tenfootpole.org

By Aaron Gustwiller
Aaron's Gaming Stuff
S&W
Levels 2-3

Recently, and much to the despair of the nearest residents, a Young Red Dragon, Malurax, has taken up residence within the ruins. Shortly after moving in, the young dragon began preying on the livestock of the local peasantry, driving many to the brink of ruin. Harold, one of these peasants, called a fool by some but egged on by others, decided to try and slay the beast himself, but never returned. 

This eight page adventure uses two pages to describe nine rooms in a young dragons lair. It flirts with some decent imagery at times but comes off very flat. It’s just a room with a drgon in it.

Ok, so, good on Harold! I bitch all the time about the locals not taking their fate in their own hands. And, it just goes to show you … sometimes you get the dragon and most of the time the dragon gets you. But, still, I admire Harold. We don’t get anything about Harold, but, I’d have loved to have seen some shit about Harold being desperate, in dept, loansharks on his ass, or hating his wife, or great with the local always volunteering and stuff. And then some shit about finding harolds body. And, maybe, the villagers caring more about Harold than they do the party at the end. These are the things that really ground an adventure and tha ta DM can really riff on. I guess the fact that I’m brining it up at all means that it DID spark some interesting thoughts for play, but, as always, I want the designer doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Or, better said, some medium lifting through heavy work.

And. then, there’s the dragon. At levels two or three. That’s an AC2 (ouch!) and 9HD 18HP dragon. What is that, like, 18HP of damage, save for halfsies? I’m not sure that halfsies is gonna matter. There are some giant bats present in one of the rooms, but other than that it’s just a dragon sitting on its hoard. (Which, I appreciate. The classics are always the best.) Anyway, this is gonna take some work. Any dumbass party is gonna get cooked. You’re gonna have to go in with some poisoned cows or some shit. Or a fuck ton of men at arms. Which you aint getting at the local village (not detailed.) That AC2 man. Ooph. That’s gonna be a rough one. But, hey, at least you’re not a dirt farmer!

The villagers offer some cash for killing the dragon. 600gp as I recall. And you get 1200xp for turning down the gold. *hrumph* Not a fan of imposing morality in an adventure. There ARE gods in D&D, and an afterlife, so, I guess there IS a morality inherent in a land without Neitzsche. But it just seems wrong. 

The map has some small castle ruins, just the ouline of walls really, running up to a creek with a hole in a cliff wall and six chambers inside of it. There are a couple of loops, and a couple os passages that the dragon can’t get down .. .which, as the adventure points out, is not true for the dragons breathe weapon. Still, it offers some opportunities. It is, in the end, just a lair map.

Room one, the courtyard of the ruins. “Scattered around the ruin’s courtyard are the bones of cows, horses and sheep.” Ok, so, we’re going minimalistic here. Nice concept, with the bones of the livestock the dragon has been preying on. I could use a little more viscereal in it though. Room two, the ruines of a small one room building in the courtyard: “ Inside the ruined building are the remains of a half-eaten horse, being picked at by crows. The crows fly away when a

character enters the doorway.” So, a little bit of padding here. But, the crows, dead horse, and them flying off? That’s good. It SEEMS dynamic even if it is still static. That is the extent of those two descriptions. There is nothing more to those rooms. We’re clearly working up to the dragon. Adding some foreboding and such. Not bad, but still a little lacking if were just gonna shove a dragon in a room on the inside. Which is what hte adventure does.

Room three, the stream crossing from the ruins in to the cliffside cave mouth:  The land bridge between the ruins and the lair entrance is made up of dirt and the scattered remains of the castle walls that washed away in the flood. The footprints of a small dragon can be clearly seen in the dirt.” This is a little interesting, from an evocative standpoint. Land bridge, dirt, huge chunks of stone. Th dragons footprints could be a little more ominous, but, I’ll take on that challenge.

I won’t do all of nine rooms, but I’ll do one more “ There is a pool of murky water in the southwest corner of the room. The pool is about 1ft deep.” With just nine rooms I think I’d like to see just a little bit more going on. Some viscera? Harolds body? The dragon is kind of an afterthought. Just The dragon sitting on its hoard, with no description beyond that.

Not much lead in at all here beyond what you’ve read in the intro. A little bit of “theres a dragon here” window dressing in the ruins, but not much at all in the cave. And then an aggressively minimalistic approach to the descriptions. With just nine rooms to work with, it feels like more could have been with the lead in, or to build an environment in which the characters and dragon face off. I’m not the biggest fan of set pieces, but, a nine room set piece, or some room count like that, could have been an interesting concept. (I wasn’t exactly mad at some of the 4e adventure concepts in which encounters spanned a larger larger with multiple chambers) 

You’re not really buying anything here. Figuratively or literally.

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/515288/malurax-lair?1892600

I’m gonna keep on dancing

By Giles Pritchard
Caradoc Games
With Every Fibre

Redevelopment of an old building deep down, close to the mines, led to a collapse. A crack in the wall has revealed a cave beyond. Now, the builders say, when the hammers and forges of Bellfounders District fall quite, you can hear something. The sound of some vast thing sleeping… Terror has put a stop to the work, you don’t need to be superstitious to find the distant hissing sigh of giant breaths unnerving. Is anyone brave (or foolhardy) enough to find out what’s causing the noise?

This 36 page adventure presents a cavern system with about thirty rooms. There is little in the way of evocative text, with most being overly padded out mechanics. It’s got an interesting vibe, kind of Tekumelish, but its just a hint.

So, I’m not sure about that intro. Redevelopment? Mines? Builders? Dudes got a basement and a wall collapsed and he hears giant breathing beyond it. Somehow the miners are involved and send a crew in but they turn back after a hundred feet, the breathing scared them. Ok. Sure. And now you’re being offered 150 coppers to go figure shit out. Oh, and the favour of the Founders Guild. Sure. I’m not judging the 150 cp thing, different game world different economy. But, also, you’re paying more. Terror has put a stop to the work? Your first crew turned back after a hundred feet? Also, your crews stopped work because of some heavy breathing in a basement somewhere else in the city? I’m just gonna hand wave a Setting Details thing, but, in my heart, I know its just another one of those shitty hooks without any thinking behind it. If you gonna hook, and I’m not saying you have to, then put some effort behind it. If kis are missing, and there are parents, then theres a vigilante mob, not parents too scared to do something. Miners can’t work? That’s not what some dude in a suit sitting behind a desk has to say about it. There’s always scabs and a mine owner willing to break the workforce for more profit. 

 The dungeon itself is … well, lets cover the vibe. The encounters range from caves to old basements to and underground lake to ancient sites to beastmen warrens. This is, I think, where I’m making the Tekumel comparison. It’s an interesting mix, under an urban environment. One portion of the basements has bootleggers in it with a FUCK TON of whiskey. Bootleggers! That’s chill! I Love it! Not bandits. Bootleggers. This is the specificity I’m always referring to. Not just Bandits. And, you might be able to join them! Thats not really covered much, but also they are willing to talk in some circumstances. That’s the kind of shit I am looking for. 

Most of the rest of this, though, is terrible. 

The room descriptions are … I don’t know. It’s not minimalism, for sure. There is sentence after sentence after sentence of text for even the smallest mechanic. The mechanics of a room are what make up 95% of the room descriptions, I’d say. And we’re not talking overly complex things here. There are no Grimtooths to be found. This is very simple stuff like falling in to a pit or getting scared of the breathing sounds. That hearing the breathing sounds in the hallway? Half a page of text. To be scared of it or figure out that your torches waver when you hear it. And that is not that unusual at all, the amount of text. It’s wiiiild! 

And the atmosphere of the various locations? Practically nonexistent. The room that the sounds originate from? Two pages long. “A room so large the light of a torch or lantern will illuminate only part. The roof, if there is one, is beyond sight. Dominating the room, and giving off a strange and eerie glow, is a vast insectoid statue. It looks like it is made of metal, and is crusted green, markings are barely visible on the surface. Each leg rises and falls in turn, like giant bellows, whatever this thing is, it is obviously the driving force behind the wind rushing through the tunnel system.”  Note the padding. “If there is one” and abstraction with the use of the words “strange and eerie glow.” Instead, pulsating iridescent or something. This BY FAR the best of the rooms in terms of atmosphere. There are brief glimpses, here and there, that the designer was trying. But they are full of this abstraction and lack of specificity in most places … and then followed by tons of padding, a conversational writing style and mechanics, mechanics, mechanics. 

This is for a d10 system that I’ve not heard of before, so I thought I’d check it out. This COULD be the reason that the mechanics play such a prominent role. After all, you don’t do your own system unless you give a couple of shits about mechanics and fixing all of those problems that all of those other RPGs have. It also appears to be for a light system, with the rulebook being 48 pages, which makes the focus on mechanics even weirder to me if its a light system. I suspect that the light folks are looking for atmosphere and interactivity, not die rolling and minute judgements. Your debut adventure has to be rock star; it’s what people are going to remember. It should chanel ever essence of what you’ve got going on. 

There is a nice bit of naturalism here, with the caves, basements, and ancient civ room. (That bug statue.) The bootleggers mixed in with a chasm and underground lake.That’s a great vibe. In theory. 

This is $6 at DriveThru. You shall find no preview here! Sucker!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/515078/the-caves-beneath-us?1892600

By Kai Putz
Self Published
LotFP
Level ... 4?

Devils of the Old Barrows: a rural community is disturbed by strange figures that sneak around the outer homesteads at night, as well as by howling calls coming from the nearby ancient barrow graves. The people that heard them swear that those are not from dogs or wolves nor from a human throat. Not willing to have superstitions infect the souls of his flock, the local priest moved to the barrows at daylight to see for himself what is going on. He never returned and now the people are afraid to go there themselves.

This fifteen page adventure uses six pages to describe eleven rooms in a lovecraft-ghoul burrow. It suggests a giant fight full of ghouls, and presents way too much text. This combines with a standard paragraph style of formatting, with no highlighting for scannability during play. 

Pickmans Model rises again! What happens if you DO go down that long burrow in the basement? Well, you end up in a dig out place with a bunch of ghouls in it. This is mostly going to be a big fight. You run in to some ghouls in one room and then they all end up swarming you, coming in from multiple sides, as the occupants in the other rooms join in. So, I don’t know, maybe, 20 or so two HD ghouls with a few three HD dudes mixed in? These are lovecraft ghouls, though, so no real paralyzation other than maybe losing initiative because of being repulsed by them. Once you are through this you can use some skulls as an oracle, meet and kill the immobile, bloated and defenseless ghoul queen, talk to an intelligent ghoul who is pretty resigned to being killed. (A stoic to the end, literally, that one) and face the ever popular “do you kill the children” question, which is elaborated on in some designer notes. I don’t know man, your ecosystem involves, as its central tenet, killing and eating people. 

The usual problems. A lack of specificity in the setup and background. “Characters are hired to look after a man who has not been seen for days. Said man …” Abstraction and generalisms don’t suit the pursuit of evocativeness. We do get a short list, maybe two dozen entries on ghoul looks, “thick & scarred; hulking” but this still isn’t great and isn’t a substitute for the designer putting in the work to make a creepy and interesting environment … and ghouls. 

“And you, the refer, may even rule that one is not able to navigate it [the tunnels] in full plate armor.’ I’m free to do a lot of things as the ref. Rock fall, everyone dies. I don’t need to be told what I could do. Again, it’s up to the designer to elaborate and construct an environment. Dynamic in this case ,to adventure in … which may contain tunnels that cannot be explored in full plate with drawbacks and boons for doing so. That’s why we’re paying the designer. There’s a lot of this running around the adventure .At best is a conversational way to relate information and at worst, my rocks fall example.

Another example, of the padding involved would be “Characters that approach the opening to the south will notice that …” which is a very long winded way to say it smells like rotting bodies. It’s all padding. This isn’t academia, we don’t need to coach everything in twelve half-sayings before we get to the point. Just fucking tell us. And make it evocative. Sickly sweet. Putrid cheese. Whatever. Just don’t pad the shit out. “If they have not already dealth with the ghouls in area 2b …” Yeah, that’s what happens. 

This is just SO padded out. About three paragraphs per room, at a minimum, with some taking far, far longer. And to no real effect. The room descriptions are weak and the interactivity almost all a few ghouls that will show up in another room to fight, thanks to their order of battle in swarming targets. 

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview gets you the primary group living quarters, that they all swarm out of. It’s a decent preview if you know what he rest of the adventure is like. And now you do!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/513947/gregorius21778-burrow-of-the-ghouls-lotfp?1892600

By Lixu
Lixuni Gaming
OSE
Levels 3-5

An Adventure module for old-school essentials, uncover the mystery of an ancient celestial civilization an its ruins, involving yourself in the events taking place on an apparently frontier region, slaying evil monsters, fighting bandits and chaotic cultists and eventually reaching a floating ancient dungeon!

This 29 page adventure features a little region and mini-sandbox that culminates in exploring a 31 room floating fortress full of robots. It’s an interesting beast, needing a WHOLE lot more evocative writing, but it has its heart in the right place … if only it knew how to do things other than stab.

I know how this is going to sound, but … Cult of the Reptile God vibes from this one. No, not the town conspiracy. And not really the reptile gods lair. I don’t know. It’s a combination of the sandboxy nature and the tend of minimalism in the writing. Also, I said a vibe, I  didn’t say it was worth it.

You’re in this town and there’s this dude missing, an herbalist. The inn owner hates him. Her sister, the general store chick, got ghosted by him when he disappeared. His apprentice has a gig for you … clear out the bandits by the lake? He’s double crossing them, farming psychedelics out there. There’s a few other threads also; the local nobles, fallen from the grace of the capitol, protecting the roads and hunting the mutant monsters that are roaming around to protect the lands … and their income. You can fuck around town a bit, fuck with the bandits and learn about the double-cross, find the dudes lake house … wth him dead in it, and explore a cult shrine of cannibals natives. And then transport up to the sky fortress … all while potentially dodging some weird weather in the area. 

It’s not the best sandbox ever written, but the designer is making an effort to have several things going on in the region and around town … and they all kind of lead to the same place, eventually. This is good; you’ve got a main thing and you’re working in some other things, either subplots of the main thing or other happenings in the area, back to what the core of the adventure is meant to be. I’m down with that.

There’s also a hint of realism in this. If you fuck around too long on one of the subplots then it could be that the son of the local lord, a level six fighter, eventually shows up to resolve the issue … with all that implies for both the party and the region. A random happening in town is that the price of something goes WAY up, because bandits have hit the supply wagon for it and now its super rare. Thats a pretty good cause/effect related to an adventure lead. And, then, the room descriptions are, if you squint, trying to bring it also. “Filled with skulls and rags from the warbands enemies” or mounds in the area, a hole in the ground marked by a flag, with a ladder in it leading down, to a room full of charms and candles … all burning green. Noice overall zone. 

But it’s not a great overall zone. The first half of the booklet is devoted to background, the town,  and other places that are less than adventureful. That leaves us maybe eight pages for the bandit lair, the lakeside cottage, the native shrine, and the sky fortress. Not exactly fully realized environments are possible with those page counts, eh? 

And that’s true. The room descriptions, the descriptive part, is quite terse. It’s not exactly Just The Facts, but it cuts close: “The room consists of only one stone bed carved into the wall, which depicts a military battle with what appear to be dragons and flying machines” That entrance room is “the entrance lies around a series of mounds, a flag pole standing at a hole to go down a ladder, 30’ deep. Once down, the room is filled with charms and candles, all made with a special wax that makes the flames have a green coloring.” and is by far one of more fully realized ones. A couple of rooms have pits/holes full of poisonous snakes. A little smell in the room above would have been nice? It’s just SO minimal. Matter of fact. 

The treasure, for example. These almost always run to “Treasure room: This room is filled with 6 pieces of jewelry (4 x 1,000 gp & 2 x 1,100 gp)” That is the descriptions of the treasure room. And several are like this. You might get a +1 sword here and there, but “4x1000gp jewelry” is pretty much the height of this. 

It’s like, in all places, it is ALMOST there, but pulls back just a little. The Lack of treasure detail beyond the barest minimum. The lack of an evocative environment beyond the barest minimum. The lack of interactivity (beyond stabbing) except for the barest minimum required in a kind of sandbox. The hooks are not fleshed out at all (and presented in a random manner, as in a random roll, not a good use of randomness …) 

And then there’s the editing. I suspect that there might be an EASL thing here, so I’m not going to go down the path of the word order and so on … it’s good enough. But there are some mistake mistakes. The local lord … that level six fighter son? It says they are a daughter. And it’s implied in other ways, like with the name. I know A Boy Named Sue is a thing, but it really is more than a bit confusing. I guess it doesn’t matter, but, also, I’m bewildered at multiple times in this over multiple issues. 

This isn’t a terrible adventure. It’s more than a little straightforward for me, with very little in the way of local color or interactivity beyond some basic stabbing. It isn’t realized in the manner of a good sandbox, or even have components that are realized, like the village in Reptile God. Some better flavour, interactivity, and maybe a touch more going on … a more complex web, and this would be great. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. Alas, there is no preview, and thus no ability to make a purchasing decision based on that preview before you actually buy it. Shame. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/514767/appendix-l-3-fane-of-the-laruleans?1892600

By Mitchell Doucette
Thunder Toad Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

The Quorth are dying. Their stone bodies erode to dust by the will of their own god, and a swarm of giant ants has overrun their archives. A lone wizard sees opportunity in the chaos and seeks adventurers—whether for profit or preservation, only you can decide. Will you answer the call?

This forty page adventure presents a four level dungeon full of stabbing, fetch quests and riddles. It’s a simplistic implementation of a basic formula, with some frustrating things left out … due to editing? Anyway, far too basic for a design.

There’s an interesting interplay between RPGs and cRPGs. You’ve got D&D screaming out of the 70’s with it’s first age and transitioning in to the 80’s. Just about the same time you’ve got computers becoming more mainstream and the personal computer showing up. And this the cRPG is born. It wants to be D&D but it can’t emulate the experience, and thus we get the fetch quest. And everything and everyone is now immersed in the CRPG genre from birth. Which means that D&D is not the norm. The fetch quest is the norm. And then the cRPG folks find D&D again and move what they know in to it …

This is a giant fetch quest, in cRPG form. You need item four from location B-nine to give to npc Z in order to fulfill his “Golden Dawn” request so he will give you The Jade Falcon which you can then take to NPC RR and give to them to fulfill the “Purple Haze” quest … and do on and so on.

You get a letter. Some elf guy wants you to go this village full of rock people. It’s been cursed, is in decline, blah blah blah. Please come help me restore the village. Arriving at the base of a mountain, you find broken walls and some huts/buildings. There are, I don’t know, like six rock people in the village and the elf dude at the inn. I guess you wander in and meet some of the rock people, and then find the inn, where elf dude is trapped on top being ‘menaced’ by some giant ants. Nobody in the village seems to care. This isn’t on purpose, its just bad design. Everything in the village is within a hundred feet of a central point, with most of it being withing fifty feet of the central point. So, yeah, its not that they hate the elf, it’s just that each encounter is completely self contained in that way … only existing as either a fetch quest giver or a fetch question location, with no actual interactivity. Stonemason dude wants his tools back. Go to the collapsed walls to dig them out. Frank wants to be guard captain, Bob thinks he’s incompetent, but would soften if he knows of Franks experience. Frank has medals of military service, but they’ve gone missing … and around and around you go. The final quest is in the village also. You go up the mountain twelve hours. Halfway up three giant hawks attack you. At the peak is a giant throne with a cloud giant dude and his three giant hawks. A great glowing sphere is beside him. This is the ending boss fight. AT the end of everything you rescued the stone peoples high priest in the dungeon and he comes with you, chants, while the orb opens up and you attack the inside while the cloud giant and hawks attack. Destroying the orb nukes the curse and Yeah, everyone is happy again, I guess.

The actual encounters in the dungeon are mostly along the same lines. You need the key from the bottom of the well to open a door two. The well has an elemental who wants a diamond before they give you the key. Answer a classical riddle to open door four. This is all very, very basic interactivity on a very basic map.

There is a frustrating element to the editing. One of the small handful of buildings in town is the House of Knowledge. “A well kept marble building, The entrance to the archives within is protected by a Sand-Lock, which must have a specific symbol impressed into the sand within its basin to unlock the door. “ That’s it. Nothing else. Room one of the dungeon, though, reads: “The entrance to the dungeon is concealed behind a beautifully crafted mural of Titan’s Throne in the House of Knowledge. If the players acquired the sealed letter from Glendath they will have the proper impression to press into the Sand-lock. Imprinting the proper symbol into the Sand-lock will push the mural aside to reveal a flight of stone stairs leading down into darkness. The air is cool and damp.” Ok, so, lets go check Gleddaths entry … which is one and a half pages long … Nope. Nothing there. Good luck putting together all of the multi-step fetch quests; the information is scattered everywhere.

Another fine example is the high priest. On level two two of the three level dungeon you meet him. You need him to chant at the mountain peak so you can go all Tron/MCP on it. The rooms he’s in is a page and a half long … mostly about him. But, then, there’s this, right ta the start of the room: “Some long-dead Quorth litter the room, trapped in states of conflict. Giantspeaker Oza is here and he is excited that the party arrives. I don’t understand. They are dead? Undead? He’s dead? It sounds like he’s dead. Or maybe, it just occurred to me, he’s alive and kind of adventuring in the dungeon also? There’s not really ANY mention of him outside of this. No one in the village is like “Orza is missing!” or anything like that. I have absolutely no fucking clue what is going on.

So, three HD hawks on the way u p the mountain pass. Six HD giant ants. A twelve HD cloud giant. Six and eight HD creatures are not uncommon. I’m all for overpowered enemies. But not ones that stand in the way of the party. You have to snake, convey, ally, run, etc to manage from overpowered enemies in a good adventure. You can’t just put an eight HD enemy in the path of the first level party and make it a required part of the adventure to fight them. No bueno.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that elf dude wants you to donate 2000gp so they can repair the walls of the town. In spite of everyone in town being LITERALLY made out of rocks. And the twon having a quarry INSIDE the walls. WITH a rock dude living there who is a stonemason. Who owes you one because you found his masterwork tools. I shit you not. But you need to give the elf 2000gp. How about, instead, we get a nice coke supply for the town? Or, better, just let it die off. If they can’t be bothered to help themselves at least the smallest amount then why is it your problem?

This is $12 at DriveThru.The preview is eight pages and shows you just the first eight title pages and some brief background. Shitty preview, doing nothing to help you make a purchasing decision. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/514759/titan-s-throne-infested-archives?1892600

By WIll Flora
Prop Co Games
OSE
Level 1

A secret thieves guild, The Crimson Web, has stolen an artifact from the Archmage Twane*, and the party must recover it. Twane’s spies have deduced that the hideout for these thieves is a ruin located in the Feylight Wood, south of the small village of Edgewood. These thieves are of the utmost cunning, and Twane must warn the party that they have spies everywhere.

This 21 page adventure uses five pages to detail eleven rooms in a thieves lair in the woods. Nothing to see here but padded descriptions of prosaic encounters. Who woulda thunk it?

You are sent by a sage on a ten day journey overland (dude give you two weeks food rations. I guess you raid to come back home again?) to raid a thieves lair in the woods. The lair itself is …  I don’t know what it is. Is it a dungeon? A fort? Treehouses? We’re simply told that after searching the woods for awhile the party finds the lair … and then a dungeon map ensues. Fucking wonderful. This is, mind you, TWELVE MILES IN to the Feylight woods. The Feylight woods which are, by my calculation, cover some 972 square miles. I guess, though, we’re playing D&D tonight and this is what is in front of us. Nevermind the whole “questgiver”/Elminster shit. God forbid you want to make a buck instead of sucking off an old wizard. Anyway, did I mention the Feylight woods? They glow different colors. All the colors, the trees do. That’s covered in, like, once sentence. Sure man, let’s name the adventure after something that doesn’t matter. 

There’s a village on the edge of the woods. It has five buildings in it. There’s a smith. “Yargle, Honest, Halfling, works for any who need Smithing.” Yeah man, that’s what a smith does. They smith for people. And then there’s a windmill description. It tells us what a windmill does. It also tells us that if we climb to the top and look out the window, I kid you not, you can see the woods that are next door. This is just padded the fuck out for no fucking reason. The village doesn’t make sense. The shit IN the village is the flimsiest of pretexts to have an adventure. Five buildings. No support. 

The fun continues in the actual dungeon. Padded out. If/then clauses galore. “Should the players wander in to this area they will be able to see …” and “if they somehow light up the pit they will see …” 

Ultimately the dungeon comes down to stabbing a few folks. No real interactivity beyond that. Oh! Oh! There’s this room with two halls off of it, north and northwest. North leads to a room. Northwest goes straight for about a hundred feet and then just ends. DUH! Secret door. Unlocked. To the treasure room. The map makes no sense at all. I can get behind, I guess, telegraphing a secret door to be found, but to the treasure room?! 

At the end of the adventure the Elminster tells you that the artifact you were after, that was stolen from him, that you just murdered a bunch of people for, that you travelled a month for, that you most likely lost several party members for, was the first book he ever purchased. Seriously. No magical. Just ‘Tales of the Ancient Hero.’ A normal book. Fuck me man. Fuck me. You gotta start selling this for more than a dollar a bag; we lost four more men on this expedition!

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. You get to see that magnificent village. Poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/514909/filchers-in-the-feylight?1892600

By Michael & Brooke Strauss
ACKS II
The Pheonix Tome
Level ... 5?

In a remote forest far from civilization, an ancient faerie cultivates a garden of monsters created by his sadistic experiments, grafting plants onto beasts and men. His most prized creations are the corpse ower hybrids – horrors made from a dryad and her elven lover. These poor souls maintain their sentience and long for freedom. Meanwhile, the faerie caretaker searches for new victims to ensnare

This seventeen page adventure presents six encounters in a mad botanist fairies garden. As the page to encounter ration implies, it’s wordy, with little impact. Nice head crabs though!

This is, essentially, a single encounter location. There are six sub-sites, all within about two hundred feet of each other. The set up is that you stumble across it in a hex or some such. And old fey has a garden and he’s been grafting plants and people together. Notably, there are two that appear here: a dryad hybrid and an  elf hybrid, her former lover. Along the way you get his cottage, those two, a cave full of trolls, an awakened oak tree, and a chasm full of heads that have crab legs coming out of their mouths and scurry about. That, or, rather, the picture of that, is a highlight of the adventure. Nice and creepy. Otherwise, you’re gonna wander about wondering why you care, hit the fey’s cottage and get drawn in to a fight with him and his dogs. (Ths dogs bark when they detect someone, which will be inevitable, and that summons him, and he’s hostile, so …) I guess you also get his notebook telling you what hes up to. If you’ve randomly done things in the correct order then you can meet the dryad and elf encounters and convince them that they’ve been lied to. This lets you dig them up and take them back to the dryads tree where they die. Yeah! Also they give you some treasure for doing that. But, you gotta do it in the right order and make all the right choices, so … Really, there’s not a whole lot to this … especially for the page count. 

The troll encounter is just some trolls in a cave. The headcrabs are just some headcrabs in a chasm … with a chance of disease because of the filth. The tree is an angry old grumpy bug. These all take, I don’t know, a quarter page or less to describe? In fact, we’re looking at about 3.5 pages of text for the entire thing, with the six rooms of the gardeners cottage taking up two of those pages. The rest of this is padded out information. Long monster stat blocks in the black. Long if/then clauses. The actual encounters are, essentially, fact back minimalism expanded upon. “5A Troll Cave: A gang of five trolls and one troll champion nest in this shallow cave strewn with bones and refuse. A narrow tunnel at the back connects to 4 Headcrab Chasm. If the trolls are alive, there is an 80% chance that they are found in the cave. Buried under bones and refuse is a bronze statue of Talah, Queen of the Fire Elementals, with a large ruby mounted in her crown. The statue weighs 2 st. and the ruby is worth 6000gp” Dems your trolls cave. “ So, we’re looking at “nest in this shallow cave strewn with bones and refuse.” This is not exactly showcasing the delight of the english language. A little bit of padding with the IF the trolls are alive nonsense. 

Anyway, two problems with this adventure. Well, three major ones. First, the use of language. There is little effort here to conjure an evocative environment. This IS one of the value adds that a designer brings to the table with an adventure. You got a chance to think about it beforehand, you know the material and vibe better than anyone buying this, and you have a chance to really pour over the edit to make it come alive. Tersely. Otherwise I’m just rolling on Ye Olde Wandering table a couple of times and doing that. Let’s see, I rolled fairy, troll, and crab and treant. Ok. 

Related to this are the situations present. In this adventure we see one BIG thing going on: the fey is making hybrids. But this isn’t really a situation, it’s just an excuse to fight the dryad/corpse flower. Maybe the whole I trust the fey too much” thing that the dryad and elf are doing is a situation. You can, as the adventure points out, convince them otherwise. But I think not. This is just something associated with stabbing them. There is not situation in this adventure. Maybe the closest is the diseased refuse pile at the bottom of the chasm that, obviously, the party will want to search for loot. How to do it without getting diseased? Maybe A LOT more headcrabs and an obvious treasure would turn it in to even more of a situation, but I’m willing to go with whats written here. Theories just none of this in the adventure. It’s stabby stab stab with a lot of intricate backstory to explain why you have to stabby stab stab. I love stabbing, and I don’t need a backstory to do it. I need more than a stab, though, for a good adventure.

Finally the overwhelming amount of support material for a 3.5 page adventure. For 3.5 pages of adventure we get thirteen pages of support material. At some point you need to ask yourself if you are really writing an adventure or if you are writing support material and the adventure is the bonus. This would almost certainly not be something I gave a shit about, except that the adventure proper is so forgetful. Which means that all of that effort spent on the support material could have gone in to the adventure and, potentially, had it turn out much better. “Im gonna do great art and layout!” is another pitfall similar to this. The fucking adventure is the main thing. That has to deliver first. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview, and thus no chance to see what you are buying before you spend your filthy wage slave money.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/513169/the-garden-of-flesh-and-blood?1892600

By Aaron Gustwiller
Aaron's Gaming Stuff
S&W
Levels 1-3

[…] After the fire, the ruins gained a reputation an evil and cursed place, following the disappearance of several people in the nearby forest and a small group of adventurers that went to explore the site. But even though this reputation keeps people away, there is still much talk about what treasures may be hidden away in the catacombs beneath the ruins

This twelve page adventure uses about six pages to describe a two level dungeon with about 75 rooms. As the room count would indicate, it is pretty aggressively minimalistic, with faint hints of interesting situations that never really play out. 

There’s not much to go on here. This is just a site based adventure, two dungeon levels of a ruined monastery. We’re just told that there are ruins with an evil reputation and told that there are two entrances, one to the crypts and one to the catacombs. So, two levels and not a two-level dungeon. Beyond this, we’re on our own for a framing. This is, I think, fine. It’s a site, it’s a dungeon, off we go. I am more than a bit disappointed  by the environs around the dungeon, just getting a sentence or two description. This is nothing more, really, than just two isolated maps that have been keyed and little framing beyond that.

The maps are by Hartin, and are reasonable. Some small loops on the first one, the Crypts, and on the Catacombs more of a star design from a central room, in layout if not in practice, with a tendency for the dungeon, I think to play out in a more linear form. You go north and keep going north until you can’t anymore. They look pretty and there’s an interesting feature or two, but the core construction is not the greatest, I think. I’m exaggerating when I saw this, but you travel down a long hallway with doors to either side. It’s a little too linear and a little too … isolated because of the central hub design.

The core problem with this is in the room descriptions. While I usually go on and on about adventures with high page counts and a low number of encounters, there is also a thing where people go full on minimalist. If forced to select, I’d go that way also instead of droning on (touche’!) but that don’t mean it’s a good thing. If you’re room description is “There are 2 Skeletons armed with swords standing in the center of the room. “ (and that happens here, and I’m not cherry picking) then we have a few questions to ask ourselves.

Fundamentally, what is the point of a published adventure? I have struggled with my own answers to that, in contrast to what I see routinely published. We just roll on a random table and put monsters in rooms? That was Vampire Queen. The very minimalist approach that was taken in, say, B2 or G1?  And I mention those two specifically because of the range of quality, I think, that exists between them. A minimal description, almost on a wandering table, with perhaps a “ad the orcs are rolling dice” vs a more integrated environment for the encounters with better surrounding context … and yet still tending toward the minimal and terse side of the spectrum. And then go to the other end, with full on page or half page descriptions of rooms. Quarter page rooms. You know the type. Droning on to little purpose, confusing word count with gameable content. Somewhere in here is the right balance. Somewhere in here the designer has done more than I could have by rolling on a table by myself. And, thus, what value, to me, the purchaser? If I grab a map and roll random encounters to populate it … what value is there is a designer does that for me? If we roll on another table, of room features, and put a well in one room and a table in another … has enough value finally been added that I feel like Yes, I Do Not Feel Ripped Off. But I ain’t no senators son and Andrew Eldritch tells me that I need more. “The large, 10ft deep well in the center of the room is dry, with a pile of bones at the bottom” Is that enough? Are you not entertained? Well, maybe it’s better than two skeletons standing in a room? How about “A thin beam of light comes through a small hole in the ceiling and falls on the center of the room, where a knocked-over pedestal lays on the floor. On the pedestal is a broken, rusted iron sundial.” But there is nothing else here. You can’t set it up or repair it to some effect. It’s just like a room with a broken table, or the chess players in Dwimmermount. 

What’s lacking here is everything that would, in my opinion, add value to an adventure. There is little in the way of evocative language used to describe rooms. The interactivity here is almost always confined to stabbing things. And even that feels a little staid  I see anything here beyond a simple roll on a random table for a creature and another for maybe room contents and then turning that in to a sentence or two. It’s very VERY basic in the way it is presenting encounters. Not really any situations at all anywhere in it. Lareth? Nope.

So, I’m not really hating on this. I guess if you flopped this down in front of me at a cone I could run it immediately, which is more than I could say for most adventures. (This being the standard for when I ran games for the RPGA; no forewarning, just “run this” three minutes the game started”) But that’s small praise. No, it’s not a badly written monstrosity. It is instead a rather bland crawl.

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/514265/the-ruins-of-arbel-monastery?1892600

Also, I really wish I could find my old RPGA number from … 1979?

By R. Nelson Bailey
Dungeoneers Guild Games
1e
Levels 3-6

The dungeons of Mal-Thenga lie below the ruins of a once-great city, its name now lost in the dust of time. Long have adventurers come to its darkling halls in search of glory and treasure. Now, the forces of Law and Chaos ensconced in the sprawling complex’s blighted chambers vie for complete control of the dungeons. These dungeons once served as the seat of power for the enigmatic Two-Faced God. Here, minions of this forgotten deity patiently wait to fulfill the prophecy that will restore his shrine to its former splendor.

This 48 page dungeon presents a five level dungeon with about 120 rooms that is an exercise in tedium. An obscene amount of text working towards a mighty battle between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil, it engages in the chief of all adventure sins: To Be Read. 

Ruined city. Inside it is a ruined temple with a (single) 10×10 entryway leading to below. Under that a five level temple dedicated to the god that keeps lawful evil and chaotic evil in check. Battle your way through what I think is every level appropriate monsters in every monster manual to reach the demiplane where you unleash their cosmic warriors to do battle in the dungeon: LE vs CE!

And I have no idea why the party is there or engaging in things. To them, it is presented as just a dungeon. I guess, maybe, we are doing a Tharizdun thing here where you stumble on to something in what is otherwise a crawl? Anyway, you end up in this extraplanar place and the herald of LE and CE demand tokens and then they weigh out the tokens on a cosmic scale and blow some giant horns and then warriors stream out of gates and down stairs and through other gates only to meet in the dungeon proper and engage in a mighty battle between themselves and the dungeon occupants until one side wins. *whew*. Only I have no idea why the party, who have, I guess, stumbled on to them, are engaging in this activity. They are compelled, no save, to provide the tokens, which I guess is the parties only act in the process. But, also, just don’t? Go back home? The text tells us that tha the heralds will attack if the party resists. “Once engaged in melee, they strike with their weapons, inflicting terrible blows on the unbelievers with them. These beings offer their enemies no quarter and fight to the death. (Players who insist on battling the Heralds face a high likelihood of death. A merciful GM can have an astral deva appear to intervene on their behalf to battle this fell pair. If successful, the deva requires the party to complete a quest on behalf of a god of Good, or sacrifice at least 10,000 gp worth of money or goods in their name.)” Sure. AC0 and 54hp. I guess maybe if you are level three? 

But, also, by this time, you’ve battled through every monster in the books. Medusa. Orcs, gnolls, red dragon, ghouls, ghast, wights, zombies, beetles, origillions, cave fishers, piercers, heucuva, a blue dragon,manticores, hell hounds, minotaurs, trolls, toads, human NPCs, … the list goes on and on. Like, EVERYTHING in this place. But, sure, after making it through all of that those two 54HPd dudes are an issue. Maybe the AC. 

This is a fucking monster zoo. One room on the first level has two ghasts, five ghouls and eight zombies in it. The room leading to this one has a deadly spear trap blocking the way. The room on the other side of this one dead ends in a disenchanter room. Look, I don’t need bathrooms for my monsters, but, also, just a TAD bit of logic, please? And the  entire thing is like this. Just shit everywhere, for no real reason most of the time. A medusa and her scarecrow servant? Sure, why not? There’s no pretext at all.

The text here is OVERWHELMING. Each NPC gets multiple paragraphs, including some backstory. “Korghol works with the enchanter, Bin-Tarso (AREA 69). Together, they seek to dominate the entire Dungeons of Mal-Thenga for Chaotic Evil. The anti-paladin has a violent, vulgar disposition with a sardonic sense of humor. Korghol has an immensely frightening appearance, as fire horribly burned most of the upper portion of his body. The skin on his hairless, grotesque head looks like mottled, melted candle wax. He has a Comeliness rating of 0.” NONE OF THIS MATTERS. You’re just gonna stab him. Ok, so, maybe the hairless grotesque head with burn marks, but that’s it. And this happens for every NPC. In, like the very second room we have the exist described to us three separate times! Besides the map we halso have “Besides the passage leading to the surface, the great hall has seven other exits: four archways leading to AREAS 3 to 6; two large iron-bound doors to AREAS 18 and 23; two secret doors to AREAS 8 and 11; and a bronze door to AREA 7” and then also we have  “Bronze Door: This locked door is set in the middle of the north wall. It leads to the chapel (AREA 7).” It’s fucking insanity. At every opportunity as much text as is seemingly possible is stuffed in to the adventure to give a fully realized view. With little to no aid at the table. 

And How Can This Be?

It’s a kickstarter. Fucking $10k. Every couple of months dude hits for about $10k. Noice! Good job with the marketing! You have found a market and have created a product that appeals to them. A thing to be read. “As with all Dungeoneers Guild Games products, creating a module with quality production, artwork, and printing is the paramount goal of this project.” Uh huh. Production. Art. Printing. This is a memberberry. You get to buy it and read it an d remember the good old days before you gave up on being actively engaged in society. This made for nostalgia/made to read shit disgusts me. But, also, I admire it. Dude published. Dude is making bank. He can take his regular $10k and laugh at everyone else. If the warranty on a car is three years then we spec car parts that last three years and one day in order to build it. You can have quality. You can have a good adventure. You just don’t get it at Gordon Food Service. And that’s ok.

Or, at least, that’s what I am required to say in public. Privately these money grabs disgust me and I would prefer to live in a world of magnificence and wonder and cigarette trees created by the cacophony of sounds of a billion billion chisel-strokes of the Dionysian world-artist. Pardon me while I eat my McDouble.

This is $10 at DriveThru. No preview. Fuck you.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/513361/dungeons-of-the-two-kings-dungeon-delve-special-4?1892600

By Joey Brock
Self Published
Cairn

Ariel is now requesting that a brave adventuring party explore the Crimson Caverns and bring back this device, plus any other artifacts of Zeliah’s, for a generous reward of 100gp or possibly one of Ariel’s relics or spellbooks. Enter the Crimson Caverns and explore the abandoned hideout of the evil sorcerer Zeliah!

This seventeen page adventure features a cavern with sixteen rooms and a cave spider. Enjoy what is one of the lamest adventures I have ever come across.

Some asshat in a nearby village hires you to go explore some nearby caverns, the lair of an ancient evil wizard, and bring back a device they were working on. J’ACCUSE! The party is hired. Because all adventures must come from quest givers who give you 100 coins to go do something for them. And while I believe in the social contract, I would also like to think I have a little more free will and personal motivation than being a middle class quest slave my entire adventuring career. 

The caverns were the home to an evil wizard. Except the wizard isn’t actually evil, she just has some traps and people that wander in get accidentally killed. J’ACCUSE! Another adventure in which no one is actually evil. A world of misunderstandings where people don’t get pissed you killed their favorite pet, mean you no harm, and everything is solved by just … existing? I’m not looking for everything in an adventure to be cut and dried, and there’s certainly a place for normalcy to exist. But, also, you have to have SOMETHING in an adventure to get behind? If the normal and expected outcome is just to wander around and make friends with everyone, well, I guess that’s a vibe. But it’s not the vibe that I think most people are looking for in a game.

In this adventure you fight a giant spider. Maybe. If you go down that hallway. And, maybe, you fight two cave crickets, if you fuck with the moss on the wall that they are eating. Otherwise you just wander around and in to traps that don’t kill you. J’ACCUSE! Nothing to do. No challenge. No risk. No contention, or tension, in the adventure. Do you have to hack everyone down, like in a raid? No, certainly not, but, again, there needs to be some risk and tension in an adventure. 

“Pressing any incorrect glyph causes 1d6 skeletons to appear and attack the PCs.” Mind you, this is in a room without any skeletons in it. J’ACCUSE! This is abstracted. The monsters are not even in status, to let you know that fucking up will case consequences. Youjust push something and some skeletons “appear.” Skeletons in the room, bones, alcoves on the walls with bones in them, these all provide the smallest bit of framing for the encounter that will soon occur. But not here. Just *poof* here they are!

“On the floor is the corpse of an adventurer, clearly dead of blunt force trauma.” J’ACCUSE! Again, abstracted content. This is a conclusion. The oldest piece of writing advice is to show and not tell. The description is one of conclusions. We want a description that makes us think “Ah, an adventurer that has died of blunt force trauma!” Or, even better, a description of a body, and then further investigation by the party reveals that it is an adventurer and that they died of blunt force trauma. The key flow in a game is the back and forth between the party and the DM. They ask something or take an action, the DM follows up. That causes the party to further follow up. This back and forth is the heart of D&D. But not if you deal in abstracted conclusions.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. No preview, but it’s pay what you want, so, you know …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/504028/the-crimson-caverns?1892600