tenfootpole.org

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

By Travis Fauber
Self Published
Dragonslayer/OSR
Levels 1-3

A wicked corruption has befallen the Mounds of the Fairy Kings and has tainted the Barrow of the Unbroken King. The once grand halls of his tomb are now imbued with dark, sinister energy, and the honored dead who lie within have been twisted and defiled by this insidious force.

 The source of this foul magic remains shrouded in mystery. Whispers abound that a dark curse was placed upon the Mounds of the Fairy Kings by an ancient enemy seeking to dishonor the memories of those buried. Whatever the truth, it remains elusive, adding to the chilling weather that envelops these sacred barrows. The Mounds of the Fairy Kings, once a place of reverence and honor, now stands as a haunting reminder of the past, in a forest where the boundary between the mortal and the twilight realm blurs in the face of unknown danger.

This 26 page adventure uses about three pages to describe about twelve rooms. The writing is bland. The interactive elements are bland. The evocative nature of it is bland. It’s bland. 

I’m bored to death just writing this summary and would rather, well, I’ve edited out what I would rather do than write more. But write more I am. Twenty six pages for twelve rooms described in three pages. I think I’ve seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending. The usual suspects are at play. An extensive hook and background with lore. A lengthy section on how to play D&D and what a stat block means. Appendices for monsters, pre-gens, torchbearers, and summary of the XP and treasure in the adventure. Again and again and again the broken repeats: the main thing is the actual adventure. Support for the adventure is great, but not at the expense of the main adventure. When the main adventure is substandard and there is a lot of support information it forces the question to ask: what would the adventure have been like if the effort spent on the support information had instead been spent on the keys? There is no solution here. I sometimes run across travel videos on my feed that are something like “Do not trust this man in Kashmir!” Of course, none of us will run across that man. Just as no designer getting a bad review will be aware of this guideline. A mighty conundrum. The firehose of poor adventures will continue until all hope is lost. Tomorrow is a new day, until another designer brings their vision to light and flings themselves forward chaotically with little awareness. The same old same old, poor official adventures, mimicking what you’ve seen before which is almost always poor also. There is no respite from the endless line of people making the same mistakes. 

“Random monsters are an essential part of classic fantasy role-playing games, and The Barrow of the Unbroken King is no different. In normal situations, the Referee should roll for random monsters every other turn or whenever the players declare they are “searching” for something (with a roll of 1 on a d6 indicating an encounter)” What?! No rules for how to roll dice and read the THACO chart? 

“The exterior of the barrow mound has a diameter of 60 feet. At each compass point, four menhirs stand 30 feet away from the barrow. These stones are marked with petroglyphs that detail the life of The Unbroken King.” And thus a column of backstory was born. Contributing little to nothing to the adventure. 

What is the purpose of a monster entry? Following our major guidelines, everything in an adventure should tie back to running the adventure at the table. What do you need from a monster entry to do that? Some stats, surly, HP, AC, attacks. And, I would assert a description. You you need an ecology of the monster to run it at the table? No, almost certainly not. SO, what should be prioritized? The ecology or the description? I’m not arguing for inline stat blocks, I have no opinion on those. I am, though, asserting that “an ogre attacks you” is less assistance to the DM, less evocative, than a terse and evocative description of the lumbering brute with great yellowed tusks. Guess how the monster entries are arranged in this?

These keys, the main part of the adventure. There’s nothing here. Yes, sure, niches to loot and a few monsters. But there’s not really anything here for a DM to hang their hat on. No evocative writing. Really not much more than, say, Palace of the Vampire Queens monster listing and treasure. B2 may have more interesting encounters.

Are you not entertained? What type of gem? No altar description. Nothing about an evocative curse detail. It’s not that any one of those things would make this stand out, but it’s all the bare minimum. This is what you are paying your money for. And there’s not much more here than a random number generation on a table would provide.

I am aware that for the vast majority of designers there is no malice. This is not a money grab. They had a vision and they just were not able to translate that vision on to the paper. It’s just so frustrating. This can’t be the vision the designer set off to put down and I don’t know how you make it pass a proof read not knowing that.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. No preview. You gotta put in a preview so we can make an informed purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/544497/the-barrow-of-the-unbroken-king-kickstarter-preview?1892600

By Dave Robinson
KEH Publishing
OSE
Levels 4-6

Travel from the city of Cismontane into one of the worlds beyond the Breaking on a mission to stop a monstrous cult. While shopping in the main market in Cismontane, one of the nearby merchants calls out to one of the party members, selected at random. “Hey, that ruffian stole your amulet!” 

This 26 page single-column adventure describes a short linear adventure with a few scenes to Save The World. Yes yes, I know, but, also, it has some nice touches to it with great puzzles and hints of great imagery. But just hints. 

Dude had an idea. It feels like it’s a home campaign idea. Dude put his ideas down on paper and published it. Dude knows nothing about adventure design. Inevitable result happens. Also, dude does actually know something about how some parts of D&D work and craft a decent Special encounter. 

There are bits of this that make me think this comes straight out of a home game. This is centered around what the designer admits is a Stargate ripoff. Ages ago the gods threw down one of their own blah blah blah, temple at the site around the ensuing spatial rift eventually becomes a city. “The Skid” is the main street, representing the bodies skid down the mountain, blah blah blah. We’ve got some norse and egyptian and greek gods based game, and the temple now allows adventurers through the rift to various places using special amulets as passes. The mixed pantheon, the riffing on a stargate, the skid, and, of course, placing the dungeon under the local bar (or, in the temple in this case) is a time honored home game feature from the early days. 

There are some parts to this that are quite good. In particular there’s a kind of perspective puzzle to get in to a building. Looking at the facade from one angle does one thing, looking at it from another does another thing. Shrinking features, growing features. It’s great puzzle, the likes of which is seldom seen in adventures. Not only is there this perspective thing going on but also a kind of environmental thing as you have to figure out how to, essentially, build a ramp to it in the skewed perspective that allows entrance. The designer is trying for, explicitly, an otherworldly vibe here and it does that quite well. It’s explained in a cumbersome way, and the evocative language is not really present, but the strength here is the core of the puzzle proper and it carries a lot of the heavy lifting for that vibe. Really good job and an excellent example of thinking about design in terms of imagination rather than starting from the standard book challenges of trap, environment, skill check. 

There’s another portion, inside the temple, with a great piles of bodies, mostly skeletonized, and black cable-like things extending from the ceiling in to them. The skeletons get ‘animated’ by the cables, in a kind of puppet way instead of being undead. As you hit the skeletons pulses of energy ripple up the cables, with the entire encounter being treated much the same way as one would a hydra. You can kind of get a good image of what the designer meant, even if it, again, isn’t exactly the most evocative or clear way of describing it is present. The mechanical animation and treating it like a hydra are great riffs as well, again, a kind of imagination forward version of design with some rules thrown in to make it work instead of the other direction. 

The adventure, though, is amateurish. And I don’t mean that in an overly negative way. Perhaps, uneducated, or unaware? I write sometimes about the difference between how a home game is run and an adventure for publication. I might scribble some notes on a paper and run the game from that. I’ve thought some about the game and those notes are really just a reminder of the aspects of the adventure I want to hit on as I riff my way to the game, responding to what the party is doing. I know what I mean when I see the words on the paper. I was inspired by something and thought about it and the notes are really just a way to get back into that vibe. The challenge, when writing for publication, is to transfer all of those ideas and imagery and whatnot into words on the paper, such that the DM using it picks them up and gets generally the same vibe I was going for. It’s all about efficient and effective communication from the designer to the DM, not losing the flavour initially imagined even before those homemade notes were made. 

Some of this is formatting. We see here a single-column approach which makes that information transfer clumsy. And being concise in the writing while still being evocative. And here the writing is somewhat cumbersome and the general vibes meant are not really conveyed very well in the use of the descriptive language. Lost in the translation of The Telephone Game, so to speak. And then there’s the linear gameplay, where scene A leads to B leads to C leads to D. This is something that I think a home game does often, with the DM providing the glue to tie the various beats together, riffing in between them and perhaps dropping clues, etc to get the party to the next beat. Chase a thief, wander into cultists, go through the Breaking/Stargate, hit the temple exterior, then the two scenes in the interior, to get their stolen item back. And in a published adventure there needs to be just a bit more glue. Not a railroad, but support for the DM to get from A to B to C without it looking linear, just as one might do in a home game. 

There’s an off phrase here an theorem padding things out. And a frustrating “Between the altar and the carving is a large chest containing the enemy’s hoard. From the way it’s piled, it looks like it was just dumped there. The hoard is Treasure Type B, with one each of types L, N, and O.” which really should have been expanded upon. There’s a rough fight in there also with an EHP and minions, but I’m gonna trust that the credited playtesters made it through without too much DM fudging.

Dudes heart is in the right place though, and the perspective puzzle is a great idea. He knew what he wanted to do, he’s just having a trouble getting there and communicating it to the buyers.

This is $3 at DriveThru. No preview. Boo! Boo! You gotta do a preview so I can make an informed purchasing decision. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/544746/into-the-breaking?1892600

By Nicole Mattos, Davide Tramma, Icaco Agostino
Angry Golem Games
OSE
Levels 2-4

In a place far distant from civilization there’s the remote island of Enjin no Chi, or The Land of the Fire God. Even though it has a magnificent landscape, no living soul dares to enter the region and get exposed to its dangers. It is a place shrouded in terrifying legends, spoken of only in whispers by the few sailors who have seen its shores from afar. Tales warn of a land where nature itself has gone mad and unknown monstrosities hunt in the volcanic gloom.

This sixteen page adventure gives a rough overview of four sites. “How to ruin a bad ass erupting volcano” hates keys, loves generalizations, and is, essentially, a wall of text for the four sites it does present. 

There is always room for new things. New. Ideas. New ways of implementing old things. Refinements. Experimentation. And there is also room for looking at your own latest perpetual motion machine and deciding it doesn’t work and scrapping it before you release it on the world. This is #1 in the fortnightly adventure series. It looks pretty good. Let us hope that looking good and putting out a product every fortnight does not trump a good product? But, you know the answer to that already, don’t you? They had an idea. That’s great. They implemented the idea. That’s even better. They should have spent a lot more time implementing the idea before releasing it. 

And it’s pretty obvious there was a lack of focus here. The designers didn’t know what they were designing, or why. And therefore they couldn’t match the design to the porpoice.I’m not saying that every product made needs to originate in a home game that is then edited to make it to publication. But I think it’s clear that this was an idea that came about without much thought about what was actually needed. Either that or it’s guilty of original sin: just another in an endless line of mass consumerism in the RPG industry meant to be read instead of played. A good example is the content density. It’s four hexes, one hex per page. That’s four pages out of sixteen. There’s a place in an adventure for support information. But when you’re doing four pages of content and twelve pages of support and boilerplate then it raises the question of what the priority here was. It’s not the actual content, thats for sure. Yeah, the digital page count is free, in that there’s no cost difference between four pages and sixteen pages. But its clear that there IS a cost, in focusing on the gameable material. The time spent on the boilerplate and support information heavily outweighs the time spent on the heart of the adventure for the DM. You gotta work the keys. You gotta work the adventuring sites. You gotta work the heart of the gameable material. 

And the core of the adventure, those four hexes, are very loose. In a hex crawl I might image some very loose language, resulting in a paragraph or so. An adventure seed. But once we reach a page I would expect something more concrete. It’s just loose language though, saying nothing more than a paragraph would, just spread out over the entire page. It’s combined with “dungeon-like” environments for some of them, complete with maps. Unkeyed maps. “Inside the tunnel, they’ll find a Skeleton from a cultist’s body. He will be depressed in a corner, crying and mumbling to himself. He will attack if the characters come too close or try to touch him. He might engage in a conversation with the PCs. He’ll tell them he was left behind by his lover during one of the missions to exterminate the beetles” The skeleton is weird. An erudite skeleton? Ok, sure, it’s D&D. But it just feels out of place, and isn’t keyed on the map except with a very general “Skeleton here” note with an arrow pointing to a hallway.  Toss in some 6HD and 12HD opponents. 

The central conceit, I think, is that there’s this giant erupting volcano and you’re in the hexes around it. Which is kind of a cool image. Lava, smoke, ash (rules provided!) and so on. But i don’t think it really gets much into the erupting volcano vibe. Sure, rules for ash falling from the sky. But beyond that there’s nothing that really sells that vibe, either in the four hexes or in the support material. And this is with a literal lava monster living in a cave in the volcano. It’s just not there, the vibe. 

I’m not sold on the hybrid map/general description layout. I’m not sold on the almost wall of text like hex descriptions. There’s not much solid to sell the whole vibe of any of the hexes. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages, which is mostly boilerplate. It needed to show us maybe a hex description and the accompanying map for it, or something like that, to get an idea of what he actual contents were.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/545174/fortnightly-adventures-1-the-flame-pact-ose?1892600

Motherfuck! I had to correct that four times before it would take porpoise! Lethal poison for the system.

By Morgan Davie
Taleturn
Moldvay
Levels 1-3

Atop a lonely sheer-sided plateau stands a Keep, an outpost against the chaos that creeps in nearby caves. Few know that another fortress lies abandoned and hidden within the stony mount itself. Strange wonders and forgotten treasures lie within, waiting to be claimed by brave adventurers. Dare YOU enter the hidden halls?.

This twenty page adventure features a four level dungeon with about eighty rooms that is entered through BELOW the Keep on the Borderlands. Coinage is abstracted and the writing is not evocative. There’s an interesting concept or two, but otherwise this is cramped and bland. 

Looks like the guildhall in the Keep on the Borderlands has a secret. Literally. They’ve found a secret door in their basement. For 10% of the take they’ll let you through it. Inside you find four levels of underground dungeon with about 20-25 rooms per level. Turns out this place used to be a fortress of chaos! 

Oh, hey, you’re not finding treasure though. I mean, you’re not finding treasure you can level with. You’ll find a potion or scroll or something here or there. But, as for that sweet sweet lucre that drives all adventurers and the level titles they want, well: “22. Secret store. Behind this secret door is a small treasure hoard: three potions of healing, two potions of invisibility, two sacks worth of silver coins, and two gems.” Yeah. Two sacks worth of silver coins and two gems. No values. Not anywhere. It’s all abstracted away like that. 

I find this super puzzling. This IS the core of Moldvay. Gold=XP. Maybe B/X and 1e, both learn hard core to the GAME side of the spectrum. You ARE looking for gold so that you can level. It’s you against the game world with the DM as judge. You win D&D every time you don’t die and get some more progress towards your next level. It’s a fucking GAME and the points are laid in Gold, literally. You can roleplay. You can have fun. You SHOULD do those things. But the gold’s the thing. That’s a core reason I like B/X, the more game-like and carefree nature of it. It might be similar to a 5e adventure that pays TOO much attention to coinage. Hey, that’s not what you do in 5e. Gold is a plot device. If you need a lot of it then I would expect it, but, otherwise, what is core to B/X becomes part of a victorian laundry list in 5e. It’s just so jarring to see the main point being abstracted here. “Put in some treasure.” Uh. Ok. Isn’t that the designers job? DOn’t they have the chore of putting smaller treasures in and then locating the larger treasures in lairs? Don’t they have the job of not putting the hoard in the first room? Of making the layout of the map make sense in relation to the contents of the map? Fuck it man. Who cares anymore, I guess.

Let us, however, ignore the rather small and simplistic maps. Forward! To adventure!

What you’re looking at is nearly a column of text describing room one in the dungeon. This is the basement room of the guildhall and the entrance to the hidden halls. And it’s got trap and door porn in it. This is nearly a column of text to handle two secret doors in a room with a basin. Which are also bland in description if not in effect. Shaking their fists, magical blade, that’s great. I’m not sure, though, that this is the sort of entrance to the mythic underworld I was looking for.

Never fear though, we follow that up with rooms three and four. Rotted. Fungus. Beetle-men. No, I don’t know what they look like. “Stats as fire beetles.” So, yeah. I’d like to point out at this point that B2 was not the end all be all of design. It’s been fifty years. I think we can do a little better. There is a huge place in D&D for “monster wants to eat you, better stab it.” And there’s no place in D&D for an overwrought encounter. But there is a place in the middle where everything works together, the encounter, hack or no, has enough in it for the DM to riff on, both in creature and environment. “Fungus and wrecked doors” does not a description make. Nor does “fire-beetle men”, presumably just standing there waiting to die and have their glands ripped out? Hmmm, come to think of it, I love the idea of giant throbbing diamond-forehead men. Enough diamonds growing out of their foreheads to level. Sitting in a circle playing games and singing songs. “How the fuck did these dudes live even this long?!” As your DM I make no judgment upon you, PC’s, but simply delight in glee at the reaction to the situation.

Ok, so, anyway. Here’s a trap: “The area in front of the false door is a drop-away floor (a dungeon trap). When triggered, everyone within ten feet of the door is dropped into a chute that deposits them into the pool in level two area 14.” It’s a trap? Yeah, it’s a trap. As delighted as I am to see a reappearance of a chute trap (Only desperate Angband players can realize the full horror of a chute trap) I think it could be handled better. And room title. I like room titles. I think they provide a good framing for the room ahead, getting the DMs head in the right place for the description to come. When they are done well. But not when done blandly. “Safe room” “hidden treasure” “old shapes.” These are somewhat abstracted summaries of the room. Rather, provide a vibe for the room. But not here.

It’s not the worse thing ever written. It’s just bland, minimalistic, and padded out all at the same time.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3.50. There is no preview. Sucker.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/537478/mb1-into-the-hidden-halls?1892600

By Morgan Davie
Taleturn
Moldvay
Level 1

The great lands of Law do not march forever. At the great wall of tall, steep hills, Law’s reach fades, and beyond flickers the uneasy influence of Chaos. Between the two, amongst foothills and thick forest, beneath strange purple sunsets, is the Borderlands. Here waits adventure.

This sixteen page regional supplement presents a small area in and around B1 and B2 with several adventuring sites. I’m not sure how it even got to sixteen pages given the lack of things in it and the lack of detail in those things. It’s written like someone is describing an adventure to someone else.

Moldvay always gets reviewed and this is a Moldvay supplement. It’s meant to be a small region in and around the Keep on the Borderlands. It also locates B1 in its area, and tries to expand the adventuring sites, villages, and dungeons in the area. The usual “yes, but what’s past the hermit’s kitty cat?” stuff from B2. The issue here is both in density and specificity. There’s not much past the lizard men, either literally or figuratively. 

First, there’s no map. No regional map. I find this strange. If you’re doing a region, especially one with both B1 and B2 in it, outlying villages, small adventuring sites and so on, then where are they, in relation to each other? How do I get from here to there? I don’t want to make it seem like I absolutely HAVE to have a map every time, but, in many cases, yes, a map would help. There’s some adventuring site here in this, a tower, that overlooks both the lands of law and the lands of chaos. That’s a great idea. Get an idea of the Valley of Chaos, ie: the caves. That would be a great lead in to much intrigue, watching the comings and goings. And, perhaps, meeting an orc band or something like that who is also doing the same thing to the keep. I just can’t help thinking that having a map SHOWING all of that, the adventuring sites, the villages, roads and relationship of the smaller sites to the larger ones, would help. Plus, there’s the wanderers table. How do you run a decent wanderer without knowing the distance to travel? I mean, they are based on time, which is based on distance and terrain. Why include a wanderer table if there’s no time/distance to wander? It’s a curious decision, to not include one. But not necessarily fatal.

The density here is another issue. I don’t know what exactly is going on, but the things FEELS so sparse. Overview of the lands, village, rumors, retainers, minor sites, NPC parties, events … I don’t think it should feel sparse, but it does. It just all feels a little bland and uninteresting. Maybe, kind of like those adventures that just pull a wanderer table straight out of a DMG. No embellishment. Here’s a list of retainers. Just stat blocks and a name. Well, sure, Ready Ref. Here’s a village. We gave it a fifth of a page. It doesn’t say anything more than Ready Ref did. Just kind of bland content. “Costs 1d10sp between each adventure” says the first bullet point of the village. Ok, so, upkeep costs. That’s fun. Mechanics oriented, just the facts. Which I kind of admire about Ready Ref. That thing was DENSE.  The language of pure adventure support. But, I think the idea that you are going to support the region comes with an implicit expectation that there will be COLOR in the region. And there’s not any in that village. And very little in the rest. Angry owlbear with a hornet singer in its ass also gets six or so sentences, to no effect beyond “angry owlbear with a stinger in its ass. So while there are sixteen pages here and a few “adventure site” one pagers, the density here, the ratio of interesting content to padding and blandness, is quite off.

The content, proper, can feel abstracted. Not as if an encounter is being listed, but rather as if someone were describing an encounter, much in the same way that I do in a review. A ghostly warrior who is you defeat will point to a gravesite containing the same sword and armor we wore and also a chest of gold. How much gold? Deets on the armor and sword? Nope. That’s it. It’s more of a seed, an idea of an encounter rather than encounter. And much of this feels that way. It’s tax day in town! That’s really all you’re getting. I get that some of these are meant to be ideas, but they seem longer than a seed, an idea but lacking the specificity that one might expect to be able to really launch them in to something, something to riff on. “Artillery – A mounted heavy crossbow is aimed along the western passage and sentries always keep watch for visitors. Most kobolds sleep here, on piles of wrecked gnomish loot.” It’s an idea. There ARE kobolds here, sentries at the least, yes? I don’t understand why its written this way. It’s like there’s an allergy to the specifics. And, yet, sometimes you’ll get paid 2sp by someone to do something. It’s maddening, the seemingly random way in which sometimes minor and meaningless trivia is included and yet the meat of what should be in the adventure is not.

There’s another adventure in this series. While this is a kind of regional setting the other adventure appears to be an actual dungeon. I’m going to review that one next and see if, perhaps, this is all a symptom of being a setting-like place? In any event, I can’t see much value here.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3.50. There is no preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/537471/mb0-morgue-s-borderlands?1892600

By Zzarchov Kowolski
Self Published
NGR/OSR
Level Any/1

A dead body found clutching a map is found at a major crossroads with an arrow in his back. He wear simple clothing, leather armor, a sheathed sword, and carries a backpack with three torches, 50; of rope, an empty wineskin and a flask of oil. The map shows the crossroads and leads to a tower labelled “treasure” in beautiful handwriting, apparently only half an hour into the forest.

This twelve page digest adventure features a five room tower. It’s a cross between a Fuck You and a kind of hook for a larger campaign thread, much like the advice in Broodmother.It can’t be denied that Zzarchov knows their shit. A brief little thing stretched out.

This describes a five room dungeon in a tower. It’s a roach motel for humans. Humans go in, find treasure, spend it and, low and behold, the coins are a slow poison. Which, theoretically, sow discord and rebellion among the wealthy and powerful as coinage circulates upwards and the power vacuum from deaths foment unrest and rebellion. The bent is toward the elves doing this, but, obviously, it’s whatever baddies you want in the campaign. If it’s lotFP then, obviously, aliens, since everything in LotFP is aliens, but, whoever you want.

The suggestion is that he DM drop the tower in to the players game. They find a map at the crossroads. It leads to a nearby tower. Off you go. But, also, it’s suggested that as the campaign progresses, the characters start to hear rumors about other people who have been to other towers. This is a hint to a larger conspiracy going on in the game world and thus, an initial adventure hook is actually the hook for a larger campaign arc, etc. All undetailed here, but it’s an interesting idea. 

The whole tower takes three or four pages to describe. It’s five rooms. A Five Room Dungeon. Sound familiar? The Entrance, The Puzzle. The Red Herring. The Climactic Battle. The Reward. Zzarchov is not afraid to go tell the Bad D&D Advice people to fuck off, implicitly anyway. He takes the common bad advice trotted out for pay per word views and mocks it in fine style. And this, the Roach Motel of adventures, is the perfect place to do that in. It walks the line well. Roach Motel for Humans by Elves. Mocking the bad advice prevalent on the internet for adventures. This could be mean-spirited. Instead it simply shows you the absurdity of these ideas as implemented and leverages them in to the beginning of a nice campaign arc. After all, isn’t the first adventure SUPPOSED to lead to the last one? 

Each room of the five tower rooms looks like a normal dungeon room. A room, dominate by a large wooden throne. Seated on it a skeleton with gemstones for eyes in a suit of ancient bronze armor with a horned helmet. An echoing inhuman voice “I vow to slay all violators who have defined my tower!” But, the ancient armor shows no signs of rust. No one ever wears horned helmets. The throne isn’t aged at all, just stained a dark color, as are the wooden doors. There’s a ladder propped up nearby to reach the trapdoor in the ceiling to the roof level. The chest on the roof is dark stained balsa wood, identical to the one on the first floor. And so on and so on. Looking just a little beyond the surface shows that something is quite off, in every room, from every standpoint. The build, the aging, the tower isn’t even is there to defend anything, being out of place. 

Each room calls these things out in detail. There’s a little description, sometimes a column long for the longer rooms, and another section of “Clues Something is off …” The riddle room accepts any answer as an answer “Hrm, a worthy answer that I fid accept, the curse on the bars has been lifted.” Any basic inspection of anything, beyond the surface level, will reveal something isn’t quite right here.

This is a gimmick adventure. Essentially a hook for a larger campaign. For what it is it’s fine. Perhaps a little obvious in places, like the balsa wood, but the vast majority of it is subtle enough to make it through a first glance unless one digs deeper. Perhaps a little long for what it is, but, seen for what it is, a print promo offering (which is what I seem to recall it is) it’s a fine little give-away. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. No Previeeeewwwww!!!!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/537468/pest-control?1892600

By Corey Hickson
Corey Hickson Games
OSE
Levels 1-2

The adventurers celebrated their newfound wealth in Crossroads Vale, a prosperous trading village, merrymaking and sharing their spoils with the townsfolk. Unbeknownst to them, the hoard was a trap left by the dragon for the foolish and unwary and every treasure they returned with is cursed! As twilight fell, Crossroads Vale descended into chaos. The cursed treasure unleashed strange monsters and terrible magic: an enraged manticore rampaged, petrifying townsfolk; the fountain in the market square churned with a possessed water elemental; and a parasitic ooze began animating the dead.

Life is Pain.

This eighteen page adventure presents thirteen possible encounters in five pages in a village suffering from an influx of cursed magical items. A loose collection of aimlessness wrapped in some Wouldn’t It Be Fun If does not an adventure make. This is also, likely, a one-shot. 

“I wrote this adventure with fun at its heart. I hope it brings you and your friends laughter and a joyful game night” I, obviously, do not know the definition of the word “fun.” The adventure starts in an inn. The town has gone crazy. You’re the [butcher, baker, candlestick maker, mayor, alewife, etc.] Hank the Adventurer is there. He brought back a cartload of treasure from the local dragons lair and the entire town celebrated. Except. Shit started happening. There’s a water monster in the town fountain and a manticore is flying around the town square turning people to stone. 

“Hank the Adventurer (pg. 5) is at a lone table, carefully plotting how to get as much of the cursed loot and escape the Vale before the slumber arrives.” Hank is described as “Voluble, Ignoble, and Determined.” He knows everyone in town is going to sleep at midnight, in seven hours, because of a magic orb in the town square. As far as I can tell, Hank is the only one in town to know this, besides the person who caused it, Ekert. “Hank now realizes the rumor he got from Ekert began this horrid night.” Sooo … how do you get from point A to point B? How do you get info out of Hank, learning about Ekert and the orb? Clearly, it has to come from Hank. And, I think, just as clearly, Hank, the 3HD warrior with a +3 sword who can shoot fire rays from a magic amulet,  is described in such a way that he’s not going to want to tell the L1 party. So … what do we do? You are, I suppose, the village worthies, by want of being the player characters anyway, so, you’re motivated, I guess, to save your fellow villagers. And pissed, maybe that Hank won’t help you?  This FEELS an awful lot like the adventures in which the quest giver/hook is an asshole and you have to beg to go on the adventure. I can get to The Town Is In Danger And We Need To Help! I’m having a much harder time with Hank, and getting the information you need from Hank in order to actually play the adventure. 

Moving to the actual encounters, they come in three types. We’ve got monsters rampaging. This is the manticore in the town square and the water weird in the town fountain. The weird is a kind of puzzle, you need to figure out there’s a cursed coin in the fountain and remove it. So, a straight up fight with the manticore and/or lure it away (since the Midnight Sleep Orb is in the same place) and/or puzzle your way past the water weird. Then there are some kind of Weird Monster locations. The graveyard has a ghost and some zombies with only tenuous ties to whats going on and not much reason to explore. Likewise a farmhouse with two dudes turned in Beauty & Beast type couches. Ok. Sure? Just weirdness. And then finally some things to spice things up. There’s a wanderer table, which could really use cross-references to the named people you encounter, and some rando locales/encounters you can throw in. The best of these is probably the WIll o the Wisps. “Help, I’m trapped!” seems like a perfect things for them to do in a village full of chaos. Being able to use a classic monster like this in a way in which they fit, and the party won’t suspect, is great. The context f the encounter, the village in danger, leverages the Wisps core aspect, luring people to their doom in a dangerous situation. Hearing a “Help!” out of he blue puts you on edge. Hearing a “help!” in a situation in which you EXPECT to hear a help is good monster usage. (See also: harpy singing, etc.)

The encounters tend to be short, a column at most, and formatted well so they are easy to scan. Not everything makes sense; there is weird bolding to highlight things that should not, perhaps, be highlighted. And the ending of the adventure doesn’t really make sense. You presumably stop the madness, but, there’s no epilogue, which I think would have been nice, even in a one shot. O, maybe, especially in a one-shot. 

So, it’s a one-shot. You need to work it to get to some coherance.

This is $3.50 at DriveThru. The preview is the first four pages. It should, as always, really show some encounters. The Hank NPC description gets you a good way there though, if you know, from this review, what the rest is like.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/536929/cursed-calamity-at-crossroads-vale?1892600

By Guilherme Providello
Savvy Thief Studios
OSE
Level 1

For years, you were victims of an imperial Senator who lived in the Capital. He stole you as children from your home village in the Ancestral Peninsula, and assured your subservience through drugs and witchcraft. After many years receiving this treatment, you no longer remember who you truly are or where you came from. Enslavement was never accepted in the Empire, and one day his illegal actions were discovered. In a desperate flight towards your forgotten homeland, the senator let his guard down. And now, at last, he lies dead at your feet. This momentous death is only the beginning of the PCs’ struggle to recover their past

This thirty page supplement uses about ten pages to describe ten hexes in a Roman/Iberian like setting. It’s just boring crap. Nothing going on. Hardly a hex crawl. At a page per hex you’d think SOMETHING was happening here. No. Good luck. 

This thing is so frustrating. It took me a minute to figure out why. It’s Isle of the Unknown all over again. Maybe not QUITE as bad, but close. And when I say bad I mean aimless. There’s an aimlessness here. But, let’s back up. 

We start with the framing. Ok, you’re from fantasy-Iberia and you were fantasy-enslaved to a fantasy-roman senator who removed your fantasy-memories. You’ve fantasy-killed him right at the fantasy-threshold to fantasy-Iberia with the game starting with “How did you manage to kill the senator? What did you find on his body“. (I guess the whole “physical violence may be kept off-screen” is out the window as a trigger, yeah?) So, I guess you’re fleeing into non-Roman Iberia and away from Roman lands? Got it? You’re escaped slaves who just murdered someone. 

So what’s the frequency Kenneth? What are you doing in this hex crawl? I guess it’s always the players job to find a motivation for doing things, yeah? But it just seems like there’s more to this. You are hexcrawling in a settled land. Whose treasure you stealing to level up? Or, who you stabbing to level up? That leaves the usual culprits: demons and animals. And, there are a couple of demons here in two of the hexes. More on that later, right now we’re philosophizing. How do you level in a world in which you can’t loot to level? I don’t know man. What do you exploit when you can’t exploit? I guess you just damn the torpedos and full hypocrite ahead? I’m down for a more nuanced view of monsters. After all, I love a good situation. But we’re still playing a game. The designer has to give us something to do. There’s got to be an out, someone to kill and something to loot if we’re playing a game in which we get XP by killing and looting. If you want to write for the “get xp by interacting with the environment” game then I’m down with that also. But that’s not what is going on here. I mean, IM happy to stab and loot, but, also, it seems more than a little disrespectful to play the Things Fall Apart adventure by looting houses and killing people. So, the designer forgot something. A critical something. 

We’ve got a hex with d3x100 mermaids in it in a cave surrounded by shipwrecks. Hot damn! That’s a real hex crawl hex! We’ve got a hex with the millers family under the sway of a demon disguised as a pig with the families children rooting around in the pigpen. NOICE! A demon goat trapped under a hill temple. A witch in the woods. This is all very classical. 45 giant eagles in a lair. WTF?! Rock on man! This is the shit! Wilderlands eat your heart out! Lots of shit in the lair man! The lair where the goodies are …

But, then, the entry goes on for a page. Wilderlands did this in a couple of sentences, not a page. If Wilderlands jumped off a bridge then would you? Yes. Yes I would. A column for a stat block and a column for an encounter and treasure. I’m not even sure what the fuck to do with this encounter. I mean, stumbling upon it. Live and let live, I guess? There’s no reason to go here. There’s no reason to interact. Oh, look, we need a place to sleep for tonight? And the kids live in the sty? Ok. When in Iberia do as the Iberians do. Either I want to exploit a situation for my own ends or I’m an interfering do gooder? For my definition of good? I guess that’s why its a demon? Platonically bad? Does that cash belong to the miller though?

This is another full page hex and this is the pertinent part of the description. Do you care? Why are you interacting here? Domed rock? An entrance to it? Do you see one? In THAT text? Ok. Uh. I guess we move on? There’s just nothing here. I mean, functionally, what’s the difference between this goat encounter and “a 10 foot tall parrot on stork legs is in this hex.” (That being the platonic Isle of the Unknown encounter.) There isn’t on? Just more words spreads across the page?

Ok. So. What secrets? There are none. That’s it. That’s all you get. Can you riff on it? Sure. In the same way I can riff on a dictionary entry. In the lava temple the text tells us that “A lot of care and courage are necessary to leap from rock to rock over the lava to reach the temple (see map.)” There is no map. There’s a line drawing, a little art piece, of some rocks in a stream/lava. Is that it? Cause there ain’t no map of a temple.

This is pointless. The designer has explicitly outlined a play style and then provided hexes in which the journey is the destination … but no rules for XP for the journey. What the fuck do you do here? It is a simplistic worldview presented where a more nuanced one would have resulted in the situations in which a party of characters can enter.

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. That shows you the slant but not any of the hexes, and it really should have shown some hexes to be a good preview. We need to see what we’re getting ourselves in to.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/534682/ancestral-peninsula-1?1892600

By Adam Helešic
The Curios Eye
OSE
Levels 1-2

Delve into the decrepit druidic crypt occupied by the warring tribes of lizard men and gullygugs. Discover its treasure, history, secrets, and rituals. Ally yourselves with the inhabitants, fight them, outsmart them, use every advantage you have to gain the upper hand and leave the dungeon with pockets full of gold, gems, and magic items!

This 24 page adventure uses thirteen pages to describe about twenty rooms in a druid crypt/cave complex overrun by a couple of humanoid factions. It tries. Really hard. Like, maybe, if you really tried to hand copy an illuminated manuscript. It just feels off, as if the various rooms don’t really belong together or interact together in any but the most basic of ways. The OSE style is not used in a very effective manner and the writing could be better. Still, though, you can see an adventure in there.

In a throwback, we’ve got no hook here. There’s just a giant tree with a hole hacked in to it and a set of stairs going down. Inaside we find an old elven druid burial ground. At least a few rooms full of it. And some bullywugs who’ve started to set up a lair. And some lizard men who are also trying to set up a lair. With the two groups fighting. And a treant protector of the tomb, who is absolutely useless, who wants everyone to be respectful. And a genie that the bullywugs have who is kind of an asshat in a new and different genie way. And some arcana spiders who just want to be left alone too do their magic shit. . Which almost certainly means they’d be REAL happy if the bullywugs were wiped out. No one likes you bullywug! Go home! Enter the party. 

The map supporting play has, I don’t know, maybe one major loop. It does have monsters noted on the map and is easy to read, but also it feels rather linear. Not, I don’t know, natural? It’s ok. If you were looking for a basic map to support an adventure then this would do it. It’s not going to create fun, but, there it is.

And, that’s kind of the same with everything in this. What if you knew what the correct thing to do was but can’t quite get there? There are wanderers. They are doing things. But, well, they are not great. “1d6 lizard men in a battle-ready formation, slowly moving through the dungeon.” Well, ok, sure. But thats really not much more than my d12 table I use in my game for wandering motivations. It’s fine. Really. 

There’s a line in this that I think is great. “The gullygugs are bandits, thieves, and overall bastards who can’t agree on anything, their approach always preceded by the sounds of their bickering.” That should, I think, be the springboard to many encounters and many situations. But I don’t think it’s taken advantage of. Playing them against each other. Hearing them coming. Luring them away. That’s the kind of “neutral environment” thing that I love. But I can’t see the adventure really taking advantage of it at all. Or, even, making opportunities where it could come in to play beyond the most simplistic “we approach the room and hear arguing” sort of thing. A potential denied, so to speak.

There’s OSE formatting. OSE formatting can be good. But only if done well. Is it done well here? Well, no? There’s descriptive text. Is it done well here? Well, no? There’s encounters with people to talk to and scheme. But, is it done well here? Well, no? Is any of it done BADLY, to the point of being odious, obviously off the mark or so on? Well, no.

We can see from that clip the OSE style. And how it has been clumsily implemented. Then, given the sarcophagi, the treant (in a dungeon …) and the skeleton vine dude, what order would you put the follow up the detail in? Or even the initial OSE style detail? Which is likely to be the most important thing, meaning what the party notice first or interacts with the party first, etc. What are you likely, as a DM to NEED first, in terms of follow up order and what are you likely to want to know about first, as a player, in terms of the OSE description section? Not what’s there. And then, the dude. The skeleton vine dude. Essentially he doesn’t do anything. I think the designer MEANT for this to be important. Interacting with him, what he says/des etc. But I don’t get much of anything out of that description. How to use him, both literally and figuratively. There is a lack of … payoff? Build up that leads to payoff? Does anything there, on that entire page, make you excited and the make the juices broil and cause ideas to leap to mind? Sure, not everything has to be The Jungle Cruise at Disney, but, also, maybe we can get to Epcot levels? Nothing there inspires.

And, even, nothing there is very well integrated in to the other environments. The lizard men, the bullywugs, the genie, the arcanas … there’s not much here. The treant would like people to play nice. Great. We just need a little more here. Some slightly stronger leanings towards interactive play. You can’t just SAY there are factions, you also need a little shove in to factions.

There’s this tendency to miss the obvious thing in the adventure. We see here the murmuring figure, a 50% chance of being there. Ok. Kind of an OSE description. Ok, not the bets one ever. Kind of a lack of understanding what the OSE description style is, but it’s there. I wonder, though, what the murmuring figure IS? There’s no indication of which monster this is. It’s not obvious at all. I’m not cherry picking, it’s not in text below this or anything like that. There’s just nothing there. You just missed one step: what the fuck it is. The most important one. In another spot there’s this adventurer that’s is emaciated, slumped against a wall, almost in a coma or asleep. He’s got some worm thing sucking his could out, and it will attack the party. But, what then, the adventurer? Nothing. Nothing at all. Who is he. Does he wake up. What if the party manages it? I get it “12 prisoners in a cell” don’t all need a personality and a life story. Sometimes genero dude is just a genero dude. But this is ONE guy. And it’s almost certainly the case that the party will do SOMETHING to try and help him. And if almost every party is going to do almost the same thing every time, then it seems like the designers job to maybe just provide a couple of words there to help support the DM during play.

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527477/the-crypt-beneath-the-earth?1892600