tenfootpole.org

By muv, Billman
Novis Ludis
OSE
Levels ?

The Lord and Lady Talbot are the last of their line, wealthy owners of a remote but productive silver mine. Over the past decade or so, things have changed. The Talbots have become reclusive, packs of wolves howl throughout the nights, and people have vanished without a trace.

This 25 page adventure has three encounters. With werewolves, mummies, Franenstein’s monster (fuck you!) and a vampire. And igor? A new low in 4e conversions. Or, someone’s home play style with OSE resembles the worst that 4e had to offer.

I went to see My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult once at Talbot street in Indy. So, now, yo uget a Talbot adventure.

I am disappointed. Shocking, I know. But this had a decent start! The party is in a village, a mining village, when an earthquake hits. Miners are trapped! Off to the rescue! See, now that’s something I can get behind. A great big communal rescue job. The party as a part of a bucket brigade or making a human chain to reach someone in a flood/river. This is how people act. It’s relatable. When the party, the players, can react to situations like this, situations that are real, that have that flavour of reality to them, then it sticks much more with them. The players get  motivated, and that is SOOOO much more better than the characters being motivated or resignation to the monday night hook.  So, the premise, generally, is that some miners get trapped by an earthquake.

But, also, generally is all you’re getting here. There’s no real information about the cave in, etc. To quote the adventure “Early the next morning, a small tremor rocks the village. Miners pour from the silver mine calling for help; a cave-in has trapped and possibly killed miners!” That’s it. The adventure then transitions in to encounter one. Oh, I did mention that there are only three encounters, right? In 25 pages? Oh, but it gets worse! More on that in a minute. I was looking forward to some greedy mine owners, foremen, a company store, wildflowers, crying kids, lunch pails and the whole lot. Nope. Just that little bit I copied above. 

There are mountains and mountains and mountains of text in this. Backstory, almost all of it. I think we’re told three time that “Lord Talbot’s mind shattered and he became obsessed with disturbing uses of alchemy.” At least three times. To get us to those three announcers, each of which  takes about a page to describe. In the mine you get attacked by werewolves. At the lords castle you get attacked at the gates by mummies. In the great hall you get attacked by Frankensteins Monster and a vampire. Yes, I have accidentally reviewed a halloween adventure, I guess. I try to avoid those for exactly these reasons. Anyway, there’s no castle details and no treasure in this adventure. No silver in spite of it being a silver mine. No treasure in the castle. Or magic items. Must be something inside, says El Senor Ant. Clearly no one has ever leveled in OSE before. Strange, but the adventure is FOR OSE, yes? Hmmm … Three encounters. A page for each. A map for each encounter that has multiple areas on it … I know what that means!

4e.  Look, I’m not gonna hate on 4e. I mean, sure, it’s a disgusting pile of shit, but, if you want to enjoy your tactical minis combat then you should be able to enjoy it without me dumping on it. It’s just not my cup of tea, because I don’t like a giant turd floating in my cup. To each his own, though. 

This is clearly a 4e conversion. I’m not sure how anything could be more clear. The maps here are of an area. So, encounter one is a map with like ten locations on it, each with one sentence like “two werewolves start here” and shit like that. Nothing evocative at all. Just minis combat notes. Mechanics. And the same with encounters two and three; large area maps for you to tactically move on. “Blacksmith – this shop is functional and appears to be in occasional use (Lord Talbot sometimes uses it in his work)” Just notes about the extensive bestiary. No one cares about treasure. No one cares about descriptions. No one cares about roleplaying or situations. Just tactical minis combat. 

Oh, hey, did I mention tha the opening read aloud mixes third person and second person narrative, in amazing levels of abstracted text? No? Oh,ok.

We do not do that here. A shitty shitty 4e adventure pretending to be OSE. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $4. The preview lets you see encounter one. Not that I’ve seen the entire thing the 4e nature is obvious.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/498351/dark-clouds-over-castle-talbot-ose?1892600

By directsun
Self Published
Knave2
Level 2

The viscount’s son has been kidnapped. The worst is feared when a ransom paid does not return the son. But could the truth be far darker – or wilder – than anyone suspects? See what actually happens! The win, smoke and forbidden potions flow freely in a reckless spree of medieval excess. It’s a whirlwind of power, pleasure, and peril. WIll they survive the highs, or lose their souls to drug-crazed abandon!

This sixteen page adventure details about eighteen rooms in six pages inside of a cave complex that is an old cult site full of horny ghosts and hand abominations. It wants to be a frat party with monsters in the basement and a portal to elsewhere. It’s not that at all.

Ok, dudes son was kidnapped and not returned when the ransom was paid. Some drunks bought a bunch of booze at a rural bar with the ransom gems. You’re sent in to get the son back. It’s obvious, I think, that the son is behind everything, just from that summary. You track them back to a small cave system that once housed a drunken cult. Inside are the drunk and drugged up youths and a bunch of friendly spirits that are going to eat their souls.  You have to destroy the body of the high priest spirit, which you get at by going to a demiplane like place inside the mouth and over the tongue of a giant head that talks to you. Fun! 

The magic items here are pretty decent. A jar of pupae that when ate turn you in to a horsefly for a turn. A small silver gorilla status that, when shaken, hoots more and more until an irritated angry gorilla pops out. Now THATS how you write a figurine of wondrous power! The most abusable is a jade frog that turns you in to a bullfrog when you kiss it. I’m not a big fan of mechanics but that one may need some limits, although seeing Ra turn in to a bullfrog would be cute.

There’s also an encounter or two that is decent. “Shelves full of tomes and trinkets cover the east and west walls. A massive openmouthed head fills the north, saturating all in oppressive red light.” And then the tongue A thick, curvy tongue drapes limply over her chin, resting on a dark altar” There’s more. The head is alive and speaks and tells you you would be much more comfortable inside of the mouth. Walk right up on the tongue! You can see inside … a mystical realm/room awaits! That’s a nice little vignette. There’s a great piece of artwork also, of ono the monsters, a combination of many many arms and hands. It gives very creepy vibes. 

Alas, our time with the positive has come to an end …

I hate it when I have to validate the views of the prols. This is using a bullet point type format slightly reminiscent of other bullet/bolded formats. And it’s bad. It’s not bad because of the bullet format; the starting with a couple of short sentences and then expanded upon on certain things with section headings with bullets. It’s bad because it’s not very evocative at all and the choices for both language and subject, on what to expand upon are not well made. If we assume the platonic form of a format that is not going to save an adventure that implements it badly. And, in this, it’s done poorly. The initial text tends to the purple side of the spectrum. “Sounds of snores harmonize with the gentle undulations of a colossal humanoid—their over-sized limbs draped languidly over a Barrel.” I’m afraid this is a critical case of thesaurus syndrome. We must imagine a scene and then try to describe it, not just pick out words from the dictionary. And then we tend to get bullets that expand on mechanics or some slavish minutia. The major heading of Ratbird Nest then tells us, in the first indented bullet, that “?Grape-sized, veiny eggs. Silhouettes are visible throughbtranslucent shells.” and then we get another level of indentation and bullets with “? Ratbird eggs (12).” We’re engaged in post-modernism at this point, with bullets, bolding and indents just for the sake of having them, as Moe would say.

In another example we have a back entrance to the place: “On the south side of the rocky hill is a three-foot-diameter dug-out hole that tunnels through the earth. HOLE ?Handprints in the loose earth. ? Made by Pluckerfiends (p. 14). ?Speed is halved. Checks at -5. ?Leads to Escape Hole (p. 8).” You’re gonna have to imagine the indentations rather than the run on Im using. But, also, We see backstory/explanatios and this need to tell us what the map already tells us. Certainly not the worse sin, in this example, but we see this over and over again.

And this comes to the detriment of actual content. It is, for the most part, lacking. The room descriptions are not the greatest, while they are terse. They come off as boring and the expanded bullet sections to little to augment them. Combine this with an interactivity that is also somewhat lacking: doing rugs and stabbing things. The map annoys me, having page numbers on it instead of keys, but in the grand scheme of things I’ll live.

You, however, will not live. Those pluckerfiends? Remember the level range here, 2? 14 HP each, attacking at level 3. Every time you’re hit you need to make a save or your soul is plucked from your body and replaced. The last room, with the ghost last boss? That’s got twelve of them in it. You not making it there though; there;s more than enough on the wanderer table or other rooms, in threes and fours, to fuck you up before then. CHA save my ass. I THINK I know how a CHA save should work in Knave2 … maybe I’m wrong?

The formatting and bullets make this an outline, but not a great one. Things just don’t click, from an interactivity standpoint. Great magic items, ut the drug/alcoholCHA save stuff is a bit heavy handed, I think, for level 2. All for a transparent hook that is expanded enough for me and a cult ending that doesn’t have enough lead in for me.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $7.50. The preview is everything, as a PWYW should be.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/497712/with-the-cult-of-crimson-revelers?1892600

By Ramsay McGregor
FantasyBound
D&D
Levels 2-3

The church in the village of Endmarsh have asked the adventurers to investigate dancing lights that flicker across the horizon of the sea. This phenomenon started at the same time as when fishermen had begun mysteriously disappearing, and the folk of Endmarsh started experiencing haunting dreams and whispering voices at night. The Graenician priests of the Endmarsh church will pay a handsome sum of 230 gold crowns to investigate and if possible, remove this supernatural incursion.

This six page adventure uses four pages to describe … six encounters? Long overwrought read-aloud, wall of text DM notes, plot, backstory, it’s got it all. The concept here should be, like, a quarter page in a larger dungeon.

Oh no! Lights on the horizon of the ocean! Missing fishermen! Strange dreams! Better have the church spend a bunch on some adventurers so they can take a rowboat out to investigate! Once out to see you hear some voices. You land on an island and see a puka chained to a cart. You go down some stairs in to a ruin and maybe fight some zombies. You go in to another room and maybe fight a revenant. And, a 50% chance, you might a 5hd witch. Then there’s three more boring rooms, one of which has a magic gate you can step through. Your weekly evening of torment is now over.

The read-alouds are long. People get bored listening to long read-aloud. Don’t put in long read-alouds. You get three, maybe four sentences tops. The first real adventure page of this is taken up by almost a column or so of read-aloud. The read-aloud is in italics. Don’t do that. Italics, or any weird ass font, is hard on the eyes. You lose your place. It’s a cognitive burden. You can use italics to highlight a word or two, but if you want to offset a decent chunk of text, like read-aloud, then use another method. Shade it. Use white space. Th read-aloud over reveals information. A core feature of an RPG is the back and forth between the players and the DM. How they ask questions and interact with the game world and then the DM responds to that. If your read-aloud over reveals information then you are working against that model. When you tell us, in the read-aloud, what the etching on the inside of the cauldon says then you prevent the players from walking over to the cauldon, the DM describing it. The players examining the cauldron and the DM describing it, and so on. Don’t over reveal in your read-aloud. The read-aloud is very second person focused. “You feel …” or “You find yourself …” This is a symptom of poor writing. The designer is trying to tell the party hat to think. Instead, a better practice is to describe what is going on in way that makes the party think “oh, i feel sad/angry/whatever.” Besides, it seldom takes in to account the fact that the party is invisible, dig through the top of the room with shovels, or some other, now destroyed, implicit assumption that the designer has made. 

The text of the adventure is overwrought. “You feel the sudden pressure of the ocean against this unnatural island as you continue downwards until at last, after a minute, you feel yourself touch the base of this underground ruin” You don’t need this. This focus on feeling. Calling it an unnatural island. Until at last. This is all text that tends to the purple side of prose. Again, we’re trying to make the players think “man, this island is unnatural!” not TELL them that the island is unnatural. You know, showing instead of telling. 

There’s also this tendency to dump in awkward wording. At the end of the zombie room encounter the text tells us “The witch has since placed a terrible spell on the bodies.” This is referring to, I’m 90% sure, the fact that the bodies are now zombies. And, yet, its … trivia? Padding? Or when the party arrives on the beach of the island the text eventually gets around to telling us “There is nothing of value on the coast besides a silver bracelet worth 60 silver crowns.” This is an awkward way of saying there’s a bracelet on the beach. It would have been far, far better to say its sticking out of the sand, or catching a glint of sun or something instead of saying There is nothing on the coast except.” And, then, the famous if/then statements appear. “IF the adventurers open the party.” Which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be IF the party opens the chest, but whatever. Samesies. No if/then statements in adventures. That’s padding. “If they do, the GM will read or show them the following …” 

There’s no real interactivity. The last room has a teleport gate with a book in a different room telling you how to operate it. You might fight some zombies or a revenant. The main baddie, the witch/necromancer, only has a 50% chance of actually showing up in the adventure. That might be fine for longer term play, I guess? But, also, I’m not sure anything takes place here. Talk to the pooka, I guess. Free some air spirits. I don’t know. “ 

There’s not really anything here of any interest.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. There’s no preview but it’s Pay What you Want, so, there/s that.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/496605/moss-stone-steel-the-whispering-lights?1892600

By Mr. Pilgrim Tomes
Self Published
OSE
Levels 2-3

The Malatir tribe has escaped the goblin hordes that invaded their home after a catastrophic defeat. They have since found refuge in a narrow canyon, occupying some ancient ruins. With them, they have brought six wyvern cubs, a holy creature to the Malatir. However, the canyon is not empty. On the opposite end of the canyon a group of snake-men have occupied an old dam where they conduct blood rituals and sacrifices to their ancient god, the Anathema. Now the Malatir are in dire straits, too weak to defend themselves and with the perfect sacrifice for the Anathema in their home. Without help the Malatir are destined to vanish in the throes of a gruesome ritual, their souls lost to an horrid god hunger.

This eleven page adventure uses four pages to describe eleven rooms in a small complex full of yuan-ti. Simplistic rooms with little interactivity beyond stabbing the snakeman in the room. The boring snakemen in the room.

Ohs Nos! The hunter gatherer tribe had three people kidnapped by the snakemen! If you go save them then they will give you a rope! I swear to fucking god. This is the most boring tribe ever. You get nothing. They are a gunter gatherer tribe and they have five little wyverns. That’s all you get to work with. And I’m not fucking around here, there is no other information to work with. Nothing. No chief. No matriarchal society. Nothing else. This has got to be one of the thinnest pretexts I’ve ever seen. Again, you don’t need a fucking hook, but when the point of the adventure is to save the fucking people then one might expect that you interact with the fucking people a bit and thusly there might be just the brest shed of information to help the DM bring that to life. But no.

The descriptions here are frustrating. We don’t get the steaming jungle motif frequent with snake men. Instead they are hold up in a dam. And that’s ok, we don’t have to trope it out. But, also, the dam descriptions don’t really work for me. We get occasional references to “machinery” in some of the rooms, but no real evocative descriptions of them. “A giant broken machine injected with bronze tubes lies motionless on the northern wall, a once powerful turbine, now useless.” And that’s a good one, relatively speaking. The descriptions repeat items from the map, sometimes incorrectly referring to the map features, and there is the occasional reference to room purpose that does nothing but pad out the description with no impact, such as “The room is used to extract information, screams and organs from the snakemen’s captives, a procedure done by their leader Ssilviss.” The prison tells us “This small room with barred doors houses

the snakemen’s prisoners awaiting the ritual. They are beaten up and cannot fight, but are still conscious” No real squalor or anything else that could be evocative. 

Interactivity is limited to stabbing snakemen and occasionally opening a valve to flood a room/complex. At one point we’ve got a lookout in the text, buried deep inside a description, that shold be able to se ethe party approaching the dam, but no real indication hes there WHEN the party is approaching, or any order of battle which would reflect the nakemen reacting to the party, in that case or any other. I might note, also, that the bestiary gives us the stats for “snakemen” and then in that description gives us a one liner that modifies them for purebloods … while there are no snakemen, just purebloods in the adventure. And no mention at all of the “thralls” that sometimes inhabit the rooms, either in stat, description or how they react. The dam, proper, with its turbines … does nothing? 

Simplistic descriptions that are not very evocative and basic interactivity. It’s a raid mission, not exploratory, so some of that is ok. But it just seems like there be so much more to support that type of adventure. Lookouts, reactions, some intrigue, maybe? A basic adventure that isn’t really making a lot of mistakes, but also isn’t really doing anything too interesting.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.46. The preview is four pages and the last page shows you two of the, quite basic, rooms. So, decent preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/495235/the-snake-s-nest?1892600

By Chris Bissette
Self Published
A Dungeon Game
Levels 1-3

Beneath a desolate moor lies an enigmatic maze, its twisted corridors teeming with treacherous traps and remnants of ill-fated adventurers who dared to tread its path. The Moss Mother guards her home against all intruders, but there are great rewards to be had for those who brave her hallways. Immerse yourself in a world of rot, rust, and rebirth, where the echoes of buried legends stalk your every move.

This 31 page adventure presents a maze with about thirty rooms in it. It leans heavily toward minimalism, in a bad way, with a few encounters that punch things up a bit. A slow affair, it feels like the tedium of a maze inflicted on the party.

Good Literature makes you feel something. Hence my rotting leg of lamb story. We empathize. Or, at least we should. But, what if the feelings we experience are unpleasant? What then? We can be excused for only reading Thieves World from then on, I suppose, being creatures of free will. And, what of an adventure? If I don’t have fun. If I am instead confronted simply with tedium. Am I allowed to say, forever and ever, that I don’t like D&D? The adventure, as a technical document. Meant to help the DM run the game. To facilitate the DM facilitating the players having fun. Inspiring the DM, but in a way that makes it easy for them. And providing the elements for the players to interact with so they can have fun. We ignore outside conditions, after all, a good DM could …

There are parts of this adventure that do a good job conveying the mood of a scene or providing an interesting environment. You can meet a formed adventurer, in town, missing an eye and both legs from the knee down. Ouchies! That’s fun! And, there is an occasional decent room description. “Long chains hang from the ceiling and trail across the ground, hundreds of them, so many that it’s impossible to make out details of the dimensions of the room or whether there are other exits.” or maybe “The gibbering head of a bearded man mounted on a barbed spear thrust into the iron floor with abominable force. His ribs rest on the floor, forming a cage around the base of the spear in which his lungs still flutter and his heart” These are, I think the best examples. And that last one a very good description. Gibberring. Bearded. Barbed. The rib cage on the floor, rotted away. That paints a magnificent picture of a scene. That’s exactly what a description should do! We get a real sense of the place. We feel something. And that allows th DM to then communicate that onward and riff on it to the players.

But alas, these are few and far between. Nothing reaches the heights of that spear scene. There are a couple of other rooms, maybe three others, with descriptions that, I would assert, actually exist. The rest of the room descriptions either do not exist or are so minimal so as to be little more than Empty Room. “Thick chains hang from hooks in the ceiling. They creak loudly if disturbed.”

And this is a problem. The rooms have little int he way of description. And little in the way of meaningful interactivity. We get traps in some of them, and, I think, four rooms with creature sin them? Although one of them has 1HD. So. You know. Does that count?  Other rooms are just … weird? A room with talking gargoyles that can’t otherwise move and taunt the players. A room with a dude hiding out on a platform, with no other use to him. It feels … hollow? Empty? Why is that encounter there? Certainly, not every encounter needs a reason, but some of them should make sense sense. Or fit in, perhaps? And I’m not sure that a lot of these contribute. 

The overall effect here is one of tedium. There’s just not much going on. Only, like, three or four rooms have creatures? And I’m not saying that hacking is the end all be all, but I’m looking for SOMETHING to interact with on a meaningful level. A few traps, sure. But you wander about the maze. And, eventually, the high HD dragon shows up and you need to RUN. (I note that I think FEAR/Running is a sure path to a TPK in a dungeon. Fleeing in to the unknown is a sure fire way to end up dead in an exploratory dungeon.) I get that there is supposed to be a stalked through the dungeon thing going on, but the speed of the dragon means that you have to run, not retreat, and running leads to death. The problem is that running, in this dungeon, is not a fail state. It’s just a quirk of the wanderer chart. That you can’t avoid BECAUSE ITS A MAZE.

I note two other points. That spear in that description? You can be killed by violence while wielding it. Holy shit! And, then, at the end, we get some advice that the magic lup of metal at the end of the adventure “if you intend to continue your campaign you may decide that

selling it requires finding a buyer. You may also wish to consider the ramifications on your campaign world of a sudden influx of highly toxic material into local economies, and how this might impact future sessions.” That’s not too bad, as advice goes. But a couple of specific examples would have been better. Specificity is always better. Not verbose, but specific. 

So, a couple of highlights but essentially tedium that has the deck stacked against you. 

This is 5 pounds at itch. You’ll be getting no preview, so SUCK IT L0SERS!

https://loottheroom.itch.io/moss-mother

By Eduardo Raffo Carozzi
Breeding Calamities
Generic/Universal

Year after year, the monks meditate and pray with the desire to get closer to enlightenment. They boast of having abandoned the desires of this material world, of being one with the Universe, however, no one is beyond temptation and many times the most devout are the first to be corrupted.

This thirty page outline is trying to convey the hunt for a demonic beast in a small village and with their growing anxiety and panic. It’s way too wordy for what it is with not nearly enough gameable assistance. Great NPC’s though.

On the first page the adventure tells us “This is just the sketch of the adventure …” Well, fuck me man. I guess if I knew that going in to this I MIGHT have still purchased it. I do have an academic interest in adventure sketches; enough information to get the thing going but far fewer pages than a traditional adventure. But, also, I thought I was buying an adventure. I’m not buying an adventure though, as I learned. That makes me sad. It makes me feel like I’ve been cheated. I did NOT want the clearcoat. I feel like going on a diatribe about this. I will save everyone the explicit insight and just say that the buyer should know what they are getting.

Ok, so, a monk is sick. The party comes up to the monastery to help and the dude implodes. Or escapes to the village and implodes. Either way, a monster now stalks the village at night killing people a night.The party gotta stop it. Errr…. Should stop it? Could stop it? 

There are two good parts to the adventure. The designer knows they are the good parts. They ARE what the adventure is. The core of it. The first is the list of village NPC’s. It’s a good list. An entry or so takes a full page. Others take columns. Others are a paragraph or two. So, yes, the writing is WAYYYYYYY too long. (In a small fucking font that looks like wall of fucking text. Jesus man, give a dude a break!) And the adventure is in DESPERATE need to a summary sheet for the NPC’s. The name, occupation, age, relationships, secrets. Somehting like that, so I can look at one page (NOT IN A SMALL FUCKING FONT!) and work them in the on-fly social interactions in the village as the game progresses. But man oh man oh man, the NPC’s are good. The dollmaker digs up a body every couple of years and has a basement full of zombies that he makes. He’s going to be a strong ally of the party in their hunt for The Beast. No, seriously. He is. He’s devoted to the village. The Reeve is cooking the books and has been sleeping with the local milkmaid. If she dies then he goes fucking nuts, in a small way, rounding up all of the young men and going on a vengeance hunt for the Beath, making a lot of mistakes in his hubris/anger. That’s fucking good. That’s real life. And the hits just keep coming and coming. Including a farmer with good yields, five kids, a young and beautiful wife who cooks well. “He is living his best life” the text tells us. Oh man, the ways I could use that! The NPCs work with the adventure their shit makes sense IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ADVENTURE. It’s not just random trivia, it’s things that can help enrich the adventure. 

The other nice part is a small, three event, section. There’s a mechanic called VIllage Hive Mind, or some such, which basically tracks the mood in the village. As people die their IMP score is subtracted from a starting total. More important, liked NPCs subtract more. When it reaches a certain level then people start a mass exodus from town. When it gets still lower then some people start to think they should worship the Beast,leading to a confrontation and death in the town square. The third and last event is The Rapture, where they kind of go buts. They start self sacrificing themselves to The Best, or “the people begin to voluntary surrender themselves to the Beast, worshiping it like some kind of god and letting the monster absorb them as it evolves into its Abyssal Phase.” Sweet! I fucking love it! Again, mirroring a kind of dark human nature in extreme pressure trope. Alas, these event section are quite short, just a couple of sentences each. 

That is, essentially, the adventure. There are no real maps of the monastery. Or the village. Or any events to speak of. No kills. And while there’s quite the focus on the ecology of the monster there is not a whole lot on how to use it during play. 

The designer recognizes, correctly, that the adventure they are building is a kind of paranoid monster hunt where the creature also stalks the villagers. That is a social adventure and the designer knows that. The NPCs would be the heart of that, the designer recognizes that and a substantial focus, via page count, is there. The second support, though, would be the events. And while there is that very basic outline, that could use a great deal of supplementing. More kills. More vignettes and so on. Somehting for the DM to riff more on. SHort, just a couple of sentences each, but there for the DM to sprinkle in. Do you need maps? Well, no, not really. Not very good ones anyway, like an exploratory map. But, also, having a map of the monastery and village, just a rough one, not really keyed much, would have helped a lot also. 

It’s very hard for me to get over the small font and extreme number of words that is taken to describe almost everything. Those three events, of just a couple of sentences each, that’s about the right size for what it is. You could get away with a few more sentences there, maybe. But, other than that, almost every entry in this just drones on and on and on, with the smaller font making it even harder to scan the text for the important details. The large page count here is almost entirely wasted. Yeah, there’s a hunt wandering monsters in the wilderness so you can craft minigame. And that’s ok also. But the main monster text focuses on the wrong things about the monster. Ponderous, I guess. The text is ponderous. The phrasings and vocabulary choices are off just a bit, which may be an EASL issue,  but that’s not really a problem. The ponderousness of the verbosity. That’s the issue.

Reference sheet for NPC’s. More events/kills/etc. A couple of throw-away maps. Bonus points if they have some features that enable some interesting play. Cut the word count drastically and pump up the font. 

I leave it as am exercise for the reader if generic/universal is appropriate or if you just stat shit for D&D and be donet with it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. No preview, but, with PWYW you can look at the entire thing. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/445024/killing-grounds?1892600