tenfootpole.org

by GMaia
Knight of the Lake Games
OSR
Levels 7-9

In the murky night of the past, none now can recall the dire events that led to the demise of Elophant and the onset of the epoch of incivility, wherein wisdom, wellbeing, and happiness were supplanted by fear, hatred, and ignorance. The few survivors who witnessed the impious assassination managed to erect a sanctuary, that Elophant might not fade into oblivion, nor the virtues it embodied be forgotten. In such an underground sanctuary, a balance has long existed that allowed coexistence between two incompatible social groups. The place provided both groups with the resources to survive without conflicts. Recently, this balance has been weakening due to the natural consequence of areas with limited resources: one of the two groups has increasingly fewer means of subsistence, bringing the situation to a critical level.

This seventeen page adventure uses three pages to describe about ten rooms on … a megadungeon level? It’s got a decent setup and a couple of nice general ideas, but it squanders it by not actually doing much with the setup in question.

Or the surrounding areas. Or the room descriptions. Or almost anything else in the adventure. Well, except the monster summary sheet. There is one of those and I appreciate that. But the adventure proper, yes? Or, at least the setup.

There is a level on a megadungeon. In the middle is a large lake. Over on one side of the lake are the caves of the Starry Eyed Cavemen. Degenerate humans, they are the descendants and guards off the sacred god towers of the elephant. It’s tusks. They been here a couple of millennia and are chill with it. Interestingly, they have some mental powers (hence the starry eyes) that focus on a lot of communication. It’s random, from a table, but most of the entries are like Read Emotions, or Understand language (but not speak it), or Transmit one word telepathically. You can see how this would play out when the party first meet them, with the random distribution of powers and the chance to misunderstand intent and so on. Nice! Ok, back to the lake. On the other side are some other caves, these inhabited by the Lime Trolls. They lick limestone as a food source. They are chill also. Well, they were chill, now they are not. They are running out of limestone formations to lick. But you know who has some? The Starry Eyed Cavemen.

This is a classic set up for a great level. I wanna lick your god towers and you don’t want me to. Some of the best dungeons ever designed have this sort of thing going on. Toss in a decent map so things can breathe and fill in some minor players and maybe a few hidden rooms and get those factions moving against each other! Get those party fireworks working in the gas factory!
But that doesn’t happen here. This most excellent of premices is squandered. There is no expansive dungeon map. A few caves for the trolls which amount to “the six troll families live in these caves.” Much the same for the cavemen caves, except you also get The Three Trials. Test your strength, purity, blah blah blah. That’s it. No other encounters. No other oom for things to happen. No causing trouble or getting help from others or anything like that. So, maybe, you can go all Yojimbo on it? Nope. There’s not really any personalities to key off of either, or any subplots by the subleader or shamen. It is what you see in the most obvious way. This is a great, great shame.

Sometimes the trolls attack the cavemen. There is a system to resolve that. 1d4+1 trolls attack. If they lose then “the GM must count 10% of the losing group as losses in terms of lives.” I have no fucking idea man. Also, on the other side, in one of the two ways the trolls can attack is “the entire village.” So, 10% of “the entire village I guess. This kind of weirdness is prevalent all throughout. I am somewhat curious if this is a case of EASL, but, also, EASL doesn’t cause the 10% thing. And, tere is someones name attached to this for revisions, so, … did they revise?
Some of the rooms are columns long. Some of them are, like, two sentences. In most cases they are not evocative descriptions AT ALL. The best is the soft white glow of the god towers in the dark; the elephant tusks. Oh! oh! The treasure room! “The GM can consider a type G treasure stored in this place.” Thanks the fuck a lot man! I am inspired!

I’ve been running across these weird adventures lately. They are bad in such interesting new ways! I know people want to blame other systems or some such, but I think it has to be the influence of other media, maybe? You have to have had SOMETHING that you’ve seen before that you subconsciously emulate. I don’t want to be a dick here, but, also, before you Jabberwocky maybe you should learn to spell?

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is four mostly useless pages. The last one has a small Background section that gets to the decent framing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524058/the-god-towers-of-the-elophant?1892600

by Peter Gray
Self Published
OSRIC
Level ... 3?

There is something rotten going on in the backwater Barony of Near-Marsh and the region’s noble, The Countess DeWitt has sent the heroes to investigate.  Green hooded outlaws, maniacal heirs, a village razed to the ground and a lonely tower far out in the marshes all have their parts to play.

This ten page adventure uses four pages to loosely outline a peasant revolt. I have no idea why it takes five pages to describe what it does.

Ready? Got your pencils out? I’m going ti write an adventure for you. Here we go: “Clueless Baron has an evil son and the survivors one HIS villages that he razed are now bandits gathering evidence against him while he tries to find them and kill them.” Git it? Ok, now you owe me $35 a month from my Patreon or something.

That’s it. that’s all you’re getting. From me or this adventure. There are almost no specifics or details beyond what I’ve just typed. Oh, sure, people get names as do places, but nothing more. Quirks? No. Timeline? No. Actions? No. There is NOTHING on those five pages to add to what I’ve just typed. And the last five pages are state blocks. In spite of the adventure having a Role Play not Roll Play section. 

Ok, so, I guess I lied, there are a few specifics. If you ask too many questions when you arrive then evil son sends some henchmen disguised as rebels to attack the party. And in, like, seven days he sends two henchemen in to the swamps to map a way to the rebel hideout, a spy he planted having paid off, with an attack planned by him four days later.

Now, seriously, that IS it. There is nothing more to be gained by grabbing this adventure. I am so disappointed. You see, there I was suffering under the yoke of the adventures backstory, when I came upon this: “Thirteen months ago, Edric was out hunting with his friends and some loyal guards. Drinking during the day and making an early camp they rapidly became drunk and looking for female company, they decided to take some maidens from the nearby village of Lock Lea. Understandably the villagers, already unhappy at the increasing taxes resisted. After a heated battle several of Edric’s men were killed or injured, the village was put to the torch by the remainder, and the villagers fled. Painting the incident to his father as an unprovoked attack by the locals, the surviving villagers have been declared outlaws.” Hey hey! Not bad! If that was the ONLY backstory then we’d have a winner of an introduction. It’s not. You have to suffer a lot to get there, And there’s nothing else in the adventure that even comes close to comparing to it.

Man, you gotta actually DO something when writing an adventure. Right now this isn’t even the outline of an adventure, it’s just an idea. Other than just saying “evil henchmen disguised as rebels attack the party”, you need to do more. Other scenes .her incitements to action. There are not even any NPC personalities. Jesuso Christo, you want the party to go talking to NPCs and gathering information and then you present ABSOLUTELY ZERO in the way of NPCs to talk to or information to gather. I mean, ZERO. I know, I can be hyperbolic at times, but in this case it truly is ZERO. 

I can understand an outline of an adventure. Let’s say you publish a book and each page, or facing pages, is the rough outline of an adventure with high points and such. Not my cup of tea, but I can understan how it can fit in. I can even understand an adventure idea product. One of those “101 encounter to have the road” or something like that. That makes sense to me. Again, not what I would consider an adventure, but I can understand it. What I can’t understand is an idea that takes ten pages to describe … and coming away with nothing more than what a short paragraph might say.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is all ten pages, so, good preview at least.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/523940/the-peasants-are-revolting?1892600

By Christopher Capone
Wicked Cool Games
OSR
Levels 2-3

Long Ago, the folk of Rhu made an agreement with a witch to save their tree-thorp from destruction.  She honored the agreement, but the folk broke their promise.  Soon the village was razed.  Now, years later, the adventurers must delve into Rhu to find a lost friend and deal with the evil still lurking within the ruins.

This 34 page adventure uses about four pages to describe a burned down village with ten locations. It wants a creepy horror vibe, but the lack of much evocative content lends itself to more of an abstracted vibe. Too bad because it’s got a nice premise. 

Ah, a tale as old as time: the town didn’t pay their dealer. Specifically, they bargain with a witch to save the town from attack, she keeps up her end and then they don’t give her the baby teeth that they agreed to. They didn’t even have to yank em out! She was content with them falling out naturally. The kids go missing and when they come back, with amnesia, they are carrying these little sack dolls. And then one night the dolls murder everyone and burn the town down. Oops. We’ve got a witch, murderous little sack dolls with knives that turn you to dirt if they kill you, baby teeth … good stuff! But the adventure doesn’t really know what to do with it all. This kind of excellent horror/folklore vibe just doesn’t come through. The burned down town doesn’t feel like a burned down town at all. The creepy little dolls get a “giggle when they run away” thing, but thats it. The entire horror vibe, along with a ghost child or two, just isn’t creepy. 

It’s hard, I gotcha, to write some evocative text and transfer the vibe, the intent in your head, on to the written page in such a way that the DM on the other side can pick it up and run with it. But, also, that’s a decent chunk of what folks are paying for in an adventure … to get the vibe that the designer is putting down. 

That’s not what we get here though. There is a lot of lead in. A starting village with people to talk to … which doesn’t really lead anywhere. There’s no real mystery to solve. There’s no amulet to burn or anything. You’re there for [pretext] and the entire framing, the entire backstory, is just there to explain the presence of the little sack monsters. Thus all o the NPC interactions in town are for nought. The wilderness encounters as well. Those don’t have to lead to something, but, also, they don’t So all of those pages, all of that text, is for nothing. What if, instead of all of the useless town material, and the description of a forest that the party will never enter, instead that effort was put in to the burned down village? To bring it alive? To give the party something to do in the village except stab little sack monsters. There is a dead dude trapped in a soul gem, but he’s just there to explicitly provide monologue and explanations, to bring out the backstory. Likewise the little ghost child, there’s nothing to really be done with him. He wants Bloody Tear, his sack doll, back, but if you do so then … he just goes away.

Nothing here contributes to anything other than the backstory of why the monsters are here. There is no real tragedy to bring forth and no triumph to be had, the witch is not present and you can’t really accomplish anything. It’s as if you wrote LotR as a backstory and the adventure was “pick a flower from Mt Doom” and there are a couple of orcs there. Ok, sure, I understand why the orcs and Mt Doom are there, but nothing contributes to the NOW of the adventure. 

“Apple barn: Processing & storage area for apples & mead. Slight sweet & rotting smell. Many overturned barrels and crates with a mushroom-infested sludge.” This would be a typical description of one of the areas in the adventure. There is more, but it mostly consists of sack dolls dropping from a ceiling and stabbing you before they run away giggling. There’s just not much to work with in that description. The sweet and rotting smell is a highlight of this description, and of the adventure. There’s just not enough of that. The burned down town. The tragedy of the parents being little piles of dirt (Ala On the Beach) … the children themselves. There is just not enough of the horror element here, not enough of descriptions that ground the place. 

The witch, the teeth, th children, the ever present mist … not really used in any way, not leaned in to. It’s not that it’s BAD, it just ends up being a whole of backstory for an adventure that amounts to little other than stabbing little sack monsters and an ant-lion  ala sarlacc pit. 

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. I got excited with the NPC summary, but nothing goes anywhere. It needs a better preview, of the actual encounter keys, to give a better feel of the core of the adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/522590/ashes-of-rhu?1892600

By Dougal Cochrane
Self Published
Shadowdark
Level 4

A Lost Ruin – The Quiet Shrine lies half-buried and half-broken. Its holy places are desecrated, its defenses cracked, its silence disturbed not by reverence, but by the echoing burrow of chitin claws. Yet the dwarven wards endure in part, and within the hidden tomb, Ord’s sacred charge still sleeps undisturbed… …until now.

This sixteen page adventure describes a dwarf temple with twelve rooms. It has some simplistic mini-quests in it that are combined with a “which puzzle does this fresco solve” instruction set. I’m not angry, there’s just little reason to go with this. Sometimes it’s just hard to summon enthusiasm for an adventure, positive or negative, and this is one of those. 

Each room starts with an italics read-aloud, a few sentences long. As per the usual complaint italics is bad to use in long sections of text because it’s harder to read. The text then gets purple and, in fact, the very first read-aloud of the adventure is “Framed by roots and the bones of the mountain” … and .. end with “The world holds its breath. No birds sing here.” Don’t go purple in your descriptions. And, you also want to avoid things like “the world holds its breath.” A good description will make the PLAYERS the impression that the world holds its breathe, be it in anticipation or in melancholy, but you want to avoid outright TELLING the characters what they feel. I will note, however, that the “No birds sing here” line is pretty good. Better, I think, to use it in the description of the doorway, as a carving or runes for the players to read. The text goes on, roof after room, trying hard to give this impression of a massive emptiness and the silence (hence the title) but it comes off purple in most cases. The writing of a terse but evocative description IS the hardest part of an adventure, I think and thus I am somewhat sympathetic at clumsy attempts to evoke a vibe. But, purple is purple.

The text then goes on, the read-aloud, to over-reveal in many cases. “Cold air hangs heavy in this tiled chamber, where black and white stones alternate beneath your feet. Ancient murals adorn the walls. The silence is broken only by the whisper of dust and the faint scent of rust. Two goblin skeletons lie slumped near the far wall, riddled with iron darts.” The goblin bodies is an iver-reveal. The iron darts are an over-reveal. I would suggest that perhaps even the black and white stones are an over-reveal. There is the concept in RPG’s, the core cycle between the DM providing information and then the players taking that an asking follow ups questions/interacting with the environment. Thet core cycle is CRUCIAL for rpgs/ When the rea-dlaoud text over-reveals this then that cycle is broken. You don’t need to investigate the bodies to see what they are. Or to see the iron darts. The black and white floor tiles here, are indicative of a trap, along with the darts, of course, giving some warning to players who pay attention. But its being obviously telegraphed. You want to hint at things, and then let the inquisitive players follow up. You’re cutting to just the end of the room by over=revealing the information. 

A different room tells us, through read-aloud that there is large creature in the water. Ok, sure, but then it has a section of text called “Clue” that reads “A slow, rhythmic chufng sound is heard—the matriarch’s breath as she drinks. Deep gouges and claw marks line the walls.” Well, sure, I can see the fucking thing in the water man! This sort of sloppiness in editing, in the core concepts of the rooms, is evident throughout. Am I figuring out theres a creature in the room or am I seeing that there’s a large creature in the room? Both are valid encounters in D&D, figuring something out or avoiding something obvious that you cannot, perhaps, take on directly. But you have to pick one in your editing. 

This is a meh adventure. It’s a basic map layout, with rooms and a few caverns. It’s got a few simple puzzles, that almost all revolve around “look, that fresco has a dude dropping a gemstone in to a well and THIS room has a well!” I’m not angry that those puzzles, but they are so very basic as implemented. Kill some umber hulks, move on with your life. 

This is Pay What You Want on DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The preview is five pages, mostly intro, with one room shown. Not a very good preview

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/521855/the-quiet-shrine?1892600

By Will Flora
Prop Cor Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

The magic of Diathea sits in disarray! The Emerald Emperor and the Archmage of the Realms need a party of adventurers to uncover the secrets that lie within the Tomb of the Ancient Hero! Those who dare to wander into this mausoleum will find that it holds much more than bones…

THis 44 page adventure uses about fifteen pages to describe about fifteen rooms in a small two level dungeon. Loose text and wordiness, uneven enemy distribution. We’re on the Epic Adventure train here, but, hey, the weirdness in this is nice.

The Emerald Emperor had his magic sceptre stolen by The Evil Kingdom and now magic is falling apart. Elminster (who is called Twane in this adventure, for some reason)  sends you to the Emperor (AC4 HP14 … prime for stabbing. You keep what you kill, right?) who sends you to the tomb to “find out more information.” This is going to amount to a tablet with like six words on it, something like “Rock and Stone, Tree and Hill” or some nonsense. Oh, also, Elminster shows up on your way to the tomb to warn you about The Duke and give you healing potions and then disappear in classic Elminster fashion in a puff of smoke. 

This adventure has exactly one thing going for it: it is fucking WEIRD in places. It also has some classic elements that harken back to classic design, but it is those weird elements that stick out. I’m talking Dungeon of the Bear ‘Swallow the gem to turn in to a badger’ kind of shit. It is that classic “Imagine first, then design it” kind of philosophy that I think a lot of great adventures clearly come from. We’ve got a Hydra in this adventure … but it’s a Plant Hydra … which means a Giant Venus Flytrap. AC 6, 6HD, 6 Attacks … at level one? But, still nicely imagined! And then the trippiest of all things, in any adventure EVAR. I want you to think of every time you’ve seen mushrooms in an adventure. Eat a mushroom for an effect. Those classic art pieces of mushroom caverns with adventurers in them. The Vegipygmies or mushroom people of 5e. And then there’s this,  The Entirety of the Room 4 Description – “This room is separated in two by a large chasm. There are glowing fungi on the far side like in the crack in room 1. If the party manages to make it across the chasm, the mushrooms willall group up and move towards the boulder. If a party member offers them rations, they will eat the rations and hop onto their shoulders and travel with them. While the Fungi are with a character, they gain +5 feet to their battle movement. They will stay with the character indefinitely, but have a 5% chance of dying at the beginning of every day.” Have you no soul, gentle reader? And this is the artwork from the room, and I swear I did not edit it. This is magnificent.

Alas, though, these moments will be few and far between. For every pit trap that leads to a rushing river below, we get far more generic and uninteresting encounters. Which seldom make sense. Or, maybe, in a jr. high kind of way? On the way to the tomb, about fourteen six mile hexes away, is a wilderness wandering table. In which you can meet six cros. Are you living through that?! Or, better yet, a 1 in 6 chance of meeting a fucking dragon! There’s even a four entry dragon subtype table. I’m not super sure what the terrain type column is for. The terrain is on the hex map … the wandering monster table doesn’t care about terrain. But if you roll a 6 on the wandering table you get a dragon and then the dragon subtype table both has a terrain type AND a random roll? We need to take this not for what it is, as an isolated example, but rather indicative of the type of issues that plague the adventure.

You arrive outside the tomb after your croc and dragon wilderness crawl. You meet your Level four elves who won’t let you in. They guard the entrance. No worries, you got a ring that lets you pass. Except these fuck wit elves, who take their jobs soooo seriously (with,like fifteen more backup elves nearby, all level four) have let everybody and their uncle in to the fucking tomb. LIzard men wandering monsters. A fucking ogre who got in somehow. 

Oh, oh, those level four elves? And that 6 HD plant hydra? There’s also a fucking mummy in your final room that you need to defeat to get the fucking treasure. Levels 1-3. I’m not the biggest critic of power levels in adventure EXCEPT when they block your path and you’re railroaded in to the encounters. This is clearly not tested, at all.

I could talk about page long room descriptions. I could talk about the page and half of opening dialog, that comes in italics form. I think long term readers understand why this is bad, the lack of player focus for long read-aloud and the difficulty in reading long sections of italics. (Shade the fucking thing!) But, actually, I am going to talk about those room descriptions. 

I am going to pick on them. This is both nitpicking AND an example of a larger problem. You need to remember that the rooms do stretch to a page. The cumulative effect here is large. The room two description is: “Area 2 is the entry way hall. There are 2 torches on the wall illuminating the room enough to see clearly. There is nothing of note in this room.” The first and third sentences say nothing. Instead of “Room 2”, the same effect can be gained by saying “ 2 – Entry Hall – There are 2 torches illuminating the room enough to see clearly.” And I might even not be cool with that “enough to see clearly” clause. Writing that is padded out is hard to scan, and the ref NEEDS to be able to scan a room during play. They have to be able to see what’s going on in the room quickly so they can run it for the players. Another example is room three “This room connects the entry way to the rest of the upper complex. There are no torches lighting this room […]  If the players light a torch in this room and pay close attention to the floor, they will notice”. Again, telling us what is NOT  in the room would result in a very large room description indeed. 😉  But then, also, we see the classic if/then statement. IF you light a torch and IF you pay attention to the floor. NO! Beyond the hilarity of the quantum event here, it is far far better to just note that the description of the thing on the floor. 

And then theres room four, the first of the VERY long rooms: “Area 4 holds a great many secrets. There is a reflection pool along the southern wall that can grant a permanent increase to one stat of the characters choice. They must throw in a coin and make an audible wish for this to happen.” Obviously that first line is padding, but note the next sentences. It’s almost like they are in reverse order. And this sort of padding combined with an unusual illogical order of things in rooms follows for every room in the dungeon.

This does show some promise in imagination in areas. But the room descriptions are atrocious and not evocative at all. You have to suffer through the Epic Adventure nonsense, and that’s if you are, say, level 3-5? 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages of padding. You get nothing of the rooms, and thus have no way to tell what the adventure is actually like. Poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/515075/tomb-of-the-ancient-hero?1892600

By Josh Yoder
Crimson Adder Curiosities
Weird Heroes of Public Access

It’s time to hang ten, heroes—we have a mystery to solve. Tiki Tony was found dead at the Mahalo Tiki Bar. Police ruled that the 45 stab wounds in his chest were self-inflicted, claiming he was alone and that no other evidence was found at the scene. However, anyone who knew Tony swears he was in an exceptionally good mood that week, excited about a new “centerpiece” he had just added to the establishment. His niece is hosting a wake for him at the bar tonight. Go there and ask around—I feel something fishy is afoot.

This fifteen page adventure presents a couple of NPCs in a bar for the party to talk to. While organized well, there’s just little here beyond the NPC’s to run an adventure with.

Tiki bars are the best bars, after dive bars. And I’m rather fond of murder mysteries. And that Hawaii episode of The Brady Bunch was ok. Besides, people are always trying to do mysteries in D&D and they all suck because of divinations spells, so let’s see one where the spells don’t exist, ey?

This adventure has a page with six entries for “pushing the adventure forward”. It has a page with six weird things that can happen, like your drink turning red. It has a page of “ritual ideas” (more on that later) and five pages of NPC’s, two to a page. It is from this, and an overview page, that you are to run an adventure. I suspect that this could happen, in some possible world in which an adventure supports itself, but it doesn’t really happen here. 

Tiki Tony is dead, you go to the wake in his tiki bar. There are ten people there for you to talk to. They each have an initial description, on an overview page, or something like “The grizzled old man is in a leather jacket, and his eyes seem tired.” This is good. A brief quick hit, glancing around the room, not over revealing things, but communicating some vibe from the initial impression. Great way to present a room full of NPC’s. Perhaps just a little static, the googly eyes and hateful stares (that are to come) are missing from this quick hit, and I do believe that the INTERACTIONS between people is what can drive a lot of great social situations in games. Anyway, we then move on to the actual NPC descriptions, two to a page, in a kind of index card format with bullets. Each starts off with their name and something like “Drama Teacher, Former Girlfriend of Tony,.” Again, very good. A concrete grounding of both who they are and their relationship to the murdered party. Then we move to some bullets, which starts with he same description we got in the overview: “Women in her mid-50s wearing loosefitted hippyish night clothes.” So far so good. Then five or six bullets of things they know and/or do. 

These are generally ok. Well, better than ok. We’re missing any interesting quirks, and the characters come off a little dry, even though they have some batshit stuff, like the biker who is the only survivor of his former gang. The descriptions, while good at facts, just don’t come off as very colorful. Or, perhaps … just don’t spark the DM to really run with them. The counterpart to an evocative room description, perhaps, that puts an idea in to the DMs head that they can expand upon? Anyway, beyond this point, the interactions between them are not handled well, i think. We get things in these descriptions like “Giving death stares to Betty” or “Flirting with Bob” as well as “Loudly calling to Tony from beyond the grave.” What I’m looking for, in a group scene like this, is for a page of this stuff, front he various NPC’s, to be pulled out. I want, in essence, a summary page. Not of what they know, that works well, theoretically anyway, as bullets in an NPC description. What I’m looking for is for that summary page to have the interactive information as well. That we see X making eyes at Y, or drinking heavily, or yelling out to Tony for his spirit to talk to him. This is, in essence, the same as my “Vista Overview” points: When you arrive at the top of the hill you want a brief overview of what the party can see down below: the bright lights, fires, large structures, mobs, and so forth. You don’t want to them have to dig through forty different locations descriptions to check to see if any of them have something that the party might see from atop the hill. The goal, as always, is to assist the DM in running the adventure. 

The more pressing issue with this, though, is the lack of anything going on. There is a page of “weird shit that can happen to you”, which is generally something like some object in the tiki bar talking to you. Other than that, there’s a page of “Moving the adventure” things to roll for, six in all. You see a clean spot on the counter where something recently sat. In the bathroom mirror you see a tiki idol staring back at you with glowing red eyes. Yeah, ok, sure. The result, I think, is that you perform some ritual to exorcise the demon of the idol. What is the ritual? It’s a random table, roll three times and that’s what the ritual is. I’m not a fan. There’s no real way to discover this, you’re just told to roll. Actually, you’re told to go with whatever reasonable plan the party has for a ritual. I’m actually a fan of THAT. The random use of Bless, in D&D, to solve a problem is an under-utliized tool. But, then, the random table, disconnected from the adventure? No way to discover a ritual? Nope. This is the misuse of randomness in an adventure and I’ll have none of it. 

There’s this whole “He went to a carnival and make a deal a dude to get the idol” (that was going to save the bar business) that is really never explored. Maybe it’s a series and that’s the next adventure? It just feels like there’s not much going on here. This is one scene, the “go to the wake at the bar” scene, in a larger adventure, it feels like. There’s not much in the way of investigation. Just talking to the NPC’s. Which, yes, IS investigation, but there’s not much beyond that. 

I guess, what do you want out of a one room play? No Exit?

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages, showing you the overview and the NPC summary page, such that it is. You don’t really get a sense as to what the adventure IS though. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/517383/whpa-13-murder-at-the-mahalo?1892600