make some thoughts inside our heads only. Seriously, why would you thumb your noses at people? We keep our conversations related to the weather and the state of the roads. We do NOT talk about religion, politics, or the use of AI in products. I’m just absolutely gob smacked.

Ah, I see the problem. We’re sharing stories and we’re connecting with each other.

The setting here is pseud-scifi. Let’s call it Gamma World like, but not quite so primitive. I thin we’re going for a Planescape like vibe, except techno. In this “story” a dude hires you to to a ship and recover a thing. You get hired in a bar. You ride a ship to the wrecked ship, and probably do nothing on the way. At the ship you explore, maybe, three rooms and probably make a skill check. Then you fight a giant bird. Then the adventure is over. And it takes 52 fucking pages to do that. And why is that?

Because there’s tons and tons of generic advice for the DM. Is any of this supported, for the experienced DM? No. Did a new DM just wander in here to run this? No. Doesn’t matter through, it’s all still present.

It takes nineteen pages just to get through the hook. By page twelve, above, we do get a description of the bar where the hook takes place. Yeah!

Long italics read-aloud. “Your adventure begins here.” *sigh*

Hey hey! A meaningless location description in town that has no bearing on the adventure! Yeah!

Congrats. You rode a boat to the wrecked ship. This is kind of a weird way to present the entrances, grouping them by challenge phases instead of by location. No consequence to going in via the hash in the hull. Guess you pick that one. No clue why you would though. Life is random. That’s page 24.

Well, we’re doing a Fail Forward anyway. We don’t place critical information in a binary way in front of a die roll. If you want to create atmosphere, then you create atmosphere regardless of the die roll, which is what is going on here. I’m not a fan of the overly mechanistic stuff here. I think it robs the setting of sense of the evocative.

We’re in to the appendix. This is the dude that hires you, although you never meet him, only an agent. “This could elevate his status.” That’s boring. I want some scheming. Tell me his dirty little insipid scheme. Just add some color to the adventure.

And that’s the adventure. It generalizes. It wants to create this very evocative picture but it does by saying “Paint an evocative picture” instead of priming the DM to create that evocative nature. That’s the designers role. TO provide those cues to the DM. To provide things for them to riff on. Not to tell them to riff on things but to provide the specificity that will then allow that riffing.

I get that that the folks behind this were excited. But, also, there seems to be no clue as to what makes a decent adventure. It’s hard to fathom a hook, a boat ride, and four rooms taking up 52 pages.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Sucker.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/541172/nexum-the-aurion-contract?1892600

By Ken Taylor
Ripped Tabard Adventures
Castles & Crusades
Levels 3-5

The autumn wind whispers through the corn, carrying the sound of crows and the rustle of straw. Somewhere in the fields, justice denied walks on legs of wood, seeking those who wronged him. Will your party bring peace to a restless spirit, or simply add more blood to the harvest soil?

This 25 page adventures presents a vengeful scarecrow taking out its revenge on a farming family. It wants to be a drawn off eerie affair, and tries to provide some advice in doing so. It also lacks meaningful specificity to help bring it to life in a way that is other than combats.

Fifty years ago an innocent man was executed for theft. His body was stuffed in a scarecrow to make an example of him by the local bigwig farm family who he supposedly wronged. Oops, he didn’t do it. A lightning strike all these years later has caused his spirit to animate the scarecrow, which is now killing folk in the same family.  Oopsie. 

The adventure here is doing something interesting with its organization. It wants to be a little open-ended sandboxy like thing and is organizing itself to help promote that. We get the basic set up and then a list of key NPCs and what they know, and a few others to add some color. We’ve got sections on how to run the scarehow, creating atmosphere, pacing, and so on. And, of course a whole lot of focus on the combat encounters and the scarecrows hit and run tactics, etc.

I can absolutely see how this thing is supposed to be run. Wander in, talk to people, see the tension in the air, set up a couple of glimpses, build some tension, find out more information, hun it down and/or deal with it in a way other than hacking it by putting it to rest, etc. And, some of the advice is decent. The scarecrow can set fires in a distant field to create a distraction while it circles around behind to try and get someone, or the advice to try and build sympathy for the wrongly executed man. And it’s all generally laid out in a decent manner, with bullets highlighting information for easy scanning and so on. I might take a little exception to some of the “people” information being scattered a little more than I would like, with motivations and timeline information not all being in the same place for a person. The single column doesn’t help with density issues and there is also a distinct lack of “other NPCs” beyond the main players. It would have been nice to have a few more just to fill in a bit when needed, a name, a quirk, a vignette, something like that to help support the DM through what is recommended to be three sessions of play. (12 hours?! For this?!) 

Where the adventure falls down is in its specificity. I’m going to grossly exaggerate here, but, “make it spooky!” is not specific. There is a decent amount of general information here, which could be tightened up by combining some NPC information, etc. There is a general flow, and general advice on what the designer intends to happen. I think you can understand the vibe the designer is going for, they outline it several times. And there is some very general advice on how to create that vibe. For example, “build sympathy for [wrongly executed dude].” Well, ok yes. That is going to add some depth to this otherwise pretty straightforward adventure and may even lead the party to put him to rest from a position of sympathy and empathy rather than from solving a killer scarecrow/hack problem. But HOW do you do that? Given that the farm family is reluctant to expose their past deeds and the family secret, what to do what to do? A few words leading us down that path would be good. It does hit in places, like that whole advice to start fires as a distraction and so on. It’s just a few words like “it will cause distractions [starting a fire in a distant field, making animal noises]” And this is great. I think you can riff on a nighttime scene from that, the chaos and so on, in saving things from a fire. (Which, again would help with a few more supporting characters) But MOST of the adventure doesn’t really have that degree of specificity. I’m going to use the words “lacking in vignettes”, but I don’t think you even need to go to that extreme, of a full blown vignette. Just a few more tips to emphasize certain points, themes, actions and the like, as the party adventures and the DM strives to fill in twelve hours of play time. 

Another example here is the AFTERMATH section. We have a couple of notes, based on the outcome, of the prominent farm family having a tarnished reputation or suffering from some setbacks, in about as many words. This lacks somewhat the gravitas that more specificity would bring to the outcomes and really bring home the weight of the proceedings.

There are hints in that screenshot of some decent things. The harvest setting portion in particular, although, again, this is mostly generalizations. It’s more advice than the grounded things that a DM could riff on to make an adventure really comes to life and hit home. This is not, by any means, a throw away adventure, though it tackles the trope of a vengeful autumn scarecrow. Anyone who has heard the wind wistling through dry corn can imagine the eerie vibes it brings, but if you’ve not then you’re going to struggle to bring that to life.

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is the first five pages. Given the unconventional nature of the organization, which I’m intrigued by the possibilities of in a sandboxy way, I’m struggling to imagine a better preview, but a better preview IS needed.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/541684/scarecrow-s-revenge?1892600

By Richard Davis
Explorer's Guild Publishing
OSR
Level 5

A Fallen Star. A Hidden Power. A Town on the Brink. When a blazing light crashes into the hills near a sleepy barony, mysterious events begin to occur. Animals, and even some people, are driven mad. Adventurers arriving in the region soon find themselves drawn into a dangerous mission that will draw them into the deadly crystaline depths of the earth.

This twelve page adventure uses about three pages to describe four rooms underground with a couple of mutated animals. Almost certainly a 5e conversion, it weirdly spends a lot of time in the lead up to the star-shard cave. An aimless series of mechanistic die rolls and skill checks with little glee in it. 

You get attacked by a couple of weird wolves in the forest. Then you run across some mercs hunting them and they tell you Baron Fuckwit is hiring people to track down and stop these weird animals. Going to him you learn of a meteor crater and how dude sent two guardsmen to look in to it, with only one returning guy. You get to talk to guy. On the way to the crater you maybe have a challenge. THen you get to the crater and explore up tp four rooms, rolling dice to overcoming challenges and then eventually fighting a 6HD bear. You won. Congrats. Ain’t no treasure, but Baron Fuckwith might give you up to 1800gp. Which sounds great for a group of level fives as a reward. In 5e. 

Yeah. No loot. Lots of skill challenge/attribute check shit. “Causes 1d4 radiant damage.” Uh huh. Conversion, yeah? Which doesn’t have to be bad but nearly almost always is. Hmm, or maybe nearly every adventure is bad anyway and therefore nearly every conversion is? Either way, it’s clearly not localized for the OSR. Which means it’s a fucking money grab.  And, therefore Fuuuuuuck You!

Beyond the money grab aspect of a poor conversion, with it’s emphasis on die roll checks, I find the degree of lead in here quite unusual. The initial “hook” is a combat; you’re attacked by mutant wolves which leads to the merc showing up and telling you about the baron and his efforts/hiring./job offer. THis take at least a page to go over. And then the meeting with the baron and some follow ups, with the surviving guardsman and the home of the dead guardsmen perhaps. In another adventure I might look favorably on this. Supporting the DM, adding some flavour, etc. But in this the page count is off. There might be about five pages of this kind of lead in/.side trek stuff and then just a couple of pages for the adventure site. There is,certainly room for this sort of thing in an adventure. Investigation/bad guy lair, that sort of thing. 

And the trip to the meteor site. There are four possible encounters possible, presented on a die roll table. This makes no sense. None of them really matter. In one you can find some game trails as a shortcut, if you have tea with a gnome. But there’s no urgency getting to the crater or the return. It’s just flavour. You need a reason to NEED a shortcut, or the shortcut is just the same as “the wind blows from the east now”; there’s nothing behind it. It’s just trivia. 

It’s also hitting a pet peeve of mine, the use of the word “turn.” A decent example is “The water is the main vector of the curse, and if the party touches it, they suffer 1d4 damage per turn.” Every ten minutes? Round? Segment? Ten minutes seems off to me? 

Everything here points to a very low effort conversion. But, beyond that, even as a 5e adventure, this seems like a throw-away. A disproportionate amount of adventure before the adventuring site. A mediocre hook. An overland journey that is pretty meaningless and should have been been handled as a static encounter that contributed to the adventure instead of just “I need a skill check” encounter. And then the disappointment of the adventuring site proper. A couple of challenges and then a fight with a mutant bear. The Steading, recall, was eight pages. I guess on the plus side there IS a cavern and there IS a star shard.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Sucker.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/542514/cavern-of-the-star-shard-osr-basic-fantasy?1892600

By Oghan N'Thanda
Maria das Letra Publishing House
OSE
Levels 1-2

The Order of Archivists needs your help. Beneath the suffocating mist of the Grey Swamp lies the Mausoleum of Perpetual Fog, the supposed final resting place of Baron Aldric, “the Just.” Your mission: retrieve the sacred Book of Condolences and the Diadem of Sorrow to restore the family’s honor. The reward is high, and the danger, according to your employer, is merely the wear of time. But the truth is rotten. Baron Aldric was a murderer, and the tomb is a prison for his victim’s vengeful spirit. The Book is a grimoire of blood pacts, and the Diadem is the key to a permanent cover-up. Will you return with the gold, becoming an accomplice to a powerful lie? Or will you risk the Order’s wrath to free the true Baron, igniting a potential civil war in Old Pit?

This seven page adventure uses three pages to describe about seven (or eight?) rooms in a … hedge maze? Mausoleum? Minimalistic to an extreme yet still taking up seven pages, it’s barely an RPG, even in 1968. This isn’t worth even the minimal effort I’m going to make to write about it.

There’s a byline. That’s useless. There’s “Quick Information for the DM”. That’s useless. There’s a Focus. That’s useless. There’s a required rules. That’s useless. There’s a Quick Hook. That’s useless. This section is then followed by the real hook, which doesn’t say anything more than the Quick Hook does and is, maybe, three sentences in total as well as a rewards table? In fact, there are a suspicious number of tables in the adventure.

“PART 1: THE COURTYARD OF DECEIT (E) (A)
The mausoleum is a dark, damp structure. The wrought iron gate is rusty. The fog is thick, limiting vision to 10 feet (3 meters)” What do you think that description means? It’s kind of a preamble to room one. DO you think we’re outside? Inside? It mentions a mausoleum. That could be a block structure in the middle of a graveyard or it could be used more loosely as a dungeon-like environment above or below ground. There’s no indication. Courtyard is indicative. Oh, also, somewhere someplace this thing mentions a swamp. There’s nothing about that. It launches straight form the hook section in to that little bit I bolded above.

Directly following those words that bolded above, DIRECTLY, is the screencap above. That’s room one. There’s nothing more. No table, no extra words before or after it. That’s it. You like that? This is usually where I scream “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!” or something like that.

That there, above, is room two. It follows directly that room one information. I know. You think I’m cherry picking.

So, no, I’m not cherry picking. That’s the real page. Room three would be one of the highlights of the adventure, from an “evocative writing” standpoint. Meaning that there is any writing at all that describes something or sets a scene.

There’s a map in this that does little to help. It makes little sense, with room one leading directly to room six. Rom eight is not shown on the map but exists in the adventure.

Going back to those room keys. Note that the Key “1” is called “The Illusory Fog”, which appears as a room title in a different room. Hmmmm ….

Slop.

But, a new slop to be wary of.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Otherwise you wouldn’t be suckered in to losing your $3 now would you?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540720/broken-adventures-the-usurper-baron-s-tomb?1892600

By Hilander
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-3

Sixty years ago, the young noble who built this mansion was to take a bride. Cakes were baked, a dress adorned with finest pearls, and guests and entertainers from across the countryside arrived to celebrate. Instead, they came to a funeral for the would-be bride, a funeral from which none emerged alive…

This eight page adventure uses five pages to describe about 22 rooms in a haunted mansion. It’s doing a relatively rare and focused style to achieve it’s terseness with some interesting evocative aspects. The promises of the overview are probably better than the rooms keys proper, though, even though this could be, in many ways, a textbook example of how to write a key. Or … START to write a key.

The young noble is getting married! Ought oh! The chick backs out at the last minute! He drowns her. Then, when the party guests show up, in shame, grief, and madness, pours strong poison in the marriage wine for a final toast. Oops. Just like a Samurai film, everyone dies in the end. Now the guests are all ghosts, the bride is a ghost, and he’s a ghost. And you’ve arrived at the mansion. This all comes in a relatively short little background section, a couple of paragraphs long. Nicely done, solidly terse, and relatable as human emotions. “The souls here are grieved by the betrayal of their host. None can rest until the spirit of the young noble is put to eternal rest, but they also.” This is good, you are given liberty, when playing the ghosts, to be a bit haphazard with them while giving them some focus as well. A couple of sentences and you can riff on. Likewise, there’s a coachman, 

We might call this almost the platonic encounter in this adventure, an example of what all other encounters are like. Big title. Coachman. A little encounter, and a terse description. Charming, warm, friendly, helpful. And then a sentence at the end in italics which brings into context the more general description above. What’s really going on, so to speak. We can see further example of this in the main adventure site keys.

I love some of what’s going on here, even if I may be dissatisfied with the results. First off we see the rooms have a room name. Music Hall. Ballroom. You know what those rooms are, because you, gentle reader, know what the fuck a music room and ballroom look like. This orients the DM. Now, when I read the rest of the description I am reading it in the context of “Ballroom.” This will make it easier to riff on things and get the imagination going. The same general formatting is present. A short little description followed by some extra DM information in italics. The italics never goes overboard and is probably right at the edge of what I would find acceptable for highlighting before it becomes harder to read. Still, another technique would have probably been better.

That’s a pretty decent monster description in The Noble’s Soul. And it’s followed up by a decent attacks description with the Adore you and then How Could You bit. Those two lines convey an awful lot of information on how to run the encounter, which is what good writing should do.

There is a bit of a gimp present. Once you enter the house the doors and windows lock and become immune to damage. I’m not the biggest fan of that, and, it would appear to neg out the Coachman a bit, perhaps leaving him to steal horses or gak the party when they come out of the house. However, there is an out: through the use of holy water on the doors/window. Big big fan of this kind of stuff. Utility items, utility spells like Bless, these are problem solvers in the characters arsenal. Should it always work? Meh. But this is a more “neutral” way, an appeal to a game world in which gods exist and actually do small things, like Bless as a problem solver instead of just a bonus.

Approached from a First DO No harm mentality, then this adventure is hitting well. It sets up the rooms well. It has something a little interactive in most places, something to discover or something to do. It keeps the text tight. it’s written from a more neutral standpoint rather than a Screw the Party standpoint. And it hits on what makes a ghost a ghost., It’s mournful. They are not just things to stab. It allows the party to discover the history through play and perhaps resolve things.

I am not in any way mad at this thing. I’m not exactly happy with it, but I’m not annoyed and you CAN run it. I am, I think, looking for just a little more though. Most rooms are going one ‘thing’ in them. It’s just a bit TOO terse. A few more evocative words. A little dynamism to the rooms and environment. A little more creepiness to it. Certainly a DM can introduce some of that, but I’d like to see just a little more support form that from the designer. As a rather basic ghostly drop in it does fine.

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is long enough that you see the intro and more than a few of rooms, so a good preview as well. And it’s nice to see it listed for $1.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/541024/the-mourning-mansion?1892600