tenfootpole.org

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

By Rustic Ink
Self Published
Shadowdark & "OSR"
Levels: 4

The Order of the New Dawn: Set in the heart of the Iron Duchy, where political tensions are tearing the city apart, a dark cult grows in the shadows, weaving intrigues and threatening to consume everything. The recent death of the ducal family has left the city in chaos, with no legitimate heir to restore order. Ambitious nobles, wealthy merchants, and unscrupulous military figures fight for control of the region. In this volatile climate, the Dragon Zoryak, lurking in the city’s sewers, leads a fanatical cult that seeks to seize power. While the cult’s leader knows that his magical powers are granted by the dragon himself, the followers believe they are serving a divine entity named Zoryak, who promises a “New Dawn” and a better future for them all. As the cult’s influence spreads, mysterious disappearances begin to plague the surface

This eleven page page adventure presents fifteen rooms in a dragons lair. That is also a cult. That is also a sewer. That is also a mine. With a mad scientist. The read-aloud isn’t terrible, but the encounters are essentially just stabbing this rooms monster and rolling a save for a random pretextual effect combined with some DM/designer fiat. Not cool.

The OSR category on DriveThru is littered with Mork Borg and Shadowdark adventures. And this, it turns out, is also a Shadowdark adventure. I probably would have skipped it if I had noticed that. Nothing against Shadowark, but I’m not interested in it.  And why is that? Sewers. And Mines. And a dragon. And a cult. And a mad scientist. I guess when in doubt just chuck everything in there. And none of it really works. It’s sewers. But also the sewers break in to mines! And there’s a cult! But its controlled by a dragon! With a Mad Scientist lieutenant! Who creates mechanical monsters! Sure man, whatever. 

There a turn of phrase here and there that is not terrible, usually in the read-aloud. “An old, rusted iron ladder descends from the market alley into a dark and foul-smelling sewer canal. The atmosphere is thick with humidity and the distant echoes of dripping water. A central channel divides the sewer into two narrow walkways through which sewage fluids slowly flow westward.” Yeah, ok. I’m not the happiest with “old” but we’ve got some dripping water and thick humidity in there with some foul smelling water. Let’s move on the negative, yeah?

Wandering monster have a 50% chance EVERY TWO ROUNDS. That seems a tad rough. The rumor table is boring and abstracted. “A mechanical monster was spotted dragging an unconscious woman through the alleyways of the market in the West Port District.” Well color me thrilled I guess. This is the kind of useless and meaningless writing that just drags me down for the rest of the day. Give the fucking thing some life! Be specific! Not wordy, specific. Spotted by who? A mechanical monster? No. Describe it. That’s the way fucking people work. “Pimp Ray swears he saw something with two heads, shadowy, drag that matchstick girl, no, the other one, down …”  How about a hoooky mchookerson? “A humble woman, wife of a missing sailor, begs for help. Her only clue is that he was last seen in the market of the West Port District. Her faith in heroes drives her to offer everything she has, even if it’s little, and her gratitude will be eternal.” It’s all just non-specific drivel. There’s nothing here to riff on because there’s nothing here. 

The formatting here is weird. It’s a smaller font, maybe four entries to a page. Each one boxed. Boxed text is shaded, bolding and bullets are used. And yet it looks like some wall of text. It’s possible, I guess, to follow the individual rooms and the entries, but man. The boxes around each room do something to this to make me just tilt my head in angst. It’s also fully committed to this, so, for example, the first room, the main sewer line, has this line in it “If the players follow the clues leading to the market, they will find an entrance to the sewer system in one of the market’s alleys.” Thus the transition from the hooks to the dungeon is handled in room one. Which is fine, I guess? It just somehow transgresses against conventional forms .. and for no good reason. And I have to be down for that, I don’t believe in a set formula. But it’s just jarring. 

The interactivity here is low effort. You get in a fight. You trigger a trap. The traps are weird. It’s just a Roll A Save trap, in ome cases, with little to no warning. There’s this pretext sometimes “its a magic trap that effects you if you try to leave the room” but, its just a save and something happens because the pretexts are just “magical effect.” But, then in another place, there’s a trap that more of a special, r puzzle. There’s a read-aloud that says “Halfway through the passage, a thin beam of dim light crosses from one side to the other. The rocks on the floor in this section appear unusually smooth and marked with scars from fire.” 

We get some descriptions that tell us, in boxed text “The air is heavy and warm [GREAT!] filled with a mineral scent [Great!] that irritates the throat.” I’m not sure I would have put that very last part, the throat, in the description. I’d have left it out and roleplayed it, as a mystery that the party doesn’t know about, letting them make the leap of logic from mineral scent to irritated throat.  In another place we get some abstracted descriptions “The images on the tapestries are very disturbing.” And thats the FOLLOW UP description. The initial one says something like sacrifices or something. It’s just explaining, again, WHY you have to make a save in the room. Because the tapestries are disturbing. 

“Karstov and his concubine (a Fanatic) are indulging their base instincts” When you put sex in an adventure then you want to talk to the player about sex and you’re horny. Unless its his mom hes fucking, and its integral to the adventure, I don’t need to know. 

The dragon, the cultists, the mechanical monsters … no descriptions for them. Enjoy your abstracted adventure. The cultists are just dudes. Who wrote that great thig for the cult in the that WotC Tiamat adventure? THOSE were great cultists! Oh, the dragons treasure hoard does self destruct and melt in 1d4 turns. You think they mean forty minutes? I can snag a lot in ten minutes. Also, I don’t really care if it slags; I’ll haul it out and get it made into ingots. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is all eleven pages, so, nice preview. I approve! Well, of the preview …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/513164/the-order-of-the-new-dawn?1892600

By Charles Smith
Charles Smith Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

In the village of Edgewamp, ancient bad blood has finally led to bloodshed, and from this a new and terrible mosquito god has been conceived. Now monstrous mosquito-men steal away the inhabitants of Edgewamp to be drained of their bodily fluids in a secret sunken temple in the swamp, where the god-fetus waiting to be born screams out for blood… and the treasures of hell itself wait to be looted.

This seventeen page adventure presents a small swamp temple with seven room and some giant mosquito action. It has that kind of farcical tone combined with some depression that I really enjoy, but takes it too far in to comedy in the last bits of the adventure. It’s doing a pretty good job until it can’t figure out to write a temple dungeon.

Small swamp town. Two feuding families. Things go too far, someone gets killed and blah blah blah, an accident happens and a new temple rises from the swamp, with a new god gestating in it. Mosquito men and giant mosquitos raid the town … and one, killed, was adorned in LOTS of jewelry. There’s some motivation for you 🙂  I’m going to cover this thing in two parts: everything before the swamp temple and then the end: the swamp temple. 

This has a wonderful tone to it. It just hits, over and over again. Specificity. Humans acting like humans. A little farce/hyper realism and just a tiny amount of folklore, if you squint. That hook I mentioned sets the scene: there’s loot on the mosquito men. Sure, people are dying, but the bell rang/there’s loot! The town leader is “Big head, wide-set eyes, meticulously well-kempt. “ and VERY fond of ceremony. And will waste the parties time at every opportunity through rubbing elbows. You know the type. And I do! The sheriff, prob a drunk now, who things this is all his fault. A capulet drinking himself stupid in the bar because he KNOWS it was his fault cause when he stabbed that Montague in the swamp he mouthed off, being silly. “Let your blood be resigned to whatever dark god resides here.” Which is a pretty cold thing to say to someone as they die. Unless it summons a new god, of course. His two buds are witnesses. Wonder if he gets drunk and shuts them up to hide things? The bar hirelings are great “: Huge, arms like tree-trunks, big ears. Doesn’t know where he is, only that he’s here to fight bugs. Very kind, and fiercely loyal if treated halfway decent. Zero survival instinct”. And then there’s the head Capulet, arm in a sling, all withered and drained cause of a giant mosquito attack, willing to put the feud aside. And others in the village not willing to. It just hits and hits and hits with the kind of petty social situation that can blow up and helps bring everything to bright color. Situations, opportunities, chances for the party to interact. It’s fucking great. Just reality, pushed a tony bit further. Transition to the swamp journey and you get The New Center Of The Universe, a bullwug camp overflowing with pomp and circumstance. “A gullygug dressed in the mud-caked finery of kings, but with a strong preference for quantity over quality. Wears three capes unless the situation calls for more. “ And then a wanderer called The Country Grig Jamboree, where a grig band passes by and invites you to dance. Doing so ends well. Not doing so causes them to try and do their charm shit. That’s a great fey encounter! They are not just being assholes. The PARTY are the assholes, for not dancing. Rude. Also, the bullywugs hate the grogs, and there are some half-bullywugs in town  you might accidentally get in to your party … It’s all connected man! Maybe the weakest of the special is Mother Sweettooth the swamp hag. She’s just a monster with nothing special about her, which is sad considering all of the specificity and situations everything else brought to the table up to this point.

And then we go over the edge.The temple. Seven rooms. The map has the “always on” features on it, which is great. But it also lacks any other features. Giant staircase in the first room, leading to the second level? Not on the map. NOTHING is on the map. More importantly than this, though, is the tone. If the adventure up to now, with the town and swamp, touched on being lightly farcical and perhaps a little folklorish, this thing just is full on comedy. And comedy doesn’t work in adventures. You can throw in some shit here and there, but if you explicitly lean in to it then its gonna fall flat. Three mosquito-men scribes in a room argue. “They speak the common tongue, although one of the points of contention is whether “mosquito-man” should be a language, and if so what should the grammatical rules be, and has anyone considered how a new language is going to impact the rhyming scheme of the three half finished poems we already agreed on?” This is one of your seven encounters. Another is a priest casting the bones for divinations. But his god isn’t a god yet so it doesn’t work. But that doesn’t stop him. And he does it for literally EVERY decision he makes, even if he is being taken advantage of. The dungeon just isn’t large enough, at seven rooms, to support this sort of aside rooms. In something larger? Sure.Room six dazzles us with the following, complete description: “Pile of dried up bloodless bodies, along with some of their treasure. “ 

The language falls down. The specificity is absent. Where it exists it devolves in to comedic fantasy. Everything up until now has been great and, now, that the main event is at hand, it just doesn’t exist anymore. Stab some things and then meet people wearing funny hats doing silly walks and then stab them. This is NOT what the adventure was up until this point. The hag encounter is the closest it comes, where we get a Mother Sweettooth name, but nothing else but a monster. No situation. And the temple has no situations other than those comedic ones. It’s just fucking boring when you get to what would normally be considered “the main part.” (Blah blah blah, journey is the destination, the friends we made along the way.) 

It’s a hard pass, but also the designer is not on the No Go list. Let’s see what the future holds and if they can seal the deal after all of the flirting.

“[Town NPC] Is pretty sure he can find the mosquito-man lair. He’s wrong, won’t admit it until 3 days of wandering fruitlessly in the swamp.”

This is $2 at DriveThru. Alas, there is no preview, and thus I cann;t share with you the good parts of it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/513388/blood-for-the-mosquito-god-ose?src=newest_recent?1892600

By Paul Hoeffler
The Alchemical Press
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

Navigating through the sprawling wilderness, your party enters the quaint hamlet of Braeford, a community perpetually besieged by marauding rat raiders. Your mission unfolds amidst this perilous backdrop, promising a blend of adventure, danger, and unexpected discoveries.

This 30 page adventure has the party fighting orcs, kobolds, and other humanoids in a couple of missions given to them by the town guard. The sites are boring and staid and the text to get there is loooonng and without much flavour. 

I don’t want to hear it. It could have been good. There was that adventure back in Dungeon that was good. Or maybe had potential? I forget. Anyway, it shrunk you down. “Rely on your ingenuity!” this one says. Ha! Nothing like that. This is a mouseworld adventure. You get turned in to mice. The rest of this is just the boring version of D&D. Instead of humans there are mice people. Instead of orcs and kobolds there are rats. Instead of gnolls there are black rats. Your size does not matter AT ALL. Everything is scaled to you. The only thing that DOES seem to matter is the occasional hawk or owl. That’s the only evidence that this is not bog standard D&D. And “giant hawk” and/or “giant owl” are, I think, monsters that have appeared. Again, this is just normal old D&D. Everything is scaled down and a search/replace has been done to replace orc with rat. NOTHING else matters related to a mouse-sized world or a being a mouse. If you take B2 and replace “human, elf, dwarf” with “mouse” and all of the monster names with some derivation of “rat” then you understand what this adventure is. Window dressing. Nothing more.

And, at that, it’s pretty poor. Three thing happen. When you reach town one, after transforming, it is raided at night by “rats.” After that you get encouraged to go ferret (ha!) them out at their lair. Which is seven rooms. Then you go to an overrun fortress with eleven rooms with rats. End of adventure. Nothing interesting happens in any part of this. Oh, it’s a room with two rats. Oh, it the literal tripwire pit trao. Oh, it’s a room with rats, rat women and rat children. It’s a room with one rat. Oh, it’s a room with some rats in it. Of, it’s a room with a rat and some prisoner mice.It’s the rat shaman room, and then the rat leaders room and then the double rat treasury. It’s just a room with a fucking rat, man. You stab it and move on. The other stuff is like this also. And there’s no real order of battle, just stab them and move on. Oh! Oh! The initial town raid? You know, the rats raid the town of mice in the middle of the night. The DM is given three options.  A sentry can shot the alarm, or the party can lead the defences, or some soldiers can come to help the party. That’s it. The section takes up a third or half a page and there is NOTHING to it. Just that they attack. No details beyond what I typed. No vignettes No situations. 

Worry not though! The text is long and the only formatting is an occasional section break or the bolded monster in a room. It takes THREE LINES to tell us one room has light in it. THREE FUCKING LINES. Conversational and padded out.  “If you camp for the night then there will be a higher than average probability of a random encounter (twice as likely)” Jesus Christ man. “Like most of the town he is a follower of the goddess Berwyn” It’s just meaningless trivia, padded out FOR. EVER. I was thinking about this. Where do people learn this? It has to be that they are emulating all of the previous adventures they have seen. The endless text blobs or WoTC and Paizo and Chaosim. That’s what people think an adventure is so that’s what they write. Would that I could just snap my fingers and make all of these things go away. But, of course, a good adventure is only a side effect, the big boys are looking for sales. A good adventure is just a nice coincidence. 

The very first door in the adventure, that hides EVERYTHING else behind it, is a problem. You must succeed in a lockpick, break it down roll or spell it open. And if nothing fails? I guess you’re stuck there forever Now, obviously, thats not going to happen, the DM is going to fudge something. But then WHY?! Why put it in there? It is meaningless. 

There is absolutely nothing to see here. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. You’re going to have to intuit, from pages four through six, how the formatting and padding goes.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/497328/module-m1-a-miraculous-mousy-metamorphosis?1892600

I’m gonna go listen to Dua Lippa on repeat to get through this.